Time for yet another essay on Transgender Marxism
This essay marks the halfway point!
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 previous essay discussions is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
If you’re unsure what this post is: I’m leading a discussion group in real life on Intersectional Marxist Transfeminism, and I thought some of my comrades on the Internet may be interested in reading this essay collection as well.
This will be my initial read-through and note-taking. I hope to spark a discussion, or at least for us to learn something new together. So feel free to add comments and ask questions <3
Today’s essay is Queer Workerism Against Work: Strategising Transgender Labourers, Social Reproduction & Class Formation by Kate Doyle Griffiths.
Kate Doyle Griffiths is an anthropologist at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, a lecturer at Brooklyn College, and co-chair Red Bloom in New York City. Kate is an editor of Spectre. They are an ethnographer who writes about Southern Africa and the USA, workers, strikes, health and medicine, gender, Queers, race, class, Marxism and what is to be done.
Edit: the discussion continues with the next essay, by Farah Thompson, here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/417377
“[Kim] Moody is probably the most well-known Marxist analyst of class composition and strategic power in the Anglophone world.”
Really? I’ve never heard of him or his book, On New Terrain.
Griffiths likes to make a lot of uncited claims I’m noticing, and also is rather fond of speaking on behalf of others. Really annoying to see some academic use “we” in reference to trans people as a whole.
It’s instantly alienating to any trans person reading this that doesn’t fall in line with the thing that was just said under the generalised “we.”
I’m keeping an open mind here but I’m sure it’s obvious that I haven’t been a fan of Griffiths’ writing from the start. I think it might be that many of the previous writers were grassroots educators and direct activists, whereas Griffiths is an academic. I tend to find that academics often lose sight of the ways in which their own material conditions and class interests as intelligentsia are not in complete alignment with the proletariat.
“In the stark absence of strategy-focused Marxist analysis that looks beyond or primarily outside electoral efforts”
I’m actually really lost on this one. What Marxist analysis looks within electoral efforts? I truly have no idea what Griffiths is talking about here, most Marxist analysis looks beyond electoralism. What are they reading?
“Specifically his approach to rank-and-file organising has lately been popularised within both the right and left wings of the DSA, and well beyond.”
Again with the DSA. This is the issue I think I’m coming up against with Griffiths. They consider the DSA socialist and seem to have largely read writings about electoral “socialism.”
I’m left with the impression that they think being trans has inherently elevated them past settler socialism, but they seem to be advocating for settler socialism but with queers.
Now there’s like two entire pages just describing Moody’s book and not offering any new ideas that I couldn’t get from reading Moody’s book myself.
It doesn’t even have anything to do with queerness, it’s literally just describing rank-and-file strategies of strikes and slowdowns.
Which is obviously important. But I don’t see anything inherently on topic about rehashing someone else’s book and then adding “and queer people should do this too.”
Like, yes. Of course queer people should participate in the broader worker’s movements and labour organising. Everyone should.
“Though written in 1990, this book was canonical for DSA activists and others looking to build socialist politics ‘from below’ within the labour movement.”
Oh my god. Who let a rose emoji into my Marxist literature?
Moody is a writer for Jacobin? Is that why I haven’t heard of him but Griffiths thinks everyone has? (I don’t know if he is, they just referenced an essay he published in Jacobin).
This whole thing is so…US centric. Like, I know that most of the essays are based in the US and UK, but they have broader implications for socialist movements in the West as a whole. This is really just…really boring to read for someone not in the US.
Edit: I looked it up and Moody is some American writer who was a member of Students for a Democratic Society in Baltimore, International Socialist Clubs, and International Socialists. (Trotskyist). Now he’s a senior research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. Still feels pretty wild to claim he’s the most well known Marxist writer in the Anglosphere.
There is a point being made that strikes in reproductive labour sectors (health care, education, etc) are critical in securing labour rights, as these particular forms of labour are some of the most integral in ensuring the continued propagation of an exploitable work force.
And Griffiths’ argument is that, because queer people are drawn to reproductive labour due to specialised experience in social reproduction that they can play a crucial part in these strikes. Which is true to an extent. It’s important to note that these are jobs that are the most legislated against striking and worker organising specifically because they are so crucial to the capitalist system. Such strikes will not come without heavy pushback, including militarised pushback. Queer people will also face the brunt of the consequences for such labour movements: firing, arresting, violence.
“This precisely lends itself to incorporating and validating Beverly Silver’s globe-spanning, and comparative analysis of the role of social reproduction struggles and public sector strikes at the early stages of periods of class struggle over the last century. Silver’s book provides a quantitative overview of strikes over the last 150 years. With remarkable continuity, she demonstrates that time and again social reproductive strikes and public sector strikes are often predominant or concurrent in early waves of struggle. Rather than a sideshow, these are the crucial foundations for those more explosive moments in working-class history. Struggles around crises of care are interwoven with those broader movements in the history of working-class resistance.”
I’m very interested in this book, the title isn’t mentioned here, but I looked it up and it’s called Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870
This next section is about another of Moody’s books, The Rank and File Strategy
“Moody proposes that crosssectoral ‘transitional’ organisations and multi-union campaigns, like Labor Notes or Our Walmart, can play the role of connecting shop floor organising to larger class-wide and movement politics”
“Rather than lay out the further details of that argument here, I’m going to supplement it by explaining the role I think trans and queer workers play in this strategic elaboration”
Here we go, finally!