A Marxist-Leninist case against the CPGB-MLās reactionary stances on gender identity
I would like to note that the CPGB-ML is hardly worth writing an entire article about alone.Ā Were it simply an outlier case, this party would merit no investigation.Ā However, while they certainly epitomize the worst reactionary elements within the Left on the issue of LGBT+ rights, the fact is that echoes of this sentiment can be found across the Left in a variety of flavors and intensities.Ā It speaks to an unwillingness to employ the actual theory underlying Marxism, and instead relies on vacuous notions of gender, race, and so on that are treated as self-evident, eternal truths that are not engaged with historically, if indeed they are engaged with in any scientific capacity whatsoever.Ā This approach fails whole swathes of the working class in its failure to meaningfully engage with their conditions beyond pure, abstract class struggle.
If we are to criticize the CPGB-ML on their stances as Marxist-Leninists ourselves, it necessarily must be done through the lens of dialectical materialism, as it is foundational to ML theory and practice.Ā We cannot simply declare their opposition to identity politics to be āreactionaryā without justification; baseless dismissal and name-calling is pointless sectarianism.Ā In the same light, we cannot hide behind identity politics just because it is being attacked in a reactionary fashion.Ā Instead, we must demonstrate the need to introduce the class element back into our discussion and action regarding identity rather than rejecting all ideas about identity wholesale, so that these disparate movements can be directed at the true source of their oppression and not accept meager concessions by bourgeois society.
However, I must admit that this argument will be somewhat simplistic, though somewhat lengthy; partly for ease of explanation, and additionally for the purpose of meeting time constraints.Ā Some details may be glossed over in the course of putting forth this argument.Ā While I believe it to be sufficiently strong as a counter-argument to the vague arguments of the CPGB-ML et al., under no circumstances should it be seen as an authoritative end to the discussion, nor should it be treated as a source in and of itself.Ā Rather, it should be seen as (a) an attempt to provide a summary of the various ideas it draws upon, (b) a more complete argument for LGBT+ struggles from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, rather than several disconnected articles touching on the subject, and (c) an effort to do away with the dismissive chauvinism that has occasionally characterized discussion among Marxists upon this very issue.
I will provide references to the sources at the end of this document.Ā Given the non-academic nature of this document, I have elected not to adhere strictly to formatting with respect to in-line citations and references, and will simply append references to the source material that most directly informs this argument at the end of this document.
PART ONEāThe case for LGBT+ issues as class issues
If we are to form our critique, it is necessary to determine the function of gender roles (specifically binary gender roles, or simply āthe gender binaryā) within capitalist society.Ā To that end, we would clearly do well to discern how gender roles came to be in the first place.Ā While this piece will not exhaustively cover the historical progression of these roles, it is necessary to at least put forth a rudimentary explanation of their formation and evolution.Ā From there, we can examine their role in capitalism, the important connection it has to LGBT+ struggles, and the intersection between normative gender roles and other systems of capitalist oppression.Ā With this, we can avoid the vulgar materialism and often outright metaphysical idealism of the CPGB-ML without resorting to faulty assertions of our own.
I. Sex and gender are both constructs
The naive suggestion often put forth is that these roles are a logical consequence of natural sexual differentiation, but this is simply not the case.Ā While there may be a case to be made for biology playing a part in the beginning of gendered division of labor, biology alone does not determine nor explain why women occupy a subordinate position in capitalist society, or indeed any class society where women occupy such a position.Ā This is not to mention the vague ways in which ābiologyā is often appealed to when putting forth such claims about the oppression of women.Ā It is not āself-evidentā or ācommon senseā that the division of labor between men and women (and indeed, even the mere existence of those two categories) is natural; even if it were, it is undialectical.Ā Nothing is ājust so,ā it is a product of what comes before, and gives rise to what comes after.
Biology itself, as mentioned, is also vaguely defined, so much so as to be useless.Ā If by biology we mean āgenetics,ā then the two assumed categories of XY men and XX women are insufficient to explain the other chromosomal configurations which produce perfectly valid people who are still considered men and women.Ā If we instead mean to refer to, say, menstruation and pregnancy as necessary identifiers of womanhood, then sterile women and women who do not menstruate could not count; yet, we still consider them to be women.Ā If, again, we mean gonads, then there are people with both sets, or gonads that do not match what is expected by their secondary sex characteristics.Ā For every biological definition anyone has put forth, one can find plenty of examples of people for who that definition is inconclusive.Ā These indistinct definitions leave these people having to defend their identity; if biological differences were so clear, these defenses would not be necessary.Ā Furthermore, biological definitions of sex are not consistentāwhat is implied physically by āwomanā or āmanā is not consistent between people or between periods in history.Ā The notion of sex, like gender, is a product of its time.
The notion of fundamental sexual difference, that is, biology determining society and morality, is not even very old in the first place.Ā It is a relatively new idea.Ā The two-sex model was predated by the Galenic one-sex model, asserting women as an āinversionā of men, lacking āvital heatā.Ā That is to say, women were defined by their lack.Ā There was an inherent essence of āmanhoodā that defined men positively, as possessing an innate characteristic which made them men; it would not be until the advent of the two-sex model that āscienceā would come to regard women and men as biological categories.Ā Notably, these categories purported to explain the dominant social phenomena regarding men and women (sexism, to be blunt) as a natural consequence of biology.Ā In short, the notion of ābiologyā was used to justify existing systems.
This is, as many Marxist-Leninists (and even non-communists, to be fair) understand, the role of the intellectual class as they are employed by the ruling class in any class society; the legitimization of the existing system through science, religion, philosophy, and so on.Ā While any given intellectual may not do this, the ruling class always rewards those who work in this way.Ā Ideas which uphold the system upon which the ruling class justifies their existence and maintains their supremacy are rewarded and propagated; ideas which contradict these are suppressed if they are discovered, else they are left to eke out a minimal acceptance in society at large.Ā Intellectual output is not totally neutral, and often has this incentive from above to support the system.Ā This output also has a large role in generating the ācommon senseā of the day; that is, common sense is simply the default, shaped at least in part by the ruling class, in absence of personal experience which contradicts it.Ā This is how one should look at the biological determinist perspective; the science does not support it, and the idea did not even come around until fairly recently in human history.
II. Division of gender is division of labor
Anthropological studies strongly contradict the notion that labor had always been divided in a gendered way.Ā That is, it disputes Engelsā notion that procuring the necessities of life (read: productive labor) was the role of the man, and that this had simply always been the case.Ā Instead, productive and reproductive labor was more equally spread among all members of early human societies.Ā The family as we know it had not even begun to materialize, as mating was only very loosely restricted at the time.Ā Monogamy was nowhere close.Ā In this sense, women taking on more of the reproductive labor makes some sense, as it was impossible to know for certain who oneās father wasābut it was certain who the mother was.Ā However, this does not imply that reproductive labor was always relegated to the women; as stated above, anthropological studies demonstrate that labor was much more equally divided in early humanityās development.
Even as recently as feudal Europe, women had not yet been forced fully into their current subservient role.Ā While the old matriarchal system of lineage had or was giving way to patriarchal lineage, women still had some degree of autonomy with regards to their access and ownership, limited as it may have been, to the means of subsistence and production.Ā Men had gained the right to pass property down to their own children, but he did not own it in the sense we think of today.Ā In other words, men had changed how property was passed down, but not fundamentally how property was owned, which was still collectively, by the family.Ā He could not yet leverage this state of things into a totally dominant class position.
āTraditionalā gender roles as we understand them had not yet crystallized at the time when the rising bourgeois classes in feudal society were, crudely speaking, privatizing all the land and means of production.Ā They were transforming common property into private property, into capital; in doing so, they were depriving the peasantry of access to this property and relegating them to wage labor.Ā This was a marked difference from the old system, by which a family (not to be confused with the modern ānuclearā conception of the family) could reasonably accumulate additional wealth in their usage of this common property.Ā The upcoming bourgeois classes sought to appropriate this property, and the surplus that was generated through labor done on ātheirā property would also be appropriated.
Obviously, this upset the peasantry.
This is not to say that feudal society was egalitarian in any sense of the word.Ā What is important here is to see the transition from early manās communal, roughly egalitarian distribution of productive and reproductive labor, to todayās gendered roles dividing āmasculineā productive labor from āfeminineā reproductive labor.Ā This transition necessarily implies a transformation at some point from the unity of production and reproduction to the division of production and reproduction.Ā Thus, gender roles cannot possibly extend back indefinitely in humanityās past.
The crystallization of the basis for this distinction happened generally during the period of primitive accumulation mentioned above.Ā The peasantry, now stripped of the commons they had been accustomed to, resisted this change, and the rising bourgeois classes had to divide the peasantry against itself.Ā The creeping changes towards patriarchal systems of lineage and inheritance had given men leverage over women, but not yet total control.Ā Backed up by religious institutions, sweeping attacks against womenās control over their reproductive capabilities were made.Ā This coincides with the witch hunts of the 15-1600s and it was through this process that reproductive labor was divested from productive labor in its entirety.
The bourgeois classes, which were emerging out of the feudal society of the time, needed laborers to work on their property.Ā While before, as mentioned, families would keep the surplus wealth produced by their labor, now the bourgeois classes would appropriate that surplus.Ā Only productive labor, labor which would now generate surplus value for the bourgeois classes would be of any value to them.Ā Reproductive laborāchild rearing, housekeeping, etcāproduces no surplus value, and as such is worthless to capital.Ā However, reproductive labor is obviously not something you can do away with as a society.Ā This task had to be assigned to someone, and women were the gender created by class society that would be responsible for this āworthlessā reproductive labor.
This is obviously not to say that women were created by capitalism.Ā However, the genderāthe set of expectations, their roleāwas crystallized in this transition phase.Ā The role of reproductive labor was to now support the manās productive labor; productive labor, in turn, was now in service of the bourgeois classes and their desire to accumulate wealth.Ā By turning women and men against one another, whether through accusations of witchcraft or other diabolic practices, the rising bourgeois was able to defuse the resistance by dividing productive labor, which it valued, from reproductive labor, which it found worthless, and privileging men with the ārightā to earn subsistence from ātheirā property.Ā Women, on the other hand, were made dependent on the earnings of men, and were not compensated for the very real work they were doing.Ā They were reduced to supporting the working men.
In other words, men became the ābreadwinnersā, while women became the āhousekeepersā.
III. The function of the divide within capitalism
In the previous section, I briefly laid out the evolution of gender roles.Ā While a crude approximation, it lays out the idea that the unity of production and reproduction gave way to the separation of the two, and that women were saddled with the latter, along with some general reasons for the selection of women for this role.Ā Additionally, it is possible to begin to see gendered oppression in capitalism as not just an unfortunate remnant of a darker time, but as a foundational contradiction within capitalism.Ā Sexism is not a vestige, it is a feature.
It is one thing to see the gender binary as inherent to capitalism, but what is its function?Ā In the last section, I laid out the basic antagonism.Ā In order to retain control over the means of production, and therefore economic supremacy, it was necessary to pacify the large majority of the population by turning them against one another.Ā By state-sanctioned violence against women, women were forced into the economically subordinate position of unpaid reproductive labor in support of menās productive labor.Ā This set men into the economically privileged position, effectively ābribingā them into complicity with the bourgeoisie.
Antagonisms such as this one are how bourgeois society keeps workers fighting each other instead of challenging the capitalist system; by effectively ālayeringā exploitation, some parts of the working class benefit from the worse exploitation of the people below them, creating an economic incentive to defend the status quo.Ā This arrangement is then legitimized by religion, science, and other parts of the societal superstructure to provide an additional social incentive to maintain oneās designated position in society.Ā Without antagonisms like these, (race is the another major antagonism among the working class) the working class would quickly ascertain the nature of their collective exploitation and turn against the bourgeoisie.
Additionally, as stated before, capitalism only values certain kinds of labor.Ā Only labor that can increase the value of existing capital is valued by the bourgeoisie.Ā Labor which only maintains itself, that is, reproductive labor, has no direct value to capital.Ā Reproductive labor itself can be thought of in two major ways: the daily āmaintenanceā of existing labor, that is, ensuring the continued capacity of existing laborers to perform labor; and the generational replacement of laborers by way of child-birth.Ā This labor is necessary for the continued existence of the working class that capital requires, but it is reduced to ānaturalā work that merits no direct compensation, and it is women as a whole who are expected to perform this labor.
However, this supporting labor does have a cost.Ā The economic unit of capitalism is not the individual, after all; it is the family as a whole.Ā Man, wife, and children all require basic subsistence, at a minimum, in order to reproduce the labor power that is valuable to the capitalists.Ā The wage the traditional bread-winning working man receives must therefore also pay for the continued subsistence of his entire family.Ā This was not always the case; early industrialization replaced costly men with cheap women and children.Ā This system could not last, however; the long hours and dangerous conditions threatened the reproduction of labor power by pulling women and children out of the family home and killing them off at an alarming rate.
This exploitation was an attack on the entire class as a whole, but labor-aristocratic leadership convinced many men that their jobs were instead being threatened by the employment of the traditionally subservient women and children of the family unit, rather than the attack by capitalism upon the working class as a whole.Ā The aforementioned family wage rectified this problem in a way that was suitable to capitalism; the man was put back in his ārightfulā place as head of the family, and the wages he earned were now sufficient to ensure that women could return to domestic servitude without worry.Ā This element of sexism, as that sense of being āmaster of the houseā can be thought of as the replacement for property that would have ensured his control in previous modes of production.
In this way, womenās societal role as the gender responsible for the reproductive labor can be made more specific; it is her role to perform this duty within the family as a unit.Ā This is where the specific distinction between the role of women and men under capitalism can be brought to light; as stated before, she bears the responsibility of reproducing labor power.Ā This reproduction of labor power, while indeed being labor itself, is not labor that produces value, and therefore cannot produce surplus value.Ā Her labor is not governed by this law of value because it must be done regardless of the current demand for labor power, as this labor is necessary for survival.
She is, therefore, not exploited by capital in the strictest sense.Ā She does produce use-value in the home, but her labor is removed from direct participation in value production (what I have called āproductive laborā) with regards to capital.Ā It is in this way that her assigned role is an oppressive oneāshe is reliant on her husbandās direct participation with value production to acquire the means of subsistence from him.Ā Obviously, women do perform wage labor in capitalism, often for poor wages or only in part-time employment, but she is saddled with the burden of providing domestic, reproductive labor in addition to the wage labor she performs.Ā It is the notion that her immediate priority is domestic labor, rather than wage labor, that capitalism takes advantage of in these circumstances.
In addition to this, womenās societal obligation to perform domestic labor, often at the expense of productive wage labor, serves another function within capitalism: its need for unemployment.Ā Unemployment serves not only to ensure a āreserveā supply of labor power in times of crisis, it also serves to create competition between workers, which gives a strong incentive to workers to accept poorer wages and conditions lest they be replaced by someone else who will.
While this does not cover the function extensively, it is sufficient to see the basics upon which the entire sexist system of oppression is formed.Ā Of note is that capitalism needs to maintain this system so as to suppress the idea that it is societyās responsibility to provide this service rather than women; however, it is also constantly subjecting the family unit to upheaval. It both requires the family as a unit, but wants no part in sustaining it economically; it needs women to take up the burden of sustaining work rather than make demands of the bourgeoisie to provide these services to her and her family.
The fundamental contradiction, as with all others in any class society, must be papered over with ideology that masks the contradiction so as to prevent consciousness within the exploited class(es) of people.Ā Gender roles, in this sense, are that ideology that sustains the family as a unit which is necessary for the exploitation by capital, and the ideology that exploits women by chaining them to the drudgery of domestic labor.
IV. How LGBT+ people cross the divide
Once you accept the formation of gender roles as constructs beneficial to capitalism, and understand their basic function within it, it is possible to demonstrate the connection of LGBT+ persons to this construct.Ā Specifically, LGBT+ persons, in some way or another, directly challenge either the gender roles inherent to capitalism, or the normative sexuality it imposes.
Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and any other persons with non-heteronormative sexualities confront this by defying the traditional gender roles within their relationships.Ā (They may also defy these roles individually, but this is the more notable point of defiance for our purposes.)Ā For instance, a relationship between two men necessitates that at least one of them defies the traditional role of producer.Ā In a relationship between two women, similarly, at least one of them must defy the traditional role of homemaker.Ā This challenges the necessity of gender roles; if this couple can do well enough for themselves while rejecting the heteronormative gender roles that define the concept of the modern family, how necessary are these roles?Ā This is a direct blow to the ideology which props up the gendered division of labor by demonstrating that these roles are, effectively optional, which weakens the superstructure that sustains these gender roles against the interests of proletarians (and the proletariat as a whole, for that matter).
Transgender individuals defy gender roles in a similar way, but on the individual level; they reject the role specifically assigned to them.Ā In their rejection of their assigned gender, they reject the role thrust upon them corresponding to that gender; either the role of producer or the role of reproducer.Ā Assigned-male-at-birth trans people are damaging to the patriarchal system by rejecting this āmanlyā role, which throws the dividing line into question.Ā Similarly, assigned-female-at-birth trans people damage this by āusurpingā (which I mean here in the driest possible sense) the role of men in patriarchy.Ā Non-binary trans folk pose an additional challenge to gender roles; they cannot even be reconciled with the gender binary.Ā All trans people therefore challenge the ideology surrounding gender roles by discarding their assigned gender role, in part or in whole, and some even discard the notion of gender altogether.
Additionally, asexual individuals challenge gender roles by refusing in some way to participate in the generational reproductive cycle; they do not form relationships and sustain families (and therefore produce future labor power) in the way that the capitalist system requires.Ā They also reject the ācompulsoryā nature of normative sexuality, demonstrating that the desire to rear children and/or even the desire for sex at all is not universal.
The common thread that ties all LGBT+ people together is their collective challenge to normative gender roles and sexuality that capitalism relies upon.Ā While individual LGBT+ people may not challenge these significantly, or only bits of one or the other, collectively, LGBT+ people throw the necessity of these systems and all their associated baggage (appearance, behavior, etc) into question.Ā This poses a threat to capitalism, which relies upon these systems (among other systems of oppression like racial oppression) to sustain itself.Ā The most important takeaway is that the source of LGBT+ oppression is the same source as womenās oppression.Ā These struggles only appear to be disconnected when the class element and systemic analysis of capitalism is omitted.
PART TWOāRebuttal to the CPGB-ML
With this, the connection between the LGBT+ struggle and the class struggle as a whole is established.Ā While not an exhaustive proof, the link is clear enough between the two, and we can move on to tackling the CPGB-ML, and by extension, those that hold similar views.Ā Additionally, while the link between the class struggle and LGBT+ struggle has been established, LGBT+ oppression and its sources have ramifications beyond simple class issues; they intersect with imperialism, racism, and other struggles that must also be vigorously opposed by any communist person or party.
-Considering the previous, in what ways is the CPGB-ML et al deficient in their stances on trans rights/idpol? (fetish of the average worker and class reductionism, rejection of grassroots in favor of broad appeal, failure to apply dialectics in favor of vulgar materialism/idealism, simple strategic failure to ally with oppressed peoples,Ā etc)
-Conclude: What is the role of both communists and the LGBT community on this front?
I. Marxism is not vulgar materialism
The most notable of the failures of the CPGB-ML is their dismissal of not only identity politics, but of the theory they profess to hold so dear.Ā They make many references to material reality, materialism, and even make occasional mention of dialectics, but make no effort to utilize dialectics (or even materialism in some cases) in their analysis of LGBT+ issues.Ā Indeed, analysis of any kind, when it is done, is done in only the crudest possible fashion, without actually engaging with the history of LGBT+ struggles.Ā No effort is made to engage with the established research nor to perform research of their own; they simply assert that what is commonly accepted as ārealityā itself serves the function of a materialist analysis.Ā But of course, we are not materialists, we are dialectical materialistsāour understanding of what is material must be mediated through history.Ā Without engaging with the history at all, can you arrive at anything other than idealistic, and therefore deficient understandings?Ā Lewis Hodder writes,
āMembers of the party have praised ārealismā, assuming that reference to what is ārealā, ie material, fulfils the function of negation and of dialectical materialism itself. Yet, this does not come up against anything that exists but merely seeks to replicate it and keep things as they are; in assuming that it has established a natural history, it looks at the end product of the development of material conditions within capitalism and seeks to maintain it on the pretence of fighting idealism and supposes that it has established a positivist science out of dialectical materialism.ā
In essence, the party has reduced Marxism to vulgar materialism.Ā Assumptions are not grounded in research, they do not perform any of their own.Ā They do not contemplate and expose the contradictions withing LGBT+ struggles, there are simply assumed to be none of note.Ā Marxist theory alone does not provide answers to these questions; it is only a tool for analysis.Ā Without researching the contradictions of capitalism, Marx himself would have never been able to write Capital; it was only through reckoning with the development of capitalism through the lens of dialectical materialism that he was able to discern its workings and offer an insightful analysis of it.
For example, in āThe reactionary nightmare of gender fluidity,ā the speaker for the CPGB-ML says,
āAre āsexā and āgenderā synonyms? Well they are synonyms, but a certain group of academics in the seventies in the United States decided that they werenāt synonyms. They were going to use āgenderā in their own way; they were going to use āgenderā to mean the social construct of behaviour surrounding what was expected of the biological differentiation among human beings (men and women).
But biological differentiation between male and female is a real thing. It doesnāt just exist in humanity, it exists in many species throughout the natural world.ā
This is not a slip-up or simple glossing over of facts; this is a naked assertion that sex is ābiological differentiationā, whatever that is supposed to mean, without justification.Ā Furthermore, is there any reason we ought not to differentiate between biology and behavior?Ā That this is ridiculous to them insists they hold that sex and gender are unified, that is, that biology and gender (along with all the expected behaviors that entails) are inextricably linked.Ā A cursory search of the existing research, or even the relevant historical science, would reveal that this is not only untrue, but a relatively new concept, as I demonstrated near the beginning of this piece.
The CPGB-ML cannot move past this ācommon senseā understanding of sexuality and gender.Ā The belief that men and women are immutable biological categories, that their expected behaviors are direct products of the differences between these categories; these are simply elevated to principle.Ā However, we cannot simply assert that this is true; we must, as has been repeatedly stated, engage with the material through theory.Ā They dismiss the research off-hand as the product of some bourgeois academics, and conduct none of their own.Ā That this is pure arrogant idealism is not merely an insult being slung at the party: they openly reject the notion of even considering the distinction between sex and gender.
As Marxists, we cannot dismiss things out of hand and make assertions in place of hard research and study.Ā Having read Marx alone does not empower us to speak on specific issues; again, Marxism is simply a lens through which to examine material reality and construct a coherent narrative.Ā Without doing that examination, you cannot hope to arrive at a useful, much less accurate understanding of reality.Ā The CPGB-ML makes this clear; by refusing to engage in this careful analysis, they end up siding with evangelicals in their conception of LGBT+ people!Ā Though we get the benefit of a through-gritted-teeth acknowledgment, they refuse to stand with us; we are to be contented with āequal rightsā as a natural consequence of socialism.Ā One need only to refer to Cuba or the Soviet Union to understand how ānaturalā LGBT+ rights are under socialism.Ā These rights must be actively campaigned for by challenging the institutions that withhold them, and the CPGB-ML flatly refuses to do so.
II. The obsession with the āaverage workerā
There is also a very class reductionist element at play within the party.Ā Several articles devote no small amount of time dismissing issues of identity in favor of a broad-base appeal to the working class as a whole.Ā Only strictly class issues are given much attention, as it is asserted that the working class can only be appealed to on the basis that āan injury to one is an injury to all.āĀ One need only consider history to see that this approach has never worked; this approach does not challenge the divisions present in society, and it is obvious to see that this approach never can.Ā Only when the people have been connected to the broader working class through their own experience can they understand their place within it and begin to develop a class consciousness; without making this connection from their place within society to the class struggle first, they will not see themselves as part of the class as a whole.
Even the CPGB-MLās own iconography represents this, to a degree: the hammer, representing the urban industrial worker, and the sickle, representing the rural peasantry.Ā When Lenin appealed to the peasantry, did he simply appeal to them as workers?Ā Did he do this for the industrial workers in the same way?Ā He did not; he appealed to them by connecting their respective grievances to the greater struggle against capitalism.Ā This is the important part; one must actually acknowledge the differences within the working class and engage with these particulars before the working class can be united.Ā There is no one-size-fits-all approach to building consciousness.Ā People do not see themselves as in the same boat as others; capitalism has trained them not to.Ā It is true that the class struggle is the critical struggle that we must all actively participate in, however, this struggle takes on a variety of forms that must be shown to be just reflections of the class struggle.Ā Declarations do not convince people, demonstrations do.
Their insistence that the āaverage workerā will reject them if they were to support trans people is also a puzzling stance to take.Ā Are we to believe that communist movements are built by simply appealing to the sensibilities of the working class?Ā Are we chasing votes or are we building a revolution?Ā What are we doing if not challenging the misconceptions that keep us in servitude?Ā By working to mirror this caricature of the working class as closely as possible, they just replicate the most reactionary elements within their own party.Ā That this caricature is ultimately just a vision of what they think the working class ought to be, is evident when you consider how consistently this vision of the working class lines up perfectly with their unwillingness to engage with LGBT+ struggles and their broad-appeal rejection of grassroots practice.Ā Their supposedly objective vision of society ordains them as the vanguard party; that the working class will come to them is treated as a given.
III. The intersection of LGBT+ and other oppressive systems
Capitalist nations have not contented themselves with the exploitation of their own people.Ā Imperialism, often called the highest stage of capitalism, has its fingers around the entire globe.Ā Where it may use a softer grip in the mother country, in its colonies and semi-colonies, brutal exploitation generates super-profits which are used to provide luxury commodities for the homeland.Ā Oppression is intense in these subjugated nations, and what would be considered unthinkable brutality here is the norm there.Ā In addition, racial oppression divides even the working class of the mother country.Ā In the United States, for example, African slaves were brutally exploited, along with the indigenous peoples in the āNew Worldā, in order to serve the white settler-colonial nation; an exploitative relationship that continues largely unabated to this very day.Ā In these cases, the imperialist power imposes its own norms upon the native populace, destroying their own norms and culture.Ā Criminalizing ādeviantā behavior paves the way for the imperialistsā oppressive systems by force.
These peoples are subjected to the imperialist powerās standards of beauty and behavior, the imperialist powerās religion is imposed upon them, and all attempts by the colonized peoples to retain their own sense of identity is savagely repressed with state-sanctioned violence.Ā This happens not only abroad, but at home, where racial minorities are subjected to white standards.Ā It hardly takes any time to find an example of, for instance, a black womanās womanhood being questioned on spurious grounds.Ā Examples of repression of indigenous peoplesā familial structures, sexual practices, gender expressions, and so on are commonplace.Ā The Indian hijra under British imperialism, homosexuality of some indigenous American peoples under Spainās genocidal practicesātake even the example of Caster Semenya for a contemporary example of racialized misogyny.
Deviations by non-white people in the imperialist powers of today from Eurocentric ideals about gender and sexuality are not tolerated.Ā While the superficial justifications may vary in any case (religious objections and conflicts abound), the result is that the gender roles and compulsory heteronormative sexuality under capitalist society is imposed upon the colonized peoplesāoften violently, especially in the Third World.Ā The CPGB-ML has asserted that theĀ
āwestern imperialist bourgeoisie has suddenly discovered and embraced gay and transgender rights, which only yesterday it was vigorously opposingā¦ the advantage to the bourgeoisie of its newly-discovered enthusiasm for gay rights is that it can use them to castigate oppressed countries who stick to traditional religious prejudices...ā
This preposterous statement implies that they have somehow failed to notice that the western imperialist bourgeoisie has far more often castigated oppressed countries for sticking to traditional sexual and gendered practices that defy heteronormative gender roles and sexuality.Ā That Saudi Arabia is spared our unholy gay bourgeois wrath has everything to do with Saudi Arabiaās ruling class generally co-operating with the imperialist United States and nothing to do with āenthusiasm for gay rightsā the bourgeois has supposedly developed over the last 40 years.Ā This enthusiasm does not exist; it is an illusion that is created by elevating the preconceived notion of LGBT+ rights as ābourgeois ideologyā into a principle, and applying that to their analysis of capitalism and imperialism.Ā This blinds the party to the very real oppression abroad and how it compounds with racial oppression at home, a blindness that could be alleviated by engaging critically with the āmaterial realityā that they appeal to so often.
This serves to show that a rejection of identity wholesale in favor of crude, purist notions of class inevitably produces a deficient analysis of capitalism and imperialism.Ā There is not just āthe working classā, it is a diverse group whose members face differing kinds of oppression.Ā This oppression still comes from capitalism itself, which liberal identity politics does not recognize; however, the oppression is directed along lines of identity, which the CPGB-ML does not acknowledge with respect to LGBT+ rights.
IV. Strategic failures as a result of bad theory
The preceding sections provide examples of the deficiency of the CPGB-MLās stances.Ā These stances, being built on shaky, idealistic foundations, are divorced from the theory that is foundational to Marxism-Leninism; they do not provide accurate assessments of the struggles they speak authoritatively about.Ā Beyond this, these stances also affect the strategy the party employs in its efforts to build class consciousness, and by extension, revolution.
I have already touched on the first strategic failure; that is, the refusal to go grassroots in favor of a broad-base approach.Ā By this, I mean that the party restricts themselves to appealing only to the working class as a whole.Ā I have already demonstrated the problem here, as well; workers must be engaged with on issues specific to them in order to bring them into the movement.Ā People form their understanding with the conditions in which they live, in combination with the ideology they hold.Ā The ideology they hold, by default, is typically bourgeois ideology in nature; this ideology must be challenged.Ā In this respect, the partyās stance on identity politics is correct: identity politics as an ideology is bourgeois in nature.Ā The problem with their approach to identity politics is that they also reject the underlying conditions which produces it, that is to say, they reject not only the ideology which shapes identity politics but the grievances of the people who āpracticeā it.
The obvious problem here is that the grievances of these people are very real grievances.Ā The CPGB-MLās rejection of these grievances stems from their inability or unwillingness to engage with the grievances directly; that is, they do not engage in any kind of analysis of the issues plaguing groups that practice identity politics.Ā Whether this is because of prejudice or ignorance, it is hard to say, and frankly kind of irrelevant.
However, to repeat: their rejection of the ideology behind identity politics is valid.Ā Their fault comes from only engaging with the superficial ideology and none of the material conditions underlying it.Ā While āidpol-ersā hold both the ideology and grievances as legitimate, and the CPGB-ML denies the legitimacy of both, the truth is that the underlying conditions are valid (as I demonstrated to some degree in Part One), while the ideology is rotten.Ā By exposing the contradictions in the ideology, it would be reveal the deficiency of omitting the class element; in returning the class element to the struggles, these struggles are not denied, but justified and supported in the larger context of class struggle under capitalism.
It is this kind of dismissal that characterizes the entire CPGB-MLās approach to building socialism.Ā By rejecting the opportunity to engage with the various underlying circumstances of workers directly, the opportunity to connect their distinct struggles to the larger class struggle is lost.Ā This direct engagement cannot be skipped over, and it cannot be done in broad strokes.Ā Whether it be challenging identity politics, or convincing white and black workers to unite as a class, without going to these people directly, engaging with their struggles, and connecting these struggles to one another by way of including the class element, the movement will never be able to take place.Ā When you engage in this broad strokes approach and refuse to get down and ādo the dirty workā as it were, you fail to bring about the class consciousness required for revolution.
V. A brief critique of identity politics
This all being said, the last elephant in the room is identity politics itself.Ā I will specifically critique it on the LGBT+ angle, as it is more relevant to the piece.Ā However, the arguments here will more or less hold for any other struggle being carried out through the lens of bourgeois identity politics.
As Lewis Hodder writes in āInside the last days of the CPGB-MLā, the problem with identity politics is that:
āThis is the failure of identity politics, that the immediacy of identity is elevated into a principle; it is without concrete content and remains indeterminate, along with all of the contradictions that manifest itself from taking either race or gender as a self-evident apparition and the defining factor of oppression.ā
This is to say, the problem with identity politics is not the validity of the underlying identities, which the CPGB-ML rejects as well.Ā The problem is that this āelevationā of identity into a principle is without justification.Ā This is where the CPGB-ML comes close to getting it right, in saying that it is idealism; liberal identity politics is idealistic.Ā Furthermore, this elevation of identity into principle also obscures the real source of oppressionābourgeois societyās need to maintain oppressive structures to maintain capitalismāby asserting that the identity itself is the crux of oppression.Ā It is this assertion that leads liberal identity politics down the road of reformism: they do not see their oppression as an inherent contradiction of the system, which does not compel them to challenge that system.
Instead, they content themselves with concessions, and long, arduous struggle to acquire them.Ā One of these concessions is that bourgeois members of these oppressed identities are given a modicum of power.Ā The problem of liberal identity politics, then, becomes this: the drive to overthrow the system is suppressed in favor of requesting limited participation in the system.Ā This is similar to the liberal clamor for āfemale CEOsā, in which success within the oppressive system is held up as a virtue.Ā It is clear to us that no amount of female CEOs or gay representatives will fix the true problem, but as identity politics can only associate identity with oppression directly, success in the system is treated as proof that the system is no longer (as) oppressive.Ā Of course, these bourgeois LGBT+ people are economically removed from the proletarian struggle; their economic interests, which require them to exploit the labor of the proletariat, suppress their identification with their proletarian LGBT+ fellows.
This granting of certain oppressed peoples the āprivilegeā of becoming an exploiter themselves gives them this economic incentive to oppose revolution, and content themselves with slow, marginal legal reforms, so as to not challenge their economic supremacy.Ā They are still LGBT+ themselves, no doubt: the problem is that by placing them in an economic position that relies on the exploitative system, they come to justify the exploitative system, and betray the best interests of the LGBT+ community as a whole.Ā Of course this is not a problem for capitalism: it is quite handy to have members of an oppressed group justify the system that keeps them oppressed in the first place.
Thus, our rejection of identity politics has to be along these lines: we must insist on the class element being of primary consideration in relation to our individual struggles, we must insist on the overthrow of the system and never content ourselves with meager reforms, and finally, we must never allow bourgeois members of our own communities to divert us from the path of revolution in order to prop up their own exploitative position.Ā We should see identity politics as a problem, to be sure; but it should also be an opportunity to connect disparate struggles to the larger struggle of capitalist class society, and by engaging with the underlying conditions unique to these various identities, we can create for them meaningful connection to that larger struggle.Ā Only through this engagement can we truly uncouple LGBT+ oppression, as well as all other oppressive systems, from opportunist tendencies within our movements and truly unite to create a society in which oppression can finally be ended.
In this essay, I have provided my justification for LGBT+ struggles as class struggles, and spoken of the deficiency of the approach of the CPGB-ML with regards to these struggles.Ā It is my hope that with this essay, I have demonstrated the need for communists to connect to the struggles of people directly; that communists must stand with oppressed people actively, and not merely passively accept them; that communists have a duty to engage with the scientific aspects of our ideology, and not merely the theoretical abstract aspects; and finally, that as communists, we cannot allow ourselves to become complacent, and must always subject ourselves to criticism, so that we never fall into the trap of assuming that the revolution will come to us.Ā It will only come when people can personally connect to the wider struggle, and to this end, it is our duty to stand with all oppressed peoples, to vigorously defend their struggles, and to bring their plight to the forefront of any action we take.Ā In this way only can we build the trust needed for the formation of a revolutionary proletariat, and finally bring about the overthrow of the system that exploits us all.
Ā 1. Excerpt of a speech given by (person name) at the 8th Congress; this section about why gay rights is not a class issue according to the CPGB-ML. https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2019/04/20/news/why-gay-rights-is-not-a-class-issue/
Ā 2. Excerpt of a speech given by (person name) at the 8th Congress; this excerpt about transgender people and gender fluidity https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2019/03/23/news/the-reactionary-nightmare-of-gender-fluidity/
Ā 3. Excerpt of a speech given by (person name) at the 8th Congress; this excerpt about how āidentity politicsā supposedly divides the working class https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/12/07/news/the-only-thing-that-unites-us-is-class/
Ā 1. Saturday 3 July 2004 ā Party founded at Saklatvala Hall in Southall.Ā After expulsion from the Socialist Labour Party run by Arthur Scargill over clashes between the social-democrat wing and the Marxist-Leninist wing, some ex-SLP members create the CPGB-ML, citing the SLPās support for the āimperialist Labour partyā as one of the chief reasons for creating the new party.
Ā 2. Monday 26 February 2018 ā Red Fightback, another Marxist-Leninist organization in Great Britain, posts an article detailing their stance on LGBT oppression in capitalism.
Ā 3. Early 2018 ā Lewis Hodder, among others in the CPGB-ML, encounter resistance by the Central Committee regarding transphobia and homophobia within the party. Hodder is prohibited from attending the 8th Congress (see September entry, below)
Ā 4. 4 June 2018 ā CPGB-ML Twitter account links the above Red Fightback article, receiving a great deal of backlash in the replies.
Ā 5. July-August 2018 ā Hodder begins work on an essay attempting to āset a baseline of theory that would allow these problems [on trans/homophobia and other reactionary sentiments] to be overcome,ā that would not be finished until April of the following year.
Ā 6. September 2018 ā CPGB-ML holds their 8th Congress, stating āfive months of discussions and inner-party debateā in preparation, and that āMotions were submitted from around the country on housing, education, identity politics, racism, employment rights and a great many other issues...ā
Ā 7. CPGB-ML passes Motion 8 (see References document for full details) during their 8th Congress, enacting a rule that makes any āpropagation of identity politicsā grounds for expulsion from the CPGB-ML.
Ā 8. Party founder and chair Harpal Brar steps down after 14 years, replaced by Ella Rule. Zane Carpenter and Joti Brar (daughter of Harpal Brar) elected as vice-chairs.
Ā 9. October-December 2018 ā Transcriptions of speeches given at the 8th Congress are posted in quick succession, all centering around identity politics and making frequent reference to LGBT rights.
Ā 10. December 2018 ā An article is posted briefly covering some changes to the partyās tactics and organization; of note, membership purges are admitted to in the then recent past.
Ā 11. 29 April 2019 ā Lewis Hodder (see above), now former CPGB-ML member, posts an essay entitled āInside the last days of the CPGB-MLā on Ebb Magazine, citing clashes with the CPGB-ML Central Committee that resulted in his barring from the 8th Congress, and the resultant fallout from inter-party fighting in the middle of 2018.
This timeline is not totally complete: some articles and videos that were relevant to this have been deleted or are no longer available due to missing archives.Ā However, it serves to show the relatively brief, intense period of vicious transphobia and homophobia by the partyāthe developments and later purges of the part occur over the course of less than a year.
