Capitalism, Queers & Equality
In April 2013, New Zealand finally legalized marriage for same-sex couples. There was
considerable discussion among left-wing queer and trans activists about whether marriage equality
should be supported as a democratic right, or opposed on the grounds that marriage is a bourgeois
institution. In October 2013, the Queer Avengers organized a conference in Wellington entitled
“Beyond Marriage” where this issue, among others, was discussed. Reprinted below is a
speech given at the conference by Bill Logan, a leader of the successful 1985-86 struggle to
decriminalize homosexuality in New Zealand and a supporter of the International Bolshevik
Tendency.
Like most of us, I’m far more interested in love than marriage, but I want to consider the
connections and antagonisms between love and marriage today. I don’t want to attempt a precise
definition of love here, but I don’t merely mean deep caring for our fellow humans, or close
friendship, or filial affection, or warm companionship. All those are great things, and often in the
world we live in today, they are our best sources of personal security. But what we are talking of
here is passionate, spontaneous, sexual love.
Now, in this sense, love and marriage both have long histories in Western culture, going back
thousands of years, but they are almost entirely separate histories. Love and marriage have quite
simply had nothing to do with each other. Even the fiction that love and marriage should
somehow be combined is rather recent, and rather unevenly applied. Marriage has always been about
status and property. Even in the last two hundred years, when marriage has attempted to appropriate
love for its own purposes, it is a debased, deformed kind of love that marriage has sought to
incorporate—a love where the perfect match involves celebrity, power and money, and where your
grandmother tells you it is as easy to fall in love with a rich woman as with a poor one. The ideal
marriage requires you to love a millionaire, a film star, or preferably a prince—all of whom
are probably pretty unlovable.
The Pet Shop Boys [a British electronic pop duo] are not exactly right that love is a bourgeois
construct—it would be more true to say that love is a feudal construct, because the modern
ideology of love is primarily shaped in the ideals of the knightly chivalry of the Middle Ages. And,
of course, love under chivalry was always outside marriage, and about either unfulfilled yearning,
or unadulterated adultery. Marriage was about power and property, and love was counterposed to
it.
If love penetrated the ruling classes during the age of chivalry, it had a pre-history, which is
largely unwritten. Before chivalry, love was confined to the lower orders. Citizens of Athens and
Rome did not love their wives, though they may have been infatuated with a slave-girl or a
boyfriend. But servants and shepherd boys, whose lives went mostly unrecorded because they
didn’t matter, were able to love each other, and love intensely. Although the record is
sparse, traces are inevitably left in song and verse.
We live in a cynical age, and intelligent people are not supposed to believe in love. However, in
hints and traces, and also in anthropological studies of pre-class societies, we can see that
patches, incidents or explosions of love have formed in most of the different kinds of social
arrangements our species has tried out. We can see that love is sometimes capable of great heroism
against the predominating institutions of society. And we can see that love has been most widespread
where power, status and property are weakest. Indeed, what I want to argue here is that love can
appear in many environments, and has extraordinary potential for social disruption, but if love is
to transcend the exceptional and episodic, and if there is to be a generalized freedom to love, then
class society must be dismantled.
Of course, the spontaneity and diverse forms of love—its passion and sheer joy—do not
sit easily beside the authority and hierarchy necessary to run a class society. So marriage has
become a tool for the organization of love. Love is a danger, and marriage is put into
service for its moderation and debasement, and to render it uniform.
So heterosexual marriage is the standard, against which all other relationships are measured.
Parental expectations, housing policy and architecture, family law, and popular music all tend to
push toward a marriage-like form. To the extent that a relationship is in the nature of a
marriage—a heterosexual marriage—it is judged successful.
And so we have the modern nuclear family under capitalism as an instrument for the mass
organization of domestic tasks and reproduction, and for disciplined training of the workforce. The
ideal wherein love and marriage are combined has a dual function—of bureaucratizing and
routinizing love to render it socially harmless, and of spicing up marriage to make it
acceptable.
This is not to say, of course, that there is no real love in the world today—indeed many
get a taste of genuine love, and some get a full serving, but the commercial mass-media love
industry and the attempts to tie love to the institution of marriage have profoundly misshapen it.
The pursuit of love is combined with a pursuit of money, power and fame, and the experience of love
is twisted by crass commercialism, showy weddings, and the legal and social controls that define
marriage.
Nor is this to say that marriage at an individual level is necessarily a betrayal of love. Each
of us must make their way as best they can in this broken world, and marriage helps many negotiate a
path. But as a cultural institution, marriage is fundamentally conservative.
And so we come to the struggle for same-sex marriage rights, which has emerged with remarkable
historical speed on a global basis very recently. When I was a younger man fighting for homosexual
law reform in the 1985-86 campaign, gay marriage was not something we thought of as a possibility to
be considered.
In the context of the way marriage is carried out, its social role and its debasement of love, it
is frankly not surprising that radical queers looked on this movement with great suspicion. Why
would we want to buy into the process whereby the creative, disruptive, passionate power of love was
tamed to fit the conservative straightjacket of marriage?
But marriage will not be transcended by maintaining the limitations and constraints on it, but by
opening it up, and by freeing it of the compulsions which surround it—compulsions which are
ideological, legal and material.
So of course, most of us took a deep breath, and supported the marriage reform. We supported it
quite simply because legal prohibition is not an instrument of liberation. Many of us don’t
want to join the army or the police force, or to become a truck driver, or adopt children. But we
want the same rights to do those things as anyone else. The point about the fight for the right to
get married was not that we were advocating that all of us queer people should actually get married,
but that we should be allowed to get married.
While there were some attractions in the argument that we want the right to be different, not
merely to be the same as the majority, the truth is that the fight against oppression (whether
sexual, religious, national or economic) is always a fight for equal rights, the right to be the
same. Separate but equal, is not equal. Where Muslims or atheists do not have the same rights as
Christians, they are pushed to make their beliefs about religion invisible. Where queers do not have
the same rights as straights, they are pushed to make their queerness invisible. It is only through
winning the right to be the same that we really gain the freedom to be different.
So we supported the campaign for equal marriage rights. But it was hardly an earth-shattering
episode, and although our little victory in that campaign was quite satisfying, mostly because we
don’t get to experience very many victories, it was not exactly a turning point in history.
The campaign was an occasion for some highly reversible mass consciousness-raising, and possibly
laid some groundwork for the more important struggle to protect queer kids from bullying in high
schools. But the objective and concrete achievement of this campaign was actually just a tiny
logical extension of bourgeois democratic rights, which will have very little impact on our real
lives. At the end of the day, it was not a big deal.
When the celebrations died down, queer and trans people still faced discrimination and oppression
in families and schools and workplaces, as we always knew we would. In my counseling practice I
still see heteronormativity pushing people to the brink of death. I see very high levels of stress
and addiction among queers. I see the Independent Youth Benefit denied to adolescents who have
nothing—no family, no accommodation, no job [though it is routinely given to youth who are not
queer or trans who are cut off from financial support by family breakdown]. There are in fact
extraordinary levels of unemployment among young queers right now. I still see health professionals
refusing to take seriously the problem of queer and trans suicidality, and gay boys bullied at
school, and trans teenagers kicked out of their homes.
It sometimes feels like we’re in a battleground, and in the context of the trauma that
surrounds us, and the lesser, but still urgent, practical needs, our imaginings of a future utopia
of polymorphous perversity seem a bit indulgent. We might want a world where the privileges of
monogamy are dismantled, where there is a culture of celebrating diversity and a universal
validation of relationships with many different shapes. But right now what we have to concern
ourselves with is that almost all queer and trans kids grow up in fear of bullying at school, and a
significant number want to kill themselves because they have been kicked out of home with no
resources.
What I want to argue is that we should not separate, but rather we should link, the struggle for
immediate needs and the struggle for a more profound liberation. Indeed it is only in the struggle
to meet immediate needs that we can lay a path to profound change and a fundamentally better
society.
To take the example of housing: it is clear that an abundance and a variety of subsidized housing
would be an enormous step in meeting immediate needs—helping counter the effects of poverty
and taking a lot of the sting out of family transphobia and homophobia. If even modest housing were
immediately accessible, it would take much of the stress and conflict out of adolescent coming-out
crises. There are depressions that would lift, and suicides that would not happen.
In fact, it’s not just queer and trans adolescents who need access to accommodation
separate from their parents. Most families with adolescents at certain points need more housing
options. And as well as addressing the immediate needs of adolescents, good accommodation options
would also address the needs of married people when their marriages were in trouble, or they were
merely needing a little space. Whether it is a question of domestic violence, irritations about the
relatives visiting, or a new sexual configuration disturbing the equilibrium of the household,
access to housing would remove one of the most important constraints that too often turn a marriage
into a prison.
When there are children, one of the compulsions that ties the couple together and makes it
difficult to escape a marriage even though it has passed its use-by date, is the expense of setting
up accommodation that allows genuine co-parenting. People are forced to stay in the marital home in
order to keep connected to their children or, in leaving the marriage, they also leave most of the
parenting to one of the former partners, usually the mother. Decent accommodation options
for families that are coming apart would remove another of the compulsions that shape marriage.
So while certainly it is true that family law, fairy tales and Hollywood are important forces
shaping and maintaining the institution of marriage, actually it is too often simply the absence of
an alternative place to live, or even to stay temporarily, that keeps a given marriage going, or
determines its shape.
As with housing, so with decent free childcare, which is another thing we should be fighting for.
It would remove another set of compulsions that keep in place the marriage system and gender
inequality. A program to remove those largely economic compulsions and see what people make of their
lives without them seems a far more sensible way of approaching the world of the future than to try
to imagine in advance how it will look, because that is something we simply cannot know.
We cannot know the future of marriage, but we can fight for the removal of the constraints on
domestic relationships. If there were true material security, which would of course include
guaranteed access to well-paying jobs, the compulsions that today hold marriage and the currently
prevailing family system in place would be removed. With material security can come enormous sexual
freedom and diversity of domestic arrangements.
Of course, we are told that the system simply cannot pay for full employment, easily accessible
decent housing and childcare, and I guess that the people who say this to us know their system and
that they are right. This system can’t pay for these things. So much the worse for
the system. Throw it away.
And so the struggle for domestic freedom is indivisible from the struggle for socialism. The
running costs of the capitalist system are simply too high. There is an awful lot of corruption and
freeloading involved in running capitalism, and also an awful lot of paperwork, all of which eats up
human lives without giving anything back. And then there is the human effort wasted in financial
shenanigans, and whole industries that add very little to the sum total of human
happiness—banking and insurance and advertising. Capitalism is profoundly wasteful.
But the resources exist. There is a study on the basis of data for the year 2000 by the United
Nations World Institute for Development Economic Research. It reports that the three richest
individuals in the world possessed more financial assets than the lowest 48 nations combined. It
reports that the richest one percent in the world owned 40 percent of global assets.
So the program for a world beyond marriage must be a program that addresses the obscene
inefficiency and inequality of the capitalist system. Only a program of socialism can create the
conditions for transcending marriage.
Exactly how will we live under socialism? We cannot know. We cannot know what will replace our
current marriage and family arrangements. But we can suspect that when issues of material security
are behind us, people’s personal preferences will trump any considerations of family pressure
or popular prejudice. And we can expect that our domestic arrangements will be extremely
diverse.