Marxism, Socialism, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Liberation
The Politics of Gay and Lesbian Liberation — A Marxist Critique (Part 5 of 5)
Bob Nowlan
Mark Wood
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • April-May 1992 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1, No. 5 (pp. 14-15) | ||
| • August 27, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Gay and lesbian liberation must become more thoroughly, militantly, and sophisticatedly radical in order to enable gays and lesbians to struggle successfully against heterosexism and homophobia. Gay and lesbian liberation must fight against the forces which oppress gays and lesbians by pushing forward what gay and lesbian liberation uniquely has to offer towards the progressive development and transformation of human culture at large and human society as a whole. There can be no true and lasting freedom for gays and lesbians within capitalism because gayness and lesbianism represent, at their most fully developed and radically advanced levels, the anticipation of both the supersession of gender and the emergence of proto-communist modes of sexual community and culture. Gay and lesbian liberation pushes human sexual — and human social-sexual — development beyond the limits that capitalism can sustain: only a fundamentally different and far superior form of social organization can allow for the free and unrestricted development — including the substantial growth and extensive proliferation — of gay and lesbian sexuality. Gay and lesbian liberation must therefore join the revolutionary struggle for socialism as a matter of direct and immediate self-interest.
This radicalization of gay and lesbian movements will require that these movements unite with other elements of the broader struggle to abolish capitalism and to build a new socialist world order. Gay and lesbian liberation must make the degree to which sexuality has been elevated beyond mere necessity into a realm of genuine freedom will be a fundamentally important criterion by which society will measure its progress towards communism. In fact, without this vital contribution of gay and lesbian liberation — as vanguard of the revolutionary socialist transformation of capitalist sexuality into communist sexuality — it will be impossible to achieve communism.
Gay and lesbian movements which remain merely content to work for greater tolerance, acceptance and/or inclusion of homosexuality and homosexuals within capitalism are engaged in ultimately futile pursuits. Without abolishing the need for a gendered division of labor as part and parcel of the system of capitalist relations of production, genuine liberation of homosexuality is impossible. The failure to link homophobia to the reproduction of capitalism means that battles fought to expand the rights of homosexuals will too often be waged against merely local instances of oppression rather than against the capitalist system which produces these specific instances.
Toleration and acceptance are very limited goals. The other can be tolerated and accepted insofar as she can be ignored and dismissed; in practice, mere toleration and acceptance of homosexuals and homosexuality means that the institutionalization of heterosexism remains unchanged and is unnoticed. Tolerance also implies that the other is simply other, external, and implicitly not only naturally different but also naturally deviant, deficient, and abnormal rather than socially and historically constructed as other in tandem, in connection with the construction of “the same,” “the norm,” “the center.” “Heterosexual” and “homosexual” are not natural antitheses but polar positions in a natural continuum between heterosexual and homosexual. Toleration suggests that homosexuality is only extrinsically rather than intrinsically related to heterosexuality and that heterosexuality is natural and unconstructed whereas homosexuality is unnatural and constructed. This makes no sense in any way other than to denigrate homosexuality (e.g as a lesser and even “freakish” kind of sexuality). Gay and lesbian liberation should aim not for mere toleration and acceptance but rather to undermine the very basis upon which heterosexuals have the power to decide whether or not to accept and tolerate homosexuals (as homosexuals do not have the power to decide whether or not they tolerate and accept heterosexuals).
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At present the gay and lesbian liberation movement is divided between a “right wing” and a “left wing.” The “right wing” is largely assimilationist: it seeks little if anything more than acceptance and toleration of its — largely parallel and not very different — “lifestyle.” This right wing is willing to accept and tolerate its own marginalization and subordination in exchange for a limited, fragile, and ultimately elusive and illusory toleration and acceptance by straight society. It is important that the “left” wing refuse to be led into an ultimately very similar position as that deliberately and naively sought by the right. This requires that the left develop a mode of emancipation which supercedes a mere reversal of the terms which define its mode of oppression. Instead of accepting the terms by which homosexuality and homosexuals are excluded, expelled, and ostracized from the dominant society and culture, and instead of remaining content to develop a merely separate, self-excluding, and self-ostracizing sub-culture, a genuinely radical gay and lesbian liberation movement must reject its marginalization and rebel against its exclusion, expulsion, and ostracism. It must oppose the division of society into heterosexual majority/heterosexist dominant and homosexual minority/gay subordinate. Gay and lesbian liberation must strive to re-make and transform the dominant sexual culture into a “gay” culture. Gay and lesbian culture must therefore develop a positive content which is both genuinely critical of and ultimately superior to straight culture: gay culture must work to supercede straight culture as the newly dominant sexual culture of a genuinely sexually liberated society. This is necessary because existing limitations and restrictions imposed upon the naturally free and flexible variety of social and sexual associations of human beings are oppressive and exploitative. It is also necessary because complete toleration, acceptance, integration, and equality of homosexuals and homosexuality in heterosexist and patriarchal sexist society and culture is impossible. In fact, it becomes less possible with every crisis in the effectivity of the contribution of heterosexism and patriarchal sexism to the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism and with the increasingly desperate need of capitalism in crisis for such support. The violence against homosexuals will continue to increase as the capitalist system heads closer to its ultimate collapse. A revolutionary gay and lesbian liberation movement must move from accommodation to transgression, from allowable to unallowable rebellion, from struggle for personal liberation to struggle for social emancipation, from difference as life “style” to making a difference in the conditions by which all must live, and from rebellion as escape and retreat to rebellion as confrontation and contestation, destruction and re- construction, supersession and transformation.
The successful development of a revolutionary gay and lesbian liberation movement requires it develop a more principled and less pragmatic political practice. Pragmatism, as George Novack explains, “is what pragmatism does. It is the habit of acting in disregard of solidly-based scientific rules and tested principles. In everyday life, pragmatism is activity which proceeds from the premise (either explicit or unexpressed) that nature and society are essentially indeterminate. Pragmatic people rely not upon laws, rules, and principles which reflect the determinate features and determining factors of objective reality, but principally upon makeshifts, rule-of-thumb methods, and improvisations based on what they believe might be immediately advantageous” (Pragmatism Versus Marxism, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975, 17).
Pragmatic politics works within a sharply circumscribed complex of means and ends, and concentrates all of its resources into attaining these and only these ends. It is caught up in the short-term, emphasizes tactics over strategy, leads to a radicalism of means over a radicalism of ends, and tends towards an aestheticization of politics — in which focus is directed towards planning actions which are dramatic and which disturb and shock rather than planning a series of interconnected actions and initiatives to be conducted over a long time which aim to — and can — actually break down and transform existing institutions and relations.
A principled politics is a theoretical politics that is able to abstract from any particular question or problem in order to make visible its intrinsic links with other questions and problems in the long chain of interconnections which constitute the social order as a totality. For a principled politics, it is a theoretical understanding of society and its development — including a theoretical understanding of the objective and subjective conditions of possibility for social transformation, including a real multiplicity of tendencies and counter-tendencies — that determines strategic orientation, mode of organization, allocation of resources to specific purposes, and application of specific tactics. It is only by maintaining a high theoretical level that it is possible effectively to connect strategy with tactics and organizational means with ends.
The gay and lesbian liberation movement is relatively young — and, because of this, in many respects relatively primitive. However, a potentially even larger obstacle than this relative immaturity to a further radicalization of the movement is its domination by sectors of the petit-bourgeoisie which have not broken their alliance with and support for the (big) bourgeoisie, and which have not aligned themselves with the proletariat in struggle against the bourgeoisie. The objective class interest of the petit- bourgeoisie is to maintain its privilege over the proletariat and to prevent its succumbing to proletarianization. This leads often to a quite desperate struggle on the part of the petit-bourgeoisie due to the fragility of the intermediate position which makes possible petit-bourgeois privilege. Moreover, commitment to radical and revolutionary change by members of the petit-bourgeoisie is, as a result, often largely — and virtually always initially — the product of ethical and intellectual as well as aesthetic and even moral-religious rather than directly economic or even political motives. This in turn results in a frequent tendency of petit-bourgeois elements to distort the direction and limit the effectiveness of struggles for liberation over which they exercise dominance.
Nevertheless, this is not always the case. The petit-bourgeoisie is a contradictory and intermediate class which offers — from the vantage point of the different contributions advanced by different petit-bourgeois sectors and strata — radically opposing kinds of direction to struggles for human emancipation (and this is as true of the struggle for sexual freedom as it is of any other liberation struggle). In fact, in late capitalist society today, the petit-bourgeoisie plays an inescapably predominant role in the intellectual leadership of virtually all radical and revolutionary movements conducted in the interests of the exploited and oppressed. This is due to the severe constraints upon time, energy, and access to intellectual and technical resources that confront these exploited and oppressed members of the proletariat. As Ernest Mandel points out, representatives of the more progressive sections of the petit-bourgeoisie can equip proletarians “with the knowledge that is indispensable for a relentless critique of bourgeois society, and even more for the successful taking over of the means of production by the associated producers” (“The Leninist Theory of Organization,” International Socialist Review, 31, 1970, 112). According to Mandel, if “the decisive barrier which today holds back the working class from acquiring political-class consciousness is found less in the misery of their surroundings than in the constant influence of petty- bourgeois and bourgeois ideological consumption and mystification,” it is “precisely then that the eye- opening function of critical social science can play a truly revolutionary role in the new awakening of the class consciousness of the masses,” (117) and yet this “critical social science” is itself also largely the product of activity conducted by men and women who are petit-bourgeois (at least in their social origin).
The proletariat will need allies in its struggle against capital. Today, these potential allies chiefly include groups organized within the so-called “new social movements” along lines of gender and sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, age and physical or mental (dis)ability, and ecological commitment. Unlike previous kinds of allies in previous revolutionary struggles for proletarian emancipation, the chief allies of the proletariat in future revolutionary struggles will not be classes that represent the vestiges of pre-capitalist (or even semi-capitalist) modes of production and forms of social organization such as the peasantry (especially because late capitalism has brought about an increasingly rapid proletarianization of remnant peasant classes in the third world). Instead, the principal allies of the proletariat in the late(r) capitalist revolutionary struggle for proletarian self-emancipation will be those social groups that represent the anticipation of a future mode of production and a future mode of life in a new form of social organization beyond capitalism. The logical development of the most advanced and radical tendencies within gay liberation is to prefigure the progressive liberation of human sexuality in the communist society of the future. In this light, the vanguardism of gay liberation will be a predominantly pedagogical vanguardism: a vanguardism in leading and teaching and showing the way in the struggle to transform capitalist sexuality into communist sexuality.
The gay and lesbian liberation movement can succeed in advancing — and leading — the struggle for greater human freedom if it is able to avoid the dangers of reformism, assimilationism, accomodationism, aestheticism, separatism, pragmatism, opportunism, and sectarianism which so often reduce, dissipate, and destroy the potential radical effectivity of movements for liberation subject to petit- bourgeois domination and control. This necessitates victory of radical and progressive over reactionary and conservative sections of the petit-bourgeoisie within the leadership of the gay and lesbian liberation movement. It also requires further — intensive and extensive — radicalization of this radical leadership, and acceleration of the development and integration of proletarian sections into not only the body but also the leadership of the movement. Finally, it requires that the movement take its place within the international struggle for socialism — and that the international revolutionary socialist movement accept a revolutionary gay and lesbian liberation movement as a relatively autonomous vanguard movement for sexual emancipation such that the struggle for sexual emancipation is made an intrinsic and integral part of the struggle for and the realization of communism.
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