Communists are queer creatures. Emerging around the middle of the nineteenth century, they are at times shunned by polite society, at others increasingly incorporated and appropriated. They make loud, proud speeches scandalously proclaiming their identity; they hold secretive and cliquey meetings; they are bohemians and misguided moralists; they rant, they rave, they demand attention. Theirs is not only a politics of the factory floor, but of the street, the smoke-filled room, the bar – and, we might add, the bedroom. “Tearing away the decent drapery” of capital to parade its freakish constitution of human interiority, and driven by a solemn madness to endlessly diagnose, correct, and abjectly celebrate their own deviations, Communists must surely rank among the foremost perverts of modernity.

Many have, of course, tried to put the record straight. While the performative power of The Communist Manifesto (1848) has been rightly celebrated, there is also a certain defensiveness at work from the very start, an anxious desire to “counterpose to the horror stories of communism a manifesto of the party itself.” Marx and Engels go on to counter claims of Communist sexual immorality with a little sexual panicking of their own: “Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of the proletariat at their disposal, not to mention legally sanctioned prostitution, take the greatest pleasure in reciprocal seduction of married women.” This indictment of bourgeois family life and its traffic in women is a powerful heuristic for radical sexual politics – to be further developed by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) and by various strains of Marxist feminism – and also serves a tactical purpose in allaying fears and recruiting new adherents. However, this counter-moralizing movement also instantiates a foundational tension for Communist, and more broadly Marxist politics; a tension always overdetermined by questions of sexuality, whether or not explicitly raised, because it operates within and against a paradigm of moral scandal.

The question is: how can one answer accusations of moral turpitude without replicating the terms of such condemnation and thus upholding elements of bourgeois life? The signature maneuvers of Communist politics can be re-charted along the lines of this reverse discourse.