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So, in Greece there is a discussion on a law proposed by the centre-right government which will allow homosexual pairs to be officially married and adopt children and the Communist Party has declared that it will vote against it.
Today they published a lengthy text explaining their controversial decision with arguments like claiming the law will abolish the proletariat’s rights to “maternity” and “paternity” in favour of having “parent 1” and “parent 2” and possibly more, according to what is apparently dictated by European law (which it claims will be detrimental to the interests of the child). It makes the (probably not totally wrong) argument that there are too few children for adoption in Greece and too many people already waiting to adopt a child, and that might lead pairs to seek children through surrogacy, thus reinforcing the commercialization of birth and exploitation of women. And then it goes on to say that it is wrong to totally disregard biological sexes and their needs, rejects the theory that gender is a social construct and makes the claim that the liberalisation of gender policy leads to estrangement of the proletariat from class struggle (!). And after all this, they still claim to be protecting the interests of people of all sexual orientations.
I am pretty new to marxism and this position confuses the heck out of me. Is the Party position as controversial as I think it to be, or is there something that I am failing to grasp in its analysis?
What’s really absurd about their position is they’re taking an anti-materialist stance on the family and its origins. There’s nothing natural about the nuclear family, it is a modern construct that emerged alongside the state and capitalism.
My guess is that the way that liberalism and capitalist modernity now pretends to embrace gender and sexuality minorities has caused them to take a reflexive stance against it, as if communism is just reactionary anti-liberalism. Do they even read theory?
That isn’t controversial for a modern Marxist party, unfortunately. Most of them seem to be neck-deep in homophobia and/or TERF shit.
CW: homophobia
The Greek party position could be sound but only if you’re missing something important in the wording of the proposed law. Maybe there’s a clause that abolishes parental leave/pay while granting equal marriage rights. I can see why they’d challenge that if it would (a) remove support for all parents on the very day of the victory (i.e. for equal marriage/parental rights) and (b) lead reactionaries to blame homosexual couples for their loss of support. Idk, though. If that’s the case, it’d be better to campaign for amendments than to vote against it completely.
Either way, it’s problematic to challenge homosexual couples adopting due to surrogacy because unless they plan to abolish surrogacy, it essentially means a ban on homosexuals having children unless they have a child by a different heterosexual relationship (I imagine single people can’t easily adopt). Maybe they plan to get into power, abolish surrogacy, and then grant full family rights to homosexual couples. If that’s the case, it’s a terrible plan; how long are homosexuales supposed to wait?
If you’ve got a link to an English (or Spanish) translation, I’ll have a look. Is it this? https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/The-commercialization-of-surrogacy-is-a-billion-dollar-business-obscurantism-modern-day-barbarity-and-brutal-exploitation/ If it is: shit show of a communist party. Accusing the bill-proposers of obscuring the true benefactors and of appealing to the right wing while complaining about the loss of the mother-father binary. A reactionary US local government is trying to ban the use of ‘pregnant people’ and other ‘woke language’ and here we have a Greek ‘communist’ arguing that he wants to stop the same thing from even entering Greek discourse.
Who gives af if the state calls parents ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2’, anyway, even if that does happen elsewhere (I’m not convinced it does). Or ‘parent 3’ for that matter. Kids will still be raised to call their moms ‘mom’ and their dads ‘dad’ if the family wants that. I can’t see any family of any sexual orientation numbering the parents except as a joke. Utterly bizarre argument. The kind of thing you hear from the conservatives.
And opposing progress because the right wing might take advantage of it? We won’t get very far if we take that approach.
Sounds like the KKE has found what they think is a clever way of pandering to conservatives under the guise of ‘thinking about the working class’. I can’t wait for the day that ‘communists’ realise that conservatives aren’t put off by this or that progressive position but because they’re bloody communists. We might actually build some solidarity and get the revolution going when that happens.
Welcome to being a communist in the west. You’re not wrong. You’re just realising how many Western marxists are wrong.
A lot of the points that you raise were actually brought up in discussion about the time that the stance of KKE on this topic was announced. The article you linked is, I think, the first time the decision was made public by the party gensec himself, but the text I was referring to was actually only published yesterday, so far only in Greek AFAICT. Still, if you want to have a go with a translator, this is it: [https://m.902.gr/eidisi/politiki/354061/oi-theseis-toy-kke-gia-ton-politiko-gamo-ton-omofylon-zeygarion-kai-tis].
The reality is, KKE is the strongest communist party in the country and I support its stance on most other topics, but on a few approaches its approach is at best questionable or at worst inadequate and conservative. It certainly feels like they care too much about their percentages in the elections (which, truth be told, are better than they have ever been), so far as to support homophobic views in an attempt to win conservative and right-wing sympathizers (very pathetic). Still, I find it hard to believe that they can implement their program by just winning the elections. The bourgeoisie won’t give up easily on their benefits, and NATO and EU will almost certainly react.
Still I think that if any party deserves support in the elections, it is KKE, and I have hopes that things will change for the better over time, especially considering its increasing popularity among the youth.
European “communists” never fail to disappoint.
That’s an insane problem to have. Mfs like “I want my own physical being to take care of and put tons of effort into in addition to my work.” This problem calls for less traditional family norms, not more. Have these revisionists not even read the manifesto?
-Karl Marx
Earlier he notes:
Your Greek opportunists do not understand that we are trying to move past capitalism, not to revert to earlier relations.
One more thing. I’m sure one of the worries is the “demographic crisis.” The solution they should be putting forward is making the bourgeoisie lower the cost of living. Criminalizing gay people isn’t going to make them be straight and have kids.