Bourgeois ideology, strongly influences social consciousness by reframing complex social problems—such as violence against women, gender, racism, and identity—through the narrow lens of individual rights. This ideological framework obscures the social and class roots of oppression and therefore must be confronted theoretically and politically. The task is to critically examine the social and economic conditions that give rise to these ideas, their anti-scientific and irrational character, their institutional enforcement, their strategic role for the capitalist system, and the necessity of their systematic, evidence-based opposition.
The spread of these ideologies is linked to changes within the working class itself, particularly the growth of new strata of wage labor that rely increasingly on intellectual and creative capacities. These groups often lack collective experience, class consciousness, and organizational skills. Capitalist forces seek to keep them fragmented and individualized, preventing their transformation from a “class in itself” into a “class for itself.” Within this context, individuals are increasingly defined as bearers of marketable skills rather than as social beings. Alienation, consumerism, and narcissistic culture promote artificial needs and fragmented identities, encouraging a proliferation of individualized “rights” detached from collective and class interests.
Lifestyle, consumption patterns, and self-presentation become part of the commodification of the self. The obsessive pursuit of extreme self-definition—especially through fluid gender and sexual identities—is presented as liberation but instead leads to endless dissatisfaction, loss of meaning, and intensified alienation. Sexuality, detached from its biological, emotional, social, and cultural dimensions, becomes fetishized and instrumentalized, reflecting the broader emptiness produced by capitalist social relations.
Foucauldian micro-power theories and postmodern claims that gender and identity are arbitrary social constructions are the basis. Such approaches elevate particularity while rejecting universality, collectivity, and class-based subjectivity. Methodologically, they oscillate between biological determinism and sociological reductionism, both rooted in a metaphysical, anti-dialectical understanding of humanity that blocks scientific analysis of social laws and historical development.
These ideologies are not merely academic but are actively enforced through state and supranational institutions, international organizations, NGOs, and media networks. The same forces responsible for wars, exploitation, and social devastation promote gender and identity policies, fund academic programs and activism, and normalize practices such as commercial surrogacy. Such policies represent new forms of bodily exploitation and, particularly regarding children, constitute grave crimes.
This strategy serves an aggressive objective of global capital: the dissolution of collective bonds and even the biological foundations of human continuity, in order to preempt the formation of revolutionary subjects. Popular instinctive rejection of these developments reflects a healthy response to systemic decay, but without a scientific and organized progressive alternative, this reaction can be exploited by reactionary or fascist forces.
The communist strategic goal is a society where the full development of every personality is a condition for social development itself. Rights struggles are meaningful only insofar as they are organically linked to this goal and to the collective abolition of exploitation, oppression, and discrimination.
However,
“Everything that is human in the human being—that is, precisely what distinguishes them from animals—is 100% (not 90% or even 99%) the result of the social development of human society, and every individual capacity is an individually exercised function of the social, not the biological, organism, even though it is carried out by the natural, biologically innate organs of the human body—in this case, the brain.” (Ilyenkov)
While it is necessary to contribute in a comprehensive way to the critique of postmodern ideology, the excessive emphasis placed on it underestimates the persistent and intensifying dominance of traditional bourgeois ideology around gender (“fatherland–religion–family”). This is more deeply connected to the political weakness and/or unwillingness to rally LGBT workers in a revolutionary direction.
The problem, therefore, is not limited to the weighing of ideological currents, but concerns the problematic state of our intervention in the gender question and its theoretical foundations. We correctly identified the philosophical roots of the issue. However, theoretical questions cannot be detached from their political and movement-related consequences. In this context, a related but distinct question arises: on what terms is the confrontation with postmodernism conducted? These terms cannot be reduced to mechanistic materialism, nor exhausted by proclamations of “objective reality.” However radical such positions may appear today, the demands are higher. Only dialectical materialism is consistent materialism.
Human survival and development rest on the metabolism between social humanity and nature through labor, which is not merely a technical act but a social relation and the basis of consciousness; by changing nature, human beings change themselves. Marxism rejects biological reductionism and mechanistic materialism, recognizing that human capacities, consciousness, and identity are products of socio-historical development, with a material biological basis, within specific social relations. They are not reducible to lower forms of the motion of matter. This is the content of Marx’s critique of earlier materialism, including Feuerbach, when he pointed out that it failed to grasp reality also as human material activity, as practice, subjectively.
On the basis of contemporary scientific data, the complexity of the biology of sex, the existence of intersex conditions, and the “plasticity” of neurological (the unity of brain development with cultural, familial, etc. environments), hormonal, and bodily characteristics come to light—facts that refute simplistic biologism. Ultimately, only the dialectical-materialist methodology grasps these phenomena as contradictory expressions of a single, dynamic reality and provides a foundation for a consistent politics of emancipation, in contrast to the postmodern reduction of self-determination to a verbal act.
The species Homo sapiens was constituted through biological preconditions marking the transition from the herd to society, while the regulation of reproduction through exogamous kinship ties and the use of tools laid the foundations of the specifically social form of the motion of matter. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, documents the existence of the pre-class primitive communal system and links the emergence of surplus product, classes, and the state to the “world-historic defeat of the female sex”—a thesis generally confirmed by contemporary anthropology, though specific historical details concerning the allegedly “natural” gendered division of labor require revision. The monogamous family, as the economic unit of class society, became the basis of the gendered division of labor, the chief perpetrator of the double oppression of women and LGBT people for the benefit of the ruling classes.
The oppression of women and LGBT workers is not a legal anomaly but a structural element of capitalism. The EU and bourgeois states promote formal equality and women’s “rights” as mechanisms of flexible labor, while maintaining wage inequalities and structures of patriarchal dependence, since the need for the nuclear family for the reproduction and disciplining of labor power—and, by extension, the criminalization of non-normative sexuality—is deeply rooted in the history of capital. Despite official proclamations, data show systematic discrimination against LGBT workers, particularly trans people, while legal equality conceals material oppression. The bourgeois state continues to exploit patriarchal notions to divide and exploit the working class. These lead even to murderous violence. The management of AIDS/HIV by bourgeois states was also murderous. Genuine emancipation presupposes the overthrow of capitalist relations of production.
Historically, the emancipation of women and LGBT people is linked to class struggle, while opportunist degeneration and eventual incorporation into individual rights discourse reflect weaknesses within the communist movement itself—despite evidence that socialism can abolish the material basis of this oppression (the October Revolution, the GDR, and Czechoslovakia).
The oppression of women and LGBT workers is not a matter of “attitudes,” but a product of exploitative relations of production and the bourgeois family and ideological framework. The bourgeois notion of “self-determination” and individual rights appears as a semblance of freedom that conceals wage slavery and deeper social inequality. We must not cede this concept to our enemies. On the contrary, real bodily self-determination and equality can exist only through collective emancipation.
Ideological confrontation with bourgeois philosophy is insufficient without practical struggle for the emancipation of LGBT workers. Denouncing marriage as an institution is a necessary starting point, but it is not enough when it entails tangible economic and social security benefits. The contemporary revolutionary Program constitutes the only consistent basis for a strategic confrontation with state institutions, revealing that bourgeois laws do not aim at substantive equality but at the commodification of reproduction, adoption, and the female body, and at ideological incorporation. A revolutionary policy must combine a comprehensive anti-capitalist proposal to detach the family from economic coercion with concrete measures facilitating the lives of the oppressed. This expresses a central task for communists today: overcoming the contradiction between the formally and the substantively revolutionary character of our work, as theoretical shortcomings lead to tactics that neither serve the interests of LGBT workers nor strengthen their rallying and the unity of the movement.
For the revolutionary Program to enter the lives of the oppressed, certain backward views must be overcome. A child’s development is independent of the parents’ sexuality: relatively so, since it is not responsible for homophobia or the deficiencies of the bourgeois state; absolutely so, since personality formation is determined by the mode of production, social relations, and participation in class struggle. Motherhood and fatherhood have social content, which is transformed under socialism, as illustrated by Gorky’s Mother, who felt all the children of the Soviet people to be her own.
Ultimately, under the rainbow of imperialism, LGBT workers fight “under a foreign flag.” The true symbol of the emancipation of all humanity is the red banner, which sooner or later will fly again. Thus, LGBT workers can find their freedom only in common struggle with the revolutionary workers’ movement.