On the 23rd of September, 7.30 pm, we will be hosting the second instalment of our ‘Marxist-Leninist Talks’, for a wider discussion on Queer theory, and post-modern identity politics.
Earlier this year, we held our event ‘Against Feminism: Towards Women’s Liberation’, in which we presented a Marxist analysis of the relations of the sexes, and the emergence of sex-based roles in distinction to popular feminist theories. We will expand this analysis, inquiring how postmodern theories grounded in identity and social justice have their foundations in petty-bourgeois theory, that is, a theory that proposes that the liberation of the individual is a prerequisite for the liberation of the collective, at times rejecting or overlooking the latter. In this way, they obscure the fundamental class relations in capitalist society, make them secondary to isolated social struggles, and therefore distract from the necessity of a revolutionary organisation of the working class against the bourgeoisie.
To counter this danger, it is necessary to see where petty-bourgeois idealism is present in the consciousness of workers, and to struggle against it on the basis of uniting the working class in the struggle to come. Sex-based oppression, discrimination, and violence, as well as racism or xenophobia, are expressions of the capitalist system and the social relations necessary for its maintenance. Communists do not shut down sentiments towards individual emancipation, but rather redress them against the source of collective oppression and exploitation. As Marx wrote, communists “do not say to the world: cease your struggles, they are foolish”; they merely “give the true slogan of struggle” and “show the world what it is really fighting for”.
Join us in an open discussion on how communists should relate to the struggle around LGBTQIA+ issues; how positions of the identity-political left are incompatible with a Marxist understanding; and what do we mean when we say that social ‘constructionist’ ideologies, such as queer theory, are based in petty-bourgeois worldview and cannot provide a basis for the liberation of the working class?