'Adapt or Die?!

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A Response to Terry Sullivan
I for one welcome Terry Sullivan's recent contribution to the debate on sexuality. This welcome is not rooted in an overall agreement with his formulations but is rather aimed at his expansion of the discussion into a debate on the question of "primitive communism". Sullivan is correct to assert that debates over sexuality are not just debates about sexuality.

By asserting the importance of "primitive communism" in a debate about sexuality, Sullivan, perhaps unintentionally, acknowledges that any consideration of questions concerning the origins of oppression or conversely human self-expression, are integrally related to the overall project of revolutionary socialism. If "primitive communism" is a necessary component of any discussion on human sexuality, then sexuality and the politics and struggle against sexual oppression are an inherent concern to be answered by any meaningful political project aimed at human emancipation. To paraphrase, there will be no communism without true liberation from sexual oppression, and there will be no true sexual liberation without communism.

Furthermore, Sullivan's revealing of the intersection between a communist political project and a historical understanding of human sexuality and sexual practices touches on a fundamental question for a marxist political project: that is the theorization of agency in the context of history. Karl Marx himself conjures up an evocative and deceptively simple, yet endlessly fruitful explanation of the relationship between agency and history;

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. (Marx, 1852)

For Marx, the dialectic of history, the balance between the attempt by revolutionary struggles to found the world anew has to rely upon a language of liberation written in words and dialects borrowed from the world which those revolutionary forces are themselves in struggle with. This means that old heroes, inspiring myths, and moments of the past now mired in legend are all evoked in order to confer a sense of meaning to a process that is itself being forged out of a precarious attempt to do things in a different way. It is Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish writer and theologian who argued that revolutionary struggles do not only change the future, but that there are a tiger's leap into the past which redeems the dead who have previously fallen in the battlefields of class struggle. Names long forgotten are spoken again, past victories recelebrated, and the history of the oppressed classes becomes recognized as human history itself. Rosa Luxembourg understood this in less high-handed way when she wrote that

Because of the contradiction in the early stages of the revolutionary process between the task being sharply posed and the absence of any preconditions to resolve it, individual battles of the revolution end in formal defeat. But revolution is the only form of war and this is another peculiar law of history in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats. (Luxembourg, 1919)

The revolutionary struggle is therefore not only a struggle to relieve ourselves from the immediate muck and squalor of a system built on exploitation and alienation, it is also a historical process that will illuminate in it's victory the contingent nature of class society. In this sense, what we call communism is the inevitable outcome of a successful revolutionary workers movement, but the importance for us as revolutionaries here and now is that this victory is not guaranteed by anything other than the activity of the workers themselves. So, whilst we know where we are heading, we cannot predict if, or when, and perhaps how, we will get there.

This is what is meant when Marx states "communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" (Marx, 1845). Communism is not therefore a predestined formation, or state-of-being, but an active process created by the selfactivity of the exploited classes leading oppressed groups in their struggle against the forms of oppression and exploitation that dominate them. This process of struggle is one marked by inventiveness clothed as repetition, improvisation rooted in class instinct, and which ultimately must result in the widening participation of those subject to societies inequalities in governing society itself. The role of revolutionaries is not only to lead that revolution, as if the masses were not able to themselves, but to act as the memory and expression of self-consciousness that struggle creates in workers at both an individual and collective level. It is not conscious

revolutionaries aiming towards it that makes communism appear to become a 'state-of-being', but the mastery of the masses over their own fate meaning that "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (Marx, 1848). The role of revolutionaries is to perform the function of the midwife for this new society, advocating for likely courses of events, explaining the frequency of painful spasms and the rhythm of action and rest, and standing ever vigilant in concern and solidarity.

"Primitive communism" as a concept is another borrowed notion. It is attempt to read into historically dissimilar, and a vastly politically different circumstances, a justification for a project rooted in a genuine desire for untempered human liberation. By striving for an echo in the past of something we long will come to be, we seek to ground a notion of 'communism' in an ahistorical human nature. If the original social life of humankind was one in which our full faculties were liberated, and all sensuous and worldly experience open to us, then it stands to reason that the natural state of humankind is one devoid of inequality, oppression and exploitation. When we hypothesize that what we call 'prehistoric' humanity lived in a state of communism, class society becomes the aberration, an artificial edifice born out of circumstance but not developed out of any innate qualities belonging to people themselves. This is a noble vision, but a quite unnecessary one.

If "primitive communism" was undone by the development of productive forces, at what point in this process was a conscious decision taken by one section of humanity to subjugate another? The point to stress here is that "primitive communism" did not drop from the heavens and blight humankind. When one group of humans sought to gain control over the surplus, this would have been a contested attempt. The movement from "primitive communism" to class society was therefore not just the result of technological advancement, but was predicated on an act of class struggle itself. When classes emerged on Earth, they did so already in struggle. To argue that the end to "primitive communism" resulted from changes in technology functions as a variant of technological determinism, albeit a dystopian version. Class society will have emerged organically from the way in which social behaviour modified in relation to the emergence of a surplus. Therefore, classes themselves, or rather the active agency of humans organized into classes was there from the moment that "primitive communism" is supposed to have ended. This means that classes were not an imposition from above by the sovereignty of advanced technology, but an organic development in the history of humankind, no less 'natural' than the "state-of-being" referred to as "primitive communism".

It is important to stress that class society is not an imposition on humanity but an organic development of history precisely because this then informs the commitment of revolutionaries to the political project of working class self emancipation. Rooting the creation of a new society,

founded on the carcass of the old, in the actions of a historically determined and contingent class relies on understanding that it is precisely through these temporary formations called classes that we are able to overcome longer term historical processes. The working class has agency, not because it has benevolent self-interests, but because it's struggle against the conditions of its own historical existence as subjugated, exploited and oppressed changes those conditions so as to eradicate them. In so doing, the class overcomes the events of history that have lead to it finding itself in struggle with a ruling class. When the working class fights against capital, it is also fighting against the very same historical conditions that made it working class in the first place. As Marx himself explains;

"All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property." (Marx, 1848)

So, the victory of workers over capital leading to the creation of a new order is not premised on the idea that in a long dead, unwritten time, we all lived in harmony, but in the active, necessary requirements of class struggle here-and-now. It is in our current struggles against those that oppress and exploit us that we will create our new ways of doing things. Whilst we will call back, and echo the voices of our best and past heroes and inspirations, we will be forced to face the task of building a new society consciously. Class struggle is then understood as an act of consent, without the certainty of any inherent natural proclivities. This is because human nature created classes as much as it was once before them and will exist after they are consigned to the history books.

Human nature is in an ongoing process of realization. With each moment of struggle, or each act of liberation, a new aspect of what we can term 'human nature' is revealed to have always been there. When the movements for gay liberation marched, they were not just there to represent a minority sexual persuasion, but were also marching into our theory a recognition of the inherent diversity and historical transformations that human sexual identity is capable of performing. The presence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans* and asexual peoples in our society here-and-now necessitates a rethinking of human nature in opposition to classic forms of bourgeois morality that only recognized heterosexual love and desire as real and natural. It is not that nonheterosexual identities are a tolerated or celebrated minority, rather, we must come to terms

with the fact that what is often historically held to be a 'common-sense' notion of 'natural' sex versus sex which is 'unnatural' breaks down. When gay people marched for liberation, they changed history.

This means rooting any conception of sexuality in a narrative that allies the historical emergence of sexual practices in biological necessity leaves itself open to one fatal flaw - when a new struggle for the liberation of a previously unrecognized mode of consensual sexual expression begins to assert itself as a political struggle for recognition and rights, revolutionaries who base a conception of sexuality on what they consider to be the 'natural' or 'evolutionary' development of humanity as a species will lag behind in understanding the actions of humankind as a conscious historical being capable of erecting it's own desires in thought better than any ape can achieve pleasure in practice.

Accepting a notion of "primitive communism" as a 'state-of-being' more natural than class society alienates agency from the very same classes that could eventually overturn the histories of oppression that preceded their existence. Isolating sexuality in the 'natural' replication of humanity as a species condemns human sexuality to the fulfilment of biochemical processes, even if we accept that we don't care about the gender, or lack thereof, of the consenting sexual partners involved.

When we are considering the relation between underlying laws of motion and their manifestation in practice we are encountering the question of the tension between immanence and transcendence. These two terms roughly correlate to the immediate physical objects we experience through our senses, and the scientific laws (biological, chemical and physical) that govern the motion and interaction of these objects. The first approximates to the immersion of the consciousness human beings in reality, and the latter the largely abstract notions we devise as describing the reason for certain causes to have certain effects. Immanence refers to the immediate experience of potting a billiard ball with a cue, transcendence refers to the predictable laws of physical motion that define why a ball will follow a certain path when force is applied to it across separate games. Predictable laws transcend the immediate moment of experience.

The relationship between immanence and transcendence is what is realized in the ability for people to grasp the 'rules' of playing pool with enough expertise to become pool sharks. The gaining of expertise in relating the seemingly abstract rules of motion to the experience of reality is the product of intentional practice. It is very rare for someone to grasp this dynamic without consciously applying any effort to establish the relationships of causality between the action of using a cue and the movement it generates in the billiard ball.

The role of conscious intention Is what determines the difference between humankind and animal life. This contention sits as a key insight in the work of Karl Marx himself, and defines, in part, his understanding of what the political significance of labour as a human quality itself means;

We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workmans will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be (Marx, 1867)

By dispensing of their capacity to labour, humans are not only effecting a material change in reality, there are also realizing in practice the relationship between underlying scientific laws of motion and their manifestation in the objects we encounter. The point of overlap is the intentional application of will power, by conscious humans, to the shaping of material reality itself. Our ability to make things happen is related to our ability to engage with the world as a place where we test out the relationship between immediate lived experience and abstract theory. One way that capitalism functions as a class society is by preventing the full realization of this potential in the mass of people. Rather than enabling the general mastery of things by all, class society isolates such power in a minority of hands, and distorts the potential of the majority by limiting their engagement in governing the total impact of humankind upon the Earth. For most of us, our expertise is expected to be limited to what function we can perform as an appendage to the overall process of production. Again, Marx outlines this process in typically evocative style;

[W]ithin the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man,

degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital (Marx, 1867)

The process which develops a continuing revelation of underlying human qualities such as the struggle for sexual liberation is itself an attempt to break free from the limiting and distorting effects of the social division of labour. It is a struggle against the way it defines a meaningful human existence for the majority as being little more than a lever or cog in a production process. When these struggles are not linked to an overarching historical project, they leave themselves at risk of being blind-sided by future attempts at control by the ruling class. This is another reason why the project for communism must include immediate struggles for sexual liberation, as well as from other forms of oppression. Workers will continue to push for further and more meaningful ways to experience our shared reality, and capitalism will continually move to limit and constrain the unproductive self-expression of the majority. Intention, here, plays a vital and endangered role in the process of class struggle.

When considering the relationship between the objective laws of evolution that have informed the development of species on Earth, and the subjective experience of being human, it is important to locate mastery of cause and effect dynamics in the agency of human beings, rather than in the objective biological processes of a species development. If humans are professed to possess a naturally occurring inclination to any given form of social behaviour, then it must logically be rooted in the objective laws of evolutionary development, rather than in the subjective struggle for meaningful identity. Contra to this is we should assert that whilst a biological imperative can influence behaviour, that biological imperative is itself blind to it's own aims. Biological imperatives cannot possess intention. This means, if we argue that any particular form of human behaviour is rooted in pre-conscious or biochemical patterns or impulses, we undermine or define unassailable limitations to the potentials or possibilities of human self-expression and self-determination. We then end up line managing liberation.

It is also the case that as a process evolution is ignorant of it's own outcomes. If we infer that the objective laws of motion belonging to physical world possess have intended results, we wander into territory formerly covered by theology. Faith-based or mystical ways of understanding the world attribute intention to the results of processes governed by the physical laws of nature. It then becomes the case that the immanent world of things, the objects we touch, taste, feel and smell, seemingly possess magical or mystical qualities that indicate intention laying behind the arbitrary outcomes of non-conscious processes. This is especially the case with theories of evolution.

The common sense notion of evolution is that through the development of adaptations, organisms adjust over time into species that share common traits, which allow them to fit more effectively and successfully into particular environments. Evolution 'selects' the useful traits passing them on through defining the boundaries of a species inhabiting a certain aspect of an ecosystem; a niche. Fitting into a certain niche results from the process of successful adaptations by an organism or collective of organisms. Species emerge in relationship to how certain useful traits enable a set of creatures to survive and flourish.

But, the end result whereby a set of creatures or organisms evolve to fit into a niche is not pre-determined by the adaptation itself. Just because a fish developed lungs did not mean it would eventually move onto the land and give birth to the process of evolution that led to the emergence of humanity. The adaptations that define the traits of a species do not necessarily emerge because they make that species 'better' than others. These traits are unpredictable and unintended mutations or cross-fertilization that would cease to exist if they did not resonate with the demands of their environment. Often, species become successful because a prior idiosyncrasy or quirk suddenly becomes exceptionally useful when there is a sudden catastrophic change in the layout of the world around them, or a previously proliferate species enters decline.

The concept of exaptation becomes valuable here. This term means where a trait that emerges through evolution that originally fulfills one purpose is retrofitted after a change in circumstances to serve another. Bird feathers are the most commonly know example, having perhaps initially emerged as a means for a creature to regulate their body temperature, they later become re-used in the development of natural flight. Something emerges to solve one problem for a species, only to introduce a potential that is realized in a completely unpredictable manner. This means that when the feathers first appeared, we could not know that they would eventually provide the physical basis for flight, but now that we can understand the evolutionary process retroactively, we can see that the contingent emergence of feathers allowed for nature to branch in unpredictable directions.

The concept of exaptation is useful for thinking through the relationship between biology, reproduction, and sexual pleasure and desire. The fact that sex is pleasurable is an exaptation. Sex can be potentially pleasurable because the relationship between stimulation and result might mean the furtherance of the species. If sex wasn't biochemically pleasurable, then why would a creature without the scientific knowledge of how reproduction works engage in sexual activity? But, even if sex is probably meant to produce biologically responsive pleasure, that does not mean that sexual reproduction is the goal of sexual pleasure. The biochemical responses of the human organisms to sexual stimulation is the engagement in intentional pleasure seeking activity not the supposed intended outcome of biological reproduction. Sex is pleasurable because that then has the greatest outcome for the species as a whole, regardless of whether the sex acts inspired by pleasure are aimed at reproducing the species. An unintentional biochemical process only gains meaning when it become enmeshed in the intentions of conscious human beings, who act out of desires constructed from social relations not the necessity of biological reproduction. The fact that we experience sex as pleasure is because we learn to desire it. This learning is not constrained by nature demanding we prioritize heterosexual reproduction because if nature

constructed desire to discriminate we'd be more likely to miss opportunities to fertilize. It is productive for a species to seek sexual pleasure from any and all partners rather than within a defined normative relationship because evolution itself is a flawed process of improvisation and chance. Limiting your chances would just not enable the likelihood of survival. This idea that evolution should be understood to have a messy and unpredictable character informs the way in which Lenin himself understood history itself;

In our times, the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely penetrated social consciousness, only in other ways, and not through Hegelian philosophy. Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegels philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (the negation of the negation), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; breaks in continuity; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite lawsthese are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one (Lenin, 1914)

Humankind is a thinking, conscious species that is capable of reflecting on it's own history. In doing so, it observes how it's own nature is in a constant state of disclosing new and unpredicted qualities. The end goal of human nature can only be adequately fathomed via a theory that recognizes our own capacity to put intention into an activity. If our nature is conflated with a 'state-of-being', then we undermine our political traditions commitment to a society deliberately governed by the majority in their own interests. This is because we are the only guarantors of our survival and success, our prehistory is not our destiny. The role of a conscious revolutionary project is to generalize the spirit of creative improvisation and the practical understanding of the universal laws of historical motion that our willed activity bring into play. Whilst generalizing this spirit, we also generalize the lessons about the immediate world of the senses being where we will try and fail in our struggles to master historical processes and create something truly new. These failures and successes are our lessons, and are also the stories we wish to teach so that they become the borrowed languages of tomorrows revolution.

References:

Benjamin, W., 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', (1940)

Lenin, V.I., 'Karl Marx', (1914)

Luxembourg, R., 'Order Prevails in Berlin', (1919)

Marx, K., 'The German Ideology', (1845)

Marx, K., 'The Communist Manisfesto', (1848)

Marx, K., 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte', (1852)

Marx, K. 'Capital, Vol. 1', (1867)

'Exaptation', Wikipedia entry.