Queer Is Total, Baby!

Toward a Communist Universalism and the Militancy We Desire

Ira Hybris and Ricci Galiano

June 27, 2025

This text is part of a debate among militants in the current articulation of the communist movement in Spain. The authors belong to the queer dissident caucus, Anticapitalistas, a revolutionary Marxist organization historically rooted in Trotskyism and whose perspective on gender liberation is rooted in queer Marxism and social reproduction feminism. With the closing of the previous political cycle—characterized by the failure of the radical left to implement an institutional hypothesis as well as other phenomena such as the feminist reinvention of the strike—socialists are experiencing an opening for new tactical and strategic reflection. In this context, various tendencies, organizations, and collectives are providing new frameworks for communist politics within and against the present, with disagreements as to what direction should be taken. In light of this, we are seeing many Marxist comrades adopting a class-reductionist perspective which posits that any struggle other than that of “The Proletariat” (singular, masculine and with a capital P) is an obstacle to class unity and the horizon of revolution. This, of course, implies a rejection of LGBTQIA+, feminist, antiracist, antiableist movements along with other struggles against oppression that are not strictly communist. This rejection is often made in the name of totality. This article contests such reductionist readings of totality, calling instead for a queer Marxism that, in the words of Marx, posits class unity as a unity of the diverse.¹

Anticapitalism and Queerness

I still remember fondly those Saturday afternoons when you could relish in the hope of taking full advantage of the weekend, even as the responsibilities of school (the place we’re being groomed to join the exploited labor force) loomed close. On those afternoons, especially the rainy and gloomy ones that made going outside prohibitive, I used to play with a puzzle that I inherited. Its cover (yellowed from age) had distorted the image in such a way that it was almost unrecognizable, but the pieces themselves were preserved almost intact. So, I spent my time with that puzzle, arranging it almost blindly, amusing myself by playing around with combinations until…a complete picture.

There is a historical tension between queer struggles and socialist politics. On the one hand, a revolutionary strategy against capital necessitates a program for the seizure of power, and the unity of all the proletarians of the world in their immense diversity, which is not a given. On the other hand, the self-organization of sexual and gender dissidents within the working class suggests that any anticapitalist militancy that sacrifices these different, concrete forms of experience of oppression and resistance runs several risks. First, it risks becoming hostile to many comrades who are dispossessed of the means of production (since the international proletariat is and has always been less white, masculine and cisheterosexual than we can imagine). Secondly, it runs the risk of neglecting certain viewpoints—forged in the heat of class struggle—that reveal hidden domains of capitalist domination in its historical development, denaturalizing bourgeois social relations embodied in all people and relationships; relationships which make up the daily reproduction of the world as it exists. That is, it runs the risk of neglecting our very reproduction as exploited people, rendering us incapable of determining the future of our own lives.

More precisely, this political tension emerges around the issue of totality. The aim of communist struggle, the “real movement that abolishes the present state of things” in Marx’s words, is to emancipate humanity and life as a whole through revolution. In other words, it is a universalist horizon, aimed at breaking all the chains and social forms of oppression experienced by all people.² Far from merely a productive transformation—a view commonly referred to as “economistic”—communism radically supersedes and expands all existing relations. Challenging a common, false separation in the workers’ movement about relations such as sexuality, gender, or race, we demonstrate that these are as ingrained in the capitalist world order as the relations of exploitation between boss and worker.

To say that we are communists aspiring to totality implies we are inclined to “leave no proletarian behind” in the construction of a classless society free of domination. This impulse to leave no proletarian behind is a precondition for the very process of building a classless society free of domination. This is due to two rather simple reasons:

First, the reproduction of the capitalist class (that is, the maintenance of the conditions of production and the subjectivity of the exploited) incorporates into its a multiplicity of social relations and institutionalized divisions. In this sense, we cannot confront capital as it exists without attending to the historical forms through which it is perpetuated: a gendered and international-imperialist division of labor, debt, and the plunder and accumulation by dispossession of indigenous lands; the devaluation and alterity of queer, disabled, racialized and migrant bodies—of those who are imprisoned, marked as surplus population, or who expand the industrial reserve army, who experience colonial occupation, genocide, securitization of states, and growing authoritarianism; and so on.

Second, the working class does not all live and perceive domination in the same way, so that a multiplicity of viewpoints—not individual, but the collective result of diverse experiences of struggle—becomes necessary to even know the contours of the world to be abolished, or at least a provisional view with the least amount of blindspots.

For proof of this we can look to the fact that, although socialist politics have enjoyed centuries of history, it was not until very recently that, hand in hand with antipsychiatric, antiwork, and crip struggles, we have been able to appreciate the ways that capitalism has been and is an ableist system. This awareness is essential to bringing about its downfall. In other words, it is essential to building communism today; and not just any communism but one that, genuinely emancipatory, begins from the actually existing conditions in order to overcome them.

These positions do not exist in a vacuum, but rather are interconnected by the same process— the self-valorization of value—that orders other social relations under capitalism, always with the ultimate goal of guaranteeing its incessant accumulation. The proletarian class holds a strategic social position as a driving force (not to be confused with an overdetermination that denies our agency), since it is the bearer and potential seller of labor power—a singular commodity capable of producing more value than its cost. In this sense, it is the working class, those who participate directly or indirectly in the production of value, that acts as the requisite gear for the reproduction of capital and in whose hands lies the ability to put an end to it.

Consequently, the revolutionary subject of communist struggle is the proletariat in its totality. The white, male, cisheteronormative, neurotypical, securely waged, (and so on), Proletariat of the imperialist core—but also the migrant, feminized, racialized, queer, crazy, insecure, indigenous, precarious, from the Global South proletariat. This is very different from saying that “queer people,” “racialized people,” or “women” in and of themselves make up a revolutionary subject with sufficient political means to make capital obsolete.

But does it mean that struggles against racial, gender, and sexual oppression and so forth should occupy a secondary place with respect to those on the shop floor? Does it mean that racialized, queer, and feminized proletarians should renounce their particular experiences, desires, and needs (often relative to members of their own class) in order to conform to a “universal” mold of the experience, desires, and needs of the Proletariat? Taking it a step further, does this mean that queer, feminist, and antiracist liberation movements do not challenge, enrich, and transform the whole of the world proletariat, as well as communism itself?

This is where the question of totality begins to take shape. Because as true as it is that the proletariat in its universality is the subject of the socialist revolution it is also the case that, historically, when we hear the word proletariat, we don’t always automatically think of its real diversity. Instead, in practice, it conjures up a particular image: the European male industrial working class, conveniently normative in its corporality, self-expression, desires and productivity. An image that, to reiterate, is an obstacle to communist praxis. Hence why we postulate the need for a queer anticapitalism necessary to achieve a Marxist politics of totality worthy of its name.

Queer Anticapitalism

The main hypothesis of a queer anticapitalism is that no aspect of capitalist life, including sexuality or gender, exists in isolation from its social formation.³ In other words, our bodies, self-expression, intimacy, and desires are not alien or external to the economic relations of this world, but are one of its many terrains of reproduction—and of antagonism. This does not mean that having a dissident gender identity, living in a nonmonogamous arrangement, or carrying out nonheteronormative erotic practices are, in and of themselves, acts of anticapitalist militancy; but neither is it to exist in an economically precarious context, to wake up at 6 a.m., or to depend on selling your labor force.

To say that we are communists aspiring to totality implies we are inclined to “leave no proletarian behind” in the construction of a classless society free of domination.

However, it does imply that queer liberationist struggles correspond to capitalist social relations and that these are intersected, like any instance of social conflict, by class struggle. That is, their content is neither inherently reactionary nor inherently revolutionary; their demands and horizons are not essentially linked to the reproduction of capital, nor to its overthrow; and, finally (but no less importantly) that class struggle is also a process that has to radically reformulate and transform the way in which sexuality and gender are experienced, since the social forms that queer militants rebel against (cisness, heteronormativity, and so on) are part of the very deployment of capital. In short, any process of struggle against existing forms of oppression—regardless of its initial limitations—highlights our political task as communists.

Returning to the previous example, perhaps questioning the gender binary, monogamy and normative sexuality (and its imposition, known as allonormativity) can and perhaps should be part of an anticapitalist militancy. In a satirical passage from The Politics of Everybody, queer Marxist theorist Holly Lewis states, correctly, that “a queer sex party is no more likely to disrupt capitalist production than a heteronormative grandmothers’ knitting circle.”⁴ But, does this mean that there is no place for queer kinky parties (or even knitting!) in the socialist struggle?

We argue that it does, in fact, make a lot of sense to build, in the course of the revolutionary struggle, spaces, or counterinstitutions that prefigure, or rehearse—if only partially—a life organized by and for our class on the basis of social relations opposed to capitalist hegemony. Sometimes all it takes is a small exercise of political imagination. In the face of the privatization of food, we organize people’s kitchens; in response to the commodification of tools, we organize utensil libraries; in the face of a lack of care within the family, we organize militant day-cares; in the face of the State fining individuals, we organize resistance boxes; in the face of segregationist capitalist education, we organize popular schools; in the face of real estate speculation, we squat blocks of unused flats; in the face of a lethal patent system, we share smuggled meds and hormones.

This is in no way at odds with the organized proletariat’s struggles for public health reforms, reproductive justice, housing, or demands against repression. Such struggles grow our capacities, achieve material victories, and enable us to gain organizational experience to ask for much more than this system can offer us. These are different tools and timelines of the same struggle. However, these prefigurative practices are not in themselves an anticapitalist means. To become that, they have to be connected to a broader revolutionary strategy, as well as to the ongoing struggles of the working class and against all oppression. In this way, such “rehearsals” of communism can become hopeful glimpses through which we can not only ponder, but begin to experience, that another world is possible. And, above all, that it is the working class itself that has the ability to nourish it into existence.

But is it feasible to transfer this proletarian self-experimentation to the terrain of gender and sexuality? According to our comrade Peter Drucker, queer anticapitalism seeks to recapture the liberationist impulses of the 1960s and 1970s, when “radical politics embraced the totality of human experience, including its most intimate aspects and the most despised and marginalized sectors of society.”⁵ This means to make sexual and gender liberation a process of emancipation that extends to the rest of the working class. From this perspective, there is no reason to exclude erotic and nonbinary counterhegemony from the prefigurative practices that the socialist struggle can carry out. Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch. Let’s look at some concrete examples.

La Antiga Massana was a space under popular control in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona, located in a building that once housed the local art school. This space, which housed very active neighbourhood groups and autonomous initiatives, including the the Socialist Union of Catalonia (Sindicat d’Habitatge Socialista de Catalunya) and the Young Socialists of Catalonia (Organització Juvenil Socialista de Catalunya or OJS), had a political orientation explicitly opposed to capitalism. Faced with the threat of eviction by the city council, among their most creative tools of struggle were two drag parties under the name of La concedida. This name was a deliberate choice. It alluded to the demand (that we signed on to) for the concession of a space dedicated to the self-organization, cultural production and leisure of the working class.⁶ The event was conceived of as much more than simply entertainment or a spectacle to attract a large audience. We argue that La concedida frames sexual and gender dissidence within class struggle. When queer, drag performers like Jéssica Pulla hold a “Stop speculation” sign or Goliarda Parda wave a red flag, these are instances of proletarian political subjectivity undergoing a transformation. In those moments there is something about queer lives and practices that is no longer so alien to the rest of their comrades in struggle—that can be celebrated (and perhaps even desired) by the working class as a whole.

Shifting now to our own situation, a similar and possibly more ambitious process (in that it invites more active involvement) took place on the open LGBTQIA+ night of the Revolutionary Youth Camps of the Fourth International. One of us had the opportunity to present at the final rally of that militant evening and read the following words, which reflect the prefigurative potential of queer anticapitalist leisure:

We want to think of this party as a political laboratory in which we create new relationships and desires together. Because we want to show that we can build, through communist militancy, the conditions that make it even ephemerally possible to explore a freedom denied by capital. And to do so while fighting to abolish the real conditions that make it impossible for the whole of the working class to experiment and enjoy outside the norm.

The political value of the queer night of Campas lies in the ability to sustain an internationalist Marxist space that enables free, collective self-exploration through militant work. It’s a space where you can confront social norms alongside your comrades, knowing that reciprocity is at the center, and there is nothing you should do or wear if you are not comfortable with it, and at the same time maximizing the possibilities and avenues of desire. The queer socialist theorist Bini Adamczak captures this vision very well in one of her texts: “The circulation of mouths, hands, bums. In ever-changing cycles, on seldom taken paths. There is little fear of touching and little fear of being untouched. No one has to be included, no one should have to remain excluded. The gender of origin may be left at home.”⁷ Here is a powerful picture of what it can mean to rehearse, here and now, an erotic and nonbinary communist counterhegemony. However, it is clear that at the moment these types of experiments and initiatives are a very small minority position within the whole of the anticapitalist movement in Spain.

If we start from the fact that, through a queer anticapitalist lens, our bodies, self-expressions, intimacies, and desires are not alien or external to given economic relations (that is, that the capitalist production and regulation of bodies, self-expression, intimacy, and desires affects all people), why is the critique of normativity in practice presented to us as so counterintuitive, even absurd, as far as a communist program is concerned? Why would the spontaneous, perhaps not vocalized, reaction of some of our comrades be a “let’s cut the faggotry and focus on what’s important”? The important thing here being only that which “affects us all.” This brings us back once again to the problem of totality.

Queer liberationist struggles correspond to capitalist social relations, and these are intersected, like any instance of social conflict, by class struggle.

Social life under capitalism becomes visible to us in an atomized, fragmented way, separating us from the social relations that shape us as people on a regular basis. In other words, the ways of making sense of reality that are historically available to us often do not correspond with the full picture of reality. Let us try to draw parallels between this hypothesis and that memory of trying to solve a puzzle on a rainy afternoon. Capitalist society provides us with such an atomized vision of the world that, like a puzzle, we tend to focus on the characteristics of a singular piece at a time. We might analyze the piece’s contents, its colors, or what we can make out from the traces of the image, its particular shape, size, edges, and so on. In isolation, this piece may well seem like an entity on its own, as independent as it is unique. This process, by which different existing social relations (race, gender, class position, ability, and so on) are presented as unconnected to each other and to capitalist accumulation, are what Marxists call reification. Therefore, when we observe our reality spontaneously—without mediation—it is easy for us to become convinced that there is nothing more to be perceived than tiny, disjointed fragments. Are any two pieces in a puzzle ever identical? The answer is obviously, no, two pieces in a puzzle are never the same in their shape or in their content. Reification thus helps us understand that a significant portion of the proletarian class is not ignorant to their conditions of exploitation, but in how they come to know them.

For our purposes, the reification of gender and sexuality is usually accompanied by a process of naturalization of their dominant historical forms: cisness, the nuclear family, and monogamous, vanilla heterosexuality. According to Holly Lewis, one of capitalism’s hegemonic positions is the idea that what you believe to exist within yourself is what is natural and eternal. Consequently, she argues, “if normativity means anything, it must mean the reification and naturalization of what most benefits capital accumulation.”⁸ Of course, the reification of our experiences and subjectivities has political consequences. On the one hand, this fragmented appearance of social life is largely responsible for the fragmentation of struggles against oppression. On the other hand, it accounts for the unfortunate ascendency we are currently experiencing of class-reductionist anticapitalism. In practice, this latter tendency asks us to focus on just one piece of the puzzle, to the detriment of all the others. Faced with this atomized scenario, we queer communists oppose such a politics of totality.

Queering Totality

As far as the queer movement is concerned, articulating a politics of totality means generally rejecting it as our starting point. This objection is not flippant on our part, nor should it reinforce the notion that there is a tendency on the part of working-class queers to recoil from mass socialist politics. Rather, it is an invitation to the communist movement to carry out a reparative exercise of self-criticism. Though it presents itself as a universalist, emancipatory horizon, the workerist notion of totality has, too often in our recent history, concealed specific forms of domination: racism, misogyny, ableism, cisheterosexism, and so on. Moreover, countless Marxist organizations and militants have, for centuries, proposed a totalizing worldview of class relations that has in practice relegated the issues of gender and sexuality to the “merely cultural” realm, in the words of Judith Butler.⁹ Going against the grain here, thinking with totality suggests to us a questioning of the marginalization of any oppressed group with respect to the prevalence of capitalist society.

Seven years ago, an essay entitled La trampa de la diversidad (The Diversity Trap), which gained traction with the radical left, was published in our state.¹⁰ The main hypothesis of this book (at least our hopefully generous reading of it) was that symbolic transformations in the realm of identity politics were a sneaky way for neoliberals to dismantle the workers’ movement, by way of left-wing politics, stripping it of its political structures and subjectivities, moving it away from a redistributive agenda, and impeding class unity itself. This thesis was based primarily on an analysis of identity politics in its most hypercommodified forms such as the representation of queer and racialized people on large streaming platforms. It was a text that, more or less intentionally, inherited the view of struggles around sexuality and gender as particularistic and merely cultural. Thus, from the subtext of this book emerged a concrete idea of solidarity as “focusing on what unites us (class) and not on our differences (race, sexuality, gender, etc).” As queer Marxist theorist Ashley Bohrer points out, this type of coalition, based on the lowest common denominator, has been dominant among a large sector of the labor movement.¹¹

Taking this to the terrain of sexual and gender dissidence, this line of reasoning is one that many of us have heard from well-intentioned comrades: “it doesn’t matter who you sleep with or how you dress if you suffer the same exploitation as me.” The person speaking most likely has no intention of justifying racism or misogyny in the name of unity of the exploited against the exploiters. However, this position relies on a mechanical articulation of solidarity, in which the shared struggle for a set of common material goals on its own should bring about a leap of consciousness capable of dissipating the reactionary prejudices and material differences that exist within the working class—that is, eliminating the need for a political intervention which is specifically antiracist, transfeminist, antiableist, ecosocialist, and so on.

While the political value of experiences of shared struggle is undeniable, when it comes to combating reactionary convictions, Marxist totality must be understood as something diametrically opposed to unity in spite of diversity (the movie Pride is an excellent example of such an alliance between miners and queer activists). In Grundrisse, Marx is suspicious of the idea that the totality of capitalist life can be perceived in a univocal and finite way, since the “totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can,” which is inevitably conditioned, limited, and situated in a specific location within that social totality.¹²

This implies, in practice, that the social position of a subject (whose mind thinks about the whole) circumscribes what anyone can know about that whole. As queer, antiracist, antiableist, and other struggles have shown, some subjects are capable of perceiving characteristics of the world that are obscure to others. In this way, a particular point of view can reveal a universal image.

To use a simile, the same city can be perceived in very different ways. To a normative man, its streets at dusk may not elicit any sense of danger and may even offer a desirable sense of serenity. However, it is possible that for a woman or feminized subject this same scene causes some anxiety and a need to stay alert, for fear of exposing themselves to an unpleasant or violent situation. It is no coincidence that we women and queer people often prefer to travel with a companion when returning home in the wee hours of the morning. Similarly, a white person with wages and citizenship may consider the metropolitan area a welcoming space of freedom of movement, while, to someone who is undocumented, migrant, racialized, and outside the formal economy (such as a street vendor or a sex worker), those same avenues might represent arbitrary identifications and police harassment. That some people do not see that darker side of the city doesn’t mean it isn’t there. These diverse experiences, taken together, offer a complete picture of the city complete with the potential nighttime intimidation of women and dissidents as well as repression and racist harassment. In other words, in order to get the most accurate picture of reality we need to adopt the point of view of women, queer people, migrants, racialized people, and people outside the formal economy.

As queer, antiracist, antiableist, and other struggles have shown, some subjects are capable of perceiving characteristics of the world that are obscure to others. In this way, a particular point of view can reveal a universal image.

So, concrete totality can only be understood as composed of these multiple realities and relations rather than a preconceived notion about class struggle. Far from being, in the words of the Marxist theorists Zoe Sutherland and Marina Vishmidt (rest in power), an undifferentiated whole—a kind of prefabricated solution to historical divisions—the communist totality must be reconstructed through differences. In fact, this is how Marx put it: “The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”¹³ Should we try to to compare various forms of oppressions in an attempt to systematize them (say, patriarchy) to an abstract totality (say capitalism, but without paying attention to its specific relationship with patriarchal domination), we would be acting no differently than someone who, hoping to make a solid circle, draws only its contour and leaves the surface blank.

This last point is lucidly expressed in the critique of Sutherland and Vishmidt:

The marginalization of ‘identity politics’ not only renders their reproduction difficult to grasp, but it also turns capital into an abstract, and fetishized, totality…Rather than seeing the particulars as interconnected, as constitutive of and systematically produced by capital, both ‘capital’ and ‘identity’ are instead theorized as fetishized forms, whose interrelation becomes difficult to articulate.¹⁴

This is also why communists should not abandon the revolutionary aspiration behind intersectional critique, which is none other than being able to name each of the oppressions of this system. Ironically, in those long lists that often provoke the ridicule and disdain of the traditional left (racial-heteropatriarchal-capitalist-colonial-imperialist-ableist-speciesist and so on) beats the same totalizing impulse that once inspired Marx. Because when we begin to stack our puzzle pieces and stop to analyze their shape, we observe that what seemed like just an outline actually reveals something more complex. The pieces have edges, edges with peculiar shapes. When we compare these multiple, jumbled pieces, we can begin to see hints that there exist connections between them. This is the viewpoint of intersectionality. While we can continue to see our pieces as autonomous, we should also recognize that they can be connected to each other and that doing so produces new configurations. Intersectionality is and has been crucial as opposition to an atomized viewpoint, requiring us to understand that the way of observing any phenomenon or structure of capital remains incomplete as long as it does not aspire to find its points of connection to others.

However, anyone who has ever played with a puzzle knows that, in order to solve it, it is often not enough to connect it at the edges. When we begin to match pieces together, these matches hint at continuities between their contents, showing that the pieces are not, in fact, autonomous. The pieces only have meaning in relation to others. All of them connected is what produces a finished image; to drive home the metaphor, that image is capitalism as a totality. The complete puzzle shows us an image that is produced by the sum of each and every one of its pieces. However, if we distance ourselves enough from the puzzle, we will see that there is a virtual image that is superimposed on this sum of pieces, in which we can no longer distinguish the edges. This is its abstract content. And it is none other than the image that appears printed on the cover or the back of the puzzle box which, during the building process, we compare our product to over and over again until the enigma is solved. The major problem that we face as communists is that we find ourselves building an immense puzzle without the complete picture because capital deprives us of such a vision.

We could say that the task of every communist has been—and still is—to contribute to this great puzzle that we are constructing with our successes and mistakes; in the absence of the complete image we are destined to approach the task of communism not only through radical collectivity but as a broad and diverse class subject. For the greater the knowledge of its different pieces, the sooner we will come to put them together in the most precise way. The sooner we arrive at the total picture—a new revolutionary subjectivity—the sooner it is possible to totally defeat capital. Every militant intervention wherever the class struggle unfolds—whether in the absence of spaces for revolutionary leisure, in a wage dispute, in the alteration of a neighborhood by a road detour, in the felling of a forest for commercial purposes, in systemic racial violence, or in the expulsion by design of proletarians who resist becoming (voluntarily or not) capable subjects in the sale of their labor power—places us in front of a piece of our puzzle. At the same time, each piece, each beautiful (for the class struggle can be beautiful even in its cruelest harshness) fragment-turned-conflict is ready to act as a gateway to totality. And if our task did not in itself already seem difficult, we have one more challenge. Although the finished image remains the same, the puzzle is in a process of continuous mutation. Its number of pieces, edges and shapes are in constant change, recombining and reorganizing themselves in a dynamic and contradictory way, which requires a constant updating of our political work.

Thus, the fundamental conclusions we draw are: first, that it is not enough to have an abstract and reductionist knowledge of capital. Rather, it is necessary to study it in its concrete incarnation under equally concrete material circumstances and historical contingencies; second, that any fragment which attacks a part of the proletariat necessarily sustains our collective vulnerability, affecting the whole (the vulnerability of sexual and gender dissident reveals the painful vulnerability that harms all dispossessed subjects, including those who make up the norm); and third, that overcoming each particularity requires, in reality, the liberation of the entire proletariat.

Historically, an aspiration to totality has been considered an inherent characteristic of class politics, as opposed to the alleged fragmentation of so-called identity politics. However, as we have shown, the reality is more complex. On many occasions class politics have masked a violently particularized struggle: think, for example, of the workers’ demand for a family wage which in practice meant the expulsion of proletarian women from social production, or of the stigma against the pétroleuses in the Paris Commune and against militia sex workers in the Spanish Civil War and workers’ insurrections […].¹⁵ Consequently, certain configurations of so-called identity politics harbor an inadvertently totalizing desire, insofar as they denounce and reveal a false universalism.

The “universal” revolutionary man who would come to mark most of the anticapitalist politics of the twentieth century was shaped by orthodox Marxism’s identification of the industrial working class (which was assumed to be white and male) as the only subject capable of challenging class domination.¹⁶ Certainly, to universalize the experience of the industrial worker as the quintessence of belonging to the proletarian class implied, among other misfortunes, the exclusion of all impoverished housewives and enslaved black people, whose daily activities (whose alienation was equal if not greater than that of those in the productive sector) was carried out on a nonwaged basis. In this way, the workers’ movement, automatically identified with “class politics,” emerged as the first of the identity politics: workerism, which did, in fact, fragment the working class on the basis of respectability.

Class unity is not a given. It must be built, day-by-day, in open struggle against all forms of oppression.

Faced with workerist and class-reductionist positions, a Marxist politics of totality allows us to explore how capitalist imperatives weave together racist, misogynist, cisheteronormative, ableist, imperialist, and environmentally destructive social relations. However, within the working class there are specific positions of rebellion against these capitalist social relations. We must be open to the possibility that the communist totality of our time, if we can talk about one as such, is trans, queer, Black, Latina, Asian, indigenous, feminized, crazy, disabled, ecosocialist, and so on—at least until the day when these categories become redundant.

In The Politics of Everybody this affirmation is explored through a crystalline example:

[In the face of] the liberal/conservative desire to ‘correct’ the hashtag #blacklivesmatter into the hashtag #alllivesmatter. In the aftermath of a procession of police murders of Black people, only the phrase ‘Black lives matter’ can possibly reflect the sentiment that ‘all lives matter’ because Black lives are precisely the lives that are being treated as if they do not matter.¹⁷

In this specific case, the word “all” is a hindrance to a politics of totality, which requires the concrete experience of and resistance to the oppression of “Black lives”—and, as was reflected in numerous banners during the George Floyd rebellion, “Black trans lives”—in response to the outrageous number of murders and tortures against this oppressed group by the police and the prison industrial complex.

Thus, Marxist totality allows us to think about the relationship between the universal and the particular from a new lens. On October 7, after a year of escalating genocide in Gaza, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine shared a poster that read “Palestine liberates the world” on a torch and two rifles. This order of words is very important, since it is not “the world,” the universal concept par excellence, that liberates Palestine, a particular territory, but the other way around.

This, of course, does not mean that the international working class should watch impassively as a televised massacre unfolds, expecting the best outcome for a revolutionary horizon while sitting idly. It also does not mean that each one of us, communists from far and near, do not have immediate political tasks in our own territories. On the contrary, to say that Palestine liberates the world implies that a battle is being waged against all existing forms of oppression and domination in the struggle and resistance of the Palestinian people, but also that no action of solidarity with Palestine can be taken to its last consequences without confronting the structures of oppression by the states who take over our lives (especially in the imperialist core).

Echoing a recent intervention by queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar: “What happens in Palestine has to do with the future of all people. The state of Israel is rehearsing in the Middle East what will happen to the disposable population in all parts of the world. Whether or not Palestine is victorious, whether its people are liberated, how and when they are liberated, are questions that matter to all of us.”¹⁸ Palestine becomes a point of view that reveals a picture of the violent workings of racial capitalism as a whole. And in doing so, it shows us the way in which its emancipation depends on a tactical escalation of the class struggle on a global level, how advances in every local struggle against oppression impact reciprocally on Palestine. How, in the words of alQaws militants, queer liberation requires the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea and vice versa. That is what totality means.

This perspective invites us to redefine the relationship between the communist movement and partial struggles against oppression, starting from a position of humility that moves away from the moral superiority that we have had in our recent past. It is not about our spaces of militancy merely tolerating, accepting or even promoting the participation of queer, disabled, racialized, migrant comrades from a liberal logic that imposes a one-dimensional character on us. Nor is it, in our opinion, about a mechanistic wait for these comrades to abandon their current spaces of struggle with a crossclass ideological composition such as the feminist, antiracist, antiableist and LGBTQIA+ movements while, most of the time, the actually existing revolutionary movement has still only barely brushed an analysis of sexual and gender oppression, ableism, and race—analysis that these “identity politics” movements have been broadly developing, albeit with undeniable limitations. It is, instead, a matter of queering, disabling and decolonizing the daily struggle of communists, of understanding that such expressions of liberation actually contain an emancipatory potential open to all the oppressed and exploited of the earth and, ultimately, to be open to the possibility of these expressions of class struggle altering our own sense of the world and even of the revolution itself.

This, in turn, involves disputing a very set-in-stone idea within our ranks, that queer struggles are limited to the particular experience of a minority of people. If, in manifesting our revolutionary commitment to sexual and gender liberation, we find proletarian comrades who do not consider themselves potential participants in this horizon, it is worth asking: are sexuality and gender not present in the lives of all working class people? Are those proletarians who do not currently identify as LGBTQIA+ not deserving of self-determination and unconfining their bodies, self-expressions, intimacies, and desires? We believe they are and, for this reason, we consider that continuing to define queerness as a small group of individuals who are separated and even opposed, in an essentialist way from (those read as) cis and heterosexual is not politically operational. Instead, queerness names those people and practices in most direct conflict with a set of social relations. The relations in charge of producing and regulating the bodies and desires of all people under capitalism.

In fact, queerness as a tactical position does not even have to be reduced to people who identify as LGBTQIA+. In her brilliant critique “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens,” queer, Black, proletarian writer Cathy J. Cohen proposes to extend the subject of queer struggle to all sexualities, bodies, and genders deemed unacceptable and disposable by capitalist states. Starting from the violent state control over Black mothering, as well as the eugenic (genocidal) and forced sterilization policies against Puerto Rican and Native American women, she suggests that it is not enough to be read as heterosexual in order to benefit from the privilege of the white middle-class heterosexual norm. Suggestively, Cohen adds: “Who, we might ask, is truly on the outside of heteronormative power–maybe most of us?”¹⁹ In this way, queerness is one of many tools needed in the struggle to build a communist universalism.

Queering Class Solidarity

So, a communist politics of totality urges us to practice a very different form of revolutionary solidarity. In capitalist society as it exists, it certainly does matter how you dress, who you sleep with, the color of your skin, your gender presentation, where in the world you were born, whether you are undocumented, or if you are a person marked as disabled, among many other things. To put this diverse reality aside on the basis of a common experience of exploitation is not exactly an act of camaraderie. Class unity is not a given. It must be built, day-by-day, in open struggle against all forms of oppression. When a self-organized movement returns a divided picture of the proletariat, it is actually showing us the way forward. For we must fully commit to the abolition of all social relations that currently separate the working class, recognizing our differences and embracing them as fertile ground for the struggle. Solidarity means taking sides. For this reason, we argue that the process must inescapably be transfeminist, antiracist, anticolonial, antiableist, and so on.

The most recent episodes of the class struggle show us an ever-increasing presence of a diverse proletariat, confronting the ghosts of whiteness, neurotypicality, cisheteronormativity, and masculinity that still roam the halls of the communist movement. When we remember the student encampments in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we can observe the transformation of the class subject, opening up the possibility of an active role in the political struggle for our racialized, queer, and feminized comrades. It was precisely the dark-skinned (“prietas”), the trans* folks (“travas”) and the dissidents who emerged as the vanguard of the Argentine workers’ and antifascist struggle in the massive mobilization held on February 1 against the authoritarian government of Milei.²⁰

Let’s ask ourselves, then, in the presence of such diverse comrades in the trenches: What lives do they prefigure? What displacements are these creatures making in the socialist imagination? What kind of militancy emerges from their revolutionary desires?

We communists are building a politics of bread and roses, because we are not only fighting for a world without exploitation, but also for a life we desire. Hence, for us, the struggle against capital is also a call to remake the capability for desire of our class (in all senses). As queer Marxist theorist Alan Sears puts it, revolution is an erotic untimeliness—it consists of creating the circumstances in which new forms of life can be created from below through collective and democratic processes based on debate, but also on experimentation.²¹ Only in this way will we be able to recover the infinitely utopian power that the proletariat took on during the first years of the October Revolution, when it seemed possible to revive the dead, live with automatons, and take a walk around Mars. May neither hearts nor bodies starve again. ⊱

In this text we have tried to offer some notes, from a queer Marxist perspective, that help us forge a politics of totality. We do so with humility, open to critical debate and to the possibility that our hypotheses be overcome, but with the hope that they can serve in the reconstruction of a revolutionary internationalism and to nourish the struggle against all oppression. ♥

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Toward a Communist Universalism and the Militancy We Desire

Ira Hybris and Ricci Galiano

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Queer Anticapitalism

Queering Totality

Queering Class Solidarity

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