15 year old British student raps it down « Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

15 year old British student raps it down « Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

An Assessment of the LGBT Liberation Movement

It's clear that the LGBT movement at the present is dead, or at least its gone back to sleep.  Two years ago, we marched in the streets for equal rights chanting "Yes, we can!"  Today, we're back to spending our time waiting for the powers that be to act and gossiping among ourselves about the next move of so-and-so politician.  As the latest chapter of the LGBT movement comes to a close, it's time for a reassessment.  Over the coming months, I’ll be writing critical assessments of the LGBT Liberation movement from a Marxist perspective.  

Some of the topics I’ll be covering:

• 1.       The four main periods of the LGBT movement and what was different about the latest chapter

• 2.       Gay Rights v. Queer Liberation, how activists from each camp undermine the progress towards liberation and why neither makes a priority of teaching LGBT people to see themselves as the agents of the their own liberation

• 3.       An analysis of the concept of “assimilation”, its origins, and its ultraleftist strand

• 4.       The question of “middle class ideology” in the movement

• 5.       The ultraleftist stand of the queer liberationists towards the trade unions

• 6.       A critique of the “queer oppositionist” perspective:  “The point is to change it”

• 7.       The unique challenges of LGBT Liberation compared to other social movements including the relatively late development of the notion of “homosexual” identity and community, the early co-optation by the Democratic Party, the impact of AIDS and its decimation of an entire generation of movement cadre, and the impact of neoliberalism

• 8.       Democracy as a solution to the impasse of gay politics

• 9.  The radical roots of LGBT Liberation:  why Marxism was necessary for the birth of the movement and why a return to Marxism is necessary to move forward

New York Times Beats Drums for War

On the 50th Anniversary of Rosa Parks' Protest

Today is the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks' courageous protest against an institution as American as apple pie, white racism.  Contrary to liberal revisionism that tells us Parks sat down because she was tired, her action was not spontaneous:  activists had planned this challenge for a while.  And, like today's movement for lgbt liberation, activists didn't start out with radical demands.  The initial response didn't even call for desegregation of the bus system.  Upon learning that the powerful and the privileged will not simply give up their power and privilege because you ask them to, activists began to change their minds. They debated and discussed they way forward and refused to let the dominant organizations of the time, the NAACP and the Urban League, dictate how people should fight back against racism.  Similarly, lgbt rights activists are learning that asking the powers that be for change, even if they are Democrats, doesn't move us forward and they are raising the level of struggle.  We owe Rosa Parks much love and admiration, but the best way to honor her work would be to follow her example and learn the lessons she and others learned.  So, queer activists, when you are told by the "adults" of Gay Inc. to tone it down so you don't "embarrass" the Democrats or cost us an election, be proud.  You're in good company.


http://www.isreview.org/issues/45/civilrights.shtml

The Montgomery bus boycott
The growth of militancy among Southern Blacks produced its own leadership and organization, since virtually no political organization existed that stood for the interests of the mass of Southern Blacks. The two main political parties in the United States maintained segregation. The existing Black organizations—the NAACP and the Urban League—were organizations of middle-class professionals, aiming to end segregation through legal means and not through a mass struggle. The politics and leadership that would come to dominate this upsurge first emerged in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.
The bus boycott was sparked by the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, on December 1, 1955. Parks was a seamstress and secretary of the local NAACP chapter. The driver called the police, who promptly arrested Mrs. Parks. She was charged with violating the city’s segregation ordinance. The very next day, a meeting at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church called for a one-day boycott of all Montgomery’s buses on Monday, December 5. On that day the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) elected its first president, Martin Luther King, Jr. The boycott lasted 381 days, elevating the struggle—and King—to national prominence.
The initial demands of the Montgomery movement were quite moderate, and did not aim to challenge the system of segregation as such. The MIA asked for courteous treatment for Black passengers, seating on a first-come, first-served basis, with Blacks seated in the rear, and employment of Black drivers on the predominantly Black routes. The local chapter of the NAACP had discussed a boycott for the last year, but had failed to act. Resistance by Montgomery officials and the virtually unanimous support for the boycott by Montgomery’s Black population changed the character of the struggle. King said later:

Feeling that our demands were moderate, I had assumed that they would be granted with little question; I had believed that the privileged would give up their privileges on request. This experience, however, taught me a lesson. I came to see that no one gives up his privileges without strong resistance. I saw further that the underlying purpose of segregation was to oppress and exploit the segregated, not simply to keep them apart.20

The new leaders, like King, were not radicals. But King was not only an expression of the “new mood.” He was also influenced by it. The civil rights leaders believed that theirs was a moral struggle and that the “nation” suffered from the blight of racism. “It is...a moral issue...which may well determine the destiny of our nation in the ideological struggle with communism,” argued King.
King and other leaders of the movement played down any suggestion that the bus boycott was designed to challenge the existing order of things. As King put it in 1955: “We are not asking for an end to segregation,” King said in 1955. Instead, Blacks sought the right to sit, not stand, in seats that were not occupied by whites, because, King said, “we don’t like the idea of Negroes having to stand up when there are vacant seats.”21
Their basic strategy would revolve around nonviolent mass action to pressure the authorities into negotiations, leading, it was hoped, to concessions. As such, it was not a struggle of Black against white: “We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust.”22 King was well aware that the movement’s demands would be met with concerted resistance, but this only elevated the moral character of struggle itself:

We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering.... We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer.23
Rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood.24
The non-violent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of these committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.25


http://www.isreview.org/issues/72/rep-arizona.shtml

Laws that need breaking

It is impossible to avoid the comparison between Arizona today and the era of Jim Crow segregation—or between the protests against these racist laws today and the struggles that finally ended Jim Crow laws by defying them en masse. 

Although Rosa Parks is today revered for her role in launching the civil rights movement, at the time, most Southern (and Northern) whites disparaged her for promoting racial integration. When four Black students sat in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, they were soon joined by hundreds of other students from a nearby Black college—but they also faced protests by angry white mobs.


Indeed, at virtually every juncture, civil rights demonstrators encountered a violent white opposition seeking to uphold the segregation laws of their state. These racists justified their attacks because African American activists “broke the law.”


There is no doubt, however, that the civil rights movement challenged and ultimately changed prevailing opinion.

Faith-Based Politics

Many progressives rightly criticize the notion of faith-based politics in this country.  We rightly oppose the imposition of any particular faith on others.  We quietly (or not so quietly) laugh at those who force reality to conform to unconfirmable beliefs.  But can't the same criticism be levelled against those who support the Democrats?  What about their "faith" in Obama and the Democratic Party as a means for change?  Don't we rearrange or distort facts to comply with our "faith" in the Democrats?  One example:  Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  A Democrat is responsible for this noxious policy.  Democrats have the power to put to an end to it and have had two years to end it.  But they've chosen not to.  Now, as the spin goes, we blame the Republicans.  Isn't this distorting facts to conform to faith?

My Thoughts on Election 2010

Election Day 2010

I recently read a piece by David Mixner that pissed me off.¹  Yet another commentator telling us what this election “means” even before the election is over.  “The new political reality?”  Really, Miriam, enough with the hysterics.  A couple nutjobs won seats, a couple didn’t.  Don’t be so eager to swallow the crap the corporate media is serving us.

Lenin’s Tomb¹ offers a great analysis of the recent elections here in the United States and, surprise, it’s not at all what you’re hearing on the TV news.

"The Democrats have lost the House of Representatives but kept the Senate by a slim margin. The Tea Party 'movement' will be credited for giving the Republicans this energy in the polls, but in fact there will be little evidence when the dust settles that anything particularly remarkable happened here. A few whack jobs got elected, quite a few didn't, turnout was probably around 40% (which will be hailed as a record high if true), and capitalism remains firmly in control of the political process. The dominant faction of the 'political class' will still comprise rich corporate lawyers, the majority of senators will still be millionaires, and Wall Street will still control the Treasury.

The Republican sweep, announcing a "seismic shift", will be every bit as flimsy as the 'revolution' of 1994. This was when Gingrich's hard right rump took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in fifty years. They added 54 seats to their total in the House of Representatives (2010 equivalent: 36, with 14 undecided), while adding 8 senate seats to their total to gain the upper house (2010 equivalent, 5, with 3 undecided - and no prospect of gaining control of the upper house). But the 'Republican revolution' took place with the support of less than 20% of eligible voters, with a turnout of less than 40%. Many of the same personnel who drove that 'revolution', and drafted the 'Contract with America' that few read or understood, are now 'activists' in the Tea Party movement. The FT calls Dick Armey an 'activist', for christ's sake."

So memorize this lesson, folks.  The election is NOT a sign of a right wing surge.  It's not a sign that people reject Obama's "socialist" agenda.  It's a sign that people are pissed off that Obama didn't even bother to propose it and fight for it in the first place!  We're still waiting for Obama to keep one promise he made!  Just one!  Given our shitty political system, you either support the party in power (in this case the Democrats) or you reject them.  This is the "democracy" our soldiers are dying for?

The only people sad and depressed after the election are people who had illusions that the Democratic Party was the party of the people and that they were on our side to begin with.  Hopefully, these elections had cracked that illusion and that's a good thing.

Tea Baggers are not taking over.  Nothing has really changed.  We still live with a White House and a Congress and a Supreme Court occupied and controlled by political parties that oppose lgbt equality.  We were not equal before and we are not equal now. 

Our job today is the same as it was the day before the election:  we fight for our rights against two political parties that oppose us.  We fight against racism, including racism against immigrants, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, and we condemn Obama's silence on the disproportionate impact of the recession on the African-American community.  We still fight to defend a woman's right to control her own body (especially as queers for if women can't control their own bodies, what right do I as a gay man have to exist?) against assaults by both the Democrats AND the Republicans AND we continue to fight for abortion to be free, legal, and safe for all women who choose to have one.  We still fight to end these still illegal wars for oil and empire that Obama has not only inherited from Bush, but has expanded.  We oppose being forced to support Obama's wars in order for some of us to have equal rights on the job (DADT).  We fight against the draining of our money and our public dollars for the sake of the military and Wall Street.  We demand an end to draining money from the federal, state, and local budgets to pay for their wars and their bailouts.

In short, we're still fighting for the same things we were fighting for when the progressive majority of this country elected Obama to fight for these same things. 

Mixner is wrong to say that passing ENDA and repealing DOMA and DADT are over.  He seems to forget one very important factor, a factor that the politicians and Gay Inc tend to forget:  US.  We are not passive lumps of flesh waiting for the Democratic Party Good Fairy to grant us our wishes.  We have the power to force those fuckers in DC to act. 

Richard Nixon was nasty, right wing, conservative asshole President.  He was also the LAST liberal president this country had.  How, you say?  Because the social movements of the day FORCED him to act.  Nixon...

* Simultaneously reformed welfare and brought in serious new civil-rights laws and agencies for minorities, women, the handicapped and children.

* Proclaimed the first official U.S. Earth Day/Earth Week in 1971.

* Totally reformed the government's relationship with Native Americans, bringing new self-determination and civil rights to U.S. tribes while saving such Indian natural wonders as Pyramid Lake - the tribe even renamed its capital "Nixon."

* Spent more on social programs than defense!

* Recognized the People's Republic of China

* Created the Environmental Protection Agency, created OSHA to oversee workplace safety and comfort

* Created the Consumer Product Safety Commission

* Created Title IX for women's sports

* Added the cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security

* Expanded food stamps and welfare assistance

* He also supported the Equal Rights Amendment

We’ve seen what happens when we sit and wait.  We’ve also seen what happens when we agitate.  Let us commence agitating.

It's time for a change.  And change begins, as it always has, with us.

Let them fear the queers.

1. “LGBT Community:  What Now?”,  http://www.davidmixner.com/2010/11/lgbt-community-what-now.html

2. “The class basis of US elections”, http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/11/class-basis-of-us-elections.html

The most important election of our lives, Part 459

Cut and paste. 

That's what all the arguments in favor of 1) voting 2) for the Democrats come down to every election season.  The arguments are literally cut and pasted from the previous election.  For a community whose stereotype is creativity, this is unacceptable and intolerable.

I hate this argument because it joins two separate ideas:  1) we should vote for Democrats (today's code word is "equality-minded") and 2) we have to vote in this election.

But there something missing from the "Vote or Die" crowd:  voting and electing an "equality-minded" politicians does not guarantee that they will advance lgbt equality.  As this movement's recent experiences with the Democrats should make clear, without pressure from below, every equality-minded candidate transforms into a "reality-minded politician" when they take office.  After all, EVERYTHING takes precedence over lgbt equality in DC.

After what we've seen from the Democrats in every election since 2006, I hope there is no one who can disagree with the claim that politicians are under no obligation to abide by the wishes and expectations of the people who voted them into office.  Yes, Virgina, even the Democrats.  What we've seen from the Democrats over the last several elections is they run for office with one set of speeches and when they win, they govern with an entirely different set of speeches. 

Voting for "equality-minded" politicians is a dead end and a waste of time.  As a strategy, it will not get us to where we want to be.  One needs to remember that Richard Nixon was the most liberal president this century.  Why?  Because he was forced to respond to the social movements of the day and that is why we have OSHA, the EPA, Earth Day, affirmative action, SSI, and more.  Nixon was more liberal than Clinton.  Why?  Whereas the social movements of his day kept the pressure on Nixon and forced him to respond, Clinton snapped his fingers and the liberal groups played dead during his terms ("don't pressure him, he's got a lot on his plate") and he moved to the right.  That is the way of the Democrats.  They are a right-wing party that uses lefty rhetoric when they run for office.

To all who read this:  our movement needs to break out of its rut of obsession with the doings of rich people in Washington DC (ie the politicians).  It's not what THEY do that matters so much as what WE do.  What are WE doing?  Right now, we're begging for rights.  That's because our movement is weak (ten people blogging about the latest professional homophobe's actions and twenty people sitting in is not a mass movement).  When our movement is STRONGER, the politicians respond to US instead of us responding to the politicians.  For most of us, especially those of us who were not around to see the 1960s, this is unfamiliar territory because we've NEVER seen social movements large enough and strong enough to pressure politicians (no doubt in small part to Gay Inc's depoliticization of the movement), but it can and it must happen if we are to advance.  Can we have a moratorium on the "look what they did now" postings?

If we find it strange or even impossible to imagine participating in a social movement that is powerful enough to force the hands of politicians, then it's time to break from activism and read up on the history of social movements, especially the granddaddy of them all, the African-American civil rights movement.  We can't keep making the same mistakes and repeating the same actions every election and expect things to be different.