I have heard vague calls for queers to work with labor. Yet, broadly speaking, what is labor? By labor do we mean the labor bureaucracy or the rank and file? Also, what is queer? Is queer the assimilationist white, rich, patriarchal gay men or the transfolk denied jobs for their gender expression? When queer works with labor, who exactly are we talking about?
The majority of the world is the rank and file of the working class, not the union bureaucrats. The majority of queers are not middle class and white. In fact, union bureaucracies and queer middle classes have betrayed us in their grab for their own power, making shameless alliances with the very forces that exploit our labor and erase our identities. We are mostly working class, rank and file, queer people of color and that’s who most of us see when we look into the mirror everyday. Any attempt to build an “alliance” between labor and queers needs to begin from this starting point. An “alliance” or “intersection” should not even be necessary, it is only made necessary by the fact that the union bureaucracy dominates “labor” and the gay elites dominate “queerness.” If we can break down these twin dominations then it will be much easier to build an “alliance” because most queers already are labor and many laborers are queer. This involves struggle and organizing.
Queer Struggle is Class Struggle
Selma James is a Marxist feminist who wrote the seminal piece, “Sex, Race and Class,” among other feminists texts that reclaim women’s liberation from middle-class, racist ideology. She and others in the Global Women’s Strike were pioneers in organizing Wages for Housework, demanding that women who engage in the often invisible and devalued reproductive labor, be compensated for their work as laborers in capitalist society. I draw heavily from their perspectives toward women’s liberation to understand queer struggles as also manifestations of class struggle, hoping to expand beyond the heteronormative theories that nonetheless, were so groundbreaking at the time.
To adapt James: the queer struggle need not wander off into the class struggle. The queer struggle is the class struggle.
Rather than dissecting who we are and dividing ourselves into neat compartments that await token representatives to “intersect” our oppressions for us, is it possible for us to see that these oppressions are manifestations of class oppression? Our experiences and oppressions as women, as queers, as folks with disabilities, cannot be separated from the capitalist structure of society.
The old, white, male revolutionary left would have us think that class struggle was only in the factories. In “Sex, Race and Class” Selma James decisively shows that the class struggle extends beyond the factory. Unwaged labor done by housewives in heterosexual families, provide the reproductive labor that is essential for the system to maintain itself. Whether it is bringing up the next generation of workers