In the struggle against Western imperialism, and in the context of debates within the global justice movement about global versus local struggles, activists often forget to pay attention to interpersonal relationships. Our communities, families, and love lives are also political sites in which we fight oppression and create alternatives to the status quo. These relationships can have a powerful place in social transformation yet receive little more than lip service from many leftists. In this article we look at polyamory as a liberatory way of living these personal relationships.

Polyamory queers itself when it challenges the conventional heterosexual model that gets constructed as “normal” in Western societies. Not only is the Man-And-Woman sexual relationship privileged in this heterosexist-hegemony, but that model also requires compulsive monogamy to carry the couple-centrist torch from generation to generation.

“Polyamory” has about as many definitions as people who practice it, but most people we know agree that what it generally means is being open to the possibility of intimate relationships with more than one person. Although we talk about “relationships” in this article, we use the word in a pretty broad sense—from one-night stands to life-partnerships. Our position is that sex is a fun and creative expression that people have a right to enjoy on their own terms and that the longevity or exclusivity of a sexual relationship has little to do with its value. We also think it’s important to demystify fucking because romantic notions of sex buttress the practice of compulsive heterosexuality that we will address later on. But polyamory isn’t just about sex: the term literally means many loves. But, at the heart of it, polyamory is also about opening up to many kinds of love. The Polyamory Society defines it as the non-possessive, honest, responsible, and ethical philosophy and practice of loving multiple people simultaneously.

Polyamory emphasizes consciously choosing how many partners one wishes to be involved with rather than accepting social norms which dictate loving or fucking only one person at a time. Polyamory is an umbrella word that integrates traditional multipartner relationship terms with more egalitarian terms. Polyamory embraces sexual equality and all sexual orientations towards an expanded circle of intimacy and love. Polyamory can cover anything from swinging, the classic open relationship, large commune-style “families”, group marriages, to extended relationship webs that have dozens of people.

Polyamory challenges social practices that urge individuals to want to control and regulate their desires within relationships of ownership. Most importantly, polyamory is practiced through consent, honesty, and active communication. It strikes at the power dynamics in our most personal lives to empower and liberate individual expression while cultivating collectivity and cooperation.

Sex and the System

So why should serious radicals be interested in polyamory? Besides the history of liberation movements and revolutionaries like Emma Goldman promoting “free love”, polyamory can be a social experiment that has the potential to point to the ways in which capitalism disfigures our intimate relationships while posing an alternative that is in line with socialism-from-below values like liberty, creativity, and fulfillment.

The capitalist mode of production revolves around private property and as such requires various kinds of enclosures and divisions, from land to labour, to operate. When amassing profit is the name of the game, then those in control of wealth need to erect boundaries around the economic means of production to protect their private interests and fortunes. With enclosure comes a system of entitlement and regulated access. As the old saying goes, property is nine tenths of the law. Personal relationships also have to function within certain kinds of enclosures in order for people to access what they need. Economic boundaries translate into emotional ones. Under capitalism, people form economic units in order to organize their means of life, like household management, earning an income, and child-rearing. The nuclear family, with a heterosexual couple at its core, is the classical unit that makes up Western capitalist societies. If we lived in a world where everyone had access to health care, housing, education, and the freedom of movement, in a world where resources weren’t divided up between owners, while the rest of us are divided up into different kinds of labourers, then the ways in which we draw the lines, and their very existence, between us and our kin would be different.

Monogamous relationships often engender co-dependency because many economic and social rewards are granted to members of a couple, more so if the couple fits the conventional norms of heterosexuality. The conventional norms of heterosexuality also foster alienation from a broader social community in terms of care and support via gendered divisions of physical and emotional labour. According to this model, couples are self-contained, self-fulfilling units in which each person is the other’s “better half”, so members of couples often end up living very disconnected and atomized existences.

The skills and experiences of open relationships—like compassion and cooperation over competition, are antithetical to the values and practices of capitalism and heterosexism. Intentional communities allow people to pool both physical and emotional resources. A celebration of polyamory, however, must avoid the pitfalls of advocating lifestyle politics. Living a life according to values that we hope a revolution would realize is an excellent way of sustaining our ability and morale to fight and work for change, but also runs the very real risk of creating a little bubble, in which all of our energies are devoted to living according to some political principles within a very small social circle. Eventually, such a focus can prevent us from making more direct interventions into struggles and movements for social change. Another problem with political strategies that centre around personal lifestyle is that they foster the illusion that as radicals we are somehow “outside” the system, but polyamory is definitely not an oasis away from capitalism, oppression, and the destructive habits of monogamy. Cheating, lying, jealousy, and abuse happen in open relationships too.

The Limits of Limitless Love

While considering the importance of a polyamorous perspective, it’s important to note that the viability of practicing polyamory is shaped and limited by forms of privilege and oppression. Privilege comes into play in polyamory when you consider the time and energy it demands. It is hard to build a healthy relationship with a partner—forget exploring intimacy with a community of people—when you are hit hard by the exploitative hand of the capitalist system. In a world of overworked, underpaid, unemployed, dis/abled, homeless, and under-represented people, barriers to leisure time and social space put polyamory onto a long list of liberties that not everyone has access to.

Polyamory, like all other sexual relationships, cannot escape the grip of racism, ableism, class exploitation, hetero/sexism, and other forms of oppression. Furthermore, polyamory cannot be liberating if it doesn’t place itself in every other struggle against oppression. These forms of oppression foster hierarchies of power and privilege between partners and shape their ability to pursue other relationships. A discrepancy in access to sex can in turn amplify and multiply the power dynamics and imbalances between lovers. Race, ability, and gender affect people’s relationships to their own bodies and other people’s bodies. With the challenges of surviving sexual abuse, to transitioning between genders, to being comfortable with one’s body image, sex can be a very tricky matter to negotiate with even just one person. Yet open relationships can also force us to explore and push our boundaries and limitations, so in many ways polyamory can be a method of self-empowerment. Polyamory asks you to be sometimes painfully vulnerable in a world that teaches us to exploit and be exploited. It is often through a difficult process of struggle that emancipatory change comes about personally and politically.