Transgender Marxism - Discussion 1 (Intro)

Seanchaí (she/her) · edit-2 1 year ago

Transgender Marxism - Discussion 1 (Intro)

Seanchaí (she/her) · 2 years ago

"“The ‘mainstream’ of trans activism has focused on smoothing over the process of transition as it runs through institutions, including those belonging to the state. Our domination by state bureaucracy, by landlords and employers, is often enough treated as a given, to be reclad with sensitivity training workshops and pronoun go-rounds.”

Pronoun go-rounds is killing me here. Ohhh, your boss doesn’t give you bathroom breaks and pays you pennies on the dollar for what he extracts from you? Well, at least HR gave that talk about pronouns. Good luck finding a trans inclusive shelter when you’re evicted next month though, hopefully they won’t misgender you when they kick you out.

Liberal trans activism really does see such incredibly floor level acceptance as a rights victory though. Like nah, that’s not liberation, that’s just the bare minimum for you to talk to me.

Seanchaí (she/her) · 2 years ago

“those groups, self-styled as ‘communities’, that are clearly riven by the divided class positions and interests of its participants. Too often we have found ourselves expected to set aside questions of exploitation or modes of production, to quiet that part of us that might detect any differentiation within the commonality. The consequence is always the same: it will always require a dose of bad faith to maintain the conceit that all transgender people share precisely the same interests.”

This is what gets me most. When affluent white women speak on behalf of “the trans community” as if their interests or experiences provide a framework for the totality of transness. When one of the largest struggles for trans liberation is escape from exploitation, poverty, violence and lack of medical care, then having Charlotte Social Clymer the US hegemon-pushing military babe speak on behalf of the “trans community” is absolutely void of meaning.

It’s a complete reduction to bioessentialism. That there is anything that ties a Black trans woman living on the streets, or a nonbinary Iranian whose entire way of life has been decimated by the very US interventionist military Social Clymer works for, to her beyond that they were all born with a penis?? Truly wild, and the absolute limits of what can be gained by “representation politics”

Seanchaí (she/her) · edit-2 2 years ago

"“There is no thoroughly anti-capitalist politics that does not include a critique of the household as a social unit of capitalist governance. There is no critique of value that succeeds without becoming queer”

You heard it here first folks, anti-capitalism is the gay agenda.

But from a more serious perspective, it’s true that the construct of the household is built around reproduction of labour forces, and also competition between discrete family units rather than a wider community-focused value system

Edit: and don’t even get me started on the way that the Fordian nuclear family is used to prop up American banking through demanding every individual household assume debt through mortgage, car loan and credit lines.

Seanchaí (she/her) · 2 years ago

“Capital and its mediating categories do not just direct distribution of a social surplus. They are actively productive of the ways of understanding and behaving towards which it leads us. The motions of capital link subjectivity with objectivity, form with content, abstract with concrete, universal with particular. They do this through the racialised and gendered processes of making demands on time and surplus labour, organising speculative operations into contractual bonds, underwriting the differential extension of credit and life chances to various classes and strata, apportioning labour between sectors and households, and demarcating certain modes of comportment and expression as socially valorised and compensated – or as demonised, excluded and open to intense forms of socially-validated violence”

socially validated violence is one of the prime methods through which capitalism enforces itself in our daily lives. The exploitation of the global south is built around the demonisation of the entire national character of those countries which are most ripe for resource extraction, manufacturing our consent and complicity.

The prison industrial complex thrives on the dehumanization of its victims. The valorisation of cops coupled with the immediate attack on the character of the so-called criminals is an integral part of crafting a social acceptance of modern-day slavery, a concerted effort to divert our attention from the ultimate failure of emancipation.

Seanchaí (she/her) · 2 years ago

“mass evictions of trans and gender-nonconforming street workers in Turkey have been supported ad hoc by a predictable alliance of nationalists, the police, the local state, and neighbourhood associations alike. The transphobic animus of the popular classes finds itself routed through the blunt self-interest of the rentier.”

Anecdotally, we see this on Turtle Island as well. Landlords are loathe to rent to visibly queer people: it’s a common idea amongst the rentiers that trans people in particular lower property value

So while the existence of trans people on the street is one that troubles and incites anger in the middle classes, trans people are at the same time driven into the streets

Seanchaí (she/her) · 2 years ago

“anticapitalist critiques that imagine capitalism merely as a force for the dissolution of social bonds.”

“it is a heartless machine that tears apart homes, communities, received patterns of custom, gender, family life – all that is precious for human flourishing is dissolved remorselessly in the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’.”

I don’t have anything to add here, these lines really speak for themselves.

Seanchaí (she/her) · 2 years ago

“Rather than merely destructive, capitalism is simultaneously productive of affects, attachments, fierce passions, commitments, and hatreds. Each of these passions provides sources of legitimacy and social assent for the continued organisation of production and exploitation. In missing these intense affective bonds and sources of renewal, ‘class first’ leftists misunderstand the real dynamics of the forces they wish to oppose.”

I think this is a really key point. Especially amongst orthodox Marxists, I often see this almost dogmatic focus on class relation to the means of production as the ultimate and only true struggle of anti-capitalism. Not only does this make defeating capitalism more difficult (as an enemy not fully grasped is one not easily strangled) it also concerns itself, really, with merely creating what I call a settler socialism.

Without a focus on the multitudes of hierarchies that capitalism has created, without a focus on abolishing the class characters of race and gender, and without landback, settler socialism will continue to perpetuate hierarchies of white and male privilege. A truly classless society will never emerge from settler socialism. (PatSocs are a prime example of this phenomenon)

Seanchaí (she/her) · 2 years ago

“The history of sexual difference is inextricably a history of contracts. These contracts might be entirely formal, informal but explicit, or they may barely even register within conscious thought. They are forged with yourself, your family, your doctors, your school, your employers, and with the state. What other accounts of transgender lives have identified as a transition in epistemic regimes in the social, scientific, and medical understanding of gender; we would identify as the weighty historical corollary of a transition in property regimes, working patterns, unwaged labour, family structures, and domestic life. Transition requires an eruption in all of these”

“To live in any capitalist society is to make the best one can of alienation, of having one’s will twisted through a logic that can never fully belong to us.”

Seanchaí (she/her) · 2 years ago

“‘Traditional’ ideas about the ‘moral economy’, of the family and gender, are not only to do with the provision of comfort and shelter. They also aim to internalise the harsh costs of adjustment and austerity against the vicissitudes of the market. This includes additional demands for uncompensated feminised labour, romanticised as a freely given ‘gift’.”

This is the crux of Marxist feminism. That reproductive labour (caregiving, reproduction, household work, and all the labour that goes into raising and maintaining the human capital needed to perform wage labour) is an unpaid and eminently exploitable facet of the very identity of womanhood.

@afellowkid@lemmygrad.ml · 2 years ago

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