ABSTRACT
I am interested in a facet of organizing that often motivates action and commitment-what I refer to as aff ect-culture. Aff ect-culture can be the glue of collective eff ort, even as it can also be its solvent. In the organizing campaigns I have witnessed in northern Mexico, this aff ective dimension of politics punctuates everyday undertakings in the accomplishment of short-term goals, and it propels the dream that longer-term aspirations are possible. Short-term goals in this context often include rights, such as to collective bargaining or health and safety in the workplace, and to land, water, health, and education in the communities. Longer-term goals include sustainable projects to claim and maintain common resources. While the participants may not use these terms, their activities confront and aim to redress the unmet needs that capitalist social relations always produce by rallying a surplus potential immanent to it. Can “love” serve as a name for this surplus potential as it is realized in attachments that facilitate a collective process of transformation? If so, I propose that we might conceptualize it in materialist terms as the passionate reason that accompanies the conversion of unmet need and living labor into organized resistance for a common cause.
