Detailed Abstract:

This article outlines the epistemological foundations of transmarxism through a decolonial Marxist humanism taking up groundwork laid in Transgender Marxism (2021) by Nathaniel Dickson as a starting point. The transmarxist critique of alienated life via the continued subjection of trans people to an arbitrary and finite set of external determinations coincides with hi[r]storical materialism and a decolonial humanist critique of racial capitalism. While there are many debates around various forms of humanism, this article takes the position that a decolonial Marxist humanism does not have to put forward a problematically sexist, racist, or anthropocentric understanding of the human to say that there is nothing proper to the human other than impropriety. As argued in the latter half of the article, the historical and conceptual relations binding revolutionary Marxist humanism to the theory and praxis of autonomous queer, trans, and feminist struggles found in the work of Sylvia Wynter, Wages Due Lesbians, and the concept of hi[r]storical materialism are critical to ending colonial capitalist imperialism, fighting fascism, and revealing the limitations of liberal inclusion as a long-term solution to anti-trans violence.

[Author’s last version of an article published in Transgender Studies Quarterly 11:2 May 2024]

Marxist epistemology, building on elements of Hegelian logic, analyzes social relations by placing the meeting of human needs at its center, while rejecting all forms of reductionism and abstraction—principally liberalism’s abstraction of social needs as if they reducible to, or secured by, individual “rights.” It is not surprising that many queer and trans theorists have found the means of forging an explicitly trans philosophy within the Marxist tradition. How we conceptualize problems and contradictions informs how we develop strategies and tactics to address them. In giving a systematic treatment of the philosophical foundations of transmarxism as it relates to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy, I want to demonstrate the value of transmarxism as a particularly useful framework for moving beyond forms of reductionist, mechanical, and/or crudely materialist accounts of social and political phenomena. While turning to Hegelian dialectics might be surprising given that Hegel was no Marxist transfeminist, taking the dialectical method alongside the Marxist humanist concept of alienation, we are able to give an account of trans life and politics that reveals the truth of gender as the product of social labor. Nathaniel Dickson’s contribution to the recent publication Transgender Marxism is exceptional in this regard. Dickson provides the reader with a rigorous re-articulation of the concepts alienation and commodity-fetishism while outlining a trans-epistemic framework adequate for liberation as understood in revolutionary theory in general, and a revolutionary Hegelian-Marxism in particular.

This article begins from the thesis that by further developing the implicit categorical structure in Dickson’s analysis we will find: (1) the philosophical and epistemological foundations of transmarxism and the tradition of Marxist humanism are compatible; and (2) in light of contemporary anti-fascist struggles, the relevance of transmarxist epistemology today lies in its confrontation of the limitations of liberal inclusion as a long term solution to anti-trans violence. Beginning with an overview of dialectics and the categories of alienation and negation, we will be able to clearly grasp what’s at stake when Dickson claims, “transness draws attention to, and estranges, the social relations that produce shared oppression – while simultaneously providing an opportunity for re-socialisation, and thus a potentially better model for relating to others.” (Dickson 2021, 206)

I conclude that the transmarxist critique of alienated trans life via the continued subjection of trans people to an arbitrary and finite set of external determinations—biological taxonomy, biological sex, neurobiology—coincides with hi[r]storical materialism and a decolonial critique of racial capitalism. In each case, the production of alienation is characterized by the combined and unequal distribution of predicates (external determinations) for respective racialized and gendered social subjectivity. This article aims to demonstrate that the truth common to each of instance of critique is that there is nothing proper to the human other than impropriety. Developing a transmarxist humanist epistemology that measures our collective dis-alienation as proportional to our increasing collective enjoyment of time, our bodies, and our relations with the human and non-human world, we can link Sylvia Wynter’s decolonial critiques of both liberal and Marxist-Leninist feminisms with a h[i]rstorical materialism. In a time of massive re-organization and re-building of the right, a transmarxist humanist epistemology has a critical role to play in the refashioning of a mass left politics able to offensively confront every form of oppression, exploitation, and dehumanization.

I. Hegelian Logic, Dialectics, and Marxian Epistemology[1]

Fundamental for grasping the conceptual solidarity between Marx’s use of the dialectic and transmarxist critique, is an understanding of the syllogism in Hegelian logic, which serves as their vanishing mediator. For Hegel, all categories can be comprehended as a “universal that through particularity is united with individuality.” (Smith 1992, 12) Marx understood the production of history through this syllogism: human beings have needs—e.g. shelter, air, food, water, these are universal—but individual communities address these universal needs in particular ways. How individual communities in different times and places mediate human need is the production of different histories through the particularity of the context in which those individual communities reproduce themselves—i.e. the universal, the particular, and the individual constitute a self-mediating social totality. Thus, dialectical analysis of a concept entails systematically related arguments that show how the particular mediates the individual and universal (I-P-U), how the individual mediates between the particular and universal (P-I-U), and finally how the universal mediates between the individual and particular (I-U-P).

Social theory may fall into different kinds of reductionism by holding fast to only one of these formulations at a time, rendering one reading of the syllogism as if it represented the concept as a whole. Tony Smith names three common forms of reductionism pervading modern political philosophy: (1) socioeconomic reductionism—e.g. social contract theory—resulting from “reducing individuality and the state to the particular interests of civil society;” (2) methodological individualism which “reduces sociopolitical reality to an expression of the private interests of individuals;” (3) and political idealism which “reduces individuality and their particular interests of society to state imperatives” (Smith 1993, 15). From a transmarxist perspective, we can see how each of these relate to prominent theories of gender, as well as solutions to gender-based oppression and marginalization. Dickson analyzes reductionist theories of gender following the same syllogistic pattern, outlining three common ways of describing the ‘objective’ reality of gender: (1) through binary biological determinism (genitals, karyotype, genetics, hormones); (2) through dualism of sex as biological and gender as a social construct; and (3) seeking a neurological, but ultimately biologically determined, basis for gender.

Biological determinism, as it appears in the first form, reduces an individual and their social relations to their particular facts of embodiment. Bifurcating sex and gender maintains biological determinism by individualizing what are actually social relations, while also maintaining their separation from embodiment. Looking for neurological evidence as the truth of gender again maintains biological determinism but in a new form of reductionism that abstracts from all individual and social relations vis-a-vis one’s embodiment.[2] When Dickson moves to analyze the practice of naming, we find is decidedly dialectical logic at work: “a trans epistemology doesn’t demand fidelity to a given name, but rather to the process of naming itself…to name yourself is to assert your active participation in shaping our shared reality.” (Dickson 2021, 207) To hold fast to a name merely because it is given prevents the mediation of an individual’s particularity—it is in the process of mediation that one asserts agency rather than being reduced to external determinations. While not always immediately visible, the transmarxist critique of reductionist theories of gender centers on the dehumanization inherent in being reduced to asocial and external determinations. This form of critique is directly linked to Marx’s critique of alienation and its foundation in Hegelian logic.[3]

As Karen Ng has persuasively argued, Hegel’s ability to move beyond Kant’s aporetic idealism was made possible in part by his monist metaphysics, but even more importantly, Kant’s idealism was epistemically overcome through the assertion of life as the ground of intelligibility. This grounding in a logical concept of life is how Hegel argued that the thing-in-itself, or “objective reality,” is fundamentally knowable. For Hegel, “the identity and opposition between life and self-consciousness constitutes the process and activity of knowing, a dialectical process that [Hegel] comes to call absolute method.” (Ng 2020, 9) Hegel’s “absolute method” is the unity of life and the Idea of cognition. (Ng 2020, 21) Cognition is fundamentally shaped by the form and activity of life, or what Hegel calls Gattung [species] concepts. Hegel’s ontology of life maintains distinctions between life and non-life, while also showing the continuity between these two categories, avoiding the pitfalls of dualistic metaphysics. (Ng 2020, 20)

Alongside the syllogism’s critical role in Hegel’s logic,[4] we should note that there are four kinds of judgement (existence, reflection, necessity, and teleology) but only three syllogisms. The term “teleology” gets discussed in many different ways by different thinkers, for Hegel the concept of teleology happens after the concepts of mechanism and chemism in the Science of Logic. Teleology emerges as “the determination of internally purposive activity and form, a determination that brings us from objectivity to life and the Idea.” (Ng 2020, 229) This is where the concept of a subject-object emerges from the Idea of life which entails a “striving” towards self-unity and a unity with otherness. The emergence of the concept of life from non-life (mere mechanism or mere chemism), rather than a manifestation of anthropomorphism, “is a marker for the materialist ambition that we can one day come to fully understand the emergence of living processes from non-living ones, while also continuing to grasp the important of the life/non-life distinction as opening up any possible system of intelligibility.” (Ng 2020, 230) This is also where the concept of violence comes in Hegelian logic, if there is striving towards self-realization and self-individuation then there is now the possibility of that striving to be thwarted by another power. For example, in a dense forest you can visually track every plant’s striving to reach sunlight despite larger plants getting in their way.

The final form of the judgement of the concept is teleology, and yet teleology does not have a corresponding syllogism. This is significant because the content of teleological judgments are normative evaluations: the true, the right, the good, and the beautiful. (Ng 2020, 187-8) While these are undoubtedly the most important kinds of judgements, Hegel is adamant that they cannot be “deduced” by syllogistic logic alone: “the proper determinacy of the individual subject in the judgement of the concept is therefore exemplarity: the individual is an exemplar of its species or kind such that its actuality is irreducibly both individual and universal at once.” (Ng 2020, 204) Individuality “is an activity of self-determination and self-constitution, an ‘original judgment’ of the living I in which individuality with a particular constitution is self-posited as an exemplification of its Gattung [form of life/species].” (Ng 2020, 205) The syllogism of existence cannot fully render an individual intelligible. To grasp what binds a life to its form, or a specific individuality to a species of generality, necessarily involves the arbitrary selection of generic and arbitrary predicates vis-à-vis individual subjects. Moreover, the universal and objective concept of Gattung is itself contingent on the subjective actuality of its individual members. All this is to say, answers to normative questions about individual members of a species cannot be “deduced” by syllogistic logic because of the structure of what it means to be alive as a subject-object.

Given this, the logical structure of life and species-being (Gattungswesen), from Hegel’s logic to Marx’s very specific form of humanism, must resist positing any fixed determinate content for “human nature.” Following Hegel’s logic—and specifically not Hegel’s political or philosophical anthropology—Marx makes normative judgments against modes of reproduction of human life insofar as they illicitly reduce the quantity and quality of human life as it exists in relationship to nature as a whole. Following Hegel, the exemplarity of individual existence means that human beings can change the meaning of their ‘genus’ through their collective life activity. (Ng 2020, 211) As Ng shows by way of the nature and logic of Hegel’s concept of life, there is no one way to be human, nor one way to adjudicate one form of life as better than another without reference to other normative concepts. This is why teleological judgments, or evaluations of forms of life, are not reducible to syllogistic logic.

To connect a transmarxist analysis of reductionist theories of gender to Hegelian logic, we must not only focus on the subjectivity of the concept pertaining to forms of judgement, but also the objectivity of the concept in terms of forms of activity, namely: mechanical, chemical, and teleological activity—the latter being the site of both self-determination and violence.[5] For Hegel, the structural prevention of self-determined (i.e. teleological) activity is the condition of violence, where an external power wields an objective universality that “disables, restricts, and even destroys the capacity of an object to ‘constitute itself as a subject in this universal, or to make the later its predicate.” (Ng 2020, 231) This is the basis for Marx’s critique of the capitalist value-form that imposes an external force rendering a majority of humanity unable to constitute itself as subject vis-à-vis the law of accumulation.[6]

To be reduced to external determinations, in Marxian language, is to experience alienation to oneself, to others, and our shared reality. As Dickson writes, “the objective or factual presence of a name in a computer does not describe the physical properties of anything. It implies an idealistic and ahistoric understanding of meaning as something inherent to an object, neither shaped nor changed in anyway by human observation or participation.” (Dickson 2021, 207) The erasure of the social labor that produces gender, and the process of naming, is what Dickson marks as the hallmark of reductionist bourgeois approaches to gender. Understanding Marx’s use of Hegelian logic and its role in transmarxist epistemology, we are better positioned to see the truth of gender as constructed, while also being “material, that its value might reside in the people doing the making, [and] that it can be transformed by the process of making itself.” (Dickson 2021, 206) While the detour through Hegel’s Science of Logic for a transmarxist epistemology may be surprising given Hegel’s actual political views, the dialectical method and a Hegelian concept of life ground Marx’s humanist critique of capitalism in the concept of alienation. Outlining these epistemic foundations of Marxist humanism reveal its particular usefulness as a framework for both understanding and critiquing our current reality to uncover the ways in which trans life reveals the truth of gender as the product of social labor.

II. Marx’s Humanist Critique of Capitalism

Given the structure of Capital Vol. 1, many people conceptualize Marx’s critique of capitalism as primarily explained through a “labor theory of value.” However, this formulation obscures the fact that locating labor as a source of value was not what distinguished Marx from other bourgeois political economists like John Locke and Adam Smith. Further, Marx actually criticized the reduction of value to solely human labor if that understanding erased the importance of nature and other non-human life.[7] Marx’s innovation was to understand that the law of value of capital is determined by socially necessary labor time—which is geographically and historically contextualized. Marx showed that capital, commodities, and private property were the products of alienated social relations rather than a mythical state of nature turned nation-state—as if property was the result of the granting of “civil rights.”

In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx critiques a proposal about what a transition to socialism would entail. In his critique, he begins to outline a vision of an alternative to capitalism. The original program was written during a conference in Gotha that would merge the two main socialist organizations in Germany, eventually becoming the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In an introduction to a new English translation of the text, Peter Hudis explains how Marx’s analysis was prescient given the past century of socialist experiments. (Marx 2023) With respect to confusions around the “labor theory of value,” the very first line of the Gotha Program begins, “labor is the source of all wealth,” to this Marx responds: “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists?) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.” (Marx 2023, 51) Hudis further explains, “abstract labor is the substance of value, while socially necessary labor time is the measure of value.” (Marx 2023, 7) The struggle against capitalism has to do with the control of time, thus the measure of our liberation from capitalism has to do with how much control we have over our time as we meet our needs and desires. It is capitalism that renders labor an absolute end-in-itself. The Marxist humanist goal is not labor for the sake of labor, but rather, the humanization of labor which requires enjoyment of leisure time, as well as the supersession of the division of mental and manual labor.[8]

From this perspective, we can see that the central contradictions of capitalism cannot be resolved as many have proposed. Whether it’s managing market “anarchy” through state “planning” or abolishing private property in favor of state owned property, the contradictions posed by alienated labor and the rule of value as determined by socially necessary labor time persist. For Marx, the humanist alternative to the law of capitalist value is the democratic control of self-activity—which should not be primarily mediated by the market or the state, but rather by freely associated individuals. To abolish abstract labor, we must inaugurate directly social labor where the means of production are held in common and care is available for all—regardless of one’s ability or non-ability to labor in particular ways.[9] As Hudis writes, “socially necessarily labor time confronts individuals as a person apart, irrespective of their sensuous and spiritual needs, whereas actual labor time is the material and mental activity of individuals mediating their relationships with nature.” (Marx 2023, 9) This is the basis of Marx’s famous definition of communism as the full transcendence of bourgeois right: “From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs!” (Marx 2023, 59)

Just as the temporality of value and the commodity form are mystified by bourgeois political economists, so too is gender mystified by many theorists of gender. As Dickson opens his essay with an apt quote from Capital Vol. 1,

A commodity is…a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relations of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor. (Dickson 2021, 205)

Marx shows the commodity form as the product a particular kind of labor just as Dickson reveals gender as the product of a particular kind of labor: “Commodities are imbued with a mythical relationship to one another that bears no trace of the labor of human beings. In just the same way, gender is imagined as having an explanation that bears no trace of human effort.” (Dickson 2021, 204) Trans people reveal the truth of gender as the product of labor within a particular set of social relations, also exposing the ways in which the cis-gender binary is the product of a particular set of determinate social relations.

While a dialectical trans epistemology reveals the shortcomings of various reductionist theories of gender, the practical pay off of this analysis is its ability to identify how our current social relations embody particular kinds of alienation such that we can work to overcome these forms of alienation. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx outlines his conception of human nature, which is directly opposed to conceptions of human nature that pin it to some finite content like “egoism” or “altruism.” For Marx, human nature is that which overcomes (Aufhebung) external necessity through its appropriation of need through the dialectical transformational power of desire and will from a perspective that can take the flourishing of humanity as a whole into consideration. As he writes in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” (Marx 1978, 145) Freedom, on this account, means to consciously take part in shaping one’s relation to reality via social existence. Without the ability to appropriate one’s life and social relations, the products of alienated labor appear as separate from our social activity, “as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer.” (Marx 2004, 42) Human labor appears as “the vitiation of the worker, objectification as a loss and as servitude to the object, and appropriation as alienation,” which mirrors Hegel’s discussion of violence in the Science of Logic. (Marx 2004, 42) What should be the end of human activity, social relationships between people, has now become a means for the objectification of social relations between things. Alienation reduces our life activity to anti-social and individualistic ends.[10]

The only universal determination of humanity is their special quality of “species-being” (Gattungswesen), which only becomes fully manifest when human relations are in- and for-themselves social. A transmarxist perspective derived from a revolutionary Hegelian-Marxism demands: (1) there is no one way to be human; and (2) we can and should make normative critiques of ways of organizing and reproducing human life that are fundamentally dehumanizing. If humans are to be properly human, it means that the reproduction of their life should be determined by their self-determined connection not only to the species, but also with all other forms of life and non-life, i.e. our shared environment. This is why Marx famously writes, “[humanity] is the highest measure of being for [humanity],” (Marx 1973, 182)[11] while he also writes:

[The human being]is directly a natural being.…But [the human being] is not merely a natural being; [they are] a human natural being. [They are] a being [for-itself], and therefore a species-being; and as such [they have] to express and authenticate [themselves] in being as well as in thought. (Marx 2004, 140-1)

Humans are “natural beings” in that they find themselves in bodies that have immediately given needs, but the modalities by which they meet these needs assume a specifically human character.

What does it mean that the normative measure of the human is nothing but the human as a so-called “natural being”? As Vanessa Wills explains, it is that “the value of any practice, theory, or social arrangement depends crucially on how well it promotes or hinders human beings in realizing their essence as beings that, consciously and purposively, produce and reproduce their own existence and conditions of existence.” (Wills 2019, 54) From this position it is clear how one can argue that gender affirmative care is both a human right and an entirely natural necessity. Against the various charges of being “unnatural”—whether that be transgender existence tout court or gender affirming medical interventions—what is clear, from a Marxist humanist perspective, is that appropriating one’s existence with what has been made possible by human labor is the most humanly-natural thing one can do. Therefore, it should be made freely accessible and available to all. (Giles 2019)

To demand the flourishing of trans life globally is fundamentally at odds with colonial and imperialist capitalism and its attendant forms of alienation. Bringing together the linage of the Marxist-feminist international Wages for Housework Campaign and transmarxist demands, Harry Josephine Giles writes: “Wages for transition is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it attacks capital and forces it to restructure social relations in terms more favorable to us and consequently more favorable to the unity of the class…The work of transition is the work of class struggle.” (Giles 2019) To fully appreciate the theoretical and practical advancements of this kind of autonomous and revolutionary feminist transmarxist analysis, one has to appreciate its development not only within a specific political and historical context, but also within the history of theoretical advances specific to decolonial and Marxist iterations of feminism.

III. Autonomous Queer and Trans Feminism for Gender Self-Determination

In her essay “Beyond Liberal and Marxist-Leninist Feminisms,” Sylvia Wynter articulates the grounds for an autonomous feminism “in its own name” which avoids becoming either amorphously universal or narrowly provincial (Wynter 2018 [1982], 32). The danger of feminists leveling difference in favor the utopic unity of “sisterhood,” and/or narrowly circumscribing what counts as a “woman’s issue,” has been well articulated (Vergès 2019; 2022). Wynter’s intervention articulating the method and grounds for an autonomous feminism is an example of what Hegel would call “absolute method”[12] towards the creation of what Marx would describe as a properly humanist standpoint.

Fitting into her broader analysis of the histories of different hegemonic forms of humanism, both Liberal and Marxist-Leninist feminisms represent aspects of the “overrepresentation of Man.” (Wynter 2003) The normative, epistemic, and political wrongs of the overrepresentation of Man, are that in every iteration they posits one particular and abstract description of the human as the truth of all humanity, while also operating at the absolute exclusion and exploitation of other forms of life. Drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, Wynter describes our current world order as a “classarchy” based on “the sovereignty of a middle class model of human identity, whether it appears in a Liberal humanist definition (Man-as-Norm) or in a Marxist-Leninist definition (Labor-as-norm). (Wynter 2018 [1982], 32-3) The liberal humanist definition of Man articulates freedom with respect to the ownership of property, rendering many women the wards of their fathers and/or husbands. The radical individualism of social contract theorists was “crucial to the dynamic functioning of the laws of form of classarchy; to its systems of accumulation distribution and related modes of calculation.” (Wynter 2018 [1982], 35) This would be further developed through the articulation of “Man-as-White-and-Western” grounding both a Black-White and gender-based distinctions which “related ‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality to the ‘unnaturalness’ of all forms of non-heterosexuality, serv[ing] to substantialize the order’s discourse of justification.” (Wynter 2018 [1982], 36-7)

Given this reality, Wynter writes that an autonomous feminism must be “Particular/Universal” in the sense that it aims to bring together a world-wide popular feminist cultural revolution while also respecting the ways in which feminist struggles are particular to different cultural contexts. Wynter offers an analysis of Virginia Woolf, the campaign for Wages for Housework, and Catharine MacKinnon as examples of forms of feminism reaching beyond the frameworks of both liberal and Marxist-Leninist feminisms. Woolf offers what Wynter sees as “the founding charter of feminism in its own name” through the concept of Looking Glass Vision in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf explains that in a sexist world, the exploitative and demented recognition between men and women relies on women not telling the truth: “For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking glass shrinks, his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgements, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books unless he can see himself…at twice the size he really is.” (Woolf 1929: 35-37) Wynter then reads the Wages for Housework campaign and Catherine MacKinnon’s work as examples of feminism “in its own name,” as a beginning to tell the truth—defying the Looking Glass Vision of Man.

Against Marxist-Leninist feminist Charnie Guettel, and some early writings from Angela Davis that reified productive labor and the owners-of-productive-labor as the primary revolutionary agents, the Wages for Housework campaign changed the terms of analysis by broadening the method and scope of organizing against capitalist colonial modernity. As Wynter writes,

For the proposal of pay for housework calls into question a mode of calculation by which until hitherto, housewives were not paid; by which women and other res extensa categories could not get ‘comparable worth’ and thus remuneration…If we note the close parallel between the representation of the housewives’ mere maintenance role and that of the Third World, as only being engaged in the lesser production of ‘raw materials’ as contrasted to the ‘real’ productive activity of the First World, the point of the Marxist-Leninist distinction begins to emerge. (Wynter 2018 [1982], 42)

Wynter characterizes Marxist-Leninist feminism as operating within the constituting analogy of Man-as-Labor where “man defines himself as human by the process in which he produces himself-as-value,” which comes along with racialized, spatial-geographical, and gendered connotations. (Wynter 2018 [1982], 44-5) This mirrors the productive work ethic of liberal humanism that proves one’s natural and reasonable humanity, even if it does not emerge as the product of an individual alone. Rather than rely on the abstract value of “productive labor” as the fixed reference for the measure of one’s humanity, the Wages for Housework campaign highlighted the unequal valuation of life expenditure and life potentiality that rendered reproductive work both in the home and in the Third World as always minimally valuable in comparison to the white Western able-bodied man-as-industrial-laborer. Their analysis revealed the ways in which socially reproductive labor done in the home and in the Third World was actually the condition of possibility for Man-as-laborer to exist elsewhere.

What the international Wages for Housework campaign highlighted was less about a comparison of different forms of labor in terms of their value-as-money, but the equal value of the worth of one’s life expenditure. This is exactly Marx’s analysis of what exchange would look like in a communist society where the value of labor was no longer tethered to the average socially necessarily labor time, but rather according to the real needs, abilities, and expenditure of life activity. Wynter calls the Wages for Housework campaign’s new mode of calculation the first “rupture” allowing for the existence of an autonomous feminism to emerge. The second rupture is explained with the work of Catherine MacKinnon who showed women’s sexuality as the ground of destabilizing heterosexuality as a primary frame of reference (Wynter 2018 [1982], 47). Wynter calls the perspectives coming from women marginalized because of their non-waged labor or their sexuality “Liminal” perspectives. As such, these perspectives are able to take an objective view of the hegemonic constituting frames of reference, elsewhere Wynter calls this process the “disenchantment of discourse.” (Wynter 1987) By revealing the limits and structure of hegemonic ways of understanding the world, an autonomous feminism is able to disrupt “problematic hierarchical structures in order to attain a kind of universal emancipation.” (Paquette 2018, 1069) Because Wynter sees “capitalism” as a term overdetermined by the abstract analysis of Marxist-Leninism, she says that autonomous feminism then displaces that concept for the concept of “classarchy,” revealing the limits of both liberal and Marxist-Leninist conceptions of modernity and sexism.

That there is no “separate struggle” for women’s liberation but rather, “our liberation as women must be necessarily co-evolutionary with a general liberation of concrete men and women from the governing categories of Western classarchy,” is the political consequence of this analysis (Wynter 2018 [1982], 52). While Wynter does not engage the Marxist Humanist writing of Raya Dunayevskaya in her critique of Marxist-Leninist feminism, Dunayevskaya’s analysis of the revolutionary aspects of the women’s movement is actually very similar. As Dunayevskaya writes:

[The] new revolutionary force of Women’s Liberation, which has named the culprit—male chauvinism—as characterizing the revolutionary movement itself. That is to say, [male chauvinism] is not only characteristic of capitalism, and not only of this epoch, but has existed throughout history. The point is not to stop there. But in order not to stop there, you have to recognize Women’s Liberation as a force that is Reason and not just force—and that means a total uprooting of this society, and the creation of totally new human relations. Which is why Marx was not exclusively a feminist but a “new Humanist.” The fact that feminism is part of Humanism and not the other way around does not mean that Women’s Liberation becomes subordinate. It means only that philosophy will not again be separated from revolution, or Reason separated from force. (Dunayevskaya 2002, 308)

What revolutionary autonomous feminism accomplished is not reducible to a list of actions or political wins, but rather, according to both Wynter and Dunayevskaya, it created rifts and shifts within the architectonics of Reason itself. Revolutionary autonomous feminism achieved theoretical advances that cannot be reduced and written off because of failures to win actual wages for housework. More importantly, the international Wages for Housework campaign changed the topography of struggle. It offered a vision of totally new human relations displacing the frameworks of Marxist-Leninist Man-as-Labor and Liberal Man-as-Norm and their attendant geographical and racialized norms that rely on modes of calculation still fundamentally determined by capital’s law of value.

However, Wynter’s reduced of all forms of “Marxism” and “Marxist materialism” to the particular forms of reductionist Marxist-Leninism that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s. This is why she writes,

a feminism in its own name therefore turns ‘materialist logic’ on its head. Not the contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production as the spur to change, but rather the non-congruence between the intentionality of a cultural model, rapidly changing historical forces, and the major aspirations of women towards freedom in our age. (Wynter 2018 [1982], 52)

Wynter pinpoints the fundamental contradiction of modernity as the hegemonic descriptions of the human. This is why she understands autonomous feminism as “turning on its head” the materialism characteristic of Marxist-Leninists identifying Man-as-productive labor as the lever of modernity’s contradictions. However, I argue that Wynter’s critique of the crude materialism of 1970s and 1980s Marxist-Leninists actually mirrors Marx’s own critiques of the crude socialist analysis in the Gotha Program as if “laborers” created all wealth, rendering the solution to alienation as the fair distribution of the wealth from laborers to laborers.[13] This of course does not actually break the capitalist law of value as determined by socially necessary labor time, nor the ablest, racialized, gendered, national, and environmental discrepancies inherent in that definition of value.

IV. Stretching Wynter: Wages Due Lesbians, Hi[r]storical Materialism, and Queer Marxist Humanism

Through a transmarxist perspective, we can link Wynter’s analysis of the racialized gendered sexuality of Man-as-White-and-Western-laborer together with a materialist framework analyzing cis-heteronormativity. Wynter’s decolonial articulation of feminism embodies an epistemology and politics logically entailing trans and intersex liberation. (Adamson 2023) Following Wynter’s analysis of the Wages for Housework campaign as an important rupture within Marxist forms of feminism, transmarxist feminist Nat Raha has further investigated the liminal organizations within that international movement, namely the London based organization Wages Due Lesbians. Wages Due Lesbians represents both ruptures identified by Wynter as critical for autonomous feminism. Through her analysis of these organizations, Raha theorizes a hi[r]storical materialism which operates as a disidentification (Muñoz 1999) of transmarxist feminist analysis with historical materialism. (Raha 2018, 42-6; Raha & Baars 2021)

Wages Due Lesbians published a book entitled Policing the Bedroom and How to Refuse It (1991) including a revised version of the essay “Out of the Clause and into the Workhouse.” This essay challenged Section 28—a law in the U.K. that passed May 1988 and was not fully repealed until 2010—demanding local authorities, including all schools, not “promote homosexuality,” publish anything “promoting homosexuality,” or teach anything showing “homosexuality” as acceptable as a so-called “pretended family relationship.” [14] Wages Due Lesbians outlined how this attack was not only a product of conservative Thatcherism and ineffectual liberal resistance, but also the Labour Party’s flimsy opposition. As they write,

According to traditional Labour Party (and some other Left) definitions, the working class is white, male straight, ablebodied, over 20, under 50, has 2.2 children, loves football, the police and nuclear power, and lives on a council estate. The cream of the working class belongs to a (white dominated) trade union and to an all-white or white-dominated tenants’ association. Anyone who doesn’t conform to this stereotype is other than working class, and could be an ‘outside agitator’, whose rights need not be defended, in fact who need not have rights. (Wages Due Lesbians 1991, 28-9)

This 1988 appraisal of the Labour Party mirrors Wynter’s 1982 analysis of the shortcomings of Marxist-Leninist feminism because it brings together the best of the analytical innovations from the international Wages for Housework Campaign and MacKinnon’s analysis of heterosexuality.

Wages due Lesbians framed their struggle as one of working towards autonomy rather than separatism. They avoided the kind of separatism of issues of a Marxist-Leninism that understands issues of class as separated or primary with respect to race, gender, and sexuality, as well as the forms of separatism characteristic of the “gay and lesbian” movement. Instead, Wages Due Lesbians saw sexual choice as struggle against all forms of alienation:

Before we described ourselves as lesbian, and even if we believe we have always been, we struggled as little girls, and maybe also as wives, mothers and lovers of men, for the power to discover and then act on our sexual desires. We drew and continue to draw understanding and power from all these battles and confrontations, our own and other people’s, redefining our possibilities and raising our standards as we find out more about who we can be. (Wages Due Lesbians 1991, 29-31)

This analysis emerges from a form of queer temporality and a critique of additive models of identity and subjectivity. Wages Due Lesbians refused to separate aspects of their lives within the norms of either bourgeois liberal feminism, Marxist-Leninist feminism, or lesbian separatism because they saw that “there is no self-sufficiency in today’s global capitalist economy.” There is no “self-sufficiency” whether the “self” in self-sufficient is taken to be the individual, the family, the nation-state, or the lesbian community. Any one of these taken alone, amount only to a “pretended revolution” (Wages Due Lesbians 1991, 31).

Separating sex, race, class, age, sexuality, disability, and nation merely reproduces the status quo because it fails to confront capitalist and colonial state violence and all of its attendant forms of dehumanization. Autonomy for Wages Due Lesbians meant articulating the specificities of their struggle at the same time as they conceptualized their goal of sexual freedom in reference to “who else we are and what else we do.” (Wages Due Lesbians 1991, 32) As M. E. O’Brien has persuasively argued, a major point of both theoretical and tactical of the international labor movement in the twentieth century has been the instance of the “family wage” as primary demand of the workers’ movement. (O’Brien 2023, 109-125) Rather than abolishing the bourgeois family form that coalesced around capitalist and colonial social forms, the family wage sought to rehabilitate the bourgeois family form for the working class.

The identity of the “worker” that the demand of the “family wage” was built around is the very issue of Man-as-labor that Wynter takes to task. The concept of the “respectable working class family,” which Section 28 played into, was a doubling down on capitalist and colonial narratives of civilized and uncivilized. While this outcome is unfortunate it is important to realize it was a “contingent outcome of class struggle,” rather than a wholesale argument that “class struggle” is fundamentally patriarchal or cis-heteronormative. (O’Brien 117) The passing of Section 28 was a coordinated tactic by the state to divide issues of sexuality from a mass-based working class movement to abolish the prevailing state of things.

Building on the insights of the revolutionary Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Eric Stanley writes that “gender self-determination is a collective praxis against the brutal pragmatism of the present, the liquidation of the past, and the austerity of the future.” (Stanley 2014, 89) Working within the Black Anarchic Radical tradition and Third Worldism, Nsambu Za Suekama writes that gender self-determination is critical to fight “transmisogynoir [as] a specific set of material struggles under capitalism and colonialism, that position Black trans women and transfemmes at the crossroads of multiple forms of domination: national oppression, gender exploitation, ableist suppression, and class war” (Za Suekama, 2021). Following in the footsteps Wynter’s analysis laying out a critical perspective for a new hegemonic description of the human, these more contemporary articulations of forms of abolitionist gender self-determination can be read as compatible with a queer dialectical humanist autonomous frame of reference.

 V. Conclusion

As Dickson writes, “Since gender does clearly require work, transgender people need access to the means to produce ours.” (Dickson 2021, 204) A transmarxist epistemology arrives at this demand by showing it as necessary for overcoming alienation, and arguing that it must be constitutive of any truly anti-capitalist ethical and political orientation. Arriving at this demand from the Hegelian-Marxist humanist analysis provided here is qualitatively different from the liberal alternative that identifies the relation between legal protections and individual rights as the benchmark of trans liberation. This is critical in a moment where fascism is rising globally and liberals consistently move to the right by taking up ground ceded as the right becomes far-right. As Cathy Cohen put it in a 1998 report to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Creating Change Conference, “a politics of mere inclusion or liberal accommodation will not serve the needs of most gay and lesbian people.” (Cohen 2001, 56)

Cohen’s remarks came within the context of the 1990s when Democrats were busy rolling back welfare benefits and using “liberal inclusion” as the basis of the reversal of affirmative action and progressive immigration policies. However, our context today is not so different when we look at the scale of liberal concessions to the right. Cohen links the rightward turn of Democrats in the 1990s with the rabid anticommunism of the 1940s and 1950s: “let us not forget we experienced a similar move to the normative right among our [lesbian and gay] organizations during the McCarthy era…don’t believe their lie; our inclusion in and of itself will not make things different.” (Cohen 2001, 54) The link between US forms of fascism, anti-Blackness, sexism, and anticommunism has been made explicit in the work of Charisse Burden-Stelly. By outlining the “longue dureé of McCarthyism,” she shows that Black communists in the US have long identified the fascistic origins of the HUAC and Hoover’s likening of communists as a “disease” to be “quarantined.” (Burden-Stelly 2022, 170) As Claudia Jones identified it, the Smith Act and McCarran Act together worked as “thought control” insofar as they served to “punish radical ideas and to construe them as acts of force and violence.” (Burden-Stelly, 175) These forms of antiradicalism, “the disciplining of communists, socialists, and other anticapitalists whose ideas, politics, and activism are deemed subversive or threatening to the US government—presaged a US brand of fascism insofar as it all but criminalized left-wing militancy as foreign-inspired, un-American, and threatening to the stability and security of the United States.” (Burden-Stelly 2022, 162)

The same dynamics are at play with the criminalization of teaching or merely talking about “Critical Race Theory,” the existence of transgender people, and queer sexuality in K-12 schools in a number of states with the United States. As Cohen put it, “community leaders would have us adopt oppressive rhetoric and ideals of the right not only for a seat at the table, as is commonly articulated, but also because some believe in the society as it is presently constituted—except for that minor problem of their own personal experiences with exclusion.” (Cohen 2001, 54) But as I have worked to demonstrate, to fully address alienated social relations requires a dialectical process of overcoming those relations and their replacement by re-humanized social relations. In Hegelian terms this is called “the negation of the negation” of alienated social relations. If capitalism and its attendant forms of racism, cis-heteronormativity, anti-trans violence, imperialism, and ableism are a first order negation of social life, then what is called for is a negation of a second order; a negation that abolishes the capitalist totality while simultaneously creating social relations corresponding to a new social totality.

This position is not a problematic form of idealism, rather as István Mészáros writes, addressing alienated social relations “does not have to go to the realm of abstraction, because it is given as a potential reality—an actual potentiality…the negation of alienation is not an ‘absolute’ (empty) negativity, but, on the contrary, the positive assertion of a relation of unity whose members really exist in an actual opposition to each other.” (Mészáros 2005 [1970], 184) The potential for new modes of social life is already present and can be acted upon immediately.[15] The key is not to address the contradictions of alienation one-sidedly by reducing human beings to public producers, private consumers, or bearers of individual rights. The myriad ways in which our world is dissociated, atomized, and confronts us as an alien force has to be met with a transformation that reinstates a unity between our relationships with our bodies, with others, our social worlds, and the earth anew. As Mészáros puts it, “private life has to acquire the practical consciousness of its social embeddedness…public life has to be personalized, i.e. become the natural mode of existence of the real individual; not only must passive consumption change into creative consumption, but also that production must become enjoyment.” (Mészáros 2005 [1970], 184)

While sometimes dissociation is a survival tactic in the face of alienated social relations, as Gleeson and Dickson explain, “trans politics today demands a work of reassociation, an undoing of the aftermath of the closet that yet clings to us. This move is one of reunification: of easing us out of the over-individuation required for us to weather harsher periods.” (Gleeson and Dickson 2019) It is for this reason Dickson asserts that transition is estrangement. That is to say, transition is a form of negating the negation of alienation. Through “add[ing] difficultly to the seeming naturalness of things, and in doing so prolong and make strange our perception of the everyday so that we might see it anew.” (Dickson 2021, 206) This process has effects for everyone because of its dialectical structure opening onto a field where social relations are to be refashioned. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “this—making something into something else—is what negation is. To do so is to wonder about a form’s present, future-shaping design—something we can discern from the evidence of its constitutive patterns.” (Gilmore 2022, 477) Against the liberal trans standpoint seeking inclusion into current alienated social relations, a dialectical hi[r]storical materialism and queer Marxist humanism involves remapping and reassociation within new forms of social relations: “A liberatory trans epistemology is one that can help us to map the cognitive and relational possibilities that emerge as oppositional communities and individuals come into being, and as we transform through our relationships with one another and our strategies for survival.” (Dickson 2021, 216) In bringing together Wynter’s decolonial feminist analysis with a transmarxist humanist h[i]rstorical materialism, we have the grounds to refashion a mass left politics able to offensively confront all those who want to maintain the current state of things. The measure of our collective dis-alienation is the measure of the release of creativity, flourishing, and enjoyment in all of our relationships: social, political, economic, and ecological.

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Woolf,

[1] While many have characterized Marx’s philosophy as either economic determinist, “stagist” in terms of its conception of history, or “teleological” in the sense of a closed system offering a “theory of everything,” these charges are not necessarily accurate to Marx’s work as a whole. For a few accounts that challenge these prejudices against Marxian philosophy see (Hall 1973), (Adamson 2021), and (Rodney 2022). Historical materialist epistemology, as Stuart Hall points out, is what distinguishes Marx from bourgeois political economists like James Mill, Adam Smith, or John Locke who read current social relations and relations of production backwards in time to naturalize them and render them logically necessary. The dialectical method is decidedly non-linear and is diametrically opposed to crude empiricist iterations of “Marxism” that explain the present based on vague analysis of what humans were like before capitalism. The “science” of Marx’s method is analogous to Hegel’s articulation of science as the movement of the Concept as critique of what remains one-sided, abstract, and ahistorical, or as Hall writes: “critique appears as the form of the scientificity of [Marx’s] method.” (Hall 1973, 69) While many cite The German Ideology as the lynch pin of their argument about Marx stagist philosophy of history, this text has been radically called into question in terms of its authenticity and strategic editing to fit a Soviet philosophy of history, see (Carver 2013)

[2] Because I am interested in a materialist account of gender I won’t engage the fully idealistic/antirealist forms of social constructionism.

[3] While focused on different content, it is worth mentioning that the syllogism in Hegel’s logic was also critical to Lenin’s Hegel studies. Kevin Anderson has persuasively shown its influence on Lenin’s writings immediately after his completion of the Hegel notebooks (1914-16) in both Imperialism, State and Revolution, and his shorter essays on national liberation. Learning from the failures of the Second International and a deep study of the multiple moments of the syllogism, Lenin is able to see that there are differences in forms of nationalism and that national liberation movement of oppressed nations is important for socialism internationally. Additionally, he saw that for socialism to end national oppression nations would have to be freely able to succeed and have cultural autonomy. He was particularly adamant Finland, Ukraine, and Poland should be free from Russian chauvinism and imperialism. He pointedly critiqued Bukharin’s “imperialist economism,” and wrote that “If Finland, Poland or Ukraine secede from Russia there is nothing bad in that. What is wrong with it?…Any Russian socialist who does not recognize Finland’s and Ukraine’s right to freedom will degenerate into a chauvinist. And no sophisms or references to his ‘method’ will ever help him to justify himself.” (Lenin quoted in Anderson 1995, 145). It is also only after his study of the Science of Logic that Lenin breaks with his earlier crude materialist analysis, and he critiques Plekhanov—who was the first to popularize the term “dialectical materialism”—as a vulgar materialist. See (Anderson 2007) and (Anderson 1995).

[4] As Hegel himself writes, “everything rational is a syllogism” (Hegel 2010, 588)

[5] Mechanical activity consists of instrumental actions, whether in the realm of physics or the social world. Mechanistic understandings of action in the social world correspond to the concepts of fate, law, rule, and government. (Ng 2020, 228) Chemical activity, which of course corresponds to chemistry and metabolism, Hegel also links to forms of activity in the social world, e.g. the activity of language and the formal bases of love and friendship. The final form of activity is teleological action or self-determining activity. However, we must be careful not to interpret teleological action in an anthropomorphic sense since self-determination will mean something different with respect to different forms of life and forms of non-life. (Ng 2020, 229)

[6] Countering a position that sees Hegelian-Marxist humanism as problematically anthropocentric, Ng argues that engaging an analytical lens looking at “species-specificity is not species solipsism, and the importance of species-specificity in no way rules out complex interspecies relations, including forms of imaginative and affective identification with the points of view of other life forms.” (Ng 2020, 279; Ng 2021)

[7] As Adam Smith puts it: “The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labor which it enables him to purchase or command. Labor, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. (Smith 1981, 47). See also Ch. 5 Of Property in John Locke’s Second Treatise (Locke 1980).

[8] As Marx writes, “For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals The measure of wealth is then not any longer in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.” (Marx 1973, 708)

[9] For more on what this might look like, see (O’Brien 2023) and (Abdelhadi and O’Brien 2022).

[10] Alienated labor, “(1) alienates nature from [humanity]; and (2) alienates [the human being] from [themselves], from [their] own active function, [their] life activity; so it alienates [them] from the species. It makes species-life into a means of individual life.” (Marx, 2004 83)

[11] I am intentionally changing the translation that normally goes “man is the highest measure of man” because Marx actually uses the word Mensch and not Mann. There is no gendered connotation in this phrase unlike the typical English translation. This is a major issue is essentially all English translations of Marx, falsely translating grammatical forms of Mensch as if he wrote the specifically gendered term Mann.

[12] The Science of Logic ends with a discussion of ‘method,’ as that which provides the ground for normativity and thus also for a critical perspective on reality emerging from the self-determination of the Concept. While the description Hegel offers in the Science of Logic is an abstract study of method, I argue along with Rocío Zambrana that it can be seen as a method by which any normative commitment or institution can be critically interrogated. As Zambrana writes, the absolute method Hegel develops allows for “a critical history of the development of a practice or institution, since [it] make[s] possible different perspectives from which a normative commitment is assessed. The syllogisms make possible an assessment of the history of a normative commitment along with the awareness of the irreducible precariousness and ambivalence of any given commitment.” (Zambrana 2015, 17)

[13] We can add also that Lenin shared these critiques of crude materialists like Plekhanov (and even some of Lenin’s own earlier writings) after his in-depth study of Hegel’s Science of Logic. (Anderson 1995)

[14] The official text of Section 28 was as follows:

“Prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material

(1) A local authority shall not—

(a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.

(2) Nothing in subsection (1) above shall be taken to prohibit the doing of anything for the purpose of treating or preventing the spread of disease.

(3) In any proceedings in connection with the application of this section a court shall draw such inferences

as to the intention of the local authority as may reasonably be drawn from the evidence before it.

(4) In subsection (1)(b) above “maintained school” means,—

(a) in England and Wales, a county school, voluntary school, nursery school or special school, within the meaning of the Education Act 1944; and

(b) in Scotland, a public school, nursery school or special school, within the meaning of the Education (Scotland) Act 1980.”

[15] For examples see (Spade 2020).