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The Queer Left Legacy and Marxist-Humanism by Jennifer Pen

Alienation and the objectivity of freedom by David L. Anderson, Chicago News and Letters Committees

In Defense of QUEER by Jesse Heiwa of Queers for Racial and Economic Justice

In a monumental collection of over eight-hundred pages, entitled We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics (1997), Shane Phelan and Mark Blasius have helped to make manifest a tangible queer left legacy. From the French Revolution to the present, they show that les-bi-gay voices have emerged in tandem with revolutionary movements, engaging directly with the thought of Marx in their search for a total uprooting of this exploitative society. One of the impressive aspects of this legacy is the universality of les-bi-gay thought, and its consistent connections to other freedom movements.

What would it mean to critically study and develop this thought within a Marxist-Humanist Philosophy of revolution? Raya Dunayevskaya, speaking about the women’s liberation movement, said that women have been not merely hidden from history, but hidden from philosophy, which means that women were recognized as force, but not as Reason. This compares all too well to lesbian, gay and bisexual people, who have likewise been hidden; in fact, our liberation follows what I call the dialectics of silence and passion. This contradiction between passion and silence can result in both an invisibility as force, though queers have been an unacknowledged part of all freedom movements and to an invisibility in thought.

The thinkers who make up this queer left legacy span the last two hundred years, both before and after Stonewall: Edith Simcox, Anna Reuling, Adrienne Rich, Frank Kameny, Bayard Rustin, Monique Wittig, Walt Whitman, Carl Wittman, John d’Emilio, Jeffrey Weeks, Alan BÈrubÈ, Charlotte Bunch, Barbara Smith, Gloria Joseph, Guy Hocquengham, Angela Davis, Cheryl Clarke, Merle Woo, Margaret Randall, Martin Duberman, Robin Morgan, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mary Daly, Leslie Fienberg, Tony Kushner, Larry Mitchell, the Radicalesbians, and many others. The five thinkers I am going to briefly consider are: Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), Harry Hay (b. 1912), Audre Lorde (1934-1992), Mario Mieli (d. mid 1980s) and Gloria Anzaldua (b. 1942). Because of the dialectics of passion and silence, these thinkers have not always even been aware of each other’s work, so finding their common themes necessitates a philosophy of revolution.

The pattern of radical movements opening a space for queers to emerge is consistent: the Abolitionists and Transcendentalists inspired Walt Whitman. Whitman’s vision and the Paris Commune moved Edward Carpenter to socialism and solidarity with the working class. Harry Hay was won over to radical action by the longshoremen’s strike of 1934 and joined the Communist Party, but by 1949-1953 he found it necessary to leave and build the first radically homophile organization, the Mattachine Society. His later work was further inspired by Native American freedom movements. As a Black woman, worker, and mother, Audre Lorde’s political thought was shaped by the Rosenberg trial, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement. The New Left and the student movements of the 1960s galvanized the Italian Marxist, Mario Mieli, who was a founding member of the London Gay Liberation Front and the Italian group Fuori!. Poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldua imbibed the politics of labor and Chicano liberation as well as feminism. What is interesting about these points of entry is what they share: all these thinkers had experience as part of mass movements, and in being told not to raise the issue of sexuality within those movements. They had lived this dialectic of passion and silence, even within revolutionary organizations.

One of the first commonalities in their thought is a critiquing of false naturalisms, and, through that critique, gaining a mind of one’s own, entering the journey to self-consciousness. Anzaldua describes it thus:

Anzaldua sees her queerness as a way to inhabit all her identities, without reifying any of them. Writing seventy-five years earlier, prior to Stonewall, Carpenter, believing queerness to be biologically determined (he refers to gays and lesbians as "intermediate" persons), also sees philosophic reflection as inherent:

Both Anzaldua and Carpenter are suggesting that their sexuality prompted them, and will prompt others, to think about social conventions and false limitations. They did not fear that their sexuality had depleted their revolutionary impulse, but theorized it had added a crucial imension of critical self-consciousness.

Another commonality in these thinkers is their search for a non-determinist Marx. Harry Hay, as a teacher in the Communist Party, had a thorough but mechanical knowledge of Marx and the dialectic. After Stonewall and his role in founding the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, Hay began writing a theoretical work on gay subjectivity. Here he broke with Marxist dialectics because he (mistakenly) felt it was merely objective, with no room for human subjectivity. Yet he still recognized that Marx’s development of "the principle of the Unity of Opposites and of the Negation of the Negation, to the political struggles of their times were then and are now precisely those exercises by which the Human Mind acquires the skills and dexterities to make the qualitative leap from Binary to Analog thinking." (Radically Gay, 207).

Mario Mieli’s book, Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Critique, is one of the few full-length theoretical works to unite Marxism and gay liberation. Published in 1977, then translated into English by 1980, the work has fallen into an undeserved obscurity outside of Italy. Mieli was thoroughly disillusioned with the Communist Party of Italy, and followed the works of Herbert Marcuse and the New Left in general:

Both Mieli and Hay miss the mark of a full dialectic of Absolute Negativity, however. Marx, in a phrase which resonates with lesbian and gay experience, evocatively sees that "new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down."(RLWLKM 150). The logic of negating current conditions, within the ediation of revolutionary struggle, must include the transcendence of the constrictions placed on us, in order to create a new human future. Dunayevskaya describes this as the "integrality of second negativity with Marx’s Humanism." (P&R 54-55). Hay, still imbued with Stalinist vulgarisms, even when making his final break from them, can only see Marx as a determinist, and the dialectic, even of second negativity, as an ‘exercise.’

Similarly, when Mieli is looking for how to "transform mere survival into life," he turns primarily to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse. But he shies away from the Absolutes of Hegel and of Capital, preferring to call for a single "total qualitative leap," to a new society (209). So he has reduced the problem to one of merely re-evaluating and valorizing a revolutionary gay subjectivity.

Whatever his dialectic shortcomings, Mieli’s work is prompted by a critique of the Left, similar to though not as developed as what Dunayevskaya called "Post-Marx Marxism.." He mocks the "protectors of the Left,"(212f) pointing out that despite their efforts "to extinguish our movement," the queer critique of the Left, " is among other things the negation of all male supremacist political rackets."(213-214; see also Julia Jones’ review of Simon Edge’s With Friends Like These, in Queer Notions II Bulletin).

These thinkers do engage with Marx’s categories and launch a thorough critique of capitalism. The queer left saw that sexuality and labor were intimately connected, from the reproduction of the laborer in heterosexuality to the humanist questions: What kind of work should people do?

What is the role of the human being as revolutionary, as simultaneously thinker and doer? (P&R 76). Audre Lorde pointedly raises this in her famous essay "Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power," when she says that the erotic is not confined to sex and the bedroom, but is a quality of passion that flows through our entire lives. She condemns capitalism when she says:

Lorde’s revulsion from the alienation of labor is echoed in Marx’s observation that "the machine does not free the laborer of work but deprives the work of all interest." (Miner’s General Strike Pamphlet, 33). Likewise, her understanding of all of life as humanly embodied and humanly created echoes Marx’s philosophic call for revolutionaries to understand the subjectivity of "human sensuous activity (and) practice." ("Theses on Feuerbach." quoted RLWLKM 115).

Mieli highlights Marx’s thoughts on the estrangement of all the senses when he contends that "sexual repression...maintains the forced sublimation that permits economic exploitation, ‘the theft of alien labour-time’ (Marx), the theft of pleasure (time) from woman and man, the constriction of the human being to a labour that is no longer necessary in itself, but only indispensable to the rule of capital."(210).

Mieli and Carpenter share an impatient desire to leap to the Absolute, but their visions of an alternative to capitalism are interesting nonetheless. Carpenter, in his aptly titled Love’s Coming of Age, follows Engels in hoping that in an "economically free society human unions may at last take place according to their own inner and true laws."(121-122) Unlike Engels, though, Carpenter sees this as a world beyond gender dualism and heterosexism (see N&L, December 1997/January 1998, p.2).

It is the particular responsibility of queer left thinkers to point out the role that heterosexism plays in maintaining capital’s ill logic. But it is here that the problems with this legacy begin to multiply. There is a pull, for instance, toward intuitionism and immediacy. Anzaldua and Hay have turned to questions of spirituality as primary. For instance, Hay speaks of a, "socially invisible Arc," between gay men that can, "zap into both our eagerly ready bodies total systems of knowledge." which, he speculates, is an, "inheritable consciousness."(257-58). Once the intuitive is so invoked, it becomes an inaccessible fact of individual consciousness, rather than a consciously shared objective development.

It is important to critique these thinkers with an eye to what they bring to the movement of the Idea of Freedom. The fact that the queer left legacy is unfinished and incomplete is both an opportunity and a responsibility. This is exemplified in their attitude to organization, which can best be characterized as deep distrust. Carpenter makes a fascinating comment that from 1883 "forward I worked definitely along the Socialist line: with a drift, as was natural, towards Anarchism."(England’s Ideal, 115). Why did it seem natural, especially at an historic juncture prior to even the reformism of Bernstein? Perhaps because the rigidity, hierarchy and self-importance -- not to mention Puritanism -- of the Left appeared as yet another false naturalism. The funny-house mirror effect of being a closeted gay theorist was a price that these thinkers were unwilling to pay.

But this attitude of distrust can become self-limiting rather than self-developing. The queer left critique of post-Marx Marxist organizations is appropriate, but not outside of a thorough consideration of the dialectics of philosophy and organization. While some, from Bayard Rustin’s key role in the Civil Rights Movement, to Huey Newton’s stated support for the gay liberation movement, to the decentralized forms of ACT-UP, have raised crucial questions concerning les-bi-gay liberation and organization, the task of returning to the high points of these movements and not allowing the needed revolutions to fall short, is ours.

Transcending the dialectics of passion and silence cannot be achieved through assimilation. We have to negate the alienation of capitalism, and negate that negation with the creation of a new human being, embodied and loving other human beings without the fetters of the old order. The thinkers of the queer left legacy have bequeathed a responsibility to us: to bring the fullness of Marx’s Marxism to bear on queer liberation and, thus, human liberation. Therein lies our best hope to make possible Mieli’s "vision of the extraordinary scope of existence, the richness which this absurd social constriction prevents us from naturally enjoying."(183).

This essay was originally printed in News & Letters. For subscription information, contact News and Letters Committees, 59 E. Van Buren St. - Room 707, Chicago, IL 60605, USA, TEL 312 663 0839, FAX 312 663 9069, email: nandl@igc.apc.org , Website: http://www.newsandletters.org

My days are full of the kind of alienation one feels in the modern world. I know my day is not my own. There is a division of me from my very essence, who I am. I work with my hands, which I like to do; I come from a family of mechanical people. I should be enjoying what I do, but the nature of our society and our labor is such that I don't. Ten years ago, I wrote an article about this called "Alienation of the Human Spirit" (N&L, April 1987). At first, I liked the article up to a point, but something was gnawing at me. Two weeks later, I read Raya Dunayevskaya's "Why Hegel's Phenomenology? Why Now?" in the May 8, 1987 News & Letters. In it she showed that Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind tells you about a lot of things that go down even after you "gain a mind of your own", i.e., even after you, as a worker, realize that you are alienated.

There are so many traps you still face--stoicism, skepticism, even the "unhappy consciousness." All of a sudden, I was no longer satisfied with what I had written. I had written that article because the alienation in the lives of those around me was becoming so bad. All this came back to mind a year ago, when I received a call that a close friend of mine had taken a gun and shot himself. The shock that hit me was not only remembering him, but the recollection of who I am. I am not much different from that person.

Three years ago, another friend overdosed on drugs for the third and final time. He was no idiot; he was considered one of the "smart ones." Yet even he could find no way out of this alienated life. That is why I say, the dead weigh heavily on me. The dead and the living dead need an answer. We need to spell out the objectivity and the subjectivity of the Idea of Freedom.

As an answer, most Leftists would give you "the plan." It's like religion--that is, as soon as you find god (in this case, revolution), everything's going to be all right. But we are still in the pre-history of humanity. Many things still need to be worked out. The religious preachers talk about people who are alienated as if they suffer from some moral deficiency, some deficiency of character. But it is the life these people live that causes their alienation, not some moral deficiency.

Another friend of mine was good with his hands, a skilled worker. In the almost 20 years since I graduated from high school, the jobs are gone. He got his foot in the door of a good paying job just long enough to get used to it. All of a sudden, those jobs are gone and the nature of the work that remains is now different and more alienating.

Marx described this process of alienation in his 1844 essay "Alienated Labor." He shows that the product is of course alienated or ripped off from the worker. But he also shows that there is a deeper problem: Your very activity of laboring is alienated--if you're "lucky" to have a job. With alienated labor you're trapped in alienation from your species-being or humanity. It becomes a question of "it's either me or someone else," since there's always 500 others to take your job. You are separated from your humanity. And once you cut yourself off from your humanity, you are cut off from others, and you are trapped.

Psychologists focus only on the last two parts: the alienation from your humanity and from others. The problem is that it never gets back to the most fundamental problem--the very way in which one lives and works. There's been drugs, psychological problems, etc., in other societies and times, but it's in this society, and foremost in this society, that these problems have taken on such strength. It is not an individual question. It's a social phenomenon. In the kind of life we live under capitalism, everything is a commodity, an object. As Raya Dunayevskaya paraphrased Marx in his 1844 essay "Private Property and Communism," you can see this even if you forget the class struggle, by just looking at the man/woman relation. If you treat even "the one you love" in an alienated manner, as an object, it means everything is an object for you. Marx is saying: Even if everything else would work right in society, if this is how we relate to each other it shows this society has to be overthrown.

The only reason I have not gone down the same road as my friends, the dead and the living dead, is that I still have a concept of the importance of others. To me, the notion of the Self becomes the core and the turning point, the way one cuts oneself off from the world, and also the only way back, once you see others not as objects but as living subjects. This is why Marx called his philosophy a "Thoroughgoing Naturalism or Humanism."

Your humanity can only be in relation to others. You have to hold onto your humanity. That gives you a whole different view of life. When you do not see others or yourself as an object, you are open for infinite possibilities. What we have to "prove" is the kind of method that can help us hold onto all hope when all hope seems to be lost--the "quest for universality" as Marx named it, in each human being, or "individuality that lets nothing interfere with its universalism, i.e., with freedom itself" as Hegel named it.

This brings us back to "Why Hegel's Phenomenology? Why now?", especially concerning what happens when a person gets "a mind of one's own." Hegel discusses this in the section in the Phenomenology on the master/slave dialectic. He shows that the slave stands higher than the master because in the struggle for freedom he/she gains "a mind of his own." "Gaining a mind of one's own" is certainly great. But Hegel gives you so many paths that lead nowhere from that point. One is skepticism. To be skeptical of the world sounds good; but Hegel shows you that it leads nowhere. Another is stoicism--the idea of "just hang tough, you can do it." Yet he shows that also leads you nowhere--or at best, to the unhappy consciousness.

Later in the Phenomenology of Mind he takes this up in another way in the chapter "Absolute Freedom and Terror." I think this question of absolute freedom and terror is the question of our day--more so than when Hegel wrote about it. That's because his discussion of this reminds me of revolutionaries of our day. This is what Dunayevskaya writes of that chapter in "Why Hegel's Phenomenology? Why Now?":

"The last section of the Spirit in Self-Estrangement that we have been dealing with, Hegel entitled 'Absolute Freedom and Terror.' It is an analysis of what happened to the French Revolution as factionalism broke up the unity of the revolution so that for 'pure personality' the world became 'absolutely its own will,' so that terror succeeded so-called absolute freedom, since, by being only negative it was 'merely the rage and fury of destruction.' In a word, Hegel considers that if you have not faced the question of reconstruction on new beginnings, but only destruction of the old, you have, therefore, reached only 'death--a death that achieves nothing, embraces nothing within its grasp; for what is negated is the unachieved, unfulfilled punctual entity of the absolutely free self.' This is where he identifies that absolutely free self with a faction. 'The victorious faction only is called the government;...and its being government makes it, conversely, into a faction and hence guilty.'"

One thing that strikes me in this passage is the whole question of Hegel's critique of "pure personality." If freedom is narrowed to personal revelation, you revert back to the self that is alienated from others--what Marx speaks of in 1844 in discussing the kind of personality that becomes separate from the world around it. Marx points out that the key here is that the world takes on the appearance of an object; everything appears as an object outside the self.

This brings me to a point made by Lenin in his Philosophic Notebooks on Hegel from, 1914-15. Shortly before reaching the final chapter of Hegel's Science of Logic, "The Absolute Idea," Lenin writes: "Alias: man's cognition not only reflects the world but creates it. The notion [=man], as subjectivity, presupposes an otherness which is in itself [= nature independent of man]. This notion [=man] is the impulse to realize itself, to give itself objectivity in the objective world through itself, and to realize [fulfill] itself....What the subject has in the fact of its determinateness in and for itself, is a certainty of its own actuality and the non-actuality of the world."*

Lenin rightly sees that the existing world is an object alien to us; it is not who we are, it is an object outside ourselves. And because it is an object outside ourselves, we understand that world to be "non-actual." In recognizing this, we get both a view of what we are against and a glimpse of what the world could be for us. This provides a glimpse of the cognition which "not only reflects the world" that we oppose, but also "creates it." That is, instead of just taking the objective world as is and being weighed down by it, we are opposed to it and develop through its contradictions. This is a step beyond just being alienated. It is a movement from and through alienation. "Man" (the human being) has a sense in the back of his/her head that this is not the world they want.

The non-actuality of the world is the one thing we get in this damn society. The question is not to leap beyond the given society, as with religion, but instead through one's own experience to struggle against alienation and gain a mind of one's own. It is not just an abstract category to me. It is through the struggle, our own activity of life, that we realize the non-actuality of the world. In light of the limits that we still face after gaining "a mind of one's own," the question is what kind of unity of objective and subjective can get us on the path to freedom. What is needed, it seems to me, is a new unity of mental and manual, of theory and practice, of worker and intellectual, worked out as an Absolute. Such a new unity would open up a new beginning. It is the kind of unity that has the highest form of contradiction within itself, and thereby contains self-movement.

The need for the unity of object and subject, of worker and intellectual, is due to the incomplete nature of each of us. We all come to this society as individuals with different histories and thoughts. We need to work out the unity that can have us face the limits of our own selves and the contradictions we all have. We should not let the contradictions lie there, whether they be sexism, racism or heterosexism, as if they can be left till the day after revolution. We instead need a physical place, a forum, where all these voices can speak together. Just knowing we're alienated is not going to get us anywhere.

The only answer is a place where different groups of people who are alienated in this society can talk to each other, where diversity and difference can come to life and speak to each other in a context set by a philosophy of liberation. Such a space--as paper, as organization--would have a dynamic to it that comes from not just quantity but quality, that is from the different qualities we bring to the idea of freedom as different people from diverse historical backgrounds. That, when coupled with the kind of philosophy that holds the freedom of humanity as central, is what we need.

The objectivity of this is not something we can "prove" until we make it be. Yet we can see throughout history that there have been "individuals who let nothing interfere with their universalism"--whether it was the Paris Communards of 1871, the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917, or the Hungarian workers' councils in 1956. No, they did not get us to the new society. But they did show that the idea of freedom manifests itself in mass struggles, and that the will to liberty has actual existence in the real world: "Cognition not only reflects the world but creates it", exists both theoretically and practically, in theory and in the life of the people.

This is what Marx saw in the Paris Commune of 1871, when he said the greatest thing about it was "its own working existence." The actions of the workers in the Paris Commune helped Marx demystify the fetishistic character of the commodity. Not only did the Paris Communards give a view of the new society, they also aided the next stage of Marx's theoretical development. This is the history of ideas as well as of people, simultaneously "speaking" to each other. It shows us what we as human beings can be. Hopefully, it will emerge in our time on an even higher level.

*See Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks in Collected Works, Vol. 38 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1961), pp. 212-13. The material in brackets is by Lenin and represents his effort to "translate" the Hegelian categories.

I recently attended a public forum at my local Gay & Lesbian Community Center on the issue of marriage and what it means to our communities. During the public comment and question section, a person stood up and said, "Let's not use Queer."" Let's not use any term that alienate us from those who would support us, or confuse the issue." It seems that Queer, a term reclaimed by our communities in the early 90s, is no longer considered an "appropriate" dinner guest to the table of our assimilation. He finished off by saying, "our gay community."This got me thinking. Did we forget the last 25 years of our his/herstory? The battles that women fought to be included in the boys club that was the "gay community". Where grudgingly, LESBIAN as a term was added to gay to acknowledge the role of women, and where issues such as reproductive freedom were finally deemed an important part of our struggle for human rights? Where in the early 90s, the BISEXUAL and TRANSGENDER communities had to struggle to even be considered to be part of "us." Where pitched battles were fought over whether even their own names for their communities would be included. Where they were told they could march, but not be named.

In our rush to gain acceptance (but not equality), some communities aren't yet even acknowledged officially at all, such as other sexual minorities like the SM/fetish communities or intersexuals; who without their consent are forced into the gender binary we call male/female. Can we really boil it all down to that for us to gain allies, we must jettison the diversity that is the REALITY of our community? Can we erase the last 25 years and just go back to the term "gay"? With that logic, why not go back to the previous attempt at relating to the mainstream, and use "homophile?" Can't we keep moving forward instead of going back? Can't we instead celebrate the diversity that makes up our lives; including our chosen families that don't always "fit" the traditional monogamous model. Where we truly include the majority of people in this world, People Of Color. Where youth and seniors are not relegated to either being silenced or made invisible. If we need an umbrella for us all, why not Queer? Let's not be afraid of ourselves. We should welcome support from outside of our communities. But let's not do the job of those who oppose our very right to exist. Let us name ourselves and speak with our own voices. I am a proud QUEER; in solidarity with all my brothers and sisters around the world, and I will be accepted as what I am, not who someone else want me to be.