Thread by @Tyler_A_Harper

Here’s what I’m trying to get at about the new polyamory discourse: I’m not interested in whether polyamory is “ethical.” I *do* think that the normalization of polyamory that is currently underway isn’t a threat to, but is the ultimate expression of, bourgeois individualism 1/

The point isn’t that polyamory is/isn’t immoral. Rather, polyamory is a *symptom.* It’s downstream from a culture that is allergic to limits and personal sacrifice and that embraces the idea that human beings are fungible commodities to whom no permanent attachment is owed 2/

Polyamory is the terminal cul-de-sac into which the culture of capital has always been rushing headlong. The self is a continual project of improvement. Other people are accessories to that project, onboarded only to be discarded when they no longer fit our sense of self. 3/

Then there’s the bleating about polyamory as a challenge to the repressive “nuclear family.” Yet no one seems to notice that the supposedly “bourgeois” and “conservative” vision of the nuclear family is precisely what capital is making impossible for large swaths of Americans! 4/

Isn’t it at least a little suspicious that polyamory — which is supposedly a “liberatory” corrective to repressive family structures — happens to be exactly compatible with a mode of economic life that has made both traditional marriage and parenthood completely unaffordable? 5/

Isn’t it the least bit odd that all of the trendy progressive developments of recent years — antiracism, polyamory, whatever — conveniently pose zero challenge to the economic status quo? And in fact are tailor-made for a world of soaring inequality and collapsing safety nets? 6/

The right and the progressive left have both installed personal freedom as the last god standing. They’ve just chosen different fetish objects. Both are a product of a Balkanizing culture that makes it impossible to imagine spending our lives in one place or now with one person.