[lbo-talk] Re: Question about Marx and homosexuality

[Michael Dawson]

Nice change of question.  Were there folks who, on sex, were more modern and
humane in the 1800s than Karl Marx?  Yes, of course.  So what?  The question
is why Marx's view matters.  He didn't challenge his era's flawed orthodoxy
on the topic, but neither did whatever homophobia he harbored affect
anything else he wrote, said, or did on the public level.  The topic is
simply not relevant to assessing work or legacy.  Neither is Marx's comment
on the issue highly relevant to the fight against homophobia today.  Only a
Marx basher or a Marx fetishizer would care what he said on the topic,
beyond a tiny drip of curiosity.

And, by the way, it isn't necessarily relativist to observe that people had
worse attitudes about sexuality in previous times.  See Cornel West.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of Michael Pugliese
> Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 4:52 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Question about Marx and homosexuality
> 
> On Mon, 27 Dec 2004 13:19:07 -0800, Michael Dawson <MDawson at pdx.edu>
> wrote:
> 
> > Why would anybody much care about what Marx said about sexuality
> > anyhow?  It
> > was the 1800s!
> 
>     Well on that bit of relativism to excuse retrograde 'tudes ignore
> these
> other socialists and radical democrats from that century with progressive
> sexual politics, Edward Carpenter or Walt Whitman.See Jeffrey Weeks's
> Coming Out. Homosexual Politics in Britain from the 19th Century to the
> Present (1979) for chapters on Carpenter.
> --
> Michael Pugliese
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