TROPLOIN

LOVE-ECTASY-CRIME

(1983)

This introduction to a critique of social customs is a contribution to a necessary revolutionary anthropology. The communist movement possesses a dimension which is both a class and human one. It is a movement which is based on the central role of workers without being a form of workerism, and without being a humanism it moves toward a human community. For now, reformism thrives on separation by piling up demands in parallel spheres without ever questioning these spheres themselves. One of the proofs of the potency of a communist movement will be its capacity to recognise, and in practice to supersede, this gap and contradiction between the dimensions of class and community.

It is this gap and contradiction which flourish in the ambiguities of emotional life, making the critique of morality more delicate than other critiques.

What follows is not a text about "sexuality," which is an historical and cultural product in the same sense as the economy and work. Along with work and the economy, "sexuality" came into being as a specialised sphere of human activity during 19th century capitalism, when it was finalised and theorised (discovered). It was then banalized by capitalism in the 20th and is something we can go beyond in a totally communist life.

For the same reasons, this text is not a "critique of daily life." Such a critique expresses only the social space which is excluded from work and is in competition with it. "Customs," on the contrary, include the entirety of human relations from a viewpoint of the sentiments. These customs do not exclude material production (the bourgeois morality of the family, for example, is indissociable from the work ethic).

Since in its own way capitalism sums up the human past which produced it, there can be no revolutionary critique without a critique of the customs and lifeways which preceded capitalism, and the way they have been integrated by it.