PARTISAN!

Communists need to present queer workers with an emancipatory, revolutionary program. Alice sketches out an idea of what that could look like in our current situation.

In an era of global capitalism characterised by a crisis of reproduction, sustained systematic violence, and the rolling back of social and political rights, the contemporary struggle for queer liberation is dangerously weak, disparate, and confused.

Queer workers are presented with “solutions” which amount to liberal bourgeois reformism, moralism and assimilationist politics, reifying the very social and material conditions which underpin the exploitative regime of global capital.

Communists must demonstrate the complete futility of this “queer rights” campaign in addressing the oppressive and exploitative social relations of our time, and must develop and present a political alternative in the form of a revolutionary program.

This means we must openly and ruthlessly critique the false promises and insidious hegemony of reactionary ideology and repressive state apparatuses which maintain the subjugation of queer proletarians, placing us at greater risk of poverty, discrimination, homelessness, incarceration, suicide, and domestic, interpersonal, and family violence. This critique, however, cannot solely be a negative criticism of reactionary and bourgeois elements (“The legalisation of gay marriage does not provide equality for queer workers”), we must accompany negative analysis with positive demands (“Bourgeois formal legal ‘equality’ in marriage must be superseded by the complete abolition of marriage as an institution.”).

As queer workers, we are endlessly confronted with an immense grief, fear and hopelessness in our personal lives, in those of our queer comrades, in the suffocatingly hegemonic mass-media, and in the dead-end proliferation of laws, policies, and regulations. None of this furthers our liberation, and in fact, often only provides the state apparatuses with further mechanisms of violence, repression, control and surveillance.

We must break from a cycle of reformist assimilation and ideological subsumption by fighting for queer liberation, as well as the interconnected struggles of all components of the working class subject to exploitative relations of social domination, under the banner of communism.

Involvement and agitation in the contemporary queer liberation movement should seek to address the immediate aims and concerns of queer workers through a patient yet fervent strategy which ultimately advances the fight for the formation of a mass communist party . Such a strategy is conceptualised as a minimum-maximum program.

The scope of the minimum demands desirable for such a program are broad and complex, and an article of this size would be unable to meaningfully address each aspect.

However, I would like to outline two key points of strategic orientation below, including a range of minimum demands pertaining to each.

For the unity of the queer and women’s liberation movements

We must recognise and agitate around the fact that there can be no queer liberation without the liberation of women. Gendered relations, and thereby gender, functions as a mechanism for the social division of labour, and crucially, this ensures the necessary social reproduction for the formation and maintenance of the ideal worker under capitalism. In particular, the family unit is key to the patriarchal exploitation and social relations of domination over women and queer people. Unpaid and systematically undervalued domestic labour, domestic, sexual, and family violence, and social alienation and isolation are just a few of the many social phenomena sustained by the atomised organisation of a society dependent on the family form for its social reproduction.

Communists must fight for the total abolition of the family unit and agitate for political alternatives which address the issues of our current epoch. Free childcare and parental leave, and the collectivisation and socialisation of all forms of domestic labour including child-rearing, as well as abolition of private property, seizure of all housing and redistribution on the basis of need by the working class are all measures which seek to further the struggle for liberation on a social and material basis. We must not shy away from the necessary militancy in these aims. Militant activities will of course be paramount to the seizure and redistribution of housing in addition to their role in the self-emancipation of those subject to patriarchal and discriminatory forms of social domination. Of particular importance is the formation of women’s and queer defence militias tasked with organising around the prevention and elimination of sexual and domestic violence.

Communists must also organise around issues of access to healthcare and social and community services. Of note is raising minimum demands for access to free gender-affirming care and reproductive healthcare under the informed consent model. Women and queer people, including transgender children, must be supported to break from the ideological and legal repression of the bourgeois state and family unit. This includes calling for free abortions, contraception, crisis and psychological support services, access to gyms and sporting facilities, as well as Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) accompanied by revolutionary education developed by women and queer workers for the advancement of our own informed self-emancipation. For the abolition of gender and the family form! Death to reactionary feminism and reformism!

For an international and anti-imperialist struggle

Globalisation and de-industrialisation, as well as successes of aspects of the queer rights movement in the imperial core, has contributed to a crisis in the reproduction of gendered-relations and the destabilisation of the family unit.

For example, the formal legal recognition of monogamous homosexual marriage across imperial core nations presses up against the normative division of social and “productive” labour, as predicated on, and reinforcing of, the bourgeois family unit. Additionally, domestic and social labour necessary for the reproduction of this increasingly destabilised family form is outsourced to socially and economically marginalised proletarians of the imperial periphery. The proclaimed pluralism of the contemporary liberal state is in contradiction with the gendered relations and family form which reproduce the ideal worker. In an attempt by the liberal nation-state at a violent reassertion of purported “family values”, social chauvinism drives the undercurrent for a wave of fascistic reaction, as domestic and social labour in the imperial core is outsourced to socially and economically marginalised proletarians of the imperial periphery. An anti-imperialist, international struggle is necessary for queer liberation precisely because queer liberation is only possible through emancipation from a global system of capital. A global struggle is required to overthrow a global system. Thus, the necessity of an internationalist, anti-imperialist struggle does not emerge from the character of the queer identity in and of itself directly. Rather, it emerges from the character of gender and the heterosexual unit as dependent upon the particular division of labour and mode of production that define them.

To overcome the exploitation of gender and patriarchy (and thus, to achieve queer liberation), we must overcome an international system of (re)production. Amongst many other demands, the scope of which are beyond this article, we must do away with the bourgeois, moralistic notions of human rights. International law enshrines the social relations that keep women and queer workers subsumed into the global system of capital, and work to maintain the hegemony of imperial core nations. The institution of marriage, and sex and gender as legally defined categories are reified by supra-national bodies to justify the continued super-exploitation of workers in the imperial periphery under the guise of social chauvinism. Human rights are also used to advance the political and economic interests of governments and corporations on the international stage. Emboldened by the bourgeois legal entrenching of parochial liberal ideology and imperial capital interests (the two inextricably linked), nations in the imperial core maintain hegemony through war, violence and super-exploitation in the imperial periphery. The unity of the queer liberation and anti-imperialist movements is central to the emancipation of the global working class under a global system of capitalism.

Communists, therefore, must take on an explicitly revolutionary strategy which engages with the contemporary socialist, workers’, women’s, and disparate queer movements by engaging in open and ruthless critique which is both positive and negative in nature. This critique must be centred and organised around a minimum-maximum program which moves towards the baseline conditions required for the fundamental transformation of all aspects of life, and which sees the self-emancipation of queer workers, as members of the global proletariat, unified under the banner of the communism.