This was written by my daughter-in-law, Ljubica. I found it very worth sharing.
On Love, Violence and Yugoslavia
Ljubica & Adam
When your name is Ljubica, most introductory conversations will follow a standard script. As soon as I say, “Hi, I’m Ljubica,” someone will ask about my heritage. When I say I was born in Macedonia, they’ll ask, “What language do they speak there?” and I’ll say, “Macedonian!” They’ll say, “Oh sure, duh!” and ask what my name means. My parents, Vesna & Blagoj, having lived through very similar interactions, armed me with an answer before I’d even entered elementary: Ljubica means love to all people.
It’s interesting how a name works when you’re younger. You have to form a relationship to your own name, while you’re still learning about yourself. Repeating “love to all people,” it seemed like my Socialist, Yugoslav parents had given me an imperative through my name. And like all things repeated often enough, and all words given to you by someone wiser, it became a bit of a mantra.
My relationship to “Ljubica,” to love, was colored by my parents’ political values. They sent me to a Catholic elementary school despite being atheists, as many immigrants do, because public education in America is criminally underfunded. As a young atheist at that school, my feeling about the religious people around me was never that they were stupid or gulible. I felt by being religious, by having faith in a higher power to take care of things, they were missing out on the type of love for all mankind that I believed in. I thought being an atheist or Socialist meant we have to take care of each other. We have to limit suffering for all people, because we only have each other, and we only have this life.
When I was a little older, the Kosovo war was on TV. My parents (and every other Macedonian I knew) were glued to the footage. We couldn’t look away from the news about how, once again, Yugoslavia was being torn apart. When I asked my parents what was happening, my dad told me something nice: You have to understand, in Yugoslavia, we’re all like brothers. And sometimes when families fight, we can hurt each other more than anyone else can hurt us, but that’s because we love each other. Even if we break up, we’ll always be a family, and we’ll always love each other like family.
As an adult, I know now that’s not the most precise explanation, but his simpler explanation is still effective: it gives me clarity, an emotional truth to hold onto, when I think about the complexities of the breakup. It’s not a less true explanation, and if I forget about it – if I think that this violence was somehow inevitable, instead of a choice made cynically by people who could’ve remained brothers – then the horrors of history are less clear in their horror. Maybe it captures more of the unconscious truth of the situation, which would be difficult to explain in prose, and it’s been useful to me for a long time.
When I was a little older, we saw the Iraq War on TV. I saw grandmas who looked like babas I knew, and like the ones I’d seen on TV in Yugoslavia — my Slavic babas wore head-scarves tied in the same style, even though we have different faiths and ethnicities. These Iraqi grandmas looked like family, and the love and pain I felt for the people of Yugoslavia transferred to the Iraqi people. I hated the Iraq War and the Bush administration that started it. I protested and volunteered for Kerry at a time when I was too young to vote, with a hope that I could help end the pain I saw in the faces of the Iraqi babas. All of my earliest political actions were driven by love for my brothers and babas, and a deep desire to see them flourish instead of suffer.
As a Socialist, my politics are rooted in love, in a universal love to all people. When Bernie began running in 2015, I was excited and invigorated to suddenly see more Americans identify as Socialist and become interested in left-wing politics. I started to seek them out online, but the Socialism of online was so aesthetically and emotionally different from the brotherly love of my parents & Yugoslavia. Online, Socialism took on the characteristics of an American subculture, with in-jokes, trivia, and the cynical, knowing attitude that all nerds use to irritate each other and mock outsiders. Aesthetically, it was a subculture drawn to spectacle and gore, juxtaposing guillotines with ironic cuteness. Practically, it was inclined to in-fighting and factionalism already. When it was united, it was usually in mockery or cynicism.
Fast forward a few years, and not much has changed. After Bernie lost the nomination for a second time, if anything, the online Socialist discourse got even more cynical. Bad faith readings, factionalism, and cancellations continued and continue to this day. Slightly different patterns of left-wing media consumption produce warring factions. Tenuous groups of commentators and fandoms define themselves in opposition to other groups of left-wing media consumers, who said or thought something that wasn’t the best or most correct thing to say. Among all the groups, the idea that politics is a game of power – a zero-sum struggle over who gets what – seems to be setting in.
In Yugoslavia, there were two crucial periods of violence: one at the beginning, when the nation forged itself through violent struggle in the midst of a world war, and one at the end, when violence tore the country apart.
In the beginning, we united our different regional identities in a common project, first to survive and then to live. Partisans formed volunteer brigades, fighting and dying together against fascists and genocidal violence, until they won. But the violence of the Partisans was exceptional — it was literally a state of exception, when an untenable political order had already started to break. Up to that point, the Partisans and the communities they came from had lived fractured under different imperial regimes. After that exceptional moment of violence was over, they remained united and began a new project. Monuments were built and schools were named to honor the fallen heroes — but always to center their sacrifice and the importance of fidelity to the project they ushered in. When I was little, my baba would take me around to monuments and teach me about the various heroes. We would honor their sacrifice by cleaning the monuments, my baba washing them with a plastic water bottle she’d brought along, and I with my little broom would sweep away leaves and dust, the same way we would when we visited my great-grandparents’ graves. To aestheticize violence and guillotines takes them out of the contexts where they made sense. It cynically normalizes them, as if conflict is something to celebrate, and not a unique moment where you sacrifice for others.
The end of Yugoslavia was also a violent period, but for a different reason: people (particularly those in power) acted cynically, out of a belief that violence was inevitable and necessary — or worse, they saw it as a strategic choice in pursuit of their own power and glory. Now, especially in the West, we talk about that period of violence as if it were normal. It’s discussed as if it were inevitable, and the brotherly union under Tito was a temporary dream masking a deeper, cynical reality.
But that’s not true. During WWII, there were also Nationalist groups who fought, who felt they were fighting for “their people.” But those Nationalists ended up in collaboration with the Nazis to exterminate their neighbors. The Partisans – fighting out of solidarity, not the self-interest of an ethnic identity – forged a new “the people” out of this common struggle. And when the war was over, the people began to self-determine politically, outside of imperial borders, together. They continued in this solidaristic love to form a united state, and then as Socialists, they began to self-direct their own means of production.
As it turns out, the violence when they came together was momentary, but their participation in it stemmed from a universal(izing) love — it was a love of the people for whom they fought and who they fought with. A Macedonian Partisan named Stiv Naumov was a local fortunate son, and he’s a hero of my city to this day. He was born relatively wealthy, and he studied abroad. When he saw that even the poor people where he studied were better off than the poor back home, he became a Communist. He fought and gave his life as a Partisan, even though he had been personally wealthy and comfortable under the existing order. After the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was founded, people like my grandparents maintained fidelity to the revolutionary beginnings of the country — my grandparents built the refrigerator factory where they would work for the rest of their lives, dedicated it to Stiv Naumov, and held celebrations every year to honor both his memory and their own hard work. (This is how you never allow yourself to forget that moment of exceptional violence, without glorifying death.)
Stiv Naumov didn’t side with his own narrow self-interest. And we should be careful as we fight capitalism not to imply it’s natural to do so — we should say no, if anything is natural, love is natural! I want to convince every Socialist that it’s important to keep love at the center of our politics, but I know immediately that many will be turned off by the concept. I know how people will excuse themselves from love: They’ll say politics is about power, and we need to wield it; we must ruthlessly attack systems that oppress; we have wealthy, powerful enemies, and we need to create a better world as soon as possible.
Yes! To all of that, yes — but how do we seize and use power? How do we take it away from the wealthy, connected few, and occupy it together? Solidarity! Americans associate love with a position of weakness, because it implies dependence on another. In fact, we pathologize couples who rely on each other as “co-dependent.” We don’t imagine that the strong, rational, radically self-reliant individuals we’re supposed to become under capitalism should ever be in such a position.
It’s no surprise that both romantic gestures and unions have degenerated in America. These muscles have atrophied from underuse in our hyper-individualistic, hyper-capitalist environment. Loving work, commodities or “self-care” – things that optimize you for market valuation – is safe, not a vulnerability or a risk.
To see what a modern gesture of love looks like, we can look to Youtube, which hosts seemingly millions of proposal videos. Over and over again, we see men make ostentatious, public displays. Instead of a private intimacy between two people, love becomes the relation between you and an audience, like a commodity you produce and ask the market to value. It’s an attempt to make love safe by taking it out of its proper one-on-one exchange, by neutralizing the intimate risk when you ask the person you love if they love you back. How could a person say no in front of a whole football stadium?
Similarly, when we post online, we perform our politics for an imagined audience. Many of us want to label ourselves Leftist in our profiles and feeds for the world to see, so if someone we’ve brought into our space says something that might be problematic – maybe it’s just ambiguous, but we worry it might be – then we feel a need to call (or kick) them out. In the absence of love & solidarity, we’re performing for an audience, so our politics become about self-definition. And our relation to others in turn is as their audience, a relation of consumption. We feel we should be vigilant, when it comes to our process of self-definition — we have to police the bounds of our consumption, when that’s our connection to the world.
If we read people in bad faith, we can reduce our exposure. We can reduce our risk of being let down or challenged by others, but we also reduce our chance for connection. Factionalism is a problem for the American left only where there’s a lack of love — or more precisely, an unwillingness to acknowledge that we are all already dependent on one another. It’s much safer, psychically, to be cynical. It’s easier to build your own atomized, idiosyncratic ideas about what you would do if you were AOC, than it is to risk all that’s entailed in joining a collective project. Likewise, it’s easier to engineer the most epic proposal than it is to work through the doubts and difficulties relationships leave you vulnerable to.
Love and risk go hand in hand. In the instability of life under capitalism, we learn a desire to eliminate risk. But when we think of love, we should know that depending on another person is not an inherently weak position. And when it comes to politics, we should know building a connection with others does not leave you weaker — turning your politics into a process of cynical self-definition does. Is not the cynic someone who tries to protect against exposure so drastically that they armor themselves, trying to forget their soft middle, while shouting to anyone who will listen, “I knew it all along! I am impenetrable!”
Love through solidarity is how we work together, how we come to build confidence in one another and move things forward. Love (in the agape, brotherly sense) will allow for people, including ourselves, to make mistakes in the service of a common project. The relationship of love and solidarity, unlike the individual/audience dynamic of the marketplace, will allow us to say and even do the wrong things sometimes, if afterwards we can reaffirm our commitment to the relationship sincerely, and be accepted by those we’ve hurt. Forgiveness follows from love and is necessary for all relationships.
Romantic relationships can seem threatening, because they require us daily to subordinate ourselves to another — to their needs, desires, points of view, etc. After all, in our movies, churches, and diaries we imagine the perfect marriage as “two becoming one.” There’s a horror in that vision of what “union” is supposed to be. We can easily imagine there will be a stronger and a weaker partner, and the smaller one will be absorbed, blob-like, into the other. Politically, America has the same nightmare of a grey, Soviet society where we all have to wear the same rags, share a communal toothbrush, and become simple extensions of the will of Mao. We would merge into a single mass, moving together in a smooth mess of skin and repression.
But as Alain Badiou reminds us, in In Praise of Love, we can never internalize another, not even in love. “Love is not simply about two people meeting and their inward-looking relationship: it is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two.” Our love, as we make it, is something that exists outside of us as well as in. We have a relationship to it – it is, after all, our mutual relationship with an other – but it only works because we retain and respect autonomy, and we choose to continue creating it together.
Love is already inscribed in every act of solidarity. Solidarity gives us strength because it requires us to trust and need others in the struggle with us. Other people will be the means of our liberation, and we of theirs. None of us can do this alone, and for that reason when we act together, we do not “become one” blob-like mass, even though liberal and conservative ideology fear that we do. (In the particularly virulent individualism of American conservatives, the imagined horror of the Black Lives Matter “riots” is that Antifa and/or George Soros pulled the puppet strings of the brainless masses and got them to “destroy their own neighborhoods.”)
In reality there are massive individual benefits, personal as well as social, in building this perspective of Two, in mutually constructing love or a political movement. Both carry much the same risks — you might be let down, made uncomfortable, or even be betrayed. But when you act for another person, to meet their needs or further their desires, you will gain confidence in yourself, because they gain confidence in you. Then when they act for you, the virtuous cycle continues.
Badiou goes on to say that love (the perspective of Two) is crucial, because, “It is an individual experience of potential universality.” This, I believe, is the dimension that opens up to us when we act in solidarity: a perspective of difference with universal implications. That’s why, to fight the cynicism that leaves us blind to our already existing interdependence, to fight the suspicions that separate and weaken us, we need to keep love at the center of our politics.
No guarantee will ever be possible. There is no way to neutralize risk and produce a version of your love (or revolution) that won’t fail – one that any rational individual would choose in the marketplace – because this is not a process of selling yourself to others. Like romantic love, if you want to make a better world, you have to take an actual leap of faith with another!
Badiou talks about love as a tenacious adventure. He calls love an “event,” which in his own philosophical language is a phenomenon that feels impossible until it happens, and then the world, even history is re-shaped around it — like two people falling in love by chance, and then feeling they were “meant” for each other. But for the event of love to continue, the lovers cannot revel in the moment of their initial meeting. It must be an on-going construction.
The event of love is not a meet-cute, where you trip over your perfect match. We would dissolve the gravity of the event, if we replace that feeling of impossibility with a story of fate, to make it feel guaranteed to happen no matter what. We might like to imagine it was destined, but for a radical, life-changing event to happen, there can be no guarantee ahead of time that it will — or else it would not be radical and life-changing! “Fate” loses its magic, when you realize that it’s just a synonym for necessary.
Just as we’ve replaced intimate gestures of love with spectacle in America, for many on the left and particularly those online, we’ve chosen to fetishize revolution. (Like money, it represents and hides social relations, until we begin to desire money itself.) We want it to be fate, to be inevitable. We want to experience that one magical moment that will recreate the world and reconfigure History around us — and we want it to be guaranteed, instead of an event that we have to keep making happen together.
The online left reminds me of having Hugh-a-Thons with my friends in middle school. A Hugh-a-Thon, of course, is a sleepover where you marathon Hugh Grant movies and talk about boys. Lots of junk food is involved; it’s very fun. But those nights can limit your imagination to the end of the movie. They leave you dreaming about fabulous meet-cutes with the perfect match. Once you get past some hijinks caused by his charming, foppish inability to properly communicate his feelings, getting to the altar will be inevitable. The promise of the meet-cute will be fulfilled. Of course, most of us are hoping to live past the wedding night!
So we have to ask ourselves, actually, what does happen after the libidinally charged, highly anticipated wedding night? What’s after the honeymoon? We want that magical moment of revolution. But if we all make our feelings known and flood the streets tomorrow, is that what we would have? What happens the next day? Would that moment itself birth a new, collective life? The answer – the only answer – is that we must construct love and solidarity every day. In the weeks, years, and decades after a night of revolution, solidarity will carry us through.
Solidarity in movement building is solidarity for a new world. It will have to be a tenacious adventure, or else like Yugoslavia, all of our love and sacrifice will be lost in a spectacular explosion of self-identification and cynicism.
“He who once became aware of the power of solidarity and who breathed the air of freedom will not be crushed.” – Lech Walesa
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