Marxism, Socialism, and the Politics of Gay & Lesbian Liberation

Part III: Patriarchal Sexism, Heterosexism, and (Late) Capitalism

Mark Wood

Bob Nowlan

Revision History
• December 1991-January 1992	Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students.
The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1 No. 3 (pp. 8,10)
• September 2, 2000	Webpage: .
DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original.

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Homosexuality is one of the potentially most explosive challenges to the possibility of maintaining a strict division between gendered men and gendered women, threatening to accelerate the pace of equality between biological sexes by greatly reducing or even eliminating the significance of gender difference. The openly acknowledged existence and acceptance of homosexuality threatens to increase the mobility of human beings across not only the heterosexual-homosexual but also the man-woman continuum.

Gender difference is a kind of hierarchical difference which has been put to work to support and maintain the existence of a vast system of not only unequal but also oppressively and exploitatively unequal differences in right of access and opportunity to exercise the resources, powers, and capacities of nature, culture, and society. Within capitalism these differences have proven necessary to insure optimal conditions for the exploitation of wage-labor by capital. Thus the production and realization of surplus value and the accumulation of capital can continue at the most secure and profitable levels for the capitalist class.

Gay and lesbian sexuality is a serious problem for capitalism because it also threatens more than the gender system. Under capitalism, sexuality is governed and regulated not only by institutions and discourses concerned with reproduction and gender, but also by institutions and discourses which prescribe precisely where, when, and how — as well as with whom and for what or why — expression and enjoyment of sexual pleasure is acceptable.

Gay men and lesbians transgress not only the boundaries of what prevailing social contracts define and delimit “real men” and “real women” can be and do, but also create a public community and (sub)culture based upon free, active, and potentially “un-restricted” engagement in and experience of sexual pleasure. This in turn threatens the way in which bourgeois society restricts the direct and active engagement in and experience of sexual pleasure to the realm of the private and the individual — rather than the collective public, the community — and to the space of a “leisure-time” outside of, after, and beyond — at least largely separated(d) from — work.

Full acceptance, toleration, and integration of homosexuality (and not merely of — some — homosexuals), and especially full acceptance, toleration, and integration of a kind of (radical) “gayness” (in which large numbers of men and women freely and flexibly move regularly and often across continua of heterosexuality/homosexuality and homosociality/homosexuality) would threaten the patriarchal sexist division between men and women which is vitally necessary for capital. It also would severely undermine the alienation in and reification of social relations upon which capitalism depends.

Strict division of private from public, leisure — and pleasure — from labor, and individual from community are necessary within capitalism in order to prevent the exploited from developing a mass (not merely marginal or fringe) critical-oppositional community and counter-culture. A sexual culture made truly “gay” would be a radically anti-capitalist culture: it would be the culture not only of a community able to cognitively to map its place within the capitalist totality (to develop a genuine, substantial, and collective public space), but also of a community driven by the intrinsic logic of its communality to proceed beyond this re-cognition to work, collectively, first to redefine and transform its place within the capitalist totality and then — because such efforts to redefinition and transformation would eventually result in and require it — to question, challenge, criticize, disrupt, destroy, and replace the fundamental structures of relations which define the totality of capitalism itself.

When men accept and conform to “appropriately” masculine roles and women accept and conform to “appropriately” feminine roles, they do not only make choices, set goals, and develop plans for subsequent interaction with other men and women -- as men and as women — but also accept and conform to the requirements of different positions within relations of production and reproduction — different positions associated with and enabling different kinds and degrees of access to, exercise of, and control over the resources, powers, and capacities of nature, of culture, of others in society, and of their own individual selves.

When gays and lesbians transgress patriarchal sexism and heterosexism they threaten the gendered division of labor. Historically, this division has gendered the reproduction of labor power female and the reproduction of capital male. This is true even as women have participated extensively in the production of material goods and “public” services beyond the household as well as in the production of life and home. Men, on the other hand, have far less extensively, far less routinely, assumed significant responsibility for the work of maintaining the household, raising children, and nurturing the physical and emotional health and well-being of all members of the patriarchal family.

While this has changed in recent years, and women are increasingly recognized, in both first and third worlds, as performing necessary and important work beyond as well as within the household, bourgeois society has often recognized this change only by expanding its definition of women's capacities and abilities to include being able to work full-time as semi-skilled and subordinate wage workers in addition to working as wives and mothers. This “expansion” has not been accompanied by any corresponding transformation in the patriarchal sexist ordering of gender relations in the workplace, outside or inside of the home.

Patriarchy helps capital produce, realize, and accumulate profit both directly and indirectly. It does so indirectly by gendering the work of raising children (future labor power) female and by rendering this invisible as work. The tasks associated with raising children, from shopping for food and clothing, cooking and cleaning, to emotional and psychological support, receive little or no monetary compensation. Recent studies indicate that the value of women’s labor performed in the home within the U.S. averages approximately $45,000 a year (“Fact Sheet on Institutional Sexism” compiled by the Council for Inter-racial Children’s Books, 1988). Thus, while women working at home do not directly sell their labor power to capital, the fact that they render their services without compensation indirectly benefits the capitalist whose profits will not be compromised by the price he might otherwise have to pay for the work women do at home. In addition, within patriarchal households, women are subject to their husbands as both sexual objects and as objects on which their husbands can take out frustrations accumulated as the result of alienated working conditions — thus relieving capital of the cost of paying for an alternative source of this “relief” and “release.”

Secondly, the gendered division of labor directly facilitates the accumulation of capital through the super-exploitation of women’s labor in the work women perform outside of the home. For example, in the United States women on average still make only about .65 to every dollar a man makes for doing the same job. As of 1988 the average salary for female executive administrators was $23,545, whereas for males it was $36,759; the average salary for female service workers was $11,032, whereas males received $18,648 for doing the same job (Statistical Abstracts of the United States 1990: 411).

The median income for all jobs for women was $18,545, whereas for men it was $27,545 (453). Women also predominate in jobs requiring the most menial kinds of labor. As many as 97% of all typists, 82% of all bookkeepers, 89% of all waitresses, 87% of all cashiers, 82% of all elementary school teachers, 75% of all food service workers, and 70% of all retail clerks in the United States (in 1984 were women). (The New York Times Nov. 25, 1984).

Insofar as compulsory heterosexuality represents the potentially weakest link in the reproduction and maintenance of patriarchal sexist differences and divisions between men and women, gays and lesbians in turn represent a serious threat to capital accumulation. The eradication of the difference between men and women would mean the loss of the profits gained directly from super-exploitation of women's labor and the loss of profits gained indirectly by not paying women for the work of maintaining house and home, raising and caring for children, and nurturing and supporting of men that women do without direct compensation. Moreover, gay sexuality challenges prohibitions directed against prostitution, public sex, and monogamy, and all of these challenges also threaten the traditional (patriarchal sexist, nuclear, monogamous, and heterosexual) family — an institution which has proven indispensable to the reproduction of capitalist forces and (especially) relations of production.

Today capitalism is not only in the midst of a severe global recession but also has entered the third decade of a long wave of stagnation and decline in the average rate of capitalist profit. The global capitalist system is a system in a state of increasingly intractable long-term crisis. Late capitalism is capitalism in decline: capitalism in virtually continuous and ultimately irremediable crisis. In a long wave of stagnation and decline in capitalist profit, capital must intensify its assault on labor, on social welfare, on third world colonies and neo-colonies, and on non- (pre-, semi- and post-) capitalist production to compensate for its loss in profit (and as each successive long wave of stagnation and decline in the history of capitalism becomes even more difficult and costly for capital to overcome, each new long wave of stagnation and decline means that these assaults must necessarily become ever more brutal).

The struggle and competition for profits in a period in which this becomes increasingly difficult and all kinds of other avenues have been pushed to the breaking point results in an even greater expansion and intensification of the struggle of capitalists in competition with each other and of capital against labor. Until — and unless — radical resistance and opposition grows much stronger among the general American population than it is at present, the immediately foreseeable future is likely to mean that U.S. working class men and women will face further reductions in social welfare and further increases in direct and indirect taxation.

Large capital will gain even larger profits at the expense of smaller profits for small capital while the cost of purchasing goods produced by the latter will rise further without an equivalent corresponding reduction in the cost of purchasing goods produced by the former. The military budget will continue to absorb a huge share of government spending — and the ever-more capital intensive industries that dominate the production of military arms will benefit at the expense of the need for jobs — and decent jobs — for American working people.

Regulation of health and safety in the workplace, of environmental destruction, and of consumer responsibility will be cut back further as will provision for all the worst victims of poverty, hunger, and disease. Restriction on exercise of civil liberties will also be extended even further as will the internal policing of the American population throughout virtually all areas of Americans’ lives.

And, of course, at the same time as this, the political and ideological victory for the right as a result of the “support” for and the “success” of the Iraq war and the rise of fascistic sentiment such as the kind which has led to support for David Duke will mean that once again millions of Americans will continue willingly to support their own subjugation while scapegoating and terrorizing others who are not responsible for the problems of a continuing free-fall in average real income and wealth and in the average real standard of living in the United States.The chief such targets of course are and will continue to be women, gays and lesbians, African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, and immigrants and foreigners of all kinds (especially non-white and non-European immigrants and foreigners).

The increased violence waged against homosexuals and women can be understood as one consequence of the current crisis of late capitalism. We can expect this violence to increase as the struggle of capital to maintain its level of profitability -- and ultimately its entire viability and legitimacy — becomes even more desperate. The sharp increase in overt physical violence directed against homosexuals and women — as well as members of various racial and ethnic “minorities,” the old, the sick, and the poor — is in part a reflection of a crisis in the effectivity of institutionalized forms of violence adequately to do their jobs and in part a reflection of the success of the ruling capitalist class in mystifying and misleading the proletariat by dividing the proletariat into factions struggling against each other rather than against the bourgeoisie.