By Bernard E. Harcourt
A few months after completing the Paris manuscripts of 1844—which we just discussed with Renata Salecl at Marx 4/13—in February 1845, Marx is expelled from France by the minister of foreign affairs, François Guizot, and moves his family to Brussels. There, Marx connects with Frederick Engels, whom he had met in Paris in August 1844. Together, they write and publish a polemical book against Bruno Bauer and the Left Hegelians, which they title The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Criticism (1845). Marx and Engels then begin to draft a manuscript in two volumes to which Marx gives the name The German Ideology. It is in preparation for that work that Marx jots down his Theses on Feuerbach, which we discussed at our inaugural seminar with Étienne Balibar at Marx 1/13.
The German Ideology, written in 1845-46 and only published in full in 1932, has been the source of myriad interpretations—and controversies—over the materialist conception of history, the dawn of revolution and communism, and divergent theories of ideology. The work, famously, represents the point of rupture according to Louis Althusser between the early philosophical Marx and the mature scientific works.[1] For that reason, paradoxically, Althusser accused The German Ideology itself of being “ideological.”[2] The work has also been critiqued for not articulating a Marxist theory of ideology that would apply to the belief systems of both those who dominate and those who resist—calling for further theoretical developments on ideology that would ultimately be supplied by Lenin, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School (or even Michel Foucault on “regimes of truth”).
On the question of ideology, there are several ways to read The German Ideology. I personally favor a heterodox reading, which I will discuss, according to which the manuscript is a narrow critique of the Left Hegelians (Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, but also Ludwig Feuerbach) that essentially treats them as “ideologues” in the sense in which Antoine Destutt de Tracy coined the term in the late eighteenth century and Napoleon turned it on them. On another reading, The German Ideology is the main location where Marx develops his materialist conception of history, from ancient times through feudalism to capitalism, and on this reading, the discussion of ideology is somewhat ancillary or superstructural. On a more expansive reading, The German Ideology proposes a one-sided theory of ideology that applies exclusively to the ruling class but can do a lot of interpretive work. On the most ambitious reading, the manuscript sets forth a general theory of ideology that is at the root of an entire tradition from Antonio Gramsci’s writings on hegemony through the Frankfurt School’s and current Ideologiekritik.
Despite my preference for a heterodox reading of The German Ideology, it is mainly the one-sided theory of ideology—limited to the dominant class—that has gained the most traction and that can be identified, for instance, in the writings of Monique Wittig, especially Wittig’s essay “The Category of Sex,”[3] which we will pair with The German Ideology at Marx 5/13 at the suggestion of Guillaume Rouleau.
Guillaume Rouleau, a doctoral student at the EHESS, is completing a brilliant dissertation on the notion of ideology in French political philosophy since 1945. In the dissertation, Rouleau traces the notion of ideology back to The German Ideology and forward through several key stages in French philosophical discourse, beginning with Raymond Aron, continuing through Louis Althusser, and leading to the materialist feminists of the 1970s and 80s, highlighting the work of Monique Wittig.
Rouleau proposed that we read Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology through Wittig’s article “The Category of Sex” for this seminar Marx 5/13.[4] Rouleau will be lecturing in March about Wittig’s use of the concept of ideology in a keynote lecture for Marx 13/13. His lecture will form the basis of a forthcoming article.
Most recently, Marx’s manuscripts and Monique Wittig’s writings have been key reference points for new writings in the field of transgender Marxism. This is evident in a new collection of writings, titled Transgender Marxism and edited by Jules Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, recently published by Pluto Press in 2021.[5] Several contributors draw on the work of Wittig, including Jules Gleeson and Anja Heisler Weiser Flower.[6]
And so, to help us read, discuss, and actualize The German Ideology and Wittig, we are privileged to welcome to Marx 5/13 a brilliant critical theorist and the co-editor of Transgender Marxism, Jules Gleeson. Jules Gleeson is an author, historian, and comedian, who has published essays in journals including Viewpoint Magazine, Invert Journal, the Boston Review, and VICE, and has performed internationally at a wide range of communist and queer cultural events. At Marx 5/13, Gleeson will present on Marx, Wittig, and Transgender Marxism.
Prefiguring the Argument
In this introduction, I will provide background and context on the three texts. More than just that, I will argue, strenuously, for the importance of reading Marx through the lens of Gleeson, O’Rourke, and other contributors to Transgender Marxism. My encounter with their writings has been transformative, and has changed my vision for a Marxian horizon. Let me say a few words about this and indicate where I will be headed later in this introduction, before turning to the three texts.
There is, on my reading, an abolitionist line that runs through Marx and his readers, Monique Wittig, and a certain strand of transgender Marxism. It is an abolitionist ambition that starts with the eradication of private property and capital in Marx, but that extends quickly in other writings (Angela Davis, Dorothy Roberts, and others) to the spheres of punishment and family policing, and that leads to the abolition of the sexes in Wittig and the abolition of gender in certain strands of transgender Marxism. Jules Gleeson discusses these later extensions in two essays over at Blind Field titled “The Call for Gender Abolition” and “Abolitionism in the 21st Century.”[7]
Now, as Gleeson underscores, not all transgender, trans*, or trans theories—and not all strands of transgender Marxism—advocate for the abolition of gender. Some remain attached to a notion of gender that grounds the unique standpoint and necessity for some of gender transition. As a result, some strands of trans theory come into conflict with queer theories that envisage the radical abolition of gender.
Not all Marxist or Marxian theories are alike either. Some Marxisms remain focused on the category of class only, or predominantly, and dismiss claims to racial or gender recognition as counterproductive and undermining of class struggle. Others are more inclusive along some dimensions but not always all. And some Marxist theories are all inclusive.
I do not want to impose one reading of transgender Marxism on the many different contributions in the collection Transgender Marxism. But I do discern in certain chapters of Transgender Marxism an argument for a form of Marxism that includes not only the abolition of class, but the abolition of gender as well. I hear that, for instance, in Rosa Lee’s suggestion regarding “the possibility of collective transition to communism as a process of undoing, remaking, or even substantively abolishing gender.”[8] I read that as well in Jules Gleeson’s articles in Blind Field calling, cautiously, for gender abolition.
And of course I hear that distinctly in Monique Wittig’s work—as I will discuss. In fact, I view that as Wittig’s central demand and ambition: to destroy the totalitarian category of sex—in Wittig’s words, to “destroy the sexes as a sociological reality.”[9]
Now, as we know well, Marx’s writings were explicitly abolitionist with regard to private property and capital. (If you are interested, we discussed the first, the abolition of private property, with Amy Allen, Étienne Balibar, Karuna Mantena, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta at Abolition Democracy 5/13, and the second, the abolition of capital, with Martin Saar at Abolition Democracy 6/13).
But the abolition of gender is not something that one finds explicitly in Marx’s writings. In fact, on some readings, Marx was relatively inattentive (to say the least) on matters of sex and gender. So it requires reading Marx through Wittig and a certain strand of transgender Marxism to develop a more thoroughgoing abolitionist vision of a Marxian horizon. I believe that it is crucial and necessary. After giving background on the texts we will be reading for Marx 5/13, I will explain why.
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
Marx and Engels wrote the manuscript The German Ideology over the period from about November 1845 to June 1846.[10] They never published it, although they tried. (This should be heartwarming to the many of us who have had manuscripts rejected by publishers.) In their case, they were forced to abandon publication because of censorship.
Marx famously explained the history of the writing of The German Ideology in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859 in Berlin:
when in the spring of 1845 he too [Frederick Engels] came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. The intention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript [The German Ideology], two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publishers in Westphalia when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances it could not be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification. Of the scattered works in which at that time we presented one or another aspect of our views to the public, I shall mention only the Manifesto of the Communist Party, jointly written by Engels and myself, and a Discours sur le libre échange, which I myself published. The salient points of our conception were first outlined in an academic, although polemical, form in my Misère de la philosophie…, this book which was aimed at Proudhon appeared in 1847. The publication of an essay on Wage-Labour [Wage-Labor and Capital] written in German in which I combined the lectures I had held on this subject at the German Workers’ Association in Brussels, was interrupted by the February Revolution and my forcible removal from Belgium in consequence.[11]
Engels returned to, but did not publish The German Ideology after Marx’s death, although Engels did publish Marx’s preparatory notes, the Theses on Feuerbach, as an appendix to his book on Feuerbach in 1888 (as I discussed in my introduction to Marx 1/13).
Portions of The German Ideology, less than half, were published by the leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party, including Eduard Bernstein, in the first decades of the twentieth century. The first part of The German Ideology on Feuerbach was published in 1924 in Russian and 1926 in German. The entire manuscript was only published for the first time in 1932, in German, by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, the same year as the first publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.[12]
A Critique of “Ideologues”
Today, in the conventional presentation of The German Ideology, we only read the first part of the work, the lengthy first chapter on Ludwig Feuerbach which contains the historical account of the emergence of capitalism, the discussion of revolution and communism, and passages on ideology. Much of this material was originally written in later chapters on Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, but then moved forward into the section on Feuerbach.[13]
It is important to emphasize that this represents only about 13% of the full manuscript. The rest of the manuscript, the vast bulk of it, is dedicated to a biting and polemical criticism of the Young Hegelians, with the two main parts being called “Saint Bruno” and “Saint Max.” Those critiques of Bauer and Stirner contain detailed, annotated passages from their books and constitutes the overwhelming majority of the first volume, which is the only volume that was completed and was titled “Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner.” A second volume was intended to address—and was titled—“Critique of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets.” It included a critique of Karl Grün, Georg Kuhlmann, and French socialists, but only extended for about 80 pages. Engels would continue that work with his manuscript on “The True Socialists” which he wrote between January and April 1847.[14]
So the bulk of the manuscript of The German Ideology is then a critique of the idealism of the Young Hegelians. On my heterodox reading, it represents a critique of “ideologues,” in the sense in which Destutt de Tracy defined and embraced the term “ideology” (which he coined in 1796) as the science of ideas and “ideologues” as those who engage in the science of ideas. On this reading, the manuscript, as a whole, is less about the development of a theory of ideology, and represents instead a targeted critique of certain “ideologues,” much like Napoleon would later turn against the French idéologues and accuse them of undermining the revolutionary spirit with their false ideas and their idealism.
It is notable, for example, that Marx and Engels use the term “Ideologen,” which is the German equivalent of the French term “Idéologues” or in English “ideologues.” In the opening clause of the very first chapter on Feuerbach, they write about how “Wie deutsche Ideologen melden,” in other words, “As the German ideologues report.”[15] They refer to “Die junghegelschen Ideologen.”[16]
This is translated in English as “ideologists,”[17] although I would argue that the term in English should be “ideologues,” referencing back to the earlier intellectual movement in France spawned by Destutt de Tracy. Choosing instead to translate it as “ideologists” is a crucial interpretive choice because it changes the meaning of the text.
On the heterodox reading I am suggesting here—associated with the term “ideologues”—the text becomes a one-sided critique of the Young Hegelians as false scientists of ideas, as those who believe that everything takes “place in the realm of pure thought.”[18] This entails a very different understanding of the concept of ideology than the multivalent notion of “ideologies” that is developed later by readers such as Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School.
Marx and Engels oppose their new materialism to these “ideologues,” these false scientists of ideas. One gets a sense of this from the “Preface” to Volume I on modern German philosophy, where Marx and Engels write:
Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. […] Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and — existing reality will collapse.
These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy […] The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class […] It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation.[19]
On my reading of the Preface, the ambition was not to develop a theory of history or a general theory of ideology, but to debunk a set of ideologues who believed, so Marx and Engels argued, that they could transform the world by playing with ideas, who were operating at the level of ideas only, who were engaged in a science of ideas.
Part I on Feuerbach
But of course, while drafting the critiques of Bauer and Stirner, Marx and Engels begin to lay down their own theories of history and ideology, which they would then collect, aggregate, and introduce into the first chapter on Feuerbach, and which soon took on a life of their own within Marxist circles.
In presenting their version of materialism as against the “old materialism” of Feuerbach, Marx and Engels set down their own new materialist method: a materialist method that begins from real living individuals in their physical material conditions based on purely empirical facts. “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals,” they declare. “Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”[20]
This leads Marx and Engels to develop a series of material histories: of forms of ownership, of modes of production, of the state of society, of the development of consciousness—and of the relations and contradictions between these that drive history. It is a series of interconnected histories that is well known and traverses a number of stages: first, tribal ownership in patriarchal family structures; second, ancient communal, city, and state ownership forms; third, feudal or estate property relations of the Middle Ages in towns and the country, leading to feudal kingdoms;[21] followed by the rise of manufacturing and capital in Italy, Flanders, England, and France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, accompanied by vagabondage and the disintegration of the feudal system;[22] then commerce, navigation, colonial monopolies, and the maritime wars of the 1650-1790s;[23] to contemporary times for Marx and Engels. They also propose a history of law as it relates to the division of labor and property.[24]
Their history culminates in proletariat revolution leading to communism—the necessary outcome of the conflict between productive forces and social relations. These passages are legion and legend. To recall but one, wrapping up the conclusions from the materialist conception of history:
In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness […]
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.[25]
These histories constitute a “materialist conception of history,” a term that Marx and Engels use (by contrast to “historical materialism,” which is a later superimposition), in order to emphasize that history happens through the confrontation of material elements (forces of production and social relations) and not through self-consciousness or ideas. As they emphasize in the section titled “Conclusions from the Materialist Conception of History”: the “transformation of history into world history is not indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the ‘self-consciousness,’ the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof of which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks and clothes himself.”[26]
More modestly, again, this can be interpreted as the rejection of the Young Hegelians as “ideologues,” false scientists of ideas, who, like Hegel, mistook the phenomenology of the development of self-consciousness for the real history of the world. More boldly, a reader like Louis Althusser (in line with the later Engels) would see in this work the foundation of both a new “historical materialist” theory of history and a “dialectical materialist” theory of philosophy. As Althusser writes, succinctly, the epistemological break represented by The German Ideology “concerns conjointly two distinct theoretical disciplines. By founding the theory of history (historical materialism), Marx simultaneously broke with his erstwhile ideological philosophy and established a new philosophy (dialectical materialism).”[27]
As noted earlier, The German Ideology is the exact location where Althusser identifies an “epistemological break in Marx’s intellectual development,” from an earlier, philosophical, ideological period to a later mature, scientific, economic period (which itself begins first with a transition period from 1845 to 1857, followed by the full-blown scientific economic works after 1857).[28] Althusser locates the epistemological break in The German Ideology because, according to Althusser, it is there that Marx self-consciously sheds his philosophical skin, but still in a philosophical way. Althusser is referring specifically to the passage where Marx and Engels write “we resolved … to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience.”[29] On Althusser’s reading, Marx’s immediately preceding work, his notes “ad Feuerbach” published by Engels under the title Theses on Feuerbach (which we studied with Étienne Balibar at Marx 1/13), contain the types of ambiguities and confusions that “mark out the earlier limit of this break.”[30]
Toward Communist Revolution
Insofar as they oppose themselves, as new materialists, to idealists and to older materialists like Feuerbach, Marx and Engels emphasize the primacy of material forces of production and social relations over ideas, concepts, and consciousness—what they refer to as “mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people.”[31] They invert Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, to emphasize how it is not ideas or consciousness that develops independently, but material conditions and real existence. On my reading, the reference to Hegelian philosophy is direct, even when it is not explicit, as when they write:
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.[32]
The main idea is that it is not ideas but material shifts in forces of production that drive history, and that, at the same time, it is “not criticism but revolution [that] is the driving force of history.”[33] Material technological changes and transformations in methods of production are what drive history. As they emphasize: “slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. ‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse…”[34]
I should add that “co-operation” plays a large role in this history. (If you are interested, we discussed Marx on cooperation with Étienne Balibar at Coöperism 5/13). Marx and Engels refer to co-operation as an essential social relation among individuals, as a “social stage,” and as “itself a ‘productive force.’”[35] It is the force that is transformed by the communist revolution “into the control and conscious mastery of these powers.”[36]
The German Ideology leaves the reader with a vision of communist society, which Marx and Engels describe in several famous passages, including the marvelous passage that ends with critique after dinner: “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”[37]
To criticize after dinner: what a beautiful and utopian (in the best sense of the word) vision of a future society of critique and praxis. I anticipate that Jules Gleeson will have something to say about this passage at the seminar and how it relates to transgender Marxism.
Monique Wittig
As I indicated earlier, the more prevalent reading of The German Ideology focuses on the elaborations on ideology that develop a general theory regarding the ways in which “the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people” are in fact the dominant ideas of the ruling class and serve as an illusion that maintains their dominance and oppression.[38] It is within this current of interpretation that Guillaume Rouleau places Monique Wittig’s work—both as a return to, combined with a sharp critique, of Marx. Wittig draws on Marx’s writings on ideology to formulate her own critique of the category of sex, while simultaneously critiquing aspects of a Marxist approach.
Monique Wittig (1935-2003) was a brilliant philosopher, novelist, and (I would say) queer theorist avant la lettre, who wrote foundational work and engaged in foundational praxis in lesbian feminism. I had the great privilege of being a colleague of Monique Wittig’s when I entered the academy at the University of Arizona in Tuscon, in the late nineties, where Wittig taught and lived. I recall inspiring conversations with her and also about her work with other colleagues and friends in Tucson, such as the artist Olivier Mosset, who immediately shared with me the collection of Wittig’s writings Paris-la-politique et autres histoires upon its publication in 1999.[39]
Wittig gave “The Category of Sex” as a talk in New York in 1978, then published it in Feminist Issues in 1982 (date stamping it “Berkeley 1976”), and then included it with other essays in The Straight Mind and Other Essays in 1992. As Rouleau will discuss in his lecture, Wittig is drawing on, but simultaneously criticizing the theory of ideology in The German Ideology in the essay.
Wittig argues that the dominant way of thinking about sex and gender is through the lens of “difference,” but that this way of understanding the world is an ideological product of the social, economic, and political domination of men over women.
Instead of using a framework of difference, Wittig argues for a standpoint of conflict and struggle, similar to class struggle or to the struggle of enslaved persons against enslavers. By replacing the discourse of difference into sex struggle, Wittig aims to overcome and abolish the very category of sex.
Wittig’s argument is spellbinding and, I would argue, right. What I would like to do is rehearse it step-by-step with Wittig, in the way, say, that an analytic Marxist would do with Marx.
One caveat first. Some of the concepts and language are dated. The binarity of men versus women does not account for the possibility of nonbinary or queer persons and, I believe, does not anticipate transgender issues.[40] The language of “master” and “slave” does not use person-first language. There is a lot in the writing that feels out of step with contemporary discourse—just as, I am sure, this text I am writing and the language I am using will appear dated in a short while. For purposes of reconstructing the argument, though, there are certain features of the text—such as the binarity of sex—that I will need to maintain.
Step by step with Monique Wittig
1. The starting point is the dominant, hegemonic viewpoint that sex is a matter of difference, what is usually called “sexual difference.”
Wittig uses the single term “sex” (as was common in the late 1970s/early 1980s) to signify both what people refer to as “biological sex” and what we now recognize are socially constructed concepts of gender. So the term “sex,” as Wittig uses it, should be understood today, in 2024-25, as comprising both sex and gender, both the distinctions of male/female and of masculine/feminine. The term “category of sex” is to be understood in contrast to other socio-economic and political categories such as class, race, ethnicity, or religion.
It is important to emphasize that Wittig is describing her present, the late 1970s – early 1980s (she writes her essay “The Category of Sex” in 1976 while at Berkeley and publishes it in 1982 in Feminist Issues); but what she says about relations of power sadly remains true, for the most part, still today, I would argue.
The starting point, then, is the hegemony of the worldview that sex is best understood and discussed through the lens of sexual “difference.”
2. The viewpoint of “sexual difference” dominates the various approaches to social inquiry, including philosophical, biological, and social scientific approaches.
Wittig emphasizes that the viewpoint of “sexual difference” is pervasive across the disciplines and across the various ways of analyzing and thinking about the world. These include ontological approaches that focus on constitutive being; natural science approaches like biology or genetics; and social scientific approaches, such as sociology or anthropology.[41] It is pervasive and hegemonic in the natural and human sciences, and in ordinary discourse. In Wittig’s words, it “impregnates all discourses, including common-sense ones.”[42]
3. The viewpoint of “sexual difference” even dominates Marxist approaches to reality.
Wittig emphasizes that certain Marxist approaches—Wittig actually writes “the Marxist approach” (my emphasis)—also rest on the idea of sexual difference. Wittig is referring here to the idea in Marx of “a ‘natural division of labor in the family,’ a ‘division of labor [that] was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act.’”[43]
Wittig does not provide a citation for these quotations, but the first comes from the discussion of the tribal form of ownership in The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels write that, at this “underdeveloped stage of production,” “the division of labor is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labor existing in the family.”[44]
The second also comes from The German Ideology and is found in the discussion of the tribal consciousness, a few paragraphs later, where they write: “With these there develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act, then that division of labor which develops spontaneously or ‘naturally’ by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g. physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc.”[45]
Now, there has been controversy over these statements, and some readers have argued that they should not be taken out of context, which is an elaboration of “sheep-like” or “herd-like” consciousness, in Marx and Engels’ words, in which man is still at a stage that resembles “animal” life.[46] Regardless, though, Marx and Engels reify in these passages an essentialized view of the physical and sexual relationship between men and women. There is no question: they naturalize male domination in sex and physical strength through a state-of-nature mode of reasoning. And this, despite Marx’s searing critique of state-of-nature theories in the Paris manuscripts of 1844. As you will recall from last seminar, Marx wrote there: “Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing. He merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance.”[47] Despite those warnings, Marx and Engels do go back here to states of nature and supposed primitive animal behaviors.
The critique that Marx was insufficiently attentive to relations of power between men and women, and in the home, is most often associated with the remarkable work of Sylvia Federici and her critique of primitive accumulation in Marx, with feminist Marxism, with writings on reproductive labor, and with the Wages for Housework movement. It is often discussed as well in relation to Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, published in 1884, which drew on Marx’s notes marginalia on the anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan’s book, Ancient Society, Or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, published in 1877. We will return to some of these debates in our next seminar, Marx 6/13, with the authors of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser.
For purposes here, this third point represents a pointed critique of not all, but certain Marxist approaches to the role of the family and sexual difference.
4. The dominant viewpoint of “sexual difference” serves to mask the reality of the conflict between the sexes and the domination of men over women.
Wittig argues that the sexes are not in a relationship of “difference,” but instead a relationship of conflict, a state of opposition and contradiction, and that men dominate women in society on the model of the master-slave relationship.
This is known and recognized by the dominant class, Wittig maintains, even though it is ignored by the dominated class, or disbelieved. Wittig emphasizes that men “know perfectly well that they are dominating women.”[48] By contrast, she writes, “Women do not know that they are totally dominated by men, and when they acknowledge the fact, they can ‘hardly believe it.’”[49] It thus functions through knowledge and ignorance. In this sense, it is a form of knowledge-power for men.
Accordingly, Wittig calls this “the dominant thought.”[50] It is the thought of the dominant class, namely men. It is at the same time “the thought of domination.”[51]
For Wittig’s argument, it is important that this form of dominance is not natural, but socially produced. There is a family resemblance here with Rousseau. In a Rousseauian way, Wittig insists that there are no natural forms of dominance. Dominance is a product of society. “As a category of dominance,” Wittig writes, “it cannot be a product of natural dominance but of the social dominance of women by men, for there is but social dominance.”[52]
5. In this sense, the viewpoint of “sexual difference” functions as an “ideology,” as Marx and Engels understood the term in The German Ideology – I thank Guillaume Rouleau for drawing my attention to this point, which he will further develop in March in his Keynote and in an article.
Wittig insists that the mindset of sexual difference is an “ideological” product of the state of domination of men over women. The dominant viewpoint functions to mask the conflict between the sexes behind the idea of difference. The result is that many women do not even realize that their relationship to men is one of domination, Wittig says. As ideology, it naturalizes the idea of sexual difference and renders difference the main way that people understand sex and gender.
Wittig expresses this in the following terms: “The ideology of sexual difference functions as censorship in our culture by masking, on the ground of nature, the social opposition between men and women.”[53] The terms she uses are: to mask, to conceal.[54]
It is here that Wittig draws directly on Marx and Engels. She quotes the famous passage from The German Ideology—which is, notably, her only reference and her only source quotation in text:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. [Marx and Engels, The German Ideology][55]
Throughout the essay, Wittig refers back to this theory of ideology. At various points she covers each element. It is possible to map Wittig’s argument onto each clause of Marx and Engels:
- “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, “i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
- Wittig: “The perenniality of the sexes and the perenniality of slaves and masters proceed from the same belief, and as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men.”[56] This is the very opening of the essay.
- “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”
- Wittig: “the divisions are abstracted and turned into concepts by the masters”[57]
- “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.”
- Wittig: “It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.”[58]
Wittig deploys the framework of ideology in other essays as well, including “One Is Not Born a Woman” in 1981[59] and “Homo Sum” in 1990,[60] most often referencing specifically The German Ideology – once again this will be further developed by Guillaume Rouleau.
6. This understanding of reality is dialectical materialist insofar as it recognizes a contradiction (the opposition between the sexes) because of a materialist analysis (focused on material rather than ideal conditions) and leads to an overcoming of the opposition (in a dialectical movement).
In several instances throughout the essay, Wittig insists that the analysis is both materialist and dialectical.
By materialist, Wittig means that the opposition between sexes, in her words, “always belong to a material order.”[61]That material order is the reality that “women perform three-quarters of the work in society (in the public as well as the private domain) plus the bodily work of reproduction.”[62]
The materiality of opposition and domination is realized through the marriage contract that serves to bind women to the material conditions of reproduction. The materiality is physical: it involves, in Wittig’s words, “a surrender by the woman of her physical person to her husband.”[63]
By dialectical, Wittig means a process of change and movement. “As long as there is no conflict and no struggle,” Wittig maintains, “there is no dialectic, there is no change, no movement.”[64]
7. It is only when women begin to struggle against the domination of men that people begin to understand that the relationship between men and women is one of social opposition and not just difference.
The hold of the ideology of sexual difference begins to let go once women rebel and start to struggle. Wittig argues that this is similar to the way that the domination over an enslaved person becomes denaturalized when they begin to struggle. It is the moment of struggle that transforms difference into opposition.
In other words, it is praxis, political action, that unveils and demystifies, at the very same time as it attacks domination. Wittig’s theory is a theory of praxis and critique.
“The important idea for me,” Wittig writes, “is that before the conflict (rebellion, struggle) there are no categories of opposition but only of difference. And it is not before the struggle breaks out that the violent reality of the oppositions and the political nature of the differences become manifest.”[65] Notice that the moment of praxis as struggle is what deconstructs the ideology. It is what denaturalizes the difference
Here too, the model is the relation between enslaver and enslaved persons. “The slaves, when they rebel and start to struggle,” Wittig writes, “read social oppositions into the so-called natural differences.”[66]
8. The struggle simultaneously reveals the opposition between sexes and creates the condition of possibility of a resolution or overcoming of the contradiction.
It is important for Wittig that the category of sex does not exist before social relations. It is created by society, or more exactly by men, as a device of dominance, as a form of dominance.
As Wittig underscores, “The category of sex does not exist a priori, before all society.”[67] It arises in a dialectical movement that allows for its overcoming. It arises and simultaneously founds the kind of society that is heterosexual and patriarchal.[68] “The category of sex,” Wittig writes, “is the product of heterosexual society that turns half of the population into sexual beings.”[69]
So the sexes are the product of conflict and opposition. They arise. And thus they can be overcome. This is all part of a dialectical process.
9. Once revealed, it is clear that the category of sex applies only to women.
As a form of domination, the category of sex attaches only to women and not to men. Men do not have a sex, they are the norm. Only women are sexually identified.
As Wittig writes, “the category of sex is the category that sticks to women, for only they cannot be conceived of outside of it. Only they are sex, the sex, and sex they have been made in their minds, bodies, acts, gestures; even their murders and beatings are sexual. Indeed, the category of sex tightly holds women.”[70]
10. Once exposed, the totalitarian nature of the domination becomes clear.
Wittig emphasizes the totalitarian nature of the domination. Wittig puts it at the level of the Inquisition, of Nazism, of terrorism, of sex trafficking.
The category of sex, Wittig insists, “is a totalitarian one, which to prove true has its inquisitions, its courts, its tribunals, its body of laws, its terrors, its tortures, its mutilations, its executions, its police.”[71] Women, she writes, “must wear their yellow star, their constant smile, day and night.”[72]
The material condition is one of violence and forced sexuality—a period of forced sexual service like military service.[73]
11. The resolution and overcoming will happen by means of the abolition of the sexes.
The concept of abolition is central to Monique Wittig’s essay. Wittig uses the term “abolition” or “abolishing” frequently—five times in the essay. And she closes the essay on that theme. It is the demand of the essay, in the clearest terms. It is what the essay calls for. Wittig concludes the essay with these words, referring to the abolition of sex: “I say: it is about time to do so.”[74]
Abolition is tied to the notion of destruction. Wittig argues for the destruction of the category of sex: “we must destroy it,” she exclaims, “we must destroy the sexes as a sociological reality if we want to start to exist.”[75]
In this regard, Wittig emphasizes that the abolition of the sexes should occur in parallel fashion to class conflict and race conflict—and that, at least with regard to race, society is at a more advanced stage. Regarding class struggle, Wittig writes that it “is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time as it constitutes and reveals them as classes.”[76] With regard to race, Wittig notes that people are already aware that differentiation by race is discriminatory. Wittig emphasizes that that has not yet happened with differentiation by sex.[77]
In the end, Wittig’s essay is proscriptive. Wittig expressly states that all women “should” undertake the “class struggle between women and men” which “resolves the contradictions between the sexes, abolishing them at the same time that it makes them understood.”[78] Wittig’s is a radical argument with a radical ending: the abolition of sex.
It is that thread of abolitionism—that runs through, in different versions, Marx, Wittig, and certain writings on transgender Marxism collected by Jules Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke in their volume, Transgender Marxism—that I find most compelling. Let me first say a few words, though, to present more generally the collection Transgender Marxism.
Transgender Marxism
Transgender Marxism, as I understand Gleeson and O’Rourke, has both a negative and a positive dimension.
The negative dimension
The negative dimension builds on Marx’s concern with the physical and bodily elements of exploitation.[79] Marx was certainly attuned to the physicality of exploitation. As we saw in the Paris manuscripts, Marx elaborated on how workers were reduced to their basic animal needs, like eating, sleeping, and procreating—how the proletariat became pure physical labor.
Gleeson and O’Rourke suggest a parallel with transgender persons who tend to be hardest hit with regard to the physical forms of exploitation. Trans persons are, as Gleeson and O’Rourke write, “more likely to experience poverty, destitution, engage in sex work, experience abuse and mistreatment by wider society, and the police and the criminal justice system.”[80]
This, they suggest, translates into a more “proletarianised condition.”[81] “In short,” Gleeson and O’Rourke underscore, “we serve the cause as exemplary proletarians.”[82]
Gleeson and O’Rourke underscore the dark side of this proximity: because they are at the margins, trans persons are assumed to be allies and comrades to Marxism but are often treated as the exotic other or viewed as merely tag-alongs. Transgender persons are presumed to be radical and rebellious but treated merely as a supplement to ongoing struggles. “We are of note due to our suffering, and by dint of our stigmatisation,” Gleeson and O’Rourke note.[83] “Little space is left for the actual substance of trans life, the experiences of surviving in the context of separation that we already share among ourselves, and the resultant insights for a broader and refreshed view of capitalism’s reproduction.”[84]
The positive dimension
Those last words—“insights for a broader and refreshed view of capitalism’s reproduction”—gesture to the positive dimension of transgender Marxism. And in this regard, Gleeson and O’Rourke distinguish their work from other efforts at deriving a positive theory from transgender experiences, such as Paul Preciado’s pharmacological approach in Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in The Pharmacopornographic Era (The Feminist Press, 2013) or Gayle Salamon’s phenomenological approach in Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (Columbia University Press, 2010).
Regarding the positive element of transgender Marxist, there are certain formulations in Transgender Marxism that I find most compelling. There are three in particular that help guide my reading:
1. Unmaking the (supposedly) natural
A first formulation, and one of the most incisive to me, is the final sentence of Gleeson and O’Rourke’s introduction: “What has been made can be unmade.”[85] Along these lines, another author in the collection, Rosa Lee, proposes, in a chapter titled “Judith Butler’s Scientific Revolution,” that “the possibility of collective transition to communism [is] a process of undoing, remaking, or even substantively abolishing gender.”[86]
What these first formulations suggest is that the transgender experience is one of the closest experiences to the kind of radical transformation of naturalized existence that Marxism proposes. The power and resilience of the “natural”—of that which is considered to be natural, such as private property—is at the very core of Marx’s writings: the fact that value becomes naturalized and that all social relations are evacuated from the commodity[87]; or the idea that capitalist relations of production are efficient and necessary, all of these fixed beliefs come to feel as if they are essential to human existence. They begin to feel overwhelming as well, as if there is no way they can be unmade. So it is here that the transgender proposition that “what has been made can be unmade” has so much force.
It is important to emphasize that this transgender proposition need not essentialize a binary transformation. There is a more open concept of transformation at play. “Not every trans life fits the teleological model of ‘binary transition’: in fact, very few ever do,” Gleeson and O’Rourke write. “Nor should our account of transition have to be straightforward in order to receive formal validation.”[88]
2. Making one’s own community
A second formulation in Transgender Marxism that I find particularly compelling is the idea that transgender persons are often unwelcome in their family and so, choose and create their own chosen communities. The so frequent and hurtful rejection by the family propels the formation of new relations. Gleeson and O’Rourke write, “To emancipate trans people requires, above all else, overturning class divisions, reversing our separation from the means of production, and developing new forms for nurture beyond the family.”[89]
This resonates with the central theme, core to Marx’s writings, that revolutionary peoples must rise up, unite, and deliberately shape a new society. They must create new communities of solidarity and commonality.
Gleeson discusses the need to build transgender communities in the chapter “How Do Gender Transitions Happen?” in Transgender Marxism. Gleeson underscores the intentionality and effort. “Communities are never to be assumed as unified, or taken for granted. Trans communities,” Gleeson writes, “like any other kind, always have to be actively cultivated, and sustained, across time.”[90]
3. Mutual constitutiveness
A third formulation involves the demand for full participation of transgender persons and movements within Marxism, and not just merely inclusion. The demand of Transgender Marxism, as I understand it, is a kind of full participation that goes beyond mere inclusion or tokenism. Too frequently, Gleeson and O’Rourke emphasize, “trans people and trans struggles are taken as being relevant only in so far as they boost struggles in which socialist groups are already participants, or in which they wish to participate.”[91]
The demand goes beyond diversity, equity, and inclusion. It aspires to a full-blown relation to Marxism. I was going to say a full-blown integration, but it is not just integrationist, I believe, because that again assumes the priority of Marxism. On the other hand, it does not subsume Marxism to transgender theory. So it aspires to a different paradigm of full mutual constitutiveness.
This relates to the imperative that contemporary Marxism get beyond an exclusive focus on class and class struggle, as well as beyond anything that might be considered as mere inclusion, to a full throttled or full throated embrace of what are typically marginalized theories such as transgender Marxism.
In addition, there are other helpful formulations. At times, Gleeson and O’Rourke refer to “transgender communism,” rather than “transgender Marxism.”[92] That also captures something important. The ambition is communism. That helps understand transgender Marxism as a movement toward a new form of transgender communalism.
As Gleeson and O’Rourke write, “with stakes this high, a much more drastic intervention into world history is needed […] Our circumstances demand more than one simple answer to a complex series of questions.”[93]
Incidentally, Rouleau has also drawn my attention to additional work, in French, of Pauline Clochec and Noémie Grunenwald, who edited a volume called Matérialismes Trans, a collective work that appeared in 2021.[94] We need to put that work in conversation with these formulations in Transgender Marxism.
Finally, there is also an important abolitionist formulation in Transgender Marxism, regarding the abolition of gender—which to me is key for a couple of reasons. First because it ties inextricably to the abolition of capital and of the carceral sphere; second because it indexes, as well, Michel Foucault’s abolitionist side. As Gleeson and O’Rourke write, “Our end is not just a more rigorous understanding of our social afflictions, but fuel for the abolition of what has long been intolerable.”[95] In that use of the word “intolerable,” I hear a reference to Foucault. The concept of the intolerable was central to Foucault, especially during the early 1970s with his participation in the abolitionist struggles against the prison. It is no accident that Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn gave to their book on Foucault and the writings of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons, the title: Intolerable.[96] Let me turn now to this abolitionist dimension.
Rereading Marx Through Wittig and Transgender Marxism
Reading Monique Wittig and transgender Marxism underscores, to me, that Marx’s writings, standing alone, do not properly address sex and gender. For this reason, it is essential that we read Marx through the lens of Wittig’s version of feminist materialism and an abolitionist version of transgender Marxism.
Why? I promised to answer that question at the beginning of this essay. The reason, very simply, is that once you embrace Marx’s abolitionist position with regard to private property, capital, and class, the resulting vision of society, of solidarity, and of cooperation requires the end of any forms of dominance associated with the category of sex (as well as other categories, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc., but let’s stick with gender for now). The abolition of class distinctions calls for the abolition of gender distinctions that create relations of domination. If we, as a society, were ever to overcome class but maintain gender distinctions, we would merely find ourselves in the same place of male domination without class distinctions (which, some feminist Marxists would argue, is already the case). In effect, maintaining the idea of sexual difference undermines the possibility of a genuinely classless society.
It is no surprise that abolitionists in the carceral context quickly extended the argument for penal abolition to the abolition of family regulation. There is an inherent link between the abolition of policing and prisons and the abolition of the policing of families in the “child welfare” context. Dorothy Roberts’ work here has been foundational.
Jules Gleeson offers a compelling argument for this in her two essays “The Call for Gender Abolition” and “Abolitionism in the 21st Century.”[97] In the first essay, Gleeson traces an intellectual history of gender abolition, discussing the writings of Shulamith Firestone, Mario Mieli, Monique Wittig, and Judith Butler—and, interestingly, Butler’s movement away from abolition. In the second essay, Gleeson discusses the early feminist abolitionist perspectives of the French Marxist theory journal Theorie Communiste and Maya Gonzalez, and suggests how they can be “refitted” in dialogue with transgender perspectives to support the abolition of the family. As Gleeson writes, “Only through breaking the current monopoly of families on inter-generational recreation of society can we truly liberate successive generations from the arbitrary brutalization of gender.”[98]
I would go further, with Wittig and certain strands of Transgender Marxism. I believe that the thread from Marx’s abolitionism to prison-industrial-complex (PIC) abolition and the abolition of family regulation leads necessarily to gender abolition. There is simply no justification for a differential distribution of benefits and burdens based on sex or gender. There is no place for gender distinctions that distribute resources, labor, or wealth. Women and men, conventionally defined, are along every conceivable dimension equal—in brilliance, resourcefulness, strength, ambition, etc. It is only differential treatment, upbringing, and cultural training that produce category distinctions, such as more aggressive or violent, or more relational or caring behaviors. These differences are chiefly the product of upbringing and policing, as evidenced by the wide range of variations between and within different societies, at different times, in different cultural contexts.
Sex and gender need to be abolished ultimately so that all humans can thrive equally without domination. The horizon must be one where sex and gender no longer play any social role and no longer have any distributive consequences. The abolition of class and inequality calls for the abolition of gender—as it does the abolition of the punishment paradigm. The future must be oriented toward a horizon where sex and gender have no role to play in society, nor in government regulation.
This is not to suggest that the abolition of sex and gender can happen instantaneously. Gender blindness today would be cruelly counterproductive. Because of male domination and the reality of gender relations of power today, it will require work to create the space for abolishing the sexes—just as cooperation democracy is necessary to lay the foundations for penal abolition.
To be sure, even on the horizon, there will remain hormonal, morphological, and reproductive distinctions between people. And there will be sexual attractions of varying kinds. But on an abolitionist horizon, people would be free to present in whatever way they desire. There would still be high heels and high tops, skirts and pants, and overalls, in a world without the sexes. But there would be no policing and enforcement. People would not be told what they should be. And there would be an effort to avoid, at all costs, the imposition of gender difference or rules by the state and private entities. Sex and gender would have no role to play in society.
There would be many ramifications to work out. To compensate for reproductive difference (the fact that only certain persons, who choose to, carry a fetus to term), those who willingly participate in social reproduction but do not carry a fetus would be encouraged to offset the labor of others, through cooperative childcare or other activities. These are crucial questions that need to be addressed in a longer treatment.
The main point is that Marx’s vision of a classless society needs to be augmented by the ultimate abolition of sex and gender. The two ambitions go hand-in-hand as forms of genuine cooperation. In this regard, Wittig is right. And so is Jules Gleeson. So let me conclude with Gleeson’s words, from her essay “Abolitionism in the 21st Century”:
Abolition is accepted as a destination by many, but the path towards it remains unclear. What seems apparent from this reading of revolutionary theory’s history, however, is that much work has already been done to develop strategies of emancipatory abolition. The retrieval of these by-gone dialogues and forgotten analyses can hopefully point out the pathway toward a queer communism.[99]
On that note, welcome to Marx 5/13!
Notes
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Jules Gleeson, Guillaume Rouleau, and Fonda Shen for helpful comments and reactions to this essay.
[1] Louis Althusser, “Introduction: Today,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1969), at 32.
[2] Althusser, “Introduction: Today,” in For Marx, at 33.
[3] Monique Wittig, “The Category of Sex,” Feminist Issues 2, no. 2 (Spring 1982); also in Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 1-8 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
[4] Monique Wittig, “The Category of Sex,” Feminist Issues 2, no. 2 (Spring 1982); also in Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 1-8 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
[5] Transgender Marxism, eds. Jules Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke (London: Pluto Press, 2021).
[6] Jules Gleeson, “How Do Gender Transitions Happen?” in Transgender Marxism, at 74; Anja Heisler Weiser Flower, “Cosmos Against Nature in the Class Struggle of Proletarian Trans Women,” in Transgender Marxism, at 241-243, 250.
[7] See Jules Gleeson, “The Call for Gender Abolition: From Materialist Lesbianism to Gay Communism,” Blind Field, July 31, 2017, available at https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/07/31/the-call-for-gender-abolition-from-materialist-lesbianism-to-gay-communism/; and Gleeson, “Abolitionism in the 21st Century: From Communization as the End of Sex, to Revolutionary Transfeminism,” Blind Field, August 7, 2017, available at https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/08/07/abolitionism-in-the-21st-century-from-communisation-as-the-end-of-sex-to-revolutionary-transfeminism/.
[8] Rosa Lee, “Judith Butler’s Revolution: Foundations for a Transsexual Marxism,” in Transgender Marxism, at 66.
[9] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 68 (1982); at 8 (1992).
[10] See Note from the Marx-Engels Collected Works, available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_German_Ideology,_Volume_1.
[11] Marx, “Preface,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859], available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
[12] See Note from Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 1, available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_German_Ideology,_Volume_1.
[13] See Note from the Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 1, Preface, available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_German_Ideology,_Volume_1/00/Preface.
[14] See Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, at 540, available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_True_Socialists.
[15] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die deutsch Ideologie, in Band 3 (Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1978) at 17.
[16] Marx and Engels, Die deutsch Ideologie, at 20.
[17] See Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_German_Ideology,_Volume_1/01/I._Feuerbach:_Opposition_of_the_Materialist_and_Idealist_Outlooks; Tucker 2nd edition at 147, 149. In German, there is also the term “ideologisten” different from “Ideologen, that is closer to “ideologist.”
[18] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_German_Ideology,_Volume_1/01/I._Feuerbach:_Opposition_of_the_Materialist_and_Idealist_Outlooks; Tucker 2nd edition at 147.
[19] Note from Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, Preface, available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_German_Ideology,_Volume_1/00/Preface.
[20] From here on, I will refer to the Tucker 2nd edition, which reproduces the entire Part I on Feuerbach, that most students have on hand. Here, Tucker 2nd edition at 149.
[21] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 151-153; 159-163.
[22] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 180-181.
[23] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 183-184.
[24] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 186-188.
[25] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 192-193.
[26] Marx and Engels, “Part I. Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks,” in The German Ideology, available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_German_Ideology,_Volume_1/01/I._Feuerbach:_Opposition_of_the_Materialist_and_Idealist_Outlooks#Conclusions_from_the_Materialist_Conception_of_History
[27] Althusser, “Introduction: Today,” in For Marx, at 33.
[28] Althusser, “Introduction: Today,” in For Marx, at 33 (“There is an unequivocal ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s work which does in fact occur at the point where Marx himself locates it, in the book, unpublished in his lifetime, which is a critique of his erstwhile philosophical (ideological) conscience: The German Ideology.”)
[29] Louis Althusser, “Introduction: Today,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1969), at 32.
[30] Althusser, “Introduction: Today,” in For Marx, at 33.
[31] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 154.
[32] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd ed. at 154-155.
[33] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 164.
[34] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 169.
[35] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd ed. at 157.
[36] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 164.
[37] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 160.
[38] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd edition at 154.
[39] Monique Wittig, Paris-la-politique et autres histoires (Paris: P.O.L., 1999).
[40] As Rouleau suggests, these issues are raised by Judith Butler in “Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex” in Gender Trouble.
[41] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 66 (1982); at 5 (1992).
[42] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 66 (1982); at 5 (1992).
[43] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 66 (1982); at 5 (1992).
[44] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd ed. at 151.
[45] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd ed. at 158-159.
[46] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Tucker 2nd ed. at 158.
[47] Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Tucker ed. at 71.
[48] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 65 (1982); at 3 (1992).
[49] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 65 (1982); at 3 (1992).
[50] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 65 (1982); at 4 (1992).
[51] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 65 and 66 (1982); at 4 and 5 (1992).
[52] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 66 (1982); at 5 (1992).
[53] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 2 (1992).
[54] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 2 (1992).
[55] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 65 (1982); at 4 (1992).
[56] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 2 (1992).
[57] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 2 (1992).
[58] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 2 (1992).
[59] Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” in The Straight Mind, at 9 (1992).
[60] Wittig, “Homo Sum,” in The Straight Mind, at 47 (1992).
[61] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 3 (1992).
[62] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 3 (1992).
[63] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 67 (1982); at 7 (1992).
[64] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 65 (1982); at 3 (1992).
[65] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 3 (1992).
[66] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 2 (1992).
[67] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 66 (1982); at 5 (1992).
[68] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 66 (1982); at 5 (1992).
[69] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 67 (1982); at 7 (1992).
[70] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 68 (1982); at 8 (1992).
[71] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 68 (1982); at 8 (1992).
[72] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 68 (1982); at 7 (1992).
[73] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 67-68 (1982); at 7 (1992) (“Wherever they are, whatever they do (including working in the public sector), they are seen (and made) sexually available to men, and they, breasts, buttocks, costume, must be visible. They must wear their yellow star, their constant smile, day and night. One might consider that every woman, married or not, has a period of forced sexual service, a sexual service which we may compare to the military one, and which can vary between a day, a year, or twenty-five years or more.”).
[74] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 68 (1982); at 8 (1992).
[75] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 68 (1982); at 8 (1992).
[76] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 3 (1992).
[77] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 68 (1982); at 8 (1992).
[78] Wittig, The Category of Sex, at 64 (1982); at 3 (1992).
[79] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 9.
[80] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 10.
[81] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 11.
[82] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 11.
[83] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 11.
[84] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 11.
[85] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 28.
[86] Rosa Lee, “Judith Butler’s Revolution: Foundations for a Transsexual Marxism,” in Transgender Marxism, at 66.
[87] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 13-14.
[88] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 25.
[89] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 26 (emphasis added).
[90] Jules Gleeson, “How Do Gender Transitions Happen?” in Transgender Marxism, at 76.
[91] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 11.
[92] See, e.g., Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 1.
[93] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 27.
[94] Matérialismes Trans, ouvrage collectif sous la direction de Pauline Clochec et Noémie Grunenwald (Hystériques & AssociéEs, 2021), see https://hysteriquesetassociees.org/2019/09/15/materialismes-trans/. Rouleau also highlights another book by Pauline Clochec titled Après l’identité. Transitude et féminisme (Hystériques & AssociéEs, 2023), https://hysteriquesetassociees.org/2023/10/12/apres-lidentite/.
[95] Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, at 28.
[96] Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, eds., Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980) (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
[97] See Jules Gleeson, “The Call for Gender Abolition: From Materialist Lesbianism to Gay Communism,” Blind Field, July 31, 2017, available at https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/07/31/the-call-for-gender-abolition-from-materialist-lesbianism-to-gay-communism/; and Gleeson, “Abolitionism in the 21st Century: From Communization as the End of Sex, to Revolutionary Transfeminism,” Blind Field, August 7, 2017, available at https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/08/07/abolitionism-in-the-21st-century-from-communisation-as-the-end-of-sex-to-revolutionary-transfeminism/.
[98] Gleeson, “Abolitionism in the 21st Century.”
[99] Gleeson, “Abolitionism in the 21st Century,” at https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/08/07/abolitionism-in-the-21st-century-from-communisation-as-the-end-of-sex-to-revolutionary-transfeminism/
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