23.02.2023

Gender, class and capitalism

Mike Macnair argues that the emancipation of trans people requires the overthrow of bourgeois rule

This is the fourth article in a series triggered by the Tory veto of the Scottish government’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill - which has now issued in the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon and (the crowing Tory press hopes) a historic defeat for Scottish nationalism. In this article I hope to address the specific roles of the social institution of class, and of capitalism as a sub-form of class rule, in the oppression of trans people.

As I said in previous articles, this is no more than a hypothesis of a possible approach. I hope to be corrected as necessary by people who are better biologists or anthropologists than I am, or who have looked at a wider range of the historical and modern sources and literature. And, as I said in the last article, the line you read is my individual responsibility - not a CPGB position.

I ended the third article¹ with the point that it is practically impossible that trans people should be emancipated without women also being emancipated. The oppression of women is not the whole ground of the dynamics of the oppression of trans people; but it is a very large part of it, and any amount of ‘reform’ in favour of trans people which leaves the oppression of women intact is likely to be merely cosmetic.

And earlier in that article I made the point that it is a delusion to suppose that the emancipation of women could take the form of a ‘return’ to a society of matrilineal inheritance/matrilocal marriage, while keeping class intact, because it is not ‘male aggression’, but the dynamics of class and - particularly - of capitalism as such, which today threaten the world with destruction. The real meaning of ‘emancipation of women’ within the framework of maintaining class society is the form appropriately symbolised by Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean in: the emancipation of a few managerial women, at the expense of thousands of women drudging on the tech assembly lines of east Asia and of the discarded millions of victims of de-industrialisations around the world.

In addition, class and capitalist dynamics have direct implications for the oppression of trans people: in particular, by way of the impact of ‘gender policing’ efforts in the interest of disciplining the lower orders (more systematic and effective in capitalism than before); and by way of the consequences of the compulsive or fetishistic heterosexuality, which the capitalist regime of courtship and marriage formation produces, and its effects on parenting and parental fears.

This said, it is necessary to take a brief step back to the point of what I mean in this series by ‘trans’ - and why it is not necessary for Marxists to offer an explanation of what causes it in order to oppose the oppression of trans people: and conversely, that explanations of ‘trans’ as a peculiarly modern phenomenon are misconceived.

Transgender

I use ‘trans people’ for the present purposes to mean people who wish to live permanently in the gender identity polar opposite to that ascribed to the biological sex in which they were born.

I take it, though the evidence is rather limited, that this reasonably describes the class of people who identified as trans in the UK 2021 census. It also describes the class of people for whom gender recognition legislation - and the penumbral political arguments about presence in single-sex spaces and groups, and the attribution of the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ - might provide a benefit.

The formulation does not count intersex people as trans. I think this is correct: the oppression of intersex people arises from the same system of state, medical, etc regulation of genders as the oppression of trans people, but it is a different oppression, and gender recognition legislation within the framework of the compulsory choice between male and female is not helpful to intersex people.

Equally, it does not apply to people who wish to identify as genderfluid or non-binary. The point is identical: such people may be oppressed by the system of regulation of gender regulation, but gender recognition legislation within the framework of the compulsory choice between male and female is not helpful to them.

Finally, it does not apply to the larger minorities - and, in some cultures, majorities - who some of the time invert gender forms, whether as a sexual fetishism (around 3%, according to a 2005 study, so at least double the proportion who self-identify as trans),² or as part of gender-swap role-play,³ or in pre-capitalist societies as ritual gender inversion (whether dancing for Dionysus or as part of medieval carnival, or whatever).⁴ This last aspect of gender inversion arguably goes back to the beginning of gender as such, as distinct from physical sex, as Camilla Power and Ian Watts have argued.⁵ It is unlikely that any of these people would self-identify as trans if they were hypothetically given the option.

Conversely, I do not take trans to require a commitment to hormone treatment or sex-change surgery. This view is partly based on the arguments for gender recognition reform: people who wish permanently to live as the opposite gender identity, but do not intend physical treatment, would (like the groups discussed before) potentially benefit from gender recognition reform. But, more importantly, it reflects on the historic existence of the two-spirit individual among native American peoples, and similar gender roles; and of the very well-evidenced phenomenon of women by birth living permanently as men, for whatever reasons, in pre-20th century societies.⁶

It follows immediately from these inclusions that it is neither necessary nor possible to explain trans as a peculiarly modern phenomenon. The point is two-sided. On the ‘negative’ side, Janice Raymond argued for trans as partly an elaborate imperialism of the plastic surgeons and hormone suppliers. This has certainly been an element of mass-media publicity round trans, but it is plainly not a sufficient explanation. A variety of gender-critical feminist argument has argued for trans as an effect of modern alienated society: but this is useless for explaining the two-souled person or the women who lived permanently as men in pre-capitalist societies.⁷

On the ‘positive’ side, the arguments of Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg manifesto’ proceed on the assumption that we are on the verge of the post-human, and trans represents one aspect of the steps towards the cyborg, etc.⁸ I opposed this point of view in the last article - as with arguments for the discourse-based construction of the body, it is a case of theoretical overkill, carrying foundations which necessarily imply the moral legitimacy of ‘white’ and ‘male’ identity politics.

Pat Califia argues, as they did round lesbian BDSM, that ‘gender dissidence’, reflecting modern social development, undermines the structures of class and male power.⁹ Califia offers by a long way the most sophisticated version of this line of argument, which several ‘Marxisant’ authors couple with the belief that gender-disciplining is connected to immediate needs of capital to control women’s labour in the social reproduction process.¹⁰

The problem with these lines of argument is that as a matter of causality they make the tail wag the dog. The large majority of people are primarily disciplined by the “dull compulsion of economic relations”¹¹ - and are also, for reasons discussed in the last article, interested in having children, with what that implies. Hence the appeal to the majority to join the gay or lesbian minority in the 1970s, or the leather minority in the 1980s, or the trans minority today, will not overthrow the actual regime of economic compulsion or the destructive military powers this regime creates (now on display in the USA’s part-proxy war of colonial conquest of Russia, recently seen in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq …). Indeed, it is no more likely to appeal to the majority of trans people than ‘sex radicalism’ did to the majority of gay men or lesbians in the 1970s, and so on.

Hence it is not necessary or useful to seek an explanation or ‘etiology’ of why some people are trans, whether biological, psychological or cultural. The presence of trans people goes back to the probable prehistoric antecedents of the ‘two-spirit person’. Trans people can be found without much difficulty in the records of pre-capitalist societies. Neither purity-politics objections to trans as modern corruption, nor gender-radical, sex-radical or cyborg-radical enthusiasm for trans as representing the wave of the future, ‘resistance’ or ‘rebellion’ will yield a usable political strategy. Trans people are a normal minority of human society (like redheads or highly successful athletes), and why they exist has no moral or political implications.

Class

I take a class order to exist in a society (both to abstract from the particular forms of class and to approximate) where inheritable relations to the means of production result in some families or family groups appropriating (exploiting) the labour of other people, in a social order which reproduces itself and persists over generations.

Exploitation, and therefore class, depends on possession of the means of production (land, cattle and so on) extending beyond personal tools, huts, etc. I emphasise possession because the legal form of ownership is secondary (and in contrast to Proudhon, who argued in What is property that possession was virtuous and ownership vicious). Stable possession, however, of assets sufficient to allow exploitation of others depends on possession through subordinates. The Roman paterfamilias possessed through his slaves, his sons, his tenants and any holders of ‘usufruct’ over his land (usually the widow of a previous holder). The medieval lord was ‘seised’ of property through his villeins. The capitalist firm possesses through its employees.¹²

The consequence is that members of the possessing classes cannot be consistently libertarian. Even if they stand for liberty for themselves (by no means invariable), they must stand for social discipline for those below. This is already evident in the optimates of the late Roman republic, advocates of their own political and economic freedom (against the aspirations of the lower orders for forms of economic regulation, such as limits on land-holdings, expressed by populares politicians) and the writings of their ideologue, Cicero, for whom scepticism about the gods might be appropriate for the upper classes, but traditional religion should be maintained for its beneficial effects on social discipline.

It continues to be evident in the 1970s ‘big-L Libertarian’ lie, that economic liberty is associated with political and social liberty: visible in the evolution of nonprofits like the Cato Institute and Independent Institute from general Libertarianism in their earlier periods to a commitment to ‘religious liberty’, which, by barring public education, poverty relief and so on, would in fact create complete dominance of churches in these fields and thereby create an actual establishment of religion, turning the first amendment to the US constitution on its head.

The need to discipline the agents through whom ruling class families hold possession produces attempts at gender policing of the lower orders by the possessing classes. ‘A place for everyone, and everyone in his place’ or “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate: god made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate”. Members of the possessing classes of various forms of class society back moral entrepreneurs of one sort or another who promote policing social purity and, among other aspects of social purity, the gender divide: Confucians and Legalists, Brahmin dharmasutra and dharmasastra writers, Platonists and Stoics, bishops and other Christian leaders, policemen, doctors and psychiatrists, ‘social scientists’, journos and rightist demagogues - and so on. Gender policing is merely part of this general dynamic which seeks to divide the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor, to keep noses to grindstones, and so on. Gender is useful to this project precisely because it is built on the biological sex divide, which can lend a superficial plausibility to the otherwise unconvincing narratives of the purity campaigners.

The other side of this coin is that class creates impunity of ruling class members from the purity-policing directed against the lower orders. A trivial example from ancient Rome is the routinely cross-dressing senator mentioned, in a completely neutral way, by the jurist and pontiff Q Mucius Scaevola (around 100 BCE), in spite of the fact that Roman society and law did penalise contraventions of gender rules.¹³ Ruling class impunity has, as a consequence, that the gender-policing of moral entrepreneurs is a necessarily endlessly unsatisfied aspiration, so that it persists, however much success it has in oppressing the lower orders; and, in addition, that this gender-policing can demagogically appeal to the false attribution of gender nonconformity to the ‘elites’, as opposed to ‘normal people’. This sort of appeal is very visible in medieval Europe in the episodic attribution of ‘sodomy’, linked to ‘luxury’, to various sorts of political opponents.¹⁴

My point here, then, is that as long as there are possessing classes, they will sponsor purity-policing moral entrepreneurs with resources and political support, with a view to disciplining the lower orders. Gender policing is by no means the only target of these moral entrepreneurs: alcohol and other drugs, poets, actors and ‘wrong’ forms of music - all have been targeted at several times. But for the reasons already given, gender policing is a hardy perennial on this front, going back to classical antiquity at the latest. Trans people will not, therefore, be emancipated from the attacks of the moral entrepreneurs without the overthrow of the possessing classes who are their natural sponsors.

Capitalism

In pre-capitalist societies, the effects of these gender-policing operations are episodic, or in other ways relatively limited. There are, broadly, three reasons for this. The first is that the domain of the sacred is not dominated, as it becomes in capitalism, by ‘nomolatry’ - the worship of rules, or the reconceptualisation of religion as primarily rule-compliance.¹⁵

Before nomolatry, the domain of the sacred, containing space for charismatics, also contains space for both forms of ritual gender inversion (referred to above) and spaces for gender-non-conforming individuals. This is especially visible before the development of Christianity, which has a significant gender-policing aspect to it: famous examples are the galli priests of Cybele in Roman antiquity, and the hijra of southern India in modern times.¹⁶ But the gender-policing aspect of Christianity is by no means absolute.¹⁷

In capitalism, the ruling class can no longer claim its right to streams of social surplus product either by inherited ability to rule (as landed aristocrats did) or by alleged personal holiness (as priests and monks did). Its claim is only to be the ‘wealth-creators’ and that, however immoral capitalists are, their regime indirectly creates ‘trickle-down’. In consequence, the necessary ideological form of capitalist rule is the ‘rule of law’ - meaning, below the binding quality of statutes paid for by bribery, the sanctity of property and contracts. The ‘rule of law’ conception of the state power necessarily leaks into the conception of religion, creating nomolatry. And it generates more generally bureaucratic-rule government, ‘jobsworth’ and ‘computer says noʼ. The insistence that there must be only two recognised genders is partly a direct result of this effect.

The second reason is that before the development with capitalism of market dynamics of the formation of marriage, there is less mass fetishistic pursuit of successful heterosexuality. In pre-capitalist class societies, marriages are generally dependent on the combination of family resources, and hence to a considerable extent arranged by families. That this is an economic transaction is completely transparent. In the transition to capitalism, this transparency disappears: urbanisation and the development of wage-labour in manufacture opens possibilities of ‘free sexual choice’. Social spaces for flirting and more, independent of parents and employers, develop.

But these possibilities gradually resolve into a regime of intensified sexual market competition (between men for women, and between women for men). The trend, beginning in the early modern period, has intensified and has continued to intensify into the present. The result is mass compulsive, or fetishistic, heterosexuality. This is not only performed by the young, but also promoted by parents who hope to see their children successful in what used to be called the ‘marriage mart’ and ‘happily settled’ with a fertile opposite-sex partner.

The dynamic of heterosexual competition drives queer-bashing, which is a form of performance of competitive heterosexual masculinity. Parental anxiety for children’s success in the ‘marriage mart’ drives not only pressure on children, but also the mass anxieties which the Tories attempted to exploit with section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, and have more successfully exploited with the witch-hunt against the Tavistock child gender identity clinic (continuing after its closure).¹⁸

The third element is the relative weakness of the pre-capitalist state. Witch-hunts appear episodically and largely locally in pre-capitalist states, but these states are both small and impose limited exactions on the general population; they largely depend on the cooperation of local ‘notables’ to get things done, and these ‘notables’ depend on the cooperation of those below. Hence, though moral entrepreneurs aiming for purity politics can achieve legislation, or can achieve locally or temporarily effective witch-hunts, this is not systematised.

In capitalist society this changes. First, the claim of the ‘hidden hand’ or ‘general equilibrium’ is merely false. ‘Market failures’ are utterly routine, so that capitalism as such demands a much stronger state, which plays a much larger role in productive activity, than is the case in pre-capitalist society. Hence historians’ talk of ‘state formation’ in the 17th century Netherlands or 18th century England. Secondly, the improved material productivity of capitalism, especially once the steam engine has come into play, supports a vastly greater capability of the state. The Spanish state of the 16th-17th century would have committed a genocide of people of Jewish and Muslim descent, if it could - but all it actually succeeded in creating was large-scale emigration. In contrast, where they capture the modern capitalist state, purity campaigners can create utterly horrific results - and have done so not only in Nazi Germany, but also in the USA, with its bizarre purity laws and its ‘prison-industrial complex’.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued in Dialectic of enlightenment that these phenomena were products of the ‘Enlightenment’ which thus showed its double-sided character. Michel Foucault similarly, but more systematically, argued for the preponderance of causes in the realm of ideas for the lunatic asylum, the modern prison, ‘sexuality’ and so on.¹⁹ Both lines of argument treat France and Germany as innovating from scratch, and ignore the untheorised pragmatic experimentation in these fields of the late medieval Italian city-states, the early modern Netherlands and England.²⁰ The ‘critical theory’, and Foucaultian, theory-before-practice lines of argument, which the supposed historical examples are used to support, are thus worthless.

Trans people are crushed by the unfenced machinery of these mills of the bureaucratic-coercive state. But, as Dean Spade argues in Normal life, this is an experience common between trans people, the racially oppressed and the poor more generally.²¹ And, indeed, the mills were originally designed - as the regimes of ‘houses of correction’, workhouses, poor law regulation more generally, and so on - to grind down the ‘undeserving poor’. The demand for legal gender recognition is thus a demand to escape from the assimilation of trans people to the ‘undeserving poor’, while leaving this regime of control as such intact.

But nomolatry, competitive heterosexuality and the expansion of the bureaucratic-coercive state are all produced not by bad ideas (transphobia, etc), but by the dynamics of capitalism as such as a social practice. As long as this social practice is not undermined, queer-bashing of trans people (as well as of other ‘deviants’) and gender-policing witch-hunting operations, will always persist or revive.

Reform?

It has been put to me in oral discussion of these ideas that I am inviting trans people to ‘wait for socialism’, and/or that gender recognition reform is at least a useful equal-rights reform, like gay marriage.

The ‘wait for socialism’ argument is self-defeating. Trans people rightly demand treatments in the national health service. But the NHS is a socialist institution - yes, in a limited and deformed way - reflecting the fact that society today is in (blocked, deformed) transition to socialism. That is why the Tories want to destroy it. So in demanding NHS treatment, trans people are immediately demanding socialism: ‘From each according to their ability; to each according to their needs.’ If they did not demand that, they would be demanding the (partial) emancipation only of those trans people wealthy enough to pay for lifetime private medicine: the rest would still be cast into the mills as undeserving poor.

Secondly, gay marriage was predicated on a ‘rainbow alliance’ with the liberals, big capital and the US department of defense around anti-discrimination against the religious conservatives. This offered to provide a symbolic gain for (some) lesbians and gay men, while leaving intact the principle of state bureaucratic regulation of marriage and divorce. The nature of the demand was such that only religious opponents could object.

‘Gender recognition reform’ is designed to operate similarly. But the problem is that it is not deliverable by the liberals, mainly for the reasons I gave in my first article. It is perfectly understandable why trans people should imagine that gender recognition on the basis of self-identification works in the same way: like gay marriage, it leaves the core principles of state regulation intact.

The problem is that this immediately poses the conflict between trans women and ‘cis’ women about ‘who counts as a woman’ in a way which - as we saw - the social conservatives can easily exploit for witch-hunting. It poses this problem because it directly engages the rape anxiety which (as we saw in the last article) is a normal component of the form of the oppression of women in capitalist society.

The small numbers involved are a reason why the Tory press witch-hunt is fraudulent, but not a reason why it should be understood to be fraudulent by broad masses, except in the context of a broader campaign to delegitimise the advertising-funded media as such, as a producer of fraudulent narratives in capitalist interests - which would destroy the alliance with the liberals. It is thus exactly a ‘Vote Clinton, get Trump’ proposal: in the UK, vote Sturgeon, get some rightwinger - and ongoing witch-hunting round the ‘gender question’.

If, instead of starting from the principle of creating a rainbow alliance with a section of capital round a single-issue proposal which does not threaten capital, we start from the basic goal of building working class solidarity in opposition to the capitalist political regime, there is a chance that we may be able to formulate usable reform demands. This will be the topic of my next, and final, article in this series.

mike.macnair@weeklyworker.co.uk

‘Moving towards the positive’ Weekly Worker February 16: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1430/moving-towards-the-positive.↩︎
N Långström and KJ Zucker, ‘Transvestic fetishism in the general population’ Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy Vol 31, pp87-95 (2005).↩︎
A Brown, ED Barker and Q Rahman, ‘A systematic scoping review of the prevalence, etiological, psychological and interpersonal factors associated with BDSM’ Journal of Sex Research Vol 57, pp781-811 (2020) shows widespread sexual role-playing; gender inversion would obviously be a sub-set, but the anecdotal evidence of writers on heterosexual BDSM suggests a common one.↩︎
Dionysos: for example, E Csapo, ‘Riding the phallus for Dionysus: iconology, ritual and gender-role de/construction’ Phoenix Vol 51, pp253-95 (1997). Carnival: for example, S Carpenter, ‘Women and carnival masking’ Records of early English drama, Vol 21, pp9-16 (1996).↩︎
‘First gender, wrong sex’ in HL Moore, T Sanders and B Kaare (eds) Those who play with fire: gender, fertility and transformation in east and southern Africa London 1999.↩︎
‘Two-spirit’: this is a modern terminology: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-spirit has literature and a list of terminologies. A wider range of varieties is in G Herdt (ed) Third sex, third gender: beyond sexual dimorphism in society and history New York 1996, chapters 6-9. Women by birth living as men: eg, RM Dekker and LC van de Pol The tradition of female transvestism in early modern Europe Basingstoke 1989; J Mannion Female husbands: a trans history Cambridge 2020, Part I is on a relatively late period.↩︎
J Raymond The transsexual empire London 1980 (the argument runs throughout the book). For the second point, see, for example, R Dunn, ‘Philosophy, Marxism and gender ideology’ Weekly Worker May 30 2019 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1253/philosophy-marxism-and-gender-ideology).↩︎
DJ Haraway, ‘A cyborg manifesto: science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century’ in DJ Haraway Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature London 1991, chapter 8.↩︎
P Califia Sex changes: the politics of transgenderism San Francisco 1997, especially chapter 8; for the BDSM argument see T Weinberg and GWL Kamel S and M, studies in sadomasochism Buffalo NY 1983.↩︎
For example, there are several authors in JJ Gleeson and E O’Rourke (eds) Transgender Marxism London 2021.↩︎
K Marx Capital Vol I, chapter 28: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm; N Abercrombie, S Hill and BS Turner The dominant ideology thesis London 1984.↩︎
. Roman: various aspects in Digest Book 41, ‘Medieval’: for example, Bracton (early-mid 1200s): amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/Bracton/Unframed/English/v2/87.htm. In modern law the point that a corporation possesses through its employees is too obvious to find explicit discussion.↩︎
See K Tuori, The return of the cross-dressing senator’ Arctos Vol 43 (2009), pp191-200. Controls: A Raggi, ‘Cross-dressing in Rome between norm and practice’ in D Campanile, F Carlà-Uhink and M Facella (eds) TransAntiquity: cross-dressing and transgender dynamics in the ancient world Abingdon 2017, chapter 2.↩︎
For an outline and some references, see magistraetmater.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/the-invention-of-sodomy-as-a-political-weapon-5192369.↩︎
Coined by the Catholic philosopher, Charles Taylor, for an anti-liberal polemic in his A secular age (Cambridge MA 2007), the concept is nonetheless analytically useful in characterising changes in religion with the development of capitalism.↩︎
Galli: see, for example, E Adkins, ‘The politics of transgender representation in Apuleius’ Golden ass and Loukioos, or the ass’ in A Surtees and J Dyer (eds) Exploring gender diversity in the ancient world Edinburgh 2022, chapter 11. Hijras: see, for example, S Nanda Neither man nor woman: the Hijras of India Belmont CA 1999.↩︎
Gender-policing: see, for instance, R Webb Demons and dancers: performance in late antiquity Cambridge MA 2009, chapter 9. Spaces: see R Betancourt Byzantine intersectionality Princeton NJ 2020, chapter 3.↩︎
‘NHS to close Tavistock child gender identity clinic’ BBC News July 28 2022; the witch-hunt continues: ‘More than 1,000 children were given puberty blockers at controversial Tavistock gender clinic “in scandal compared to doping of East German athletes”, new book claims’ Mail Online February 12 2023.↩︎
Madness and civilisation New York 1988; Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison London 1991; The history of sexuality London 1977. The remaining volumes of Foucault’s history of sexuality, published after his death, were a serious disappointment to his Foucaultian academic and political followers, since his exploration of classical antiquity plainly undercut his earlier arguments about the enlightenment.↩︎
For example, on imprisonment, For Italy, see G Geltner The medieval prison: a social history Priceton NJ 2018; Netherlands and England, A van der Slice, ‘Elizabethan houses of correction’ Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Vol 27, pp45-67 (1936).↩︎
D Spade Normal life: administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law Durham NC 2015, although Spade’s perspective is Foucaultian and ‘intersectional’.↩︎