Gender Materiality
The Question of Gender
In many arguments in communist spaces, people consider gender as a non-material category, as ideal. By viewing it as bourgeois ideology, Marxists excuse themselves from contributing to the struggle of gender and sexual liberation, proclaiming that these are not a productive use of time in Marxist organizing. While excusing themselves from this, however, they ignore crucial elements of people’s everyday activity. To address this, we have to understand that gender affects material reality, and is affected by material reality. How we understand gender is through our activity, through practice and material analysis. In this essay, I seek to combat certain understandings of gender prevalent in communist organizing, particularly transphobic and postmodern understandings of gender.
“Gender Ideology”
All too often, I hear about “gender ideology,” notably in the ramblings of nazbols and institutionally in the Communist Party of Great Britain, Marxist-Leninist. They have intentionally painted the struggle of trans people and “gender ideology” as an issue which has no basis in material reality. They treat any organization along lines of gender as an issue not congruous with class conflict. It is natural that a limited understanding of Marx should lead people to believe that it is a transphobic ideology, that it does not deal at all with gender or sexuality in general.
The problem is that in ignoring sexuality and gender, they ignore key aspects of sensuous human activity. It is nonsensical to treat somebody as though they engage in no gendered activities, do not produce a service to capitalism which we might call gender. Gender is based, not in ideas, not in concepts of what is and is not female/male, but in the way in which one does things, in what one does, and in the whole productive process. We can attribute male domination and gender absolutism, in their current forms, to capitalism and material processes. How we gender ourselves, the labels we take on, and the whole of how we perform gender itself, is determined by our material conditions. How we perform our gender, in turn, partially determines our material conditions. Trans people are less likely to stay employed or be hired. It must be understood, then, that to abstract from an activity of gender is to ignore key aspects that determine the material position of the person involved. It is like ignoring women as a materially oppressed group, to ignore colonized people as a materially oppressed group.
Merely because gender is performed, does not mean it is any less material than something biological. In fact, because gender is made real only in its material expressions, we cannot understand it as anything besides what Marx would term “sensuous human activity.” Marx determines, in his Theses on Feuerbach, that the latter did not consider the world in the most material way, how a person interacted with the world. Gender is a way in which we interact with the material world; it is a category of behaviors that exists to separate male and female. Because proletarians exist in the way they do, they do not fully fit into male or female categories of labor and activity. This allows capitalists and colonialists to further exploit them, because they cannot be fitted correctly into either male or female camps, and thus may be considered less human. The identity of gender exists because the exploiters use it to classify activities; it is made real in the everyday actions of the people who are gendered, and therefore it is a material identity. Sexuality also is made real in everyday action, in the formation of certain associations with certain actions, all of which are concrete and real. “Gender ideology,” in reality, is only the thought that gender is a concrete category of historical and material analysis.
We, as Marxists deny the linguistic turn of the postmodernists. We deny the reality of subjective identities in favor of definitions of people based upon their sensuous human activity. As such, we deny the reality of pure symbolism. When historians and activists first began to analyze gender critically, it began in the 1980’s, a time when postmodern theories were in vogue, and the intellectual had been schooled in Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze. They worked in complete isolation from material reality. They ignored the reality people faced in favor of analyzing things from ideal circumstances; they separated all identities from their material groundings, and said that the proletarian is akin to the woman is akin to the colonized. In denying that each of these categories have different material realities, they denied that they had any material reality at all. They treated everything as though it were individual, and that the individual could determine their own identity, without the necessary role of society in doing so, without the necessary role of their activity. Marxist feminists deny that there is any non-material reality to gender. Gender is another way of specifying material relations. It forms a material category; to ignore this is to ignore reality.
Dialectical Materialism
However, if we apply dialectical materialism, we realize that this is not the case. Strictly speaking, dialectical materialism is the idea that all things are derived from your relationship to producing things. There are several types of productive labor, one where the value is within the thing created, and one where the value is within the person producing a use value [1]. Perhaps one of the most difficult things to produce is ourselves; we produce our own gender by acting in certain ways, and that material identity is given a particular value in society. We are commodities. We possess a use and exchange value. The use value is the capability of capitalists to exploit us, while the exchange value is the value of our labor. The activity of gender, then, might be considered an act of producing ourselves, which affects the usefulness we have in society. The person performing gender, then, is producing a use value that they embody. [2] The usefulness is within them. The exchange value of their labor decreases the more they deviate from certain expected behaviors. As such, we might consider the person’s sensuous human activity as an act of production, and thus an act which is capable of defining an objective identity. [3]
The behavior of the person defines their material identity. Identity politics is not the primary means of constituting gender. Ironically, the CPGB-ML has formed its own understanding of gender ideologically and not materially. They have engaged with gender only on the most simplistic level, and in isolation from the processes of production concluded that there is no material reality to gender. If they were more observant or more capable of applying dialectical materialism, they would come to the understanding that material gender exists. The way a person acts in public space is a way in which they may be categorized and used; it helps to determine the social worth of the person. It may thus be used in their material oppression. Trans people have a rate of unemployment which is typically twice the national average. They engage in sex work at a much higher rate than cisgender people. Colonized nationalities engage in sex work at a much higher rate than those of uncolonized nationalities even within transgender people. In this way, gender affects the way in which people engage in work and labor. [4]
It is undialectical to treat an identity which affects and is affected by the material world and relations of production and labor as something which is purely ideological. It is with this that we understand that the act of producing gender contributes to the way in which a person is made into a commodity. The person’s exchange value (wages) may decrease, and they may be more easily exploited in that they might never be employed at all, making them less likely to participate in unions or other labor organizations. They may be employed illegally or forced into the lumpenproletariat, engaging in criminal sex work. It is because the trans population is exploitable that they are in this position, and because of the gender ideologies of the bourgeoisie that they are materially disadvantaged.
Conclusion
The reason many leftist groups are transphobic is because of class reductionism. They do not understand material categories outside of the capitalist relations of labor. Jose Carlos Mariategui acknowledged in his First Essay on Peruvian Reality that there can coexist within one place three different types of economy: capitalist, colonial, and feudalistic. These three different economies are characterized by the presence of multiple materially oppressed categories and classes. [5] This Latin American revolutionary has immediately discarded all attempts at class reductionism which these groups espouse. If we ignore the material circumstances in which different people exist in different forms of economic domination, we ignore the material reality of the society in which we exist, and this is undialectical.
A Marxist group that accepts no material theory of gender is not interested in the liberation of women in genera. These revisionists do not see gender as material, and they refuse to see it as a means of liberation. They must necessarily discard all feminism or maintain that women are a material category, which means that ideological gender constructs do not exist, contradicting their views on “gender ideology” as something that does not have material reality. They ignore key aspects which affect the lives of working people, particularly gendered oppression, which forces people into certain patterns of behavior and oppresses those that do not conform. In doing this, Marxist groups that whine about gender and decolonization being “identity politics” prove themselves to be right opportunists. They use class analysis to benefit themselves and at the expense of the oppressed.
This marks them as either an instrument which participates and traffics in the ideology of the bourgeoisie, or as people who do not correctly apply the theories of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Motion 8, a reactionary move by the CPGB-ML to expel those engaged in “LGBT identity politics,” also does not follow the model of “unity, criticism, unity,” proposed by Mao. Any organization which will expel members because of their political ideas without attempting to change those ideas or explain the incorrectness of those ideas is revisionist. It is beside the point to argue that gender is not material. In fact, it is a tendency of postmodern gender theory to treat it as non-material, and thus the CPGB-ML appears to be engaging in postmodern discourse; nothing is fully ideal. All things have roots in material reality, according to any reasonable orthodox Marxist. Marxists are correct to be skeptical about self-identification. However, gender is not a case of self-identification, it is a means of oppression and behavioral classification. Society determines that individuals should undertake certain actions, and if you undertake actions contrary to this, you will be oppressed or reprimanded. Identity, in this way, is material, it is based on our “sensuous human activity.”
[1] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value.
[2] Marx, Capital Volume I. This reading treats labor as embodied in commodities. Because we contain value understood to be the product of our actions in social space, we can understand ourselves to be commodities if the actions taken in social space produce in others perceptions in the ways we might be used.
[3] Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” Thesis I in particular.
[4] Statistics proving this in the United States may be found here.
[5] https://www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/works/7-interpretive-essays/essay01.htm. Noting that there are significant differences between gender and other material groupings because they are different material functions.
