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
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!
“Socialists and communists must recognise and engage the uneven development of class consciousness. We have to recognise that this unevenness is rooted in experiences that are particular – but ones which foreshadow and make possible the development of a class consciousness. The implications of this goes beyond the politics of ‘bread and butter’, to one of bread and roses.”
I fucking knew it. Rose emoji.
“Roses here signify a humane and insurgent response to and recognition of the deeper and universal depredations and alienations of working-class exploitation: from the length of the workweek as a perpetual site of struggle, to the experience of direct violent repression by the state and the family, to the embodied humiliations and alienations of working-class subjectivity that are particularly crystallised in the experiences of trans and queer workers”
“This transgender workerism will allow us to think through a left strategy with a practical shot of achieving utopia.”
Are you serious? A practical shot of achieving utopia???
This is ridiculous idealism.
And somehow that utopia is meant to be achieved through labour organising and electoralism? There’s not even a hint of a mention of anti-capitalism through revolution
“A wave of rail and port blockades in Canada, by and in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people (and echoing the Dakota Access Pipeline struggle) have demonstrated potential for white and indigenous workers as effective comrades”
I wish more white people effectively allied with Wet’suwet’en land defenders.
“In the present and historically, trans/queer people have also tended to find themselves grouped into key nodes of distribution and logistics networks”
This is a really white-centric viewpoint. 44% of Black trans women in the US are sex workers. A few anecdotes about queer people working as long haul truckers is not really the same as queer people “tend[ing]” to those jobs. This whole essay is rife with unconfirmed claims and extrapolations based on anecdotal evidence and supposition.
Queer people exist in every job, but that doesn’t equate to statistical tendencies for queer people to be in those jobs.
“Several accounts detail the lives and experiences of trans/queer workers in production and logistics, but few offer any systematic quantitative accounting of our presence”
If there’s no systematic quantitative accounting of queer people in these jobs, then why are you saying that they tend to be in these jobs???