Eric reproaches me for not "accounting for how they [emotions] might arise in our intimate relationships" in a communist society, but it is neither possible, necessary, nor desirable to do such precise accounting. The only possibility allowed us is to make a reasonable inference based upon the analysis of the present. For instance, as I suggested in another post, I think it reasonable to infer that there might be much less "fear," "jealousy," and like emotions of the kind that has negative feedback on soma in a classless society without gender oppression, in that, in such a society, private property, competition, and bourgeois moralism (e.g., yucking about "extra-marital sex," blaming the poor for their "moral deficiency," etc.) are absent. But other than such negative predictions of a limited character, I don't think we can say much about the shape of a communist future. Engels is quite right when he says in _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ (1884):
***** What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual -- and that will be the end of it. *****
BTW, I am interested in discussing emotions. Has anyone read _Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader_, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke UP, 1995)? His theory of affects is quite interesting and gives us a much richer description of emotions than Freud's or Lacan's work does. Now that we are speaking of emotions, we might also consider why some people feel obligated to voice a knee-jerk, emotive rejection ("impossible, undesirable, dull, sanitized, icky") whenever they hear even a casual remark on the possibilities of a future more pleasant than the present. Who's afraid of desires and pleasures? Us or Doug & Eric?
Yoshie