Exploring the meanings and powers of love from ancient Greece to the
present day, Richard Gilman-Opalsky argues that what is called “love” by
the best thinkers who have approached the subject is in fact the beating
heart of communism—understood as a way of living, not as a form of
government. Along the way, he reveals with clarity that the capitalist way
of assigning value to things is incapable of appreciating what humans value
most. Capitalism cannot value the experiences and relationships that make
our lives worth living and can only destroy love by turning it into a
commodity. The Communism of Love follows the struggles of love in different
contexts of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and shows how the
aspiration for love is as close as we may get to a universal communist
aspiration.