The Left & the Homosexual Question: Germany

The reaction of the socialist left to the 'homosexual question' has a rich and varied trajectory, I will attempt to provide a brief outline to some of the main themes. In order to understand the nature of the left's reaction to the issue of what we would now term 'gay rights', an understanding the historical contexts occasioning the call or protection of marginalized sexual minorities is needed.

At the end of the 19th century there occurs a particular tightening of laws in reference to 'homosexual' or same-sex sex acts, this is expressed in the UK in the form of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 and within Germany via Paragraph 175 of the German Legal code.

Paragraph 175 of the German Legal code introduced a provision of the German Criminal code from 1871 onwards punishing "unnatural fornication" among "persons of the male sex" as a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment and potential "loss of civil rights"[1].

It may be noted that during a period following the introduction of Paragraph 175 "until Hitler's accession to power in 1933", movements of opposition to the criminalisation of same-sex acts, among both "homosexual emancipation movement" and socialists remained unrivaled in neighboring european states; a fact partially reflected by the petition of the Reichstag by the formation of what has been termed the first "gay liberation organization" in the form of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, formed in 1897 [2]. The extent to which we can logically align this organisation to the political trajectory of "gay liberation" is deeply questionable, yet it’s formation does say something about the response the law engendered from a range of Germanic society.

We find an expression of opposition among socialists expressed by many of the leading members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during this period. August Bebel, co-founder and parliamentary leader of the SPD of Germany was the first politician to speak within the Reichstag against the criminal code in 1989, supporting a petition calling for the repeal of the statute. Bebel noted that in a society in which so called 'unnatural fornication' is prevalant among "all sections of society", enforcement would require the Prussian state to "build two new penitentiaries just to handle the number of violations against Paragraph 175 committed within the confines of Berlin alone" [2].

Sections of the Social Democratic reichstag representatives delegates "distanced themselves firmly" from Bebel, while a commitment to the rights of Homosexuals did not remain an approach articulated within the political programme of the SPD [3]

However Bernstein would not be an isolated figure in opposition to Paragraph 175, other prominent members of the German Social Democratic Party would oppose the statue and raise issues of relevance to the rights of persecuted sexual minorities. Within one of two articles published in Die Neue Zeit leading SDP theorist Eduard Bernstein elaborated a view upon the trial of Oscar Wilde, prosecuted under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, within the United Kingdom. Bernstein including an acknowledgment that

within the German social-democratic movement, very far-reaching differences of opinion regarding the position society should adopt towards those sexual activities which do not fall within the ambit of what passes for normal [4]

In understanding how to characterise the 'crime' for which Wilde had been persecuted, Bernstein rejects judgements "based on more or less arbitrary moral concepts" instead noting the historic variability of what are considered 'unnatural acts' in reference to the historic prevalence of same-sex sex acts within Greek and Roman society.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_175

[2] http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/pride20610.php

[3] Leftist Sexual Politics and Homosexuality: A Historical Overview

[4] http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1895/wilde/homosexual.htm

The National Union of Students (NUS) and the struggle for gay liberation

In order to understand the prominence of commitments to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) rights within the organizational structures of the National Union of Students an understanding of the historical trajectory and emergence of such rights is necessary.

The formation of Gay Liberation movements during the 1970s reflected a rising level of 'radicalized' anger among marginalized of LGBT minorities, influenced most clearly by the 1969 Stonewall Riot in New York. The Stonewall Riot followed a 'raid' upon a gay drinking establishment in Greenwich Village, as punters turned their attention to the invading police force and met the routine harassment with resistance. The Stonewall Riots would influence the formation of 'Gay Liberation' movements within both America and the United Kingdom.

Despite the eventual dissipation of the Gay Liberation, under the pressure of conflicting internal differences, the organization would prove influential. Its legacy is expressed, albeit in a partial and conditional form, in the formation of a gay and lesbian 'movement' within NUS. As the NUS document 'Liberation officers in Every Union' notes, while there existed no "formal national campaign" in the early 1970s during the movements height, by 1971 the "first explicit policy on lesbian and gay liberation was passed by annual conference", while by the mid 1990s a specific LGB Campaign had been formed [1].

A degree of representation of minority groups has been ensured by utilising organisational structures for this purpose; regular LGBT conferences are meant to "democratically set the policy that gives the political direction to the campaign" alongside the election of LGBT officers [1].

While there rightly exists structures to ensure the representation of marginalized groups within the NUS, part of the proposed Governance Review of 2007/08 includes proposals that would attack 'Liberation' sections such as that of the LGBT Campaign.

Proposals include attempts to split the existing NUS national executive into a "board" and a "senate" in which the senate will include representatives of each liberation campaign, in contrast to the 'non-political' board that will meet a limited number of times a year and be comprised in part by external appointees. The board has been created to over-see "legal policies, the “strategic planning framework”, the wages of senior management, development of budgets and estimates, scrutiny of financial performance, scrutiny of senior management and appointments" [2]. It remains the case within the existing proposals no Liberation officer is ensured a place on a board that will possibly scrutinize their work.

Communists must be at the forefront of those defending the autonomy of the campaigns as the most consistent supporters of the rights of minority groups, however beyond simply seeking to defend the existing structures of NUS, questions must be raised about the reasons for dwindling LGBT conference sizes and the failure of many of the Liberation campaigns to resonate with students.

Priority campaigns are those said to be "based on the policy" decided upon at NUS LGBT conference meaning broadly that the LGBT committee, proposed of those elected at LGBT conference, "decide upon the priority areas for the year ahead" [3]

The existence of many of the campaigns remains unknown to most students, while the limited scope and visions they express reflect a growing apolitical trend within student politics. The mismanagement of these campaigns is assured by a situation in which so-called ‘independents’ have been able to secure election as LGBT officers. This is a process aided by the general lack of awareness of most students that annual LGBT conference is even taking place.

Accommodation by the left to the narrowness of the campaigns proposed is likely to result in the depoliticisation of many students, who have and will continue to turn away from the increasingly sectional, individualistic and apolitical politics pursued by the campaign.

The need to raise demands that speak to everyday existence of LGBT students remains clearly evident. As Lenin once noted Marxists must seek to "react to every manifestation of Tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects"[4] on the basis of an understanding that the project of Marxism is the project of human emancipation, possible only on the basis of collective liberation in which the opportunity for each individual's self-development is recognized and made a reality. This remains the only way that emancipation, irrespective of individual sexuality, may be won and sustained.




[1] A Liberation Campaign In Every Union

[2] http://www.free-education.org.uk/?p=393

[3] NUS LGBT Priority campaigns 2005-06

[4] Lenin, What is to be done?

Once More With Feeling: musings on the Soviet Union

Ukrainian born Leon Trotsky assumed positions of prominence within both the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, holding high-ranking ministerial office within the newly formed Soviet government following the successive October revolution. During the early 1920s Trotsky led movements of opposition to the newly emerging Soviet bureaucracy, before his eventual expulsion in from the Communist Party and deportation from the Soviet Union in 1929.

It is during this subsequent period that Trotsky began to develop a theory of the Soviet Union’s development as conforming to that of a ‘degenerated workers state’. An understanding I will seek to expand upon in greater detail.

The starting point for a discussion of the nature of the soviet State remains the initial characterisation of the Soviet Union as that of the world’s first workers state emerging organically from the 1917 October revolution.

Within the early 1920s we begin to see the development of forms of 'bureaucratic deformation' within the USSR. The emergence of the young bureaucracy, originally subordinated to the wider agency of the working class, begins to grow independent from this constituency.

This growth of bureaucratic deformation remains bound with a series of historic catastrophes for the working class. The principle features of decisive importance included “the backwardness of the peasantry, the weariness of the proletariat and the lack of decisive support from the West” (1). The hasty retreat of the German Communist Party provides one glaring example of this. This retreat occurred during a period in which many Russians looked to Germany as the most likely basis for the international growth of revolution. This failure remains of decisive importance for the consolidation of power of the growing bureaucratic regime.

The characteristic features of the Bolshevik Party internal life during the initial years of the revolution may be broadly understood as belonging to the organizational method of democracy centralism; this enabled freedom of criticism and the intellectual struggle of competing ideas. As has been noted, “the history of Bolshevikism is the history of the struggle of factions” (2).

In the contexts of an escalating civil war, blockade and famine within the newly formed workers state, temporary measures of self-defense were taken to prohibit opposition parties.

A series of successive measures, “by means of a number of minor civil wars waged by the bureaucracy against the proletarian vanguard”, enable an understanding of the eventual dominance of a bureaucratic caste (1).

The prohibition of alternative parties and internal factions is transformed in understanding from a temporary evil necessitated by a hostile Civil War, to an elevated "principle" (3). The vibrant internal life of the Bolshevik Party, within which there existed a struggle of ideas, groups and factions, is replaced with the threat of internment in concentration camps, exile or death.

Power is transferred from the mass organizations upon which the successful revolution depended, as democratic centralism finds its distorted expression within the bureaucratic centralism of the ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’.

This usurpation of this power is enabled only because the “social content of this ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’ is determined by those productive relations that were created by the proletarian revolution” (1).

The ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’ is forced to defend the property relationships established by the proletarian revolution, for the purpose of maintaining its own interest; while at the same time representing the “worst domestic brake on progress, the greatest internal source of danger to the workers state, and an absolute obstacle to socialist revolutions outside the Soviet Union” (4).

The task that flowed from this is analysis was the need for a political movement to overthrow the bureaucracy for the purpose of the preservation of the existing property relations. Without the working class militating to crush the bureaucracy and open the way for socialism:

The bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into Capitalism (5)

Trotsky was entirely correct in this analysis, as substantiated by subsequent historical events, to the great misfortune of Russian workers who have witnessed a steep decline in life expectancy and the great many destructive uncertainties of capitalism. On the basis of the then still existent Soviet Union property relations, implying the curtailing of the rights of capital and the limited monopoly of foreign trade, adherents of global capital perceived the USSR as an irreconcilable enemy and welcomed this development. The subsequent restoration of capitalist property relations heralded a period within which the ideas of Marxism were said to be defeated.

Trotskyism ‘carried the torch’ during the dark years, highlighting the deformations that were elevated to ‘principles’ on the basis of the needs of the bureaucratic caste that had assumed power. It is upon the Marxist tradition, upheld by Trotsky, that we must seek to build to the appropriate lessons of the Soviet Union in our fight for new October revolutions.






1) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/02/ws-therm-bon.htm

2) Trotsky, L. The Revolution Betrayed. Pg.91.

3) Trotsky. L. RB. Pg.240.

4) http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isr/vol21/no1/hansendeutscher.htm

5) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tia38.htm

Those nominations in full..

The deadline has passed and now the prespective 'left' candidates have emerged. This is the list of prospective candidates, along with their particular grouping, to be ammended as and when necessary:

Education Not For Sale
President: Daniel Randall, Sheffield University
National Secretary: Heather Shaw, Sheffield College
National Treasurer: Koos Couvee, Sussex University
Vice-President Further Education: Laura Simmons
Block of 12: Heather Shaw, Sheffield College

PRESIDENT
Ruqayyah Collector (SBL)
Ciarán Norris (Indie)
Daniel Randell (ENS)
Wes Streeting (NOLS)

NATIONAL SECRETARY
Richard ‘Bubble’ Budden (Indie/"Bubbles")
Heather Shaw (ENS)

TREASURER
Koos Couvée (ENS)
Dave Lewis (Indie/"Bubbles")
Bryony Shanks (SBL)

VP HIGHER EDUCATION
Rob Owen (RESPECT)
Sam Rozati (Conservative)
Aaron Porter (OI)

VP WELFARE
Sarah Bolt
Hind Hassan (RESPECT)
Ama Uzowuru (OI)

VP FURTHER EDUCATION
Simon Byrne (RESPECT)
Laura Simmons (ENS)
Beth Walker (Indie/"Bubbles")

BLOCK OF TWELVE
Joel Braunold
Arran Cottam (SS)
Primal Andrew Fernando
Dan Glass (ENS)
Hind Hassan (RESPECT)
Becci Heard
Evangeline Holland- Ramsay (Independent FE)
Yemi Makinde
Ed Marsh
Florian Mertens
Stephen Mullen (Independent FE)
Susan Nash
Rob Owen (RESPECT)
Sam Rozati (Conservative)
Bryony Shanks (SBL)
Heather Shaw (ENS)
Elizabeth Somerville
Christopher Strafford (CS)
Tom Stubbs (LDYS of sorts)
Nasir Tarmann
Ben Whittaker
Hollie Williams (NOLS)

HONORARY VICE PRESIDENT
Anoosheh Azaadbar (Iranian student)
Rose Gentle

Alliance for Workers Liberty: lesser evils and collective class action

Readers may or may not be aware that the Searchlight publication and associated organisations 'Hope Not Hate' and ‘Stop the BNP’ split from Unite Against Fascism in 2005. This has raised a series of questions about how the existing left interacts with the fractured anti-fascist movement. Alongside this debate emerges a series of issues of relevance to anti-fascist work.

Charlie Salmon of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL) treats us to his ruminations on the nature of Fascism in the article For A Working Class Campaign against Fascism in the latest edition of Solidarity.

Salmon characterizes Unite Against Fascism group as “a political coalition of the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Action” utilized when politically expedient for the purpose of “protests or conferences” (1). The extension of an invite to Sir Iqbal Sacranie as a headline speaker to UAF’s 2006 national conference, despite Sacranie’s well-documented reactionary and homophobic politics, is correctly noted as reflective of this opportunist political trend.

The article does fall short on a number of levels; the conclusions drawn remains deeply flawed. While the suggestion of a political alternative in the work of Searchlight, albeit one about which it remains mildly critical, is problematic to say the least.

The features of the UAF are contrasted to the “work towards major mobilisations of trade union members”, seemingly characteristic of the Searchlight organisation, alongside the latter's focus on “very successful, grass-roots responses” (2). The AWL limits the criticism of the Searchlight’s 'Stop the BNP' produced campaign material to an endorsement by millionaire Alan Sugar. An individual, who, readers will be amazed to find, apparently has "nothing to say about poorly funded public services and the attacks on the working class".

Searchlight suggested that the prime reason for their departure was because "it is incompatible for us to be in an organisation that is pushing a different strategy to our own" (1). A view seemingly collaborated by Salmon's article. That the reasons for the split amount to anything more than a desire to better pursue its particular brand of Labourism remain less than clear.

The role of anti-immigration as a characteristic feature of both Blair and Brown's premiership is a topic that receives scant attention in the pages of Searchlight. Any mentions of the Labour Party are confined to examples of the successful electoral 'fight-backs' of the kind Salmon touches upon as exemplary examples. The superficial analysis of the politics of Searchlight would seem to operate in contrast to suggestions made elsewhere within Solidarity that “eulogising Labour’s triumphs” with the use of a “single leaflet through the door a week before an election” simply won’t cut it (4).

This is perhaps reflective of the potentially divisive nature of the AWL’s call for a vote for Labour “in almost all the areas where the BNP is standing” in which no other ‘independent working class candidates’ are standing (5). An approach that while conducted under the ruberic of ‘collective working class action’ would seem to lend itself to ‘polemics’ of the kind Salmon provides.

While the article provides very little in the way of new information, it does provide something of a surprise with its use of the old, treating us to a good three paragraphs on Trotsky's views on the united-front tactic.

While providing quotes highlighting a series of entirely correct statements made by Trotsky on the nature of the united front, a correct integration of these views are far from evident by the AWL’s politics. Indeed this politics operates in direct contrast to the most perfunctory of understandings of this tactic. For Marxists, the question is not decided by a quotation, but by means of the correct method.

While Solidarity notes the need while utilising this tactic to “break ideologically and organisationally with the reformists and the centrists” (2) the extent to which this remains an abstraction far from concrete application remains evident within the pages of Solidarity.


(1) http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=template&story=146
(2) http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2008/01/13/working-class-campaign-against-fascism
(3) For a Workers United Front Against Fascism
(4) http://www.workersliberty.org/node/9691
(5) http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8256

Student Respect leader accused of racism

Assed Baig of Staffordshire University and Student Respect has been attacked for a rather curious article written for a student rag ‘GK News’ in which he muses:

In reality it is the white ruling elite which are responsible for much of the problems that we see today. Nuclear weapons, AK47’s and M16’s are all invented and made by white people. Fighter Jets, tanks and land mines are a white invention and largely made in the white dominated Western World. Terrorism has been perpetrated by white states. The terrorism that we are told to fear in the so called ‘War on Terror’ was initially funded and terrorists trained by our governments.

These and other comments inspiring groups titled Racist GK Ramblings. Assed has since qualified his remarks within a mass facebook message. Assed argues in this message that he intended to describe the relationship of a ruling class to other subordinate classes and the role of “deep-rooted, sub-conscience racist” ideas that play a role within this. Assed does not probe the suggested relationship between racism as a “tool of the ruling class” and the suggested “deep seated racist ideas” hidden within us. That the “rulling class” may indeed be ‘multi-ethnic’ in character is not a theme to which Assed chooses to turn.

If Assed is guilty of anything it’s having a poor analysis of society, which he then articulates. Poorly. The mechanistic appraisal of class and race he provides only mirrors the pond-like depth of the cod-sociology-cum-political analysis he is able to provide. That the wider political-project of Student Respect cultivates ‘student leaders’ able to provide ‘polemics’ of this depth perhaps speaks volumes of the shallowness of the project.

Britz

Britz hit our screens a few nights ago promising something exciting and a bit glitzy with a comprehensive ad-campaign in the run up to its four hour screening, including an accompanying DVD release.

The reaction to the show seems to have been mixed with the ever-progressive Telegraph suggest it expressed the show was largely expressive of an inherently simplistic “old-fashioned agitprop politics". This comment can only be understood in reference to the hamfistedly deadpan script and acting provided for the duration of the second instalment, unable to provide a degree of nuance beyond that perhaps expected in a book entitled ‘The Dummies Guide to Why I Became A Terrorist’.

What’s interesting is that while the program addressed many of the suggested featured involved in the ‘radicalisation’ of young British Muslims (including the screening of films displaying atrocities committed against Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere for example) the characterisation didn’t convincingly display a person being radicalised. Even with the use of running-commentary – roughly paraphrased as “oh, god, this is terrible, maybe that terrorist sympathising bloke had the right idea” - provided by the protagonist for the sake of the viewer. That said, the cardboard-cut-out approach to characterisation involved in the second episode occasionally provided a few laughs; when a comrade sees the main protagonist semi-naked and objects she dejectedly comments, with all the frustrated nuance of a teenager being asked to tidy her room, “what does it matter, I’ll be dead in an hour!” While this was perhaps intended to be something akin to the criminal in Albert Camus’s The Outsider rejecting his last rites, it instead comes across as more of a blunt instrument labelled ‘pathos’ smacked around the viewer’s head.

Text provided at the end of the episode cited statistics noting the number of those opposed to the war in Iraq and the resulting fear of persecution within Muslim communities. These figures may lend themselves to associations between a rise in terrorist activity and the increasing frustration felt by many Muslims about British imperial adventures within Muslim dominated countries. These are points that have readily been made by Stop the War Coalition leaders such as John Rees in reference to the perceived absence of ‘civil liberties’. While this is likely to retain strong elements of truth – an approach which limits the causes of terrorism to this factor alone seems unable to raise wider commentary on the nature of political-Islam, ignoring this phenomena for the sake of a good/bad duality of limited scope and vision.

As Mike Mcnair notes in the Weekly Worker, the focus of the U.K. as a target for the actions of Jihad is not a new phenomena while the rise of Jihadism must be understood in reference to the rise of political Islam, operating in a vacuum in which Communism has not the hegemonic appeal as the alternative to the alienation and commodification of capitalism. This fact operates within a context in which advocates of Marxism seem gripped by inertia and a dramatic absence of confidence in their own ideas. As Mcnair suggests the left, in this sense, has provided no solutions to the frustrations of members of those aforementioned working-class communities within the U.K. While Yassmine Mather and Ardeshir Mehrdad have commented that in order to understand the role of political Islam we must first understand the nature of the “economic, political and ideological” crisis enveloping those states in which Radical Islam has been resurgent, the role of a form of Neo-Liberalism seems key to this process.