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The Hopes of Disalienation

A Review of Alan Sears's Eros and Alienation

September 16, 2025

doi.org/10.63478/VRK1FMEO
9780745349435
Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities
by Alan Sears
Pluto Press
2025

What is the relationship between Marxism and hope? Understood mechanically, historical materialism would have no need for hope—if history is merely a linear progression of stages moving steadily towards the highest social form, then communism is simply the inevitable outcome of this evolutionary process. But if emancipation means more than a fated change in the mode of production—if it requires the political activity of conscious subjects a flourishing human society—then Marxism must understand human nature as open-ended, unfinished, and able to find both its realization and aspiration in a future strikingly different from the present.

In Eros and Alienation, Alan Sears grounds a utopian vision of a qualitatively different future in the concrete relations of the present through an analysis of our creative lifemaking activity—that is, our “species-being”—with particular attention paid to its erotic dimensions.1Karl Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 75. While capitalism has reduced this activity to a means of survival—something we exchange for the wages we need to pay rent and buy groceries—it has not, and indeed cannot, fully extinguish this essentially human character. Sears highlights the incomplete and contradictory nature of capitalist alienation, while consistently emphasizing people’s capacity to resist it and, in the process, transform themselves and the world around them. By bringing historical materialism into conversation with queer utopian thought, Sears encourages us to think and act beyond the possibilities offered by capital and the state while remaining grounded in concrete forms of struggle from below.

Sears mobilizes a broad understanding of eros rooted in the notion of lifemaking activity as human fulfillment, instead of a more limited and confined understanding of sexuality. Likewise, the concept of work goes beyond wage labor, encompassing all lifemaking activity, including “caring, aesthetic expression, physical performance and social belonging.”2Alan Sears, Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities (London: Pluto Press, 2025), 22. Drawing from elements of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) such as Susan Ferguson’s expansive concept of labor, Sears explains how work includes worldmaking for ourselves, and not just profitmaking for others.3Sears, Eros and Alienation, 5. Sears’s framework is founded on the fact that this creative activity comprises sensuous, material, social, and aesthetic fulfillment.4Sears, Eros and Alienation, 23. Eros, then, contains sexuality while exceeding it. At the same time, focusing on creative activity as the locus of eros reveals the historical nature of needs and desires.

By bringing a historical materialist framework to the study of the making of gender, sexuality, and desire, Sears situates the containment of gender and sexual expression within the specifically capitalist conditions of alienated labor and goes beyond dichotomous understandings of gendered sexuality that view it as either a feature of human nature or an abstract indeterminate social phenomenon. While the erotic realm is interwoven with biological impulses, these are expressed in different ways according to the specific sociohistorical form human organization takes.5In the sections “Capitalism and Alienated Making” and “Sexuality and Embodiment in Second Nature,” Sears focuses on the emergence of the sexual realm specifically, but also understands this framework as applicable to other lifemaking activities. As Sears states, “it is precisely the combination of biology and culture that makes human sexuality what it is and what it could be.”6Sears, Eros and Alienation, 6. Human activity satisfies our needs while also transforming and producing new ones, highlighting both its and eros’ open-endedness.7Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 48; Sears, Eros and Alienation, 28.

After a brief exposition of Sears’s rich conceptions of alienation, eros, and labor in the initial section, the following two sections of this piece will interrogate the application of these concepts to the ecological crisis: In the second section, we outline some ambiguities in Sears’s reconfiguration of Jason Moore and Neil Smith’s conception of first and second nature, arguing that the liberatory possibilities Sears sees in Indigenous forms of ecological resistance sit uneasily with the ecomodernist implications of Smith’s monism; in the third section, we argue that Sears’ notion of alienation might be fruitfully paired with some areas of degrowth communism, as both perspectives see the potential of recovering concrete practices and ways of life from the past as part of a future-oriented struggle. In the concluding section, we explore Sears’s manner of tying the past, present, and future together as central to his understanding of utopia, which emerges from the concrete activity of resistance from below. Utopia provides the throughline that highlights queerness’s centrality for Sears’s project as both disalienating struggle and glimpse of what is to come.

Eros and Alienation in the Broad Sense

Departing from the notion of the unalienated condition as the “complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes” allows for an equally broad and complex reading of alienation.8Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, 101. Alienation severs the ties between humans and their products, activities, and social relations, thus hindering the lifemaking activity at the basis of creative self-realization. Sears’s  broad conceptions of both labor and eros as expressions of self-actualizing and transformative activity makes analyzing the the interconnection between eros and the containment of our erotic fulfillment possible. Departing from Marcuse’s notorious analysis of the role of erotic surplus repression in reinforcing the regulation required by capitalist society, Sears explores the relationship between erotic containment and capitalist alienation and, specifically, the separation of work from its sensuous and social aspects that fragments humanity’s lifemaking capacities.9Sears, Eros and Alienation, 30. Sexual repression in the early nineteenth century played a central role in redirecting human activity away from the fulfillment of biological and social needs (including erotic ones) and towards the production of surplus-value in factories through the implementation of temporal forms of discipline and the division between the spheres of work and enjoyment.10Sears, Eros and Alienation, 40. This not only encouraged a more productive workforce, it also created a more disciplined and subordinate working class. At the same time, Sears incorporates a queer perspective in order to underline the connection between alienation and the capitalist limitation of queerness and the contribution that the normalization of certain sexualities makes to the historical development of erotic sensibilities and practices coherent with erotic containment.

Even within conditions of alienation, workers struggle to impose their own sexual and gender subjectivities, often in solidarity with others, such as when flight attendants in the 1960s and 1970s resisted efforts of their employers to force out older and racialized workers on the basis of physical attractiveness. Like other “animal” functions, erotic practice ends up offering glimpses of self-actualization and social connection.

A social reproduction framework allows Sears to extend alienation beyond production to include its inner abodes in daily life. Under capitalism, reproductive labor is organized as the necessary trade of our capacities to access the means of life, and this logic of exchange has infiltrated our relationships and our ways of expressing gender and sexuality.11Sears, Eros and Alienation, 25–26. Despite holding an expansive view of alienation, Sears does not view alienation as total. While humans are deprived of control over most aspects of lifemaking activity, social reproduction stands as a contested terrain between representing, on the one hand, a reservoir of labor-generating labor power for capital and, on the other, the means to regenerate and fulfill the lives, needs, and desires of individuals.12Sears, Eros and Alienation, 25, 33. This insight follows from the work of SRT scholars, including Sue Ferguson and David McNally, who argue that workers are (re)produced both as workers for capital and as human beings with the capacity for self-directed creative activity.13See Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction (London: Pluto Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvs09qm0; David McNally, “The Dual Form of Labour in Capitalist Society and the Struggle Over Meaning,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 3 (2004): 189–208, https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206042601819. Because the social reproduction of the working class occurs at least partially outside the direct control of capital—in the home, for instance—it retains a higher degree of autonomy, allowing social reproductive work to be directed towards actualizing potentials for self-realization.

Sears also insists that the SRT framework could be enriched by queer approaches considering the inherent coexistence of normative and nonnormative practices within reproduction. SRT should include mutual aid efforts of queer and trans communities, which are themselves necessary for their survival given their common exclusion from state institutional forms of social reproduction. Such practices of mutual aid can be seen as the beginning of new institutions that might point towards liberatory, postcapitalist ways of organizing social reproduction. Drawing on Nat Raha’s work, Sears names the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries as an example of such practices in action, providing essential services for community members while also beginning to create new forms of care and struggle from below.14Sears, Eros and Alienation: 27–28.

Exploring the relation between erotic containment and alienation reveals some parallels between the aspects of “traditional” alienation and sexual alienation. Like other human products, sexuality has been fetishized as an external and ahistorical object that confronts us as if from the outside. This is often expressed through an identitarian orientation of affects and impulses we supposedly receive when we are born, while the collective production of sexuality is left out of both sight and history. Furthermore, as the human’s relational and interdependent nature is obscured by alienation, human connection is segregated to the sphere of personal and sexual life and “satiated through sexual coupling and/or the consumption of sexualized commodities.”15Sears, Eros and Alienation, 33. Sears argues that the project of sexual liberalism, while expanding the realm of bodily autonomy in certain ways, also contributed to the infiltration of market relations into everyday life. For Sears, “the romantic model of companionate marriage” is tied to a market-based view of human relationships in which partners are chosen based on an individualist notion of commodified exchange.16Sears, Eros and Alienation, 65. Despite this market subordination, Sears insists that “people deploy individual and collective agency to bend the alien worlds of monetized and reproductive labor around their own wants and needs.”17Sears, Eros and Alienation, 57. Even within conditions of alienation, workers struggle to impose their own sexual and gender subjectivities, often in solidarity with others, such as when flight attendants in the 1960s and 1970s resisted efforts of their employers to force out older and racialized workers on the basis of physical attractiveness. Like other “animal” functions, erotic practice ends up offering glimpses of self-actualization and social connection.18Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, 64.

Alienated Nature

By situating our erotic sensibilities within the broader notion of the human capacity for lifemaking activity, Sears is able to expand the concept of alienation beyond the realm of capitalist production into all aspects of social life, including the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. In conditions of alienation, Sears argues, “people relate to their own bodies and the external environment transactionally, as property and resources, undermining the commitment to mutuality based on the recognition that sustaining ourselves, each other, other species, and the natural environment is the fundamental basis for our wellbeing over generations.”19Sears, Eros and Alienation, 18. By obscuring the integral relationship between human activity and the natural world, capitalism disrupts the metabolic balance between humans and nature. Like human activity, the natural world becomes simply a means of producing value under capitalism. Marx described the fracturing of human–nature relations as “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”20Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 949. Following John Bellamy Foster, Sears argues that the notion of metabolic rift refers to the fact that capitalist value production has undermined the relationship between humans and nature that underpins all social life.21 John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017). The expansive definition of both eros and alienation allows Sears to engage with various perspectives from within Marxist ecology—though, perhaps due to this wide range of engagement, some questions remain as to the book’s position in its response to the ecological crisis.

While Sears grounds his discussion of ecology in the notion of metabolic rift, he draws extensively from environmental geographers Jason W. Moore and Neil Smith whose monist conceptions of human–nature relations are, in different ways, opposed to the dualist understanding from which the concept of metabolic rift is derived. While the monist perspective maintains that nature is entirely socially produced, the dualist perspective insists that the natural world retains, in some sense, independence from the social. The theoretical indeterminacy regarding Sears’s conception of the relationship between humans and nature leads to the political question of what a response to the ecological crisis might look like: is a socialist solution to be found through a process of sustainable and rational social reorganization of economic and ecological systems, achieved by an intensification of human control over the natural world and mediated by democratic collective planning processes? Or might a sustainable socialist future involve the selective recovery and reimagination of a less alienated and destructive relationship between humans and nature? What follows begins to develop connections between Sears’s framework and the latter perspective.

While Smith dismisses any appeal to the past as nostalgic and reactionary, Sears is more open to political strategies—including those of indigenous communities—grounded in a selective recovery of past ways of relating to each other and the natural world.

Sears distinguishes between “first nature,” or nature prior to its modification by humans, and “second nature,” or nature that is produced through the application of labor. While second nature has existed throughout history, capitalist production on a global scale has produced a specific form of it, distorting the relationship between humans and nature. For Neil Smith, who Sears draws these concepts from, this replacement is rooted in the alienation of labor. Such labor has qualitatively transformed the natural world, in that first nature been replaced by, and fully produced, as second nature. In Smith’s words, “no part of the earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum, or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital.”22Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Georgia, The University of Georgia Press, 2008), 79. While it is certainly true that no area of the globe is safe from capitalist profitseeking, Smith is arguing that all aspects of life have been subsumed to capital’s logic of value, both in terms of the natural world and in relation to human life. Not only is nature produced as second nature, but “[a]s a class alienated from control of the society that employs them, the working class are in every way unnatural and a product of capitalism.”23Smith, Uneven Development, 85, emphasis added. This assertion about the “unnatural” nature of the working class is incompatible with Sears’s view of alienation as an incomplete process. For Smith, capitalism will only be overcome through the production of a “good” second nature under worker control. While Sears agrees that “[t]here is no full return to pristine first nature possible as a route out of global capitalism and second nature,” his insistence on the persistence of both natural and human life and the ongoing struggles against the dispossession and commodification of life points towards possibilities beyond Smith’s view that “social control over the production of nature, however, is the realizable dream of socialism.”24Sears, Eros and Alienation, 116; Smith, Uneven Development, 91.

Sears’s framework is also consistent with reflections on social reproduction that conceptualize it in global terms, illuminating dispossession as a contemporary process of accumulation that impacts existing strategies of reproduction either outside or at the margins of traditional circuits of capital.25Aaron Jaffe, “The History and Afterlife of Marx’s ‘Primitive Accumulation’,” Historical Materialism 32, no. 3 (2024): 1–28, https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-bja10030; Sedef Arat-Koc, “Whose Social Reproduction? Transnational Motherhood and Challenges to Feminist Political Economy,” in Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism, ed., Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 75–92, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780773576902-006. The fact that global capital penetrates other geographies, proletarianizing the population. and generating global reserves of labor-power, implies that the second nature of capital is not yet all-reaching and remains an expansive project. While a “pure” or untouched wildness may no longer exist, spaces of “relative wilderness” endure.26Andreas Malm, “In Wildness Is the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature,” Historical Materialism 26, no. 3 (2018): 9, https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-00001610. As Aaron Jaffe argues, processes of colonial extraction and displacement are ongoing—for instance, in the operations of Canadian mining corporations—and these efforts are resisted by Indigenous communities.27Aaron Jaffe, “The History and Afterlife of Marx’s ‘Primitive Accumulation,’” 209. As such, capital encounters forms of reproduction that are comprehended either under the umbrella of a different metabolic regime. Drawing on Leanne Simpson, Sears shows that certain Indigenous forms of living remain grounded in nonhierarchical relations to other peoples and the natural world—relations that would not be included under the conditions of capitalist second nature.28Sears, Eros and Alienation, 105. Sears is careful not to fetishize or flatten precapitalist forms of life, but by drawing on anticolonial perspectives, metabolic histories adjunctive to capital can be recognized as still present in contemporary capitalism. However, this salutory aspect of Sears’s work is not necessarily consistent with the monist conception of human­–nature relations, making a clarification of his reconfiguration of Smith’s concepts of first and second nature necessary.

The Erotics of a Healthy Metabolism

The relationship between ongoing forms of capitalist dispossession and the resistance to the imposition of capitalist relations manifests in a variety of ways, some of which inspired by memories of nature before capitalism. Sears draws from romantic poet William Blake to demonstrate the link between nostalgic yearnings for a lost past and the struggle for a new and sustainable relationship with the natural world. While Smith dismisses any appeal to the past as nostalgic and reactionary, Sears is more open to political strategies—including those of indigenous communities—grounded in a selective recovery of past ways of relating to each other and the natural world.

This view pairs well with Kohei Saito’s politics of degrowth communism, which includes the recovery of communal forms of life through their linkage with forms of cooperative labor developed under capitalism.29Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933544. Saito insists that, while not a call to return to the past, degrowth communism would involve the combination of elements of capitalist development with precapitalist and non-Western forms—a point germane with Sears’s approach. Saito’s contention is based in part on Marx’s own consideration of the Russian obshchina as the potential basis for communism in Russia if combined with a proletarian revolution in the rest of Europe in the 1882 Preface to the Russian Edition of The Communist Manifesto.30Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Books, 2002). Sears is similarly open to the combination of elements of the past with the ecological movement in the present: “the move forward to third nature necessarily includes elements of a return to/of first nature, even in a form altered by second nature.”31Sears, Eros and Alienation, 118. This is central to anticolonial struggle, which requires addressing questions of reclaiming access to the land and restoring indigenous practices. Such a return can only be envisioned if we, like Sears, understand alienation under capitalism as an incomplete and ongoing process. This possibility remains closed off for Smith, who views second nature as a complete project; this possibility is also foreclosed by the broader ecomodernist perspective, which maintains that the technological development enabled by industrial capitalist society—albeit freed from those social relations—holds the key to human emancipation.32See Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff (Hants: Zero Books, 2015); Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2016).

On the surface, the politics of degrowth communism might seem at odds with Sears’s view of human emancipation as the realization of a fulfilling and flourishing life. However, this is only the case if we accept that a full human life can be achieved exclusively through the constant development and expansion of society’s productive forces. As Saito argues, a robust understanding of social wealth goes beyond that which is produced in factories and is largely based on the amount of socially available free time to engage in the cultural, political, and other activities that make up a fulfilling human life. This does not mean a wholesale rejection of industrial and technological development. Rather, it would require us to critically examine how and if such development might contribute to a flourishing society. This would go beyond human concerns to include natural forms of wealth, including a healthy ecosystem.33Of course, natural wealth is not entirely distinct from social wealth, in that a flourishing ecosystem would also encourage a healthy human society, and vice versa.

While Marxism has often criticized utopian thought for being an ungrounded idealist fantasy, Sears makes the compelling argument that a rejection of utopian imaginaries limits Marxism’s vision of liberatory possibilities. Sears urges us to draw from utopian thought in order to expand our revolutionary imagination and envision a future world as part of the material struggle against the conditions of the present.

Sears likewise argues that moving towards a sustainable metabolic relationship between humans and nature would involve neither the full adoption of capitalist industrial and technological developments, nor a return to a pure state of nature. Instead, an ecological communist society would emerge through the struggle against alienation in all its forms, including alienated labor and the alienated human–nature relationship produced by capitalism, “orienting our metabolic interchange around purposive making, mutuality and reciprocity.”34Sears, Eros and Alienation, 129. This expansive view of disalienation gestures towards a utopian vision of the future that includes drawing from past experiences and material elements of previous ways of relating with each other and the natural world.

Sears’s Utopian Vision

As discussed, erotic practices and possibilities do not develop in a vacuum, nor just in the confined space of gender and sexuality. Indeed, eros today is grounded in the broad relations of alienation. From this diagnostic departure, it follows that sexual liberation cannot pertain to the realm of sexuality alone but “sexual revolution must be part of a process of anticapitalist transformation to overcome alienation and dispossession, driven by mass insurgency from below.”35Sears, Eros and Alienation, 134. For Sears, sexual liberation is understood within a process of broad disalienation.

Starting from a notion of disalienation as a necessary condition for sexual liberation is consistent with understandings of queer identity as something not yet here, rather than as a present feature of our current social arrangements.36Sears, Eros and Alienation, 143. Since the current structures of containment limit human possibility, the realization of queerness is projected into the future: queerness, then, is outlined by utopian features.37Sears, Eros and Alienation, 128. By explicitly integrating queer utopian thought into his framework, Sears is able to point towards a horizon of possibility that goes beyond what might be possible in the present. As Sears writes approvingly of Muñoz’s concrete utopia: “[it] is not about untethered dreaming, but an audacious envisioning of other possible futures grounded in the serious analysis of history and mapping of present conditions that allows us to find paths to realizable transformation.”38Sears, Eros and Alienation, 143. While Marxism has often criticized utopian thought for being an ungrounded idealist fantasy, Sears makes the compelling argument that a rejection of utopian imaginaries limits Marxism’s vision of liberatory possibilities. Sears urges us to draw from utopian thought in order to expand our revolutionary imagination and envision a future world as part of the material struggle against the conditions of the present. Furthermore, this queerness under development—as practice, form of belonging, and mode of life—can only be reached through revolutionary transformation: its utopianism necessarily includes and grows out of struggle.

Utopia, by its nature, travels on different temporalities. The utopian tradition brings in an asynchronous aspect, pointing beyond the present.39Sears, Eros and Alienation, 144. While the present is not yet enough for fully queer lives, it offers glimpses that exceed the dominant arrangements today.40José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2009), 22. Sears underlines this compresence of normative and counternormative as the result of the historical struggles and cooptations of regimes of sexuality and of combined and uneven development.41Sears, Eros and Alienation, 153. We could also frame this temporal relation between future and present as “the affirmation that is contained in every negation, the future that is in the present,” which, as C. L. R. James reminds us, is “no longer a mere philosophical but a concrete question.”42C. L. R. James, Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity, in Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 79. It is no secret that pointing to a future beyond our histories carries with it the theoretical problem of teleological certainty and the strategical problem of more or less precise roadmaps.

While this is a recurring issue for utopian thought, Sears’s investment in the open-ended nature of human desires and arrangements allows for undetermined elements to creep in and makes more precise roadmaps of the future impossible. Focusing on the sexuality of the future, rather than the future in general, Sears envisions a radical transformation of erotic lives that we are yet to imagine, rather than the simple expansion of gender expressions and sexual orientations.43Sears, Eros and Alienation, 151. The notion of third nature, as a counteroffence to capitalist second nature, offers a way to imagine this transformative process as a reappropriation and reimagination of means of reproduction, like in the case of trans self-formation: trans embodiments can transform medical practices modifying the body, reorganizing them around communities’ and patients’ knowledge.44Sears, Eros and Alienation, 131–32. The elements foreign to our present relations point to a change that will not be quantitative (an acceleration or expansion of the existent), but qualitative (shifting the current organization of relations).

To avoid the untethered dreamlike quality of utopia which would orient us to a future decoupled from our histories and the issues we face in the present, utopian previews need grounding. We can find anticipations in the “inventive life-making from below associated with freedom struggles throughout the history of capitalism.”45Sears, Eros and Alienation, 155. We can recognize that these past histories stratify, but are also continuously reinvented in the present, tying the two temporalities together. We could take advantage of Sears’s usage of Muñoz’s notion of queerness as utopian to employ utopian hermeneutics in order to further understand the relationality and the content of past, present, and future. The past is identified by Muñoz both as historical possibilities, desires, and struggles dialectically animating constrained and impoverished presents and as a Blochian notion of no-longer conscious elements—of traces providing hope and critical visions.46Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 27–28. We can find a similar structure in Sears. On the one hand, the past is previous traditions, practices, modes of life, and sexuality from below that Sears frames as the result of the combined and uneven development of sexuality and as an integral part of queer histories. On the other hand, the past is understood as a “recovery” of lost human connections, as in the case of ecology, which cannot be recovered in themselves but can act as critical impulses, feelings, and aspirations.47Sears, Eros and Alienation, 116. Sears couples this tethering of anticipatory presents to histories with a speculative element—to be found in science fiction (in a Jamesonian fashion) and in experimental practices in the present, as in the case of queer mutual aid discussed above—which both appear as a projection of futurity in the present. As in Muñoz, present striving for utopia appears as relational to “the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of [both] past and future affective worlds.”48Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 27.

The not yet here of queer eros, understood as both sexuality and human fulfillment, is premised on a present that is not enough and needs to be toppled: queerness is both a disalienating struggle and a glimpse of what is yet to come.

Opting for a politics of queer utopianism has two main political implications. First, Sears implicitly critiques the areas of queer theory that favor the micropolitical (à la Foucault) while disavowing systemic change. Second, utopianism is opposed to an LGBT rights-oriented politics, which resigns queer potentialities in exchange for securing a life within the limits of the horizon of capital. This opposition also echoes Muñoz’s problematizing division of queer politics between utopianism and pragmatism.49Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11, 20. These political implications underline the political necessity of a collective revolution for queer liberation, as a process able to concretize aspirations otherwise constrained or coopted. Remembering that for Marx, the working class “can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew,” Sears roots this understanding in a framework of emancipation—not as a power-seizing event—but as a transformative process of class formation that develops capacities and desires.50Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 60. An evident connection is present with Sears’ previous work and his notion of “infrastructure of dissent,” the forging of variegated collective capacities—analytical, material, imaginative—that are necessary to form and maintain resistant communities.51Alan Sears, The Next New Left: A History of the Future (Toronto: Fernwood Press, 2014), 4. In this work, Sears focuses on the erotic and affective capacities we develop through political activity, including insurgent strategies of social reproduction based on mutual care.52Sears, Eros and Alienation, 136.

The process of revolution from below must involve a struggle both within and against the alienating capitalist relations that place constraints on our lifemaking capacities, directing them towards the production of capitalist profit, rather than the reproduction of a flourishing human community. It is for this reason that Aaron Jaffe rightly insists that “social reproduction strikes also construct their own terrain, not beyond capital, but as radical potentials long-dormant, but stirring within it.”53Aaron Jaffe, “From Social Reproduction Theory to Social Reproduction Strikes,” Socialism and Democracy 35, nos. 1-2 (2022), 171–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2023.2170671. A permanent sexual revolution responds to the necessity of addressing the combined and uneven development of the regimes of sexuality in the same way Trotsky’s permanent revolution addressed the differential development of global capitalism and the attendant local struggles. Using this frame would allow us to eschew prescribed and linear stages of revolutionary struggle and consider different opening points for the transformative process while embedding them in a common project. The notion of revolution in permanence focuses on a specific dimension of the struggle: as a process that establishes the conditions to open and reorganize human possibilities. As an ongoing struggle, where insurgency figures not as the end but as the starting point, the permanent revolution brings together “duration and event, the determinate conditions of the historical situation and the uncertainties of political action which strives to transform the range of possibilities.”54Daniel Bensaïd, “Revolutions: Great and Still and Silent,” in History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, ed., Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys (London: Verso, 2007). Appreciating struggle as an ongoing process reframes the temporal dimension of politics, connecting extant political action with future potentialities and opening space for concrete utopias.

By broadening alienation to include and highlight the containment of fulfillment and realization in both productive and reproductive activity, Sears expands the essential project of queer Marxism, locating regimes of sexuality in broader sets of relations while underlining the role of erotic containment in the capitalist discipline of productive and social life. These materialist analyses of the evolution of regimes of sexuality are then paired with a more speculative one: that of queerness’s not yet here. It is in this transitory and negative dimension that disalienation, now understood in a broad manner, is to be found. The not yet here of queer eros, understood as both sexuality and human fulfillment, is premised on a present that is not enough and needs to be toppled: queerness is both a disalienating struggle and a glimpse of what is yet to come.

Like queerness itself, this book is open-ended: it leaves us with an open invitation to engage in further questioning. How might we retain a sense of hope in the face of capitalist exploitation and oppression? What forms of theory and practice in the present might we engage in to grant an ontological foundation to necessary hopes, saving them from turning into empty illusions? What would sexuality as a tool of disalienation look like for social life but also for broader sets of relations? Sears’s framework, then, orients us towards recovering hope, not as a feeling but as a practical attitude of inquiry and worldbuilding.

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