Archive for category: PINKO MAGAZINE

Rojo del Arcoíris describe themselves as a Spanish queer Marxist project that aims to reclaim the space historically stolen from us working class sexual dissidents within revolutionary thought. We are publishing their self-translated manifesto here in solidarity.

We state that our oppression as working class sexual dissidents must be tackled through the tools to analyse and transform reality that marxism gives us. We subscribe to the words of our British colleagues from Invert when they declare that “the dissolution of static forms into social relations is at the very core of marxian dialectics”. The queer potential of historical and dialectic materialism resides, then, in the possibility of unveiling the class dimension, and as such socially constructed, of everything that we have been presented as natural and immutable. Nonetheless, often this radical potential for questioning normativity has been historically delayed within revolutionary organizations, and as a result bourgeois ideas about family (and consequently eros) have been perpetuated. The number of queer comrades who have left the struggle for socialism because of their dissidence is significant: Pedro Lemebel, Mario Mieli, Sylvia Rivera, Nastasia Rampova, Nestor Perlongher, Jean Nicolas, Daniel Guérin, Pier Paolo Passolini, to name but a few. Even higher is the number of names of queer comrades, like the one behind Amanda Klein, that we shall never know because of reactionary prejudices from those who wished for revolution erstwhile without realizing that sexuality was just one more of the relations of production to be revolutionized. So, we don’t just study the classist dimension of heterosexism and cissexism as they relate to our lived experiences as transfagbidykes; it’s our lived experience as transfagbidykes what allows us to notice that the heterosexual matrix is not being incorporated into analyses of the capitalist totality, leaving a central aspect of the bourgeois hegemony unquestioned —if not naturalized. We continue Leslie Feinberg’s legacy: Our oppression hasn’t always existed, but was born out of the class society. Let’s use, like hir, an old key to unlock new doors. It’s time to allow the queer potential marxism has always had to bloom.

II. PRO-PINK, AGAINST BOURGEOIS MORALITY

Even though Marxism prides itself on being oppositional to bourgeois ideology, marxists are constantly judging themselves on the basis of standards of what is decent or serious, constructed within those very values shaped by capitalism.

Moreover, on many occasions it opposes fervently everything that the bourgeois moral regards as perverted in any way, generally as to what is considered feminized. And so, the aesthetics and values of so-called marxist organizations take on archaic and folkloric —and masculinized— tinges, with the goal of giving themselves a particular status. From Rojo del Arcoiris (The Red in the Rainbow) we vindicate everything the bourgeois hegemonic morality doesn’t consider acceptable or dignified, because we don’t need approval from anyone guided by standards born in the bedrock of exploitation; and this is the reason we happily foster a femme and camp aesthetic, beyond what the bourgeoisie made us believe was valid.

III. SEX, GENDER AND FAMILY

We argue that the matrix of sexual difference resides not in biology but in political economy, particularly in the institution of the bourgeois monogamous family. We thus proclaim that the family produces heterosexuality, and with it, the realities of man and woman. As a product of the historical stage of bourgeois domination, heterosexuality is much more than an orientation of desire, it’s the mechanism that naturalizes the reproduction of the present state of things. Likewise, the idea that there are two separated sexes does not precede the —historically specific— production of heterosexuality. The mandates of masculinity and femininity that are nowadays named under the gender label are therefore not the politicization of the natural differences of our bodies, but are themselves responsible for producing the bourgeois fiction of the natural condition of sexual difference. Genital mutilations suffered by intersex babies reveal how, behind the scenes, capital normatively adapts bodies to pass off the division of labour, as it exists today, as inevitable. Nevertheless, neither man nor woman are natural destinies; they are social relations needed to perpetuate a world divided between exploiters and the exploited, as well as the embodied product of this division itself. Abolishing the sexual difference through which capital institutionalizes our bodies as spaces for the reproduction of social classes and private property requires the abolition of the family, as a result of a prior abolition of wage labour.

IV. CAPITALIST TOTALITY AND SELF-DETERMINATION

From RDA we declare that the oppression queer people suffer is not previous or separate from class relations, but it’s, in fact, inscribed within them. This applies equally well to other oppressive dynamics such as racism, ableism and sexism, that, although presented as independent, are part of the same relations of production and reproduction of capital.

We pick up the view of our comrade Holly Lewis when she argues that “class is not another vector of oppression; it is the mystification of all social relations in service of the production of surplus value”. Consequently, we do not only reject any interclass LGTBI position, as they reconcile antagonic interests, but also oppose obreristas stances which perpetuate the declassing of sexuality as if it were external to the relations of production — this perpetuation exists in uncritical alignment with bourgeois divisions between what is public or private. This means saying that the oppression of a transfagbidyke worker is class oppression is not reduced to them being dispossessed of the means of production; their own subjectivity as a sexual dissident is a product of the capitalist order.

We make the words of our comrades from Pinko our own, since within capitalism “(t)he sexual or gender freedom we possess is nothing but the freedom to reproduce the current social order”. We question the bourgeoisie’s strategies of faux-inclusion of sexual dissidents. As the queer Marxist anthropologist Gianfranco Rebucini argues, this inclusion in the capitalist order is done insofar as it makes us acceptable consumers, at the expense of the expulsion of a racialized Other. And, we add, also of the dissidences that do not bend, those of the psychiatrized and the disabled. We do not want liberal equality so that some of us can climb the social ladder; we fight for revolutionary politics that will tear the ladder down.

We assert that “gender self-determination” cannot be achieved within capitalism. The effort to legislate it within the bourgeois normative framework is not only insufficient, as it keeps coercive social mechanisms intact, but also commits the mistake of underpinning the naturalization of the sexual division of labour. What’s more, gender cannot be viewed from an individual perspective, because, as pointed out in Pinko: “Gender is currently where the work of class reproduction gets naturalized. Though it is experienced as deeply personal — as the essence of personhood, even — it is one of the central mass political experiences in capitalist society.” Likewise, it cannot be understood as a product of biological narratives either, in the way certain voices claim; voices that, far from carrying out a materialist analysis of the oppression of women, persist in a reactionary and ahistorical narrative.

We will only destroy the chains that oppress us in a collective act, we will only achieve gender self-determination by abolishing class society.

V. FAMILY ABOLITION

For most people a future without family seems almost as unthinkable as a future without capitalism; it’s hard to imagine the everyday without this system. The capitalist state pours into family care, education, sustenance and other responsibilities that should be collective, and it is therefore understandable that different working class subjects perceive it as a refuge, even as their only means of survival. This perception of the family as a bastion of working-class ties, in the face of the liquid forms of affection within neoliberalism, has recently encouraged a nostalgic turn that vindicates the hospitality of the family, displaying a naturalizing and binarist rhetoric that distances itself from the historical materialist analysis of capitalism and its institutions.

Nonetheless, the family is, above all, not just the literal — biological — but the social reproduction the capitalist regime. A regime that takes the nuclear family as its model, where the offspring is a property that has to be directed towards the interests of the bourgeois class in order to guarantee the subsistence of the surplus value guarded by the family unit. Individuals who, consciously or unconsciously, do not fit into this model endanger the stability of the family regime and, with it, the stability of the capital matrix. Therefore, they are first pushed to reform themselves and, when they remain unreformable, they are exiled from the family’s political economy.

The bourgeois state also accentuates the unfeasibility and irrelevance of any form of working-class solidarity that has been built on the margins of biological filiality by those who have historically been left out of this model. These are experiences that run through the testimonies of our queer elders and contemporary comrades who weave networks of mutual support, education and emotional care outside the logic of the bourgeois nuclear family.

We know that the spaces where what Nat Raha calls queer social reproduction is weaved are still perpetuating the capitalist fiction that says we can only take care of “our own”, in intimate and domestic units. We understand that family abolition does not mean reproducing the fiction of the family through the idea of “chosen families”, but through a communal care for all, which we build through sheltering all the lives that capitalism, in its impersonal logic, decides that do not matter.

Queer political subjects who, often, share a extensive historical legacy of marginalization, silencing and expulsion from the family, have been and should be aware that abolishing capitalism necessarily involves abolishing its main institution of reproduction: the family.

We go back to Holly Lewis’ words: “Family abolition is not a call to abolish the ties between people who love each other.” What we seek is to destroy the capitalist class’ capacity to exploit and control our support networks and our affections.

We understand that, ultimately, queer working class people, like other oppressed communities, represent the vanguard of the social reproduction to come. So, the black lives capitalism disregards, the queer lives capitalism disregards, the disabled, psychiatrized lives capitalism disregards, they hold the imaginative potential for the social relations of a communist future.

VI. ABOLISHING THE EXPLOITATION OF BODIES

When faced with the question of labour, as communists, we assume the premise that nobody should have to work. Wages hide a relation of exploitation from which we want to liberate all bodies. The division of labour itself was the originator of the class issue, and therefore we declare ourselves abolitionists of wage labour.

Furthermore, as queer people within marxism, we are aware there can be no freedom when it comes to sexuality as long as we still live inside the capitalist system. Therefore the goal for transfagbidyke workers should involve ending the existence of work itself, and not just the particular way in which this system exerts repression on sexual dissidence.

We also dissociate ourselves from the mythicist and obrerista view of wage labour as “ennobling” since this is nothing more than a trap of capital. It appeals to an alleged class pride, while in reality only seeking to reproduce capitalist hegemony while hindering the revolutionary impetus of the working class, making them think that they profit from the mere act of working. That is, as if we should thank our bosses and landlords for “letting” us work. The myth of individual realization through wage work stands as the antithesis of our “labour” in RDA.

However, we recognize that the place of exploitation is the place from where the working class forms ties and organizes itself, allowing collectivity and, as such, having the potential to generate spaces that can foster revolution and solidarity. That’s why the bourgeoisie tries to destroy any space for organization, especially those that arise within social production, as a weak link in the capitalist order.

Human beings have the capacity to develop technology that automates work processes until our time is freed up and we can develop other activities, for ourselves – not just to survive within capitalism. To enjoy ourselves, not sell ourselves. Something hard to imagine in an environment of neoliberalism where even our hobbies and passions have been commodified to create capital.

On the other hand, we understand that the goal of labour abolition includes the abolition of sex work. We see no contradiction between this goal and helping women workers in their struggles to survive the horror of capitalism. With Silvia Federici we say “I, too, am abolitionist: I want to abolish capitalism; I want to abolish wage labour; I want to abolish exploitation”, but also: “We can’t say: this kind of exploitation is acceptable, but this one isn’t.” For us, labour abolition does not entail an alliance with neoliberal proposals based on punitivist fantasies, which seek to give more power to the bourgeois state, using its repressive and colonial tools. Likewise, as communists, we are opposed to exercising any tutelage over other working women, for as we are united by oppression, we shall only build solidarity.

However, when it comes to dealing with the issue of the exploitation of our bodies, we can’t avoid mentioning human trafficking. As Holly Lewis highlights: “trafficking —sex, or otherwise— is a problem of political economy, not evil or the patriarchy.” The difference between the conventional labour market and the trafficking of bodies lies in the fact that being a worker is defined on the basis of exploitation, and enslaved people are themselves commodities. The separation between exploitation and dehumanization is shrinking, but it involves a “paradigm shift”. Going back to Holly Lewis’ words: “the fact that an economical exchange is linked to sex does not magically change the way in which capitalism works.”

To emancipate all bodies from all oppressions — to make heterosexuality, a creation of capitalism, perish in the process.

VII. CULTURE FOR A NEW SOCIETY

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

–Ursula K. Le Guin

Imagining worlds to create them. Art is not exclusively bourgeois, we do not relegate aesthetics — in Herbert Marcuse’s terms — to a “lesser” place to be emancipated. We follow figures like Raymond Williams, who understood culture as something ordinary that is constantly produced and reproduced. We are committed to offering new horizons to the community, through close communication: we do not intend to impose anything on ignorant masses, because we do not consider the people ignorant masses. It’s not our intention to write in order to show off the knowledge we have. In fact, the culture we develop here is from, and for, the community. We do not want neither the culture produced for “the rabbles” with economic interests, nor the tradition the capitalist class chooses as distinguished. To the bourgeoisie we already are those villains the D*sney oligopoly has queercoded: let’s become, then, the ones to offer working-class culture a communist turn.

We need to analyse the ways in which capitalism uses art to reproduce itself, to convince us all that there is no alternative to its “inescapable” power. They have tried to extinguish our revolutionary energies through concessions that may be important to individuals —the representation of LGBT people in art— but that are co-opted in order to make us complicit in capitalist oppression.

To study queer art, too, as a possible place of revolution, to support and enhance these expressions, to find new forms of creation that could shake the stagnated capitalist present. Steal the bourgeoisie’s own tools, too. Who better than we queer people, who have historically appropriated the insults used against us, to change the hegemonic meanings that condition our way of interpreting the world?

We ought to recover our genealogies. In how many film schools does the fact that one of the creators of montage, Sergei Eisenstein, was homosexual, remain unspoken? How many contributions which queer people have made to an emancipatory culture have been erased by both sides?

We declare war upon the existing hegemony and, though aware of the limitations imposed by the capitalist system, we propose producing and experimenting new ways of living in common. We believe an alternative hegemony is possible, one in which these emerging forms can become dominant.

VIII. CARING FOR EACH OTHER WITHIN THE RIOT

After the sexual division of work the feminine was relegated to housework. Family care was the stable pillar keeping the wheels of capitalism turning. It was up to us to take care of feeding the mouths that would eventually sustain other mouths. Learned care was unidirectional, altruistic, moral. The hegemonic strand endowed it with the biologicism that already permeated female gendered roles.

During history’s darkest years, we sexual and gender dissidents were forced into hiding, to avoid persecution and even annihilation. But it was in those years of extreme marginalization and criminality that we began to meet and recognize each other. Coming together to survive, to legitimize our existence. And over time, to share culture and identity, and even to visualize a future of belonging within the norm. We existed for capitalism, it might even seem that we were accepted by the system. But at what a cost? Once Chueca, Torremolinos or Gaixample were conquered by the interests of capitalism, and the posters of proletarian female impersonators and drag queens were replaced by RuPaul, all the years of learning self-care, of creating welcoming spaces, were permanently annihilated. This fact had already been observed in the case of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, completely sanctified by capitalism today, but who lived in absolute misery as queer workers. Only rescued in order to create martyrs.

With the rise in violence against LGTBI realities, especially dissident ones, a new radical fire has sparked. As during the HIV crisis, as under the Francoist regime, we the marginalized stand in solidarity in moments of profound helplessness and rage. It’s our responsibility to use all this counter-reproductive force to organize ourselves, seeking or, in its absence, founding new welcoming spaces in which to develop pedagogical and revolutionary projects. We want to reclaim spaces that belong to us, bringing the whole body of theory together and debating it, building it with blocks of firm lexicon, and cementing it with care and solidarity. Let us thus reproduce the lives that the system doesn’t want alive. Brice Chamouleau points the path to follow: “take up arms against a profoundly unequal symbolic world, and against those who reproduce those social inequalities”

Together we are more of everything. We come out of the little alley we had been hidden away in after the sexual revolution —where we had always stayed. We struggled against intracommunity prejudices. We tried to heal generational resentment. We were an army of lovers. And we fought. Because we understand that our enemy is the capital and that the capital benefits from competition, niches, intolerance and mistrust, the most combative gesture is to get together and take care of each other.

To find in our relationships the home that was snatched from us, but never settle; set everything on fire until the Universe becomes our home.

IX. WE WANT EVERYTHING

If you let them red-bait, they’ll race-bait, and if you let them race-bait, they’ll queen-bait. That’s why we all have to stick together.

–National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards

We declare nothing terrifies the capitalist class more than solidarity among the oppressed and the exploited of the world. In the fight, we queer people join up in solidarity with racialized people, disabled people, psychiatrized persons, migrants and the fights of women. From our political praxis, we build propositional solidarities that share a common horizon of emancipation with the rest of struggles. Like the comrades at Third World Gay Revolution said: Their victories are our victories and our victories are theirs. Our freedom will come only with their freedom.

We know the capitalist class wants us atomized, as Marx and Engels taught us: “Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers.” They use our sexual dissidence to keep us apart. They corrode the solidarity between us to the shouts of “Faggot!”. But the cisheteronormative working class receives no benefit from the oppression of queer people. Reactionary sectors who call themselves communists have fully entered this game of divide and conquer between cishetero workers and working class queers. They create false dichotomies among the needs of the working class and a supposed queer lobby whose needs they see as frivolous. Healthcare or inclusive language? Labour rights or mixed bathrooms? We want everything. Give us bread, but give us roses.

We need to recover and resignify the word comrade. To weave present fights we need to create a shared horizon together, a shared ideology, a shared compromise that can go beyond specific actions. Like our comrade Jodi Dean reminds us, comrade means that “together you can fight the long fight”. To that end we must build a shared desire that racialized people, with disabled people, with psychiatrized people, migrants, women, cisheteronormative workers, and us sexual dissidents, can have in common. It’s this shared and common desire that will allow us to break away from identitarianism and fracturations: all in, to change everything and demand everything, and never leave a single social relation without disruption.

X. REVOLUTION

The emancipation of working class sexual dissidents can have only one path; let us break the chains of capitalist social relations that keep us bound to an old family institution in which our bodies and forms of expression could never be fully possible. Let us stop the heteronormative wheel of surplus, let us end the disciplinarian violence class society exerts upon queer lives. No more reproducing the old world in the name of what’s normal: All that is acceptable deserves to perish.

After the bourgeois storm, we are the red in the rainbow

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Neutrality is something that we usually place unto scientific catergories. Catergories such as medicine, are seen a cool, marble like structures that have always been. However, we know this not to be true given numerous examples from the birth to gynecology to the Tuskegee experiements, the medical field always comes with an agenda. In the essay below by Edna Bonhomme, she discusses the impact of Napoleon’s French occupation of Egypt and it’s impact on public health.

At its core the social and political afterlife of disease might work in the service of the empire or against it. French colonialism brought and intensified the bubonic plague epidemic in Egypt and Greater Syria between 1798 and 1801, and the colonizers attempted to manage the plague as a method of social control. The plague was not merely a biological ailment; it prevented the French from advancing in Egypt and Greater Syria. Before French colonization, the Egyptian state handled the plague quite minimally insofar as there were no public health institutions to implement quarantine. Yet a set of contradictions emerged during the occupation, and the French invasion engendered plague as well as new public health enforcement. Meanwhile, French concern for medical treatment did not forestall the epidemic among soldiers.

The French military campaign and the plague were part of an account of social and political control but also a consequence of life under occupation. Denying or minimizing the threat of the disease could function within the matrix of what I call “sanitary imperialism.” In each circumstance, French and Arab officials tailored their oral and written portrayals of the plague to give them an aesthetic appeal that made broader political claims about the French occupation. Moreover, Napoleon altered his position about the plague according to the viability of the French presence in Ottoman Egypt and Syria.

The French military occupation of Ottoman Egypt and Greater Syria is a story of how disease can be destabilized and how systems of control operate on multiple levels. The expedition can be evaluated in terms of the rise of institutions and of French military medicine, as well as along gendered lines.

Although information control and censorship occurred for other reasons, the plague served as a catalyst to the implementation of a colonial hospital and a colonial public-health regulation. In the French case, disease transmission was monitored and controlled by medical practitioners of the French military as they advanced within Ottoman Greater Syria, while playing a particular role in producing and reproducing medical hierarchies. It also had a political role because of French efforts to control it in order to achieve their broader aims of territorial expansion (Elgood 1936; Schur 1999; Howard 2006; Cole 2007). After the French occupation of Egypt, the Mamlūk political leadership was reshuffled; its military structure was discredited and a new layer of leadership stepped in (Fahmy 1997). By 1805, Ottoman Egypt was undergoing another political transformation as Muḥammad ʿAlī established semi-autonomous rule. At the heart of this moment in history was a colonial project in which medicine became modern.

Public Health

Colonial medical regulation was not merely applied to the living—even the dead were not immune from the French occupation. As part of plague and public-health regulations, the French forbade the population from burying the dead in cemeteries close to the communities of al-Azbakiyya and al-Ruway’ī—instead, they were expected to bury the corpses in graves far from the city center. In addition, they ordered Egyptians to hang their clothing and belongings on their roofs for several days after a death from plague to fumigate their homes and reduce the smell and contagion of the disease, arguing that the putrescence could penetrate people’s residences. On 18 Rabī al-Thānī 1213 AH/ September 28, 1798 CE, members of the qawwāsa (indigenous guards that served the French) demolished some graves in the al-Azbakiyya cemetery that resulted in the leveling of some monuments. This was a moment where military occupation prioritized public health over the sacred.

On May 26, 1799, Napoleon sent a letter to the French military Executive Directory, headquartered at Jaffa, and asserted:

The opportunity appeared to be favorable for carrying the place; but our spies, the deserters, and the prisoners, all agreed in stating, that the plague was then making most terrible ravages in the town of Acre [Greater Syria]; that more than sixty persons died of it every day; and that the symptoms of it were dreadful. (Berthier 1990, 11)

The French army perceived the plague as a terror perpetuated by its enemies—those who were no longer serving and those who had been captured. Yet layered in Napoleon’s critique is that these adversaries functioned to shift public perception about the plague. For him, there was consensus that the plague would affect people’s perceptions about the French presence in Ottoman Egypt and Syria.[^1] As rumors waxed and waned, the colonial army used medicine to stifle discontent.

As medical practitioners treated their patients, their ideas about the plague were challenged on many fronts. The battlefield was an opportunity for physicians and surgeons to experiment with medical treatment in periods when masses of people were flirting with death. The dynamics of military occupation and knowledge exchange set the stage for strained power relations. Disease emerged at the most volatile moments, and military doctors had to adjust accordingly. In their positions, René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes (1762–1837)—the chief physician—and Dominique Jean Larrey (1766–1842)—the chief surgeon—documented that the wounded were more susceptible to disease and a quick death. Sanitary imperialism could only be possible with the complicity and cooperation of trained medical practitioners.

The precarity of life existed in a context where military occupation was the norm and illness prevailed.[^2] Of the 9,000 soldiers at Acre, approximately 150 were hospitalized at any given time because of the plague outbreak. Desgenettes commented on his treatment methods for the plague:

In order to sustain immediate hydration and strength, as a matter of urgency, a drink consisting of coffee and quinine, flavored with fresh lemon or lemon juice. The swelling of the glands requires, in principle, a soothing poultice, and when the patient is weak, his tumors must immediately be opened by the application of one or several cauterizing lances. Experience has already shown the effectiveness of this treatment; experience has also proved, through close observation of a great number of cases, that this sickness is not contagious. (La Jonquière1899)

Each treatment and procedure might have been experienced at a radically different pace—what was done for a swelling limp was distinct from what could be done with an open sore. He believed that placing a soft, moist material on the open sores could relieve inflammation and pain. In another, he inserted his lancet into the pus of a bubo and made slight incisions with it. Desgenettes and his medical team were charged with diminishing the spread of infectious diseases. Their ability to treat patients was compromised when other political agendas interfered. Yet, another element of this excerpt is the extent to which he perceives that plague is not contagious which contradicted French perceptions of the disease at the time.

High officials took part in ongoing arguments about methods of treatment for the plague. Desgenettes and Napoleon occasionally disagreed about whether the plague was present and how to treat impaired soldiers. The chief physician insisted on setting an example in the wards by diagnosing the patients with plague and treating them accordingly. Napoleon claimed that plague was merely psychological, stating: “It is one of the peculiar traits of the plague that is most dangerous for those who are afraid of it; those who let themselves be overcome by fear almost always die of it.” Contrary to his initial warning that the bubonic plague was endemic to Jaffa and Cairo, Desgenettes tried to convey to the soldiers that they should not let their anxieties about the disease overcome their bodily strength. Napoleon also insisted that the plague could be attributed to poor hygiene for two reasons: he wanted to maintain control over diagnosis and assert his own medical diagnosis over the military. Nevertheless, physicians appeared to accommodate his wishes through standard treatment and sanitation measures.

Such health sanctions were part of daily practice as an attempt to minimize the spread of infectious diseases—not only the plague. Desgenettes advised his colleagues on how to maintain their hygiene:

The army is informed that it is very advantageous for the health to wash at frequent intervals feet, hands and face with fresh water and even better to wash them with warm water, into which has been poured a few drops of vinegar or alcoholic spirit. (Desgenettes 1835)

But when a soldier fell extremely ill, military doctors sometimes resorted to pharmacological treatment. For example, Napoleon wanted to give doses of opium to the sick in Jaffa. Desgenettes refused. The drug that was eventually used for the dying was laudanum, an opiate solution that could assuage pain (Wilson 1803, 92). The distribution of medication was one way physicians could challenge Napoleon or other top-level authorities. Yet not all top medical officials carried out Napoleon’s orders.

French military physicians constructed temporary hospitals in other structures. Provisional hospitals became part of the campaign. Larrey (1832, 71) documented the condition of one French officer in Egypt:

Peter Genet, a sergeant of the fourth half-brigade of light infantry, aged 30 years, of a dry and bilious temperament, entered the hospital (a farm of Ibrāhīm Bey, in Egypt) on the 4th of October 1800, with every appearance of opisthtonos; his jaws were locked, the muscles of the face convulsively and permanently contracted, the head thrown back upon the trunk, the lower extremities rigid and extended, the walls of the abdomen contracted and approximated to the vertebral column, the pulse small, respiration laborious, deglutition and speech difficult.

The soldier’s ailments become the main concern of the practitioner in a hospital located on a farm of Ibrāhīm Bey. But who was displaced from that farm? Where did they go? Could the fellahin still cultivate the land? The absence of indigenous voices could also be a product of the extent to which displacement was normalized under military occupation. This report shows how colonial spaces were absorbed to secure the army’s health; medical practitioners relied on military occupation to achieve their goals.

Medical reports were one way to produce and control information, and doctors described in detail the nature of the diseases and the condition of the people who contracted them. Although the hospital was a zone where knowledge was controlled and constantly monitored by other officials, a journal, if kept private, could divulge the intricacies of disease incidences and personal life while also pointing to the physical landscape of military occupation.

Desgenettes’s aristocratic background shaped his interactions with Napoleon, and in many respects he challenged Napoleon more than Larrey did. Their positionality as executors of colonial medicine gave them the power and privilege to create new institutions, monitor bodies, and implement policy. Some of the French scholars and Egyptian intermediaries were also part of the public-health machinery to rescind disease transmission. Given the extent to which ideas, goods, and people traveled, the issue of French control was part and parcel of their military campaign. The mandatory reporting they instituted is similar to late-nineteenth-century public-health reforms in Europe and North America (e.g., Rosenberg 1962). What was especially noteworthy about this proclamation was its threat of death as punishment for those who failed to report disease.

On April 17, 1799, the French military was defeated in the siege of Acre. The result was a reshuffling of militarization, public health, and imperialism in Ottoman Egypt and Syria (Tombs and Tombs 2008). Ottoman Egypt renegotiated its position under French occupation, and Mamlūk political leaders used the French defeat for their gain.

Thus, the French enacted public-health regulations as they monitored and negotiated their relationship with the Egyptian population. Most French medical practitioners focused on documenting and treating illness among soldiers. In contrast, al-Jabartī’s chronicle (1994) documented French and Egyptian discourses regarding plague regulations and represents a place where the subaltern voices could be recovered. It also points to the dynamic of French administrators regulating disease transmission by governing the behavior of the indigenous population.

Plague and Gender under Military Occupation

French policies often conflicted with those of Arab medicine and formal medicine was gendered insofar that Arab women medical practitioners were largely shut out of French colonial medical practice. In addition, women of “ill-repute” were blamed for the plague which was an ancillary element of the gender dynamic. Subsequently, the European colonial machinery produced racialized and gendered discourses around health that obscured the medical sphere in Ottoman Egypt and Syria. The French military occupation was a gendered endeavor that was skewed with respect to colonizer and colonized—the majority of the French occupying force was male, while the Arabs who were being colonized were of mixed gender. Gender featured in the colonial project in overt and covert ways, with the predominant literate perspectives those of men, leading to the historical erasure of many women (Solnit 2017).[^3] Yet, within this colonial matrix, plague and power unearth the gendered dynamics of contagion and therapeutics.

Following on the theme of social discourses on the plague, the French military perceived all Egyptians vectors as vectors of disease and Egyptian women were especially charged with being blamed. For example, the Assembly of the General Dīwān had the following proclamation:

After consideration, we have discerned that the shortest and most auspicious means for alleviating or preventing the danger, i.e., the ailment of the plague was derived by associating with women of ill-repute, for they are the primary vehicle for the above-mentioned ailment. (Boustany and Jabartī1971, 65)

This assumption is riddled with misogyny because women, not men, were blamed for transmitting the disease. Up to this point, plague transmission was attributed to close contact with an infected person, irrespective of gender. This narrative positioned women of “ill-repute” as progenitors of disease and this could be interpreted in several ways. This could refer to women who were not regarded as practicing Muslims or sex workers; this is not entirely clear from al-Jabartī’s text. Nonetheless, discussions about the plague were gendered, and this document ascribes blame to certain women as vectors of disease.

There is a history where women are blamed, reproached, and chastised for transmitting disease. Yet this comes with a social force whereby disease can be an arbiter for broader political commitments. As the philosopher and writer Susan Sontag noted in Illness as Metaphor (1979, 38), “In its role as scourge, syphilis implied a moral judgment (about off-limits sex, about prostitution) but not a psychological one.” In much the same way, the plague functioned within the realm of moral judgment: the colonizer used moral discernment to set the tone and regulation for diseased bodies.

Medical pluralism was the norm in Ottoman Egypt and Greater Syria and in the broader Islamicate world, from al-Andalus to Persia. Consequently, Arab-Islamic scholars negotiated between classical Greek texts, Qurʾānic text, Sunnah, and the occult sciences to generate definitions and therapies for illness.[^4] Understanding premodern and early modern definitions, debates, and negotiations about contagion and disease helps to elucidate the theories and practices of Ottoman Egypt and Greater Syria.[^5] Moreover, eighteenth-century Arab medical practitioners were mostly divided along gendered lines; with midwives (dayas) mostly female and health barbers (halaq al-sihhas) mostly male (Gallagher 1990). Nevertheless, these medical practitioners used similar methods to ward off the plague (and anxieties) when an epidemic struck: rubbing oil on buboes, drinking a rose-infused elixir, hanging a magic square on one’s door. In addition to prayer, a person was expected to clean his/her body and house and give alms. The timing of prayer was also important for its effectiveness—dawn was the optimal period.

Traditional remedies were diverse, and domesticated plants played an important role in medieval Arab pharmacology and the remedies directly applied to boils (Amster 2013; Levey 1973). Herbs, ointments and spices were seen as both preventive and curative agents for the plague and were part of the political economy of therapeutics. The sixteenth century Muslim scholar Al-Suyūṭī (d. 911 AH/1505 CE) surmised that people used violet infused ointments to prevent the buboes from spreading to other portions of the body. As such, the eighteenth-century Egyptian ʿulamāʾ ‘Abd al-Mu’ṭā al-Sahalāwī (unpublished manuscript) reached similar conclusions to Arab medical philosophers and surmised that violet was a curative agent for the plague. Doctors, pharmacists, and blood-letters could profit from the plague insofar that they advocated for an herb and provided it to their willing and sometimes dying patient.

Moreover, traditional Egyptian medical practices were recorded in Kitab al-Khawāss (Book of Occult Properties) and Aḥmad al-Dairabī’s (d. 1151 AH/1738 CE) Kitab al-Mujarabāt (Book of Remedies) (YEAR) to find cures for a range of diseases, including impotence or the plague. The occult sciences complicated elite and religious notions of medicine and the natural world. What made occult practices “acceptable” for those who considered themselves pious was the incorporation of Qurʾānic prayers.

One strain of ḥadīth literature (a compilation of axioms by the Prophet Muḥammad; see Burton 1994) prohibited people from leaving areas infected by plague; other sayings warned travelers not to enter places where plague was known to be present. This argument was supplanted by another corpus of literature arguing that pious Muslims who died from the plague were martyrs (Conrad 1981). What this meant was that authorities could force people to remain in a plague-infected area—even if they wanted to escape its wrath. In practice, this meant that the Muslim segment of the population might avoid treatment or quarantine with the presumption that they might have salvation. Thus, some interpretations of prophetic law were discordant with the French response to the plague. For this reason, French soldiers who exhibited plague-like symptoms blamed local inhabitants, thereby justifying their control over the population.

Overall, the proximity of popular remedies and religious practices during the eighteenth century represented significant social reactions to the plague and operated within a broader medical community of medical philosophers, medical practitioners, and shifting political structures. In a colonial context where an invading army wanted to maintain a particular kind of health, traditional medicine was obscured, and Arab women health practitioners were mostly excluded.

Conclusion

At its core, the social and political afterlife of disease might work in the service of the empire or against it. Late eighteenth-century perceptions of the plague were fragmented and contested; those with authority and power were better positioned to put their ideas about the plague into practice. French colonialism brought and intensified the bubonic plague epidemic in Egypt and Greater Syria between 1798 and 1801, and the colonizers attempted to manage the plague as a method of social control. The plague was not merely a biological ailment; it prevented the French from advancing in Egypt and Greater Syria. Before French colonization, the Egyptian state handled the plague quite minimally insofar as there were no public health institutions to implement quarantine (Mikhail 2011). Yet a set of contradictions emerged during the occupation, and the French invasion engendered plague as well as new public health enforcement. Meanwhile, French concern for medical treatment did not forestall the epidemic among soldiers (Sonbol 1991; Kuhnke 1990; Gallagher 1990).

The French military campaign and the plague were part of an account of social and political control but also a consequence of life under occupation. Denying or minimizing the threat of the disease could function within the matrix of what I call “sanitary imperialism.” In each circumstance, French and Arab officials tailored their oral and written portrayals of the plague to give them an aesthetic appeal that made broader political claims about the French occupation. Moreover, Napoleon altered his position about the plague according to the viability of the French presence in Ottoman Egypt and Syria.

The French military occupation of Ottoman Egypt and Greater Syria is a story of how disease can be destabilized and how systems of control operate on multiple levels. The expedition can be evaluated in terms of the rise of institutions and of French military medicine, as well as along gendered lines.

Although information control and censorship occurred for other reasons, the plague served as a catalyst to the implementation of a colonial hospital and a colonial public-health regulation. In the French case, disease transmission was monitored and controlled by medical practitioners of the French military as they advanced within Ottoman Greater Syria, while playing a particular role in producing and reproducing medical hierarchies. It also had a political role because of French efforts to control it in order to achieve their broader aims of territorial expansion (Elgood 1936; Schur 1999; Howard 2006; Cole 2007). After the French occupation of Egypt, the Mamlūk political leadership was reshuffled; its military structure was discredited and a new layer of leadership stepped in (Fahmy 1997). By 1805, Ottoman Egypt was undergoing another political transformation as Muḥammad ʿAlī established semi-autonomous rule. At the heart of this moment in history was a colonial project in which medicine became modern.

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What does a burning cop car do?

We began with a cop car in flames. We plastered ourselves and the outlines of our project with its images.

The burning cop car was for many a memory not our own but passed down from our predecessors in the streets. There is no time for the past like the present. The riots deliver another memory now, carried out by the people who have taken to the streets to mourn the murdered and defend the living.

Black movements for freedom have always been the motor. This time it was the carriers of black rebellion in Minneapolis who turned.

We honor the life of George Floyd. In bringing down the city, the police, and the prisons in his name, the people fight as well for the many lives stolen since Minneapolis began. The lands there are at the crossroads of America’s never complete project to extinguish the rowdy spirit of the African, Black, Dakota, and Ojibwe generations and all others stolen and stolen from. Minneapolis historically and today is also a gathering place for the explosive potential of the movements made against racist colonial violence.

In 1979 fags and their revolutionary friends torched San Francisco. In the century before, it was plantations in the South and US military forts on the Midwest frontier that met the flames. This year in Minneapolis, young Black people lit up the third precinct. Hundreds of burning cop cars across the continent this past week have brought further light. The fire this time.

The liberal recuperation of our own insurgent origins has tried to extinguish this legacy of fire. There were always embers but we didn’t expect to see them catch so quickly once again.

From a cop car to a precinct, what burns next?

In the totality of the fire, from the markings left in ashes to the shape of shooting flames, are the forces that transform history into prophecy.

The people lived without police before. They will live this way again.

There was a time before the United States. They forced us together here, the enslaved and the dispossessed, and this will be their undoing. There will be a time after.

Time to tend the fires.

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The demand to abolish the family has served as a way of imagining life beyond compulsory heterosexuality, misogynistic subjugation and familial violence.1 It brings up profoundly personal anxiety for many who believe that the family is the only protection against the violence of the state, white supremacy, or poverty. Opponents equate abolishing the family with childhood neglect and a prohibition on affection and care.

Marx and Engels were known for avoiding speculative depictions of communist life, objecting to imaginaries that lacked a strategy for how such a society could emerge from the contradictions of capitalism. In Anti-Dühring and its excerpted form in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels laid out the division Marxists would use to fend off any threat they may inadvertently become science fiction novelists. Though I agree that concrete descriptions of communist life cannot easily serve the programmatic function imagined by utopian socialists, I also believe that a return to speculative visions of communism can again serve us today. The horror of 20th century Soviet states calling their class- and wage-labor based societies “communist” calls on us to do what Marx and Engels avoided: write science fiction on futures we want to create. Such visions may provoke or enrich, but their utility is not in reading them as proposals to be implemented by the convinced. Their power lies in making visible the tenuousness and horror of the present, and in supporting an unfolding process of exploration and discovery in the midst of struggle.

When evoking the abolition of the family, Marx and Engels use the word Aufhebung for abolish. A Hegelian concept sometimes translated as “a positive supersession,” Aufhebung is to preserve, uplift and radically transform. This meaning is largely unlike the American legacy of anti-slavery abolitionists. Demands to abolish the family are not efforts to destroy people’s ability to form caring, romantic, or parental ties, nor to celebrate the pressures market economies put on domestic life. Instead, to abolish the family is to free our capacity to care for each other into more humane forms. Here I offer one speculative sketch of social reproduction to replace the family, specifically the commune as initially suggested by the early 19th century French socialist Charles Fourier.

Qualities of Communist Social Reproduction

The family serves as the main institution that mediates proletarian dependency on the wage. Along with the wage, welfare programs and the carceral system, we depend on those we call family to survive. For many proletarians unable to work, including infants, small children, people who are disabled and the very old, the main means of securing resources are from personal, familial relationships of dependence on a wage laborer. The growing systems of market-based reproductive care are no escape from this dual dependency on the family or the wage, as they are paid for from one’s own wage or that of a family member.

In our society, love and care are bound within the dependency and obligation of the family, and with them much of the labor of social reproduction. The family, therefore, takes a contradictory form in our world, both the means of love in the midst of a harsh and dangerous world, and a space of private dependency with little protection from the risk of internal abuse, violence, and heteronormativity. However good some families may be, their privacy and insularity buffers them from the necessary process of struggle. For those unable to live well under this gender regime, the gamble of who your family happens to be is a matter of life and death. The state, the wage, and the family: each oppose gender and sexual freedom, and each are incompatible with a full, free expression of human flourishing through gender and sexual diversity. The abolition of the family must be the positive creation of new institutions and practices of love, reproduction and erotic life.

In place of the coercive system of atomized family units, the abolition of the family would generalize what we now call care. Care of mutual love and support; care of the labor of raising children and caring for the ill; care of erotic connection and pleasure; care of aiding each other in fulfilling the vast possibilities of our humanity, expressed in countless ways, including forms of self-expression we now call gender. Care in our capitalist society is a commodified, subjugating, and alienated act, but in it we can see the kernel of a non-alienating interdependence.

Around the People’s Kitchen

People spontaneously form self-organized communities based on collectivizing reproduction during periods of prolonged insurgency. I call these communes, and consider them early forms of social reproduction that could come to dominate under communism. When large numbers of people directly confront the state and capital in forms that bring them into a shared location for multiple days, they often develop practices for collectively procuring food, cooking, and shared eating; for sleeping arrangements in proximity to each other; for sharing child rearing responsibilities and aiding disabled comrades. All work to share the work of care, to enable diverse participation, and to protect each other against harm.

We see some variation of this wherever prolonged occupations take root: in rural, direct-action protest camps like Standing Rock in the Dakotas or the ZAD in France, or in movement of the squares. In the Oaxaca Commune of 2006, women created collective reproductive activities on the barricades as a means of sustaining the protests and resisting the gender domination of home life:

The barricades were places where the people of Oaxaca slept, cooked and shared food, had sex, shared news, and came together at the end of the day. Resources such as food, water, gasoline and medical supplies were re-appropriated and redistributed, and in the same way, reproductive labor was re-appropriated from the specialized sphere of the home and became the underscoring way to reimagine social life and collective bonds.2

These arrangements serve immediate needs as part of an ongoing struggle. They collectivize reproductive labor, create new shared forms of intimacy and friendship, open new avenues for contesting gender and sexual relations, and can work to directly challenge the atomized, household structure of the nuclear family. Though misogyny, homophobia and sexual violence have often been the horror of such shared protest sites, their collective and political character provides a better forum to contest and challenge such dynamics than the isolated family. The protest camps we need must combine emergent forms of communist reproduction with feminist and queer practice, and ultimately, perhaps, better sex.

Just as the communal kitchen arises in past insurgencies, the commune as the prevalent mode of social reproduction could arise under a wider condition of communization. Though we can’t know the conditions of future insurrections, a few features characterize communist measures: a critical mass of proletarians rapidly seizing, transforming and putting into use the infrastructure and land, to enable non-market human survival and human flourishing. The obligatory nuclear family relation and wage labor would operate as direct obstacles to such shared survival, freedom and the persistence of the insurrection. If the nuclear family is not radically challenged, its pernicious counterrevolutionary logics of property, misogyny, heteronormativity and domination remain untouched. The communist reproduction of material life must resist dependency on obligatory family relations and participation in wage labor. It would instead be pursued through the democratic, collective management and global circulation of productive activity without market mediation.

In their 2016 article “Insurrection and Production,” Angry Workers imagine such a potential communizing revolutionary process in the UK, focusing on the essential industries that must be taken over for an insurrection to persist. Similar studies are necessary elsewhere, though much of their analysis parallels US conditions. They propose the formation of collective domestic units with each unit collectivizing food production and consumption. The commune here is not a prefiguration but necessitates the generalized condition of communism. They write:

The uprising and takeover of essential industries has to go hand in hand with the formation of domestic units comprising 200 to 250 people: communal spaces (former hotels, schools, office blocks, etc.) as central points for distribution, domestic work and local decision-making. The quick formation of such domestic units is as important as the takeover of the essential industries. Mainly in order to break the isolation of domestic work and gender hierarchies, but also to create a counter-dynamic to the centralisation in the essential industries: a decentralisation of certain social tasks and decision making.

This is very different from what were called communes in the 20th century: deliberate, small-scale countercultural communities attempting to survive under a market society. These 20th century communes include back-to-the-land collective farming communities in the 1960s and 1970s, group houses of hippies and punks, urban squats, queer families living together, and utopian planned communities. These are legitimate strategies for trying to live less alienated lives in the atomizing conditions of the market. Such practices are an admirable part of radical traditions, but as they operate within capitalist conditions, their limits are severe.

Communes in a capitalist society are forced into the shared poverty of economic self-sufficiency and isolation, or depend on significant contributions from wage labor or inherited wealth. The pressures of state policies, poverty, class contradictions among residents, or lack of mental health care inevitably exacerbate interpersonal conflict, and often lead to the eventual collapse of such deliberate communities. Only considerable class privilege offers long-term stability.

Further, many proponents of such planned communities mistakenly imagine that their very existence will inspire their gradual spreading in the shell of a capitalist society, providing the means of living anti-state communism in the present. Such thinking has produced the blossoming of isolated countercultures, but nothing suggests it could ever offer an exit from the rule of capital and the capitalist state. The structural conditions of proletarianization, market dependency and state violence make such a vision of a revolutionary transition impossible without generalized insurrection, and leave such communities inherently unstable, inaccessible and isolated.

For Angry Workers, and the analysis here, the commune is instead the collectivization of reproductive labor and consumption, the abolition of the family, and the freeing of love, care and eroticism into a collective, democratic space of shared life. To survive as the basis of freedom, the commune must be a part of a broader and successful effort to destroy the coercive mechanisms of the racial state, to seize the means of production and collective survival, and to defeat the class enemies of the revolutionary struggle. The commune can only survive under the conditions of global communization.

On Charles Fourier

This vision of the commune as a collective, erotic and joyful site of reproductive labor most closely resembles the theories of Charles Fourier. Fourier was a French merchant, clerk, and writer, and a major figure in what has come to be called the utopian socialist tradition. He was born shortly before the French Revolution and published most of his work in the early 19th century, dying in 1837. Fourier’s writing on the evils of the market, the bourgeois family, and collective communes became tremendously influential on socialist politics of the 19th century. There is clear evidence that Marx closely read Fourier, and many of Marx’s greatest statements in support of women’s rights, gender equality and women’s freedom are near verbatim quotes of Fourier.

Fourier is best known for three theoretical and political contributions: First, he identified early that the horrors of poverty were a result of the growing market economy, and that socialists needed to abolish markets and private property. This new society would guarantee all a “social minimum,” a concept of universal material provision that became central to new socialist thinking. Fourier defines it as essential to the shared well-being of the coming society: “Finally, in this new order the common people must enjoy a guarantee of well-being, a minimum income sufficient for present and future needs. This guarantee must free them from all anxiety either for their own welfare or that of their dependents.” (275)3 Second, Fourier was a major proponent of women’s rights, seeing the subjugation of women as a cornerstone of bourgeois society, the family, monogamous marriage, and the oppressive social order. He advocated extensively for the social, economic, and sexual rights of women, and is believed to have coined the word “feminism.” He generated a theory later adopted by Marx and others, that the degree of freedom in a society is best measured by the level of women’s emancipation.

Third, Fourier proposed that the solution to the horrors of the market and monogamy was a form of commune he termed the phalanx, numbering 1,600 people in a vast building of the phalanstery. Fourier’s vision of the phalanx was embedded in his science of the human passions, a “theory of passionate attraction.” By carefully examining the natural instincts, proclivities, pleasures, and developmental capacities of humans, we could design deliberate communities that perfectly calibrate personality types. The phalanxes would be shared spaces of labor as productive centers exporting a particular foodstuff or manufactured product. They would collectivize all reproductive labor, designed to maximize serving the diverse pleasures of food and daily consumption by all residents. Fourierist communes were started throughout the US and Europe in the 1830s and 1840s.

Rather than relying on compulsion to maintain social order or productive work, these communities could design “amorous work” to skillfully use pleasure, eroticism, and joy as incentives, so that collective and individual benefit align. “Useless as it is today,” he wrote, “love will thus become one of the most brilliant mainsprings of the social mechanism.” (176) Fourier’s theories of human passions were fundamental to his vision of social harmony. Love and attraction would replace domination as the central social bond of society.

Though Fourier’s writing on the erotic were not as widely regarded, he saw his commitments to sexual freedom and fulfillment as essential to his social theory. As well as a social minimum, he advocated for a “sexual minimum,” where the physical, erotic needs of all were guaranteed by their community, allowing each person the freedom to pursue full, authentic love.

We are going to discuss a new amorous order in which sentiment, which is the noble side of love, will enjoy an unparalleled prestige and will endow all social relations with a unique charm. How will sentimental love maintain this dominion? Through the fact that the physical impulses, far from being fettered, will be fully satisfied. (340)

Fourier may have been fiercely critical of the misogyny of today’s incel movement, but he worried about the despair of those denied sexual pleasure: “The disorders caused by the fear of amorous deprivation are not, in fact, as obvious as those caused by hunger riots. But the mutiny of love is only the more effective for being hidden and concealed behind all sorts of masks.” (340) He was confident that humans are naturally polyamorous, bisexual, and erotically joyful. The free love of the phalanx would be among its greatest appeals, and soon no one would be drawn back to the hypocritical horror of the conjugal family.

Fourier allowed himself a considerable degree of outlandish fancy in his writing on sexual freedom. He went to some length describing the integral role carefully choreographed orgies would play in future communes. As a parody of the Catholic Church, he described a new, voluntary clerical hierarchy based on sexual skill, sexual selflessness, and the capacity to bring sexual pleasure to the ugliest in society. As a replacement for the horrors of war, he imagined roving armies of amorous youth competitively demonstrating their erotic prowess on battlefields. Those who were sufficiently awed would signal their defeat by submitting themselves to voluntary erotic bondage and orchestrated sexual punishments for a limited duration. One such future encounter between traveling erotic armies and their hosts proceeds:

When the Head Fairy waves her wand a semi-bacchanalia gets underway. The members of both groups rush into each other’s arms, and in the ensuing scramble caresses are liberally given and received. Everyone strokes and investigates whatever comes to hand and surrenders himself or herself to the unfettered impulses of simple nature. Each participant flits from one person to another, bestowing kisses everywhere with as much eagerness as rapidity. (389)

This initial orgy is disrupted by the intervention of same-sex desire: “To break up the skirmish, use should be made of a divisive agent. Since everything is done by attraction in Harmony, mixed or homosexual attractions should be employed. Groups of Sapphists and Spartites should therefore be thrown into the fray to attack people of their own kind.” (390) This allows the sexual priesthood to issue their recommendations for the most compatible romantic pairings, as “the goal of Harmony is to establish compound amorous relationships based on both physical and spiritual affinities. Thus while the opening sensual skirmish is indispensable, it is only a prelude.” (390)

After one such dry erotic exposition, Fourier teases us, “Yet the minor details I have touched on will already have been enough to let you see how the new order will open the way to love affairs of such splendour and variety that all Civilisation’s tales of love will evoke nothing but pity.” (179)

Fourier, in short, was a delightfully kinky science fiction writer, and an inspiration to imagining pro-queer communes of the future. Fourier’s work can provoke in us not only a concrete alternative to the family as a unit of social reproduction, but an open-ended erotic desire for a better mode of life we have yet to discover.

Communes to Come

Rather than as the implementation of a plan, the commune could arise spontaneously out of insurrection. As masses of proletarians directly confront state, capital and oppression in their personal lives, they will need to turn to strategies of collective survival beyond the family. During an insurrectionary period, people would initially appropriate large buildings as centers of social reproduction, with collective canteens, shelter, childcare centers, medical care, and halls for democratic assemblies. Parents joining in the insurrection would likely come to share the labor of childcare to enable their full participation. These new institutions could offer both shared survival, and new forms of joy and belonging.

As an insurrection unfolds and consumes larger parts of society, collectivizing domestic, social reproductive labor offers a strategy of survival and community. There would be a spontaneous, overall tendency towards the formation of the commune as a primary unit of domestic life. Isolated households would lack the means of materially reproducing themselves without access to the market and market-based systems of distribution like supermarkets and box stores and their associated supply chains. Disrupting capitalist production, the state and the family would necessitate their rapid replacement with new institutions, chiefly the collective life of the commune. Communes are answers to the essential question that will arise in a revolutionary process: “How can we take care of each other?”

As the communes begin to offer material stability and supportive community, many less-normative families would choose to self-abolish, joining communes and dissolving their economic and social insularity into the broader community. Much recent debate has contrasted family abolition with forms of alternative, loving and non-normative families forged by some people of color and queers against white supremacist heteronormativity. Rather than a retrenchment of the family, such chosen forms may be the particular strategy that the yearning towards family abolition and shared care often takes in our world now. In a revolutionary process, queer-chosen family, women-headed families of color impacted by migration and mass incarceration, families living in poverty, and those surviving through other non-heteronormative working-class kinship relations would be the most likely to pursue the commune.

Family abolition is not the destruction of kinship ties that currently serve as protection against white supremacy, poverty, and state violence, but instead the expansion of that protection into broader communities of struggle. Those family householders most resistant to self-abolition—white property owners, abusive patriarchs, homophobes and others most invested in the normative family—would need to be challenged through feminist, queer and communist struggle both within their families and in the broader society. The more loving and chosen the family, the more amenable it may be to self-abolishing by joining a large, well-functioning commune.

The estimate of Angry Workers of around 200 people strikes me as reasonable, perhaps preferable to Fourier’s 1,600. Two hundred could be a sizable apartment building, the stand-alone homes clustered immediately around a school or other center, or a block of small apartment buildings. The shared kitchen would create a natural initial size, given the logistics of cooking for substantial groups. Other shared consumption and reproductive labor activities would quickly develop, and, depending on demographic distribution and concentration (of children, the elderly, and the disabled), may encompass multiple proximate communes in shared activity.

Establishing such free communities must be a part of an expanding, universalizing, and revolutionizing process that also develops fully communist modes for the production and circulation of material goods. These communes would not be self-sufficient agricultural communities or isolated units struggling to survive in a market society. A communist transition will take time and unfold unevenly in different places. But to survive, it must continue to expand, and ultimately destroy the means of reinstating the domination of the state or the market anywhere. Communist production, without wages, money or exchange, would be the democratic coordination of manufacturing of material goods, the provision of services and the sharing of culture, all managed through many layers of virtual and in-person assessments, surveys, debated algorithms, assemblies, meetings, and many other manifold deliberations to identify and sustainably meet human needs. These communes would be integrated with a communist production system expanding to a global reach, depending on the highest level of technology compatible with human decency and ecological sustainability.

These communes could consolidate within them collective reproductive services, including childcare and education; collective laundry, apartment cleaning, canteen food cooking and serving; repair and maintenance of household goods; mental health and regular medical care; and group entertainment activities. Collectivizing many forms of consumption would reduce the social resources and carbon consumption necessary for providing abundance to all. Advanced, high-skill services requiring substantial facilities and infrastructure could be organized regionally, such as surgical care or specialized education. All members could have full digital access to global networks of communication and collaboration, and could be encouraged to form a variety of networking relationships across other communities. These communes could provide the primary institutions for meeting human material needs while also being the center for new forms of communist sociality, art, expression, community, sex and love.

Direct-democratic governance and internal struggle would be essential for these communes to avoid internal class stratifications. Though some tasks could be delegated to elected bodies, the essential decisions of the community must be made through group assembly, deliberation in extended conversation, and weighing the concerns of all affected. Direct democracy could serve as a counterweight towards new forms of class rule and internal domination within the communes. Where world production would have to be organized through other, internet-based and networked mechanisms, decisions immediate to daily life could be made by each commune’s assembly. Two hundred people is about the maximum size of an in-person assembly where everyone is able to take part in decision making directly, and to have opportunities to speak to the entire group.

Drawing on Fourier’s commitment to the harmony of different personality types, communes should be internally diverse, rather than communities of affinity. The free circulation and migration of people between communes could be an essential contribution to such heterogeneity. To avoid becoming centers of survivalism, ethnonationalism or gender fascism, such communes must also resist tendencies towards religious and social homogeneity. Though individuals can harbor whatever beliefs they choose, their relations with others would be subject to public challenge and political struggle, breaking down a rigid divide between private and public.

Among the innumerable unresolved questions in imagining communism is preventing stratification between communes. What practices could assure the universality of “to each according to their need,” without the impersonal domination of a state removed from, and governing over, the social body? The lack of property, wage labor, and markets would limit communes’ capacity to dominate others, but communes may try to consolidate some forms of private production towards their own consumption internally. How could society prevent some communes from coming to enjoy significantly better living standards than others? Or negotiate conflicts over resources between communes? Or dismantle the existing distribution of geographic inequality, uneven development, and racial stratification that organizes capitalist space?

Those who imagine socialism as impersonal services through a state managing a market economy have intelligible and ready answers: they can outline policies that deliberately counter-weigh against inequality through bureaucratically investing in underdeveloped areas, taxing wealthier areas, and promoting policies of desegregation. But with decision-making dispersed throughout the society as a whole, and the communes functioning as a primary site of consumption, we would require new and currently unknown practices to mitigate against potential inequality in consumption between communes, and to assure basic material well-being for all. Here I support Fourier’s rare combination of calling for both dispersed non-market social infrastructures and a universal guaranteed social minimum.

As people encounter a free society, the numbers of people identifying with non-normative sexuality could grow, as we are now witnessing among young people increasingly not identifying as straight. Similarly, when Fourier treats standards of attractiveness and ugliness as transhistorical, I argue instead these will necessarily transform and broaden. Queer culture, queer leadership, and queer movements are an essential resource to communist struggles pursuing richer forms of human freedom. Combined with the collective character of the commune, such queer tendencies could unfold into new dynamics valuing consensual, positive, and healthy sexual relations.

Sex and sexual pleasure could become collective concerns, both challenging sexual coercion and abuse, and supporting people to find paths towards sexual fulfillment. Unlike Fourier, I recognize that full sexual satisfaction and perfect harmony is not likely possible given psychoanalytic insights about human development; but the commune provides the opportunity to transform sexual practice and eroticism into something that could be collectively considered as a human need, a source of well-being, and a field of ethical care. This could occasionally take the form of Fourier’s imagined mass planned orgies; but more often it would look like supporting people in their sexual health and sexual satisfaction by incorporating it into mental and physical healthcare; polyamorous relationships could be more common; and a social acknowledgement that good sex is a source of human well-being could all help undo heteronormative misogyny.

Successful communes must include those unable to work. Recent experiences of houseless people joining Occupy encampments make clear the strategic necessity of skillful, collective, and non-exclusionary strategies to deal with disability, drug abuse, and mental illness. Harm reduction, mental health support, and drug recovery would all be central concerns of those initially setting up the communes. The communist society will take many generations to heal from the traumas of capitalism and war, as well as complexities of human biological variation in the forms we now define as disability, neurodivergence, or mental illness.

As the insurrection secures more stable, large-scale material conditions, there could be a countertendency towards the reassertion of the family. If these communes fail to become the generalized form of social reproduction, and the nuclear family again became the main unit of consumption, society would see the return of the capitalist family’s current logic of conservatism, whiteness, property-ownership, and self-isolation. The return of the family would contribute to counterrevolution, the reassertion of the state, and the failure of communism.

To resist this countertendency, the contradictions of gender and sexuality could become central to resisting such a return to the family. Like Fourier, I imagine self-interest coupled to transformed consciousness would be essential to maintaining the collective commitment to the commune. Women and feminized partners could refuse the reimposition of the family, having witnessed the reduced domestic labor of the collective commune, and the opportunities the commune affords to contesting sexist relationship dynamics. Queer and trans people could recognize in the commune the means of resisting the abuse and domination of the family for themselves and future queer and trans children. Those who have experienced the insurrectionary commune could recognize in it the material basis for a freer gender and sexual order, and choose to defend and expand its reach. All those who come to realize what is at stake in winning communism could join queers, trans people, and feminists in resisting the return of the family, and instead fight for the family’s full replacement with the commune.

If the communes succeed, gradually new forms of architecture, design and construction would reflect the needs for both a combination of heterogeneous private living space for individuals and small chosen clusters, and shared space for reproductive labor and consumption. In the design of new physical spaces for communes, people could have sufficient private and personal space for themselves and their self-chosen kin. But many things now done in the private home could be far better done in shared space: canteens can replace most kitchens and dining rooms; crèches replacing a child’s individual play room; entertainment rooms could serve as places to watch television or hang out in groups; personal studies could instead be shared libraries and co-working areas; home maintenance and cleaning equipment could be available in common space; vehicles could be similarly shared. The commune of around 200 is small enough all of these things are close at-hand and easily accessible at any hour. On the other hand, the commune being much larger than currently existing households reduces the need for individualized consumption and isolated living space to a reasonable minimum. In most cases, private space could be limited to clusters of comfortable bedrooms for those opting to live in a family-like arrangement grouped around a single shared room, easily accessible to the commune as a whole.

Within the commune, kinship ties could persist in many forms, but would be integrated with a broader, interdependent community. Individuals could opt into an arrangement of co-parenting with one or more adults, creating family-like arrangements for purposes of raising children. In recent decades, research into psychological development has established children do need the consistent attention of a small number of adults early in life. This challenges some historical family-abolitionist currents that have mistakenly seen mother-infant bonds as inherently oppressive and in need of complete prohibition. Among the heterogeneous arrangements of close relationships within a commune, people may choose to raise children they gestate or with whom they have a biological relationship; or they may choose other arrangements; or they, their child, or those immediately in the life may change those arrangements as a child ages. Similarly, a few may choose to form lifelong relationships with their biological family, or to partner romantically for the long term with one other person and incorporate child-rearing as a practice.

Yet these close parenting or familial units would not serve as an economic unit in any sense and would not organize material consumption. Instead, they would only act as a voluntary and personal arrangement to be entered into within a broader economic unit, within the ready availability of multiple alternatives for anyone to opt out. If a child found their living situation intolerable, there would be many other adults interdependent with them and in social proximity who could observe the situation, intervene collectively if needed, and offer easily accessible alternative housing arrangements, including other families the child could join, or crèches specializing in such tasks. Children could pass through multiple households and living arrangements as they grow up—including time in children-centered group housing—always within a building or short walk from the original group of adults who they may identify as their parents. When they come of age, as Fourier imagined, they could set out to travel across continents exploring the richness of the world, maintaining digital remote contact with their friends and many forms of familial relations. These alternatives allow parents as well to opt out, assuring their children’s material and social needs will be met by others.

The commune could come to prioritize gender discovery, exploration, and expression in every person. New gender modalities could be integrated with child-rearing, with games and social spaces, with entertainment, and with medical care. Gender liberation is an essential feature of creating a new basis for communist human well-being. In the communization of society and the abolition of the family, gender would undergo massive transformations to no longer serve as a basis for the division of labor, interpersonal domination, or sexual violence. Instead, gender could become what is already prefigured in trans experience: a form of expressing subtle personal truth, the beauty and richness of human expression, and the wielding of aesthetics, eroticism and personal fulfillment.

Writing in 1808, Fourier describes the timeline of the complete revolution in all social relations. Though like all past revolutionaries he proved wrong in his timeline, he is right that communism is always immanent to the present, as the real movement to abolish the existing order of things:

Do not be misled by superficial people who think that the invention of the laws of Movement is just a theoretical calculation. Remember that it only requires four or five months to put it into practice over a square league, an attempt which could even be completed by next summer, with the result that the whole human race would move into universal harmony, so your behaviour should be governed from now on by the ease and proximity of this immense revolution. (306) ⊱

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Our straight sisters and brothers must recognize and support that we, third world gay women and men, are equal in every way within the revolutionary ranks.

We each organize our people about different issues; but our struggles are the same against oppression, and we will defeat it together — Once we understand these struggles, and gain a love for our sisters and brothers involved in these struggles, we must learn how best to become involved in them.

The struggles of the peoples of the world are our fight as well; their victories are our victories and our victories are theirs. Our freedom will come only with their freedom.

Together, not alone, we must explore how we view ourselves, and analyze the assumptions behind our self-identity — We can then begin to crack the barriers of our varying illnesses, our passivity, sexual chauvinism, in essence, our inability to unabashedly love each other, to live, fight, and if necessary, die for the people of the earth.

As we begin to understand our place in the international revolution, and join with others in this understanding, we must develop the skills necessary to destroy the forces of repression and exploitation, so as to make it possible for a new woman and man to evolve in a society based on communal love.

While we understand that in the United States our main enemy is the socio-economic-political system of capitalism and the people who make profits off our sufferings, fights and divisions, we also recognize that we must struggle against any totalitarian, authoritarian, sex-controlled, repressive, irrational, reactionary, fascist government or government machine.

What We Want, What We Believe:

  1. We want the right of self-determination for all third world and gay people, as well as control of the destinies of our communities.
    We believe that third world and gay people cannot be free until we are able to determine our own destinies. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  2. We want the right of self-determination over the use of our bodies: The right to be gay, anytime, anyplace; The right to free physiological change and modification of sex on demand; The right to free dress and adornment.
    We believe that these are human rights which must be defended with our bodies being put on the line. The system as it now exists denies these basic human rights by implementing forced heterosexuality. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  3. We want liberation for all women: We want free and safe birth control information and devices on demand. We want free 24 hour child care centers controlled by those who need and use them. We want a redefinition of education and motivation (especially for third world women) towards broader educational opportunities without limitations because of sex. We want truthful teaching of women’s history. We want an end to hiring practices which make women and national minorities a readily available source of cheap labor confined to mind-rotting jobs under the worst conditions.
    We believe that the struggles of all oppressed groups under any form of government which does not meet the true needs of its people will eventually result in the overthrow of that government. The struggle for liberation of women is a struggle to be waged by all peoples. We must also struggle within ourselves and within our various movements to end this oldest form of oppression and its foundation — male chauvinism. We cannot develop a truly liberating form of socialism unless we fight these tendencies. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  4. We want full protection of the law and social sanction for all human sexual self-expression and pleasure between consenting persons, including youth. We believe that present Iaws are oppressive to third world people, gay people, and the masses. Such laws expose the inequalities of capitalism, which can only exist in a state where there are oppressed people or groups. This must end. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  5. We want the abolition of the institution of the bourgeois nuclear family.
    We believe that the bourgeois nuclear family perpetuates the false, categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality by creating sex roles, sex definitions and sexual exploitation. The bourgeois nuclear family as the basic unit of capitalism creates oppressive roles of homosexuality and heterosexuality. All oppressions originate within the nuclear family structure. Homosexuality is a threat to this family structure and therefore to capitalism. The mother is an instrument of reproduction and teaches the necessary values of capitalist society, i.e., racism, sexism, etc. from infancy on. The father physically enforces (upon the mother and children) the behavior necessary in a capitalist system, intelligence and competitiveness in young boys and passivity in young girls. Further, it is every child’s right to develop in a non-sexist, non-racist, non-possessive atmosphere which is the responsibility of all people, including gays, to create. Therefore, the system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  6. We want a free non-compulsory education system that teaches us our true identity and history, and presents the entire range of human sexuality without advocating any one form or style; that sex roles and determination of skills according to sex be eliminated from the school system; that language be modified so that no gender takes priority; and that gay people must share the responsibilities of education.
    We believe that we have been taught to compete with our sisters and brothers for power, and from that competitive attitude grows sexism, racism, male and national chauvinism and distrust of our sisters and brothers. As we begin to understand these things within ourselves, we attempt to free ourselves of them and are moved toward a revolutionary consciousness. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  7. We want guaranteed full equal employment for third world and gay people at all levels of production.
    We believe that any system of government is responsible for giving every woman and man a guaranteed income or employment, regardless of sex or sexual preference. Being interested only in profits, capitalism cannot meet the needs of the people. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  8. We want decent and free housing, fit shelter for human beings.
    We believe that free shelter is a basic need and right which must not be denied on any grounds. Landlords are capitalists, and, like all capitalists, are motivated only by the accumulation of profits, as opposed to the welfare of the people. Therefore, the system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  9. We want to abolish the existing judicial system. We want all third world and gay people when brought to trial, to be tried by a people’s court with a jury of their peers. A peer is a person from similar social, economic, geographical, racial, historical, environmental, and sexual background. We believe that the function of the judicial system under capitalism is to uphold the ruling class and keep the masses under control. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  10. We want the reparation for and release of all third world, gay and all political prisoners from jails and mental institutions.
    We believe that these people should be released because they have not received a fair and impartial trial. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  11. We want the abolition of capital punishment, all forms of institutional punishment, and the penal system.
    We want the establishment of psychiatric institutions for the humane treatment and rehabilitation of criminal persons as decided by the people’s court. We want the establishment of a sufficient number of free and non-compulsory clinics for the treatment of sexual disturbances, as defined by the individual. We believe that the system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  12. We want an immediate end to the fascist police force.
    We believe that the only way this can be accomplished is by putting the defense of the people in the hands of the people. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  13. We want all third world and gay men to be exempt from compulsory military service, in the imperialist army. We want an end to military oppression both at home and abroad.
    We believe that the only true army for oppressed people is the people’s army and third world, gay people, and women should have full participation in the People’s Revolutionary Army. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  14. We want an end to all institutional religions because they aid in genocide by teaching superstition and hatred of third world people, homosexuals and women. We want a guarantee of freedom to express natural spirituality.
    We believe that institutionalized religions are an instrument of capitalism, therefore an enemy of the People. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

  15. We demand immediate non-discriminatory open admission/membership for radical homosexuals into all left-wing revolutionary groups and organizations and the right to caucus. We believe that so-called comrades who call themselves “revolutionaries” have failed to deal with their sexist attitudes. Instead they cling to male supremacy and therefore to the conditioned role of oppressors. Men still fight for the privileged position of man-on-the-top. Women quickly fall in line behind-their-men. By their counterrevolutionary struggle to maintain and to force heterosexuality and the nuclear family, they perpetuate decadent remnants of capitalism. To gain their anti-homosexual stance, they have used the weapons of the oppressor, thereby becoming the agent of the oppressor.

    It is up to men to realistically define masculinity, because it is they who, throughout their lives, have struggled to gain the unrealistic roles of “men.” Men have always tried to reach this precarious position by climbing on the backs of women and homosexuals. “Masculinity” has been defined by capitalist society as the amount of possessions (including women) a man collects, and the amount of physical power gained over other men. Third world men have been denied even these false standards of “masculinity.” Anti-homosexuality fosters sexual repressions, male-supremacy, weakness in revolutionary drive, and results in an inaccurate non-objective political perspective. Therefore, we believe that all left-wing revolutionary groups and organizations must immediately establish non-discriminatory, open admission/membership policies. The system must be changed. Socialism is the answer.

We want a new society — a revolutionary socialist society. We want liberation of humanity, free food, free shelter, free clothing, free transportation, free healthcare, free utilities, free education, free art for all. We want a society where the needs of the people come first. We believe that all people should share the labor and products of society, according to each one’s needs and abilities, regardless of race, sex, ange, or sexual preferences. We believe the land, technology, and the means of production belong to the people, and must be shared by the people collectively for the liberation of all.

REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM IS THE ANSWER.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
⊱


Communism for fags!

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