We are joined by Alan Sears to discuss the themes of his new book, Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities.
Alan lays out his expansive understanding of key ideas like labour, alienation, social reproduction, and eroticism. We discuss ‘erotic enclosure’ in 19th century industrial capitalism, bodily discipline and identity formation at work and in school; how state social policy has shifted, balancing the constraint and unleashing of desire, and forged hegemonic, heteronormative (and homonormative) gender regimes. We also look at nature and ecology, and what science fiction can offer us as we think through more revolutionary possibilities and practices around gender and sexuality.
Podcast listeners can get 40% off the book using the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.
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Alan Sears is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He has been writing about queer Marxism for activist and scholarly audiences since the mid-1980s. He is an activist and author of several books including The Next New Left: A History of the Future. Alan resides in Toronto, Ontario.
Episode Transcript:
Chris Browne:
Alan I’d like to welcome you to Radicals in Conversation. It’s lovely to have you here today and be in conversation with you about your new book, Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities. So for listeners, this book’s come out in January 2025, so it’s brand new, hot off the press. And as ever, listeners of the show can get 40% off by using the coupon code PODCAST at the checkout on plutobooks.com. So a little plug there and now we’ll dive into the conversation. So if you could maybe just introduce yourself in your own words for our listeners, maybe tell us a little bit about your professional background, you know, your research interests and what’s led you to write this book.
Alan Sears:
Great. Well, my name’s Alan Sears. I basically think of myself as a queer Marxist who recently retired from teaching sociology. I’ve been an activist and a teacher and a scholar writer, whatever you call it, a theorist. And so this book kind of wove those things together in a lot of ways. When I first became involved in kind of political activism, there was a real separation between queer movements and socialist Marxist movements.
And I was involved in trying to reconcile the two. And so that’s been a long term project that’s been both activist and intellectual, to figure out how those different streams fit together. And I would say that this book is a kind of a long term growth of a process of thinking that actually began for me in the ‘80s when I first tried to put those two things together.
I taught at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto for 17 years, and before that at another university, and recently retired – loved teaching. And so, yeah, that’s a little bit of background. I hope that kind of establishes a bit.
Chris Browne:
Yeah, Yeah, definitely. I mean, you describe throughout the book that this is a work of queer Marxism and it’s also a work of, yeah, I mean, it emerges from the Marxist tradition, definitely. And also this kind of social reproduction theory strand of Marxism. You know, one of the interesting and exciting sub strands of that. So maybe we’ll talk a little bit about some of the key ideas, you know, that are there in the title, there in the subtitle, and that underpin the book throughout.
So, you know, maybe we could start by you giving us a sort of, I guess a classical Marxist and perhaps therefore quite a narrow definition of alienation and the alienation of labor, right? Because this is right at the heart of the book. So yeah, could you say what alienation is in this traditional Marxist understanding and then how you’re going beyond this, I suppose, in developing your own argument throughout the book.
Alan Sears:
Great. Well thanks for that question. So basically to get the concept of alienation, it’s first important to talk just a little bit about the Marxist idea of labor, because if you understand labor in the broad sense, it’s much easier to understand the implications of alienation because often in our day to day conversation, we use the word ‘work’ most often to describe paid employment.
And one of the things about the social reproduction tradition within Marxism that you mentioned, Chris, thank you, is that it broadens that idea of labor and argues that that actually is there in Marx’s original work. So it’s not just the work that we do for pay in different contexts, but it’s this broad life making activity that we do in so many different ways.
And one of our essential characteristics as humans is that we are makers, We work on the world around us and transform it physically, mentally, and we create what we need. We create what we want. We create wants by doing it, we get hungry and thirsty because we’re working, so that we transform the world around us in all kinds of different ways.
And that includes taking care of each other and ourselves. It includes creative work of all sorts. And in fact, those things get mixed in together so that even the way that we meet our most basic needs, like hunger, is definitely affected by our creativity, so that the way that we eat is very different culturally in different cultural contexts and ecological contexts. And we prepare food. We don’t just kind of grab whatever it is and so on. So we’re constantly working on the world and this making is incredibly fulfilling to us. It’s not only the actual product of the making that’s fulfilling to us. The food itself meets a need, but it’s also the process of the making that fulfills us, the actual preparation of the food, for example, where we feel that we may be caring for the people who are going to be eating it with us.
We’re showing our own flair in the way we do it, all that kind of stuff, so that there’s this complex combination of things that are our making. Alienation becomes important because in capitalist societies we are deprived of control over that making. We lose control over the process and over the product. One of the key features of capitalism as a way of organizing society is that the capitalists, a small minority, own and control all the key productive resources of society: land, factories, patents, all the different things.
And because they own and control, they take monopoly control over those things. For the rest of us, the vast majority, the only way that we can get access to those things is by selling our capacity to work for a period of time to capitalists. And at least someone in the household has to be doing that. Others are doing reproductive work and so on.
And alienation is about the fact that that work that we’re doing under their control is not inherently satisfying. It’s not meeting our self-defined needs. At the end of the day, we control neither the product nor the process. We’re told how to do it. We’re told what to produce. And if you think of it on a societal level, it means that most basic human needs, for example, right now in Britain and Canada and the United States, desperate need for housing and especially affordable housing, and yet there’s almost no affordable housing being produced.
It’s not that we don’t have the know-how. It’s not that we don’t have the construction materials. The construction materials are going into building expensive elite housing. They’re going into building other things, but they’re not building the housing that we know is desperately needed. And so as a society and as an individual, we’re not directly using our productive capacities to meet our needs.
Instead we’re doing it to serve the profit making needs of capitalists. That’s the way it works in a capitalist society. So that’s the basic idea of alienation.
Chris Browne:
And I suppose what the book does, which is sort of novel and really interesting, is it then goes kind of one step further to talking about how alienation then shapes all of our desires and sexuality and gender and so on. We could jump straight to that. I mean, I guess I was going to go through a couple more of these sort of fundamental questions, you know, around… you know, the book is in our Mapping Social Reproduction Theory series.
And as I say, you know, we’ve already mentioned that. Many listeners will be familiar with social reproduction theory, SRT. Could you briefly explain some of the key ideas here? You know what lacuna it fills in the Marxist tradition?
Alan Sears:
I think that, going back to that basic idea of work and labor, I think it’s possible to say that a lot of Marxist theorizing since Marx and activism focused a lot on that moment of paid labor. That’s where capitalist profits come from primarily. And so for capitalists that seems like the most important thing in society. That’s where key union organizing has been done, where key moments of worker activism that Marxists celebrate have been produced, where insurgency has included workers actually taking over workplaces.
It’s also included community aspects and so on that were perhaps less talked about. And so a lot of Marxist theory focused on that almost common sense notion of work because it was important for capitalists, it was an important side of organizing. And that meant leaving aside certain key questions like how do the workers get to work every day in condition to work? They need to sleep, they need to eat, they need to raise the next generation, because the next generation of workers is very important.
And in many Marxist traditions, those questions largely disappeared. And so social reproduction theory pushes us to ask questions. So what’s happening outside of that moment of paid labor that is providing the next generation of workers? Is allowing people to arrive at the workplace, fed and so on, to use the wages in a second labor process to reproduce ourselves, to keep ourselves going, to take care of each other.
That kind of life making moment. And so social reproduction theory says not that the paid work is unimportant. Absolutely not. But that if we really want to understand the working class and its life and its political capacities, we need to understand not only what goes on in that moment of paid labor, but also what goes on in the household, in the community and so on.
And once you start with that lens, you begin to realize even worker activism in paid employment, for example, is actually very dependent on what’s going on in that other realm. For example, when workers are on strike, and especially historically when there was no strike pay before there were formal unions and so on, how did workers stay alive through a strike? And what you realize is the whole community rallied. And often if it was a traditional gender divided workforce where women were primarily doing the labor in the household – though, that varied a lot, you find, in fact, over the history of employment – in fact people oriented, anchored in the household, often women, were doing really important work to sustain the activism that we think of as workplace activism.
And so social reproduction theory seeks to think of labor broadly, including the household labor that’s unpaid, that’s not under the direct supervision of capitalists, but needs to fit into the system and the paid labor and understand these as complete cycles, and that you need to understand all those elements to fully understand the working class, its political activism, its understanding of itself, and to understand our own lives.
Chris Browne:
Absolutely. Okay, great. That’s perfect. Well, let’s go back then, to what you were about to dive into, which is how the erotic comes into this, eroticism, which is the ‘Eros’ of the title, if you will. So, yeah. How does this relate to alienation?
Alan Sears:
Yeah. And so this is what in the end became my main focus for this book, is to argue that the erotic is not just kind of a byproduct of all of this, but is actually quite central to it in ways that we haven’t thought of. And I just want to start by saying, just like there’s a broad conception of labor that I’m using in the book, including not only work, as we think of it, paid labor, but also unpaid labor and our creative work. All those kinds of things, our imagining our dreaming – all those different things are different forms of labor. Similarly, I’m using an expansive sense of erotic, which is based on work by Freud and others, but I’m kind of using it expansively, which is to say erotic is where our hunger for embodied fulfillment… we crave embodied fulfillment in various ways.
And that’s not all about pleasure. It can also be about pain, can be about all kinds of things. But that fulfillment that happens through various mind and body processes is something that we crave in many different ways. At the same time, we have a great thirst for social contact. We are a social species and sociality is absolutely essential to our day to day lives.
We only learn language socially and so on. And so the erotic is basically the crossover between embodied fulfillment and our hunger for social connection. And basically we therefore get erotic fulfillment through a lot of different things we do. We think of it in society, often in narrow terms, in terms of sexual activity, and especially genital centered sexual activity.
And we often think that that exhausts the erotic. And I’m not denying that that’s a crucial part of the erotic, but in fact, the erotic is a whole range of different kinds of embodied fulfillment and social connection. And if we think of erotic in that sense, then we get erotic fulfillment from a lot of the work we do.
The physical and mental work we do satisfies our senses, it fulfills us, it gives us a sense of connection with others. And so our making and our erotic fulfillment are deeply connected, and there’s an inherent erotic fulfillment out of that kind of free making, that creative, fulfilling making. In capitalist societies, we lose the chance to do that kind of creative making.
And in fact, eros is contained at work. We don’t do the work for the erotic fulfillment. We do it for the paycheck. We don’t do it the way we want to and need to for who we are. We don’t get the sense of social connection at work. In fact, we get the sense that we are in a hierarchy and that the most important thing at the work is the hierarchical structure, not our relations with each other.
We don’t form community necessarily through the work we do because that’s not the job there. And so we lose control over that erotic element. And instead that erotic hunger is channeled into this very narrow canal, which is gendered sexualities; a very specific form of hetero, homo, or bi connection that is understood to be genitally centered and so on.
And this isn’t to say that that can’t be important and that people don’t form important relationships and so on. But a tiny portion of the erotic stands in for much broader hungers and needs. And to me, one of the crucial things about liberation, then, it’s a reconnection with ourselves erotically. And one of the key ways that systems of oppression operate is through erotic containment and indeed, erotic violence, sexual violence.
Chris Browne:
Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you were talking about work there, so maybe I’ll jump to that. I found that… Well, the whole book was really fascinating, but I guess there’s like a few of these different thematic areas. So there’s like a big section on work and, you know, the workplace and how… you write that the everyday experience of embodiment through work is not the only factor that forms gender and shapes practices of desire, but it’s a telling factor that’s underexplored. And the stuff on like ‘erotic enclosure’ and I guess the 19th century, you know, we think of the Victorian era as a time of sort of moralism, but you kind of make it quite clear that this trammeling of desire, that sort of erotic enclosure, is really fundamentally linked to the emergence of an industrial capitalism at that time. And, you know, the imposition of things like clock time and time discipline and all of this productivist side of things. Could you could you say a little bit more about some of this history of work and and the impact that it had in that kind of erotic enclosure, I guess?
Alan Sears:
Yeah. And I really appreciate the question. And I think one of the reasons it’s important to look at it historically and to understand the 19th century and so on, even though it seems like a long time ago and it seems very different so on, is to realize these things don’t just happen. These systems of oppression actually need to be designed and built by humans in various ways.
At first, capitalist didn’t really as such, have a lot of interest in those things. They designed factories and thought that the workers would show up and so on. And at first when they started, because a factory is opposed to previous forms of collective labor, requires the articulation of a lot of workers at once. So if it’s start time and some of the people are missing, the ones who are there can’t necessarily make the whole process operate.
So you needed the idea of a united start time. You couldn’t just start when your particular task began and end when you completed your work for the day. It was set by the clock because the whole mechanism kind of went into motion when everyone was at their station. And that meant introducing people to very different conceptions of the day to day rhythms of life.
Because we’ve grown up with that. It seems so natural that at 2 o’clock or at whatever time you have to be somewhere, you look at your watch if you’re old like me; you look at your phone if you’re younger and hipper, and you realize, Oh, it’s X time, I’m supposed to be doing Y. And it seems natural, except that if you watch what happens with kids, and this still happens, is that if you’re a parent or a friend or whatever and you’re dealing with kids and you have to be somewhere, the parent has to be somewhere, the kid who is engrossed in a task that is inherently fulfilling at the moment, is absolutely not interested in moving somewhere because it happens to be 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. or whatever. And historically, that’s the way people operated. When they first started trying to get people to show up at work at a given time, which because people didn’t have watches meant often factory bells and so on, that a lot of people wouldn’t just show up. So it took a lot of work to begin to design the institutions to make that seem natural.
And one of the major things I argue in the book, one of the major things that schooling does as part of this system, we think of schooling as teaching us to read and write. But actually a lot of what schooling is doing is training our bodies for a regime of subordination, getting used to following the commands, getting used to following the system.
So you show up on time. And the school bell was modeled on the factory bell. E. P. Thompson argues this in ‘The Making the English Working Class’. That it kind of followed after and that to begin disciplining at the younger age so that by the time you reach work age, you’re already used to sitting still. You can hold your body constant, which if you think of it, is the stupidest way to learn.
In fact, people learn, and you see this again with kids, people learn by tasting things, by smelling things, by exploring things, by taking them apart and putting them back together. We do it together too. We figure things out, we puzzle it out. One of us will have an insight. We’ll try. It may or may not work. And the idea that you learn by sitting still, especially for some people who are much more kinetic and so on.
But in general, it’s totally separate from the way people learn. And if you think the way people learn their first language, it’s not that they’re sitting in school, it’s not that they get grades for doing it properly and so on. You learn language because it gives you command over the world. Crying is very inefficient as a way to get something because the person who’s being cried at, they may want to do something to shut you up, but they don’t know what it is that they need to do.
Once you begin to learn the words, “cookie,” they can decide whether or not you get a cookie at that time. And so we learn because it’s inherently fulfilling. And that happens in kind of natural rhythms. And we learn then over time, through a range of different institutions, including school, to focus that on very specific disciplined time, and to discipline our body and mind to this artificial construct, which is the clock – but it’s not artificial because it’s backed by all these different social mechanisms.
And that means that during the time we actually learn to regulate our body originally with bathroom attendance, you know, like one of the first things that you learn in young grades in school is actually to discipline your bathroom visits to the spares between classes. And it’s actually a bit embarrassing if you have to put up your hand and ask to go to the toilet.
You certainly can’t just get up and go when you need to go. And that I argue, is actually deeply connected to erotic fulfillment, that we’re learning to turn our bodies off and to turn them on again in these narrow windows, once all the work is done, often in dark, in private and quiet, because there’s something almost shameful about actually coming back to our bodies.
And so, yeah, that’s the basic thing. So through the 19th century, they developed a full range of laws and regulations. It included the more prescriptive ones. In other words, the ones that taught us how to live in this system and more proscriptive ones that outlawed the things that they didn’t want us to do. So what you see, for example, in late 19th century Britain is the illegalization of the sex trade.
You see the illegalization of male homosexuality and not of women’s homosexuality, because Parliament was so sexist that it didn’t imagine that women could have sexuality without men. And so it didn’t bother to proscribe it. And so you see a whole range of different limits on what you can do – sex in public, because parks, for example, had been very big places for sex and so on.
So you find a regime that actually teaches us to hold our bodies constant, to not feel, and to exclude the erotic from productivity; to argue that those are separate, erotic undermines productivity.
Chris Browne:
Hmm. Just to dwell for a last moment on the rise of factory work, again, it’s really interesting to see how this has also led to a reconfiguration of, like, masculinity, these kinds of identities. You know, I think you mentioned in the book how a new kind of masculine identity was necessarily forged around the sort of the ability to kind of tough it out under these kind of acutely alienating work conditions, particularly in factories in that Fordist sort of environment.
And, you know, that was kind of also predicated on the exclusion of women from the workforce, which, you know, maybe runs counter to the expectations about what deskilling normally does in terms of women in the workforce. But yeah… And actually like as well, talking about the control of the body in another sense, you give this really fascinating history of bodybuilding, right?
That history is really interesting. And again, you see that influence of the factory assembly line and the relationship of bodybuilders to their bodies, that sort of scientific management, productivism. But it’s also interesting how you talk about that was quite a marginal practice or hobby or obsession or whatever for much of the early sort of 20th century, maybe because it has quite a complex relationship with dominant sort of ideas of masculinity.
But then, you know, you see as capitalism progresses into the sort of neoliberal era that this, you know, bodybuilding and the kind of the associated aesthetic moves into the mainstream. So yeah, that resonated with me, when you were talking then about bodily control. Could you say a little bit more about that history, which I found really interesting?
Alan Sears:
I think one of the things that is an overall argument in the book, that’s not unique to me, but is there in a lot of writing about gender and sexuality, is to denaturalize what we often assume to be natural. The way it operates, and it’s often if you listen to people talk, people talk about bodies being hardwired and that gendered expression is really hardwired into certain bodies.
So if you’re born with certain biological equipment, you’re hardwired to behave in certain kinds of ways, and that that is essentially evolutionary. And every human society has expressed that in exactly the same way. And in realms of both sexuality and gender, in fact, you find huge ranges of expression over time in all kinds of different ways. And one of the things that I did look at specifically is the way that even through the history of capitalism, masculinity hasn’t meant the same thing.
And even, by the way, class by class, masculinity doesn’t mean the same thing. Masculinity is in fact much more contextual than we realize, but also much more deliberate than we realize. So that, you used examples that actually came from the Canadian labor historian Wayne Lewchuk, and I just found his article ‘Men in Monotony,’ I think it’s called, just fascinating, which was looking at the Ford Motor Company in the early 20th century, had a sociology department, and it was to research workers because when they first set up mass production lines, not surprisingly, if you’ve ever been in a Ford factory or any other kind of car factory, people ran from it.
The wages were fairly low. People would, you know… they were desperate, they didn’t have a lot of alternatives. They would sign up for factory work and then it was so horrible they would leave. And so Ford had this sociology department to try to figure out, What do we do to keep people working? because the factory won’t work if the people aren’t working.
So how do we do that? And what they found is that one of the key things was that there was no pride in the work because the very design of the work process made it almost impossible to… you couldn’t see yourself in what you’d done. The whole idea of mass production is that if it’s you on the job or me or someone else, it looks exactly the same. In fact, they’re telling us, Don’t put your own angle on this. If you found a little shortcut, don’t do it. The engineer is going to tell you exactly how to do it. And so there was very little satisfaction. It was noisy, it was smelly, it was absolutely monotonous. You know, it’s very common for factory workers to say a trained animal could do my job or whatever.
It feels like you’re part of the machine. The machine’s telling you the pace to work at. It’s very dehumanizing. And so they began to figure out, how do we do it? Well, one of the things is they bump wages a bit because they said the more that you can come close to the wage earner supporting a family, the more that they can take a pride in the fact that even if the work sucks, it’s doing something socially recognized as worthwhile: supporting a family.
But they also began to realize that masculinity, which had been anchored among other things, varying again by class, by racialized categories, by a lot of things that differentiate the actual workforce – it had been a lot grounded in particular crafts skills, that you knew how to do something that you’d learned from your parents and so on, that these skills were passed on and that you enhanced them, and so on.
And the rise of mass production meant that those skills didn’t matter. In fact, as you said, often what happened therefore, is that male workers who had those skills as they brought in mass production were often displaced by women workers who didn’t have those particular skills and were brought in because employers thought they could pay less and because they didn’t have those specific skills, they had lots of other skills, but skills that didn’t matter in the same way in the workforce.
And what Lewchuk found was interesting is that Ford, as they deskilled, rather than bringing in more women, which had been the primary tradition, in fact brought in more men and excluded women because they wanted to create this kind of masculinity. And it became a kind of a deliberate goal to say, “I can put up with this shit,” essentially. The monotony, the smells, the noise – that I can endure it. And that that became the ability to kind of suffer pain, became a major marker of masculinity, which we still see to this day in many ways, that masculinity is marked in many ways by suffering. And so that masculinity went through a very major change in the early 20th century and things that we think of as inherently male, as if it’s hardwired are in fact things that people learn to survive the world conditions that they’re facing.
And so the interesting thing is that that also affected attitudes towards our own body and attitudes towards leisure, towards what we do with our time and so on. And so what you begin to see is that these mass production methods that they developed originally in factories to produce things like cars, which involves strict measurement, efficiency, repetition, all those things, people began to apply it to the training of their own bodies.
And that’s where I kind of relate bodybuilding, which began as a very marginal leisure activity. When people first started weight training, it was for other sports and it was integrated into a regime in which a lot of your practice was actually doing the sport. You know, like if you look historically at things like football and so on, the way that you’d learn football is by doing it.
And then they began to realize, well, actually if you’re a little stronger, so you do a bit of weightlifting and stuff, but it was to make you a better football player or whatever it was. Bodybuilders began to use those things as an end in itself. It was about the aesthetics, it was about the way you look. And that was regarded as horribly unmasculine. At the time bodybuilding was very marginalized, in part because it wasn’t for a means to an end, but it was actually about aesthetics, and if you look at the dominant idea of gender through much of the 20th century, women were supposed to be concerned about aesthetics, not men, men were supposed to be the lookers, women were supposed to be looked at. And that began to shift in various ways so that… but this marginal group of men began to take these principles of mass production and apply them to the body. Very carefully measuring inputs, output, calories, repetitions, regimes, much more fine tuned weight movements, and you end up with the body as a product as opposed to the body as an inherent outcome of the things we’re doing with it. And the body is a product for the way it looks to others rather than the body as a means of fulfillment. And so we find that the attitude towards our bodies begins to shift a lot through the 20th century, and we become much more aware of the body as a product because at the same time, the way people began to form relationships was shifting.
And what you find in the early 20th century is that there’s a major shift in the formation of heterosexual relationships where the idea that we are marrying for love and that love is a product of sexual attraction – which again we think of as natural, we think of, well, we’re hardwired for that. But in fact, among human society is a very, very recent concept.
And if we are marrying for sexual attraction, what we find is that making yourself attractive matters and so people begin to invest more and more. First, women have to, because of the way that social power operates, but also men begin to do that too, and rather than the body as an end in itself as their fulfillment and so on, the body becomes a means to an end.
It becomes kind of our marketing image, our brand.
Chris Browne:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, there’s a really excellent section in the book on ecology, and I think I’ll quote at length and hopefully I’ll arrive at my point here. You say in the book: ‘we experience sexuality through our own embodiment, which in contemporary capitalist societies is framed by the metabolic rift in the interchange with nature.
We view our own body’s internal nature through the frame of our engagement with external nature and in conditions of metabolic rift, when external nature is reduced to property and resources for plunder, we see our body as alienable property and a resource that we are obligated to cultivate.’ Which is this really interesting parallel, how that logic of extraction and in the wider natural world is also sort of worked upon our own bodies – that we are, you know, dominating nature internally.
And there’s also that element of a kind of fetishization of the commodity there, because that’s another thing that runs through the book is whilst you have this kind of narrowing of eroticism into that realm of narrowly defined gendered sexuality and as you said, it’s kind of often under the cover of darkness at the end of the day. But at the same time you see this kind of greater sort of sexualization of commodities in the public realm.
Yeah. Could you say a little bit more about that process running along in tandem?
Alan Sears:
Yeah. So the language of metabolic rift comes originally from Marx. He argued one of the central features, because people are makers, one of the central features of our making is an ongoing ‘metabolism’ with nature is the word that he uses. And this idea that there’s an interchange, and I’m using the word interchange very deliberately because it’s two sided and the idea that what we take we also have some responsibility to renew has been there in various ways, in different cultures and societies. Whether that’s done spiritually, whether that’s the literal cycles of planting and harvesting in agriculture, the idea that there’s an element of replenishment along with the taking in that it’s an interchange and that I quote Indigenous activist and theorist Leanne Simpson talking about her nation as marked by relations of reciprocity with other peoples, other species, the land. The idea is that if you take from the land, you owe the land back, and that it’s an ongoing interchange. And what we find in capitalism is that that metabolism with nature shifts. Marx at first notices by reading stuff about soil and the fact that the soil is being depleted by modern agriculture.
And that was where that term metabolic rift was first coined, was to talk about the fact that – and we all know this about agriculture – the inherent nutrition that’s there in the soil gets sucked out and therefore you need to keep fertilizing and you need more and more fertilizer. And so the soil becomes essentially sterile. And it’s only us putting back in these fertilizers that are often biochemical and extracted in very dangerous ways and so on.
So our relationship with the land has changed and the idea of metabolic rift has been taken by ecological socialists much more broadly to describe our broader relationship with nature. In capitalism, part of that seizure of the key productive resources of society that I talked about earlier is that everything becomes property: the land becomes property, the resources under the land become property, our bodies become property.
Our capacities become property. It’s not just our bodies themselves, but our capacity. So our capacity to work becomes property that we sell to an employer to get a wage, to get the things that we need to keep our body going. And once you get a society where everything is property, the idea is that you use your property in a capitalist society to get what you need from it.
You extract from it, but you don’t go back, you own it, you dominate it. It’s a one sided relation of domination and extraction. And this relationship of extraction marks so many different elements of our relations with each other, our relations with the land and so on, that we treat ourselves as property because we have to. Going back to bodybuilding, what we were talking about, you improve your property so that rather than your body being a source of generative powers that you fulfill because it’s inherently enriching for you, your body becomes a piece of property that you improve so that you can get through life and earn the things you do.
And so you see a lot of parents, for example, with even quite young kids concerned about are they learning to speak fast enough? Are they learning to read fast enough? That, are they developing their productive capacities at the pace that we need, because it’s all about the productive capacities of the body or in the marketplace of building relationships it’s about attractiveness, and what is your kind of currency in that market. And so we’re stuck with this idea of everything becomes a means to an end and extraction becomes central. And so in that situation, we lose a sense of our creative transformative capacity. And instead we think that those things actually have a power over us.
So we think that an attractive person is almost like a magnet that is drawing us towards them. We don’t think about where desire comes from, how much we ourselves shape our desire. We think, Oh no, there’s a magnetic force outside me, and it feels like that for a whole bunch of different things. When you see something in a shop window, when you see an ad for a chocolate bar, whatever it is, it seems like that thing is attractive.
Marx, one of the things that he looked at in terms of capitalist society, is to look at the way we fetishize, to use a word that was originally in anthropological terms used in very Eurocentric ways to describe non European based religions and to say that they fetishize – they create artificial gods. We have the monopoly on the true one.
And that idea of a fetish, Marx said, Well, yeah, but the fetishism isn’t theological in capitalist societies, it’s actually very practical and day to day – those things actually seem to have a power over us. We actually believe that if we had that shirt, we would look attractive, we would have different powers, and then you get the shirt home and put it on, and actually you’re still you. But the idea that these things have power over us, these things that are human products that humans create, and so we lose a sense of authorship and that dramatically affects our sense of sexuality, attraction, gender, all those things. It seems like those things are fixed in that they have a power over us and we lose a sense of the fact that as a society we’ve made this system of genders, as a society, we’ve made this system of relationships, we’ve directed our desires in particular ways that are regulated in particular ways, and therefore we can change them so that we can actually meet our real needs.
Chris Browne:
So obviously the role of the state in capitalism is to maintain and reproduce the workforce, the working class, which is necessary for the reproduction of capital. And you know, I think you point out the states have been far more involved in regulating privatized working class reproduction than maybe Marx envisioned, and that they sort of have this kind of role of a complex and shifting balance – and again, I’m quoting here – ‘The moral regulation of the working class and capitalist societies involves a complex and shifting balance between constraining and unleashing desire.’ Now, we’ve talked a bit already about the workplace and that productivist side of things. And, you know, indeed in sort of formal educational settings as well. But what about that unleashing of and managing of desires?
You know, what is the role of the state here in that process of rationalizing our desire?
Alan Sears:
One of the interesting things about it, because you asked earlier on about a kind of historical perspective, one of the things is that the state’s role has shifted historically. So if you look in the 19th century and the kind of the rise of the British state, (it just it happens to be the one that I read about the most), you find that in the early 19th century, the state was doing very little in terms of what we now think of as education, health care, welfare. There was very limited outdoor relief that had a long tradition in Britain, that was seen as a problem in capitalist society because it was allowing people to survive even if they weren’t employed.
And so you find that outdoor relief becomes indoor relief and the workhouse and we have these images from Dickens and so on – very real institutions that also existed in Canada, by the way. And so that state largely played a proscriptive role, which is stopping, eliminating alternatives to the wage. But workers fought back because workers are never fully dehumanized.
However much capitalists may try to do that, workers find ways to resist, and workers made themselves a problem. Some of it was that working class life was literally unsustainable. So there was that problem that wasn’t only about worker organizing, but was also literally when men, women and children are all employed, children over five are all employed, it’s almost impossible for anyone to have the time to take care of the little ones, to make sure that there’s proper food.
People were exhausted, people were dying, and infant mortality rates were absolutely out of control. But adult mortality rates were very high. It was just not sustainable, even from the point of view of capitalists. And so you find regulation increasing. At first, taking the forms of things like trying to make sure there’s a safe water supply and that the sewage isn’t just going into the Thames, for example, but is actually being directed through sewage systems and that it’s not contaminating the water.
And then it grows. Education becomes an early one where kids are actually being formed into the time disciplined and so on, people who are ultimately needed. And you find that as workers make themselves a problem, because at the same time as all that was happening, part of what galvanized it in Britain was the uprisings, a whole history of uprisings, including the Chartist uprising, is that workers made themselves a problem and that galvanized state policymakers to say, How do we solve this problem longer term?
And these different waves of worker militancy have pushed to different modes of state regulation, which are not the direct outcome. It’s not what workers were asking for, but it’s an attempt by the state and capitalists to diffuse the workers’ struggle by giving some of the things that workers are asking for, but not fully. And so there was a massive strike wave towards the end of World War Two, and after World War Two in Britain, in Canada, in the States and in other countries.
But those are the three that I’ve read the most about. And what that led to was, the state didn’t simply say, Oh, yes, we need a lot more workers’ power, but instead we need to provide some of the things that workers are worried about to calm this down. And so you find the National Health Service in Britain just after World War Two, you find a whole bunch of trade union rights actually put into law.
You find a massive expansion of social assistance in various ways. You find in Britain, especially a massive public housing program with council housing growing dramatically after the war. So they grant those things, but gradually capital began to… they spent a long time trying to figure out how do we do a counter-offensive? Workers are too powerful right now.
It’s making it difficult. And especially in the 1970s, there was a big economic downturn. They really needed to do something, in their view, to keep the capitalist system going. And they began a counteroffensive against worker organizing. And one of the things that marked that counteroffensive is to say we’ve got to stop providing so much. So you find in Britain, for example, privatization of council housing, dramatic cuts in social assistance, and you find that in Canada, in the States as well, in slightly different forms, cuts to health care.
The United States never had national health care, but all kinds of cuts across the way. The idea that people on social assistance are actually a problem and that social assistance at a living wage is a problem. And so you find this massive attack and at the same time massive attacks on worker organizing, reorganization of work, all those kinds of things.
And that all sounds like it’s very negative. The other thing that happened at the same time that they realized is they also did elements of what I refer to in the book as moral deregulation. Some things that they had proscribed, like certainly in Canada, gambling was very strictly regulated, and it was largely deregulated; still regulated but now you can go to any corner store and gamble, buy lottery tickets, do those kinds of things.
Sometimes on screen gambling and so on. Casinos are legal. A lot of elements of sexuality were decriminalized and you find in different ways the idea that hedonism is actually good for the system actually becomes part of social policy in some ways. I mean, I saw this most dramatically for me years and years ago. I was employed at an agency working with people coming out of psychiatric hospital.
And at that point when I was doing that work, which was the early ‘80s, people were still tending to spend a fair amount of time in the hospital. Now that’s become reduced, unfortunately, not always for good reasons, but people were spending long times in hospital coming out to the community and we were supposed to be assisting them to reintegrate, find work and do all those kinds of things.
They had very small social assistance incomes and I was outraged at first that they were spending that money on lottery tickets. And then I began to realize, well, actually, realistically thinking of their outcomes, the limited odds of a lottery win we’re not that much worse than their odds in any other thing, because once you come out of hospital, when you try to enter the workforce, the obstacles to renting a house, relationships, all those, because there’s so many obstacles in your way, that actually the limited odds of a lottery ticket aren’t so bad.
And the idea that that’s the way they want us to be thinking is that even if it seems like shit right now, there’s the dream that that will be overcome. It might be a lottery ticket, it might be a great investment, it might be Bitcoin, it might be… but somehow or other the shit of my everyday life will be changed.
And so you see these changes in the way the state operates. And now they are operating with that balance between… because day to day you need not only the compulsion, the temperance, the control, though that is important and you saw certainly in Canada, in the States in the early 20th century, massive temperance legislation and so on to control working class drinking and and so on.
The idea that you can’t just indulge your body and that the balance between that kind of moment of temperance and the moment of hedonism is a complicated one for state policy, because they need, at the same time, enough of what working class people need and want, enough fulfillment of desires that you still feel human. And so it’s that ongoing balance that you see in policy and sexuality is – and erotic containment is – actually at the core of that in many ways.
Chris Browne:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, again, we won’t go into the detail maybe, but there’s a bit in the book, probably this bit we’re talking about where you can highlight these different phases of capitalist development and that each comes with this different kind of state social policy regime and with it a different mode of sort of sexual regulation. So, you know, I think we’re talking here about state policy, I guess, being formed also in response to pressure from below, I guess is the idea of Gramsci’s sort of hegemony.
You know, it’s interesting, again, you know, referring back to these different phases of capitalist development and state social policy and sexual regulation that’s associated with them, that I guess the neoliberal era has seen a sort of increasing sort of homonormativity correspondingly, that’s kind of entered into the hegemony of gendered sexuality, I guess. So what is it about the neoliberal phase of capitalism that accounts for why homonormativity has become sort of part of the hegemonic gender and sexual norms, I guess?
Alan Sears:
Yeah. And so the first thing I want to say is that in the current context, just because of what’s happening in the States right now, but what’s happening in Hungary and what’s happening elsewhere is what’s interesting is that the generalizations in the book about neoliberalism are at risk right now. And is this that we’re no longer in neoliberalism or whatever?
But clearly the anti-trans, especially the anti-trans offensive that we’re seeing very clearly in Trump’s first week in office, for example, where he’s already said there are two genders as part of his inauguration speech, and they’re trying to very quickly undo trans rights in a whole bunch of different ways. And that anti-trans offensive, unfortunately, is not just limited to the States, and it’s horrible in the States, but it’s also happening elsewhere in all kinds of different forms.
And that that is kind of the leading edge of the attack on homonormativity. So I think one of the things that’s interesting is that I and others almost glibly assume that what seems to be happening must be a trend. And we’re seeing perhaps a discontinuity in that trend and very, very concerning attack, especially on trans rights but more broadly on queerness, that is horrifying in terms of the impact on individuals.
And the other thing, though, is that it was a trend, certainly in Europe, but also elsewhere, that neoliberalism was associated with elements of deregulation. And that wasn’t simply the state saying, oh, let’s let them have some sex, it’ll be good for them. It was actually, again, just like after World War Two, they diffused the workers’ movement. They lowered strike rates dramatically, in part by granting concessions. But they were concessions that were designed to keep the system going. And similarly, feminism, queer rights and anti-racist movements, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, rose and made a whole new set of demands. And again, those demands, elements of concession to diffuse the movement also get combined with how do we make this sustainable within the system? How does this contribute to the sustainability of the system?
And so the idea that, yeah, the old it’s heterosexuality or nothing wasn’t working, queers made enough of a problem and the old version of heterosexuality that was so male dominated, women were making that a problem. And so you find shifts within the idea of how heterosexuality and how heterosexual households are going to operate. You have rise in women’s employment, you have rise in childcare facilities, you have a bunch of changes going on.
And that includes the idea that you can have a gay or lesbian relationship (but I’m using those terms very specifically here) that fit the standards and look a lot like the dominant form of heterosexual relationship. So it’s not all queer sex. It’s certainly not non-couple, non-monogamous queer sex the same way that non couple non-monogamous heterosexual sex continues to… when you’re young and exploring, it’s okay. But once you reach a certain phase, it’s supposed to be coupledom. And the idea that that coupledom can be a little bit more varied than the older system, but it nonetheless needs to look in particular ways. It needs to be a household. They are allowed to raise children. They don’t have to, but they’re allowed to. But if they do, in any case, they’re responsible for their own well-being. They need to take care of themselves. So a lot is devolved on to that couple. If you think of how much caregiving partners are responsible for and parents are responsible for, and children of older parents are responsible for, that, a lot of stuff that we should be doing as a community, you know you think of elders isolated in care homes without the support of the community, without seeing younger faces, except that of their immediate offspring.
And you realize there’s a lot that we’re not doing as a community to care for each other, that so much of that is channeled narrowly into the couple. But the version of the couple that’s acceptable has been somewhat expanded and has been expanded because of pressure from below, but it’s also been expanded to diffuse that pressure from below.
Because if you look at ‘60s and ’70s versions of feminism and queer stuff, you get a more revolutionary vision that a real sexual revolution, for example, is going to change a lot. And it will raise questions about couples because not everyone wants to live that way. It raises questions about what we owe each other as a community. It raises all those kinds of questions.
It raises questions of what does free expression of sexuality actually look like? What does childhood look like and what should it look like? And a lot of those questions got damped down as the movement succeeded in certain ways in meeting certain legislative goals. So what fits with the system becomes incorporated into it. What doesn’t fit with the system remains suppressed in various ways.
That leads to what’s sometimes called homonormativity. The idea that acceptable forms of sexual expression and of coupling and of gender expression can be more varied than it used to be. But there’s still limits on what’s accepted. And so now gay couples can marry and so on. But there’s still huge restrictions in all kinds of different ways.
Chris Browne:
Absolutely. And actually, I did have a question which was asking, do you think we’re shifting into a new sort of phase? Because I guess the period is defined by, you know, this growing chasm of wealth inequality, certainly a more authoritarian, if not fascist, sort of turn politically and you see therefore kind of echoes with, you know, the rise of Stalinism, right.
Where those kind of early Bolshevik liberalizations of norms around gender and sexuality were then… there was a retrenchment. And you definitely feel like there’s echoes of that here. But we need to do well, I guess, before we finish this recording, on some of the more positive aspects, because we’ve talked a lot about what’s kind of wrong with the world and how we are constrained.
But you do put forth this kind of queer Marxist approach and you devote like the last I think chapter in the book to, you know, utopianism and the sexual revolution. So what makes queerness utopian? Why does utopian thinking need Marxism and why does Marxism need the utopian?
Alan Sears:
Basically, my original political education as a Marxist was fairly anti utopian because Marx himself distinguished himself in his writing from another political trend at the same time, which he referred to as utopian socialism. And he said that the problem is that they are simply dreaming about something better and imagining how you get there. But they didn’t have a path from here to there, and that that was a tremendous weakness.
And so that was part of my political training. And so the word utopia, the idea of ‘no place’, became as a Marxist, “yeah, well, but we are practical.” We are actually, even though it may not seem so right now, where the forces on the other side seem strong and our forces seem weak. Nonetheless, we are realistically saying what are the forces that can change things?
And I think that it’s not completely untrue, but I think the idea that people are actually motivated to work on the world to change it, in part by seeing what can be different, by seeing in ourselves, by seeing in each other, by seeing in our relationships elements of a much better world, because we’re not totally dehumanized even by the most dehumanizing conditions and so on.
And you still see the beauty of humanity in our relationships with each other. In the play of children, in dancing in a club at night, depending on who you are, where that is, a concert, whatever it is, you see the beauty of humanity, and that that’s actually important. And one of the things I began to realize by reading especially Sheila Rowbotham and others, is that they pointed out that actually the utopian socialists in the 19th century did far better in terms of understanding sexual and gender diversity and how that was a positive political force then the more orthodox Marxists tended to.
And so you find that stream beginning to develop. In the modern sense it means that as people are coming out or working on their sexuality and imagining it, that there’s this sense of possibility that comes from rejecting the normal. Once you reject the normal, the question about what can it be gets opened up. And so part of queer mobilizing has been – and not just for queer people, but for anyone – to say what is possible? And to realize that humans have immensely different needs from each other individually, collectively, in a whole bunch of ways.
We have a wide range of different kinds of needs. Our hungers, our thirsts are voracious and are partly of our own making. We actually create desires in a lot of ways and direct them in particular ways and decide to fulfill them in particular kinds of ways. And that utopian stream is to say, what happens when we build on the best of humanity?
What does society actually begin to look like when we actually begin to think about fulfilling our needs? And I’m arguing queer Marxism needs to combine that utopian element the same way Marxism needs to more broadly, that utopian element with that practical element, and to say the idea that we dream, we think about what’s possible, but we also think really clearly about how do we get there?
So it’s not what do I dream of, but it’s what’s possible and how do we get there? And you find out very different ways of relating to our own bodies, to our desires, very different ways of fulfilling desires, very different ways of living are possible. And in the book I draw on, just because it was one of the ways that people thought about this in the 1970s, especially, there was a stream of kind of science fiction writing that began to use that particular genre of fiction expression to say what is actually possible?
Because most fiction, just like most of our thinking day to day, we begin to process what we’ve experienced and assume that it’s necessarily so; what’s necessarily so under the conditions of my life seems to be necessarily so more broadly. Science fiction, by saying we’re going to different place and time and different ways of organizing, opens up the imagination. And I took some ideas from the science fiction of that period to say, Well, what kinds of relationships are possible when you realize that there’s science fiction that talks about huge ranges of different genders and huge ranges of desire, huge ranges of housing forms and huge ranges of community forms in child rearing and so on.
And that’s not simply based on a fiction writer’s mind, though that’s part of it. It’s also based on anthropology and all kinds of different studies about the way people can live. And if we are motivated by that, we begin to think, how do we get to a situation? And just in the realm of housing is one of the ways to think of it, as part of the Russian Revolution and the left wing uprising that had revolutionary elements in Germany at the time, you see some experimental housing that’s not simply based on single household units. Each household is supposed to be a self-contained, child rearing, adult rearing, but in fact they often had childcare built in. They had communal kitchens, they had ways of designing housing that allowed for different ways of living. And the utopian is to say, we can build housing differently.
And so that doesn’t sound that utopian in a way, because we know that people can live differently, we want to live differently. But the housing stock, among other things, first of all, is inadequate. But even what’s there isn’t designed to allow people to live the ways that they need. We pass each other if we’re in the elevator or the lift together, we may make a little bit of conversation.
But other than that, a lot of the time we’re completely strangers from the people who live next door to us and we’re not building community out of the fact that we’re cohabiting and there’s not common space. There’s not space for kids to play and so on. Kids are supposedly quiet in the halls, all those things. So the utopian is about unleashing possibility, but that doesn’t mean just giving in to dreams, it means unleashing possibility and being quite rigorous about how we actually get there.
Chris Browne:
Yeah. I mean, I guess just to that I’ll add, you know, in this same final chapter, you kind of introduce some really interesting ideas, like the ‘infrastructure of dissent’. And then also the power of the affective dimensions to, you know, collective organizing, that they’re absolutely vital to these kinds of movements and projects to try and do something better.
You know, we run the risk of undervaluing comradeship, friendship, love, affection, caring – all the stuff of human connection, basically – as, you know, being a key sort of propellant for our sort of movements and therefore for imagining other ways of doing things and being things in the world.
Alan Sears:
I would just briefly say in terms of what you just said, that, you know, I think we often think of solidarity as rational calculation, that you simply say my interests and your interests intersect. And therefore, rationally, I calculate that we should work together. There is that element. But one of the things I’m talking about is there’s also this actual passion for sociality that also is a crucial part of solidarity that we haven’t talked about enough.
And that as we form activist units, we actually feel bigger than ourselves because we have a power greater than ourselves. And you feel that, for example, in the power of a crowd chanting and you feel bigger than yourself and you realize the chant drowns out my voice, but there is no chant without our voices. And that idea that there’s an exhilaration that comes with that and a fulfillment, is something that, again, we haven’t thought about enough, that this idea that we are rational calculators is actually a way that we’ve learned to think about people.
And it’s not that we can’t calculate rationally or that we shouldn’t, but that doesn’t exhaust what it is to be human. We are also so filled with desire and joy and anger and pain, and that those things are all forms of connection, built around connection with each other. And that part of any process of liberation is unleashing that kind of connection with each other, which also means as we’re activists, we have responsibility because an unleashing comes with certain risks – the risks that people are going to do sexual assault, take advantage of the situation and so on.
It means that our movements actually need take responsibility for the fact that desire is unleashed when we mobilize together. So there’s responsibility aspects, but there’s also, I’m hoping, a sense in the book of the exhilaration of thinking otherwise. And it’s not just the horrors of Trump or the horrors a Labour government that looks a lot like a Tory government or whatever it is.
It’s actually also realizing that on our side we’ve got a lot going for us, we’ve got the joy of living, we’ve got the power of connection. And when that gets interrupted, that’s horrifying. But when we rebuild it, it’s not only the rational calculation, but also that exhilaration that that powers our movements. And that’s one of the things that I hope was there in the book.
And I really appreciate you raising it and I really appreciate the discussion.
Chris Browne:
Yeah, thanks, Alan. That’s a lovely place to end. I’ve really enjoyed reading the book. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you today. So thank you for coming on the show. And you know, once again for listeners, Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities is out now from Pluto Press. You can head over to plutobooks.com, and as I said before, you can get 40% off with the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.
So Alan, thank you for your time. Yeah, it’s been a real pleasure.
Alan Sears:
Thanks. I really appreciate it.