The Partisan Editorial Board introduce Partisan! #10.
One could not be blamed for becoming depressed by recent events. After the stunning victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US elections, it seems like the sky is going to fall on the heads of the working class, just as it was fated to in 2016. But hope is not lost: it does get better. In spite of attacks against the social and political rights of LGBTQ+ workers internationally, there is still a growing mass of queer proletarians who are deeply discontent with the bourgeois moralist “queer rights” movement.
Communism and the queer liberation movement are inextricably linked, and we must strive to make clear the intertwined nature of these emancipatory struggles.
It is important to critique the pitfalls of the contemporary left in order to develop a communist program capable of responding to the material needs and concerns of queer proletarians in a manner which furthers the overarching goal of the complete emancipation of the global proletariat. Many solutions put forward by anarchists, socialists and communists are wholly unsatisfactory. Take, for example, grouplets like the Queer Killjoys, who infamously, and embarrassingly, boasted about trashing a stall of Socialist Alternative’s. What strategy do they present in opposition to SAlt’s (admittedly sorely lacking) approach to queer liberation? A zine distributed by them – the closest thing to a work of theoretical value read by most grouplets of a similar calibre, states:
“The reality is that a fight for true trans liberation will likely mean material sacrifices for a lot of us trans people who benefit from living in a privileged position in a settler imperial core… It might see you stealing from a pharmacy, burning a white supremacist’s car, smashing the windows of a transphobe’s office, or punching a cop in the face. It might mean undertaking a direct action with a material impact that supports poor trans kids, that then lands you in a prison that misgenders you and holds you in solitary confinement for the ‘safety’ of the broader prison community.”
At no point in this statement do they make reference to the only class force capable of bringing about the totalising structural, social change necessary for queer (and thus trans) liberation. The political attitude present within is one of a highly unstable, dangerous individualist action fetish; where the single self is the political centre, and their ‘autonomous’ actions are all that is required for a spontaneous form of identity-emancipation. In the broadest possible sense, communists uphold queer liberation for the same principle that we put forth strategies for Indigenous and women’s liberation: they are sections of the working class, and we strive for the self emancipation of the working class.
Communists, in presenting a revolutionary program for the emancipation of the entire class through its self-abolition, must strive always to reflect the emancipation of the queer proletariat through this project. Historically, we have failed to do so. Although communists have spearheaded some of the most resolute charges for queer liberation, we have often failed to address and clarify, in comprehensive theoretical and practical terms, the question of queer liberation. In an epoch of reaction, recession, and international instability, this edition of Partisan is part of our small contribution to the project of doing so. While things might seem bad now, you can’t have a rainbow without the rain.
Ciao,
Partisan Staff
PARTISAN! 