Every birth and every death, far from being a protracted gradualness, is rather its breaking off and a leap from quantitative into qualitative alteration. Natura non facit saltum [nature does not make leaps], as the saying goes; and ordinary thinking, when confronted by a coming-to-be or a passing-away, believes that it has comprehended it conceptually by representing it, as we said, as a gradual emerging or vanishing…The belief that coming-to-be is gradual is based on imagining that what comes to be is already present to the senses or is in principle actual, only so small that it still escapes perception…Explaining coming-to-be and vanishing from the gradualness of alteration suffers from the tediousness typical of any tautology; the coming-to-be and the vanishing are presupposed as ready-made beforehand and the alteration is reduced to the mere mutation of an external difference, and in this way the change becomes in fact only a tautology. The difficulty confronting an intellect intent on this kind of explanation lies in the qualitative transition from a something into its other in general and into its opposite – a difficulty which the intellect meets by pretending that identity and alteration are the indifferent external identity and alteration of the quantitative sphere.

Hegel, Science of Logic (1812)

Leaps, Leaps, Leaps!

Lenin’s Conspectus on Hegel’s Science of Logic (1914-15)

Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.”

Lenin’s Conspectus on Hegel’s Science of Logic (1914-15)

Lenin’s Bolshevik Party abolished the czarist anti-gay law and legalised abortion less than eight weeks after the October 1917 Revolution.

Leslie Feinberg (2004)

Lenin held that just when capitalism had reached this high stage of ‘organization,’ monopoly (which extended itself into imperialism), was the time to see new, national revolutionary forces that would act as ‘bacilli’ for proletarian revolutions as well.

Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution (1973)

Maybe a homosexual can be the most revolutionary.

Huey P. Newton (1970)

STAR is a very revolutionary group. We believe in picking up the gun, starting a revolution if necessary.

Marsha P. Johnson “Rapping with a Street Transvestite Revolutionary” (1973)

Bringing together contemporary struggles for trans liberation and Lenin’s legacy might seem surprising at first, but I argue along with trans communist Leslie Feinberg, that even if the explicit intentions of 1917 were not organised around gender self-determination or trans liberation, the underpinnings and aspirations of the Bolshevik revolution is compatible with gender self-determination. Lenin’s work should hence be re-evaluated in light of the burgeoning, though sometimes contradictory, movement for trans liberation. The quote “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen,” is commonly attributed to Lenin to describe the experience of the Russian Revolution, but it could equally apply to the experience of transitioning. The dialectics of transition follow the route that Hegel outlines in the Science of Logic. There comes a moment of qualitative leap on many levels at once – in one’s consciousness, in the relationships one holds with others, and in one’s experience of the world as one finally consciously takes part in one’s own process of becoming. The experience is not smooth, nor linear, but continues with fits, stops, starts, and leaps – such is the movement of the dialectic.

This account of dialectics, consistent with trans experience, gender self-determination, and the movement of revolution, is contrary to the mechanical account of dialectical materialism outlined in Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908). Lenin would distance himself from this account of dialectics – and its basis in Plekhanov rather than Marx – after he retreated to the Berne library in 1914 to study and reflect on the failures of the Second International to prevent WWI. In these years he carefully studied Hegel’s Science of Logic and produced a significant body of notes and reflections on Hegelian dialectics that led him to infamously argue: “It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” As Raya Dunayevskaya and Kevin Anderson have persuasively argued, Lenin’s concepts of revolutionary defeatism and national liberation were heavily influenced by his study of Hegel. Breaking with the crude ‘dialectical materialism’ of Plekhanov is what enabled Lenin to write his most philosophically rich texts on the revolutionary nature of national liberation struggles, State and Revolution, and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. I argue similarly that a study of dialectics reveals the revolutionary basis of trans struggles, and the necessity of gender self-determination for the overcoming of all forms of alienation under capitalism.

The starting quote from Hegel on the truth of qualitative change as something fundamentally not gradual, but rather a radical coming-into-being of something new, is what inspired Lenin to write in his marginalia, “Leaps, Leaps, Leaps!” The mechanistic and positivistic thinking of the Second International is finally smashed for Lenin. This moment allows him to reorient his thinking on the nature of monopoly capitalism, revolutionary strategy, and the role of national liberation struggles as “‘bacilli’ for proletarian revolutions.” He reverses his initial analysis of Hegel’s dialectic as perniciously idealistic, instead arguing that Hegel’s writings in the Doctrine of the Concept are actually some of the most useful for a materialist account of reality. The interplay of humanity and nature for Lenin finally comes together with Marx’s notes on humanism and nature in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Marx 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.” Whereas Lenin writes, “Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.” Against various charges “unnatural-ness”—whether that be transgender existence tout court or gender affirming medical interventions in particular—from a Marxist perspective, it should be clear that appropriating one’s existence with what has been made possible by human labor is the most natural thing a human being can do.

Although trans liberation should be logically consistent with a Marxist-Leninist analysis, many who called themselves Marxist-Leninists in the 1970s and 1980s argued that LGBT people represented a counterrevolutionary manifestation of ‘bourgeois decadence’ – with some exceptions like the Los Angeles Research Group’s “Toward a Scientific Analysis of the Gay Question.” Yet Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton would come to the opposite conclusion: “maybe a homosexual can be the most revolutionary.” However, he only arrives at this position after meeting with Jean Genet and Sylvia Rivera. Rivera as a co-founder of S.T.A.R. – the first trans sex-worker led organisation offering shelter to queer and trans youth – attended the 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention and helped put gay power and trans liberation on the map of revolutionary politics in the United States. As another co-founder of S.T.A.R. Marsha P. Johnson put it, “STAR is a very revolutionary group. We believe in picking up the gun, starting a revolution if necessary.” Dividing themselves against the assimilationist and upwardly mobile gay and lesbian organisations fighting merely for rights and inclusion into the imperialist capitalist state, S.T.A.R. embodied a qualitative leap in both its analysis and strategy for revolution.

Current struggles for revolutionary trans liberation are similarly set against a politics of liberal inclusion viewing assimilation into an imperialist state as progress. Revolutionary trans liberation, just like the process of transition itself, requires a leap into something new, the “withering away” of one’s old self and one’s old world. In the revolutionary spirit of Lenin, our continued fight to overthrow capitalist imperialism and its attendant forms of dehumanization should be seen as one and the same with our fight for trans liberation. As a trans theorist and organizer, I continue to find Lenin’s work useful for forging revolutionary theory and strategy able to navigate the dialectics of transformation and transition.