PARTISAN!

In the midst of a world-wide attack against the democratic rights of LGBTQ+ people, particularly in the liberal-democratic countries. Under a regime of heterosexual hegemony, Edith Fischer answers the question: is gay liberation still subversive?

The blind, all-embracing, demanding passions will weaken; the sense of property, the egoistical desire to bind the partner to one “forever,” the complacency of the man and the self-renunciation of the woman will disappear. At the same time, the valuable aspects and elements of love will develop. Respect for the right of the other’s personality will increase, and a mutual sensitivity will be learned; men and women will strive to express their love not only in kisses and embraces but in joint creativity and activity. The task of proletarian ideology is not to drive Eros from social life but to rearm him according to the new social formation, and to educate sexual relationships in the spirit of the great new psychological force of comradely solidarity.

from Make Way for Winged Eros, Alexandra Kollontai

The lights flash on as the music abruptly stops. The room of party-goers is violently ejected into the streets as the police frisk the joint under a flimsy pretense. Gays are intimidated, while a couple of queens get up in the coppers face. You would be forgiven for thinking that such a scene might have taken place at Stonewall in 1969, or in Melbourne in 1994. Maybe even in Moscow or Jakarta, where raids like this are a regular occurrence in bars and bathhouses. However, in this case, the raid is on a gay bar in Pittsburgh, and the only difference is that one of the cops asks one of the queens for a selfie while they raid the joint.

Is gay liberation still subversive? This question has probably never been more relevant than now. A global anti-gay, anti-transsexual political wave is in full swing, and its sights are set on winding back 30 years of mainstream sexual liberalism in the advanced capitalist countries. For militant gays of all kinds, the question of how to organise against this wave, and how to deliver that still elusive promise of gay liberation, is central. To get to the heart of the matter, we must rearticulate what made gay liberation so subversive in the first place. In short, we must articulate a theory of sexual hegemony.

The dominant cultural structures of a given society are always that of the dominant mode of production. This is true of the ideological and cultural apparatus, as it is true in law and politics (the juridico-political structure). It is also true in the sexual structure – the ideological, political, and economic structures of a given society structure the daily sexual activity of society, and the ways in which that sexual activity is regulated. This structure, in which the sexual regulation of a given ruling class becomes imposed on society as a whole, can be understood as “sexual hegemony” – a term coined by the late Christopher Chitty in the book of the same name.

The Development of Sexuality in Capitalism

The development of capitalism as the prevailing mode of social production was not simply the replacement of handlooms by mechanical ones, of home industries and small workshops by foundries, blast-furnaces and machine-operated factories, or the fact that men had to move from country to town in pursuit of employment. The present advanced stage of the conquest of nature by technology results from a series of ‘impulses’ spread over several centuries, but at the same time the means had to be found to keep the process going without periodic impulses from outside, and a social personality had to be developed capable of guiding the process while at the same time remaining completely subordinate to it.

from Sexuality and Class Struggle, Reimut Reiche

In the epoch in which the capitalist mode of production comes to predominate, capital in both the historic form of the bourgeois class and in the abstract form of money-power, come to regulate sexual life. Reimut Reiche, in his excellent Sexuality and Class Struggle (1968) argues over the course of capitalist development, two distinct but intertwined sexual logics develop, allowing for a dynamic contradiction in which one is dominant over the other. We can identify these with classical Freudian terminology: repressive sublimation and manipulative integration/repressive desublimation.

The initial epoch of capitalist development, in which the primary problem of capitalist expansion was the deferral of consumption for the purposes of investment, the dominant sexual ethic was one of repressive sublimation. In short, sexual impulse (which we should understand as naturally occurring but unformed) should be repressed and sublimated into productive activity. It is this psychic structure that gave rise to what Erich Fromm termed an “authoritarian-masochist personality” – and what Reich diagnosed later as being the psychic profile of the fascist in the epoch of capitalist crisis (see: The Mass Psychology of Fascism). The dominant ideological structures of North-Atlantic Capitalism – Protestant-Calvinist Work Ethic and Classical Political Economy, both resented the scrounger, the idler, and the spendthrift. What is true of money, in capitalist society, is also true of affection, and the passions of men were seen to be a dangerous force that needed discipline.

In the Italian city-states and in the Low Countries of the Dutch Republic, the feudal-patriarchal regulation of peasant sexuality through religious life gave way to a civic repression of homosexuality. In order to control the disproportionately male slums and docks, the Good Men of the City would drown homosexuals and others accused of sexual degeneracy. The belief that the body was a machine that needed to be regulated, with desire as its prime mover, was not alien to this era. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici shows how these same ideas permeate contemporary intellectual culture, such as in the works of Descartes and Hume. Modern homophobia then can be understood alongside the repression of midwifery and the raids upon brothels and dance halls – a means to maintain social order for the benefit of economic development. The birth of capitalism brought forth a new conception of the human: a body-machinic, with destructive but conquerable passions.

This structure of repressive sublimation dominated capitalist society well into the 1950s. However, structural crises of overproduction and underinvestment had begun to permeate the imperialist economies. Falling prices of consumer durables and the expansion of automobile ownership gave rise to sprawling suburbs, and drove up the consumption of workers in the wealthiest nations. A new culture was emerging – that of consumerism and individual expression that was well documented by thinkers like Marcuse and Debord. The Society of Spectacles necessitated a new sexual morality. For Reiche, the sexual liberalism that was born in the 1960s was a transformation within the logic of bourgeois sexual hegemony, not against it. What emerged as a new form of manipulative integration. Sexuality was now to be part of social life – however, it would be for the purposes of consumption.

In the structure of manipulative integration, the previously repressed socio-sexual drives are expressed through a bourgeois-dominated consumer culture. Mass Culture, brilliantly theorised as the cultural production in the epoch of advanced capital by Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, becomes the chief means by which this integration is achieved.

One Dimensional Men

The high standard of living in the domain of the great corporations is restrictive in a concrete sociological sense: the goods and services that the individuals buy control their needs and petrify their faculties. In exchange for the commodities that enrich their life, the individuals sell not only their labor but also their free time. The better living is offset by the all-pervasive control over living. People dwell in apartment concentrations- and have private automobiles with which they can no longer escape into a different world. They have huge refrigerators filled with frozen foods. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue- which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.

from Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Herbert Marcuse

The result of this new form of sexual logic is a hollow, one-dimensional form of sexual freedom. In the most advanced capitalist countries, there seems to be no real structural limits on the free expression of sexuality. In fact, the new culture of sexual openness seems to be unlimited. However, behind the scenes structural factors continue to shape sexual life.

Today, sexual activity has been reduced to a simple exchange, one usually mediated (as are many of our contemporary purchases) over the internet. The sexual encounter comes to mimic capitalist production – industrially produced, well advertised, perfunctory, and increasingly cheap. This sexual marketplace, which is the long consequence of the end of the arranged-marriage system that dominated in most class societies, produces new anxieties – the mirror image of this one-dimensional flatness is a cultural fixation on romantic love – the bourgeois form of romantic ideology, supplanting the courtly love of prior epochs.

Where desire was once seen as a dangerous force that necessitated control, now it is seen as a consumptive force – one must fuck, in the same way that one must purchase commodities. Desire is a passion that can be harnessed for the promotion of new needs – this is indeed the force that the entire unproductive complex of advertising seeks to master. Sexual dynamics increasingly appear to be a form of market relations. In this, the atavistic culture of inceldom contains a rational kernel, in the Hegelian sense. It is the ideology of aggrieved surplus males in an increasingly lonely and isolated epoch.

The source of this loneliness is manifold, but we should recognise that it is somewhat located in the separation of spheres promoted by bourgeois civilisation. As Max Fox notes for Pinko,

Thinking of sexuality as a moment of liberalism, a mode of apprehending capitalist society as divided into apparently natural spheres expressed by the state and the market, explains some of the confusion over the meanings of taboo, prohibition, liberation, and pleasure. After his wartime Los Angeles exile, Theodor Adorno returned to Frankfurt having made close observation of this midcentury sexuality and its industrial marriage from within one of its new leading economic zones. He characteristically finds in it a false freedom: “Talk of sexual taboos sounds anachronistic in an era where every young girl who is to any extent materially independent of her parents has a boyfriend; where the mass media, which are now fused with advertising, incessantly provide sexual stimulation, to the fury of their reactionary opponents, and where what in America is called a healthy sex life is so to speak a part of physical and psychic hygiene,” he writes in a 1963 essay, “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today.” This hygiene involves “a sort of morality of pleasure, a fun moral­ity,” the experience of an illusion of liberation—but a necessary one, an illusion internal to the form of appearance social existence must take in capitalist society. If patriarchal mores of restraint have been made obsolete, now “sexuality, turned on and off, channeled and exploited in countless forms by the material and cultural industry, cooperates with this process of manipulation insofar as it is absorbed, institutionalized, and adminis­tered by society.” Far from having freed sexuality, bourgeois society after the wars has taken sexuality “directly under its control without any intermediate authorities like the church, often even without any state legitimation.” (What Was Sexual Liberalism?, 2024)

This is not to say that sexual freedom did away with the prior social rule of Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Even at its most “liberated”, or perhaps we could say “legible”, bourgeois civilisation is still fixated on the nexus of individuality, property, and national destiny that is the family, and in particular the lives of children. In his excellent article in The Baffler entitled Why Gay Liberation Failed, Scott Branson points out that it is this very fixation on the protection of children-as-property that has given rise to the present sexual panic.

Sexuality and Class Struggle

Gay liberation then, was subversive not because there is anything particularly dangerous about fags. In fact, it is not the activities of homosexuals, but rather the perceived threat to heterosexual life – to Straight Society – that is most feared. Gay liberation, at its most radical, threatened the sexual hegemony of the bourgeoisie – it posed a political threat to the family, to the state, to religion, and ultimately to the organisation of social life for capital.

For those today who seek to draw out a connection between sexuality and class struggle, we should look to the works of Reiche. He was critical, if supportive, of the attempts to emancipate sexuality of his own day, but understood that without connecting sexual politics to the struggles of the international working class, there is no future for sexual liberation. In his time, he looked positively upon the works of Wilhelm Reich, who was perhaps the first to attempt to fuse sexual politics to mass, revolutionary social democracy.

Through the SexPol mass organisation, Reich established sexual health clinics in working class neighbourhoods, promoted safe sex, and sexual equality between men and women. The need to advance working class sexual health, and promote an independent sexual politics, remains salient, even when sexual education has been integrated into bourgeois sexual hegemony. This kind of mass work should inspire our orientation – sexual freedom cannot be won by preaching a new sexual morality (albeit a libertine one). Instead it must bring people something they substantially need. Thus, organisation around labour concerns, the organisation of collective housing, the establishment of youth organisations, developing consciousness around the sex question, all have a place in developing a genuinely mass movement for sexual liberation.

The most vital immediate task in building a new sexual politics is the restoration of social life. Mediated by the structures of digital capital, a sexual politics free of bourgeois hegemony cannot possibly hope to flourish. Restoring mass working class organisation, and bringing forward a sexual politics within it, can restore the social spaces in which people can meet, love, and yes, fuck.

Traditionally, the parties of mass, revolutionary social democracy, saw sexuality in purely negative terms – it must be freed of legal constraint, but otherwise it is not a political concern. This view is as shortsighted as it is narrow. The role that sexuality, as the structuring force of desire, plays in the creation and recreation of dominant forms of ideology is fundamental. It must be systematically and critically examined, and a proper orientation towards it must be developed. The Communist Party, being the highest expression of the historical consciousness of the working class, must take all things under its gaze and analyse them from the standpoint of the class struggle. Sex, for all its blushes and blemishes, is no different. Only the international working class, with an international communist party at its head, can sweep aside the muck of ages, and usher in a new epoch of social development. In turn, only this revolution can finally make way for Winged Eros.