Marxist groups are rooted in homophobic and transphobic rhetoric

The third reason why Marxists failed to develop Marxist framing for queer politics is homophobia and transphobia. As late as 2001, Maoist groups in the United States were still describing homosexuality as a ‘bourgeois deviation’. Some Marxists engaged in apologetics for regimes that persecuted queer people under the banner of Marxism. Trotskyist sects were marginally better in that they supported gay and lesbian demands, but this did not translate to support for queer politics as queer politics: despite endless grumbling about identity politics, in the 1990s, it was common among Anglophone Trotskyist groups to demand that queer people abandon the word ‘queer’ in favor of political subject positions like ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’. Some (mostly straight) members of these sects even made political arguments in favor of the term lesbigay over queer. Beyond the obvious exclusion of trans and nonbinary people, it was the very dissolution of particularistic identities into a larger, more militant political grouping that disturbed them. These Marxists reduced queer oppression to capitalism’s failure to meet the needs of gays and lesbians. The subtext of this argument was that human nature itself was heteronormative, and it was sufficient for Marxists to focus on capitalism’s inhumane treatment of those who love differently. Criticism of heteronormativity was not on the table.1 Despite their complaints about capitalism’s mistreatment of gays and lesbians, the political interventions of such groups had a reputation for hostility toward queer activists, including shouting down queer speakers at conferences.2 At the height of the AIDS crisis, this approach was more than just petty; it indicated a Marxism that was insular and out of tune with the working class in its entirety. The task should have been winning straight working-class militants to fight beside working-class queer radicals, not micromanaging oppressed people’s identities and scolding queer activists for failing to embrace a Marxist class analysis that had yet to be connected to queer oppression. A fourth reason that Marxists were not framing queer oppression in terms of family structure and the social reproduction of racialized capitalism is that the Marxists most open to learning from queer people – those inspired by critical theory and the Frankfurt School – were largely seeking answers by examining the social and cultural effects of exchange and consumption under capitalism rather than looking at the processes of capitalist accumulation and production that made such exchange/consumption possible. Without that piece of the puzzle, critical theorists could not theorize the totality of capitalist production and reproduction and its effect on queer life. Hostilities between Marxists and queer theorists impeded the development of queer Marxism for two decades. Published at the turn of the millennium, at the height of this unnecessary bitterness between queer militants and Marxists, Rosemary Hennessy’s (2000) groundbreaking Profit and Pleasure made waves in Marxist-feminist circles but didn’t receive the full attention it deserved. It wasn’t until Kevin Floyd’s Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism was published in 2009 that Marxist circles began to take queer analysis seriously, and even queer Marxist circles themselves took a while to recognize the centrality of Marxist-feminist thought to queer Marxism. The republication of Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women helped popularize the idea that the logic of capital regulates gender to advance profitability; however, communication between Marxist-feminist and queer Marxist circles had yet to be integrated, and so Marxist-feminist analysis tended to be heteronormative and cisnormative while queer Marxist analysis overemphasized cis gay male experience. Voices at the intersection of these Marxist debates struggled to be heard. (For example, Nat Raha’s (2021) paper ‘A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction’ has only recently been published as a chapter in Transgender Marxism, though Raha first gave the paper in 2015.) My own intervention during this period emphasized the relevance and validity of queer struggle to Marxism and attempted to situate queer struggle within Marxist-feminism; however, the ultimate purpose of The Politics of Everybody was to show that a Marxist understanding of capitalism was requisite to queer liberation