A Small Piece of Red Sky to Fly In

A specter is haunting transgender studies—the specter of Marxism. Recent years have seen the emergence of numerous trans scholars, militants, and organic intellectuals championing the centrality of Marxist analyses of social life to a thorough systemic understanding of trans subjectivity, oppression, and liberation. The appearance of queer and trans studies journals with a renewed interest in historical materialism, such as Pinko and Invert, testifies to the increasing consolidation of the field of transgender Marxism (which gives its name, indeed, to a collective volume edited by our comrades Jules J. Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke 2021b). Beginning from the Marxist premise that no aspect of life under capitalism, including sex, sexuality and gender, exists in isolation from the mode of production, trans Marxism considers how capital intertwines with trans life—through the medicalized and carceralized regulation of bodies, differentiated experiences of exploitation in labor, the ubiquity and material power of the normative family structure—and how this can be collectively overcome.While we pen this answer to the question, Why trans Marxism?, the capitalist forces of dispossession, irregularly distributed around an international, gendered, and racialized division of labor, sow terror among the world proletariat. As you read this page, imperialist war and colonial occupation are marking the lives of the working class and the undercommons as ungrievable in Palestine, in the Congo, in Lebanon, in Yemen, and in the oceans that guard fortress Europe. The borders of Mexico and the immigration detention centers of the West have systematized the forced separation and murder of migrants for the mere fact of being migrants. The death throes of the world power that was the United States spread the economy of war in the Pacific and the South China Sea. The native peoples of Abya Yala face a process of plunder and forced displacement to oil the cogs of mass production and the monopolistic tendencies of goods; the Southern Cone remains suffocated by debt. The far Right and the process of fascistization eat away every day at the illusory sense of freedom within the bourgeois democracies of the global North. The reproduction of the contradictory and moving totality of capitalist social relations has frenetically accelerated the ecosocial crisis, leaving in its wake a world in flames, metaphorically and literally.But where the structural oppression of racisheterocapitalism manifests, there throbs the collective pulse of the insurgency. As we write, the Argentine working class overflows the streets in a national strike against the securitarian neoliberal authoritarianism of their president, Javier Milei; the roads of Chicago and the ports of the Red Sea come to a halt in internationalist solidarity with the liberation of the Palestinian people; the housing unions of Barcelona squat entire blocks of tourist apartments in the face of speculation by banks and vulture funds. As we write, the Naxalite guerrillas and the Communist Party of the Philippines are testing the hypothesis of socialism in their liberated territories. As we write, tens of thousands of people are marching through the streets of Berlin against the rise of the ultranationalist party Alternative für Deutschland. A viral video shows protesters chorally singing the verses of La Varsoviana: "¡A las barricadas, a las barricadas! ¡Asaltad el mundo, trabajadores!" Legend has it that this song, the union anthem of the anarchist revolutionaries of the Spanish state, reached the ranks of the CNT-AIT through the visit of a German militant who used to sing it in the bathtub.1 Intimacy, too, is a territory of reproduction for capital, as well as a potential site of its antagonism. As Marxists, the entirety of social life in its becoming is a kernel of class struggle.The skeptical reader may be wondering what precisely all this has to do with trans. We could certainly have mentioned the significant participation and leadership of queer and trans people in the union struggles against Starbucks; in the self-organization of sex workers toward decriminalization; in boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) campaigns against the state of Israel and in collectives such as Al Qaws challenging homonationalist pinkwashing; in ecosocialist assemblies; in prison- and police-abolitionist Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements; and in the movements of rupture and self-criticism within the traditional communist parties of Latin America and their Stalinist legacy. We could, and yet we would not feel ourselves to have scratched the surface of antibourgeois abundance that we envision in trans. We could, of course, highlight the moral panic facing trans and nonbinary youth in the imperial core, the attempt by certain states to prohibit the public manifestation of drag and gender dissidence in the sight of children, increasing institutional obstruction to accessing desired health care, and the imposition of nonconsensual interventions on intersex children and on any body whose existence challenges the naturalized canon of white capitalist, cisheteronormative, and productivist hegemony. We could, and yet we would not be fully realizing the horizon that trans Marxism opens up.Transness presents itself today as a battlefield, both in and against. On the one hand, trans* as a category contains epistemic limitations, since its genealogy leads us to a specific time and place, being an experience situated through specific biomedical practices (with its corresponding subjectivization from suffering) that operates solely within the framework of the modern/colonial gender binary (Lugones 2007) under capitalism. In this sense, as many contributors to this journal have argued, trans* runs the risk of becoming an analytical tool in the service of racial capitalism and new exclusionary forms of normativity and citizenship. Radical transfeminist activist and academic Nat Raha (2015) termed trans liberalism the set of policies and discourses that consider obtaining rights for trans people (understood as a private, self-contained identity) within capitalist colonial society to be the solution to our oppression, without questioning that its roots spring from the very social relations that determine the production and reproduction of life under the present state of things.Trans liberalism, by naturalizing gender identities as they take their spontaneous form within capitalism, strips of historicity the categories that cross and give meaning to our bodies. Trans Marxist theorist Nathaniel Dickson (2021: 208) points out that "as transgender people, we must work to prove that our genders preexist the work we do to produce them and make them legible to others," thus reproducing an embodied form of commodity fetishism: "Commodities are imbued with a mythical relationship to one another that bears no trace of the labour of human beings. In just the same way, gender is imagined as having an explanation that bears no trace of human effort. Our efforts, it seems, can only verify a truth that stands outside of history. Tools are not used to make gender, but to reflect it." Trans inclusion within the framework of neoliberal states further operates as a living process of encapsulation: "Trans people must be content to have their documents (or their bodies) checked when requested, which normalises the violence enacted through such checks . . . the nominal equality of rights hides individualised forms of duress, administrative violence, divestment/disinvestment and dispossession" (Raha and Van der Drift 2023: 13–14). Dan Irving (2012: 158) analyzes how transness under a neoliberal regime of accumulation is "constructed as an entrepreneurial project of the self" through discourses that frame transition in terms of neoliberal self-optimization, justifying antidiscrimination workplace policies and health care coverage by "marketing trans people as valuable employees" (161). Truncated analyses that abstract transness from material, historical relations of oppression and exploitation in the service of establishing a "transnormative subject" (Haritaworn and Snorton 2013) are thus assimilated all too smoothly into hegemonic discourses, instrumentalized to serve the capitalist and (neo)imperialist interests and projects of dominant regimes.Faced with this, our conception of trans is articulated as a collective and expansive practice of negativity against the sex/gender dialectic in its capitalist form. We declare ourselves heirs of the conception of transgender advanced by trans communist militant Leslie Feinberg (1992: 5), as "people who challenge the gender boundaries constructed by 'man,'" as well as the proposal of trans historian Susan Stryker (2007: 60) to include under the term any phenomenon that denaturalizes normative gender and draws our attention to the processes that produce normativity. Faced with the confinement and the petrified appearance of capitalist social relations, trans takes the shape of an abolitionist fluidity. This is why, in our opinion, an analysis of the subjectivization of specifically trans people is only one element of the political necessity of a trans Marxism; trans life itself reveals nothing less than the bodily manifestation of a broader struggle for the reconfiguration of the human toward the coordinates of socialism.Defining the "subject" of trans studies has been an area of protracted debate, not least in this very journal. Attuned to the problematics of defining this subject, many theorists of trans studies opt instead for what has been called a "subjectless critique," envisioning trans less as a delimitable subject, object, or predicate than as a particular methodology. Toby Beauchamp, for example, advocates for "trans studies as a mode of analysis," for "trans as a mode of critique rather than a specific subject position" (Aizura et al. 2020: 136), while Stryker (2019) argues that "trans studies has a method, even if its object is fuzzy and undefined. Understanding trans as method—trans as a dynamic, prefixial concept attached to other things—that's where the deepest critical action is." In the attempt to avoid "claiming" particular subjects in potential capitulation to dehistoricizing, colonial, or taxonomical frameworks, however, the very subjectlessness of this critique often facilitates a detachment from the realm of present social reality that is itself dehistoricizing—and, indeed, depoliticizing. We offer a methodology of trans Marxism that refuses to capitulate to a subject/subjectless binary, reconstituting that binary instead as a dialectical relation; a movement that continually returns to the contradictory historical conditions through which "trans" is materially (and) symbolically constituted, even as it works to overturn and transcend those conditions.As Jamie C. Gagliano and Alexander Liebman précis in this issue, "Grounded in the classed and raced struggles of trans people for collective emancipation, transgender Marxism develops a blistering critique of rights-based recognition, hetero- and homonormativity, apoliticized science, and how the biological family has been entrenched as the site of reproductive care to ameliorate the precarity and failures of financial capitalism"—and much more besides, as the contributions to this special issue demonstrate. The subject of trans Marxism is no less expansive than the totality of social relations under capitalism, and we must take up the mantle of denouncing and resisting the fragmenting forces that seek to privatize trans struggle to the concerns of a depoliticized interest group. Everything that sustains our proletarianized queer, trans, and nonbinary lives in conflict with capitalist social reproduction forms a particular moment of the red insurgency, just as do strikes at the direct point of production or mass protests against a world that we no longer wish to reproduce. A trans Marxist analysis compels and is compelled by Feinberg's (1998: 135) declaration, "What are the goals of trans liberation? If you ask me, the aim should not fall a yard short of genuine social and economic liberation for everyone."Trans is a collective action, not a privat(iz)e(d) ontology. In the flow of the socialized hormones, inherited binders, precarious housing situations, and erotic and militant pleasures that we share, those verses from La Varsoviana also sound. We wish to present, therefore, echoing our comrades Nat Raha and Grietje (River) Baars (2021: 3), the (merely) cultural and the economic as inextricable, such that the meanings encoded in trans and queer bodies produce positionalities within a racialized and gendered division of labor. The liberation open to all the dispossessed of the earth that trans Marxism pursues today was always part of the centrality of the class struggle, because our tools not only to interpret but also to transform reality never pointed merely toward a minority of people. "Like transsexuality itself," wrote gay liberationist revolutionary Mario Mieli (2018: 255), "the revolutionary movement is one and multiple." We want to build a new commons, a diverse trans* totality capable of deposing the present.***The contributions to this special issue answer the question, Why trans Marxism?, in interesting and interdisciplinary ways. Wren Ariel Gould addresses the question directly in relation to analyses of the present legislative backlash against trans people in the United States, while Jamie C. Gagliano and Alexander Liebman make the case for the fruitfulness of introducing trans Marxism to the field of agrarian studies. JD Fulloon and Westley Montgomery use their individual Marxist critical-theoretical lenses to investigate trans cultural production, demonstrating their mutual suitability and the usefulness of Marxist concepts, such as reification and alienation, for trans cultural studies. Alex Adamson, Alexis Davin, Eric Llaveria Caselles, and Bruno Monfort each weave together Marxism and trans studies to make dialectical theoretical contributions to some of the key questions in trans Marxism: What is the value of the etiological question for trans politics, and how should it be approached? How does abjection shape the interaction of gender and value to determine differential disvaluations of trans labor? How can an immanent critique of gender and sexual identity forms within capitalist social relations and biomedical regimes apprehend points of intertwining without either holding the two in binary distinction or collapsing them into one another—thus leaving space for agency and for trans revolutionary possibility? Can Marxism provide the dialectical key to rescuing trans negativity from trans nihilism?Together the articles in this special issue weave a tapestry of fundamental concepts for those wishing to understand the relevance of Marxism for trans studies, and the relevance of transness to Marxism. The strength of the threads that bind the two is evident throughout this issue—so much so that, for the task of introducing each piece, a mind map might be more appropriate than a monograph. Nevertheless, we have attempted below to tease out these core concepts in turn, introducing and explaining them alongside outlining one or more of the articles that centrally instrumentalize them.In recent decades, neoliberal hegemony and a weakened Left have conditioned an LGBT(Q)+ activist politics structured by goals that remain within the framework Nancy Fraser (1995) terms "affirmative": "Remedies aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them." Due in part to the population of mainstream LGBTQ+ "movements" by third-sector equality, diversity, and inclusion organizations and departments, whose funding depends legally on their segregation from politics as such, the "awareness campaign" often takes prevalence in trans activism over and above any view to transformative change in material, social, and economic conditions: "Our domination by state bureaucracy, by landlords and employers, is often enough treated as a given, to be reclad with sensitivity training workshops and pronoun go-rounds" (Gleeson and O'Rourke 2021a: 5). As Alexis Davin summarizes in this issue, "The configuration of gender in the age of mass liberal trans politics demands locating the trans individual as a civil subject, devoid of preexisting political content except for a lack of specific legal protection and recognition, and therefore similarly amenable to citizenship and formal equality as all others."The dissemination of the identity-political into the broader social fabric has taken place within a "postpolitical" historical moment characterized by what Mark Fisher (2009) termed "capitalist realism": the defanging of social movements' transformative potential within a social atmosphere incapable of imagining any noncapitalist future, where history is reshaped to naturalize neoliberalism as the culmination of human society. The increasingly globalized antitrans backlash, however, disrupts liberal presumptions of linear social progress, revealing the susceptibility of identity-based rights and social tolerance to the vicissitudes of power. This whiplash between tipping point and moral panic has boxed trans people and movements into a traumatic cycle of defense. However, as Federico Zappino argues, "If we conceive of our problems as entirely limited to questions of morality, we limit ourselves to understanding our fight as connected to a transformation of relations of recognition, rather than relations of production, consumption, occupational segregation, distribution and redistribution" (quoted in Petrachi 2020). Rather than recapitulating to essentialism and rehashing old strategies, we need to break free from the cage of moral panic in order to weave new dialectical understandings of the place of trans subjectivity and politics within the broader totality of capitalist social relations.Wren Ariel Gould's "Coconstructing (Trans)Capitalist Realism" forcefully demonstrates the utility of Marxist analysis for understanding the forces determining trans people's subjectivization—and the dangerous foreshortening of a trans politics that elides the horizon of capital. Gould analyzes the wave of legislative backlash currently impacting trans people in the United States, reviewing the many complex entanglements of trans life with capital and arguing "that Post-Marxist theoretical tools reveal a catch-22 whereby legislative attacks consolidate late capitalism while provoking a (liberal, progressive) response that colludes in that consolidation the political danger of these legislative attacks lies not just in suppressing transgender communities, but also in shoring up late capitalism."2 For Gould, the polarization of the political field between antitrans attack and essentialist medicalizing defense constitutes "a trans capitalist realism in which trans anti-capitalism is rendered impossible."The increasingly politicized conditions of trans life provide a particular vantage point on the ostensible contradictions of "neoliberal democracy": as we see transness, as biomedical technology and as drag brunch, wrenched ostensibly from the cogs of the profit machine and flung into the ghettos of criminalization, neoliberalism reveals its authoritarian face. But to analyze legislative transphobia toward a critique of the state without an equally attentive critique of the contradictory workings of capital produces a foreshortened analysis that sees private profit as a haven rather than a vampire: "These critiques overlook the neoliberal context, that venues receiving state funding are obliquely targeted by these measures, in favor of a critique of authoritarianism that excepts the market pressures driving neoliberal authoritarianism." Gould cautions against the susceptibility to the same capitalist forces—bedecked in progress flags and pronoun pins—of a trans politics that fails to center class in its analytical horizon and that thus (implicitly or explicitly) invests its vision of "inclusion" in both the market and the carceral state. This form of (wealthy, white, Western) trans politics, Gould argues, appropriates the vulnerability of working-class trans women of color globally while redoubling the oppression they face via the project of constituting transness as part of a "respectable citizenship" implicated in gentrification, increased policing, and participation in imperial violence. Marxist perspectives, Gould concludes, can provide "a necessary corrective to an identitarian focus that overlooks political economy. . . . Indeed, Marxist critique may be imperative if transgender activists and advocates hope to win a more just world."In his reading of Marx's 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse, Stuart Hall (1973) explicates the persistence of a theoretical tendency—one that, it is no stretch to argue, now holds instinctive sway in popular political consciousness—to understand the abstract as a theoretical transcendental, in opposition to the concrete of everyday lived experience. For Marx, the terms are reversed: the concrete, while still referring fairly intuitively to that which is "objective" and material—albeit with the caveat that no single object or relation can be concretely understood in isolation—is not empirically given. To conceptualize the complexity of differentiated, often contradictory relations, a certain abstraction is necessarily required of the thinking subject. What appears from a particular viewpoint as "a deceptively transparent, natural, 'given' category" is, in Marx, revealed in fact to be "'concrete' only in a common sense way" (33)—an "imagined concrete" that is in reality a necessary abstraction. In Holly Lewis's (2022: 71) words, "standing in a particular location does not guarantee the capacity to interpret experience; rather, only the understanding of one's standpoint in relation to the whole can produce an accurate analysis of one's position." Thus, the methodology of historical materialism consists in concretizing this necessary abstraction through a dialectical movement that systematically deconstructs and reconstructs it, "decomposing simple, unified categories into the real, contradictory, antagonistic relations which compose them" (Hall 1973: 34). One thereby returns to the now concretized abstraction "not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations" (Marx 1993: 100). In Marx's method, moreover, the original imagined concrete (and/or standpoint) appears not as a dehistoricized given from which analysis departs but as something to be analytically produced—as well as a condition of possibility for this very (re)production.Eric Llaveria Caselles opens "Contours of a Historical Materialist Theory of Transsexuality: Claiming a Hopeful Origin Story as a Personal and Political Necessity" by evoking instances of his own lived experience of etiological confrontation with medical gatekeeping and familial guilt: "The answers I refused to give constituted me as a human paradox . . . a sense of self detached from historical and social relations—yet so dependent and vulnerable to them." The invocation of this sense of conflict speaks to a contradictory space intimately familiar to trans people. In our individual and collective quests for bodies we can inhabit as livably gendered, we prop up the system even as we shake its very foundations, finding ourselves—as Gleeson and O'Rourke (2021a: 10) put it—"at once immersed and resistant." Beginning from this experience of paradox, then, Llaveria Caselles proceeds through a variety of "problematizations" of transsexuality, dialectically engaging critiques and elements of each in a Marxian process of concretization. His elaboration of the necessary conditions for an alternate "problematization" of transness explicates historical materialism's core principles: the deconstruction and reconstruction of the symbolic order in terms of "the material historical processes that engender and uphold" it, and the need "to theorize social reality not just at the individual level but also at the structural level, which can't be grasped through empirical means alone." The goal of such a problematization, moreover, is praxis oriented: "The analysis of the historical constitution of the transsexual in terms that enable the task of creatively developing visions and practices for collective emancipatory transformation."In taking up Hortense J. Spillers's (1987) concept of "symbolic substitution" to argue that the biomedical problematization of gender and the notion of gender dysphoria "insert in the realm of the individual and the psyche a conflict that resides at a structural and historical level," Llaveria Caselles intervenes decisively in the etiological debate, positioning the biomedical construction of transsexuality as such "not as a site of origin but as a secondary sociogenic movement that overwrites the primary conflict and displaces it to the interiority of the individual." The primary conflict—following Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory—"occurs in the space of the household and the market . . . in relation to conflicts of social reproduction specific to Western modernity and its articulation of a capitalist economy." Returning to the lived experience of dysphoria in social-relational contexts from a structural point of view, then, recasts it as "a practical destabilization of the gender order that puts pressure on its foundational contradiction and demands a reorganization of social relations." Transsexuality precariously contains "the possibility of defining the political field of gender at the level of its historicity, that is, the radical possibility of democratizing the organization of generativity"—toward "gender self-determination as the collective political work of consciously imagining and practicing less violent ways of reorganizing the work of procreation and reproduction."Alexis Davin's and Bruno Monfort's contributions provide rich and complementary considerations of value and its significance for trans life, elaborating the political-economic process of abjection through which the disvaluation of trans labor operates. For Marx, as Monfort notes, "the methodological priority conferred on value starts from the recognition of its ontological priority in the organization of the totality of social labor." The specificity of "value" in Marxist terms bears emphasizing. Value is the social form labor adopts; the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the total amount of "socially necessary labor time" required to produce it. Capitalism thus abstracts the particularities of both the subjective and the objective embodiment of labor to make it quantitatively exchangeable. Monfort explains that "Marx warns us about the commodity form that its exchange value is not derived from its use value; rather it operates a process of abstraction operates that reduces concrete labor to its abstractly human and undifferentiated character so that it can be exchanged as equivalent in the market."In "The Political Economy of Sexual Identity: From Gender Performativity to Social Reproduction," Monfort demonstrates an explication of the importance of this specificity of "value" in his critique of Meg Wesling's (2012) "Queer Value." His appraisal of Wesling's analysis demonstrates the metaphysical pitfall encountered by analyses that fail to rigorously concretize their analytical points of departure—as described in the previous section on historical materialist method—in this case precipitating "an interpretative turn in which the category of labor is erected as the point of view, and not as the object to be analyzed." Wesling's determination that the queer gender performance of Cuban transformistas constitutes disalienated, self-actualized, and yet (or even therefore) value-producing labor thus blurs two levels of analysis: labor in its transhistorical sense as transformative human activity, and labor's specific organization under capitalism as the commodity labor power. Based on this elision, Wesling "turns the reclamation of the social value of these structurally devalued activities into a political objective in itself"—thus attempting to transform the appearance of value relations while in fact further obscuring their material organization. "Value-producing" labor, in Marxist terms, refers in fact not to labor that can be considered "valuable" in a broad or moralizing sense—or even labor that contributes, without being directly market mediated, to the reproduction of capitalist social relations—but specifically to the production of surplus value: capitalist profit. "The temporality of value," Monfort explains, "is a kind of retroactive temporality in which the abstract labor objectified in the commodity is realized and incorporated only as an integral part of social labor in exchange"—that is, for Marx, the abstraction inherent in the commodity form means that value can differ only quantitatively, not qualitatively; the subjective nature of the labor makes no difference. Especially considering a critique of capitalist appropriation of queer and trans culture and practices as profit-making opportunities (see Gould's contribution), Wesling's purposeful blurring of the analytical distinction between value-producing labor, on the one hand, and disalienated social human activity, on the other, risks allowing the latter to be cannibalized by the former rather than rising as the revolutionary phoenix from its ashes.By what modalities, then, do gender and value interact within capitalism? First, for Monfort, a Marxian reading of Foucault demonstrates how the process of abstraction through which gender and sexual identity is constituted mirrors that of the value-form: "The relations that constitute parti