Writings on Abstinence?

[The Man]

Did Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha etc etc write anything about abstinence and their views on it?

[Broletariat]

Considering it's not really important I imagine that the last half of your list might have but I doubt the first half did.

[The Man]

Considering it's not really important I imagine that the last half of your list might have but I doubt the first half did.

I recall Lenin saying something about it. I may be wrong though.

[Apoi_Viitor]

Lenin wrote on his aversion towards promiscuity,

"Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the so-called ‘new sexual life’ of the youth – and sometimes of the old – often seems to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels."

but I'm unaware of anything that relates to abstinence.

[hatzel]

"Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the so-called ‘new sexual life’ of the youth – and sometimes of the old – often seems to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels."

Some of things that guy said are clearly bullshit. Just picking something you personally don't like and saying it's something the bourgeois (supposedly) do and therefore it's not to be liked is literally the most pathetic argument I've ever heard in support of anything in the history of the multiverse...but one which seems to remain quite common in some circles...

[Ocean Seal]

Did Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha etc etc write anything about abstinence and their views on it?
Lenin wrote a letter to a friend on abstinence about the sexual activity of Russian youth, and how it was excessive. Mao also wrote about lumpenized sexual behavior and sexual conservatism. I wouldn't expect much on the subject.

[Thirsty Crow]

I advise you to get a hold of Gramsci's "Americanism and Fordism" in which the author discusses issues of sexuality in relation to the new organization of production, different from the skilled industrial manufacture.

I read it some time ago, and I'm not sure if it's available online. The crux of the argument is somewhat similar to the before mentioned letter of Lenin's, in that Gramsci criticizes sexually liberal practices, especially attacking free love in anarchist discourse, for taking a toll on workers' who need to conform to a different way of life imposed on them by the restructuring of industry (he also supports prohibition).

I cant recall anything other than this vague outline, but I remember vividly that I was somewhat outraged by what I'd call reactionary statements and positions, some of them directly arguing for the suppression of the Left Opposition.

EDIT: I didn't know that Richard Seymour wrote about this writing, so here's the link: http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/02/gramsci-on-americanism-and-fordism.html



Gramsci writes, the new Fordist order required a particular kind of person. This is why Henry Ford's interrogations into the private lives of workers was so important. Ford wanted to be sure that the worker's private life was compatible with her working life, that she had really found a way of living that allowed her to efficiently reproduce her labour in its normal state every day. Such corporate paternalism was not just tyrannical and intrusive, according to Gramsci, but an attempt to answer a problem from a capitalist perspective that will be relevant to any attempt to create a rational social order. The regulation of the sexual instinct, of reproduction, of gender relations and of one's basic 'animality' is something which Gramsci thinks is necessary and historically progressive - citing the first such regulation when hunter-gatherer societies were replaced by settled agricultural communities. Here, he seems to be influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis. Gramsci's argument, though, is that moral and ethical changes which would in the past have been imposed by the despotism of the church and state, have to be undertaken on the initiative of workers themselves, or at least from within the formally 'neutral' terrain of the state. This is the only way to ensure their widespread acceptance and thus their efficacy.


But here he tends to contradict himself. He is sympathetic to feminism in one instance, resistant to sexual moralising. The next, he sees sexual openness in America as bourgeois libertinism, supports 'the family' and sees feminism as a 'deviation'. He makes some heavy weather of the idea that American workers largely backed the Volstead Act (Prohibition) - which is a hostage to fortune as it is both not wholly true and omits the impact of Christianity (rather than industrial rationalism) in galvanising support for the Act. In fact, Ford himself was very keen on preventing his workforce from being influenced by the growing sensualisation of culture, and eager to advance Prohibition and moral rectitude, which was one of the reasons for his attempt to build a little enclave of Fordist America in Brazil, known as Fordlandia. He also blames its downfall on the upper classes, whom he says is the only social group with sufficient money and leisure time to pursue drinking and free love. In light of some of his earlier writings, for example on socialist education, it's fair to say that Gramsci had a small-c socially conservative aspect to his outlook, which conflicted with his small-l liberalism, and undermined his critique of the bourgeois state and the Catholic church. He is, to his credit, critical of Trotsky's idea of militarising labour, but he also has an exaggerated worry about 'totalitarian' hypocrisy, in the sense that he believes that moral hypocrisy is principally a sin of moralising authorities under class societies, but could become general and thus only manageable through coercion in a classless society. That is to say, he worries that people will express formal adherence to sumptuary and sexual norms, but will not live them, or will consistently violate them. This seems to me to be an unanswerable fear, which isn't susceptible to disproof and can only be met with constant surveillance. There are other difficulties too. For example, Gramsci overstates the degree of rationalisation of America's demographic structure, thus missing the central role played by the petit-bourgeoisie in the reproduction of Fordist Americana. There's also no explicit approach to the issue of racism, antisemitism and anticommunism in the production of Fordist paternalism. The brutal anti-unionism of Fordist managers is discussed only in passing, in terms of the way in which horizontal solidarity between free trade unions is turned into vertical, factory-based solidarity.