The answer to Trump is revolutionary love
Our economic system is doing exactly what it is designed to do. It’s time to build a new one centred on the things that actually matter.
From Grace: I’m on holiday for the next few weeks, so I’ve been working with a few brilliant writers on pieces for my Substack while I’m away. The first is this moving and inspiring piece by writer and academic Laura Basu, whose Substack Loveconomics is well worth subscribing to. I hope you enjoy the piece!
The shrieking migraine of Trumpism has at least cleared up a few misconceptions about our socioeconomic system, capitalism.
Firstly, the idea that capitalism and democracy are natural bedfellows. Trump’s marriage of hyper-capitalism – such as pushing massive tax cuts for the rich while gutting the labour watchdog and the health department – and repression makes it clear that capitalism and authoritarianism gel very well.
Secondly, the idea that there is an opposition between class politics on one hand and ‘identity politics’ on the other, and that ‘issues’ like race, gender, disability and sexuality have nothing to do with the economy. Let me explain.
Trump’s class politics sit comfortably with a jeering sadism, what Sara Ahmed calls ‘performative cruelty’, towards trans people, immigrants and other oppressed groups. This is not a coincidence.
Despite what we have been taught, capitalism’s roughly 500-year history is not one of unimpeded progress, industriousness and enlightenment brought by pale gentlemen in cravats. As I have written in more detail elsewhere, it is a history of genocide, enslavement, colonial violence, and a war on women, the working class, disabled and elderly people, and those with non-conforming genders and sexualities.
This is logical when you think about the design of capitalism. The entire point of this system is to make money for those at the top. Meeting people’s needs and protecting their freedom often get in the way of this central goal.
In fact, the system creates a built-in incentive to dehumanise and devalue whole groups of people. If some lives are worth less than others, you can pay them less and deny them the things they need, instead channelling all the wealth to the ones plotting to colonise Mars.
“There’s no point trying to fix this system, since it isn’t broken”
Capitalists didn’t invent either class exploitation or systems of oppression like racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, homophobia and transphobia – but they can’t live without them. Capitalism joined these pre-existing prejudices with economic exploitation to create a new era of hierarchy where none of us could opt out.
We are made to feel that all the daily hardships we are suffering are our fault. In reality, they result from the structure of a social system we did not design.
Love is the answer
There’s no point trying to fix this system, since it isn’t broken. What we need is a lovely new economic system, one that is centred around the things that actually matter: our health, knowing that we are cared for, being close to the ones we love, knowing that we are safe, and that we have the freedom to express ourselves in all our glittering abundance. Of course, a precondition for all of the above is a happy, bouncing planet.
The system that I’m describing is one centred around nothing less than love. It requires taking love from the realm of the personal into the political. It’s centering the love we experience on an interpersonal level and bringing it to the systemic level.
I’m not saying that we all have to go on bad dates with each other. I’m talking about love as a practice, an action, a doing word. A politics.
What I’m describing is the ethics of love that bell hooks wrote about in her classic All About Love. Such a practice is about building a socioeconomic system which is designed to help us practice care and respect for each other, rather than doing everything it can to get in the way.
Baby giant steps
Creating such a world might sound like an impossible mission, but given the crisis we are currently facing, we don’t have much of a choice. Our world needs changing, so it might as well change into something genuinely awesome.
The first step is to refuse to buy into the politics of hate and fear that the Trumps of the world are selling. We can conscientiously object to seeing trans people as a danger, or immigrants as the problem, or disabled people as lazy scroungers.
The second thing we can do is to open our eyes to the politics of love and care already being practiced all around us, and join in where we can.
When I was pregnant with my daughter and had a nine-month flare-up of my ulcerative colitis, @Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s books Care Work and The Future is Disabled are what got me through. They describe the informal mutual aid and care networks that disabled, Black, brown, poor women and gender non-conforming people – people who have never had any love from either the state or the private sector – have been building.
During postpartum carnage, one of my lifelines was Revolutionary Mothering, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. The authors detail the childcare collectives and solidarity practiced by marginalised mothers and other mothering people.
Sure, if you’re anything like me you might be thinking: ‘exactly how am I supposed to find the time and energy to create this brave new community of liberation when capitalism is crushing me with its soul-sucking work, gaping void where childcare is supposed to be, and a chronic illness to boot?’
But there are things I can do. I’m part of an informal playgroup which has been incredibly nourishing for me. I’m also part of a small feminist collective that meets once a month, and last month I even led a workshop on money and debt.
Next on my list, I’m taking my toddler to a protest. Yes it will be exhausting dragging her around London’s outrageously inaccessible public transport system, but some protests have an accessible ‘baby bloc’, and I can plan in time to rest afterwards (which might mean my Substack post that week will be a tad less polished..).
I’ve committed to taking these steps towards practicing a politics of love as a way to resist the politics of fear. Thankfully, I’ll be joining the millions who are working to build this new world every day.
Laura Basu is a writer and academic. She is a visiting fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is openDemocracy’s former economics editor. She is writing a book called Loveconomics and has a Substack of the same name.
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Hazel Henderson, futurist, who wrote numerous books on the economy and markets, and who died in May 2022, had this to say shortly before her death: “We must rebuild and value the ‘love economy’, which is based on trust, empathy, and reciprocity.” In my work with the bioregional community, at one of our Congresses in the later 1980s, the opening words of the Economic Committee’s vision statement read: “A bioregional economy is an economy of gift, trust, and compassion.” Many others I worked with back then, when my major “thing” was “creating an economy for a living Earth”, what I called Gaian Economics, were thinking, and creating models, projects, and on-the-ground economic “alternatives” (what Bob Swann called “lifeboats”). We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We simply need to begin the work.
So maybe we need a new kind of 'money' and a different approach to sharing scarce resources/energy?