Recognising LGBT struggles is incredibly simple. It doesn’t require conceding ground to anyone – to the middle class, to reactionary politics, to postmodernism – but recognising them instead welcomes people who’ve already been radicalised through the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Both poverty and discrimination manifest themselves for LGBT people in a unique way, whether it’s facing homelessness as a teenager for coming out to their parents or discrimination at work, many LGBT people recognise the unjust and harsh realities of capitalism and its reproduction within social structures.
This failure of communist parties to recognise LGBT struggles reveals a resentment towards those parties’ own estrangement from the working class, that any progressive movements without the input and leadership of those outcast parties can be dismissed as not even false but converging on the conspiratorial. And these parties, for the most part, are not outcasts because of their positions as communists, maligned by a bourgeois state and its press, but are outcasts socially through their own doing. The image of dark and gloomy meeting places, to be stared down by men in flat caps who’ve pinned their identity around a fragile masculinity that is tenuously tied to the idea of real work, is all too often confirmed.
My induction to the CPGB-ML in Birmingham, in a drab room where every surface was covered in bright red (presumably as a reminder), was with one person from the party (in a flat cap), an old trade unionist who wouldn’t stop giving us completely irrelevant anecdotes, a comrade from the Oxford branch, and one young member whose entire experience of Marxism-Leninism was through YouTube videos. This younger member asked if I’d heard of the Finnish Bolshevik. I hadn’t, and I told him offhandedly that I generally distrusted YouTube personalities.
And so it’s no surprise that some communist parties even struggle to get women and the most vulnerable people in society to join them – including LGBT people. They are absolutely essential to any communist party, and the failure to have them in the party – especially those who are new and unfamiliar with anyone already in the party – reflects on the party itself far more than anyone in the Central Committees would care to admit.
Firstly, the fundamental misinterpretation of materialism is one that relies on the supremacy of science by equating materialism itself to the natural sciences. ‘M
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