Marxism, Socialism, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Liberation: Part 4: Sexuality and Freedom
Bob Nowlan
Mark Wood
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • February 1992 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1, No. 4 (pp. 4,13) | ||
| • August 27, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
The absolute prerequisite for the creation of a realm of genuine freedom is the minimization of time spent providing for the fundamental or primary necessities of life. Only when these needs have been met for all individuals can every individual develop a full and rich individuality. The struggle to create a communist society is most immediately a struggle to provide for these needs on a global scale so that the material foundation is laid for a global federation of egalitarian and democratically self-managed communities in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
The chief function of satisfying primary needs is, in fact, the maximization of time available for the satisfaction and cultivation of higher, more spiritual needs. The less time it takes to fulfill the first level of needs the more time available for satisfying the latter levels. Minimizing the time spent satisfying the former depends upon developing the forces of production to a level such that all human beings are freed from the tyrannical rule of economic necessity and insecurity. Extending and developing the realm of freedom means both raising the level of productive forces to such a height that the time spent working to provide for primary and even secondary needs is minimized, thus freeing up time for developing more sophisticated needs and forms of creativity, and developing productive forces which are capable of providing the means for further developing the spiritual needs of humanity. Thus, “the socialist prospect is one of a gradual satisfaction of more and more needs, not of a restriction to basic requirements alone” (Ernest Mandel, “In Defense of Socialist Planning,” New Left Review, No. 159, September/October 1986, 20).
Yet this satisfaction would, under socialism, in no way be equivalent, as it is under capitalism, with a mere quantitative expansion of needs and the possibilities for satisfying them. Rather, a “socialist democracy would grow in civilization rather than in mere consumption — that is, in a broadening range of meaningful human activities and relations” (25). With the sub- ordination of the forces of production to the conscious direction of the associated producers, the conditions of alienation which characterize social relations under capitalism would begin to wither away and with this a clearer understanding of the real relationship between human labor and its products would emerge. For the first time in history human beings would be able to direct and design their destiny in a comprehensive and rational fashion.
And yet, genuine freedom is more than merely the opposite of necessity — more than simply freedom from necessity. In order to appreciate this, it is necessary to define freedom by beginning with the category of labor. Through labor, human beings act in and upon nature to create a “second nature” out of the first. This second nature is what marxists define culture to be: as Trotsky puts it, “culture is everything that has been created, built, learned, <and> conquered by man in the course of his entire history, in distinction from what nature has given, including the natural history of man himself as a species of animal” (On Literature and Art, Edited by Paul Siegel, New York: Pathfinder, 1970, 83).
Labor thus enables human beings to create a social reality from
within and out of natural reality. Social reality ultimately includes
the entire totality of human social existence, and yet this begins
— both logically and historically — with the production of
means to satisfy the needs of survival and subsistence, rather than
merely instinctually adapting to and making use of whatever nature
itself provides. Social reality is therefore shaped and determined not
only by natural causality but also by the conscious design and
deliberate action of human beings who intervene in nature to direct and
transform the workings of natural causality. In social reality,
teleology operates in addition to causality: human beings are able to
direct changes in reality by designing and shaping a new reality from
out of the old. As Georg Lukacs puts it, “only in labour, in the
positing of a goal and its means, consciousness rises with a self-
governed act, the teleological positing, above mere adaptation to the
environment — a stage retained by those animal activities that
alter nature objectively but not deliberately — and begins to
effect changes in nature itself that are impossible coming from nature
alone, indeed even inconceivable” (Labour, First Section of Part
Two of Ontology of Social Existence. Translated by
David Fernbach, London: Merlin Press, 1980, 22). This understanding of
labor provides the basis necessary for beginning to more adequately
understand and define human freedom:
What is involved… in labour itself, is something much
more. Irrespective of how far the performer of this labour is aware
of it, in this process he produces himself as a member of the human
race, and hence produces the human race itself. We may even say
that the path of struggle for self-mastery, from natural
determination by instinct to conscious self-control, is the only
real path to true human freedom… The struggle for control
over oneself, over one's own originally purely organic nature, is
quite certainly an act of freedom, a foundation of freedom for human
life… The most spiritual and highest freedom must be fought
for with the same methods as in the original labour and… its
outcome . . . has ultimately the same content: the mastery of the
individual acting in the nature of his species over his merely
natural and particular individuality (135- 136).
The degree to which the domain of human sexuality is liberated
from the constraints of both economic necessity and mere
“natural and particular individuality” is the
degree to which this domain is elevated into a realm of
genuine human freedom. From this perspective, gay and lesbian
sexuality, sexuality which rebels against and exceeds the
limits set by the capitalist society, can be understood as
both potentially proto-communist and also potentially the
revolutionary vanguard within the domain of sexuality in
capitalist society:
gay relationships today… for all their distortion by the
gender system around us, can in the best of cases prefigure the
communist sexuality of the future, an order in which love does not
automatically establish alongside itself a relation of rivalry and
hate, but can assume an altogether more inclusive form (David
Fernbach, The Spiral Path: a Gay Contribution to Human
Survival, Boston: Alyson Publications, 1981: 93).
Through an accumulation of historical human labor, creativity, and struggle, biological sexuality is transformed into human sexuality. Homosexuality itself is transformed into gay and lesbian social and cultural identity while the biological imperative to procreate is transformed into the social possibility to freely recreate. The development of the productive forces of society are, as in other spheres of culture, intrinsically related to this process of transformation. The advent of modern forms of birth control and scientific studies of human sexuality have greatly enhanced the expansion of pleasure.
Besides the value of being able to enjoy sex for its own sake, [these developments have] undoubtedly led women to pose new demands to their male partners for sexual satisfaction, and by beginning to overcome their relegation to mere objects of sexuality and reassert themselves as equal subjects... (50).
In addition, the invention of artificial means for heightening sensual pleasure and of new forms of erotic culture also contribute to the process of creating a realm of sexuality which is itself a realm of genuine human freedom. What must be kept in mind, however, is the contradictory nature of these developments. Within class societies, the universal aspects of human cultural development, such as those outlined above, always remain subject to the control — and often remain even the exclusive privilege — of a small minority. Progress is often coupled with regress as these technological developments are turned against, and used to further subjugate and repress the vast majority. Thus, for example, while birth control technologies and education have opened up new possibilities for human association, the subordination of these developments to the needs of capital has also meant they are used as means for sterilizing members of racial and ethnic minority populations in the U.S. and women and men throughout the third world.
Sexual expression and association are structured by the economic, political, and ideological needs of particular concrete forms of organization of human society, and, in class society, this structuring is dominated by the economic, political, and ideological needs of the dominant class — including, most fundamentally, the need of this class to maintain its domination over all other classes. As long as the organization of society depends upon an exploitatively gendered division of labor — and the enforcement, rationalization, and legitimation of this division — sexual relations will continue to be subject to the imperatives of this division as well. Homophobia will only cease once gender has been abolished as a socially significant category: only in a society “in which one's sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader, Edited by Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990, 102). Such a society would be one in which one's biology plays no part in determining a person's access to and exercise of the powers, resources, and capacities of culture.
Only a communist society in which the ownership and control of the forces of social production are subordinated to the general will and conscious plan of the whole of society will it be possible not only to minimize the time spent providing for basic needs and create a space for human associations freed from the constraints of economic necessity, but also to make available to all the possibility of an extensive experience of and participation in a realm of genuine freedom: a realm of genuine free play and free creation, of self-direction and self-control of one's own activity in remaking and transforming nature, culture, and oneself.
Within class society, the enjoyment of free time is limited not only by the level and pace of development of the productive forces of society but also by minority control of these productive forces, and use of this control against the interests of the vast majority. The freedom to develop and cultivate a rich sensual and erotic culture is therefore largely limited to those who direct and control the means of social production: the ruling class (although greater or lesser “scraps” are of course granted to allies in intermediary classes and strata to buy off the latter). And yet, the ruling class of any epoch also represents — albeit in distorted form — the most advanced possibilities of existing productive forces, and therefore represents the production of a limited realm of freedom within — and beyond — that of necessity. A ruling class can only ultimately justify its rule if it is able to extend and develop the productive forces of society. Therefore, the revolutionary struggle for human emancipation must not only realize the anticipatory within the critical and oppositional but also disconnect the universal from the particular in the further progressive development of human culture wrought within each epoch in the history of class society, even as these achievements have been achieved under — and simultaneously abused by — the direction and control of the dominant class. The revolutionary struggle for human emancipation must strive ultimately to transcend the limits upon production and creation, realization and fulfillment which are inevitable within class society towards the inauguration and construction of a classless — a communist — society.
Next Issue, Part 5: The Politics of Gay and Lesbian Liberation—a Marxist Critique
