Death and Love: The Metaphysics of Communication

Ideological and class struggles – like struggles focused on pain, suffering, loss, loneliness, and death – are part of the struggles of humankind. Just like other philosophies, Marxism has to deal with such questions in order to understand and respond to the lived realities of human life. Section 13.2 considers the ontological question of death and love. Section 13.3 deals with death and estrangement/alienation. Section 13.4 is concerned with the work of mourning and the communication of death and mourning. Section 13.5 discusses mortality and immortality, as well as post- and transhumanism. Marx views capitalism as the rule of the dead labour of capital over the living labour of human beings and carries deadly potentials. Accordingly, capitalism is a system of death, whereas socialism on the other hand is a system on the side of life. Death is at the same time ultimate alienation, ‘endstrangement’. Auschwitz has shown that political and ideological mass murder is worse than death; anti-Fascism is therefore a task of socialism. Socialism cannot expel death from the world, but it may render its appearance less terrible. Socialism also includes striving for a long, healthy, fulfilled, and happy life for all. The chapter concludes by making the case for religions of liberation that together with Marxism struggle for establishing a realm of freedom, in which we ‘can live for each other so as to reap the true riches of being human’. Liberation theology and Marxism converge in stressing the importance of class struggles to establish love as society’s principle.