Nambla and Lgbt Are Together Again

	Workers Vanguard No. 947	20 November 2009

Full Democratic Rights for Homosexuals!

RCP: Anti-Gay Moralists Then and Now

(Immature Spartacus pages)

On October xi, tens of thousands turned out for the National Equality March for gay rights in Washington, D.C., calling on Barack Obama, Commander-in-Main of the imperialist military that is brutally occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, to overturn both Bill Clinton'due south infamous "don't ask, don't tell" policy for homosexuals serving in the armed forces and Clinton's 1996 Defence force of Marriage Act. (Obama opposes gay marriage.) Though supportable, these demands reverberate the fundamentally bourgeois thrust of the gay rights milieu in a period of lilliputian social struggle. As we noted in "For the Right of Gay Matrimony…and Divorce!: Marriage and the Capitalist Country": "It'due south a far cry from 'gratuitous honey' and the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 to today'south marriage ceremonies, PTA meetings and Democratic and Republican Party fund-raisers" (WV No. 824, 16 April 2004).

Far from existence a defender of gay people in this viciously oppressive and bigoted society, the Democratic Political party is a staunch promoter of anti-gay "family values" and brutal anti-sexual activity witchhunts. This results from the capitalist class' dependence on the institution of the family, which arose as a means of ensuring the inheritance of individual property. The main source of women's oppression, the family is an important ways for the bourgeoisie to regiment lodge and anti-gay discrimination flows from the need to defend this patriarchal structure against any "deviations." Our article on gay marriage explained:

"We socialists fight for a society in which no one needs to be forced into a legal straitjacket in club to get medical benefits, visitation rights, custody of children, immigration rights, or any of the many privileges this capitalist society grants to those, and but those, who are embedded in the traditional 'one human on one woman for life' legal mold."

Nosotros seek to replace the family equally an economic institution by socializing childcare and housework, freeing women to play a full and equal role in social and political life equally part of constructing an egalitarian, socialist lodge.

In contrast, rally co-organizers in the International Socialist Organisation attempted to police the rally against our "disruptive" opposition to the Autonomous Political party and our defence force of Roman Polanski, targeted for consensual sex activity that took place more than thirty years ago (run into "Stop Vendetta Against Roman Polanski!" WV No. 944, 9 Oct). The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), long notorious on the left for their open anti-gay bigotry, turned out with banners calling for gay rights, pushing Democratic Party lesser-evilism through their withal ongoing "World Tin't Await—Bulldoze Out the Bush Regime" projection.

The RCP is desperately clawing its way deeper into the liberal Autonomous Political party swamp, in an atmosphere of anti-sex bigotry and "family values" moralism. Of course, the RCP wouldn't have gotten far at the National Equality March while ranting against lesbians and gays as "degenerates." When they were known as the Revolutionary Union, this group issued a position paper describing homosexuality as a affliction of capitalist society like "exotic religious sects, mysticism, drugs, pornography, promiscuity, sex orgies, trotskyism, etc." ("Position Paper of the Revolutionary Matrimony on Homosexuality and Gay Liberation," 1974). E'er the opportunists, since that time they've had a "alter of line"—though not exactly a alter of heart.

RCP's "New Position": Same Old Prejudice

The RCP's 2001 "On the Position of Homosexuality in the New Draft Programme" admits that their former Programme "did tend to treat the fairly widespread miracle of homosexuality in the U.S. every bit a reflection of regal decay and decadence, and although not portraying homosexuals as enemies, did regard them every bit individuals whose backward outlook needed to be reformed and homosexual do remolded. This was wrong"! They proceed to defend this "incorrect" program:

"Our view on this subject was also a product of opposition to and criticism of the more than degrading and abusive sexual practices engaged in past some homosexuals (which practice be), and to some misogyny towards women (including lesbians) on the part of some male homosexuals. Also, basic masses, among whom our Party is based, works amid and relies on as a decisive force for revolution, have a wealth of feel with U.S. prisons and with the widespread use of homosexual sex (including rape) to institute power hierarchies over people in prison and sometimes exterior of prison…. All the negative things we spoke of really did (and practice) be…."

Then what is the "new" position on homosexuality? Now they "do not run across a homosexual orientation or the exercise of homosexuality per se as something that constitutes an impediment to the emancipation of women and the abolition of all oppressive and exploitative relations." Gee, thanks.

The RCP apparently felt compelled to investigate, "why do some people engage in sexual activity with people of the same sexual practice?" This obsession with trying to notice the culprit for something that is a natural miracle led them to commence on an extensive "theoretical review" of the cause of homosexuality. The fact is, what "causes" homosexuality is completely irrelevant! All we tin can say is, it'southward every bit natural a sexual expression as any other—occurring non simply in all man societies throughout history simply in many other species. All the RCP'southward distortion about reviewing biological studies to conclude that " even the most backward and socially objectionable of these practices or 'scenes' are not the 'cause' of the oppression of women" (emphasis in original) is a fig leafage on their discrimination. They would accept us believe that in the decades when they were busy excluding gays from their organization every bit "degenerates," science couldn't have told them that they were total of crap.

What they admit to sounds bad plenty, only the RCP's certificate is rife with falsifications. The statement that "our party has always been firmly opposed to the discrimination and attacks leveled against homosexuals and nosotros welcomed and encouraged the participation of homosexuals in the revolutionary struggle" is a bald-faced lie. Really, they excluded gays from their organization, stating in their 1974 position paper: "homosexuals cannot be Communists." All their rhetoric near fighting "pogromist" attacks on gays is empty —they pushed the same reactionary garbage that's used to whip upward murderous hysteria against gays, lesbians and transgenders, including calls to "reeducate" homosexuals from their "degrading" and "shameful" practices. We wonder what the RCP would say about "socialists" who pushed an alleged assay of black people as intellectually and morally junior while insisting that they "always opposed" lynching!

The Family and Uncle Joe

The RCP attempts to drag the Marxist motion into the mire of their own Stalinist degeneracy, claiming, "we were unfortunately in line with some long-continuing historical tradition within the international communist motility." In reality, the communist movement from its beginnings has stood forthrightly in defense of homosexuals' rights, including mettlesome public stands such as August Bebel'due south 1898 speech in the German Reichstag for repealing the penal code confronting "unnatural fornication." The Russian Revolution gave flesh and blood to the Marxist understanding of the woman question and homosexual rights. The Bolsheviks' position was explained in a 1923 pamphlet past Grigorii Batkis, managing director of the Moscow Establish of Social Hygiene:

"Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses confronting public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the aforementioned equally and so-chosen 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters. Simply when at that place's use of strength or duress, as in general when in that location's an injury or encroachment upon the rights of another person, is there a question of criminal prosecution."

—The Sexual Revolution in Russia

Soviet Russia annulled all laws discriminating against homosexual acts, and a campaign was undertaken against anti-homosexual prejudice as part of the broader struggle for the liberation of women and children from the prison of the family.

In fact, the "longstanding historical tradition" the RCP follows is Joseph Stalin'due south, under whom many democratic rights for women and gays were overturned and abortion and "sodomy" were re-criminalized. This was part of the procedure of political counterrevolution where a conservative bureaucratic caste usurped political power from the working class in impoverished Soviet Russia. The Stalinist hierarchy, a parasitic layer dependent on the socialized property forms won through the Russian Revolution, sought to buttress its own position by promoting social conservatism and respect for authorisation, including the outright bourgeois ideology of Bang-up Russian chauvinism and the cult of the family.

Equally exiled revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky observed in his 1936 analysis of the degeneration of the Soviet workers state:

"Instead of openly saying, 'Nosotros have proven still too poor and ignorant for the creation of socialist relations among men, our children and grandchildren volition realize this aim,' the leaders are forcing people to glue together over again the shell of the broken family unit, and non only that, but to consider it, under the threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism."

—The Revolution Betrayed

With Soviet Russia isolated afterward the revolution failed to spread internationally, in 1924 the Stalinists developed the credo that socialism could be built in 1 country if only peace could be maintained with the imperialists. This program of grade collaboration led to the strangulation of revolutionary struggles internationally, the betrayal and murder of Communists around the earth and, in 1991-92, the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Spousal relationship itself. We stand in the tradition of Trotsky's Left Opposition and its fight against the Stalinist betrayers and for the revolutionary, proletarian, internationalist principles that animated the Oct Revolution.

2d only to their cultish obsession with their Chairman Bob Avakian, the RCP promotes Chairman Mao, who represented the same nationalist programme of "socialism in one land" every bit Stalin, but in a dissimilar land, China. The 1949 Chinese Revolution overthrew capitalism and the rapacious landlords, in the process transforming the lives of Chinese women who in prerevolutionary times were barely recognized as human beings. Notwithstanding, the order that emerged was and remains a bureaucratically plain-featured workers country, qualitatively similar to Stalin's Russia. As Trotskyists, nosotros fight to defend the gains of the 1949 Revolution, including through the overthrow of the parasitic bureaucracy and the establishment of workers democracy. Internationally, we fight for socialist revolution, including in advanced industrial countries, which will lay the basis for an increment in the productive capacities of society and allow the family to be replaced.

Just like the Stalinist leaders in Trotsky'south polemic, the Chinese Maoists (who take regarded homosexuality equally an "illness") promote the family as an ideological prop. Like all Maoists, the RCP glorifies the family as the fighting unit for socialism. However, following Mao's death, the RCP backed the Gang of Four in the intra-bureaucratic fight in the Chinese Communist Political party. Later on the Gang of Four was outmaneuvered, the RCP wrote Red china off as capitalist, leaving these defenders of "socialism in one land" without a state.

Chairman Avakian'southward Bedroom Police

The RCP'due south 1974 position newspaper stated:

"We experience that the best way to struggle out such contradictions in our personal lives is in stable monogamous relationships betwixt men and women based on common love and respect…. In reality, gay liberation is anti-working-course and counterrevolutionary. Its attacks on the family would rob poor and working grade people of the virtually viable social unit of measurement for their revolutionary struggle against the imperialist system."

The sentimental portrait of the socialist family in RCP's new Programme is besides a far cry from Marx and Engels' view of an establishment "based on the overt or covert domestic slavery of the woman" (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Individual Property, and the State, 1884).

The RCP's present enthusiasm for gay union apparently has more than to do with their enthusiasm for forcing people into the stultifying institution of monogamous matrimony than with any opposition to the oppression of homosexuals. In their 1988 article "On the Question of Homosexuality and the Emancipation of Women," the RCP ranted against gay men'south "very narcissistic and self-indulgent lifestyle, including a high caste of preoccupation with sex" and "transvestism and displays of stereotypical 'effeminate' behavior" (nosotros could get on). The RCP's list of "backward and socially objectionable" practices includes sexual promiscuity, pornography and casual bearding sexual practice—and their injunction that everyone who joins their party will exist held to a "higher standard of proletarian morality and subject area than the masses," means that hapless prospective members, gay and straight, should think twice before surrendering their personal freedom to join the ranks of Chairman Bob Avakian! (One might too question the "standard of proletarian morality" of an organization that felt compelled to include rules against raising "coin for yourself in the proper name of the Political party" and attempting "to get people to support or bring together the Party by threatening them" in its 2001 Plan.)

In whatever example, the RCP'southward conservative family values take led them to embrace the vilest anti-sex activity campaigns, foaming at the oral fissure with disgust for anything that strays from their Maoist dystopia. The crowning example is their slander as "kid molesters" of NAMBLA (Due north American Homo/Boy Love Association), an organization that calls for the decriminalization of consensual relationships between younger and older men. Anti-pedophile hysteria is used by the land to justify the grossest intervention into people's individual lives, and especially to constabulary the beliefs of youth. We take a proud history of defending NAMBLA and opposing reactionary age of consent laws and all laws that curtail the privacy and sexual liberty of consenting individuals—for which the RCP also slanders us every bit "child molesters"! We believe in the principle of effective consent, that is, the sexual behavior that consenting individuals pursue is nobody's concern but their own. For the RCP, an arrangement that lumps together porn and rape, the distinction between consensual and coerced sex is simply irrelevant.

The Marxist program does not include any position on the value of any item sexual orientation, and the Spartacus Youth Clubs stand up on the tradition of the Marxist movement in opposing all forms of discrimination against homosexuals. Every bit we concluded in our 1976 RCP polemic "Bible Belt Maoists Rant at 'Deviant Sexual Behavior'":

"As Lenin declared in What Is to Be Done?, communists must be 'in, but not of' conservative society. Communists must seek to become the 'tribune of the people,' championing the cause of all the victims of bourgeois oppression and exploitation. Foolish superstitions and vicious bigotry are the odour of decaying bourgeois society."

—Immature Spartacus No. 47,
October 1976

Bereft of a Marxist program and shamelessly wallowing in the present backward consciousness inculcated by bourgeois society, the RCP caters to and promotes that consciousness. Hither, equally on every other crucial question, the program of the RCP has nothing to offer anyone who wants to fight for a revolution against this exploitative, oppressive capitalist gild.

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Source: https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/947/ysp-rcp.html

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