The Marxist Theory of Homosexuality: Part III The Future

The Alternative Orange ^ | April 1993 | Bob Nowlan

[ModelBreaker]

This may be the only book review ever to be twice a long and pedantic as the book.

[gidget7]

I'm not sure I totally agree. But all have their own opinions.

[johnny7]

Sounds gay to me...

[subterfuge]

There is a definite trend surfacing at FR. Posters are showing up to raise issues which have best potential to divide the opposition to hatellary rodhamster clinton's march on the White House.

You notice that too? There seems to be an inordinate number of "Freepers" that are suddenly Rudy and McCain backers too. Funny that they all claim Condoleeza Rice should be/will be running for Prez also.

[longtermmemmory]

The key part FYI:

It is at this eventual point in the revolutionary socialist transition from capitalism to communism that real progress towards the ultimate elimination of the need for recognition of division between gay and straight will depend first upon gay supplanting straight as both the dominant mode of sexual subjectivity and as the dominant form of sexual culture.


Sex as a political weapon in order to eliminate the family unit and replace it with hedonism as the states reward to the individual.

IOW: orgasms for good commies.

[LonePalm]

This guy's a

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[Sols]

I don't get how an 13 year old article from an extremely obscure marxist student newspaper is really relevant to anything at all.

Also, what is a homosexual denial movement? I googled the phrase but I didn't get anything. Denying that homosexuals exist or ..?

[d-back]

Thanks for the post.

True, it's longwinded, pedantic, and verbally dense, but if one has the patience for it, there is great insight into one of the rationales underlying "gay" politics: cultural marxism.

Thanks again.

[hosepipe]

After the third sentence he continues.. Yada upon Yada upon yada.. finishing with a flourish WHOOSH(flush)..

"They arrogantly use nonsense(great swelling words) to seduce people by appealing to their sexual desires, especially to sexual freedom. They seduce people who have just escaped from those who live in error." -2 Peter 2;18

[hschliemann]

Whereas the bed-hopping antics of heterosexuals today are indeed juvenile expressions of sexuality,homosexuality is decidedly infantile.

I live near the county administration building in Oakland Ca.The power poles all around the area had obnoxious orange stickers asking passers-by if they were gay,bi,or just confused.It also had a phone number to call.I tried to scratch the stickers off,but it was impossible.I finally took out my trusty marker,and wrote
CIA Mind Control
across the face of the sticker.When I passed the area a few days later,all the stickers had been completely removed!

[onyx]

BUMP

[MHGinTN]

I just came across your fruitcake picture ... oh how I would love a piece of freshly baked and soaked fruitcake with hot coffee! My deceased grandmother made the most delicious ones, soaked in rum for a week before serving.

[Billthedrill]

Making use of the Hegelian notion of aufheben, we can describe this as a process of dialectical negation, or negation of negation, in which capitalism will be abolished by the development of its internal contradictions through resolution of the struggles of the internally opposing forces and tendencies which constitute these contradictions such that this development will result in the genesis of a qualitatively new mode of social organization.

Somewhere in that torrent of muddy abstractions there may be semantic content, but if there is, it's accidental.

The real difficulty here is that homosexuals do not compose a class in terms of classical Marxism because the signal characteristic of the group has no reference either to the means or the relations of production, an argument Trotsky put forward with respect to Djilas's proposal of a New Class. Fernbach was one in a long series of Marxist revisionists who attempt to reinterpret Marxian social dynamics in non-economic terms. It's not an especially good fit, in my opinion.

[Joseph DeMaistre]

Classical Marxism is passait. Most mainstream Marxists have adopted the neo-Marxist redefinition of class that equates it with race, gender and sexuality.

[Billthedrill]

I am aware of that. I am also aware of the fact that most modern Marxists have never troubled to read Marx. It makes for some rather turgid but vital reading - you can certainly claim to be a Marxist without it but you're not.

The reason that neo-Marxists - the Frankfurt school, Gramsci - and even contemporary non-Marxist revolutionaries such as Bakunin, have troubled to re-interpret Marx is to salvage what they can of his sociology, which is of his work the least vulnerable to criticism, and dispense with his economics and historiography, both of which were obvious failures within his lifetime. In essence they want his method without its results.

But it doesn't work. Tear the economic underpinnings from Marxism and you have an empty shell which you can fill with whatever sociological stuffing you like, but it simply doesn't work the same way because it can't. For Marx the Oppressed equaled Proletariat because the nature of the oppression was economic. Within that class boundary was solidarity whether the individual was black, white, German, Greek, gay, straight - the importance to Marx was that economics dictated class identity and lent it solidarity; and outside of that the differences were not only unimportant but to be repressed ruthlessly where they occurred. Class consciousness, class solidarity depended on that and without them capitalism would never be overthrown.

It turns out that the sort of class analysis that gives us "revolutionary" classes depending on race and sexual identity constitutes a much more deadly set of internal contradictions for socialism than any of the celebrated internal contradictions of capitalism through which the latter will supposedly fail. An ostensible class that spans the various relations of production from proletariat through bourgeoisie to capitalist cannot be considered a class if Marx's class analysis is to work. (Trotsky termed this a "caste" to escape the difficulty but I'm not sure that isn't a distinction without a difference.) That's precisely what the Frankfurt school in particular is attempting - maintain the class analysis with an entirely different set of class boundaries. But nowhere is it ever shown on what basis, if not economic, the dynamics between classes operates. Envy? Resentment? Commonly these days it is considered the nebulosity named "political power" (especially in Foucault) but nowhere is the engine of that defined either. It's entirely circular - the political power that supposedly mediates between classes is also used to define those classes because it mediates. You can't possibly refute that because it doesn't mean anything.

So with this particular argument - I don't believe that the underpinnings of the homosexual "liberation" movement are necessarily Marxist. I do believe that neo-Marxists are attempting desperately to fit it, and other such "liberation" movements, within a Marxian model and further that the effort is futile for the reasons described above. Yes, those movements are an attempt to transform society by highlighting political grievances after the Marxian method, but that very method predicts their failure for ignoring true class identity. In this regard Marx would have turned his back on Gramsci as an heretic who didn't understand his work just as he did with so many of his contemporaries.

All IMHO, of course.

[nw_arizona_granny]

Ping.