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
“Protests, strikes and direct action, feints toward commune-like autonomous zones, gestures towards workers’ control, and ad hoc redistribution of goods have blossomed over recent years, too rapidly to easily follow”
So first we look at the good, but then we must also look at the bad:
“At the same time, right-wing nationalist parties and politicians have taken power in some of the world’s most populous nations. This conquest of electoral politics has been a global trend: between India, Japan, the Philippines, and Brazil (to say nothing of smaller countries like Bolivia or Israel, where the far-right and legal apartheid has continued to dominate).”
That’s the double-edged sword of faltering capitalism. When people are at their most vulnerable they need strong educators among them, helping to awaken class consciousness so that revolutionary potential and progress may be achieved. The bourgeoisie, however, are working at the same time to stoke reactionary ideas, which threaten to not only halt progress, but to drag us backwards and deeper into repression.
“For now, at least, Trump’s brand of huckster right-wing populism has not completely abandoned the pretext of formal democracy”
From the future let me say: I have some news for you about this.
“Let’s recall that old saw, ‘socialism or barbarism’. This line was always intended not to implicate pre-capitalist modes of human survival, but instead the fascist abandonment of any moral inclination towards solidarity. Heading off socialism requires the mobilisation of the state’s most brutal face in service of the horrifying end-logic of capitalist imperatives in the face of crisis.”
We are truly, as Griffiths mentions, at the “crescendo” of the clash between reaction and struggle. Climate catastrophe is here, capitalism is faltering, and the entire planet is in a crisis manufactured by the capitalist regime. There is no escaping the devastation ahead, but there is always a chance to lessen the suffering. Defeatism serves only those in power. We know there will be suffering. But it is our moral obligation to fight to ensure that the amount of suffering is mitigated.
The capitalists will not relinquish their power through electoralism. They will employ brutality–have been employing brutality. It’s literally been the foundation of capitalism from the start, from the period of enclosures and the violent, genocidal colonisation that fueled the transition to capitalism. Military intervention abroad, and murderous police at home is not some quirk of legislation or corruption, it is the very backbone of capitalism’s exploitation.
“I don’t like calling for ‘queer’ or ‘trans’ or even ‘feminist’ Marxism. Each of these additions is simply an elaboration of Marxism made into a useful tool for struggle.”
This is an interesting point. On the one hand, Marxism seeks the eventual dissolution of all class hierarchies, arriving by means of socialism at a classless society. (for instance, this is why in China, a Marxist state, there is no real talk of “feminism” per se, as the Marxist stance inherently invokes equality for women).
However there is a large group of, I’ll call them vulgar Marxists, who practice class reductionism in their analyses. That is to say, who see all class stratification as directly connected to relations to the means of production. To such groups ideas such as queer liberation, racial equity, disability rights and feminism are seen as distractions from class struggle at best, or bourgeois decadence at worst.
There is an argument amongst such class reductionists at times that the proletarian struggle should be the only consideration, and that intersectional applications of class analysis are subversive to class struggle. Because of this, while I agree that “Marxist feminism” and “trans Marxism” are really not any different than “Marxism” itself, they become, to my mind, useful addendums in promoting the importance of addressing disparate class oppressions in concurrence with proletarian class struggle, and not as an afterthought.
“One of the most relevant recent debates on the US left has focused on what theoretical and political approach Marxist organisers should take towards not just so-called ‘identity politics’”
“often what has been called the ‘anti-woke’ side of this debate unites an overt political commitment to cis/heterosexism, natalism, and the nuclear family, with an aggressively ‘colour-blind’ and anti-introspective approach to racism and nationalism. This vein of socialism imagines as its enemy a ‘camp’ of the left that doesn’t exist – one myopically concerned largely with matters of representation or calculations of privilege.”
I call this “settler socialism,” that is to say, socialism that seeks to continue colonial systems of oppression, but with workers in charge.
“The stakes in this debate are high, as a renewed interest in socialist organising has spread across the US since 2016. One left group alone, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has surpassed over 100,000 members.”
Very bold to claim that the DSA has any interest in socialist organising.
That is peak settler socialism.
“From early childhood, trans and queer people often develop the ability to mask and manage our own affect – this codeswitching is a skill picked up through sometimes brutal necessity.”
This is kind of a weird usage of the term code-switching, which is generally in reference to multilingualism (especially in relation to Indigenous and Black people having to switch between their native languages/creoles and the “standard” English they were forced to learn to communicate with white anglos).
“More broadly, the skills to manage trans and queer existence on a social level lend themselves to exploitation as skilled labour in the spheres of social reproduction and hospitality.”
This can be connected to our earlier discussion of Social Cognitive Theory, where queer identities are generally socially reproduced through communal and reciprocal processes of education and affirmation in queer circles. This lends itself to an experiential specialisation in reproductive labour.