I am a staunch proponent of LGBTQ+ rights. As a communist, some people might wonder how that can be, but you have to understand the historicity of how we got here and what it means to be a communist.
Communism, in theory, is supposed to be about the dialectical conditions of the material world. For example, if people are going hungry, communism is to seek out the root cause of the hunger, and to resolve it using methods that will resolve the contradiction (for example, if a corrupt government is preventing the poor from getting food, one of communism’s solutions could be to dissolve the government, and replace it with a governing body made up of the people who were being starved), thus allowing people to live on their terms to the benefit of all.
Does it always work out that way? No, oh hell no, of course not. Now, as a communist I believe that communism itself, the goal of a stateless, classless, moneyless society is the end goal we should all want: a point where people are not divided by economy or culture, that they are brought together by the delight of their differences.
Are we there yet? Fuck no. We may never truly get there, but as long as that is the end goal, then the sky is the limit in what humanity can accomplish. In the meantime, socialism, the process by which the workers own the means of production and thereby set the prices, the wages, the rules for how a society approaches its needs, is the process by which we use to achieve communism.
It’s why sometimes I’ll call myself a socialist, sometimes a communist, because they are, in the grandest scheme, the same thing, it’s just one is an ongoing process and the other is the end result.
So anyway, we look at the history of communist countries (or socialist countries striving towards communism if you prefer), and there were some repressive governments. For example, while I think they made amazing advances in the time they were around, the Soviet Union had many deficits in the realm of LGBTQ+ rights.
Part of it is because a lot of politicians saw LGBTQ+ people as a part of the decadent West, and that simply wasn’t true, as we know, LGBTQ+ people have been around since the beginning of humanity’s ascent from the muck, as a part of many cultures, often celebrated for who they were rather than castigated and hidden away out of shame (as many western cultures did for the longest time, I might add).
Socialist scientists, on the other hand, were often at the forefront of LGBTQ+ rights. For example, in East Germany (the GDR) back in the 1960s through the 1980s, sexual sciences were far more advanced, and LGBTQ+ people were treated very well, despite Western Germany outlawing homosexuality until the 1990s.
It has always been culture that has shaped so many attitudes. Even socialist societies are not immune from this, and it is something that many communists, myself included, are constantly reminding people to examine their beliefs to see if they’re reasonable and based on the material (which also includes social) needs of the people, or if they’re being reactionary.
What is a reactionary? A reactionary is someone who moves out of fear, not because something is needed, but because they fear the end result. A good example would be a MAGA Republican. While many people who follow Trump are often working class people, they fight against their own interests by choosing a man like Trump, who is aligned with the bourgeoisie (the ruling class), because he plays up their fears: their fear of the Other, their fear of those they don’t understand, which often comes down to LGBTQ+ people, women, immigrants, black folks, and so on and so on, the list really goes on, and why?
Because they don’t understand. They have been fooled to believe the man who exploits them genuinely cares about them, and they don’t realize he’s using their ignorance to build his wealth and power, and to maintain the status quo of the white supremacist system the exists in the United States (and in many formerly colonized countries).
That does not excuse them for what they do. A father who will throw a child out of their home for being gay is a bad father, there is no excusing hatred or bigotry. If your love for someone is so conditional that they have to conform to your deeply held religious beliefs or else they’re cast out, you’re not sharing love, you’re trying to control someone.
So while I have a lot of empathy for these people who have been lead astray, the fact is they continue to choose, every day, the path of bigotry in an effort to maintain control, to control others because of what these people fear. That is inexcusable.
I believe capitalism is part of the white supremacist system and that, in fact, white supremacy could not maintain its power without capitalism. Fascism cannot exist without exploiting the people at the bottom in order to build wealth and power for the people at the top. That is why capitalism is inherently fascist at heart, and why it needs to be destroyed.
Trotsky believed that socialism could not exist on its own, that it required a worldwide effort in order to better prevent capitalist states from trying to influence those socialist countries (which the US absolutely has a history of doing), and building unrest in order to cause those socialist states to collapse.
Lenin disagreed with this, believing that a socialist state could be built even in the heart of a world full of capitalist states. When the USSR was first formed, homosexuality was decriminalized, women were made equal, and laws that oppressed minority groups were struck down. For a while, the USSR was becoming exactly what Lenin hoped it would be, but as any revolutionary can tell you, when a revolution is lead by a strong man, problems are born when that strong man is removed from the picture.
So when Lenin died, and Stalin took power, that alone almost created a schism because, at the time, not everyone was in Stalin’s corner, and some in the politburo felt that Stalin was not the man to lead the USSR into the next phase of its existence.
Socialism is not a utopia. It is just as subject to human frailty as any other system. A good leader can make a bad system seem tolerable, and a bad leader can make even the best system seem unsustainable.
Regardless of your thoughts on Stalin (I have mixed thoughts but consider him a generally good man who had a hell of a lot of faults), the USSR *did* become stronger, more powerful, more influential on the world stage. Stalin took an agrarian country that was more peasantry and farmland than anything else, and turned it into a social, cultural, military power house.
We have Stalin’s Red Army to thank for crushing the Nazis on the Eastern front, and for stomping into Berlin to confront Hitler’s last dregs and helping end both the Holocaust and the war itself.
If, at this point, you’re confused because you’ve read The Black Book of Communism and what I’m saying doesn’t jive with it, you need to know that the Black Book of Communism was written by literal Nazis, and has been used for decades to make the USSR look monstrous.
That’s not to say bad things didn’t happen, they did, just as they happen in every country at one time or another, but many of the figures used in that book are grossly hyperbolic, for the explicit purpose of making you push against communism, and be more sympathetic to fascism.
For example, the Black Book of Communism counts the Nazis in its death toll of “how many millions communism has killed,” so take it with a massive grain of salt.
That said, I’m not here to either defend or debate any of that, you’ll have to study that for yourself, just as I had to study it to learn for myself.
What I’m talking about is the future of the LGBTQ+ community and the future we need to defend as socialists who want a world where everyone’s needs are met, and people are truly free to live without exploitation of one another or the environment.
So when you see me, as a socialist or communist, talking about LGBTQ+ rights and you might want to make a remark about “comminism 800,000,000,000 dead,” I need you to shut your fucking mouth and keep it to yourself, because you’re just full of shit, have no idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t give a fuck what you think because if I wanted to hear the ravings of a someone awash in propaganda, I can listen to a Trumper argue with me about how illegal immigrants are sneaking across the border to vote for the Democrats.
Now to the main story of my post, because yeah, the rest of this was a preface. When you’re a socialist, you have to do this sometimes because people, especially Americans, love to shout at you without knowing a fucking thing about anything. For a society that is filled with the most ignorant people on Earth, Americans sure do love to tell you how wrong you are.
Well, I love history, and I love studying cultures. I also am a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and so am interested in my community, and thus as a socialist, as a pansexual person, as someone too incredibly awesome to inhabit just one gender, it is in my best interests to be aware of what goes on around me.
I write from the perspective of a US citizen, and usually write about the US for the most part, because I stick to what I know the most. So I will often talk about fundamentalist Christianity, white supremacy, fascism, systemic oppression, militarism, and so on, because I live in what Che Guevara called “the belly of the beast.”
I live in the heart of the US empire, and the US empire sets the tone for billions of people around the world whether they like it or not, and it’s not that we should have the right, but because the US takes what it wants by force, and then lies about its reasons afterward.
Let me give you a quick shorthand lesson: When the US says “freedom,” it means economic exploitation. It’s not saying freedom as in liberation from oppression, but freedom as in how you can be exploited by corporations.
In the US, LGBTQ+ people have a lot of “freedom,” and you can see it every June as corporations pretend they give a fuck about gay people. They do not. It’s entirely transactional. All they’re saying is that your gay money is just as good as that straight guy’s money, but also if you’re gay and poor, please fuck off.
So the support is conditional.
We deserve better than that. Half-assed allies are no allies at all, they’re opportunists, and you should respect yourself more than to accept that half-assed “allyship” because at the end of the day, with the way things are going, you will still be sitting with me in a holding cell for crimes against God’s Purpose or whatever fucking bullshit fundamentalists will push as the reason they’re herding LGBTQ+ people into camps, and you’ll die just as painfully as I will.
This is why I don’t do “lesser evil” voting, because even a so-called “lesser” evil is still evil, is still someone who will throw you away at the first opportunity to advance their own agendas. There’s a reason why every election in the past 40 years has been “the most important election of our lifetime.”
Because we’ve lesser eviled ourselves to the point where all of the people running for office are generally pretty evil as fuck.
It’s time for a change. It’s time for revolution, and not in the conventional sense.
We need a revolution of ideas, of empathy, of human compassion. We need to reach out to other people in the community and surround them with our kindness, our protection, we need to create inroads that also help us maintain material solvency.
What good is “I support you” from your neighbor down the street if you can’t even get enough to eat?
We need to build our own communities within communities, bolster each other up, address our physical, emotional and, yes, spiritual needs away from the people who are more than happy to persist in the status quo.
We can’t individualize our way out of this mess, we literally need a village. We need a community. We need to do what we can in large numbers, because otherwise the Earth is going to burn and we’re just going to sink from worse to worse to worse, each time the newest “lesser evil” promising a slightly less awful hell while generally failing to deliver on it, because, and let me use all caps here:
OUR SURVIVAL IS NOT THE FOCUS OF THE RULING CLASS.
The ruling class would let billions of us die as long as the money and resources continued to flow upward, to continue the ever expanding greed and lust of these powerful people who do not care what happens to the Earth after they die.
Capitalism will not save us, it is their primary tool to keep us oppressed, and Audre Lorde was right when she said you cannot tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools. The master isn’t going to decide some day that we’ve done enough and can enjoy our lives, they will use us until we drop dead, slide us out of the way, and put someone else in our place until they drop dead, ad infinitum.
LGBTQ+ rights are just the beginning in all of this, but it is the canary in the coal mine, just as women are the canary in the coal mine.
Look there are a lot of fucking canaries in this coal mine, okay, and some of them are already dropping dead, and have been dead for some time, and people continue to ignore it.
We, as members of the LGBTQ+ community, need to look our for each other: that is the point of intersectional proletarian feminism, to uplift and defend those who have been negatively affected by the oppression of white supremacy and its rampant colonialism.
That means it’s a big umbrella, and we’re not always going to agree on things, but I need you to see your neighbor, to look past those differences in your fellow human beings, and to realize both of you have the right to live free of the weight of a group of people who honestly and truly believe God gave them the right to tell the “inferior” people what to do with their own lives.
So even if you’re not a member of the LGBTQ+ community, we still need you, because if you’re not a member of the ruling class, if you’re not helping the colonial project, you are also being pushed down, oppressed, and if they get us, believe me when I tell you they will come for you next, because they will always need a scapegoat to maintain the power of their oppressive regime, and it will never be them, the white, straight, cisgender, land owning men or the women who support them.
It will be you.
It will be us, and then you, too.
We have to change that future.
.Red
