Re: Sodomy and surplus-value

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Phil Ferguson:
>>wage-labour under capitalism.  Similarly, feudal statutes against sodomy
>>may be historically interesting, even fascinating to speculate upon, but
>>they don't explain anything about gay oppression under capitalism.


Lou Pr:
>Of course they do. The main impediment to homosexual rights in the United
>States is organized religion, the Catholic Church in particular.

But that itself is very much a new phenomenon.  For most of its existence,
the Catholic Church turned a blind eye to all sorts of sexual activities.

The Church's attitude is bound up with *defence of the nuclear family*,
itself an instituion created by *industrial capitalism*.


>If there
>ever was an institution that had the stamp of precapitalism across it, it
>is the Catholic Church.


The country in the world in which the Catholic Church has the strongest
stamp of pre-capitalism is Ireland.  Yet the Church never opposed the
legislation in the early 90s legalising male homosexuaoity and bringing in
an age of consent several years *lower* than non-Catholic, supposedly
secular Britain.

Gay oppression, and the categories of 'homo-, hetero- and bi-sexual, simply
have nothing to do with pre-capitalism, any more than teenagers or juvenile
delinquents.



> In countries that have diminished church attendance
>and beliefs, tolerance toward same-sexers goes hand-in-hand. When you get
>agnosticism mixed with a strong socialist (but non-Stalinist) movement, the
>possibilities for gay liberation are almost unlimited, EVEN when capitalist
>property relations are in place.


Strongly Catholic countries have some of the most liberal laws on
homosexual (and hetersexual) activity in the world - much more so than the
predominantly non-Catholic United States.

Moreover, if you look at the Stalinist states you will find intense
suppression of homosexuality, bound up with the Stalinist commitment to the
nuclear family.  It is because homosexual activity was seen to undermine
the nuclear family as the core unit of society that it was repressed.  The
nuclear family, of course, did not exist in pre-capitalist society.

The operations of capital, the development of technology, and the
development of struggles for women's liberation and gay liberation, have
made new forms of the nuclear family possible and so the oppression of
homosexuality is not so essential.  I also tend to think that the economic
slump has meant the ruling class need to ensure that every drop of
surplus-value is realised and thus new consumer markets, like the gay
market and the ethnic market, have become quite important.  The abandonment
of struggles for liberation has also meant that people who might once have
been primarily political activists have ended up as members of consumer
communities, like the 'gay community'.

As a number of Australian gay leftists, like anarchist Christos Tsiolkas
and Marxist Graham Willett, have argued, the rise of the 'gay community'
was a victory for the gay middle class and aspirant capitalists and a sign
of the defeat of gay *liberation*.

Philip Ferguson