First Published: Guardian, January 16, 1971.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
The chief cultural manifestation of capitalism’s deterioration is the delegitimatizing of the institutions of bourgeois society. In such a time, all social relationships, codes of morality and political structures seem irrational and arbitrary– precisely because the society which they reflect and maintain has itself become irrational and arbitrary.
It is this contradiction between the continued existence of the structures and consciousness of an outmoded social system and historical necessity which has given rise to a massive ideological dislocation in Western Europe and North America. As a result, every social and cultural structure of Western society has come under attack: the state, Christianity (and Judaism), science, the family, racism, the work ethic, the educational system, modes of dress, etc. Generalizing from the anti-human content and function of bourgeois institutions in the age of capitalism’s decline, a new generation of alienated youth are increasingly questioning and refusing to accept the pre-assigned roles society has given them.
The much-touted “identity crisis” of contemporary bourgeois society is the psychological manifestation of not only the refusal but actually the inability of many to assimilate into a “normal” role. Clearly, at such times, the word “normal” must lose all of its connotations of being “healthy.” Abnormality, in fact, may be closer to some state of psychological health–for when the social system as a whole is sick, the continuing acceptance of that system’s norms cannot be a reflection of a healthy organism.
But ideological dislocation, while clearly representing a reaction against a diseased social system, is not in itself necessarily a social response capable of changing reality. In fact, it is precisely in such periods of displacement and cultural ambivalence that both outmoded and diversionary trends appear. Some of these trends–mysticism (yoga, tarot, astrology, etc.), communal sanctuaries, anti-intellectualism, handicraft enterprises, various shadings of political anarchism, feminist sectarianism, drug culture, sexual liberation cults, hip capitalism–attempt to cloak themselves in the trappings of “revolution” simply because they seem to be against the existing order of things.
It is against this background that Marxists must consider the phenomenon of the public emergence of homosexuality and the development of a “gay liberation” movement.
Surely it must be obvious that the growth of homosexuality as a socio-cultural trend and its unprecedented surfacing is a part of that reaction to the deterioration of society which has rejected institutionalized role-playing: in this case traditional male-female roles. On one level, we must surely respect that consciousness which sees the moral bankruptcy of those roles which class society has assigned, to both women and men. (In the case of men, as men, it is in their relationships with women; in the case of women, it is in their relationships with men in particular and with society as a whole.) These traditional roles are demeaning, anti-human and based on varying degrees of exploitation and property relationships. In the era of advanced industrial development, in which the reality of socialism is already on the stage of history, these pre-defined roles have also become outmoded–because the basis for replacing them with a new kind of relationship has come into existence.
Whether or not homosexuals are themselves aware of these underlying social causes (I am not here discussing the “physical” basis of homosexuality which, according to most scientists, is much less a factor than the “social” basis) is not terribly important. The fact is that homosexuals, with a great variety of consciousnesses, are reacting against roles which society has assigned them. As a result, homosexuals are abused, oppressed, discriminated against and victimized in countless ways by the very same social institutions which, however outmoded, still retain the power to define all of our lives. In particular, the police power is used against them as part of that process which has always sensed that all “deviant” behavior is essentially anti-social and a threat to existing power relationships.
The struggle for the “rights” of homosexuals is, therefore, a struggle for democratic rights and objectively a struggle against the U.S. power structure. The exercise of police power against “sexual deviants” comprises a threat to forces of both reform and revolution and provides the state authorities with a weapon which it can use with devastating effectiveness against “political” deviants. And so, “moral” considerations aside for the moment, it is in the self-interest of the left to support the movement of homosexuals for the rights of free expression, privacy, equality before the law and against social discrimination.
However, whether “gay liberation provides a vision for a post-revolutionary society,” as Allen Young asserted in the Guardian’s Radical Forum (Dec. 19), is another question again. Clearly the end of class society and the elimination of property/object relationships between human beings will provide the basis for a new moral code and vastly changed cultural patterns. Conceivably, with the growth of population and the extension of the life span, together with a greater knowledge of birth control and even–dare we intimate it–selective breeding, the traditional relationship between social necessity and heterosexual behavioral patterns will go through significant changes. Such a social reality is, however, a lot further away than many ideological partisans of homosexuality want to believe. We really have a most imperfect idea of the capacity of the planet as a whole to sustain life and utilize human energy potential–a blindness which grew out of a “scientific” view itself shaped by inequitable and exploitative capitalist social relationships.
Much more likely, in my opinion, is that socialist society will make it possible to divest traditional male roles of their exploitative content and traditional female roles of their dependent status–enabling the new man and the new woman to fulfill themselves in a mutually supportive fashion and engendering a healthy kind of pride in sexual differentiation. Since, hopefully, neither stigma nor penalty–power nor status–will be attached to either male or female roles, it then becomes possible for the first time since the era of primitive communism for genuine sexual fulfillment to become an assumption of the human personality.
It has become fashionable in discussions of this sort to invoke political analogies. Feminists have frequently argued their theses on the basis of a comparison with racism–and homosexuals have compared their struggle to that of both blacks and women. A cheap debating point is sometimes scored that way, but I think that the limitations of analogous argument are too self-evident to provide more than a vague sort of emotional vindication for what ought to be discussed in its own terms. However, analogies can sometimes help illustrate a point and to that extent–and only to that extent–may prove useful.
Therefore let me suggest a contrary analogy in this discussion of homosexuality and gay liberation. Obviously, homosexuals have long been victimized and persecuted (with a few notable exceptions) in most Western societies. They have suffered abuse, discrimination in employment, abridgment of political rights–even physical violence, torture and death. Have any other groups suffered such treatment? Let us think for a moment about the Jews. Anti-Semitism has been one of the great scourges of history. Persecution of the Jews–simply for being Jews–has been a characteristic of “civilized society” since the time of the Pharoahs in Egypt. One merely has to think of a form of torture or discrimination and history will show that it was used against the Jewish people. The struggle against anti-Semitism and for the rights of Jews has been and continues to be a hallmark of the struggle for democratic rights.
But will any among us propose that the historical victimization of the Jews has lent any kind of contemporary ideological justification for Judaism? Will anyone suggest that Jews–as Jews–are inherently, or even potentially, revolutionary simply because they have suffered the extreme weight of a succession of hostile societies? In fact, recent history has shown that most of the social manifestations of anti-Semitism can be eliminated by capitalist society without in any way weakening the power structure of that society. Quite the contrary, the limited aspiration of Jews to be Jews has enabled the majority of Jewish people in the United States to integrate themselves into the capitalist reality quite satisfactorily–and has also led to the creation of a state which plays a most useful function on behalf of world imperialism.
Well, it will be easy enough to find the limitations in the above analogy. It is intended not so much to prove a point as to cut through some of the mythology which has grown up recently around the sanctity of the gay liberation movement. It is a movement, like any other, which has its origins in social reality and whose limitations must be defined in the context of a struggle which, under the indispensable leadership of the working class, will put an end to that self-same social reality.