From “WE MAKE A POLIS”

Or keep your eyes pointed on the state of the world & you’ll never have to
change how you behave toward the people immediately around you.
By Emily Critchley.

Politics from Πολιτικά
‘of, for, or relating to citizens’
/ amongst others
processes by which groups
always of people
make collective decisions
(like poetry, or quality
like good or bad leaders)
applies to institutions
& fields, even special interest
groups (like poetry)
all segments of society
involving authority & power
like who sings most fairly
or who thinks most rightly
from out the polis
this ‘this’ of the people.

Property is my poem
given back to me by people
the ‘right’ to my ‘re-write’
of a group of people
who have the public trust?
the little, not the main
but sometimes to exercise my right
goes against ‘my’ people
in the past, present or future
so the growth of my opinion
like the history of knowledge
which is the history of property
is the history of probably
as institutional structure
as protection in numbers
it is exclusionary as anything
it is invisible as I’m in it

the more man becomes knowledgeable
more world he owns
the more man becomes knowledgeable
more world he owes. [...]

Letter from Lenin to Inessa Armand (17 January 1915)

Trans. Andrew Rothstein.

Dear Friend,

I very much advise you to write the plan of the pamphlet in as much detail as possible. Otherwise too much is unclear.
One opinion I must express here and now:
I advise you to throw out altogether §3 – the “demand (women’s) for freedom of love”.
That is not really a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.
After all, what do you understand by that phrase? What can be understood by it?
1. Freedom from material (financial) calculations in affairs of love?
2. The same, from material worries?
3. From religious prejudices?
4. From prohibitions by Papa, etc.?
5. From the prejudices of “society”?
6. From the narrow circumstances of one’s environment (peasant or petty-bourgeois or bourgeois intellectual)?
7. From the fetters of the law, the courts and the police?
8. From the serious element in love?
9. From child-birth?
10. Freedom of adultery? etc.
I have enumerated many shades (not all of course). You have in mind, of course, not nos. 8-10, but either nos. 1-7 or something similar to nos. 1-7.
But then for nos. 1-7 you must choose a different wording, because freedom of love does not express this idea exactly.
And the public, the readers of the pamphlet, will inevitably understand by “freedom of love”, in general, something like nos. 8-10, even without your wishing it.
Just because in modern society the most talkative, noisy and “top-prominent” classes understand by “freedom of love” nos. 8-10, just for that very reason this is not a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.
For the proletariat nos. 1-2 are the most important, and then nos. 5-7, and those, in fact, are not “freedom of love”.
The thing is not what you subjectively “mean” by this. The thing is the objective logic of class relations in affairs of love.
Friendly shake hands!

Source: In Lenin’s Collected Works, ed. Robert Daglish, vol. 35 – quoted in Neil Pattison’s essay “To the Professors of Fleeting Etc.: Keston Sutherland’s Antifreeze and the Significance of Love,” in Crisis Inquiry, ed. Rich Owens.
Elsewhere: Damn the Caesars.

From an interview

With Keston Sutherland.

I’m extremely suspicious of the forms of implicit and explicit messianism involved in that kind of fetishism of intensities —not simply because it becomes harder and harder to do, the more I learn about the world, but also because I do think that it’s at least potentially and is often actually and in fact a thoroughly bourgeois posture. I think that people when they hear the word ‘bourgeois’ tend to imagine that this is a concept whose application can conveniently be limited to people whose authority we despise or who are our parents or who are older than us or who own shops or whatever it might be. But in fact, of course, there are all sorts of very exciting, very intense and emotionally bewildering forms of romantic bourgeois posturing which are bourgeois not because they come from the mouths of the people who own the means of production, but rather because they imaginatively spirit into existence solutions to social problems whose origin and engine is the poetical imagination rather than real political activity aimed at resolving social issues.