Marxists always were against reactionary positions. One of the oldest was of course the liberation of women. “The woman and socialism” by August Bebel is an absolute perfect read for this and often enough the origin of clichés about women and men are explained there and else the background for this.
Also looking a the young soviet state, were being gay was not criminalised. There were so many debates at this time about sexuality. And following the marxists theory till this day, it is fully supportive regarding rights for LGBTQ.
You can’t be a communists if you don’t support or ignore the problems of LGBTQ people and other struggling people. This is simply self evident and if someone doesn’t think so, then there is a big lack of theory.
But fighting for the rights of women and LGTBQ without a socialist perspective won’t bring any liberation. The Bourgeoisie will always attack those rights and demands and a non-binary person bombing Syria in a F16 will be presented as a step forward acceptance of LGBTQ.
Also looking a the young soviet state, were being gay was not criminalised.
I have heard it said that this was basically a fluke, seeing as the Soviet struck off all the Tsarist laws before enacting their own legal code. Decriminalising being gay was basically something that slipped through the cracks, which is why it was eventually re-criminalised.
(To be clear I still stan the USSR, just something worth pointing out. I don’t think this particular development represents a theory of queer liberation amongst the bolsheviks or such. They certainly weren’t writing about such things.)
It’s funny how liberal feminists still refuse to celebrate Alexandra Kollontai who was not only a prominent Bolshevik, revolutionary, and Marxist theorist, but also:
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The first woman to be a cabinet minister
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The first woman to be an ambassador
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The founder of the first goverment body specifically dedicated to women’s liberation, Zhenotdel
Oh wait, I remember why liberal feminists don’t celebrate her: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm
It’s the same reason they forgot why they celebrate the Women’s day on the 8th of March. :)
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👏 More female warcriminals 👏
A distraction. You must sacrifice your personal identity for the collective. We Will All Be One.
I don’t think we’ll get to communism without acknowledging the personal characteristics of identity politics. The task for revolutionaries is to consider these characteristics through the lens of dialectical and historical materialism and placed within their political economic relations.
Take race. Race is class. Race is the mechanism for divisions of labour along global colour lines. As Fanon argued, we have to ‘stretch Marxism’ so that our class analysis fully accounts for race.
Take gender. Gender is class. Gender is the mechanism for divisions of labour with regard to reproduction. As Federici demonstrated, so called ‘primitive accumulation’ never stopped; it continued, in particular against women labelled witches. Along Fanon’s lines, we need to stretch our Marxist concepts to fully account for gender.
These examples are incomplete. And I don’t mean to say that every characteristic is ‘class’ or that race and gender are only class. The examples show, however, that what gets separated under liberal identity politics is, in fact, interconnected.
Without idpol and intersectionality you get distortions like the core’s equation of ‘working class’ with ‘blue-collar white working class men’, with no antiracism and no internationalism.
The problem with liberal idpol is that trying to attend to one characteristic at a time isn’t going to lead anywhere. Maybe a few gains won here and there. But it can all be taken away once the heat dies down and the protestors go home or grow old.
Slavery can be rebranded as prison labour. Abortion rights can be reversed. Anticolonial movements can be reframed as independence movements and coopted by neocolonialists and compradors. The fight for climate justice can be reduced to recycling. Gender equality becomes more women arms dealers. The list is endless because the working class is restless in it’s fight for freedom (even if its members don’t always know that’s what they’re doing) and the ruling class tireless in its reaction.
We either all get free or none of us will be freed. Idpol has it’s use to the extent that it points the way to a more rigorous revolutionary praxis. At that point it’s up to Marxists to theorise and act upon.
“Identity” has been claimed by liberalism and is often used to directly attack communist positions (e.g. weaponised anti-semitism against anti-zionists).
That doesn’t mean that groups of common identities have (generally speaking) different class positions or differing oppressed/oppressor relations that can be recognised and useful in analysis. Grouping people based on their position within capitalist social relations is sort of the entire foundation of Marxism. “Palestinian” is an identity, but it’s also a concrete position held by certain people within the social relations of a settler-colonial state. This is where we brush up against the whole “race is a social construct”, which could also be stated as “race is a social relation”.
Where “idpol” gets weaponised by liberals (even the far right have started doing this to an extent) is ticking different boxes, and then using those characteristics as a cudgel to beat people in opposition over the head with, or to imply some innate expertise based on often bullshit self-professed subjectivity (“lived experience”). For example Kopmala is a woman, south asian, black, therefore will automatically be a good president for black people and women, because she is both black and a prosecutor she embodies the synthesis of liberals pretending to care about BLM but also wanting to twerk for thin blue line types, etc.
There is liberal identity politics and there is socialist identity politics. You only ever hear about the liberal one unless you go out of your way to find the liberatory one. That said, I’ve read almost none of it, and ProleWiki is still sparse on the topic.
