Re: Lenin on sexual "excess"

[hariette@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (hariette spierings)]

>
>
>             Of course, thirst must be satisfied.  But would normal man in
>normal conditions lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle?"
>
>Sex, according to Lenin, contains a "social interest, which gives rise to a
>duty towards the community."
>
>It is this "duty towards the community" that most engages my attention.  An
>act is not rendered good or bad, moral or immoral, socially useful or
>injurious, simply because it contains a genital dimension.  The larger good
>to the community--the struggle for the proletarian revolution and the
>overthrow of capitalism, the class dimension--is what, to my mind, is
>supreme.  It is not the sexual act (presuming, of course, that it is
>agreeable to the persons involved) that should concern us, regardless of the
>sex or number of actors involved.  It is the nature of the change being
>sought and resisted.
>
>Whatever advances the cause of communism is moral; whatever retards it is
>immoral.
>
>We are told that nearly sixty per cent of homosexuals have engaged in group
>sex, while the figure is only twelve per cent for heterosexuals.  Does this
>figure serve to exclude homosexuals from the ranks of revolutionaries--by
>virtue of their partaking in "orgiastic conditions"--and, at the same time,
>include the great body of heterosexuals?  I do not see how this argument can
>be made by Marxists-Leninists.  As Lenin said, it is one's fulfillment of
>one's "duty to the community" that is the key.
>
>I bring all of this up to express my concern that some distortions from the
>old "proletarian family" school--understandable and perhaps necessary in its
>own era--have persisted into our own age and now survive as an anachronistic
>relic among certain sects.  It now serves largely as an ugly reminder to the
>rest of us of the disagreeable consequences of hanging on to concepts long
>after their time in history as passed.
>
>It would be ironic if we communists stepped into the breach left by
>bourgeois society to continue to visit abuse and vilification on groups
>themselves victimized by bourgeois morality.
>
>                                       Louis Godena



Hello Louis:  There is in your mailer much of interest in relation to this
theme.

In my opinion, Lenin was absolutely right in denying sex to be a "biological
necessity".  Sex "thirst" is a physiological anxiety, not a necessity - even
for procreation, as proven by new scientific methods.  It is not accurate to
speak of thirst (or hunger) and sex as identical urges. Thirst and hunger
are expressions of biological necessities, while the lack of sexual
satisfaction is not.

Billions of people have gone through life without sexual gratification or
very little of it in their lives, and I don't know of many examples of
people actually dying of "thirst" or "hunger" for sex due to biological reasons.

In other words, while sex can be "sublimated" and it is in fact sublimated
in reality by countless people both historically and in actuality, hunger
and thirst cannot ultimately be.

Sex is a socially necessary activity - that is something different.  Without
people engaging in sexual (heterosexual) activities no reproduction of the
human species would have been possible while science had not achieved a
sufficient level as to offer a perspective of different methods in this
regard, and even then, for really massive reproduction as needed by
humanity, such methods are not sufficient as yet, nor are likely to ever be
practical or desirable as such.

The question of sublimation or not sublimation of the sexual "urge" (the
physiological anxiety) has to be dealt with in correspondance to - for
comunists - to the revolutionary needs of the class - the political needs -
and the concrete conditions of the class struggle at any particular time and
place.

The struggle for liberation from the oppressive bourgeois (or any other
ruling class) morality is a question of democratic rights - what is called
in other terms the question of the rights of people to control over their
own bodies free from the interference of the oppressor state and its
instruments of repression, military, ideological, moral etc..  That is its
only connection with the socialist struggle.

How will the physiological anxieties of people under communism may find
expression is not a question that arises today - not even in the advanced
countries, where the freedoms won by the proletariat class struggle are put
in practice only within the boundaries of bourgeois society, and therefore
can hardly constitute AT THIS STAGE but an expression of "bourgeois" relations.

In fact there is very little but bourgeois relations in most sexual
relationships today wherever capitalist relations prevail (most of the
advanced world) - and the more capitalist relations develop, the more
bourgeois such relations become, and since today's bourgeois relations are
decadent relations, the more decadent sexual relations actually become.

Such relations cannot become but more "expoitative" as bourgeois morality
(or inmorality) permeates more and more society as a whole.

For many sections of society, under conditions of imperialist putrefaction,
sex has become the "prime necessity of life" instead of labour which is more
and more denied.  The more sex becomes such a prime necessity, the more
unreal it becomes, the more de-naturalised it is in practice, the more
hypocritical and self-serving, despite all its claims to "liberation".

For revolutionaries, under capitalist conditions, revolutionary activity -
the class struggle - is the prime necessity of life. "Happiness is the
struggle". Only then can other life activities find their relative position
in a life balanced by the "sense of proportion" of the proletarian outlook,
and the proletarian outlook is one remarkably free of abstract morality.
Therein, no need to be a "party pooper" or a "moralistic puritan" at all.
That is not the question.

This "sense of proportion" is of course related to the concrete conditions
of every country and struggle, as well as the historical epoch.  One
sideness can not be so easily avoided here either.

In the Chinese revolution, the PLA was known as the "virgin army" for its
puritanism - not a moral or religious one, mind you, but one inspired by the
sublimation of all other anxieties to the political anxiety of the national
and social liberation.  However, even then I do not think the birth rate of
the Chinese peasantry and proletariat went down at all.

Today we live in a different era - at least in many parts of the world, and
what was good in China in the 30s and 40s may not be appropiate to today's
conditions.  That is something to debate and establish basing ourselves on
facts, and not on sweeping generalisations.

However, still the subordination of anxieties must operate in the same
fashion (politics in command) at least within the ranks of the advanced
revolutionaries - the vanguard - and that entails a communist morale, a
morale that is moral because it advances the cause of the revolution of the
exploited and oppresed people.

Many of the decayed bourgeois "orgiastics" in this list adduce that such a
Party will have no mass appeal.  That is because they see the proletariat
party as a "mass party" and not as the "Party OF the Masses" (in Leninist
terms).

They are out - not to make revolution - but to win votes, and for that they
pander ever more to the lowest common denominator and the smuttiest wish
list of any juvenile delincuent or gross materialist entitled to a ballot in
bourgeois elections.

A chicken in every pot, and turgid tits, steaming vaginas and spurting
penises for everyone's phantasies and sado-masochist "torture chambers"
seems to be their program.

New Fascism - like quite a few expressions of the old (witness the orgiastic
nature of the Hitlerite brown shirts - the film The Damned - Luchino
Visconti - is a good expression of this tendency in fascism) also seems to
be seeking to mobilise masses under hedonistic banners worthy of Heliogabalus.

Unfortunately, for these New Fascists, they will hardly be able to mobilise
such masses away from the flesh pots and the speakeasies in more than a
perfunctory fashion and only under the banners of "leave us alone to do as
we wish". The epitome of the "I am alright Jack" philosophy!

How far from Lenin, how close to Caligula they have become!


Adolfo Olaechea



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