by Mario Mieli
There have been wars in which the oppressors, sullied by atrocities, have degenerated to such a point that the only way for the oppressed to conquer has been to eliminate them to a man. In a case of this kind, it is impossible to expect many deserters. We find this in the Biblical wars: God commanded that none of the inhabitants of Jericho should survive the fall of the city. Instead of the ‘Internationale’, they play the Degüello.15 They blow the trumpet of Jericho.
But we don’t want to play those calls. What we propose is an erotic understanding: we don’t want any more destruction, and it is exactly for this reason why we still have to struggle. Revolutionary wars are never anything like the destruction of Jericho.
In 1917 the Bolsheviks and all other revolutionaries proclaimed war on war and preached defeatism in all armies. The Russian revolutionary soldiers fraternised with the German ‘victors’, they danced together, embraced one another on the occupied Russian soil and shared their bread. Germany was defeated by the revolution brought home by the soldiers. The Red Army that was taking shape was created with the intent to fight war.
Only if the revolution had succeeded in Germany could Russia have been saved. The real loss wasn’t at Brest-Litovsk but in Berlin. The French fleet’s ammunition saved Russia from allied invasion. Isolated, Hungary, Bavaria, and the Ruhr fell one after another. Russia survived and would assume a new and more perfect repressive role.
We’ve all been defeated, therefore, in Warsaw. And each of us has their own Kronstadt. But the May that grows within us obliges us now, with gay clarity, to wage real war against capital and no one else. Eros to you and to us, captivating sisters and attractive brothers of the universal incest that is announced and impending!
The Sublimation of Eros in Labour
And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of civilised nations, the class which in freeing itself will free humanity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a free being – the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work. – Lafargue16
According to the metaphysical theory that sees the process of civilisation as the conversion of powerful libidinal forces, their deviation from the sexual aim into labour and culture, repressed Eros may be viewed as the motive force of history, and labour as the sublimation of Eros.
In Freud’s words:
The tendency on the part of civilisation to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its other tendency to expand the cultural unit [. . .] Civilisation is obeying the law of economic necessity, since a large amount of the psychical energy which it uses for its own purposes has to be withdrawn from sexuality […] Fear of a revolt by the suppressed elements drives it to stricter precautionary measures.17
Civilisation, therefore, is seen as having repressed those erotic tendencies that are subsequently defined as ‘perverse’, in order to sublimate this libidinal energy into the economic sphere (and into the social sphere, too: we have seen how Freud deemed the sublimation of homoeroticism a useful guarantee of social cohesion).18 This is one of the most interesting hypotheses on the historical imposition of the anti-homosexual taboo, something that cannot be viewed in isolation, but must be considered in relation with other things, particularly the heterosexual Norm, marriage and the family, and the institutionalisation of woman’s subjugation to man.
According to Marcuse:
Against a society which employs sexuality as means for a useful end, the perversions uphold sexuality as an end in itself; they thus place themselves outside the dominion of the performance principle and challenge its very foundation. They establish libidinal relationships which society must ostracise because they threaten to reverse the process of civilisation which turned the organism into an instrument of work.19
This is already somewhat out of date, and needs to be revised. Today it is clear that our society makes very good use of the ‘perversions’; you need only go into a newsagent or to the cinema to be made well aware of this. ‘Perversion’ is sold both wholesale and retail; it is studied, classified, valued, marketed, accepted, discussed. It becomes a fashion, going in and out of style. It becomes culture, science, printed paper, money – if not, then who would publish this book? The unconscious is sold in slices over the butcher’s counter.
If for millennia, therefore, societies have repressed the so-called ‘perverse’ components of Eros in order to sublimate them in labour, the present system liberalises these ‘perversions’ with a view to their further exploitation in the economic sphere, and to subordinating all erotic tendencies to the goals of production and consumption. This liberalisation, as I have already argued, is functional only to a commodification in the deadly purposes of capital. Repressed ‘perversion’, then, no longer provides simply the energy required for labour, but is also to be found, fetishised, in the alienating product of alienated labour, which capital puts on the market in reified form. Precisely in order to be liberalised – which is to say and marketed – ‘perversion’ has to remain in essence repressed, and the libidinal energy that is specific to it must continue in large measure to be sublimated in labour and exploited: repressive desublimation is hence involved in the perpetuation of the coerced sublimation of Eros in labour. It is obvious that those erotic tendencies defined as ‘perverse’ cannot but remain repressed, as long as people continue to accept the truly obscene and perverted products that capital puts onto the market under the label of ‘perverse’ sexuality, and as long as there are still those who are content for their ‘particular’ impulses to be vented in a way that gives them a mediocre titillation from the squalid fetishes of sex marketed by the system. The struggle for the liberation of Eros is today, among other things, the rejection of a sexuality that is liberalised and packaged for sale by the permissive society: it is the refusal of sexual consumerism.
On the other hand, as capital has reached its phase of real domination – i.e. given that capitalist concentration and centralisation, inseparably bound up with the progress of the productive forces and the ‘technological translation of science into industrial machinery’ (H. J. Krahl) have reduced to a minimum the amount of necessary labour – the maximum portion of working hours now constitutes surplus labour, such that there is what Marcuse calls ‘a change in the character of the basic instruments of production’.20 This process was already foreseen by Marx in the Grundrisse:
In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.21
This transformation creates the essential premises for making the total qualitative leap realised in the communist revolution. And Marx adds:
As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great wellspring of wealth, labour-time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange-value [must cease to be the measure] of usevalue. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of the general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange-value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour-time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.22
In the face of this qualitative leap, standing as we do before the prospect of revolution and communism
, sexual repression is obsolete and only serves as an obstacle. In fact, it maintains the forced sublimation that permits economic exploitation, ‘the theft of alien labour-time’ (Marx), the theft of pleasure (time) from woman and man, the constriction of the human being to a labour that is no longer necessary in itself, but only indispensable to the rule of capital. Labour, today, serves to preserve the outmoded relations of production, and to ensure the stability of the social edifice that is built upon these.
‘Capital’, writes Virginia Finzi Ghisi,
has made use up till now of the erotic nature of labour in order to force man into this, having preventively withdrawn from him any other sexual adventure (relations with the woman-wife-mother in the family circle are no adventure, but only an extended substitution) […] Heterosexuality becomes the condition for capitalist production, as a modality of loss of the body, a habituation to seeing this elsewhere, and generalised.23
The struggle for communism today must manifest itself also in the negation of the heterosexual Norm founded on the repression of Eros and essential for maintaining the rule of capital over the species. The ‘perversions’, and homosexuality in particular, are a rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality by the established order, against the almost total enslavement of eroticism (repressed or repressively desublimated) to the ‘performance principle’, to production and reproduction (of labourpower).
The increase in the means of production has already virtually abolished poverty, which is perpetuated today only by capitalism. And if the sublimation of the ‘perverse’ tendencies of Eros into labour is thus no longer economically necessary, it is even less necessary to channel all libidinal energies into reproduction, given that our planet is already suffering from over-population. Clearly, repressive legislation on the number of children, abortion, and the wars and famines decreed by capital, will not resolve the problem of population increase. Such things can only serve to contain it within limits that are functional to the preservation and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. They serve to increase the war industry and to maintain the Third World in conditions of poverty and backwardness that are favourable to the establishment of capitalist economic and political control. The problem of over-population can be genuinely resolved by the spread of homosexuality, the (re) conquest of autoerotic pleasure, and the communist revolution. What will positively resolve the demographic tragedy is not the restriction of Eros, but its liberation.
The harnessing of Eros to procreation, in fact, has never been really necessary, since free sexuality, in conditions that are more or less favourable, naturally reproduces the species without needing to be subject to any type of constraint. On the other hand, if the struggle for the liberation of homosexuality is decisively opposed to the heterosexual Norm, one of its objectives is the realisation of new gay relations between women and men, relations that are totally different from the traditional couple, and are aimed, among other things, at a new form of gay procreation and paedophilic coexistence with children.
In a relatively distant future, the consequent transsexual freedom may well contribute to determining alterations in the biological and anatomical structure of the human being that will transform us, for example, into a gynandry reproducing by parthenogenesis, or else a new two-way type of procreation (or three-way, or ten-way?). Nor do we know what the situation is on the billions of other planets in the galaxy, many of which, at least, must be far more advanced than ourselves.
If we can thus understand how the repression and sublimation of Eros, and the heterosexual Norm, are absolutely no longer necessary for the goals of civilisation and the achievement of communism, being in fact indispensable only for the perpetuation of capitalism and its barbarism, then it is not hard to discover in the expression of homoerotic desire a fertile potential for revolutionary subversion. And it is to this potential that is linked the ‘promise of happiness’ that Marcuse recognises as a peculiar character of the ‘perversions’.
Finally, let us have done once and for all with the argument that the homosexual question is ‘superstructural’, and that priority should be given to the socio-economic (structural) level over the sexual struggle. Leaving aside the critique, no matter how important, of the mechanistic, undialectical, and post-Marxist sclerosis demonstrated by many so-called Marxists in their adoption of the notions of ‘structure’ and ‘superstructure’, it is nevertheless a grievous mistake to continue to treat the sexual question as only ‘superstructural’, given that labour itself, and hence the entire economic structure of society, depends on the sublimation of Eros. At the foundation of the economy, there is sexuality: Eros is substructural.
Even before this conception of the psychoanalytic matrix of economics and the fundamental function of libido in the process of civilisation, Marxism already affirmed the structural character of the sexual function, even though from a certain historically limited standpoint, since, among other things, its conception was heterosexual and thus partially ideological. As Engels wrote:
According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: on the one side , the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organisation under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production.24
Here we can see how the rigidly heterosexual social institutions of nineteenth-century Europe were the condition of the Engelsian idea of sexuality as a determining moment of history only in its procreative role. Engels, in particular, was strongly against homosexuality: in the Origin of the Family, he referred in particular to the men of ancient Greece who ‘fell into the abominable practice of sodomy and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede’.25 Today, the materialist conception has recognised the structural importance of desire, which cannot be reduced to coincide with the procreative instinct alone. And on the other hand, our revolutionary critique must eliminate the prejudices present within Marxism itself, its masculine spirit that would ‘ask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a manly resolution …’26
As for our heterosexual ‘comrades’, only if they free themselves from their structural fixations, from the mental superstructure that leads them to act in the way that the system allows, will they be able to grasp why the liberation of homosexuality is indispensable to human emancipation as a whole. At the present time, it is above all the repression of their own gay desire and their acceptance of the anti-homosexual taboo so dear to the system that leads them to treat the homosexual question in a capitalist fashion, and essentially to negate it.
The Absolutisation of Genitality, or, Heterosexual Idiocy
In ‘Homosexuality and Culture’, an article that appeared in Corriere della Sera in February 1975, Franco Fornari takes up the Freudian thesis on the origin of male homosexuality, expounded in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.27 He wrote:
The homosexual identifies himself with his own mother and imagines his own partner as a substitute for himself as a child. Adapting himself to representing his mother and his partner as the substitute for himself, the homosexual does not just want to recuperate, in an autarchic fashion, the irrecuperable relation of infantile love, but perform this operation through a confusing semantics, analogous to that of Narcissus, who mistakes his own reflected image for that of an other.
Ipse dixit: a Freudian hypothesis is transformed into absolute certainty under Fornari’s pen, where it takes on the force of a court judgment on the unequivocally ‘confused’ character of gay ‘semantics’. But the ‘semantics’ of homosexual relations are ‘confused’ only to the degree in which they confuse Fornari, who doesn’t know fuck all: and on the other hand, it’s obvious that only we gays are
capable of eviscerating and understanding the ‘semantics’ of homoeroticism. We homosexuals want heteros to quit condemning manifestations of gay desire, which starts from their own rigorous repression of that desire in themselves. If they censor a part of themselves and are convinced that all is going fine, how can they speak to those who live that part, if not in a prejudiced way?
In any case, before proceeding to examine Fornari’s affirmations one by one, it seems opportune to me that we tackle one idea of his theory of sexuality. As Aldo Tagliaferri clearly delineated in his study On the Dialectic Between Sexuality and Politics, where he polemicises against the ideology of genitality illustrated by Fornari in Genitality and Culture:
Fornari, with the commendable intent of resolving the antagonism between the natural and cultural, cuts the Gordian (and Freudian) knot of the relation between genitality and pregenitaltiy by cleanly distinguishing the two principles and illustrating the meaning of genital primacy, the ‘apex of human development’. He judges pregenitality to be substantially extraneous to coupling and delineates its structure, antagonistic with respect to that of genitality, by following a symmetrical schema that we can therefore outline here. Genital relation is founded on exchange. It gives rise to controlled orgasm: it implies consensus and contractuality. The object reaches maximum valorization. It responds to a correct examination. Meanwhile pregenital relation is founded on predatory infantile appropriation. It gives rise to a pregenital orgasm that is not controlled by the Ego. It presides over the friend-enemy schema. It celebrates the omnipotence of the subject through a drive to appropriate. It is of an illusive nature.28