It is today taken as almost axiomatic that the left supports the LGTB cause. It came therefore, as a surprise to me to find a communist journalist Gearoid O Colmain arguing that homosexuals, far from constituting a persecuted minority, are in fact key protagonists of the ruling class and bourgeois ideology.
He claims that
In the Soviet Union homosexuality was seen as one of the many perversions promoted by the bourgeoisie and their petty-bourgeois opponents– a ruling class phenomenon of social rather than biological origin. The communist understanding of sexuality has, since the counter-revolutions in Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR, been conveniently buried and forgotten.
My impression of his arguments is that they are very mixed with some stuff that is plausible and some stuff that is cranky, denying that HIV causes AIDS for example. But I think that a plausible economic argument can be made for one of his key arguments – that the political gay movement expresses middle class and upper class interests. I will in this post try to pull together an argument to this effect. I will focus on the mean class position of homosexual men, and show that this puts them in the top 10% of the population, and that this economic position is not incidental, but is closely connected with the gay male mode of life. Note the specificity, it does not apply to Lesbians.
1 Class
How do you define class position in Marxist terms? At its most basic the distinction between exploiting and exploited classes rests on whether a person receives goods and services involving more labour than they contribute to society. This is a general definition that applies across all class societies, slave, feudal or capitalist. If you get back more than you put in in terms of labour then you, at least partially, benefit from exploitation.
It is important to realise that whether someone benefits from exploitation is not down to the legal form of their income. A person may formally be an employee and still benefit from exploitation. Obviously this applies to a manager on £250,000 a year. It is not always so evident where the cut-off comes. To work it out precisely you have to know what the monetary equivalent of an hour of labour is. I have not worked this out recently for the UK but before the recession I reckoned that it was about £20 an hour. As a first estimate anyone earning more than this in say 2008 would have been, at least partially, benefiting from the exploitation of others.
Just taking wage income into account is obviously too simple. People may have property income as well, and on the negative side they may be exploited by banks to whom they pay interest, or landlords to whom they pay rent. But simple income figures give you a first cut.
An alternative approach is to look at the share of wages in national income, then look at the mean wage. Someone on the mean wage will be exploited by the average amount. In 2009 for example the UK wage share was 53%1 and the average salary was £26,4502 which implies that the average employee generated a surplus value of £23,450 giving a total value created per employee of just under £50,000, so anyone earning above this was not exploited.
Because the distribution of income is uneven, the mean wage in 2009 was well above the median adult income which was only £16,400, and 67% of adults had an income of less than the average wage. About the top 10% of Britons, that year, had an income above the exploitation threshold of £50,000.
What does it mean to say someone is middle class?
Was a person on the median income of £16,000 – in the middle of the income range middle class?
In strict statistical terms it might seem so, but socially that makes no sense. A middle class status used to be associated with the self employed professions or small business people, who were not exploited, nor were they employers of labour. In terms of the current income distribution that would be people earning around the exploitation threshold say in the range £45,000 to £73,000, above which a person was receiving the value they create, plus the surplus value created by an average worker. Above that level they can reasonably be said to be upper class.
This comprised roughly the distribution from the 88th to the 96th percentile of the UK income distribution, or 8% of the population. If you are in the top 10% of the population then you are either comfortably middle class or upper class.
2 Economics and the gay lobby
You might initially think that economic class position had nothing to do with homosexuality, but it does not take long looking at the empirical sociological literature to come to the conclusion that this is mistaken. There is a connection, but it is that the interests of gays tend to be aligned with that of the propertied classes, rather than being independent of conflicting class interests. First, the literature on class attitudes to homosexuality shows that working class people are more likely to be hostile to it, and people from higher social classes more likely to be favourable or tolerant towards itAndersen and Fetner, [2008,Embrick et al., [2007]. Second, published data shows that gay couples are, on average, significantly better off than straight ones. On both attitudinal grounds and economic grounds therefore, the gay straight polarisation axis, rather than being independent of the class polarisation axis turns out to be tilted with respect to it.
There is a large body of data establishing that the gay population is disproportionately drawn from the middle and upper middle class, with, as a result, disproportionately small proportion being working class. In the UK a study showed that whereas only 16% of men had university degrees, 36% of gays had themArabsheibani et al., [2005]. Where only 5.5% of all men had professional or managerial jobs, the proportion among gay men in the UK was 9%. For the USA, where educational opportunities have traditional been better than the UK, a study of couples showed that 43% of gays and lesbians had college degrees, whereas only 28% of straight men and 26% of straight women had such degreesBlack et al., [2007]. Similar results come from Berg and Lien [2002],Billy et al. [1993]. Given this difference in jobs and education, one would expect that there would be a significant economic disparity between the position of gay and straight families. This is indeed what we find.
A large Swedish survey of 1,029,420 heterosexual and 940 gay and 968 lesbian couples found that gay couples had the highest incomesAhmed et al., [2011] . They show that gay couples earn more than heterosexual couples who in turn earn more than lesbian ones. This is unsurprising since male earnings are pretty consistently higher than female ones, so an all male household would be expected to earn the most and an all female one the least. No attempt is made in this survey to compute the per-capita incomes of different household types, i.e., to take into account non-earning dependents, principally children, but also potentially older relatives. To do this one would have to know the average family size for different households.
Black et al Black et al., [2000] give data on the proportion of heterosexual and homosexual couples with 1,2,or 3 or more children in their households, thought this is for the USA not Sweden. Nonetheless, it is possible to use their data to compute the mean household sizes for different types of couples (Table 1).
| married | unmarried | |||||
| children | gay | hetero | hetero | lesbian | men | women |
| couple | couple | couple | couple | single | single | |
| 0 | 0.948 | 0.408 | 0.638 | 0.783 | 0.952 | 0.77 |
| 1 | 0.03 | 0.224 | 0.181 | 0.126 | 0.029 | 0.101 |
| 2 | 0.012 | 0.23 | 0.11 | 0.05 | 0.014 | 0.076 |
| 3 | 0.011 | 0.138 | 0.071 | 0.04 | 0.005 | 0.045 |
| total | 0.087 | 1.098 | 0.614 | 0.346 | 0.072 | 0.388 |
| family size | 2.087 | 3.098 | 2.614 | 2.346 | 1.072 | 1.388 |
ArabsheibaniArabsheibani et al., [2005] produces data for hourly rates of pay for men and women in the UK who are in either gay couples or married heterosexual couples. This broadly reproduces the results of Ahmed, Andersson and Hammarstedt for Sweden, in that he showed that the median wage of gay men in couples was higher than that of heterosexual married men, which in turn was slightly above that of lesbian women, who in turn earned more than married heterosexual women (Table 2). He does not estimate incomes of couples. This can not be done just by adding the hourly wage rates of married men and women, firstly because of the lower employment rate of married women 71% against 85% for women in Lesbian couples and 87.5% for men in gay couples, and secondly because married women have lower working hours. However if we did simply add the mean hourly pay of the married men and women scaled by activity rates and divide by an estimated family size we can get the an estimate of mean hourly pay per family member. Table 3 gives such an estimate for the UK and Table 4 corresponding estimates for Sweden. Both these tables depend on the use of family size estimates derived from Black et al. We can expect the relative family sizes of gay, lesbian and hetrosexual married couples to be similar accross countries at comparable stages of development. Although the exact divisors that should be used will vary from country to country, the ordering that we obtain of per capita income as being gay couples > lesbian couples > heterosexual couples will be robust.
| Same sex | Heterosexual married | |
| Men | £10.10 | £8.90 |
| Women | £8.70 | £6.20 |
#1Estimate of percapita incomes in gay and straight couples in the UK. Mean pay rates and activity rates from Arabsheibani et al. [2005], family size estimates derived from Black et al. [2000].
| Gays | Lesbians | Married men | Married women | |
| Mean pay rate | £11.70 | £10.10 | £10.70 | £7.60 |
| Activity rate | 0.87 | 0.85 | 0.84 | 0.71 |
| Product | £10.18 | £8.58 | £8.99 | £5.40 |
| Per couple | £20.36 | £17.17 | £14.38 | £14.38 |
| Scaled by family size | ||||
| Per capita hourly income | £9.75 | £7.32 | £4.64 | £4.64 |
| Type of couple | Gay | Lesbian | Heterosexual | |
| Mean income of couple SEKAhmed et al., [2011] | 584,000 | 464,000 | 532,000 | |
| Per capita adjusted for family size Black et al., [2000] | 280,000 | 197,000 | 190,000 |
For example we can derive figures for per-capita income for gay, lesbian and straight couples in the US from the data in Black et al. [2007] giving the same ordering. Again the per capita income of gay male couples is highest, followed by lesbian couples, followed by heterosexual couples (Table 5 ).
The figures for the UK in Table 3 show a two to one advantage in per capita incomes for gay as opposed to straight couples. If we combine this with Arabshebani’s figures for the distribution of wages by deciles, we see that this means that the median gay income is as high as the top decile of of heterosexual family incomes. Only the top 10% of straight families are as well of as a mid income range gay couple. This amounts to an appreciable socio economic class difference.
2.1 Unpaid social labour by couples
But the analysis so far has only dealt with the market economy and earnings obtained there. The family is also a place where work is done, the domestic economy. Indeed this is the original meaning of economy, managment of the household. This work does not assume monetary form, either because it is entirely private : a person cooking their own meal, or because, although it is social : looking after children, it occurs under non-capitalist relations of production. Even the ‘private’ work of a person feeding themself, is in a sense socially necessary labour, since, absent such cooking, the population would starve. But shopping, cooking, cleaning up, washing are all activities that take place whether the household has children or not and are thus not relevant in the comparison of different household types. On the other hand child care time will vary according to whether the household has children and depend also on the number of children they have. Since much of our data has come from North America let us look there. Statistics Canada give figures which show that in the average family with children the mother spends 2.55 hrs a day in childcare and the father 1.55 hours a day, to give a total per couple of 4.1 hours. On the assumption that Canadian and US household time budgets are similar we have computed the expected number of hours of childcare time in different categories of family, weighting 4.1 hrs a day by the probability that the household has children (Table 5).
| Gay | Lesbian | Straight | |
| Mean couple income | $82,000 | $66,500 | $65700 |
| Mean family size | 2.144 | 2.356 | 3.173 |
| Per capita income | $38259 | $28234 | $20700 |
| Unpaid SNLT hrs/yr | 74 | 329 | 882 |
| Bourgeois value | $567 | $2495 | $6692 |
| Marxian valuation | $2324 | $10229 | $27433 |
Derivation of Marxian valuation
| US percapita GNP 2007 | $46000 |
| Participation rate | 63% |
| GNP per participant | $73000 |
| Paid working week, hours | 47 |
| Hours per year | 2350 |
| Value created per hour of labour | $31 |
From this we see that straight couples perform much more unpaid socially necessary labour time. But how much is this labour worth. One approach taken in Colman and Atlantic, [1998] was to value childcare labour at the rate of pay of childminders in private childcare businesses. From the standpoint of Marxist economics this is wrong, since that confuses the value of labour power with the value created by labour and from the standpointsome of orthodox economics it also underestimates the impact of withdrawing this much labour from the market economy. Workers are only paid a fraction of the value they create, so valuing unpaid labour at the prevailing wage rate is a serious underestimate of the value that that labour would have created were it deployed in the market sector. It amounts to the assumption that there would be no additional property income were the effective labour force to increase. Adding the equivalent of millions of additional full time workers to the market economy would generate additional value flows that would filter through to profit, interest, tax revenues etc.
A better procedure is to estimate the monetary equivalent of social labour time, as is done in the subsidiary table. This gives a figure of about $31 value created per hour by US labour in 2007. Scaling the unpaid childcare labour in families by this gives the bottom line of Table 5. We see that whereas the average gay couple did unpaid social labour with a value of about $2300 a year, the average straight couple did unpaid social labour to a value of over $27000 a year, more than 10 times as much. Of that labour about $17000 worth is done by the mother and $10000 worth by the father.
It could be argued that this is an unfair comparison; that having children is a private decision and it is nobody else’s business if a gay couple do not want to have children. Why should they work to create labour power for the capitalist system?
The reality is that having children is, in part, a private decision although social expectations play a huge role in the decision. However, things can be simultaneously private and social. Commodity production rests on this kind of duality: commodities are produced by private individuals and firms, but they are produced to meet social needs. Children are produced as a result of private actions but once they are grown up, they constitute the future society, and via their work, support that society. A person who, due to choice or circumstances, has no offspring, depends for their day to day existence on the offspring of others. It may appear that by saving for their old age they have provided for themselves. But this is a monetary illusion. You do not save for your old age by putting cans of beans and sacks of flour in a cellar to sustain you; instead you rely on freshly produced food, clothes etc, produced by the labour of the generation that follows you. If you rely on a state pension then the next generation will be taxed to support you. If you have a private pension it will be invested in government bonds to produce interest. That interest will again come from tomorrow’s tax payers. If it is invested in shares, then the pension will come from the employment of tomorrow’s workers.
The unpaid labour of raising children, labour predominantly done by mothers, is socially essential and all the current generation, whether they have children themselves or not, benefit indirectly from it. Gay activists are wont to identify their campaigns with campaigns against women’s oppression, but the economic analysis so far shows that this concept is fallacious. Not only are gay couples financially better off, they also, in the main, often opt out of the socially necessary unpaid labour that is at the root of the disadvantaged position of women/wives. The establishment and normalisation of gay marriage will tend to increase the inequality of men and women in this respect. Insofar as a portion of the male population were once covert homosexuals, who would have hidden their preferences, married women and helped to bring up children, they can now move directly into a respectable gay marriage where they are statistically very unlikely to do any unpaid child raising work. The net effect is obviously to accentuate the disparity between men and women, and shift even more of the burden of raising the next generation onto women.
The economic basis of marriage is not love. As both experience and the tradition of romantic literature tell us, you do not need to be married to love, and many marriages continue despite an absence of love. The legal institution of marriage regulates, on the one hand, rights and duties with respect to children, and on the other, the sharing of various juridical assets. These include both direct ownership of dwellings, instances where there are heritable tenancies, and personal rights to other public and private benefits: pensions, insurance, citizenship. In the early stages after the legalisation of homosexuality, gays were relatively uninterested in marriage, and, if anything, disdained it as a mark of respectability.
Two processes operating over the last decades may have made the juridical asset aspect of marriage more attractive. The first of these is just the cumulative result of the economic advantage that gay couples enjoy. It enables them to accumulate property faster than other couples, so they have more to share on the death of a partner. Gays are twice as likely to own dwellings in the highest property band as heterosexuals. Black et al., showed that over 34% of middle-aged gays owned houses in the highest property band as against under 16% of married men and women of the same age. We have been unable to find statistics on ownership of financial assets, but one would expect, from the big income disparity, to find a similar bias there. At the same time, the advance of privatisation, neo-liberalism and the undermining of universal health and social benefits increases the importance of heritable or shareable private insurance rights.
“Couples seeking to protect their relationship and family through wills and other mechanisms in the absence of a marriage contract need significant resources, including knowledge and money. This is equally the case in the dissolution of a relationship not recognised by the state, where only those with these same resources can pursue an equitable distribution of joint assets.” Bhroin, [2009]
The conclusion from the evidence so far is that the gay marriage movement is fundamentally conservative, aimed at the securing of relatively privileged property ownership and it makes the relative position of women in society slightly worse3. The economic effects are small since the affected population segment is tiny, but the debate on gay marriage takes on a prominence way beyond any direct socioeconomic effect that it may have.
| Reproductive | Semi-reproductive | Non-reproductive | |
| Atomised | nuclear family | lesbian couple | gay couple |
| Semi-communal | extended family | ||
| Communal | phalanstery/kibbutz | nunnery/monastery |
References
- [Ahmed et al. 2011]
- Ali M Ahmed, Lina Andersson, and Mats Hammarstedt. Inter-and intra-household earnings differentials among homosexual and heterosexual couples. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 49 (s2): s258-s278, 2011.
- [Andersen and Fetner 2008]
- Robert Andersen and Tina Fetner. Economic inequality and intolerance: attitudes toward homosexuality in 35 democracies. American Journal of Political Science, 52 (4): 942-958, 2008.
- [Arabsheibani et al. 2005]
- G Reza Arabsheibani, Alan Marin, and Jonathan Wadsworth. Gay pay in the uk. Economica, 72 (286): 333-347, 2005.
- [Berg and Lien 2002]
- Nathan Berg and Donald Lien. Measuring the effect of sexual orientation on income: Evidence of discrimination? Contemporary economic policy, 20 (4): 394-414, 2002.
- [Bhroin 2009]
- Feargha Ní Bhroin. Feminism and the same-sex marriage debate. Electronic, Marriage Equality, April 2009. URL ww.marriagequality.ie/download/pdf/feminism_paper_final_01.05.pdf.
- [Billy et al. 1993]
- John OG Billy, Koray Tanfer, William R Grady, and Daniel H Klepinger. The sexual behavior of men in the united states. Family planning perspectives, pages 52-60, 1993.
- [Black et al. 2000]
- Dan Black, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor. Demographics of the gay and lesbian population in the united states: Evidence from available systematic data sources. Demography, 37 (2): 139-154, 2000.
- [Black et al. 2007]
- Dan A Black, Seth G Sanders, and Lowell J Taylor. The economics of lesbian and gay families. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21 (2): 53-70, 2007.
- [Canada 2011]
- Statistics Canada. General social survey – 2010 overview of the time use of canadians. July 2011.
- [Colman and Atlantic 1998]
- Ronald Colman and GPI Atlantic. The Economic Value of Unpaid Housework and Child Care in Nova Scotia. GPI Atlantic Halifax, 1998.
- [Embrick et al. 2007]
- David G Embrick, Carol S Walther, and Corrine M Wickens. Working class masculinity: Keeping gay men and lesbians out of the workplace. Sex roles, 56 (11-12): 757-766, 2007.
- [Nair 2015]
- Yasmin Nair. The secret history of gay marriage. 2015. URL http://yasminnair.net/content/secret-history-gay-marriage.
Footnotes:
1From Extended Penn World Tables
2 See https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/datasets/agegroupashetable6
3 “In short, the secret history of gay marriage is that its real history, as a rapacious, greedy, and entirely selfish campaign carried out by rapacious, greedy and entirely selfish gay men and women has been systematically erased by gay men like Frank Bruni and their unctuous straight allies like Frank Rich and Linda Hirshman. The secret history of gay marriage is not that it might prevent our sex lives from being more interesting, but that its victory enables the cementing of a neo-liberal society where only private relationships can ensure access to economic security and healthcare. The preferred narrative is that gay marriage will be a dream come true. The reality is that gay marriage is nothing but a nightmare and neo-liberalism’s handiest little tool.” [Nair, 2015]
File translated from TEX by TTH, version 4.08.
I think that you need to account for the presence of selection bias in studies of income and wealth for homosexual/heterosexual couples. As you write: “First, the literature on class attitudes to homosexuality shows that working class people are more likely to be hostile to it, and people from higher social classes more likely to be favourable or tolerant towards it.” If poor people’s social/employment circles are mostly other poor people, then gays near the bottom of the income distribution are more likely to be closeted compared to their richer counterparts. If survey data on income is based entirely on self-identification, then the estimates for gays are probably biased upward.
Well the effect that you describe would tend to make responses non linear but would not explain the original effect. For the closeting effect you hypothesise to be in effect the working class community would have to be more hostile to gays to start out with. Were that not the case the same effect would operate in middleclass and bourgeois circles, they too move in a closed social circle, and were homosexuality to be disapproved of in these circles, the desire for respectability would make gays there keep their heads down too.
Sure, but I don’t see measurement of an original effect. I see studies that have been carried out in the context where there is a difference in class attitudes toward homosexuality. My point is that, if you take a random sample of gays today, you are going to unintentionally oversample ones in the higher end of the income distribution and undersample ones in the lower end, producing estimates of average income that are biased above the true value.
Ok I have a clearer idea of what you are saying here. You are suggesting that there are equal numbers of gays in all classes and that results that say differently are the result of selection bias. I thought you were talking about the interaction between hostility and unfamiliarity, so that the more hostile attitude to gays among poorer people was due to unfamiliarity, whereas the less hostile attitude in the middle and upper classes was due to them encountering more gays in their own social class or working environment.
Your claim of selection bias is unfalsifiable unless you have some independent survey data that are not subject to the same biases. One could equally well argue that the reverse effect was present : Gays with higher levels of income would sacrifice more if they come out and then lose their jobs, so the studies will under represent better off gays.
Arabsheibani goes into some detail on the problems of getting reliable data on sexual orientation. Most of the studies use information that is gathered incidentally to some other purpose. He for example uses the UK Labour Force Survey which has questions about who people live with. For the purpose of the study he counts people as gay if they are living with one other adult of the same sex who is not their parent or child. He acknowledges that:
” This way of identifying gays, similar to the US studies, is not perfect as it does not include homosexuals who are married and living with an opposite-sex partner or those who do not live with a partner, whether they
have one or not. Moreover, it does not include those who live with a same-sex partner but
do not disclose it. ”
More generally you need data to back up a claim of bias. If I say that statistics from the police on assaults are too low, I could back that up with an alternative source – the national crime survey. Do you have any alternative sources that cast doubt on the sources used in the literature I cited?
I can provide a somewhat belated reply to that.
In McGarrity, L. A. (2014). Socioeconomic status as context for minority stress and health disparities among lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 1(4), 383–397.
Part 1; subheading: Methodological Issues in the Study of Sexual
Orientation and SES.
The rest of the literature review also raises other interesting points against yours.
Lastly, I am curious, what role do you think gay men would play in a socialist society, given what you have said? At the very least, you surely agree that there are some who are working class or allies.
Obviously there are homosexual men who support socialism. The Soviet policy under which people with no children paid a Batchelor tax is the correct one to compensate the rest of the population for the additional labour that is imposed on it by those who do not to have children.
That view isn’t in conflict with gay marriage then. If the state were to recognize marriage at all, it could regulate the economic incentives to only apply to those with children, which could apply to gay male couple who engage in the necessary labour of adopting children (Would also note that such adoption rate are increasing over time).
You are right
Have you seen this? https://boingboing.net/2017/09/14/platform-socialism.html
How does the role of automation play into this? Couldn’t a society based upon increasingly automated production support a reduction in population from one generation to the next?
Secondly, couldn’t subsidizing domestic labor solve the problem of people “opting out” of participating in it?
On automation that is certainly the hope of the government of Japan, but it is obviously only a short term palliative for a process of exponential social collapse. Paying for domestic labour might be one way of compensating, but a better approach is probably to provide socialisation of the services currently performed by the domestic economy. This could occur either by people living communally, or by state provision of free child care and state provision of communal dining rooms.
Hi Mr. Cockshott
First, i want to thank you for all the works you’ve done for the working class and cientific socialism. Recently, i’ve bought the book you’ve written with a spanish compatriot; Maxi Nieto titled “CiberCommunism”.
I would like yo ask you a few questions:
1) According to your article ‘’ Class and the LGBT Lobby’’ you claim that there is a small proportion of the gay population in the working class, however, you seem to focus your study mainly on the prototypical profile of the ‘’white-gay-cis-man’’ which represents certainly a more visible movement than many others of the same collective. Also, you focus mainly on EEUU and the UK, countries that are known to be expensive when it comes to higher education such as College, hence only wealthy people and people with grants can afford it. So that my question is, don’t you think your article can be biased regarding the aforementioned?
2) This question is about your book “CiberCommunism”. If you prefer, we could treat it in other blog section or via email.
In the footnotes on page 22 i read that the soviet growth between 1928 and 1975 was bigger than the US growth. In otherwise, many libertarians argue with the Angus Maddison graphs that USSR was more poor than other capitalist countries using this graph:
So, could you recommend me any article that analyzes this?
Thanks.
Friendly regards. Comins.
Education is expensive in the US and more recently became expensive in the UK but not in Sweden. The data I cite comes from the US, UK and Sweden and all give similar pictures. So I do not think education costs are a factor.
On the question of sources, I suggest you look at Robert Allen, From Farm to Factory, which provides data on comparative growth rates. There are a lot of problems with intertemporal and international comparisons of GDP as these depend heavily on the weightings and currencies used to define the base and subsequent years. I give a methodological critique of these comparisons in the latter part of this paper https://www.academia.edu/2687026/A_MORE_CRITICAL_LOOK_AT_MARKET_SOCIALISM
“…but the debate on gay marriage takes on a prominence way beyond any direct socioeconomic effect that it may have.”
Do you have any idea as to why this might be the case? Any criticism of homosexuality, transvestism and sterilisation is perceived among some of the people ive encountered on the left as being akin to racism.
This is an interesting question, I think it is part of the process by which neo-liberalism attempts to create a left in its own image as part of the process of suppressing class politics.
Surely the point from a Marxist understanding has to be that increased economic independence = increased liberation from repressive bourgeois politico-eonomic categories. So once class is abolished and everybody is rich in terms of free time as the measure of social wealth, all poitico-economic categories would have withered away, a society where everybody could finally be human, as Marx put it, meaning you could imagine a society where everyone is genderless and raceless but also polyamorous and ‘pansexual’, although even this last definition would no longer exist by definition. So to say that that the LGBT politics is solely or inherently neoliberal, an attempt to suppress class politics, surely misses the historical element, whereby capitalism is laying the basis for socialism and communism.
A precondition of reproduction of a mode of a social formation is its ability to reproduce the population. This is achieved historically via the domestic mode of production in conjunction with either peasant agriculture or, for a while, industrial capitalism. But the progress of industrial capitalism gradually erodes the domestic mode of production, upon which capitalism has entirely depended for its population.
If we look at the concepts that you set in play above, your are just thinking in terms of ‘economic independence’ and very abstract negativity – all existing economic categories being abolished.
But you can not get very far with general abstractions like this. In what sense is the trend of society towards increased independence?
As production becomes increasingly socialised people become less and less independent. They become entirely dependent on integration into a society wide division of labour, and personally dependent on those wealthy individuals and firms, who organise this division of labour. Bourgeois society generates a fantastic legal independence of persons, but this legal independence is illusory unless you are rich. In practice, those who are formally independent are still forced to sell themselves.
It is quite wrong to see the process of establishing a socialist economy in terms of bourgeois ideas of independence. Socialism is not going to make us all men or women of independent means. Instead it obliges us all to serve the people as part of the social labour force – as Lenin and St Paul said ‘he who does not work, neither shall he eat’.
What does negation of all existing economic categories mean ?
Well one meaning would be ecological catastrophe that wiped out humanity ?
You may chose to imagine a genderless and pansexual society, but what reason is there to believe that such a society would have a reproduction rate >=2?
If it does not, then we are back to the negation of all economic categories brought about by biological extinction.
If you want to escape from thinking about this in contemporary bourgeois liberal terms, you have to ask what the social relations will be that ensure the reproduction of the population. If you reject patriarchal families, the alternative that we know works is the matriarchal family, but this is far from fantasy about polyamory. Instead it would mean men staying in their maternal household and being obliged to care and look after their sister’s children.