Queercommie Girl
20th August 2010, 12:53
The British SWP has recently produced a new book, The Red in the Rainbow: Sexuality, Socialism & LGBT Liberation, which aims to describe and explain LGBT politics from a Marxist perspective. I'm reading this book now, and I think it is quite good.
While most socialists in the West nowadays are at least in principle pro-LGBT, often LGBT politics is just seen as an "add-on", something that is politically justified solely based on the generic principles of "ethics" and "human rights", but not seen as an integral part of the socialist movement to abolish class society in general. This should not be the case since the ultimate causes for homophobia and transphobia, as with sexism and racism, lie with the emergence of class societies. Archaeological evidence show that during the primitive communist era, such as among the Native American tribes, there was little homophobia or transphobia, but discrimination against LGBT people existed in every single class society that has ever existed without exception. Therefore far from being "a petit-bourgeois political issue" on the fringe of the socialist movement, the essence of the LGBT movement is fundamentally connected to that of the socialist movement in general.
You can buy this book from Bookmarks:
http://www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk/cgi/store/bookmark.cgi
Here is a long article on LGBT rights written 2 decades ago and published in the ISJ:
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=310
My personal view of the British SWP is that its "state-capitalist" theory for deformed worker's states such as China and the Soviet Union is fundamentally mistaken. But the strength of the SWP is that it is quite good at the intellectual level and tends to produce high-quality analysis of various issues, ranging from the state of China now to LGBT activism. It has got a good theoretical journal, ISJ, and the current leader of the SWP, Alex Callinicos, is a world-famous professor of sociology in his own right.
While most socialists in the West nowadays are at least in principle pro-LGBT, often LGBT politics is just seen as an "add-on", something that is politically justified solely based on the generic principles of "ethics" and "human rights", but not seen as an integral part of the socialist movement to abolish class society in general. This should not be the case since the ultimate causes for homophobia and transphobia, as with sexism and racism, lie with the emergence of class societies. Archaeological evidence show that during the primitive communist era, such as among the Native American tribes, there was little homophobia or transphobia, but discrimination against LGBT people existed in every single class society that has ever existed without exception. Therefore far from being "a petit-bourgeois political issue" on the fringe of the socialist movement, the essence of the LGBT movement is fundamentally connected to that of the socialist movement in general.
You can buy this book from Bookmarks:
http://www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk/cgi/store/bookmark.cgi
Here is a long article on LGBT rights written 2 decades ago and published in the ISJ:
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=310
My personal view of the British SWP is that its "state-capitalist" theory for deformed worker's states such as China and the Soviet Union is fundamentally mistaken. But the strength of the SWP is that it is quite good at the intellectual level and tends to produce high-quality analysis of various issues, ranging from the state of China now to LGBT activism. It has got a good theoretical journal, ISJ, and the current leader of the SWP, Alex Callinicos, is a world-famous professor of sociology in his own right.