LOVE AND CAPITALISM

Abstract

The work focuses on the way that individuals are subjectified from the capitalist mode of production; and how this process favors or represses the gestation of different types of bonds, with special emphasis on couple relationships. Romantic love will be considered, no longer as an instinct proper to our intrinsic constitution, but as conditioned by a certain structure of society. This approach, far from devaluing it, aims to make it an integral part of the social whole. First, it will be related to the ethos capitalist consisting of individuality, independence and freedom, against which romantic love shares the characteristics of free contract and voluntary consent. But, on the other hand, the way in which capitalism, based on the process of alienation described by Marx, imposes a delimitation of a field of action for these subjects who have become free will be evaluated; so the ideal of self-realization, autonomy and independence must be satisfied exclusively in the private sphere, which ends up becoming the palliative or solution of the alienation process.