> Brian writes:
>
> "I think a lot of revolutionary thought is intentionally desexualized,
> which often renders it homophobic."
>
> I never read anything in Marx or Engels or Lenin that would lead me to
> think that revolutionary thought is intentionally desexualized. In
> fact, if anything is traditionally associated/celebrated/feared about
> "communism," it's "free sex."
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx takes a sexual relation, the "relation of man to woman," as exemplifying the extent to which "species-being" has been actualized. A "species-being" is, among other things, a being having a will proper and a universal will, i.e. what Marx calls a "universally developed individual." The discussion illustrates the idea that human nature - the human "essence" - is the potential to escape having a "nature" in the conventional sense e.g. the ability to escape the determination of will by instinct.
The passage is found in a context in which one form of sexual feeling it mentions - "the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust" - is pointed to as exemplifying the brutish first form of "communism," a form that negates species-being i.e. "negates the personality of man in every sphere." This sexual feeling is associated by Marx with other unreasonable feelings - envy and greed. To some degree Kleinian psychoanalysis confirms and explains the association.
"In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man's relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature — his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man.
"From this relationship one can therefore judge man's whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man's natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence — the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man's need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need — the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
I've previously indicated what I think Marx means by a "social being." It's an actualized species-being.
Ted