Rev Left Radio - The Political Economy of Love: Attention, Affection, & What Capitalism Can't Buy

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

In this episode, Breht is joined by Kristen R. Ghodsee to dig into her provocative essay on the political economy of love under capitalism. Using Marx's distinction between use value and exchange value, Ghodsee argues that love is not just a private feeling but a material necessity for human flourishing -- and that our economic system systematically depletes the time, energy, and security required to sustain it. Together, they explore how capitalism commodifies two core components of love, attention and affection, turning them into scarce resources bought and sold in everything from therapy and childcare to the attention economy and the market for professionalized intimacy. But the heart of the conversation is the one thing capitalism can't truly monetize: reciprocal flow -- the non-transactional rhythm of giving and receiving that emerges in long relationships, cooperative play, music, community, and solidarity itself. Breht and Ghodsee discuss how inequality and insecurity train people into transactionalism, why loneliness is not an individual failure but a structural outcome, and what a genuine politics of love might look like beyond mere self-help or lifestyle fixes. Learn more about Dr. Ghodsee and her work HERE Check out AK-47, Kristen's podcast dedicated to Alexandra Kollontai here: https://kristenghodsee.com/podcast ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's episode, we have back on the show one of our all-time favorite guests. This is her eighth appearance, I believe, if I counted correctly, on the show. Dr. Kristen Gottzi to talk about her newest article that was put out in Jacobin, the political economy of love in capitalism. We talk about it basically a materialist analysis of love and how it functions in society and how it is impacted by the political economy of late-stage capitalism. We touch on interpersonal relationships.

We touch on the attention economy. We touch on spiritual notions of love, on maturing beyond narcissism. And we, at the end, articulate a positive socialist vision of a future civilization that is premised and organized around widespread human flourishing, as opposed to the fundamentally rigged game of computer. repeating to hoard ever and ever more artificially scarce resources. So this really runs the gamut from the personal to the political and everything in between. And it's the, you know, another episode with the one and only Kristen Gottzi,

which I know is a fan favorite. And, you know, over the years has become a personal, I would like to think friend of mine, even though we've never met in real life. She's just awesome. And every time we get on together, we talk for about 20, 30 minutes before we hit record. And today was no different. But yeah, strap in, and here's a wonderful episode with Dr. Kristen Gatsy on the political economy of love in capitalism. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio, feel free to join and support the show at patreon.com forward slash Rev Left Radio.

In exchange, you get monthly meditation groups. We go live on Zoom when big situations happen. You get early releases. And it is the one place where I make sure to always respond to comments. So in the comments of every post on Patreon, I go out of my way to ensure that I respond to every single one. As much as I can. It's not always 100%, but that is where you'll have the most direct engagement with me. And this community that we're building that we've been building now for eight years.

I think in February it marks our eighth year on the air, I believe, if not more than that. It might even be our ninth year. I'm not sure. But we've built a wonderful community over there. And it's because of our supporters that this show is able to continue on. It is 100% listener funded. It always has been,

always will be true independent media. So we appreciate everybody who supports the show. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Kristen Gatsy

on her article out of Jacobin, the political economy of love. Enjoy. My name is Kristen Gatsy. I'm a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University

of Pennsylvania. But I'm also currently a senior external fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. And it's wonderful always to have you back on the show. You've been on, I just looked it up, actually, as we were talking leading up to the recording here.

You've been on seven times, and this marks your eighth time, and Rev. Left has been on the air for eight years. Wow. It is true that on average we have you on once a year. It's a pleasure and an honor have you back on. That's right, but that also means that I was a very early guest on the show when it was just getting started, right? Absolutely, yeah.

I think Red Hangover was our first one. Yeah, that was. was quite a while ago. Free pandemic. The before times. The before times, absolutely. Well, it's wonderful to have you back on. And today we're going to be talking about a piece you wrote that was put out in a few places, including and most prominently perhaps Jacobin, called the political economy of love and capitalism. I think this builds interestingly on previous work you've done in and around the arena of personal life, like your book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. You and I have talked several occasions about, you know, the feminist history of socialism and, you know, Alexander Collentai and, you know, her work in this area of Eros and whatnot.

So I think this is like a natural continuation of really important and unique work that you've done. So I'm excited to talk with you about it today. Before we get into the first question, do you just kind of want to introduce the piece for people who might not have heard of it? Of course, I'll link to it in the show notes. but maybe just a quick, brief intro for people that, you know, just to orient them to what we're talking about. Yeah, sure. So the piece was actually originally commissioned for Jacobin, Germany. And it was published first in German under the title, the use value of love. And then when it appeared in English in Jacobin in the U.S., they changed the title to the political economy of love in capitalism. And what it is is a materialist analysis of love for. 2025, basically trying to understand how certain aspects of this larger concept that we call love are either commodifiable or not commodifiable. And what that means for the way that we as individuals,

as well as communities and societies, experience love in a period of time when capitalism is increasingly commodifying basically everything around us. Yeah, absolutely. And there is just a, there's a full-on assault on our subjectivity. It's probably, it's always true to one or another degree under class society broadly, but certainly under this what I would call late-stage capitalism, this techno-inflected attention economy of modern capitalism, where it feels like you are being assaulted in all areas of your life,

that you cannot escape it from your attention span to, yeah, your personal relationships to the time you have on this planet to enjoy your own existence. It feels like it's increasingly under the thumb of an inhuman economic system that we are subordinate to, right? The economy doesn't function to serve us. We more and more and more, and it's always been true to a large extent, function in the interest of it and the elite who benefit from it. So I think this, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. No, go ahead. No, I was wrapping up. I was handing it over to you. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. It just really sparked something because one of the things that I was really thinking about when I wrote, so this article was commissioned in the sense that Jacobin, Germany was doing a special issue on love. And they asked me to write something for this issue. And so this was one of those things where I was sort of given a task. And I had to, I had to really think how I, I wanted to approach it. And one of the things that I kept thinking about was this wonderful quote from a contribution to the critique of political economy from 1859, where Mark says,

it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. And given how much our economy is changing, the relations and modes of production are changing in this era of, you know, whatever, techno, techno, feudal whatever you want to call it, the AI and automation and chatbots and everything that's going on, it started to occur to me that to do a proper materialist analysis, we start with the base and we try to understand how the superstructure then changes around it. And part of that superstructure, of course, is our idea and definition and experience of love. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. All right, well, let's go ahead and get into the arguments themselves. Why did you

open with the mug example. Maybe you can, you know, articulate what that is. And Marx's distinction between use value and exchange value. And how does that frame the rest of your argument about love under capitalism? Yeah. So the mug example is a very simple reality, which is I drink massive amounts of tea when I'm writing. And European mugs are really small. And so whenever I, you know, I'm in Europe, I have to go and buy myself a mug. And the key criteria of the mug that I need is that it is very large and hopefully sturdy, but the largeness, the size of the mug is the most important thing. So I'm primarily concerned with its use value. It holds my tea and preferably it doesn't break. And so that means I spent about four euro on a mug. But I could buy a very fancy mug. I think the

example that I give is like a very expensive French designer mug, which is going to cost me like 125 euros. And so the difference between the price of these mugs is their exchange value, because their use value is exactly the same. They hold my tea. And I really wanted to dig into this distinction between use value and exchange value, because I think that in order to understand a concept like love in a world such as the one that we're living in where things that are not necessarily commodities become commodifiable, such as emotions, affection, attention, some of the other things I talk about in the article. I thought it was very important to root my analysis in a kind of Marxist understanding of commodities and the difference between use and exchange value.

But I also think that love as a concept is a very kind of fuzzy, fluffy term. We don't always have a very clear sense of what we're talking about when we talk about love. When we talk about exploitation, we know exactly what we're talking about. But love is a complicated word. And so one of the goals of this article was really to kind of root an analysis of love in Marxian vernacular terms. because I think if we're going to critically understand what's happening to our experience of love in 2025, we might need to use some of these tools that help us understand how capitalism is warping our understanding and experience of this emotion. Absolutely. So you write that love has a use value as essential to human flourishing, much like food, like water, like shelter.

As an aside, I can't imagine and none of us can really imagine what living this life. life would be like without the love of the ones that are close to us, right? Even a few, a couple relationships that are truly rooted in love, you know, make all the difference and allow you to get through the ups and downs of life. So what changes when we treat love as a political economic question rather than a purely private or a moral one? Yeah, I think it helps us to understand how our personal relationships are intimately connected to the political and economic systems under which we live. So there's, on a previous podcast that I did with you, we talked about Alexander Collentai's wonderful essay, Make Way for Winged Eros, a letter to working youth. And in that

essay, Collentai really tries to lay out a sort of historical materialist, very dialectic understanding of the emotion of love and how it changed, the ideal love changed in different epochs of production. So she looks at antiquity, she looks at feudalism, she looks at capitalism, and then she imagines what it will be like under socialism. And so what that does is that helps us to understand that these emotions that we feel for our loved ones, which are absolutely essential to our human flourishing, as you said, or embedded in an economic and political system that deprives us of some of the resources necessary to experience that love. So in a similar way that capitalism makes it very difficult to secure food and clean water and shelter, it also makes

it very difficult for us to secure sort of a, you know, a constant and necessary experience of the emotion of love and the downstream consequences of those emotions. for human survival in a long run. Yeah, absolutely. And I do think that there's obviously a sort of implicit benefit to the system as a whole to try to fence some of this stuff off from political economy, right, from the underlying society and social relations that we are embedded within and kind of keep it into the realm of the purely private or the interpersonal, but explicating how they are connected

to the social relations of an increasingly rotten. economic system, I think is incredibly important and helps people understand some of the struggles they're facing in their own lives. Like, we do live at a time, which we often hear, of this loneliness epidemic where more and more people have fewer and fewer friends, fewer and fewer and fewer places they can go to have even a semblance of community. And if you are, as you know, some people are alienated from even their family that they were born into for various reasons, you could really just be cast out into the world with very little, tethering or feeling like anybody actually cares about you. And I think a lot of people do, an increasing

amount of people do feel that way in today's increasingly alienated society. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is, this was really the jumping off point for this article. I was very, I've been so struck by the problem of loneliness and social isolation in our society. There was a recent report that said that like there are 900,000 excess deaths a year from social isolation. Like this is actually a kind of epidemic. I was talking to a couple of 18-year-olds here in Berlin a week ago, and they were saying that as young people, the winter is really hard because in the summer they can hang outside with their friends.

But in the winter, when it's really cold and icy, they have nowhere to go. There are no third spaces anymore for youth. And so there's this sort of sense of community. fracturing. And then, of course, that means everybody gets online and is on their phones, and then they get further and further siloed and, you know, divided from each other. And so there is this really important way that looking at love and understanding the components of love will help us make sense of what about, what specifically about our society right now is making the experience of social connection so difficult.

Yeah, I often tell, like, you know, younger people, but people in general, like, if you're struggling with loneliness or alienation or you don't live around friends and family or whatever it may be, that interestingly, getting involved in political organizing in your community is a great way to break through. Like, you know, I sometimes think, like organizing spaces are a sort of third place that is often underappreciated. If you are continuously engaged in an organization or a community movement fighting around tenants, union rights, or whatever the struggle may be, you know, even if you're in a labor union or something like that, but just regular community organizing in any sense, mutual aid groups, not only are you coming into contact with different members of your community all the time in the process of serving them or struggling alongside them, but the organizers that you're organizing with, they do become your friends. Like, you are not only, not only are you combating loneliness interpersonally, you're also doing it

in a meaningful way, which you're teaming up with other people to try to solve problems and help members in your community. So I just wanted to make that point. If you are struggling with this or you do feel lonely, organizing is important in so many different ways, but it's also a wonderful avenue to find, you know, genuine friendships with like-minded people and based around a truly meaningful act. And it's a great place to also find those lateral networks of just support and care, right? Like somebody to ask you how your day is going, right? there it's it's it's it's really important to have that shared political commitment but it's also really important as we'll talk about to have a kind of proximity and longevity with people in your community that's what builds the kind of networks that we need to survive the world that we're living in today

definitely absolutely you know some of the most difficult times in my life um it's it's been my comrades my fellow you know organizers that i've been working with that have come to my come to my side when I was like brutally doxed when Revlev started. I was doxed by neo-Nazis all over neo-Nazi websites and it was my organizing comrades that came to my house and allowed me, you know, to sleep and like stood watch while my children slept. When we had a miscarriage, it was, you know, comrades that showed up with food and and just love when I was jailed in a protest, you know, it was I was bailed out and I came out into the waiting room and it was like 20 of my, you know, fellow organizers that had done that

together. They handed me food and hugged me and all this stuff. So I just can't overstate how important that can be. But let's go ahead and move on. You propose that love, and this is an interesting argument that I like quite a bit. You propose that love is made of attention, affection, and reciprocal flow across romantic, platonic, filial, and spiritual forms. Can you kind of talk about that and how you arrived at this three-part model. And what does this three-part model kind of help us see more clearly? Yeah, so I think what, as I was thinking about writing this article about love, I knew I needed to really take the concept of love, the philosophical concept of love and try to pin it down in some way. Because it's such a capacious word. And especially when you're talking about all these different

kinds of love. Like, I love my dogs. I love my friends. I love my daughter. I have, you know, relationships that are also romantic. And so I think there's a way in which I was trying to say, okay, what do these three, what do all these different forms of love have in common, right? Where are their points of connection? And at the same time, I've been fascinated by the rise of people who are having relationships with chatbots, with, you know, like Claude or Tattoo-BT. or, you know, there was just an article, I think, yesterday in the Atlantic Monthly, about people who are actually getting married to their chatpot companions. And so I really, really needed to sort of spend some just like brain cells on this question. And it's not perfect. You know,

I'm not saying that it's the perfect thing. I think that these are three key components. There might be others. But the ones that I landed on that I felt like were the most essential were attention, which I really describe as this idea of giving somebody all of your cognitive capacity, like actually paying attention using your, like, you know, you can tell when you're in a conversation with somebody when they're paying attention to you. You can tell when somebody's not paying attention to you. You can feel when you're being validated. You can feel when somebody's bored or their attention is drifting.

Children know when their parents aren't fully being attentive. There's all these ways in which attention, just the focusing of one's cognitive capacities on another object or person or being is a component of love. Affection is also a fairly capacious category, but it's basically sort of tenderness and all of the kindness and, you know, touch and coziness, all of the things that sort of make us feel like we are love. and that sounds almost tautological, but, you know, that makes us feel that we're valued in some way. And I spent some time in the article talking about this study from the 50s of the rhesus monkeys, right, where people crave what they called comfort contact. So just the softness of the famous study is that there are these baby rhesus monkeys

and there's a wire surrogate mother that has milk and food. And then there's a wire mother that is covered in like very soft. blankets and towels that has no food. And the rhesus monkeys are always on, they, they feel cozy and they're comfortable on the wire mother that has all the blankets. And then they just rush over to the other one and feed when they're hungry and then they come back. And there's this sort of desire to be, to feel pampered and to feel cozy and and cuddled and caressed. I mean, anybody who's ever had children understands that desire that children have to just be held. So that's affection.

And then the third part of this model is reciprocal flow, which is really kind of the most difficult concept to really articulate. But what I try to do in the article is give a lot of examples of what it is because I think people will recognize it, which is a natural, rhythmic exchange of love and affection and attention that happens. very much without intent. It's like a flow between two things that happens rather spontaneously. And there's no real exchange value that can be associated with it. Like all of these things have use values. But affection and attention can be commodified. And I spent a lot of time in the article talking about how that happens, and they become increasingly commodified when the value, when the difference between their use values and their exchange values grows, which means that because they're becoming scarcer and scarcer in our society, which we'll talk about in a second. But reciprocal flow fundamentally

cannot be given an exchange value because it cannot be commodified. The whole point of reciprocal flow is that it is done in a non-transactional way. And so it's like one of the examples that I give is petting a dog, if anybody or, you know, an animal, a domestic animal of any kind. Like there's a way in which when you're with an animal and you're just sort of petting the animal, we actually know that it's as pleasurable for the animal as it is for the person that's doing the petting. And it's not because the dog is petting you back. it's because there's a kind of aura of flow that's happening between the dog and the person. A great conversation. Like I give a lot of examples in the article.

And what this helps us understand, what it helps us see more clearly is that if we think of love as a concept as these three different things, attention, affection and reciprocal flow, which is the one of the three that cannot be commodified, what we understand very clearly is that we are increasingly being told in our society that love is only about attention and affection and not about reciprocal flow. Reciprocal flow is devalued, like to a remarkable extent, because capital cannot extract surplus from it. And I think that that allows us to understand something about, why love in 2025 feels so much more difficult and so much more scarce than it used to. There's so many things that makes me think about.

There's a certain transactionalism in our society that I think tends toward proliferating a sort of narcissistic subjectivity where, you know, because everything else in our life is so transactional, some people do succumb subjectively to a sort of narcissistic subjectivity where, you know, because everything else in our life is so transactional, some people do succumb subjectively to a sort of sort of transactionalism, even in their own personal relationships. And I don't want to make too much of it, but there is some echoes of it in some of the more egregious forms of, you know, using phrases like, you know, self-care, which is important, of course, self-care or, you know, you don't deserve my emotional labor. We've seen this sort of explode in the last 10 years, specifically on the left, where it seems like caring for others, thinking about others, putting others ahead of yourself is like anathema and treat it as an assault on the very self. And there's a retreat using nice, flourishy or academic language back into a narcissistic focus on the self that is

justified through like an implicit transactionalism that is present in our broader society. Do you, do you notice that? Does that resonate? Oh, God, absolutely. I can't tell you how many conversations I have with people about my distaste for the term emotionally. labor, in particular that one. You know, I mean, this, the self-care as self-preservation comes from an Audrey Lord quote, right? It's Audrey Lord said that. And I think it comes from a particular moment of organizing and of, you know, difficulties in the United States where she was trying to make this argument that it's not self-indulgent to need to protect yourself. But I think what's happened in the last 10 years in particular is this sort of therapy talk,

around boundaries and, you know, cutting out toxic friendships or needy relations, you know, or what's called friend-escaping, right? Like, basically only keeping people in your life from which you can extract effective resources, but who don't necessarily require an inordinate amount of resources from you. It is extremely transactional. And I think that it's capitalism very specifically that is responsible for this because we are all so utterly exhausted by the demands of our current economic system that we have very few affective resources left. And so, of course, people retreat into the language of self-care because if they have any extra emotional, you know, resources to share, they're going to be hoarded for themselves.

because they just, there are no other sources of that support. And so we're all feeling like we need to feed ourselves. And then, of course, what does that do? That actually exacerbates the situation, Brett. It makes it so much worse. So that's exactly what I was trying to do in this article. Like, I've been really, you know, there are sometimes things that I write very academically. I spend a lot of time like going to the research and, you know, looking at the studies.

And this article does have a lot. If you read the one that's online in English, it has a lot of hyperlinks to all of the studies that I cite. I spend a lot of time trying to substantiate my claims. But ultimately, this is a plea for people to stop thinking so transactionally about love. because I think that it's damaging our experience of love and that once we destroy this experience, this understanding of how love also includes this non-commodifiable thing, which I'm calling reciprocal flow, I think it's actually going to be very hard to get it back. And so we're like on the brink of losing something extremely important. And unlike, you know, some of my other work, I feel like in this article, I really am trying to like make a plea it's a call for a sort of critical understanding of why everything that's

happening right now friendship recession and you know the the heteropessimism that everybody is talking about heterophatalism like the the cracking of so many relationships familiar relationships platonic relationships all of that is happening within a specific context and we're not talking about the context. Instead, we're pathologizing individual people and saying, oh, well, you're too needy or you're too toxic or, you know, whatever it is that you're requiring of your friends is, is overdemanding or something that we try to individualize what is ultimately a very broad societal problem. Incredibly well said, yeah. And I do, I do often argue that, and this kind of speaks to the spiritual aspect of love as well that maturation in a human being over time is a move away from narcissism.

You're your most narcissistic. Like, you know, think of a toddler. They want what they want. They don't give a fuck, you know, about anybody else's need. They literally can't conceptually put themselves in the shoes of somebody else. As the kid gets older, they start realizing that other people do have once in needs, but they still prioritize their own, right? Adolescents, you're kind of forced to kind of give in to some people at some times.

but there's still very adolescence is a very narcissistic time. I think as you grow older and older and older, you know, I'm not saying this is the only way, but as a father, having children sort of beats a certain level of narcissism out of you by force. Like, you know,

whether you want it or not, you are serving somebody else's interests over your own every day. But as you keep evolving, you start realizing that happiness and contentment is not found in self-indulgence. and narcissistic navel-gazing and self-concern and trying to get and obtain everything you can for the endlessly desiring self, but is more and more about letting go of that narcissistic self, you know, the ego, whatever it may be, and moving more and more towards a life that is oriented towards a project that is bigger than yourself and other people out there.

And the culmination of spirituality in so many traditions is literally described as transcending the self of like fully liberating from the base desires and sort of petulance of the ego in service of the broader world, a project of making the world better and in the service of other human beings in your life. So I do see like maturation from children to adolescence to adult. Many people stop there. But I think if you keep going, you can reach even spiritual heights of transcending ego and narcissism, which is an other focused and other oriented sort of approach to life. And I think

that is actually beneficial in so many ways and constructs a subjectivity that is implicitly and explicitly in contradiction to the dominant mainstream society and what they want to make you into. Exactly. And so I really want to pick up on what you just said, because that's why I included spiritual love in my analysis, because I think the whole thing about reciprocal flow, You know, Robin Wall Kimmer, who wrote this wonderful book about braiding sweetgrass and had a more recent book called The Service Fairy. And talks a lot about in indigenous studies, this idea that we live in a world that we feed and it feeds us, right? We exhale carbon dioxide and inhale oxygen. And the trees are in a sort of symbiotic relationship, the plants.

There's ecosystems, entire ecosystems run without any kind of design on this larger model of reciprocal flow. Everything in nature kind of sustains itself and each other at the same time. Sort of bees and flowers would be a very good example. And so there's a thing about spirituality and about society where if I give a, of myself to others, whether it's my kid or my neighbors or my comrades, my colleagues, my friends, my broader community, whatever. I, it's not just one way. Capitalism tries to convince us that we're suckers if we give away these valuable resources for free. But in fact, if we participate in the flow of life, of meaning, of sharing, we get back. We get, we get, we get

into that cycle and we are fed as much as we feed. We receive as much as we give. And that sounds really esoteric, but I actually think there's a very, very good materialist argument for why capitalism has a problem with this model and why we all implicitly understand every single person that I have spoken to about reciprocal flow has said, oh my God, I know exactly what you're talking about. I know exactly that feeling when you're in, you know, I was a couple of weeks ago with two colleagues here in Berlin. We went to a bar on like a Tuesday night and I think we met at like seven and we three of us fell into a conversation and we were having like such a deep conversation. And before we knew it, it was one o'clock in the morning.

I missed the last Ubon home because it was five hours had passed. I don't know how that happened, you know? And I think that was the perfect example of a reciprocal flow. Everybody had a thought. We were contributing. We were all riffing off of each other. We were perfectly present for each other in this really natural way. It didn't take effort.

I was never bored. It was all just flowing. And I think, you know, if you have kids, if you're in a great relationship with somebody, you have this feeling of reciprocal flow where you give and you receive. And it, like, there might be short-term imbalances, but in the long run, everything kind of works out. There's no tally sheets. There's no accounting.

It's just allowing yourself to be part of a flow. And I do think that, as you just said, almost every single spiritual tradition marks the ability to enter into this state of reciprocal flow with the universe, more broadly speaking, not just to mention just our communities, but like really broadly speaking, is like the pinnacle of spiritual, like enlightenment or spiritual achievement. And I think we do ourselves a real disservice because, we don't talk about love as a thing that has an essential use value to human flourishing. We think of it, as you said earlier, as a private moral question. And it is way beyond just a private moral question. And certainly, our inability to feel love or our inability to find love is not our fault. It is not our individual fault or our individual moral failing. It is the moral failing of our economic system and a society that wants to commodify everything that it can extract surplus from. Amen. Amen. Absolutely. Yeah. And speaking really

quickly on the spiritual point, like, you know, in Buddhism, the ultimate, you know, enlightenment is really a non-dual state is described as non-dual. And what does that mean? It means, among other things, the collapse of subject-object distinction. And when the self is either nothing or everything, right, when it either enlarges to encompass everything or shrinks away to become nothing, it actually functions as the same in the end, which is you feel a felt visceral, total unification with everything and everyone around you. And what that actually feels like is love, right? If there's no separation, if you don't feel that the person or that bird or even that tree to be fundamentally separate from yourself, you know, what you feel is love. Jesus says, love your neighbor as yourself.

You can't do that from a place of ego, right? You can only truly love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. Like that's unthinkable to the ego. But beyond the ego, that is possible in this non-dual state. So I just wanted to kind of emphasize that this argument goes all the way up to the highest echelons of spirituality and religious traditions. But I think there's resonance in just the concept of dialectics, right? Yeah, absolutely. There's resonance in the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, just this interpenetrient.

interdependent, constantly evolving, non-separateness of everything. That is not only an important way to approach relationships, but I think is an important way to eventually approach all of life. And I think it is, it can be radically elevating to approach life in that way. Yes. So let's go ahead and move on. There's a lot of questions. And you're touching on a lot of them. So, you know, feel free to take these questions in any direction. Maybe you've already made a point on something. But in your section on attention in particular, kind of going back to attention you emphasize how psychologically damaging, like being ignored can be,

and how modern life drains our attentional resources, right? I think of so many people, young people, young men, whatever, that feel like they are completely ignored by society. They have nobody that actually cares about them. Nobody cares about their inner struggles. And they go onto the internet to try to find community, but it's a simulacra of real community. It's not ever the real thing.

what are the main forces in capitalism that kind of make attention in particular scarce? And what does that scarcity do to our relationships and our lives? Yeah, so I mean, I think this is a multi-part question. So I'm just going to try to touch on just a few things. So obviously, exhaustion from overwork, from the precarity of our economy that requires people to have so many different jobs and so many different commitments of their time in order to meet their basic security. So there's a big part of what we're talking about, as we said earlier about like self-care, right, is that people are drained at the end of the day, especially if you're a working parent and you have kids or you've got elderly parents that you're taking care of and you've got a job, maybe two, maybe a side hustle.

You know, when you get home at the end of the day, you are just spent. And it's going to be very, very difficult to muster some extra attention to just share freely with people in your community. So I think that what happens is when attention is scarce and this is not even considering like the algorithms and social media and the doom scrolling, right? The infinite scroll that is also competing for our attention. the Netflix and all of the ways in which our leisure is increasingly becoming commodified as these big corporations try to capture our attention. So when attention becomes scarce, its exchange value in the Marxist vernacular increases. And when the exchange value of attention increases, more and more people are drawn into the market to sell it. So,

rather than give it away for free or to share it openly and non-transactionally with our loved ones, many people will decide, okay, I'm actually going to commodify my attention. And so what do we see in 2025? There's like a million life coaches, a million executive coaches and personal trainers and therapists of different kinds who will literally pay attention to you for money. And as that increases, then it means that people who do have attentional resources think, well, why should I give mine away for free when everybody is paying for them? So increasingly attention becomes a commodity, which means that wealthy people can afford to buy it. And poor people at the bottom of our society, people who may not have the extra resources, either intentional or financial, they get shut out. And so you have a massive underclass of people who are increasingly socially isolated and lonely.

And as you said, they turn to the internet, which is a very, very dangerous place to go, which not only because of the content for radicalization, but also because it actually exacerbates the problem. Those attentional resources are then just being consumed by corporations, which are commodifying our attention in order to convince us to buy things. that we basically don't need. Yeah, and all these weird, grotesque outgrowths of these internet communities, like a recent one that's been getting a lot of attention is this looks maxing shit on the internet for young, you know, young men and women, but particularly young men who feel like it kind of evolves out of the in-cell communities that feel like, you know, your value as a human being is so intimately tied to how you look and how tall you are that so much of your energy

needs to go to try to looks max or do everything. everything you can, from soft maxing to hard maxing, even like smashing your face with a hammer to make your bone structures grow back thicker so that you look like you have a bigger jaw. This is very trans. This is very capitalist, right? It's very much. But it also functions in a world in which young men date on Tinder or these profiles where you have to kind of put out a reel and a picture of yourself, a highlight reel of your

entire being and hope that it attracts somebody. and, you know, just statistically, the odds are that it's not really going to for very many people, because you can swipe through and find an seemingly infinite amount of people, and you could, you know, pick like a menu, which one you want. It's just a grotesque distortion of social relationships. And that's just one arena in which I think it's like, you know, like contemporarily, like right now in this moment, it's a big thing. It's a flash in the pan, but it's a particularly rotten outgrowth of that.

Oh, I agree. And the whole business model of something like Tinder or Hinge, right, is precisely that you don't find somebody that you love and connect with and experience reciprocal flow with because then you would leave the app and it would lose a customer. Right. So they want to keep you on there. I do think it's really problematic that a lot of our, at least romantic relationships, are increasingly being mediated through for-profit corporate platforms.

And then another layer of this is the AI. aspect where not only are social media obviously adding fake bot accounts that will seemingly be more and more real and then we'll interact with lonely people keeping those people on the app right if you're like if you're having Instagram but you don't have many friends or followers it's not a lot keeping you on that app if you can have an AI profile that looks real that suddenly takes an interest in your post and suddenly goes into the DMs and starts talking with you and then you put that on to like Tinder and stuff like that's been proven that some of these online dating apps have used AI, knowing that most men do not get attention from women on these apps. They will use fake women AI profiles to flirt with and keep men on these apps longer because they can't do it otherwise.

So like now when you go online, increasingly you're not even sure if you're engaging with a real human being. And it's just it's so it's so dystopian. Oh, it's so dystopian. It's just awful. So let's move on to affection now. We covered attention a little bit. I'm skipping some questions, but feel free to go back and touch on points because I feel like we're covering a lot of it.

But on affection, you argue that economic pressure overwork and anxiety make tenderness and comfort more scarce. You've kind of argued that raising their exchange value and as you've said, expanding markets for purchased attention. Can you kind of talk about some of the we've already touched on a few, but some of the more revealing examples of this commodification and kind of what they tell us about class and inequality more broadly? Yeah, so this is the category of affection.

And here I really want to talk, I think, about touch, but also like compliments and validation. So I'll start with the first one. I lived many years ago. I lived for three years in Japan. And in Japan, there's this really interesting thing called the Hostess Club, which is a place where usually salaried workers, mostly men would go after work, sometimes with their bosses, sometimes with their colleagues. And they would sit at a table and basically there was a woman who was assigned to that table. So she was like a personal kind of waitress, sort of a server for the table, which meant that she got the snacks and she got the drinks.

But when she wasn't, you know, getting drinks, her job was essentially to complement the men. And a lot of these men, you know, sometimes they would sing karaoke, and so that meant that she would say, oh, you're such a good singer. Sometimes it was like a kind of a subtle flirtation. Oh, you're so handsome or, oh, you look so nice today or you're wearing a very nice suit. But it wasn't sexual. It was really just somebody to sit around and say nice things about you. And I remember thinking at the time, like, what was strange? What a strange institution. But it is clearly something that was very important. It served a purpose in Japanese society. Now, we don't have anything exactly like that in the United States, but we do have a lot of pampering. And if you look at, you know, the schedules, for instance, of very wealthy people, men and women, but a lot of them women, one of the things that you'll notice is that they spend a lot of time with like,

personal trainers or getting their hair done or getting massages or foot reflexology or various kinds of chakras readjusted or whatever right there's a lot of affection that you can buy now obviously one example would be sex work that's the obvious example but i'm also interested in these other kinds of forms of purchased affection and again what this means in a capitalist society is that that we know we have, I can, you know, I can cite you studies until the cows come home. And hopefully, if you read the article, you will find links to some of these about how important physical touch is to people. And not in a creepy way. I mean, literally, high fives are just as good as hugs. But physical touch, when people are deprived of physical touch, it has really, really negative

psychological consequences and physiological consequences on them. And so increasingly wealthy people can purchase touch and purchase validation and compliments and kindness. And once again, people who do not have the financial resources are shut out of these markets, not only because they can't purchase them, but because people who have the ability to share touch and affection and compliments, rather than giving them away for free, are now increasingly encouraged to sell them on a market where prices are determined by the vicissitudes of supply and demand, because when demand is high and supply is scarce, prices go up. And in capitalism, that means that people are increasingly going to sell their affection rather than share it freely

with the people in their life. That leads well into this next question about elites and pricelessness. And just the fact that broadly elites, you know, a startling fact for the first time in history, the top 10% of the richest Americans account for 50% of all consumer spending. That just shows you that the economy is so top heavy that most of the spending done in the economy is done by the people that have the money, the top 10%. But as you go up the wealth ladder, more and more rich people are just simply, I mean, in so many ways that you just said, but in other ways, extracting themselves from the problems that the wealth inequality that they benefit cause in the rest of society. So, you know, underfunded schools, rich people don't mind. You just take them into private schools, right?

A broken health care system doesn't matter. I have enough money. I don't even notice the money going out of my bank account. Rising food costs and inflation. who gives a shit, I have my butler go and shop for me anyway, right? The cost of living, shooting through the roof, housing, all of that stuff, it does not matter to rich people. And rich people run our society, they run our economy, and they run our government.

Everybody in Congress is a fucking millionaire. The donor classes of both parties are composed of millionaires and billionaires. And you wonder, like, why do politicians never talk about or really do anything about the actual serious material day-to-day issues that are affecting us? Well, because they don't answer to us. We don't live in a democracy. They are rich. They're surrounded by rich people and they answer politically to rich people.

And it is not the concern of rich people how much health care or housing costs because they've got that shit on lock. It doesn't matter that the neighborhoods are falling apart, that there's no sense of community and that people are pressed to the pedal and have to have three jobs just to survive because they're extracted from having to deal with that. I think eventually that does catch up with them in the form of a broken, angry, bitter society that sees them living in these gilded, gated communities and all of a sudden you start seeing people aiming their attention in the right way. So much of reactionary politics

in the U.S. is geared toward taking your gaze and turning it away from the rich and the powerful and toward trans people and immigrants and Maduro and whatever the fuck so that you don't fucking take the pitchforks and the flames in the right direction. I mean, that's the quintessence of reactionary politics in so many ways. But you also argue that, you also argue that, that the things that we call priceless, I think this is an interesting argument, right? The things that we refer to or think of as priceless, as beyond a price tag are often the things that elites benefit from most. So how does the sanctity of motherhood, perhaps, and the priceless label act as a tool for the capitalist state to avoid building a robust welfare system? Yeah. So I think what you just said is so interesting because the one thing that those wealthy people worry about,

and they have been openly worrying about is the collapsing birth rate. So, you know, Elon Musk says it's the one thing that keeps him up at night, right? J.D. Vance was up there saying he wants Americans to have more babies. In Texas, there are these Natal, you know, conferences that are trying to figure out how to convince American women, basically by stripping American women of their political rights and reproductive freedoms in order to increase the birth rate. And a lot of this fear about the collapse of the birth rate is very intimately tied with sort of white supremacist language. But they cannot insulate themselves from the fact that people aren't having babies, especially the working classes, obviously. There's a, and young people, like particularly Gen Z. Millennials in Gen Z, we're seeing a massive baby bust, right?

There's like so much anxiety among the elite classes about why it is that young people aren't having kids. Well, for the one in the first place, the argument is so obviously clear. It's because the fucking world sucks right now. And why would you want to bring children into that world? A lot of people, if you do surveys, it's anxiety about the future. It's the cost of raising children. It's the insecurity of our economy. It's the climate.

There's so many things. that are driving this. But what it means for capitalism is that in the long run, they're not going to have as many workers to exploit. They're not going to have as many consumers to sell things to. They're not going to have anybody using their, they're not going to be any eyeballs on their apps, right? So there is this one thing where they can try to blame, you know, immigrants.

But I don't know what immigrants have to do with American women not having babies, right? The classic sort of right-wing reactionary move is to blame minorities, women, trans people, foreigners, whatever, right? Some other, other than the elite class that is benefiting from the system. But at the end of the day, the elite class, at least for now, really does need babies. And for whatever reason, you know, they don't, I guess it's related to immigration because they don't, they blame women. for immigration, they blame women for immigration because of women were having babies, then we wouldn't need, quote unquote, need to have immigrants in our economy. That's their language. You see this very clearly in the right wing in Germany where I'm living right now.

There was an ad, a billboard for the IFDA, which is the far right party here in Germany. And the people who come, who are non-German, but who live in Germany are often called new Germans. And this billboard showed a white woman with a very large pregnant belly. And it said, new Germans, question mark, we make them ourselves. So there's a direct link between reactionary politics and the birth rate that I think is really important. And this relates to this question of motherhood and the idealization of motherhood. So anyone out there who has kids knows that kids require an incredible amount of attention, affection, and just labor, right? Washing and feeding and driving around to soccer practice or music lessons or school.

There's an incredible amount of just energy and time that children require. And elites need children for our society to function. They need new taxpayers. They need new consumers, new soldiers, new workers. They need young people, but they don't want to pay for them. Because if they have to pay for them, it will reduce their profits. It will require higher levels of taxation, greater levels of redistribution. So what they do is this really sneaky rhetorical move.

By saying that, the sanctity of motherhood, the idealization of motherhood. Now, this applies a little bit to fatherhood, too. Like parents are required to provide for free. outside of the market, the input into capitalism, in this case babies, that capitalism requires to thrive in the long term, but they don't want to pay for it. So they obscure it with this language of pricelessness. Like what I say in the article and what I'm going to develop in a further article that's specifically a kind of political economy of motherhood is that I think that they use this language of reciprocal flow, like, oh, the only only, you know, the only

proper way to raise a child is to provide all of this attention and affection and resources within the framework of reciprocal flow, not through a robust social safety net, not through some kind of universal free child care or child tax credits or child allowances or ways in which it would be so much easier to raise children. Look, even some of the most conservative sort of people on the pro-natalist side of this debate in the United States, the honest ones at least will say, yes, actually spending social resources to help struggling families will increase the birth rate. And so I think it's very important to understand that when we are faced with something in a capitalist society where people tell us that, oh, it's priceless, you can't put, you know, you can't measure, you know,

the ideal state of motherhood in some way, you know, because that's a way of saying, oh, this is something that we don't want to pay for. So it's a personal decision that you're making and that you get a benefit out of because they're your children, ultimately. And so we don't have a responsibility for doing anything to help you. Even though every person who receives Social Security right now

is benefiting from the labor of other people's children, any war that we have fought in the United States is the result of people sending their children to fight, in some cases, for causes that they absolutely do not even believe in. Every tax, you know, dollar that is going flowing into the federal government is coming from workers who are other people's children, which our society did nothing to help raise. And so I'm very, very suspicious of anything in a capitalist society that gets labeled as, oh, oh, it's priceless. Because I always think that that's a place where elites are benefiting and they know that they're benefiting from this thing that they really need and really want, but they don't want to pay for.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that is such an important and insightful argument. Just pulling on one of the threads you put out there, is the contradictions within the right now regarding the anxiety around low birth rates? There's many economic reasons you laid out many of them, why they would be concerned about that. The obvious solution to it would be immigration, but they're reactionaries and they hate immigrants. So then they have this other element of like the techno oligarchs, the same people in many cases, Elon, right? Elon is against the lower birth rates and he's to repopulate the planet,

but they're pushing AI. Elon, by the way, used to be a warning about AI. Now he's fully on board because the dollar signs are in his eyes. Yep. But AI would displace if it would. We're works out well, it will displace workers raising profit margins for corporations because you don't need to pay AI to do the work. They're already trying to offload work to AI, even though it's kind of a fucking mess right now. So these are all kind of in contradiction. If you lay off mass amounts of people in the workforce, replace them with AI. Yeah, on one dimension, your profits go up, but then who's going to consume the items? Well, they talk about a UBI. But then you have the immigrant situation. Well, immigrants would solve this problem.

but you have white nationalism that is also on the same political side. And in fact, is, you know, like Elon Musk would get, got into like a MAGA civil war over HB1 visas, H1B visas or whatever the hell. Right. Because he was like,

well, Americans aren't skilled enough. We got to bring in because for Elon, this is exploitable labor. You know, those visas are tied to you being, you know, completely at the behest of your employer.

You will get sent back if you do not, if your employer, requires you, so you are much more easily exploitable. But they come from different countries. So it's just all of these contradictions are just bursting the right to pieces right now. But there's no real coherence there about what the solution is. And yeah, AI immigrants, the low birth rate, they're all sort of in an interesting way in contradiction to one another. They are.

But I will say that like, you know, a conservative think tank, like the Institute for Family Studies, if you go on to their website, at least this was true a year ago when I was writing something about them, you know, they will openly admit that the low birth rate is a threat to capitalism. So, and, and, you know, they, they kind of keep quiet on the immigration issue because they know that obviously immigration would be an obvious solution to this. But they, but they're just really worried that as our population shrinks, that, you know, our GDP shrinks. There are fewer people to pay for Spotify subscriptions or Netflix subscriptions. Like the consumer products, like AI is only profitable because people use it and they pay to use it. But if they replace all of the workers with AI, who's going to pay in the long run to buy the product that they're making? Like it's a very, you know, it's a problem of like capitalist quarterly reporting, right?

They're looking at short-term profits and they're not thinking of long-term consequences. But like when haven't they? Exactly. Exactly. Right. So that's why I'm saying this is where I really do think that a solid Marxist, proper, materialist analysis of love and of emotion and affection and attention and reciprocal flow, all these things that we're talking about right now is kind of necessary to make sense. Like you just said, you know, the low birth rate and the epidemic of social isolation and loneliness and immigration and reactionary politics, in sales, looks maxing, friendscaping. All of these things are completely related to the ways in which the material base of our society, the modes and relationships of production are changing.

And because the modes and relationships are changing, largely, I think, in response to technological advances around AI and automation and algorithms, that means that our superstructure is also going to change. We're in a moment where the superstructure of our ideals of justice, of love, of philosophy, of law, of what is right and wrong, all of those things are in flux right now. because if you remarks this and you believe that the base determines the superstructure, the material basis of our social existence is changing. And I think that as people on the left, we have to preemptively do the analysis to understand, like a chess player, as the material basis of our society changes, as the modes and relations of production change, as the relations. between employers and employees change as the division of labor changes as property relations

change like we're we're entering a world of of intellectual property right where like all of these algorithms don't even get me started all of these uh AI chatbots large language models they've just basically stolen all of their material from the internet from authors like me for instance right so it's another enclosure of the commons. We've seen what happens in the aftermath of an enclosure of the commons. But we should know if we've studied our history that we can fight the enclosure of the commons. We know what happens, why this happens. We understand the mechanisms of primitive accumulation. And so if we can use the tools that, you know, good solid materialist analyses have given us in the past to understand our current moment, we will actually be empowered to meet that moment.

Because when the crisis comes and it will come and it will come hard, we have to be prepared to build something new out of the ruins of the world that they're going to leave us. And I don't think we're prepared. I really don't think we're prepared. And we're certainly not prepared in our personal and emotional lives. And, you know, I think a lot about a lot of things. But as a scholar, for me, one of the most important things that I think we have to remember is that a social and economic system is a good social and economic system if people are happy and thriving in it. And as you said, our system is depriving vast majority of people in our country from living a satisfying, happy, connected. meaningful life. And that's just not sustainable in the long run. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the,

the optimism of a population, I think, is a proxy for how happy they are. And, you know, we always get our hearts broken when we go back and look at like, you know, socialist societies of the last century. And the people were so optimistic. Like, where is society going to be by the year 2000, you know? there's such a heartbreaking optimism that things were going in such a good direction. And that manifested in people's outlook of the future. But now if you ask people in America, where's this whole thing going? You will not find an optimist among most people. Everybody is pessimistic about where this is going.

They're scared about where this is going. And it's endlessly irritating that the actual real solution, you know, some form of socialist transformation of the mode of production to match the ever-evolving social relations and meet the needs of the vast majority of people has been so systematically demonized that regular working people will just regurgitate a knee-jerk hatred of socialism and communism. They've been so trained by their rulers to just hate the very thing that would be a solution. So like the American political system will try anything and everything except the actual thing that works because the actual thing that works is a threat to the material interest of the people who

own our society. And to see people just put on a leash and train to attack the most powerless people in our society and thinking that that's going to solve their problems, it's tragic and endlessly irritating, but it does show the power of ideological conditioning. And like, that's the hardest thing for us on the left to do is try to break through the fog of that ideological conditioning, because it's interwoven in our popular culture and it goes back generations. And it's sad to see, but it's a real obstacle we have to overcome. I agree. And I think in some ways it is, comes back to this wonderful thing that you said at the beginning of the podcast about your

comrades, right? And how it were your comrades that showed up for you. And being engaged politically gives you a community and a sense of belonging. And I do think for those of us, who know quite clearly that there are solutions to our problems and that those solutions are staring us in front of, right, you know, staring us in the face, as they say. But you're right, the ideological conditioning, the need your anti-communism, the sort of red-baiting that is so pervasive, especially in the United States, is the obstacle. You need to have a community. You need to have people who are willing to discuss and share and think through some of these things. things. And, you know, we need to have it. We need to articulate a positive vision because I think

too often on the left, we're very good at being against things, but we're not very good at being for things. And that's why, you know, when I sit down and really think about what do people want in their lives, what they want really, other than a safe place to live and food on the table and some kind of basic economic security, they want love and belonging. They want affection and attention. They want to feel like they have a place where they're valued as human beings

and not just on the internet and not just by a chat bot. Chatbot is just a prosthesis for love. It is a prosthesis for attention because we're not getting the real thing. Now, I don't want to, you know, throw any shade on people, people who, you know, are perhaps finding some validation from their chatbots. I mean,

there may be very good reasons why in our world chatbots are providing something that is of use. And, you know, certainly people might have intimate issues. They might have trauma from childhood that makes it very difficult for them to open up. And so being able to open up to chat GPT or Claude or whatever allows them a kind of intimacy that they otherwise might not feel. But I think for the vast majority of us, these sorts of technologies are prostheses for the kind of connection that we really crave. And on the left, we're very good at identifying the problems. We're very good at identifying, you know, why things are the way they are and how they might get worse. We're very good at dooming. What is it, you know, like envisioning the dystopian future. But what we're not very

good at in some ways is really articulating a positive vision of how the world could be better if we implemented these policies. That's what I think we need to focus on is this message of like, okay, what are we going to offer in this increasingly dystopian world? What are we giving as a promise for the future? Well, that leads perfectly into this final question, which is, and I totally agree with everything you said there. You cite Alexandra Collentai's 1923 vision of a socialist future where people would enjoy an abundance of, among other things, reciprocal flow. Can you kind of articulate this positive vision of a socialist future and how we might begin to prefigure such a future in the here and now? So I think that, you know, again, this is like

a multi-stage argument. So I'll try to keep it short. I mean, obviously sort of step one, very particular to the United States, is to reduce the precarity that most people feel in their lives. We need to have a very robust social safety net. We need things like universal health care, universal child care. We need some kind of more stable job situations. We need protections for gig workers. There are so many things that we could do tax the rich to redistribute these resources. more equitably through society. I mean, these are the classic sorts of things that people on the left talk about. Those are very materially achievable. Those are things that are kind of almost technocratic solutions. And we can think about how they've been implemented in the past in other

countries, how they are being implemented today in other places, even in some U.S. states. I think these are like a really essential sort of step one. But there's a bigger step. And there's this sort of broader politics of love. And it's, again, this relationship between the base and the superstructure. So, Cullen Tye imagined a socialist society where everyone was embedded in rich, bountiful, lateral communities of care and support. And this meant that sort of that That feeling of reciprocal flow, that attention, that affection was abundant. It wasn't scarce. And it's because we weren't just getting it from our romantic partners, which is where a lot of

people end up getting it because if you have any despair, it's going to go to your immediate partner or maybe your kids or maybe your parents. But it's very narrowly focused. In Collentai's vision of a socialist society, we have comrades and colleagues and neighbors and people that we might, you know, just pass on the street or, you know, meet in a shop every once in a while, what social psychologist often call weak ties. But we live in a community of people where everybody has a little bit of extra time, a little bit of extra energy to be kind to each other, to look each other in the eye and smile when you walk past. So what it means is if we have all of these wonderful sort of things like housing is a human right and social, universal socially funded child care and health care and all these things, so that we're not working so much so that we have more free time to share with our friends, we have more time to host parties, to go to parties, to spend time in nature walking, to go to whatever religious, you know, temple, church, whatever your, you know,

preference is, to spend time with God or gods or some kind of thing that's higher than you, to sleep, to just sleep some more, to play with your children, to relax with your lovers, to stare out a window and daydream, all of these things that don't require the market, that don't require or invite necessarily commodification, because if they were abundant, we would engage in them so much more often. So we have to fight for the future. We have to fight for a future where we withdraw our affective

and our effective resources from the market. That means our attention. That means our affection. where we allow ourselves more naturally to fall into states of reciprocal flow with others without fearing that they're going to take advantage of us, without fearing that we are being suckered or we're being scammed. Now, I understand that in the world as we live today, it's very difficult to do this because there are people who are kind of emotional vampires out there who will absolutely suck you dry of your emotional resources and then move on to the next person once you've, you know, tired of giving them.

But the reason that happens is because these resources are so scarce. So this positive vision of the future, this positive vision of love, is to create a world of abundance, a world where love in all of its forms, as delineated in these three things, attention, affection, and reciprocal flow, becomes just more natural, more easy, more fluid so that we can engage with each other. in less transactional and less suspicious ways. And I know that's really hard, but I don't think it's impossible. Yeah. No, I mean, what you're describing is a more human society, one based on human flourishing as opposed to profit accumulation.

We have to go from a society where we are trained to compete to hoard resources in a rigged game to cooperating with one another to achieve the highest quality of life possible for one another, for all of us, for the majority of human beings on this earth. And that would mean, among other things, I think, getting away from a desperate need for things. Like what commodities fill is the void where community and meaning should be. We hoard things and we buy and we purchase and we consume because we lack meaning and community and connection to something bigger than ourselves in our day-to-day lives. It's a sort of pacifier that we are constantly.

putting in our mouths to calm ourselves in a lot of ways. And of course, a society promotes that exact thing because the whole thing is built on commodity production and consumption, et cetera. But actually, you will realize that a happier life is actually a life that is less cluttered with things and gadgets and shiny, sparkly beeping things and is more embedded in the natural world, in community, in hobbies that ground you to your loved ones, to the earth, and finding out what you're interested in, right, in exploring different hobbies and having the free time control and autonomy over your own time on this planet to find out who you are and what you're

interested in, to pursue spiritual paths, to pursue, you know, different forms of skills that are not to be commodified, but that are a means in and of themselves, not a means or an ends in and of themselves, not a means to a further end. Yeah. And on your original point about like obviously the social structures of health care. and childcare and housing. That's absolutely essential, and higher taxes are essential. And I would also add, dismantling the empire is essential.

This trillion dollar a year black hole of not being able to pass an audit at the Pentagon that just goes around stomping on the throats of human beings all around the world. That has to be dismantled as a necessary pretext and prerequisite to building up the material structures that would meet our needs because our needs cannot be met. on the backs and throats of humans in the global south or in the rest of the world, right? Replace that empire and that imperialism with proletarian internationalism because our flourishing really does depend on the flourishing of all other humans on this planet. Yeah, exactly.

I can tell you a really interesting example here in Germany. You know, in Germany, they've had this thing called the debt break, which was a sort of constitutional provision that prevented them from spending over a certain percentage of their GDP. but, you know, when it came time to remilitarize Germany, they just blew right through it, right? And so we see exactly in many European countries right now that this sudden, massive increase in military spending is going to come at the expense of social safety nets. So when people say, oh, you could never have these things. They're too expensive, you know, whatever, free public transportation or free child care or universal health care, all these things that other countries actually have, they say we can't afford it in the United States.

The richest country in the world can't afford it. Why? Because of our military spending, obviously. It's so obvious that you can just like shift money from one bunch lying into another and you could create the circumstances for so much flourishing, not only in our country, but as you said, around the world, right? There's got to be solidarity, not just with our communities, but with the sort of broader. sense of human flourishing and that means humans in every country around the world. But I wanted to end, as you were talking, I thought about something, which is a very sort of concrete example, about how we can prefigure this positive vision of creating community. And it's, it was about, you were just saying how, you know, life is not about the bibles. Those are just a substitution for feeling connected and feeling meaning and community and things like that. And here in Germany,

I decided rather foolishly and sort of spontaneously to host a Thanksgiving dinner. And this was a very complicated thing because for all sorts of reasons, a lot of the ingredients that you need for American Thanksgiving dinner is, you know, and it's a problematic holiday, I know, but when you're abroad, you're trying to create community. So I invited, there were 12, of us adults and three very little children. And it was, you know, we were supposed to eat at 3.30, you know, kind of a late afternoon thing. And the whole event was just a catastrophe as from my perspective, because we bought a turkey, it was eight kilo turkey and it was too big for the German oven that we had. And it was a convection oven. So we didn't know how to cook a turkey in this kind of

oven and, you know, we didn't have enough space to cook everything. We didn't have enough chairs. We were like, it was so chaotic. The food was hours late. Everything about this just felt to me, like I was falling down on the job. I couldn't get, you know, keep track of everybody who needed to drink or what they wanted. And at the end of the night, I remember sitting down and thinking, oh, my God, that was so chaotic. What was I? thinking and then realizing that everybody had such a good time. Everybody, nobody cared about the turkey being three hours late. Nobody cared that the chairs were kind of like decrepit and falling in.

We basically had to kind of put two tables together and there was like a big gap that things could fall into. There were kids running around and screaming. I mean, it was like a total chaos thing, but it was togetherness. It was people together sharing a nice day, a meal. And it really taught me something, even though, you know, I think about this kind of stuff all the time. It taught me that these really small moments of being with others. And, you know, sometimes the conversations were very political.

Sometimes they were very artistic. Sometimes they were rather banal. That's what a dinner party is about. everybody brings what they bring, but there's something really important that happens when we gather. And it's not just the coziness, although that's an important part of it. It's the political potentiality of recognizing that people have power together. And I do think, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do think that capitalism is increasingly isolating us from each other, precisely because it knows that the greatest challenge to this economic and political system is going to be large groups of citizens coming together to resist the politics of the present and to imagine a brighter and better future.

Well, let's end on that beautiful and important note. Thank you so much once again, Kristen, for coming on the show. The article is a political economy of love and capitalism, as it was put out by Jacobin. I'll link to that in the show notes. You also, of course, have many books. You're working on writing books right now. You also have a podcast. Can you let people know where they can find you and your other work online?

Yeah, sure. Everything that you need to know is linked from my website, www. Christendogadsie.com. Yeah. And the Jacobin article is also in Spanish, and there's a great discussion of it in Chinese. as well, and a forthcoming Arabic translation. So I think, you know, if English is not your first language or you know somebody who speaks another language that might want to engage, there are also links from my website to those

translations as well. That is wonderful. I'll link to that in the show notes as well as to your website where you can find the podcast, your books, your other articles, etc. All right. Well, that is our episode for today. This is your eighth time on Rev Left. Let's do a ninth and a tenth and an 11th.

Great way to start off 2026. Yeah, well, happy New Year to everyone. And thanks so much. It's always such a pleasure talking to you, Brett.