How come Scandinavian countries are miles ahead of literally all communist countries w.r.t. queer rights (Cuba excluded)?

I explained this a bit already, but to rephrase and simplify, when your country is under the threat of imperialism, colonialism, settler-colonialism, or neocolonialism, social progress is stunted. Imperialist countries like Scandinavia have had more time benefiting from imperialism, and as such have a form of “Herrenvolk” progressivism. In Scandinavian countries (and imperialist countries in general), social progress itself is allowed as a concession to workers and as a way to justify imperialism, not out of the kindness of the ruling class.

Further, Scandinavian countries are not miles ahead of literally all socialist countries. Queer rights are gradually improving in all socialist countries, which are still under siege but ultimately progressing faster than peer capitalist countries. As the aging populations die off, much of their social conservativism does too, which is why in China for example queer rights have been rapidly improving.

Social progress happens not in a vacuum, simply due to having better and better ideas. Ideas are formed from our material conditions, and alongside economic development comes social progress. The fact that Scandinavian countries have been able to develop earlier due to relying on imperialism is what has allowed their proletariat to struggle for queer rights more effectively, as they aren’t struggling against siege. That’s also why socialist countries have brought positive momentum to queer rights when previously they were more oppressed.

This gradual process of improvement comes from a long struggle towards liberation. Comparing countries with entirely different historical contexts directly is a metaphysical analytical error, which is again an example of why dialectical materialism is so important.

To borrow from Gramsci, who I’ve been reading lately:

To judge the whole philosophical past as madness and folly is not only an anti-historical error, since it contains the anachronistic presumption that in the past they should have thought like today, but it is a truly genuine holdover from metaphysics, since it supposes a dogmatic thought valid at all times and in all countries, by whose standard one should judge all the past.

The method of anti-historicism is nothing but metaphysics. That past philosophical systems have been superseded does not negate the fact that they were historically valid and served a necessary function: their obsolescence should be considered from the point of view of the entire development of history and the real dialectic; that they deserved to perish is neither a moral judgment nor sound thinking issued from an “objective” point of view, but a dialectical-historical judgment. One can compare this with Engels’ presentation of the Hegelian proposition that “all that is rational is real and all that is real is rational,” a proposition which holds true for the past as well.

This doesn’t just apply to past philosophy, but also to past ways we view social rights, gender, sexuality, and more, and this development is not flat and even across all of humanity but often restricted by dialect, language, and level of development.