this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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You are missing the point. Also, bringing up gay rights in the USSR is a non-sequitur, it has nothing to do with what my original comment was about. I was doing you a favor providing you with a source that explains the historical context behind the unrelated topic that you brought up, it's up to you if you prefer to ignore it.
You said he was unshakeably principled. If you don't want people to challenge your claims, don't make them. It's not changing the subject to call you out on the bullshit you didn't want people to call you out on, it's just life. Get used to it.
It is changing the subject (and derailing the conversation) because it has nothing to do with my original comment. Where in the principles of communism (as they were understood in the 1930s and 40s) does it say which position one should take on homosexuality? As far as i am aware Marx for example never wrote a single word on the subject.
There are many good communists around the world even today who hold conservative views on sex. It's regrettable but the majority of the world outside of the West is more conservative on these issues. Are you going to dismiss them all as well? They may be wrong to hold these views but this does not make them unprincipled as communists. Their principles, which are influenced by their own specific material and cultural conditions, are just slightly different than ours.
Marxism-Leninism is a science, not a dogma. Science can get things wrong but science also progresses. The Soviets acted according to the understanding of these issues that was available to them at the time. Communists are not omniscient, we are all a product of our cultures and societies. You are mistakenly extrapolating our contemporary western understanding now in the 21st century to the 1930s and 40s Soviet Union.
Yes, he was a principled marxist. Marx didn't really write about gay people. LGBT rights weren't on the radar of the average marxist (or much of anybody really) in the early 20th century.
Plenty of German leftists, Marxist or otherwise signed a petition, in the 1890s, opposing Paragraph 175 of the German Legal code that criminalized homosexuality, including Albert Einstein, August Bebel, and Karl Kautsky.
Queer activists, like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, actively sought out far left politicians in their attempt to repeal the law.
Bebel, who was the one to sponsor the bill to repeal paragraph 175, continued to be an advocate of women's and queer rights throughout his life and career.
Alexandra Kollontai was Bisexual and opposed the criminalization of homosexuality under Stalin's administration.
Harry Hay, who would found The Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights groups in the US, was organizing farm workers for the Communist Party as far back as the 1930s.
Queer issues were definitely on the radar of plenty of Socialists in the early 20th century.
This argument gives the same vibes as "but everyone was racist back then!" arguments that American liberals give to hand wave away past injustices.
If we're to be thoughtful dialectical materialists about this: while queerness has always existed, and cultures throughout history have had queer subcultures, such as the Kathoey in Thailand or Molly Houses in England, the development of Capitalism brought with it a trend towards a more systematized, wider reaching regimentation of reproductive labor, then what had been seen under previous forms of class society.
On the one hand, this brought about the categorization and subsequent oppression of queer people. But on the other hand, industrialization brought people into urban areas, socialized labor, and allowed queer people to form larger communities, who could start organizing politically on a large scale.
Since the Soviet Union had not industrialized, that pressure on queer people in the Soviet Union, to organize at a large scale, didn't exist. And the prevalence of queer organizing in the more industrialized west, brought Stalin's administration to make the idealist error that queerness was an outgrowth of "bourgeois decadence", rather than material conditions.
Excellent dialectical materialist analysis comrade, and good job on providing extensive historical context too! These are the kinds of high quality comments that i really appreciate this place for.
Thank you! For anyone else reading this thread, I'd highly recommend Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg, Capitalism and Gay Identityby John D'emilio, and Caliban and The Witch by Sylvia Federici, for good dialectical analyses of capitalism's impact on queer people.
Federici's work focuses on cis women, but makes a good theoretical base that Feinberg builds on, and that leads well into D'emilio's work. So that's the order I'd read them in.