Valentine’s Day: when millions of people around the globe have the perfect occasion to express their love for their significant others in many forms. Also, a perfect excuse for a great many businesses, large and small, to make a good amount of money by selling merchandise to those lovers eager to express their love.
In the midst of this rather chaotic lovefest, how should anti-capitalist revolutionaries feel and act?
In order to conduct my defense of the Valentine, I have to inevitably start by polemicizing against a few well-known critics who are very skeptical of this modern holiday and the way in which it is celebrated.
The two most common lines of criticism point to two realities: one, the supposed Christian and Western roots of Valentine’s Day, and two, its very much apparent commercialization.
Let me start by addressing the first one.
It is well-known that Valentine’s Day, according to legends (and not historical facts) celebrates the memory of St. Valentine, a Christian Roman saint who was executed on February 14, 270 AD.
Isn’t it ironic then that many of our liberal and secular critics ask that millions of non-Christians today celebrate this very Christian day?
I would like to point to the details of this legend. Why was St. Valentine murdered? According to legends, he was killed by the Roman imperial authorities who had forbidden marriage after Roman men began refusing conscription so they could stay home with their wives. St. Valentine’s “crime” was that he would secretly marry couples in defiance of the Roman Emperor’s order.
Where can you find a more powerful story of a defiance against the moralities imposed by the authorities and a celebration of humanity against the war-agenda of the ancient imperialists?
Besides, why should we buy this secular liberal insistence on erasing anything in our history that has had to do with Judeo-Christianity or other religions? The kind of society that these secular liberals want us to envision, one that is devoid of any “traditional” cultural basis and is based on pure calculative rationality, is, at any rate, merely a modern myth. The modern secular liberal state uses this myth, along with many others, to establish capitalism as its very own “religion” (As Walter Benjamin would say) and maintain the status quo under the cover of common sense and “rationality.”
How about a second, apparently more left-wing group of critics, who point to the acute commercialization of Valentine’s Day? If you’ve ever wandered around leftist circles, you’ve surely come across those who, rather condescendingly, declare that they don’t care for days like Valentine’s or Christmas and refuse to be “consumers” who take part in these capitalist “commodities.”
I have to acknowledge that there is obviously some truth to this critique. As I pointed out at the beginning, Valentine’s Day is brisk business for many capitalists. In the United States alone, more than 180 million Valentine’s cards are sent by mail by some rather cowardly lovers while another 700 million are handed in by their more courageous counterparts. Hallmark alone sells more than 1,300 different styles of Valentine’s Day cards.
Yes, it’s an ugly aspect of capitalist societies that they turn everything into commodities that you can buy and sell. To quote Karl Marx “[capitalists] resolved personal worth into exchange value.” This is exactly why we Marxists fight for the overthrow of this system.
This doesn’t mean that we should shun all aspects of present human culture as “bourgeois” and revert to cave-dwelling. One thing I don’t have the stomach for is all those organic juice-drinking, self-proclaimed “anarchists” who think they are doing something positive by growing food in their own backyards. We Marxists instead engage in a political struggle for a socialist revolution that would give the working people collective control of our own resources by abolishing private ownership of the means of production.
Marxists should welcome a day like Valentine’s Day that is dedicated to the idea of love between human beings, for it is precisely this that goes against the individualistic moralities that capitalism wants to portray as “human nature.”
Most people around the world might not consciously question this conventional wisdom or go along with it. Deep down, however, they know that this is not humanity and that another world is possible. One of these possibilities is love. By professing your love for your many loved ones, by giving up some of yourself for other individuals, it is as if you are declaring to the world: “self-interest isn’t all.” By tying part of your destiny to that of another human being, you are practising the life in future communist society, “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
