Socialists' position on gender and sexual minorities: an urgent review

Apr 17, 2022

It is wrong to distort and alienate the ruling class of these movements, but some self-proclaimed "left-wing" people who completely deny the progressiveness of these movements because of these distortions do not seem to be as correct as they claim to be.

Posted by Bruce Yu

Correction: Fries Fries

the beginning of the event

The debate on LGBT issues in Matt City is heating up. First, the red flag that called himself "Mao Zuo" was planted all over the world and wrote an article called "Modern Homosexual Disaster". This article aroused the current discussion on LGBT issues in Matt City, and successfully caused public outrage, garnering a lot of criticism from various quarters. Then, an article titled "I'm LGBT, Say What I Think" expressed his opinion on the "Modern Gay Plague" article as a subject and rebutted all of its arguments.

Of course, this event is nothing special if you ignore the personal political stance that the red flags are flying all over the world. After all, there are not a few people who oppose progressive things because of their own experiences and personal prejudices. But the author called himself "Mao Zuo" in the comments, and tried to use his self-proclaimed "Mao Zuo" identity to refute those progressives and prove that LGBT is evil. Because the author's logic and remarks are too bizarre, and reflect a series of problems that are common among pan-leftists on the Internet today, Fries commissioned me to write this article, an urgent review of socialists' due regard to LGBT issues and other equality issues.

Socialist views on the LGBT movement and other specific group rights movements

The LGBT movement, in contrast to the movement for gender equality and racial equality, has not been noticed by socialists much earlier. The early socialists we know well, such as Marx, Engels, Bakunin, etc., did not describe the homosexuality problem, although they all mentioned it more or less: the ruling class maintains the traditional family model is Because it serves the interests of the ruling class. And the history of the 20th and 21st centuries also tells us that this conclusion drawn by the socialists of the past still holds true today.

The reason why the feminist movement received such massive opposition in the first place was not entirely because of the discrimination against women by the male ruling class and the prejudice of men against women in society. You know, in Britain, the most severe repression of the feminist movement was precisely in the Victorian period. Even in a country ruled by women, as long as the idea of women's independence and gender equality harms the interests of the ruling class, the ruling class will inevitably pretend to be deaf and mute, ignoring her and other feminists' identities as women, giving those who pursue independence And gender-equal female proletarians are called shameless, because the rights they pursue will break the traditional family relationship in the industrial age and reduce the surplus value that the bourgeoisie can exploit.

Victorian working-class women Photo: The Victorian Web

The ruling classes, regardless of their gender or race, must act on the premise of safeguarding their own interests. When the third industrial revolution occurred, the progress of productive forces brought about changes in the relations of production. So when capitalists found that independent men and women were better exploited than traditional working families, they began to support feminism and women's liberation. However, because of their own interests, they distorted feminist thinking and the feminist movement in the process, linked the purchase of goods and services that support the feminist movement to the feminist movement, and transformed consumerism into a way of showing women's status in traditional families way of promotion. Of course they wouldn't mention it: they were the ones who backed patriarchy and invented the concept of the traditional family in the first place because of their interests. Yes, the modern concept of patriarchy and traditional family is not a tradition carried over from the Roman period, from the Han Dynasty, or from the Renaissance, from the Republic of China; it is a pure invention of the Industrial Revolution. This is described in detail in Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Numerous anthropological studies have also proved that the patriarchal society that replaced matriarchy in the Stone Age, and even the patriarchal society of the feudal class, is completely different from the patriarchal family in today's society. Just as it is difficult for Chinese people to understand that footbinding, polygamy, and patriarchy only emerged and became so-called traditions in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Western proletariat does not know what they have in mind without detailed historical information. The Christian tradition of China was only created by the bourgeois government of the Industrial Revolution era. Therefore, although the bourgeoisie now supports feminist ideas, this does not mean that they are in line with the interests of the proletarians who participated in the feminist movement.

"Consumerist thinking transformed into a way of showing the advancement of women in the traditional family"

Of course, bourgeois support does not mean that socialists are against feminism. This is also a mistake made by many pan-leftists. This erroneous thought holds that since the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are antagonistic, what the capitalists agree with must necessarily harm the interests of the proletariat. This kind of thinking is narrow and metaphysical. From the materialist point of view of history, the bourgeoisie is progressive relative to the feudal class, but backward relative to the new ruling class that will inevitably replace the bourgeoisie developed later. Pan-leftists often use "wrong line" as the reason to deny other people's ideas. However, the basic concept of scientific socialism is that there is no concept of "absolute truth", only a concept that is more in line with the times . Just like "survival of the fittest" rather than "survival of the able", production relations that conform to the productive forces of this era will exist, and those that do not conform will be eliminated. These "socialists" made the mistake of the "utopian socialists" they often despised, believing that what socialism advocates is a road leading to "absolute truth", leading to a "communist society". This is mainly because some bureaucratic classes have tampered with or taken out of context the theoretical articles of Lenin and Mao Zedong in the name of communist ideology, making this idealistic metaphysical thinking reappear and gradually replacing the existence of scientific dialectics in the pan-left wing. .

"This view is essentially that of all socialists in England and France, and of the first German socialists, including Weitling. For all of them, socialism is absolute truth, reason and justice performance. " - Engels, "Anti-Dühring"

Socialists oppose capitalism and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie not simply because it is wrong; but because it is only reasonable for a certain period of time, and is bound to be rejected by a more progressive, better suited to advanced technology and advanced productive forces. It does not matter to the socialists at all whether or not this more advanced relationship of production will be the one advocated by socialism. However, many pan-leftists narrowly interpret the antagonistic relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the bourgeoisie; and since socialism supports the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, the socialists must oppose everything that the bourgeoisie supports. Thought. This right-or-wrong metaphysical thought is not a scientific socialist thought.

At the same time, we can try to analyze the relationship between the LGBT movement and the bourgeoisie with the help of our ancestors' analysis of the family, gender equality, and the bourgeoisie.

First, like the feminist movement, the LGBT movement is essentially a movement that undermines the family model promoted by the ruling class. The difference is that most of the reformed feminist movements emphasize the promotion of women's status in the family, that is, the establishment of a new family model for men and women; while the LGBT movement emphasizes the establishment of a new social An approved family model, a family model that is relatively more difficult to produce offspring and more difficult to exploit the surplus value of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie approved of the new family model advocated by the feminist movement after the productivity improvement; however, they had a hard time accepting the family model advocated by the LGBT movement. In the eyes of the current ruling class, since the existence of same-sex families is harmful to the current bourgeoisie, it should be opposed to it. The ruling class only recognizes the social models that they devise that can benefit them, and same-sex families, which are relatively difficult to produce offspring, are obviously not one of them.

"We need men. Life-destroying abortion is not recognized in our country. The Soviet woman has the same rights as men, but she cannot be freed from her great and honorable calling: she is a mother..." - Stalin

The ruling class mentioned here not only refers to the Western ruling class, but also includes various bureaucratic-bourgeois governments, revisionist governments, etc. that have betrayed the revolution and the proletariat ; to be precise, the ruling class here refers to the bourgeoisie A dictatorship, a social structure that rules the world.

“The masses in the Stonewall riots burned down a bar they saw as part of their oppression, while the LGBT Liberation Front said it was exploitative and not part of the liberation struggle . They opposed the commerciality and It reinforces gender stereotypes - some gay bars even ban people of the same gender from dancing together." -Colin Wilson, Socialism and Gay Liberation

Like the feminist movement, the bourgeoisie began to compromise with the proletarians who supported the LGBT movement after discovering the tenacity of the LGBT movement. Gay bars, and various other products and services that support the LGBT movement, claim that they help the LGBT community, albeit on the premise of money; some "liberal" media outlets are beginning to report on the experiences of oppression among LGBT individuals. Although the LGBT Liberation Front has spoken out against gay bars and other venues that cater specifically to gays, the overall LGBT movement has begun to capitalize. "Vulgar" feminism began to rise under the guidance of bourgeois public opinion, which attributed social injustice and injustice between genders to all men in society, erasing the differences between classes and the existence of class contradictions. Idealistic metaphysical theory replaced scientific dialectics, people no longer discuss the contradictions between classes, but focus on individual cases in a certain group. The socialist organization that originally launched the LGBT movement, after compromising with society, began to embark on the path of pluralism—self-dissolution and division.

Stonewall Movement Image Credit: History.com

This is also a negative negation. The ruling class first denied the rights and interests of a specific group (such as women, blacks, LGBT) because of the low productivity, and then denied their original denial because of the improvement in productivity, recognized the original rights and interests of a specific group, but tried vainly Adding private goods to the liberation movement of these specific groups, distorting the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, trying to eliminate the class nature of the rights-defense movement of specific groups. A homosexual in the ruling class will not have any empathy for LGBT proletarians just because he belongs to the LGBT community. Any compromise they make to the LGBT community is by no means their goodwill, but the credit of the proletarians who participated in the rights movement. The LGBT movement is not a class-agnostic group movement, it is class-based in itself. A homosexual in the ruling class will not be excluded because he belongs to the LGBT community, while the LGBT of the proletariat is excluded everywhere because his own freedom conflicts with the demands of the ruling class. The LGBT movement is essentially a proletarian movement, but the proletarian groups involved in this movement are LGBT groups. Like the miners rights movement and other rights movements, the LGBT movement is a movement of the proletariat. However, the bourgeois dictatorship has distorted the LGBT movement for its own benefit so that it no longer benefits the truly proletarian LGBT community.

But, as I said before, in dealing with the distorted feminist movement, the socialists of the day did not deny the progressiveness of the feminist movement, but provided help, even technical guidance, to feminists. Movement participants explain the class nature of the feminist movement, we, the socialists of today, should not deny the progressiveness of the LGBT movement, but should, like our forefathers , revive the movement while supporting the LGBT movement Class nature itself distorted by the ruling class. The LGBT movement, the feminist movement, and all other specific group movements are all initiated by the proletariat and cannot be separated from their own class nature. The essence of these movements is not to turn specific groups into the ruling class or to be accomplices of the ruling class, but to liberate the entire proletariat while liberating specific groups within the proletariat. It is wrong to distort and alienate the ruling class of these movements, but some self-proclaimed "left-wing" people who completely deny the progressiveness of these movements because of these distortions do not seem to be as correct as they claim to be.