"We are often reminded of the countless procedures which Christianity once employed to make us detest the body; but let us ponder all the ruses that were employed for centuries to make us love sex, to make the knowledge of it desirable and everything said about it precious. Let us consider the stratagems by which we were induced to apply all our skills to discovering its secrets, by which we were attached to the obligation to draw out its truth, and made guilty for having failed to recognize it for so long. These devices are what ought to make us wonder today. Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from a shadow. […] The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our 'liberation' is in the balance." (Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 159, emphasis added.)

One of the more recent and problematic ideologies that has been embraced by left-wing movements, organizations, and working groups is the ideology of polyamory. A sexual politics that rejects monogamy as retrograde, polyamory is promoted by some as a necessary radicalism––a rejection of the conservatism that is supposedly the essence of monogamy––a qualification for being properly. My issue with this ideology is not moralistic but political: I do not see polyamory as essentially more progressive than monogamy, and I am deeply suspicious of how this claim of poly-radicalism can replace material political struggle with an idealist body-politics.bell hooks once asked and interviewer rhetorically, "Don't you think the biggest lie of our contemporary liberation movements is that who you fuck radicalizes you?" We can addto theas we reconsider the warning behind hooks' question in the context of poly-radicalism. The point she was making with this question was that "[w]e have to move past the idea that our sexual preferences radicalize our consciousness" because if we do not then our politics will amount to little more than "liberal individualism." A politics of sexual practice in this manner cannot replace material struggle if we wish to pursue a better society.The political motivation of the "poly-pushers" (as one of my friends dubbed them once) certainly seems properly left. We know that the monogamy that emerged during capitalism, and cohered around the puritan and horrendously patriarchal nuclear family, was a building block of capitalist society. This family, and the gender and property roles it has veiled, is also the "natural order" for reactionary mono-mongers amongst the religious right and banal liberals. Since the spectre of "family values" (treated as eternal though not really that old) is often summoned from its grave for multiple conservative or liberal reasons, perhaps it is time that we exorcize this ghost once and for all. Pushing polyamory as the new sexual normativity, however, is not automatically anti-capitalist.Some poly-pushers maintain that their sexual practice is anti-capitalist because of its more radical understanding of love. Monogamy, it is argued, confines love to the ghetto of marriage. We are taught to see love as scarce, as something we can only find with that "one special person" (the Hollywood ideology of "true love"), and so we are thrown into competition with others in pursuit of a single love. Fair enough: there is definitely some truth to this claim. But leaving aside the problem that poly-pushers define love in the same simplistic manner as mono-mongers (as romantic and/or sexual), capitalist logic can easily accomodate polyamory as well.Overconsumption and overproduction also define capitalism. Thus, wanting to have as much sex with as many people as possible is very capitalist. The concept of the family has been re-articulated over and over throughout the long nightmare of capitalism, and capitalism will not fall simply by a bunch of people pursuing multiple lovers and trying to fuck it away. Libertinage and bohemianism have always been the practice of the bourgeoisie; polyamory can easily be reconciled with the brutality of class society. I am not arguing that polyamory is essentially capitalist––that would be just as idealist as the poly-pushers' argument about monogamy. The point is that neither polyamory or monogamy are inherently revolutionary.Moreover, polyamory is not very new. In fact, prior to capitalism there were feudal and tributary polyamories that were intensely patriarchal: polygamy. Here we must recall Engels' comments about how, in comparison to polygamoy, "[m]onogamy was a great historical advance." And though he also notes, in the same passage, that monogamy "at the same time… inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative transgression," Engels' analysis demonstrates that neither polyamory nor monogamy are by themselves revolutionary. (Engels,, 94) Most importantly, neither sexual practice is linked to a single mode of production: both polyamory and monogamy have existed with and without capitalism, their characteristics mediated and partially determined by more concrete social relations.Nor is the radical fetishization of polyamory especially new. The left has tried this before, but because we leftists often have short historical attention spans––and waste so much time and space trying to recreate the radical revolutionary wheel––we forget the utter failure of previous radicals' poly-pushing. Hippy radicalism pushed for free love, a rejection of nuclear family monogamy, and sexual freedom. Like today's poly-pushers, the hippy love gurus made sexual practice essential to their political practice. The result, as we now know, was a de-radicalization of the free love advocates and a re-radicalization of those who founded their political praxis on a rejection of sexual revolution politics. Cell 16 , one of the first radical feminist groups in North America, emerged partly in response to poly-radical ideology. And the reason Cell 16 would promote celibacy was not out of conservative puritanism. They understood that the sexual revolution was thoroughly patriarchal, that it was replicating the feudal practice of polygamy, and that it was not radical/progressive for women to be told they were "counter-revolutionary" by refusing to "get with it" and participate in hippy neo-harems. Thus celibacy, in this specific instance, was revolutionary whereas both polyamory and monogamy were judged regressively patriarchal. Again, the point is not to elevate one sexual practice (or in this casesexual practice) over another––I am not claiming that celibacy is inherently radical––but to indicate thatsexual practice is essentially more revolutionary than another. It's a bit like arguing that the colours red and black are essentially revolutionary even though fascist flags and uniforms have used these colours with as much frequency as communists and anarchists.In any case, the experience of the North American and European left in the 1960s-1970s should make us wary of poly-pushing. Why is it that so many [straight] men preach the radical "virtues" of polyamory ? By mistaking a sexual practice for a material politics we do not ask the question "whose practice and for whom." We also fail to see how the practice of polyamory, like monogamy, is shot through with class contradictions: white male heterosexist privilege and bourgeois notions of beauty can be renormalized in polyamory––even if the poly-pushers claim to be queer positive. It can be radical in form but reactionary in essence.Finally, the pseudo-radicalism of polyamory maintains the stale dogma that love is primarily romantic and sexual. The poly-pusher Bible,, is a good example of this anti-holistic approach to love. (This book is also a good example of petty bourgeois politics masquerading as progressive: "sex is good for you" is the primary thesis and if we just replaced "sex" with "vegetables" it would be nothing more than one of those health manuals that bourgeois environmentalists seem to love.) Love is so much more than sex and romance, camaraderie and intimacy larger than infatuation and lust, but the puritan hatred of sex engenders the binary fetishization. Michel Foucault, who wasn't wrong all of the time, wrote at the end of the first volume ofPerhaps we should take Foucault's warning seriously.