What the fuck was up with communist parties back then associating being gay with the petit-bourgeoisie? What exactly about fucking a dude is petit-bourgeois?
>>1375Essentialism. They saw that there were more proportionally more (petit) bourgeoisie gay people than proles, and instead of thinking "these people are more willing to be free with their sexuality because they are more free generally" they instead came to the fucking insane conclusion that being gay
makes one bourgeoisie.
A frustratingly large number of people think like this, unfortunately. It's a deeply unmaterial way of thinking that runs deep in many supposedly Marxist ideologies.
>>1377It's been a while since I read his argument, so I don't know how well it holds up. I remember not being convinced though.
Cockshott in general is one of those guys who, while smart, puts the carriage before the horse intellectually. I think about his dumbass barista video as an example. Like, he's right that they don't fit the exact definition of a proletariat, and the labor they do doesn't fit the exact definition of productive labor, but if you take your head out of your ass and experience the world from they eyes of a worker, rather than an academic, the kind of person who's stuck working at Starbucks is obviously significantly closer to the guy on the assembly line than they are the middle-manager at the office in terms of class interest.
>>1375>RevcomsI was wondering what their argument was and there are some articles they published about it from the 1980s. I read one called "On the Question of Homosexuality and the Emancipation of Women," and the argument laid out is a lot like anti-idpol arguments you hear but applied to homosexuality itself. Also that it's misogynistic to be gay. And that it reflected the petit-bourgeois aspirations of the pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent, individualistic 1980s and therefore it was necessary to "ideologically remold homosexuals"
>>1387>By that logic communism would lead to a substantially more queer society as more people have more free time and energy to explore alternative lifestyles.You know it's funny, the other thing is that the essay ends with them saying that while homosexuals will be "remolded" in socialism, they couldn't rule out that it would return in communism, or that everybody would bisexual – who knows!
>>1379>A frustratingly large number of people think like this, unfortunately. It's a deeply unmaterial way of thinking that runs deep in many supposedly Marxist ideologies.I think it's also just cult shit. Avakian created a cult and while prohibiting homosexuality is one thing they do, they also prohibit a lot of other things too. Because it's about control and they do that by destroying your sense of identity, autonomy, self-worth, etc. to make you dependent on them and the leader. You can be gay in theory and be part of the group, but you have to suppress that and commit more deeply to the group. You're trapped. It's the same with the Moonies, Scientologists, Jehova's Witnesses, etc.
>>1395>petit-bourgeoisie=thing I dont likeI think one can also acknowledge that class and Marxism plays a role in understanding social, political and economic interactions between people. But it's not like every single issue or everything that happens can ONLY be defined or completely understood that way. Because people are not perfect and Marx was not perfect and nothing is perfect. No theory is perfect. Marxism is not perfect. But that's how you get these cults.
>>1375>What the fuck was up with communist parties back then associating being gay with the petit-bourgeoisie? What exactly about fucking a dude is petit-bourgeois?>>1379>It's been a while since I read his argument, so I don't know how well it holds up. I remember not being convinced though.https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/08/29/class-and-the-lgtb-lobby/>It is today taken as almost axiomatic that the left supports the LGTB cause. It came therefore, as a surprise to me to find a communist journalist Gearoid O Colmain arguing that homosexuals, far from constituting a persecuted minority, are in fact key protagonists of the ruling class and bourgeois ideology.
>He claims that<In the Soviet Union homosexuality was seen as one of the many perversions promoted by the bourgeoisie and their petty-bourgeois opponents– a ruling class phenomenon of social rather than biological origin. The communist understanding of sexuality has, since the counter-revolutions in Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR, been conveniently buried and forgotten.
>My impression of his arguments is that they are very mixed with some stuff that is plausible and some stuff that is cranky, denying that HIV causes AIDS for example. >But I think that a plausible economic argument can be made for one of his key arguments – that the political gay movement expresses middle class and upper class interests. >I will in this post try to pull together an argument to this effect. >I will focus on the mean class position of homosexual men, and show that this puts them in the top 10% of the population, and that this economic position is not incidental, but is closely connected with the gay male mode of life. Note the specificity, it does not apply to Lesbians.Dialectically proven to be bourgeois.
(POST LEFT UP TO BE MOCKED AND RIDICULED) >>1375There is a difference between having less common sexual preferences and being LGBT, no matter how you slice it. The way LGBT emerged in the 20th-21st centuries was tied with bourgeois ideology and ways of thinking, and in the 21st century it was also directly tied to US soft power. I don't think this is a problem in the long term since the cat is out of the bag, people will just distance these sexual preferences from their USAID-sponsored past and go on with it sooner than later. It's the way China bans LGBT parades but doesn't care about the really pretty ladies and men.
>inb4 but LGBT only means the abstract idea of being non-straight, not the real way the movement exists todaylol.
>inb4 but why did the Soviets do it, it's not like they had a good idea of social processes that went on to create the modern LGBT community that is extensively used by western capital in their endless destabilization campaignsidk.
>>1387I mean it could be (although I have some doubts because intimacy, romance & erotic behaviour would be de-identiarianized and decommodified resulting in just less paraphilias in general).
Still, my point was more that the economic status is an enabling condition under capitalism; Hence all other things being equal, one would expect more homoerotic behaviour from the petit bourgeoisie compared to classes with lesser incomes (and indeed, perhaps the most homoerotic behaviour by the bourgeoisie itself).
>>1406Indeed, and there is little reason to think "sexual orientation" as an identity marker wouldn't wither away as well, kind of like race. But I admit I am an optimist about these things.
I am much more pessimistic about gender & ethnicity.
>>1410Not the other anons, but as I point out here
>>1384 and here
>>1407 its likely they get up to proportionately less "freaky shit" compared to the petit bourgeoisie & bourgeoisie, if only because they have less time energy, etc. for sex in general (I would also add, because of their income, their is less money to be made selling them various paraphilia adjacent consumer goods and services).
>>1411The problem is that you are reading into what I am writing in binary terms (sex or no sex).
But I am making relational quantitative claims (relatively less sex than, less paraphalias than, due to relatively less money, time, energy (hell even shorter lifespans likely cobtribute)
>>1401Zeroed in on this part:
>The economic basis of marriage is not love. As both experience and the tradition of romantic literature tell us, you do not need to be married to love, and many marriages continue despite an absence of love. The legal institution of marriage regulates, on the one hand, rights and duties with respect to children, and on the other, the sharing of various juridical assets. These include both direct ownership of dwellings, instances where there are heritable tenancies, and personal rights to other public and private benefits: pensions, insurance, citizenship. In the early stages after the legalisation of homosexuality, gays were relatively uninterested in marriage, and, if anything, disdained it as a mark of respectability.Yes, it is the case that the economic basis of *marriage* is not love. But it doesn't follow that *homosexuals* are incapable of love. I think that's where these guys' analysis goes wrong. Basically I think they had/have a prejudice that homosexuality is just about sex. They see it as a form of raw hedonism and that gays are freaks who don't share love or intimacy or friendship. He doesn't say that outright, but the idea that men can love each other and form couplings don't seem to factor into the picture, often it has been viewed as sickening and outrageous. Then he writes:
>Two processes operating over the last decades may have made the juridical asset aspect of marriage more attractive. The first of these is just the cumulative result of the economic advantage that gay couples enjoy. It enables them to accumulate property faster than other couples, so they have more to share on the death of a partner. Gays are twice as likely to own dwellings in the highest property band as heterosexuals. Black et al., showed that over 34% of middle-aged gays owned houses in the highest property band as against under 16% of married men and women of the same age. We have been unable to find statistics on ownership of financial assets, but one would expect, from the big income disparity, to find a similar bias there. At the same time, the advance of privatisation, neo-liberalism and the undermining of universal health and social benefits increases the importance of heritable or shareable private insurance rights.It's possible but here's another thing – urbanization, modernization, and the go-go rush of capitalist development has also broken up traditional family structures and freed people to live more autonomous sexual lives. There's a reason why large cities, for example, are generally more tolerant places for gays than small towns. (The traditional family unit can also be just as oppressive if not more so than any government.) I don't think this is something communists should regret, it's all part of a great historical transformation that is happening whether you like it or not. But a new contradiction emerged since these gay couples couldn't get lawfully married, which is important for the division, transfer, etc. of private property. The resolution of that (in capitalism) was same-sex marriage to create bourgeois subjects.
I'm just riffing on this, but it's not "gays are bourgeois" per se, it's that capitalist development sorta logically leads to the embourgeoisement of gays. But then again, we do live in a class society, so that happened to some gays and not others.
That's really why you see these banks at Pride parades. It's not a conspiracy. It's because when you get married, one of the first things married couples do (if they can afford the down payment) is to take out a mortgage and that's what the banks provides. There can be tens of thousands of people who attend a Pride parade in a major city and it doesn't cost much to send a float down the middle.
>>1406>It's the way China bans LGBT parades but doesn't care about the really pretty ladies and men.Yeah just look at Zhou Shen. But I have a charitable theory that they see the parades as kind of like proselytizing. And that can be wrapped up liberal ideology but I suspect they don't allow those for the same reason they don't allow many types of religious processions. And that's combined with "you can do whatever" and "none of my business" in terms of people's private lives as far as the state is concerned.
>>1407>Still, my point was more that the economic status is an enabling condition under capitalismI think it's more about the overall development of the economy and society and the transition from agricultural to industrialized and urbanized societies. Proletarian workers are, in certain ways, better off than agricultural laborers and subsistence peasants under conditions of feudalism or landlordism (who are also more isolated and subject to traditional hierarchies including the patriarchal family). It doesn't mean workers' conditons are good, but it can be less bad compared to rural laborers. And it's not necessarily absolute immiseration that motivates class conflict, but relative inequality, like the conditions of workers actually improving – which creates rising expectations – yet the wealth of the rich grows by leaps and bounds more than that. It's complex.
>>1413I should add as an addendum that its not a coincidence when you exclude the labour aristocracy (highly concentrated in the west, though not exclusively existing there) that it isn't surprising that the rest of the world have more conservative sexual mores.
Anyway I am not trying to make a moral point here really, or "laud the virtue" of the world workers & pesants. This is just how things happen to be, and there are materialist explanations for it.
>>1406>>1409>There is a difference between having less common sexual preferences and being LGBT, no matter how you slice it. The way LGBT emerged in the 20th-21st centuries was tied with bourgeois ideology and ways of thinking, and in the 21st century it was also directly tied to US soft power. You could apply this to literally any social movement of the 21st century, this is a myopic way of thinking. Gay and Queer people weren't even accepted in any capacity in the United States 40 years ago, only got some modicum of being tolerated 30 years ago, got some of the basic legal right straight couples got around 20 years ago, and have been fighting ever since to keep those legal rights as they get thrown around every administration or so regarding if they should be able to exist much at all. Politicians and capitalists taking advantage of a given social movement and recuperating it is a tale as old as capitalism, but you would look at this as somehow essential to the given social movement. This is like looking at the black social movements of the 90s, seeing their radical principles co-opted and defused for neutralized capitalist "solutions", and then coming to the conclusion that it's black people and more specifically the black movement that is and was a problem. Its a position that I can only imagine emerges from having a pre-existing disdain for a given thing, and then rationalizing it by means of vulgar "analysis".
>>1419Oh dear anon, you misjudge me! (specifically the one who made this post
>>1409)
I have disdain for all things; In this thread I just happen to be putting on more of a materialist analysis cap. But nothing is beyond grasp my raw raging contempt.
If anything I happen to disdain so called heterosexuals the most, if only because they are the majority demographic for capitalist degradation & degeneration.
Thank goodness at this stage there is no "hetero pride" parades, though I wouldn't be surprised if they started at some point…
>>1417>This is just how things happen to be, and there are materialist explanations for it.I think it's the greater percentage of the population working in labor-intensive agriculture. But changes in the superstructure lag the material base (possibly by decades). When the Islamic Revolution happened in Iran, around 40% of the population worked in agriculture, and large parts of the country were still basically feudal.
I think there's something about societies built around labor-intensive agriculture that makes it so homosexuality can't exist or is severely repressed, like the combination of a population boom due to the rising productivity, but still labor heavy methods, so you need more kids to grow more food to feed more people in a loop. Like medieval Europe. And also there we go with the rise of Christianity with the church in the middle of the agricultural villages reflecting a feudal-agricultural mode of production compared to how things were arranged in antiquity where there was more tolerance for same-sex love (and people were also fed to lions as a form of entertainment). The Aztecs also sacrified some number of people every year to their gods, and then the Spanish arrived and fed natives they caught for the crime of sodomy to dogs. Really.
Iran executes gay people from time to time. But clearly gays exist in Iran because some of them have been hanged. But I'm not sure in the 1970s, they would have even felt the need to symbolically run over Pride flags on the street. I reckon they might not have thought it even existed. But now you have a much more urbanized country with a government that has an ideology that's rather feudal and represented hangover elements – including people who opposed the Shah's land reforms. That's a contradiction. There's also (apparently) a lot more people in Iran with secular views nowadays.
>>1421>Thank goodness at this stage there is no "hetero pride" paradesThey have them in the U.S. and it's called Mardi Gras and Spring Break Weekend.
>>1413>Not the other anons, but as I point out here >>1384 and here >>1407 its likely they get up to proportionately less "freaky shit" compared to the petit bourgeoisie & bourgeoisie, if only because they have less time energy, etc. for sex in general (I would also add, because of their income, their is less money to be made selling them various paraphilia adjacent consumer goods and services).This isn't true, and when I hear this kind of stuff, respectfully, I can only feel like a lot of people making these statements have little interaction with people regarding sex or what not. I've been in the scene for a hot minute, LOTS of proletarian people have freaky sex. While energy is a concern, that actually ends up adding to it because people end up really sexually frustrated too. Some people here really think tradesmen and nurses and teachers and retail workers all have sex in the missionary position.
>>1417>I should add as an addendum that its not a coincidence when you exclude the labour aristocracy (highly concentrated in the west, though not exclusively existing there) that it isn't surprising that the rest of the world have more conservative sexual mores.Socially conservative? Maybe. Conservative when no one is looking? I'd argue less so.
>Anyway I am not trying to make a moral point here really, or "laud the virtue" of the world workers & pesants. This is just how things happen to be, and there are materialist explanations for it. Maybe, but also, I would make the suprising argument that kink events have people talking and acting vanilla as fuck and making sure to act respectable in some way or another, while non-kink events that still have the obvious intent of people trying to get with each other are far more "debauched" and sexual.
>>1421I didn't see this before I started typing, but I'll say that I feel that most of the points in this post still stand regardless separately.
>>1423
>They have them in the U.S. and it's called Mardi Gras and Spring Break Weekend.You know gaynazi, it didn't come to mind, but you are absolutely right. They absolutely are functionally equivalent, and in many ways worse. See this is the kind of insight I really do find invaluable.
Yet another reason, amongst so very very very many, the united states must be totally civilizationally annihilated.
t. Your Faithful Eamobulgaric Enemy
>>1425An elaborate sex dungeon is pretty extreme, and I suspect you're probably right, but there are counter-veiling examples because Lady Gaga (who is a queer-coded artist) had two million+ Brazilians show up at her concert over the weekend. Or some absurd number. Most of them are proles and it's Brazil (the concert was free because the city government paid for it). The Rio metro area's population alone is 13+ million. But think: urbanization, social productivity, transportation, mode of production.
The gay party scene – which is different from this – is also now an international entertainment industry. To travel for it does require disposable income, but you see now in Thailand with the Circuit Party Asia a pretty big festival that draws men from all over the world, and all over Asia as well.
>>1427Whatever I can do to help.
>>1427You know what it must be the late hour, but I can't believe I forgot it (video in Hellenic parliament) where Pafilis exactly points to this phenomenon (promoted by the major bourgeois parties and their university groups).
Μελιγαλάς, not even 1% of the job that needed to be done…
>>1428Right exactly, you are elaborating on my points. While I focused on disposable income and how much energy/sanity/time one has left over after a hard day of labouring, surely the social infrastructural & institutional elements are key as well.
For a third worldist, this kind of thinking is doubly important for praxis: Often identitarian tensions exacerbate divisions already (in Africa it takes form of ethnic nationalism/tribalism mostly), and so making sure downplay potentially very inflammatory erotic identity issues takes on similar importance (though less proportionately).
The communist party has no identity based criteria; The key is to accept party ideology & discipline.
>>1375It's simply projection. "Family values" or the obsession with property inheritance is primarily a petty-bourgeois or peasant thing. Unfortunately, a lot of the periphery nations which have had the most success with socialism still maintain backwards feudal values. This also combines with capitalist psyops trying to divide and conquer. To some degree, part of this is also that many queer people effectively haven't had a bourgeois democratic revolution yet the same way women have had in many places which is a prerequisite for them participating in proletarian revolution.
Anyhow the remedy for this is rainbow anti-imperialism and anti-imperialist queer liberation. Anti-imperialists must study how to radicalize lumpenized groups such as queer people. IMO Black communists have written the most on this subject. Queer activists should tie the struggle against white Supremacy into their activism. Racism is the main justification for imperialism today and the struggle against racism brings the contradiction of imperialism into more public view. On the other side, white Supremacy and the inheritance of whiteness justifies "family values" and queerphobia. As much as you may detest the progress pride flag, putting race issues to the front brings anti-imperialism to the front immediately.
>>1375>communist parties back then associating being gay with the petit-bourgeoisie?Not going to waste an hour reading the entire thread, but lots of Marxist-Leninist parties are still like this today.
The Greek communist party (KKE) is still very anti-LGBT, in Britain there's two ML parties, one which is still very anti-LGBT (CPGB-ML) and one which accepts LGB but not T (CPB).
Why isn't this thread on
>>>/LGBT/ ?
>>1405also it ignores that gay people want to adopt but are often prevented from doing so due to discrimination. So I really don't get the argument that "oooooh you're not doing your party of reproducing the work force" when so many straights abandon their kids and then LGBT aren't allowed to adopt for not being "normal"
t. was raised by lesbians
>>1464Dumb argument to make tbh. They're communist but their intellectual capacity is absolute garbage. Just see the KKE and the dumb shit they publish. Unfortunately, due to living in the blackest reaction, communist parties in the west are absolute garbage.
I don't understand how people can read Marxist theory and come out not understanding the fundamental notions of it. Instead it feels like they memorized terms and apply their morality on top.
CPGB-ML and CPB as mentioned too. But also the so-called anti-campists on this board. Apparently 0 reading. We're so lost in the west, and I don't see a way out.
>>1476see also the "new soviet man" archetype that was pushed a lot
also the soviet woman archetype who was increasingly depicted as a baby oven
>>1375I don't really have any stake in the argument about gays being bourgeois
As a whole though, as a group, we're very alienated (despite / because of all the awesome kinky hookups, hedonism, international travel, etc that we're "enjoying")
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/gay-loneliness/I find str8s tend to project this fantasy onto LGBT people being completely liberated when that's not actually the case
>>1476The Soviet union was a backwater largely peasant uneducated society. I don't know why Marxists pretend this doesn't have an influence on the ideology present in various parts of society. As if by establishing a communist state, it eliminated all social ills instantly and everyone suddenly became a Marxist scholar, a historian, and a scientist.
It's no surprise that people like Haz and the schizos at ACP, or the CPGB-ML exists. Or that the rather well read but poorly socialized first worlder semi-autistic shut ins that haven't done a second of praxis in their lives that lurk around here have absolute dog shit takes. It's almost as if Marx wrote about this somewhere.
>>1401>The communist understanding of sexuality has, since the counter-revolutions in Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR, been conveniently buried and forgotten.What a retarded sentence.
How the fuck can you come to the conclusion that homophobia is a cornerstone of communism? It's about as ridiculous as arguing that phrenology is a cornerstone of biology. Just because a lot of people were engaging in it at one time doesn't mean it's an essential aspect of the movement. Science is constantly changing and adapting to new information and ways of thinking.
Cockshott uses this statement to poorly launder (what he thinks is) a more "palatable" homophobia that has "nuanced" "dialectical" positions. Oh gay men are bad but lesbians are fine. How convenient for a straight old boomer. Impressive, very nice, now let's see your search history.
>>1476They should have just gulaged the conservatives as the obvious counter-revolutionaries they would prove to be.
When china had racist riots they just shot the conservatards and that was settled. Either re-educate or shoot.
>A majority of Clevelanders surveyed seem to agree is that it is a city of couples. A high percentage of those interviewed by The ADVOCATE were, themselves, currently involved in primary relationships of one to 16 years in duration.
>"There seems to be a tendency in Cleveland for people to couple up instead of remaining single," David Feltham notes. "It's that kind of town. But as a result, everybody is into their own little social group and un-willing to let other people in. It is very cliquish in Cleveland."https://reddit.com/r/rsforgays/comments/1ki25p6/advocate_archives_cleveland_ohio_edition_1979/Saw these profiles from the Advocate of gay men living in Cleveland around 1979, some of them poor and proletarian.
Interesting that nearly all of them are monogamous, very different to what was happening in Los Angeles, NYC, SF at the time.
>>1506The party was also filled with people who weren't really good Marxists plus they simply couldn't escape their historically contingent moment. If centuries later people like cockshott can't do it either, with mountains and mountains of research into the topic of homosexuality in a huge variety of fields, there was not a lot of hope for the burgeoning soviet republic. Even then, people forget how homophobic the entire west was. The DDR was groundbreaking in this regard. Everywhere else in the west was absolutely horrible.
>>1509>>1507Just mathematically it doesn't make sense that gays are bourgeois. Plus there have been many studies that confirm that incidence of homosexuality is pretty uniform independent of time and place, not to mention that people seemingly have a set sexuality since very very early in life, which wouldn't make sense with the class component angle.
>>1485its complicated
the soviet union made a lot of leaps in reforming rights in favor of women, and industrialization freed a lot of them from patriarchal peasant life, but under stalin these developments were curbed a bit
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