As we indicated in our introductory post, it is necessary to draw a line of demarcation between the proletarian feminist position and other incorrect positions within the movement. To begin this process of delineation, we will first address the erroneous line held by some within the German milieu of the ICM, which contains several theoretical missteps and ultimately results in strategic misdirection on the gender question. 

We begin with a Marxist analysis of the woman question, which then serves as a basis for critique of the German line. Catalina Adrianzen, founder of the People’s Women’s Movement of Peru and a brave communist fighter, summarizes the Marxist view on the woman question in Marxism, Mariategui, and The Women’s Movement. Adrianzen begins with a broad summary of the Marxist understanding of human beings, stating that: 

Marxism, the ideology of the working class, conceives the human being as a set of social relations that change as a function of the social process. Thus, Marxism is absolutely opposed to the thesis of “human nature” as an eternal, immutable reality outside the frame of social conditions; this thesis belongs to idealism and reaction.

There are several parts of this statement that must be analyzed:

1) Adrianzen foregrounds the dialectical principle of the universality of struggle and transformation. Human beings are not static, but are subjected to change on the basis of shifts within social processes. There is not an eternal human essence which transcends social relations in a given historical moment. In other words, since human beings are constituted by social relations, when social relations change, so does humanity.

2) And she correctly asserts that any view that claims a fundamental and unchanging nature at the core of humanity is idealistic and reactionary.  

Adrianzen then applies this analytic to the question of gender. She writes:

Just as Marxism considers the human being as a concrete reality historically generated by society, it does not accept either the thesis of “feminine nature,” which is but a complement of the so-called “human nature” and therefore a reiteration that woman has an eternal and unchanging nature; aggravated, as we saw, because what idealism and reaction understand by “feminine nature” is a “deficient and inferior nature” compared to man.

If “humanity” is socially and historically contingent, it follows that the category of “women” or gender is also mutable. Adrianzen insists that there is no feminine nature which eternally defines women, but more importantly, she also demonstrates how this belief in an immutable unchanging foundation for womanhood is a product and key component of patriarchal ideology.

Expanding further on this question, Adrianzen writes:

For Marxism, women, as much as men, are but a set of social relations, historically adapted and changing as a function of the changes of society in its development process. Woman then is a social product, and her transformation demands the transformation of society.

Adrianzen demonstrates the socio-historical contingency by way of the scientific perspective of materialist dialectics, which alone allows complete understanding. She foregrounds class relations, particularly via an analysis of the structures of property, family and State, as developments in the condition and historical place of women are directly linked to those three determinant factors as we argue in our own explication of Engels and Marx.

From our perspective, the two dominant revisionist lines on the gender question both diverge from this dialectical standpoint. The German line rejects contingency and embraces idealist immutability. The Swiss embraces contingency but abandons the materialist focus on the social processes which produce the contingency of gender (NB: we will be engaging with the Swiss position in a later document).

If Marxists want to change the social conditions which produce the oppression of women, we must understand the social and historical processes that create womanhood – property, the family, and the state. Consequently, the task at hand is to smash capitalist social relations themselves, not an abstract notion of patriarchy or a fundamental man-woman contradiction. Adrianzen’s formulation allows us to reassert a core point we have made above: the oppression of women is a consequence of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. 

Now that we have established a theoretical grounding, we will turn towards a direct critique of the line advanced in “KLASSENSTANDPUNKT: The Ideological Decay of Imperialism,” which is available both on the Dem Volke Dienen as well as the CI-IC blog. While the Klassenstandpunkt document offers a generally correct critical approach to postmodern philosophical trends and the struggle against idealism, it nevertheless contains serious theoretical errors we will enumerate below.

This document begins by attempting to trace the development of “discourse analysis,” specifically in relation to Foucaldian postmodernism. The writers note that Foucault built on previous iterations of so-called critical theory to develop an approach to historical inquiry which treats “discourse” as theoretically primary, thereby contributing to the broader development of poststructural philosophy in general. They write that poststructuralism “is about using discourse to discover abstract and objective rule structures in language or in the use of signs.” We cannot afford to drift too far into an analysis of poststructuralism or its relation to earlier structuralist thought, but largely agree with the assertion that the development of discourse theory and poststructuralism exemplify a displacement of concrete analysis of the material world by a fixation on linguistics. The German authors correctly assert that the poststructuralist linguistic turn is an idealist revolt against materialism. They write:

The social practice of class struggle is separated from theory. ‘Language creates reality’ means in the beginning there is theory not practice, the Marxist epistemology is turned upside down and this is simply pure idealism.

That postmodernism emerged as a response to Marxism is certainly true, and we unite with this assertion of the Klassenstandpunkt authors as well as Comrade Siraj of the EBULF, who similarly argued in Postmodernism Today that “Post-modernism is the outcome or result of the ideological and objective crises in the period when the prospect of revolution receded to the background and the militant working class movement in Europe was largely assimilated by the states.” 

After describing the emergence of postmodernism, the Klassenstandpunkt authors turn their attention to a particular iteration of postmodern philosophy: gender theory, which they attribute to the work of postmodern philosopher Judith Butler. They claim that “Gender-Theory is no longer about patriarchy, but about sexism, i.e. the question of gender as an idea, not a material reality. The term “sexism” is a substitute for patriarchy.”

Judith Butler is undoubtedly an arch-idealist of contemporary continental philosophy and has contributed much to postmodern theories of gender. However, it is incorrect to say Butler’s work focuses on sexism rather than patriarchy. Butler’s writing does abandon a materialist focus on patriarchy as a product of social processes, but it does not offer the standard liberal view of women’s oppression as merely a product of “sexist” attitudes. Butler focuses instead on gender as a performative reality which is grounded in discourse, drawing eclectically on Derrida, Foucault, and Beauvoir, and argues that the discursive construction of gender operates as a material reality; it is this gesture which divides her work from materialism. 

While the Klassenstandpunkt authors misidentify Butler’s approach to gender, they are correct that Butler contributed to a view that treats gender as historically contingent, based in discourse, and articulated by diffuse and amorphous notions of “power” which Butler imports from Foucault. This focus on gender as “constructed” by discourse is obviously at odds with the Marxist perception of gender developed in Adrianzen’s work. While both affirm the notion that gender is contingent, this contingency is grounded in completely different realities. For Adrianzen, contingency is caused by gender’s operation as a set of social relations composed of material realities of property, family, and state. In contrast, Butler’s contingency is grounded in ever changing discourses and in the subversion of gender through individualistic performative reiterations of gender which call into question its essential and unchanging nature. We will dive further into the differences between the Marxist and postmodernist views in the next section of this text, but for now it is sufficient to say that postmodern views of gender (what the Klassenstandpunkt authors refer to as gender theory) do diverge fundamentally from Marxism, even if both share in common an abstract notion of contingency. 

Unfortunately, the line on gender put forward by the Klassenstandpunkt authors ultimately fails to understand the divergence between Marxism and postmodernism correctly, supplanting both with their own form of idealism as a result. 

In a section titled “The Rollback of The Women’s Movement,” they attempt to extend their criticism of postmodernism to contemporary trends within gender politics today. 

In order to respond directly to their claims we will quote this section in its entirety:

​​The harmful and reactionary influence of postmodernism or identity politics is also leaving its clear mark on the women’s movement. In the emergence of the progressive women’s movement, especially in the 1960s, one of the central points was the negation of the traditional role of women. One should no longer wear a bra, shave one’s legs, accept “female” role models or ideals of beauty. Although this movement was strongly influenced by the petty bourgeoisie, the communist parties also had their influence here. Postmodernism then says that all this, the role of women in society, gender itself, are all constructs. As described above, Gender-Theory emerges, in which the question of an allegedly constructed gender plays an important role. 

This leads to a problem in identity politics today, because if there is no biological sex, what defines what a woman is? The answer that identity politics arrives at is: woman is whoever is or looks “female” (or simply claims to be a woman). The struggle of the women’s movement used to be that these differences in appearance should not exist. You can see this in how “flirtatious” the women comrades were in the Cultural Revolution. They had the same cap and the same jacket as the male comrades, a slightly different haircut perhaps and sometimes a skirt, but that was it. And that was a good thing. They then also did the same jobs as the men and were in no way inferior to them. This is the Marxist understanding of women’s liberation. Today with identity politics, a woman is defined by whether she moves, dresses and makes up like a woman. A transsexual man who claims to be a woman is celebrated as a woman because he is “feminine” and moves, dresses and makes up like a woman. This has negated the whole struggle for women’s liberation of the last decades, thus plays a backwarded role in the women’s movement. On top of that, one idea of identity politics is that a marginalised minority can take degrading and stigmatising terms and reinterpret them to their liking, “positively occupy” them. This leads to the fact that suddenly there are people in the women’s movement who claim that when women call each other “whore” or “bitch” all the time, instead of slapping pimps and patriarchal pigs on the head, this is part of women’s liberation. This postmodernist position, which emerges from Discourse Analysis and grants language the ability to create reality, is then also expressed in gender language acrobatics with all their asterisks, colons and Internal-I What does this lead to? To a change in the situation of women? To the destruction of patriarchy? Unfortunately not, because that requires the struggle against the imperialist system. What it actually leads to is the eternal academic discussion about which spelling would be the most “inclusive” in order to make women “visible”, but in reality it does not advance the fight against imperialism and patriarchy one step, but instead the women’s movement is further fragmented and those who do not use the proper “gender” become the preferred target of moral apostolic rebukes. If women are to become truly “visible”, then they themselves must ensure this in direct militant action, guided by the ideology of the proletariat. 

Finally, to summarize: To realise its idea, postmodernism has given birth to identity politics. Better said, identity politics is the next step in the increasing decay of bourgeois idealism in its “left” manifestation, as an expression of the ideological decay of imperialism, in a long strand of increasing decay. It is idealist because, in the tradition of Discourse Analysis and postmodernism, it puts the idea first and not the actually existing material reality of human society, which is being transformed by the class struggle. Today, when alleged communist groups, organisations and parties adopt aspects of this bourgeois idealism, it is nothing other than revisionism. For they smuggle bourgeois points of view into the ideology of the international proletariat and thereby reject it as a self-contained, harmonious system, all-powerful because it is true.44 True because it is confirmed in practice over and over again.

Before turning towards a criticism of this section, it is worth noting that this section does correctly reject certain postmodern and idealist positions. The idea that gender is purely a matter of how one looks, is perceived, or what one claims to be is of course ultimately idealist and subjectivist. This idealist view assumes that gender is an amorphous social phenomena which exists intersubjectively through perception and subjectively through self-identification, a position at odds with the Marxist view that gender is a set of social relations. Marxism, instead, demonstrates that gender is produced by material forces operating at the level of the economic base. It is not merely a set of individual choices or behaviors. 

Although the German comrades are correct to criticize this idealist conception of gender, their criticism does not uphold a Marxist analysis in which gender is understood as contingent upon the social relations of a given society. Instead, they make several contradictory claims about the basis of women’s oppression, each of which contains idealistic misdirections in its own right. 

The Klassenstandpunkt authors do not locate the genesis of women’s oppression within the economic base of society. While the authors gesture broadly towards the need for “a change in the situation of women” and “the destruction of patriarchy,” they do not explain what sort of change this entails or how patriarchy can be destroyed – indeed, because their position has no theory of the material basis for patriarchy, the comrades seem to be unable to identify how we might end it. The document does vaguely point to “the struggle against the imperialist system” as the means for overcoming patriarchy, but this does not explain the relation between patriarchy and the imperialist system. Absent such anexplanation, this line rings as nothing more than empty sloganeering. 

Throughout this section, the Klassenstandpunkt authors offer us a brief glimpse of what a non-postmodern struggle against patriarchy might look like. First they suggest that the women’s movement originally struggled against notions of traditional femininity. They write that:

In the emergence of the progressive women’s movement, especially in the 1960s, one of the central points was the negation of the traditional role of women. One should no longer wear a bra, shave one’s legs, accept “female” role models or ideals of beauty.

This demonstrates a major theoretical deficit. The struggle outlined here is not a struggle against the material conditions which produce patriarchy, but rather a superstructural struggle against the ideologies and norms of gender.

We might forgive this superstructural focus inasmuch as the authors are explaining bourgeois feminist struggle within the broader women’s liberation movement. Unfortunately, the authors maintain this incorrect orientation in their analysis of communist struggle against patriarchy as well. In writing on the cultural revolution, they focus solely on the way that the communists struggled against gendered differences in appearance and occupation, writing:

[Women] had the same cap and the same jacket as the male comrades, a slightly different haircut perhaps and sometimes a skirt, but that was it. And that was a good thing. They then also did the same jobs as the men and were in no way inferior to them. This is the Marxist understanding of women’s liberation.

“Women’s liberation” will not be achieved by changes in dress, appearance, and occupation alone. To dismantle patriarchy, we must smash capitalism and eradicate the material conditions which create women as a coherent social group; ideological struggle against the superstructural expressions of those conditions (struggle of the type undertaken during the Cultural Revolution, a historical sequence whose radical historical significance our comrades do not seem to grasp!) can only succeed as a consequence of the political struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeois state. 

Adrianzen tells us that women as a social group are a product of specific social relations. These relations are not manners of dress, appearance, “flirtatiousness”, or any other superstructural aspects of gender, but are rather property, the family, and the state. The Klassenstandpunkt document completely mystifies these relations in its fixation on superstructural struggle. This is a particularly ironic commitment, given their correct diagnosis of the same idealism at the core of postmodernism. That is, rather than focusing on the social relations which give rise to the existence of women as a social phenomenon, the German line focuses on a fundamentally superstructural understanding of womanhood which frames the “women’s movement” as a movement against traditional gender roles, not a movement against the social relations of capitalism and the bourgeois class state. 

There is a second error which emerges from the German line regarding the question of social construction. The Klassenstandpunkt authors broadly dismiss the notion of social construction by failing to explain what the postmodernists mean by the term and what is incorrect in their formulation of construction. They write, “Postmodernism then says that all this, the role of women in society, gender itself, are all constructs. As described above, Gender-Theory emerges, in which the question of an allegedly constructed gender plays an important role.”

Let us adopt an attitude of philosophical rigorousness and seek truth from facts, which the Klassenstandpunkt authors fail to do.

What do postmodernists mean when they say that “the role of women in society, gender itself, are all constructs”? The postmodernists argue that women’s role within society, and the social phenomena of gender in general, is constructed on the basis of discourse and discursive norms. According to Judith Butler, women’s role within a society is determined not primarily by economic and material conditions but by a set of norms which are entangled in diffuse structures of “power” and regulate human action. Because these norms operate at the level of discourse – that is, in the realm of the ideal rather than the material – Butler’s theory of gender cannot identify whose class interests are served by gender norms. Gender, for the postmodernists,  is abstractly constructed as a self-generating process that exists purely within the linguistic realm. By placing gender on a plane of pure abstraction, postmodernism erodes our ability to connect the struggle for women’s liberation to the struggle against capitalist imperialism.

This is the actual mistake of the postmodernists, not the idea that women’s roles in society (and gender itself) have changed throughout history, that they are, as a result, “constructed.” After all, Adrianzen explains that gender’s contingency and changing structure shows us that it is possible to overcome patriarchy in the first place. If the oppression of women is constituted by social processes within class society, then patriarchy can be overcome through the defeat of capitalism. Proletarian feminists must assert that gender is a changing social and historical process created by class society, such that to end patriarchy, we must end capitalism. 

If “construction” refers to the notion that something is contingent and shaped by fluctuating historical processes, this is not a threat to Marxism. In fact, such a view is inherent to the dialectical outlook, which understands that history is shaped by material processes in a system of complex social relations. Marxism does not assert that things have an unchanging internal essence; rather they exist within processes and systems of social relations.  On the other hand, we reject the postmodernist idea that social phenomena are continuously constructed via discourse.  Unfortunately, the Germans equate these two possible readings of “construction” and treat it with the utmost philosophical superficiality. 

This philosophical laziness thus leads the Klassenstandpunkt article to offer a particularly mystified view of women’s oppression. For them, struggle against patriarchy and oppression by patriarchy both exist at the level of superstructural norms and behavior alone. Consequently, the authors approach the question of women’s oppression with the same error as the postmodernists. Contingency as a concept is rejected altogether, and this rejection thus throws out the entirety of the materialist analysis advanced by Marxists like Adrianzen. The reader is thus left without any dialectical materialist theory of patriarchy in the first place. 

This brings us to a third principle error: the attempt to ground a theory of patriarchy within women’s own biology. The German comrades insist that postmodernism is flawed chiefly on the basis of its rejection of biological sex and biological sexual difference, which they frame as the inversion of the reduction to discursivity. For, to them, without this ground, there is no way to think of the oppression of women in the first place!

Here we can immediately assert that the idea that biological sex “defines what a woman is” diverges from the Marxist perspective. Marxism, when tasked with defining what a woman is, responds simply that women “are but a set of social relations, historically adapted and changing as a function of the changes of society in its development process.” 

The attempt to supplant this definition with a biological definition is itself an idealist mystification which, ironically, naturalizes patriarchal oppression. Comrade Anuradha Ghandy showed in Philosophical Trends In The Feminist Movement that past bourgeois radical feminists have engaged in this same form of mystification by putting forward a crass biological materialism in place of dialectical materialism. She writes: 

In their understanding of material conditions they have taken the physical fact of reproduction and women’s biological role as the central point for their analysis and concluded that this is the main reason for women’s oppression. Marx had written that production and reproduction of life are the two basic conditions for human existence. Reproduction means both the reproduction of the person on a day to day basis and the reproduction of the human species. But in fact reproduction of the species is something humans share with the animal kingdom. That could not be the basis for women’s oppression. For in all the thousands of years that people lived in the first stages of human existence women were not subordinated to men. In fact her reproductive role was celebrated and given importance because the survival of the species and the group depended on reproduction

This criticism is important for two reasons. First it shows that the idea that women’s oppression is grounded in biology is simply ahistorical. Women’s reproduction historically precedes the emergence of patriarchy and does not consistently result in patriarchal domination throughout the animal kingdom. The definition of womanhood as biological sex thus attempts to create an immutable definition of womanhood which simply cannot explain the emergence of patriarchy. Second, such a definition offers an ideological naturalization of patriarchy by grounding it within biology itself. This very definition is what pushed radical feminists like Firestone to argue for an overcoming of biology through artificial gestation as a basis for women’s liberation. This bizarre notion demonstrates the flawed strategies which emerge from this definition. 

A purely biological view of womanhood mystifies the way that class relations themselves produce women’s oppression and falls into a sort of vulgar materialism. Adrianzen notes that the power of Marxism is precisely its ability to overcome such vulgar materialism. She writes that:

The Marxist position also implies the overcoming of mechanical materialism (of the old materialists, before Marx and Engels) who were incapable of understanding the historical social character of the human being as a transformer of reality, so irrationally it had to rely on metaphysical or spiritual conditions, such as the case of Feuerbach.

A rejection of mechanical materialism is a prerequisite for theorizing women’s oppression, because such a rejection asserts that women can transform reality in order to achieve liberation in the first place. Therefore, we must also reject the biological mystification which emerges from the German line. 

Ghandy again offers us a way back to the proper Marxist view precisely in her reject of a biological definition of womanhood. She writes “Marxism understands that some material conditions had to arise due to which the position of women changed and she was subordinated. The significant change in material conditions came with the generation of considerable surplus production.” Here finally we see a return to a materialist position which is sorely lacking in the Klassenstandpunkt document. Ghandy continues to oppose the radical feminists by stating that “Their solutions are focused on changing roles and traits and attitudes and the moral values and creating an alternative culture” This same criticism can be applied to the Klassenstandpunkt authors, who center the struggle against gender roles and gender stereotypes rather than the particular social relations which produce and construct the patriarchal system of gender in the first place. 

Ultimately, however, it is not enough to insist that the German line is merely engaged in mystification here. We must go further and insist that it has allied itself with chauvinism and reaction, due to its crass materialism and reductive superstructural emphasis. The purely biological definition of women as the Klassenstandpunkt document does not merely misdirect the struggle, but actively aids the defenders of patriarchy. Ghandy explained this best when she argued that this argument:

 gives the biological basis of male female differences more importance than social upbringing. This is in fact a counter-productive argument because conservative forces in society have always used such arguments (called biological determinism) to justify domination over a section of the people. The slaves were slaves because they had those traits and they needed to be ruled, they could not look after themselves. Women are women and men are men and they are basically different, so social roles for women and men are also different. This is the argument given by reactionary conservative forces which are opposed to women’s liberation.

Such biological essentialism, in addition to its flimsy theoretical basis, also leads to the Klassenstandpunk authors to a chauvinistic position with regards to transgender people as a social group. Because the German comrades understand gender on a purely superstructural level, they are incapable of grasping the material conditions which constitute transgender people as a social group. 

As we have argued elsewhere, transgender people constitute a social group which is under attack by the reactionary wing of the bourgeoisie. The very conditions – ie, the family-form and its ideological expressions – which generate the exploitation and oppression of women are also conditions which produce the oppression of transgender people. As a result, transgender people ought to be allies of the proletarian feminist struggle, which is also to say, allies of the proletarian class struggle against capitalism and in the fight for proletarian dictatorship. We must be able to draw transgender people into the communist movement by analyzing and demystifying the conditions which produce their oppression while concretely demonstrating that only the defeat of capitalism can lead to securing their democratic rights. This is a unified struggle which requires solidarity rather than division. 

Due to their refusal to engage with the material conditions which produce gender, the German comrades are incapable of understanding the need to incorporate transgender people into the fight against capitalism. In fact, their superstructural focus causes them to see transgender people as a threat to the struggle for women’s liberation in general, because their conception of women’s liberation does not extend beyond the fight against gender roles and norms (which they claim that transgender people reinforce). This is an absurd conclusion; the struggle for women’s liberation is first and foremost a struggle against the bourgeois class state and their exploitation by the bourgeoisie, not against the superstructural norms which emerge from those social relations. The question of the relationship between transgender people and women’s liberation must be posed not in terms of how trans people relate to gender roles, but in terms of how trans people relate to the struggle against capitalism! 

Because the German comrades treat the struggle for women’s liberation as an entirely cultural affair, separate from the broader struggle against capitalism, no consideration is given for the fact that transgender people as a group have their own liberation tied up with an end to capitalism, which ought to make them allies in the struggle against capitalism. By missing this basic fact, by avoiding the question of the material basis for women’s oppression, they mistakenly drive a wedge where there should be solidarity.

The hegemony of this and similarly chauvinistic positions within the antirevisionist trend has driven many transgender people into the hands of liberal NGOs or the anarchist ultraleft, who tend to be the only groups interested in organizing them, allowing a petit-bourgeois electoralist orientation to dominate within transgender politics. For Marxists to allow this co-opting to go uncontested is a failure to unite all progressive elements under the banner of the communist struggle, a task which Lenin clearly set out over a century ago. 

While the Klassenstandpunkt comrades are correct that we must reject and struggle against postmodernism, we cannot allow ourselves to substitute non-Marxist theories of patriarchy and gender in its place. Cultural feminism, petit-bourgeois radical feminism, and mechanical materialist theories are no better than postmodernism for the proletarian feminist struggle. They serve the same fundamental role of mystifying gender and aid reactionary attacks against women as a whole. We must instead provide thoroughly materialist analyses of the exploitation and oppression of women as a group and of the oppression of transgender people as a group.  We have attempted to provide such an analysis in previous documents, one which necessarily concludes that the liberation of women and the liberation of transgender people is bound up with the struggle against capitalism. The proletarian class struggle thus offers a basis for unity, rather than needless division. We therefore conclude that the Klassenstandpunkt line must be rejected and a proletarian feminist line must be developed and advanced!

Having developed a general outline of the economic basis for women’s oppression, we can now examine the formation and transmission of its ideological expression (patriarchy).

The question of ideology is tied to that of the state apparatus insofar as its role is the maintenance of the conditions of reproduction; bracketing, for the time being, our critique of Althusser’s politicism and one-sided emphasis on the relations of production in his analysis of the principal contradiction, we find his formula regarding reproduction and ideology to be compelling: “[T]he sine qua non far the reproduction of labor-power is the reproduction not only of its ‘qualification’ [both in its technical-social sense, the division of labor across skills and posts] but also of its subjection to the dominant ideology or of the ‘practice’ of this ideology…ensured by the exercise of state power in the state apparatuses.”

If, as we argue above, the oppression of women generates superprofits for the bourgeoisie, it follows that the same bourgeoisie retain a vested interest in the maintenance of that oppression, particularly insofar as it is rooted in a particular set of relations integral to social reproduction; a challenge to the institutions which organize the forces of this oppression would therefore pose a threat to those same superprofits as well as the conditions of production themselves. The ideological function of patriarchy serves as the bourgeois answer to that possibility, reinforcing the economic base of women’s oppression (the family) and perpetuating the subjugated position of women more broadly through social chauvinism and political/legal repression.

The family constitutes the primary structure around which the oppression of women is oriented. The various ideological appendages which follow from this, from  “sexuality” to gender or “deficient womenly nature”, are meaningful only insofar as they are translated into social practices which maintain or execute that oppression, and must be conceived of in strictly historical terms, in accordance with that structural function. Examining the particular connection between sexual reproduction and heterosexual sex, we can see how the social phenomenon of “sexuality” (which renders “heterosexual sex” legible in the first place!) serves to reinforce the structure of inheritance of private property through father-right, and thereby of patriarchy, by facilitating the reproduction of the nuclear family form.

Consequently, as the LA Research Group argued, “[t]he history of civilization has been in part the ruling class’s attempts to enforce the connection between sexuality and reproduction in order to preserve private property through the institution of inheritance. Repressive laws against adultery, pre-marital sex, illegitimacy and homosexuality (which often carries the heaviest penalties), are examples of the repressive measures taken by the ruling class to punish those who rebel against its false unity of sexuality and reproduction.”

It is in the material interest of the bourgeoisie to maintain this structure through the repression of homosexuality, which is ideologically nonassimilable to the demands of the heterosexual family form, and they have done so through the denial of democratic rights to homosexuals as well as the propagation of violent chauvinism and “homophobia.”

We are thankful that, for the most part, our trend has successfully expunged itself of the influence of such chauvinism, which was dominant within the communist movement in this country for many years, particularly among many sectors of the so-called ‘New Communist Movement.’ Today, most communists have recognized that the gay and lesbian struggle for democratic rights, against social chauvinism, is a just struggle which must be won over to the proletarian revolutionary movement.

Despite this development, however, parallel chauvinistic attitudes appear to persist within our trend regarding the struggles of transgender people against similar legal and social repression. While we will deal with the specific problem of “gender” in more depth in a later section, we find it worth asserting at this point that, as much as sexuality, gender “exists” only insofar as it serves to organize certain ideological constructions in the service of the reproduction of the family and the conditions of production. To speak of the existence of women (or of men) as a social group is to speak of the existence of a set of social relations (exploitation of women by the bourgeoisie) with an ideological superstructure. Neither element is immutable, and only the latter draws reference to the biological characteristics of bodies, and this only after the fact, in order to justify the economic relations in question.

To say otherwise is to engage in a gross misrepresentation of dialectical materialism: the superstructure does not determine the base.

There is nothing inherent to the possession of a vagina which makes such a body more subject to exploitation because there is no “feminine” nature which precedes the institution of patriarchy as a historical phenomenon; the concept of gender (which is to say, the ideology of gender) develops and was deployed after the institution of father-right in order to justify the particular economic arrangement of the family form. The interpellation and constitution of women as a distinct social group coheres on the basis of both this particular economic arrangement (the family) and its ideological expression, but this is hardly an unchanging set of criteria (and as Lenin taught, “the fundamental proposition of Marxian dialectics is that all boundaries in nature and society are conventional and mobile”). A thoroughly Marxist definition of womanhood must not rely on bourgeois ‘common-sense’ understandings, which are themselves ideological tools for the maintenance of its apparatuses and the conditions of capitalist production, but must proceed from an understanding of the social relations of exploitation and oppression which give rise to womanhood.

We also take for granted the thesis that transgender people – by which we mean people who experience gender dysphoria and seek to change their bodies or social existence in order to relieve that dysphoria – exist in the world. The social fact of their existence draws them into contradiction with the ideological demands of gender/sexuality as a buttress for the family form and capitalist superprofits; the legal repression and social ostracization which they today face is indistinguishable from the violence faced by gays and lesbians discussed above, often in an intensified form and typically expressed directly as a form of male chauvinism (as in, for example, the “trans panic” legal defense strategy).

A key aspect of the ideological maintenance of gender and sexuality is a stable notion of sex and gender. We believe that the LA Research Group successfully demonstrated that the family-form is maintained and perpetuated in part by the repression of sexual practices which resist assimilation into heterosexual ideological formations. These formations themselves structure and impose ostensibly immutable sex categories into which all people must fall. It is in this regard that transgender people find themselves in contradiction with the demands of patriarchal structures of gender and sexuality. That is, the existence of transgender people presents a challenge to ideological claims regarding the immutability of sex, and is therefore presented as a destabilizing threat to the institution of the family.

Just as the social reactionary wing of the bourgeoisie argued that homosexuality and gay marriage were threats to the nuclear family (and to the broader social order which, they would have us believe, rests upon it) these same reactionaries see transgender people as destabilizing even more fundamental ideological categories upon which the family as a social relation is constructed. 

It is important to clarify here that we are not interested in asserting that the very existence of transgender people is an act of rebellion against patriarchal ideology, as some postmodernists argue. Existence alone is certainly not the same as practical struggle, just as the existence of the proletariat alone does not immediately translate to its rebellion against the bourgeoisie. Our position is simply that the existence of transgender people is in contradiction with certain core precepts of patriarchal ideology, and that, consequently, the repression of transgender people as a social group is tied to the ideological demands of the capitalist family-form. The bourgeoisie therefore retains a material interest in the ongoing legal and social repression of transgender people.

The evidence of this repression and ostracization is indisputable, even according to the metrics of bourgeois sociology. A 2012 United States study showed that 18- to 64-year-old “transgender adults were more likely to be living in poverty (31% vs 9%) and unemployed (33% vs 12%) compared to their non-transgender peers” 50 years after the Stonewall uprising, transgender people are still more likely to be wage-workers than their cisgender neighbors – a 2015 study identified that legal discrimination, lack of family recognition, and hostile educational environments (along with lower wages on average) all contribute to the significant lumpenization of transgender people, many of whom turn to extralegal work or are forced into the sex industry.

However, as in the case of women and homosexuals, the possibility for transgender people to secure certain legal protections or rights from the bourgeois dictatorship is never fully closed off: contradictions between liberal ideology and the demands of capital, expressed in the vacillation of the repressive apparatus and the law, mean that, on occasion, it is to the benefit of the ruling class that limited democratic rights are ensured.

Our current period seems to mark a turn on this front: in conjunction with the mass reversal of many gains of the womens’ movement (particularly with regard to abortion access), the reactionary wing of the bourgeoisie has begun an all-out assault on the democratic rights of transgender people to medical care and safety from discrimination. In the United States, we have seen the passage of state level legislation directly targeting transgender peoples access to healthcare, alongside direct repressive actions such as Texas’ decision to pursue child abuse investigations into parents of transgender children. Additionally, there has been a broader development of so called “culture wars” specifically focused on transgender people. These developments point to an obvious intensification of state repression targeted at transgender people. 

As Marxists, it is crucial that we understand the state as a whole in terms of class struggle. We must also understand the repressive actions of the state as offensives within that class struggle. It is crucial that we develop an understanding of this intensified offensive against transgender people in relation to the maintenance of bourgeois dictatorship. 

This increased repression has also prompted erstwhile liberals to call for the mobilization of transgender people and their “allies” for electoral “struggle” to “oppose” the reactionary onslaught. Absent a proletarian feminist political line capable of responding to of this onslaught (and absent mass organizations able to take up that line through militant class struggle), these liberal opportunists will continue to misdirect existing rage and fear into fruitless liberal “organizing.” A proletarian feminist analysis also demands that we emphasize the differential effects of these repressive policies on the various social classes. That is, it is working class trans people who are least able to relocate or access alternative means of healthcare when state repression increases (just as working class women are more directly impacted by restrictions on abortion rights, etc.).

Against these opportunists and their allies in the revisionist left, we must offer the proletarian feminist line of march: democratic rights – from healthcare and employment to protections against chauvinism and an end to the sex trade – can only be secured by carrying the proletarian class struggle through to the end. The family form – the true source of women’s exploitation and oppression, and of the oppression of transgender people – can only be smashed under the dictatorship of the proletariat over the course of a cultural revolution to root out its base. But, as we argue elsewhere, this cannot mean the relegation of struggle against chauvinism to a later date; the mobilization of transgender people for the struggle today demands an urgent assessment of the failures of our trend to successfully root out reactionary chauvinism from our own organizations and the ruthless denunciation of so-called revolutionary organizations which fail to do so.

A correct understanding of the contradiction between the just struggle of transgender people for their democratic rights and the demands of reactionary patriarchal ideology is crucial for the communist movement. If the proletarian feminist line is accepted, then it follows that the chauvinist position which persists within segments of the ICM must be fought on two fronts. First, it must be rejected because it creates disunity and division where there ought to be unity and solidarity. The struggle of transgender people for democratic and social rights must be directly linked to the struggle for proletarian dictatorship. The chauvinist line does all that it can to destroy this link. Second, it must be smashed because it upholds capitalist and patriarchal ideologies which are designed to maintain the capitalist social order. We will expand more on this chauvinist line and these two errors in our next post.