A chairdre! Time for another discussion on Transgender Marxism!
The PDF is here - https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf
The intro discussion with links to all other essay discussions is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Today’s essay is Notes From Brazil by Virgínia Guitzel.
Virgínia Guitzel is a working-class philosophy student at the Federal University of ABC, and a Member of the Movimento Revolucionário de Trabalhadores (MRT), which is the Brazilian section of the Fração Trotskista – Quarta Internacional. She is a participant in the Women’s group Pão e Rosas, which worked in the front line struggling for legal abortion in Argentina.
Feel free to join in the discussion, add your thoughts, comments, questions. I hope we are all able to learn something today <3
Edit: the discussion continues with the next essay, by Kate Doyle Griffiths, here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/414322
“To borrow from Gramsci, elements of organic crisis are at play: this era has been characterised by an economic crisis, a crisis of traditional political parties, and the emergence of ‘new’ ways of thinking. Yet despite intense moments of national protest surrounding flash-points such as the 2014 World Cup, this crisis has developed without ever reaching a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation. We can trace the roots of the crisis to the millions who took to the streets in June 2013 when the self-described progressive Workers’ Party ordered bus fare hikes. The youth that took to the streets broke the paralysis of the masses, expressing the mounting disaffection with the PT’s narrowly ameliorative administration. This street resistance highlighted the contradiction between, on the one hand, the aspirations of the working class for economic and social progress and, on the other, the limits that constrain it under capitalism in a semicolony. It was in this context that the US began a campaign of subversion and naked interference in the political affairs of Brazil.”
“However, while revolutionaries certainly can and should run in elections, the PSOL has demonstrated its own strategic limits by putting electoral victory at the centre of their political practice. Vote-winning became an end of its own, rather than a means for building class struggle”
Electoralism will never upend capitalism. This is an important thing to stress. When revolutionaries participate in elections, it is to spread a message, to gather support, and to have a platform. It is not to win the election and hope that you can legislate capitalism away.
Revolutionaries having a voice in legislature can be a positive thing, for sure, but it should never be seen as the goal and the victory.
“It would make an enormous difference to have a revolutionary party rooted in the working class with a strategy that brings together the tactical struggles in parliament, in the unions and in the social movements to strengthen the power of the working class”
Hmm, we’re now at just a general discussion about institutional regression and Bonapartism, which I guess is pretty par for the course in Trotskyist reading materials. Not going to bother to pull quotes here, these are all broad discussions had all over the place.
Not to say it’s uninteresting or anything, it’s just giving a more thorough overview of the political situation in Brazil (this was written before the current elections, where Lula and Bolsonaro are currently in a run-off, Lula with a closing margin in the polls ahead of Bolsonaro)
“As Brazilian socialist feminist Diana Assunção has stated, ‘Preventing the new generations from knowing the history of struggles of the old generations is also a way of dividing us’.”
“Understanding oppression against the LGBTQ+ sectors is to understand a mechanism of capitalist domination based on the economics of sexual misery”
“Beyond the front lines where we trans revolutionaries stand, capitalism also inflicts brutal sexual repression on the whole of the working class. This results in illnesses, unwanted pregnancies, and numerous restrictions on one’s own bodies and desires. Those brought in line by the capitalist order suffer in their own fashion, fostering reservoirs of resentment and selfloathing consistently drawn on by right-wing movements.”
“Control over others’ bodies, the imposition of binary genders predefined by genitalia, heteronormative sexuality, and cisgender conformity are not ‘natural’. These norms are at the service of a specific economic system, which favours a specific social class that organises society (and consequently its morality) to serve its own class interests”
“The sexual question is not separated from class domination. Capitalism allows us to consume not only sexual acts, but films, ideas, fetishes, and a wide range of products that seek to stimulate pleasure and imprison it at the same time.”
“Capitalism, resting on centuries-old institutions such as the patriarchal family and religious dogma that espouse misogynistic, homophobic, and sexist prejudices, aims to transform sex into an almost pleasureless routine act with the sole purpose of reproduction. This is imposed upon billions as the only ‘normal’ sexual expression”
I know I’m pulling a lot of quotes here without saying much, but they generally speak for themselves. I find they’re great parts of this text worth reading, but also things we’ve discussed quite a bit in previous essays.
From ‘Sexo y revolución’ (1973) by Argentinian poet Nestor Perlongher:
“Genitalization is destined to remove from the body its function of reproducing pleasure to convert it into an instrument of alienated production, by only sexualising what is indispensable for reproduction.”