General Comments on Marx and Queer Theory

by Ron Brokmeyer

Dear Jennifer Pen and Julia Jones,

A new pamphlet on the Queer Left Legacy and the revolutionary aspect of Queer subjectivity is crucial for the present moment of the right's intense homophobia along with an attempt to appeal to unquestioned immediate forms of sexuality and man/woman relations. There have been many magnificent discussions in N&L and Queer Notions, from the critique of Engels and the Queer Left Legacy to Julia's persistent critique of those who "naturalize the social" as well as singling out from the June archives column the importance of being for a new question (which in the column was national self determination in 1914) like Queer liberation not just because it is the right thing to do but "because you consider it integral to the very dialectic of liberation." Because I'm fighting with some Hegelians over Marx, especially his relation to Feuerbach in 1844, I wanted to single out the other point Dunayevskaya made in that column which is the importance of "the founder of a unique theoretical tendency." In this case I'm speaking of Marx, often called by Dunayevskaya "the founder of us all" who created the "humus" for all further development. Even though, as Peter Wermuth pointed out, Marx had very little to say on homosexuality it is the full projection and consciousness of the "humus" he created that can, to continue the metaphor, continuously assure new growth on the tree of liberation.

Let me begin with Marx's relation to Feuerbach. Everyone acknowledges that Marx had a sharp critique of Feuerbach in 1845-6, yet it is not seen as coming out of Marx's 1844 Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and his recreation there of Hegel's dialectic of the negation of the negation. Instead, many see Marx in 1844 as strictly a follower of Feuerbach. Indeed, Marx praises Feuerbach for raising the need to concretely recognize the sensuous, limited, finite, objective, suffering, necessary character of human existence. The point of departure comes over Feuerbach merely counterposing immediate sense certainty as the only true positive to Hegel's negation of the negation. Marx begins "But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation, from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it, as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and self-realizing act of all being, he has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history; which is not yet the real history of man..."

In the rest of the Critique Marx keeps honing in on what he means by negation of the negation as real history. Sensuous human activity is crucial to Marx because then one no longer has to apprehend nature, as Marx felt was the case with Hegel, "in an external fashion." Then the alienation to be transcended is not merely thought's alienation, but becomes "the fact that the human being objectifies himself inhumanely, in opposition to himself." Marx's focus on the internality of nature--"the human character of nature...the nature produced by history"--means one no longer has to counterpose, as Feuerbach does, "humanly sensuous consciousness" with "the outstanding achievement of Hegel's Phenomenology...the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating process."

However, apprehending nature internally means the subject for Marx is not merely sensuous human activity but the "true" subject is "the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective." Through the action of innate "human powers" the human being "establishes his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalization." In other words, for Marx innate human powers have to be confirmed through an engagement with external nature. But the human being's endowment of "natural powers of life...exist in him as tendencies and abilities--as instincts." In so far as the human being is a limited natural being, the exercise of this endowment through a sensuous engagement with nature is the necessary, objective, suffering side of human development akin to plants and animals. For Marx "history" is the specifically human dimension: "But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being...a being for himself...Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is directly given in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything natural has to have its beginning, man too has his act or origin--history--...as an act of origin it is a conscious self-transcending act or origin." In other words, it is the power of the negative, the inadequacy of nature, that drives human's self transcendence as historical beings. Far from sense certainty being the "only true positive" the only true human positive is the realization of the nature that emerges historically wholly from within, a humanism whose goal is to begin from itself.

That goal is impeded under limited productive forces because everything, including human powers, appears as a means to satisfying necessity. Pre- capitalist historical forms, spontaneously emerging with very limited productive forces, are bound up with nature through a worship of nature, the immaturity of the individual or direct relations of subjugation. Necessity seems to overwhelm historic transcendence. What post-Marx-Marxists forget when they tout Marx's emphasis on forces of production as historic determinant, is that for Marx the greatest "force of production" is the human being and the point of developing productive forces is the all round development of the human being. Marx kept articulating his vision of humanism beginning from itself. The goal, as Marx put it in Vol 3 of Capital and which we use in our masthead, is to get beyond the necessary realm of material production to "the true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself."

Now all this may seem to be far removed from questions of Queer Liberation today, but think about it in terms of Marx's view of the relationship between necessity and freedom. Marx's view is that whatever the stage of development the specifically human is not what is given by nature or by biology, but rather the specifically human is the historic dimension of how human's determine nature, including their own nature. This is, as Jennifer pointed out in relation to the queer question, something that Engels didn't get: appealing in Origin of the Family to some kind of primordial unmediated natural state of sexual relations as well as a division of labor determined solely by natural differences between the sexes.

The inadequacy of nature holds for our own physical being and its necessity. Nothing amplifies the dynamic of natural necessity and the specifically human dimension than when other is not a natural object but another human being. Thus, Marx saw the man/woman relationship as a measure of the degree a society was human. Marx critiqued abstract material need, physical necessity, as a determinant. Marx's concept was needing a human being as a human being. No one could necessarily foresee the wide range, natural objective differences, and sexual inclinations in humans, differences and inclinations repressed within historical relations posed as fixed. Yet the principle of needing a human being as a human being, i.e., as someone who is essentially free and self-determining when it comes to their own nature, holds.

Commodity exchange and its development into capitalism brought a process of dissolution of old fixed forms, relating humans through a purely social property, value, in the products of their own labor. This new historical form, parading as a material property of things, constantly revolutionizes production and creates a vast productive capacity. This expansion of production is for accumulation of value in things, commodities and capital. It also reveals its necessary movement as totally anti-human in the every day struggle in the workplace against restructuring. This becomes clearer and more universally recognized in a general crisis. Fetishism is the historical, not the objective, sensuous, necessary side of this reality. This self alienating way of relating, how human's relate to things, commodities, is purely social. It is the total estrangement and inversion of thought and reality. The purely social property of value is taken as material, real and objective while the thing as a creation of human activity, an externalization of subjective innate human powers, is taken to be merely subjective.

The innate human power that Marx singles out against this self alienating historical form is the "power of abstraction" through which he shows that only workers consciously and freely creating their own social relations can wipe away this self imposed barrier to recognizing the objectivity that comes from innate human powers. In other words, the dialectic itself gets into the fray in order to sort out the historical and the natural, in order to overcome the illusion that the commodity is an immediate object that determines life in the latest stage of its production as in today's globally integrated production and free flowing capital markets. A dialectical breakthrough can set free the true inner relationship between the historical and the natural. It is through the dialectical attitude toward objectivity that Marx develops in Capital that we can fully appreciate the statement in the Manifesto that capitalism forces humans to finally soberly face the real conditions of their existence and relations with their kind.

The prevailing reactionary attitude appeals to an immediacy whether in relation to the commodity or pre-capitalist forms like the family. Both are mediated historical forms which the prevailing ideology wants to preserve as fixed and unquestioned. Against this is Marx's concept of labor as human relations and dialectic. The views Jennifer quotes from those like the socialist homosexual Carpenter powerfully resonated with Marx's real vision at a time (1894) when prevailing Marxism was locked into economic determinism, especially Carpenter's view of the work of building socialism as "the patient and life-long building up of new forms of society, new orders of thought, and new institutions of human solidarity" which includes going beyond the concept of "love-union" as "one founded on the quite necessary but comparatively materialistic basis of matrimonial sex-intercourse and child-breeding."

While the struggle to overcome the way necessity reduces labor to a mere means isn't over with new forms of free association among workers, the goal is clear when one is grounded in Marx's full concept of labor as: human relations and the dialectic of absolute negativity. The latter is Marx's concept of the Idea's return to self out of its own self externalization in nature which is how Hegel defines Mind as negation of the negation in Philosophy of Mind (para. 381) Marx cites this paragraph nearly in full at the end of the 1844 Critique where also he explicitly singles out "transcendence as objective movement, withdrawing externalization into itself" as the "positive" aspect of the Hegelian dialectic.

In Hegel's disembodied idea nature "vanishes" as the Idea becomes its "absolute prius." For Marx, Hegel's process provides insight "into the real appropriation of [the human being's] objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world" not, as in Hegel, the annihilation of the object per se. However, Marx doesn't leave the movement at only annulling the alienating determination of the objective world (religion and private property). "Appropriation of...objective essence" is not yet beginning from that objective essence as the ongoing determinant, is not yet positive humanism beginning from itself, i.e., Marx's concept of the "absolute prius" of the humanity of nature. This, I feel, is what Marx means by "labor" when he defines his concept of organization and outlines his vision of future being realized only "after labor, from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual...only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banner: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

Yours,

Ron

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