1. 13. 2025
Eros and Revolution
Alan Sears
The first demonstration I attended, roughly 55 years ago, has shaped my life ever since. I was only 13, but the movement against the Vietnam War was everywhere: in the news, the music I listened to, and my conversations with friends and family. My first march took over downtown streets, our loud chants magnified as they echoed off the surrounding buildings. I still remember some of those chants. “NATO, NORAD, ICC, End Canadian Complicity!” I yelled myself hoarse, even though I had to do some research later to figure out what all those initials actually meant.
The demonstration was attacked by Toronto police on horseback at the US consulate. I was far back in the march, and never knew exactly how the police brutality got started near the front. I was shocked and scared to find police horses headed towards me, with mounted officers beating people, seemingly at random. But I was also exhilarated by the reaction of the marchers, whose anger fuelled louder chants and pushing back against the cops.
I fell in love with socialist politics on the day of that march. It was not only an intellectual attraction to fighting injustice and making a better world, but also the sensation I felt vibrating through my body. I was turned on to mass mobilization, which acquired what I now think of as an erotic allure for me. I do not think that is a perverse personal reaction, but a crucial factor in revolutionary politics that hasn’t been adequately discussed.
Bound by love and anger
Our resistance is motivated by anger at the horrifying injustices that mark everyday living in capitalist societies. But it’s not enough to be pissed off. If it were, capitalism would have been overthrown long ago. To be effective in resistance, we need to develop a counter-power from below, capable of overcoming the entrenched dominance of employers and the state, backed by cops and the military. This means recognizing our own transformative capacities, and building the infrastructure to organize collective learning and effective activism.
There are important erotic dimensions to the formation of this infrastructure. At the most general level, eros describes our drive to fulfill our appetites for embodied fulfillment, forging and deepening social connection in the process, as each of us is highly dependent on each other to meet our wants and needs. Erotic fulfillment weaves together imagination, sensation, and connection.
In this expansive sense, erotic fulfillment extends far beyond genital-centred sexual engagement. People may get an erotic charge in many different ways, ranging from a hug to a vigorous workout, from cooking and eating a satisfying meal to an intimate conversation while hiking in a beautiful setting. Erotic life is also not only about pleasure: connection can hurt, and pain can fulfill wants and needs. At the most basic level, every meaningful social link is already pregnant with future loss – yet this only intensifies its resonance.
The erotic dimensions of active resistance include the charge of forming into a collective, gaining power as we contribute, each in our own ways, to creating something greater than ourselves. The chanting of a mass demonstration drowns out any individual voice, but there is no sound without each of us shouting our part.
Our horizons open up as we become part of something bigger. The people who ultimately make revolutions generally enter into activism with far more modest and immediate concerns. I remember talking to a woman in Windsor, Ontario, who became politically active at a time of widespread militancy in the 1940s. She was motivated to form a union by the very immediate personal experience of being sexually harassed by her boss at the restaurant where she worked. She cautiously raised the issue with trusted co-workers and found out she was not alone in being harassed in this way. Given the widespread worker activism going on around town at the time, unionization seemed like a powerful way to respond to harassment. The struggle to unionize connected her to many other workers at her own workplace and beyond, exposing her to a wide range of issues and repertoire of responses.
As people become involved in collective resistance, particularly at a time of rising struggles, the stakes of activism increase. Activists might get fired, be ostracized, face police violence, or go to jail. These intensifying stakes, which I felt when the police attacked the first demonstration I attended, can also deepen our engagement. In 2012, Quebec students went on strike, walking out of CEGEPs (community colleges) and universities to halt a massive tuition increase. As the strikes went on, municipalities banned marches by striking students and police tried to shut them down. Activists defied the bans, marching through the night and producing an electric sense of their own defiant collective power.
Learning together
In these situations, people develop collective capacities that exceed the sum of what individuals bring to the table, creating something new together that takes them to places they hadn’t imagined. This process is intensely erotic, as the exhilaration of mass action resonates through the bodies and minds of all involved. But that doesn’t mean it’s irrational. While the conservative response to the open-ended power of mobilized masses of people is to denounce it as “mob rule,” there is in fact great wisdom in insurgent collectivity. One key feature of the process of rising up together is that people develop collective knowledge, learning together by reflecting on their experiences – and figuring out how to make their action more effective. People begin to take their own thinking more seriously, as they acquire a new sense of responsibility for their participation in high-stakes decision-making. A vote to go on strike, for example, means risking loss of income and committing to many hours of picket line duty, even in crappy weather or conditions of police clampdown. This process of collective learning has crucial erotic elements: we develop intense connections as we put our bodies on the line and process our experiences of agony and ecstasy in struggle.
People develop an enhanced need to know as their horizons of possibility expand. Among other things, they seek out the inspiration, warnings, and strategic lessons they can obtain from the stories of others. The conversation I described above with the woman who formed a restaurant union was just one of many opportunities I’ve had to learn from other activists’ experiences, whether killing time during a dull picket or grabbing a bite together after an organizing meeting. These discussions have taught me so much about the power of mass insurgency, going way beyond my own direct experience. The radical wing of the Quebec student movement formalized this process of insurgent learning in their long history of “camps de formation,” in which new activists engage with others who have built the movement over time, not only learning from them but also teaching them the realities of the present circumstances.
Faced with high-stakes challenges as we confront the power of the ruling class organized through the state, it’s imperative that we try to avoid errors from the past – developing new forms of democratic decision-making, and expanding our practices of solidarity through learning from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, disabled people, migrants, worker activists, women, and queers.
Revolution and leaps
Because people create new possibilities as they rise up, their collectivity generating erotic energy, revolutions have an open-ended character. They are incalculable. Mass insurgency is not simply a linear development: people who set out to address an immediate concern can end up fighting to upend the whole system. In Russia in 1917, for example, experienced male revolutionaries warned women workers against launching a general strike on International Women’s Day, given the conditions of severe repression during World War One and the lack of wider mobilization. In the event, those women workers’ strike was a massive success that served as a crucial launching point for the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Revolutions mark a departure from the everyday expectations we have developed through our own life experience. You get a taste of that when a large and active demonstration takes over the streets, shutting down vehicular traffic and filling the space with a whole new register of sounds and sights. Loud rhythmic chants forge connections, so that tens of thousands amplify a single message: “Free, free Palestine!” Participants in a massive militant demonstration can develop a sense of collective power to challenge the cops and other authorities, even when that potential is not actualized.
French revolutionary Daniel Bensaïd described revolutions as leaps, departing from the everyday rhythms of life and politics. These leaps are a complex combination of spontaneity, as people discover collective capacities through the exercise of them, and deliberateness in seeking to make these mobilizations more effective. There are, again, important erotic dimensions to these leaps into collectivity grounded in the exhilaration of mass insurgency. Solidarity in struggle is not simply a rational calculation of how to be most effective in changing the world. Mass insurgency generates physical and emotional sensations that fuel audacity, but also devastating moments of defeat, including arrests and deaths. Through these highs and lows, people develop new bonds, sometimes beginning to see fresh depths in themselves and each other, as they intensify their sense of their own power as individual and collective world-makers.
Reformist politics oriented towards seeking change within the system of capitalist liberal democracy tend not to create these erotic openings. My own experience of knocking on doors for the NDP did not generate exhilaration in the same ways mass demonstrations did. The goal of NDP activism is to motivate people to participate in the relatively passive and individualized act of standing in a polling booth to mark an X beside a candidate’s name, not to build a movement to take power with our own hands. Political rallies during an NDP campaign may offer a momentary taste of connection and power, but only to rev people up to go and vote.
The fact that revolutionary politics unleash erotic energy imposes a responsibility on activists and their organizations to ensure these erotic openings aren’t exploited in violent ways. There is a history of relatively powerful people within radical groups sexually exploiting others in their organization, contributing to gender-based and sometimes also racial oppression. Effective revolutionary organizing requires deliberate action to eliminate the sexual violence that often develops where erotic openings mix with oppressive hierarchies of gender, racialization, sexuality, settler colonialism, migration status, and disability.
Eros and rehumanization
One of the most erotic aspects of forging collectivities of resistance is that we challenge the dehumanization of ourselves and each other that is a central feature of capitalist systems of domination. In capitalist societies, we are generally not employed as creative makers, but as compliant workers who will produce as directed, under the control of employers. Our motivation is not the inherent fulfillment of realizing ourselves by transforming the world, but the paycheque or equivalent that grants us access to the means to satisfy our wants and needs. People have to turn themselves off to survive the work regimes in capitalist societies, whether in the context of employment, school, or unpaid labour in the household. We learn to endure work, which becomes the means to an end (such as a paycheque) rather than inherently fulfilling in itself. We become alienated from our capacity to live as makers who gain inherent fulfillment from creatively transforming the world around us.
We lose touch with our humanity, and each other’s, as we turn off those generative powers and cap our desires. This dehumanization is highly differentiated; that is, it looks very different in different people. White, heterosexual, abled cisgender males with national citizenship status tend to be recognized legally and culturally as full persons in a settler-colonial state such as Canada, while others are relegated to second- or third-class status.
Mobilization from below necessarily involves rehumanization, taking back our core capacities for creative world-making and developing solidarity grounded in mutuality, the understanding that we must take care of each other. This rehumanization includes erotic awakening, as repressed capacities and desires surface. Rehumanization in this sense requires deliberate processes of reparation, redress, and return, to address the multi-generational impact of dispossession, violence, and erasure.
Desire for revolution
These erotic currents power the leaps that make apparently improbable revolution a possibility. Many people recognize the disgusting state of the world, but it’s harder to have the confidence that we can do something effective to address it. The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza is enabled and supported by imperialist states, whose interests are served by Israel’s settler-colonial regime. The far right is rising; racist, colonial, anti-trans, and anti-immigrant perspectives are increasingly shaping the political mainstream. Public education, health, and social programs are falling apart, undermined by ever less adequate funding. Decent housing is increasingly unaffordable. There are growing symptoms of the deepening ecological crisis, from mass extinctions to agricultural disasters to wild weather patterns.
The reform-oriented alternative for change has never seemed less viable. Social democratic parties such as the Labour Party in Britain and the NDP in Canada are offering recycled capitalist policies with a human face. They are happy to throw in their lot with developer-led housing policies and anti-immigrant measures. They have tried to shut down the most committed advocates for Palestine in their midst, such as NDP MPP Sarah Jama and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. They have failed to reverse generations of cuts to public education, health, and social programs, and have run for office on agendas explicitly oriented towards privatization, deregulation, and austerity.
The need for revolution is clear, yet it can be difficult to sustain confidence in the prospects for mass insurgency from below, people taking collective and democratic control in workplaces, communities, and public institutions. The gap between the need for revolution and its apparent low likelihood in the near term can lead people to resign themselves to a future that offers more or less the same as the present. Yet revolutionary leaps are possible – and necessary, if we’re to get beyond the limits of the capitalist system. We are drawn into collective action by the rational calculation of our interests, but also by the erotic dimensions of our human connection, a drive towards intellectually and erotically fulfilling rehumanization through mobilizing together.
Revolution is powered by anger at everyday injustices we face, but also by our love of humanity, other species, and the world around us. This means we must understand and take responsibility for the ways both desire and love are unleashed in mass insurgency. The more we know about what makes revolution possible, the less we will settle for the grim present and the horizons of the possible under capitalism.
Alan Sears is a sociology professor, recently retired from Toronto Metropolitan University. He is a long-time socialist, queer activist, and theorist of movements. He has written on sexualities, education, and radical organizing. His latest book, Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities, is published by Pluto Press.
Related:
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- What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.
- Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.
- Festivals of the Possible Megan Kinch on the Occupy movement, which erupted 10 years ago: its particular blend of spontaneity, organization, and technology; the forms it took in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada; and its mixed legacies. A personal and political reflection.