Episode Transcript
Episode 11 — The Communism of Love
Host: Matthew Remski
Guest: Richard Gilman-Opalsky
Other voices: Jordan Peterson, Doug Ford, Anita Anand, Jenny Kwan
[00:00:00] Matthew Remski: You know, they say you just can’t...put a price on a mother’s love.
And that’s great for the guys running a global racket that doesn’t want to pay for most of what women do.
[00:00:16] Matthew Remski: I’m Matthew Remski.
[00:00:18] Matthew Remski: That was an Antifascist Dad joke. Welcome to episode 11, “The Communism of Love,” with Richard Gilman-Opalsky.
[00:00:27] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: So I don’t accept this idea of love as a private power that is also a commodity. And so I insist instead on love as an activity, as an active relation, not a thing.
[00:00:44] Matthew Remski: So that’s coming up. But first, it’s like: I don’t know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can’t keep your room organized. Yes, that’s the appeal to housekeeping from friend of the pod Jordan Peterson.
You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and on YouTube as Antifascist Dad. Also on TikTok under that same handle, where I try to post mini-essays a number of times a week.
Our Patreon is AntifascistDadPodcast, and if you go there right after listening to this episode, you’ll hear the second half of my interview with Richard, and you’ll be able to catch up there. It’s already up.
[00:01:25] Matthew Remski: And lastly, in the show notes you’ll see a preorder link for the book that this podcast is based on and supporting. It’s called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. It drops on April 26, 2026.
In Fascist, Squish, and Antifascist News of the Week, I’m going to keep it local this time with a single quote from a media scrum with the Ontario MAGA-style premier, Doug Ford. He’s basically summarizing the fascist-capitalist alliance in a single answer to a reporter about a Canadian manufacturer of armored cars getting a contract from ICE.
[00:02:12] Reporter: Brampton provides armored cars for a lot of people. ICE. The enforcement agency in the States has—just ordered 20 cars.
[00:02:17] Doug Ford: That’s fantastic. I’ve been through that plant. They make great military vehicles, and now we need the federal government to start ordering some as well off them. And maybe they are. I’m not too sure.
[00:02:31] Reporter: Don’t you see it’s ironic, with the tariffs?
[00:02:34] Doug Ford: I know it’s ironic, but that’s all right. We’ll take orders anywhere in the world, and thank goodness that the Americans are ordering it off us. They’re a great operation there, and maybe you should go and pay them a visit and see all these great employees building armored vehicles.
[00:02:49] Matthew Remski: I don’t know if you can hear it, but if you watch the video, there’s a little bit of a smirk there. It’s almost as if he’s nodding and nudging his business buddies as he’s speaking to the press out of the other side of his mouth.
There’s a style of fascist comms strategy in Canadian right-wing politics that comes straight out of hockey culture, where the whole vibe is skating around with a puffed-out chest and a stony face, almost looking for a fight. Ford takes this question as though he’s the bully who just knocked someone down and now he’s getting a dirty look. And his answer is: oh yeah? What are you going to do about it?
So yes, ICE has contracted 20 Senator armored vehicles for $10 million from the Roshel company facility in Brampton. This is just west of Toronto, where I live, and Brampton is kind of a specialty auto-manufacturing hub.
ICE placed the rush order on the grounds that Roshel alone could meet its technical and delivery requirements. And that might have something to do with the fact that none of its four plants globally are unionized. I don’t know.
But the contract was signed in late November with a 30-day due date, which is just a blindingly fast turnaround on an order like this.
Roshel was founded by Soviet-born, Israel-raised Roman Shimonov, who spent 15 years in the IDF, after which he got into the business of selling encryption services to defense clients, including the Israeli military.
His company’s business has exploded with orders from Ukraine, as well as contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, Customs and Border Patrol, as well as policing units in Brazil, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Costa Rica, and Moldova. The Canadian Defence Review has named Shimonov Canada’s Defence Executive of the Year for 2025.
Now, what does Shimonov have to say about the contract?
“We don’t sell to ICE,” he told the Globe and Mail. “We sell to the U.S. government.” But then he also wondered aloud: why don’t they report on companies that sell socks to the U.S. government?
And it’s a frivolous and insulting answer, because we know that ICE sole-sourced the vehicles from the procurement documents.
And I’m sure Shimonov knows that socks don’t violate human rights. You can’t use socks to separate families. You can’t use socks to conduct illegal deportations. No sock can run a squalid detention facility.
Now, Roshel and Shimonov are by no means alone among Canadian companies providing arms to fascist governments. Canadian firms, contrary to government assurances that military exports to Israel following October 7 would stop, exported over 30 million Canadian dollars in military goods to Israel in 2023 and almost 19 million in 2024. And independent researchers have identified nearly 9 million more Canadian dollars in aircraft-parts exports in just the first half of this year.
Now, there’s something about these stories in which reporting out all the slimy details feels both scandalous and banal.
It’s scandalous because it’s really hard to believe that anyone with a conscience would sell weapons to facilitate war crimes. But it’s banal because it’s standard practice.
Arms companies routinely sell weapons to governments that are widely known to be oppressive or to be committing war crimes.
Throughout the 20th century, this pattern was a structural feature of the global arms trade shaped by imperial rivalries, Cold War geopolitics, and, of course, profit incentives.
So when Shimonov says, “We don’t sell to ICE, we sell to the government,” he’s not just being an evasive jerk. He’s echoing the old trick of the arms tycoon deferring responsibility for how the equipment will be used to the government. Now, of course, the buying government will say that the reasons for the procurement are classified, and then the selling government can turn around, like Doug Ford, and say: hey, we’re allowed to buy and sell. What are you going to do about it?
So all the way up the line, you find one jerk after another, shrugging their shoulders and filling their pockets.
Now, who are the squishes in this segment? Well, you could take your pick of mainstream news outlets reporting this in some matter-of-fact tone. But they absorb that tone from industry and economy wonks who comment on the success of Roshel’s business model as if that success wasn’t soaking in blood.
In learning about what Shimonov has pulled off here, I went through a bunch of automotive blogs, fact sheets, and business reports, praise quotes from Brampton politicians, as well as the Canadian Defence Review article on him.
And what I learned is that Roshel’s boom is solutions-based, meaning he’s solved money problems for his clients. Armored vehicles typically cost over $1 million each, sometimes much more. But the Senator’s unit cost is about half that because Roshel builds its military capsule portion on a Ford F-550 chassis and cab.
This is Ford’s heavy-duty chassis that firms can purchase off the assembly line for modification.
It’s just the cab and engine and the flatbed with the back axle and wheels. And the Ford plants are already pumping out between 1,000 and 2,000 of these units per month in North America.
Now, anyone can purchase one of these chassis and do what they want with it. But if you’re Shimonov, or any other reseller who wants to benefit from Ford’s ongoing support of the vehicle through warranties, its global parts network, existing emissions certifications, and service bays, you have to get vetted as an official upfitter by Ford, demonstrating manufacturing competence and ensuring no modification voids the warranty.
Ford gives out its qualified vehicle modifier sticker to firms based on quality, engineering, safety, and facility standards.
But you know what they explicitly don’t check? End use.
What will the truck be used for? There’s no buyer who has to disclose whether the truck will be used for military, police, or border security applications. No buyer has to pass a human rights assessment or screening. So behind Shimonov shrugging his shoulders is the entire Ford family, giant-sized, shrugging their giant shoulders. It’s none of their business how Kristi Noem wants to use these trucks.
And this is standard practice as well, because all that human rights stuff falls to the government.
So you can be assured that our feds are looking carefully at this contract under the Export and Import Permits Act.
That should make everyone feel good about things, because the Act mandates a human rights risk assessment and a review of the sale against Canada’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.
But oh no: Canada has a longstanding U.S. exemption under the EIPA because we’re such good neighbors and trading partners. Which means that many military and dual-use goods exported to the United States do not require individual permits.
But not to fear: here is Defence Minister Anita Anand on December 3.
[00:10:39] Anita Anand: The government is not involved in the transaction. We have not received any questions or permit requests regarding this transaction. And I will continue to reiterate that Canada and the United States have a strong bilateral relationship with an open line of communication in which, if necessary, I will raise the issues with Secretary Rubio.
[00:11:06] Matthew Remski: So: the dog ate my homework. But we are committed to the process and the ideal of homework, and we hope to have a good dialogue about homework going forward.
Remember that this is about a week into Roshel’s 30-day timeline for filling this order, which again is lightning fast. And this tells me that they absolutely expect approval—and that where it matters most, there is no moral daylight between the economic objectives of the government and the profit-seeking of the firms working under that government.
And with this one, there’s a hidden benefit as far as the government is concerned: a deal like the one between Roshel and ICE displays the potential for rapid militarization of civilian supply chains. Government and arms companies become indistinguishable.
And that’s why you’ll find statements from all levels of government that sound like this one from Patrick Brown, the mayor of Brampton:
We are thrilled to welcome Roshel to the City of Brampton. This $65 million investment marks a significant milestone in our city’s economic development and demonstrates the momentum here in Brampton. Our city’s strategic location, diverse talent pool, and vibrant business community make it the best place to invest.
This collaboration reinforces our commitment to fostering growth, innovation, and prosperity in our city. Thanks to Roshel for choosing Brampton as the home for their new production facility.
Now, in Antifascist News this week, I want to shout out NDP MP Jenny Kwan from Vancouver East, who’s not ignoring the end-use question the way Patrick Brown is. Back in September, Kwan tabled a private member’s bill called C-233 to remove the U.S. exemption and clamp down on export end uses.
[00:12:56] Jenny Kwan: We can no longer turn a blind eye to the back door by which Canadian arms are ending up in the wrong hands halfway around the world, contributing to gross violations of human rights and ongoing complicity in war crimes.
[00:13:13] Matthew Remski: Now, for listeners unfamiliar with parliamentary procedure: a private member’s bill is “private” because it’s brought forward by an MP whose party is not part of the ruling majority. It’s basically the MP acting as a private citizen to put forward a law that likely can’t pass, but that opens the subject up for debate—which will unfortunately move far slower than the military business cycle. But it’s something.
[00:13:48] Matthew Remski: Hopefully the labyrinthine Roshel story helps to illuminate just how different the world my guest today envisions.
Richard Gilman-Opalsky is a professor of political science at the University of Illinois Springfield. His work spans the history of political philosophy, continental and contemporary social theory, Marxism, capitalism, autonomist politics, postmodern philosophy, critical theory, and global uprisings and social movements.
He’s written a bunch of books, including Unbounded Publics, Transgressive Public Spheres, Zapatismo and Political Theory, Spectacular Capitalism, Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy, Precarious Communism, Manifest Mutations, Detourned, and others.
But today we’re going to be talking about his incredible book, The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value.
Oh, and do you hear that music underneath—the drumming especially?
Richard is also a highly skilled improv, jazz, and experimental music drummer. And here he is with his friends Yea Big on bass clarinet and Adam Larison on guitar in Springfield.
He’s been playing drums since his parents bought him an Animal-from-The-Muppet-Show kids’ drum kit when he was eight. So that’s very cool. And we talk about that a bit as we get into our conversation.
Now, Richard’s book is about how the capitalist system fails to appropriately value the experiences and relationships that human beings treasure most. And for Richard, love—if it’s taken out of its common tit-for-tat, transactional forms—can function as a communism that challenges the logic of capital in organizing our lives.
Love also expresses a universal longing for a communist type of relationality. And when that’s frustrated, it can manifest in revolts aimed at creating or restoring humane relations against a monetized existence.
Hello, Richard. Welcome to Antifascist Dad.
[00:16:05] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Hello, Matthew. Thank you for having me.
[00:16:07] Matthew Remski: It’s a real pleasure. I think you’re probably an antifascist dad too.
[00:16:11] Matthew Remski: So I think we’ll find a lot to confer about.
I didn’t realize—this is my first question, until I read your book—that I didn’t really have a definition for love, which is very strange, actually, for a concept that we think about, or we feel our way into, or we use as a term, throwing it around quite a bit in various contexts. It’s very strange that I didn’t really consider the definition of love.
So I wanted to ask: why do you think this is such a big hole in the culture?
[00:16:50] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yeah, well, I think love is one of many concepts that people don’t bother to define because they are repeating a given definition.
There are other words like that—words like freedom, democracy. People talk about those; they’re in constant circulation. People use those words all the time without bothering to think that they might have to define them.
Isaiah Berlin made this point a long time ago in his famous essay about liberty: you have to stop and think what you mean. If you ask somebody what they mean by words like freedom or democracy, you’ll find it’s not so easy. They’ve been using them all their lives, but they don’t quite know how to think about them.
And I think love is a word—and an idea—that also has a given meaning. It’s something derived from the context in which it circulates.
Right? So when people talk about love, they’re giving it a meaning. And I think not a very good one. So like other important concepts in our lives, it requires interrogation. It requires definition.
[00:18:14] Matthew Remski: There’s a very fancy concept that I sort of remember from my college days. I think it comes from Derrida, or somebody like that, who described terms like this. They said these are transcendent signifiers. They’re words that we don’t ask questions about.
But he added something to it, I think, which was that when you don’t add your own definition—when you don’t really know what you’re saying—the word can actually take on a kind of aggression with regard to forcing a meaning.
[00:18:54] Matthew Remski: Like if everybody assumes that they know what freedom means, then the ICE agent and the protester will both be using it, and there won’t be any harmony there.
[00:19:09] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yeah, I mean, I think this is a very important point. And it just so happens that I was a student of the late Jacques Derrida.
[00:19:16] Matthew Remski: No.
[00:19:17] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yeah. At the New School in New York when I was a graduate student. He was there as a visiting professor, I think.
I think that’s a very important insight of Derrida’s: there’s force behind the meaning of a lot of words that are given. You don’t necessarily discern the force, but in the way that words are established with very specific meanings, there is force. There are interests behind it.
That’s part of why Derrida insisted on deconstructing the meaning of texts. He was very focused on words and ideas.
But love is problematic because it’s rendered a kind of private affair. The meaning of love is shrunk down to something that is the private property of families or lovers.
And often, too, in my research I found that love is treated as a commodity: it’s something everybody wants, and then the question is, how do we get it? If you give love, you may get it in return.
This commodification of love—and I would say privatization of love—is not some natural thing having to do with love in the world. Behind that meaning is force.
[00:20:51] Matthew Remski: Okay. Well, I’m going to ask for a fifty-word, let’s say, high-school-level answer for your idea of the communism of love.
[00:21:06] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Okay. Well, I’m going to not count my words.
[00:21:09] Matthew Remski: Okay, I won’t either.
[00:21:11] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Maybe I have a high idea of what a high schooler is capable of, but I’ll be as short as possible.
So I don’t accept this idea of love as a private power that is also a commodity. And so I insist instead on love as an activity, as an active relation, not a thing. Right? So it’s an active relationship, not a thing.
And it’s not a terribly original insight. It’s not something I can claim. Erich Fromm wrote extensively about love as an activity, for example—a great Marxist critical theorist and psychoanalytic theorist.
So if love is an act of relation, then what kind of relationship is it?
Often in my work I talk about how, if you have a friend and you say you love your friend, and you come to your friend in a time of need and you say, I’m going through something awful and I desperately need you, friend—and your friend says, of course, Matthew, I’m there for you one hundred percent, but it’s going to cost you fifteen dollars an hour—
[00:22:24] Matthew Remski: Right.
[00:22:26] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: —that is exactly your friend telling you that they’re not a real friend. If your friend charges fifteen dollars an hour for friendship, they’re telling you that they’re not your friend.
So it’s not an exchange relation. Love relations—in friendship, in families, in society more broadly—are not exchange relations. Love is an active relationship that doesn’t follow the logic of capitalist relationality.
Capitalist relationality is exchange relation. You can get lots of things in our societies in exchange for labor, in exchange for money. It’s a web of exchange relationality.
I don’t tell my fifth-grade son that he can have food and shelter in exchange for labor, and that’s because I love him.
So a love relation is opposed in a very fundamental way to the logic of capitalist exchange relations. In our active love relations, I find what I call a little experience of communism.
[00:23:41] Matthew Remski: Right.
[00:23:42] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: And so that’s the communism of love, in the shortest way I can give it.
[00:23:48] Matthew Remski: Okay. So it’s not fifty words, but it was very concise.
[00:23:51] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Thank you.
[00:23:52] Matthew Remski: And I think what I want to pull out is something fundamental about love as something that can’t be commodified, ultimately. Because I guess the way I look at it is: when you are in a loving relationship, there’s no keeping of accounts. You can’t actually assess or measure or evaluate. I mean, it’s all priceless.
So is that at the heart of the problem—love being seen as something you could exchange—and that means it’s not really love?
[00:24:34] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Absolutely. I mean, the fastest road to resentment in human relationality is a spreadsheet.
[00:24:43] Matthew Remski: Yeah.
[00:24:44] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: If you try to quantify human relationality and reduce it to measurable units— I always do the dishes, I always make the dinners—if you reduce human relationality to quantifiable units that we give and get in exchange, then it’s not just a fast road to resentment. It’s an uncritical acceptance of the capitalist logic of quantification.
What we’re seeing in our societies—and we’ve been seeing it for a very long time—is the abandonment of qualitative assessment of everything. Everything is reduced to quantifiable, commodified units.
Love does resist that. It is not compatible with that kind of forcible reduction to measured units on a spreadsheet.
But we nonetheless often try, because we accept a given understanding of love—which needs to be challenged and overturned, ultimately.
[00:26:08] Matthew Remski: There is— I don’t want to use the word economy—but there is a sphere of love that I think is subconsciously acknowledged by capitalist systems in the sense that it must be ignored.
Here I’m thinking about the unpaid labor of the domestic environment, the unpaid labor of women. If you acknowledge that the nonstop caregiving of parenting, work, and homework should actually be valued or remunerated in some way, then everything about capitalism has to change.
So there is an acknowledgement, I think, that unpaid labor is running the world in some way. That is a kind of expression of human love, but it must not be acknowledged. It has to be sidelined.
I’m wondering if that’s essential to the way we’re organizing things in capitalism.
[00:27:17] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: It’s absolutely essential to the way we organize capitalist society—to the organizational logic of capitalism.
What you were just talking about, Matthew, has been very well explored by Marxist feminists, particularly from the Italian tradition.
If you look at writers like Silvia Federici or Leopoldina Fortunati, they’ve talked about—Fortunati specifically—what she calls the secret workshop.
There’s this very long history of unpaid labor that enables the whole production process, that enables the whole political economy of capitalist societies.
And then, when finally there is some confrontation there—as the Italian feminists in New York did with Wages for Housework—and they press and they say we should be paid, the real challenge is that it can’t be paid for. Imagine the back pay. It’s impossible.
The whole history of capitalism depends upon this endless extraction of surplus labor, which is gendered.
[00:28:41] Matthew Remski: Yeah.
[00:28:42] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: And it is also, as you rightly point out—and Fortunati is very good on this point—it is also dependent on a certain abuse of the concept of love.
So the woman works in the secret workshop for free because she loves her family.
[00:29:03] Matthew Remski: Right.
[00:29:03] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: And if she loves her family, she shouldn’t have to have wages for love.
[00:29:10] Matthew Remski: That’s its own reward. If she is seen as loving, then that is its own reward.
[00:29:16] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Exactly. So in that context, the concept of love is weaponized against women in that setting of domestic labor.
[00:29:27] Matthew Remski: This show is about how parents and caregivers and children supporting each other can actually be—or is—fundamentally a political act, and I believe can naturally teach us about antifascism.
You have one paragraph near the start of your book that, for me, really sums up the kind of wisdom the parent or caregiver has to develop if they want to get the most out of this idea.
So your overall point is that loving someone means wanting to participate in who they are becoming, even when you don’t know what that will look like.
In the passage, you focus on your kids, so I’m going to read it to you and ask about certain ideas along the way.
Quote: “With my own young children, presently twelve and five years old, it is not controversial to say that they are not yet the beings that they are becoming.”
Okay. So I don’t think it’s controversial either.
[00:30:27] Matthew Remski: But why is this so hard for some parents to really accept?
[00:30:31] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Well, this is a great question, because it really gets to the beating heart of the problem of love as an activity.
It’s hard for parents to accept for many reasons, but part of the reason is that we’re not supposed to not know. Parents, in a particular model of parenting, are supposed to have answers. That’s one part of it. That’s not the whole answer.
But I claim there’s a huge epistemological limit point for every parent in the activity of parenting. It’s really hard to know what to do as a parent. And any parent who knows exactly what to do—I’m suspicious of such parents.
[00:31:34] Matthew Remski: Well, you can find them on Instagram telling other parents what to do, I’ll tell you that.
[00:31:37] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Absolutely. And some of them write books. I read some of those books before my firstborn son arrived.
I think it’s a problem because we don’t— I mean, I sometimes wonder—
I was reading a book by Franco Berardi called Quit Everything, in which he argues it’s not even ethical to bring children into this world. This world is a place that does immeasurable harm—not only to children, but definitely to children.
Children living in a war zone. Children surviving, or trying to survive, a genocide, with their families being blown apart.
And even in other parts of the world, living inside a frenetic and psychologically precarious world full of anxiety and insecurity.
In psychology, there’s this really crucial concept of future-oriented thinking. Psychologists will tell you to worry if your child doesn’t show evidence of future-oriented thinking.
But what is future-oriented thinking for a child raised in a world where they think their lifespan is longer than that of a habitable Earth?
[00:32:54] Matthew Remski: Right.
[00:32:55] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: We’re living in a time where we don’t know how to do it. And I think we have to sort of not pretend to know everything that will happen.
My older son was really into soccer and was great at it. We sold all that stuff at a garage sale, and we never saw it coming that my younger son would get into soccer. But he has.
A child—a son in many families—becomes a daughter.
My older son has become a pretty impressive musician.
A child born into an evangelical household grows up and becomes an atheist.
So the destinations are unknown in many ways.
And then the question becomes: what is love’s role if we cannot know? If we cannot know how to do this—if we cannot know—and if we’re suspicious of the knowledge of experts on Instagram who know every answer to every problem of parenting, then we have to ask: what is love’s role?
For me, it seems quite clear that when you love someone, you have to try to actively participate in their becoming what they are not yet.
And I got that concept—the not yet—from Emmanuel Levinas, who writes about possibilities on the horizon.
As a communist, as a revolutionary, I’m intimately committed to horizonal possibilities of becoming—not just of family members and friends and comrades who I love, but of the world that we live in, in this upside-down world that we inhabit, which I think we have to say has to become something else.
So we don’t have to know exactly what the world will become. We don’t have to know exactly what our children will become. But as human beings, we have to try to participate in transformative becomings.
[00:35:26] Matthew Remski: I think it’s the opposite of the anxiety of control as well, which is really what a lot of parenting—based upon expectations and particular investments—is about.
It’s like: if I do this correctly for my child, then the outcome will be X. There will be success in this realm, or they will have a good job, or they will be set up for this particular experience.
And I suppose it’s natural to look ahead somewhat—to some beneficial or enriching circumstance that you would want them to have. I think that’s very natural.
But it’s very easy for those parental investments to become almost like mutual funds or something. Some sort of best guess you can make on the marketplace of your family life.
[00:36:40] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yes, I completely agree that we have to move away from thinking about human beings as a financial investment, or modeled after one.
But your point about looking forward and having some horizonal idea is very good. And it’s not something I would argue we should abandon.
We have to use our imaginations. We have to think about what is desirable and possible in politics and life. We have to have some things to aim toward.
I think many parents, struggling with that epistemological challenge of not knowing, then go and grab the developmental maps. They reach for them—and can you blame them? Can you blame us? No.
You want to know: where should my child be at nine? Where should my child be at eleven?
Many families—this is part of the problem of capitalism—they only know their own.
So it’s natural to say: show me the map.
How many friends should a child have in fourth grade? How good should they be at this? How proficient in math? How good in conversation?
[00:38:09] Matthew Remski: Oh, can I just pause you for a moment?
[00:38:10] Matthew Remski: I think you’re pointing to the fact that in the conventional nuclear family, there’s enough isolation from other ways of being parents and children in the world that you don’t have access to multiple forms of developmental tracks.
[00:38:29] Matthew Remski: So in the village, let’s say, you might understand that so-and-so learned to read this way and so-and-so learned to read that way, and it happened at different times, and in the interim they were doing different activities.
Anyway.
But in the absence of that, what you’re saying is: parents are going to turn to the stats, they’re going to turn to the textbooks, and they’re going to turn to the school curriculum, and they’re going to say, well, I’m going to be worried if my child doesn’t meet these evidence-based benchmarks for when they should be reading.
Whatever. That’s what you’re getting at.
[00:39:06] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Exactly.
The feedback we get from so many schools across the world gives us comparative measures of development in different proficiencies—academic and otherwise. It’s very common in the United States, increasingly now for some decades, to focus on social and emotional learning. So it’s not just math and reading.
But the problem is: these maps don’t necessarily work for neurodiverse children. These maps don’t necessarily work for families situated in different ways—economically, geopolitically. And they may not even work for neurotypical children.
Because these maps were written in a different time. They were developed in a different time. And technologically and ecologically and psychologically—those three areas specifically: technology, psychology, and ecology—so much changes so quickly that we really need to rethink the map all the time.
So, I mean, it’s hard to throw away the map, because for many parents it’s the only way we get some sense of how we’re doing—how the school is doing, how the community is doing, how the family is doing.
But it’s a very problematic way to deal with human development.
[00:40:33] Matthew Remski: So I was in the middle of quoting this paragraph. I’m going to get back to it.
You write: “But what do I want my love for my children to do in the world? Do I want to ossify my children just as they are, making them into static objects of my love? This is in no way an ultimate hope or aim, in no way the interest or orientation of love.
“What I really want to do is participate in their becoming what they are not yet, but could be and desire to be. A future being that I cannot yet specify, a being to be determined. How does one participate in a person becoming what they ought to be when neither the love nor the beloved knows yet what he is? How can I assist my beloved children in becoming what they are not yet beyond my own limited sense of possibility? This is precisely what I want to do with my love for my children.”
Okay. So these are sentences for the ages, I have to say, Richard.
And I just want to ask: how long did it take for you to come to this? Because I don’t think this is just about study.
[00:41:39] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yeah, it’s a very hard question for me to answer.
My best guess is that it probably took my entire life up to the point that I wrote those words for me to come to them.
Part of it is coming to a certain orientation as a parent in the process of parenting.
[00:42:07] Matthew Remski: Right, right.
[00:42:08] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: You have some experiences with human flourishing, as it were—trying to participate in flourishing. I quite prefer to think of human flourishing instead of human development, because of many problems associated with the concept of development.
In that sense, I would say my children played a dialectical role in the development of my view.
But there are other variables. I am a philosopher. I am a revolutionary. I’m also an improvising jazz musician.
[00:42:49] Matthew Remski: I did not know that.
[00:42:51] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yes. In fact, my next book—which I’ve just begun—is called Revolution and Improvisation.
The subtitle is The Epistemology of Not Knowing What Will Be.
[00:43:04] Matthew Remski: Oh, wow.
[00:43:04] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: It’s really about creating, or participating in the creation of something—co-creating, or co-participating in the becoming of something—without knowing exactly what it will be.
I had those orientations as a musician, as a philosopher, as a revolutionary, before I had children. But certainly my children—my experiences with parenting—and then there’s also the research into love as a commodified concept, the idea of love as a commodity itself, which many other people have dealt with.
So you’re right: it’s not just scholarly research.
But I also hope that these very particular contingencies that are so personal about me and my life—my hope is that there are insights there that are generally resonant, widely.
One doesn’t have to be a philosopher or an improvising jazz musician to understand what I want to say about the communism of love.
[00:44:09] Matthew Remski: I’ve known a lot of musicians. I’ve done a fair amount of music myself.
I was never able to improvise because my training—in piano, and then pipe organ later—was really by the book, and quite rigid and non-exploratory. That’s something I kind of grieve. And if I ever get back to a keyboard, maybe I’ll try something else.
But it makes me wonder whether practicing—knowing what the basic patterns and possibilities are within your basic tune—and knowing you’re going to take it somewhere else, but you’re not necessarily going to leave the planet, although you might, and then you’ll come back—
Did that teach you something about the moment of uncertainty in parenting?
Because I can imagine there are improvising musicians who are fine doing that on their instrument, but then when it comes to their kids, something really locks down in them.
[00:45:20] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yeah. First, Matthew, I want to push back on the first point you made, when you said you were never able to improvise.
You were, when you first sat down before a piano—the first moment you put your fingers on the keys, trying to figure out what sound it makes. That’s improvisation. That’s experimentation.
If you give a young child a toy drum or a xylophone, it’s improvisation.
And then the book comes in as a way of saying: you can’t do this very well. You can’t do it right. You can’t achieve excellence by improvising.
I was quite surprised—naive as I was about being a parent—how much I would need to improvise. So much of what I’ve had to do as a parent is improvisation.
And it is a kind of collective improvisation, because you have to respond to what the other person is doing—whether it’s your partner, whether it’s other people in society.
So there’s a whole collective improvisation.
I do think people aren’t comfortable improvising, which was part of your point as a piano player. It’s a level of comfort with improvising.
But improvisation is necessary.
[00:46:57] Matthew Remski: Right.
[00:46:58] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: And it requires a certain openness.
And that, perhaps, may get us more concretely to the question of fascism, because there were certain forms of music that fascists in the 20th century despised for many reasons.
[00:47:15] Matthew Remski: Well, exactly.
[00:47:40] Matthew Remski: You know, I loved that so much, I just can’t do Antifascist Dad this week. My heart isn’t in it. So that’s the show.
In part two with Richard, we continue our discussion of music and jazz.
We look at the tension between fascist modes of total control and the need for freedom in development and radical politics.
We talk about how the loving orientation of organic communism has to be de-privatized and extended beyond the family sphere to address broader social issues.
And we also talk about how the best ideas often need to be smuggled in by teachers within highly controlled educational systems that resist concepts of human flourishing.
Next week, I’ve got a special Christmas-solstice holiday-time story for you all. Until then, take care of each other.
