The Queer movement’s devotion to liberal democratic rights-first politics is a ball-and-chain on queer liberation politics. Mila Volkova explains how queer liberation is incompatible with queer liberalism, which is the “politics of injury”.
In the struggle for gay marriage in Australia, the queer movement scored an enormous victory against the right. Yet, even after such an enormous defeat of the conservative movement, the queer movement felt discouraged rather than elated. We hadn’t won the complete ‘recognition’ and ‘freedom’ that we thought we would. Even though the struggle was openly anti-patriarchal and pro-queer, we had only made a little progress, if we had made any at all. Why?
In States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Wendy Brown launches a scathing critique of the liberal conception of ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’. She argues that liberalism only offers an abstract form of freedom, that of equality under the law and universal human rights. We are promised that we’ll get a ‘fair go’, and that we’ll be treated equally no matter who we are. But this formal, abstract, universal, and equal freedom falls flat in the face of the objective conditions of exploitation.
Liberal democratic institutions don’t stop the real de-valuing of women’s testimony in sexual assault cases, or the violence against queer or indigenous Australians. Though capitalists and workers supposedly interact as equal beings under contract law, they are nonetheless really unequal – the former controls the means of production, while the latter does not, leaving them with no choice but to sell themselves to the capitalist for whatever they can get.
These aren’t just divisions based on bigotry or ignorance, manifesting in systematic oppression; they are the weapons of structures of exploitation – someone gains from this. For the capitalists in particular, that humans meet one another as formal equals in the market of contractual relations is what allows the real dominance of money (a massive quantitative difference). Liberal democratic freedoms don’t just obscure the real relations of exploitation; they enable them in the first instance.
Brown goes further, arguing that there is no ideal of freedom that can be applied universally, already existing but just waiting to be grasped. Freedom is a practical process; it emerges from the conditions of domination and the social positions of those being dominated. Importantly, this domination takes a myriad of forms. Humans are particular beings, determined more by the places we occupy in the relations of power than by our common species. There can be no universal outlook of freedom, only particular ones informed by our particular positioning.
In reality, liberalism’s universalism is the enforcement of an outlook born of one particular position on all others – the bourgeoisie, inflected with maleness and whiteness. This has an oppressive effect that renders all other particulars non-human, non-existent, and un-understandable. The potential political consequences of material division and exploitation is cancelled out by abstract political representation, the particular is incorporated into the universal through law and parliament.
The Queer Activist Scene
Fight, or raise awareness? Lobby, or organise? Liberation or liberalism? These are questions posed, though implicitly, by the queer activist scene in contemporary Australia. This scene is dominated by big NGO / lobby group / party-political personalities who often emphasise that our eventual and total liberation “one day” and fighting for rights and concessions now can peacefully co-exist. Though they certainly dedicate most of their enormous energy towards legal, health, and welfare reforms rather than liberation, is this claim true? Is the polite high-society road to reform parallel to the raging road to queer power?
The rights demanded by the queer scene seem to destabilise the universalist assumptions of the status quo by introducing concessions for specific groups, but they really serve to uphold this assumption. Trans people, women, indigenous Australians, the poor and a variety of other categories are to be seen as ‘special cases’, which require certain additional protections to gain equal access to civil society. The acceptance of a particular “I” as outside or complementary to the assumed “we” of liberalism works to ensure that the difference is not seen as fundamental – it can be cancelled through concession and negated as a-political.
What such concessions really achieve is the freeing of the state itself from the potential political force of social difference. By recognising them, the state undermines the basis for a social movement built on that difference. In doing so, the state does not free us from the material conditions that created the difference in the first place. The inferior social position of queer Australians may be recognised by the state, and concessions may be provided, but this does not change the fundamental reality of exploitation.
This is the plastic cage. We can bend its flexible bars as much as we like, but we are still trapped.
Brown calls our current era of social movements obsessed with these sorts of concessions as ‘the politics of injury’. The obsession with collective trauma, of ‘healing’, of ‘having our voices heard’ and with ‘recognition’, emerges from a deep upset that many have with being excluded from the white male bourgeois ideal. Since the 20th century’s universalist ideals (the Fordist family wage, lifelong employment, the end of history, global modernisation, etc.) have all crumbled in the face of capitalism’s continued existence and the commodification of communication via social media, new identity-discourses have cropped up.
Queer identities especially are often rooted in disciplinary procedures; we use terms doctors once use to demean our sexuality or our peculiarity. This is somewhat natural. However, these identities are increasingly oriented towards a liberal discourse of injury and of rights, inherited from the civil rights movements. Though ‘identity politics’, as it is often disparagingly referred to, can be quite oppositional in stance, it is always protesting an exclusion from the white male bourgeois ideal. While it does so, it cannot protest the ideal itself. We are protesting our exclusion from an ideal which is made up!
Rights claims such as these naturalise, neutralise, and euthanise (as Brown puts it) our particularity without attacking the problem at its source. Our emancipation is purely idealistic, assumed through recognition in the legal and political system. Though Brown is primarily critiquing the extremely legalistic tone of the American social movements, it applies just as well to the Australian context.
Truth, Morality, and Power
This is where Brown’s criticism of ‘truth’ in social movements comes in, which can be applied quite accurately to the Australian queer activist scene. A social group can become so mistreated, the horizon of its emancipation so far away, that it becomes more interested in truth and morality than in power. Here, truth means the idea of a transcendental truth that applies to everyone in all contexts, usually invented by ‘rationality’. Similarly, morality here is defined as a system of ethics that has been made up abstractly, without regard for material context and social position. We have become so defeated and hopeless that we no longer demand victory. Instead, we yearn above all else to be recognised for our plight. There is a kind of sick satisfaction of its own in this – we enact abstract revenge on the powerful that exploit us for their wickedness. Nonetheless, we let them remain seated on their thrones.
This ‘ressentiment’ (from Nietzsche) accepts the universality of the white male bourgeois ideal. Rather than asserting our own particular ideal against theirs, and beginning the struggle to violently assert it, we have simply inverted theirs. This is what happens when the left compared Dutton to Voldemort and makes fun of Donald Trump for his perceived stupidity / craziness. These is no conception that these men aren’t products of individual evils, but of a class that legitimises its domination after the fact.
Even where racism, sexism, transphobia etc. are posed as ‘systemic’; this is only the outcome of an original western enlightenment fall from Eden. The original sin of the white, male, western colonist is framed in ontological (reality) and epistemological (truth) terms, rather than material terms. It is then compared to the moral perfection of indigenous or women or queer Australian culture. This contests the universality of the white male bourgeois ideal only at the level of the abstract, it is left intact at the level of materiality and of power itself.
Though many with this outlook are involved in radical direct-action, and would resent the description I have offered here, they are nonetheless engaged in a strategy that is just as reformist as the leaders of the queer activist scene. They are simply a more defeated and hopeless version of them. These acts do not contest power. They are simply more desperate attempts to reflexively strike out at one’s exclusion, and to be recognised for it by the state.
Brown argues that ideas of truth and objective morality are corrosive for liberatory struggles. Such ideas find their power in the abstract, which is why they can satisfy themselves in the abstract. But power emerges from the material conditions of exploitation. Morality and truth thus hold back the quest for power. Our conditions can only be overcome through our own struggle for power that forcibly changes those material conditions.
Any struggle that bases itself in truth, for Brown, is also at risk of reproducing the conditions of its exploitation, even in the struggle for power. Her experience in the civil rights and workers movements in the 20th century highlighted to her how the notion of a universal female ‘sisterhood’ or of a working-class ideal excluded black women and migrant workers, which served to undermine the quest to destroy patriarchy and capital.
But there is another great risk in the politics of injury – fear of judgement. For Brown, it is critical for political movements to make judgements about what they want to achieve. But for movements obsessed with truth and morality, especially those claiming to fight white male bourgeois universalism, political judgement just replicates their traumatic exclusion. To them, judgement does not recognise the truth of exclusion. Power is evil and we, the powerless, are good for it. The politics of injury are thus insulated from necessary judgement. We will be inclusive and polite even as everything we love burns.
Transformation and Communism
But like many academics, Wendy Brown has a fetish for chaos. Apparently, the 21st century has disorganised life so thoroughly that there can be no sense of common reality anymore. For example, she argues that the bourgeoise and the proletariat no longer really exist, which is ridiculous. The working class has always been fragmented by race and sex. Though Brown is totally right to point out that unity must never be assumed, and that de-industrialisation has dramatically altered class composition, the proletariat is already, always, half-united in its common exploitation by capitalism.
The queer activist scene, the radical liberals, the greens staffers, the NGOs, the lobby groups, the direct-action-ists, the socialist movement; all rely, in one way or another, on the assumptions of objective truth and morality. These hold us back. On them, Brown is right – there is no objective truth or universal morality, there is only the struggle for power between the exploiting and exploited classes. We must take the side of the working class, and only the working class (in all its stripes), without apology. There is no universal vision of freedom, there is only our vision. We need no further justification to pursue it than that it is ours, and that achieving it will free us from the social murder, rape, and exhaustion the capitalist system inflicts on us. We can, we must, and we will create a world without hunger – where our children will live free to love, to create, and to rest without restraint.
As said, this vision does not exist out in the abstract waiting to be grasped: it must be created, and it emerges from our material conditions. We must make our own meaning, not find it. This is the role of the hypothetical communist party that the Revolutionary Communist Organisation wants to create. The half unity of the working class, existing in the conditions of our exploitation, must be transformed into concrete unity by revolutionary political education and struggle for reform. Of course, such unity is impossible while the socialist movement itself remains divided. But, furthermore, it remains difficult while the working class itself is divided by internal stratification between citizens and migrants, men and women, queer and straight, indigenous and white. We must use the organs of struggle that already exist to collapse these divisions even while under capitalism’s rule.
This is where we differ from the leaders of the queer activist scene in our attitude towards concessions and their role in the revolution. Unlike them, we do not see concessions as a good unto themselves, with no negative side-effects on the revolutionary struggle. On the contrary, we recognise the role they play in upholding the white male bourgeois ideal and obscuring the material source of our exploitation. This is why we must oppose all attempts at legal ‘inclusion’, such as gay marriage or gender marker reform; but make immediate demands for the wholesale abolition of these institutions. Reforms should only be won where they fight to bring the material situation of different groups in the working class closer together and thus accelerate the development of political consciousness. This is why the fight for immediate reforms must always be framed in terms of the revolutionary struggle. The wariness of many socialists to use openly revolutionary rhetoric for fear of alienating workers is, in this way, self-defeating.
The roads to revolution and reform are not parallel, and queer liberation and queer liberalism are not complementary strategies. The revolutionary highway may have many bus stops of concession along the way, but the leaders of the queer activist scene are on a never-ending roundabout to nowhere. It’s time for queer Australians to get on the damn bus.
PARTISAN! 
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