In online and offline discussions, social media posts, video essays, blog posts and so on, there is constant regurgitation (worded in countless different ways of course) of a discourse we refer to as “The Queer Question.” The essence of this question is the following pair of smaller questions: Are queer people recognized by Marxists as an oppressed group, and are their rights upheld within Marxism? The answers typically given leave much to be desired and are rarely based on a coherent materialist line.
It is necessary to clarify here that by “queer” we are referring to all people who do not fit within the dominant normative notions of gender, sex, and sexual and romantic orientation. GSM, LGBT+, queer etc. are culture-specific labels for these people. Though there is of course always some controversy or other regarding the specifics of terminology, we will use “queer” for the sake of requiring a single one, and because we like it.
The queer question is as old as class society itself, although it hasn’t always been phrased as such. While the modern forms that queer consciousness takes are younger than Marxism and the Communist movement, we know from decades of scientific, historical, and anthropological scholarship that queer people have always and everywhere, in some cultural form or other, formed part of class society, and their recognition and rights within those societies have constituted class struggles.
Recently the answer to the queer question, as posed above, has increasingly been “Yes”. However, there has also been a continuation and diversification of political tendencies that galavant as Marxists but which actually serve to obscure and mystify the very heart of Marxist analysis, dialectical materialism. Such groups put forth vulgar positions which seek to justify chauvinism and oppression against queer people, and they do this by disguising themselves as Marxist. Although the specific details may vary from group to group, the goal is the same: to use pseudo-Marxist or Marxist sounding nonsense to exclude some particular groups of queer people, or all queer people, from the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat.
Queer people, if even just by sheer happenstance of being part of the working class population, have always been among the ranks of the Communists. We can safely discard any arguments asserting that queer expression is a purely modern, western liberal phenomenon. The old trends within 20th century Marxism which rejected or did not have a firm answer to the queer question lacked the access we now have to modern scholarship on gender and sexuality, and have been scientifically outmoded by it. Those few organizations which still cling to notions of “bourgeois decadence” or other such wholesale rejections of queer liberation are therefore objectively unscientific and do not warrant further discussion here.
More common than wholesale rejection of the queer question these days is an error of idealism which asserts that the struggle for queer liberation is either secondary to or irrelevant to the cause of proletarian revolution.
Some argue that “Queer liberation is unpopular with the masses broadly, so it should be rejected or set aside so as to make Communism more appealing to those masses.” A principled Marxist knows immediately that vulgar populism is not revolutionary — the Communists lead the masses on the path to liberation, we don’t tail their backwards ideas and errors in science while begging them to join us. Those who hold this position need to go all the way back to their unopened copy of The Communist Manifesto and actually read it this time. Marx and Engels clearly explained there that the task of the Communists is to guide the most advanced class conscious section of the working class:
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. (Manifesto chapter two, emphasis mine.)
It is clear that the task of the Communists is to unite all sections of all the oppressed classes, not exclude one or the other on the grounds of populist appeal.
Others argue that “Some queer identities, such as the homosexuals, are recognized by Marxism as having a material basis. However others such as the transgender and transsexual identities ignore or contradict the material basis of sexual biology, are therefore idealistic in nature, and must be discarded in order to arrive at a materialist position.”
This second idealistic deviation is one of the most subtle and insidious of the social-chauvinist arguments, and is a slow poison to materialist analysis. In the course of properly refuting it, we will arrive at a more correct, more scientific analysis of the queer question. The fundamental flaw in the above argument is in how it assumes the “material basis of sexual biology” has any bearing on the queer question. It does not. The deviationists either forget or are unwilling to admit that sex itself is a social construct.
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State Engels explains:
Thus, monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes entirely unknown hitherto in prehistoric times. In an old unpublished manuscript, the work of Marx and myself in 1846, I find the following: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for child breeding.” And today I can add: The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative regression, in which the wellbeing and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other.
Here it is explained quite clearly that sex is a social category based on the division of labor. Men and women became defined in dialectical contradiction with one another. They are not eternal immutable categories, but categories which arose from the conditions which existed at a particular historic time. One common theory about this division of labor is that it was made necessary by child rearing; women were biologically equipped to nurse newborns and men were not, and this took shape in the social consciousness as the first dichotomy. The material necessity of this division of labor has long since been abolished by developments in society. Today infants can easily be fed from bottles and reared by anyone. The original basis for the sex dichotomy has passed into history. What remains is the institutions to which it gave rise.
As societies developed and grew in complexity, they began to rely more and more on maintaining a pool of labor to continue to serve the increasingly complex social functions necessary for survival. The development of animal husbandry gave rise to a production surplus which enabled the development of manufacture; weaving, pottery, etc. Men, not being bound to care for the children as the women were, were driven to take up the task of maintaining the pool of labor through acquisition and exchange of women’s reproductive labor — and therefore the acquisition and exchange of women.
For a more detailed discussion of this process see The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner.
Further developments in production led to settled agriculture, by which point the nature of women as the exchangeable property of their tribe became fully entrenched. The great increase in surplus brought by settled agriculture enabled the overall population to rapidly increase beyond that of older modes of production, a process known by historians as the Neolithic Revolution. Methods of manufacture became more complex, metallurgy was developed and further revolutionized agriculture with the plow. Class society began to take shape as the acquisition of wealth became possible, and control over women’s reproductive labor became a primary form of wealth. The concentration of wealth into fewer hands led to the development of private property to institutionalize this control, which first took the form of ownership of women-slaves and livestock. Ruling patriarchs were then compelled to compete with one-another in order to maintain their control over society, and therefore competed on the basis of violent acquisition of property. Women were seen as a resource which could be obtained through force, and those societies who still treated women as equals were largely subsumed by the violent expansion of the enslaver state.
We can therefore see how differences between individuals in their biological characteristics (configuration of sexual organs, ability to nurse infants) at one point made necessary the first division of labor, which later gave rise to the institutionalization of the patriarchal state. Ruling ideology adapted to serve the continuation of this state of affairs on behalf of the ruling elite — the sex dichotomy became “naturalized,” seen as immutable and eternal, and encoded as such in countless religious scriptures and legal codes ever since. But we can easily see how this sex dichotomy is the product of a particular stage of social development, and we can therefore easily see how it will pass into history.
A useful comparison is the categorization of human beings into racial groups: though there is a “material biological basis” for this division (skin color and minor differences in constitution and disease resistances), we know that “race” is not an eternal natural category but a socially constructed category which was developed to legitimize the institutions of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Racial ideology emerged from a particular moment in historical development and will in turn fall as the conditions which gave rise to it recede into history. So too will the sex dichotomy.
As capitalism develops, it breaks down the old class barriers as it proletarianizes the masses. It is not a coincidence that the feminist movement first arose in the 19th century, when proletarianization began to hit its stride and the “natural” nature of women’s disadvantaged status began to be more consciously questioned. Increasingly, women began to perform the exact same labor as men, working at first in parallel factory operations and later directly alongside men. It is evident that “woman” represents an oppressed class just as much as “proletarian” or “Indigenous,” and as the social division of labor which enforces this class division becomes increasingly obsolete the necessity of its overthrow begins to crystalize.
How does the queer question figure into this analysis of sex? We must look at the emergence of queer identity and consciousness as a historical process. It is nowadays a well-known fact that societies in which class had not yet developed had different notions of gender and sexuality than the patriarchal rule of class society. “Two-Spirit” First Nations people are a common example of this. There are as many notions of gender and sexual diversity as there are different cultures, which makes it clear that this diversity is common to all human groups.
The emergence of class society and the rise of the rigid sex dichotomy condensed the wide spectrum of human expression into two classes, an oppressed class of “women” and an oppressor class of “men.” Queer expression fundamentally challenges the naturalization of the sex dichotomy. If women can choose to have romantic and sexual relations with women, then the naturalization of female sexual subordination to men is directly challenged. If “woman” is not an immutable natural state — if it can be altered, transcended, or cast off — if a woman can simply become a man, or something else outside the binary dichotomy, then the sex dichotomy is revealed to be materially meaningless. This is a threat to existing class relations, so queer expression is violently suppressed by patriarchal ideology.
Capitalism continues to require the sex dichotomy in order to function. Capitalism requires that the population continue to grow with each successive generation. As production improves, the amount of labor crystallized within commodities falls, and so too does the rate of profit. In order to maintain a steady rate of profit capital requires that production always increase, which requires increasingly more workers to produce and consume commodities. Therefore it is necessary for the continued existence of capitalist class relations that the working class grow without limit, and in order to facilitate this women must continue to be exploited for their reproductive labor.
As the process of proletarianization continues, the perception of the sex dichotomy as “natural” begins to wither away. It is not a coincidence that queer consciousness has primarily risen first within the most advanced capitalist economies. It is here that proletarianization has reached its most advanced state. It is also here that the forces of reaction respond most harshly to the rise of queer expression. This is why fascism (which we know is how capitalism reacts to a state of crisis) is so concerned with “traditional family values” and rigid gender roles. It is a violent reaction to the emergence of real human expression, an intensified reimposition of ideological structures of bourgeois oppression. Language accusing queer people of “defying the natural order” and other such anti-materialistic nonsense is slung about. “Communists” who parrot this rhetoric are communistic in name only: they objectively serve bourgeois reaction.
In communist society the requirement for endless growth is finally done away with. Absent the necessity to generate profit, production is purely on a needs-driven basis. The absolute volume of production can be consciously set to ensure everyone is provided for, and further improvements in production reap a reduction in the working day for all. Reproduction becomes a personal choice rather than a social imperative, and so the material basis which gives rise to the sex dichotomy is abolished. Men and women become true equals, and thereby the distinction between them ceases to be of any consequence and individuals become free to express themselves however they like. Queer liberation is not merely adjunct to communist revolution, but is in fact an intrinsic aspect of it.
This then should make clear the scientific socialist position on the queer question: as an oppressed class within capitalism, the very existence and free expression of queer people holds boundless revolutionary potential. The task of the Communists is not to set aside queer issues in favor of “the working class,” but to recognize that the vast majority of queer people are of the working class and make up a highly class conscious revolutionary element.
The oppression experienced by queer people, even today under liberal “tolerance,” is highly intense and acute. Queer people are subject to rampant discrimination in all areas of life, with the most visibly queer people relegated to the extreme margins of society. They are subject to severe violence, and in many places it is still fully legal to murder queer people. They experience the worst of the brutalities of capitalism, with homelessness (particularly among youth) higher than any other demographic. This severe oppression leads queer people to band together and support one-another as a matter of survival. They regularly form their own organizations, community support groups, activist groups, community defense, and so on. They are of course naturally drawn to radical politics in search of answers to their oppression — the “transgender communist” stereotype exists for a reason. They often go on to form a vanguard of sorts for other liberation struggles, making up a disproportionately large section of and often being the leaders of labor activists, Communists, anarchists, antifascist militants, national liberation activists, and so on. It should be difficult to miss how this spontaneous organizing and spontaneous arisal of class consciousness by queer people represents a heightened form of class struggle in embryo, yet somehow certain “Communists” appear to be wearing blindfolds.
It’s long past time we change that and start making serious efforts towards uniting with queer organizations. This starts with forming a coherent political line on queer issues. The resurgence of fascism endangers us all, and queer people most acutely and most urgently. We need to be able to provide community defense, political activism, medical support networks, and education to queer adults and youth. The Communists have until now largely left queer people to their own devices on these fronts, and this is a fatal error in analysis. We cannot afford to continue to allow this revolutionary potential to go to waste. The victory of communism must be the victory of all oppressed people.
