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The class system that underpins homophobia PDF Print
Liam Byrne 08 February 2010

It is impossible to understand homophobia without understanding the central role that the class division plays in capitalist society. Without a class understanding you cannot decipher where homophobia comes from, whom it benefits, and how to get rid of it.
This is not a popular assertion. Long gone are the radical days of the Gay Liberation Movement in the 1970s, when the dominant conception was that capitalism was the cause of homophobia. Instead within the LGBTI media and amongst academics today the dominant discourse refers not to continuing oppression, but to supposed “liberation achieved”. It is argued that the main barriers to equality have been overcome, that no challenge to the status-quo is required, and all that remains is a few areas of discrimination that will inevitably be overturned, such as the ban on same-sex marriage.
While celebrating the victories against our oppression, and campaigning against continued legal discrimination and other forms of homophobia, socialists completely reject this mistaken notion of “liberation achieved”.
Capitalism is a system defined by the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. The ruling capitalist class are the minority of society that controls all the wealth produced by the working class, the mass of the population who sell their ability to work for a wage. This exploitation, the fact that the working class is forced to cede the vast bulk of the wealth that it creates to the parasitic capitalists, is where the life-blood of the capitalist system – profits – come from.
Because of the centrality of this exploitation of the working class, capitalism is riven with oppressions. They are constructed and propagated from the top of society to perform numerous functions that aim at maintaining the status quo: to maintain the social formations that the capitalists see as necessary, to divide and conquer the working class, and to permeate whole swathes of it with feelings of helplessness and despair to better prevent workers from struggling against the capitalists’ rule.
Homophobia quite clearly fits within this mould. Homophobic ideas can be accepted in various forms amongst all levels of society. While workers can and do take up bigoted ideas, they do not create them. It is the capitalist class that benefits from such divisions and which has the capacity to spread homophobic ideas in the workplace, through the media, the education system, and within the political world.
The most obvious example of how homophobic ideas are spread from the top of society today is the ban on same-sex marriage. The ban, which continues to be supported by both the Labor government and the Liberal opposition, actively propagates homophobia and entrenches inequality by clearly stating that LGBTI people do not share the same rights as straights. This exclusion from legal equality bolsters the ideas that exist in society that there is somehow something different and wrong about LGBTI people and their relationships, to the point where they need to be treated differently.
This acts like a red rag to a bull for all the bigots in society who carry out the acts of verbal and physical abuse that the majority of LGBTI people are repeatedly forced to suffer.
Homophobia serves a number of purposes for the capitalists and their cronies. Its primary role is as a means to continue to bolster the ideology of the nuclear family as being the norm in society.
For the capitalist class the nuclear family provides material benefits. Hence the capitalists have long promoted the ideology of the nuclear family as being the only “natural” way to organise society. The ideology of the nuclear family is deeply rooted within the bedrock of society. Much of popular culture is obsessed with different presentations of this social model, and pretty well all politicians, from the Sarah Palin Looney-Tune right to Kevin Rudd, base pledges and electoral pleas on their ability to serve and strengthen the family unit. Hypocritically, such rhetoric usually goes alongside attacks on the living standards of many working-class families, through cuts in government welfare support, funding for schools and hospitals and a whole plethora of other avenues.
The nuclear family has been a central institution during the historical development of capitalism. The nuclear family organisation means that all the work that goes into raising and training the next generation of the working class is privatised within the home. Historically the nuclear family has guaranteed the bosses a steady supply of future workers to exploit free of charge, with women performing the unpaid labour.
To maintain the centrality of the nuclear family it has always been vital for the ruling class to portray it as the only possible form of social organisation, to ensure that sexual divisions would be passed on into the future. This requires mass state intervention into people’s sexual lives: women’s sexuality had to be repressed so as to try and force them into accepting the restrictions of monogamy and their subservient role in the household. It has also required demonising anything that exists outside this social norm, and in particular anybody expressing a same-sex attracted sexuality, because by our very existence queers challenge the idea of the monogamous nuclear family as the only possible way of living, and the idea that sex is only for procreation.
Even today, when fewer and fewer people are actually living within the nuclear family model, the capitalists want to maintain the gender roles and divisions that have been entrenched in the past centuries. The sexism that has historically been established through the family perpetuates a role for women which is seen as being inferior to men, meaning that women continue to play the dominant role in domestic labour, in the rearing of the next generation of workers and the privatised care of many of the sick and elderly. At the same time, all the stereotypes and dominant ideological conceptions that are spawned from this role allow the bosses to hyper-exploit and destroy the confidence of working women, who today make up half the workforce.
The queer-bashing prosecuted by the capitalists and their ideological lackeys is part of the process of maintaining the centrality of the nuclear family as the social ideal.
Homophobic attitudes promoted from the top of society seep into our lives through every aspect of society, from the way we are educated to popular culture. The effect of this is the erosion of self-confidence and agency on the part of lesbian and gay people, in a process similar to that which occurs amongst other oppressed groups under capitalism. This proves to be a great benefit for the ruling class, for when workers do not feel as though they have control over the most intimate and basic aspect of their lives – their sexuality – then they are obviously going to be less confident about other areas, in particular over how they get treated in the workplace. And that is what capitalism is about, maximising profits at the expense of human need and dignity.
Socialists recognise that homophobia, just like other forms of oppression, is bound up with the class relations and exploitation that is inherent to the capitalist system, and for true liberation capitalism needs to be gotten rid of entirely.
Historically there have been forces within the lesbian and gay movement that would identify with such anti-capitalist conclusions. But these non-Marxist forces, particularly those who identify with anarchist ideas, have had no clear conception of how such change would come about, and tended to identify the main enemy and oppressor as being not the capitalist class, but rather as those who did not identify as LGBTI, or in other words, all straight people no matter what their class position.
But the reality is that LGBTI people with wealth and privilege have as much interest in the maintenance of the oppressive structures that underpin the domination of the ruling class as do straight capitalists. There is precious little in common between a LGBTI proprietor of a top-end gay venue and a working-class lesbian or gay from the outer suburbs. But the rich and powerful have an enduring common interest in exploiting and profiting from workers, no matter what their sexuality is.
The exploitation of the working class gives it the material interest and social power to get rid of capitalism. As the producers of all of society’s wealth, it is only the working class who can cease this production for the rich and instead use all that is created to satisfy the needs of all. This will require a shrugging-off of the oppressions such as homophobia that aim at dividing and subjugating the working class.
The greatest achievement of the Gay Liberation Movement, a movement that in Australia largely involved middle-class students, was a rise in the visibility of lesbian and gay people. While it still remains incredibly difficult to live as “out”, it has become more accepted than it was before Gay Liberation. This has meant that more and more LGBTI workers are proudly identifying with their sexuality in the workplace, and not just in the gay ghettoes. Trade unions have established fighting homophobia as a workplace issue time and again. The most recent example has been the public support of many unions such as the Australian Education Union, the Construction division of the CFMEU in Victoria, and many others who have publicly endorsed the campaign for same-sex marriage.
Such small practical measures show the kind of solidarity that workers can demonstrate, and history is replete with other examples. Workers have the industrial muscle to back up struggles for social reforms, but true liberation goes well beyond this.
Class politics are vital for anyone interested in lesbian and gay liberation. It shows us where our oppression comes from, and who our true friends and enemies are. It means we can see through the cynical manoeuvres of those such as Liberal Party Mayor of Melbourne Robert Doyle, who recently posed for the media as part of the launch of the LGBTI Midsumma event. Doyle could happily do this despite the bigotry of the party and his own personal homophobia, because it is good business, and at the end of the day, rich gays and lesbians have an interest in working with such scumbags, and such scumbags have an interest in working with them wherever money is concerned.
But anyone interested in lesbian and gay liberation should also be interested in the liberation of the working class. It is only through the power of workers as a collective class that all oppressed groups can be united, and the chains of subjugation and hatred with which the oppressed are clasped can be thrown off.
The exploitation and oppression of workers is the defining characteristic of capitalism. It is the most crucial struggle to which all others, including the struggle against homophobia, are connected. The material basis for oppression is to bolster exploitation. So it is only by ending economic exploitation that true liberation can be won – for lesbians and gays, and all other oppressed groups.
 
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