A chairdre! I’m leading a discussion group on this collection of essays, and I thought this might be of interest to some of my Internet comrades.
Firstly, the essay collection in question: https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf
Alright, so I’m reading through this in order to prepare some notes for my discussion. Thought it might be fun to have a few discussion threads here. This first thread is for the lengthy editors’ introduction. I will make a separate thread for each essay as I read them.
I’ll grab some quotes, type up some thoughts, hope I can spark a discussion! If not, that’s fine, I at least hope someone will benefit from having the link to the PDF.
I’ll edit this post with links to the subsequent posts (though I’m only going to be doing the intro and the first essay today, I’m a busy lady).
Edit 1: The discussion for the first essay by Noah Zazanis is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/396403
Edit 2: The discussion for the second essay by Michelle O’Brien is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/397671
Edit 3: The discussion for the third essay by Rosa Lee is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/401480
Edit 4: The discussion for the fourth essay by Jules Joanne Gleeson is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/402441
Edit 5: The discussion for the fifth essay by Nat Raha is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/408500
Edit 6: The discussion for the sixth essay by Virgínia Guitzel is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/412487
Edit 7: The discussion for the seventh essay by Kate Doyle Griffiths is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/414322
Edit 8: The discussion for the eighth essay by Farah Thompson is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/417377
Edit 9: The discussion for the ninth essay by JN Hoad is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/424986
Edit 10: The discussion for the tenth essay by Zoe Belinsky is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/437038
Edit 11: The discussion for the eleventh essay by CAACD is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/444545
Edit 12: The discussion for the eleventh essay by Nathaniel Dickson is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/508468
“anticapitalist critiques that imagine capitalism merely as a force for the dissolution of social bonds.”
“it is a heartless machine that tears apart homes, communities, received patterns of custom, gender, family life – all that is precious for human flourishing is dissolved remorselessly in the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’.”
I don’t have anything to add here, these lines really speak for themselves.
“Rather than merely destructive, capitalism is simultaneously productive of affects, attachments, fierce passions, commitments, and hatreds. Each of these passions provides sources of legitimacy and social assent for the continued organisation of production and exploitation. In missing these intense affective bonds and sources of renewal, ‘class first’ leftists misunderstand the real dynamics of the forces they wish to oppose.”
I think this is a really key point. Especially amongst orthodox Marxists, I often see this almost dogmatic focus on class relation to the means of production as the ultimate and only true struggle of anti-capitalism. Not only does this make defeating capitalism more difficult (as an enemy not fully grasped is one not easily strangled) it also concerns itself, really, with merely creating what I call a settler socialism.
Without a focus on the multitudes of hierarchies that capitalism has created, without a focus on abolishing the class characters of race and gender, and without landback, settler socialism will continue to perpetuate hierarchies of white and male privilege. A truly classless society will never emerge from settler socialism. (PatSocs are a prime example of this phenomenon)
“The history of sexual difference is inextricably a history of contracts. These contracts might be entirely formal, informal but explicit, or they may barely even register within conscious thought. They are forged with yourself, your family, your doctors, your school, your employers, and with the state. What other accounts of transgender lives have identified as a transition in epistemic regimes in the social, scientific, and medical understanding of gender; we would identify as the weighty historical corollary of a transition in property regimes, working patterns, unwaged labour, family structures, and domestic life. Transition requires an eruption in all of these”
“To live in any capitalist society is to make the best one can of alienation, of having one’s will twisted through a logic that can never fully belong to us.”
“‘Traditional’ ideas about the ‘moral economy’, of the family and gender, are not only to do with the provision of comfort and shelter. They also aim to internalise the harsh costs of adjustment and austerity against the vicissitudes of the market. This includes additional demands for uncompensated feminised labour, romanticised as a freely given ‘gift’.”
This is the crux of Marxist feminism. That reproductive labour (caregiving, reproduction, household work, and all the labour that goes into raising and maintaining the human capital needed to perform wage labour) is an unpaid and eminently exploitable facet of the very identity of womanhood.
“It’s no coincidence that, exactly when standards of living are ravaged and proletarian households reach their breaking point, the Global Right takes a moral turn – extolling the family as a unique safe haven against sinister plotting and alien forces”
This is something that we are seeing right now with the rollback of women’s and queer rights in America as the Imperialist economy begins to crumble. Much like in the final days of Rome, the never-ending need for expansion, the devastation of resources, and the outsourcing/offshoring of production to feed the Imperial core has created a completely unstable and untenable system. And in response, as the core begins to feel the house of cards trembling, the reactionaries push their so-called traditional values as a bulwark against supposed outside threats. But there’s no horde at the door; indeed, the danger the core faces is the cracking foundations of the house itself
“Capitalist families are never the answer to the separation to which proletarians are subject. They are exactly the means by which this alienation persists, one generation after the next”
“So-called ‘post-Fordist’ life sees the household and reproductive labour articulated in new forms – not just the sphere of wages and the sphere of domestic labour, but the broader reproduction of families as managed consumers of financial services, servicers of debt, and, crucially, as beneficiaries (or not) of a financialised dynamic of rapidly appreciating household wealth, where intergenerational wealth transfers acquire an increasingly distinctive role in contemporary class formation. Households are increasingly elicited to internalise the calculative rationality that they are ‘businesses’ of a kind, to manage themselves as but one nexus in a series of interlocking balance sheets of cash-inflows and cash-outflows, assets and liabilities.”
This reminds me of an essay by Alexandra Kollontai that speaks of capitalism’s crimes in decimating love. Replacing the vast spectrum of love with the insular nuclear family was a devastatingly effective way to not only weaken the solidarity of the working class, but also to create a self-replicating internalization of the inherent nature of capitalism. Despite the fact that capitalism only began to be conceived during the age of colonisation, we’re raised by our very family interactions to believe it is human nature. More, that it is natural order that transcends humanity. Everything is competition, and only propagation of our own patrilineal line matters.
A revolution’s driving force, meanwhile, must be love. Love for the world. Love for the people around you. A belief that everyone deserves a better world, where the people around you can be compatriots rather than competition.
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Kollontai has a lot of really great writings, often women’s contributions to socialist thought are diminished in the anglosphere.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1923/winged-eros.htm
Recommending bookmarking this one, Comrade SpaceCowboy was kind enough to post this link so we don’t have to try to find it in a library <3
“From the early 1990s onwards, this process steadily gathered apace and purported to ‘diversify’ itself. Groups that had previously been excluded from access to finance as a matter of course – African-Americans, Latinas, female heads-of-household – found themselves aggressively targeted for lending under predatory and adverse terms. This was required to satisfy the voracious appetite of institutional investors for asset-backed securities”
It looks like this introduction decided to get me started on this topic anyway!!
If you read writings from the early days of European colonialism, you quickly find reference to a shared proletarianization and exploitation of Black, Indigenous, and ostensibly white labourers. However, as the population of settlers was predominantly lower class, exploited/indentured Europeans, the aristocrats and bourgeoisie behind the settling were vastly outnumbered and quickly noticed solidarity movements.
So they invented this entire racial class structure, extending “whiteness” to people they had previously enslaved and colonized, to deradicalize them and enlist them as settler footsoldiers against the populations of Africa and the Americas
Basically: you were given a little civic engagement as a treat
“Medicalisation organises transgender possibility as defined by our interactions with medical science. In the aetiology of clinical life, transsexuality is understood as deviation, excess to or deficient from an otherwise desirable state of embodiment. While possible to manage and mitigate, ‘transsexuality’ in this sense remains a pathological diagnosis, a defect within one individual’s psychological development that can never be allowed to challenge the norm of sex itself.”
“The chaos of gender nonconformity is reconceived and swept under the organising logic of a racialised, normatively teleological binary transition. The origin and endpoint of trans possibility, where our identities are justified, legitimated, and consolidated in-and-through their journey down a narrow pathway of surgery, hormones, and ‘living in the role’.”
I don’t have much to say about this passage (rather, I have a lot to say about this passage, but nothing that will fit in the scope of this particular discussion). But transmedicalism is a source of never-ending despair for me, and one so much more present due to the actions of transsexual people themselves. This relegation of trans to a relation to pathology is so engrained in popular culture that the rare trans person who is given leave by society to speak publicly is as likely to buy into and perpetuate it as they are to speak against it.
And while a pathologised/medicalised trans experience may ring true for some, it is hardly a universal truth, and it gives an undue amount of leverage for gender critical cis people to reify bioessentialist gender class structures
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