The Queer Worker

The mainstream view in regards to the queer worker exists, as most issues do in the mainstream, divided between two capitalist camps. While one camp of capitalists will claim they are allies to the working queer, this allyship is only as far as they employ them (and thus exploit them), occasionally ensure the comfort and safety of their queer employees (which is the right of every worker anyhow), and fund pride events, oftentimes leading to censorship of queer culture, a revisionist history of pride, and a complete stripping of the revolutionary, anti-capitalist rhetoric of the historical queer rights movement.

On the other hand, the other camp of capitalists vocally support the complete repression of the queer worker. While both wings are capitalists, this wing has a vested interest in specifically upholding the patriarchal nuclear family insofar that they still view the nuclear family as the most effective way to organize the working class into dispersed tribes where the main unit in society is not the collective but the family and,  moreover, the patriarch. It works to maintain the systems of oppression and fuel toxic individualism.

Comparing these two factions, and deciding what the proper socialist line is, is a difficult one. In many multi-party parliamentary countries, a tactical alliance with a liberal party on the issue of queer rights would be seen as an option that ought to be considered. Yet in America we have a two party state dominated by the two factions of capitalists, a duopoly which holds a near total political power. Whereas one doesn’t wish to advance the cause of queer workers anymore than to make them more easily exploited and assimilated, as well as expand their voter base, the other seeks their complete destruction, while the catastrophe that both factions bring to the third world and the working masses are more comparable and compatible. The question of what the queer worker is to do is of utmost importance. 

The first order of business would be to recognize the most active threat to the queer worker. Economic terror from the rich, as it affects every worker, certainly comes into the discussion. As proletarians it is the owning class which extracts the surplus value from them in what can only be called theft. This exploitative relationship between the workers and the owners is the key contradiction within society as well as in the oppression of the queer workers. Within the frame of American capitalism, the queer worker, as opposed to the non-queer worker, is bombarded with a more vicious form of exploitation. Whether it is the rate of which queer workers are homeless, unemployed, or otherwise leveled with economic terror, it is undeniable that capitalism hyper-exploits the queer worker. It is this relationship that the queer worker experiences primarily due to their class and is exasperated as queers. Yet the key contradiction is not necessarily the most prominent threat. Previously, it was these conditions which would be the highlight of any analysis of the strategies of the queer worker, but conditions have changed.

As the capitalist camp that wishes to see queer workers assimilate into mainstream society and fully integrated into the capitalist structure began to succeed politically, the opposite camp began to mobilize their base against the queer worker. It was and remains a politically motivated campaign to galvanize the small business owner and the suburbanite semi-Proletarians into a frenzy to spend all capital, both economic and social, into defeating the queer worker and by association the capitalist camp that sought assimilation. The extent of which the queer worker will be abandoned as political dead weight by the assimilationist camp remains to be seen, yet even with this possibility being just that, a possibility, it must be prepared for given the noncommittal attitude that the both capitalist camps have on any progressive issue. 

With all this being said, the way forward is very precarious. The queer worker must unite with each other and other sections of the working class in a front to combat the most extreme forms of anti-queer sentiment spewing forth from the elimination-focused camp of capitalists. And, so long as they continue to steadily maintain the milquetoast support for the mere existence of the queer worker, tolerate some elements of the assimilationist capitalist camp within the ranks, specifically the ranks and not the leadership, of this movement. However, toleration of this camp is purely a matter of pragmatism and choosing one’s battles. The queer worker, like all workers in the current setting, have a severely limited source of independent political power, and must choose how to exert their social capital carefully. By not actively ejecting certain capitalists elements entirely, we focus our efforts on those in power now who wish to see either us or our identities erased. This is not the time where we as workers can stand proud and alone as we wish we could. In our current conditions, with our movement still in its infancy, we focus on survival, because if we don’t then the alternative is we don’t survive.