Episode Transcript
Episode 11 Part Two — The Communism of Love
Host: Matthew Remski
Guest: Richard Gilman-Opalsky
[00:00:08] Matthew Remski: Welcome, Patrons, to Part Two of episode 11, “The Communism of Love,” with Richard Gilman-Opalsky. I’m really grateful for your support, and I hope this project brings some joy, hope, and utility to your work and your days.
I’ll reiterate my plan for these second parts: I’ll review and reflect a little bit on Part One, then I’ll roll the rest of the interview, and then I’ll come back with a few further reflections. So that’s what I’ll do today.
So, in Part One of this two-part episode, poli-sci professor and improv jazz drummer Richard Gilman-Opalsky answered my first question—why the heck I didn’t have a definition of love before reading his book. He did it by talking about how many vital concepts—freedom, democracy, even the word America when somebody is clearly imagining a capital-A America—can be used unconsciously and uncritically.
These terms often take on “given” meanings established by underlying forces and interests we can’t really see—forces that conceal themselves. I said, oh, that reminds me of what Jacques Derrida says about the transcendental signifier. And Richard said, oh yeah, I took classes with that guy. So that was cool.
Now, Richard’s Communism of Love insists that love is an active, non-transactional relation that contradicts the logic of capitalism. You can’t measure it. You can’t spreadsheet it. You can’t cost it out.
Unfortunately, that fact can also curdle into an excuse for sidelining and ignoring the vast amount of unpaid, often gendered domestic labor—the “secret workshop” described by feminist Marxists—where the concept of love can be abused and weaponized to justify demands to work for free, and to claim that love is your payment, and love should be your reward.
We also talked about how real family love requires parents to actively participate in their children’s becoming who they are not yet, without trying to control or ossify them. That means getting over the anxiety of controlling outcomes, and the tendency to treat children as emotional—or even financial—investments.
Parenting, like revolutionary politics and improv jazz, requires constant collective improvisation and a love of possibilities, rather than fixation on rigid or predetermined structures.
So we’ll pick up the interview with me reflecting on what it was like not to learn piano through improvisation.
[00:03:17] Matthew Remski: It’s quite melancholic, actually, to hear you describe the fact that—yes—when I sat down at the piano to begin with, and I’m five years old, I was just playing and listening, sort of in conversation with the instrument. And then, very quickly—not because this was the fault of my parents; they didn’t have musical education themselves—they sent me to a place where I was going to get some.
And that freedom was really drummed out of me almost instantly: into exercises and scales and note reading, and trying to replicate something rather than express something.
I remember that well. I think what happened is that the experience of suppression made me yearn for improvisational freedom elsewhere. And I did find that in writing, thank goodness, later—but it took a while.
So: back to the point that fascists hated jazz—and they certainly hated improvisational jazz. I think they also hated the notion that parents should be humble about what they know and what they don’t know, and that their expectations for their children shouldn’t be oppressive.
So is that all fair? Is that part of what fascists brought to this conversation about development?
[00:04:57] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Robert Chapman has written a bit about the Nazi and fascist history of dealing with what we today call neurodiversity.
And this effort to— we were talking before about maps, developmental maps, the given maps that help us figure out where we are.
Those exist not just for childhood development. They exist for music. They exist for the financial sector, for investment.
And it is absolutely a part of fascism—maybe we can get to this more in a basic or philosophical sense in a moment—having to do with the question of control, right?
Total control. Maximal control. Maximizing control. Maximizing predictability. Scientizing becoming.
These are all things that are irreducibly in tension with improvisation, transformation, becoming, creating something new and unpredictable.
So this latter series of ideas—unpredictability, openness, creativity, improvisation, experimentation—these are necessary in parenting. They’re also necessary in any kind of radical politics, or if we’re going to think about a revolutionary horizon at all.
We need those orientations. And they’re clearly opposite to the orientations of fascists. So absolutely, I would say there’s something there.
[00:06:49] Matthew Remski: There’s something extraordinarily contradictory about fascist modes of control, because when we look at the actual behaviors of those leaders and demographics, often they are in states of absolute personal and emotional chaos, right?
On one hand, there’s the drive to make sure the children are all wearing the right lederhosen and singing the right songs. And on the other, there’s the vision of the Wehrmacht all on meth and off their heads as they hurtle into mechanized warfare.
So there’s this difficult way in which control over creativity also seems to come out sideways—or be off-gassed—in aggression.
[00:07:58] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: In certain circles—certain conferences, academic conferences, political circles—one of the more controversial positions I take as a Marxist, as an open Marxist, is humanism.
Marxist humanism, which I think is more important than ever, is about human becoming—human flourishing.
The humanism is there in my book The Communism of Love. But I’ve been dealing with these questions as a humanist for a long time.
And I think what you’re pointing out with the Wehrmacht—the illusion of total control, but also the impulse against it—is very important.
Because I would say fascism is fundamentally anti-human.
[00:08:38] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Human flourishing, human becoming—it cannot be so tightly bound as the fascists want.
You know, the fasces that fascism is named for—if our listeners look up a picture of a fasces, F-A-S-C-E-S—it’s a tightly bound bundle of rods, a strange implement with an axe head protruding out one side.
Before fascism became a political concept in Italy, there was the fasces that inspired Mussolini. The fascist party was inspired by the idea of strength through being tightly bound: almost no wiggle room, no openness.
The strength of the fasces comes from maximal control, minimal dissent, no wiggle room. A fasces where the rods are not so tightly held together is a weak weapon.
So strength comes from the tightly bound absence of wiggle room.
I would point out, though—and I think this is very important and almost always neglected when people on the left talk about fascism—that moving from the fasces to fascism in Italy, it was expressly anti-communist.
[00:10:22] Matthew Remski: Right.
[00:10:22] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: That is a crucial point.
Max Horkheimer wrote a great essay called “The Jews and Europe” in the early 1930s in which he said those who speak of fascism but are unwilling to speak of capitalism should keep their mouths shut.
[00:10:39] Matthew Remski: Yeah, exactly.
[00:10:40] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: So it’s really connected.
It’s anti-human and it’s anti-communist. And for me this is extremely important, because communism—as Marx defined it, the abolition of the existing reality—requires openness. It requires possibility.
If we talk about antifascist parenting—part of the reason we’re talking today—antifascist parenting has to be less like a fasces. It has to be more open. There has to be more wiggle room.
And in doing that, it’s more human—and, in a sense, more communistic.
[00:11:28] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: In the original sense of communism—the Gemeinwesen we aspire to, the human solidarity and community we aspire to—it requires a flexibility not present in the fascist orientation.
[00:11:46] Matthew Remski: It’s not present. And it also seems to contain—or betray—its own destruction constantly, because it doesn’t work for the sticks to be bound so tightly if we’re talking about human beings. It doesn’t work. It will not work.
And the contradictions I’m pointing to with Wehrmacht soldiers are one thing, but we also currently have fascist implementation of policy throughout the United States headed up by people who are obviously out of control—people who are emotionally and cognitively all over the map, people with substance issues, people whose interpersonal relationships are chaos.
The paradox is almost— I don’t want to say it’s a comedy, but there’s something absurd about it: an entire cabinet made up of people who are either felons or sex assaulters or obvious substance abusers on the job, trying to control everybody else. There’s something bizarre and yet predictable about that.
[00:13:19] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: I agree with this. And I think this gets to the point about the anti-humanism of fascism.
The anti-humanism is that even the human agents of fascism are out of control.
For them, it’s some combination of false projection and aspiration: they want the control they lack.
It’s sort of like when I’m feeling out of control in my life, I open up a calendar and start planning things—or I clean my office. Those impulses can go together.
And with regard to the U.S. for a moment: the first Trump presidency—when Trump gave his nomination acceptance speech, it was famously called the “law and order” speech. It was a reaction against Black Lives Matter, a reaction against uprisings.
The George Floyd rebellion hadn’t happened yet, but we’d seen Baltimore after the killing of Freddie Gray, and Ferguson, and close to where I sit in Minnesota there were movements happening. Trump wanted to control that.
If you fast forward to the present—we’re talking together in August of 2025—what Trump is trying to do is take cities and crack down on dissent. Part of this is because there were powerful uprisings against ICE in California.
Another part is the craving for control.
Your point is that beneath the façade of fascist control there is an out-of-control chaos going on behind the scenes—or sometimes not behind the scenes, sometimes it’s right there in front of your eyes. I agree with that.
But what is more important is the ways that we get out of control, because we can never count on the wild side of fascists. That will not manifest in our favor.
Politically, the real question is: how will we get out of control in the face of being so tightly bound?
In a different book of mine, I talk about the specter of revolt—an idea I got originally from Derrida’s Specters of Marx—that there will be reactions against this tightly bound fascistic tendency.
The ones that don’t come from the agents of fascism are the ones we have to hang our hopes on. And I do think there is always cause for hope.
[00:16:37] Matthew Remski: I think we’ve established that love is anti-capitalist. I wonder if you have an overview of what happens to families—and to our vision of the family—when we don’t understand what’s at stake.
[00:16:59] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Part of what I want to say is that if we don’t have this vision of the family, it’s particularly catastrophic in this form of society.
But you could imagine the family could even be abolished if we had a society that secured for children—for vulnerable people—what is now outsourced to families as private responsibility.
Now, inside a decent family where there’s real care and reliable support, you can find true believers in capitalism who are pretty good dads and pretty good moms. You can find parents who don’t share my theory of love or the communism of love who are good parents.
But what I would say is: there is a communism at work inside that family, even if the members are full-throated anti-communists.
It’s hard for people in capitalist society to realize that the best things under capitalism are the least capitalist things.
The best things in a capitalist society are the least capitalist things.
They may not be interested in my theory. They may not be interested in reading Marx. But part of my aim is to make these non-capitalist forms of life—the relationships that mean the most to us—visible.
So I want to help people see that even in a capitalist society there are experiences and relationships, and the ones that mean the most to us are the least capitalist.
If we could talk about what it means to experience love in a capitalist world—the kind of refuge it creates from work, during a crisis like Covid—if we could talk about these refuges we create for each other, not that we pay for, not that we buy, not that come with a bill later on, but that we create voluntarily out of the activity of love—
If we could see that those things we value the most have no exchange value—what else could we see?
[00:20:05] Matthew Remski: I think you’re describing the possibility that the threshold between the home and the larger society could become softer or more permeable.
That the avowed capitalist dad, who is actually decent and loves his family, might bring that into a larger sphere—might realize: the way things work in my household doesn’t follow the rules of exchange value. I’m not keeping accounts.
So why do I put on my suit and tie, pick up my briefcase, and enter a completely different world? Am I split? Am I two different people?
I think that’s what you’re pointing to, and I think it’s really hard.
And I’ve also noticed a barrier in some of the liberal self-help discourse—especially the “let’s help our boys do better in this world” genre—that goes like this:
I know things are tough out there, but this is what you have to do. This is how you get ahead. I have faith in you, and I’ll help you as much as I can. And there’s a sphere where a communist promise is offered—but without any expectation it could be extended beyond the family.
The dad isn’t saying, you know what, the situation we live in sucks, and we should change it together.
It’s more like: the world is as it is, and I’ll be your support to help you tolerate it. And that’s where it ends.
It has this mournful, existential mood: I know, son, I know this is hard, but you can do it. And if you can’t, I’ll still love you.
But it’s not about changing things.
[00:23:06] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: I agree with you. But we have to be careful that when we say it’s not good enough, we don’t convert that into a greater responsibility for the parent.
The parent also inhabits this upside-down world of cruelty and neuroses and insecurity—psychological and financial. We’re all living in that world.
Part of what I would want to say about the decent capitalist parent is: if they could see that the orientation they take toward their beloveds is the right orientation, then think about what it would mean to deprivatize that orientation—turn it across the border into Gaza, or toward immigrants at the border, or toward healthcare and education, psychology and ecology.
Something about the deprivatization of that orientation.
The limit of the good-hearted liberal capitalist dad is that they see no reason to deprivatize that orientation, because it seems appropriate as the private property of their own family. That’s where I disagree.
I think if it’s appropriate there, it must also be appropriate elsewhere.
[00:25:04] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: And you had asked what happens to the child where this isn’t the case. I glossed over that earlier.
There’s a lot of very good research in critical theory and psychoanalytic theory about the importance for children who are becoming—affirmation, being attended to in their frailties, being seen.
There’s a great book by the critical theorist Axel Honneth, The I in We, where he talks about children who lack this kind of affirmation and what it means for them.
And it’s not just true for children in immediate families. It’s true for children everywhere.
Inside families, people can be expelled without this. They can be disowned if they’re transgender. They can be disowned if they’re queer. They can lose their families if they take a particular political view.
There are concrete consequences.
And bell hooks—she wrote quite a few books on love as a political concept. I mentioned Erich Fromm, but I always want to mention bell hooks too, because she’s sometimes not given the seriousness she deserves for her attention to love as a social and political power.
Hooks warned against thinking about the family as the site of love. Many people won’t have that, and they’ll have to flee the family in search of active love relations outside it.
So two points: we should never assume the family is the place of love, because for too many people it simply isn’t. And second: we better learn how to deprivatize love, because a lot of people who flee the family in search of it need to find it.
[00:27:30] Matthew Remski: Last question, Richard.
Let’s say you leave the university for a year to teach high school, or maybe even middle school. How would you smuggle these ideas into whatever you were teaching?
I’m assuming you’re not going to be given a Grade 7 philosophy class. It might be history, it might be social studies. What would you turn to?
[00:27:57] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: It’s another difficult question, because teachers are given a curricular program they have to reproduce. And they’re measured on a spreadsheet of sorts, just like their students are.
Some of the tests at the public schools my kids have gone to—my own kids have said, well, I’m not being tested; the school is being tested.
But one thing any teacher can do—any teacher—anyone who teaches anywhere, is conceive of their role as participating in the becoming of their students.
You’re not determining it, as we’ve discussed. You don’t have that much control. You’re not a fascist, after all, hopefully. But you can aspire to the great honor and privilege of participating in their becoming.
And in your question, Matthew, what’s key is when you said “smuggle it in.” I love that phrasing, because it points to the problem that it would have to be smuggled in at all.
What concept of education would require this approach to becoming and human flourishing to be smuggled in?
Some kind of act: what we might call a pedagogy of love.
bell hooks—who wrote a lot about love—also wrote about education in Teaching to Transgress. She wrote several books on this. So people are thinking about smuggling it in.
There may be a rigid curriculum, but one thing you can do is introduce perspectives beyond it. You can do damage control on the ideological limitations of the program.
If you’re a history teacher who is supposed to teach the 20th century a certain way, maybe you have to do that to keep your job. But you can also move beyond it to introduce challenging perspectives.
The tragedy is: if you go too far, you can be fired. And that’s an indictment of education as it is—that the best ideas would have to be smuggled in, that the orientations kids need would have to be smuggled in. It really means we need a different system.
[00:30:45] Matthew Remski: Richard, thank you so much for your time today. It’s a real pleasure to speak with you. I really appreciate your work.
[00:30:51] Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Thank you so much, Matthew. It’s been an honor and a pleasure to talk.
[00:31:00] Matthew Remski: Since we’re around that time of year, I’ve been thinking about the communism of Christmas—or maybe how Marx would regard the materials of the season, the sensuous details that make the holiday feel as it feels.
I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve got a reflection on it for you. I think it loops back into the communism of love.
I think we can all feel it start in early December, especially if we’re here on Turtle Island. The colors of the retail world change, and the memories start flowing.
What is all the familiar warmth? What are all these radiant objects that are somehow connected to birth and love and salvation?
The evergreen tree. The ornaments. The music and candles. Wrapping paper. Holly. Shortbread. Ribbons.
How do these things come to us? How do they appear to us? And why do they seem to communicate something vast—something eternal?
My late mother was so industrious with handicrafts and decorating and baking. Some of my earliest Christmas memories involve unpacking and hanging ornaments she made by hand in the 1970s. She would cover styrofoam balls with pleated scraps of satin left over from making a blouse or a skirt. She made all her own clothes, and she would use pushpins with glass bead heads to fix the satin and create designs and patterns.
We made popcorn strings with dried cranberries every foot, and we tried to store them carefully from year to year. That was hard. They would crumble, of course, and then we’d have to redo them.
My mother also made Christmas fruitcake from an old European recipe. She would soak the dried fruit in brandy for days. And then, after baking it into this dense brown loaf, she would wrap the slices in brandy-soaked cheesecloth and store them in vintage cake and cookie tins.
She found an old German recipe for an anise-flavored butter cookie called Springerle, and she took great pride when they bulged up in the oven—springing up. That’s what the name refers to: Springerle.
My dad’s family was German Catholic, and the tradition was that we would open gifts late at night after midnight mass—in the dead of night. The tree was blazing, and it looked like it had always been there. It felt like it connected me directly to a shed in Palestine.
And there were plays, pieces of music, movies that contributed to this feeling of continuity—of eternal return—if only because they repeated year after year.
I’m not sure when I started to see through the glow, to understand the ephemeral nature of the commodities that made it up. I think it came in small moments.
At one point I realized that The Grinch was a modern story—only decades old. When I got into vintage films, I realized after a while that Miracle on 34th Street wasn’t made that long ago. Then the Peanuts Christmas special— it “dropped” in the 1970s, but it had seemed to have always been there.
Today, I’m the dad in charge of the tree lights. If one string in the old box doesn’t light up anymore, and the replacement bulbs don’t work for it, and I go to replace it, but none of the new lights are incandescent— they’re all LED—
I find myself saying, “I prefer the traditional lights.”
And suddenly that is ridiculous. Like, what the hell am I saying? There’s nothing about those lights that was traditional.
The lights I loved were the expression of what labor could produce at that time: a particular type of green rubber-coated twisted wire, and little replaceable bulbs with bright gold filaments.
They represented a unique and temporary intersection of resources, labor, and consumer demand.
There is a tradition, but it’s not of things. It’s of making things to which meanings become attached.
My mom’s industry and aesthetics were so honed that this distinction remained hidden from me for a long time—maybe longer than it otherwise would have.
She told me the fruitcake recipe went back centuries, and the brandy was ancient. That was true. She told me the Springerle cookies went back to the medieval period.
And the fact that she was reconstructing these commodities from international supply chains, and baking them in an oven made possible by industrialism—that disappeared behind the joy of feeling something to be authentic.
Occasionally, the reality of capitalism attempted to shine through the glare.
I remember the moment in the 1951 A Christmas Carol film when Bob Cratchit arrives in the frigid office, and Scrooge won’t allow him to burn any coal on Christmas Eve in the little stove.
I don’t know why that stood out among all the possible moments, but it made a stark impression on me. I think I identified with Bob sitting on his clerk’s stool, shivering in his threadbare coat, rubbing his hands so they’d be warm enough to write with his ragged quill pen.
I remember Depression-era stories about the pleasure of getting a Florida orange for Christmas morning as the main present. And like all Depression stories, it seemed to be told for the grim joy of having survived it.
But it also made it sound like that period of deprivation and poverty was kind of like a natural disaster.
I’ve known many boomers, and I’ve never heard one of them say: my mother or father never forgave the capitalists for causing the Depression.
Why didn’t I hear anyone say that? Why didn’t that come down to me? Why did a disaster like that get lumped into the “unavoidable things we survived” category?
In my own time, I sometimes went to help an eccentric Catholic doctor here in Toronto named Andrew Simone down on the shipping docks. He collected food aid from local businesses, packed it into donated shipping containers, and sent them to Ethiopia. This was the 1980s, and that’s where a lot of news about global inequality and food crises was coming from.
I was proud to be eleven or twelve years old, carrying fifty-pound bags of rice on my shoulder. But when I stopped to think about why so much food was needed so far away—and why—that troubled me.
There was another moment when capitalism—and I guess colonialism—interjected itself into these Christmassy feelings.
Later in retirement, my parents visited Israel, and one of their stops was Bethlehem, where there was still a robust handicraft industry serving Christian pilgrims. Carvers would turn olive wood from family groves into crosses, Bible scenes, and creche figures.
My mother loved artisans in general—networks of people making things together. I think she fantasized about that being her whole life: in community with makers.
She found a woodworker selling a full set of figures, packed into a stable made from thin split planks of olive wood, and she bought it.
That was decades ago. Now it’s in our home.
I look at it and remember how it used to fill me with reverence because it came from the Holy Land, carved by hands that knew the soil where all of this had happened.
But now I see through that to understand that the wood-carving industry itself only professionalized in Palestine after steam travel made it a tourist destination in the 1850s.
When I think about how the woodworker my mom felt common cause with was at the end of a long line of artisans now losing access to markets and olive wood because the IDF is uprooting grove after grove in an ethnic cleansing endgame—
These olive wood icons that carry such feelings of depth and continuity emerged from colonial contact and are now disappearing through ethnic cleansing.
The things that seem to carry eternity never do.
But something does.
The original creche wasn’t objects. It began when St. Francis of Assisi—who I think was a real theatre kid, to be honest—decided to bring a donkey and actors into midnight mass one year and play out the nativity scene.
That was a performance, not a commodity.
At Christmas, we are surrounded by an embarrassment of commodities that attempt to signify joy and generosity at the heart of human life.
But the spectacle they generate through countless dancing lights conceals as much as it reveals—if not more.
Santa manifests gifts. But where do they come from? From a fantastical workshop—meaning: from thin air.
It’s like Santa is the patron saint of children, but also the patron saint of the commodity fetish reaching its peak splendor—the point where you forget how things are made and by whom, and you start calling a certain brand of tree lights “traditional,” with no idea whether the factory they were made in is unionized or not.
Even when you’re a leftist, it’s hard to think about, because what you want—like everyone else—is the relief of known, spectacular, sensuous comfort.
But what I’ve learned from Marx so far—and I did some recent episodes on the Conspirituality podcast about this—is that in its periodic overflows of commodities detached from their makers, where the conditions of manufacture are forgotten or covered over by price tags, capitalism is a form of idolatry.
In the old religions, there were arguments about whether God should be represented at all, because if you tried, you would obscure the full, unspeakable glory of divinity.
Marx argued that representations of value on the commodity market are godlike themselves, with money right at the tippy top.
And if we’re mesmerized by this, it’s not that we miss the unspeakable glory of things. We miss the unspeakable amount of human labor and love poured into them. We won’t see it. We won’t see each other through the things we offer each other.
For me, it boils down to: what is the actual feeling of tradition or eternal return that I crave?
And if those first sprigs of fake holly showing up at Dollarama cue that feeling for me, will I remember what’s actually happening? How I’m being deceived?
The shelves aren’t filling up with Christmas. They’re filling up with the time and lifeblood of working people who are just like me.
My mother wasn’t trying to trick me with old-timey ornaments and fruitcake and Springerle cookies.
In her life, she was always reaching for something real—recreating things from a time before box stores. A time of more simply accessible happiness. A time in which you could gather windfall from the olive grove and carve it by the light of an oil lamp into the shape of a lamb.
I could try to reconstruct my mom’s fruitcake recipe, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never taste fruitcake like hers again. And that elicits a lot of feelings.
In the capitalist mode of feeling, the emphasis is on regret: something has been lost because the thing is no longer with you.
But Marx also said that when the use value has been consumed, the labor embodied in it has also been extinguished.
The fruitcake could have been anything. Ultimately, it was the work of my mother’s hands.
She made it for herself and her friends and for me. We ate it, and my mom’s labor became my body. And that’s why I’m here.
So I’ll keep putting the decorations up. I’ll keep watering the tree.
I’ll keep humming along with the carols and having random verses pop into my head. I’ll keep looking for those incandescent bulbs.
But the beauty of their glow, when they light up, will come from remembering where those bulbs come from, how much life they contain, and how many darkest nights of the year it will take to build a kinder world.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
