*ḱh₂méṛh₂s kitroǵénh₁h₂

So I originally wrote this post on some niche science fiction forum somewhere in response to a common misunderstanding regarding the persecution of homosexuality in the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Because of this, it is possible that parts of it may read a little awkwardly, though I have generally tried to edit it, so it can stand on its own as an essay. As such, I apologize if some parts come off like they are responding to someone else, or shadow boxing:

The conventional narrative of East Germany being a state in which homophobia continued to flourish, hidden by an otherwise superficial anti-Fascist veneer is inaccurate. The popular historiography of the former "People's Democracies" and "Marxist-Leninist Republics" frequently misrepresents their complexities, and is rarely free from ideological motivation. In this essay, I do not mean to strip it of such ulterior motives—something I am far from capable of—but at least try to present it a little closer to what life was like. So just to be clear here first: Homosexuality was always, and would always remain, a somewhat taboo and "icky" topic in the GDR's society.

It was a homophobic society, much like the West at the same time, and much like the West remains today, and much like the rest of the eastern bloc at the time. It was awkward, people didn't really know how to relate to it, and it was generally seen as a little abnormal. I am not interested in portraying the GDR as a model for today.

Because of this, both persecution and homophobia were present in the GDR, especially during its earlier days. However, people frequently compare the GDR, not to contemporary Western society, but to an illusion of Western society as it is remembered today. This is an error. This popular memory of contemporary Western society frequently owes more to our modern impressions of life in the West than it does to the far more repressive and transitional society of the Cold War era. Furthermore, it misunderstands or elides the differences between the atomized mode of living created by a liberal capitalist state, and the collective mode of living created by a Marxist-Leninist-leaning democratic centralist party-state.

While the existence of StaSi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit - the Ministry for State Security) infiltration of LGBT+ groups in the GDR period is undeniable, responses to civil rights campaigns were parochial, far from monolithic, and frequently at odds with one another. What I am to get at here is not the assertion that the GDR spied at its homosexual and transgender citizens, is basically trivially true but that it actively sought to undermine them. To do this, I would like to launch into a greater explanation of Marxism in general. To do that, we need to understand some concepts first.

The watchword here, is not homophobic persecution, but "organizational life". Organizational life is a term found in older North Korean use—where the term is chojik saenghwal—referring to voluntary participation in the honeycomb-like structure of organizations, structures, associations and so on affiliated with the Party, which was appropriated by the historian Suzy Kim to describe a general phenomenon in Marxist-Leninist states. To understand organizational life, we need to understand Marxism first, and to do that we need to understand liberalism. In On the Jewish Question, Karl Marx asserts that:

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.

To my knowledge, basically all Marxist critiques of liberalism go back to this ur-critique. To Marx, history is what we call "dialectical", which means that every society is a product of a sort of dialogue, produced by opposition between two dominant forces. This "dialogue" (or "dialectic" for fancy people) is commonly called a contradiction, and the tension ("sharpening") of this contradiction is the central driver of historical progress. To Marx, we can say that human society can be modelled as a building of sorts. Figuratively, this building consists of a base, which it is built on, and a superstructure, which is everything else.

Quite obviously, the superstructure is built on top of the base. Now, if this was a house, the superstructure might be built of wood, of steel, of concrete and all sorts of other materials. Some of it is essential, some of it is just bells and whistles, but regardless of what it is, it is going to fall apart without the foundation—the base. This does not mean that the foundation is superfluous. I cannot stress that enough. Even in a house, an improperly built superstructure might, for example, place undue weight on one section of the base. In Marxism, this relationship between base and superstructure is used to describe economic relationships.

A common example of vulgar Marxism (i.e. a surface-level misunderstanding of Marxism) is that Marxism only need concern itself with the base and the superstructure will follow. This is not correct. The base shapes, and thus maintains, the superstructure, but the superstructure also maintains, and thus shapes, the base. Now that we understand this basic exposition on Marxism, let's return to liberalism. So, when When Marx tells us, in On the Jewish Question, that the "so-called" rights of man fail to go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, what he obliquely refers to is, of course, a contradiction:

Political emancipation is, at the same time, the dissolution of the old society on which the state alienated from the people, the sovereign power, is based. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word – feudalism. The character of the old civil society was directly political – that is to say, the elements of civil life, for example, property, or the family, or the mode of labor, were raised to the level of elements of political life in the form of seigniory, estates, and corporations. In this form, they determined the relation of the individual to the state as a whole – i.e., his political relation, that is, his relation of separation and exclusion from the other components of society. For that organization of national life did not raise property or labor to the level of social elements; on the contrary, it completed their separation from the state as a whole and constituted them as discrete societies within society. Thus, the vital functions and conditions of life of civil society remained, nevertheless, political, although political in the feudal sense – that is to say, they secluded the individual from the state as a whole and they converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as they converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation. As a result of this organization, the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this unity, the general power of the state, are likewise bound to appear as the particular affair of a ruler and of his servants, isolated from the people. The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which constituted the political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life. A person's distinct activity and distinct situation in life were reduced to a merely individual significance. They no longer constituted the general relation of the individual to the state as a whole. Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general affair of each individual, and the political function became the individual's general function.

Now, I do really apologize for the lengthy quotes, but bear with me here. When Marx describes a "feudal" mode of production, he does not mean feudalism in the sense that historians might talk about feudalism today. This, of course, is fortunate for him, as historians have long established that feudalism, in the sense of a single coherent lord-vassal model of society, simply was never real in the first place, but what actually does he mean then? In Marxism, the feudal mode of production describes an order of society in which the dominant class is one of landlords, who depend on the control of land rents on arable land, and thus the exploitation of the peasants who farmed it to support their military power.

For this reason, Marx called feudalism a "democracy of unfreedom" , characterized by a holistic integration of political and economic life but utterly undemocratic and subject to the whims of militarized landlords. Thus, to Marx, capitalism arises from the resolution of the class struggle between landlord and cultivator, in favour of the landlord's victory through the enclosure of the commons. The resolution of this contradiction produces a class of landless proletarians, whose surplus labour can now enrich the greatest landed proprietors, freeing them to become a mercantile class on profits in textile, corn, meat and diminishing land rents produced via the inflation caused by New World bullion.

Thus, as the nascent bourgeoisie grows rich, and both labourer and landlord are diminished, the migration of that labourer class—alienated from their own land—causes the towns to swell. This is what Marx means when he says that the political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power and raised state affairs to become the affairs of the people [...] abolished the political character of civil society. The "universal rights of man" Marx criticizes are, in fact, themselves characterized by another contradiction immanent within them; the conflict between the rights of the citizen, a member of society, and egoistic man, an individual.

The egoistic, profit-seeking individual is the man of the bourgeoisie, the profit-seeking merchant. It is important to understand that far from characterizing himself purely as an opponent of liberalism here, Marx himself, in fact, writes in the liberal tradition. He happily cites Locke and Rousseau, and in fact in his youth he himself had been a republican and liberal radical. That is not to say that Marx is a liberal, in this sense, but that in his regard, the emancipation of man promised by socialist victory in the class war between proletarian and capitalist is a completion, and not a rejection, of liberalism. Marx elaborates:

Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person. Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his "own powers" as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.

Alienation, as we know, is the diagnosis Marx gave for capitalist society. Under capitalism, the inability of a worker to determine life and liberty; to think for themselves as the determiner of their own actions, their relations with other people; and to use the items and services they produce for their own benefit, leads to their alienation, not just from what they produce, but from the whole activity of labour and production, and their their whole being and essence itself.

Just to be clear. When I say "essence" here, what Marx means is not some abstract human nature, or whatever. Anyone who reads this can surely relate to the sense of exhaustion, of frustration, of rage, helplessness and self-hatred produced by working a dead-end job: Why am I doing this? Is this the rest of my life? Is this really what I exist for? To work for someone else?

In Marxist theory, following the work of Feuerbach, the essence Marx talks about is called Gattungswesen, or "species-being", the nearly unique human ability to labour, not just out of biological need, but creatively, consciously, freely and recreationally for the purpose of expression. That is the essence Marx refers to.

For this reason, Marx was a critic of the selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property — in other words: Attempts to find a natural, human-nature based explanation for this or that phenomenon whose cause is really to be found in the relations and mode of production and property. Marx does not, as such, deny the existence of a human nature, only our ability to know it objectively as social and collective beings. To Marx, any diagnosis of man as naturally egoistic or altruistic reflect, far more than any biological reality, our own current and conditioned existence as beings within a greater economic sphere.

Now, to bring us back to organizational life. As I said, organizational life is a term that comes from the North Korean revolution, and describes the act of participation in the honeycomb-like structure of various volunteer organizations connected to the Party. Capitalism, not "liberalism", fosters competition between individuals and alienates people from being able to understand their dependence on each other, and thus also from each other. For this reason, revolution in the Marxist sense, was understood to not just require a revolution of the public, political, and economic spheres but also of the private sphere of the family and personal living.

It was thought by Marxist revolutionaries that communism would bring about, a collective, shared, and comradely life, and thus reveal the true nature of social revelations. They aimed to pave the way for the emergence of a wholly new form of social life; collective, organizational, and authentic. Marxist-Leninist republics have maintained this honeycomb of collective volunteer structures as part of their attempts to accomplish exactly that.

To a degree, they have not been unsuccessful in this regard. In the alternate socialist modernity of the DPRK, China in the Cultural Revolution, the former USSR, the Eastern Bloc states and yes, indeed, the GDR, organizational life successfully abolished the private sphere. Membership and participation in those communal and social groups, such as trade union committees, worker militias, and all sorts of little citizen's associations is essential to daily living, and so important that many citizens who grew up within it, often speak of missing a communal spirit that used to be there.

This goes for both defectors from North Korea and citizens of the former GDR and USSR. It even goes for my old Armenian linguistics professor who, sometimes, zones out during class and wistfully reminisces of a Soviet society that used to be, even while he himself is nowhere near a communist. This does not make those societies good. Again, I am not saying that the GDR shuld be a model for today, or that the USSR should, or that the DPRK should, or that the Cultural Revolution should. I am just explaining.

Suzy Kim describes how this manifested in practice, at least in the beginning, in North Korea:

Not simply the aggregate effect of individuals, organizational life created different forms of agency that were represented in new forms of discourse and different configurations of time and space. Daily schedules and the pace of work changed as meetings and study sessions had priority over the production line. Communal spaces took on novel significance as Japanese mansions were turned into kindergartens and Shinto shrines became public parks. People now addressed each other as "comrade" rather than with the familial hierarchical terms of appellation. Thus, to be part of a collective and to live an organizational life was to enact the revolution into concrete reality, making the revolution visible through everyday practices. With multiple organizations, it was not always easy juggling and navigating the many responsibilities and duties. But, the relationships between the different organizations, particularly in the early years as they were being defined, show the extent to which these relationships had to be negotiated.

But of course, as is the case with all things, just like not every prescription and suggestion of early liberal political thinkers made it into what we call liberalism today (in De l'esprit de loix Montesquieu was quite favourable toward sortition as a democratic principle, yet we do not see much use of sortition in modern democracies, for example), so communist thinkers came to pick up new principles as a result of the conditioned process of history. They could not simply enact the prescriptions of Marx without considering, and being influenced by their context. Thus, in the early Bolshevik phase of wild experimentation to create the new enlightened society of the lower stage of communism, they too encountered a contradiction of sorts.

Russia, and the former Russian Empire in general of course, was not a very industrialized society, and the urbanization rate was not very high. In addition, to avoid the heavy-handed and murderous apparatus of Tsarist repression, the Bolsheviks had organized themselves into a secretive vanguard party with strict requirements for entry. Thus, once society began to be reorganized along the lines of participatory soviet democracy, the Party was there to supervise it, party cells observing and influencing every step of the ladder of workers' representatives and providing lists to be elected, policies to be enacted and counter-revolution to be suppressed.

What had been meant as a temporary state to overcome, instead, became an influential model for the organization of society, to be emulated by subsequent Marxist-Leninist-leaning republics. After the Stalinist Thermidor, this became intractable. In other words: Vanguard party and organizational life had become inseparable. Because of this, in all subsequent party states, the purpose of organizational life, thus, was to serve as "transmission belts" between the Party and the people. This is the "honeycomb" I have referenced a number of times now, a metaphor I have stolen in a most uncomradely manner from Mary Fulbrook — the author of the marvelous The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker.

The ideal of the Bolsheviks, and of Marxists in general, was to create a society in which the actual national "government" was a tiny group of people, a small committee of elected individuals who would serve on a mostly as-necessary basis on behalf of the people, whereas the rest of the affairs of government could be kept more or less entirely local. Part of this was just a matter of some somewhat underdeveloped theories of political participation; for all of Lenin's insights, for example, he had a very naïve understanding of actual political disagreement, and didn't really think about the possibility of how class-conscious workers might disagree politically with each other like, within their class, after getting rid of the capitalists.

So because of this, in a Marxist-Leninist republic, unlike a liberal democracy or your more conventional absolute monarchy or military dictatorship, it is actually quite difficult to find where the border between "regime" and "people" actually goes, is the thing. In the GDR, to quote Mary Fulbrook (emphases mine), the vast majority of East Germans were caught up in a system in which they had to participate; and by virtue of their participation, they were themselves changed. It was thus, in the end, a dictatorship sustained by the actions and interactions of the vast majority of the population. This was a system that was more like a honeycomb full of criss-crossing little cells than a simple homogeneous pot of 'the people' with a repressive lid, 'the regime', clamped down on it to keep the contents from boiling over. It is crucial to understand the changing roles and relationships within this honeycomb, in which there were so very many functionary positions, both official and honorary, and in which, to get anywhere and make anything of one's life, one had to play by the emergent rules.

This approach to society, systematized like this, is what meant that people had so much less, comparatively, room for deviation from the ordained worldview than people did and do in liberal democracies, and why the penalties for deviance, even unintentional, could be so much greater. But we should not let that blind us to the fact that, as Fulbrook also says, people were not "just" repressed ambiently but also, to some degree, did not merely 'come to terms with' the system, but were actually in some sense constituted by it, their attitudes informed by it; and by their actions they also sustained, reproduced and changed it.

Fulbrook has a little more to say there, so bear with me: To write this into the history of the GDR is neither easy nor uncontroversial; but in the interests of a comprehensive and hence more adequate picture of this society, it is essential. In a sense, it is almost funny, as this brings us back to the Marxist characterization of feudalism as a "democracy of unfreedom" once more. The honeycomb structure of the GDR and the other "people's democracies" was, for lack of a better term, a "participatory dictatorship". This is also why the StaSi could be so large, compared to the Gestapo and many other secret police organizations. It was a "popular" institution, not in the sense of being beloved by the people, but in the sense of being "of" the people. It was a bottom-up panopticon. A little more cynically, we might say that people loved the StaSi as long as it didn't happen to them.

This brings us to homosexuality in the GDR. As I said at the beginning, homosexuality was never "normal" in the GDR. As I also said in the beginning, the GDR was not unique in this regard. Both were deeply homophobic societies, both during the 1950s-1960s, and also the more liberal (lmao) 1970s-1980s. Lest we forget, the AIDS crisis and the US government's systematic willingness to ignore it, and let the "gay disease" do away with the problem at the root, was in that exact era.

By comparison, in that same period, we find strict instructions from the GDR Ministry of Health that homosexuals should, "without any personal discrimination", be permitted to donate blood. Incidentally, in my home country of Denmark, gay and bisexual people were only allowed to serve as blood donors on the same basis as straight people last year. By contrast, in the GDR, homosexuality was never discoursively tied to public health risks, at least not officially. This was the view GDR functionaries and cadres tried to promulgate as well.

The worries of the "People's State" lay entirely in the dimension of a population that was characterized as already being used to "subversive ways of life" and to seeking out anonymity in large towns. The question for the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, in other words, was how to teach a population that rightly knew to avoid the scrutiny of the public eye, how they too could and should participate in the honeycomb of the people's revolution? And for that sake, to what degree could homosexual people participate?

This brings us to an interesting aporia in earlier Marxist thinking. The approach of the Marxist-Leninist republics, and of communists in general before quite recently, was quite honestly relatively naïve. I don't mean that to say that they were stupid, or foolish, or that communism never works, or the myriad host of other things people say. I mean it to say that, as I alluded to earlier, Lenin and other revolutionaries simply didn't really think about the possibility of intra-class disagreement. At their time, this probably seemed pretty reasonable, so the thinking was that once they'd done away the capitalist class, things would be just fine. What do workers have to disagree about anyways? They have the same class interests.

This, incidentally, is the origin of the socialist doctrine of unified power. It was modelled on the Paris Commune. The guiding principle was that, in the words of Lenin, the way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into 'working' bodies.

Regardless, this meant that these party organizations remained, in general, quite nervous about any kind of "splitting up" of the people in general. GDR officials could, at the same time, say that homosexuality was just as natural and comradely as heterosexual, and that homosexual comrades should under no pretense be excluded from socialist society, and then still refuse to extend any kind of organization for homosexuals. Why should they? Homosexuals were people, like any other, right? If nothing distinguishes them from heterosexuality, why should a specialist organization be needed? This kind of tendency toward societal monopolization by the Party was a general weakness and tendency in the Marxist-Leninist republics.