Towards a Gay Communism

by Mario Mieli

  The last element that I want to address here, one that I think our new translation draws out more fully due to materials not included previously, concerns precisely this point about how social control functions without being seen to do so. Specifically, it is about Mieli’s relation to Marxism and to the gay communism that we’ve chosen to use as the overall title (rather than a literal translation of the original Italian title, Elements of Homosexual Critique). There’s no doubt that Towards a Gay Communism is no work of ‘orthodox’ Marxism, even if I’d argue that designation is far less meaningful than its frequent deployment would indicate. The book is decidedly scornful, albeit often in an acidly playful way, of many of the predominant tendencies amongst the Italian and European left, from Maoism to centrist socialism, even as it remains undeniably committed to revolutionary political movements – provided that they are willing to deeply consider and unmake their own complicity with capital’s reliance upon gender and heteronormativity, and, in so doing, to go beyond the affirmed limits of politics itself. Especially in its critique of persistent machismo in radical formations, Mieli shares much with the aforementioned variants of Italian Marxist feminism active in these same years, which also posed crucial challenges to the orthodoxy of what was allowed to count as political, let alone militant, even as those challenges were taken to heart far less than they deserved to be, and seemingly in inverse proportion to just how much they pointed out something deeply embedded and wholly worth tearing out.

  So if Towards a Gay Communism is a book engaged with Marxism, just how so? It is, first of all, of an unmistakably Freudo-Marxist bent. Despite Mieli’s relentless criticism of Freud, it is that criticism, and the general architecture of Freudian thought, in addition to its pathologisation of homosexuality, that drives much of the text. Indeed, one of the elements of this book that only became clearer to me during the process of translation was just how much of it is structured around a series of engagements with texts that Mieli doesn’t merely disagree with but openly loathes, and for good reason: for the homophobic violence they excuse and naturalise, for their denigration of any subjectivity other than the norm, for their deadening of pleasure’s convoluted and inconstant pathways, and for their unmistakable complicity with the order of capital as such. One result of this is that the book is studded with bilious and incisive takedowns, such as that of Fornari, although many of its most compelling and joyous – gay, Mieli would insist – moments come when he leaves behind both the Freudian hobbyhorse and the model of textual critique more generally to trace his speculative and desirous communism of recombinatory transindividuality.

  All that said, the book is not only engaged with an expanded Marxist critique of capital but also deeply involved in its stakes. This is evident in the repetition of a single pair of terms – formal domination and real domination – that recur throughout the book and without which I don’t think its force can be fully grasped. An attention to these terms isn’t just my own preference or interpretation, however: they appear in the first sentences of the first full chapter, as a way to situate the historical ground on which his whole project takes hold:

  Contemporary gay movements have developed in countries where capital has reached the stage of real domination.

  However, while still under the formal domination of capital, and for the first time in history, homosexuals had organised themselves into a movement.

  These terms, which Mieli partially unpacks in a footnote so long we have included it as an appendix, come specifically to him from Jacques Camatte, a French left communist thinker with whom Mieli carried on a correspondence and who wrote a long critical appraisal of Towards a Gay Communism in 1978. Camatte was associated with a heterodox group of theorists often deemed ‘ultra-left’ and, more specifically, with the journal Invariance.2 The terms themselves are extensions of key concepts in Marx’s own work, the ‘formal subsumption of labour to capital’ and the ‘real subsumption of labour to capital’. Often statically interpreted as designating successive periods or stages, especially concerning the pivot to mass industrialisation, these terms are better understood as processes of articulation by which capital incorporates labouring activities into productive enterprises and the generation of surplus value. Formal subsumption specifies a relation in which those activities themselves are not constitutively altered but whose results are commodified, like agricultural production after the enclosure that continues to function much as it had for centuries but whose crops are now exchanged on the market, rather than consumed by its growers or forfeited to feudal lords. As Marx puts it plainly, ‘There is no change as yet in the mode of production itself. Technologically speaking, the labour process goes on as before, with the proviso that it is now subordinated to capital.’3 With formal subsumption, the only way to substantively increase surplus-value is to make people work longer, harder, and faster, and in this way, it suggests a mode of capitalism predicated on ‘variable capital’ (i.e. human labour) and reliant upon direct political control and coercion in order to enforce discipline and productivity. Real subsumption, conversely, designates how labouring activities are themselves transformed in accordance with the appropriation of surplus value, shaped into a concrete image of the social abstraction that impels their continuity.4 It involves a major shift towards the importance of fixed capital, such as machinery, as is made plain in the most notorious figure of real subsumption, the factory, that inhuman assemblage of machinery, material, and workers that is increasingly organised, down to the smallest gestures, around the most efficient production of commodities possible. Crucially, with the real subsumption of labour to capital forms of direct external control and discipline become less effective, as the control schemas become embedded in the very material and social arrangement of production itself.

  What, one might fairly ask, does this long detour have to do with a theory of transsexuality and gay communism, let alone with Mieli’s analyses of pop stars and cruising? The key turn, for his central incorporation of the idea lies in how Camatte as well as Gianni Collu, another thinker in the Invariance orbit, shift from subsumption to domination. In the simplest sense, that shift involves raising formal and real subsumption from specific historical processes to historical periods. As Camatte and Collu put it, ‘The starting point for the critique of the existing society of capital must be the reaffirmation of the concepts of formal and real domination as historical phases of capitalist development’.5 Yet this is a restricted sense, a starting point indeed, because what is ultimately crucial in their work on this question is a way to understand what happens when that process of restructuring activities in accordance with an abstraction – i.e. subsuming discrete processes and practices to the form of value – spills far beyond just waged production or the factory floor. As the translators of Camatte’s major work on this question into Italian (the volume that Mieli himself cites), formal and real domination are ‘the extensions to all of society of the periodization of the development of capital that one finds at the center of the analysis in Chapter 6’, Marx’s unfinished draft for a chapter in Capital which forms the core of Camatte’s extensive theory.6 So if, as Camatte argues, the foundation of capital required both expropriation (such as the enclosure of common land and the restriction of access to modes of reproducing and caring for a community) and autonomisation7 (the decoupling of exchange value from the limited sphere of market exchanges, so as to become a general social form), the expanding real domination of capital means that this autonomisation bleeds outwards. Real domination involves, in short, a creeping substitution: the ‘human community’ and its processes of interchange and political decision-making – vicious and exploitative as its results historically could be, and certainly deserving of no nostalgic sighs – is gradually supplanted and remade by what Camatte calls the ‘material community’ of capital itself, a tautological network of accumulation and reproduction. This network, which has increasingly little need for those more conventional forms of political control (and hence reduces r
epresentational politics to a baleful game of lesser evils), slowly absorbs all forms of life and activities and leaves nothing but a variegated surface of capital, its sanctioned relations, and its support structures.8 This material community both becomes increasingly dematerialised, in the sense of financialisation and in that of its diffuse cultural logic, and, if we push out from Camatte’s reading, materially instantiated in the physical networks that facilitate the circulation of value, information, image, and human movement.

  One of the major consequences of this is what it does to the possibility of critique and revolt, for ‘if capital dominates everything to the point of being able to identify itself with the social being, it appears, on this basis, to disappear’.9 In short, it poses a genuinely fundamental problem: how do we even discern what is to be challenged, what provides opportunities for antagonistic expansion, what is newly emerging, and what is merely the persistence of the accumulated detritus of the past? Faced with what Mieli calls ‘the chameleon-like flatness that marks the real domination of capital’, we stare at this camouflage of putative difference and supposed free choice, gazing at what seems at once constantly in flux and obstinately the same, and we search for some crack able to be pried open.

  This, I would suggest, is the grounding understanding of the relation between capitalism and social forms that underwrite Towards a Gay Communism, and this is why Mieli introduces it at the very outset of his argument. What he does in the book that follows, then, is to demonstrate the utter centrality of homosexuality in both understanding and challenging this order. His approach to this is dual, involving both a history of homophobia (and its accompanying violence) and a speculative but wholly corporal horizon of generalised transsexuality and the liberation of Eros, a queer revolt in the name of pleasure against deadly and stultifying dominion. But it’s worth insisting that he does not simply overlay Camatte’s schematic onto a lived research into homosexuality or vice versa. Rather, this inquiry proceeds along two interrelated paths. First, he claims, we can only understand not just the structure of society in general but also the specific violence, marginalisation, and panic directed at queer populations if we adopt a framework able to detect how capital disappears by means of this autonomisation and saturation into all corners of life, especially including into those realms of pleasure and apparent transgression, unincorporability, and brief freedom. Second, however, he insists that the history of homosexuality and homophobia alike cannot be entirely explained within this framework. Not least of all, this is because, as he demonstrates at length, homophobia is hardly a novel invention that might be easily correlated to the enclosure of common lands and all else that follows. One would have to discount the reams of evidence that Mieli compiles of millennia of attacks on homosexual behavior in order to imagine that the horror of gay desire is simply one amongst many torqued expressions of the community of capital. Yet for Mieli, the fact that homosexuality cannot be contained wholly within this theoretical model and historical period doesn’t mean that the model needs to be scrapped. Rather, it does not fit cleanly because homosexuality is in excess of real domination, both in its revolutionary potential and in the continual panic and retribution it engenders. So over the wandering path of the text, he insists that the prospect and practice of gay liberation bears a unique insight into the structures of capital’s real domination, and that this insight – never in theory alone, always constituted by the bravery of those who desire something other – detects and widens several of those elusive cracks. What is that insight and force? It is capacity to disrupt what he calls the ‘absurd absolutisation of contingent historical values and the hypostasis of opinions (scientific, ethico-moral, socio-political, psychological) that are in reality relative and transitory’. It is a refusal of the idea that heterosexuality is ‘eternosexuality’, as he puts, and that this arrangement of corporal pleasure, access, and judgment is transhistorical. It is, above all, a challenge to the calcification of a certain vision of the human, one that has been gradually molded to double and mimic the contours of the material community of capital. To call for a gay communism, as he does, isn’t just to add a qualifier. It is to assert that the process of the abolition of a present cursed equally by its past and prescribed future will require a total remapping of the values of productivity, civility, usefulness, and decency that have been congealed into the model of heterosexuality and literally beaten into those who contest it.

  Two final comments, on the occasion of the release of this book.

  First, I undertook this project in memory and honour of our comrade Chris Chitty, whose remarkable work on the history of homosexuality Mieli would surely have loved and from which I learned deeply. I can only hope that new readership of Mieli’s text will have the same vivifying, challenging, and radicalising effect on readers that Chris’ work and life did on all of us.

  Second, this edition will be released into a cultural and political landscape where an assemblage of neofascists, men’s rights advocates, white supremacists, rape apologists, old-fashioned conservatives, and blowhard fools join together in arguing that capitalism, white supremacy, and Western civilisation itself are under assault from a subversive program of ‘cultural Marxism’ and postmodernism that seeks to erode cherished values and bring about the perverse reign of a queer communist abolitionary mob. I’m reminded once again of Guy Hocquenghem’s precise diagnosis: ‘society’ is, in this respect, paranoiac: it suffers from an interpretative delusion which leads it to discover all around it the signs of a homosexual conspiracy that prevents it from functioning properly.’10 (Some things never change, it seems.) So in this context, I can’t help but feel a small degree of satisfaction that my efforts towards bringing about the new release of this book will contribute to offering a text that argues stridently for exactly what those joyless bores are so terrified of. As Mieli puts it in the very pages that follow: Oh my gay God!

  __________

  1. An English translation of the letter was published at ‘Letter from a Trans Man to the Old Sexual Regime’, Texte zur Kunst Online at: www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/

  2. Both Camatte and Invariance more generally drew especially on the work of Amadeo Bordiga, a communist and engineer who was involved in the initial formation of the Italian Communist Party but whose work after the fascist period grappled with a fascinating range of topics, from peasant communes to urban planning, ‘natural’ disasters and capitalist temporality.

  3. Karl Marx, ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 1026.

  4. The key point, in Camatte’s gloss of this, is that the ‘labour process’ and ‘valorization process’ become unified in the ‘immediate process of the production of capital’. And as he says, ‘The transition from formal to real domination is linked to this transformation.’ Il capitale totale: il capitolo VI inedito de «Il capitale» e la critica dell’economia politica (Bari: Dedalo, 1976), p. 89. All translations from this text are my own.

  5. ‘Transition’, Invariance, Series I, n. 8, (1969). Available online at: http://revuein-variance.pagesperso-orange.fr/Transition.html. My translation.

  6. Giovanni Dettori and Nicomede Folar, ‘Nota sulla traduzione’, Il capitale totale, p. 5.

  7. I’d suggest that we also read autonomisation, in the early formation of capital, in the sense both of forcing persons onto the market as autonomous ‘free individuals’ and of the decoupling of accumulation from any automatic ties to a political and religious order, as in the feudal system.

  8. As Camatte puts it plainly, ‘if it is true that labour creates all wealth, so it is true that capital, as it appropriates surplus-value, seems to be endowed with this same ability. This occurs in the phase of real domination, in which everything appears as capital’. Camatte, Il capitale totale, p. 109.

  9. ‘Transition’.

  10. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1993), p. 55.

  Preface

  We are entirely correct when we say that the only experts on homosexuality are homosexuals. – Herbert Spiers1

  This book grew out of a university thesis on homosexuality. That fact is responsible, I believe, for some of its limitations, and in the first place for a certain discordance of style between the stilted tones of academia and the less inhibited gay mode of expression. There is also a discordance of content in that some themes have been investigated more deeply, while others have remained more or less at the level at which they were originally drafted.

  As a thesis, this book essentially focussed on male homosexuality, even if many of its arguments bear on homosexuality in general. As a gay man, I have preferred to discuss female homosexuality as little as possible; for only lesbians can really know what lesbianism is, rather than just speaking about it in the abstract.

  Moreover, at a time when the homosexual question is generally understood as uncharted waters2 that open out into the wider ocean of the women’s question, I decided to limit myself to addressing six points in particular:

  1) I have tackled from my own perspective, one that was matured and rejuvenated in the ambits of the gay movement, many of the most widespread anti-homosexual commonplaces and some of the best known psychoanalytic theories that bear on homosexuality. I did this because I think it opportune, even on a ‘theoretical basis’, to oppose the opinions of us gays to the traditional opinions of the heteros, which as a rule share – more or less deliberately, more or less consciously – the prejudices of a certain reactionary rabble,3 i.e. all those doctors, psychologists, magistrates, politicians, priests, etc. who peddle as truth on the homosexual question the crudest lies – or, more rarely, the more subtle ones. We, who refuse to identify ourselves with their ‘science’, base ourselves rather on a gay science.