Are we in danger of saying “Queers and Straight, Unite and Fight?” along the same lines that the Communist Party once envisioned for Black workers? The vision of “Black and White Unite and Fight” put black workers demands as secondary to white worker demands, claiming that black workers had to silence their struggles against racism for a façade of unity. Instead of demanding white workers overcome white supremacy,, black workers were accused of dividing the class through their resistance against their racist co-workers. For our purposes, how do we avoid the same class reductionist strategies that call for an undemocratic popular front between queer workers and a by-far heteronormative labor movement?
There are some precious lessons to take from the Black Power movement. In her piece, James discusses how Malcolm X, a figure whom many would associate only with Black nationalist politics, was able to hit at the crux of working class struggle.
To quote her: "Intellectuals in Harlem and Malcolm X, that great revolutionary, were both nationalists, both appeared to place colour above class when the white Left were still chanting variations of “Black and white unite and fight,” or “Negroes and Labour must join together.” The Black working class were able through this nationalism to redefine class: overwhelmingly Black and Labour were synonymous (with no other group was Labour as synonymous-except perhaps with women), the demands of Blacks and the forms of struggle created by Blacks were the most comprehensive working class struggle."
Where class is racialized and oppression exacerbated along racial lines, then race was also another redefinition of class. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers was one such example. Based in Detroit in the late 1960s, the LRBW was a Black autoworkers organization that was independent from the union bureaucracy. They saw that the union bureaucracy, in its collaboration with management, was unable and unwilling to fight against the racism that Black workers were facing. They were always the last ones hired and first ones fired, and subject to extremely dangerous working conditions because their lives didn’t matter to the capitalists and the union bureaucracy. The LRBW took independent action on the shopfloor, such as wildcat strikes, to fight for their safety, through a message of Black workers struggle against racism. When the demands were achieved, it was a victory for all of the working class. The Black struggle is the class struggle.
How can we form organizations today that take up the struggles that queer workers, both employed and unemployed, face at the workplace and in doing so, further the struggle for all of the working class? So that our victories are also class victories?
The need for a working class queer liberation theory and practice is not just an academic foray. It is a necessity for us to reach out beyond the abstract lingo of queer theory, beyond the annals of academia, urban centers and progressive non profit scenes. If we are to appeal to queers who are working class, are people of color, are differently abled, and who may not even identify as queer but, whose love lives, sex lives, gender expressions and family formations are all queerly out of heteronormativity, then we need to articulate a politics that reflects this diversity.