User:RD/9k/Defeat Stalin with gender identity (Q36,74)

Main entry

3674. Defeat Stalin with gender identity / Gender identity is proletarian but it's Stalin that divides people [1]

Ideology codes

• (none)

Analysis of example

• LGBT+ people are anticommunist because capital has been busy discrediting Marxism [correct]
• Historical workers' states failed due to "Stalinism" [incorrect]
• Queer activists argue that Marx was probably biased against the LGBT+ movement or LGBT+ subpopulation, with the subtext that he wasn't an anarchist obsessed with Lived Experience and so he couldn't possibly know the Truth.
  • Note: if we're not talking about Marx, you could sort of argue that Lenin was specifically homophobic because of actual things he said. However that doesn't actually say anything about Marx, Engels, Mao, Che Guevara, Kim Il-Sung, or Stalin. This creates a bit of a bind for Trotskyists because a lot of what they say is just rather literal copies from the early works of Lenin.
• Marxist groups have made historical or scientific errors on the gay question and the trans question [correct], therefore blue and charcoal anarchists want to say Marxism is homophobic or transphobic
• Archaic Marxists have sided with capital because they have sided with the capitalist state [correct?] on putting out "the liberation of identity and desire" — what is this??
• "Stalinists" betrayed the gains of the Russian revolution [dubious], including here
• "Stalinists" wrote off demands of sections of the working class as empowering petty-bourgeois-based movements
  • This gets messy because in the United States nobody's a worker to begin with, everybody's a Careerist ""worker"" operating in the new "Careerist" or "marketist" mode of production. So it could technically be true LGBT+ movements are petty bourgeois movements, with the important caveat that nearly everyone is "the petty bourgeoisie" by century-old standards so it doesn't actually matter. In the United States you really have to know the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism and not just repeat specific statements by rote. Here I think one of the most relevant concepts is Lenin's article that you have to join up all the movements to create a country, and it's not enough to just carelessly smash together some majority-Russian blob of workers or anarchist blob of workers that doesn't cover the whole country. If you sided with Stalin on defending the Soviet Union this idea of preferring defending material country structure over believing in anarchism would be obvious. [2]
• Some "Socialists" allege that just because Rowling has the "correct" position of "not oppressing women through gender ideology" she is not empowering capital in its ability to abuse women
  • "Big-business philanthropy in the USA has poured phenomenal amounts of money into lobby groups driving the trans trend" [3] - that is really misleading because it covers exactly half the story. United States capital is truly divided in two and half of it pours large amounts of money into supporting trans people and half of it, maybe over half by now, pours large amounts of money into causes against them. this really goes to show how all Marxists that aren't Gramscians get really easily tripped up by multicapitalism; they all want to believe that capital is just one thing with one major set of beliefs, when that isn't actually true, capital really is two groups of people and they don't actually do the thing of constantly re-dividing themselves to deceive anyone, they do it because they genuinely believe it takes away their potential for abuse as a class, even though it's not true.
  • I think part of the problem with this blog is they actually believe psychotherapy works on things that run as deep as misery under capitalism, transphobia, or ableism. [4] At this point in my life I'm starting to think it doesn't. They have this weird belief that commodities are this deliberate creation of fake things that people don't need in separation from what people actually need to accomplish, when that's not really what commodities are, a commodity is taking something actually useful to anyone and making it available to only a limited amount of people; it couldn't hurt people if they didn't actually need it. So they try to single out therapists as offering patients an easy way out when supposedly therapy is deeper than that and above commodification. But that's wrong twice over, because trans people have a real need to see therapists that are simply kept unaffordable, and people in general often find that therapists in general are an easy way out. Trans people are, ironically, probably some of the only people getting genuine benefit from therapists because their problem is really simple and has a definite end; it's not the other way around.
  • They like? Simone de Beauvoir. [5] They like Judith Orr. [6] They don't like "social constructs" of gender existing. They don't understand the concept of being more upset at someone being a Republican than at them being a gender-stereotyper. So they're not Gramscians.
  • They blatantly don't understand what race is. The old argument about people trying to "change race" uses a nazi definition of race, while most people now understand race categories to exist in the form of subpopulations people freely associate into and then start deciding whether to label themselves "Mexican" or "Latino" or "White", or whatever set of choices applies. Worst case, a U.S. town is Black because it's poor. Best case, there aren't truly any Black towns, which means anybody can achieve the equivalent of changing race by moving to a Black town, or to another country and getting a new passport. People's daily experience is usually somewhere in the middle, that towns develop particular local cultures of music, food, whatever, that get arbitrarily associated with the people who live there, but once again, anyone can live there.
  • "femininity ... which on one hand is ... timeless, and on the other hand expresses itself in ways specific to time and place" [7] — Oh boy. But that's how it actually works. What do you bet these people don't understand the concept of socialism with country characteristics? If they can't understand male and female subpopulations forming over and over in different countries and different historical periods, understanding different sequences of socialist transition is going to be hell for them. They don't seem to know what a population is or how populations naturally split into subpopulations. Which is also historically how proletarian revolutions become possible, so it's a hell of an omission. How many steps are they behind the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union understood multiple nationalities and smaller autonomous cutout populations as long as they didn't fight each other, but it also sometimes proposed these weird hypotheses that the populations would meld together. I'm not sure which model was more common. We now know the anarchy of populations won and is what is historically accurate.
  • "It is not society that needs to change, it is you and your body" — what an ironic criticism of blue anarchists when you are saying the same thing at the transgender people by trying to stop them from transitioning. Like, just saying gender abolitionism at them won't cause the actual on-the-ground subpopulations to change their local culture and become more accepting of particular kinds of behaviors just because the trans individual has them as an identity and wants to do them. People have to actually match other people to form relationships and be part of society. If they don't, there's no society, no community, no mass movements, and no workers' movement. To think you can be whoever you want and not shatter society into a bunch of teeny businesses and no relationships is one of the great problems of anarchism. So in that way, it's almost like they've absorbed part of anarchism, even as they really don't like some of the other parts of the vast array of anarchisms. They think they aren't individualist but in some ways if you don't understand populations and keep trying to erase them and claim capitalism invented them rather than selling to them because they formed together through other processes you're fundamentally individualist. Just like when early Trotskyism didn't understand how the Soviet Union worked and started trying to attack it it had accidentally turned individualist.
  • Are they Western-Marxists? "Fisherists"? The repetition of the word "stereotypes" is what tips me off. They're like, obsessed with capitalism manufacturing culture and narratives but they don't know the actual ways the material structures of society work in the background to produce those things. They don't really understand the later-uncovered Marx pieces that invoke the socioeconomy and step away from The State being the main thing in order to de-mystify structures. But then again they kind of half support the Trotskyist idea of all workers in all countries being part of the same thing, and there not really being any such thing as countable populations. But an anarchist can believe both those things. And Western-Marxism is Marxism that absorbed charcoal or blue anarchism (less often the orange stuff that is just barely not brown).
  • Both of these yucky arguments against gender manage to correctly clock that explanations like that Guardian quote are super muddy and confusing. You get the worst explanations of gender identity out of Existentialists. [8]
  • Choosing hardline gender ideologists?? They have broken with Cannonism!! The SWP is not caught up in ossified dogmas of Trotskyist sects!! [9] — That is very telling. Only certain kinds of people could believe that. But what really confuses me is that they like movements very specifically for women that don't recognize trans women as women and yet don't like "the identity politics milieu". Seems very identity-politics to me. I think they're kind of trying to perform not having absorbed anarchism but I'm not sure.
• Cannonists can't just go supporting Cuba because it tossed out gay people... in the past. It is so notable how this article starts at the SWP excluding gay people and based on partly related and partly unrelated reasons pivots over from that to "you can't support Cuba" [false].
• Theoretical arguments against LGBT movements only turn into actual queerphobia [half true? dubious]
• Gay and transgender subpopulations could not exist until capitalist industrial structures brought people out of households and manors [true] and allowed for public life
  • Oh boy this one is severely interesting in relation to the "state capitalism" arguments. It's like, history has shown that socialist transition isn't as linear a thing as people thought it was in 1900; there are structural layouts to worry about. Hayashi tried to say that Bolshevism and kingdoms engineering businesses are the same thing, and it could be that that's true and yet it's not a bad thing because Liberal-republicanism and purposefully dividing societies in two was just a really bad invention. Also, later stages of society can still look like earlier ones even though they change. So... are Trotskyists smart enough to realize that if they attack state businesses they could accidentally regress society by taking away the means for LGBT people to independently form subpopulations thanks to public life? They're smart enough to realize Stalin can do that by taking out "women's industries". But can they look inside themselves and see their own errors?
• Trans liberation is not possible unless all workers in a country come together
  • What a weird implication they're finally acknowledging countries for just a second
• Belief in eternal truths is anti-dialectical [correct]
  • Oh god the number of times you have to tell them this about countries in historical periods and they don't get it
• Emancipation is the removal of an overall ruling class pattern that repeated acts together to keep down a particular vulnerable thing that is weaker than its current combined power
  • Wasn't said out loud but was in there. I wish critical theory would be this precise!
• "as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed"
• Okay, but did the Bolsheviks legalize homosexuality intentionally, or was that just something of an accident? Feels like one of those instances where Trotskyists are taking credit for something they didn't actually do
• Cis workers started a resistance around a trans colleague. The movement went on for a while, they seized the factory [10]
• One of the single most respectable Trotskyist articles I'd ever read. I still think so. I think this article had a large part in falsely persuading me early on that the popular image of Stalin's Marxism as reactionary was actually true and that the conversation on whether Trotskyism was right or wrong was genuinely unsettled. And now... I just think that's a hell of a compliment to this article because any other one I eventually find something so weird in it I start laughing at it, but this is one of the only times Trotskyism has been like actually legitimate