Workers Vanguard
"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at
this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is
the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on
private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists
only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement
in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and
in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter
of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with
the vanishing of capital."
- Communist Manifesto (1848)
Until the welcome day capitalism does vanish, the monogamous
family remains the legally enforced social model, at least in Western
societies, for the organization of private life in its most intimate
aspects: love, sex, bearing and raising children. It is the central
social institution oppressing women; anti-gay bigotry flows from
the need to punish any "deviations" from this patriarchal
structure. Why anyone not under social pressure or economic duress
would voluntarily enter the bonds of matrimony is, of course, one
of life's mysteries. Nonetheless, it appears that these days the
only people who actually want to get married are the only ones President
Bush wants to stop: gays and lesbians.
Absolutely, they ought to have the right to marry. And just as
absolutely, we socialists fight for a society in which no one needs
to be forced into a legal straitjacket in order to get medical benefits,
visitation rights, custody of children, immigration rights, or any
of the many privileges this capitalist society grants to those,
and only those, who are embedded in the traditional one man on one
woman for life legal mold.
Controversy over 'gay marriage' has roiled the U.S. since last
November, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that
permitting only 'civil unions' for gay couples was unconstitutional,
thus establishing the right to gay marriage in Massachusetts. In
February the San Francisco mayor ordered same-sex marriage licenses
issued, and 4,037 gay and lesbian couples from 46 states and eight
countries got hitched before ceremonies were ordered halted on March
11. The Green Party mayor of New Paltz, New York, jumped into the
fray, officiating at 25 same-sex marriages. When he was barred by
court order from continuing, two local Unitarian ministers took
over, only to have criminal charges filed against them by the Ulster
County D.A. for solemnizing "unlicensed marriages" in
March.
In 1996, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act which pronounced,
"the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man
and one woman as husband and wife." With unholy glee, Christian
fundamentalists of all sorts are now pushing an amendment to the
U.S. Constitution banning states from recognizing gay marriage (39
states already refuse to countenance it). Others warn direly that
the floodgates of unspeakable immorality are now open. Polygamy
is the least of it; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting
from last year's Supreme Court decision overturning Texas sodomy
laws, claimed that decision could abolish bans not only on same-sex
marriage, but also adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery,
fornication, bestiality, and obscenity.
President Bush, supporting the anti-gay constitutional amendment,
intoned: "The union of a man and a woman is the most enduring
human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by
every religious faith," complaining that "After...millennia
of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming
to change the most fundamental institution of civilization."
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal, beady profit-making eye
on the bottom line, featured a piece on "Cashing In on Gay
Marriage" (March 11), while vendors presented Loveland, a Same-Sex
Wedding Expo at New York's Jacob Javits convention center.
All this sudden churning of the crazed, hypocritical witches brew
that passes for American political discourse these days, especially
on questions involving sex, certainly has its darkly humorous and
bizarre side. Partly that's because the messy reality most people
actually live in bears little resemblance to the rigid official
portraits of "Christian moral rectitude" this government
claims as models of social behavior. But the deeper social issues
involved are deadly serious, ranging from the most intimate personal
questions to broad areas of responsibility for raising new generations,
and how to care for others, whether family, friends or lovers; in
short, how private life in its entirety is defined and organized.
Workers Must Fight for Democratic Rights for Gays!
Apocalyptic predictions of the end of civilization if gays are
allowed to marry are obviously hysterical fantasies; at the same
time, gay marriage in itself will not end the often deadly prejudice
and pain gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people encounter
every day in this homophobic, anti-sex society. But that pain makes
it even more important to fight for every possible democratic right,
every form of social and political equality that can be wrested
from this society.
It is a vital task of the workers revolutionary vanguard to fight
for full democratic rights for gays including, today, marriage rights
and to fight to win the working class to this cause. The Spartacist
League has done this since its inception. As Lenin pointed out in
his 1902 work What Is To Be Done:
"Working class consciousness cannot be genuinely
political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond
to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse, no matter
what class is affected....Why is it that the Russian workers as
yet display so little revolutionary activity in connection with
the brutal way in which the police maltreat the people, in connection
with the persecution of the religious sects, with the flogging of
the peasantry, with the outrageous censorship, with the torture
of soldiers, with the persecution of the most innocent cultural
enterprises, etc. We must blame ourselves for being unable as yet
to organize a sufficiently wide, striking and rapid exposure of
these despicable outrages. When we do that (and we must and can
do it), the most backward worker will understand, or will feel,
that the students and religious sects, the muzhiks and
the authors are being abused and outraged by the very same dark
forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his
life."
Here in the United States, one of the most politically backward
advanced capitalist countries on earth, saddled with a huge burden
of puritanism and religious fundamentalism to boot, there is a lot
of backwardness on the gay question.
Even among black workers, historically among the most militant
in the proletariat and in general those with the fewest illusions
in the good nature of this rotten capitalist social order, there
is a significant amount of anti-gay prejudice. Much of it is pushed
by conservative forces in the black church, although even the black
churches are deeply split on this question. As we wrote in our article,
For the Right to Gay Marriage, "In its extreme, one
gets the phenomenon of a black Baptist minister, the Rev. Gregory
Daniels, who declared, 'If the K.K.K. opposes gay marriage, I would
ride with them' (New York Times, 1 March). He might saddle
up, but it will be a short ride — the first target of this
motley collection of nativist, anti-labor fascists is black people"
(WV No. 821, 5 March).
In contrast to this myopic anti-gay prejudice is the compassion
so many black people feel because they know first-hand the torment
and danger of oppression and discrimination. A Massachusetts State
Senator from Roxbury put it well: "I know the pain of being
less than equal, and I cannot and will not impose that status on
anyone else. I was but one generation removed from an existence
in slavery. I could not in good conscience ever vote to send anyone
to that place from which my family fled." Others can't see
that an injury to one is an injury to all, and so in a backhanded
way end up in the camp of the racist anti-gay bigots. Black columnist
Adrian Walker, writing in the Boston Globe (12 February),
quoted one clergyman: "Think about Emmett Till, the Scottsboro
Boys, and those police dogs in Birmingham and then tell me they've
faced what we've faced. This has nothing to do with civil rights."
This reflects in part the pernicious influence of Democratic Party
constituency politics, where one sector of the oppressed is pitted
against another in the scramble for aid from a state which defends
capitalist rule.
Of course there are many, and qualitative, differences between
black oppression and gay oppression in this society. Racism is the
bedrock of American capitalism, the great fault line in American
politics since the founding of the nation on the backs of black
slaves. The ruling class consciously manipulates racism to weaken
the proletariat. The fight for black freedom will be central to
the proletarian revolution in the U.S. For that revolution to succeed,
the working class, including its strategic black component, must
understand its historic task is to abolish class society in order
to open the road to human freedom for everyone. And that most certainly
includes gays and everyone else who, however self-defined, rebels
against the straitjacket social roles imposed by the capitalist
ruling class.
Further, violence against gays, lesbians and, increasingly, transgendered
people is a deadly constant on America's mean streets and in the
repressive holding pens known as public schools. The grisly 1998
murder in Laramie of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay Wyoming
student who was kidnapped, beaten, burnt and then left tied to a
fence to die, shocked the nation. Though accurate statistics are
almost impossible to come by, given that many victims don't come
forward because they rightly fear more harassment from cops, school
authorities or parents, and because official statistics don't always
accurately list "hate crimes," there are still well over
1,000 reported cases a year of violence, sometimes fatal, against
gays and lesbians and others deemed sexually deviant.
A recent internet search uncovered an article from the Arizona
Tucson Citizen (23 February) titled "Gays, Jews Top Targets
of Hate Crimes Here," which described the June 2002 beating
to death of 24-year-old Philip Walsted, who was gay. It was a hate
crime, according to police. In January of this year another gay
man was found lying on the street, badly beaten, near a gay bar
in Tucson, while a gay University of Arizona student was stabbed
in 2000. That's just a few stories from one city. According to the
Winter 2003 Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, there
were 27 murders of transgendered people in a 21-month period (2002-2003)
in the United States. The point of these few examples is not to
prove that any social group is more or less hurt than any other,
but to indicate that moral regimentation is part of what keeps this
unjust society running the way it does.
It was a good thing that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy
statutes in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling, because
it explicitly overturned the Court's infamously reactionary 1986
decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that upheld states anti-sodomy laws.
That decision castigated gays with statements like "proscriptions
against sodomy have ancient roots." Chief Justice Warren Burger
practically called for a holy war against homosexuals, writing approvingly
in his concurrence that "Blackstone described the 'infamous
crime against nature' as an offense of deeper malignity than rape,
a heinous act the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature,
and a crime not fit to be named." This is the legal language
that gives cover to gay-bashing.
Gays still don't have full civil rights: they aren't allowed to
serve openly in the U.S. military, for example. According to the
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a gay rights group, in the
ten years since Democratic president Bill Clinton adopted the infamous
don't ask, don't tell policy, around 10,000 service members have
been discharged for being openly gay. As we stated when that policy
was raised: "Open gays and lesbians have just as much right
as anyone else to participate in the armed forces," while raising
the classic Marxist slogan of "Not one man, not one penny for
the military" (Gays in the Military, WV No. 569, 12
February 1993). This is the tradition of militant Marxism in opposition
to imperialist war. At the same time, the military is a microcosm
of society as a whole, and so we fight against racist atrocities
and discrimination in the armed forces just as we do in the rest
of society. The fight to integrate black soldiers fully into the
armed forces toward the end of World War II created a potentially
powerful base for struggles for black emancipation — and in
fact black civil rights activists also fought for homosexual rights
in the armed forces then.
Government and Social Control of Women
Many people still would argue, gays should have democratic rights,
but why marriage? The capitalist politicians running for president
are all dancing around the pretty meaningless civil union cop-out,
basically catering to religious reactionaries with votes. But isn't
marriage in some sense special, more private, more sacred somehow?
Not at all. Monogamous marriage is a creation of society, not god
(since there isn't one), and it has been used historically as a
means of reactionary social control by the ruling class.
We advocate effective consent in all sexual relations and think
that what any combination of individuals do in bed is nobody's business
but the participants themselves, as long as it's consensual. While
defending the right to gay marriage, we also argue that the marriage
mania represents a fundamentally conservative thrust by the well-to-do
petty-bourgeois gay milieu. It's a far cry from free love and the
Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 to today's marriage ceremonies, PTA
meetings and Democratic and Republican Party fund-raisers. In the
quest for bourgeois respectability, gay pride day organizers have
viciously banned NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association)
from their marches (thereby fueling the anti-pedophilia hysteria
which targets all gays) and welcomed contingents of gay cops who
spend a good part of their time busting sex offenders.
Nonetheless, by analogy to our position on the armed forces, we
oppose excluding any category of people from access to the privileges
and benefits such institutions offer in this society. At the same
time, in the course of fighting for these rights, we seek to convince
activists that to really resolve women's and gay oppression it is
necessary to create a socialist society, in which the current functions
of the bourgeois family are socialized: communal childcare; communal
kitchens; free, quality health care; and in all ways freeing women
from the burden of child rearing and household slavery.
A look at the history of monogamous marriage in the United States
reveals its use as a tool of governmental control. A valuable book
on this subject, Nancy F. Cott's Public Vows: A History of Marriage
and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2000), states: "The
structure of marriage...facilitates the government's grasp on the
populace.... In the form of the law and state enforcement, the public
sets the terms of marriage, says who can and cannot marry, who can
officiate, what obligations and rights the agreement involves, whether
it can be ended and if so, why and how." The following history
is largely drawn from that book; quotations from other sources are
noted.
One of the book's central themes is how entire categories of people,
especially those deemed inferior, were denied the legal right to
marry in many states. This included, most notoriously, black slaves,
who of course had no rights whatsoever. And for decades after the
Civil War, blacks and Asians were banned from marrying whites. Additionally,
as Cott writes, "Prohibiting divergent marriages has been as
important in public policy as sustaining the chosen model."
Thus polygamous Mormons and Native Americans were forbidden to practice
their own forms of marriage, while attempts at utopian communes
made in the years before the Civil War came under massive assault
following the North's victory and the consolidation of the American
nation under the strengthening grip of industrial capitalism.
In America from the beginning, marriage, though infused with Christian
doctrine, was a matter of governmental control, not primarily a
religious institution, because the U.S. was established on the formal
basis of separation of church and state. In the late 18th and early
19th centuries, marriage itself, based on older common law, was
seen as "a form of governance.... A man's headship of a family,
his taking the responsibility for dependent wife and children, qualified
him to be a participating member of a state.... Under the common
law, a woman was absorbed into her husband's legal and economic
persona upon marrying, and her husband gained the civic presence
she lost." This concept in fact continued right up through
the 20th century, and was really only dealt a decisive blow, in
terms of public civil rights at least, with women getting the right
to vote nationally in 1920. However, Congress determined in 1922
that a wife would lose her citizenship if she married a foreigner
and stayed in his country for two years; other grounds for female
loss of citizenship included marriage to an Asian, a polygamist
— or an anarchist!
Within the strict confines of the marriage relationship, male supremacy
remained largely intact. Cott describes three U.S. Supreme Court
cases, in 1904, 1908 and 1911, all of which essentially upheld the
husband's right to control of his wife's body. The 1904 case determined
a husband's right to collect damages from his wife's lover in a
case of adultery, even asserting that the husband's right to "exclusive"
sexual intercourse was "a right of the highest kind, upon...which
the whole social order rests" (rhetorical excess, to be sure;
were this literally true, civilization would have collapsed long
ago). The 1908 case justified Congress's ban on bringing women to
the U.S. for an immoral purpose, thus keeping out a man and his
mistress and upholding the government's authority to legislate monogamy
and punish women who transgressed. The 1911 case involved a woman's
attempt to sue her husband for assault and battery. The Supreme
Court refused to interfere between man and wife, rejecting the radical
and far-reaching belief that a wife could sue her husband for injuries
as though they were strangers, and that it was "better to draw
the curtain, shut out the public gaze," as an earlier North
Carolina court decision put it, on the prerogatives of male brutality
within the family circle. It took massive social upheaval and a
wave of New Left-derived feminist activism in the 1970s to finally
breach what was in fact the husband's right to rape his wife; only
in 1984 did a New York court finally overturn that state's marital
rape exemption, then followed by others.
Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, Immigrants: Forced or Banned
Marriages
The creation of the American nation rested on the backs of black
slaves and on the virtual obliteration of the native Indian population
of tribal hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists resulting in the
creation of a bourgeois democracy for white, male property owners.
How much more we could have learned about the early history of our
species from these indigenous peoples, relentlessly slaughtered
and driven onto reservations, is a question American Marxists must
feel keenly. Friedrich Engels work, The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State (1884), was after all inspired
by American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan's pioneering research
into the family patterns of North American tribes. It was this research,
in good part, that led to the Marxist understanding that in fact
human beings have lived for millennia in non-patriarchal relationships,
in tribal, matrilineal societies in which women were not enslaved
within the straitjacket of monogamous marriage, in which children
were the responsibility of both men and women. Monogamous marriage
is a social invention brought to North America by the colonizers,
along with their diseases, their sacred family and their slaves.
So the Native American population, when not simply killed, was
offered an enlightened choice by their overseers: rot on the reservation
or give up your heathen ways. As Cott puts it, "Most groups
notably the Iroquois, who dominated the eastern part of North America
did not make the nuclear family so fundamental an economic and psychological
unit as Protestants did, nor did they generally recognize private
property as such.... The federal government consistently encouraged
or forced Indians to adopt Christian-model monogamy as the sine
qua non of civilization and morality." In some cases it was
considered that Indians could be civilized by converting to Christianity,
and marriage of an Indian woman to a white male was tolerated, though
in some dozen states marriages between Indians and whites were declared
non-valid. The 1887 Dawes Act stole Indians communal land and undermined
their tribal way of life, assigning male family last names to Indians
(against native cultural tradition), and establishing individual
property-ownership, and further subverted native American women's
roles as agriculturists by presuming the Indian male should be the
landowner and farmer. Cott writes: "Like ex-slaves and ex-polygamists,
Indians were required by the federal government to adopt monogamy
as 'the law of social life' to become citizens."
On the other hand, for black slaves in America, legal marriage
was out of the question, though slaveholders did encourage childbearing
to reproduce and expand the slave population, especially after 1808
when importation of slaves was banned. "Concubinage, which
is voluntary on the part of the slaves, and permissive on that of
the master in reality, is the relation, to which these people have
ever been practically restricted," wrote the Chief Justice
of the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1838. Thus the fight for
the right to marriage, as an assertion of the right to control one's
own body and make a free contract with another human being, was
seen as an important aspect of the fight for black freedom.
As it is with just about everything else in America, racism is
deeply intertwined with marriage law. Attempts to keep the white
race "unmixed" were a unique feature of the American colonies
since their inception (with the peculiar result that people of all
different skin tones and ancestral background are automatically
considered black if there is even a hint of a black ancestor somewhere).
Ever since the inception of monogamous marriage and the family,
from ancient times on, laws against intermarriage between different
classes aimed to preserve ruling-class privileges. Spain in 1776
had such laws, as did the British imperialists in Ireland in the
14th century, for example. But America uniquely developed the illogic
of racism, due to its slaveholding history, to such an extent that
even after the victorious Civil War that freed the slaves, many
states still banned black-white marriage; in Mississippi the penalty
was life imprisonment. The miscegenation law was not repealed in
Alabama until 2000!
The relationship between slavery and women's subordinate position
in marriage was widely noted and utilized by those on both sides
of the issues. Southern evangelical Protestant ministers, who published
more than half of pre-Civil War pro-slavery tracts, regularly quoted
the Bible; a typical claim was that god included slavery as an organizing
element in that family order which lies at the very foundation of
Church and State. On the other side, those among the anti-slavery
abolitionists and early women's rights advocates who shared the
liberal ideals of individual freedom and the view that self-ownership
was a natural right, saw that both slaves and married women lacked
this basic right. As Lucy Stone put it, "Marriage is to woman
a state of slavery. It takes from her the right to her own property,
and makes her submissive in all things to her husband."
Following the Civil War, successive stages of immigration fed the
fires of growing industrialization in the U.S. Here too the government's
marriage policies were aimed at social control. Chinese immigrants
on the West Coast, who first came in the gold rush, were in demand
for mining and railroad-building, but when the transcontinental
railroad was completed in 1869, an explosion of anti-Chinese racism
was unleashed. The first federal step to restrict immigration, the
Page Act of 1875, was aimed at Asian women, who were supposedly
all prostitutes, and required the U.S. consul to make sure that
any immigrant debarking from an Asian country was not under contract
for lewd and immoral purposes. By 1913 eight states had laws against
whites marrying Japanese or Chinese people.
"Free Love," Utopias and Polygamy
In the stormy years leading up to the great social explosion that
was the American Civil War, the last progressive gasp of the bourgeoisie
(like the 1848 Revolutions in Europe) in North America, many experimental
utopian socialist alternatives to monogamous marriage flowered.
There were many free love communities established in the U.S., inspired
by such utopian visionaries as Robert Owen, Claude Saint-Simon and
Charles Fourier, whose profound insight that the status of women
is the decisive indicator of social progress inspired further Marxist
theory on the subject. The New York Oneida community, founded in
1849 with a pamphlet called Slavery and Marriage: A Dialogue,
did away with the exclusive pairing of couples, though within a
rather formal structure. These groups, though ridiculed and condemned,
were not by and large prosecuted before the Civil War, but afterward,
when in the name of consolidating the nation, a crackdown on most
forms of social deviation began.
One interesting and still contemporary group stands out in all
this: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons,
one of whose founding tenets is the right of men to polygamy, or
multiple marriage to many women at once. Right-wingers today throw
up their hands in horror at gay marriage, breathlessly bemoaning
that polygamy will be next. Well, guess what, it's already here,
and has been for over a hundred years, out in Utah and other Western
states, where an estimated 30,000 old-style Mormons still practice
the sect's early preaching, though the official church formally
renounced it a long time ago. We believe the Mormons have the right
to be left alone, to practice their religion and live their private
lives however they see fit. Our position for the right of gay marriage,
like the right of Mormons to practice polygamy, stems from our opposition
to government interference with the rights of individuals to effect
whatever consensual arrangements they wish. We pointed out that
American Mormons, including the women, essentially freely choose
their practice, unlike in countries without bourgeois revolutions,
where women are still little more than property of their patriarchal
masters and where polygamous social systems must be relentlessly
opposed. As we wrote in "Free Tom Green! Mormon Polygamists:
Leave Them Alone!" (WV No. 764, 14 September 2001),
defending a man convicted of felony bigamy charges:
"The family structure — whether monogamous
or polygamous — necessarily oppresses women. However, not
everybody understands the source of their oppression, and people
do all sorts of things that are undoubtedly bad for them that the
state still has no business throwing them in prison for. As Marxists
we understand that the family serves a real social purpose and cannot
simply be abolished, even in a workers state, but must be replaced
with alternate social institutions."
Women's Liberation, Individual Freedoms and the Fight for Socialism
So, as radical columnist Alexander Cockburn put it, "Why rejoice
when state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage
is all about" (Sidestep on Freedom's Path, CounterPunch,
20/21 March). Cockburn quotes early ACT UP activist Jim Eigo
on the question: "Why are current mainstream gay organizations
working to strike a bargain with straight society that will make
some queers less equal than others?... Marriage has no more place
in efforts to achieve equality than slavery or the divine right
of kings. At this juncture in history, wouldn't it make more sense
for us to try to figure out how to relieve heterosexuals of the
outdated shackles of matrimony?"
It certainly would. And it is the modern Marxist movement which
has figured out how to break those shackles, through abolishing
the system of private property in the means of production, thus
abolishing the need for the bourgeois family structure to pass on
such private wealth. As Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the
1917 Russian Revolution, wrote in response to the magazine Liberty
(14 January 1933) which asked, "Is Bolshevism deliberately
destroying the family?":
"If one understands by family a compulsory union based on
the marriage contract, the blessing of the church, property rights,
and the single passport, then Bolshevism has destroyed this policed
family from the roots up.
If one understands by family the unbounded domination of parents
over children, and absence of legal rights for the wife, then Bolshevism
has, unfortunately, not yet completely destroyed this carryover
of society's old barbarism.
If one understands by family ideal monogamy not in the legal but
in the actual sense then the Bolsheviks could not destroy what never
was nor is on earth, barring fortunate exceptions."
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 824, 16 April 2004.
Subject Headings
