the revolution will probably involve kissing

the revolution will probably involve kissing.

this is not how lenin put it. lenin had other priorities. grain. war. the proletariat. the seizure of state power. the rather pressing matter of overthrowing the tsar. nobody knows what he thought about a six-foot-two man with excellent forearms who disappears for forty-eight hours after saying, "i really like talking to you."

i suspect he would have considered it a structural problem.

he would have been wrong.

it is, obviously, a personal problem.

but this is where the revolution becomes interesting. every revolution begins with the conviction that the conditions of life are the problem. change the conditions and perhaps the people will change too. change property. change labour. change the state. change marriage. change the family. change everything sufficiently and surely, eventually, people will stop behaving like idiots.

this is a beautiful idea.

it is also completely fucked.

russia tried it in 1917. i have tried it by deleting hinge. neither produced the promised liberation.

the russian revolution was, at its core, an enormous argument about what a human being might become if you rearranged the world around them. the old structures would go. private property would go. class hierarchy would go. the bourgeois family, eventually, would be interrogated. the individual would be freed from the economic conditions that had made his life small. this was, in principle, rather lovely. then came the small problem of the actual human being.

the actual human being is rarely as revolutionary as his circumstances. she is jealous. insecure. sentimental. vain. lonely. occasionally magnificent. usually tired. she says things she does not mean and means things she is too frightened to say. she falls in love with people who are objectively terrible for her. she develops inexplicable attachments to people with excellent jawlines and no discernible capacity for communication. history has never adequately accounted for this.^*1

alexandra kollontai, to her considerable credit, came much closer. she understood that you could not reorganise society while leaving intimacy untouched. if women remained economically dependent on men, if domestic labour remained invisible, if marriage continued to function as an economic institution disguised as a romantic one, then political liberation had not really reached the bedroom, the kitchen, or the miserable little psychological interior where people keep their private catastrophes. kollontai wanted a new kind of love. less possessive. less economically dependent. less interested in ownership. which sounds excellent until you realise that most people can barely handle someone liking their instagram story without constructing an elaborate theory of intention. the revolution had barely begun and already there were problems.

imagine the estates of the old russian empire. the aristocracy has its palaces. the bourgeoisie has its apartments. the workers have overcrowded housing and twelve-hour shifts. the bourgeoisie does not merely own capital. it owns privacy. this is an underrated aspect of class. there is something deeply erotic about having a door that closes. you cannot build an elaborate theory of romantic liberation while four generations are sleeping in the same room. intimacy requires time. it requires privacy. it requires enough material security to spend an evening doing something that produces absolutely nothing.

the soviet students of the 1920s discovered this the hard way. they had free love, theoretically. they also had dormitory beds in separate buildings and no rooms to fuck in. "we are both leading truly monastic lives," one student wrote. the revolution had arrived. the rooms had not. capitalism has always been suspicious of unproductive time. capitalism wants your time accounted for. your labour must produce. your attention must convert. your leisure should ideally become consumption. even romance has acquired productivity metrics. be attractive. be interesting. have hobbies. optimise your profile. take better photographs. answer within the correct temporal interval. do not appear too eager. do not appear too indifferent. develop emotional intelligence. maintain boundaries. drink water. go to therapy. lift weights. become the best possible version of yourself so that someone with an avoidant attachment style can leave you on read.

the modern romantic subject is exhausted. and still horny, occasionally.

this is where i think the bolsheviks missed an opportunity.

not to regulate desire. that would be absurd. but to at least create a space where certain questions could be asked. where certain behaviours could be named. where someone, somewhere, had the authority to look a man in the eye and ask what exactly he meant by that.

the first item on the agenda would have been simple enough. the right of all citizens to know whether "come over" constitutes a date. this is not a radical demand. it is the bare minimum of a functioning civilisation. the second would have been thornier. the phrase "let's see where this goes" would have been officially recognised as a form of political evasion, a linguistic manoeuvre designed to preserve optionality at the expense of another person's sanity. the third would have concerned men who say they are "not really looking for anything serious right now" after behaving exactly like someone's boyfriend for four months. such men would be invited to explain themselves. they would not be permitted to say "i don't know, i'm just going with the flow." that sentence would be struck from the record. the record would be kept. the record would be read aloud at the next meeting.

the revolution has standards.

at least initially.

then, inevitably, there would be factions. the bolsheviks would demand immediate emotional clarity. the mensheviks would suggest gradual reform. the anarchists would abolish labels altogether. the liberals would propose an app where everyone could indicate their intentions through a series of tasteful icons. someone would inevitably suggest a five-year plan. by 1928, loneliness would be reduced by forty percent. by 1930, all citizens would have access to adequate housing, leisure, friendship and courtship. by 1932, situationships would be abolished. the statistics would be falsified by february. someone would ghost someone else. the plan would be revised.

this is the part that interests me. revolutions are very good at changing structures and much less good at changing the embarrassing little animal living inside them. you can abolish the aristocracy. you can redistribute land. you can nationalise industry. you can rewrite the constitution. you can change the entire language through which people understand class. and still, at the end of the day, there is some man in a black t-shirt standing outside a bar saying, "i'm just not great at texting." the revolution has not abolished him.^*2 this is not necessarily a failure of revolution. it may simply be a failure of imagination.

we tend to think liberation means removing external constraints. and obviously it does. nobody should be poor because someone else owns the factory. nobody should be trapped in a marriage because they cannot survive outside it. nobody should have their life determined by whether a man with inherited property finds them suitable. but there are other forms of captivity. wanting someone who does not want you back. wanting someone who does want you back but not in the way you want. being terrified of intimacy. being addicted to uncertainty. mistaking anxiety for chemistry. mistaking consistency for boredom. thinking a person is mysterious when, in fact, they are simply bad at communicating.

these problems do not disappear when the means of production are redistributed. the proletariat can seize the factory and still be insecure. the peasant can receive land and still be jealous. the bourgeoisie can be overthrown and someone can still develop an irrational fixation on a six-foot-three man because he has forearms that look like they were designed by a particularly indulgent sculptor. history does not know what to do with the forearms.

this is perhaps why kissing matters. not because kissing is revolutionary. it really isn't. kissing does not abolish private property. it does not reorganise labour. it does not dismantle the state. it does not redistribute wealth. it cannot even guarantee that the person you kissed will text you tomorrow. it is almost offensively unproductive. which may be precisely the point. there is something suspiciously beautiful about an activity that produces nothing.

two people sit somewhere. perhaps on a badly designed sofa. perhaps in the back of a car. perhaps outside a bar at 1:17 in the morning pretending they are not cold. someone leans closer. someone decides not to move away. for a few seconds, neither person is producing anything. no capital is accumulated. no quarterly target is met. no linkedin update is generated. nobody becomes a better candidate. the state does not benefit. the market does not benefit. the algorithm does not benefit. it is simply two people being alive in the same place at the same time.

this sounds embarrassingly sentimental. i know. i resent it too. but perhaps this is what the revolution was always supposed to be about, at least partly. not merely changing who owns what, but changing what human beings are permitted to do with their time. to have enough of it. enough privacy. enough security. enough leisure to become something other than labour. enough time to sit with another person without immediately asking what the relationship is worth.

we have become very good at measuring things. income. productivity. engagement. desirability. followers. height. especially height. six feet is apparently now a political category. a man can have no political opinions whatsoever, but if he is six-foot-two and has excellent forearms, the electorate becomes unstable. perhaps this is what marx meant by commodity fetishism. probably not. but i am choosing to interpret it this way. the modern dating app has taken desire and turned it into a marketplace. people become profiles. profiles become photographs. photographs become measurements. measurements become preferences. preferences become filters. six feet. non-smoker. emotionally available. likes dogs. has read dostoevsky. does not say "females." the revolution arrives and asks us to abolish private property. the dating app asks us to swipe left because his second photograph is holding a fish. both are systems of classification. only one has excellent forearms.^*3

and perhaps the strangest thing about desire is that it keeps refusing to cooperate with our politics. you can know exactly what you believe. you can have read the theory. you can understand patriarchy, capitalism, attachment, class, gender, alienation and the entire miserable history of human domination. you can have a beautifully articulated understanding of why you should not want someone. and then they walk into a room. that's it. the revolution is postponed.

this is the humiliating fact at the centre of being human. we are not only political creatures. we are also bodies. we want. we remember. we become attached. we misunderstand. we touch. we leave. we come back. we make catastrophically poor decisions because someone looked at us in a particular way. no committee can abolish this. no manifesto can solve it. no five-year plan will save you from someone saying "i've been thinking about you" at 2 a.m.

perhaps this is why every revolution eventually develops a problem with the individual. the collective wants clarity. the individual remains strange. the collective wants equality. desire remains asymmetrical. the collective wants rational organisation. the human being wants one particular person for reasons they cannot adequately explain. and perhaps that is not something we should eliminate. perhaps a genuinely liberated society would not be one in which everyone finally learned how to desire correctly. perhaps it would simply be one in which people had enough freedom, time and security to discover what they actually wanted. even if what they wanted was occasionally stupid. especially then.

the russian revolution changed the world. it destroyed an empire. it created another kind of state. it produced theories, martyrs, purges, famines, propaganda, enormous historical arguments and an almost pathological quantity of facial hair. but throughout the series of all kinds of revolutions our civilizations have been through we could not solve love. we have tried religion. we have tried marriage. we have tried poetry. we have tried therapy. we have tried hinge. god knows we have tried hinge. and still, somewhere, a person is looking at another person and thinking, against all available evidence, yes.

so perhaps the revolution will probably involve kissing. not because kissing will cause the revolution. not because it will overthrow anyone. not because it is inherently radical. but because after the flags have gone up and the statues have come down and the men with magnificent beards have finished arguing about historical necessity, there will still be two people somewhere who have nothing particularly productive to do. one of them will look at the other. someone will lean closer. and for once, nobody will ask what it produces.^*4

hopefully, they text back.