Reflections on Stonewall

Brunhilda Olding reflects on the Stonewall Riot, and the path of the queer movement since.

In the fifty-five years since the Stonewall Riot in the United States the struggle for Queer Liberation has advanced further, and further. In many ways the rights, legal defences, and advancements that have been won are unthinkable to those first pioneers who threw bricks at the NYPD. However, the question remains: are we actually free? Or has capitalism integrated us into its blood-soaked façade as another faux example of the “rights and freedoms” granted by bourgeois liberalism.

The answer is that we are not free. Capitalism has given us concessions after decades of struggle, and then turns around to parade us as cute little deviants who show the tolerance of capital. Rainbow capitalism is a well-documented phenomenon. Every June, capitalists will fly the rainbow flag, give a couple of speeches about how much they respect the existence of the Queer community, and then fuck off.

This shameless two-faced annual concession is proclaimed to be ‘progressive’. And indeed, it is. After all, progressivism is about restraining the excesses of capital. The ultimate end point of any social struggle within capitalism will be capital adjusting itself to integrate new types of people into the market.

The Queer community is just the latest example of that, before in the United States it was African Americans, or migrants, before that Roman Catholics. Capital’s very nature requires the total destruction of what makes communities unique. All that is solid melts into air, and the same is happening now with the queer community.

The struggles for Gay liberation, which formed a mass movement of the queer working class fighting for the most basic democratic rights, was devastated by AIDs. Indeed, AIDs was one of the greatest strokes of luck for the capitalist social order in decades. The shift from the struggles for Gay Liberation to more moderate demands were in effect the logical end point of the sheer devastation of the AIDs crisis.

AIDs was a scourge which killed so many that even today the Queer community (one that infamously does not grow via reproduction) is still recovering from the damage done. I write this as a Trans woman who grew up in the 2010’s, so to me and my peers AIDs is a historical footnote, yet to so many others it was death that stalked their communities.

We must remember it as what it was. An intentional failure on the behalf of the capitalist governments, a failure which allowed so many to die, just so they could attack those deviants. Is it any surprise now that as reactionaries rally against us, the state leans back, and washes their hands from the issue? And is it any surprise that the only group we can rely on to defend ourselves from these attacks is ourselves? We defend ourselves, we defend our siblings, we defend our loves, we defend our community, yet the current culture of constant defence and organising around actions opposing offensives is one that has long since rotted with the fervour of activism.

The only consistent way that we will ensure our own safety, and to ensure that we will have the ability to crush fascism, bigotry, and reaction where, and whenever it arises. Is through the organised power of the working class. This hardly a new position. Capitalism has sowed the seeds of its own destruction, the very labour which fuels its great industries and empowers the capitalists to throw money and funding behind the reactionary bigots calling for our death will arise and shatter the system.

We will be part of that revolution.

As such it is the duty of Queer socialists and organisers to rebuild our community as what it once was: a mass working class movement fighting for our liberation and the liberation of all others. The current political culture of anonymous Instagram accounts and internet micro-celebrities is not, and indeed cannot, ever be enough. We must wage an unrelenting struggle against the atomisation that capitalism promotes in our community. If we are to achieve our own liberation, we must rebuild our community into one that is fully separate to the capitalist mass cultural hegemony. We must rebuild the cultures of gay bars, and a well-established arena in which we can organise and interact with our community, on our own terms.

This is a key part on the road to Queer communism, and we must understand that Queer Communism isn’t a buzzword, or a series of theoretical papers, in a dust jacket on a shelf. It is a living, breathing movement, it is the self-organising against alienation, it is remembering the work of our previous martyrs, and it is uniting. It is uniting and fighting for the rights and dignity of all our fellow workers. It is integrating ourselves into the body of the proletariat once more to truly show that our liberation is class struggle. To reveal ourselves as the rising sun of human liberation.

There has never been a greater necessity for the establishment of a mass Queer socialist movement than today. The collapse of mass Queer politics has left a gap that must be filled, and it cannot be filled with reformists or liberals, who spit away our gains, or try and ally us with the capitalists. If we allow ourselves to be bought by the capitalist class, we will sell ourselves into slavery for farcical rights that can and will be revoked, and perhaps we will get more than an annual raising of the rainbow flag.

We need to fight for our own Liberation!

The road to achieve that is through the formation of an independent mass socialist organisation run with the highest aims of democracy, and the most noble goal in all of human history: the self-emancipation of the proletariat from the chains of capitalism.

To all those interested and willing to stand up and fight for our own liberation, I send my comradely salute, and sisterly greeting. We must fight and stand together. If you desire to join in the fight for Queer liberation, please email Liberation.LRSF@protonmail.com.