Queer Spirit: From Marxist-Hegelian Humanism to Decolonial Politics [Dissertation] 9781392056646

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Queer Spirit: From Marxist-Hegelian Humanism to Decolonial Politics A Dissertation Presented by Alyssa Adamson to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy

Stony Brook University

August 2018



  

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Copyright by Alyssa Adamson 2018




Stony Brook University The Graduate School

Alyssa Adamson

We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation.

Mary C. Rawlinson - Dissertation Advisor Professor of Philosophy

Lorenzo Simpson - Chairperson of Defense Professor of Philosophy

Harvey Cormier - Internal Reader Associate Professor of Philosophy

Peter Hudis - External Reader Professor of Philosophy at Oakton Community College

This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School

Charles Taber Dean of the Graduate School




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Abstract of the Dissertation Queer Spirit: From Marxist-Hegelian Humanism to Decolonial Politics by Alyssa Adamson Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Stony Brook University 2018 While modern democratic political theory claims to be founded on a humanism oriented towards universal freedom, the conceptual foundations of many Western European thinkers, and in particular G. W. F. Hegel, naturalize dehumanization. In my dissertation I draw from the work of queer, feminist, socialist, and decolonial thinkers to elucidate and address the contradictions of modern political philosophy as they are outlined in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. I argue that his concept of universal freedom remains abstract as his construction of the modern state does not facilitate freedom universally. There are three critical sites of this failure: (1) heteronormativity and the status of women who are socially necessary but excluded politically; (2) the creation of a “rabble” who, for no clear reason, have become economically dispossessed to the point that they cannot enjoy any form of freedom; and (3) colonialism and its attendant dehumanizing racialization of non-European peoples, justifying their degradation for the well-being of European nation-states. To address these issues, I offer an account of queer spirit/Sittlichkeit, decolonial humanism, and decolonial political economy as promising new developments articulating a decolonized humanism and a new approach to political economy able to take the well-being of the totality of humanity as its object.




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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my mother who was excited to see me begin this journey even though she also knew she wouldn’t see me complete it.

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Table of Contents Introduction I.

Hegel and the Contradictions of Modernity…………………………………………...1

II.

Outline of the Philosophy of Right…………………………………………………….5

III.

Chapter Outlines……………………………………………………………………..15

Chapter One: A Hegelian Account of Queer Freedom and Gender G. W. F. Hegel’s Account of Gender in the Phenomenology of Spirit………………20

I.

1.1 Antigone and the Role of Gender in the Sittlichkeit of Ancient Greece…21 1.2 Why Antigone?..........................................................................................30 Feminist Receptions of the Phenomenology………………………………………....32

II.

2.1 Luce Irigaray: “The Eternal Irony of the Community” ...…………...…..32 2.2 Judith Butler: The Ek-Static Subject of Desire……………………….….37 2.3 Judith Butler: Antigone’s Claim……………………………….......…….41 III.

Queer Spirit………………………………………………………………….……….49 3.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………...….49 3.2 Nature and Spirit……………………………………………………...…50 3.3 Sex and Gender in the Philosophy of Nature and Subjective Spirit…….57 3.4 Objective Spirit: Realizing Personal, Moral, and Social Freedom…..….60 3.5 Gender and the Family in Modern Bourgeois Western European Sittlichkeit……………………………………………………………………67 3.6 Queer Spirit……………………………………………………..………..73 3.7 The Abstract Freedom of Hegel’s Political Economy…………...………80

Chapter Two: Queer Marxian Humanism I.

Introduction: The Marx-Hegel Connection……………………………...………84

II.

Marx as a Queer Feminist Hegelian……………………………………..……….88 2.1 Marx’s Human/Nature Distinction and the Concept of Species-Being…..….89 2.2 Alienation from Three Perspectives………………………………………….96 2.3 Communism and the Dialectic of Human and Nature……………………...101 2.4 Gender as a Characteristic of Species-Being: Queer as the Negation of the Negation of Feminism……………………………………………………….….104 2.5 Marx as a Queer Theorist: The Meaning and Aesthetics of Non-Alienated v







Gender..................................................................................................................107 III.

Towards a Queer Communist Sittlichkeit………………………………………114 3.1 Engels for Queer Communism………………………………...……………115 3.2 Queer Marxian Humanism……………………………………………….…119

Chapter Three: Decolonial Humanism I.

From Hegel and Marx to the Decolonial Standpoint……………….………………121

II.

Modernity, Coloniality, Decoloniality and Eurocentrism…………………………..126 2.1Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality……………………………..……….128 2.2Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn………………………………..…….136 2.3María Lugones on the Coloniality of Gender………………………………..141

III.

Sylvia Wynter: A Decolonial Analysis of “the Human”……………….…………..148 3.1Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter’s Decolonial Metaphysics of the Human..………………………………………………………………….150 3.2Wynter’s Liminal Dialectic and Philosophy of Revolution…………………155 3.3A History of Humanisms and the Argument for the Overrepresentation of “Man”………………………………………………………………………..158 3.4Wynter on the Coloniality of Gender………………….…………………….167

IV.

Decolonial Feminism and Queer Humanist Politics………………….…………….170 4.1María Lugones on Decolonial Feminism………………………...………….170 4.2Transition to Decolonial Politics and Political Economy……………………………………………………………………..175

Chapter Four: Decolonial Political Economy I.

Decolonial Humanism and Political Economy……………………………………..178 1.1What is Political Economy?.................................................................................179 1.2Developing a Decolonial Humanist Approach to Political Economy……….....181

II.

Towards a Decolonial Political Economy: Luxemburg and James……….………..185 2.1Rosa Luxemburg………………………………………………………………..185 2.1.1 The Political Economy of Rosa Luxemburg: Imperialism’s Role in the Accumulation of Capital……………………………………………187 2.1.2 Organization and Spontaneity: The Mass Strike and Revolutionary vi







Class Consciousness……………….……………………………….197 2.1.3 Democracy and the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”………...…….204 2.1.4 National Liberation and Anti-Colonial Struggle……………………209 2.2C. L. R. James…………………………………………………………………..218 2.2.1 C. L. R James’ Political Economy: Decolonial Humanism as Praxis………………………………………………………….....….228 2.2.2 The Tragic Comrade Love of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Étienne Laveaux………………………….………………………………….238 III.

Decolonial Political Economy………………………………...……………………246 3.1Luxemburg and James in Conversation…………….…………………………..246 3.2Towards Revolutionary Intersectionality……...………………………………..251

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….…………..254

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Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks to my friends, cohort, colleagues, comrades, and professors who supported me through the ups and downs of this program and recent years. This could not have been done without you, thank you. Special thanks to my partner DeAnna Young for pushing me to be my best every day and not letting me give up every time I wanted to in the last year of this project. Besides the members of my dissertation committee, I want to personally thank the following for getting me here (in no order): Julie Sushytska, Courtney Crowley, Caitlin Francoisse, Cameran McCoppin, Ashleigh Neeley, Brian Pope, Antonio Miles, Stephen Simmons, Emma Velez, Robbie Cormier, Jose Rosales, Marcus Brown, Adam Israel, Esther Adison, Jxhn Martin, Atulya Prasad, Mike Stewart, Moyse Romane, Phil Opsasnick, Mike Kryluk, Luis Carlos Ricón Alba, Harrison Fluss, Phil Nelson, Eva Boodman, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Paget Henry, Cameron Crowe, and Paul and Margie Block. You have helped me existentially and practically survive the last five years in more ways than I could ever enumerate. Special thanks to Adam Israel, Jose Rosales, Marcus Brown, Mike Kryluk, and Emma Velez for reading many drafts of dissertation chapters, presentations, and seminar papers. Thank you for always giving me the encouragement and criticism I needed to get to the next step.

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Introduction I.


Hegel and the Contradictions of Modernity This dissertation investigates a number of critical responses to the contradictions of

modern political theory as it has been outlined by 18th and 19th century Western European philosophers. Hegel’s metaphysics and political theory, particularly as it is laid out in the Philosophy of Right (PR), is a systematic and rational account of modern philosophy in general and modern political thought in particular. Hegel’s oeuvre attempts to synthesize Enlightenment thought with its historical precursors ranging from ancient Greek to Medieval to Renaissance philosophy. I will argue along with feminist, queer, socialist, and decolonial thinkers that while Hegel aims to develop the concept of an absolute standpoint from which to judge world history—and the history of social and political thought—what he actually does is provide an analysis of world history and the history of philosophy from the perspective of modern Western Europe, i.e. a Eurocentric standpoint. In other words, he offers a systematic and rational account of human history from the perspective of modern Western Europe and for the further development and supremacy of Western Europe epistemically, existentially, and politically over the rest of the world. What sets Hegel apart from other thinkers who maintain similar aims and world outlook, is that Hegel offers a rational account for this reading of history and the social ontology that justifies Eurocentric hegemony. While European globalization has ushered in the conditions of possibility for thinking about humanity as a totality connected politically and economically, its Eurocentric standpoint is a dead end in terms of thinking ethically or politically for the well-being of humanity as a totality. Those whose fundamental well-being has been left outside of the

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rationality of modernity for the past 500 years have developed analyses and critical responses to the European project of modernity. This dissertation attempts to think through some of the contradictions of modernity that point beyond the current hegemonic order towards an organization of human relations not predicated on exploitation and dehumanization. While Hegel’s philosophical system provides justification for modernity, Hegel’s fundamentally inter-subjective epistemology and dialectical method is immanently useful for illuminating the aspects of modern political thought that are surreptitiously irrational (even on their own terms) and/or illuminate the places of instability which can be exploited politically for overturning current organizations of global power. The Philosophy of Right is a speculative1 account of the rationality of the modern nation state. Hegel’s famous dictum that “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational”2 as a speculative philosophical claim is not a wholesale acceptance of what is empirically and historically the case. Rather, this statement is a metaphysical and ontological argument against a Kantian metaphysics that severs the actual and the rational, or ‘what is’ and ‘what can be known.’ Hegel fundamentally brings together what is with what we can know, which consequently means that what we do based on what we know, can have transformative effects on our reality. I argue that Hegel’s statement on the rational and the actual is not only a metaphysical and epistemological claim, but is the ground of political action. Political action aims to make reality rational according to some standpoint, and revolutionary political action both exposes






























































1

Shlomo Avineri and Gillian Rose have thoroughly explained the import of Hegel’s speculative approach to philosophy. See Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009). 2 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (PR), ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20.

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what is irrational in our current reality and reconstructs it according to a new perspective on reason. Each chapter exploits contradictions of the Eurocentric rationality of modernity, aiming towards codifying a new perspective on reason, culminating in what I term “decolonial humanism” taking up queer, decolonial, feminist, and Marxist insights, for a new perspective on political economy to break out of the deadlock of Eurocentric Marxist and liberal political economy. Hegel will say that Plato’s Republic was a speculative account of the Spirit of the Greek polis. This is neither to say that the Republic empirically mirrored any specific Greek polis, nor that it was supposed to be used as a founding government document. Rather the Republic, for Hegel—and this goes for any philosophical work he takes to be truly philosophical i.e. speculative—is “its own time comprehended in thought.”3 This means that it takes the fundamental organizing principles of Plato’s specific social and political totality (Sittlichkeit), and attempts to carry them to their full conclusion. The Republic, as a speculative philosophical document, was meant to interrogate the founding principles of Greek society and determine what kind of social and political organization they would lead to if they were allowed to fully develop. The Philosophy of Right is also this kind of speculative philosophical text; it outlines the rationality of modernity and works to justify it on its own terms in order to draw out the premises of modernity as far as they are able to go. Against some misconceptions, the Philosophy of Right (PR) is neither a justification for the Prussian state nor is its speculative method one that effaces critique or challenge to its principles. On the contrary, it is only with a clear and worked out conception of modernity, such as the PR, that we are best situated to offer criticism and find ways of moving beyond that




























































3

Ibid., 21.

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particular conceptualization of social relations. To comprehend something means one must also, in some sense, be on the brink of being beyond that which one comprehends. This is what gives an objective account in the Hegelian sense of the term. ‘Objectivity’ here merely means that something is able to be taken as an object for thought, i.e. there is mediation between the subject and the object such that we can understand it as being conceptually distinct from us, which doesn’t not entail its being empirically distinct. Thus, there is a sense in which the fact that Hegel was able to fully articulate a rational account of modernity (even if there can be other accounts besides his), means that “modernity” is already positioned for its supersession i.e. Aufhebung. This remains true even though Hegel was “a child of his time,” and wrote with the attitude that his Sittlichkeit was the “end of history.” For Hegel European modernity4 is “the end of history” only insofar as, from a Eurocentric perspective, all previous history operates as the means to the end of the conditions of possibility for his particular world/Sittlichkeit. Coupled with this philosophy of history is Hegel’s concept of freedom, constitutive of his metaphysics of nature and Spirit, which I take to be the “rational kernel” of Hegelian philosophy.5 For Hegel, the main difference between the natural and spiritual categories are the particular set of laws that primarily determine them. Nature is primarily determined by laws of necessity, whereas spiritual categories are primarily determined by laws of freedom. Freedom for Spirit is not a negative freedom from nature, on the contrary, nature is the condition of possibility for Spirit: Spirit only emerges from nature. However, spiritual beings’ agency (e.g. humans) cashes out in terms of the ways that they shape their relation to external necessity, that is, they




























































4

While Hegel calls this “final” moment of history the “Germanic realm,” it is not just the nation-state Germany. It includes those from all of the major colonial powers: Germans, Franks, Normans, England, Scandinavia, and the Romanic people of France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. This is why I will refer to this historical moment as the moment of European modernity/Eurocentric hegemony, rather than the “Germanic realm” which might lead to misunderstanding. See PR §358. 5 Hegel refuses dualism and maintains a monistic metaphysics. The distinctions between nature and spirit are categorical rather than ontological. These concepts are more fully explained in section III of chapter 1.

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find their own ways to relate to “nature.” The subjective ability to shape one’s relations with objective conditions is what constitutes freedom for human beings. I will later argue that this metaphysics of agency is compatible with a non-abstract universal humanism able to ground a political orientation aimed at creating the conditions for the self-determination of those most exploited and dehumanized. The overall content of this dissertation can be read as responding to what I argue are three fundamental contradictions of modernity as outlined in the PR: (1) heteronormativity and the status of women who are socially necessary but excluded politically; (2) mass poverty as a structural feature of civil society and the creation of the “rabble” who are so economically dispossessed that they are excluded from the freedoms promised by civil society; and (3) colonialism and its attendant dehumanizing racialization of non-European peoples, which was both the antecedent condition of possibility for the European nation-state and the posited solution to its inherent instability. II.


Outline of the Philosophy of Right The PR, as a speculative work, is organized according to conceptual sequence and not

empirical history, so it begins with private property rather than the state. The first moment of modernity is founded on an individuated free will inscribed in legal “personhood” as it becomes embodied in property. The ability of the person to externalize their will in private property is the most abstract form of freedom within modern Sittlichkeit. On the most basic level, those with the status of “personhood” relate to one another as owners of property, interacting through contracts of their common will. Freedom here is “in its immediacy” in the sense that freedom of the will is expressed in the immediate taking up of things not otherwise owned (i.e. held by contract or immediate proximity by some other person). The concept of “crime” emerges as a violation of

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this abstract right. Hegel points out that those who have personhood cannot become possessions, because “only something external to the person or something which the person can dispose of, i.e. always a thing,”6 can become a possession. The rational aspect of property in the PR is to be found not in the satisfaction of needs— as Marx will later mark out as the rational element of non-bourgeois property ownership—but in the superseding of mere subjectivity for the achievement of personality.7 Not until one has property does that person exist as reason. As Hegel writes: “In relation to needs—if these are taken as primary—the possession of property appears as a means; but the true position is that, from the point of view of freedom, property, as the first existence [Dasein] of freedom, is an essential end for itself.”8 Through property, subjectivity as it was developed in the previous moment of the Encyclopedia in Subjective Spirit, is given inter-subjective objective content in the status of personhood—which is why the PR is the moment of “Objective Spirit” in Hegel’s system.9




























































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§40 Ibid., 72. Already we see the outlines of Frantz Fanon’s insight on the sub-human status of the colonial subject as constitutive of modernity’s “freedom.” 7 Hegel also talks about the ways the modern state must dissolve communal land, as it has done in some places with monasteries “because a community does not ultimately have the same right to property as a person does.” (Hotho’s note to §46 Ibid., 78.) Hegel further writes: “The idea [Vorstellung] of a pious or friendly or even compulsory brotherhood of men with communal property and a ban on the principle of private property may easily suggest itself to that disposition which misjudges the nature of the freedom of spirit and right and not comprehend it in its determinate moments.” (§46 Ibid., 77-78) 8 §45 Ibid., 77. 9 I would argue that that Hegel takes the principles of Enlightenment philosophy to a higher level, and one way this plays out is in Hegel’s consummate take down of any form of mind/body dualistic ontology. To prove this would require a treatment of other places in the Encyclopedia (e.g. the philosophy of nature and subjective spirit), but even only looking at the PR Hegel makes it clear that our bodies are immediately us. Consequently, a crime against my body is the highest form of crime, and there is no way to fully rectify it—whereas a crime against my external property is able to be rectified through punishment by the state. In the remark to §46 Hegel writes: “It is only because I am alive as a free entity in my body that this living existence [Dasine] may not be misused as a beast of burden. In so far as I am alive, my soul (the concept and, to use a higher level, the free entity) and my body are not separated; my body is the existence [Dasine] of my freedom, and I feel through it. It is therefore only sophistical understanding, devoid of any Idea, which make a distinction whereby the thing-in-itself [Ding-an-sich], the soul, is neither touched nor affected if the body is abused and the existence [Existenz] of the person is subjected to the power of another. I can withdraw into myself from by existence [Existenz] and make it something external to me; I can keep particular feelings outside

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Because the universal right to property does not have anything to do with the satisfaction of needs, vast material inequality is justified within the modern nation-state: “In relation to external things, the rational aspect [i.e. the universal determination of free will] is that I possess property; the particular aspect, however, includes subjective ends, needs, arbitrariness, talents, external circumstances…What and how much I possess is therefore purely contingent as far as right is concerned.”10 Here it is clear that the only thing that is “equal” about abstract right is the potential of having property insofar as one is counted as a person. The quantity, quality, and individual needs of persons are not considered by Recht in the modern bourgeois sense because needs are produced by our arbitrary and particular bodies and lives. These have to do with our natural needs, and nature is outside the realm of justice. Our natural needs are a product of having a natural body, and although our bodies are spiritualized within our Sittlichkeit, our “natural needs” cannot be justly or unjustly met because they are not a product of our freedom/will: “That all human beings should have their livelihood to meet their needs is, on the one hand, a moral wish; and when it is expressed in this indeterminate manner, it is indeed well intentioned, but like everything that is merely well intentioned, it has no objective being. On the other hand, a livelihood is something other than possession and belongs to another sphere, that of civil society.”11 Hotho notes in the addition to §49 that the distribution of goods is dependent on the “diligence” of individuals who are only equal as persons. He continues, “Accordingly, everyone ought to have property,” however because this is only a “moral wish,” it is distinct from questions about how much one should




























































myself and be free even if I am in chains. But this is my will; for others, I am in my body. I am free for the other only in so far as I am free in my existence [Dasine]…Because I feel, contact with or violence to my body touches me immediately as actual and present. This constitutes the difference between personal injury and infringement of my external property; for in the latter, my will does not have this immediate presence and actuality.” (Ibid., 79) 10 §49 Ibid., 79-80. 11 Ibid., 80.

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possess.12 Recht only entails that we all have the right to property, but says nothing about the particularity of the content. The transition to the second moment of objective spirit—morality—emerges from the concept of wrong as an infringement of abstract right. Punishment of a crime affirms right which leads us to a concept of “the good.” Our concept of the good is an inner determination of our free will and is connected to the distinctive and particular interests of the human being. Within the realm of morality in modernity, one makes one’s own interests and good objective. The moral will intends its deeds, claims responsibility for them, and tests them against its principles and conception of the good. Because one’s moral conception of the good is still tied to one’s naturalistic well-being, it has not been fully rendered universal/rational. “The good” will be lifted to universality through one’s membership in a state operating according to a universal conception of the good as an end-in-itself, and not as the means to the end of an individual’s particular well-being. Interestingly, it turns out that there is one right which may outdo abstract right: “life, as the totality of ends.”13 Hegel calls this the “right of extreme necessity,” which actually justifies debtors to not have to give up their means of supporting themselves if it would immediately sink them to a place below personhood or to their death. In this case, theft for survival can be morally pardoned even though it violates abstract right. One can do moral things that are wrong according to abstract right, insofar as what is done is the immediate preservation of one’s life. As Hegel writes in §127: In extreme danger and in collision with the rightful property of someone else, this life may claim (not in equity, but as right) a right of necessity, for the alternatives are an infinite injury [Verletzung] to existence with total loss of rights, and an injury only to an




























































12 13

Ibid., 81. Hotho’s addition to §127, Ibid., 155.

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individual and limited existence of freedom, whereby right as such and the capacity for rights of the injured party, who has been injured only in this specific property, continue to be recognized.14 As an avowed bourgeois political economist, Hegel understood that if there were a large mass of human beings sunk below personhood, it would destabilize civil society and risk completely obliterating modern European political organizations. Hegel then proposes a series of mediating welfare mechanisms to minimize the social, political, and economic instability stemming from the extreme disproportions of wealth characteristic of modern nation-states. For Hegel everything about the modern state is about the stabilization of relations between the universal and the particular as they are manifested in the individual, social groups, and the larger social totality. As Hegel himself notices, there is a major issue of instability insofar as there necessarily develops a mass of people who are dispossessed of all rights and property e.g. the European working class. What we learn in the section on morality is that the truth of the will is the good, but one’s own welfare is not good without right. One’s duty for selfpreservation needs to be coupled with a consciousness of universal principles transforming “the good” from “a means to the end” of one’s own wellbeing, to an end-in-itself for the social totality.15 If morality develops a concept of “the good,” ethical life (Sittlichkeit) develops a concept of the living good—as individuals and their particular interests will pass away, it is the social totality that lives on as a historical subject. It is only from the perspective of the social totality that right is ensured universally, setting the condition of possibility for realizing abstract right and the right to realize one’s own well-being: “Ethical life is the Idea of freedom as the






























































14

Ibid., 154. Hegel maintains an Aristotelian concept of virtue as a habit, and not as a single action but rather a disposition. For Hegel a process of education (Bildung) makes human beings ethical, and along with Aristotle, Hegel will say that for one to be an ethical/virtuous person one must be a citizen of a virtuous State. See §153.

15

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living good…[it] is accordingly the concept of freedom which has become the existing [vorhanden] world and the nature of self-consciousness.”16 Ethical life within a modern Sittlichkeit entails divisions between the family, civil society, and the state. The bourgeois family is meant to raise and care for children who will become selfsufficient and self-interested members of civil society.17 The division of the family and civil society is the division between private and public life. Relationships in the family are not mediated by contracts, as the basis of the family is supposed to be located in love and mutual recognition rooted in love. Civil society, on the other hand, operates as Adam Smith described, mediated by the “invisible hand” of individuals’ self-interested actions. However, contra Smith, Hegel does not believe that the self-interested actions of civil society will lead to the highest good, rather they lead to a class society marred by wealth disparity and fundamental instability. As Hegel notes in §195: “The tendency of the social condition towards an indeterminate multiplication and specification of needs, means, and pleasures—i.e. luxury—a tendency which, like the distinction between natural and educated needs, has no limits [Grenzen], involves an equally infinite increase in dependence and want.”18 Hegel saw a connection between the mode of the reproduction of European bourgeois civil society and increasing needs that, because they remain indeterminate, have no practical way of becoming fulfilled. Alongside this, Hegel was disturbed about the ways that modernity had fundamentally changed the nature of labor. As the structure of labor becomes more abstractly universal through mechanization, the division of labor becomes more dehumanizing. Hegel writes in his Jena lectures, “the amount of labor decreases only for the whole, not for the individual; on the contrary, it is being increased, since




























































16

§142 Ibid., 189. The organization of gender and the role of the family within modern European Sittlichkeit is discussed in depth in chapter 1. 18 Ibid., 231. 17

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the more mechanized labor becomes, the less value it possesses, and the more the individual must toil.”19 Hegel here inches towards Marx’s labor theory of value and conception of alienation in industrialized mass labor. What exacerbates the crisis of mass wealth disparity is that civil society gives ethical (i.e. spiritual) significance to social and economic inequalities even though one’s access to capital is contingent on skill and luck of birth into a situation that allows one access to the Bildung required for success in civil society. What first appears as merely a natural inequality (in the Hegelian sense) is then raised to spiritual significance as differences in physical and mental aptitudes become major determining factors for one’s self-determination and well-being within civil society.20 Poverty is a structural effect of the efficient functioning of civil society because even though civil society’s goal is the “expanding of its population and industry,”21 through its accumulation of wealth: “specialization [Vereinzelung] and limitation of particular work also increase, as do likewise the dependence and want of the class which is tied to such work; this in turn leads to an inability to feel and enjoy the wider freedoms, and particularly the spiritual advantages, of civil society.”22 In order to mitigate the social and political instability introduced by those who are unable to enjoy the freedoms of modern civil society, Hegel will argue for a welfare-state that intervenes to decrease the crisis of poverty as much as possible. What Hegel terms ‘the police’—which is wholly unlike what is known as the police today—are a group of civil servants paid for by the state to mitigate the socio-economic problems of civil society. ‘The police’ make up the entire welfare system including branches dedicated to economic regulation, public health, public




























































19

See editor’s footnote to §198, Ibid., 442. See §200. 21 §243 Ibid., 266. 22 Ibid. 20

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school, poor relief, the fire department, housing, etc. Alongside the police are corporations— which are not capitalist corporations—made up of social bodies akin to labor unions. Together the police and corporations are meant to form the “universal family” of civil society.23 Hegel writes in §241: Not only arbitrariness, however, but also contingent physical factors and circumstances based on external conditions may reduce individuals to poverty. In this condition, they are left with the needs of civil society and yet—since society has at the same time taken from them the natural means of acquisition, and also dissolves the bond of the family in its wider sense as a kinship group—they are more or less deprived of all the advantages of society, such as the ability to acquire skills and education in general, as well as of administration of justice, health care, and often even of the consolation of religion. For the poor, the universal authority [Macht] takes over the role of the family with regard not only to their immediate deficiencies, but also to the disposition of laziness, viciousness, and other vices to which their predicament and sense of wrong give rise.24 Because Hegel has a structural account of poverty, he also understands that personal or private charity is not a substantial solution to poverty.25






























































23

See §218. Ibid., 265. For more on this see Hegel’s 1819-1820 lectures: “The emergence of poverty is in general a consequence of civil society, and on the whole it arises necessarily out of it…Poverty is a condition in civil society which is unhappy and forsaken on all sides. The poor are burdened not only by external distress, but also by moral degradation. The poor are for the most part deprived of the consolation of religion; they cannot visit church often, because they have no suitable clothing or must work on Sundays. Further, they must participate in a worship which is chiefly designed for an educated audience…Equally, the enjoyment of the administration of justice is often made very difficult for them. Their medical care is usually very bad. Even if they receive treatment for actual illness, they lack the means necessary for the preservation and care of their health…The poor are subject to yet another division, a division of emotion [Gemüt] between them and civil society. The poor man feels excluded and mocked by everyone, and this necessarily gives rise to inner indignation. He is conscious of himself as an infinite, free being, and thus arises the demand that his external existence should correspond to this consciousness. In civil society it is not only natural distress against which the poor man has to struggle. The poor man is opposed not only to nature, a mere being, but also my will. The poor man feels as if he were related to an arbitrary will to human contingency, and in the last analysis what makes him indignant is that he is put into this state of division through an arbitrary will. Self-consciousness appears driven to the point where it no longer has any rights, where freedom have no existence. In this position, where the existence of freedom becomes something wholly contingent, inner indignation is necessary. Because the individual’s freedom has no existence, the recognition of universal freedom disappears. From this condition arises that shamelessness that we find in the rabble. A rabble arises chiefly in a developed civil society...” (Ibid., 453) 25 See §242. 24

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Some proportion of those who are economically depressed become so impoverished that they sink so far below the general standard of living that they develop an active disposition against civil society and the state. This group is what Hegel terms “the rabble,” who, because they do not enjoy society’s freedoms, have lost “that feeling of right, integrity [Rechlichkeit], and honor which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity.”26 Here Hegel begins to realize what Marx would later demystify, somehow, “despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough—i.e. its own distinct resources are not sufficient—to prevent an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble.”27 Hegel does not have any solution to the problem of mass poverty, though he does realize that its existence poses a material and existential threat to modern European Sittlichkeit. Thus, the state for Hegel has nothing to do with securing the property rights, that is the job of civil society, rather the state is supposed to orchestrate the “good world” in which a good life is able to be lived. This means the state can infringe upon private property and ask for its citizens’ lives when threatened by external forces or to expand its wealth through colonial and imperial forays. Hegel has a few arguments about the rationality of colonialism, one of which is similar to what Rosa Luxemburg will describe in terms of seeking new markets for consumption of commodities to assuage overproduction, and the other is more straightforwardly Eurocentric— that other nations “lack creativity” in commodity production. Hegel writes in §246, “This inner dialectic of civil society drives it—or in the first instance drives this specific society—to go beyond its own confines and look for consumers, and hence the means it requires for subsistence [Subsistenz], in other nations [Völkern] which lack those means of which it has a surplus or






























































26 27

§244 Ibid., 266. §245 Ibid., 267.

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which generally lag behind it in creativity, etc.”28 Hegel does not explicitly name the transatlantic slave trade here, but he does talk about the role of the ocean as not a boundary but a link necessary29 to the economy of modern civil society and finally globalization: “This extended link of the ocean also supplies the means necessary for colonization—whether sporadic or systematic30—to which the fully developed civil society is driven, and by which it provides part of its population with a return to the family principle in a new country, and itself with a new market and sphere of industrial activity.”31 It is interesting that Hegel says it is civil society, and not the state, that is driven to colonization. I read this aspect of the PR as an implicit realization of what Marx would later make explicit, namely that the sphere of modern civil society is made possible by a particular mode of production and consumption. This mode of production, because of its structure and telos of continued accumulation for its continued existence necessitates global expansion, and transforms the sovereignty of the nation-state into a tool of capital accumulation. The “return to the family principle” for the settler-colonials sent outside of Europe ideologically entails the following: (1) they are to carry with them the bourgeois European conception of the family and its attendant gender roles and force surviving indigenous peoples to fit them, and (2) they must re-create a modern European civil society once they have made the




























































28

Ibid., 267-8. See §247 30 For more on the distinction between sporadic and systemic colonization see the addition to §248: “Civil society is driven to establish colonies. The increase of population alone has this effect; but a particular factor is the emergence of a mass of people who cannot gain satisfaction for their needs by their work when production exceeds the needs of consumers. Sporadic colonization on is found particularly in Germany. The colonists move to America or Russia and retain no links with their home country, to which they are consequently of no service. The second variety of colonization, quite different from the first, systematic. It is initiated by the state, which is aware of the proper way of carrying it out and regulates it accordingly. This mode of colonization was frequently employed by the ancients, especially the Greeks. Hard work was not the concern [Sache] of the Greek citizen, whose activity was directed rather towards public affairs [öffentlichen Dingen]. Accordingly, whenever the population grew to a point at which it could become difficult to provide for it, the young people were sent off to a new region, which was either specifically chosen or left to be discovered by chance.” (Ibid., 269) 31 §248 Ibid., 269. 29

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bourgeois organization of the family hegemonic where ever they have settled. Who will be able to fit these roles and manage to acclimate to the imposition of globalized European social norms will run along a hierarchy organized by what critical race scholars have termed “racial capitalism,” or what Sylvia Wynter calls the “Chain of Being.”32 Colonization, then, serves as an attempt to stabilize modern civil society in a few ways: (1) by assuaging overproduction and expanding profits through international markets; (2) by ensuring European hegemony not only economically, but also ideologically with the globalization of bourgeois European social norms which facilitate the development of civil societies elsewhere that maintain to the kinds of markets needed by colonial metropoles; and (3) by sending away those who are at risk of becoming a rabble within the metropole so that they may enjoy the right to property and the possibility of wealth accumulation elsewhere—which is ensured by the military strength of the colonial country and the repression and extermination of indigenous peoples. What I term the three fundamental contradictions of modernity are then thoroughly intertwined. Bourgeois gender roles not only have destabilizing effects within the European nation state but also in colonial encounters and within the labor market. The effects of racialization used outside Europe also come back to re-organize those within Europe as colonization and global capital will reorganize all social relations. While I make no attempt here to give a systematic account of these forces, in my last chapter I offer the concept of “revolutionary intersectionality” that I see as a potential framework for thinking through the reorganization of social relations such that those who have been most dispossessed and exploited by modernity come to have the means for self-determination.






























































32

This is covered in chapter 3, and racial capitalism is described in more detail in chapter 4.

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III.


Chapter Outlines

In the first chapter I trace the significance of gender throughout Hegel’s system and show that gender is essential to the development of social freedom and ethical communities. I put my reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit in conversation with contemporary analyses from Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler, while I also argue that they each misread Hegel in an interesting complementary way. I conclude that in order to fully realize social freedom, spirit (i.e. the ethical substance of a particular ethical community) must be queer. ‘Queer’ will be defined as a characteristic of a positive socio-political configuration that founds social freedom—ruling out social norms and institutions that rely on oppressive configurations of gender. Given this reading, I make the following points: (1) gender and sexuality understood as categories of Spirit are not determined by external necessity or biological “nature,” even though nature/biology is present (as sublated) within the realm of spirit; (2) Spirit, then, is not ‘male’ or ‘female,’ it operates at a higher logical level determined by laws of right/freedom and not external laws of nature. To say Spirit is intrinsically phallocentric would then not only be a category mistake, but would actually inhibit us from thinking through what it means for gender and sexuality to be determined by freedom. My account of queer spirit/Sittlichkeit then uses the positive aspects of Hegel’s metaphysics to show that biological determinism is fundamentally incoherent when talking about human beings, and any naturalization of spiritual categories results in illicit despiritualization. I conclude that for Hegel to be consistent with his own account of freedom, heteronormativity cannot be constitutive of a Sittlichkeit that actualizes social freedom—and in this sense, a Sittlichkeit that actualizes freedom can be called queer. From here, I move to interpreting and translating Hegel’s account of Spirit into the terms of Marxian humanism addressing the consequences of Hegel’s bourgeois political economy.

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Marxist political economy demystifies the situation of “the rabble” and shows that Hegel’s political economy takes economic categories outside of their historical context within a particular mode of production. While Hegel attempts to offer the most concrete form of freedom within the modern nation-state, his account ends up being abstract as the global majority not only does not attain these freedoms, but are actively hindered from being able to attain concrete social freedom by the modern European nation-state. Marx’s account of human nature takes Hegelian metaphysics seriously and builds on Hegel’s distinctions between ‘nature and spirit’ and ‘necessity and freedom,’ but places it within the context of an account of political economy reimagining modernity insofar as the latter leads necessarily to mass dehumanization, alienation, and totally effaces freedom for those most dispossessed by modern European nation-states. Marxian humanism then aims at the liberation of the social totality through a reorganization of the relationship between labor and capital— including one’s relationship with one’s body and its interactions with others. Marxian humanism will entail the abolition of capitalism as the mode of production within civil society—ending the gendered division of labor and heteronormativity will also be shown to be a necessary, but not sufficient condition, of the abolition of capitalism. Taking up the concept of a Hegelian queer Sittlichkeit aimed at concrete social freedom, I show that queer liberation must be constitutive of any broader Marxist/socialist vision of restructuring of social relations. Because heteronormativity involves alienating social relations, and Marx’s humanism calls for the disalienation of humanity, Marx’s humanism must then call for the abolition of heteronormativity— and in this sense I call Marx’s humanism queer. The third chapter articulates the principles of a decolonial humanism as it further makes concrete the principles of queer Marxian humanism and the Hegelian concept of freedom. The

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principles of decolonial humanism can be summed up as the following: (1) it maintains an analysis of social and political conditions beginning from the experiences and conditions of the most dispossessed and dehumanized; (2) decolonial humanist politics categorically operate for the humanization of the most dehumanized elements of society—so middle class white women and the European working class are not necessarily prioritized, making it distinct from liberal and Eurocentric forms of socialist humanism; (3) it analyses economic, social, and political exploitation with a revolutionary, and not liberal-atomistic, intersectional analysis of social and political identities as they are organized under hegemonic organizations of power; (4) the ultimate goal of decolonial humanist theory and praxis is the fundamental re-humanization of ourselves, our relations to others, and our relations to our larger social totality. To outline the features of a decolonial humanist standpoint I unpack the concepts of coloniality and decoloniality through the work of Aníbal Quijano, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and María Lugones. I show the significance of these concepts for a new understanding of humanism using Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of the history of “the human” as a decolonial philosophical anthropology. Additionally, I elaborate a decolonial feminist account of gender through the work of Wynter in conversation with Lugones, and I show the significance of decolonial feminism for queer humanist politics. In my fourth chapter, I move from the politico-ethical doctrine of decolonial humanism to outlining a decolonial account of political economy. A decolonial account of political economy retains the fundamental logic of Marxist political economy insofar as it exposes the limits and illusions of classical bourgeois economics. But in addition to this, it will offer a new account of: (1) “primitive accumulation” (i.e. colonialism and the coloniality of power) as both the foundation and condition of possibility for continued accumulation of capital; (2) modern social

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ontology and the co-imbrication of race and class (i.e. racial capitalism);33 (3) political agency and political organization; and (4) the role of anti-colonial liberation struggles for “class warfare.” Through a dual analysis of the political economic works of Rosa Luxemburg and C. L. R. James, I outline a theory of decolonial political economy. In particular, I focus on Luxemburg’s and James’ analysis of national liberation movements, democratic political organizations, the mass strike, and the party as a political vehicle for revolution. On these topics, I compare and contrast their complementary weaknesses and strengths in light of decolonial humanist principles. While Luxemburg is abstract with respect to the national question, she is strong on refusing stage-based reformist conceptions of progress as she puts forth a comprehensive philosophy of revolution. On the other hand, James, coming from a colonial situation, deeply understands the importance of national liberation struggles for international socialist struggles— though he is at times ambiguous about what constitutes revolutionary action and progress towards the abolition of racial capitalism.






























































33

For more on “racial capitalism,” see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Ornette Clennon, “We Are the World: Racial Capitalism and its Links with Pan-Africanism,” in The Polemics of C.L.R. James and Contemporary Black Activism (Manchester: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 109-123; and Robin D. G. Kelley, “What did Cedric Robinson mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review. Jan. 12, 2017. http://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism

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Chapter 1 A Hegelian Account of Queer Freedom and Gender I.


G. W. F. Hegel’s Account of Gender in the Phenomenology of Spirit Many feminist critics have taken Hegel’s reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy in the

Phenomenology of Spirit as the basis of their analysis and criticism of Hegel on gender.34 Before looking at two different feminist interpretations of this text, I will situate the Phenomenology in Hegel’s system and go through the passages typically relevant to Hegel’s feminist readers. While the Phenomenology is a phenomenological description of spirit’s development out of consciousness/self-consciousness to spirit/religion/absolute knowledge—embedded within it is also Hegel’s reading of history, its crises, and its development from ancient Greece up to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The Phenomenology is a controversial text because it is dense, chaotic, and is supposed to serve as a “preparation” for the study of philosophical science, which we get in Hegel’s further work on Logic, Nature, and Spirit (i.e. The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences). In this respect, the Phenomenology is a text that lies “outside” of the system, but at the same time it is a text that helps illuminate some philosophical moves Hegel makes in other places.35






























































34

Though there are notable exceptions, for example see Seyla Benhabib, Carole Pateman, Allison Stone, Kimberly Hutchings, and Laura Werner. 35 As Hegel himself explains in the Encyclopedia Logic (EL): §25 “In my Phenomenology of Spirit, which was for this reason described, when it was published, as the first part of the system of science, the procedure adopted was to begin from the first and simplest appearance of spirit, from immediate consciousness, and to develop its dialectic right up to the standpoint of philosophical science, the necessity of which is shown by the progression. But for this purpose it was not possible to stick to the formal aspect of mere consciousness; for the standpoint of philosophical knowing is at the same time inwardly the richest in basic import and the most concrete one; so when it emerged as the result [of the development], it presupposed also the concrete shapes of consciousness, such as morality, ethical life, art, and religion. Hence, the development of the content, or of the subject matters of special parts of philosophical science, falls directly within that development of consciousness which seems at first to be restricted just to what is formal; that development has to take place behind the back of consciousness so to speak, inasmuch as the content is related to consciousness as what is in-itself. This makes the presentation more complicated, and what belongs to the concrete parts [of the System] already falls partly within that introduction.” G.W.F Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, with the Zusätze: Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991) 64.

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In the following sections I offer my own reading of the moment of Antigone in light contemporary analysis by Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Butler and Irigaray are central to thinking through Hegel for liberatory purposes because in their respective readings they illuminate different ways of imagining a political future that destabilizes the traditional patriarchal order by postulating a different configuration of gender. While Irigaray and Butler’s readings of Hegel are complementary for positive feminist reasons—i.e. in identifying the phallogocentric order and showing its weakness to destabilization—there are critical ways in which they also misread Hegel. Getting clear on the strategic readings of the moment of Antigone by both thinkers as those readings correspond to their respective socio-political aims, will better position us to assess Butler and Irigaray’s projects, alongside Hegel’s, for advancing a liberatory theory of gender. 1.1 Antigone and the Role of Gender in the Sittlichkeit of Ancient Greece Antigone first appears at the beginning of the section on spirit. This is a significant moment because we are here moving from the mere shapes of consciousness—culminating in abstract reason—to shapes of worlds. ‘Abstract reason,’ understood as the testing of abstract laws, has given way to the moral law as it arises in its immediacy within ethical communities— i.e. the immediacy of being claimed by “the right.” From the perspective of reason, moral laws are insolent, they only offer an “ought” and not “what is,” where “what is” can be tested for its reasonableness. A mere “ought” escapes these tests of reason. The phenomenological point Hegel is drawing out here, is that moral laws do not immediately ask for reasons and they do not invite immediate testing. Moral laws are, and in this sense they are given to us without an explicit history.36 We do not have to give mothers reasons to care for their children, but rather we




























































36

G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (PhS) trans. Terry Pinkard, 381 (§436).

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would have to give them reasons why they shouldn’t care for their children. Moral obligation (or Moralität, which will later be better distinguished from Sittlichkeit/ethical life), is the immediate phenomenological experience of being claimed by “the right” and one is not immediately disposed to challenge or test this claim. The moral laws for Antigone are the “unwritten and unerring law of the gods.”37 These laws become concrete in spirit when reason becomes “self-consciously aware of itself as its own world, and the world as itself.”38 What “world” means here is not “a separate metaphysical or natural object but [a] historical, communal space organized by practical norms governing the actions of individuals and institutions.”39 In this moment of spirit, the reflection and knowing of reason have become embedded in living social relations and norms (i.e. in a Sittlichkeit) of a particular historically situated community. What was meaningless in reason because of its abstract character is given ethical substance by self-represented and self-representing consciousness.40 Thus the laws of reason are concretized and actualized by “work, which generates itself through the doing of each and every one, as their unity and identity,” i.e. as the living norms and customs of a people that recognizes itself as a community.41 The initial ethical substance is sundered into two: the human and the divine law, which are then mapped onto man and woman respectively. In acting, self-consciousness in the first moment of spirit, experiences a contradiction between “its own knowledge of the ethical life of






























































37

Ibid. G. W. F. Hegel, Spirit: Chapter Six of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (PS) edited by Daniel E. Shannon trans. The Hegel Translation Group at Trinity College, University of Toronto (Indiana: Hackett, 2001), 1 (§438). 39 Jocelyn B. Hoy, “Hegel, Antigone, and Feminist Critique: The Spirit of Ancient Greece,” in The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ed. Kenneth R. Westphal (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 172. 40 “When this reason, which spirit has, is finally intuited by spirit as reason that is reason or as reason that is actual in it, and becomes its world, then spirit exists in its truth: it is spirit, it is the actual, ethical substance.” PS, 2-3 (§438-440). 41 Ibid., 2 (§439). 38

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its action and what is ethical in and for itself.”42 So this reflective self-consciousness is split in two, and “the multiplicity of ethical moments becomes the duality of one law of singularity and one of universality.”43 However, we should be careful to note that each of these laws (that each have moments of singularity and universality) are fully spirit—i.e. they are each shapes of a world, so they will turn out to be contradictory but not oppositional as they did as abstractions earlier in the section on perception.44 In the form of singularity, human law is the certainty of an individual citizen in their lawful actions, and in the form of universality it is “familiar law and present custom.”45 The divine law, on the other hand, confronts human law and state power as “violence against individual being-for-self,”46 as a violence against the singular individual. The divine law is linked to the family and entails recognizing each family member in their singularity as brother, mother, sister, etc., and it aims to spiritualize (i.e. make ethical) seemingly “natural” things such as birth, death, reproduction, and sexuality.47 In contrast to the positive human law of the state that “favors no one to favor all,” the divine law is concerned with individuals, and treats individuals differentially based on their particular kinship relation. While these two laws are presented as opposed, Hegel admits that the divine law constitutes the condition of possibility for






























































42

Ibid., 5 (§445). Ibid., (§446). 44 In Hegelian terms, a contradiction is two things that, even if in tension with each other, can exist together. An opposition, on the other hand, means that either one side can be the case or the other, but it would be a logical impossibility for both to exist at the same time. 45 Ibid, (§448). 46 Ibid., 7 (§449). 47 As Jocelyn Hoy points out, Hegel’s acknowledgement of the ethical role of woman here in the Phenomenology is actually an evolution in Hegel’s own understanding of the significance of women’s work. In his earlier essay on Natural Law it was only the soldier who sacrificed himself for the state who would have properly ethical significance in the gendered division of labor. 43

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the human law and “the universal possibility of ethical life in general.”48 The divine law is ethical life in its immediacy, and as such, it appears as the family. It is critical to note that here—where Hegel is characterizing ancient Greek Sittlichkeit — the ethical connections between family members are explicitly not “the connection of feeling or the relationship of love.”49 It does not emerge as feeling or love because love only arises for Hegel in the modern configuration of the family—which we will later see in the Philosophy of Right.50 The ethical connection between family members lies here only in “the relationship of the single family member to the whole family qua substance, so that its conduct or actuality has only the family as [its] purpose and content.”51 This is why Antigone can only think of the burial rights of her brother as her duty—as avatar of the divine law she only has actuality in preserving and carrying out the purposes and preservation of the family as a whole.52 It is only in the sphere of the family that single members are cared for as such because they have a direct influence on the preservation of the family as a unit. The family performs an indispensable role to the stability and possibility of the state—as the realm of the state does not (and structurally cannot) have in mind the needs of single citizens as such, but only citizens in general.53 Additionally, because of




























































48

Ibid, (§450). Ibid., 8 (§451). 50 For Hegel there is something special about the modern institution of marriage that is not present in the world of Antigone. He considers human freedom to be more fully actualized in the modern institution of marriage (i.e. marriage based on the free choice of the marriage partners—which rules out arranged marriages and buy/selling women into marriage). According to Hegel the modern institution of marriage allows for mutual recognition between marriage partners and the development of love in light of free consent. I will further draw out this point in my reading of the Philosophy of Right. In the moment of Antigone, however, we see that the closest we get to a situation of mutual recognition is in the relation of brother to sister. 51 Ibid., 8-9 (§451). 52 It will later become important to mention that in ancient Greek Sittlichkeit, the family is explicitly connected by the blood relation, which Hegel describes as the non-accidental quality of the relationship between Antigone and her brother. We will see that the configuration of the modern family lessens the import of the blood relation—and this has immediate significance for what I will develop as the queer spirit of modernity. 53 It is important to note the absence of civil society in the world of Antigone. The moment Antigone steps outside the realm of the family she is under the rule of the state and trespasses directly on state activities. Civil society will appear later in Hegel’s system as a mediating sphere between the family and the state. It is because the world of Antigone lacks the mediator of civil society that Hegel characterizes the ancient Greek world as the realm of immediacy in his writings on history. 49

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the fundamental distinction between divine and human laws, the public and private spheres constitute a fundamental contradiction within Greek Sittlichkeit. Antigone’s action to bury her brother, despite the human law that forbids it (as represented by Creon’s order), is her attempt to preserve the family as dictated by the divine law. What it critical in this action is: [that it] embraces the whole existence of the blood-kinsman and has him (not the citizen, for he does not belong to the family, nor the one who is to become a citizen and ceases then to be valued as this single [member]), but just this single one who belongs to the family—[which] has him as a universal essence…This action no longer concerns the living but the dead, one who is brought together out of the long succession of his dispersed being into one completed shape, and is raised from the unrest of accidental life to the rest of simple universality.54 Thus the burial of Polynices is meant to restore the unity of ethical substance of the family. The labor of burying the body of the blood-kin “interrupts the work of nature, and saves the blood relation from destruction, or better, since its destruction is necessary, the kin takes the activity of destruction upon itself.”55 As in the Cadmean myth of Thebes, the earth as symbolic womb is able to receive the body, and in this sense it is returned to the “beyond” from which it first came and it is able to retain its ethical significance—i.e. preserving the family blood-line. In contrast to a death qua family member, death qua citizen, is a death for the state. Because the state represents the true universal, a death in the name of the state always already overcomes nature as the state’s unity is not threatened by the loss of an individual citizen, and as such, it is not the one to handle burial rites. 56 A loss of a family member, on the other hand, results in the potential instability of the ethical unity of the family—which is why it is necessary
































































54

Ibid., 10. (§451) Ibid., 11 (§452). 56 The assumption being that the citizen of ancient Greek Sittlichkeit is a man whose death was for the good of his state. 55

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that the family carry out the burial rites to “restore” the family. Thus the individuality of the divine law is the family, while the individuality of the human law is the government.57 The community of citizens is the proper constituency of the government and human law. It is this political (and not familial or blood related) community that can “organize itself into systems of personal independence and ownership, of personal and property rights, just as it can articulate the modes of labor…into association of their own and make them independent [i.e. into an independent state].”58 With this macro-structure of human and divine law in place, in §456 Hegel explicitly brings to the fore the gendered roles and relationships of the family in Greek Sittlichkeit. Hegel describes the relationship of husband and wife as “the immediate self-cognition of one consciousness in the other and the cognition of reciprocal recognition.”59 However, because this is only a cognition of oneself, and not mutual recognition of both the self and other that is both in-oneself and in-the-other, it is described as natural i.e. not yet fully concrete in spirit: “it is only the representation and image of spirit, but not the actual spirit itself.”60 The relationship between husband and wife is made concrete by having a child, and it is only between siblings that we encounter a relationship free of “natural desire.” Siblings encounter one another as free individualities and their connection is more spiritualized than that of their parents because of the lack of desire between them.61 The daughter is attached to the singularity of the family, but it is a properly spiritual (and not merely natural) relationship: “in the house of ethical life, what matters is not the husband or




























































57

Ibid., 13 (§455). Ibid. 59 Ibid., (§456). 60 Ibid., 14 (§456). 61 And we should remember that desire first appears not within spirit, but in the previous section on the lord and bondsman in the realm of mere self-consciousness, not within an ethical community. 58

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child, but a husband or children in general—not the sentiment but the universal on which these relationships of the woman are grounded.”62 Women have a distinct role in ethical life in that they are immediately universal in their desire for singularity—Antigone cares for her brother not as Polynices, but as her brother. Men, because they can become citizens, have their universality mediated and recognized by the state and thus are conscious of their universality—whereas woman’s universality is only known inwardly without external mediation by the state. As the wife who is desired and desiring (and thus mixing natural intentions with ethical ones), the woman is unable to be fully recognized by her husband. It is only in her relationship to a brother where she can be a free singular self, “both as recognizing and recognized…hence the loss of a brother is irreplaceable for the sister, and her duty toward him is the highest.”63 Antigone’s burial of Polynices transformed what accidentally happened to Polynices (death) and made it into “something willed and hence joyful,”64 fulfilling her duty to the divine law. While the daughter ascends to wifehood and continues to be the keeper of the divine law in the family, the son crosses outside of the sphere of divine law and enters the realm of the human law: “in this way both sexes overcome their natural essence and come forth in their ethical significance, as diversities that share between them two distinctions produced by the ethical substance.”65 This is the moment that we see sexual difference determining the ethical significance of each gender—which is all to the end of creating a stable socio-political configuration. Within the state as the figure of a unified ethical substance, “the distinction of the sexes and of their ethical content still remains within the unity of substance.”66 But in any case, it






























































62

Ibid., 15 (§457). (emphasis mine) Ibid., 16 (§457). 64 Ibid., 19 (§462). 65 Ibid., (§459). (emphasis mine) 66 Meaning there is not a fundamental two-ness of ethical substance—Hegel is metaphysically a monist. (§460) 63

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is the man who furthers the dialectic into the public sphere and “the human law proceeds into its living moment from the divine…the nether worldly power has its actuality on earth.”67 Thus the abstract laws of reason have become concrete in the actions of the man who enters the political sphere after emerging from the realm of the divine law. The gendered division of labor is meant to maintain equilibrium between the law of the universal (state) and the law of the singular (family), as well as carry out the necessary labor of care for individuals. If “women’s work” is not done, the state is legitimately threatened if it has no other way to socially reproduce its individual citizens. However, if disproportionate power is given to the singularity of the family, human law must instantiate power through the universal, i.e. the government of the people. On the other hand, if the singular suffers oppression by the universal/state, vengeance must be taken by the family to restore its rightful place. We see both motions in Antigone: it is only Antigone as the blood relation of Polynices who can resolve the injustice by carrying out the burial rites—but it is also only Creon as king who can restore the unity of the state against the man who committed treason. The suffering of Antigone shows the triumph of the human law over the divine, but the suffering of Creon shows the triumph of the divine law over the human.68 The story of Antigone performs the Hegelian point that fixedly sticking to any one side of what should be a dialectical whole ends in death. Thus we see that each of the roles of man and woman “contains the other and brings it forth…this antithesis is really the confirmation of the one through the other.”69 The lot of man to “fa[ll] down into the danger and trial of death” must be united with the lot of woman who “goes up toward the actuality of the day and to conscious determinate being,” or each is a dead end and neither can






























































67

Ibid., 17 (§460). Ibid., 25 see footnote 43. 69 Ibid., (§463). 68

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exist without the other.70 Neither ethical power (of either man or woman) “has any precedence over the other, so as to be the more essential moment of substance.”71 However, because of the particular configuration of Sittlichkeit in ancient Greece, “the community establishe[d] itself only through the disturbance of family happiness and the dissolution of self-consciousness in the universal, it create[d] its own inner enemy in what it suppresse[d] and what [was] at the same time essential to it, [namely] the female principle in general.”72 This where we get Hegel’s comment on woman as the “eternal irony of the [ancient Greek] community”: the truth of ethical substance is unity, and the gendered division of labor is only sustainable if in perfect equilibrium. However, it is structurally impossible for the gendered division of labor to be in equilibrium: man’s dual presence in both the sphere of the family and the sphere of the state, taken with the human law’s suppression of the divine, means that there will never be peace between the sexes nor between the family and the state. Harmony within Greek Sittlichkeit is structurally impossible. However, we should not be surprised about this because Hegel is constructing spirit in its immediacy, and until we move on to a further mediated structure of the family and state, political stability will not be possible. Woman as “the eternal irony of the community” is neither a transhistorical claim about the structure of gender nor is it a prescription. It is a description of Sittlichkeit in its immediacy as read through Sophocles’ play Antigone. The “destiny”73 of the conflict between the sexes is a function of each sex’s role in the ethical community—and it is the fundamental sundering of this community through the war of the sexes that then gives rise to




























































70

Ibid. Ibid., (§472). 72 Ibid., 28 (§475). 73 The word translated as “destiny” here is Bestimmung, and Hegel’s use of this word is less loaded than the English—it could also be translated as “determination” which more obviously shows that it could change depending on the context—rather than an “unavoidable destiny.” 71

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each as atomistic persons in the Roman world.74 The personhood that emerges from the sundering of Greek Sittlichkeit is not a happy development: this consciousness is “complete inessentiality and the loss of reality; to designate an individual as a person is an expression of contempt.”75 Because the “personhood” that results from the development of the human law is a “dead spirit,” we should not read the move to the Roman realm as a “triumph” of “masculine” over the feminine divine law. While the human law as masculine is what moves forward in Roman Sittlichkeit, this is not a demonstration of the moral supremacy of the masculine over feminine—but rather, this is Hegel’s descriptive philosophical reading of Roman Sittlichkeit which too will dissolve.76 1.2 Why Antigone? Fundamentally bound up in the Phenomenology is Hegel’s philosophical reading of history—and for us to understand the moment of Antigone (and why this play was chosen in the first place) we should be hermeneutically careful to figure out what question Hegel is trying to answer in this part of the text. Hegel takes the ancient Greek world to be attempting to philosophically manifest spiritual harmony through its constitutive social roles and laws:77 “The whole is a stable equilibrium of all parts, and each part is a native spirit that does not seek its satisfaction beyond itself, but has that satisfaction within itself precisely because it is in equilibrium with the whole.”78 However, the question then becomes, does the ancient Greek






























































74

The Roman community is considered to be “spiritless” as it is made up of only isolated individuals: “this dead spirit, the universal—split up into the atoms of absolutely many individuals—is an equality in which everyone counts as each one, that is, as persons.” PS, 31 (§477). “Personhood” is “dead spirit.” 75 Ibid., 33 (§481). 76 In fact, even given the patriarchal nature of most of the “history of philosophy,” compared to thinkers like Kant or Rousseau, Hegel ascribes a revolutionary essentiality to the role of the feminine/woman—she has an essential philosophical role to play and her labor is necessary to the function of the entire system. 77 Hegel is probably drawing inspiration here from the Romantic writers of his time idealizing the Greeks as nonalienated by society living in harmony. 78 PS, 18 (§462).

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world actually amount to this idealized harmony?79 It is in answering this question that Hegel draws out the binaries of man/woman, human/divine, and family/state in order to show that actually the ancient Greek world is much less stable than it initially seems—precisely because it draws such stark binary oppositions. War, ironically (given that harmony is the principle of Greek Sittlichkeit), ends up the only mediator between family and the state—and in turn, ancient Greece gives way to the Roman world.80 Sophocles’ Antigone is particularly useful for Hegel’s purposes because it is a play that demonstrates the struggle between one-sided moral laws (as demonstrated in the hardheadedness of Antigone and the hard-heartedness of Creon), while it also demonstrates the family’s tendency toward factionalism as a real threat to the maintenance of the state. It displays the dialectic of family and state in its immediacy without the mediator of civil society as in modernity. The actions Antigone sticking to the divine law and Creon sticking to the human law, unravel the community from within—even though they are both ethically motivated laws. Taken one-sidedly, both the human and divine laws are dead ends: each leads to the destruction of the other. But we should also be careful to remember that even if the human and divine laws seem to be foundationally divisive of society, they are also deeply interconnected. If we take the role of the Phenomenology seriously as a text that is trying to get us to intimately experience the breakdown of each shape of consciousness and spirit, to take us down the “pathway of despair,” Attic tragedy is an apt conduit. As Jocelyn Hoy writes, “Attic tragedy not only presents the transformation of consciousness of the actors—as in the recognition of the






























































79

Hoy, 173. See §454 of the Phenomenology for Hegel’s description of war as necessary to maintain the unity of the state and avoid the factionalism, which is in part threatened by the family. War will continue to be necessary for the state even in modern nation-states.

80

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‘mistake’ or error of judgment…it also produces a transformation in the spectators.”81 The immediacy of the divine and human laws, which overdetermined the actions and roles of each sex, are reflected even in the presentation and performance of Attic tragedy: “the masks used in the actual performances can be said to reflect to the spectators this ‘pre-given’ determination of action.”82 Hegel’s choice of Attic tragedy, and in particular the play Antigone, were intentional tools used to phenomenologically perform the truth of Greek Sittlichkeit—and we shouldn’t forget that in ancient Greece it was also historically the case that women were relegated to the home and not part of the political sphere.

II. Feminist Receptions of the Phenomenology 2.1 Luce Irigaray: “The Eternal Irony of the Community” In the essay “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” Luce Irigaray gives her reading of the moment of Antigone to further develop her thesis of the phallogocentrism83 of Hegel’s dialectic and Western philosophy more generally. For my purposes I will outline and critically respond to her comments about the role of women in the Phenomenology. For Irigaray the “eternal irony” of woman—which she reads as a transhistorical fact—is that woman is both the precondition of society and systematically excluded from it. In terms of Antigone, Irigaray claims that Antigone’s act against Creon’s decree was meant to carry out the spiritual transformation of the natural phenomenon of death. The task of spiritualizing what is immediately natural is delegated to womankind so that “man is thereby raised into the peace of






























































81

Hoy, 176. Hoy links this with Aristotle’s description of tragedy and its social role. Ibid. 83 Phallogocentrism is the idea that the current (and historical) understanding of subjectivity—and even more strongly for Irigaray, logos or reason itself—is an expression of masculine rule at the expense of the feminine i.e. the symbolic rule of the phallic. 82

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simple universality.”84 But we shouldn’t forget that this “peace of simple universality” is the peace of a dead man—and not the universality of a living ethical community even if burial rites are also a tool to keep the family integrated within the state. Irigaray continues, “so woman must be that external and effective mediation that reconciles the dead man with himself by taking upon herself the operation of destruction that the becoming of mind cannot manage without.”85 However, we should challenge Irigaray on the point that Antigone “reconciles the dead man with himself,” because Antigone/woman’s role as keeper of the divine law is to reconcile death with the family as a whole not the particular man himself.86 Antigone has the highest duty to her brother because it is in her relationship with her brother that she comes closest to experiencing recognition. However, her duty to carry burial rites is in virtue of her job as keeper of the divine law, which aims to preserve the individuality of the family over the course of generations—which means that it only concerns itself with individuals within the family in terms of their specific kinship relation (i.e. as brother, husband, children, wife). In fact, Hegel makes it clear that Antigone does what she does not for the particularity of Polynices, but the singularity of her brother qua brother. She does not carry out the divine law for “mankind,” she does it for the preservation of the family and for herself (although it is true this action leads to her death). She must do this because in Greek Sittlichkeit, it is only in her relationship to her brother—and not a husband—that she comes closest to experiencing herself as a free personality. Irigaray’s mistake here is that she takes the merely




























































84

Luce Irigaray, “The Eternal Irony of the Community” in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel ed. Patricia Jagentowicz, (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1996), 45. 85 Ibid., 46. 86 Part of some feminist’s frustration here (esp. Butler) is that Hegel, many times without distinction, moves between talking about woman/womankind/the feminine and Antigone as the character in Sophocles’ play. However, because Antigone is essentially an avatar of “womankind” within Greek Sittlichkeit, I do not take specific issue on this point with Hegel. Contra Irigaray’s claim that Antigone “reconciles the dead man with himself” see PS §457: “in the house of ethical life, what matters is not the husband or child, but a husband or children in general—not the sentiment but the universal on which these relationships of the woman are grounded.”

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natural blood relation to be the primary attribute holding the sister and brother together—when it is additionally a spiritual (i.e. ethical) relationship that connects them. They attend to one another in virtue of their recognition of each other and not in virtue of a merely natural desire.87 Irigaray does not see the relationship between brother and sister as a spiritual haven from generally oppressive patriarchal conditions—instead she reads it as a mere function of patriarchal discourse. The “Hegelian dream” of “a truce in the struggle of uneven foes” is impossible, according to Irigaray, because each sex has already yielded to a destiny that is counterpoised to the other.88 Even if “rape, murder, breaking and entering, injury, were still, in appearance at least, in general at least, suspended between brother and sister,” she sees nothing promising in their relationship. For Irigaray, even this “truce” between brother and sister is an illusion because she reads the recognition afforded to the sister as fundamentally non-reciprocal: “the brother has already been invested with a value for the sister that she cannot offer in return, except by devoting herself to his cult after death.”89 In part, Irigaray insists that reciprocal recognition between brother and sister/man and woman is structurally impossible because Hegel characterizes the divine law as “unconscious” and the human law as “conscious.” Phenomenologically speaking, the point is that human laws (that Creon supports) are given publicity and are supposed to be visible and known to everyone




























































87

As I will more fully flesh out later, relationships are queer insofar as they are not constituted or determined by sexist gender roles or heteronormativity—or the new homonormativity under neoliberalism in the US (homonormativity is the term for the condition that now heteronormativity accepts “gay marriages/couples” as long as they fit particular white middle-class standards c.f. Lisa Duggan’s work). Queer spirit is about restructuring all social relationships, both within “blood ties,” friendships, mentorships, comradeship, and ultimately redefining kinship as not tied to the merely natural “blood relations.” Queer spirit (or queer Sittlichkeit) will require the constructing of a sustainable socio-political world where contradictions are not primarily mediated by either war, exploitation, or oppression. The sibling relation in Greek Sittlichkeit emerges as the first potentially queer relationship because it involves relations that are not determined by oppressive gender roles or exploitation. Even if only in a very limited way, brother and sister attend to each other as “free personalities.” (PS §457) We can read the love between brother and sister here as a foreshadowing of the “comradely love” in Alexandra Kollontai’s work. 88 Irigaray, 48. 89 Ibid.

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in the polis. The divine laws on the other hand, do not seem to be the immediate product of humans and thus appear as the “unwritten and unerring law of the gods.” It is because they are unwritten—and therefore not public in the way that the human laws are—that Hegel describes them as “unconscious.” Clearly Antigone is acutely aware of her duty and claim by the right of the divine law, so it is not the case that she is unconscious of her claim by the divine law. As Hoy describes: “The status of divine law as ‘unconscious’ or ‘unknown’ is not a detraction or derogation but, rather, an attribution of its ethical necessity or ‘absoluteness,’ the sense that such law must be obeyed. Here the binary ‘conscious/unconscious’ has to do with the origins, scope, and force of the laws, rather than their positioning in an epistemic hierarchy.”90 Even though it is clear that Antigone is acting within patriarchal and fraternal frameworks that denigrate ‘woman’ generally, the lynchpin of her own structural oppression does not lie within the characterization of the divine law as “unconscious.” The structural oppression of women within Greek Sittlichkeit lies primarily in women’s exclusion from being able to effect political structures, the highly regulated gendered division of labor, or to put more plainly, the asymmetrical power dynamics between men and women generally in ancient Greece.91 But even though Greek Sittlichkeit is unarguably operating within a patriarchal/fraternal organization, it is interesting to notice the breakdowns of male supremacy. I would argue that the importance of burial rites, which are only carried out by women, is one place of such breakdown. As Polynices is dependent on Antigone for his continued meaning and legitimacy in their family, it turns out that woman is essential for the flourishing of the larger social community.92




























































90

Hoy, 183. (emphasis mine) See Hoy, 182. 92 It is only in casting off the essentiality of the divine law and woman that we enter the brutal and inhuman realm of Rome—and it will not be until modernity that gender and sexuality are potentially liberated for Hegel. 91

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Irigaray writes, “the cult of the dead and the cult of death would thus be the point where divine law and human law join. And also that point where, at least on the higher ethical level, the relationship between man and woman is possible.”93 However, it is not only in the “cult of death” that divine and human laws interact or reciprocally need each other—the divine law and woman’s role do not end at “the cult of death.”94 Within the living Sittlichkeit, the state requires the family to take care of its individuals—especially women if it is only men who are citizens— because the state only concerns itself with citizens taken in general. Conversely, the family requires the state to organize around macro-systems of needs to sustain itself across generations—at least as long as we are talking about Greek Sittlichkeit and not a nomadic social configuration. Irigaray illuminates Hegel’s conflation of sex and gender,95 but she does not fully draw out its consequences in terms of its place within Hegel’s larger project. Immediacy characterizes the Greek realm, which is why sex and gender and the corresponding gender roles are so conflated—it is not because of a transhistorical sameness of women’s oppression. In every place and time oppression will manifest differently based on the socio-political organization in place— the oppression of women in Greek Sittlichkeit is going to look different than that from within Roman, or the later “modern” Sittlichkeit for Hegel. As Hoy further describes: “The play




























































93

Irigaray, 47. In Irigaray’s reading of the play Antigone, while she reads Antigone as upholding the patriarchal order, she sees her sister Ismene as “indisputably a ‘woman’ in her weakness, her fear, her submissive obedience, her tears, madness, hysteria.” (Irigaray, 48-49) However, as Mary C. Rawlinson has pointed out in her book Just Life, it is actually only Ismene who is not taken up into the “cult of death” that is “woman’s work.” Ismene is the only character who advocates against death and fraternity in favor of living relations. So if there is a character in Antigone that feminists should be paying attention to, it should be Ismene, as she is the only one who is able to see beyond the one-sided deadlock of Antigone and Creon. Mary C. Rawlinson, Just Life (New York: Colombia University Press, 2016), 83-105. 95 A criticism to be made in general of Hegel is that he does not make a rigorous distinction between sex and gender and uses them interchangeably—which is a serious oversight according to his own system that moves from logic to nature to spirit. Plants and animals have a sex, but do not clearly have a gender. Gender requires a highly developed free will and is a second order product of a socio-political configuration (i.e. is it is already a function of highly mediated activity). 94

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Antigone, at least on Hegel’s reading, shows the collapse and destruction that tragically follows precisely from holding the binaries stringently apart. It is not Hegel, then, who maintains those binaries in strict opposition, but rather, Greek ethical life itself, infected by this ‘false consciousness.’”96 Ultimately what is at stake for Irigaray is to show how the subject formation of ‘woman’ is different from the subject formation of ‘man’ due to the structural, and for her, the metaphysical oppression of women. However, any “war of the sexes,”97 or conflation of men with “masculine” or woman with “feminine,” presupposes the western and fairly modern binary gender system—which is neither applicable nor intelligible in the same way in every place and time (including ancient Greece).98 The metaphysical twoness of sexual difference put forward by Irigaray will always clash and have problems with the monism of Hegel—but this does not amount to a damning critique of dialectics as metaphysically phallogocentric. 2.2 Judith Butler: The Ek-Static Subject of Desire In contrast with Irigaray, what Butler enjoys about the Phenomenology is how everything that first appears fixed, stable, and immediately known, actually turns out to be the opposite: “we know at any given textual moment what negation ‘is’ and what it does, only to find out by the following course of its action, indeed, by reading it, that our former convictions were unfounded.”99 Each figure that emerges in the Phenomenology is descriptive of a “state that has






























































96

Hoy, 180. We can say with the transfeminist Julia Serano that Irigaray, while attempting to oppose “traditional sexism” as the source of misogyny i.e. the maintenance of a gender hierarchy, she actually doubles down on “oppositional sexism,” which is “the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and non-overlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires”—which we will see later actually shores up traditional sexism and is the source of cissexism, homophobia, and transphobia. See Julia Serano, “Trans Woman Manifesto,” in Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2007) 11-20. 98 Even if “sexual difference” is biologically necessary for reproduction, modern queer spirit will sublate the merely natural “sexes” in order to spiritualize their “natural” division. 99 Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), xi. 97

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not yet achieved a stable logical status; indeed, the figure marks the instability of logical relations.”100 This insight will later develop into her understanding of queer performativity, and what she will use along Derridian lines to deconstruct the stability of heteronormativity or the “heterosexual matrix” (as described in Gender Trouble). Thus crucial to understanding Butler’s use, and eventual break with Hegel’s system, is her reading of the role of desire in the Phenomenology, and the emergence of the “ek-static”101 self from the section on lordship and bondage.102 Butler’s understanding of what queer means is wholly dependent on the ek-static subject of desire: “To be a self is, on these terms, to be at a distance from who one is, not to enjoy the prerogative of self-identity (what Hegel calls selfcertainty), but to be cast, always, outside oneself, Other to oneself.”103 The ek-staic self that Butler reads from the bondsman’s evolution through productive labor is then counterpoised to what she takes as the typical modern philosophical “stable subject”—the “I” of Descartes’ cogito.104 In contrast to the cogito, “the Other is revealed as an essential structure of all




























































100

Ibid. There are intentional Heideggerian overtones in her formulation. 102 See the first chapter of Judith Butler’s dissertation Subjects of Desire. 103 Judith Butler, “Longing for Recognition” in Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? eds. Kimberley Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 124. 104 In some places she even attributes this problematic structure of “the subject” to Hegel: “The Hegelian model of self-recognition that has been appropriated by Marx, Lukacs, and a variety of other contemporary liberatory discourses presupposes a potential adequation between the “I” that confronts its world, including its language, as an object, and the “I” that finds itself as an object in that world. But the subject/object dichotomy, which here belongs to the tradition of Western epistemology, conditions the very problematic of identity that is seeks to solve.” Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 196. This seems to be a blatant misattribution—for Hegel the “subject” is the system is totality/world history—something that is anything but a stable and fixed “I” that confronts the world as if it was something merely external to it. Even if Gender Trouble and Butler’s use of Foucault ushers a damming critique of the “enlightenment” subject of Kant or Descartes, it can’t condemn Hegel’s system because the dialectic of subject and object for him is opposed to the “stable fully objective/unbiased/neutral subject.” However, what Hegel does inherit from Descartes is a distinction between subject and object—even if these distinctions do not translate into a dualistic metaphysics. Contra what Kimberley Hutchings writes: “There is no a priori in Hegel’s philosophy, and that neither the subject nor object of knowledge have logical priority in determining the validity of any particular claim to truth. Instead truth is conceived as a matter of both the experience and recognition of identity and non-identity between subject-knowers (which include both the philosopher and the philosopher’s readers) and objects of knowledge. Reason, the process of comprehension, cannot transcend nature and spirit, since they form the conditions of its possibility,” Hegel does maintain an a priori identity between thought and being—otherwise there would be no ground for knowledge. While there is no fixed essence of spirit because it is historical—and in that 101

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experience in the course of the Phenomenology; indeed, there can be no experience outside the context of intersubjectivity.”105 The role of recognition to hold the destruction of the self by otherness in check, and the need for the Other’s recognition then means, “that the self is not its own, that it is given over to the Other in advance of any further relation, but in such a way that the Other does not own it either.”106 Recognition is always a two-way street and it spiritualizes desire, which initially emerged only as merely natural hunger: “Desire here loses its character as a purely consumptive activity, and becomes characterized by the ambiguity of an exchange in which two self-consciousnesses affirm their respective autonomy (independence) and alienation (otherness).”107 The self is then always compelled to move outside of itself—and this is due to desire according to Butler—because “one finds that the only way to know oneself is through the mediation that takes place outside of oneself, exterior to oneself, by virtue of a convention or a norm that one did not make.”108 Thus for Butler—and this is where she diverges from Hegel— there is never a “return to the self” due to the structure of the ek-static subject that is a subject of desire: a “subject neither has nor suffers its desire, but is the very action of desire as it perpetually displaces the subject.”109 In this way Butler sees desire as the propelling force of the dialectic in the Phenomenology, and the self’s constitution by “norms they did not create” marks the place where Foucault is used to supplement Hegel—as he offers the further question: “What can I become, given the contemporary order of being?”110 This question is what leads Foucault to




























































sense spirit cannot be described a priori—analysis of spirit is not merely relative to our place and time. See footnote 91 for more of my contentions with Hutchings radical historicist conclusions for absolute spirit following from these points. Kimberley Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 104. 105 Subjects of Desire, 47. 106 “Longing for Recognition,” 126. 107 Subjects of Desire, 50-51. This will later develop into love, as described in the Philosophy of Right. 108 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 28. 109 Subjects of Desire, xv. 110 Giving an Account of Oneself, 30.

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focus on the particular apparatus operating in any given social context—knowledge is always articulated in and through institutions that are foisted upon and shape living bodies. Depending what apparatuses we are subjected to, those apparatuses will determine the possible configurations of who and what we can become. It is this desire for recognition by the Other—and not ownership as demonstrated in deformed/asymmetrical recognition—that drives Hegel’s Phenomenology forward from talking about self-consciousness to talking about organizations of systems of need i.e. Sittlichkeit: “The project or desire to live and the project or desire to gain autonomous identity can be integrated only in the desire that explicitly takes account of need.”111 What in the lord/bondsman situation ended in the contradiction of dividing the self against the self—as the Lord tries to deny his body while reducing the bondsman to only a body—self-consciousness “discovers that implicit in its own identity as a desiring being is the necessity of being claimed by another,”112 or more specifically, being claimed by the needs of the other. Mutual recognition, then, will not be found in the shapes of consciousness (e.g. the lord/bondsman relationship), but only in analyzing organizations of worlds: “mutual recognition only becomes possible in the context of a shared orientation toward the material world,”113 which is structurally impossible in relationships of lordship and bondage. Within the organization of a world: “we are recognized not merely for the form we inhabit in the world (our various embodiments), but for the forms we create of the world (our works); our bodies are but transient expressions of our freedom, while our works shield our freedom in their very structure.”114 In other words, in a situation where one’s works maintain a world both where freedom is possible




























































111

Subjects of Desire, 56. Ibid., 49. 113 Ibid., 57. 114 Ibid., 57-8. 112

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and acknowledged by others. Butler thus understands spirit, as it emerges from shapes of consciousness, “[as] still [being] desire, but one that seeks metaphysical satisfaction through the articulation of the subject’s historical place in a given community.”115 Where Hegel, as we will see later, sees desire as fundamentally transformed in spirit—i.e. spiritualized through rechtlich sittliche love. 2.3 Judith Butler: Antigone’s Claim In Butler’s lecture series entitled Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, she explores the ways in which Antigone is claimed both by the divine right, the needs of her family, and how her response to those claims leads her transgress gender norms.116 Butler finds Antigone’s defiance of the human law, or the state, as something to take up in a feminist discourse critical of state apparatuses. While Irigaray’s interest in Antigone stemmed from what she saw as her “prepolitical opposition to politics, representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it,” Butler seeks out Antigone for her “exemplary political status as a feminine figure who defies the state through a powerful set of physical and linguistic acts,”117 and in many places transgresses her role as woman and steps into roles only given to men.118 This is in contrast to what Butler reads as Hegel’s interest and understanding of Antigone as representing “kinship and its dissolution, [while] Creon comes to




























































115

Ibid., 58. For example, “Her loud proclamations of grief presuppose a domain of the ungrievable. The insistence of public grieving is what moves her away from feminine gender into hubris, into that distinctively manly excess that makes the guards, the chorus, and Creon wonder: Who is the man here?” Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 80. 117 Ibid., 2. (emphasis mine) 118 While Butler does not go as far as to say that Antigone is a “queer heroine,” she does say that Antigone “emblematiz[es] a certain heterosexual fatality that remains to be read.” (Ibid., 72) And she adds, “If kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws. She acts, she speaks, she becomes one for whom the speech act is a fatal crime, but this fatality exceeds her life and enters the discourse of intelligibility as its own promising fatality, the social form of its aberrant, unprecedented future.” (Ibid., 82) 116

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represent an emergent ethical order and state authority based on principles of universality.”119 However, as mentioned in the earlier section on the Phenomenology, I disagree with Butler on this point, Creon is not the only figure representing principles of universality. The divine law is also based in universal principles e.g. the spiritual transformation of birth, death, reproduction, sexuality, etc. Both the divine and human laws have moments of singularity and universality. Butler enacts a creative re-reading of the play while she also exposes places where Hegel “misinterprets” and offers incorrect quotes because at times he used section of the Hölderlin poem instead of sticking only to Sophocles. She also exposes his conflation of the chthonic gods of the Greek tradition with the Roman Penates, which may or may not have been purposeful by Hegel.120 But for my purposes, I am less interested in what the play was “really about” or what Hegel misread, and instead I am most interested in how Hegel used the characters in the play as avatars of claim’s by “right,” and how these claims lead to transitions. In the following paragraphs I will explore Butler’s reading of the moment of Antigone and try to begin to explain why our readings lead us to different conclusions both about Hegel’s work and its relevance for a liberatory theory of gender. Butler sees Hegel’s characterization of the relationship between Antigone and Polynices as “desire-less” as a tenuous assumption because of the central role of incest in the Oedipus trilogy. She does not think that the transcendence of unmediated desire is the criterion for mutual recognition—as Butler’s understanding of the movements of the Phenomenology rely on desire moving the ek-static subject, this shouldn’t be surprising.121 She cites the lord and bondsman section to try to show Hegel as inconsistent on the role of desire and recognition, saying that






























































119

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. 121 Ibid., 12. 120

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recognition is driven by desire. I would counter that the desire of the previous section (which is not yet transitioned to the realm of spirit) is both still abstract, and taken as a merely natural (i.e. unmediated) feeling. Within spirit, desire is spiritualized within kinship bonds and transformed into love—in marriage, love is contingent on free consent. It is only in these relationships, whose ethical substance is grounded in love, that mutual recognition is possible. This is not to say that desire is not present in marriage or in ethical relationships, but that ethical substance derives from the spiritualization of that desire into love. Thus Butler’s understanding of spirit as desire on a metaphysical level is not wrong, but it must be clarified that desire prior to transition to the realm of spirit is still abstract and not yet fully part of ethical substance. Butler prizes the extra-legal status of the divine law/the feminine as something that is powerful for altering socio-political arrangements: Antigone’s non-codifiable law is the Derridian trace, “an enigma of another possible order.”122 The eternal irony of the community, for Butler then, is “womankind” perverting the universality of the state, particularizing it and turning it into “possessions and ornaments for the family, decorating the family with the paraphernalia of the state, making banners and shawls out of the state apparatus.”123 Butler further writes: “Although [Antigone] operates within the terms of the law when she makes her claim for justice, she also destroys the basis of justice in community by insisting that her brother is irreducible to any law that would render citizens interchangeable with one another. As she asserts his radical particularity, he comes to stand as a scandal, as the threat of ruination to the universality of law.”124 Antigone “destroys the basis of justice,” because in Greek Sittlichkeit






























































122

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 35. 124 Ibid., 52. 123

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women were supposed to stay in the family and not appear in the public/political sphere, and yet Antigone publically declares her crime—a double transgression. But there is a problem in Butler’s generalization of the role of the family as that which “perverts” and particularizes the universality of the state. While it is true that Antigone claims the singularity of her brother as someone who is not interchangeable to her in the way that citizens are in the eyes of the state, I do not think Hegel would say that she “asserts his radical particularity.” What she does is uphold the divine law of preserving kinship ties, and she respects his relationship to her qua brother—in other words, Polynices makes an ethical claim on Antigone as her brother, not as Polynices.125 Hegel’s passage in the Phenomenology exactly reads: “This [feminine] principle—the eternal irony of the community—changes the universal of the government into a private purpose through intrigue, transforms the universal activity of government into the work of some definite individual, and inverts the universal property of the state into the possession and adornment of a family.”126 While this passage reeks of male chauvinism, it is also a fairly accurate description of the portrayal of women in the majority of plays (comedies and tragedies—all written by men) from ancient Greece (see Daniel Shannon’s note on this in his commentary to the Phenomenology).127 This, then, is not a statement about the transhistorical nature of womankind and the family, but rather it is a description of a real reaction to the ensuing hegemony of men, the human law, and the rise of Roman realm at the expense of woman and the divine law. In a Sittlichkeit where woman is both an “eternal irony” and a fully conscious spiritual being—of course she will try to subvert the state and its claim to “universal property”—in situations of






























































125

This same point was made in the section on Irigaray. PS, 28. 127 Ibid., see note 48. 126

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oppression the first moment is indeterminate negation. Woman’s so-called “trickery,” and subversion of the state’s property into “private family matters,” is a first negation of the state as an oppressive entity in relationship to women who are relegated to the family sphere. We can agree that Hegel’s description of this phenomenon is a reality in the sense that women under oppressive conditions will do whatever they can to assert their agency—while we can disagree with his male chauvinist tone that implies that women maintain this behavior “instinctually” or because they are “unreasonable.” In fact, women are only capable of “trickery” in virtue of their ability to reason and understand the inherent unreasonable character of their situation. We don’t see women building a positive political project to instantiate a just state (e.g. a state that is not predicated on the subjection of women) in Greek Sittlichkeit because of the structure of Hegel’s system. This is only the first moment of immediacy—the conditions of possibility of liberation will be further concretized with the development of just social institutions that mediate between individuals and the state within modernity. Butler sees Hegel as prescribing woman’s position to be eternally subordinate to the human law, and thus to men. She considers Hegel to not be properly carrying out the dialectic, and instead, leaving the moment of Antigone behind: “[Hegel] insists that the conflict between [the two laws] is one in which kinship must give way to state authority as the final arbiter of justice. In other words, Antigone figures the threshold between kinship and the state, a transition in the Phenomenology that is not precisely an Aufhebung, for Antigone is surpassed without ever being preserved when ethical order emerges.”128 If we only look at the transition from Greek Sittlichkeit to the Roman Sittlichkeit, this would seem to be the case. The moment of abstraction






























































128

Ibid., 4-5.

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within the Roman world that further takes us away from viewing humans as singular beings opens up new forms of brutality. As Hegel describes in §357 of the Philosophy of Right (1821): In [the Roman] realm, [the process of] differentiation comes to an end with the infinite diremption of ethical life into the extremes of personal or private self-consciousness and abstract universality. This opposition, which begins with a collision between the substantial intuition of an aristocracy and the principle of free personality in democratic form, develops into superstition and the assertion of cold and acquisitive power on the one hand, and into a corrupt rabble on the other. The dissolution of the whole ends in universal misfortune and the demise of ethical life, in which the individualities of nations perish in the unity of a pantheon, and all individuals sink to the level of private persons with an equal status and with formal rights, who are accordingly held together only by an abstract and arbitrary will of increasingly monstrous proportions.129 The Roman realm not the glorious triumph of the masculine principle or the human law over the feminine/divine law, it is a “spiritless” moment in which ethical life is lost to itself. Everyone is “sunk to the level of private persons” held together, not by concrete ethical relations, but by mere abstract principles of formal rights. While it is true that the truth of Antigone and the divine law is lost in moment of Rome, but this is all for the worse. In the infamous sections on world history at the end of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel refers to modernity as the “Germanic Realm,” he writes: “The spirit now grasps the infinite positivity of its own inwardness, the principle of the unity of divine and human nature and the reconciliation of the objective truth and freedom.”130 Contra many feminist readings of Hegel, in the final analysis Hegel actually says that human and divine laws must be comprehended in their unity—and that this will be a mark of modernity for Hegel—free will as concrete and actualized.131 Thus, even if we take Hegel’s philosophy of history to be a can of worms, it is true that he sees modernity as aiming towards the reconciliation of the divine and human laws—thus the




























































129

G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (PR), ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 379. 130 Ibid. (§358) 131 Whether or not this is actually the case within modernity is yet to be seen.

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truth of Antigone must be preserved and returned to dialectically. Butler (as well as Irigaray) take Hegel to be presenting the divine law, in Greek Sittlichkeit, as obviously subordinate to the human law, yet Hegel portrays Antigone and Creon’s crimes as of equal guilt and equal onesidedness. The human law becomes hegemonic over the divine in the transition to the Roman realm, not because of some higher ethical value, but instead because of its ability to harness the brute power of the state to subordinate the divine law. This assertion of brute power to overtake the divine law is a naturalization of what should be asserted by right—which is right (recht) precisely in virtue of its not being essentially determined by brute force, but rather by free will. In terms of ethical substance, the telos of the human and divine laws is to exist in a non-static and non-hierarchical dialectical relationship. The sheer power of the state as that which ushers in the transition to the Roman realm sheds light on Butler’s comments about the family as only being useful to the state in terms of making men for war: “[Hegel] argues that the ideal is for the family to furnish young men for war, those who come to defend the boundaries of the nation, who come to confront one another in the life and death struggle of nations, and who ideally come to reside under a legal regime in which they are to some degree abstracted from the national Sittlichkeit that structures their participation.”132 However, we might contrast this reading to what Kimberley Hutchings writes on the same issue: “Hegel is making the point that the spiritualization of natural contingency has to be understood in non-natural terms, terms, which recognize dependency, limitation and determination as an inevitable aspect of the self-determination of spirit. The sacrifice of young men in war does not affirm the supernatural triumph of the polis, but heralds its






























































132

Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 12.

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disintegration.”133 Hutchings reading is closer to getting at the significance of the role of women as mothers in the Greek into the Roman Sittlichkeit in context. The exploitation of women by a legalistic regime that simply desires young men for imperial conquests is not going to turn out to be a thriving socio-political organization. The hegemony of the “masculine” principle of the human law in Creon that completely eliminates the divine law and ethical significance of the family only further exasperates its own one-sidedness and proves this through its own dissolution. From these remarks, we can see that Butler’s reading of Antigone raises interesting and important questions for social and political work: Antigone’s predicament “[may] offer an allegory for the crisis of kinship: which social arrangements can be recognized as legitimate love, and which human losses can be explicitly grieved as real and consequential loss?”134 This is a particularly important question given Butler’s motivation to challenge state sanctioned violence and develop a feminism that is not complicit in state violence. Additionally, she is an excellent






























































133

Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, 97-8. I find Hutchings work on Hegel to be really helpful in trying to get at what follows from Hegel’s project on his own terms as distinct from what feminists have used Hegel to do for their own projects. But I do not completely agree with her larger claims about Hegel as a “radical historicist.” Hutchings writes: “A Hegelian account of knowledge permits the claim that it makes sense to say that Hegel is more wrong about women now than he was when he made his claims, because his partial grasp of the position of women has become less and less sustained by spirit and the forms of its self-understanding in science and philosophy. His position has therefore become less and less capable of being recognized or shared by the actual and potential audience of his argument. This is not a question of finding excuses for Hegel; rather, it is an attempt to understand the conditions for the production of truth as neither fixed nor arbitrary, but a matter of the complex potential of selfchanging, self-interpreting being.” (p. 109) On my reading, Hegel’s account of absolute knowledge has consequences for the past, i.e. something can be eternally conceptually true like freedom of the will, even if it is not yet fully historically realized or manifested. I take this position from Hegel’s remarks in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right on the difference between conceptual truth and sequential/temporal history. This means I will say that Hegel was just as wrong in his time as he is today about women, Africa, the “rabble,” etc. I do not take absolute knowledge to be relative in the same way that Hutchings does. Even is something is granted “right” by law, for example slavery or mass incarceration, we can say that that which de-humanizes and de-spiritualizes what is a spiritual being, or is a human being, is always wrong. It is wrong given the terms of the truth of absolute spirit. Exploitation and oppression might be organized differently depending on the historical time and place (meaning also that strategies for liberation will be contextually dependent) but something like the suppression of women’s humanity is always wrong even if it takes varying forms and extremes. We should be careful to remember that positivist historicism is not equivalent to historical materialism. 134 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 24. Butler raises these questions specifically thinking about the AIDS crisis.

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dialectician in that she continually demonstrates the truth that there are no “stable” categories, and in particular heteronormativity relies on its ‘other’ for its continued reiteration—thus we might say that Butler demonstrates ‘queer’ as the eternal irony of heteronormative community. However, her mischaracterization of Hegel’s system as blind to these insights, her underestimation of the spiritualization of desire in spirit and the transition to love—as well as her characterization, in some places, of a “Hegelian” legacy of dichotomizing subject and object (when Hegel’s subject is the totality of the system)135—is where we diverge on the usefulness and the meaning of Hegel’s system for the further development of theories of gender and sexuality.

III. Queer Spirit 3.1 Introduction What we should take away from the moment of Antigone in the Phenomenology has less to do with sexual difference as it is normally understood, than, as Hutchings writes, “the fact that, insofar as both man and woman are spiritual beings, they are mistaken in understanding themselves in the terms of immediate giveness and closure which characterize instinctual (animal) as opposed to self-conscious (ethical) activity.”136 Creon and Antigone are equally guilty in their one-sidedness. While attempting to make a break with the “phallogocentric” beginning from the position of woman as alterity (as Irigaray does) is tempting for feminist political philosophy, Butler’s reading of Antigone’s situation illuminated the fact that “the ‘elsewhere’ from which feminist politics begins cannot be a radical alterity…[any starting






























































135 136

See footnote 63. Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, 101.

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position] is always already contaminated [by the world that it occupies].”137 Because categories are unstable to begin with, any concept of radical outside-ness logically presupposes something that relies on it for its apparent stability (e.g. the heterosexual matrix that must logically include homosexuality as its eternal irony—which is why a lesbian separatist or “homophile” movements will not actually destabilize heteronormativity). To develop a Hegelian theory of gender, I will clarify the relationship and development of ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’ in Hegel’s system, transitioning to take a closer look at objective spirit. It is in the moment of modern Sittlichkeit that objective spirit is supposed to make social freedom possible and where we should find Hegel’s modern theory of gender. In delineating the requirements that Hegel himself lays out for the actualization of social freedom, I will assert that his particular configuration of gender, and the social institutions that inform it, leave something to be desired. In pointing out the promising places in his account of gender and its corresponding institutions in the Philosophy of Right, I will assert that that modern Sittlichkeit actualizes social freedom only insofar as it develops into queer Sittlichkeit, i.e. queer spirit. I will initially take ‘queer’ to mean the following: something can be characterized as queer if it recognizes heteronormativity as a social institution that inherently inhibits the realization of social freedom—ruling it out as a legitimate institution. However, this definition will take on further valences as I move into analyzing the relationships between gender and sexuality to capitalism, labor, social movements, and the history of colonialism in the following chapters. 3.2 Nature and Spirit To understand what nature and spirit mean for Hegel, and what the consequences of this distinction have on a Hegelian theory of gender, we will need to take a detour through Hegel’s




























































137

Ibid., 149.

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Encyclopedia of Logic, the Philosophy of Nature, and finally the transition to Subjective Spirit. Knowledge of spirit is knowledge of the most concrete, meaning it is “consequently the sublimest and most difficult kind [of knowledge].”138 Because of this difficulty, it will be helpful to derive the transition from logic to nature to spirit, so that we can better grasp the full meaning of natural and spiritual categories. In the Encyclopedia of Logic (EL), the third division is the doctrine of the concept. The concept is then subdivided into (1) the subjective concept, (2) the object, and (3) the Idea. Following Fredrick Neuhouser, we can understand ‘the concept’ (as delineated in the EL) to be “a highly abstract account of the kind of inner articulation required of a self-conscious being, whether individual or collective, in order for it to be a whole, fully integrated subject.”139 With the “Idea” we see for the first time something able to keep both subject and object within itself. Life is the first subject-object concept, and accordingly it sets us up to finally face an other that is not only an abstract contradiction, but is the other to abstract conceptuality i.e. nature. Life further concretizes the initially completely abstract category of being—with which the logic begins—and shows that the Idea as being is nature.140 Life, however, only knows itself in-itself—we do not get the concept of life for-itself until we reach the level of cognition. In cognition, life takes itself as its own object and by doing so it determines its own concrete content through the subjective concept, which turns out to be the most abstract form of the good. Once it determines its own good, life must will the good to realize itself: “its drive to realize itself has the converse relationship to that of the Idea of the true and aims rather to determine the world that it finds already there according to its own






























































138

G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Vol. I Introduction, ed. M. J. Petry (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company, 1978), 3. (§377) 139 Fredrick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 134. 140 Hegel, EL, 307. (§244)

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purpose.”141 Hegel continues: The finitude of this activity, therefore, is the contradiction that the purpose of the good is being achieved and equally is not being achieved in the self-contradicting determinations of the objective world; that it is posited equally as an inessential purpose and an essential one, as an actual purpose and at the same time as a merely possible one. This contradiction presents itself as the infinite progress in the actualization of the good, which is fixed in this progress as a mere ought.142 The contradiction that the good both is and is not, which proceeds to the “infinite progress,” or the becoming of the good, mirrors the move in the doctrine of being (i.e. we move from being to nothing to becoming, which is the truth and unity of being and not-being). Hegel writes: The objective world is in this way in and for itself the Idea positing itself [and its selfdetermined good] eternally as purpose and at the same time bringing forth its actuality through [its] activity. This life, which has returned to itself from the difference and finitude of cognition, and which has become identical with the Concept through the activity of the Concept, is the speculative or absolute Idea.143 As life returns to itself through difference by its own activity of determining, willing, and realizing its good, we arrive the absolute idea. In the absolute idea we find that the truth of the transition from mere life, to cognition, to willing its good, is the concept that intuits itself through its other, not the other as concept, but the other to abstract conceptuality i.e. nature. In nature, considered ‘rational’ on Hegel’s terms, the concept remains external to itself because spatial and temporal relationships exist externally. As Hegel writes in §247 of the Philosophy of Nature, “Nature has yielded itself as the Idea in the form of otherness. Since the Idea is therefore the negative of itself, or external to itself, nature is not merely external relative to this Idea (and to the subjective existence of the same, spirit), but is embodied as nature in the






























































141

Ibid., 301. (§233) (emphasis mine) Ibid., 301-2. (§234) (emphasis mine) 143 Ibid., 303. (§235) (emphasis mine) 142

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determination of externality.”144 While nature make the abstract categories of logic more concrete, because of its essential determination as externality, spirit is alienated within the realm of nature. The externality of nature means that rationality confronts nature as necessity (i.e. physical laws) and not as freedom: “we are therefore justified in saying that necessity and not freedom holds sway in nature, for it is precisely the simply internal and consequently also the simply external relation of independent existences to one another which constitutes the most intrinsic significance of necessity.”145 The essential determinations of the concept as it occurs in nature “display[s] necessity and contingency, not freedom.”146 This means that when we are strictly speaking of matter, it is determined by natural laws. Events that happen to matter (natural events) are contingent meaning they are not determined by a self-known internal logic. Natural bodies are not selfdetermined but externally determined by natural laws (e.g. gravity). For example, a rock does not know the chemical processes by which it erodes or transforms into a different substance—it doesn’t decide how to dissolve, but rather just dissolves according to the external conditions to which it is subjected. However, even if necessity and not freedom is the controlling force in nature, nature is nevertheless the condition of possibility of freedom and the emergence of spirit. In Hegel’s terms, this is how we come to spirit as the truth of nature.147 The highest philosophical task, according to Hegel, is to carry out the dictum “know thy self,” and the transition to spirit marks the completion of this task. What was only related externally to nature and appeared as necessity, is turned inward such that the concept is said to “return to itself,” and what is rational, then, emanates from it. The inward turning of the concept is the actualization of




























































144

G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature Vol. I ed. M. J. Petry (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 205. (§247) Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Vol. I, 31. (§381) 146 Philosophy of Nature Vol. I, 208. (§248) 147 Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Vol. I, 25. (§381) 145

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freedom—which is the movement of spirit. Spirit, that maintains necessity as a moment but not as an external prescription, is said to know itself because it is self-determined and not externally determined. This movement turns what first confronted us as an unquestionable prescription of necessity, into a function of our self-determination—although as Hegel writes, there is no simple transition to freedom from necessity, it is a process with many moments.148 Nature (contrary to some feminist readings), is not absolute immediacy from which spirit is then posited, but rather: [Although] spirit displays, so to speak, the sovereign ingratitude of sublating, mediating, that by which it appears to be mediated, of degrading it to nothing but a dependent subsistence, and of thereby establishing itself as completely independent. What has already been said implies that the transition from nature to spirit is not a shift into something entirely distinct, but simply a return into self of the spirit which in nature is self-external. It should be added however, that the specific difference between nature and spirit is not sublated by this transition, for spirit does not proceed forth from nature in a natural manner….[it is a] procedure not of the flesh but of the spirit. It is to be understood not as a natural proceeding forth, but as a development of the [concept]. The [concept] sublates both the one-sidedness of the genus, which rather than reaching adequate actualization displays itself in death as a power negative to this actuality, and the opposite one-sidedness of animal existence, which is bound to singularity.149 Here we get the dialectical relationship of nature to spirit, and necessity to freedom. While it appears in human history that spirit has only harnessed nature to become independent from it, this is only an apparent “independence.” The truth is that spirit is the manifestation of the truth of




























































148

Ibid., 45. (§381) Ibid., 47. (§381) (emphasis mine) Kimberly Hutchings also draws on these passages to point out the “nonnatural” emergence of spirit. This can also be seen in Engels’ famous quote about the “leap” from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Or as Marx writes in Capital Vol. III linking freedom to socialism: “The realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper…[the] realm of natural necessity expands with [humanity’s] development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power...The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond [the realm of necessity], though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.” Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books, 1991) 959. 149

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nature. This means that the concept of spirit is also the concept (or the rationality) of nature— even if nature only relates to it externally. However, what is important to pull from this passage is that there is a qualitative leap in the transition to spirit—what was only a life cycle in nature is transformed into a history of world making in spirit. This is why Hegel says that spirit comes forth not from “flesh” and does not proceed from nature in a “natural manner.” Spirit cannot come forth merely naturally because it is not essentiality determined by necessity, but instead it is mediated by freedom i.e. the will, which cannot be comprehended “naturally.” It is only in this transition from necessity to freedom that we change from talking about the life and death of fleshy beings and move to human history and the development of worlds. In the realm of spirit, what were at first only natural inclinations become spiritualized i.e. transformed into ethical duties, for example birth and death. This has already been demonstrated in the discussion of Greek Sittlichkeit, where Antigone’s duty was to spiritualize the natural occurrence of death. In general, we can say that the kinship/family relations spiritualize the merely natural sexual and reproductive acts we see in animals and plants. It is only because humans are spiritual beings that they are gendered and not merely “sexed,” and what is initially merely natural reproduction of the species transforms into child-rearing, kinship building, and world making i.e. social reproduction. However, even if spirit demarcates itself from nature, it is always true that nature is the condition of possibility of spirit—it could not exist without it. The moment of subjective spirit demonstrates the distinctions between what is natural about human beings and what is spiritual. Looking at Hegel’s anthropology, as a moment of subjective spirit, we see how humanity emerges from natural categories and how these categories are transformed into spiritual ones. The categories Hegel delineates in the realm of subjective spirit, particularly about anthropology, are categories that are supposed to be transhistorical/prehistorical about

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humans as a species emerging from nature. This is in contrast to the realm of objective spirit, which has to do with the socio-political worlds that emerge from the subjects that develop from subjective spirit. This means that the categories of objective spirit will be tied to a particular location in time within a particular world.150 Objective spirit manifests worlds and instantiates institutions that are able to conceptualize and organize the social totality, i.e. it works towards the development of the standpoint of “absolute spirit” or absolute knowing. In absolute knowing, art, religion, and philosophy are each a “thinking” of the whole of a world, where Spirit takes itself (finally) as its object for-itself and by-itself. Spirit begins in external nature, but also in the embodied nature of human beings—but because of the distinction between nature and spirit, and spirit’s “unnatural” emergence, we can see that Hegel is no biological determinist. Even if the body, or external nature, confronts spirit as a limit, by the very nature of what it means to cognize a limit means that spirit is, in a formal sense, free from the mere necessity of nature/embodiment. For Hegel the formal essence of spirit is freedom and “on account of this formal determination, spirit can abstract from all that is external.”151 But this “abstraction” is nothing like the dualism of mind and body we find in Descartes because what it means for spirit to abstract from “all that is external” is to comprehend it. On Hegel’s monistic metaphysics, this “abstraction” does not mean “to be separate from,” as it would be in a dualistic metaphysics where the concepts of knowing and being are radically and ontologically separated. Hegel writes, “our knowing of a limit is already evidence of our being beyond it, of our unlimitedness,”152 thus nature is only finite because it does not know its limit or




























































150

Objective spirit is where the concept of historical materialism will emerge. Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Vol. I, 49. (§382) 152 As Hegel writes in the addition to §92 in the EL: “In being-there negation is still immediately identical with being, and this negation is what we call ‘limit.’ Something only is what it is within its limit and by virtue of its limit. We cannot regard limit, therefore, as merely external to being-there; on the contrary, limit totally permeates everything that is there…Humans who want to be actual must be there, and to this end they must limit themselves. Those who are too fastidious toward the finite achieve nothing real at all, but remain in the realm of the abstract 151

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its finitude. Because spirit knows its finitude (and thus maintains finitude as a moment) it is infinite.153 Spirit is then divided into three moments: (1) subjective spirit—how spirit emerges from nature through study of anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology developing free will; (2) objective spirit—Sittlichkeit or politics, spirit as it unfolds in the history of worlds; and (3) absolute spirit—world history through art-religion-philosophy. 3.3 Sex and Gender in The Philosophy of Nature and Subjective Spirit The category of sex first appears in §368 of the Philosophy of Nature, which emerges in the context the animal lifecycle and the regeneration of the genus. Here Hegel writes: This [sex] relationship is a process which begins with a need, for while the individual as a singular being is not adequate to the immanent genus, it is at the same time the identical self-relation of the genus in a single unity… the genus is present in the individual as a strain opposed to the inadequacy of its single actuality; it is present as an urge to attain its sentience in the other of its genus, to integrate itself through union with this other, and by means of this mediation to bring the genus into existence by linking itself in it. This constitutes generation.154 Animal sexual reproduction has nothing to do with gender or gendered roles—gender as a category only emerges as mediated by culture and a world, which is not yet present within the realm of nature.155 The addition to this passage goes on to describe different gonadal configurations and their role in reproduction. Hegel gives an account of an “active” [male] principle and a passive/undeveloped unity/pure materiality [the female principle] that go into actual conception. To these ends Hegel cites Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where Aristotle says “What is the material cause of man? The menses. What is the moving cause? The semen.”156




























































and peter out.” (italics mine) EL, 148. Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Vol. I, 75. (§386) 154 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature Vol. III ed. M. J. Petry (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 172-3. (§368) 155 Within the realm of spirit there is no stark divide between sex and gender. Even though sex as a category emerges within nature, when the category of sex is applied to spiritual beings that category is spiritualized such that there are no mere “biological facts” separate from a particular Sittlichkeit. 156 Ibid., 175. 153

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While the necessity of the reproduction of the species is clear, Hegel gives no argument for why there suddenly appear “female” and “male” principles that are obviously gendered in a sexist way. It is illicit that these pseudo-gender roles emerge here in the realm of animal life, as plants and animals do not consciously inhabit a world that would endow them with gender. It is suspicious that Hegel here cites Aristotle’s description of “material” and “moving” causes of man. We can explain, on Hegel’s own terms, why Aristotle would give such a description of the genesis of “man” because he was someone living in a Sittlichkeit organized around the kind of understanding of woman we see in Antigone—but Hegel should not be citing this here. Aristotle also makes the mistake of importing his culturally sexist views onto what should be descriptions of natural categories and not culturally defined categories—but given Hegel’s division of nature and spirit, this should not reappear. Here Hegel is already violating his own system and its internal understanding of natural and spiritual categories and their attendant logics in the Philosophy of Nature—and this illicit thread continues into subjective spirit. In §397 Hegel writes: In one respect the sex-relationship is a natural difference of subjectivity, a subjectivity which remains at one with itself in the sensation of what is ethical, of love, etc.; its other aspect is that it is a natural difference of activity which, by inwardly tensing itself into the opposition between universal, objective interests and the existences both of itself and the external world, first actualizes these interests and this experience into an established unity. The sex-relationship acquires its spiritual and ethical significance and determination in the family.157 We shouldn’t be surprised to see that the sex-relationship returns in the anthropology because humans as a species must regenerate. However, because we are now firmly within the realm of spirit—even if the anthropology is not as spiritualized as objective or absolute spirit—we should




























































157

G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Vol. II Anthropology (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company, 1978), 125. (§397)

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not find the same description as in the Philosophy of Nature. Indeed, here Hegel admits that with spiritual beings, even in what seems to be immediately natural like reproduction, there is a spiritual/ethical element i.e. love developed and determined within kinship relations.158 In Hegel’s 1827-1828 lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, he further explains in §397: We now examine the species-sexual relation more closely. These are natural differences between individuals, but the human being is also conditioned by a difference of a spiritual sort. The difference is that one sex remains identical with itself and does not advance to the contrast between universal and particular, whereas the other produces the unity of universal and particular through its own activity. Man and woman.159 Here we more clearly see Hegel’s illicit move: Hegel posits—with no legitimate argument or structural reason from his own system—a bifurcation within the genus of human into two subjectivities “man and woman.” This difference, Hegel says, is not only natural, but also a spiritual difference. But how could a spiritual difference enter the realm of anthropology? A spiritual difference between humans could only arise from a particular organization of Sittlichkeit i.e. in a particular socio-political configuration of the world that operates within some ideology that founds “spiritual differences.” If we understand the human in terms of being mediated by a culture (which only happens once we are the realm of objective spirit) then we no doubt will find “spiritual differences” within the single genus of human beings—most infamously, through socio-political configurations that rely on ideologies of racism and sexism for their foundations.160 This statement that bifurcates humanity according to the spiritual category of gender






























































158

It is obviously true that humans engage in sexual activity for not only spiritual reasons—and I think even on Hegel’s account there is nothing morally or inherently wrong about that. However, we should expect humans to engage in sex for “natural reasons” in addition to spiritual ones (i.e. love) given that humans have both spiritual and natural determinations—even if they are not essentially determined by nature. 159 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827-8 trans. Robert R. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 108. (emphasis mine) 160 Where racism and sexism impose, within the single genus of humanity a continuum of more and less human.

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appears within Hegel’s discussion of anthropology where there can be, on his own terms, no legitimate bifurcation of humanity. Spiritual differences arise in worlds and cultures, yet these comments of the bifurcation of humanity into “man and woman” appear in subjective spirit, where subjectivity is still being developed and has not yet coalesced within a world.161 While this is a mistake on Hegel’s part within Subjective Spirit—Hegel tentatively says it will be justified pointing towards the ethical significance of the sexes that will develop in the family within objective spirit. Now we must turn to objective spirit and the modern configuration of the family to see whether Hegel’s insistence of sexist gender roles actually organically emerge from his system and are its legitimate telos—or, whether his system ultimately points us towards a different understanding of sex and gender beyond heteronormativity. 3.4Objective Spirit: Realizing Personal, Moral, and Social Freedom Subjective spirit realizes that to know itself it must also know the world in which its self is intelligible—which is where we transition to objective spirit. Objective spirit, investigates how a self is developed by and maintains an intersubjective world. The Philosophy of Right (PR) is an account “of the different ways a subject’s activity within the world can be its own, proceeding from its own will rather than from an external source.”162 It is the process of the movement of a free will engaged in practical action, not only to actualize an external world, but also to “give reality to certain conceptions [of the self].”163 This “giving reality” to a conception of the self is how objective spirit is more concrete than subjective spirit. It should be mentioned that the PR takes place within modernity, which Hegel characterizes as having a developed civil society that






























































161

Hegel’s comments on race in the anthropology are an analogous illicit move to his comments on sex. It would be interesting to do a corresponding analysis of Hegel’s comments on race and the concept of spirit in light of decolonial philosophy and contemporary critical race theory. 162 Neuhouser, 21. 163 Ibid., 22.

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mediates between the family and the state.164 As objective spirit organizes freedom in the world, Hegel describes three forms of practical freedom: (1) personal freedom (abstract right/personhood), (2) moral freedom (morality/subjecthood), and (3) social freedom (membership in ethical life).165 Each of these forms of practical freedom involve “successfully acting upon a conception of oneself as a being who possesses a self-determining will,” either as a person, a subject, or a member of ethical life, where each of these forms represents a more concrete form of freedom.166 Hegel’s method in PR follows that of the Phenomenology in that each form of freedom is carried to its limit until it becomes clear that it is not as concrete a concept of freedom as it could be. The person of abstract right realizes that freedom cannot only be the external alienation of the will in property, but must also be an inward ability to determine what the good is for oneself. Moral subjectivity taken apart from an understanding of the world falls short because it cannot arrive at content for the good without reference to social norms and institutions.167 For my purposes of developing a concept of ‘queer spirit,’ I will focus on the development of freedom in membership within Sittlichkeit/ethical life (i.e. the third section of PR). Sittlichkeit must be able to preserve the two more abstract forms of freedom (the freedoms of personhood and moral subjectivity), while it also makes possible social freedom, which will entail a subjective and objective component. The subjective component of social freedom lies in the ability of individual social members to be self-determining, and “their self-conceptions are linked to the social roles they occupy.” 168 An individual’s participation in Sittlichkeit entails an




























































164

Further issues with “modernity” and its colonial and racialized significance will be confronted explicitly in following chapters. But here modernity on Hegel’s account will merely be described. 165 I am following Neuhouser’s outline of these three kinds of practical freedom from his book Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory. 166 Ibid., 23. 167 Ibid., 32. 168 Ibid., 33.

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appropriation of one’s life for-themselves through social institutions and social roles that also connect them with others. The appropriation of one’s self is a self-constituting activity, even though its condition of possibility is through institutions that are not the immediate product of one’s will. Because of the status of social institutions in the constitution of the self, a Hegelian account of gender will not be based around the arbitrary or “voluntary” actions of individuals taken in isolation from the social totality. I am interested in developing a Hegelian account of gender in part because I think it will help us avoid both the essentialist and voluntarist accounts of gender that prevail in contemporary gender theory. As the transfeminist Julia Serano puts it, there are to be two major feminist camps on the status of gender and the path towards liberating gender: (1) unilateral feminists, who view “sexism as a straightforward matter of women being oppressed at the hands of men,” where ‘woman/female’ as a category is a coherent whole (Irigaray could be put into this category), and (2) deconstructive feminists, (Butler is clearly in this camp) who: share the belief that the category ‘woman’ is socially constructed and therefore doesn’t exist independent of the societal norms and discourses that bring it into being. Therefore, instead of working to end sexism by highlighting the ways that women are ‘oppressed’ by men…deconstructive feminists set out to deconstruct our very notions of ‘woman’ and ‘man,’ exposing the assumptions and expectations that enable sexism.169 The deconstructive view tends to put forward a “performative” account of gender that renders gender categorization voluntary,170 underestimating the role of social institutions in the formation




























































169

Serano, 334-335. I do not think Butler in the final analysis would put forward a voluntary account of performativity, but it has to be said that many who claim a “performative” theory of gender do ascribe to a kind of volunteerism that obscures relevant historical material elements of gender formation and the role of gender in political economy. Deconstructive feminist voluntarism leads to the idea that anti-normativity or undermining the gender binary initself is immediately revolutionary, and thus can radically re-organize society and all social relations. From a Hegelian perspective, it is clear that this position is naïve insofar as it underestimates the role of social institutions in subject formation, and their ability to operate independent of individuals qua individuals. It is through the work of communities, taking up the needs and lives of their members, that are able to found new social institutions that can alter hegemonic understandings of gender and sexuality. 170

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of gender as a category itself. While these two approaches to feminism may see disparate they end up having a number of things in common: both deconstructive and unilateral feminism share the belief that (1) femininity is not a natural form of expression, but rather one that is socially imposed; (2) most women are “duped” into believing that their femininity arises intrinsically rather than due to extrinsic forces such as socialization or social constructs; (3) people who are “in the know” recognize that gender expression is artificial and easily malleable, and thus they can purposefully adopt a more radical, antisexist gender expression (e.g., androgyny, drag, etc.); and (4) because feminine women choose not to adopt these supposedly radical, antisexist gender expressions, they may be seen as enabling sexism and thus collaborating in their own oppression.171 For a Hegelian account of gender to be liberatory and in line with a queer and trans-feminism, it will need to find a way to dialectically engage these elements such that it can put forward an account of gender that neither stigmatizes femininity nor posits the gender binary in-itself to be the problem, and thus only understanding those configurations “in-between” as legitimate. On a Hegelian account, it is logically impossible for one to maintain a gendered identity in isolation of others, but this also does not mean that there must be oppressively prescriptive gender roles. Even though the conditions of possibility for gender are not up to the individual, gender must also be a product of one’s free will for it to be a legitimate expression of gender as a category of spirit—operating primarily according to laws of freedom and not primarily by laws of necessity. Social institutions are supposed to free us up from being merely concerned with necessity so that we may enjoy expressing and shaping who we are within an ethical community. This is where the subjective component of social freedom comes in as the self-conscious appropriation of one’s identity—it is only through one’s self-conscious appropriation of social institutions that gives real determinacy to our identities.172 The objective component of social




























































171 172

Serano, 336-337. Neuhouser, 33.

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freedom then lies in the organization of the social order itself in rational laws and social institutions, which constitutes “a self-determining whole, one that is more thoroughly selfsufficient than any individual on its own can in principle be.”173 These two components of social freedom within in the moment of Sittlichkeit taken together mean that “the rational ends of the social organism must be achieved in such a way that not only the whole as such but also the parts themselves (human individuals) possess wills that are undetermined by anything external to themselves.”174 It is crucial that individuals, as well as the social totality, are undetermined by completely external impositions, because this would involve the illicit naturalization of a spiritual being. This means that individuals must view themselves both as producers and reproducers of their social institutions, and social institutions must be tempered by subjective freedom. While the relationship of the individual to the whole (i.e. the state) is a fraught relationship, “forsaking egoistic ends in favor of the good of the whole can be regarded not as a sacrifice of self but as its very opposite, namely, activity through which social members achieve their selfhood by establishing for themselves identities as determinate (and therefore particular) individuals.”175 The particular identities of the members of ethical life might be parents, teachers, farmers, civil servants, etc. These identities are not merely subjective because they have a relationship to the larger social totality and are necessary to its preservation. They are life projects, but not in the existentialist sense of projects based in a radically free individualistic choice—they are mediated by the social totality (i.e. identities within ethical life are both particular and universal).176




























































173

Ibid. Even if we do not think that Hegel’s account of civil society and the state actually lead to social freedom, that there are subjective and objective requirements that must be met for social freedom to be actualized should not be controversial. Indeed, I will later say that Hegel’s account as it stands does not meet all the conditions for social freedom. My development of queer spirit will be an attempt to better meet these requirements. 174 Ibid., 48. 175 Ibid., 92-3. 176 Ibid., 304. See footnote 23.

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Thus, “the roles that socially free individuals occupy within the institutions of Sittlichkeit are constitutive of their identities in the sense that these roles provide the basic framework in terms of which individuals define themselves.”177 However, it is crucial that social roles do not become oppressive such that they unnecessarily limit the kind of conceptions of the self that members can take on. Contemporary gendered social roles are examples of social norms that do not meet the requirements of social freedom—thus a modern Sittlichkeit, which aims at social freedom, must rule them out as legitimate options. This would rule out any and all heteronormative social institutions or social configurations, and thus modern Sittlichkeit can be described as queer insofar as it takes social freedom seriously. As Hutchings writes: Desire, consent, and love are lived within the modern state, civil society, and the private sphere as effects of the constitutive fiction of modernity, that is, that the range of human experience and interaction can be understood in terms of free, discrete individuality. But desire, consent, and love can only be lived as effects of free individuality insofar as free individuality is sustained and institutionalized through actual relations of dependency which are always also relations of power.178 The identities of the members of ethical life are ultimately framed to ensure a stable and self-reproducing social totality. The telos of objective spirit is the creation of a stable totality that makes possible the development of absolute spirit (art, religion, and philosophy).179 So a further question remains: How do social institutions secure the personal and moral freedom of its constitutive individuals? Hegel’s short answer is that social institutions must be rational, where rational social institutions would have to: “(1) provide a protected social space within which individuals can fully exercise their rights as persons and moral subjects; (2) form, or educate,




























































177

Ibid., 97. (emphasis mine) Hutchings, 145. 179 However, Hegel’s description of ethical life in PR shows he was unable to actually envision a stable social totality as his social totality relies on bourgeois property relations that logically entail mass poverty and a dispossessed rabble that ultimately dissolves civil society—even as it attempts to re-stabilize itself through colonial forays. 178

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individuals into agents who are capable of self-determination; and (3) satisfy the particularity of individuals in a way that enables them to find their identities within those institutions and freely embrace them as their own.”180 This break down of the requirements for rational institutions shows that the achievement of social freedom necessitates both free space in the world and access to education for individual’s self-determination. Taken together, the access to free space and education is what allows individuals to develop who they are according to their own selfdevelopment within the context of a larger socio-political world. Social freedom “is fully realized only insofar as each social member takes the universal ends of his institutions as his own,”181 i.e. by them both knowing and willing the universal.182 On Hegel’s scheme, the institutions that are supposed to achieve social freedom are the family, civil society, and the state. The Bildung, or development and education, of individuals as subjects and members of Sittlichkeit, then takes place in each of these institutions. According to Hegel, the family is meant to give children the subjective disposition toward freedom (i.e. pull them out of their immediate natural particularity), so they can eventually self-determine their own identities, which will require them to develop self-respect for their own abilities, emerging through their parent’s love.183 Civil society shapes individuals by engaging them in socially productive labor meant to develop a state reflective of the labor of the citizens. The kind of social freedom that Hegel is constructing differs from the liberal understanding of social freedom in that it cannot be founded on an individualistic ontology. The will of a single individual cannot realize social freedom—only a rational community “considered as a whole, can come close to




























































180

Neuhouser, 312. See footnote 2. Ibid., 202. 182 This point later dooms Hegel’s project insofar as his civil society is predicated on the creation of a propertyless “rabble” who, by his own definition, cannot be counted as persons—and thus they structurally cannot will civil society. 183 Ibid., 152-154. 181

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achieving the highest ideal of practical philosophy, complete independence from determination by an other.”184 To demonstrate the kind of social institutions that would enable freedom in the realm of gender and sexuality, showing freedom of gender expression and sexuality to be constitutive of social freedom, I will focus on the transition from Moralität to Sittlichkeit leading to the first moment of ethical life: the modern family. 3.5 Gender and the Family in the Modern Bourgeois Western European Sittlichkeit In the section on Moralität we move from, “the good as Idea, as the unity of the concept of the will and the particular will…[where the good is] realized freedom, the absolute end of the world,”185 to “ethical life [which is] the Idea of freedom as the living good which has its knowledge and volition in self-consciousness, and its actuality through self-conscious action.”186 The concept of freedom has become “the existing [vorhandenen] world and the nature of selfconsciousness.”187 The formal universality of morality is met with concrete content—which is why ‘the good’ (at first only the abstract good) is now characterized as ‘the living good.’ The concrete content of the living good consists of distinctions made according to the Idea of freedom, which raise the subjective knowledge of morality to objectivity through “laws and institutions which have being in and for themselves.”188 In the realm of ethical life, we take the determinations of what is good in and for itself, i.e. what “true conscience” produced, and we






























































184

Ibid., 224. This is also why colonialism, as Hegel’s solution to the fundamental instability of civil society, will never achieve social freedom. Colonialism cannot fix the internal problems of bourgeois society as an external solution. As anti-colonial thinkers like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon have pointed out, Europe’s “civilizing mission” in building empire actually reversed any progress towards freedom—it actually sent Europeans back into barbarism—which is why Fanon calls for the destruction of Enlightenment pseudo-humanist ideals and the creation of a new humanism to move forward out of the barbarism of modernity’s coloniality. 185 PR, 157. (§129) 186 Ibid., 189. (§142) 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid., 189. (§144)

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develop an “objective system of these principles and duties.” It is the uniting of this objective system with subjectivity that furnishes us with a properly ethical point of view.189 We should remember what Hegel says in the preface about the philosophical project of PR in general: it is not about coming up with a prescriptive plan to construct a “state as it ought to be…but rather [it is about] showing how the state, as the ethical universe, should be recognized” as an “inherently rational entity.” 190 When we read the section on the family and Hegel’s corresponding insights about marriage, family property, and raising children, we should be careful to realize Hegel is not laying out what ought to be in the modern bourgeois family— but rather he is attempting to describe what is rational within that configuration insofar as it aims to satisfy particular needs within a particular Sittlichkeit. While it is true that the section on the family reflects Hegel’s sexist prejudice (as we also saw in the Phenomenology), I will argue that (particularly with the discussion of sexual difference) some of the categories that Hegel deploys are actually illicit holdovers from an unmediated “natural” understanding of sexual difference meaning they are not properly spiritualized within ethical life. As Hegel’s student Hotho notes, “it is true that the natural is in itself ingenuous, neither good nor evil; but in relation to the will as freedom and as knowledge of freedom, the natural contains the determination of the unfree, and it is therefore evil.” Accordingly, we should be highly suspicious if we notice natural determinations characterizing the social institutions and categories of ethical life. In morality we arrive at a substantial determination of the will as “duties, which are binding on the will of the individual.”191 However, because the subject has certainty of itself only in its particularity, its conscience is ambiguous. When the subject wills something contrary to the






























































189

Ibid., 164. (§137) PR, 21. 191 Ibid., 191. (§148) 190

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universality of the will, according to its will as only particular (i.e. in terms of uneducated inclination, desire, etc.), it is an evil will.192 In the transition to ethical life, the subjective knowledge of morality is given objectivity through laws, institutions, and social norms. Laws and institutions are the apparatuses through which a living ethical community (i.e. ethical substance) is able to recognize the freedom of individuals in both private and public matters.193 Hegel in §40 of Abstract Right writes, “it will later be shown that the substantial basis of family relationships is […] the surrender of personality,” this is because “a right based on contract is not a right over a person, but only over something external to the person…i.e. always a thing.”194 Within the family one does not have rights over others, instead one has ethical duties to others. The family is the “immediate substantiality of spirit,” and as such, it has “as its determination the spirit’s feeling [Emfindung] of its own unity, which is love.”195 The love that binds the family together is not the product of a contract, but a disposition “to have selfconsciousness of one’s individuality within this unity as essentiality, which has being in and for itself, so that one is present in it not as an independent person but as a member.”196 This means that to be a member of the family necessarily means to give up one’s personality (and rights based discourse in general), so that the family is not a collection of independent persons, but an ethical unity—which is later described as uniting into a single person as it operates within civil society.197 In this ethical unity, subjects are respected as particular subjects, but not particular in the one-sided inward fashion of morality. The “immense contradiction of love,” is that we are




























































192

Ibid., 169. (§139) See §156. 194 Ibid., 72. (§40) 195 Ibid., 199. (§158) 196 Ibid., 199. (§158) 197 Of course the representative of this single person will be the father of the house and his sons. 193

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respected as particular subjects that limit ourselves with reference to others, while we nonetheless remain ourselves in this limitation.198 Individual rights re-emerge and take on legal form “only when the family begins to dissolve,” and the individual’s disposition changes from dependency on the family to “self-sufficiency” as a member of civil society.199 Thus the moments of the family are as follows: (a) the instantiation through marriage, (b) the development of communal family resources, and (c) the upbringing of children, which is the beginning of the end of the family. Marriage transforms what for animals is a merely a “natural union,” i.e. the project of propagating the species, into a “spiritual union, into self-conscious love.”200 Marriage, then, is explicitly not a contract that would bring together two persons who nonetheless remain particular in the abstract union of a contract.201 While the subjective origin of marriage lies in the inclinations of the partners who as particular individuals have particular goals in mind (e.g. becoming parents), the objective origin of marriage is “the free consent of the persons concerned, and in particular their consent to constitute a single person and to give up their natural and individual personalities.”202 Marriage is an end-in-itself and not determined by particular goals made in advance by the partners. This means it can be neither an arranged marriage where






























































198

This is explained nicely in Hotho’s note to §7 of the introduction: we possess the concrete concept of freedom “in the form of feeling [Empfindung], for example in friendship and love. Here, we are not one-sidedly within ourselves [as in subjectivity from the point of view of morality], but willingly limit ourselves with reference to an other, even while knowing ourselves in this limitation as ourselves.” (Ibid., 42). 199 Ibid., 200. (§159) 200 Ibid., 201. (§161) 201 This is contra Kant’s description of marriage as the contracting out of sexual organs for the other’s use as explained in his Metaphysics of Morals. 202 Ibid., 201. (§162)

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partners do not freely consent to marry, nor the product of contingent and capricious “love.”203 In other words, this kind of marriage is a product of rechtlich sittliche love.204 Here we begin to see how embodiment interacts with the will concretely. As in the Phenomenology, and Hegel explicitly mentions Antigone again on this point, it turns out that woman’s role in ethical life ends in maintaining the family and she does not continue into the realm of civil society. As mentioned in Griesheim’s addition to §164, “a girl’s vocation [Bestimmung] consists essentially only in the marital relationship.” So, the role of the binary division of the sexes/genders achieves ethical significance in marriage: “the natural determinacy of the two sexes acquires an intellectual and ethical significance by virtue of its rationality.”205 What constitutes each sex’s “rationality” is determined by each sex’s role to facilitate “concrete unity” and stability within the ethical community. In the next section (§166), Hegel further explains that the male sex “divides itself up into personal self-sufficiency with being for itself and the knowledge and volition of free universality, i.e. into the self-consciousness of the conceptual thought and the volition of the objective and ultimate end [which continues outside the family, through civil society and the state].”206 While the female sex has its unity in concrete individuality and feeling, i.e. love within the family. Thus men have their substantial life in learning, work, and struggle with the external world in the state, while women’s substantial life is in the family and the family’s piety (as seen in Antigone). The distinction between men and women is even more crudely put in Hotho and Griesheim’s addition




























































203

However, this does not rule out every instance of arranged marriages, rather it rules out the instances where the marriage partners did not consent to the arranged marriage. As long as someone consciously chooses to have an arranged marriage and gives consent to their parents to set this up, on Hegel’s account of freedom we can say this is a completely legitimate manifestation of one’s social freedom. This point is especially critical in light of many Westerner’s racist “righteous indignation” against arranged marriage in other parts of the world—as if the mainstream Western paradigm of marriage was better example of social freedom. 204 Griesheim’s note to §161. 205 Ibid., 206. (§165) 206 Ibid., 206. (§166)

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to §166. Here they say women cannot be in government positions because they only make decisions based on “contingent inclination and opinion,” women have “insights, tastes, and delicacy,” but are not fit for philosophy or the “higher sciences,” and finally the analogy that women are more like plants (peaceful, passive, their knowledge is “imperceptibly” gathered) and men are more like animals. What is ethical about marriage207 (and thus determined according to the Idea of freedom) is that individuals are liberated from being one-sidedly particular (as in morality) through their free consent to self-limitation in “love, trust, and the sharing of the whole of individual existence.”208 The ethical bond of marriage becomes actualized and recognized by the community with the consummation of the marriage ceremony—Hegel, against some of his contemporaries, does think the actual marriage ceremony is a necessary part of marriage (§164). However, because there is a subjective moment of marriage, it is inherently unstable and prone to dissolution—so divorce is ethically sound on this account (even if Hegel urges divorce be avoided). Incest, on the other hand, is logically excluded because “what is to be united must first be separate,”209 and marriage’s purpose is to create a new ethical union. The inward unity and love between marriage partners is not yet fully in existence until parenthood. Children then become the existence of the family that “has being for itself, and an






























































207

See Michael Thomas Taylor, “Right Queer: Hegel’s Philosophy of Marriage.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 3, no. 2 (November 15, 2013) for a great description of how we can give a radical queer reading of Hegel’s account of marriage. What is special about Hegel’s method in giving his account of marriage, which doubtless carries patriarchal and sexist overtones, is that nonetheless every aspect of the family is supposed to serve the realization of freedom within spirit and the self-development of its members. As Taylor concludes, “Hegel turns to marriage in order to determine the ethical significance of the dependency and inequality that arise through desire, birth, and death; through the public intelligibility of this intimacy as freely chosen kinship. As a public recognition of private freedoms, this conception of marriage cuts across distinctions between liberal and communitarian modes of political thought. Thus, his philosophy of marriage can also be read as a philosophy of a queer body politic.” (Taylor, 21) 208 Ibid., 202. (§163) 209 Hotho’s addition to §168 (Ibid., 208).

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object [Gegenstand] which they [i.e. the parents] love as their love and their substantial existence.”210 In the communal family property, the parents see their love as an external thing, and it is only in having children that they see their unity in a spiritual form. When children become “free personalities,” finally recognized as legal persons capable of holding property and creating their own families, the family is ethically dissolved. Sons become heads of new families and daughters become wives.211 From here we transition to civil society, where the family disintegrates into a plurality of families “whose relation to one another is in general that of selfsufficient concrete persons and consequently of an external kind.”212 Public schools treat the child according to “general determinations,” and subjecting the child to “general rules,” instead of the particularized love of the family which helps them to “transition from the family to civil society.”213 Civil society consists of taking the “single persons” created by each familial unity and making them independent in their self-sufficient and self-determined particularity. 3.6 Queer Spirit While I am not trying to discount Hegel’s severely sexist characterizations of men and women in §165 and §166, the further additions by Hotho and Griesheim are particularly extreme and unwarranted. We should note that while in these few sections the distinction between men and women is very prominent, there is no distinction between gender or sex in the discussion of children, who are pivotal in completing the moment of the family and moving forward to civil society. Additionally, in the description children’s eduation, there is no specifically gendered






























































210

Ibid., 210. (§173) It is interesting to note that Hegel never says that children have to be biologically related to the parents. It does not seem that adoption or surrogacy is excluded here—and notwithstanding the assumed heteronormativity of families in his discussion, there is room for other familial formations if biological procreation is not the spiritual basis of the family. 211 Ibid., 214. (§177) 212 Ibid., 219. (§181) 213 Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Vol. II Anthropology, 115. (addition to §396)

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education.214 Hegel says that the education of children is to bring them out of their “natural immediacy,” and consequently, it is the mother who is delineated this task—which would not make the natural “immediacy” of women in the plant analogy make sense. On the one hand, if women were doomed to merely natural immediacy how would they be able to teach the not yet gendered children the subjective disposition to freedom and self-determination of their identity? Even if this process of “raising children from their natural immediacy” does not happen in the family alone, as public education is also crucial, the parents (and for Hegel especially the mother) plays no small role. The only way Hegel can get away with a non-differentiated education of children and maintain that women as the main childrearers are “plant-like” and unable to impart a spiritualized education for their children, is if Hegel takes the position that (1) sex and gender are one and the same and (2) that one’s biological/chromosomal structure immediately determines one’s gender. The first is ruled out because of Hegel’s own account of sex and gender within subjective and objective spirit, where it is clear they are categorically different. In terms of the second point, while it is true children would not need to have specifically gendered upbringing if one’s gender was biologically determined, this too is ruled out by Hegel’s own system because gender is squarely placed as a category of spirit mediated by a culture—i.e. it does emerge from nature without reference to a particular Bildung within a specific Sittlichkeit. As Hegel explains the development of spirit, subjective spirit does not arise immediately from a biological blueprint, but rather is the product of a mediating and self-determining will within a socio-political community. It is because of the presence of this free will that children must be educated in the first place—to prepare them to be both moral subjects and members of




























































214

Contra Rousseau’s Emile that calls for a completely separate education of boys and girls.

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ethical life. Thus either children are born innately with their gendered education blue print, or a specifically gendered division of education would be necessary to maintain Hegel’s posited ontological sexual difference. These moves on Hegel’s part illogically take natural determinations as essentially characterizing ethical institutions. Additionally, according to Hegel’s own distinctions between nature and spirit, no particular gender could be decided a priori as the one who is “determined” biologically to be the childrearer. To say that women are trans-historically socially determined to be care takers illicitly brings back characteristics of the immediacy of Greek Sittlichkeit and does not realize the full potential of freedom in family relations within modernity.215 Biologistic-determinist arguments about sex and gender end up being incoherent given Hegel’s metaphysics, granted that in Sittlichkeit we are in the realm of the actualization of spirit—and spirit is not a bone.216 Spirit comes to terms with the laws of nature as limits, but laws of nature do not determine spirit. Because Hegel does not make a distinction in this text between sex and gender, we lose sight of the distinctions between categories of nature and spirit (i.e. sex and gender) and the ways that natural categories are mediated within the realm of spirit. Even if these categories are only analytic, and you never find spirit without nature, the nature/spirit distinction is important to keep in mind so that we don’t forget the fact that spirit appropriates nature to determine itself. Laws of freedom, and not necessity, are at play in spirit—which is why gender emerges as a category only in spirit, where previously in Hegel’s work on nature the focus is on “sex” understood in terms of merely reproducing a species. Gender emerges as a further determination of the free will and is a further expression of freedom






























































215 216

Which explains why Hegel brings back Antigone to make one more appearance in the PR. PS, §343.

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in spiritual beings—humans are gendered because they spiritualize and give meaning to their bodies. While it would be wrong to delineate in advance what kinds of organizations of gender there should be (and given Hegel’s own project he should not be interested in saying what “ought to be” but rather only what is in a speculative sense), ‘gender’ as a category can be provisionally defined as the appropriation of one’s body and one’s social roles—which is constituted by subjective and objective components that produce and reproduce one’s identity within a sociopolitical space.217 Defined in this way we can see that talking about gender only makes sense when speaking of beings within the realm of spirit and that what kinds of organizations of gender exist and are recognized by a particular Sittlichkeit, which will necessarily be context dependent within a mode of production within a particular historically and geographically situated world. Hegel’s bringing back of the significance of sexual difference in its immediacy and “the eternal irony of women” from the moment of Antigone in his notes to §166 is a mistake on multiple counts. In the first place, he forgets what was actually preserved from Greek Sittlichkeit, which was the feeling of unity and love of the social totality—which was lost in the Roman Sittlichkeit. The modern configuration of the family is supposed to be founded on the free consent of partners to build a life together as a unity is what makes the mutual recognition in love possible—as Hegel so beautifully describes it earlier. This rechtlich sittliche love, which helps to hold together modern Sittlichkeit, is the basis for trust and stability. Secondly, because he does not see the significance for the development of freedom in the distinction between the






























































217

This provisional definition of gender will be made more concrete in the following chapters. In this chapter what is crucial is the description of the way in which gender is a category of freedom shaped within a socio-political context with both subjective and objective components. In the following chapters I will talk at length about its role under a capitalist mode of production and its role as a meaningful aesthetic valuation of the body to be liberated from alienation under capitalism.

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categories of sex and gender, he misses his own insight that raising children is not about assigning genders and then educating them according to externally imposed gendered norms. As we saw earlier in the section on social freedom, identity within ethical life must be selfdetermined, and gender identity is no less constitutive of one’s self-determination. Thus, Hegel is right to say that what raising children is about is enabling them to become self-determining individuals that understand themselves within a larger socio-political context. Sex and gender appeared as an immediate identity in Greek Sittlichkeit because of its overall character of immediacy—but within modernity, which is supposed to be characterized by the mediation of free will, it can only be a mistake to conflate sex and gender, or better the concepts of bodies and gender.218 Human bodies are always gendered, but gender is only a product of a spiritualization of the body through an individual’s self-determination within a particular Sittlichkeit that renders certain configurations of gender meaningful and intelligible. While it is true that what configurations gender are socially and politically recognized will be dependent on the social institutions in place, if we are trying to construct rational social institutions (on Hegel’s terms) then they would have to recognize all gender expressions that were legitimate functions of free will. This would mean that fully rational social institutions could not be predicated on the suppression of legitimate gender identities.219 This last point is what makes social institutions legitimate or rechtlich functions of the free will. Following this understanding of rechtlich gender configurations, we would be able to rule out concepts of masculinity that relied on the




























































218

As Butler rightly points out, “sex” as we generally understand it is also culturally constructed, however I think it is still a useful distinction (sex/gender) insofar as it is used along the Hegelian lines of nature and spirit—but it might be better to then make the distinction between the categories of what confronts us externally such as our bodies and what emerges from us, i.e. the valuation and configuration of our body in some gendered expression. 219 Where legitimate gender identities would not include toxic masculinity predicated on the subjection of femininity or alternative configurations of masculinity.

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subjection of femininity, femininity conceptualized as reduced freedom compared to masculinity, biologized conceptions of manhood or womanhood, and a heteronormative understandings of the structure of desire. It turns out that to fully realize the concept of freedom, spirit must be queer, where queer is not defined abstractly or only negatively as “anything or everything” or “anything different from the norm.” So far I have outlined a positive and concrete account of queer as I use it to characterize a socio-political configuration that founds social freedom such that gender functions according to its concept as a determination of freedom. A queer Sittlichkeit does not legitimate social norms and institutions that relied on oppressive configurations of gender and sexuality. ‘Queer,’ in this sense, will imply a positive political project that aims towards the transformation of social norms and institutions to bring about a queer Sittlichkeit into concrete existence. On this account, a queer understanding of freedom can only be called liberatory insofar as it does not remain an abstract idea of freedom—meaning merely negative or anti-normative definitions of ‘queer’ do not deserve the name ‘queer’ on my account.220 Given this account of gender and freedom, a Hegelian account of human sexuality will function in a similar way. While it remains true that humans must reproduce themselves to continue the species—laws of nature/necessity are not the main forces developing human sexuality (i.e. spiritualized nature). Because humans are spiritual beings whose gender is ultimately a product of their shaping, their choices about their sexuality is also a function of their free will. Even though one’s Sittlichkeit will offer only a finite set of gender configurations, this




























































220

Negative definitions of “queer,” do not deserve the name ‘queer’ because their lack of positive content means they can be filled in with any kind of political project. Negative conceptions of queer are easily co-opted by oppressive political regimes (e.g. the “homonormative” regimes characteristic of Western neoliberal societies, the gay flavor of white supremacy we see in the “gayborhoods” of San Francisco and NYC, the recent “twinks for Trump” phenomenon, and the pinkwashing practices of the US and Israel to cover over genocidal and colonial political tactics justified by their “progressive gay friendly society”).

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does not have to translate to prescriptive gender roles, and indeed true freedom is only a function of finitude. A Hegelian account of gender and sexuality rules out any “born this way” argument about sexuality. Spiritual beings are not born with a preset gender or sexual orientation, rather, these aspects of their identity emerge as they grow up and further develop all aspects of their identity—and these aspects will probably change multiple times throughout their life. A Hegelian account of “the subject,” then, is not the “stable subject” who is the main target of Butlerian criticism—a spiritual being is not “fixed” or “stable” by definition. Butler’s account of sex/gender performativity is for the most part amenable to a Hegelian account, but the advantage of a Hegelian account is that it explicitly rules out configurations of gender and sexuality that would be predicated on the subjection of others while ruling out voluntarist approaches to gender. To reiterate, heteronormativity and prescribed gender roles are ruled out as legitimate on a Hegelian account because they either (1) rely on biological/natural determinations; (2) they are tied social norms that are not rational because they try to externally force individuals to be something they themselves have not willed; meaning (3) they are not fully mediated by free will and thus produce an impoverished conception of the self. The telos of spirit is to “know itself,” which means it cannot simply immediately take as true what is given as the “truth” (like a sex/gender assignment at birth)—as that would be an example of mere Verstand and not Vernunft, thus actualizing freedom on Hegel’s account requires queer spirit.221 With Irigaray we see that it is necessity to think through the ontological, epistemic, and political implications of the historical exclusion of women from the public sphere and the category of rational beings more generally—and we take her concept of phallogocentrism to be a useful tool to talk about




























































221

For Hegel Verstand is mere understanding and Vernunft is speculative/philosophical knowledge.

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political ontologies and epistemologies that attempt operate at the expense of the subjection women. However, if we want to further develop the potential liberatory and revolutionary aspects of Hegelian metaphysics we must be careful not to conflate Hegel’s conceptual account of moments of abstract freedom’s development into concrete freedom with the contingent fact that past and present organizations of society have never realized freedom on the level of the social totality. We must resist the temptation to become fixed on women’s subjection under particular historical configurations of Sittlichkeit and falsely assert a trans-historical form to women’s subjection. Past and current exploitation, oppression, and subjection of women is a function of the historically contingent institutions and social norms that are used to meet the needs of societies while it attempts to establish some form of social stability to sustain and reproduce various forms of social life. In other words, we should maintain a historical and material analysis of social, economic, and political asymmetries and inequalities so that we can think through what kind of transformations a particular Sittlichkeit would need to undergo to make social freedom actual. Because it is the nature of spiritual beings to mediate their relationship with nature, there will be many forms of life and possible organizations of Sittlichkeit. 3.7 The Abstract Freedom of Hegel’s Political Economy Understanding the political implications of Hegel’s metaphysics involves working towards a concrete account of the social and political conditions necessary to realize freedom for the social totality, which will also imply thinking in terms of the global social totality. As the historical legacies of colonialism and the global capitalist economic order unite the fate of many different social groups, our current moment demands a thinking beyond the boundaries and categories of the sovereign nation-states of Western liberal political theory. Given Hegel’s

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political philosophy as presented in the PR, he is only able to reveal the particular and peculiar rationality of social institutions within modern colonial European nation-states. His account of social freedom as enabled within capitalist metropoles does not measure up to his own account of social norms and institutions characterized as “rational” insofar as they do not facilitate the further realization of concrete social freedom. Hegel’s account only offers an abstract outline social freedom and its processes of development through the dialectics and structures of selfconsciousness, the nature of social identities, intuitions, and the roles of these elements social reproduction. Hegel’s political philosophy, as it stands, does not have the resources within it to fill in its own concept of freedom with determinate content. In order to give determinate content to the concepts of personal, moral, and social freedom, Hegel would have needed to work out the social relations within a Sittlichkeit that operated on universally rational terms. Social and political freedom, as delineated in the PR, does not extend to all people—and if it does, it only extends to them selectively and differentially. While the exact social ontology accompanying Hegel’s political theory of the modern state remains an absent presence in the PR, it is less obscured in his other works. The substratum of Hegel’s account of freedom, as it is to be developed by the collective free will of intersubjectivity self-conscious world-making beings, relies on a particular conception of the human developed in Hegel’s philosophical anthropology in the Encyclopedia. Hegel’s political philosophy relies on a biological-evolutionary conception of the human which makes possible a conception of humanity existing in evolutionary degrees. Sylvia Wynter, a Jamaican decolonial humanist thinker, will call this the Chain of Being, which results from world historical shifts in social ontology from the Medieval religious subject, to the secular political subject of the Enlightenment, and finally to the Darwinian biological-organism/homo-economicus of

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contemporary political theory. The Chain of Being articulates a continuum of normative moral and political value on which individuals and social groups are judged. The content and specific organization of the modern Western European conception of humanity has developed from both old and newly articulated perniciously un-dialectical dehumanized concepts of the Other—anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness are both very new and very old. While the conditions under which these dehumanizing concepts persist have changed since their inception, their abstract social function has largely remained the same. These concepts are constitutive of a Sittlichkeit whose structures secure social freedoms only for particular social groups/a particular ethno-class which exists at the expense of the rest of the social totality.222 While Marx will say that all history is the history of class struggle, we could translate this into Hegelian terms as “all history is the history of the struggle for the totality of Spirit to exist under conditions of concrete freedom.” Ossified, dehumanizing, ahistorical, and un-dialectical conceptions of “the Other” emerge are “irrational” in Hegelian terms insofar as they miss the mark of developing universal conditions of freedom by creating distorted social norms and institutions that dehumanize and despiritualize human/spiritual beings. From a Hegelian perspective, we can see that these dehumanizing concepts have acted as short term solutions working to stabilize fundamentally asymmetrical power relations by naturalizing them and presenting them (depending on the time and place) as divine, natural, or biological-scientific facts meant to prevent those most currently dispossessed from reorganizing power to their benefit. Taking up Hegel’s dialectical method, and




























































222

I hesitate to even call this a situation of “freedom for a few,” because on Hegel’s terms freedom is secured by Recht. And as Rousseau famously argues in the Social Contract, anything secured through brute force is not secured by right—and as Hegel would agree if it cannot be freely willed it isn’t about freedom. To put it in a cliché manner, freedom gained through anything but we might term a “Just Sittlichkeit,” that founds the social conditions necessary for the realization of freedom for all of the social totality, or to foreshadow the Marxian and Decolonial humanist imperative for the concrete conditions freedom for all of humanity.

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broadly his concepts of freedom, Marx illuminates these mystifications and reifications of social relations posited as “unmediated ahistorical natural facts,” showing them to be mediated historical results of struggle over the conditions of humanity’s reproduction. In working out his theory of alienation, Marx develops a normative political philosophy that articulates a correlate political project (loosely in the terms of Hegelian metaphysics) founding the conditions of possibility for freedom for the social totality. Through this de-mystifying process Marx exposes “civilized bourgeois social relations” of Hegel’s modern state to actually be barbaric and dehumanizing. Hegel’s political theory presents us with only an abstract and particular account of freedom under civil rights secured by the modern European nation-state—and even these “freedoms” are only achieved through degrading social condition that actively under develops and inhibits the development of freedom for the social totality (i.e. its majority, the working class). To continue to address the contradictions of modern freedom as laid out in the PR, I turn to Marx’s philosophical humanism as useful normative standard and a tool for analyzing gender as a category of freedom. I will to show Marx’s humanism to operate within a Hegelian account of gender and queer freedom in order to articulate a Queer Marxian Humanism.


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Chapter 2 Queer Marxian Humanism When the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-out of [humanity’s] creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the endin-itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where [humans] [do] not reproduce [themselves] in one specificity, but produc[e] [their] totality? Strives not to remain something [they have] become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics—and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds—this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end.

-Karl Marx from Grundrisse223 In saving the Hegelian dialectic from what Marx called Hegel’s ‘dehumanization’ of the Idea, as if its selfdetermination were mere thought rather than human beings thinking and acting, Marx dug deep into revolution…revolutionary praxis—revolutionary ruthless critique of all that exists. -Raya Dunayevskaya from Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution 224

I. Introduction: The Marx-Hegel Connection In the last chapter I outlined a Hegelian account of gender as the following: gender is a category of freedom instantiated by the self-appropriation of one’s self, body, and social roles; these are given determinate content by the subjective and objective components of the surrounding socio-political world. As demonstrated with Antigone in the Phenomenology, the kinds of configurations of gender rendered intelligible and meaningful are delimited by the attendant mode of production and the particular social division of labor within that Sittlichkeit. While I came to the conclusion that any Sittlichkeit which fully realized personal, moral, and social freedom would have to be characterized as queer—insofar as it would necessarily






























































223

Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 488. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982), xi.

224

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eliminate heteronormative configurations of gender—a properly queer Sittlichkeit could not be realized from the modern Sittlichkeit of the Philosophy of Right (PR) for a number of reasons. While the PR does well to show that for the concept of freedom to be realized there must exist a Sittlichkeit that enables personal, moral, and social freedom—the limits of Hegel’s political theory are the limits of bourgeois political economy, as Marx would say of economists like David Ricardo, Jean-Baptist Say, and Adam Smith.225 Hegel exposes some of the major contradictions of modern civil society and the nation-state, but he was unable to see past these contradictions. While Hegel’s insight about the necessity of social freedom is a valuable insight for any liberatory political philosophy, we must also acknowledge that the concept of social freedom is not yet concrete in the PR due to the relegation of women to the domestic sphere, the creation of what Hegel terms “the rabble,”226 and the nation-state’s reliance on colonial and imperial forays to assuage its own internal crises. The Hegelian concept of freedom will not be fully realized until the conditions of possibility are in place for a world where social contradictions are not primarily mediated by alienation, exploitation, oppression, or colonial subjection. In order to delineate the conditions necessary for a queer Sittlichkeit, we will need to take a closer look at the social division of labor, what kinds of configurations of gender are






























































225

As Marx writes, bourgeois political economy “begins with the fact of private property; it does not explain it.” Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (EPM), trans. T.B. Bottomore in Marx’s Concept of Man, edited by Erich Fromm, (New York: Continuum, 2004), 78. 226 Hegel writes, (§244) “When a large mass of people sinks below the level of a certain standard of living - which automatically regulates itself at the level necessary for a member of the society in question - that feeling of right, integrity [Rechtlichkeit], and honor which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity and work is lost. This leads to the creation of a rabble, which in turn makes it much easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.” G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (PR), ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 257. What is interesting about Hegel’s category of “the rabble” it that it is about a group of people who are not merely poor—but a group so immiserated they no longer understand themselves to be a part of the Sittlichkeit, their material circumstances have quantitatively decreased to such an extent that they experience a qualitative change in their consciousness. As Shlomo Avineri explains, “it is only when poverty reaches this qualitative dimension of exclusion that a rabble (Pöbel) is created - a heap of human beings utterly atomized and alienated from society, feeling no allegiance to it and no longer even wishing to be integrated into it.” Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 150.

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rendered meaningful or not meaningful given capitalism as our current mode of production, and what changes would need to be made to our current Sittlichkeit for it to become queer. While the literature on Marx’s connections and breaks with Hegel is enormous, I am not interested in assessing all the specificities of Marx’s metaphysics and what he says about his relationship to Hegel. Instead, I am interested in seeing how Marx normatively deploys Hegel’s dialectical method in his analysis of gender, sexuality, and the family and the ways in which these categories are currently co-imbricated within capitalism and how their liberation and disalienation is a necessary moment of transitioning to a queer socialist/communist Sittlichkeit.227 As far as Marx is concerned, this will entail (at least) the following: (1) the abolition of alienated labor (i.e. abstract labor); (2) the abolition of labor in the form of wage-labor; (3) the abolition of the division between mental and manual labor228; and (4) the abolition of the divisions between ‘man’ and ‘woman’229—which, I will point out, portends the necessity of queer spirit.230 If Marx is able to offer us the beginnings of a “new humanism” able to accommodate queer spirit and break away from a static understanding of “human nature,” it is because he utilizes Hegelian dialectics. In his application of Hegel’s dialectical method, Marx demonstrates the social and historical nature of the categories of gender and sexuality. Thus, the crucial insight




























































227

Following Peter Hudis, I want to point out that for Marx, “the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’—along with ‘free association,’ ‘society of free individuality,’ or simply ‘the new society’—are completely interchangeable.” Peter Hudis Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 190. 228 c.f. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998). 229 Hudis, 202. 230 Addressing points (1) and (2) will involve altering the ways in which we organize our time, both quantitatively and qualitatively. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse: “The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition 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.” Marx, Grundrisse, 705-6.

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made by Marx is the following: if gender and sexuality are social and historical, then they are categories that must be understood as products of human freedom and not aspects of natural determination. The dialectical method offers us “an awareness that the beginning is not merely the empirical ‘given,’ that the immediate is itself a mediated result, and that the further developments then lead to the concept of the concrete as concrete totality, the new concrete which contains self-differentiation.”231 This method taken with a Hegelian definition of freedom which understands freedom through self-determination as the sublation [Aufhebung] of necessity (not elimination of necessity), is why Marx will say that “the realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends.”232 This will only be achieved when humanity acts collectively to manifest the true meaning of a legitimate humanism—the full liberation of the social totality. On a Marxian humanist account, the realm of freedom begins where human gender and sexuality determined by necessity and external experience ends—and depending on how much progress we have made towards this will determine in part how far we have come in humanizing alienated social relations, founding truly human history. As Dunayevskaya writes, “The historic rationality Marx discovered as immanent in the hope of people meant, in turn, that it is living people who work out the meaning of philosophy by making the theory of liberation and the struggle to be free a unity. So much is free man the true subject of history that Marx called the period in which we lived, and the one in which we still live, the prehistory of mankind.233 In the last section of this chapter I will address some of the criticisms of Friedrich Engels’ work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in terms of his analysis of gender,






























































231

Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution, (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003), 30. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, trans. David Fernbach, (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 959. 233 Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution, 74. 232

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sexuality, and intimate/romantic relationships. I will argue that while this text has numerous theoretical issues, in some surprising ways, it also reveals Engels as forward thinking insofar as he was able to point out what would need to be abolished to organize relationships (erotic, familial, and comradely) in a humanized way. This chapter will conclude with the following claims: (1) capitalism as a mode of production inhibits the realization of a queer Sittlichkeit; (2) queer liberation (in the sense argued for in the previous chapter) would require the end of capitalism, and (3) queer liberation (i.e. the end of heteronormativity and the alienation of gender and sexuality under capitalism) should be a fundamental part of any socialist/communist restructuring of social relations.234

II. Marx as a Queer Feminist Hegelian While some feminists have dismissed Marx and Marxism as an inadequate ally for feminist political and philosophical thought, Raya Dunayevskaya writes in her book Women’s Liberation and the Dialectic of Revolution: The young Marx [developed]…a whole philosophy of human liberation deeply rooted both in class struggles and in that most fundamental relationship, Man/Woman. Marx helped organize women’s movements, not only for the right to vote, but for full freedom. Eighty full pages on women and child labor went into Capital, Vol. 1, not only as description and resistance, but, as Marx expressed it when he drew the whole work to a conclusion, ‘the new passions and new forces’ that would produce the ‘negation of the negation,’ that is to say, become the ‘grave diggers’ of capitalism, creating a whole new society where ‘the development of human power is its own end.235






























































234

I recognize that there are many different traditions of humanism, even within Marxist thought. In this chapter I only focus on what can be derived from Marx’s work and his relationship to Hegelian philosophy for my account of Marxian humanism. In the following chapters I will engage with other Marxist humanists, like Dunayevskaya, and others who I will term “decolonial humanists,” such as Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, C. L. R. James, and Sylvia Wynter. 235 Raya Dunayevskaya, Women’s Liberation and the Dialectic of Revolution, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1958), 81.

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Here Dunayevskaya is able to point out that women’s liberation is an essential aspect of Marx’s overall philosophy of revolution—without which, we will not be able to adequately “negate the negation” of capitalism and instantiate a new social order taking human freedom as its telos. Just as some of the feminist criticisms of Hegel were not as cut and dry as they purported to be—so too with Marx.236 What smoothly connects Hegel and Marx for my purposes is (1) their dialectical approach to nature and the human world and (2) their understanding of overcoming alienation in terms of fully spiritualizing/humanizing nature. I will show feminist Marxism to be possible just as feminist Hegelianism is possible. Given Marx’s philosophical and political commitments—to the dialectical method, the relationship between necessity and freedom, and his account of humanism—maintaining hierarchical gender relations is ethically and politically untenable if we are trying to fully develop what it means to be human. Hegel showed that the categories of gender and sexuality are to be understood as categories of freedom and not necessity and Marx adds to this theoretical claim is the positive political project of communism grounded in humanism and Hegelian metaphysics. Marx’s positive political project aims to instantiate the necessary social and material conditions for the full development of human freedom and thus instantiate the preconditions necessary for the development of queer spirit/Sittlichkeit. 2.1 Marx’s Human/Nature Distinction and the Concept of Species-Being While Marx will use the language of “humanism,” and Hegel uses the language of Spirit/Geist, what Marx takes to be “human” is like Spirit insofar as it can be characterized as a




























































236

As we saw in the Phenomenology, Antigone and Creon were both spiritual beings even if woman was relegated to uphold the “divine law” which spiritualizes merely natural phenomena. And in the Philosophy of Right we see the need for the parental relationship to be characterized by mutual recognition and love, which serves as the basis of not only the unity of the family—as it ends in children—but also the basis of what holds the state as a whole together. ‘Woman’ is necessary to the realization of social freedom until we are able to get beyond a binary system of organizing gender.

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subject-object.237 For Marx, humans are objectively determined “natural” beings (as a being-initself), while they are also free, self-transcending, and self-creating beings (as a being-for-itself), with needs and qualities beyond natural “necessity.” As Heather Brown puts it, for Marx: “Objectively, humans are ‘conditioned and limited being[s]’ dependent upon other objects for their survival. Thus, humans cannot be pure subjects in any real sense: instead, objects act upon and mould [sic] them as well…[and in terms of human’s subjectivity] while humans have needs that can be satisfied by other objects in nature, these needs are satisfied in particular, human ways based upon the standards of time.”238 This rules out any abstract existentialist stance that might say that humanity’s telos is pure transcendence and separation from all that is “natural.” Nature and necessity will always be in some relationship with humans—thus there is no “pure subject” above nature. However, human needs differ from the needs of plants or animals in the sense that their needs are not merely natural. Human needs take on social and historical qualities because humans have a hand in shaping their relationship to nature and necessity, determining what forms their need satisfaction will take. As Mehmet Tabak further describes Marx’s conception of “human nature”: “Humans have historical nature because they assert their powers to modify nature and themselves. They have a natural history because history is a result of their actions, and the results of their actions constitute their nature as their existence. They have a historical






























































237

For an explanation of what a “subject-object” is in Hegelian terms see section 3.2 of chapter 1. For another way of describing Marx’s dialectical (and ultimately Hegelian) understanding of the human, Mehmet Tabak writes: “Marx, paralleling Hegel’s logic, believes that humans are both determined and determining. This suggests a dialectical contradiction, which is resolved with two additional dialectical moves: First, the proposition that humans are both determined and determining implies that they are collectively the object and the subject of social and historical processes. This dialectical contradiction requires us to treat these processes as the self-determination of the subject. Second, this dialectical contradiction can exist only as a process of self-determination.” Mehmet Tabak, Dialectics of Human Nature in Marx’s Philosophy, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 6. 238 Heather Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 20.

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nature and natural history because they have needs or are compelled by necessity.239 Because humans can be said to have both a historical nature and natural history, Marx and Engels in The German Ideology describe humans as being both of the subject and object of history, thus human’s actual existence and their relationship to nature constitutes the first premise of history.240 Thus Tabak writes, “Humans, in the act of satisfying their needs, transforms themselves both objectively and subjectively. They determine themselves, and in this sense, they are the presupposition and the result, the object and the subject, of history. Moreover, the development of the forces of production, while creating the ability to satisfy more and more needs, which bring about further growth of humankind’s powers and transformation.”241 This is the sense in which we can say that humans are a subject-object able to sublate finite limitations and external necessity just as Hegel describes with Spirit. For Marx, humans are the kind of beings who, while being determined in some way by natural conditions, are able to shape their relationship to external conditions. Insofar as humans determine their relationship to their needs and external necessity, we can say they operate by laws of freedom and not nature/necessity (to borrow Hegel’s language)—and insofar as humans are engaging their history, they forge infinity from their finitude. It is in this sense of humans as the subject-object of natural history, which Marx affirmed, that we should understand as operating in passages such as the following:242






























































239

Tabak, 37. (emphasis mine) “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.” Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 37. 241 Tabak, 19. 242 Note on English translations of the EPM: Translators typically translate the German word ‘mensch’ as humans and the words ‘menschen’ and ‘menschlich’ as ‘man,’ even though these terms do not have a gendered connotation. Only the German word ‘Mann’ should be translated as “man” using he/him/his pronouns. Unfortunately, I am working with a translation that does not translate these terms correctly. Given this I have looked to the original German and altered the translations where the gender neutral ‘mensch,’ ‘menschen,’ or ‘menschlich’ are translated 240

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[The human being]is directly a natural being. As a natural being, and as a living natural being [they are], on the one hand, endowed with natural powers and faculties, which exist in [them] as tendencies and abilities, as drives...The objects of [their] drives exist outside [themselves] as objects independent of [them], yet they are objects of [their] needs, essential objects which are indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of [their] faculties…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.243 Humans are “natural beings” in that they find themselves in bodies that have immediately given needs and every need has a corresponding power or faculty that works to fulfill that need. Having needs is characteristic of anything that is alive, but there is a way in which humans have needs in a specifically human way. In humans have to confront natural objects outside of themselves, “essential objects,” which are “indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of [their] faculties.” However, while humans are clearly natural beings in one sense, they are not merely natural. As Tabak further explains, The process of need satisfaction is not simply a matter of obtaining from nature what is missing within. It also denotes the assertion of human powers through self-will. The process of need satisfaction, then, is the one in which the objectification of the human subject occurs; it is a process in which the external nature and the inner nature come to form a dialectical unity, which, in Marxian terms, is the unity of human essence and existence, that is, of human nature in its totality.244 Humans don’t merely exist (as a being-in-itself) but they also exist for-themselves, thus “natural objects” confront humans as objects-for-humans—for human needs—as humans are able to appropriate them for their needs.245 Thus human’s “essence,” or their “inner nature,” and external




























































using “man” or masculine pronouns. In terms of the 1844 manuscripts, “Mann” does not appear until the section on “Private Property and Communism” where Marx talks specifically about the relationships between men and women. 243 Marx, EPM, 140-141. 244 Tabak, 17. 245 Tabak points out that while history is created through the changing ways humans collectively engage in in the objective activity of need satisfaction this does not necessarily mean that history has a telos apart from the agency of human beings: “Need satisfaction, broadly conceived, through objective activity is the general aim of human beings in history, which is not, by the way, the same as history having its own teleological aim apart from humans.” Tabak, 36-7.

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existence form a dialectical unity as they appropriate external nature for their needs—which is to show human nature in its “totality,” in both its objective and subjective moments. When Marx says that humans are beings-for-themselves that “express and authenticate [themselves] in being as well as in thought,” he means that humans have the ability to cognize, in a second-order fashion, their immediate situation and existence. This means humans have the ability to appropriate their bodies, actions, and external natural objects according to how they think about themselves and their relationships to others. Human action, then, has the potential to not only be a reflection of an individual’s will for survival, but also a reflection of the considerations and needs of the entire species—this is what Marx means by saying that humans participate in species-being. Humans reproduce themselves and their species consciously—which is a major difference between humans and non-human living beings. While it is true that plants and animals reproduce for the continuation of their species in an abstract sense, they do this unconsciously—each individual only conscious (if conscious at all) of their immediate situation and their immediate needs. Because humans are able to have a second order awareness of how their actions and their needs connect them to their whole species, it makes them the kind of being with history—where history articulates the different ways that humans have socially produced and reproduced themselves.246 What follows from this is: not only are humans natural beings with a qualitative dimension setting them apart from immediately natural objects—but by the very existence of humanity as a being both in-itself and for-itself, anything that confronts humanity undergoes a qualitative transformation. An “object” for a human is not merely an “object,” but rather it becomes a “human object.” As Marx further explains:




























































246

As Marx and Engels write in The Holy Family, “History is nothing but the activity of [humanity] pursuing [its] aims.” Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The Holy Family (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 4:93.

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Consequently, human objects are not natural objects as they present themselves directly, nor is human sense, as it is immediately and objectively given, human sensibility and human objectivity. Neither objective nature nor subjective nature is directly presented in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything natural must have its origin so [the human being] has [its] process of genesis, history, which is for [itself], however, a conscious process and thus one which is consciously self-transcending.247 Nothing for humans is merely given (i.e. merely natural), all objects for humans are mediated by human history. This is what Marx means when he says “neither objective nature nor subjective nature is directly presented in a form adequate to the human being,” all objects that confront humanity automatically take on a historical quality. Rocks, mountains, “natural” events like earthquakes, are no longer merely natural phenomena but each rock, mountain, or earthquake has a historical dimension insofar as each is given a meaning for a human society in a specific place and time. As oil might have been just another natural element at one point, at present it has an entirely new meaning and is connected to wars, death, transportation, climate change, etc.248 The fact that humanity’s relationship to nature and “natural objects” changes is what it means to say that history is “a conscious process and thus one which is consciously self-transcending.”249 This second order awareness, production, and reproduction throughout history of humans as a species constitutes humanity’s species-being. As Marx further describes, Human beings are “a species-being not only in the sense that [they make] the community ([their] own as well as those of other things) [their] object both practically and theoretically, but also (and this is simply another expression for the same thing) in the sense that [they] treat [themselves] as the present, living species, as a universal and consequently free being.”250 Humans are “universal” insofar as




























































247

Marx, EPM, 141-142. And if our relationship to things like rocks and mountains is transformed by history—even more so does our relationship with our own needs, desires, bodies and body parts as history transforms the meaning and significance of sex, gender, and sexuality. These aspects will be thoroughly explored in section 1.5. 249 Ibid. 250 Marx, EPM, 83. 248

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they produce and reproduce themselves in a way that has effects for the whole of humanity, but also insofar as humanity’s present historical condition and the life activities of present humans is what defines what it means to be human.251 Due to the peculiar awareness of themselves as a species (i.e. their species-being), humans are “self-transcending.” In changing how humans maintain and reproduce themselves they transform what it means to be human. In this sense, humans “freely” define what it means to be human insofar as they can shape and manipulate their relationship to their needs, which are historical and social, and not merely natural or overdetermined by (biological) necessity. The ability of humans to achieve “self-transcendence” is merely their ability to continually re-define and re-organize what it means to be human by doing it differently than it was done before. Marx and Engels explain this further in The German Ideology when they write: a mode of social reproduction “must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.”252 Each different organization of human need and social reproduction is the expression of humanity in an ontological sense—humans are what they do.253 For Marx, there is no fixed determination of human nature due to his dialectical analysis of the






























































251

This fact can either be liberating or catastrophic if we think of the racist history of colonialism or the effects of climate change. 252 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 37. 253 “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are therefore coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce. Hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions determining their production.” Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 37. Here we see how Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit aligns with Marx. Every configuration of Sittlichkeit involves a different way of organizing the social reproduction of human life. It is the existence of different organizations of Sittlichkeit that constitutes world history and Hegel explains that the ability of humans to achieve “self-transcendence” is in virtue of their being a properly spiritual being who is embedded within a particular Sittlichkeit. That humans are spiritual beings means merely that they are not wholly determined by external necessity (i.e. nature) but are self-organizing and self-determining; they actively manipulate and define their relationship to necessity. It is this ability to manipulate one’s relationship to necessity and external nature is Hegel’s most basic definition of abstract right/personal freedom in the PR. What Hegel does not explicitly draw out in explaining the conceptual structure of the modern state, is its particular mode of production, i.e. capitalism.

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relationships between humans and freedom/necessity. What it means to be human is to be a social being who freely shapes (but not in an individualistic voluntarist sense) their relation to nature, biology, their body, external objects—which consequently rules out biological determinism in the same way it was ruled out for Hegel. 2.2 Alienation from Three Perspectives Just as there is no finite or deterministic “human nature” for Hegel, as spiritual beings shape their conscious existence with respect to their socio-political world—so too with Marx. For Marx what universally determines humans is their special quality of “species-being.” If humans are to be properly human, it means that the mode of production of their life should be determined by their social connection to the species, and if this is not the case they are under conditions of alienation.254 In Hegelian terms, we would say that history involves the drive towards making freedom (personal, moral, and social) more concrete. In Marxian humanist terms, history is the drive of humans to express their species-being free from alienation. However, if the limits of Hegelian political philosophy are the limits of bourgeois political economy, it is because a central aspect of the modern nation-state is its special mode of production and reproduction—capitalism. If it turns out that capitalism as a mode of production fundamentally alienates humans’ species-being, then it is no surprise that the kind of Sittlichkeit that would enable “queer spirit” and fully realize social freedom is impossible given only Hegel’s account in the Philosophy of Right. This is one of the major contributions and advances




























































254

As Marx writes in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach criticizing abstract definitions of “human essence”: “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled: (1) To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract-isolatedhuman individual. (2) The human essence, therefore, can with him be comprehended only as ‘genus,’ as an internal, dumb generality which merely naturally unites the many individuals.” (emphasis mine) Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in The Marx-Engels Reader second edition ed. Robert C. Tucker, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 145.

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of a Marxian account of the modern state compared Hegel’s account. Part of the mystification of “bourgeois” political economy is that it begins with the fact of private property but does not give an account of how it came to exist as a category.255 Marx writes, “[bourgeois political economy] conceives of the material process of private property, as this occurs in reality, in general and abstract formulas which then serve it as laws,”256 it does not understand political economy as a product of particular historical developments. It fails to comprehend the distinctions and relations between capital and land, labor and capital, wages and profit, and labor and the production of surplus value. One of the defining characteristics of capitalist modernity is its creation of two classes, “property owners and propertyless workers.”257 Marxian political economy breaks with bourgeois political economy in that it does not begin with the mere fact of private property and the “laws of the market,” but instead it begins with the “contemporary economic fact…[that] the devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things. Labor does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods.”258 Contrary to the way that the external embodiment of the will in Abstract Right in the PR was a moment of the freedom of the will, under capitalism, the products of workers’ labor confronts them “as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer.”259 This is because the value their labor produces is not immediately their own—it belongs to the capitalist. Work appears as “the vitiation of the worker, objectification as a loss and as servitude to the object, and






























































255

Marx, EPM, 78. Ibid. 257 Ibid., 82. 258 Ibid., 79. 259 Ibid. 256

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appropriation as alienation.”260 What is peculiar about this is that, unlike what should be the case given the dialectic of necessity and freedom/nature and humanity that we saw in Hegelian metaphysics, “the more the worker appropriates the external world of sensuous nature by [their] labor the more [they] deprive [themselves] of [the] means of existence.”261 This happens to the worker because: (1) “the sensuous external world becomes progressively less and less [an] object belonging to [the worker’s] labor or a means of existence of [their] labor;” and (2) “it becomes progressively less a means of existence in the direct sense, a means for the physical subsistence of the worker,”262 as it becomes more and more the means for the capitalist to accumulate capital. Labor under capitalism, then, is not a manifestation of one’s species-being for two reasons: (1) it is done for the mere subsistence of the single worker, or the single worker’s family, and (2) it is not a manifestation of the worker’s freedom. As Marx writes, “the culmination of this enslavement is that [the worker] can only maintain [themselves] as a physical subject so far as [they] are a worker, and that it is only as a physical subject that [they are] a worker.”263 The worker’s labor confronts them as an object they must sell out of necessity to survive—from this perspective alienation arises from the worker’s relation to their products, as a result of the capitalist mode of production. However, we can also evaluate alienation from a second perspective, namely from the process of labor itself i.e. productive activity under the capitalist mode of production. As Marx writes: “What constitutes the alienation of labor? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of [their] nature; and that, consequently, [the worker] does not fulfill




























































260

Ibid. Ibid., 80. 262 Ibid., 80-81. 263 Ibid., 81. 261

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[themselves] in [their] work but denies [themselves], [they have] a feeling of misery rather than well-being, [they do] not develop freely [their] mental and physical energies but [are] physically exhausted and mentally debased.”264 The laborer experiences the process of production as an external necessity forced upon them. This is not the dialectical confrontation of the external world with a spiritual being’s freedom to shape their relationship to external nature and necessity. Marx further explains: We arrive at the result that [the worker] feels [themself] to be freely active only in [their] animal functions—eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in [their] dwelling and in personal adornment—while in [their] human functions [they are] reduced to an animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal. Eating, drinking and procreating are of course also genuine human functions. But abstractly considered, apart from the environment of other human activities, and turned into final and sole ends, they are animal functions.265 Alienation under capitalism affects us both in our relationship to ourselves and to others—what should be social relations between people become object relations. Activities like eating, drinking, shaping the way one looks, and having sex, while “natural” in some senses—as animals do these things too—should be embedded within social and cultural practices and given specifically human meanings. They should not appear as endsin-themselves for the mere survival of an individual—in Hegelian terms, they should be spiritualized natural activities. Alienation from the social character of our activities is what reduces human activities to “animal functions” and anti-social/individualistic ends. When these activities are debased under the alienation inherent in capitalism, they lose their spiritualized and social qualities and become abstracted from concrete social relations. Humanity’s alienation from species-being is a third perspective from which we can view alienation. Marx summarizes,




























































264 265

Ibid., 82. Ibid., 78.

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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.”266 To conclude, on Marxian humanist terms, what demarcates human life from the life of animals is that the life-activity of humans is an object of their will—where animals are one with their life activity. Taking one’s life activity as an object of one’s will makes human life activity free rather than determined by necessity. As Marx describes, [Human beings make their] life activity itself an object of [their] will and consciousness. [They have] a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which [they are] completely identified. Conscious life activity distinguishes [human life] from the life activity of animals. Only for this reason is [the human being] a species-being. Or rather, [they are] only a self-conscious being, i.e. [their] own life is an object for [them], because [they are] a species-being. Only for this reason is [their] activity free activity.267 However, “alienated labor reverses the relationship, in that [the human being] because [they are] a self-conscious being, makes [their] life activity, [their] being, only a means for [their] existence.”268 What should be an end becomes a means, and what should be a means becomes an end. Instead of humans freely appropriating their own bodies and external nature in order to manifest freedom from external/biological determination of their life activity, they become completely defined by their external needs and bodies. Our body and its needs should be a means to the end of manifesting our freedom to shape our life activities, but under the alienating conditions of capitalism, our life activity (as it manifests through alienated labor) becomes the mere means to our individual body, or our individual family’s, survival. Alienation is a thoroughly de-humanizing process which robs humans of their participation in species-being
































































266

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 84. 268 Ibid. 267

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through directly social labor. 2.3 Communism and the Dialectic of Human and Nature While human life under capitalism is fundamentally de-humanized, Marx is not theoretically pessimistic about the possibility of instantiating humanized conditions. Because capitalism’s dehumanizing and de-socializing qualities are contrary to humanity’s fundamental truth of species-being, there is resistance to alienation under capitalism that can potentially lead to a new way of organizing social reproduction, i.e. in Marx’s words, the instantiation of communism. There are a few key conditions that ust be in place before talking about “communism,” makes any sense: the abolition of the division between mental and manual labor, the end of waged labor as we know it, the end of the binary division of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’269 and the abolition of private property (but this is not personal property). In terms of abolishing private property, or any other of the mentioned institutional structures, we cannot indeterminately negate private property, but rather we need to determinately negate private property meaning by developing a new way of organizing property: the positive abolition [Aufhebung] of private property, of human self-alienation, and thus the real appropriation of human nature through and for [humanity]. It is, therefore, the return of [the human] as a social, i.e., really human, being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development. Communism as a fullydeveloped naturalism is humanism and as a fully-developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between [human] and nature, and between [human being] and [human being]. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species.270 The positive abolition of private property in communism allows humans to appropriate external nature, their bodies, and their life activity for-themselves in an inherently social way. This new




























































269 270

This will be explored in the following sections. Ibid., 104. (emphasis mine)

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way of appropriating the external world in a non-alienated way is what allows humans to appropriate “human nature through and for humanity,” uniting what has been bifurcated and divided under capitalism. Communism is “naturalism” as “humanism” in the sense that, under communism, we appropriate nature in a humanized way—through the mediation of “nature” we achieve the proper end for humanity, species-being. Communism fully develops humanism as a “naturalism” in the sense that it is only under communism that we realize what is actually “natural” and universal about human beings—i.e. their species-being. Thus, as Brown writes, “far from being a one-sided development where humanity dominates nature, Marx posits a dialectical supersession [Aufhebung] of this dualism.”271 Marx further explains, “the natural existence of [the human being] has here become [their] human existence and nature itself has become human for [them]. Thus [communist] society is the accomplished union of [the human being] with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of [humanity] and the realized humanism of nature.”272 The dis-alienation of humanity reconciles humanity’s relationship with nature and the relationship of freedom and necessity, but it also mediates the relationship of humans with other humans as humanity’s social character is revitalized. As Marx writes, “the human significance of nature only exists for [the] social [human being], because only in this case is nature a bond with other [humans], the basis of [their] existence for others and of their existence for [them]. Only then is nature the basis of [their] own human experience and a vital element of human reality.”273 When humans no longer confront each other as barriers or instruments to their personal survival,






























































271

Brown, 21. Marx, EPM, 105. 273 Marx, EPM, 105. 272

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but instead confront each other as they are, as social beings inherently connected by their shared world and species-being, they will have overcome their alienation. The “natural” bond between humans under communism would entail that they both freely appropriate nature for the social reproduction of humanity. This free appropriation of nature is not a voluntarist freedom (i.e. arbitrary and merely individual) because, rather than being an appropriation for the maintenance of an individual or individual family, it is appropriation with the social totality in mind. Humans would be able to develop a fundamental interest in each other’s well-being because their life activity would be tied with the well-being and existence of each other’s life activity, not at the cost of it. As I have laid it out so far, the reconciliation between human and nature appears to have been achieved once private property has been superseded and the capitalism mode of production has been overcome. However, because capitalism’s dehumanization of humanity occurs at the level of the social totality, every aspect of humanity’s life activity will have to have been humanized before we can say that a communist world has really been achieved.274 All social institutions will need to be transformed, as Marx writes, “the positive supersession of private property as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive supersession of all alienation, and the return of man from religion, the family, the state, etc. to his human, i.e.,




























































274

Here it is relevant for me to say that I am not going to endorse a dual or triple or nth systems theory that would argue each “axis of oppression” constitutes its own “system.” On this view communism liberates us from class, feminism liberates us from male supremacy, anti-racism liberates us from racial hierarchy, queer liberation liberates us from heteronormativity, etc. Instead, I take a “social reproduction” or “unitary theory” stance to social and political oppression. This stance understands capitalism to be co-imbricated with sexism, racism, ableism, heteronormativity, etc. for its self-preservation—even if the ways capitalism as a mode of production manipulates these ways of dividing humanity is different at different times and different places. It doesn’t make sense to say that when class society is “no more” all other social problems will immediately be solved. As long as humanity is inhumanly divided and put into social and political hierarchies there will be no true “communism,” where communism is understood as a humanism in the sense Marx lays out in the 1844 manuscripts. We will have to deal with all of the aspects of our alienation for us to fully realize our species-being, merely socializing industrial labor will not address all (or even most aspects) of human alienation. Thus, I take the position with Marx that a political project against capitalism must aim to humanize us in all aspects of our life activity.

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social life.”275 Alienation of human life activity under capitalism translates into every aspect of life—including one’s understanding and configuration of familial relationships, gender, and sexuality—meaning each of these areas of life activity will have to be transformed for the full dis-alienation of humanity. 2.4 Gender as a Characteristic of Species-Being: Queer as the Negation of the Negation of Feminism276 Despite what some feminists have claimed about Marx and Marxism, Marx actually (perhaps too strongly) linked the progress of the humanization of the species with the condition of women: The immediate, natural and necessary relation of human being to human being is also the relation of man [Mann] to woman [Weib]. In this natural species relationship [humanity’s] relation to nature is directly [its] relation to [other humans], and [its] relation to [other humans] is directly [its] relation to nature, to [its] own natural function. Thus, in this relation is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for [humanity] and to which nature has become human nature for [humans]. From this relationship, [humanity’s] whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of [the man/woman] relationship how far [humanity] has become, and has understood [itself] as, a speciesbeing, a human being.277 Following Brown’s analysis of this passage, the relationship between men and women (understood as synonymous with male and female here however problematically), is “natural” in two senses: (1) the necessity of biological reproduction of the species and (2) women cannot be




























































275

Marx, EPM, 105. (emphasis mine) While it may seem surprising to say that queer operates as the “negation of the negation” of feminism, in Hegelian terms, this is the only dialectical way of making a positive contribution. 277 Marx, EPM, 103. See also Brown, 28-30 (emphasis mine). See also what Marx writes in his notes on Lewis Morgan’s anthropological text Ancient Society (the very same text that lead Engels to write his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State—though where they would land in their analysis would we quite different): “The modern family contains in embryo not only servitus (slavery) but also serfdom, since from the outset it refers to services for agriculture. It contains within itself in miniature all the antagonisms that later develop widely in society and its state.” Quoted in Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 105-106. See also Karl Marx, Ethnological Notebooks, ed. Lawrence Krader, (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1974), 120. 276

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objectified and alienated by men if their relations are to be socialized for the realization of their species-being. If men do not respect women as equal members of the species, only viewing women in terms of their labor or reproductive capacities, then they are still embracing dehumanizing and alienating social relations. Marx further writes: “The relation of man [Mann] to woman [Weib] is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates, therefore, how far [humanity’s] natural behavior has become human, and how far [its] human essence has become a natural essence for [itself], how far [its] human nature has become nature for [itself]. It also shows how far [humanity’s] needs have become human needs.”278 By examining gendered social relations, we can track how far it is that we have come in developing ourselves as social beings. When gendered and sexual relations are no longer mediated by mere necessity, gender and sexuality are freed up to become aspects of the humanity’s expression of freedom, which would be the goal of a communist society. The re-organization of necessity and freedom, humanity and nature, should free up women from being relegated to only reproductive labor, and it should socialize this labor so that women are not the only ones responsible for socially reproductive care work.279 Given these comments, even though Marx does not give us a complete analysis of women’s oppression, it is clear that Marx was not against feminist politics (as long as they are not bourgeois liberal feminist politics). Given his theoretical and political positions, he would need to actively encourage a feminist political position to remain consistent with his vision for the re-humanization of social relations.280 But even more than these feminist insights, Marx is




























































278

Marx, EPM, 103. Raya Dunayevskaya makes this same point in her book Women’s Liberation and the Dialectic of Revolution. 280 I agree with Heather Brown’s criticisms of Juliet Mitchell’s reading of the prior passages quotes from Marx. Mitchell in Woman’s Estate, reads Marx as merely re-stating Fourier’s abstract account of the progress of human culture as the triumph over nature. But as we saw in the dialectics of human and nature, “communism as a fullydeveloped naturalism is humanism and as a fully-developed humanism is naturalism.” Meaning there is no abstract “triumph” of human over nature where one could argue that woman is allied with nature and man is allied with 279

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pointing to something deeper. If society is able to free gender from determination by the expropriation of labor (reproductive, affective, wage-earning, or all of the above), then social and political bases grounding the binary gender system would be fundamentally undermined. In other words, carrying out a Marxian feminist politic that abolishes the social, political, and economic reasons for women’s subordination would also involve eliminating the need to enforce heteronormativity as an ethical and political norm. If feminism as the call for social, political, and economic equality of women with men is the first negation of sexist gender dynamics, then queer liberation (i.e. the end of heteronormativity and the alienation of gender under capitalism) is, as Hegel would say, the negation of that negation. In other words, queer liberation would entail the end of what Julia Serrano calls both traditional and oppositional sexism. ‘Traditional sexism’ being the maintenance of a gender hierarchy and the source of misogyny, and ‘oppositional sexism,’ as “the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and non-overlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires.” 281 Oppositional sexism shores up traditional sexism as the source of cissexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Queer, as the negation of the negation of feminism, would be the new content of humanized concepts of gender and sexuality. The overcoming of the gendered division of labor, wage-labor, and private property, would mean that gender as a category would be freed up to be a true expression of one’s humanization. When gender becomes a manifestation of human freedom, the conditions of possibility for heteronormativity will have ended—thus we can say that a Marxian




























































“human,” leading to a “world historical defeat of the female sex,” to borrow Engel’s ill formed (and incorrect) formulation. Rather, a historical material view of human/nature shows humanity able to shape its relationship to nature and necessity, not incoherently eliminating nature or necessity altogether. (See Marx, EPM, 104, and Brown, 32.) 281 Julia Serano, “Trans Woman Manifesto,” in Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2007) 11-20.

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humanist conception of gender is necessarily queer. 2.5 Marx as a Queer Theorist: The Meaning and Aesthetics of Non-Alienated Gender To summarize, the insights of the previous sections are the following: (1) capitalism has thoroughly alienated humans from nature, from themselves, and from other humans; (2) looking at gender and the gendered dynamics of a society is a marker for how thoroughly we have rehumanized social relations; and (3) the abolition of the binary gender system and any system of organizing gender that subordinates gender to laws of necessity rather than freedom is the definition of queer liberation. Now I will further explore what gender and sexuality are, and what it might mean to achieve a non-alienated organization of gender and sexuality given a queer Marxian humanist account. The organization of gender and sexuality can be though on three distinct levels, (1) in terms of the intimate/romantic relationships we have with some finite set of others; (2) in terms of our relationship to our own bodies and our self-understanding; and (3) in terms of our relationship to the larger socio-political world i.e. our Sittlichkeit, which will contain particular social and political norms and laws regulating gender and sexuality. In terms of the first level, as many feminists have pointed out, marriage and many of our Western traditional understandings of how to organize a romantic relationship are tied up with conceptions of bourgeois property relations. When we think about what it means to be with someone we easily fall into the language of possession, “having someone,” and in terms of monogamy, “having” someone exclusively for physical intimacy. This particular way of thinking about romantic relationships is clearly an example how the ideological structure of capitalist private property relations—which creates social relations between things and thing-like relations between people—mediate even our most intimate relationships. This is why Marx writes that under capitalism’s alienating conditions “all the physical and intellectual senses have been

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replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses; the sense of having,”282 which also includes our sense of what it means to engage in loving relationships. However, just as intimate relationships can mirror the alienating conditions of capitalist social relations, they can also be a site of resistance against alienation and show glimmers of a new way of organizing social relations. Within an intimate relationship (whether it be a dyadic, triadic, or more), partners can actually reshape the ways they confront and interact with one another by developing new habits of relating. In terms of imagining a future other than capitalism, thinking from the starting place of gender and sexuality is fruitful because finding out what new ways of organizing nonalienating social relations in intimate matters requires coordinating between a limited set of actors. Meanwhile, to end capitalism on a global scale, would take many years of concentrated organizing and international coordination with billions of people. While some might say that working towards reorganizing the way we live in our intimate relationships (romantic, friendships, or familial relations) is only a “drop in the bucket” in terms of overthrowing capitalism, Marx himself disagrees. Marx writes that the sublation (Aufhebung) of private property (and also wage labor and its attendant divisions), will require “the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses.”283 Only when all the aspects of human beings have been emancipated from alienation, in both their subjective and objective dimensions, will we be able to say that we are fully humanized. The emancipation of all human qualities and senses necessarily includes how we relate to ourselves and others sexually, and the ways in which we aesthetically shape and present our bodies. On this point Marx is fairly revolutionary given the history of Western political philosophy as he offers a thoroughly politicized and socialized account of the body. Hegel recognized that the body had political and social




























































282 283

Marx, EPM, 107. Marx, EPM, 107. (emphasis mine)

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significance insofar as he saw the spiritual significance of the care of the body in death and birth, but he did not thematize the body as a site of political struggle to the same extent as Marx, particularly in the EPM. In terms of our relationship to ourselves and our bodies, alienating heteronormative gender relations not only affect how others treat us in gendered ways, but they also affect how we relate to ourselves. We are born into a particular Sittlichkeit that assigns us a specific gender at birth given society’s understanding and interpretation of anatomy. While a biological determinist would say that anatomy and/or chromosomal structure are “natural objective facts,” given a Marxian humanist/historical material account, there is no such thing as a “natural objective fact” without concrete relation to human history. The relationship between our biology and our self-understanding as a gendered subject, then, is not determined a priori by given natural facts, but is a product of socialization subject to alteration and modification. Because gender is a category of freedom—i.e. a characteristic of our species-being—non-alienated gender expression cannot be the product an externally enforced assignment at birth given by a particular interpretation of “biological facts.” In this way we can see that Marx, even though he himself did not fully realize the implications of his comments on the body, can be said to be an inchoate queer theorist. Given a Marxian humanist perspective, we can see that queer, gender nonconforming, and trans oriented politics, far from being a product of “bourgeois” sentiments or distractions from “real communist organizing,” is a site of serious social and political struggle, working to expose the truth of gender as a category of freedom.284




























































284

To be clear, my account of gender as a category of freedom is not voluntarist because it is neither individualistic nor egoistic. Rather queer and trans identities are emerging now in serious force because they are reorganizing our ways of relating to ourselves and others socially. Queer and trans identities are and have been operating to change social and political norms to better correspond to the truth of the dialectic of humans and nature, freedom and necessity—and they show us glimpses of a new understanding of the human not determined by a false biological determinism or social prescriptivism.

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In terms of the social determination of anatomy, Marx writes: The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object, created by [humanity] and destined for [humanity]…[the senses] relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to [humanity], and vice versa. Need and enjoyment have thus lost their egoistic character, and nature has lost its mere utility by the fact that its utilization has become human utilization…It is evident that the human eye appreciates things in a different way from the crude, non-human eye, the human ear differently from the crude ear.285 An eye becomes a distinctively human eye when it belongs to a human being who uses it to interface with the human world—the objects it sees are “humanized” objects in the sense that they are given human social meanings. Further, an eye cannot become a human eye until its object (the external world it sees) becomes humanized. The eye is not a mere anatomical fact that many humans have two of, but rather, the human eye becomes a “window to the soul,” the faculty of vision becomes a metaphor of understanding e.g. “I see what you are saying.” What human bodies and senses mean, are functions of the ways they are embedded in human social relations. Human needs are not “egoistic” but inherently social because what comes to be defined as a human need is a product of a particular Sittlichkeit. The “crude ear” or the “crude eye” is the eye or ear that is defined merely formally or functionally where the object of its function is taken in abstraction from social relations (e.g. the description of eyes and ears in anatomy or zoology textbooks). While a rabbit may hear the snap of a branch and run in fear of a predator, a human could hear the snap of the very same branch and hear the footsteps of a lover, or the scurrying of an endangered species, or something that reminds them of a fond memory. What Marx writes about human anatomy and senses can also be said of human’s sexual lives and the bodily characteristics we attribute as being tied with particular sex. Thus there is no






























































285

Marx, EPM, 107.

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merely “natural” meaning of human chromosomal structure, body shape, gonadal structure, or “natural” way that humans should engage in sexual behavior because each of these “natural facts” are immediately imbued with specific human and historical meanings given a specific political world. Gender and sexuality are not human only because they are characteristics attributed to a particular human being, but also because their objects (i.e. the body, and the bodies of others) are made to be humanized. So, for a human to develop into a gendered subject not only means they have particular bodily characteristics to which they relate in a particularly gendered way, but also that the bodily characteristics themselves have been humanized/appropriated by them. There is no such thing as an “objective natural fact” for a human body insofar as human bodies are always already mediated by the individual they belong to, and mediated through a lens of a particular Sittlichkeit. This is why I want to claim that Marx—even if he himself did not realize this—offers an account of humanism that can accurately be described as having feminist and queer political implications. This account of humanism shows there to be no such thing as a merely “natural” configuration of human gender and sexuality. Unnatural human relations are those that have become object relations when they should be social relations, or when social are immediately determined by “nature.” Following from this, traditional feminine and masculine roles are unnatural insofar as they posit an object relation between the individual and their body, and their relationships with other human bodies. Thus, given Marx’s humanism, both sexism and heteronormativity are ruled out as illegitimate social and political organizations as they serve to alienate what should be aspects of human freedom to arbitrary laws of immediately “given” biology (and there is actually no such thing!). In this sense that I call Marx’s humanism queer. If non-alienated gender is the free appropriation of our own body determining its

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relationship to the existing social relations of our Sittlichkeit, then it begins to become clear how a queer Marxian humanism fits into an account of queer spirit/Sittlichkeit. No ethical gender configuration can be the product of a role imposed upon a group of people who have been marked out by particular “biological markers”—as this would be an alien power mediating between oneself and one’s body. Gender, as a product of human freedom, as Marx writes, is unlike the products of animals which “belong directly to their physical bodies, [humans are] free in the face of [their] products.”286 Thus gender is not something that dictates the behavior and aesthetics of humans, rather, gender is the product of humans determining their behavior, relation to social roles, and aesthetic appearance. And further, gender as a beautiful product of human freedom, is a sign of how far humanity has gone to realize its species-being and overcome alienation from: “[humanity] knows how to apply the appropriate standards…thus [humans] construc[t] also in accordance with the laws of beauty. It is just [humanity’s] work upon the objective world that [humans] really prov[e] [themselves] as a species-being.”287 In other words, gender should be free self-objectification and appropriation akin to the creation of art. Free expression of gender and sexuality (in the Marxist-Hegelian sense) is not predicated on the suppression of others, meaning taking free gender expression serious should be a constitutive part of what it means to be human—and what it will mean to be human in a Sittlichkeit that fully socializes humanity. Marx writes: The senses of social man are different from those of non-social man. It is only through the objectively deployed wealth of the human being that the wealth of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye which is sensitive to the beauty of form, in short, senses which are capable of human satisfaction and which confirm themselves as human faculties) is cultivated or created. For it is not only the five senses, but also the so-called






























































286 287

Marx, EPM, 84. Ibid.

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spiritual senses, the practical senses (desiring, loving, etc.), in brief, human sensibility and the human character of the senses, which can only come into being through the existence of its object, through humanized nature.288 Queer expressions of gender and sexuality are then fundamentally different from alienated heteronormative expressions as they work to engage the whole “wealth of subjective human sensibility.” Just as art, understood as the human shaping and interpretation of the external world, is seen as an example of the full expression of human’s humanity, queer gender configurations aim to do the same to one’s body—to turn one’s body and its relations with others into art “sensitive to the beauty of form.” If we look at different configurations of gender throughout history, we can see that gender has been more or less alienated given the attendant socio-political world and the degree to which one’s survival depends on adhering to a particular configuration of gender. In the following passage from Marx, if we substitute the words ‘gender and sexuality’ for the word ‘sense,’ and we analogize ‘procreation out of the necessity for reproduction’ to ‘the need to eat to keep from starving,’ we get a the full sense what queer Marxian humanism is about: The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history. Sense which is subservient to crude needs has only a restricted meaning. For a starving [person] the human form of food does not exist, but only its abstract character as food. It could just as well exist in the most crude form, and it is impossible to say in what way this feedingactivity would differ from that of animals. The needy [person], burdened with cares, has no appreciation of the most beautiful spectacle…Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both theoretically and practically, is necessary in order to the senses, and also to create the human senses corresponding to all the wealth of human and natural being.289 We can re-translate the above passage into the following: The cultivation of gender and sexuality






























































288 289

Ibid., 108. Ibid., 108-109.

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has been in the works through all previous history. Gender and sexuality which is subservient to crude “natural” needs and necessity has only a restricted meaning. For someone only concerned with survival, gender and sexuality might only have meaning in terms of the mere reproduction of the species. The person wholly determined by their most basic needs has no appreciation or desire of forging a particular bodily aesthetic that would have social and political significance. Thus, taking gender and sexuality as objects of human essence, both theoretically and practically, is necessary in order to humanize our bodies and sexual relationships, and also to create specifically human meaning of gender and sexuality corresponding to all the wealth of human and natural being.290 Human bodies, and the ways that they relate to each other, is therefore an essential site for social and political struggle and for the reimagining of a fully humanized world. III. Towards a Queer Communist Sittlichkeit Given this account of queer Marxisn humanism, this question remains: what concrete changes need to happen socially and politically such that our contemporary Sittlichkeit develops the objective conditions necessary to promote the flourishing of un-alienated gender on the level of the social totality? Clearly capitalism and its attendant social relations will have to be abolished—but what changes to our intimate lives will this entail? While it is impossible to predict the future, it is possible and necessary for us to begin to imagine a different world that isn’t mediated by the dehumanizing conditions of global capitalism. Despite some of his short comings in analyzing women’s oppression, Friedrich Engels offers some concrete insights about






























































290

My reading of Marx on the humanization of our bodies and needs is in line with Tabak’s interpretation of need satisfaction in Marxian humanist terms. Tabak writes, “The process of need satisfaction is not simply a matter of obtaining from nature what is missing within. It also denotes the assertion of human powers through self-will. The process of need satisfaction, then, is the one in which the objectification of the human subject occurs; it is a process in which the external nature and the inner nature come to form a dialectical unity, which, in Marxian terms, is the unity of human essence and existence, that is, of human nature in its totality.” (Tabak, 17)

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what will have to be transformed in our intimate lives (erotic, familial, and comradely) in order to organize relationships in a humanized way within some future communist Sittlichkeit. 3.1 Engels for Queer Communism Feminist and Marxist feminist criticisms abound concerning Engels’ text The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.291 While what feminists find useful or historically important in Engels’ text varies, the main critique of Engels is that he is ultimately a Darwinian class reductionist, equating the demise of private property and women’s entry into the public sphere with women’s liberation. This is either because Engels asserts (1) that women’s oppression is matter first and foremost of class warfare, and/or (2) because class oppression and women’s oppression are somehow parallel (but separate)—which would actually make Engels the first “dual systems” theorist in the history of Marxist feminism.292 What I would like to do in this section is offer a brief reading of some of Engels’ most salient points in his analysis of women’s oppression, pointing out the places where he offers positive insights into human relationships (both erotic and familial) within a communist Sittlichkeit. This will expose the aspects of Engels’ analysis insights that go further than what seems initially be only a reinstantiation of heteronormativity under communist social relations.






























































291

For example, see: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans H. M. Parshley, (London: Vintage, 1989), 79-86; Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 77-98; Brown, 133-175; Carol C. Gould, “Engels’s Origins: A Feminist Critique,” in Engels after Marx, ed. Manfred B. Steger and Terrell Carver (State Collage: Penn State Press, 1999), 254–260; Terrell Caver, “Marxism and Feminism: Living with your Ex,” in Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Andrew Chitty and Martin McIvor (London: Palgrave, 2009), 255–268. 292 We can call Engels a dual system’s theorist insofar as he offers a deterministic, but non-monocausual, explanation of women’s oppression as being parallel with economic exploitation. As Terrell Carver formulates it, Engels offers “an apparatus of twin-track ‘determination’ in history, involving sex-oppression, as well as class oppression.” Carver, “Marxism and Feminism: Living with Your ‘Ex,’” 258.

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Engels saw Origin to be the continuation of his work with Marx in the German Ideology. If the very first division of labor is said to be between the sexes for procreation,293 then Engels adds, “the first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.”294 This move contains at least two mistakes, (1) the conflation of a sexual division of labor for procreation and class (which is not actually the most essential division of labor for capitalism)295 and (2) an unjustified conflation of sex and gender. Engels conflates sex and class here because he links women’s oppression to their inability to perform certain kinds of labor, namely the kind of labor needed in agrarian societies—which signals the shift from matrilineal inheritance to patrilineal inheritance, and the “world historical defeat of the female sex.” This “defeat” would lead to women being slaves first by force then then through contract in marriage. Thus Engels posits women’s emancipation as hinging on “the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry; and that this again demands that the quality possessed by the individual family of being the economic unit of society be abolished.”296 While his analysis of the role of labor in women’s oppression is a welcome advance over a merely biologistic account of women’s oppression, his analysis still leaves much to be desired. As Simone de Beauvoir writes of Engels account of women’s oppression—and August Bebel is equally guilty of this—“The problem of woman is reduced to the problem of her capacity to labor…and when socialist society is established through the world, there will no longer be men




























































293

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 50. However, we should be careful to note that this division was a social division of labor (i.e. not one alienated as labor is under capitalism) and this division is not the “first division” in a conceptual sense. As Dunayevskaya points out, the German Ideology locates “the most serious division in humanity’s development [as] that between country and city. [Marx] ended by showing that the most fundamental division of all, the one which characterized all class societies, and none more so than capitalism, is the division between mental and manual labor.” Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, 105. 294 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 739. 295 See footnote 70. 296 Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 744.

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and women, but only workers on the footing of equality.”297 The reduction of women’s oppression to issues of the kinds of labor each gender is allowed or able to participate in has a number of issues—the most obvious being that it is clear in our time that even after women enter the workplace, sexism persists both and in the home and the work place, not to mention many proletarian women have always been working. The gendered division of labor could be eliminated and the fundamental relationship of labor to capital could be unchanged—thus an end to the gendered division of labor is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the abolition of capitalist labor relations. Here Engels one-sidedly focuses on the public sphere, and even in this he is overly optimistic and superficial in terms of the ways that sexism operates within the public sphere. Less obviously at issue is that fact that given queer Marxian humanism and it attendant theory of gender, asserting that gender/gendered divisions in general will be eliminated completely in a socialist world is incoherent. Alienating gender configurations like the heteronormative binary gender system will be eliminated, but this is so that gender becomes a category of human freedom, such that it demonstrates “the absolute working-out of [humanity’s] creative potentialities.”298 Gender as an aesthetic valuation of bodies will still exist even though it will lose its significance in determining one’s material life prospects—instead it will be akin to art insofar as it will be a realm of freedom for creative appropriation of one’s body forthemselves and for-others. In terms of Engels’ vision for relationships in a socialist world, he hopes that monogamy will become the primary paradigm for romantic relationships. He links the abolition of capitalism with the abolition of prostitution (which is true—sex for money is structurally impossible when the money-form has been abolished), and he thinks prostitution is the major factor inhibiting the




























































297 298

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 81. Marx, Grundrisse, 488.

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realization of monogamy on the part of men.299 But even if he personally prefers monogamy and would hope it become a hegemonic paradigm in socialism, he does not naively believe has to be the case. Engels writes, What we can conjecture at present about the regulation of sex relationships after the impending effacement of capitalist production is, in the main, of a negative character, limited mostly to what will vanish. But what will be added? That will be settled after a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in all their lives have had occasion to purchase a woman’s surrender either with money or with any other means of social power, and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than that of real love [better put: their own desire and consent], or to refrain from giving themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences. Once such people appear, they will not care a rap about what we today think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their own public opinion, conformable therewith, on the practice of each individual — and that’s the end of it.300 In terms of what we do know about human relationships in a communist society, we know that they will no longer be predicated on economic concerns or determined by external forces. Rather, human erotic, friendly, and familial relationships will be the product of human freedom and love—meaning they will be free from determination by natural, heteronormative, or economic necessity.






























































299

“Monogamy arose out of the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of one person—and that a man— and out of the desire to bequeath this wealth to this man’s children and to no one else’s. For this purpose monogamy was essential on the woman’s part, but not on the man’s; so that this monogamy of the woman in no way hindered the overt or covert polygamy of the man. The impending social revolution, however, by transforming at least the far greater part of permanent inheritable wealth—the means of production—into social property, will reduce all this anxiety about inheritance to a minimum. Since monogamy arose from economic causes, will it disappear when these causes disappear? One might not unjustly answer: far from disappearing, it will only begin to be completely realised. For with the conversion of the means of production into social property, wage labour, the proletariat, also disappears, and therewith, also, the necessity for a certain statistically calculable number of women to surrender themselves for money. Prostitution disappears; monogamy, instead of declining, finally becomes a reality for the men as well.” Engels, Origin, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 745. Monogamy for Engels takes on a special significance in the modern world as it appears as “individual sex love,” characterized as having a degree of permanence and requiring reciprocity of love (though this love is always couched in heterosexual terms). However, he was also an advocate of divorce and did not think people necessarily had to be monogamous with one person the rest of their life. He contrasts this with “ancient eros,” which did not require reciprocity, and was not characterized with permanency, nor heterosexuality—Engels chided the ancients for their homosexual relationships. See Engels, Origin, 746-750, for his historical material account of the changing forms of sexual love. 300 Engels, Origin, in The Marx and Engels Reader, 751.

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Relationships will also not have to be mediated by concerns about the substantial care of children. As Engels writes, “The care and education of the children becomes a public matter. Society takes care of all children equally, irrespective of whether they are born in wedlock or not. Thus, the anxiety about the ‘consequences,’ which is today the most important social factor—both moral and economic—that hinders a girl from giving herself freely to the man she loves, disappears.”301 Engels is hopeful that some of the oppressive economic social forces controlling women’s lives will ease: “Will this not be cause enough for a gradual rise of more unrestrained sexual intercourse, and along with it, a more lenient public opinion regarding virginal honor and feminine shame?”302 In these ways, Engels, despite the substantial limitations of his analysis of women’s oppression, does retain some helpful insights about what a queer communist Sittlichkeit would look like. In particular, his humility and acknowledgement that capitalism has so dehumanized us that only future generations will be fill out our vision of what human relationships will look like. Given this last insight, we can see why in the present moment, in the wake of decades of feminist and queer thought, we will be able to offer a much fuller picture of what a queer communist Sittlichkeit would entail and what changes would need to happen for us to achieve it. 3.2 From Queer Marxian Humanism to Decolonial Humanism As Dunayevskaya writes, “Marx envisioned a totally new man, a totally new woman, a totally new life form (and by no means only for marriage)—in a word a totally new society.”303 Engels came to the same conclusion when he noted that because we have been so deformed by capitalism and its dehumanization, we will only begin know the full potential of human






























































301

Ibid., 746. Ibid. 303 Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, 186. 302

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relationships and our capacity to freely express our love, gender, and sexuality “after a new generation has grown up.” Capitalism, and its current organization of gendered social relations, inhibits the realization of a Sittlichkeit whose social, political, and economic relations operate according to a queer Marxian humanist paradigm seeking to operate in accordance with the truth of what it means to be human. What queer Marxian humanism revels, is that a Sittlichkeit whose existence relies on a capitalist mode of production—which also structurally relies on imperialist/(neo)colonial tactics—can only mediate its internal contradictions of dehumanization through displacing the site of dehumanization externally. Capitalism creates conditions under which we are not living human lives according to what it means to be human in the MarxistHegelian sense. On the whole, the Sittlichkeit of modernity in Hegel’s terms structurally alienates us from our own bodies, our families, our would-be comrades, lovers, and from the humanity as a totality. Queer liberation then requires the end of capitalism. Thus queer liberation must be a fundamental part of any socialist/communist restructuring of social relations grounded in Hegelian-Marxian humanism—and Hegelian-Marxian humanism as fully consistent with its goals, can be described as being in line with a queer account of gender and sexuality and supporting queer politics.

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Chapter 3 Decolonial Humanism [A]t the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world. -Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism When I search for Man in the technique and style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man and an avalanche of murders. -Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area—European culture since the sixteenth century—one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it…In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the…only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance…was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge…If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared…one can certainly wager that man would be erased. -Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences304

I.


From Hegel and Marx to the Decolonial Standpoint In the preceding chapters, I outlined a queer reading of the dialectics of necessity and

freedom showing gender to be a spiritual category in the Hegelian sense, and as I showed with Marx, a measure of the level of humanization of our social world. Grounded in a vision of social relations that structurally reject heteronormativity—in all of its forms of dehumanization, including traditional and oppositional sexism305—we can formulate a new conception of “the human,” founded on a concrete understanding of freedom. However, while this work has further clarified what gender relations might be like in fully humanized world, in order to address other critical contradictions of modernity as presented in the Philosophy of Right, the humanism I have proposed must be able to conceptualize and adapt to address all modes of dehumanization, not




























































304

As taken from the guide quotes of Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257-337. 305 These terms were defined in Chapter 1 with Julia Serrano’s work.

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just gender based ones. Dehumanization should not only be thought through the lens of heteronormativity as presented in bourgeois European gender roles, but also through the ways that these ideals have been transformed and exported through historical and contemporary colonial practices, mobilized differentially according to the hierarchies of various social identities. This chapter will offer a further developed account of our current global social totality, keeping in mind the organic unity of colonial histories of racialization and the global division of labor where the value of human life is dependent on its relation to capital and a particular social ontology. Doing this will require thinking from alternative perspectives from the dominant Eurocentered position if social and political theory is to be able to account for the experiences of those who have been on the “underside” of this dominant history. While colonization and capitalism have effectively linked all of humanity economically, Hegel and Marx were not thinking or theorizing from the perspective of all of humanity. Their work suffers blind spots and miscalculations given their Eurocentric standpoints—even if unintentional.306 The decolonial






























































306

Marx near the end of his life did begin to rethink some of the aspects of his Eurocentric position e.g. in relation to the conditions in Russia—as he began to see the horizon a revolution in a “backward” country ahead of a revolution in industrialized Western Europe. For an extensive look at the totality of Marx’s writings on this, see Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010). While Anderson’s text is an important contribution to Marxian scholarship on this point, it does not refute the claim that Marx’s political theory suffers from Eurocentrism from the standpoint of decolonial philosophy (and later I will say decolonial humanism). As will be demonstrated in this chapter, the decolonial critique of Eurocentrism is not merely empirical or moral criticism. Rather, it involves an analysis of the logic and structure of Eurocentrism—just as it does not analyze anti-Blackness, racism, sexism, homophobia, trans-misogyny, as reducible to mistaken empirical analyses or personal evil intentions. Marx was an erudite activist-scholar and, for the most part (excluding some racist and homophobic remarks), he was someone we would call a “good person” i.e. having the correct moral response of disgust to dehumanization of living human beings. The decolonial standpoint will provide grounds for a systemic analysis of Eurocentrism, racialization, anti-Blackness, sexism, homophobia, trans-misogyny through an epistemic and historical material analysis of the totality of global socio-economic relations. This will include not only (though of course including) class struggle, but the persistent legacies of colonialism, gendered and racialized social relations, including a historical material account of the concept of “the human.” Marxian humanist principles are the starting place for this kind of analysis, but what decolonial humanism will add to this is an articulation of a revolutionary intersectional analysis of social relations. Queer Marxian humanism, as I have delineated in the previous chapter, will be fundamentally transformed and given determinate content through the development of queer politics by re-examining it from a decolonial humanist standpoint.

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standpoint reveals the “blind spot” of Eurocentrism to be not only non-accidental, constitutive of the logic of modernity as it has been constructed in its epistemic, ontological, and political economic dimensions. In light of these insights, I argue that we need to turn to the work of thinkers outside the confines of Europe to better theorize the crises and contradictions of modernity. Thinking from “the underside of modernity,” decolonial political philosophy has been uniquely suited for developing a standpoint that illuminates not only empirical failures of Eurocentric thinkers but also their epistemic distortions. Distorted conceptions of the self and Others result from one’s inability to think critically, politically, and morally about the conditions of one’s Sittlichkeit. The epistemic distortions that accompany Eurocentric conceptions of the human render those on both sides of the “colonial difference” unable to connect with others in a fully humanized way, making mutual recognition in the Hegelian sense structurally impossible.307 As Hegel demonstrates, understanding oneself with respect to others is constitutive of what it means to be a self-conscious, world making, intersubjective being. Eurocentrism and colonialism have differentially shaped the consciousness of both colonizer and colonized, to the end of naturalizing alienated social conditions. Decolonial variants of humanism308 attempt to think through and beyond these conditions towards a vision of the human that works against all forms of alienation. While I worked out what a specifically “queer Marxian humanism” would require for the dis-alienation of our species-being on Marx’s terms, decolonial humanism will






























































307

For more on this see George Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). One variant comes out in Ciccariello-Maher’s work which he calls “alter-humanism.” Alter-humanism arises out of the humanist debates of the 1950s and 1960s, primarily between Sartre, Fanon, and Foucault. He draws a distinction between radical humanisms (of the existential variety) and anti-humanisms of the structuralists and poststructuralists, where Fanon’s alter-humanism emerged as transcending both European radical humanism and antihumanism. See George Ciccariello-Maher, “The Internal Limits of the European Gaze: Intellectuals and the Colonial Difference,” Radical Philosophy Review 9, no. 2 (2006) 139-165. 308

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make this conception of freedom more concrete by taking its epistemic and political departure from those who have been the most degraded and dispossessed by our current global social order. Decolonial humanism calls for a complete restructuring of all social relations while working towards a radically new conception of humanity not structurally reliant on processes of dehumanization. In terms of theorizing the legacies of colonialism, there have been a few major schools of anti-colonial thought. In what follows, I will stick to what has been delineated as “decolonial studies,” as it has taken its cues from Latin American, African American, and Caribbean thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, María Lugones, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, and many others.309 Beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese empires, decolonial theorists offer a long view of the history of modern political economy, arguing that the rise of colonialism and its attendant dynamics of racialization were the conditions of possibility of Western European industrial capitalism. In one sense, “decolonial theory” is new as it only appears as a substantial body of thought in the twentieth century. But on the other hand, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes, “decolonial thinking has existed since the very inception of modern forms of colonization—that is, since at least the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,”310 as colonized peoples have always resisted domination and exploitation by re-envisioning social relations beyond what was imposed by colonial powers.311




























































309

For the ways in which decolonial thinkers (and specifically decolonial feminists) distinguish themselves from “post-colonial theory” see Breny Mendoza, “Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, eds. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 310 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-Continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—An Introduction” Transmodernity 1, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 1. 311 As Maldonado-Torres writes: “Critiques of coloniality are as old as coloniality itself. They first appeared in the cries of despair of subjects who either lost their lives or observed the expansion of the modern/colonial system in early modernity. From despair and cries the skepticism of the modern/colonial project turned into the idea of

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Decolonial thinking means to understand “freedom” and “right,” as delineated by Enlightenment philosophers including Hegel and Marx, as co-produced with the processes of colonization and exploitation that made possible the material circumstances of these thinkers and their worlds. As Breny Mendoza writes: Just as Hegel suggested that the full realization of reason and freedom is inseparable from despotism, slavery and conquest, decolonial thinkers suggest that slavery, forced labor, and the rightslessness of colonized peoples exist in dialectical relation to liberal notions of liberty, equality, justice and free labor. The colony is both the condition of possibility and the proving ground of the Western nation-state, and rights-bearing citizenship tethered to men of property. In other words, the freedom of the European and the colonial settler depends on the unfreedom of the colonized.312 While decolonial thinkers are by no means homogenous or in agreement in their analyses, there are nevertheless some general principles of ‘decolonial theory.’ Decolonial theory offers: (1) the concept of “coloniality” as a structural analysis of Eurocentrism as it manifests in organizations of power and knowledge—instantiating the modern categories of race and gender within the capitalist nation-state; (2) a historical material analysis of “the human” as a foundational category of modernity; and (3) a revised and transformed Marxian approach to political theory and political economy.313 This chapter will primarily address the first two points and elaborate their significance for a queer humanist political project. The third point on political economy will




























































decolonization, which presupposed the possibility of achieving some kind of independence. The idea of decolonization was nurtured during the first moment of decolonization toward the end of the eighteenth until the first half of the nineteenth century. The first wave of decolonization was critical of imperialism but not so much of racism, and thus of the coloniality of power. It was also still for the most part enchanted with Europe or with ideas of progress that had emanated from Europe. What I call the project of decolonization emerges when the critique of racism intensifies, the absolute goodness of the nation-state form is put into question, the disenchantment with Europe becomes strong, and the question of postcolonial agency acquires global relevance.” (emphasis mine) Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift,” in Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader eds. Nada Elia, David M. Hernández, Jodi Kim, Shana L. Redmond, Dylan Rodríguez, and Sarita Echavez See (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 440. 312 Mendoza, 14. 313 In Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ words, “decolonization [makes] reference to the construction of a new horizon of meaning that includes new conceptions about the human being and material relations that do not conform to the dictatorship of capital and that are not limited by the empire of law in the modern/colonial nation-state form.” Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift,” 439-440.

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be expanded in the following chapter “Decolonial Political Economy.” II.


Modernity, Coloniality, Decoloniality and Eurocentrism The decolonial critique of Eurocentrism is not reducible to an empirical argument of the

truth of Europe’s provincialism—nor is it reducible to a moral argument about the personal evil intentions of European imperialists. The decolonial standpoint offers an analysis of Eurocentrism as a geopolitical organization of knowledge and power—which ushers in a particular conception of what it means to be human in order to justify a specific organization of power and wealth. Decolonization not only refers to the critique of and effort to dismantle neo-colonial relations that continue and renew dependency and vertical relations of power between northern and southern countries in different ways…[but it] also refers to the radical transformation of the modern/colonial matrix of power that continues to define modern identities as well as the relations of power and epistemic forms that go along with them.314 Decolonial thinkers analyze Eurocentrism and the “modern/colonial matrix of power” through the concept of “coloniality” and “the coloniality of power.” While the current geopolitical powers might be in the process of shifting away from the traditional Euro-US center as other countries vie for power, the dehumanizing and exploitative power relations of “Eurocentric colonial modernity” are not essentially tied to any European “essence.”315 We can make an analogy between the dynamics of Eurocentrism, coloniality/modernity and white supremacy: just as white supremacy still function well under a Black president—so too can the modern colonial matrix of power operate under non-European regimes. Because white supremacy entails a particular set of power dynamics and values, it does




























































314

Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift,” 438-439. As Maldonado-Torres notes, at present Eurocentrism is an ultraconservative doctrine which “continue[s] to confirm European centrality in a world that no longer [has] faith in Europe and that [is] gradually moving beyond the European Age. Indeed Eurocentrism represents today an option similar to that taken by those who defended a Christian-centered view of the world after Copernicus had defied Christian cosmology, after Columbus had broken with classical and Christian geography, and after Descartes offered a new epistemology.” (Ibid., 442) 315

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not function only through the actions of “white people”—so too with the colonial matrix of power inaugurated by European colonialism. As Walter Mignolo writes, the colonial matrix of power, established in the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, transformed and expanded through five centuries, and controlled by Western imperial power, is now escaping Western imperial control. The polycentric world order is organized around the dispute for the control of the colonial matrix, which is being played out at different and interconnected levels: control and management of knowledge and subjectivity, of gender and sexuality, of authority and of the economy. You can expand each domain and see, for example, how the exhaustion of natural resources, food crisis, bio-technological dreams of “reproducing nature artificially,” etc., are all new aspects of a basic imperial/colonial structure: the colonial matrix of power.316 Globalization only became possible with the advent of modernity—the very same modernity that Hegel and Marx praised (even if in different ways) as inaugurating the era of the possibility of “universal” human emancipation and freedom. However, the universals of Hegel and Marx were abstract insofar as: (1) Hegel’s did not realize the role of the mode of production in determining and delimiting human freedom and (2) they both did not see the totality of the colonial matrix of power which “control[s] and [manages] knowledge and subjectivity, of gender and sexuality, of authority and of the economy”317 according to a racialized continuum of more and less human. The project of de-colonization, as Mignolo explains, aims to “plac[e] life (in general) first and institutions at the service of the regeneration of life.” 318 This will involve a fundamental reorganization of power, knowledge, and modes and means of social reproduction. While the terms ‘colonial matrix of power,’ ‘decoloniality,’ ‘coloniality,’ and ‘Eurocentrism,’ are widely used by decolonial theorists, they are not always used in the same ways. To clarify my usage of these terms, I will define them through a close reading of Aníbal Quijano’s landmark essay




























































316

Walter Mignolo, “Introduction: The Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking,” in Globalization and the Decolonial Option eds. Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (New York: Routledge, 2013), 15. 317 Ibid. 318 Ibid., 11. (emphasis mine)

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“Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” and the work of Nelson Maldonado-Torres on Aimé Césaire. 2.1
Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality Quijano’s essay “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad” was first published in 1991 and later translated as “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” in 1999. This essay lays out the colonial matrix of power, as it operates through four interrelated domains: control of economy (land appropriation, exploitation of labor, control of natural resources); control of authority (institution, army); control of gender and sexuality (family, education) and control of subjectivity and knowledge (epistemology, education and formation of subjectivity).319 In broad terms, Quijano describes the “new world order” that concentrated global power and resources into the hands of a minority of Europeans. However, in terms of his analysis of gender and sexuality, he leaves much to be desired, as María Lugones will later point out. In one sense the “age of colonialism” is over, insofar as explicit and direct colonialism had to change with the many independence movements of the twentieth century (e.g. Haitian revolution, American revolution, African liberation movements, Latin American liberation movements). As colonial rule changed from maintaining direct control to installing puppet governments made from the lumpen-bourgeois elements of colonized peoples (i.e. those who were willing to assimilate to European norms for increased wealth and status), Western imperialism became the successor to direct colonial rule. As Quijano defines, “Western imperialism is an association of social interests between the dominant groups (‘social classes’ and/or ‘ethnies’) of countries with unequally articulated power, rather than an imposition from






























































319

Ibid., 3.

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the outside.”320 Even if the structuring agents of formerly colonized nations were not people “imposed from outside,” the former colonial structures of power were naturalized and dehistoricized, remaining intact politically, economically, and socially: That specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial,’ ‘ethnic,’ ‘anthropological’ or ‘national,’ according to the times, agents, and populations involved. These intersubjective constructions, products of Eurocentered colonial domination were even assumed to be ‘objective,’ ‘scientific,’ categories, then of a historical significance. That is, as natural phenomena, not referring to the history of power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations of classes or estates.321 Quijano is careful to link the ways in which subjective/epistemic colonization was necessary to European economic domination, both in hyper-violent and repressive direct control, and under current indirect neo-liberal/neo-colonial control. Quijano writes, In the beginning colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination, while at the same time the colonizers were expropriating from the colonized their knowledge, especially in mining, agriculture, engineering, as well as their products and work. The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivised expression, intellectual or visual.322 Colonizers used indigenous knowledge when it was useful while simultaneously repressing indigenous ways of being. Additionally, colonizers offered “a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning”323 because at first they did not want the colonized to know or understand their way of life. Only in later phases of colonization would they allow elements of the colonized to be co-opted under their institutions. As European-ness




























































320

Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” in Globalization and the Decolonial Option eds. Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (New York: Routledge, 2013), 22. 321 Ibid. 322 Ibid., 23. 323 Ibid.

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became synonymous with power and civilization, what were only particular and provincial social and political norms, would appear as universal. While each colonial situation operated under different material conditions, what remained the same across colonial situations was the lack of recognition of the ways of knowing and being of the colonized. Taken to the extreme of effective mass genocide, Europe would use colonized peoples as an expendable labor force. ‘Coloniality’ then refers to “long-standing patterns of power that emerge in the context of colonialism, which redefine culture, labor, intersubjective relations, aspirations of the self, common sense, and knowledge production in ways that accredit the superiority of the colonizer.”324 What is unique about coloniality, which makes it different from pre-1492 imperial forays, is that only in the age of modernity is colonization the corner stone of global power. An analysis of the “coloniality of power,” illuminates the fundamental construction of the modern/colonial matrix as it was conceived alongside the “social category of ‘race’ as the key element of the social classification of colonized and colonizers.”325 Racialization of non-Europeans would be constitutive of Europe’s justification of using racialized others as expendable labor which, alongside “primitive accumulation” in Marx’s terms (i.e. direct theft of wealth and resources), make the modern capitalist global economy possible. On the political economic value of race, Quijano writes: During European colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the entire world capitalist system, between salaried, independent peasants, independent merchants, and slaves and serfs, was organized basically following the same ‘racial’ lines of global social classification, with all the implications for the processes of nationalization of societies and states, and for the formation of nation-states, citizenship, democracy and so on, around the world. Such distribution of work in the world capitalist system began to change slowly with the struggles against European colonialism, especially after the First World War, and with the changing requirements of capitalism itself. But distribution of




























































324 325

Mendoza, 15. Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” 25.

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work is by no means finished, since Eurocentered coloniality of power has proved to be longer lasting than Eurocentered colonialism. Without it, the history of capitalism in Latin America and other related places in the world can hardly be explained.326 The current global division of labor and the process by which various social groups are treated by nation-states can be traced to the founding of racialized social relations in the modern/colonial matrix of power. Without this context, current economic and political relations do not make sense. However, the “coloniality of power is not exhausted in the problem of ‘racist’ social relations.”327 Coextensive with the racialized political-economic configuration of Eurocentric power, is “the cultural complex of European modernity/rationality.” The cultural complex of Eurocentrism evolves from “the intersubjective universe produced by the entire Eurocentered capitalist colonial power [as it] elaborated and formalized…the world as an exclusively European product and [posited itself as] a universal paradigm of knowledge and of the relation between humanity and the rest of the world.”328 The paradigm of coloniality posited itself as “rationality”—thus its organization of power would become the rational, morally justified, and natural organization of power. Quijano traces the problematic epistemology of modernity as it is developed out of the epistemology of Descartes’ cogito, highlighting its need for a hard distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in the formation of knowledge and subjectivity.329 The epistemology of modernity involves the following:




























































326

Ibid. Ibid. 328 Ibid., 25-6. (emphasis mine) 329 Nelson Maldonado-Torres also reads the epistemology of modernity as stemming from Descartes, and he reads Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism as a decolonial foil to Descartes: “In Discourse on Colonialism Césaire aims to elucidate the dark side of the ‘deception’ and ‘self-deception’ that Descartes attempts to exorcize in his Discourse on Method. He also provides ideas about correcting these evils and falsehoods through decolonization. Thus Césaire’s Discourse, like Descartes’s, is a discourse on method. It is a discourse on decolonial methodology, on how to achieve and maintain a decolonial consciousness and a decolonial attitude.” Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn,” 448. 327

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The ‘subject’ is a category referring to the isolated individual because it constitutes itself in itself and for itself, in its discourse and in its capacity of reflection. The Cartesian ‘cogito, ergo sum’, means exactly that. Second, the ‘object’ is a category referring to an entity not only different from the ‘subject’! individual, but external to the latter by its nature. Third, the ‘object’ is also identical to itself because it is constituted by ‘properties’ which give it its identity and define it, i.e., they demarcate it and at the same time position it in relation to the other ‘objects.’330 On this paradigm of knowledge formation, the subject is an isolated de-historicized and disembodied individual mind—which elides the fact that all knowledge is necessarily intersubjective knowledge, that no mind exists apart from its social totality. This account of “objects” denies, then, the fact that perceived properties only appear within particular contexts and are not eternal “objective” properties exclusive from their contexts. Of course Descartes will try to get around this by demarcating primary and secondary properties—but the hard subject-object distinction remains. The most problematic aspect of the cogito, for Quijano, is the “new radical dualism: divine reason and nature.”331 This duality means that “the subject” becomes the bearer of ‘reason,’ while the ‘object,’ is not only external to it, but ontologically different. In fact, it is ‘nature.’”332 However, Descartes’ cogito was radically transformative for European science and




























































330

Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” 26. Among other reasons, due to the problems of Descartes’ epistemology, beginning with the epistemology of Hegel puts us in a much better position to theorize from a decolonial standpoint (Hegel’s own problems notwithstanding). As Linda Martín Alcoff writes of Hegel, “In the Philosophy of Right, it is the otherness of the Other that constitutes one’s social identity and through which moral subjectivity is achieved. Thus it is here where Hegel begins to displace the classical liberal core/periphery model of the self with a more holistic model in which the self’s very internal capacities are preconditioned by external relations. Consciousness itself becomes an emergent entity of a social and historical process rather than a kind of presocial thinking substance that could conceivably exist entirely on its own. The locus of agency, in particular, is not simply internal to the self. Hegel has thus greatly influenced current discourses on identity, relocating the source of identity outside the “core” or internal self and making it dependent for its substantive features and capacities on culturally and historically variable external elements. But it is important to note here that Hegel both inaugurates a constitutive self/Other relation and manifests an anxiety about this very dependence and integration. It is this double gesture that can be traced out through subsequent developments in Western thought.” Linda Martín Alcoff, “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” in Identity Politics Reconsidered eds. Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, Satya P. Mohanty, Paula M. L. Moya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 329. 331 Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” 26. 332 Ibid., 26-7. (emphasis mine)

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theories of subjectivity, and insofar as one is able to count as a “subject,” i.e. a bearer of reason, there is a sense of equality between rational subjects. The kind of social ontology inaugurated by Descartes and his contemporaries will eventually transform the hegemonic theological conception of Man into the secular, rational, and political conception of Man. However, as Quijano notes (and Hegel will agree), even if Descartes’ position is radical within its context of emergence, “knowledge…is an intersubjective relation for the purpose of something, not a relation between an isolated subjectivity, and that something.”333 The lack of intersubjectivity on Descartes’ account of knowledge means that there is no “other” to the self except in the objectified form of external nature. The significance of this is: The radical absence of the ‘other’ not only postulates an atomistic image of social existence in general; that is, it denies the idea of the social totality. As European colonial practice was to show, the paradigm also made it possible to omit every reference to any other ‘subject’ outside the European context, i.e., to make invisible the colonial order as totality, at the same moment as the very idea of Europe was establishing itself precisely in relation to the rest of the world being colonized.334 This modern European epistemology explains how Europe was able to posit its order and ways of knowing as universal in the face of many new interactions with other ways of being and knowing. Under the epistemology of the coloniality of power, Europe becomes Subject and the






























































333

Ibid., 27. Ibid. Césaire has similar criticisms of Descartes: “While Descartes’s Discourse on Method gave form and shape to the European rationalist project and fomented a certain form of self-critique (process of doubt), Discourse on Colonialism makes explicit the failure of the European commitment with the Cartesian project while also pointing to intrinsic problems with the Cartesian approach itself. Even though Descartes attempted to articulate a solid ground for reason, and thus to combat lies and deceit, he adopted a method that concealed the epistemological relevance of the relation between master and slave, colonizer and colonized. Descartes’s method is based on an internal dialogue whereby the subject can arrive at the truth about itself and about the true nature of reason. Cartesian individualism and Descartes’s monological process of doubt leave dialogue by the wayside and place obstacles before the flourishing of intersubjective reason. There is a different route, which consists in conceiving reason as dialogical and intersubjective from the beginning. From that perspective, slavery and colonization, rather than the tricks of an ‘evil genius,’ represent the highest betrayals of reason. The perspective of the slave is more conducive to this kind of reflection than that of the master. That is why we see in the periphery or the Third World continued affirmation of ethics and politics as first philosophy.” Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn,” 452. (emphasis mine) 334

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rest of the world becomes a naturalized object for it to know—explicitly demonstrated in the advent of the disciplines of Ethnology and Anthropology.335 Insofar as Europe becomes the macro-historical subject of reason, “history [becomes] conceived as an evolutionary continuum from the primitive to the civilized; from the traditional to the modern; from the savage to the rational…Europe thought of itself as the mirror of the future of all the other societies and cultures; as the advanced form of the history of the entire species.”336 This is, of course, also tied to the justification of European conceptions of property as dictated by the emerging capitalist mode of production. When European civilization, its labor practices, and its colonial scheme of theft, are naturalized, then all inequalities ensuing from these practices are naturalized. If the practices that left the global south and the racialized non-whites within the global north impoverished without access to resources were “natural,” then the increasingly large divides in wealth, quality of life, and access to care is a natural inevitability. With this account of the coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and the “rationality” of modernity, we are brought to the concepts of decolonization and decoloniality. While the most recent hegemonic European intellectual tradition of “post-modernism” has in a reductionist manner, one-sidedly denounced conceptions of totality, reason, and nearly rendered knowledge a logical impossibility—the project of decolonization aims to “liberate the production of knowledge, reflection, and communication from the pitfalls of European rationality/ modernity.”337 Quijano urges that it is not the concept of totality that is the problem, all cultures have some understanding of their social totality. What can be different about other perspectives




























































335

Quijano also links this to the European conceptions of society as a Leviathan-like “organic social totality” insofar as some class of people operate as the brain, others arms and feet, etc. He links this imagery of the social totality to vanguard socialist mode of organization (especially the German Karl Kautsky whom Rosa Luxemburg would eventually excoriate) where the political party/intellectual vanguard is the brain and the unions and proletariat are the feet. (Ibid., 29) 336 Ibid., 30. 337 Ibid., 31.

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on totality is that they can “includ[e] the acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of all reality; of the irreducible, contradictory character of the latter; of the legitimacy, i.e., the desirability, of the diverse character of the components of all reality and therefore, of the social.”338 Fundamentally intersubjective understandings of subjectivity, reality, and knowledge depend on the existence of different “others” for existence—and the existence of difference does not have to be the basis for domination. This will become the horizon of a new decolonial account of universality. The decolonial project does not abstractly or indeterminately negate the categories of Enlightenment European thought, rather it elucidates their historical context and function to shore up a particular set of power relations—the coloniality of power. Just as we saw Hegel’s conception of freedom turn out to be abstract, it did not mean we jettisoned his concept of freedom. Rather, we aimed to make it more concrete—to fill it with determinate historicized content under which it could be concretely realized. Marx attempted to do this, but for reasons already discussed, he did not have an analysis of the coloniality of power. It was the instrumentalization of power for the abstract ends of Enlightenment “reason,” “civilization,” and capitalist gain, instead of human ends, that “spoiled the liberating promise of modernity.”339 The history of coloniality has fundamentally deformed Europe and the subjectivity of settler-colonial peoples, because they have become unable to engage with different others. Intercultural relations embodying decolonial principles would imply “the freedom of all peoples to choose, individually or collectively, such relations: a freedom to choose between various cultural orientations, and, above all, the freedom to produce, criticize, change, and exchange culture and society.”340 In Marxian humanist terms, this translates to the un-alienated






























































338

Ibid. Ibid. 340 Ibid., 32. 339

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flourishing of humanity’s species-being. To conclude, decoloniality is “the dismantling of relations of power and conceptions of knowledge that foment the reproduction of racial, gender, and geopolitical hierarchies that came into being…in the modern/colonial world.”341 The horizon of decoloniality is the hope of a re-humanized world in all aspects of our intersubjective reality. Aimé Césaire’s life and work has embodies decoloniality as he articulates a humanism “made to the measure of the world.”342 2.2
Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn Against the impulses of some critical theorists who theorized fascism in twentieth century Europe as regression from its democratic and liberal aspirations, Aimé Césaire a Martinican politician, poet, and a co-founder of the Négritude movement, diagnosed the burgeoning of fascism within Europe’s borders as a clear telos of the logic of European colonial practices and history. In the following section, I outline Césaire’s decolonial humanist project and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ continuation of Césaire’s work for understanding the conditions of possibility of mutual recognition under conditions of coloniality. This will take my analysis of coloniality to its metaphysical implications, revealing the need for a robust philosophical anthropology (which addressed later with Sylvia Wynter) that extends explicitly into the domains of gender and sexuality.343 We should keep in mind that the initial Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas resulted in a world historical genocide, “between the Aztec-Maya-Caribbean and the Tawantinsuyana (or Inca) areas, about 65 million inhabitants were exterminated in a period of






























































341

Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn,” 440. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 73. 343 As will later be explored with María Lugones and her criticism of Quijano, and by extension Césaire, for not realizing the heteronormativity undergirding their conceptions of coloniality and decolonial politics. 342

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less than 50 years.”344 Given this, Césaire will point out the hypocrisy of viewing the inward turn of these practices on the marginalized within Europe as a phenomena that came from “nowhere.” Césaire writes, [Nazism] is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms…[but before Europeans were] its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, [they] absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to nonEuropean peoples; [Europeans] have cultivated that Nazism, [and] they are responsible for it.345 Along with Marx, Césaire calls out the pseudo-Humanism of Western Europe’s “Liberal Capitalist Democracy,” Césaire writes: And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been—and still is— narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist. I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley that is Europe…there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.346 The promises of freedom as delineated by European liberal civil society, as we can see in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, turn out to be mere abstractions relying on the un-freedom of many others—in particular women, and the economically dispossessed, and colonized and racialized non-Europeans. In the opening of Discourse on Colonialism Césaire calls European civilization “decadent” because it created problems it cannot solve, “stricken” because it “chooses to close




























































344

Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” 24. (emphasis mine) Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 36. 346 Ibid., 37. (emphasis mine) 345

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its eyes to its most crucial problems,” and “dying” because it uses “its principles for trickery and deceit.”347 The two fundamental problems that European civilization has inaugurated but remains unable to solve are (1) “the problem of the proletariat,” and (2) “the colonial problem.”348 Because these problems emerged from the inner contradictions of European civil society, “Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of ‘reason’ or before the bar of ‘conscience.’”349 The “bar of reason,” for Césaire, is not the deformed European concept of “reason,” but rather a reason that emerges from the perspectives of the global communities who have been subjected to the “unreason” of Europe. Césaire’s vision of a decolonial humanism is one that is “made to measure of the world.” Césaire’s analysis of the problem of modernity demonstrates a key aspect of the decolonial method and attitude: he locates the problem of European modernity within “the structures, not the people.”350 While the attitude of analyzing the structures of oppression is also an aspect of a Marxian analysis, what makes Césaire’s account decolonial (even though he is also a Marxist), is that “the ‘people’ in question are not even considered to be ‘people’ under racial and colonial lenses…[and he resists] subordinating the question of the proletariat to the colonial problem.”351 Césaire includes an analysis of capitalism within his analysis of colonialism, but this analysis “is not reducible to economics, class struggle, or exploitation.”352 In fact, he does not spend his time only talking about the connections between capitalism, race, and colonialism, but rather, he “focuses on the connections between fascism and the colonial experience.”353 He refuses to ahistorically reduce the material and existential conditions of the




























































347

Ibid., 31. Ibid. 349 Ibid. 350 Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift,” 446. 351 Ibid., 446. 352 Ibid. 353 Ibid. 348

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colonized subject to that of the European proletariat. Césaire, and later his student Frantz Fanon, point out the reciprocal way in which Europe’s dehumanizing conquest of the world has dehumanized and de-civilized Europeans: we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact…and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated…at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.354 This method of analyzing the rise of fascism within Europe, the pitfalls of liberal European “humanism,” and the tendencies of class reductionism, can be said to reflect the “decolonial turn” in twentieth century political thought. As Maldonado-Torres explains: The decolonial turn (different from the linguistic or the pragmatic turns) refers to the recognition and propagation of decolonization as an ethical, political, and epistemic project…[reflecting] changes in historical consciousness, agency, and knowledge, [and involving] a method or series of methods that facilitate the task of decolonization at the material and epistemic levels.355 Taken together, Césaire and Quijano’s articulation of coloniality, it is clear that the “decolonial turn” entails a new understanding of historical consciousness, agency, and knowledge as it prioritizes the resuscitation of intersubjectivity through the decolonization of both the colonized and the colonizer.356 Understanding the reciprocal relation between colonized and colonizer is critical for the






























































354

Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 35-6. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn,” 437. 356 Ibid., 438 355

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development of a humanized future, as even Hegel implicitly understood. The “decolonial gift” of Césaire is that his analysis of colonialism takes its departure not from the un-reason of Europe, but the reason of the most dispossessed, the enslaved and colonized for the foundation of new humanized social relations.357 The decolonial standpoint taking its departure from those most dehumanized reveals in a “clear and distinct” manner, to borrow Descartes’ terminology, the ways in which our current social relations alienate us from ourselves and from others. While Hegel will say that the consciousness of the master is a “dead end,” he does not offer a clearly articulated standpoint from which we could imagine a more humanized future beyond the life and death struggle. The colonized-colonizer relation makes mutual recognition in the Hegelian sense impossible as the colonized is unable to assert their humanity through intersubjective relations with the colonizer because of their inflated and distorted self-consciousness. Put in other words: “colonialism alters the coordinates of relations that allow subjects to affirm themselves as subjects and as humans. In this sense colonialism has metaphysical implications, which requires a new philosophical anthropology to spell out.358 While utilizing insights from Marxian humanism, decolonial humanism transforms and expands the scope of that analysis to substantially investigate the problems of modernity involving racism and colonialism. A decolonial humanist project, then, will attempt to reveal the metaphysical implications of the legacies of colonialism, capitalism, racism, sexism and heteronormativity and all modes of humanity’s alienation. Before moving to Sylvia Wynter’s work for a philosophical anthropology able to undergird decolonial humanism, I turn to the work of María Lugones to explicitly think through the implications of coloniality for gender and sexuality. Unless decolonial politics can undermine the constitutive heteronormativity that accompanies the




























































357 358

Ibid., 452. Ibid., 454.

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coloniality of power, decolonial humanism will not be a humanism “made to the measure of the world” as Césaire would have hoped. While the decolonial politics of Quijano and Césaire have the good aspirations, they also take part in what Mariana Ortega calls “practices of unknowing.”359 By erasing and eliding the long history of the work of women—and in particular Latinx and decolonial feminisms360—who have also theorized and resisted the coloniality of power, Quijano and Césaire do not see that they are reinstating aspects of the coloniality of power within their decolonial narratives. 2.3
María Lugones on the Coloniality of Gender María Lugones criticizes and interjects into Quijano’s analysis of coloniality with her analysis of the “coloniality of gender,” which describes the processes by which Western European heteronormativity delineated civilized from non-civilized gender formations further differentiating the continuum of more and less human and more and less exploitable.361 Lugones’ theory of the coloniality of gender shows the Eurocentric conception of gender in general to be a “dehumanizing practice [surviving] colonization [which] make[s] sense of contemporary issues such as feminicide, trafficking, and increased violence against non-European women.”362 Lugones prefaces her essay “The Coloniality of Gender” explaining that her work tries to think through “the indifference that men, but, more importantly to our struggles, men who have been racialized as inferior, exhibit to the systematic violences inflicted upon women of color.”363 She




























































359

Mariana Ortega, “Decolonial Woes and Practices of Un-knowing,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31, no. 3 (2017): 504-516. 360 Ortega mentions the work of Emma Perez, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Chela Sandoval as thinkers who need to be taken up much more seriously by all who work on decolonial studies. 361 The colonized were not even seen as human enough to be gendered at all—this fact will be further explored in following sections. See María Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender” in Globalization and the Decolonial Option eds. Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (New York: Routledge, 2013). See also, María Lugones, “Methodological Notes Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy eds. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 68-86. 362 Mendoza, 18. 363 Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” 369.

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does not think that the indifference of men to the struggles of women of color, in particular men of color, has only to do with the epistemic and categorical separation of race, gender, class, and sexuality.364 Lugones’ work seeks to marry the insights of Third World, women of color feminists, and critical race theorists with the decolonial framework of the coloniality of power. In turn she produces a theory of “the modern/colonial gender system,” that illuminates “the crucial disruption of bonds of practical solidarity” between colonized men and women and men and women of color.365 Lugones shows global, Eurocentered, capitalist power to be “organized around two axes that Quijano terms, ‘the coloniality of power’ and ‘modernity.’”366 This configuration of power then organizes what Quijano terms “the four basic areas of human existence: sex, labor, collective authority and subjectivity/intersubjectivity, their resources and products.”367 Lugones criticizes Quijano for implicitly accepting the hegemonic heteronormative and dimorphic articulations of sex and gender, positing them as definitional of the categories of sex and gender (rather than as deformations made by the coloniality of power/modernity). Thus Quijano’s understanding of sex/gender is a product of the Eurocentric/Enlightenment “light” side of modernity and does not reflect insights from its colonial “dark” side.368 As Lugones writes, “Quijano accepts the global, Eurocentered, capitalist understanding of what gender is about. These features of the framework serve to veil the ways in which nonwhite colonized women were subjected and disempowered.”369 Lugones argues that gender and sexuality as we know them need not be organized along oppressive heteronormative lines and she complicates Quijano’s conception of the global capitalist system of power. She does this by




























































364

Ibid. Ibid., 370. 366 Ibid. 367 Quijano quoted in Lugones, 370. 368 Ibid., 371. 369 Ibid., 370. 365

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expanding the term ‘coloniality’ to mean, “not just classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and gender but also the process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings.”370 For Lugones, coloniality is constitutively made up of processes of dehumanization, and in this sense, her decolonial feminist answer to coloniality, and specifically the coloniality of gender, has to do with restoring humanity and intersubjective agency to those most defaced by the coloniality of power. Lugones sees herself as both using and further complicating the insights of intersectionality as it has been formulated by Black feminists and women of color as a corrective to Quijano’s work.371 As Lugones writes: “though everyone in capitalist Eurocentered modernity is both raced and gendered, not everyone is dominated or victimized in terms of them.”372 Intersectionality diagnoses the modern colonial logic that separates the social and political categories of race and gender, in particular showing how this framework erases the experiences of Black women and other women of color. Critically, “the intersectional question reveals racism at the fundamental theoretical and epistemological levels.”373 The structural axes of analysis that Quijano uses (i.e. the coloniality of power as it is co-imbricated with racialized Eurocentric






























































370

Lugones, “Methodological Notes Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” 75. Lugones’ position on intersectionality is more complicated than my brief treatment here shows. In her older works, particularly in her 2003 book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions uses the language of “interlocking oppressions,” and borrows heavily from the Black feminist tradition of intersectional feminism. However, in her later work, particularly in her essay “Methodological Notes Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” she distances herself from intersectional feminism and posits decolonial feminism as something fundamentally distinct. According to Lugones in this essay, intersectionality does not rigorously enough posit the inseparability of race, class, gender, sexuality, as she sees it falling into an “additive model.” She will say that it misses the “coloniality question,” which decolonial and indigenous feminisms offer as a novel intervention. I do not agree with Lugones’ reading of Black feminists and intersectionality nor the decolonial/intersectionality divide, but I do not have space here to address this. I thank Emma Velez for bringing the complicatedness of Lugones’ position on intersectionality to my attention. For more on this, also see María Lugones, “Radical Multiculturalism and Women of Color Feminisms.” JCRT 13(1) (Winter 2014): 68-80. 372 Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” 373. 373 Lugones, “Methodological Notes Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” 70. 371

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global capitalism and the structure of modernity) implicitly show gender and race to be coimbricated and “constituted by and constituting the coloniality of power,”374 however it is Lugones’ formulation of decolonial feminism that seeks to make this explicit. In this, Lugones says that Quijano has his logic correct, but “the axis of coloniality is not sufficient to pick out all aspects of gender” because “what aspects of gender are shown depends on how gender is actually conceptualized in the model.”375 Quijano’s theorization of gender ends up largely biologically deterministic, as the reproduction of gender roles is reduced to sexual reproduction—“gender difference is constituted in the disputes over control of sex, its resources, and products,” meaning, “differences are shaped through the manner in which this control is organized.”376 Quijano describes the relationships between men and women, including colonized and racialized men and women, to be principally shaped around men fighting over women as resources, whether as child bearers or as sex workers. He does not show the reciprocal ways that configurations of race and gender also affect men, and he does not highlight women as agents fighting over control of their own bodies.377 While it is true that gender relations in various indigenous societies prior to colonization may or may not have been egalitarian in terms of gendered social relations, colonization intensified gendered asymmetries and introduced a specific form of Eurocentric heteronormative gendered domination.378 In order to historicize the ways we think about race, gender, and




























































374

Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” 374. Ibid. 376 Ibid. 377 Ibid., 375. 378 In particular, Lugones relies on Oyéronké Oyewùmí’s work on gender and the effects of colonization on gendered dynamics. In particular, Oyewùmí argues that patriarchy is not necessarily a valid transhistorical or transcultural category. Lugones quotes Oyewùmí: “The imposition of the European state system, with its attendant legal and bureaucratic machinery, is the most enduring legacy of European colonial rule in Africa. One tradition that was exported to Africa during this period was the exclusion of women from the newly created colonial public sphere…The very process by which females were categorized and reduced to “women” made them ineligible for leadership roles...The emergence of women as an identifiable category, defined by their anatomy and subordinated 375

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sexuality, and to avoid ahistorical biological determinism, Lugones uses intersexuality as a case study for the ways in which: (1) sex is not, and has never been, dimorphic; but rather the hegemonic conception of sex as necessarily dimorphic is a construction of colonial/modernity and (2) many indigenous cultures prior to colonization operated with a non-dimorphic conception of sex and gender and did not assimilate intersexed individuals to a sexual binary. In fact, Lugones points out that colonizers imagined the colonized largely to be outside European sexual dimorphism (which constituted viable humanity!), using heteronormativity to dehumanize the colonized as being outside “properly human” biological sex and gender.379 This leads Lugones to argue: Women are human in their relation to white, bourgeois, European men. The hierarchical dichotomy as a mark of the human becomes also a normative tool to damn the colonized…The priests and the church overtly presented their mission as transforming the colonized animals into human beings through conversion. From this point of view, colonized people became males and females. Males became not-human-as-not-men, and colonized females became not-human-as-not-women….The semantic consequence of the coloniality of gender is that “colonized woman” is an empty category. No women are colonized. No colonized females are women.380 While Quijano realizes the problematic ways that modern science creates and naturalizes “racial” differences, he does not carry this insight into his though on gender and sexuality.




























































to men in all situations, resulted, in part, from the imposition of a patriarchal colonial state. For females, colonization was a twofold process of racial inferiorization and gender subordination. The creation of “women” as a category was one of the very first accomplishments of the colonial state. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was unthinkable for the colonial government to recognize female leaders among the peoples they colonized, such as the Yorùbá. The transformation of state power to male-gender power was accomplished at one level by the exclusion of women from state structures. This was in sharp contrast to Yorùbá state organization, in which power was not gender-determined.” Ibid., 378-9. For additional women of color and indigenous feminists that influenced Lugones, she cites: “Irene Silverblatt, Carolyn Dean, Maria Esther Pozo, Pamela Calla, Sylvia Marcos, Paula Gunn Allen, Filipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Filomena Miranda, and Oyeronke Oyewumi, among others, enable me to affirm that gender is a colonial imposition, not just as it imposes itself on life in relation that was lived in tune with cosmologies incompatible with the modern logic of dichotomies but also that such inhabitations animated the self-among-others in resistance from and at the extreme tension of the colonial difference.” Lugones, “Methodological Notes Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” 78. 379 Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” 377. 380 Lugones, “Methodological Notes Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” 73, 75.

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Prior to colonization, indigenous peoples had a multitude of different ways of socially and politically structuring their societies that did not render gender the heteronormative category it is today. Heteronormativity as we know it something distinctly racialized, bourgeois, and derived from modern European Christian gender roles as they formed to become a measure of civilization.381 A decolonial lens helps us to see the furthest effects of the dehumanizing nature of the modern configuration of heteronormativity on a global scale. These insights show the abstract/logical Hegelian conception “queer,” as I worked it out in the first chapter, to be consistent with the historical and concrete reality of heteronormativity as impinging on fundamental aspects of human freedom. As Lugones further writes, “the colonial, modern, gender system cannot exist without the coloniality of power, since the classification of the population in terms of race is a necessary condition of its possibility.”382 Insofar as modern conceptions of gender are thoroughly implicated with the coloniality of power’s construction of race as a continuum of more and less human, our thinking about gender is also thoroughly co-imbricated with the coloniality of power. If we do not start from a decolonial standpoint that takes seriously the coloniality of power and the insights of a revolutionary approach to the categories of race, gender, and sexuality, then we will not be able to come up with political theory that makes sense of our reality—nor will we be able to engage in political action that is able to fundamentally transform social relations. Gender is always racialized and racialization is also always gendered—and both of these categories operate differentially depending on one’s proximity to bourgeois whiteness or European-ness. Feminism which does not take this kind of intersectional approach to the coloniality of




























































381

Lugones concludes, “heterosexuality has been consistently perverse, violent, demeaning, a turning of people into animals, and the turning of white women into reproducers of “the race” and “the class.” Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” 383. 382 Ibid.

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power should be called colonial/imperial white bourgeois feminism—as it entails a political theory and project that only seeks to improve the position of white bourgeois women. Lugones characterizes the structure of white feminism as the following: [H]istorically and contemporarily white bourgeois women [have known] perfectly well how to orient themselves in an organization of life that pitted them for very different treatment than non-white or working class women. White feminist struggle became one against the positions, roles, stereotypes, traits, desires imposed on white bourgeois women’s subordination. No one else’s gender oppression was countenanced. They understood women as inhabiting white bodies but did not bring that racial qualification to articulation or clear awareness. That is, they did not understand themselves in intersectional terms, at the intersection of race, gender, and other forceful marks of subjection or domination.383 Such a limited conception of feminism obscures white feminists’ self-understanding of who they are and how their position is a position of dominance over other women. They cannot see that what may further their very specific class and race based interests, actually leads to the further immiseration and theft of political power from working class women, queer and transgender women, Black women, indigenous women, and other women of color. Thus there is no universal “women’s movement” insofar as there is no way to abstract political interests solely along gendered lines—as race, class, sexuality, and colonial history differentially articulate one’s political interests. A political project that will operate in terms of the political interests of those most exploited and oppressed will be one that takes modernity’s coloniality of power and its associated mechanisms of differential dehumanization seriously. To summarize, Lugones’ work reveals how racialized gender categories are fundamental to the organization of the coloniality of power in the instantiation of global relations of capital and labor, the construction of knowledge, and the geopolitical divisions of material resources and political power.






























































383

Ibid., 385.

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III.


Sylvia Wynter: A Decolonial Analysis of “the Human”

With an understanding of the coloniality of power, its racialized effects on gender, labor, knowledge, and its co-constitution with the rise of Eurocentric modernity, we can now take a closer look at the ways it has informed the ontology of the category “the human.” As I outlined with Quijano, Césaire, Maldonado-Torres, and Lugones, decoloniality involves fundamentally undermining all of the ways humanity has been dehumanized and alienated by the social norms and institutions of Eurocentric modernity. As Maldonado-Torres noted: “colonialism alters the coordinates of relations that allow subjects to affirm themselves as humans…it could be said that colonialism has metaphysical implications, which require philosophical anthropology to spell them out.”384 In this section I will clearly delineate the terms of decolonial humanism using Sylvia Wynter’s work to lay out the philosophical anthropology of the human of colonial/modernity towards a new decolonial conception of the human. I will then read Wynter with and against Lugones to expose the strongest and weakest aspects of her theorization of gender for a queer decolonial humanist project. In terms of working out a concept of “decolonial humanism,” I am not the first to think about decolonial thinkers from this perspective. As Maldonado-Torres points out, there have been at least three distinct humanist movements, (1) Renaissance humanism, (2) Enlightenment humanism, and (3) decolonial humanisms—which includes thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Lewis Gordon, and as I hope to add in the next chapter, C. L. R. James and, in some ways, Rosa Luxemburg.385 As Fanon describes, the decolonial humanist project is to “to try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant






























































384

Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn,” 454. See Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Lewis Gordon: Philosopher of the Human,” C. L. R. James Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2008), 103-137. 385

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birth.”386 To do this, Fanon offered a sociogenic account of the human combining an analysis of social and political structures and their effects on intersubjective relations. Fanon’s sociogenic account of humanity is decolonial insofar as it seeks to de-center the European egocentric account of human subjectivity. As Maldonado-Torres describes, Fanon’s project is grounded in the commitment to liberation, not of the people or the citizen, but of the property-people or condemned of the earth and of everyone inhabiting the modern/colonial world. Fanon thereby advances a particular conception of the self (“the I for the sub-other”), an orienting attitude (decolonial attitude), a proposal for human study (sociogenesis), and a new ideal of conviviality (decolonial humanism).387 Instead of a theocratic or Enlightenment account of “the human” as something increasingly perfecting itself through “civilizing processes” imposed “from above”—whether by God, European rulers, or intellectuals—a decolonial understanding of what it means to be human is about the process of reclaiming one’s humanity from the dehumanizing conditions of modernity. This understanding of humanism is built from the experiences of those who are the most marginalized and the most dispossessed, positing them as the most explosively humanizing elements of society. This is a claim not based in “racial/colonized/class essentialism,” but rather in the basic insight that those most dehumanized by our current world are the most resistant to those forces of dehumanization. The import of decolonial humanism, as I would like to term it, is that it provides the basis for the normative imperative of ending capitalism and (neo)colonialism. We will see that decolonial humanism is a humanism that seeks to overturn the modern/colonial configuration of “the human” by asserting a new social and political order through the disalienation and empowerment of the most dispossessed and dehumanized. Sylvia Wynter, born in 1928, is a Jamaican playwright, historian, philosopher, and a






























































386

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 312-313. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Rousseau and Fanon on Inequality and the Human Sciences,” CLR James Journal 15, no. 1 (2009), 132.

387

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central figure both in the Black radical tradition and the decolonial tradition. In one of her early works The Hills of Hebron, published 1962 (the same year Jamaica became independent of British colonial rule), Wynter challenged traditional male led narratives of the meaning of “nationhood,” while remaining optimistic about the ways a newly independent Caribbean nation could re-imagine social relations. As Wynter explains: This alternative form of sovereignty could only come from that group, as the society’s expendable damnés…because of their systematic marginalization, they were forced to daily experience their deviance, their imposed liminal status with respect both to the normative order and to what it is to be human in terms of that order.388 In this piece Wynter names three kinds of sovereignty: political, economic, and ontological sovereignty. While demands of political and economic sovereignty are fairly clear, especially in the context of newly independent Jamaica, ontological sovereignty is something Wynter poses as a precondition for the reorganization of all forms of sovereignty—making it the hardest to achieve and requiring a completely different way of conceptualizing what it means to be a human. Wynter writes, “in order to speak the conception of ontological sovereignty, we would have to move completely outside our present conception of what it is to be human, and therefore outside the ground of the orthodox body of knowledge which institutes and reproduces such a conception.”389 The question of ontological sovereignty immediately leads us to an epistemic question: how do we know what it is to be human? 3.1
Césaire, Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter’s Decolonial Metaphysics of the Human Wynter’s decolonial humanist thought is a further development of the work of Césaire and Fanon. Following Césaire, poesis, or as she will term it, autopoesis, is a central concept to






























































388

David Scott, “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” Small Axe no. 8 (September 2000), 135. 389 Ibid., 136.

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her theorization of what it means to be human under non-dehumanizing conditions. Autopoesis requires the reanimation of our “bios-mythos,” or the “co-relational poetics-aesthetics of our scientific selves.”390 Wynter does not begin by analyzing “disenfranchisement,” or liberal political categories of freedom, but rather she focuses “on the ways in which such categories work themselves out in relation to the human, being human, human being, and codes that govern humanness.”391 Humanized poetic knowledge for Césaire is revolutionary in the face of dehumanized “scientific knowledge.”392 In my earlier sketch of the broad outlines of Césaire’s argument about the bankruptcy of Europe and the West, he linked the degeneration of Europe to its abstract development of the “natural sciences” that have become unable to have any bearing on the reality of human life. As Wynter describes Césaire’s position, The natural sciences (Césaire had argued in a talk given in Haiti, entitled “Poetry and Knowledge”) are, in spite of all their dazzling triumphs with respect to knowledge of the natural world, half-starved. They are half- starved because they remain incapable of giving us any knowledge of our uniquely human domain, and have had nothing to say to the urgent problems that beleaguer humankind. Only the elaboration of a new science, beyond the limits of the natural sciences (he had then proposed), will offer us our last chance to avoid the large-scale dilemmas that we must now confront as a species.393 The new humanized science would have to deal with not only “nature” but with “the Word,” as that which fundamentally separates the colonized from the colonizer as Jean-Paul Sartre would describe in the preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.394 Wynter draws on Césaire’s




























































390

Katherine McKittrick, “Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8. 391 Ibid. 392 For more on this see Robin D. G. Kelly’s essay “The Poetics of Anticolonialism” in Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 7-28. 393 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 328. 394 As Sartre writes, “Not so long ago the Earth numbered 2 billion inhabitants, i.e., 500 million men and 1.5 billion ‘natives.’ The first possessed the Word, the others borrowed it…Then it was over: the mouths opened of their own accord; the black and yellow voices still talked of our humanism, but it was to blame us for our inhumanity. We quite happily listened to these polite displays of bitterness. At first we were amazed and proud: ‘What? They can

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dialectical understanding of the history of colonialism and his firm assertion that there is no use in longing for a return to pre-colonial life, as Césaire writes in Discourse on Colonialism: “the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism…it is a new society that we must create.”395 For Wynter, history operates on two levels: first, there is the history of humanity as a species, “wherever we are, in whichever part of the world, whatever the terms, [or ways] in which we’re…peopling the entire planet;” and second, inserted into that history, is the history “in which the idea of humanism…where man and its human Others—that is, Indians, Negros, Natives—are first invented.”396 Understanding modern history, then, requires understanding the relationship of the West and its non-Western others. Responding to Englishmen who taught in the West Indies but saw themselves as being on “the outside” and “merely teaching there,” Wynter points out their ignorance: they refused to realize “that the condition of their being what they are today, and the condition of we being what we are today [formerly colonized subjects] are totally interlinked.”397 She continues, “you can’t separate the strands of that very same historical process which has, by and large, enriched their lives and, at the same time, largely impoverished the lives of the majority of our people.”398 Just as Fanon would focus on the intersubjective consequences of the colonized-colonizer relation, so too does Wynter. She expands this analysis to the whole of the European humanist tradition circumscribing what it has






























































chat away all on their own? Look what we did with them!’ There was no doubt in our minds they accepted our ideal since they were accusing us of not respecting it. Europe then really believed in its mission: it had Hellenized the Asians and created this new species, the Greco-Roman blacks.” Sartre’s preface in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, xliii-xliv. 395 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 52. 396 Sylvia Wynter quoted in David Scott, “The Re-Enchantment,” 198. 397 David Scott, “Re-Enchantment”, 152. 398 Ibid.

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meant to be human beginning from Renaissance Christian humanism, to the secular political humanism of the Enlightenment, and the bio-economic humanism of the present. Fanon’s conception of sociogenesis is also critical to Wynter’s project, as she sees it as a further development of the “new science” called for by Césaire. Because Fanon begins from the dehumanized situation of the damné, he is able to see that in the case of humans, “besides the genetically programmed process of ontogenesis [i.e. the reproduction of the species qua genetic species], there is the, so to speak, symbolically encoded, process of sociogenesis.”399 What this means is “besides the neural firings which physiologically implement our reflex responses of aversion or attraction, there must be something else which determines the terms in which those neural firings will be activated and, therefore, the phenomenological experience.”400 According to Wynter, the terms in which our “neural firings” will be determined will have to do with the “symbolically coded mode of the subject, of being human, for whose well-being these specific responses/firings will be of adaptive advantage.”401 She will later call these modes of being human genres of the human. In terms of her theorization of consciousness, there are some interesting resonances with a Marxist-Hegelian approach. Just as Hegel will say, “spirit is not a bone,” (where spirit represents human self-consciousness as it develops inter-subjectively within a historico-ethical world) so too with Wynter. In Wynter’s words, the casual source of the nature of our response does not lie in the neurophysiological mechanisms of the brain…it lies in the master code of the sociogenic principle. Since it is its meaning systems that determine how the mechanisms of the brain will implement our experience of being human, in the terms of each culture’s [or we could say Sittlichkeit] specific conception.402




























































399

Ibid., 189. Ibid. 401 Ibid. 402 Ibid. 400

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She continues, “this therefore means that our aversive responses to ourselves, our reality, are socialized rather than natural responses.”403 As in Hegel and Marx, there is a sense in which anything involving humans is never “merely” natural, nor could be fully determined/explained by “natural laws,” which lent their metaphysics to a queer understanding of sex and gender. The distinction between humans and nature in Wynter is similar to Hegel’s distinction insofar as they both characterize the relationship of humanity’s emergence from nature as one of a qualitative leap. In Wynter’s terms, the always already socialized…orders of consciousness through which we experience ourselves as this or that mode of the human have to be seen as the expression of a mutation in the processes of evolution, one by means of which a new level of existence, discontinuous with evolution, is brought into existence or, rather, brings itself into existence.404 Hegel will describe the transition from nature to spirit as the transition from external determination to a realm of free in and for-itself determination, where freedom is the ability to forge a particular orientation to nature/natural laws. While Wynter can be characterized as a profoundly dialectical thinker, maintaining a conception of positive progress towards the liberation of humanity from dehumanization,405 she also borrows from Foucault’s concept of episteme in fleshing out her philosophy of history. As Wynter writes, “for me, [the] episteme is always the expression of the way in which we know ourselves adaptively in the terms that we inscript ourselves and are reciprocally inscripted…the






























































403

Ibid. Ibid., 190. 405 For example, see her position on Columbus and 1492: “1492 should be commemorated…only to the extent that it marks—from an ecumenically human perspective and to an ecumenically human interest—the beginning of new possibilities. And one such possibility would have to be, and imperatively so, that of our being able to effect the deconstruction of the mechanisms by means of which we continue to make opaque to ourselves, attributing the origin of our societies to imaginary being, whether the ancestors, the gods, God or evolution, and natural selection, the reality of our own agency with respect to the programing and reprogramming of our desires, our behaviors, our minds, ourselves, the I and the we.” Ibid., 194. 404

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episteme, therefore, functions to enact a specific genre of being human, to elaborate its governing code or sociogenic principle.”406 The history of epistemes then, is also the history of genres of the human. While Foucault views the emergence of a new episteme as a break or mutation of the old—he stays away from organizing epistemes within any narrative of “progress,” because for him there is no position from which he could make a judgement about the totality of epistemes to create a narrative. Wynter, on the other hand, aspires to develop a position from which she can judge the totality of sociogenic principles or historical epistemes. We will later see that this is what she thinks a universal humanism would do, in other words, a universal humanism would take the totality of humanity, rather than merely one genre of the human, as its object. However, Wynter offers a non-abstract and non-absolute concept of universality markedly different in its terms and method from Enlightenment conceptions of universality. To get a sense of Wynter’s conception of progress and her concept of universality, I will first engage her methodology of “liminal dialectics” as it is connected to her philosophy of revolution. 3.2 Wynter’s Liminal Dialectic and Philosophy of Revolution Instead of reading all history as the history of “class struggle,” Wynter reads history as the history of epistemic struggle—though she also understands struggles between epistemes as necessarily involving economic and political struggles. Wynter positions herself with respect to Marx in the following: When Marx said that the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling group, this is because a ruling group can only be a ruling group as long as it continues to actualize and embody in itself the name of what is good….the ‘politics of truth’ of each episteme has to function in a way that enables its social reality to be known in terms that are of adaptive advantage to the survival, well-being, and stable reproduction of the mode of being human that each ruling group embodies and actualizes.407




























































406 407

Ibid., 199. Sylvia Wynter in David Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 199.

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Wynter prioritizes understanding “the good” for the ruling group because it instantiates the episteme justifying and organizing material conditions for the “survival, well-being, and stable reproduction” of the ruling group’s mode of being human in every historical hegemonic order. She then sublates the insights of Marxian class struggle, putting ‘modes of production’ and ‘class struggle’ into a broader frame of reference i.e. episteme.408 Wynter “redefines Marx’s class struggle in the terms of a ‘politics of being’: that is, one waged over “what is to be the descriptive statement of the human, about whose master code of symbolic life and death each




























































408

On a biographical note, Wynter considered herself to be a Marxist until the 1961 riots in Guyana against Marxist Cheddi Jagan, leader of the People’s National Congress (PNC). Jagan attempted to implement a Marxist economic plan for Guyanese independence with the help of two Marxist Hungarian economists. As Wynter recounts: “[The Hungarian Marxist economists] went around to different countries writing prescriptions for what they called budgets of development. And so they’d come to Guyana and gotten Cheddi in trouble because, not knowing the fundamental division between Indians and black, they had placed taxes on everything which the black Guyanese used, which were imported, and spared what the Indians ate, which were not imported. Then everything starts blowing up: labour strikes, marches and so on. So I remember Janet Jagan calling me and asking would I come over and write some radio scripts that would explain what the budget was about. So I took my little typewriter and I was escorted through back roads and back doors and back gates to get to this Red House, and I start to try and write my script. But at this time masses of people are marching towards the Red House, and Georgetown is burning, and I am inside the Red House…Yet as I looked out the window—you see, what was traumatic for me was the stark nature of the division between black and Indian — you had a black policemen at the gate, but you had a sharp-shooting Indian from the coast with a rifle aimed at him from the upstairs window. And outside you have the masses of people streaming towards [the Red House]…So I always tell this joke against myself. Cheddi asks for the British troops to be sent in. And I—I who had railed against colonialism all my life—I was never happier to hear those British boots rattling on the pavement as they came around the corner and began to set up machine guns and barbed wire. And, of course, the crowd began to melt at that moment. And then I came out. It was a traumatic experience. What is very interesting—and I want you to note this but I'm not noting this to make a cheap point but an important one at the moment that I am inside the Red House, at that moment, Michael Manley—who belonged to the Caribbean Congress of Labour, one of the US-inspired free world organizations—had been sent as a representative and he was outside preaching against Cheddi Jagan…in the days that followed on the riots, I realized a tragedy of enormous proportions was arising in Guyana. Because the division between the black and the Indian groups was profound. And I also realized, as I lived there, that however much the blacks struggled, they were eventually going to be displaced. I tried to speak to Cheddi. I said that whilst I'd love to continue working there it seemed to me that the greatest emphasis was to see if we could begin to build a common history, place the emphasis on creating a sense of a shared community, of solidarity, because that did not exist. But Cheddi at that time was a very orthodox Marxist, and to even suggest that the superstructure was not automatically determined by the mode of production but was constructed, so that you can reconstruct it, that would have been heresy for him, genuinely. And then all kinds of rashes, of eruptions, began to break out on my skin, because of the trauma of the situation…Later on it turned out that the riots were part of a CIA-inspired movement. But having been there, I know that the CIA can only act on the basis of divisions that are already there. There were profound divisions that are still coming out into the open in Guyana today. Up until then, like most of my generation, I was a Marxist because Marxism gave you a key which said look, you can understand the reality of which you're a part…but from that moment I said, no, there is something important that this paradigm cannot deal with…it was not a matter of negating the Marxian paradigm but of realizing that it was one aspect of something that was larger.” Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 139-142. (emphasis mine)

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human order organizes itself.”409 Wynter sees the Marxian focus on modes of production to miss the epistemic framework within which these modes of production operate—i.e. the hegemonic episteme. Revolutions between historical epochs occur through the overturning of the hegemonic episteme by a dialectical encounter with its liminal counterparts. The motor of Wynter’s theory of revolution is a “liminal dialectic” where epistemic change is prioritized as “the locus of crucial revolutionary change” because of the metaphysical priority of the epistemic over the economic.410 Normative categories “of any order—for example the aristocratic category of European feudalism—are normative precisely because the structure of their lived experience is isomorphic with the representation that the order gives itself of itself.”411 On the other hand, “liminal categories like those of the bourgeoisie in the feudal order of things…experience a structural contradiction between their lived experience and the grammar of representations which generate the mode of reality.”412 Any revolution in the ruling episteme will require the rewriting and re-defining of what it means to be human on the terms of those who were made liminal by the previous definition of “the human.” This in turn radically re-orients the ways that humans organize themselves socially, politically, and economically. The agents of revolutionary change are always “liminal subjects” because they are the ones who: (1) are structurally inclined to see the limits of the current episteme as they potentially have a more “objective” view of them—where “objective” means that they can properly take hegemonic norms as objects for study because they external to them in some sense; and (2) for






























































409

Wynter, “Unsettling,” 319. Paget Henry, “Sylvia Wynter: Poststructural and Postcolonial Thought” in Caliban’s Reason: Introducing AfroCaribbean Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000), 130-131. 411 Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found,” 39. 412 Ibid. 410

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liminal subjects to assert their humanity necessarily entails revolutionary changes in the hegemonic order of things.413 As Paget Henry comments on Wynter’s liminal dialectics: Wynter sees this liminal dialectic…as both encompassing and surpassing the Marxian dialectic. The practice of exploitation within a mode of economic production along with its overthrow must be referred back to the conditions of liminal domination and the epistemic changes necessary for the latter’s removal…the historical process is not driven by class or racial conflict, but rather by the epistemic and liminal dynamics in the mythopoetic constructions of groups in conflict.414 At first glance, this characterization of Wynter’s philosophy of revolution might seem as if she does not recognize the significance of race and class in current revolutionary struggles.415 However, as we move into her conceptual account of the history of genres of the human, it will become clear how race and class critically emerge in the liminal dialectics of modernity. 3.3
A History of Humanisms and the Argument for the Overrepresentation of “Man” Hitherto, all hegemonic conceptions of the human have attempted to assert the universality of what was actually only one genre of the human. Briefly stated, the history of humanisms begins with a fundamentally theocratic account of the human as an ensouled being, transitioning by what Wynter describes as the “de-godding” of Man, into to the secular humanism of the Enlightenment. This in turn instantiated the “rational” political subject of ‘Man1,’ which transitions post-industrialization/Darwin into our present bio-economic conception of Man2. These humanisms are plagued by what Wynter terms “the overrepresentation of Man.” That the West has “overrepresented Man,” means that it has posited




























































413

In Wynter’s words, “The spearheading of this thrust towards an external observer position will be necessarily carried out by those Liminal categories who existentially experience the mode of Chaos to the mode of order of the governing system of figuration, whose will to affirmation, like that of the original humanists, depends on the unwriting/rewriting of the present schema and order of knowledge.” Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2 Vol 12/13, (1984), 48-9. 414 Paget Henry, “Sylvia Wynter: Poststructural and Postcolonial Thought,” 131. This essay also offers good criticisms of Wynter’s work, in particular her peculiar idealism and displacing the significance of political economy in determining the conditions of possibility for organizing human life. 415 I will cover Wynter’s position on gender in section 3.4.

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Man1 and Man2 as universal teloi of humanity—when we know that both of these conceptions of the human rely on the categorical exclusion of the colonized, the racialized, women, the poor and un-propertied, the non-heteronormative, the disabled, etc. A truly universal humanism would need to develop “a higher order of human knowledge, able to provide an ‘outer view’ which takes the human rather than any one of its variations as Subject.”416 The positing of a new science of knowledge of the human is Wynter’s decolonial humanist project. Up until Renaissance humanism, Wynter writes, the Greek cosmology inherited by medieval Christian Europe was premised on the division between heaven and earth. On this scheme, the earth was to be the center of the universe as a fixed point. When Copernicus shows the earth to be moving along with “the heavens,” this cosmological scheme is shattered giving rise to the “natural sciences.”417 The rise of the natural sciences then opened the door to the “degodding” and revalorization of “Man” as a natural being with an anthropological history. The advent of anthropology then allowed the West to “reinvent its true Christian self as that of [natural] Man.”418 The “indios/indias/Indians in the encomienda neo-serf labor institution and the negros/negras/Negros in the plantation slave labor institution were now to be classified, in Western terms, as the human Others to the West’s self-conception in terms of Man as a rational being and political subject.”419 The otherness of “pagan” polytheistic peoples under Christian humanism gave way to the secular political conception of Man, whose other would be those deemed irrational or unable to emerge out of the Enlightenment’s “state of nature.” This new definition of “Man” would create a continuum of more and less rational, which would determine






























































416

Ibid., 56. Wynter in David Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 176. 418 Ibid. (emphasis mine) 419 Ibid. 417

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how one could be legitimately treated based on their ability meet the demands of the European nation-state. The politico-economic effects of the transition between theocratic and humanistic epistemes are born out in the Valladolid debates between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Gines Sepúlveda. Las Casas argued against Sepúlveda’s naturalized/secular law based arguments for indigenous peoples to be considered “natural slaves” on the grounds that his argument was based in “natural reason” and not divine reason. For Las Casas there is no “natural” reasoning that would justify degrees of humanity if it is true that all humans are equally loved and created by God. For Las Casas, Sepúlveda’s arguments about the legality of the encomienda system based on this his Aristotelian theory of “natural slaves” is mistaken because it is based on human arrogance and ignorance. As Las Casas writes: Clearly one cannot prove in a short time or with a few words to infidels that to sacrifice men to God is contrary to nature…to sacrifice innocents for the salvation of the Commonwealth is not opposed to natural reason, is not something abominable and contrary to nature, but is an error that has its origin in natural reason itself….And there is no difference with respect to the duties imposed upon these who do not know him, (the True God as we Christians do) as long as they hold some God to be the true God, and honor him as such….This is because the mistaken conscience/consciousness (la conciencia erronea) obliges and compels exactly the same way as does the true/a correct one (la conciencia recta).420 While Las Cases is historically taken to be “the good guy,” it is undeniable that his discourse remains firmly in the discourse of colonial Europe—as discourses outside that logic, namely of the indigenous colonized subjects, were rendered unintelligible in this debate. As Wynter describes, “the clash between Las Casas and Sepúlveda was a clash over this issue—the clash as to whether the primary generic identity should continue to be that of Las Casas’s theocentric






























































420

Las Casas quoted in Wynter, “Unsettling,” 284-285. (emphasis mine)

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Christian, or that of the newly invented Man of the humanists, as the rational (or ratiocentric) political subject of the state.”421 Las Casas’ humanism, while it resists an extreme continuum of more and less human, still operates on a particular ethno-religious understanding of what it means to be human.422 We know that conversion of indigenous peoples implied not only a religious, but a cultural and political conversion to the ways of European empire—even if Las Casas called for a more “gentle” conversion than Sepúlveda. Perhaps unsurprisingly, because of the similar logics of each party’s argument within the colonial logics of modernity, neither side “won” the debate. While Spain made a few reforms to the encomienda system, the treatment of indigenous peoples did not significantly improve following these academic debates. These debates signaled the transition between Christian humanism to secular “naturalist” humanis—here we see Sépulveda classifying non-Europeans as “natural slaves.” However, the category of sub-human, “will only [emerge] with the shift in the nineteenth century [when] we [come] to experience ourselves in the terms of the bourgeois Origin Narrative of Evolution and natural selection, and therefore come to be able to think that there can be humans who can be not






























































421

Ibid., 288. Wynter further explains the colonial logic of European Catholicism: “Beginning in 1444 with the Portuguese landfall on the shores of Senegal West Africa, all the actions that were to be taken by European-Christians—their enslavement of non-Christians whom they first classified in theological terms as Enemies-of-Christ, whether those of Africa or those of the New World, together with their expropriation of the lands of the peoples on both continents (limitedly so, at that time, in the case of Africa; almost totally so in the case of the Americas)—were initially seen as just and legitimate in Christian theological terms. In these terms, all the concessions of non- European lands by the pope to the Portuguese and Spanish sovereigns were effected by means of several papal bulls that defined these lands as ones that, because not belonging to a Christian prince, were terra nullius (“the lands of no one”), and so legitimately expropriated by Christian kings (Mudimbe 1988). In other words, they were so seen within the terms of the adaptive truth-for of their ‘local culture’s’ still hegemonic descriptive statement of the human, and of the order of knowledge to which that statement gave rise. And, therefore, as the truth of the ‘single culture’ in whose theocentric terms they thought and acted (Epstein 1993), whose truth they believed to be as supernaturally ordained as we now believe ours to be ‘objective’ because, ostensibly, supraculturally true. This means that the large-scale accumulation of unpaid land, unpaid labor, and overall wealth expropriated by Western Europe from non-European peoples, which was to lay the basis of its global expansion from the fifteenth century onwards, was carried out within the order of truth and the self-evident order of consciousness, of a creed-specific conception of what it was to be human—which, because a monotheistic conception, could not conceive of an Other to what it experienced as being human, and there-fore an Other to its truth, its notion of freedom.” Ibid., 291. 422

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quite human.”423 Only with the advent of the biocentric category of the human do ontological degrees of more and less human become intelligible. The ethico-political distinction of Man1 was rational/irrational justifying the hegemony of the landed gentry and plantation owners, which would give way to the paradigm of Man2,424 where ethico-political distinctions of eugenic/dysgenic and selected/deselected instantiate a “bioevolutionary line of descent,” legitimating one’s access or non-access to wealth and resources.425 As W. E. B. du Bois will say, the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, and it is only within the category of Man2 that we finally have race as a fully formed political-biological-economic concept, replacing the idea of “natural slaves” under Man1 or pagan idolaters within Christian humanism.426 As Wynter writes about our current situation:




























































423

Ibid., 182. Wynter further describes the reality of Man2: “Seeing that if at one level Man2 is now defined as a jobholding Breadwinner, and even more optimally, as a successful ‘masterer of Natural Scarcity’ (Investor, or capital accumulator), what might be called the archipelago of its modes of Human Otherness can no longer be defined in the terms of the interned Mad, the interned ‘Indian,’ the enslaved ‘Negro’ in which it had been earlier defined. Instead, the new descriptive statement of the human will call for its archipelago of Human Otherness to be peopled by a new category, one now comprised of the jobless, the homeless, the Poor, the systemically made jobless and criminalized—of the ‘underdeveloped’—all as the category of the economically damnés (Fanon 1963), rather than, as before, of the politically condemned. With the result that if inside Europe, it will be the Poor who will be made to reoccupy the earlier proscribed interned places of the Leper and the Mad, in the Euro-Americas, it is the freed Negro, together with the Indians interned in reservations, or as peons on haciendas, who will now be interned in the new institution of Poverty/Joblessness. That is, in an institution now made to actualize the idea of the human overcome by Natural Scarcity, and therefore in the process of being swept away by Malthus’s ‘iron laws of nature,’ because unable, as the regular job-holding Breadwinners and Investors are so clearly able to do, to master the “ill” of this scarcity. This at the same time, as Fanon shows in The Wretched of the Earth, as the “native” rural agroproletariat interned in colonial institutions would be made to actualize the category most totally condemned to poverty and joblessness, ostensibly because of the represented bio-evolutionarily determined incapacity of its members to do otherwise. Since, like the medieval Leper, whose proscribed role had called for him/her to actualize the realization of the effects of mankind’s enslavement to Original Sin, so this new archipelago of Otherness will be made to signify the realization of the new reformulation’s posited “absence of order,” or postulate of ‘significant ill,’ defined now in economic terms. And ‘curable,’ therefore, only in economic terms.” Wynter, “Unsettling,” 321. 425 Ibid. 426 Wynter further describes the reality of Man2: “Seeing that if at one level Man2 is now defined as a jobholding Breadwinner, and even more optimally, as a successful ‘masterer of Natural Scarcity’ (Investor, or capital accumulator), what might be called the archipelago of its modes of Human Otherness can no longer be defined in the terms of the interned Mad, the interned ‘Indian,’ the enslaved ‘Negro’ in which it had been earlier defined. Instead, the new descriptive statement of the human will call for its archipelago of Human Otherness to be peopled by a new category, one now comprised of the jobless, the homeless, the Poor, the systemically made jobless and criminalized—of the ‘underdeveloped’—all as the category of the economically damnés, rather than, as before, of the politically condemned. With the result that if inside Europe, it will be the Poor who will be made to reoccupy the earlier proscribed interned places of the Leper and the Mad, in the Euro-Americas, it is the freed Negro, together 424

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All our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources…these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle…Central to this struggle also is the usually excluded and invisibilized situation of the category identified by Zygmunt Bauman as the “New Poor”. That is, as a category defined at the global level by refugee/economic migrants stranded outside the gates of the rich countries, as the postcolonial variant of Fanon’s category of les damnés—with this category in the United States coming to comprise the criminalized majority Black and dark-skinned Latino inner-city males now made to man the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex, together with their female peers—the kicked-about Welfare Moms—with both being part of the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless/the jobless, the semi-jobless, the criminalized drug-offending prison population.427 The intelligibility of our present global and national conditions is undergirded by a particular understanding of the human that operates by dehumanizing a global majority—the “overrepresentation of Man” and the expense of humanity. In order to found a new humanized world what is needed is a new conception of the human that does not operate under a false or abstract conception of universality, but on a new form of universalism altogether. As Wynter writes: What we need is a new universalism whose truth-for will coincide with the empirical reality in which we now find ourselves, the single integrated history we now live. You see, the problems that we confront—that of the scandalous inequalities between the rich and the poor countries, of global warming and the disastrous effects of climate change, of large scale epidemics such as AIDS—can be solved only if we can, for the first time, experience ourselves, not only as we do now, as this or that genre of the human, but also




























































with the Indians interned in reservations, or as peons on haciendas, who will now be interned in the new institution of Poverty/Joblessness. That is, in an institution now made to actualize the idea of the human overcome by Natural Scarcity, and therefore in the process of being swept away by Malthus’s ‘iron laws of nature,’ because unable, as the regular job-holding Breadwinners and Investors are so clearly able to do, to master the “ill” of this scarcity. This at the same time, as Fanon shows in The Wretched of the Earth, as the “native” rural agro-proletariat interned in colonial institutions would be made to actualize the category most totally condemned to poverty and joblessness, ostensibly because of the represented bio-evolutionarily determined incapacity of its members to do otherwise. Since, like the medieval Leper, whose proscribed role had called for him/her to actualize the realization of the effects of mankind’s enslavement to Original Sin, so this new archipelago of Otherness will be made to signify the realization of the new reformulation’s posited “absence of order,” or postulate of ‘significant ill,’ defined now in economic terms. And ‘curable,’ therefore, only in economic terms.” (Wynter, “Unsettling,” 321). 427 Ibid., 260-261.

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as human.428 Wynter asserts that humanity as a species already has the tools needed to articulate a new conception of the human. But we will only be able to accomplish this when we can “think outside the terms in which we are,” by thinking “about the processes by which we institute ourselves as what we are, [and] make these processes transparent to ourselves.”429 For Wynter, this takes place when we, as a social totality, finally make our object of knowledge the many genres of being human, i.e. “of the governing sociogenic principles in whose symbolically coded and prescribed terms we inscript and thereby experience ourselves as an I and we.”430 Wynter’s decolonial humanism primarily interrogates and challenges the founding epistemic categories of particular genres of the human to instantiate a decolonial humanist political project to elicit a global revolution of values and organization of power. In this, there is a sense in which she is not far from the “idealism” of German Idealism. Along these lines, Paget Henry calls out Wynter for neglecting to see the ways in which she herself “overrepresents” the epistemic over the political-economic.431 As Wynter says explicitly in her interview with David Scott: “the epistemological order of which criticism is a part, [is] the order which mandates the political order.”432 As Henry writes, the concrete political consequences of Wynter’s position means that “the deepening crisis of ‘we the underdeveloped’ is ‘not primarily an economic one,’ but is really epistemic in nature…it is a crisis that stems from our failure to institute a new episteme.”433 Wynter’s focus on the primary significance of epistemic regimes means that she is willing to suggest, “we will not eliminate political authoritarianism until we are able to control




























































428

Ibid., 196-197. (emphasis mine) Ibid., 206. 430 Ibid., 207. 431 See Henry, “Sylvia Wynter: Poststructural and Postcolonial Thought.” 432 Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 168. 433 Henry, 135. 429

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the authoritarian elements encoded in the categorical foundations of our discursive practices.”434 While there is no doubt that our conception of the human works to legitimate the current world order, we can’t forget that political economy, i.e. the mode of social reproduction, profoundly limits our efforts to transition to a world that embodies decolonial humanist principles. As Henry points out, two major shortcomings of Wynter’s analysis are (1) the underestimation of the limiting role of political economy on our ability to break out of our current episteme (i.e. she overemphasizes the primacy of the categorical/epistemic over the political-economic); and (2) the under theorization and articulation of the dynamics between categorical/epistemic processes and institutional structures. Henry continues, In theory, Wynter’s position is one of equality and mutuality, but in practice this is consistently violated. For example, in the legitimacy needs of institutional systems of power, Wynter sees “the equiprimordiality of structural and cultural conceptions in the genesis of power.” In other words, “the cultural aspects of power are as original as the structural aspects; each serves as a code for the other’s development.” However, the above repositioning of political economy is not in line with this position of equiprimordiality. This gap suggests that in actual practice Wynter has not been able to control the discursive tendencies toward overrepresenting founding categories. The underrepresenting of economic and other institutional structures is systematically related to the overrepresentation of language, sign systems, and discursive processes in Wynter’s approach.435 The structural and cultural aspects of the organization of power cannot be “equiprimordial.” Rather cultural and epistemological justifications of the structural organization of power will only become hegemonic after the organization of power they justify historically comes into being. The epistemic order of Man1 only becomes hegemonic after 1492, the epistemic order of Man2 only becomes hegemonic after the rise of industrial capitalism and the Darwinian revolution in the natural sciences. As Hegel famously says, the owl of Minerva flies




























































434 435

Ibid., 138. Henry, 140-141.

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at dusk—it is only after historical events happen that we come to find what is “rational” about them, or what particular conceptions of the human underlie them. While we can come up with abstract formulations of what categories of thought are, these categories only come to have social and political significance when they are made concrete within a particular Sittlichkeit or episteme. Because Wynter’s decolonial humanism takes race and coloniality to be constitutive of our current conception of the human, her work is unquestionably a development beyond the Marxian humanism I outlined in the previous chapter. However, despite the underdeveloped aspects of Marxian humanism, Wynter’s decolonial humanism would be strengthened by an analysis of political economy within her account of genres of the human. In other words, I agree with Wynter when she says, “up until now, there has been no history of the human,”436 but I disagree with her when she posits cognitive/epistemic revolutions as the primary cause of political-economic revolutions. The concrete universality of decolonial humanism, as we find it in Wynter, appears in the fact that it is able to take the flourishing of humanity, in all of its genres, as its object. What makes this not an abstract universalism is its concrete methodology, which takes a particular group of humanity, i.e. the wretched of the earth, as its priority. In Wynter, this takes place through her philosophy of history and “liminal dialectics,” which exposes those most marginalized and dispossessed by hegemonic definitions of the human to be the most promising revolutionary agents for provoking the re-humanization of global social relations. Wynter’s decolonial approach to universalistic humanism recognizes that there are many genres of the human. How we discern what genres of the human fit into a decolonial humanist paradigm will




























































436

Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 198.

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require us to interrogate their foundations: do they rely on the abjection or subjection of other legitimate genres of the human? Do they commit category mistakes and posit themselves as the human rather than a particular genre of the human? With these questions, we will be able to root out Eurocentric, racist, sexist, and heteronormative genres of the human, as these genres are rendered illegitimate on decolonial humanist principles. 3.4
Wynter on the Coloniality of Gender Wynter’s position on gender has been criticized by some feminists for what I consider to be both good and bad reasons. Given Wynter’s analysis of the colonial history of modernity, race has an ontologically foundational place over gender because, as we see in the history of humanisms, what developed into the modern concept of race, i.e. one’s proximity or distance from white Western European ideals, became the measure for how one would be treated by hegemonic powers. Gender as a human category only applied to those interpreted to be human, the sub-human was not “gendered” in the same way. However, this does not mean that she does not appreciate gender as a foundational category of the human, but rather she thinks that many feminists make a category mistake when they posit gender as the founding category of humanity as in “patriarchy” theory. As Wynter puts it, the phenomenon of gender, while a foundational archetype unique to our situation as humans, nevertheless is itself only one member of a class, a class of something else. So what was/is this something else, this class of which the phenomenon of gender is a member? This question took me to Fanon, to his redefinition of the human, as being defined by phylogeny, ontogeny, sociogeny. And therefore, as biological beings who can only experience ourselves as human, through the mediation of culture-specific masks. Her point that gender is only one member of a class of foundational categories of the human is well taken, and as I will argue below, I agree race has a relative categorical priority to gender in terms of articulating one’s position vis-à-vis modernity’s conception of the human.

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However, Wynter—and this might be because she cannot fully escape the hegemonic categories of Man2 even within her own analysis—relies too heavily on biological descriptions and definitions of gender. In this, she falls into some of the same mistakes that Lugones criticized in Quijano’s work. For example, Wynter writes, “as Quijano rightly insists, race— unlike gender (which has a biogenetically determined anatomical differential correlate onto which each culture’s system of gendered oppositions can be anchored)—is a purely invented construct that has no such correlate.”437 Wynter here doubles down on the biological determination of gender and posits race as “purely invented” while gender is not invented because it supposedly has a “biological correlate.” This is to misunderstand both biology and gender, as well as the fact that biology has also been cited as a correlate of race (however wrongly or correctly is another issue). We would only have to go back to Lugones—and the myriad of other feminists dealing with biology and science—to see that there is no “biological correlate” to gender.438 Wynter here falls short of her promise to use Fanon’s categories of phylogeny, ontology, and sociogeny, as she doesn’t realize the sociogenic nature of gender as she so readily realizes with race. While both Quijano and Wynter are correct about the foundational quality of race as a category of human classification within modernity, Lugones along with Black and indigenous women (including Wynter) have pointed out: colonized women were not seen as women by colonizers of either gender. This was because to be a gendered would require being considered human in the first place.439 As Wynter herself insightfully points out, logically, the theory of




























































437

Wynter, “Unsettling,” 264. My Hegelian theorization of “queer spirt” in chapter 1 offers a way out from these pitfalls as well. 439 For example, see Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006) and Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). We could also think of the logic behind miscegenation laws here. 438

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“patriarchy” (as it emerged hegemonically in the 60s and 70s) could only have come from white professional women who did not experience barriers to success based on race or class, but nevertheless experienced barriers to success because of their gender.440 This is not to say that theorizing women’s oppression is not critical to theorizing the human, or liberatory political projects in general, but rather that gender is only one category of the human. Thus it is a theoretical and political mistake to theorize gender as if it is the foundational category of the human. On Wynter’s terms, the issue is not so much a strategic question of the subordinate place of the concept of gender but that race has a fundamental priority because of the place of race in the epistemic break [between previous and present epistemes]. There is a foundational epistemological priority of race vis-à-vis gender.441 But even with this said, there is no doubt that as a category of the human, or in Wynter’s terms a genre of the human, gender is critical for social and political thought, as it is a lens through which we understand ourselves as humans. Additionally, the oppression of women—and those of us who do not fit into heteronormative categories for whatever reason—is a standpoint from which to theorize and challenging hegemonic organizations of power.442 Thus taking the decolonial humanist position that there is a relative epistemic priority of race over gender, is not the same as taking a classically “race first” approach to women’s oppression. Contra traditional “race first” approaches, decolonial humanism leaves room for and actively invites analysis and political work to be done around gender-based oppression and violence. Including and especially gender based violence and oppression within racially marginalized communities. However,






























































440

Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 184. Ibid., 183. 442 Wynter herself cites the women’s movement as being politically activating for both good and bad reasons. See Scott, “Re-enchantment,” 183. 441

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decolonial humanism takes this position with the history of racist colonial social relations always in mind contra the mainstream feminist movement.

IV.


Decolonial Feminism and Queer Humanist Politics

With this argument of the relative priority of race over gender when thinking about the macro-social dynamics of colonial modernity, one might think that any conception of feminism as generally understood would be undermined. In a sense this is true, as Wynter illuminates the category mistakes guiding patriarchy theory and Marxist-feminism if it elides issues of race or calls race epiphenomenal to class. Nevertheless, there are decolonial thinkers (especially Chicana feminists, indigenous feminists, and African feminists) who have re-articulated feminism within decolonial principles. As Lugones writes, “I understand the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-human as the central dichotomy of colonial modernity.”443 But alongside this central distinction in modernity is the distinction of men and women, “this distinction became a mark of the human and a mark of civilization. Only the civilized were men and women.”444 Taking together the framework of Wynter with Lugones’ analysis of the coloniality of gender, I will articulate a queer decolonial humanist feminism. 4.1 María Lugones on Decolonial Feminism As white European women were seen to be role-model women, insofar as they “reproduced race and capital through [their] sexual purity, passivity, [being] homebound in the service of the white, European, bourgeois man,”445 Lugones will say that “the semantic consequence of the coloniality of gender is that ‘‘colonized woman’’ is an empty category. No






























































443

María Lugones, “Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia vol. 25, no. 4 (Fall 2010), 143. Ibid. 445 Ibid. 444

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women are colonized. No colonized females are women.”446 Decolonial feminism is able to articulate the conditions and reality of the situation of European women, but it does this without positing their situation as the transhistorical or trans-geographical situation of all women, and it does not position bourgeois European women as les damnés. The politics of decolonial feminism will then be radically different from mainstream liberal white feminism. Lugones, as a decolonial feminist, will describe the way that the colonized became “males and females,” distinct from and lesser than their “human” European bourgeois counterparts: “men” and “women.”447 Given these distinctions, the way that gendered roles and expectations play out for non-white and nonEuropean people will be very different. Decolonial feminism takes its starting place from a historically rich understanding of race, capitalism, and what Mignolo calls “the colonial difference,”448 (i.e. the distinction between what is required for the liberation of the colonized from the perspective of the colonized and their descendants). Lugones, proposes “a feminist border thinking, where the liminality of the border is a ground, a space, a borderlands, to use Gloria Anzaldúa’s term, not just a split, not an infinite repetition of dichotomous hierarchies among de-souled specters of the human.”449 Thus Lugones registers “the coloniality of gender” in the subjective and intersubjective ways people have resisted and rejected Western binary constructions of gender.




























































446

Lugones, “Methodological Notes Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” 75. Lugones, “Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” 148. 448 See Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 101, no. 1 (2002), 57-96. As Mignolo writes, “It is no longer possible, or at least it is not unproblematic, to ‘think’ from the canon of Western philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity. To do so means to reproduce the blind epistemic ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not impossible, any political philosophy of inclusion. The limit of Western philosophy is the border where the colonial difference emerges, making visible the variety of local histories that Western thought, from the right and the left, hid and suppressed. Thus there are historical experiences of marginalization no longer equivalent to the situation that engendered Greek philosophy and allowed its revamping in the Europe of nations, emerging together with the industrial revolution and the consolidation of capitalism.” Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” 66. (emphasis mine) 449 Lugones, “Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” 753. 447

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From this perspective, the “civilizing” mission of Europe “used the hierarchical gender dichotomy as a judgment, though the attainment of dichotomous gendering for the colonized was not the point of the normative judgment. Turning the colonized into human beings was not the colonial goal.”450 Lugones continues, the difficulty of imagining the humanization of colonized subjects as the goal of the colonial heteronormativity is that “this transformation of the colonized into men and women would have been a transformation not in identity, but in nature.”451 In other words, for the initial goal of European heteronormative gender roles to be the gendering of colonized people would have meant the transformation of the ontological status of the colonized from the place of sub-human to human. The consequences of the coloniality of gender meant that the colonizer was “gendered” but the colonized was only “sexed.” This is why Lugones says that the tendency of Western social scientists is to “search for the sexual distinction and then the construction of the gender [of colonized peoples] from observations of the tasks performed by each sex.”452 In doing this they utilize a bio-deterministic metric for the development of gender roles among formerly colonized peoples. As Lugones writes, More contemporary analysis has introduced arguments for the claim that gender constructs sex. But in the earlier version, sex grounded gender. Often, they became conflated: where you see sex, you will see gender and vice versa. But, if I am right about the coloniality of gender, in the distinction between the human and the non-human, sex had to stand alone. Gender and sex could not be both inseparably tied and racialized. Sexual dimorphism became the grounding for the dichotomous understanding of gender, the human characteristic. One may well be interested in arguing that the sex that stood alone in the beastialization of the colonized, was, after all, gendered. What is important to me here is that sex was made to stand alone in the characterization of the colonized. This strikes me as a good entry point for research that takes coloniality seriously and aims to study the historicity and meaning of the relation between sex and gender.453




























































450

Ibid., 744. (emphasis mine) Ibid., 744-745. (emphasis mine) 452 Ibid., 744. 453 Ibid. (emphasis mine) 451

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What Lugones describes social scientists to be doing is in part also what I claimed Hegel to be doing in his account of sex and gender. The conflation of sex and gender, along with the ultimate derivation of gender from a binary conception of “tasks performed by each sex,” consigns us to an ahistorical pseudo-ontology of the relations between sex and gender. This position inhibits us from seeing the ways that gender is racialized and dehumanizes those who’s gender is reduced gender to “natural” sex. That “gender constructs sex” is the import of a queer humanist account of gender, as I articulated in the previous chapters. What the concept of coloniality adds to my previous queer humanist account of gender is that, in modernity, people have not only been classified and organized according to bourgeois heteronormativity and the gendered division of labor, but also, the coloniality of modernity implies that the process of racialization that dehumanizes the nonEuropean placing them below even the deformed, but nevertheless still humanized, heteronormative categories of gender. Following the lead of Lugones, we should realize the move from here is not “to search for a non-colonized construction of gender in indigenous organizations of the social. There is no such thing; “gender” does not travel away from colonial modernity. Resistance to the coloniality of gender is thus historically complex.”454 The urge of Western social scientists to read heteronormative constructions of gender back into indigenous social organizations—which also frequently occurs during the process of translation of indigenous languages into Western European languages—is fundamentally problematic, misleading, and unhelpful in terms of re-thinking gendered relations.




























































454

Ibid. I recognize that what Lugones might be moving towards is the abolition of the category of gender altogether. However, given my account of gender as a category of human freedom, alongside Wynter’s reading of gender as a “genre of the human,” I see it as an aspect of our humanity that requires re-humanization and disalienation rather than abolition. Of course, the concept of gender that will emerge from the process will look nothing like heteronormativity or gender as we have come to know it in colonial modernity. Moving towards the rehumanized expression of one’s body and its social roles within the social totality is what a queer decolonial humanism account of gender aspires to articulate.

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The methodology of a decolonial feminism able to engage in meaningful coalition building, will start with: Learn[ing] about each other as resisters to the coloniality of gender at the colonial difference, without necessarily being an insider to the worlds of meaning from which resistance to the coloniality arises. That is, the decolonial feminist’s task begins by her seeing the colonial difference, emphatically resisting her epistemological habit of erasing it. Seeing it, she sees the world anew, and then she requires herself to drop her enchantment with ‘women,’ the universal, and begins to learn about other resisters at the colonial difference. Learning each other’s histories is what builds coalition.455 The priority of any decolonial project will be systemically understanding the different histories of the concrete situations of the colonized, including the different reasons for, and patterns of, migration and forced displacement. We can come up with abstract political theories of what the categories of “the human” are, or what humanity might look like under “just” conditions, but in order for these abstractions to have concrete political value they must be integrated with our concrete histories. In our present moment, the need to recognize rather than erase the legacies of colonial histories is critical for us to be able to politically organize according to a re-humanized conception of the good life. Political coalition across difference entails a logic that “is defiant of the logic of dichotomies; differences are never seen in dichotomous terms, but the logic has as its opposition the logic of power…multiplicity is never reduced.”456 Decolonial feminism, as expressed by Lugones, strives to understand the ways people, and more specifically les damnés, have adapted, rejected, adopted, ignored, and/or integrated themselves under the hegemonic system of the coloniality of gender. Lugones wants to see “the multiplicity in the fracture of the locus: both the enactment of the coloniality of gender and the






























































455

Ibid., 753. Ibid., 755. This kind of thinking about the meaning of coalition resonates what the transfeminist Leslie Feinberg, in a very different context writes, “When I talk about unity, I don’t mean reducing all our particular identities or struggles to one. I mean putting our collective strength and energy behind the defense of all our identities and all of our demands.” Leslie Feinburg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 114. 456

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resistant response from a subaltern sense of self, of the social, of the self-in-relation, of the cosmos, all grounded in a peopled memory.”457 Lugones sees within the coloniality of gender a “tense movement, people moving: the tension between the dehumanization and paralysis of the coloniality of being, and the creative activity of be-ing.”458 In this sense, seeds of a different future are in the present and can be seen in the ways that communities are already resisting dehumanization. However, this resistance is only the beginning of formulating political projects for liberation. The social reproduction of life under coloniality paradoxically must also include the “affirmation of life over profit, communalism over individualism, ‘estar’ over enterprise.”459 But even if seemingly impossible, we have good reason to maintain a decolonial humanist optimism for the possibility of a different world because other “ways of being, valuing, and believing have persisted in the resistant response to the coloniality.”460 4.2 Transition to Decolonial Politics and Political Economy A queer humanist account of gender based in a Marxist-Hegelian metaphysics of the human, as I have tried to lay out, takes a similar analytical position on the relationship between sex and gender as Lugones maintains. Gender is a human and spiritual category (in the Hegelian sense), while “sex” (as a definitional category) is applicable only to non-spiritualized beings, i.e. non-human entities like plants and animals who are not historical/world-making beings. What decolonial feminism elucidates is that, in colonial modernity, racialization rendered nonEuropean and non-white peoples sub-human to legitimate their exploitation for the ends of European nation-states. This rendered gender, even though a fundamental a genre of the human, either not applicable or fundamentally dehumanizing. A decolonial rendering of queer humanist




























































457

Ibid., 754. Ibid. 459 Ibid. 460 Ibid. 458

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politics will then require a complete restructuring of all social relations, while working towards a radically new conception of humanity including its various genres and categories e.g. gender and sexuality. Restructuring will have to take place in the ways that we know and relate to ourselves, to others, and to our larger social totality. While I used queer Marxian humanist principles as a starting place for this project, decolonial humanism and decolonial feminism furthers this account by articulating a revolutionary intersectional analysis of social relations. Queer Marxian humanism, as I delineated in the previous chapter, is fundamentally transformed and given determinate content from the reexamination of its fundamental categories from a decolonial standpoint. We can summarize the principles of a decolonial humanism, from which queer and feminist politics can be derived, as the following: (1) analysis of social and political conditions must begin from the experiences and conditions of the most dispossessed and dehumanized; (2) decolonial humanist politics categorically operate for the humanization of the most dehumanized elements of society so middle class white women and the European working class are not necessarily prioritized—differentiating it from bourgeois liberal humanism or Eurocentric/class reductionist socialism; (3) thinking through economic, social, and political exploitation requires a revolutionary, and not liberal atomistic, intersectional analysis of social and political identities—and it is only on the basis of this analysis that coherent political coalitions may be formed; (4) the ultimate goal of decolonial humanism is the fundamental re-humanization and dis-alienation of ourselves, our relation to others, and our relation to our social totality. In summary, decolonial humanism is a humanism that seeks to replace the modern/colonial configuration of humanism by asserting a new social and political order with methods distinct from those historically used by colonial modernity. The universalism of

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decolonial humanism lies in taking the flourishing of humanity in all of its genres as its object, while its methodology takes a particular group of humanity as its priority, i.e. the wretched of the earth. On this account, decolonial feminist humanism has shown the relative priority of race with respect to gender, insofar as gender operates differentially based on one’s proximity to bourgeois white European-ness. What still needs to be articulated is a decolonial humanist position with respect to political economy so that we do not overrepresent the symbolic order over material conditions, as Wynter unfortunately does. To outline a decolonial humanist account of political economy, I will dialectically read the political economic writings of Rosa Luxemburg and C. L. R. James.




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Chapter 4 Decolonial Political Economy The intrusion of European civilization was a disaster in every sense for [non-capitalist] social relations. The European conquerors are the first who are not merely after subjugation and economic exploitation, but the means of production itself, by ripping the land from underneath the feet of the native population. In this way, European capitalism deprives the primitive social order of its foundation. What emerges is something that is worse than all oppression and exploitation, total anarchy and a specifically European phenomenon, the uncertainty of social existence. The subjugated peoples, separated from their means of production, are regarded by European capitalism as mere laborers, and when they are useful for this end, they are made into slaves, and if they are not, they are exterminated. -Rosa Luxemburg from Introduction to Political Economy461

I.


Decolonial Humanism and Political Economy Approaching modern political theory from a decolonial standpoint involves a structural

account of the effects of Eurocentrism and colonialism on canonical political theorists to expose the coloniality of power founding and organizing the material and political realities of modernity. In particular, what has led to distortions in Hegel and Marx’s accounts of the state and political economy has been their underlying Eurocentric epistemology. This epistemology formally posits universals while their actual content is particular to their specific relation to the global division of power and labor. This is not to say that their accounts of political theory should be jettisoned—on the contrary—both Hegel and Marx, in different ways, articulate the rationality of our contemporary world, and for this they should be understood. However, as Wynter would remind us, we need to ask from whose standpoint are these accounts rational i.e. who’s wellbeing do they intend to immediately augment and whose realities do they render intelligible? To this end, I articulated a concept of decolonial humanism able to justify and articulate concretely universal political projects, aiming at the dis-alienation and re-humanization of “the wretched of the earth.”




























































461

Rosa Luxemburg, “Slavery” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 110.

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Decolonial humanism articulates a socio-political theory aimed at universal human wellbeing, but it’s methodology operates particularly through a “liminal dialectic.” It prioritizes the needs of those who have been most marginalized from whatever hegemonic social order they are subjected. In this sense decolonial humanism can be read as the first concretely universal humanism. Because decolonial humanism takes its political and epistemic departure from those structurally excluded from the hegemonic conceptions of the human, the political principles of decolonial humanism cannot be articulated a priori, but rather must be forged with a thoroughgoing historical material approach to social relations. The only thing that can be affirmed a priori from a decolonial humanist standpoint is that all forms of dehumanization and alienation are illegitimate, but this does not provide a political theory for ending all forms of dehumanization. I have up to now only outlined the concept of decolonial humanism and distinguished it from other forms of humanism. In this chapter I will look more closely at how to specifically theorize political economy and revolutionary political action from a decolonial humanist standpoint. To do this I will look the political economic works of Rosa Luxemburg and C. L. R. James as they can, by varying degrees, fit within a decolonial humanist paradigm. I will focus on their accounts of political economy, democratic forms of political organization, political agency, and the role of national liberation movements within international socialist struggles i.e. class warfare. 1.1
What is Political Economy? Before working out a decolonial approach to political economy, I will briefly outline what political economy is as a Marxist concept distinct from classical liberal economics. If the classical categories of economics as understood by economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo explained the relations of capitalist production, what they were unable to do was explain

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the historical processes that lead to the capitalist mode of production. For them, market relations and categories like ‘supply,’ ‘demand’, and ‘price’ were ahistorical and asocial categories—they effectively naturalized economic laws. The Marxist “revolution” in economics was in taking a historical material approach to analyzing capitalist relations of production and consumption. Exposing the social dimension of economic categories would lead to a distinctly political analysis of economics, thus the term “political economy” conceptually highlights the social, political, and historical dimensions of economic relations. Classical liberal economic theory makes a distinction where there is no distinction, between the “political” and the “economic.” That the political and the economic appear as independent spheres, is something Marx showed to be a hallmark of capitalism. As I outlined in chapter two, capitalist social relations are uniquely marked by their positing of object relations where there should be social relations, i.e. alienation. While life under feudalism was in no sense “more free” than life under capitalism, what changed was the appearance of economic relations seemingly untethered from social and political relations. This is why capitalist production is not fundamentally determined by social needs, but rather, is determined by the logic of capital’s selfexpansion. As the economist Riccardo Bellofiore writes, “capitalism is a system in which production does not have the aim of consumption in sight. Its aim is abstract wealth as such: capitalism is ‘production for production’s sake.’”462 Ironically, as human ends taken out of the equation for determining production, “capitalism gave birth to political economy as an autonomous discipline because ‘the economic’ was isolated from all other moments of the social nexus.”463 This is why Luxemburg will say that






























































462

Riccardo Bellofiore, “Like a Candle Burning at Both Ends: Rosa Luxemburg and the Critique of Political Economy,” Research in Political Economy vol. 21 (2004): 282. 463 Ibid., 284.

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political economy investigates “the hidden relations which give rise to the fact that the result of the economic activity of man does not correspond to his intentions, to his volition—in short, to his consciousness.”464 From this insight, we can immediately see that to disrupt the alienating relations of capitalism will entail the socialization of economic relations, which will in turn require political-economic agency to be radically transformed. What queer Marxian humanism illuminated was the insight that relations of production need to be subordinated to the well-being of the majority rather than to the minority of capitalists. In summary, political economy investigates the origins and organization of modern relations of production and consumption, tracking capitalism’s developments and crises as various social and political struggles threaten to overturn it. 1.2 Developing a Decolonial Humanist Approach to Political Economy Decolonial thinkers differ from traditional/orthodox Marxists in their reconceptualization of the relationships between colonialism, capitalism, and race. Decolonial thinkers do not theorize the origin of capitalism or its attendant social ontology as primarily beginning with English industrialization, nor merely in terms of intra-European economic developments. Rather, the conditions of possibility of modern capitalism were already forming in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. The conditions for modern capitalism were made possible through global empire building, and the racialized social ontologies that justified colonialism were not merely accidental, nor have they accidentally been preserved against the “pure logic” of capitalism as if the reproduction of global capital did not require hierarchical social ontologies to legitimate its dispossession of the global majority. Taking a decolonial standpoint, I can agree in a qualified sense with Marx that “all




























































464

Rosa Luxemburg, “What is Economics?” trans. Mary Waters in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 236.

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history is the history of class struggle”—but I would clarify the ways in which class is always already racialized.465 The import of this claim for a decolonial approach to political economy is extremely significant. If the “class” of the most dispossessed and alienated is a majority of the global population, then a global “dictatorship of the proletariat” would represent the closest thing to democratic social relations human history has ever experienced—as long as who the proletariat corresponds to is the most dispossessed and alienated regardless of their proximity (politically or geographically) to the point of production. This insight of Marxian humanism is retained in decolonial humanism, but Marx did not fully realize nor analyze the relations of coloniality, race, and capitalism—even if he did try to accommodate the role of gender. As Sylvia Wynter explains, “the large-scale accumulation of unpaid land, unpaid labor, and overall wealth expropriated by Western Europe from non-European peoples, which was to lay the basis of its global expansion from the fifteenth century onwards, was carried out within the order of truth and the self-evident order of consciousness, of a creed [and race]-specific conception of what it was to be human.”466 The ruling powers’ conception of the human, prior to industrialization, laid the basis for the ethnic, religious, and racial hierarchies within our current global division of labor despite the logically “neutral” laws of capital accumulation. As Quijano further explains: “There is nothing in the social relation of capital itself, or in the mechanisms of the world market in general, that implies the historical necessity of European concentration first




























































465

As María Lugones writes, “the structuring of the disputes over control of labor are discontinuous: not all labor relations under global, Eurocentered capitalism fall under the capital/wage relation model, though this is the hegemonic model. It is important in beginning to see the reach of the coloniality of power that wage labor has been reserved almost exclusively for white Europeans. The division of labor is thoroughly ‘racialized’ as well as geographically differentiated. Here we see the coloniality of labor as a thorough meshing of labor and ‘race’…The cognitive needs of capitalism and the naturalizing of the identities and relations of coloniality and of the geocultural distribution of world capitalist power have guided the production of [the Eurocentric] way of knowing.” María Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender” in Globalization and the Decolonial Option eds. Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (New York: Routledge, 2013), 372. 466 David Scott, “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” Small Axe no. 8 (September 2000), 160.

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(either in Europe or elsewhere) of waged labor and later (over precisely the same base) of the concentration of industrial production for more than two centuries.”467 On the contrary, it was the social ontology of modern Europe that naturalized economic disparities and justified the use of slave labor, not the “logic of capital.” As Quijano explains, the genocide of indigenous peoples in the first decades of colonization “was not caused principally by the violence of the conquest nor by the plagues the conquistadors brought, but took place because so many American Indians were used as disposable manual labor and forced to work until death.”468 Given this, a decolonial account of political economy will retain the logic of Marxist political economy insofar as it exposes the limits and illusions of classical bourgeois economics, but in addition to this, it will offer transformed accounts of: (1) “primitive accumulation” as both the foundation and condition of possibility for the continued existence of capitalism; (2) the social relations that determine who will be more and less exploited through the co-imbrication of race and class (i.e. racial capitalism);469 (3) political agency and political organization; and (4) the role of anti-colonial and anti-racist liberation struggles for ‘class warfare.’ On the first point, Luxemburg’s work on political economy will be indispensable as she exposes capitalism’s need to draw from “non-capitalist” strata to assuage crises in the civil society of metropoles and the necessity of imperialist wars for the continuation of capitalism. Luxemburg’s analysis of democracy as the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the role of the mass strike which unifies political and economic struggles, will be useful in working out a decolonial humanist account of political action and organization. On the last two points, James—through his integration of Marxist political economy, anti-racism, and Pan-Africanism—will help clarify both capitalism’s




























































467

Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000): 538. 468 Ibid. (emphasis mine). This statement rings true with the opening quote from Rosa Luxemburg. 469 See footnote 1 for more information on racial capitalism. This concept will be further explored in section 3.1.

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need for racialization and the links between anti-colonial, Pan-African, and anti-racist struggles for international socialism and class warfare. A decolonial approach to political economy will deepen the Marxian insight that revolution and substantial social transformation will only come “from below,” but it will also show that potential revolutionary actors are not only the working classes of industrialized European nations, but also the unemployed, the peasantry, the colonized, the “criminal,” the slave, i.e. the “wretched of the earth.” It will challenge traditional Marxist conceptions revolutionary “class consciousness” as the work of James and Luxemburg will show that modern revolutions rely, in some sense, also on the spontaneity of the masses reacting to concrete social and political realities apart from hierarchically organized parties and bureaucratic unions. This will come out particularly clearly in James’ reading of the Haitian revolution and the later Russian Revolution. As Selma James describes James’ The Black Jacobins, it is a text in which “we are learning from the Haitians’ determination to be free what being human is about.”470 Abstract “vanguard” models of political leadership are ultimately forms of paternalism that undermine the revolutionary potential of the masses because they refuse to put the masses in direct democratic control of the everyday workings a new humanized society. Liberation, on decolonial humanist terms can then be measured by the level of democratic direct control by the most dispossessed over the conditions of possibility for realizing their humanity, or as James will say, to become “the arbiters of their own fate.”471






























































470

Selma James, “Black Jacobins Past and Present” in Sex, Race, and Class, (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 262. (emphasis mine) 471 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, (Vintage Books: New York, 1989), 292.

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II.


Towards a Decolonial Political Economy: Luxemburg and James Luxemburg and James each posed fundamental challenges to the leading figures of

Marxist and socialist thought of their times—Luxemburg famously with Karl Kautsky and German SPD leadership, and James with Leon Trotsky and the various Trotskyite groups in the UK and the US. Both thinkers took the self-organization and self-determination of the masses seriously while trying to undermine elitist models of political leadership that prioritized either bureaucracy or electoral politics over the creative self-development of the dispossessed. An interesting point of alignment between Luxemburg and James is the way that they were each radicalized beyond established Marxism due to the failure of established Marxism to address and formulate adequate responses to imperialist invasions. With Luxemburg it was calling out the SPD for their failure to condemn the German invasion of Morocco in 1911 and their involvements in WWI. For James, it was his Pan-Africanist radicalization after Mussolini’s 1938 invasion of Abyssinia. Both Luxemburg and James lend themselves to being thought with and against decolonial humanist principles. However, I hope to show that their strengths and weaknesses operate in complimentarily edifying ways, and I argue that taken together, Luxemburg and James provide a firm foundation for an articulation of political economy from a decolonial standpoint. 2.1 Rosa Luxemburg Polish-Jewish472 Rosa Luxemburg, while still thinking from within Europe, was a revolutionary thinker and organizer who attempted to take Marx’s political economy and






























































472

Though her claiming of these identities was sometimes conflicted. Another paper could be written on her relationship to her Polish and Jewish heritage and the ways in which her attitudes towards these identities shaped her political outlook, especially on the national question.

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humanist principles to their most revolutionary conclusions.473 As she reflected on the lessons of the Russian revolution and the role of the mass strike, she pushed Marxists to realize the real power of the masses who needed no “schoolmaster” to organize or explain the necessity of revolution. Her work on political economy examined the organic relationship between imperialism and capitalism, and she exposed the hypocrisy of “aid” given to colonized countries by imperialist countries. While her critique of German Marxists’ complicity with German imperialism is to be commended from a decolonial standpoint, there remain serious limitations to her political analysis that inhibit her from developing a thorough-going decolonial position. Her abstract “proletarian internationalism,” including her position that all wars are in fact imperialist wars,474 hindered her ability to discern differences between reactionary and progressive national liberation struggles and elide and fold issues of race into issues of class. However, even though I will argue that she maintained an abstract/Eurocentric vision of proletarian internationalism, her refusal to support a Polish independence movement is more complicated than it might initially appear.475 In fact, her position on Polish independence was the product of a careful historical material analysis of the conditions both within and without Poland (whether or not they turn out to be economistically reductive). However, she then abstracted her insights from this position to






























































473

There are a few very common (and somewhat contradictory) misconceptions about the political theory of Rosa Luxemburg. She has been mischaracterized as both a “spontaneist” in the sense that she supposedly did not believe in political organizing because the revolution will “spontaneously happen,” and an economic determinist/fatalist who thought the breakdown of capitalism was an easy guarantee. Her political economy has been characterized by some as “underconsumptionist,” as if the central contradiction of capitalism was that there is merely not enough demand for its products. I do not have the space here to explicitly debunk each one of these Luxemburg myths, but I hope my analysis of her work will show her to be a much more careful, thoughtful, and insightful political theorists than any of these one-sided clichés. For a thorough defense of Luxemburg’s political and economic thought against these misinterpretations see Bellofiore, “Like a Candle,” and Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Verso, 2015). 474 As also criticized by Lenin in his response to “The Junius Pamphlet.” 475 This will be covered in-depth in section 2.1.5.

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cover all independence movements, as if they were distractions from properly internationalist socialist struggle. From this mistaken position she misses the important revolutionary subjects that emerge from anti-colonial struggles and the fact anti-colonial struggles have fundamentally challenged the capitalist order. On this point, C.L.R. James’ analysis serves as a needed corrective to Luxemburg’s abstract positions on “the National Question.” Thinking from the colonial situation, James will offer an analysis of national liberation struggles that understands the formerly colonized and enslaved as some of the most critical revolutionary subjects for reorganizing political and economic social relations. But unlike James, who will sometimes affirm reformist democratic socialism and/or a democratic socialist “transition” to revolutionary socialism in formally colonized countries, e.g. Trinidad—Luxemburg will expose the uselessness of fundamentally reformist demands that neither undermine the logic of capitalist social relations nor further the self-organization of the masses. While Luxemburg’s stance on national liberation and anticolonial struggle is not necessarily helpful for developing a decolonial approach to political economy, Luxemburg’s most valuable insights are: (1) her account of the on-going role of imperialism and excursions into various “non-capitalist strata” for capital accumulation; (2) her account of the relations between organization and spontaneity, especially as it manifests in her theory of the mass strike; and (3) her account of democracy as the dictatorship of the proletariat. 2.1.1
The Political Economy of Rosa Luxemburg: Imperialism’s Role in the Accumulation of Capital While Luxemburg inherited a Eurocentric understanding of “industrialized” versus “backward” nations from Engels, Luxemburg vocally challenged many of the dogmas of the Second International, particularly in response to German military involvement protecting European trade interests. Luxemburg, along with comrades in France and Spain, wanted to have 187





a conference with the International Socialist Bureau to assess the specific situation in Morocco, but the SPD refused to hold such a conference and never held Germany accountable for its imperialist involvements. Luxemburg then wrote a scathing report of their reactionary attitudes in her pamphlet “Concerning Morocco” published in Leipziger Volkszeitung July 24, 1911. There she named the SPD’s hypocrisy: while it was willing to support the anti-colonial Moroccan uprisings, even supporting protests in other countries around the issue, they were too worried about the coming Reichstag elections to make any public statement about German militarism and imperialism. The Party executive in Berlin wrote in response to Luxemburg’s call for a conference on the matter: “If we were to commit ourselves firmly too soon and to stress the Moroccan Question at the expense of all questions of domestic policy in such a way that an effective electoral slogan could be used against us, then the consequences cannot be anticipated.”476 Luxemburg responds: We have heard so much about the ‘splendid situation’ in which we are approaching the Reichstag elections, and at the same time we have been warned repeatedly against spoiling this ‘situation’ by some imprudent action; previously this was the struggle for universal suffrage in Prussia, and now it is the agitation against the hubbub surrounding Morocco…the best way of throwing away the advantage of this ‘situation’ would be to begin to consider all party life and all tasks of the class struggle simply from the perspective of the ballot-box.477 Taking a strong position against German imperialism could have helped to educate the public and demonstrate the resolve of a revolutionary socialist party, but the SPD had become a liberal bourgeois party operating only for meager reforms within imperialist capitalist policies.






























































476

Rosa Luxemburg, “Concerning Morocco,” Marxist Internet Archive (2004) accessed 2/13/2018. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1911/07/24.htm 477 Ibid.

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Party leaders attempted to avoid issues of imperialism by saying that they were “foreign” affairs, while the Party needed to stay focused on “domestic” issues. As a fierce internationalist, Luxemburg points out the myopia of this position, she writes: In our view, the duty of Social Democracy is not to reassure public opinion, but to do the very reverse, to rouse it and warn it against the dangers lying dormant...It is not enough for us to rely on the pacific intentions of some capitalist clique as a factor in achieving peace; we can only count on the resistance of the enlightened masses. By obeying the order to keep our peace, incidentally, we would be seen to be falling in with the wishes of the rulers of the Moroccan policy…They say that we should restrict our agitation exclusively to matters of domestic policy, to questions of taxation and social legislation. But financial policy, the rule of the Junkers and the stagnation of social reform are organically bound up with militarism, naval policy, colonial policy, and with personal rule and its foreign policy. Any artificial separation of these spheres can only present an incomplete and one-sided picture of the state of our public affairs. Above all we should propagate socialist enlightenment in the Reichstag elections, but this we cannot do if we restrict our criticism to Germany’s domestic circumstances, if we fail to depict the great international relationships, the growing dominance of capitalism in all parts of the world, the obvious anarchy in every corner of the globe, and the major role played by colonial and global policy in this process.478 In this passage there are many aspects of Luxemburg’s political outlook that lend themselves to a decolonial approach. She highlights the necessity of “enlightened” mass support i.e. the masses as politically educated for self-determination, as it is the masses who should be the motor of party decisions, while showing the progressive value of an organized party functioning as an anti-imperialist educational organ. She makes it clear that the ultimate success of the party lies in “the resistance of the masses,” and not in attempting to co-opt bourgeois electoral power. She foregrounds the organic unity (a là Hegel) of financial policy, colonial policies, militarism, and capitalism.






























































478

Ibid. (emphasis mine)

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From a decolonial perspective, it might seem obvious that political economy must be thought from the perspective of the global totality, but Luxemburg was remarkable amongst her Second International comrades for thinking this way.479 Luxemburg, as early as 1911, is linking colonialism, militarism, and capitalism as mutually reinforcing powers, but it won’t be until her 1913 text The Accumulation of Capital (AC) that she deeply explores the concrete connections between these forces. As Norman Geras summarizes, the basic thesis of AC is that “in a closed capitalist economy, consisting of only capitalists and workers and without contact with noncapitalist social formations, the realization and capitalization of surplus-value, and hence the accumulation of capital, are impossible.”480 In AC Luxemburg takes to task the content of the last chapter of Marx’s Capital Vol. II on accumulation and “Expanded Reproduction,” by providing a materialist analysis of the necessity of imperialism to the continued existence of capitalism. Luxemburg showed how and why capitalism could not be contained within the boundaries of a single nation-state, and as such, she “identified the tendency towards globalization and imperialism as being rooted in the internal logic of capital instead of either in political factors or economic conditions extraneous to the process for accumulation.”481 However, while the ultimate thrust of her analysis is correct, I would argue that she notoriously mistook Marx’s purpose in his chapter on expanded reproduction. Luxemburg criticizes Marx for abstracting from the messy reality of the circulation of capital setting up his






























































479

While Lenin might be the most famous for his writings on imperialism, he did not actually fully develop his thinking on imperialism until after WWI and the successful October Revolution. Luxemburg, however, had been thinking and theorizing imperialism as a capitalist phenomenon for many years prior. Because Lenin’s later texts were approaching these issues with the experiences of WWI and the October revolution in mind, of course his texts reflect more theoretical nuance and strategy. For more on the differences between Luxemburg, Lenin, Marx, Engels and Kautsky on the question of imperialism see: Tadeusz Kowalik, Rosa Luxemburg: Theory of Accumulation and Imperialism trans. Jan Toporwski and Hanna Szymborska (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 126-156. 480 Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, 15. 481 Peter Hudis, “New Perspectives on Rosa Luxemburg’s Critique of Global Capitalism,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 11 (2012): 29.

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analysis to not involve consumption and demand from non-capitalist strata i.e. excluding circulation and production within households in the capitalist center and from colonized countries. However, in Capital, Marx was not looking to describe circulation in terms of its phenomenological, or empirical history, but rather to capture its abstract logic.482 Marx broke up expanded social production into two departments: Department I, the production of the means of production, and Department II, the production of the means of consumption. It is no accident that these departments are divided also along class lines, demarcating the line of class struggle.483 While it is true that Marx consciously did not include foreign trade as a part of his analysis in Vol. II, as Peter Hudis notes, Marx did this “not because he is unaware that the law of value is the law of the world market…[Capital Vol. II] also abstracts from any revolutions in value that occur in the world market. Marx does so not because [these factors] are not extremely important, but to show that they alter nothing about the fundamental issue that he is analyzing—the dominance of means of production over means of consumption.”484 Showing the movement of capital through its internal logic abstracted from its phenomenological and empirical history does not weaken or downplay Marx’s critique of capital, it strengthens it. If the most basic logic of capital accumulation entails the degradation of humanity, then we will not be mistaken about its fundamental issues. Reformist attempts to temper capitalism’s fundamentally dehumanized relations of production and consumption will appear as they should appear, as temporary and minimalist solutions to deeper problems. Following the internal logic of capital accumulation and circulation, Marx proved that no set of reforms could assuage the crises of capital when those crises were written into its own




























































482

Ibid., 31. In this sense, Capital can be described as a speculative work just as I explained Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a speculative work in the introduction. 483 Karl Marx, Capital Volume II trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 568. 484 Hudis, “New Perspectives,” 33.

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logic. This meant that the crises developing from the accumulation of capital were not due to outside factors obstructing the “fair and free market.” As Hudis explains, The problem that Luxemburg fell into is that her rejection of Marx’s abstraction from foreign trade by bringing in a ‘third’ group, non-capitalist strata, that is external to the labor-capital relation, led her to ‘deviate’ from Marx’s crucial premise that the distinction between the two departments of social production reflects the class division of workers versus capitalists. Despite her profound appreciation of spontaneous revolts and mass creativity, when it came to her economic theory she separated what Marx joined together: an ability to analyze the most abstract forms of value production and circulation while never taking one’s finger off the pulse of class and human relations. Thus, ironically, by positing the “non-capitalist strata” as that which makes reproducing the means of production and consumption possible, Luxemburg ends up further abstracting from real class and human relations. By positing an “outside” to capitalism in her economic analysis, she both realizes the ways capitalism exploits all social strata for continued accumulation regardless of its relationship to the point of production. However, she underestimates the ways in which “non-capitalist” strata can be exploited by capital and were actively underdeveloped compared to centers of wealth. Because there is no linear economic development under capitalism, her so-called non-capitalist strata can continue to exist within capitalist dynamics. While the globe is finite, exploitation of “non-capitalist strata” is not finite in the same way— even if we agree with Marx that capitalism is, finally, unsustainable on its own terms. However, this is not to say that continued dispossession through colonial and neocolonial tactics is not part and parcel of the ongoing accumulation of capital—it just means that, in economic terms, it does not play out exactly as Luxemburg had imagined in AC. In terms of Luxemburg’s analysis of the organic unity of colonization and the and the continuance of capitalism, some of her insights in AC still remain useful. For example, she writes on capitalism’s need for racialized slave and waged labor to develop the conditions for

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industrialization. In Luxemburg’s words: Since capitalist production can develop fully only with complete access to all territories and climes, it can no more confine itself to the natural resources and productive forces of the temperate zone than it can manage with white labor alone. Capital needs other races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work. It must be able to mobilize world labor power without restriction in order to utilize all productive forces of the globe—up to the limits imposed by a system of producing surplus value. This labor power, however, is in most cases rigidly bound by the traditional pre-capitalist organization of production. It must first be ‘set free’ in order to be enrolled in the active army of capital. The emancipation of labor power from primitive social conditions and its absorption by the capitalist wage system is one of the indispensable historical bases of capitalism. For the first genuinely capitalist branch of production, the English cotton industry, not only the cotton of the Southern states of the American Union was essential, but also the millions of African Negroes who were shipped to America to provide the labor power for the plantations, and who later; as a free proletariat, were incorporated in the class of wage laborers in a capitalist system. Obtaining the necessary labor power from non-capitalist societies, the so-called ‘labor-problem’, is ever more important for capital in the colonies…This is a concrete example of the fact that capitalist production cannot manage without labor power from other social organizations.485 While her analysis remains firmly within a Eurocentric framework—as she operates on a monolinear interpretation of history that elides “progress” with industrialization and “backwardness/ primitiveness” with non-industrialization—she aptly connects industrialization in England with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and to the colonization of Africa and the Americas for the superexploitation use of non-white/European peoples’ labor. She takes a facile approach to the transition between slave labor to the so-called “free” US Black proletariat, but it is significant that she takes race as a central organizing category in the formation of capitalism and in the process of capital accumulation. Despite her faulty framework for interpreting “progress,” she manages to call out Marx for his naïve position on “primitive accumulation,” as if it were something incidental rather than






























































485

Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 59. (emphasis mine)

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necessary to the origins and continuation of capitalism: Admittedly, Marx dealt in detail with the process of appropriating non-capitalist means of production as well as with the transformation of the peasants into a capitalist proletariat. Chapter XXIV of Capital, Vol. I, is devoted to describing the origin of the English proletariat, of the capitalistic agricultural tenant class and of industrial capital, with particular emphasis on the looting of colonial countries by European capital. Yet we must bear in mind that all this is treated solely with a view to so-called primitive accumulation. For Marx, these processes are incidental, illustrating merely the genesis of capital, its first appearance in the world…Yet, as we have seen, capitalism in its frill maturity also depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organizations existing side by side with it.486 Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation by dispossession allows us to understand capital accumulation on a global scale even when many people and places are not “proletarianized” in the sense of being “waged laborers”—even if Luxemburg herself was not able to fully draw out these conclusions. Additionally, Luxemburg realized the ways in which offering loans and credit were ways to enter into non-industrialized/non-proletarianized markets. In her chapter on International Loans in AC, she shows the connection between international loans earmarked for infrastructure and military developments and the ability of advanced capitalist countries to doubly exploit loan seeking territories monopolizing trade and collecting interest in debt repayments. In this way, Luxemburg’s foreshadows more contemporary neocolonial developments like the use of debt and credit granted to formerly colonized countries in order to keep them financially bound to Western European nations and their proxy transnational banks.487 As






























































486

Ibid., 59. David Harvey famously makes use of Luxemburg’s analysis of “primitive accumulation,” building on her insights about the ways that capital uses dispossession within “non-capitalist strata” as an ongoing tool of capital accumulation. Harvey re-terms “primitive accumulation” “accumulation by dispossession,” which can be used to describe anything from neoliberal loan tactics used by the IMF, to women’s unremunerated care work, to gentrification. See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); also useful is Ingo Schmidt, “Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital: New Perspectives on Capitalist Development and American Hegemony,” Socialist Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 92-117.

487

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Luxemburg describes, Public loans for railroad building and armaments accompany all stages of the accumulation of capital: the introduction of commodity economy, industrialization of countries, capitalist revolutionizing of agriculture as well as the emancipation of young capitalist states. For the accumulation of capital, the loan has various functions: (a) it serves to convert the money of non-capitalist groups into capital, i.e. money both as a commodity equivalent (lower middle-class savings) and as fund of consumption for the hangers-on of the capitalist class; (b) it serves to transform money capital into productive capital by means of state enterprise—railroad building and military supplies; (c) it serves to divert accumulated capital from the old capitalist countries to young ones.488 Given this analysis of the role of loans, we can better understand the trajectory of newly independent formerly colonized countries. In order to bolster their economies after hundreds of years of colonial pillaging and underdevelopment, they ended up only being further entangled in capitalist and imperial developments—and in most cases, this occurred despite achieving flag independence under anti-capitalist/socialist auspices. Luxemburg analyzed global political economy taking into account the organic unity of imperialism, debt, militarism, and capitalism. For a decolonial approach to political economy, it is crucial that she neither treated imperialism as an accidental historical event as a last resort for a “fully developed” capitalist nation state looking for “external markets.” Despite her Eurocentric framework for understanding history, she realized that bourgeois “progress” offered in the form of international loans for “economic development” in former colonies could never have the well-being of the colonized in mind. As Luxemburg insightfully analyzes the role of the British East India Company alongside the interests of British capital: ‘The (East India) Company which ruled India until 1858 did not make one spring accessible, did not sink a single well, nor build a bridge for the benefit of the Indians… No wonder! British capital had no object in giving the Indian communities economic support or helping them to survive. Quite the reverse, it aimed to destroy them and to




























































488

Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (London: Routledge, 2003), 400401.

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deprive them of their productive forces. The unbridled greed, the acquisitive instinct of accumulation must by its very nature take every advantage of the ‘conditions of the market’ and can have no thought for the morrow. Whatever infrastructure or resources colonial nations offered to their colonies, these were only given for the metropole’s further accumulation of capital. In line with decolonial humanist principles, Luxemburg takes a stance against capitalist imperialism, showing Western bourgeois “progress” to be barbaric greed at the expense of the humanity and resources of its non-Western others. While she did jail time for opposing WWI, she writes in the “Junius Pamphlet”: “The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of culture, sporadically during modern war, and forever, if the period of world wars that has just begun is allowed to take its dimmable course to the last ultimate consequence.”489 As she watched the collapse of the Second International in the face of WWI, she was uniquely placed within the European socialist milieu to understand the contradictions within that tradition. She knew that reliance only on trade union bureaucracy complicit in the crimes of the bourgeois nation-state, would always end in nationalist quagmires rendering the working class a bargaining chip and cannon fodder in imperialist wars. Because Luxemburg understood imperialism as a phenomenon historically foundational and logically necessary to the ongoing functioning of global capital, she was able to prioritize fighting imperialism despite the push back she received from established Marxist organizations. Her insights into the role of “non-capitalist strata” in the overall organization of capitalist social and political forces then opens the door for a decolonial account of revolutionary agency outside the point of production, even if she herself did not articulate these consequences.






























































489

Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 321.

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2.2.1 Organization and Spontaneity: The Mass Strike Luxemburg’s rethinking of revolutionary agency through her analysis of the mass strike lead her to publically break with the most prominent Marxist post-Engels, Karl Kautsky in 1910. Kautsky refused to publish Luxemburg’s work in the party presses because he thought her positions were no longer in line with the SPD. In an article titled “Theory and Practice,” we find some of Luxemburg’s rethinking of the reformist approaches to political theory hegemonic in the Second International. Both before and after the turn of the twentieth century, there were a series of mass strikes in Russia, linking up with a long history of peasant uprisings. However, Kautsky and other leaders of the SPD viewed these mass strikes as “primitive” and “disorganized” excrescences of “backward” Russia, while the 40-year strong parliamentary trade unions in Germany were the cutting edge of the socialist revolutionary practice. Luxemburg exposed the distorted and prejudiced nature of Kautsky’s position, by pointing out that the “disorganized” peasantry was able to win “the right to organize not only for workers, but for the state’s postal and railroad employees…they created worker’s committees to regulate working conditions. They undertook the task of abolishing piecework, household work, night work, factory penalties, and of forcing strict observance of Sundays off.”490 Even if many of these gains would be eventually lost to extreme State and Church backed repression, this proved the Russian peasantry to be highly skilled in revolutionary organizing—on par with and surpassing the skills of German trade union leaders.491 As Luxemburg argues: The great period of strikes in Russia achieved relatively greater economic and socialpolitical successes in a few years of revolution than the German union movement has in the four decades of its existence. And all this is due to neither a special heroism, nor a




























































490

Rosa Luxemburg, “Theory and Practice,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 216-217. As Luxemburg incisively writes, “With the psychology of a trade unionist who will not stay off his work on May Day unless he is assured in advance of a definite amount of support in the event of his being victimized, neither revolution nor mass strike can be made.” Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike, The Political Party, and Trade Unions” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 199. 491

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special genius of the Russian proletariat: it is simply the measure of a revolutionary period’s quickstep, against the leisurely gait of peaceful development within the framework of bourgeois parliamentarianism.492 Here Luxemburg is able to avoid ahistorical essentialism in describing the source of the success of the Russian peasantry. While Kautsky and others chalked up the successes in Russia to a belittling ethno-essentialism of their “primitive backwardness” being susceptible to “riots,” Luxemburg analyzed the objective and subjective conditions that lead the masses to revolt. Political and economic revolt was a rational response to the increasingly intense irrationality of the rule of the Czar. This aspect of Luxemburg’s political analysis (i.e. approaching historical developments through careful analysis of objective and subjective conditions) is essential for a decolonial approach to political economy. The SPD couldn’t build a revolutionary force in Germany because it was entangled in institutions and practices that were Eurocentric and had not been constructed to democratically empower the masses. Kautsky and the SPD wrote off the mass strike as an irrelevant tactic not only for German workers, but all “Western European” workers. In Kautsky’s words, “the worker in Germany—and throughout Western Europe as a whole—takes up the strike as a means of struggle only when he has the prospect of attaining definite success with it. If these successes fail to appear, the strike has failed its purpose.”493 Luxemburg exposed the ridiculousness of this pronouncement both in terms of its misunderstanding of the history of mass strikes within Germany, and its mystification of what count as political “success.” Luxemburg points out that from 1890-1899 there were only 3,722 strikes in Germany with 424,142 workers participating, but from 1900-1908 the numbers grew to 15,994 strikes with over 1.7 million workers






























































492 493

Luxemburg, “Theory and Practice,” 217. Karl Kautsky quoted in Luxemburg “Theory and Practice,” 219.

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participating.494 Clearly the success of any one particular strike can only be assessed over time within the context of a broader movement. Immediate “definite success” misunderstands the nature of political organizing in general, as Luxemburg writes, “every union agitator knows very well that ‘definite successes’ in the form of material gains absolutely are not and cannot be the sole purpose, the sole determining aspect in economic struggles.”495 She continues, “such ‘unsuccessful’ strikes have, nevertheless, not ‘failed their purpose’; on the contrary they are a direct condition of life for the defense of the workers’ standard of living, for sustaining the workers’ fighting spirit, for impending future onslaughts by the employers.”496 Mass strikes are frequently a starting place for further and continued organizing, as many unions form for the first time immediately following a strike. Taking her lessons from the Russian revolution of 1905, Luxemburg further writes: The mass strike is not artificially ‘made,’ not ‘decided’ at random, not ‘propagated,’ [it is] an historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability. It is not therefore by abstract speculations on the possibility or impossibility, the utility or the injuriousness of the mass strike, but only by an examination of those factors and social conditions out of which the mass strike grows in the present phase of class struggle—in other words, it is not by subjective criticism of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is desirable, but only by objective investigation of the sources of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is historically inevitable, that the problem can be grasped or even discussed.497 When Luxemburg says that mass strikes are “inevitable” historical developments out of specific social conditions, she should not be misunderstood to be saying something fatalistic or deterministic. To say that mass strikes are “inevitable” historical phenomena responding to specific social and political conditions merely means: (1) mass strikes exist because social




























































494

Ibid., 219-220. Ibid., 220. 496 Ibid. (emphasis mine) 497 Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike,” 170-171. (emphasis mine) 495

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conditions are such that mass strikes are both possible and potentially rational responses to our social conditions; (2) mass strikes are not the products of “essence-based” character flaws of “primitive” racialized peoples aimed to destroy the “progress” of Western European civil society; and (3) mass strikes are presently inevitable due to the fundamentally unlivable, undemocratic, and dehumanizing character of our current social and political organizations, leaving those most neglected and marginalized no other option but full stop refusal of those conditions. The mass strike is “a universal form of proletarian class struggle resulting from the present stage of capitalist development and class relations.”498 Given that Luxemburg conceptualizes the mass strike as a “universal form of proletarian class struggle,” what she means by “mass strike” is more than just what goes into a single strike action at a particular workplace. The mass strike is: the form of the revolutionary struggle and every disarrangement of the relations of the contending powers, in party development and in class division, in the position of the counterrevolution—all this immediately influences the action of the strike in a thousand invisible and scarcely controllable ways.499 The strike represents a refusal, not just of working under bad conditions, but of all dehumanizing conditions. Strikes put revolutionary agency immediately and directly into the hands of those with the least amount of power within the context of day to day life. That mass strikes are influenced by “a thousand invisible and scarcely controllable” factors, is why those with liberal reformist leanings are the most afraid of them. They represent the opposite of electoral representation and social and economic change through incremental policy reforms made by those already in power—strikes attempt to interrupt what is meant to appear as uninterruptable. While the mass strike comes to embody the whole of class struggle within a movement to






























































498 499

Luxemburg, “Theory and Practice,” 226. Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike,” 192.

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instantiate a more humanized organization of production and consumption, Luxemburg distinguishes a few variations of strikes and their general principles. First, as is already clear, a mass strike is not just an isolated action for a delimited amount of time: “the mass strike is rather the indication, the rallying idea, of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps for decades.”500 However, within the overall “mass strike” of a movement, there are ‘fighting strikes’ and ‘demonstration strikes.’ A demonstration strike, largely more of a political than economic strike, is specifically coordinated by an organized body like a Party or union. On the other hand, the fighting strike is the result of a largely spontaneous uprising, generally in response to specific local events. They can have extreme immediate economic ramifications because as they are not “planned” and negotiated by union leadership. While we can make theoretical distinctions between primarily political versus economic strikes, Luxemburg is careful to note that in practice all strikes have political and economic aspects. Luxemburg writes, “the movement as a whole does not proceed from the economic to the political struggle, not even the reverse. Every great political mass action, after it has attained its political highest point, breaks up into a mass of economic strikes…with the spreading, clarifying and involution of the political struggle, the economic struggle not merely does not recede, but extends, organizes and becomes involved in equal measure.”501 Because Luxemburg was attentive to both the objective conditions and subjective conditions necessary for revolutionary struggle, she understood that every successful political victory, however small, “is transformed into a powerful impetus for the economic struggle extending at the same time its external possibilities and intensifying the inner urge of the workers






























































500 501

Ibid., 192. Ibid., 194-5.

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to better their position, and their desire to struggle.”502 This pushed her to realize that class struggle must be thought of more broadly than as only a fight of wage workers versus capitalists at the point of production. From this insight, I argue that we can take Luxemburg further by saying that political economic struggle can be waged in the home, in social institutions, by those who are unemployed or involved in “black markets”—in other words, everyone deprived of access to the means of production can potentially be a part of class struggle.503 While Luxemburg herself does not explicitly open the category of the proletariat in this way, my argument is that her political theory organically lends itself to this explicit expansion. Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike reveals a transformed understanding of both revolutionary “class consciousness” and the dialectics of spontaneity and political organization compared to the hegemonic Marxism of her time. If the mass strike is the primary method for making progressive changes on behalf of the proletariat, and this action is only made possible by the masses self-coordinating their actions—i.e. not through the “subtle reasoning” of Party officials or a Central Committee—then we can say that Luxemburg offers an analysis of a proletarian revolution thoroughly grounded in the self-determination of the masses. Luxemburg’s analysis of the situation in Russia led her to radical conclusions about political agency that can be easily translated into decolonial terms. Luxemburg realized that spontaneity played a central part in the Russian revolution “not because the Russian proletariat [were] ‘uneducated,’ but because revolutions do not allow anyone to play schoolmaster with them.”504 Through her analysis of the mass strike, it can be argued that Luxemburg is in the process of decolonizing her conception of revolutionary political agency and consciousness, i.e. breaking outside the






























































502

Ibid., 195. Ibid. 504 Ibid., 198. 503

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Eurocentric Marxist conception of political agency inscribed by the coloniality of power as Aníbal Quijano would term it. The mass strike, understood as the unity of political and economic struggle, aims for the reorganization of all social, economic, and political relations in the interest of the self-determination of the masses on strike. Analysis of mass strikes from any other perspective than from the actual lives of those who are choosing to strike will be fundamentally distorted and misleading. On this point we can place Luxemburg along with Martin Luther King, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James, as they all understood the rationality of riots of those most dispossessed by society. As Luxemburg puts it, “in contradiction to the police standpoint of street disturbances and rioting, that is, from the standpoint of ‘disorder,’ the interpretation of scientific socialism sees in the revolution above all a thoroughgoing internal reversal of social class relations.”505 However, while Luxemburg clearly valued spontaneous mass uprisings, that does not mean that she opposed organizing within the context of a Party or a union, but rather she realized that Party activities and spontaneous mass action need to operate in a dialectical fashion. Revolution will not be born of the subtle will of a Central Committee alone, and mass strikes don’t emerge from nowhere. They come about through worker’s intentional coordination, which arises from those who most reflected on their immediate conditions. However, it is also true that a revolution cannot rely on the class consciousness of the few fieriest proletarians, and if this occurs Luxemburg says that their actions will be “confined within the boundaries of a single town.”506 Organization of revolutionary spontaneity does not “consist in issuing commands according to one’s inclinations, but in the most adroit adaptability to the given situation, and






























































505 506

Ibid., 195-6. Ibid., 197.

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the closest possible contact with the mood of the masses.”507 Political education does not take place only through reading pamphlets or going to a Party school, but “only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution…through the actual school of experience.”508 The role of professional organizers is then directly controlled and determined by the masses, because political leadership is not about orchestrating political action, but rather in facilitating the further self-determination of the masses.509 To conclude, as Luxemburg will say, “the masses will be the active chorus, and the leaders only the ‘speaking parts,’ the interpreters of the will of the masses.”510 There are no ready-made formulas for revolution, or for how new social relations will come about, there are only a “few main signposts…and the indications are mainly negative in character at that.”511 In order to get a better sense of what positive political outcomes Luxemburg hoped a socialist revolution would achieve, I will outline her understanding of democracy and democracy’s relationship to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” 2.1.3
Democracy and the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” On political organization Luxemburg held a position more advanced than many of her contemporaries, including Lenin and Trotsky. She recognized the need to both intentionally organize and involve organic struggles emerging from the masses. While Luxemburg had a number of disagreements with Lenin, she did not think that there was no use for a “vanguard party,” insofar as its actions were subordinated to the will and agency of the masses. Given her






























































507

Ibid., 198. These insights will be further developed in later sections on James’ analysis of the Haitian revolution. We could also put Luxemburg in conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois and his account of the general strike of slaves that lead to the North ending the civil war, as he describes in Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. 508 Ibid., 182. 509 Ibid., 199. James will take a similar position. 510 Luxemburg quoted in Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982), 20. 511 Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 306.

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analysis of the situation in Russia, Luxemburg thought that the revolution could not have happened without Lenin’s party galvanizing the masses, but she also called out the undemocratic practices of the Bolsheviks after they came to power. Accordingly, she concludes her major text on the Russian Revolution, “what is in order is to distinguish the essential form the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the policies of the Bolsheviks.”512 The Bolshevik revolution was only one moment, though an important one, in a much longer international struggle: “In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia.”513 While the party was only a small cadre in comparison to the whole of Russia, the Bolsheviks were able to gain significant support from the masses. This, for Luxemburg, was a decisive departure from the tactics of the German Social Democrats who would only be willing to take revolutionary action after they gained a parliamentary “majority”. As Luxemburg explains, The Bolsheviks solved the famous problem of ‘winning the majority of the people,’ which problem has ever weighed on the German Social-Democracy like a nightmare. As bred-in-the-bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the home-made wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to revolution: first lets’ become a ‘majority.’ The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority.514 It is through substantial political actions that lead to concrete successes that lends one the support of the majority. Luxemburg will argue that in a revolutionary situation there needs to be some kind of party able to drive the masses democratically leftward. But once the chaos of the revolutionary moment is over, no one person or party is supposed to take power. Rather,




























































512

Ibid., 310. Ibid. 514 Ibid., 289. (emphasis mine) 513

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instantiating the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would mean the establishment of actual democracy, not just in words or aspirations, but in the concrete and material realization of democratic social and political institutions. It is within this explicitly post-revolution, newly founded socialist-democratic context, that Luxemburg’s writes her famous—and largely misinterpreted—words about freedom being measured by the freedom of those who think differently.515 Socialism, as a democratic political organization, will entail the existence of a diversity of political organizations, parties, and political orientations. For Luxemburg, a vanguard party is only justified in acting secretly in a top-down manner in the moment of destabilizing the bourgeoisie, but immediately after this moment, democracy lead by the masses must be instantiated. On this point Luxemburg had disagreements with both Lenin and Trotsky, and she criticized them for not fully understanding the importance of creating democratic social and political institutions, e.g. politically educating the masses alongside universal suffrage. While forging democratic political organizations is no doubt a difficult and arduous process, Luxemburg saw the necessity of democratic practices in maintaining the gains of the revolution and not slipping into the tyrannical rule of a single party: ‘the cumbersome mechanism of democratic institutions’ possesses a powerful corrective— namely, the living movement of the masses, their unending pressure. And the more democratic the institutions, the livelier and complete is their influence…To be sure every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social






























































515

“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice,’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.” Ibid., 305.

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institutions. That source is the active untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.516 While bourgeois democratic rights and institutions could only abstractly feign democracy and equality, this does not mean that with the overthrow of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, values and institutions like freedom of the press, universal suffrage, or freedom of assembly should disappear.517 Rather, these formerly bourgeois institutions and values should be substantially transformed and made concretely universal for the majority: “Every right of suffrage, like any political right in general, is not to be measured by some sort of abstract scheme of ‘justice,’ or in terms of any other bourgeois-democratic phrases, but by the social and economic relationship for which it is designed.”518 To put it another way, Luxemburg writes, “we have always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom—not in order to reject the latter, but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy—not to eliminate democracy altogether.”519 Instead of maintaining a strict division of labor between the cadre elite and “the masses,” Luxemburg pushes for widespread accessible political education in order to facilitate the self-determination of the masses. This is because she understands a socialist democracy not as a particular configuration of the working class as it is molded by political elites, but rather, “it is the working class’s own movement,”520 “the whole mass of the people must take part…otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.”521






























































516

Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” 302. In Luxemburg’s words: “It is a well-known and indisputable fact that without a free and untrammeled press, without the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the rule of the broad mass of the people is entirely unthinkable.” Ibid., 304. 518 Ibid., 302. 519 Ibid., 308. 520 Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions for the Russian Social Democracy,” 253. (emphasis mine) 521 Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” 306. 517

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For Luxemburg democracy and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” are synonymous: “[One] must at once undertake socialist measures in the most energetic, unyielding fashion, in other words, exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique—dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest public form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy.522 Because democratic processes inevitably lead to a diversity of positions, a socialist party should be “refuge for the most varied discontented elements, so that it really becomes a party of the people against a tiny minority of the dominant bourgeoisie.”523 But even if a socialist movement will be diverse in perspectives, she also recognized the need for party unity in the face of class war, as she writes, “Our party must stand up to save party unity against […] suicidal politics with a clear and decisive program of consolidation. No exclusion of groups that belong to the party by means of factional disputes…[and] the life of the party should not, for any reason, be exclusively and completely absorbed by internal disputes.”524 Party work should be equally shared, making the distinction between politicians, militants, leaders, and workers, as minimal as possible. Luxemburg’s holistic understanding of organization, struggle, and radical selfdetermination through revolutionary political education and democratic institutions, makes her a useful theorist for decolonial political philosophy and political economy. These qualities of her work help her to challenge Eurocentric tendencies of her contemporaries, insofar as she is able to see the horizon of a world radically different from the present. Luxemburg’s work points towards




























































522

Ibid., 307-308. Another insightful quote on this point is: “[Socialist democracy] does not come as a sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination…[it is] the work of a class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class—that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people.” Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” 308. (emphasis mine) 523 Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions for the Russian Social Democracy,” 262-263. 524 Rosa Luxemburg, “Credo: On the State of Russian Social Democracy,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 274.

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a globally oriented democratic society, organized from below, with collaboration between global north and south against capitalist imperialists. That she understood how non-democratic vanguard parties would lead to imperialist tendencies even among “socialists,” makes her indispensable for coming up with a new decolonial approach to political organizing. While I have so far outlined the aspects of Luxemburg’s thinking useful to a decolonial approach to political theory, I will also cover one of the major stumbling blocks for a seamless integration of Luxemburg’s political philosophy within a decolonial standpoint: namely her position on the revolutionary relevance of anti-colonial struggles and the significance of national liberation for class warfare. However, even within her abstract positions on this issue, she developed a more nuanced view of the significance of preserving and supporting a diversity of languages and cultures within the internationalist socialist politics than is typically noted. 2.1.4
National Liberation and Anti-Colonial Struggle525 Luxemburg’s position on national liberation struggles is at first perplexing given the strength of these struggles in her native Poland, but with a bit more historical background on Poland’s political scene, her position becomes more comprehensible. I will maintain that ultimately, her general analysis of national liberation is misguided and non-dialectical, even if her particular stance on Polish national independence may be warranted.526 Her position against Polish independence put her at odds with both Marx and Engels’ writings on Poland and the




























































525

This section is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of Luxemburg’s position on the national question, rather it is a brief overview of some of her positions, particularly within an organizing context in Eastern Europe. I aim to merely outline some of the pitfalls and strengths of her views on national liberation and highlight the lack of her engagement and appreciation with anti-colonial struggles as anti-capitalist struggles. For a more thorough outline on Luxemburg’s problematic sectarianism against the Polish Socialist’s Party for allegedly “reactionary nationalism” see Eric Blanc, “The Rosa Luxemburg Myth: A Critique of Luxemburg’s Politics in Poland (1893– 1919)” Historical Materialism (2018): 1-34. 526 I will not make an argument here about whether or not her estimation of the Polish independence movement and the PPS was correct or incorrect—I would need to delve deeper into to the historical details of that organization and that movement to make such a claim. Rather I will try to make her position on national liberation as intelligible as possible—even if in the end I fundamentally disagree with it.

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position of the Second International. However, her position was grounded in her dissertation research527 on Poland’s economy, which she saw as overwhelmingly integrated with Russia, meaning the support of Russian workers fight both the Polish bourgeoisie and Russian Czarism would be necessary. She saw Polish economic independence as something that would not fundamentally improve the conditions of workers in Poland, she thought only the overthrow of Russian Czarism could accomplish this, which is why she prioritized it as a primary goal of Polish socialism. Luxemburg eventually cedes ground on the Polish question as she worked on her 1903 “What do we want?” which was a commentary on the Program of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). However, it will remain the case that she abstractly universalizes the situation in Poland to denounced all national liberation struggles as distractions from class warfare. Marx and Engels’ 1848 statements on Polish independence were informed by their analysis of Poland as a potential bulwark against what they saw as backwards Russian Czarism and the Austrian Hapsburg monarchy.528 Marx and Engels never took an absolute position on national liberation struggles as progressive or reactionary, but rather they judged each situation on its own terms. What I will argue is wrong with Luxemburg’s position, is that she would not always take such a principled stance to each particular national independence movement and anti-colonial struggle. Instead she would reduce all wars to imperialist wars, making all wars for independence reactionary. Lenin would eventually criticize her position saying, Luxemburg






























































527

Her dissertation was titled “The Industrial Development of Poland,” for which she received her PhD in Philosophy and Law from the University of Zurich in 1897. See Estrella Trincado, “The Current Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s Thought,” Socialist Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 145. 528 Ibid., 146.

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“applied Marxist dialectics only halfway…Marxist dialectics call for a concrete analysis of each specific historical situation.”529 According to Luxemburg,tTaking into account the first partition of Poland in 1772, giving Russia half of Poland’s population, and integrating and industrializing Poland’s economy along with Russia’s economy, a campaign for Polish independence did not make strategic tactical sense. She saw the liberation of Poland’s working class intrinsically tied with the Russian working class and peasantry as she did not see any way to extricate Poland from the Russian market without a united front against the bourgeoisie in both Poland and Russia. Given this, she saw efforts to organize around Polish national liberation as having a divisive effect on collaboration and solidarity between Polish and Russian workers. As a general movement, she saw Polish independence as a product of only a small section of the bourgeois intelligentsia.530 However, as she eventually worked on the party program for the SDKP (later becoming the SDKPiL once it included Lithuania), and her positions on national culture and national autonomy became slightly more nuanced.531 Given Poland’s three-way partition by imperialist powers, the national question was one of the most prominent issues for Polish socialists. Luxemburg’s position on the Polish national question would develop from her relationship with the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), who she considered to be a narrow nationalist organization, and her work in the SDKP/SDKPiL, which would fiercely oppose the PPS even if they never would have mass support as the PPS had. She was infamously denounced at the third conference of the Second International in 1893 because of






























































529

V. I. Lenin, from The Junius Pamphlet, quoted in Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 56. 530 Trincado, 146. 531 Jie-Hyun Lim, “Rosa Luxemburg on the Dialectics of Proletarian Internationalism and Social Patriotism,” Science & Society 59, no. 4 (Winter 1995/1996): 501.

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her position on Polish independence and she was considered to not be an accurate representative of Polish socialism by both Engels and Plekhanov (a leading founder of the Russian SocialDemocratic Labor Party).532 Luxemburg’s rejected proposal called for the minimal Polish socialist program to be overthrowing the Czar in Russia and instituting a democratic constitution. She argued that the PPS’ plan to reconstruct an independent Poland would play into the hands of the Polish bourgeoisie rather than increase working class power in Poland, and their nationalism reflected the desires of the petit bourgeoisie rather than the Polish masses.533 In later articles criticizing the PPS’s position, Luxemburg will also point out that since the Russian peasantry had been emancipated in 1861 there had been waves of strikes and worker organizing that meant that the Second International needed to revise their idea of “reactionary/ backward” Russia and to realize that conditions were developing for the immanent overthrow of Czarism in Russia independently of Polish independence. In light of developments in Russia, Luxemburg called for the Second International to change their stance on Eastern Europe’s “backwardness,” and its need for “progressive democratic” Western Europe for liberation. This would be a direct challenge to PPS’ foreign policy “which sought the support of democratic Europe for Polish independence by exploiting the Franco-Russian conflict,”534 as the PPS was willing to trample the Russian workers in order to get into good graces with the major Western European powers to secure their independence.




























































532

Ibid., 504. Ibid., 505. In future work, I am interested in further exploring whether Luxemburg’s estimation of Polish nationalism as not originating from the proletariat is true. Whether her position is a product of economic determinism seems to hinge on how close her political claims about Polish nationalism match with how Polish nationalists actually organized. It might be the case that the PPS can be condemned on the basis of what Frantz Fanon called “narrow nationalism” in Wretched of the Earth, and if that is true, perhaps Luxemburg’s internationalism can be at least minimally salvaged from what Lim will call “Eurocentric Enlightenment Marxism.” For now, I will largely take Luxemburg at her word, and I will locate her error not in her estimation of a movement for Polish independence, but in her universalization of the social, economic, and political conditions of Polish independence to all national independence movements. 534 Ibid., 506. 533

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After Luxemburg writes her dissertation on the economic situation of Poland in 1897, she is invited by the SPD in 1989 to become the organizer for Poles in Silesia and Posen to rally wider support for the SPD and the SDKP.535 In the process of this, she came to terms with the significance of national culture and language as a major part of internationalist socialist organizing. The Poles in Silesia and Posen were sensitive to the fact that Prussian authorities were not supportive, and in fact were trying to eliminate, Polish culture and language. Because of this they were susceptible to supporting the PPS as it appeared to be “the only game in town” which supported Polish language and culture against Prussian repression. Luxemburg stressed the importance of preserving Polish culture and language by organizing against Prussian authorities alongside the German working class, calling them to support the SKPD over the PPS—going as far as to say that the SKPD was the real “protector of the Polish nation.”536 She came to see the national question as a cultural and linguistic issue, a fact that many Marxists did not appreciate because they did not have worked out ideas about how international socialism would integrate and preserve a diversity of cultures, rather than assimilating or effacing them into some abstract “universal” [read Western European] culture.537 This position would be further codified when the SDKP merged with the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party and became the SDKPiL. Luxemburg was not involved with the SDKPiL when it first formed in 1899, but when the Central Committee moved to Berlin in 1901 she became a major influence. In 1903 she would develop the party platform that would remain the platform of the SDKPiL until after WWI.538 While the SDKP party program only indirectly






























































535

Ibid., 508. Though this offer may not have been made in such good faith given the reactionary and conservative German nationalist position of much of the SPD leadership. 536 Ibid., 509. 537 Ibid. 538 Ibid., 510.

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supported struggles against the national oppression of Poland, the SDKPiL program contained an article dedicated to national questions. It called for: “The equal rights of every nationality residing in a Russian state that guarantees the freedom of its own cultural development: national schools and the freedom of speaking its mother language; self-rule of the (whole) country, or autonomy for Poland.”539 In terms of what “national autonomy” meant, she proposed that there be a separate governing body over Poland made up of elected officials (under conditions of universal suffrage), which would preside over Polish schools, the justice system, and other relevant national institutions.540 However, the catch is that Luxemburg only endorsed national autonomy for peoples with a clear geographic territory operating under industrialize/industrializing conditions. Certain other places and social groups—including Ukraine, Lithuania, the Jewish diaspora, White Russia (aka Belarus)—she did not think capable of national autonomy because of “economic backwardness” or lack of clear organization. As Jie-Hyun Lim writes, “in spite of her broad concept of autonomy, she ultimately failed to escape from the Marxian capitalocentric framework,”541 meaning ultimately her concepts of progress and “backwardness” were based in a particular European Marxist understanding of economic/capitalist development. Lim is careful to point out that Luxemburg critically missed that fact that “the rise of nationalist movements often antedated the arrival of capitalism,”542 rather than direct capitalist development causing nationalist movements. While it turns out that extreme characterizations of Luxemburg as an internationalist




























































539

SDKPiL Party Program quoted in Lim, 510. Ibid. Lim also points out that this position made Luxemburg’s conception of national autonomy more expansive than the Austro-Marxists cultural concept of national autonomy. Lim cites this helpful quote from Luxemburg: “Such a view [of the Austro-Marxists] distinguishes in autonomy only certain cultural-national guarantees, i.e., treats autonomy in a negative and purely ideological manner, as a certain minimal form of national ‘freedom,’ disregarding in it completely the positive value, the specific historical function which constitutes the core of modern autonomy as distinct from medieval particularism.” 541 Ibid., 512. 542 Ibid. 540

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at the expense of a nuanced account of national-cultural autonomy are misplaced, it is also true that she remained within a Eurocentric Marxist framework that only allowed her to grant legitimacy to the national-cultural autonomy of nations who demonstrated a particular form “development” along the historical lines traced by Western European nations. In this sense, Luxemburg’s thought on national determination falls into “the paradigmatic trap of the logic of epiphenomenalism in the Second International, which grasps the national question only in terms of the universal development of capitalism.”543 Like her Marxist counterparts, she did not understand that anti-colonial struggles of colonized peoples were tied to anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle. In AC she explains many situations where imperialist-capitalist powers exploited indigenous peoples in China, Africa, India, and the Americas, but she did not make the connection between that exploitation and the revolutionary nature of anti-colonial struggles. For example, she writes of the AngloBoer war: It was on the backs of the Negroes that the battle between the Boers and the English government, which went on for decades, was fought. The Negro question, i.e. the emancipation of the Negroes, ostensibly aimed at by the English bourgeoisie, served as a pretext for the conflict between England and the republics. In fact, peasant economy and great capitalist colonial policy were here competing for the Hottentots and Kaffirs, that is to say for their land and their labour power. Both competitors had precisely the same aim: to subject, expel or destroy the coloured peoples, to appropriate their land and press them into service by the abolition of their social organisations.544 Here Luxemburg realizes the connection between imperialism, capitalism, and bourgeois “emancipation” and “abolition” tactics drawing out the ways they work to cover over the dehumanization, subjection, and exploitation of colonized peoples. Luxemburg continues: The ultimate purpose of the British government was clear: long in advance it was




























































543 544

Ibid., 513. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 394.

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preparing for land robbery on a grand scale, using the native chieftains themselves as tools… But with the discovery of the diamond and gold fields, the numbers of white people in the South African colonies grew by leaps and bounds: between 1885 and 1895, 100,000 British had immigrated into Witwatersrand alone… At the same time the Negroes, who no longer protected favorites, were sacrificed.”545 Here she continues to explore the ways in which the British would exploit the indigenous ruling class, connecting it with settler-colonial practices. And yet, as Raya Dunayevskaya will point out, “all [Luxemburg’s] magnificent descriptions of imperialist oppression have no live Subject arise to oppose it; they remain just suffering masses, not gravediggers of imperialism.”546 While in other moments Luxemburg would see the relevance of “non-capitalist” strata in the modern organization of power under capitalism, she misses the fact that anti-colonial struggles are intrinsically tied to socialist struggles in capitalist metropoles. In “The Junius Pamphlet,” Luxemburg reduces all wars to imperialist wars and writes abstractly about the desire for nationhood: “today the nation is but a cloak that covers imperialistic desires, a battle cry for imperialistic rivalries, the last ideological measure with which the masses can be persuaded to play the role of cannon fodder in imperialistic wars.”547 Lenin famously responds: National wars waged by colonial, and semi-colonial countries are not only possible but inevitable in the epoch of imperialism. The colonies and semi-colonies (China, Turkey, Persia) have a population of nearly one billion, i.e., more than half the population of the earth. In these countries the movements for national liberation are either very strong already or are growing and maturing. Every war is a continuation of politics by other means. The national liberation politics of the colonies will inevitably be continued by national wars of the colonies against imperialism.…National wars against the imperialist Powers are not only possible and probable, they are inevitable, they are progressive and revolutionary, although, of course, what is needed for their success is either the combined efforts of an enormous number of the inhabitants of the oppressed countries (hundreds of millions in the example we have taken of India and China), or a particularly favourable combination of circumstances in the international




























































545

Ibid. Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 47. 547 Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet,” 327. 546

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situation (for example, when the intervention of the imperialist Powers is paralysed by exhaustion, by war, by their mutual antagonisms, etc.), or a simultaneous uprising of the proletariat of one of the Great Powers against the bourgeoisie.548 Luxemburg’s position misses the significance of wars emerging from the colonized rather than only between colonial nations fighting over colonial territory. Lenin is careful to point out there is nothing essentially progressive or reactionary in a war, but rather its progressive or reactionary character stems from who is waging the war and for what end. Clearly civil war against the bourgeoisie is not an imperialist war, and a war against imperialist powers is not immediately an “imperialist” war. While her position on the role of national culture in socialist organizing became more nuanced over time, it nevertheless remained true that she did not appreciate anti-colonial struggles as meaningful for international socialism. In a sense, she saw the right of national selfdetermination as an issue becoming relevant only after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie internationally. She was not able to connect up the anti-colonial struggles in the global south as being immediately connected to and useful for socialist struggles in Western Europe—despite her insights into the connections between imperialism and capitalism. I won’t try to argue here which combination of factors most defined her abstract position on the national question—but I will say that Luxemburg falls prey to many of the weaknesses of Marxism understood within a Eurocentric framework in general—even if she challenged Eurocentrism in other respects. For better insights into anti-colonial struggles and their significance for international socialist struggles within a decolonial framework I turn to C. L. R. James.549




























































548

V. I. Lenin, The Junius Pamphlet, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed 2/13/2017. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/junius-pamphlet.html 549 Frantz Fanon would be another excellent interlocutor here. As he writes in Wretched of the Earth: “History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight along lines of nationalism…National consciousness which is not nationalism is the only thing that will give us an international dimension…The natives’ challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal,

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2.2 C.L.R. James Always, always, always, the task is to develop the consciousness, the independence, the sense of destiny, the sense of responsibility, among the masses of the people. Anything else serves the forces of reaction which aim at the destruction of this enormous power which faces them. The relation I have outlined here is broad and rough. In reality it is very intimate, affecting personal lives, sex relations of the most intimate kind…But I see the evidence for these ideas every day, in the voices of the people, the songs they sing, the clothes they wear, and the terrible struggle for selfexpression, self-realization.550 -C.L.R. James, from a letter to Constance Webb (1945) C. L. R. James deepens Luxemburg’s insights into the political role of spontaneity and anti-capitalist/anti-colonial struggles as he further analyzes the differential roles of race and nation within modernity. Exploring his political and economic work through the lens of decolonial humanism, I will move through three sections dealing with the aspects of James’ work most useful to a decolonial approach to political economy: (1) his critique of Enlightenment humanism and European Marxism through his reading of the Haitian Revolution and the Russian Revolution; (2) James’ political and organizational work with the JohnsonForest Tendency in the US, Pan-Africanism, Eric Williams’ People’s National Movement (PNM) in Trinidad, and later in the Workers and Farmer’s Party (WFP); and (3) how the framework of decolonial humanism bears on James’ understanding of the fate of gender551 in revolutionary organizing. As Cornelius Castoriadis once said of James, he “had this wonderful sense of the selfactivity of the people, and he was able to translate it in universal terms that were not absolute




























































but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute…For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity…we must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new man.” Frantz Fanon quoted in Dunayevskaya Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 57. 550 C. L. R. James, The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw, (Blackwell: Oxford, 1997) 150. 551 I do not have the space to do a comprehensive analysis of James’ thoughts on gender and sexuality. For something more comprehensive on James and gender with a great bibliography of other work see: Aaron Kamugisha, “The Hearts of Men?: Gender in the Late C.L.R. James,” Small Axe 15, no. 1 (March 2011): 76-94.

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universals.”552 James’ ability to think politically in universal terms that were not abstractly absolute, make him apt for decolonial humanist political theory. James’ political economy is grounded in a humanism which shifts the geography of reason to focus on those who have been excluded from both European humanism and European Marxism. His understanding of humanism is built from the experiences of those who are the most marginalized and the most dispossessed, positing them as the most explosively humanizing elements of society.553 His claims are not based in “racial essentialism,” but rather the basic insight that those most dehumanized by our current social and political climate will be the most resistant to those forces of dehumanization. James’ was influenced by Hegel in a way that Luxemburg was not as explicitly influenced, and his commitment to a Hegelian dialectical method helped him to avoid some of the abstractions in political organizing that Luxemburg fell prey.554 In particular, James takes from Hegel his dialectical conception of truth as it emerges contextually between self and other and his conception of contradiction as the moving force of history as quantitative changes eventually become qualitative changes. As Mathew Quest describes, “for James, Hegel’s




























































552

Andrew Douglas, In the Spirit of Critique: Thinking Politically in the Dialectical Tradition, (SUNY Press: Albany, 2013) 93. 553 James eventually broke with Raya Dunayevskaya and her articulation of Marxist-humanism because he thought her focus on alienation was abstract compared to his focus on organizational questions. However, I argue that while he disagreed with Dunayevskaya’s formulation of humanism, he still operates within a decolonial humanist paradigm as I have laid out in chapter 3. For more on James’ break with Dunayevskaya, see Peter Hudis, “Workers as Reason: The Development of a New Relation of Worker and Intellectual in American Marxist Humanism,” Historical Materialism 11, no. 4 (2003): 283-4. For more of James’ criticisms of Dunayevskaya see C. L. R. James, “Letters on Organization,” in Marxism in Our Times: C. L. R. James on Revolutionary Organization ed. Martin Glaberman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999) 67-129. 554 However, I would argue James mischaracterizes and/or misunderstands some foundational Hegelian concepts, particularly “negation,” as James understands negation only in terms of “removing boundaries” rather than increased mediation that gives concrete content to abstract and indeterminate categories. (see Chapter 1 for my discussion of Hegelian logic) His text Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin is an incredible book offering a detailed history of workers’ movements, showing Lenin’s vanguard organization to be a reflection of the objective conditions of the working class in a particular place and time, and anticipating other forms of working class struggle. But nevertheless, I would not argue that it is a helpful text for understanding Hegel’s Science of Logic or Hegelian philosophy in general.

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discussion of logic and dialectic was a means to prepare to better observe the evolving material practice of human labor, which was both social and economic.”555 James saw Hegelian dialectics, coupled with Marxian political economy, as a method of analyzing history nondeterministically. James will write in Party Politics in the West Indies, “Hegel long ago demonstrated that in any examination truth lies in plotting the precise relation between what is observed and the observer.”556 James will translate these insights into an articulation of socialist organizational strategies not only articulated for the masses, but also by the masses. Technocratic, bureaucratic, or elitist political organizations, for James, posit an illegitimate relationship between the governing and the governed. James’ humanism, and account of political agency, resist static or deterministic explanations, in part, because they emerge from his reflections on Hegel’s analysis of Aristotle and Greek tragedy. As Andrew Douglass points out, James’ encounter with Hegel “enriche[d] James’ humanism by encouraging a vivification of the psychic and material situation of the concrete individual, and specifically the ‘instinctive’ hopes and frustrations that animate grassroots political activity.”557 James’ ancient Greek inspired Hegelian humanism helps him to understand the contingencies and uncertainties of political action, and to understand the deep tragedies that accompany living a political life in a world that consistently thwarts one’s political principles. The Aristotelian notion of tragedy registers on a few levels with James: first, in his humanist insight that we cannot live a good life in a world that is fundamentally alienating, and second, in his reading of the historical tragedies of political leaders unable to carry out the plans






























































555

Mathew Quest, “Beyond Measure” in Kimathi Mohammad, Organization and Spontaneity (Atlanta: On Our Own Authority! Publishing, 2013), 118. 556 C. L. R. James, Party Politics in the West Indies, (San Juan: Vedic Enterprises, 1962), 77. 557 Douglas, 93.

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and goals they struggled for given historical contingencies, unforeseen circumstances, and miscalculations. As Jeremy Glick writes, Tragedy is, among other things, a way to think and represent the dialectical mediation between leader and mass base. The classical tragic structure involves the protagonist mediating her relationship with the chorus. The chorus, in its classical sense, is often representative of the polis’ mores and sensibilities.558 James’ reading of the Haitian revolution, however, will modify the classical reading of tragedy. James writes in The Black Jacobins: The hamartia, the tragic flaw, which we have constructed from Aristotle, was in Toussaint not a moral weakness. It was a specific error, a total miscalculation of the constituent events. Yet what is lost by the imaginative freedom and creative logic of great dramatists is to some degree atoned for by the historical actuality of his dilemma…The Greek tragedians could always go to their gods for a dramatic embodiment of fate, the dike which rules over a world neither they nor we ever made. But not Shakespeare himself could have found such a dramatic embodiment of fate as Toussaint struggled against, Bonaparte himself; nor could the furthest imagination have envisaged the entry of the chorus, of the ex-slaves themselves, as the arbiters of their own fate. Toussaint's certainty of this as the ultimate and irresistible resolution of the problem to which he refused to limit himself, that explains his mistakes and atones for them.559 James reads Toussaint’s tragic failure as a miscalculation rather than a product of fate or an individualistic moral flaw because James does not adhere to a teleological account of history. The Haitian revolution—and we could also add the later Russian Revolution—were tragic insofar as they could have turned out differently. Their outcomes were not determined in advance, and it is only because of the contingent rather than necessary quality of the outcomes that they can be called tragic. What I want to point out here is the role of the chorus, or masses, in the tragedy of Toussaint and the Haitian revolution. Rather than having an individualistic






























































558

Jeremy Glick, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution, (NYU Press: New York, 2016) 87. 559 James, The Black Jacobins, 291-292.

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moral flaw, the tragedy of Toussaint was that, on the one hand, he wanted the liberation of his people, but on the other hand, he was unwilling to limit himself and his role in bringing about that liberation. The only force that could bring about a total liberation from colonial powers would be making “the chorus, of the ex-slaves themselves, the arbiters of their own fate.” Making the ex-slaves the arbiters of their own fate would have to include uprooting the colonial economic apparatus of the plantation system, and Toussaint was not willing to radically rethink the political economy of Haiti. His inability to rethink Haiti’s political economy is another aspect of his failure to maintain the faith of the masses who immediately understood that the plantation system would be fundamentally dehumanizing regardless of who owned the plantations. James’ understanding of the significance of social groups other than the industrialized proletariat—namely the ex-slaves—in bringing about revolution, is another way in which he does not fall prey to some of the pitfalls of Eurocentric Marxist analysis. As Selma James puts it: What are nonindustrial people to do about development after the revolution? The movement has struggled with this question for generations. Toussaint relied on the plantation system of the former masters who claimed to personify “civilization” and “culture”; they ultimately captured and killed him. The ex-slaves would not have it. They wanted their own plots of land, and the end of the plantation—an early form of forced collectivization.560 The decolonial humanism that James is asserting in this reading of Toussaint is one in which liberation only comes when those most marginalized and dispossessed come to possess the conditions of possibility for realizing their full humanity. The reforms that took the control of plantations out of the hands of the white colonists, and into the hands of the “mulatto” class, was no solution to the problems of the ex-slaves. It was ex-slaves who realized what was needed was a complete restructuring of power relations and their political economy if they were to have full




























































560

Selma James, “Black Jacobins Past and Present,” 263.

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liberation. As we will see later, insofar as the plantation economy persisted into James’ lifetime, part of James’ economic plan for restructuring Trinidad would involve breaking up the sugar plantations and redistributing land in order to create a new class of landed peasantry able to politically and economically control the island. This would renegotiate the relationship between the bourgeoisie/intellectual class and the working classes of Trinidad in a way such that the fundamental relation between labor and capital might potentially be altered.561 For James, revolutions have two major qualities: (1) they are special historical events insofar as they embody an unapologetic boldness and creativity and (2) “their outcomes cannot be foreseen, because the reasons why they either come to fruition or fall short of their goals [are] among the problems that no science, not even Marxist historical materialist science, [can] solve in a definitive manner.”562 Both the Haitian and Russian revolutions aimed at something that had never existed nor been figure out, they sought to solve the specifically modern problems of colonialism and capitalism. As James will say, “democratic government does not create democracy. Democracy creates a democratic government.”563 Revolutionary attempts to realize democracy then operate within the paradox that they must move from non-democratic conditions, with tactics and social norms developed within a non-democratic society, somehow to democratic conditions. James will insist that the best chances of having a democratic revolution requires mass democratic methods and division of power within the movement as much as possible. As James writes with Dunayevskaya in “The Invading Socialist Society,” The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. It is its basis. Proletarian democracy is not the




























































561

Whether or not James’ economic plans were completely worked out or made sense will be discussed in the following section. 562 Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for a New Society, (University Press of Mississippi: Mississippi, 2010), 148. This anti-teleological view of the narrative of revolutions is also why James held Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution in such high esteem. 563 James, Party Politics in the West Indies, 115.

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result of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletarian mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties and other organizations.564 That recent bourgeois revolutions and political organizing have equated democracy with electoral votes, James would agree with Luxemburg that those most suffering have been sold out. Reducing party politics to winning electoral votes has worked to only further alienate and disempower the masses: “Organizing only to seek votes is a form of degradation. It is only independent organization and independent action that people discover their needs, discover their capacities.”565 If politics is activity, then mobilizing people only for the voting booth to elect others with no substantial connection to their objective conditions de-mobilizes them from attaining the knowledge and skills needed to actually change their day-to-day living conditions. James and Dunayevskaya further explain, “for the petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat the modern party is not a political party for voting. It is a social organization for action—a response to objective and psychological needs…its appearance will signify a readiness to break the old society entirely to pieces.”566 It is James’ lens of decolonial humanism, and not an the abstract articulations of universalism as in the “principles of the Enlightenment”567 or the tradition of Western European Marxism, that makes these insights clear. His reading of revolutionary action resists a dogmatic Marxist position that would assert “proletarian class consciousness” as a necessary precondition for revolution, and instead inserts different revolutionary subjects as the






























































564

C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, “The Invading Socialist Society,” in A New Notion: Two Works by C.L.R. James ed. Noel Ignatiev (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 28. 565 James, Party Politics in the West Indies, 116. 566 James and Dunayevskaya “The Invading Socialist Society,” 56. 567 E.g. Susan Buck-Morss’ reading of the Haitian Revolution. See Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). For an excellent criticism of this book see George Ciccariello-Maher, “‘So Much Worse for the Whites’: Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Vol XXII, No 1 (2014) 19-39.

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agents of social and political change i.e. ex-slaves, peasantry, and the unemployed.568 As Selma James describes The Black Jacobins, it is a text in which “we are learning from the Haitians’ determination to be free what being human is about.”569 For Toussaint’s story to have successfully avoided “tragedy,” he would have needed to understand himself and his position as a “vanishing mediator—the only responsible vanguard model.”570 But to be generous to Toussaint’s weaknesses, “self-determination in the Black radical context is not a ‘ready-made solution,’”571 and Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolutionary role was the opening of new political possibilities.572 While James was educated in a colonial setting, and was deeply steeped in the philosophical traditions of Western Europe, he indefatigably “places the experiences and the creativity of black women and men at the heart of the humanist imaginary, suggesting that, in the United States as across the history and the geography of the African diaspora, black people have been, and continue to be, uniquely situated to shed critical light on the meaning of oppression and degradation.”573 At once, James draws both from Marxian political economy and conceptions of alienation under capitalism in addition to his insights into the colonial situation as it has affected the African diaspora. In 1941, after James moved to the United States, he founded, along with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT) which emerged as a result of unresolved contradictions within the Trotskyist Workers Party




























































568

Glick, 88. Selma James, “Black Jacobins Past and Present,” 262. (emphasis mine) 570 Glick links this insight to Amiri Baraka’s 1968 commentary on “New Wave in Jazz,” where Baraka says, “New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.” Glick comments on this, “the self that is extinguished here can be thought as an aesthetic analogue to the revolutionary leadership as vanishing mediator—the only responsible vanguard model. Political work in order to qualify as radical work should strive toward its redundancy.” (Glick, 12) 571 Gary Wilder quoted in Glick, 22. 572 “L’Ouverture means ‘the opening.’ Either Laveaux or Polverel is said to have exclaimed at the news of another victory by Toussaint; ‘This man makes an opening everywhere,’ whence the new name began.” James, Black Jacobins, 126. 573 Andrew Douglas, “C. L. R. James and the Struggle for Humanism,” Constellations 20, no. 1 (2013): 87. 569

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(WP).574 As Selma James writes, the JFT was “‘a new type of political organization’ [training] people to take an active role in their own lives as workers and intellectuals...[forming this group] allowed [C.L.R.] to break from the outdated and elitist Marxism for which Europe was the center of the world.”575 This intellectual and political group would closely read and translate Marx’s 1844 Paris manuscripts.576 As Dunayevskaya characterizes Marx’s humanism in these manuscripts: Marx’s humanism was neither a rejection of idealism nor an acceptance of materialism, but the truth of both, and therefore a new unity. Marx considered the abolition of private property to be only ‘the first transcendence.’ Full freedom demanded a second transcendence…our age should understand better than any other the reasons for the young Marx’s insistence that the abolition of private property is only the first transcendence. ‘Not until the transcendence of this mediation, which is nevertheless a necessary presupposition, does there arise positive Humanism, beginning from itself.’577 A new relationship of theory to practice, a new appreciation of ‘Subject,’ of live human beings struggling to reconstruct society, is essential.578 While this assessment of Marxist Humanism was written by Dunayevskaya after JFT had already broken up, conceptually this analysis fits in with James’ assessment of the folly of class reductionism. Class reductionism generally entails the idea that the abolition of private property




























































574

The tendency finally broke with the WP over the role of the vanguard party, the so-called “Negro Question”, and the nature of class society in the USSR. The group broke with Trostkyism altogether in 1951 when James and Dunayevskaya’s presented their text State Capitalism and World Revolution to the group and then founded the independent journal Correspondence. JFT hesitated to come out publically as a standalone organization as McCarthyism was still in full force. The group eventually was put on the Attorney General’s subversive list and over the years 1953-1955 they disbanded over disputes of the political significance of the death of Stalin and the fact James wanted to escape the McCarthyite listing. In 1953 James left the US for London due to fears of deportation and the inability to come back to the States to visit his son Nobbie. See Raya Dunayevskaya, 25 Years of Marxist Humanism, (Detroit: News and Letters Committee, 1980); Rosengarten, 71. 575 Selma James quoted in Rosengarten, 94. 576 The 1844 manuscripts were for the first time translated into English by Grace Lee Boggs for the JFT in 1947— though eventually Dunayevskaya also did her own translation as an Appendix to her book Marxism and Freedom. The 1844 manuscripts were not widely read in the English speaking world until they were translated by T.D. Bottomore in 1961. (Rosengarten, 86) 577 Raya Dunayevskaya’s translation of Marx in the 1844 manuscripts under the section “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy.” Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (EPM), trans. T.B. Bottomore in Marx’s Concept of Man, edited by Erich Fromm, (New York: Continuum, 2004), 145-146. 578 Raya Dunayevskaya, “Marx’s Humanism Today,” in Erich Fromm, ed., Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium, (New York: Doubleday, 1965) 78.

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alone will realize the full liberation of humanity—and when it’s the idea that private property will be “abolished” merely by the nationalization of industry without a fundamental reorganization of the relations of labor to capital, James and Dunayevskaya will call this State capitalism.579 The necessity for a “positive Humanism, beginning from itself,” from the struggle of the masses, to reconstruct society is exactly what James was trying to articulate in his analysis of both the Haitian and Russian revolutions and the revolutionary role of the masses.580 James was well aware of the necessity of struggles on the cultural level for a “new appreciation of the ‘Subject’” and the “reconstruction of society.” As highlighted in the opening epigraph to this section, James saw revolutionary struggle among the Black masses “in the voices of the people, the songs they sing, the clothes they wear, and the terrible struggle for selfexpression, self-realization.” 581 In the introduction to his unfinished manuscript American






























































579

I do not assert that there is a radically irreconcilable gap between the Marxist Humanist work of Dunayevskaya and James. As Rosengarten writes: “Whether Dunayevskaya’s contribution to the theory of Marxist-humanism was as original as her followers think, and whether, as they also believe, James was as indifferent and even hostile to the philosophical implications of her work, is a controversial question, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, given the ardor with which her disciples insist on this difference between her and James. I see nothing in James’s world outlook that would preclude sympathy and support for the humanistic content of Marx’s thought. Nor do I see any reason why the main thrust of his political life should not be seen as an expression of deep concern for human equality and dignity. It should be noted that, as Dunayevskaya used the term humanism, it had little or nothing to do either with the educational program that reached its climax in Europe during the Renaissance, or with the tenets of the contemporary American Humanist Association, whose activity is based on the idea that human beings are capable of developing a coherent and workable conception of life independent of supernaturalism. Her humanism turned on her effort to link philosophical questions to all aspects of revolutionary struggle, including organizational questions. She felt that James had remained mired in a limited, economistic understanding of Marxism. True, James’s Marxism was economistic in the 1930s and early 1940s, but later on James broadened his use of Marxist concepts to embrace what Dunayevskaya meant when she spoke on behalf of ‘the movement for total freedom.’” (Rosengarten, 68) (emphasis mine) 580 James recounts something written from the French soldier Pamphile de Lacroix who fought in Port-au-Prince on the side of the Napoleon as he attempted to restore slavery in San Domingo in 1801: “No one observed [but Lacroix did] that in the new insurrection of San Domingo, it was not the avowed chiefs who gave the signal for the revolt but obscure creatures. (They were not only in San Domingo obscure. They were obscure in Watts, they were obscure in Detroit, they were obscure creatures in Newark, they were obscure creatures in San Francisco, they were obscure creatures in Harlem.) They were obscure creatures, for the most part personal enemies of the coloured [sic] generals…in all insurrections which attack constituted authority it comes from below.” (emphasis mine) We could add Ferguson and Baltimore to James’ list of insurrections from below. C.L.R. James, “Lectures on the Black Jacobins,” Small Axe, Vol. 8 (2000): 106. 581 Letter to Constance Webb from C. L. R. James, The C.L.R. James Reader ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 1991), 150.

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Civilization James further writes, “I aim at showing that the apparently irrational and stupefying behavior of people in totalitarian states is a product of modern civilization, not merely in terms of the preservation of property and privilege but as the result of deep social and psychological needs of man in modern life.”582 James’ humanism allowed him to see that alienation and denigration under capitalism and colonial conditions were not merely functions of private property and “objective economic conditions,” but also a product of the subjective conditions of cultural imperialism, reductive and restrictive gender roles, anti-Blackness, and racism—this, in short, is the import of James’ decolonial humanism on his political economic analyses. As James states in an interview conducted in 1980-81, James’ decolonial humanism seeks to “explain and expand the idea of what constitutes the new society.”583 This is the society to be forged from the present, emerging out of and beyond the current contradictions colonialism, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchal relations. In order to form a deeper appreciation of James’ decolonial humanism and decolonial approach to political economy, I will explore its foundations in the specific circumstances that brought about his writings on the Haitian revolution and the significance of his work dialectically engaging socialism and Pan-Africanism to eschew the blind spots of Eurocentric Marxism. 2.2.1
C.L.R. James’ Decolonial Humanism as Praxis and Political Economy584 Both James’ play and historical account of the Haitian revolution were researched and written over the years 1932-1938 during the height of James’ Trotskyist phase in England, with some time spent in France doing research.585 In the middle of James’ research for The Black






























































582

C.L.R. James, American Civilization ed. Anna Grimshaw (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 38. (emphasis mine) Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: His Life and Work (London: Allison and Busby, 1986), 164. 584 For a much more in-depth look at James’ political philosophy as it intertwined with his political praxis and organizing see Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary. 585 James, “Lectures on the Black Jacobins,” 69-70. 583

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Jacobins, Mussolini and the Italian fascists invaded Ethiopia. This event was extremely significant for Pan-Africanist organizing and served as a turning point in James’ political thought. Through the course of the invasion “the failure of Western democracies to come to Ethiopia’s defense pushed James beyond European Marxism toward a deeper understanding of the traditions of the Black resistance.”586 However, as I will demonstrate below, James’ critical attitude toward European Marxism with his subsequent turn toward Pan-Africanist struggles does not entail a total rejection of his commitment to the principles of a socialist revolution. James’ criticisms of European Marxism in light of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia further clarified that he did not need to choose between European Marxism or Pan-Africanism. Rather, it became clear that what was needed was an understanding of socialism imbricated with the ideals, struggles, and aspirations of Pan-African struggles. James’ blending of socialism and PanAfricanism would show how the limitations of both Enlightenment and Western Marxist humanism might be overcome. In August 1935 James helped found the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE).587 Later he volunteered for service in the Ethiopian military, though he did not end up joining.588 Active members of the IAFE included, “George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, I. T. A. Wallace Johnson, Amy Ashwood Garvey (ex-wife of Marcus Garvey), T. Ras Makonnen, and Albert Marryshaw, who had attended the 1921 Pan-African Congress in London.”589 When the Ethiopian crisis subsided in 1937, the IAFE evolved into the International African Service Bureau (IASB) lead by George Padmore. In 1938 James started and edited its journal




























































586

Robin D. G. Kelley, “The World the Diaspora Made,” in Re-Thinking C.L.R. James, ed. Grant Farred, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 111. 587 It was after the development of the IAFE that James wrote the play Toussaint L’Ouverture with Paul Robeson playing Toussaint in 1936. See Robert A. Hill “In England 1932-1938,” in C.L.R. James: His Life and Work ed. Paul Buhle (London: Allison & Busby, 1986), 62. 588 Kelley, 109. 589 Ibid.

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International African Opinion.590 James sought to make this journal a “journal of action,” and as Robin D. G. Kelley describes, a journal that was to be “a mouthpiece for the masses of exploited Africans through the world.”591 Staunchly opposed to intellectual vanguardism, James’ selfunderstanding was not one of being an intellectual elite writing to explain to the masses how to conceptualize their struggles or give them a political program.592 Tim Hector explains James’ position, “the intellectual should become so involved with the work of the mass of workers in production and in society, that in that process, the distinction between intellectual and mass disappears. The worker becomes an intellectual and the intellectual a worker.”593 Along these lines James (in agreement with Fanon) was highly critical of the idea that a black middle class could emancipate itself from (neo)colonial subordination and raise the standard of living for the masses as long as they kept their lives separate from the masses. As James writes, “in the present state of world affairs there is no way out for [intellectuals and middle class folks] by seeking crumbs from the tables of their imperialist masters. They must identify themselves with the struggle of the masses.”594 While James was working to find ways to connect Pan-Africanism and socialism, he criticized the book How Britain Rules Africa for Padmore’s insistence that “sections of the ruling class could play a progressive role in the liberation of Africa from colonial domination,”595 as it elided Marxist insights on the function of class as a political category—a criticism that would carry over to his analysis of Eric Williams’ regime. However, at the same time, he also criticized






























































590

Ibid., 110. Ibid. 592 As James would later say of the Cuban Congress of intellectuals, “[it] should prepare a way for the abolition of the intellectuals as an embodiment of the culture.” James quoted in Tim Hector, “C.L.R. James and the 21st Century,” C.L.R. James Journal 8, No. 1 (Winter 2000/2001): 131. 593 Ibid. 594 James quoted in Kelley, “The World the Diaspora Made,” 111. 595 Ibid. 591

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European Marxists and European political organizations for ignoring “African struggle and [using] the colonial movement merely as a decoration for their own ceremonial occasions. Quite often […] manipulate[ing] it unscrupulously [for] their own narrowly-conceived interests.”596 At every turn James fought against class reductionism, Eurocentric accounts of political agency, and the idea that the key to liberation was the presence of strong leaders at the expense of the masses. While writing The Black Jacobins, James was immersed in the intellectual and activist milieu of the IASB, which both influenced his writing597 and was influenced by his writing. As Robert Hill writes: “Within the specific context of the changing balance of political forces in the world at the time, the International African Service Bureau was debating the political course which the African struggle would follow. The Black Jacobins was probably the most important factor in the evolution of the strategic perspective of the group, which became the premise that armed struggle would be the form of the African revolution.”598 In addition to the text’s influence on the course of Pan-Africanist revolutionary politics, Cedric Robinson further writes: “Within the same volume [The Black Jacobins] it is not difficult to unearth a critique of Stalinism, an expression of Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution, and the celebration of Lenin’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat—all constructed upon Marx’s extraordinary determination of the primitive, that is, the imperialist accumulation of capital.”599 Within James’ reading of the Haitian revolution we get both an analysis that leads us to political conclusions in terms of strategies for action (i.e. the use of armed struggle in anti-imperialist movements,






























































596

From James’ inaugural editorial for International African Opinion quoted in Kelley, “The World the Diaspora Made,” 111. 597 “The importance to James’s work of this process of developing personal/political/organizational connections through individuals who embodied the really revolutionary political stance of the age was nowhere more fundamental than in the preparation of The Black Jacobins (1938), the magnum opus on which more than anything else, James’s reputation as a scholar and political theoretician rests.” (Hill, 72.) 598 Robert Hill, quoted in Glick, 148. 599 Robinson, Black Marxism, 265.

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theorization of the relation between the masses and political leadership, and a philosophical investigation of Marxist political theory. When James returns to Trinidad in 1958 he is close with Eric Williams and becomes involved in the independence struggle as an editor and writer for the People’s National Movement (PNM) newspaper the Nation. During this period some scholars—and eventually James’ close friends and wife Selma James—considered James to have abandoned some of his revolutionary socialist positions as he characterizes revolutionary politics as being about building a “liberal democratic nation” in the Caribbean, distinct from the way he describes revolutionary socialist politics in Western and Eastern Europe.600 His analysis of the situation of Trinidad as distinct from Western and Eastern Europe has both strengths and a weaknesses. On the one hand, any decolonial account of political economy will have to be able to make distinctions between tactics and strategies within metropoles and formerly colonized places and peoples. For James, politics aimed at forming a party is needed in newly independent colonial nations, whereas in the colonial metropoles, “the traditional party [has become] outmoded and in fact reactionary.”601 Further, James sees the situation of the Black diaspora in the Caribbean as particular even within the category of the colonized. The legacy of the transatlantic slave trade meant that those who were taken to work in distant places do not have the same indigenous rooting where they landed and did not retain the same relationship to their culture as other colonized peoples. Because of this, one of the major roles of a mass democratic party within the Caribbean is to develop and codify national culture and a sense of unity. As James writes, without an immediate sense of an






























































600

See Rosengarten’s chapters 7 and 8 in Urbane Revolutionary and Paget Henry, “C.L.R. James and the Antiguan Left” in C.L.R. James’s Caribbean, eds. Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, (Duke University Press: Durham, 1992), 226239. This distinction in political economic analysis can be seen in comparing James and Grace Lee Boggs’ Facing Reality on the Hungarian revolution to James’ Party Politics in the West Indies. 601 James, Party Politics in the West Indies, 5.

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indigenous rooting in the Caribbean, “politics, economic development, art, literature, history, even social behavior, [have] to be recreated. Everything…In an underdeveloped country, particularly the West Indies, only the mass popular democratic party can be the center of the instinctive movement and need to fill the vacuum.”602 In the process of forming a mass democratic party, James hoped that the foundations would be laid for more democratic and humanized conditions in newly independent Trinidad: “You develop party life or you lay the foundations of dictatorship.”603 James hoped to achieve a directly democratic mass party, something North American and European Marxists were yet to accomplish—first alongside Eric Williams and later with the Workers and Farmers Party. As James writes, The advanced countries built from above down. We have to build from below up…From below up means involving the general public, giving them not merely a sense of participation but a sense of responsibility…They have not come there to listen to your arguments and then decide. Masses do not think, they do not act, in that way. When they come in such numbers, they have already decided. What they want now is to know what you are going to do and what you want them to do and to be armed with information and with reasons.604 James pushed Eric Williams and other leaders in the PNM to rethink how they interacted with the masses and to move away from Eurocentric (Marxist or otherwise) models of organization. James stressed, just as Luxemburg did, that the masses do not need someone to come and teach them how to do things, but rather a political organization must empower the masses to reclaim the power and knowledge they have always had but not have explicitly identified as such. If politics is an activity that you only get better at by doing, then paternalistic party leadership will actually actively inhibit the development of mass revolutionary politics. James would say, “you




























































602

From a report made to Eric Williams in 1958 quoted in James, Party Politics in the West Indies, 4. Ibid., 30. 604 Ibid., 78. (bolded in original) 603

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can’t teach people everything…a great part of political education is letting them know what is done elsewhere, watching what they instinctively choose, what models they adopt and what they reject.”605 Thus, the success of a West Indian mass democratic party would be measured The day [the West Indian masses] spontaneously in their independent organizations say to their own party or to their own government, ‘We don’t like what you are doing; it is not what we understood you to promise; please come and explain,’ then the party leader will rejoice…[doing politics] is to discuss and plan and carry out some programme or perspective of your own and then to judge how far you have succeeded or failed, and why.606 James’ decolonial humanist focus on the creativity of the masses over the rule of the middle class or elite rulers would eventually put him fundamentally at odds with Williams and the PNM. However, even if he was enthusiastic and optimistic about the ability of the masses to rule themselves and organize society democratically, James also understood that a mass democratic political organization would not appear “spontaneously” overnight: You cannot appoint the ‘people’ overnight to this committee or that board. But you encourage them, you insist that they practice self-government, that is to say, to govern themselves, in their own organizations. That is why I have insisted in the West Indies that what is needed is a Party…I cannot conceive any other way of developing a sense of the rights and duties of a democracy in an inexperienced and untutored population. Making speeches to them is useful up to a point. But they cannot live on that. They must have experience, experience of organization and of action. Organizing only to seek votes is a form of degradation. It is only independent organization and independent action that people discover their needs, discover their capacities.607 James was not naïve about the fact that West Indians had to develop their own comprehensive philosophies built from their own particular colonial history, and the West Indian masses would be the only ones able to do this. He pushed for the masses to recognize that political economic






























































605

Ibid., 117. Ibid. 607 Ibid., 116. 606

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theory developed from the point of view of the most radically dispossessed, even within small Caribbean nations, would have global significance: “[West Indians] are too much dominated by ideas and theories of advanced countries. We should, we have to develop, for example, economic ideas and theories and practice of our own, which can help not only ourselves but to help regenerate the bankrupt West.”608 Insights like these largely had no place within those Marxist, Trotskyist, and Stalinist circles that would focus on American and Western European political economy as if it could offer a universal solution to global capitalism—missing the essential political economic links to “periphery” countries, as these places are critical for the continued circulation and accumulation of capital. This articulation of party politics within formerly colonized nations like Trinidad would only emerge from James’ unique blending of socialism and Pan-Africanism and his attentiveness to the specificity of the historical, social, and political, situation of the Black diaspora. This decolonial analysis of party politics stands out against his analysis of party formations in Europe and the US, and even with his analysis of situations of non-European countries like Hungary. In some of these distinctions, I argue, James begins to sneak in a problematically stagiest conception of history and development for places like Trinidad. In terms of the Hungarian Revolution, James saw Hungarian workers ready to directly seize the means of production and to successfully rule both politically and economically through direct democratic means. In the case of Trinidad, James saw the masses ready for a representative democratic government, but economically he did not see readiness for a worker controlled economy.609 As Paget Henry puts it, “there was a desire for a more modern and productive economy that was still predominately capitalist in nature. The creative/insurrectionary




























































608 609

Ibid., 79-80. (emphasis mine) See Henry, “C.L.R. James and the Antiguan Left,” 234. Also see James, Party Politics in the West Indies, 90.

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tension was between a dying colonial society and the emergence of a modern representative democracy that was basically capitalist in nature.”610 In terms of a socialist Caribbean, James saw the need for an intermediary step of developing a modern capitalist democracy. While James continued to work within Trinidadian party politics, his revolutionary socialist position seemed to have softened. In a letter to an unnamed friend in 1961 James writes: “I am not interested in any -ism, as I have been blamed for611…What I say is now let us work out how to build the national community. This is how you can help, etc. etc. Roosevelt made it clear: ‘I don’t want to destroy capitalism. But this is a New Deal. And you economic royalists had better understand that.’ That is the way.”612 It was statements like these along with the party line of his short-lived and unsuccessful Workers and Farmer’s Party (WFP) (1965-1966) that lead Selma James and Martin Glaberman to chastise James for defaulting on his revolutionary socialist politics. December of 1962 James was forced to return to London due to rising tensions with Eric Williams and his expulsion from and denouncement by the PNM—prompting him to write Party Politics in the West Indies. But when he returned to Trinidad in March 1965, he set out alongside Stephen Maharaj—leader of the opposition Indian based Democratic Labor Party. However, Maharaj “represented a labor-oriented tendency within a party that had become notorious in Trinidadian politics for its political instability and conservative ethnic-chauvinist opposition to the Afro-dominated progressive PNM.”613 This coalitional move in forming the WFP would make it very difficult to pull the Black Trinidadian masses away from the PNM— who, in reality, did not have a dramatically different political orientation to the WFP.




























































610

Henry, “C.L.R. James and the Antiguan Left,” 234. During his falling out with Eric Williams, and later when he tried to start the Workers and Farmers Party, he would be called out by the ruling party as “communist” attempting to bring communism to Trinidad. See Walton Look Lai, “C.L.R. James and Trinidadian Nationalism,” in C.L.R. James’s Caribbean, 192-198; Rosengarten, 125126. 612 Rosengarten, 124. 613 Look Lai, “C.L.R. James and Trinidadian Nationalism,” 198. 611

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While WFP called for a Caribbean Federation and for explicit unity between Indians and Afro-Trinidadians, a move to the left of the PNM (although it also in letter called for IndianAfro-Trinidadian unity), it supported the kind of national economic policies of Castro’s Cuba and Manley’s Jamaica. However, the WFP did not use Marxist vocabulary to talk about the relations of labor and capital—nor did it detail in any depth a transition out of the current situation besides nationalizing the sugar and oil industries to avoid foreign economic control. Because James’ economic focus was on the need to nationalize Trinidad’s major industries, he, at this time, was generally willing to put national politics above class politics. James writes: “A national task awaits us. That is why I, a socialist, see that all sections of society must enter into it.”614 While it is true that all sections of society should be involved in a mass party and in the struggle to end colonialism and capitalism—it is not the case that all sections have the same immediate interest in ending these organizations of labor and capital. Because the culturally nationalist PNM organization had mass support, it would have been essential that the WFP draw on this base and recognize the revolutionary aspects of nationalist politics a là Fanon. But at the same time, we cannot forget the pitfalls of national consciousness, and that the middle classes do not have the immediate interests in overthrowing the current relations of capital and labor to improve conditions for the working masses. Rather, a liberatory mass political party would need to significantly change the relations between the formerly colonized elites and the masses. James at his best knew this very well, (e.g. in The Black Jacobins) but at some moments he was less clear on this point—which I would contend is one factor, among others, that the WFP did not fare well. Another factor being that the politics of the WFP were not obviously different from the PNM’s, meaning the WFP was unable to pull a




























































614

James quoted in Rosengarten, 126.

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mass base away from the PNM. While there were a few major differences between the parties— in particular James’ staunch opposition United States’ push for a military base in Chaguramas— in the 1966 elections the WFP did not win any seats and received only 3% of the popular vote.615 Shortly after this James went back to London and the WFP dissolved. While James’ political and theoretical aspirations sought to be in line with the political interests of the colonized, the masses, and the working class—in practice, James sometimes faltered. But even if he did not always live up to the standards he set for himself, he returned to his fundamental principles—and further study of James’ life post-1966 would bear this out. It is in this sense that I want say that the praxis of James’ life is in-line with a decolonial understanding of humanism outlining a decolonial approach to political economy operating with the differential and complex colonial histories of capital expansion and accumulation in mind. With this general outline of the significance of James’ decolonial humanism for his approach to political economy in place, I will turn to a more specific aspect of his decolonial humanism: its potential implications for developing liberatory gender relations and overcoming some aspects of heteronormativity. 2.2.2 The Tragic Comrade Love of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Étienne Laveaux While James maintained a political commitment to opposing oppressive gender relations, he generally ignored or downplayed the role of women revolutionaries.616 However, I would like to challenge the idea that James’ reading of the Haitian revolution does not have much to say about revolutionary gender relations and that he only gives us heteronormative depictions of revolutionary actors. Despite his general neglect of women’s political involvements, the






























































615

Rosengarten, 129-130. See Faith Smith, “Coming Home to the Real Thing,” and Hazel Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 616

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liberation of gender relations from capitalist and colonial dynamics is critical to his understanding of liberation. As Kamugisha writes, “there is something about the sincerity of James’ desire to rethink the past, and a determination to move beyond the coloniality of gender relations which still resonates today.”617 In fact, there are ways in which James’ portrayal of Toussaint L’Ouverture break some of the stereotypes of black masculinity and comradeship.618 There are many places in The Black Jacobins where James describes Toussaint in heteronormative ways, for example he writes, Toussaint was: The complet[e] master of his body as of his mind. He slept but two hours every night, and for days would be satisfied with two bananas and a glass of water. Physically without fear, he had to guard against being poisoned, and in the various villages where he stayed he had old black women prepare for him callaloos, a kind of vegetable broth. He could trust these old women. They had no ambitions and were too proud of him to do him any harm…His control over his soldiers was not due only to his skill as a general. He had that reckless physical bravery that makes men follow a leader in the most forlorn causes.619 Here we see all the usual heteronormative tropes about men, Toussaint is: “rational” in the sense of possessing total control of “body and mind;” physically strong with very few bodily needs; the few bodily needs he does have are taken care of by women—and the women who care for him have no other ambitions than to care for him; and he is “fearless and brave.” This is an instance where European humanism problematically arises in James’ account. Here Toussaint is “rational” subject emerging on his own terms out of a feminized private sphere, naturalizing the gendered division of labor. However, it is when James considers Toussaint’s relationship with his comrades, and in particular the French General Étienne Laveaux, that we see a different and more nuanced side of Toussaint’s character as a masculine leader. In this relationship James
































































617

Kamugisha, 94. Kamugisha also notes that there are other important insights on male homosocial bonding in James’ text on cricket Beyond the Boundary. (Kamugisha, 78). 619 James, Black Jacobins, 249-250. 618

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demonstrates the ways in which his decolonial humanism was able to subvert some of the heteronormative tropes of European humanism. French General Laveaux, briefly governor of San Domingo, first fought against Toussaint’s troops. In 1793 Toussaint briefly sided with Spain because they offered weapons and supplies to his forces, recognizing him as independent from France.620 After Toussaint strategically sides with Spain, he writes to Laveaux offering his assistance to get Spain and Britain out of San Domingo on the condition that France will agree to the full liberation of Black San Domingo and the abolition slavery. Initially Laveaux refuses. It is not until Le Cap, crucial politically and economically as a port city,621 is burned to the ground by ex-slaves in June 1793 that Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, the right-wing Jacobin French Commissioner, finally decrees general emancipation. However, this “general emancipation” was hardly worth the name, as former slaves had to work on the same plantations with the same owners receiving next to nothing in wages. After this decree, Toussaint again offers to help Sonthonax and Laveaux to drive out the Spanish and British from San Domingo.622 After this Laveaux offers Toussaint the position of Briagadier-General, making Toussaint officially a French officer in command of about 5,000 soldiers.623 When supplies were low and conditions extreme for Toussaint’s troops, the British and the Spanish “sent agents among them offering them arms and accoutrements and good pay. From Laveaux to the laborers the British






























































620

Ibid., 124. “The pride of the colony was the great North Plain of which Le Cap was the chief port. Bounded on the north by the ocean, and on the south by a ridge of mountains running almost the length of the island, it was about 50 miles in length and between 10 and 20 miles in breadth. Cultivated since 1670, it was covered with plantations within easy reach of each other. Le Cap was the centre of the island's economic, social and political life. In any revolutionary upheaval the planters of the North Plain and the merchants and lawyers of Le Cap would take the lead. (But the slave-gangs of the North Plain, in close proximity to each other and the sooner aware of the various changes in the political situation, would be correspondingly ready for political action.)” (Ibid., 58-9.) 622 Ibid., 143. 623 Ibid., 145. 621

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made their offers of money. But there is no record of any notable success with Toussaint’s men. The morale of the revolutionary army was too high.”624 As James further writes, “the British and the Spaniards could not defeat [Toussaint and the black masses of San Domingo]. All they could offer was money, and there are periods in human history when money is not enough.”625 Under Toussaint’s leadership many groups of independent maroon communities were brought together—including the most powerful group of 5,000 under the command of Dieudonné. With the mass support of his army committed to the abolition of slavery and the political empowerment of black San Domingo, it was clear that the white planter class needed to be eliminated altogether as they would only work to restore slavery.626 Together Toussaint and Laveaux worked closely to keep the allied Spanish and British at bay, and Laveaux gave Toussaint carte-blanche to organize all the relevant decisions with the military and the administration of San Domingo.627 As they worked together to keep these imperial powers out of San Domingo—while recognizing the complex situation of France’s weak position, as it is really Toussaint’s rebel army that is in control—they grew together as comrades. Toussaint writes to Laveaux, “I shall always receive with pleasure the reprimands that you address to me. When I deserve them it will be a proof of the friendship that you have for me.”628 In the blossoming of their friendship we begin to see another side of Toussaint and another side of comradeship—even with someone who, because of his colonial status, would not have originally been considered a comrade.






























































624

Ibid., 148. Ibid., 155. 626 Ibid., 145-154. Though a few whites were granted posts by Toussaint—those he had previously worked with. As opposed to many mainstream account of the Haitian revolution, Toussaint was enormously generous and kind—he wrote to Laveaux: “My heart is torn at the fate which has befallen some unhappy whites who have become victims in this business.” (Ibid., 157) 627 Ibid., 159. 628 Ibid. 625

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The letters between Toussaint and Laveaux are a rich illustration of comrade-love629 and the friendship required to carry out successful political action. To demonstrate this, I quote James at length: Toussaint, infinitely suspicious and very reserved, had absolute faith in Laveaux and never trusted any other man, black, white or brown. Laveaux had the same feelings towards him, and a letter of Laveaux to Toussaint that remains is addressed to his “most intimate friend, Toussaint.” Amidst all the military, political and other problems there is this note of strong mutual attachment. “Here is something important. I send you some truffle. Be so kind as to accept them from him who wishes you the best of health, and who embraces you with all his heart. All my officers assure you of their respect and fidelity. “P.S. General, our impatience to see you grows every day—shall we be long deprived of this pleasure?” Seven days afterwards it seems that the visit will take place: “I see with pleasure that you will not delay to come to see us here. I await you with the utmost impatience as do all my men, who ardently desire to see you and, at the same time, to demonstrate to you their attachment.” Laveaux, it is obvious from Toussaint’s replies, wrote in a similar strain. Toussaint gracefully acknowledged his commander’s graciousness. “I do not know how to express my thanks for all the pleasant things that you have said to me, and how happy I am to have so good a father who loves me as much as you do. Be sure that your son is your sincere friend, that he will support you until death…“I embrace you with all my heart and be sure that I share with you your difficulties and your cares.”630 From this passage it is clear the depth and intimacy these men shared as both comrades and friends—Laveaux calling Toussaint “his most intimate friend.” What I’d like to highlight is the ways in which these remarks complicate James’ portrayal of Toussaint as a hardened, unfeeling, warrior, the pinnacle of male leadership in a revolution. Here he sends his comrade chocolates, and while the act of calling Laveaux his “father” might seem condescending, the men were roughly the same age and it seems very likely it was a term of endearment rather than a racist




























































629

In a future article I plan to further explore the concept of ‘comrade-love’ as it first emerged in the socialistfeminist writings of Alexandra Kollontai. I think comrade-love is an apt concept for showing the potential affinities between the legacies of socialist feminism and decolonial feminism. 630 Ibid., 161.

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patriarchal trope.631 In terms of the overall structure of The Black Jacobins, this passage on the relationship between Toussaint and Laveaux comes in the last pages of chapter six “The Rise of Toussaint,” a chapter working to give us Toussaint’s full character. Given this, James makes it clear that he saw this relationship as crucial to Toussaint’s development—especially in terms of demonstrating his character as more complex than a one-sided caricature of masculinity. In the following chapter, James offers a more detailed analysis of the political significance of their friendship. James begins the chapter by noting that Toussaint and his comrades were “enemy No. 1” of the white revolutionary royalists—however, by now whites did not have the same power they once did in San Domingo as many fled to the United States and Cuba after the burning of Le Cap. James writes, “the potential rulers were the Mulattoes, and the Mulattoes saw in this growing reputation and friendship of the black leader with Laveaux, a threat to the domination they considered theirs by right.”632 Politically, the Mulatto class was made up of landed proprietors who were largely pro-British because the British promised that if they gained control of San Domingo they would reinstate the “Negro codes,” preserving Mulatto rights to plantation ownership. Because it was clear that Toussaint and Laveaux were working for the political and economic advancement of black laborers, “even the Mulattos who were republicans [i.e. on the side of France] were watching this threat to themselves in the close intimacy between Toussaint and Laveaux, and Laveaux’ interest in and popularity with the black masses.”633 However, Laveaux, as an assimilationist and firm adherent to the principles of the French revolution, would never have advocated the self-determination of San Domingo separate from




























































631

Also see Bernard Gainot, “Le Général Laveaux, Gouverneur de Saint Domingue, Député Néo-Jacobin,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, No. 278, (1989): 442. 632 James, Black Jacobins, 163. 633 Ibid., 166.

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France—which is why he was resolutely against a Mulatto take over that would hand San Domingo over to the British. Here we start to see where he and Toussaint politically diverged despite their close comradeship. As an assimilationist, Laveaux wanted San Domingo under France’s rule—and even if the island maintained its own leadership, he believed ideologically in the Republic (i.e. the nation-state of France) as the liberator of Black San Domingo. Toussaint, shrewder than this, knew that alignment with France was tactical—though as James will point out, Toussaint miscalculated how far this tactical alliance could or should have gone. However, Toussaint was also deeply moved by the principles of the French Revolution, and his commitment to the abstract universals of liberté, égalité, fraternité played a role in his tragic demise. As George Ciccariello-Maher notes, “it was this that led Toussaint to oppose not only discrimination, but any form of racial identity that interfered with the establishment of formal equality in the here and now.”634 It would be Dessalines and Christophe to complete the liberation of Haiti as a specifically Black nation. However, I do not want to speculate whether it was Toussaint’s close relationship with Laveaux that led in any definitive way to his tragic end. I reject speculation on these terms because, (1) it is empirically futile to determine,635 and (2) it would reduce our analysis of Toussaint to an individualistic moral narrative anathema to the decolonial humanism of James. Instead, I would like to think through the ways in which their comradery enabled Toussaint to set the stage for a successful anti-colonial revolution—even if he would not be the one to see it to its completion. As James describes, “no person, man nor woman, ever had any influence on [Toussaint]. He seems to have had one friend in all his life, Laveaux. Impenetrable, he trusted no




























































634

Ciccariello-Maher, 25. Especially because Laveaux was soon to leave San Domingo in 1797 to work as the deputy of San Domingo in the French Legislature—meaning he was not actually in San Domingo to sway Toussaint politically one way or another when he was making some of his crucial miscalculations. (Gainot, 433) 635

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one, confided in no one. If he had a weakness it was in keeping people mystified.”636 What James is careful not to do, and I think rightly so, is to avoid reducing their intimacy to an allegory for pathological commitment to Western colonial powers. Instead James is able to demonstrate the human aspects of their relationship that helped both men maintain their humanity in alienating situations, helping propel them towards creating a different world. James’ remarkable illustration of the relationship between Toussaint and Laveaux is an achievement made possible by his decolonial humanism able to navigate the contradictions of capitalism and colonialism and its attendant gendered and racial dynamics. To be clear, I am not highlighting James’ case study on Toussaint and Laveaux as a guide for all interracial comradeships across contradictory social and political identities. Rather, I highlight it as a counterexample to an extreme pessimism that would claim those who have different immediate political interests could never form transformative bonds. As the relationship of Toussaint and Laveaux shows, in the course of political struggle, one has the ability to rethink who they are and what kind of world they want to build. While Laveaux was wrong about what exactly would bring liberation to Black San Domingo, in the end he saw his freedom—even as he understood it as a French citizen—as fundamentally tied to the liberation of Toussaint and Black San Domingo. This reflects an objective change in his orientation to his immediately given political interests. I offer this account as a more nuanced description of James’ treatment of masculinity, leadership, and comradeship, foregrounding the possibility of positively transformative revolutionary relationships—even when mired in contradiction.






























































636

James, Black Jacobins, 251.

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III.


Decolonial Political Economy

3.1 Luxemburg and James in Conversation The significance of James’ work for a decolonial approach to political economy lies in: (1) his avoidance of class reductionism and his understanding of the perils of ignoring race as a social, political, and economic category; (2) his understanding of the organic unity of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism; (3) his undoing of the Eurocentric Marxist vision of the agents of revolutionary social transformation; (4) debunking the myth of vanguard leadership at the expense of the masses by renegotiating the relationship between bourgeois intelligentsia and their working class counterparts through the development of a mass democratic party; and (5) his vision reimagining all social relations through a reorganization of the relationship of labor, capital, and political leadership, including gender relations. James offers us an analysis of revolutionary events that neither pathologizes revolutionary actors detracting from their agency, nor projects teleological necessity where it does not belong. It is in these ways that we can say James, through his decolonial humanist approach, develops a decolonial account of political economy working to subvert Eurocentrism and its attendant patriarchal and heteronormative dimensions by beginning with the experiences of those who have been excluded from European humanism and Eurocentric Marxist political economy. Where James may falter is in his proposed concrete programs. In particular, while I agree that there needs to be differential analyses of the objective and subjective conditions in formerly colonized nations versus the colonial metropoles, James’ insistence on a “social democratic” capitalist state stage before explicitly socialist organizing in Trinidad does not make much sense given his overall work and political vision. For this, many of his close friends including his wife chided him, and ultimately he had to leave Trinidad after his unsuccessful time organizing the

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WFP. Given what I outlined of Luxemburg’s political thought, she too would have disagreed with the concrete program and tactics of James’ WFP. However, her writings for the Spartacus League’s account of “what is to be done,” also included a vision of the first step towards socialist as the nationalization of key industries just as James’ vision for a Pan-Caribbean socialism. Luxemburg writes in “The Socialization of Society:” “The first duty of a real workers’ government is to declare by means of a series of decrees the most important means of production to be national property and place them under the control of society. Only then, however, does the real and most difficult task begin: the reconstruction of the economy on a completely new basis.”637 However, Luxemburg will argue, along with her orthodox Marxist contemporaries, that the reconstruction of the economy will entail the taming of “market anarchy” with a planned economy. Unfortunately, as is clear from the vantage point of our historical moment, “socialist” planned economies did not actually improve economic conditions nor did they lead to the empowerment of the working class nor the democratic transfer of productive forces—“State capitalism,” as James will later point out, is not socialism nor does it fundamentally challenge the capitalist mode of production.638 Because of Luxemburg’s focus on exchange relations over alienation and dehumanization, she both overestimated the possibilities of planned economies and underestimated the possibilities of anti-colonial struggles. As Dunayevskaya succinctly puts it, Although Luxemburg described concretely how the war between the Boers and the English was fought ‘on the backs of Negros,’ she did not draw any conclusions about the




























































637

Rosa Luxemburg, “The Socialization of Society,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 346. Criticizing Luxemburg’s endorsement of planned economies, Hudis writes, “Value production in inherently irrational since the distribution of the component parts of social wealth takes place behind the backs of the producers. It cannot be otherwise in a system based on the separation of the laborers from the conditions of production and existence of alienated labor. It is impossible to make such inherently irrational system ‘rational’ through state intervention and control of the market. It can be transformed only by uprooting value production through a free association of producers who govern the production and distribution of social wealth.” Hudis, “New Perspectives on Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital,” 36. 638

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Black Africans being a revolutionary force. That revolutionary force was reserved for the proletariat alone…As we saw, during the 1910-11debate with Kautsky, Luxemburg’s revolutionary opposition to German imperialism’s barbarism against the Hereros was limited to seeing them as suffering rather than revolutionary humanity.639 Luxemburg’s inability to understand anti-colonial battles wages by the colonizes against European colonial capitalist forces as fundamentally revolutionary lead to her underestimation of the role of these struggles for class warfare. Her limited understanding of the role of national consciousness, that isn’t “narrow nationalism,” is something that continues to hinder her work’s wider use within Third World anti-colonial struggles.640 As Lim describes, she was even behind Marx and Engels on this point: Despite her own theory of imperialism, Luxemburg was still fixated on the proletarian revolution in the developed countries. Marx and Engels had begun to escape from the capitalocentric and Eurocentric view inherent in dogmatic historical materialism, recognizing the mechanism and the uneven development of world capitalism through the Irish experience.641 Had she investigated the Haitian revolution with the detail and care that James had, perhaps she would have been able to break out of more of the limitations of her Eurocentric intellectual milieu. But her abstract insistence against self-determination as a critical tactic for building international socialism amongst colonized populations emerged from the fact “that she could not see that the absolute opposition to imperialism was not noncapitalism, but the masses in revolt, in the oppressed as in the oppressor country.”642 While Luxemburg remains a break-out figure in the legacy of Marxist thought in terms of her theorization of imperialism, her attention to “non-capitalist strata,” and the role of international loans and debt, she retained reactionary aspects of the orthodox Marxist dogma of




























































639

Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 37. For more on this see Lim, 526-8. 641 Lim, 526. 642 Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 42. 640

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the Second International. This included the problematically teleological conception of “backwards” versus “advanced” countries and a lack of analysis of the role of race within political economic categories. Her analysis of imperialism, while useful, still misses the existential and epistemic aspects of coloniality because it is not merely an economic relation. With respect to the epistemic and existential dynamics of race and colonialism, James offers a better analysis as he couples a Pan-Africanist account of race and colonialism with revolutionary socialist politics, even if these politics at certain moments become ambiguous. Rather than understanding independence struggles in colonized places, including independent Black nationalist and socialist organizing in the US, as a distraction from international socialist organizing, James saw these struggles as evidence of the democratic selfdetermination of the masses in the face of racial capitalism. These struggles for James were then to be seen as the cutting edge of socialist politics as they attempted to fundamentally rethink political economic categories. By taking race as a fundamental category of political economy we are objectively better placed to understand the rise of global capitalism and its persistence. To clarify this point, I quote Ornette Clennon describing the import of ‘racial capitalism’ combining the work of Charles Mills and James: If democracy is racialised, then its principal role in capitalism is also racialised, which means that Karl Marx’s sentiment that “[l]abour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded” effectively merges race and class into a single point in the ‘structure.’ If capitalism is racialised in terms of the drive to subordinate blackness in order to create/accumulate capital, then class is, in effect, also a function of race. Here, what I am suggesting is that class is a ‘structural’ representation of racial formation. Since racial formation is about the definition and relationship between whiteness and blackness, its ‘structural’ manifestation in white workers is also racial. To see the subordination of the white working classes by the ruling classes as a purely class-led rather than a race-led process would suppose that the white working classes are unracialised. However, we know that they are racialised and racialised as ‘white.’ We know this because in comparison to the ‘Negro’ worker they were still accorded better

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treatment, as they sought to protect their whiteness in their labour unions, despite occupying the same structural position as their black counterparts.643 Given this structural account of race and class means that we cannot analyze class abstracted away from processes of racialization and that race is a fundamental political economic category within modernity. To take “class consciousness” as a product of “colorblindness,” as in the slogan “Black and white unite and fight,” is both a practical and theoretical mistake. It is a practical mistake in that suppressing independent organizing for racially marginalized and hyper-exploited groups not only leads to less people involved, but it also creates extra barriers for those willing to put up with their racist and prejudiced counterparts who work to delegitimize their voice and control their power within “integrated” socialist organizations. It is a theoretical mistake in that it misunderstands the nature of “class,” as it abstracts from its structural imbrication with processes of racialization—not to mention its blindness also to gendered dynamics. Because there is nothing about being ‘working class’ that immediately gives white folks consciousness of processes of racialization and the structure of white supremacy, abstractly calling for unity between white and non-white workers—who are no doubt differentially treated even within the same “class position”—has not, and likely will never, lead to productive coalitional solidarity between white and non-white workers. Rather, in order to take a decolonial approach to political economy, revolutionary socialist organizing would need to take something closer to James’ position. Developing “class consciousness” can’t happen within a colorblind narrative, it must be worked out differentially, taking into account the different colonial histories and racialized dynamics at play in one’s




























































643

Ornette Clennon, “We Are the World: Racial Capitalism and its Links with Pan-Africanism,” in The Polemics of C.L.R. James and Contemporary Black Activism, 114.

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everyday dehumanization and exploitation. Successful mass organizing will have to start from a concrete understanding of the objective and subjective conditions of the masses’ everyday experiences. Together Luxemburg and James’ accounts of political economy offer insights towards developing a systematic transformed account of Marxist political economy within a decolonial humanist paradigm. They re-envision democracy, political agency, revolutionary action, political consciousness, and imperialism’s relation to global capitalism through an updated analysis of “primitive accumulation.” At their best they each sought to empower those most dehumanized and dispossessed to forge their way to self-determination not predicated on the suppression of others—while remaining critical of those who claimed to be the gatekeepers of revolutionary politics. While the political economic theory of both James and Luxemburg is not without contradiction, their accounts continue to be useful insofar as they point to ways of thinking about political economic categories beyond the limits of their immediate contexts. 3.2 Towards Revolutionary Intersectionality Taking the insights of María Lugones and Sylvia Wynter alongside the work of Luxemburg and James, I want to argue for a concept of “revolutionary intersectionality.” I use the term “revolutionary” to qualify the concept of intersectionality in order to demarcate it from hegemonic bourgeois liberal iterations, as these articulations of intersectionality have opportunistically used the concept to legitimize exploitative social norms and institutions. A revolutionary intersectional approach, grounded in a decolonial humanism, will involve a rethinking and re-articulation of social and political identities such that both individuals and social groups are able to engage and interact in humanized ways. This will not be based in “colorblindness,” nor will it reify gender or class as the primary prisms for understanding

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oppression and exploitation. Rather, a revolutionary intersectional approach will involve a concrete historical material analysis of the objective and subjective elements constituting fundamental categories of political and social identity at personal, inter-personal, and societal levels. A decolonial account of political economy, as I have begun to outline here, can be read as part of a systematic foundation for social and political analysis aimed at actualizing a more humanized world. As activists and organizers seek to develop organizations that empower and build the skills of those most dispossessed for economic and political self-determination, there needs to be a corresponding analysis of our current Sittlichkeit that provides a systematic framework in which these political actions can become widely intelligible. This entails delineating an ethico-political doctrine and a conception of the “good life” towards which our political strivings aim to concretely and universally realize—as Wynter says, with the well-being of the totality of humanity, in all of its genres, in mind. Decolonial humanists have articulated a new account of ‘universality’ that successfully mediates the abstract universality of Enlightenment political thinkers, and new directions in political economy seek to integrate these insights into a systematic analysis of global social, political, and economic relations. This chapter, as a small genealogical account of political economy as a discipline, has tried to demonstrate the ways in which a decolonial variant of political economy would transform a strictly Marxist account of political economy. I have shown two major Marxist thinkers as pulse points for breaking out of older hegemonic Marxist approaches to political economy. Because the contradictions of our time are contradictions of the social totality, they will only be solved by the social totality actively engaging them. James and Luxemburg understood this insofar as they sought to democratize political agency and knowledge by

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empowering the masses rather than an elite cadre—but they also did not merely wait for the working class to spontaneously organize itself. They each worked within a myriad of political organizations agitating, organizing, and mobilizing towards a more humanized future. While there is no straightforward or universal answer to “what is to be done,” I argue that a decolonial approach to political economy, grounded in the best of Luxemburg and James, is a wise place to start.

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