Peter Drucker (United States, 1958) came out as gay in 1978, the same year he first joined a socialist organisation. His book Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anticapitalism (Sylone, 2023) [Spanish edition: Desviades: normalidad gay y anticapitalismo queer], which he will be presenting in Barcelona, Madrid and Zaragoza in mid-November, comes after several years of intense public debate about trans rights and the progressive opening of the left to queer struggles. We spoke with him about the potential of this alliance and about building a radical movement that embraces and seeks to emancipate “the totality of human experience”.

It’s been almost a decade since you published Warped in English. The fact that the Spanish translation appears so many years later shows that the book remains important and that many of the contributions it makes are useful today, on the threshold of 2024. However, many things have changed, both in terms of the situation facing popular movements worldwide and the ideological recompositions around LGBTIQ rights. What would you say are the most relevant changes? What is the value of the text at this moment?

I have to say that I myself am surprised by the scale and importance of queerness for human history in the last decade. The prominence of queer issues is ever greater and increasingly undeniable, even for people who are not themselves queer and who were never especially interested in sexual and gender politics, both on the right and far right as well as on the left—perhaps even more so on the right! In my introduction to the Spanish edition, I’ve tried to summarise some of the main recent developments.

What are they?

Right-wing attacks on “gender ideology”, and especially on trans people and queer “chosen families”, are forcing the left to clarify and rethink its own positions. The traditional distinction we made in the seventies between socially constructed gender and biologically given sex has proven not to be sufficiently complex. And the rapid rise of queer and non-binary practices and self-identifications, especially amongst young people, is increasingly undermining the idea that being “man” or “woman”, “gay” or “straight”, is something “natural”, although this idea remains strong and deeply rooted even amongst LGBTIQ people. Who can imagine today what the sexual and gender landscape will look like in a decade?

The rise of Black Lives Matter has highlighted the links between anti-racist organising and queer organising. The way human history is viewed, especially that of the last five centuries, is being rapidly transformed by awareness of the genocides committed against indigenous peoples and the persistent legacy of slavery and colonialism, despite fierce resistance from the right and too many people who actively identify with whiteness or Europeanness. Mobilisations like Black Queer/Trans Lives Matter are highlighting these connections.

Sexual and gender issues are unexpectedly at the centre of the world’s (increasingly deep) geopolitical divisions, including potential or existing armed conflicts: between Russia and Ukraine, between China and Taiwan, between Eastern and Western Europe, between different powers competing for influence in Africa, within the Islamic world. The left needs to have its own independent and critical analysis, not only in relation to ultra-repressive far-right authoritarianisms like Putin’s, but also in relation to homonationalist efforts (to use Jasbir Puar’s term) by the United States, its European allies and other countries to instrumentalise LGBTIQ communities in the interests of imperialism.

Historically, manufacturing industry, with its traditional masculine culture, has not exactly been very welcoming to queer trade unionists

What value does the book Warped have in the face of these changes?

Other people will have to judge that, of course. The book is one of several that have tried to bring Marxism to these issues and debates. If I had to point to the particular contribution of Warped, I would say it makes a special effort to be internationalist, to oppose Eurocentrism and to situate queer struggles in the history of changes in capitalism and in precapitalist societies. For example, trying to situate current trans struggles in the millennial history of transness.

In the book you make an effort to trace a genealogy of queer anticapitalism, also gathering contributions that don’t necessarily come from LGBTIQ militancy. Would you add anything if you were writing the book today?

I think what I wrote in Warped about the sexual politics of Marxist currents, spanning a century or even more, stands up quite well to the passage of time. It’s a shame that too often radical queers themselves aren’t interested in knowing this history and delving into it. Many left queers still tend to assume (understandably given the record of Stalinism) that Marxism has always been sexually repressive, in contrast to an anarchism that would have always been sexually liberating. The truth is that interesting things have been written about the puritanical strands of historical anarchism, especially in the Spanish State [Spain]. Perhaps if I were writing Warped today I would follow the work of Michael Löwy and Olivier Besancenot on the “revolutionary affinities” between anarchism and Marxism and discuss more the limitations of these two traditions.

I have the impression that interest in queer Marxism is increasing lately, and that it’s doing so in environments that aren’t necessarily academic. Surely Holly Lewis’s magnificent book The Politics of Everybody [Spanish edition: La política de todes, Bellaterra, 2020] has a lot to do with this, but ideas only take hold when there are sectors ready to receive them. Would you say that the recent wave of unionisation taking place in the United States (Starbucks, automotive, etc.) is contributing to broadening and redefining working-class identity in the Western world? How do you assess this phenomenon and how can we contribute to this class recomposition from queer and feminist struggles?

It’s interesting that you choose two examples from current strike waves that show the uneven scope that exists for the queerisation of workers’ struggles. Historically, manufacturing industry, with its traditional masculine culture, has not exactly been very welcoming to queer trade unionists, whilst the service sector and public sector (teaching, for example) have provided more opportunities to link sexual and class struggles. The service sector continues to have terribly low average levels of trade union organisation, and this has to change if we want the current wave of struggles to lead to major advances for workers. But for this we need new approaches, capable of organising a feminised and disproportionately queer workforce. M.E. O’Brien, for example, has written about the organising potential of trans workers in the video game industry. If advances are made in these sectors, then identification with class struggle amongst queer people will increase enormously—amongst whom I fear that interest in Marxism, although increasing, has so far been concentrated amongst students and academic staff. Perhaps the situation is better in the Spanish State, where women’s strikes have been exceptionally strong.

The biggest challenge for queer people is to act frankly and explicitly and not apologise for our own distinctive desires

In the book you pay attention to the different ways in which queer lives and LGBTIQ rights are used by the far right. I particularly like your proposal to speak of heteronationalism as a reactionary ideology that emerges in response to imperialist homonationalism, and the way both need and reinforce each other. I wanted to ask you how you assess the emergence of a trans-exclusionary current in the feminist movement and the way discourses like “the erasure of women” are ending up playing into the hands of the far right and the general offensive against our rights.

I think the current you’re referring to is what calls itself gender-critical [the so-called “radical feminism”]. Actually this current partially or totally erases the concept of gender from its thinking, thus eliminating one of the most fundamental and radical concepts from the feminist theoretical arsenal. Fortunately, I think this current is weaker overall than it was 50 years ago, when an anti-trans writer like Janice Raymond expressed views that were shared by many people who identified as feminists. Today my impression is that especially young people are overwhelmingly trans-inclusive, and the so-called “gender-critical feminists” are besieged and on the defensive, often claiming (I think sometimes sincerely) to be themselves in favour of trans rights. But the dangers they warn against (for example, that men will pose as trans women to infiltrate female spaces and attack women) are the same ones used by the far right to attack trans people in general. It’s difficult to reach and reason with people who are often trapped in a kind of identity panic. Although we don’t make concessions to their ideology and are uncompromising in promoting the demands of trans and non-binary people, I think we have to base ourselves as much as possible on objective evidence and avoid reinforcing this current’s perception of itself as somehow persecuted.

During the harshest months of COVID-19, many of us turned our attention to the struggle against HIV looking for tools to deal with the pandemic. Do you think defending public health and the struggle for universal access to healthcare can function as an articulator of popular struggles in the new century? How do we build a programme that puts the most vulnerable lives (queer, migrants) at the centre?

Defending public health and the struggle for universal access should be absolutely central themes for the radical left. Unfortunately, the parliamentary left was barely visible during the pandemic, often voting in favour of emergency measures proposed by governments without fostering mass mobilisations for a truly radical Zero COVID programme. This largely handed the far right the initiative to appeal to people’s justified rage. The far right has had the advantage that, by denying or minimising the real dangers of COVID-19, it has more easily bypassed regulations against public gatherings. But I think the left could have learnt from ACT UP’s creativity (not from its specific tactics, since coronaviruses are transmitted much more easily than HIV and demand different forms of action) in inventing new forms of mobilisation. Defending the most vulnerable lives necessarily involves mobilising shoulder to shoulder with the most vulnerable people (in ways that protect them from possible reprisals) and especially by challenging “intellectual property rights” over vaccines and medicines. The great victory that South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign won against this neoliberal regime was largely lost again in the face of COVID-19. It needs to be won again.

I’d like to end with your recovery of Rosemary Hennessy and her conception of desire as key to the very organisation of the working class. She said that “a politics without sexuality is doomed to failure or deformation”. How can queer anticapitalism help us break with the narrow agenda of institutional conformism without falling into self-referentiality and bitterness? What does it mean for you to do politics from desire?

Hennessy made a great contribution to the radical left during years when a specific queer Marxist current had not yet taken shape. And her argument about desire-based politics is crucial. The biggest challenge for queer people is to act frankly and explicitly and not apologise for our own distinctive desires whilst, at the same time, being able to appeal to the desires that unite and inspire millions of people in defending their interests. To paraphrase Marx in his theses on Feuerbach, it is revolutionary praxis that can educate desire. This is how a subject capable of transforming society can be forged, maintaining the initiative in the streets and not in the corridors of power.

Peter Drucker interviewed by Julia Cámara
Interview originally published in El Salto on 31 October 2023