I would imagine that this headline caught your attention as somewhat odd. After all, Marxism is a social-economic theory and form of government and therefore not concerned with sexual norms, or is it? The truth is that many Marxist thinkers, from the beginning to today, have obsessed about sexuality in various ways.
Marxism and the Attack on the Family
While Karl Marx was in some ways a family man who remained married to his wife until her death, he was not faithful to her. His wife, Jenny, had a live-in maid, Helena Demuth. In 1851, Helena became pregnant with Karl’s child. To keep the marriage intact, Marx convinced his partner, Friedrich Engels, to claim the child as his own. Rather than provide for this child, Friedrich Demuth, the child was given to a working-class family to raise and was largely ignored and uneducated.[1]
However, Marx and Engel’s public statements were more antagonistic towards the family, which they saw as corrupting society. Engels, in his work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, blamed the monogamous, patriarchal family as the basis of social ills, saying that it created "the cellular form of civilized society."[2]
Their famous work, The Communist Manifesto, even calls for the abolition of the family because they believe that individuals should be bound to the larger society first and foremost. Marx and Engels argue that the concept of the family is based on the pursuit of private gain. They claim that parenting exploits children for the financial benefit of the parents. The Communist Manifesto even goes as far as to assert that marriage is really a mask for men to hold wives in common. Based on this assertion, it then calls for “in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women.”[3] This means that they think that men should share women but do it openly.
Behind much of their concerns, Marxists fear that the family undermines their broader social agenda by not only supporting private property, but private connections to other individuals. As a result, many Marxists have sought to undermine the family because family creates a bond to something other than the larger society and the state. Marx did argue that marriage should be based on love but also that marriages should only last as long as the couple were still in love, meaning that marriages should not be permanent, but temporary arrangements.[4]
The Frankfurt School Melded Marxism with Freudianism
It must be remembered that Traditional Marxism never worked, as Marx’s theory held that the workers (Proletariat) in an industrial society would rise up and take over the means of production, but this never happened. The only “Marxist” societies were in pre-industrial countries, including Russia, China, and Cuba. This, and related concerns, led to the formation of the Institute for Social Research in 1923 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany and which became known as the “Frankfurt School.” With the rise of Hitler, the institute was relocated to Columbia University in New York.[5]
One of the key goals of the Frankfurt School was to unite Marxist scholars across the academic disciplines in order to salvage and promote Marxism. These scholars understood that if they were going to fundamentally change Western Society, the whole social order would need to be undermined. This meant that all forms of hierarchy needed to be overthrown, as Marxism envisions a flat, egalitarian society as the ultimate good.[6] Within this group, Theodor W. Adorno followed the pattern set by the Communist Manifesto and attacked the “authoritarian family.” If the family was to be overturned, then sex and sexual expression had to be separated from the family, thus it became more focused on personal fulfillment.
From here, Frankfurt School theorists, Max Horkheimer and Erich Fromm united Marxism and Freudianism.[7] Since Freud viewed the sexual urge as central to the individual’s identity, this naturally moved Marxism into a more sexual direction.
In 1933 Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, developed the idea of sex economy to meld Marxism with Freudianism. Reich emphasized four aspects of Freud: 1) the subconscious as the locus of meaning, thought, and action; 2) sexualization of infancy and childhood; 3) sexual repression as central to parent-child relations; and 4) adult morality not as an absolute or transcendent realty, but derived from education. Reich then takes from Marxism the concept that ideas are the expression of historical circumstances to connect Freud’s thought to the political structures of society.[8] “It becomes apparent that it is not cultural activity itself which demands suppression and repression of sexuality, but only the present forms of this activity, and so one is willing to sacrifice these forms if by so doing the terrible wretchedness of children could be eliminated.”[9] It also appears that Reich, like many others, was working to create a theory that opened the door to wider acceptance of his own predilections, as even Freud considered Reich to be sex-obsessed.[10]
Much of the wider concern of the Marxists was the transformation of society to what they expected to be a more just society. When the Marxists imported sexuality into their social critiques, this meant that sexual transformation of society was now required for a political transformation. This melding of Freudianism and Marxism mean that for society to be transformed politically, it must first be transformed psychologically, and that included transforming society sexually.[11]
Marxian Thought and Sexuality
More recent thinkers tend to use a Marxist type of analysis of society but broaden it from just economic oppression to other forms of oppression. Many therefore call this Marxian rather than Marxist. As a result, many homosexuals and those of alternate sexual orientations have used this type of analysis to criticize society.
Since Marxism has always proclaimed itself to be the voice of the oppressed, it should not be surprising that many minorities, including sexual minorities, are attracted to Marxism. Likewise, virtually all Communist parties in the world have officially embraced homosexual rights as part of their platform. Many of the leading thinkers in this New Left are both Marxists and homosexuals, including early Gay rights advocate Harry Hay,[12] Judith Butler, Angela Davis,[13] and Michel Foucault.
As a result, there has been a curious melding of Marxism and sexual ethics in the New Left. For them, LGBTQ+ issues are presented as a Marxian critique of society. As Carl Trueman observed: “With the advent of the New Left, the revolutionary politics of Karl Marx took on a decidedly sexual form.”[14] This is why the modern idea that everything is political, including sexuality, has taken hold in our world.
[1] Stopping Socialism, “Remembering Karl Marx’s Abandoned Son, the First Victim of Communism,” Stopping Socialism, 17 June 2020, https://stoppingsocialism.com/2020/06/karl-marx-abandoned-child/.
[2] Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020), 235.
[3] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 28.
[4] Soma Marik, “Gender and Sexuality in Early Marxist Thought,” Proc. Indian Hist. Congr. 65 (2004): 950.
[5] Claudio Corradetti, “Frankfurt School and Critical Theory,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[6] Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin, Battle for the American Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2022), 109.
[7] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 231.
[8] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 232–33.
[9] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism ed. and trans. Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1970), 29. Emphasis original) quoted in Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 233.
[10] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 243.
[11] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 250.
[12] “7 Early Pioneers of the Gay Rights Movement,” HISTORY, 8 June 2023, https://www.history.com/news/early-lgbtq-activists.
[13] Theodore McDarrah, “5 LGBTQ Philosophers Every Leader Should Know,” Forbes, n.d., https://www.forbes.com/sites/teddymcdarrah/2021/06/22/5-lgbtq-philosophers-every-leader-should-know/.
[14] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 271.