I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.

Category: Activism

Why the American left struggles to win the “proletariat”

Despite all the claims to fight for the working class, a lot of American leftists don’t know how to talk to or about your average working-class person. (This probably applies to other countries that were on the left side of the Iron Curtain too, though I can’t be 100% sure.) And no, this has nothing to do with identity politics—that’s for later. Right now, I’m focusing on the struggles of daily life.

I grew up working class. I knew very few adults, other than teachers and medical professionals (and a single relative), who had bachelor’s degrees, much less master’s degrees and PhDs. Having a degree was a big deal; most of these people finished high school and went straight into the workforce if they didn’t do a stint at a community college first. People do not throw around terms like “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” and “material conditions.” Instead, they’ll say “the little guy” and “the bosses.” People talk plainly and clearly; they don’t go in circles using management-speak and Marxist jargon.

When working-class people talk about their material conditions, they give concrete examples, not turgid treatises on Engels and Žižek:

“When I was growing up in the 1960s, you could get a burger for 16 cents. Now you’ll be lucky to get one for $6.”

“They closed down the factory 20 years ago because they outsourced all the work to China. Dad had a hard time getting a job after that and needed to go on benefits.”

“I broke my hip and couldn’t do my job any more, but unemployment couldn’t cover my rent. I got evicted and had to stay in a shelter just to stay alive.”

“They’ve got us under surveillance all the time. You can’t even get up to go to the bathroom without logging it on a time sheet.”

“I’m getting early and late shifts stacked together at Amazon and can’t get any sleep.”

“I need to see the doctor, but my job doesn’t give me benefits, my state didn’t expand Medicaid, and I can’t afford an Obamacare plan.”

Despite their purported focus on material conditions, many leftists (especially Marxists) spend more time spouting academic-sounding jargon rather than listening to the people they want to defend. I’ve lived in the professional middle-class world for just over a decade now. But I’ve tried not to forget where I came from or what my values were. I still detest jargon and doublespeak and piles of abstractions that sound pretty on paper but mean nothing in practice.

Want to support the working class? Then listen. Don’t call them the “proletariat.” Say “you and me,” “your average person,” “the little guy.” Don’t talk about the “bourgeoisie.” Say “the bosses,” “the big guys,” or give names: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett. It’s a lot easier to grasp it if you talk about specific people rather than a nebulous “bourgeoisie.” Put down Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. Talk plainly. Speak from the heart. Make it easy for people to imagine a better world. If you want to talk about material conditions, then fucking describe them. If you want to talk about how companies exploit their employees, then give examples. Some leftists do this, but it’s typically covered in a pile of jargon.

And your average working-class American isn’t going to be thrilled to talk about communism or socialism, either, especially if they’re older. The same people who want the government to provide them with healthcare and housing, or their unions to protect their rights, are the same ones who will turn around and denounce communism. “The country’s becoming more communist every minute,” someone—a sixtyish woman working in a unionised job—said to me recently. Communism isn’t a concrete set of political demands; it’s an abstract evil force that they associate with the Soviet Union (though they’ll usually call it “Russia”) and the Cold War. Like it or not, Marx’s better ideas have been tainted by association with the terrors inflicted by Stalin and his imitators. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” is going to make people think of Stalin, not workers’ taking control over what they produce, as they do in worker-owned cooperatives. When you ask them to think of a socialist country, they’ll think about dictatorial regimes like the USSR and North Korea.

This isn’t to say that working-class people are stupid because they think of Stalin and Kim Jong Un when you mention socialism.  Quite the contrary. They may not have read a word of Marx, but they can tell you exactly how alienated they are from their job, how exploited they feel by their bosses, how much they want to put food on the table without accounting for every penny, how frustrated they are when they talk and no one listens.

If you want workers to rise up against unfair conditions, if you want to spur a mass movement, you need to be able to meet people where they are. You can’t just wait for everything to suck so much that people will join the Socialist Equity Party of Liberation instead of voting for the tried-and-true Republicans and Democrats who actually know how to win an election. They’re just going to pull the lever for Biden or Trump. It’s impossible to have a mass movement if you don’t know how to reach the masses, but a lot of “materialist” leftists don’t seem to get that—they’re trapped in the ivory tower as much as their “pseudo-leftist” progressive counterparts are.

Talk plainly. Speak from the heart. Ditch the jargon. And then you’ll have a movement.

Cripticism: Inaccessible disability activism

I’m sick of finding writing on disability that’s inaccessible to the general public, much less people with cognitive disabilities. If you’re resorting to academic jargon and social justice buzzwords, then you’re not speaking to the majority of your audience.

For example, Sins Invalid’s 10 Principles of Disability Justice is a US-centric mess of academic jargon and buzzwords. (The Arc of Minnesota tried valiantly to turn this list into plain language, but it’s still too abstract—it still includes expressions like “bodyminds” instead of “bodies and minds,” for example.)

You can get an idea of their writing style with their introductory sentence:

From our vantage point within Sins Invalid, where we incubate the framework and practice of disability justice, this emerging framework has ten principles, each offering opportunities for movement building…

Why can’t you just say “Sins Invalid has created a set of 10 definitions of disability justice and ways to incorporate these principles in your organising work?”

It doesn’t get any better as you kep reading, either:

Leadership of the most impacted: When we talk about ableism, racism, sexism & transmisogyny, colonization, police violence, etc., we are not looking to academics and experts to tell us what’s what — we are lifting up, listening to, reading, following, and highlighting the perspectives of those who are most impacted by the systems we fight against. By centering the leadership of those most impacted, we keep ourselves grounded in real-world problems and find creative strategies for resistance.

We already have a catchier expression for this principle: “Nothing about us without us.” “Leadership of the most impacted” sounds clunky. Also, I would say “transphobia” rather than the specific “transmisogyny,” since the term is more recognisable—and because transphobia affects trans men and nonbinary people, too. Classism belongs on this list as well. Let’s try to make this more memorable:

Nothing about us without us: We don’t need academics or “experts” to explain injustice or discrimination to us when we’ve gone through it ourselves. We need to listen to people who have gone through injustice and discrimination themselves: disabled people, women, people of colour*, LGBTQ+ people, working-class and poor people, and victims of police violence. They know themselves best and are the experts on their own lives.

And it continues…

Anti-capitalist politics: Capitalism depends on wealth accumulation for some (the white ruling class), at the expense of others, and encourages competition as a means of survival. The nature of our disabled bodyminds means that we resist conforming to “normative” levels of productivity in a capitalist culture, and our labor is often invisible to a system that defines labor by able-bodied, white supremacist, gender[-]normative standards. Our worth is not dependent on what and how much we can produce.

The last sentence needs to be the first, and there needs to be an actual definition of what “capitalism” means. Activists will know what it means, but the average Westerner (and American in particular) is going to think of capitalism as a good thing, since they’ll contrast it with the Soviet Union and North Korea. Also, the definition of ruling classes is obviously US-centric. In many countries, the ruling classes may not be white, since most countries that aren’t in Europe or don’t have ruling classes descended from European colonists. As for Europeans themselves, most countries’ ruling classes belong to the same ethnicity as the working classes, even if there are immigrants from Africa or Asia living there.

Here’s my quick-and-dirty plain-language translation:

Our worth doesn’t come from how hard we work, or whether we can work at all. Our lives matter no matter what. But we live in a capitalist society. In capitalism, regular people have to work hard so that corporations, landlords, and banks earn money from their employees’ work. These owners keep all the money for themselves and don’t do much work themselves. They just want you to do all the work. Under capitalism, we have to compete with each other to get jobs and get enough money to eat. Because we’re disabled, it’s harder for us to work. People don’t always see the work we can do, or they don’t think it’s important. Capitalism hurts disabled people.

Here’s another winner of a quote, complete with some “noble savage” idealisation of pre-contact North America:

Interdependence: Before the massive colonial project of Western European expansion, we understood the nature of interdependence within our communities. We see the liberation of all living systems and the land as integral to the liberation of our own communities, as we all share one planet. We work to meet each other’s needs as we build toward liberation, without always reaching for state solutions which inevitably extend state control further into our lives

Again, there are a lot of assumptions that aren’t going to be shared by your average American, much less a disabled one who’s been exposed to only conventional narratives about US history. In a country rife with brands like “Rochester Colonial,” “Swiss Colony,” and “Imperial Margarine,” you need to clarify why colonialism is bad or cut out the mention altogether.

Here’s another quick-and-dirty plain-language fix:

Interdependence: We all need each other to live and grow. Unfortunately, a lot of us learn that we have to just rely on ourselves and not get help. But everyone needs to work together to protect ourselves, our community, and our planet. When we work together, we won’t need as much help from the government, since the government often has too much control over our lives.

Once I turn this into plain language, it’s easier to identify a political position that may give some progressives and socialists pause: the idea that disabled people should find support within the community rather than seeking help from the government. This part sounds specific to anarchism and doesn’t belong in a general set of principles. (Yes, I do point out biases even when they match mine!) Also, what do they mean by “liberate”? That word is thrown around a lot, but they’re never clear what they mean.

In general, the 10 Principles of Disability Justice are a well-meant attempt to combat systemic ableism, but the academic jargon, buzzwords, and identitarian focus prevent it from becoming the manifesto it could be.


* I hate the expression “people of colour,” but I’m using it here to avoid writing a long list of ethnic groups or using the expression “racial and ethnic minorities,” which this crowd tends to hate.

People who reduce all human relationships between “oppressor” and “oppressed” ethnicities…

…are the race-reductionist equivalent of vulgar Marxists who view everything through the lens of the eternal struggle of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. All they’re doing is taking a crude interpretation of Marxist theory and using race instead of class. Even the Marxists recognise that that the class struggle changes over time—that’s why it’s called dialectical materialism, not static materialism.

Honestly, I’m more willing to buy that a transactional relationship, such as the worker–owner dichotomy in conventional labour structures, or the dichotomy between political leaders and constituents, is more likely to be the source of systemic oppression, rather than the relationship between, say, Japanese and Koreans. But some inequitable balances of power, such as sexism, undoubtedly predated societies that were able to develop complex transactional relationships. (Also, all these relationships—yes, even culture—are mutable. People marry into different cultures, start companies, lose all their money while gambling in Vegas. The perceived value of different relationships can change over time as well, even if the traits of a group have not—for example, the Germans are viewed differently from how they were in the early 20th century.)

What not to do if you actually want people to support Palestinians

It’s spouting reductive, jargon-packed, essentialist bullshit (and, in the case of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, pogrom-inciting antisemitism) that will convince nobody outside your narrow academic circle of identitarian leftists. “Settler-colonial” (or just “settler”) is the identitarian-leftist equivalent of the Marxist “bourgeois”—or the right-wing “degenerates” or “groomers.” It’s a way to throw people into a bin and label them. I am sick to death of political movements that are predicated on just trying to wipe out the other guy. You keep doing that and we’re not going to have anyone left. Unless that’s what you want.

“Sex-based rights” is a misnomer hiding a reactionary agenda

Instead of using a trans-inclusive definition of gender discrimination, conservatives and TERFs want to base claims of discrimination on assigned sex at birth, rather than gender identity or presentation. They call this “sex-based rights.”1

The problem with this argument is that transphobia is a form of sex discrimination. By telling members of one assigned sex that they may not be referred to by pronouns that align with their gender identity, wear the clothing that suits their gender presentation, or that they cannot get treatment or surgeries that help alleviate gender dysphoria, they are practising sex-based discrimination. I’m not the only one to use this argument—the United States Supreme Court, not known for its progressivism, ruled in Bostock that homophobic and transphobic discrimination in the workplace were unconstitutional, since they targeted people for discrimination based on sex assigned at birth.

It is more accurate to call “sex-based rights” sex-based restrictions. Just as digital rights management is designed to restrict how people use and distribute computer files, the principle of sex-based rights is designed to restrict the range of gender expressions and identities based on one’s assigned sex. Supporters of DRM say they want to protect and empower copyright holders (typically large corporations). And supporters of sex-based restrictions say they want to protect and empower women.

But sex-based restrictions don’t empower or protect women. Instead, they are sumptuary laws harking back to the Victorian era. Or in contemporary society, the laws in theocratic Middle Eastern states like Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. These restrictions also reinforce the anti-feminist idea that one’s assigned sex at birth defines one’s moral character. That if you were assigned male, you are automatically a rapist and pervert, and if you were assigned female, you are a delicate flower in need of protecting. These are patriarchal stereotypes that merely reinforce the idea that men and women will never be equal.

Some feminists—the ones who believe in inculcating gender equity in future generations—focus on cultivating gentleness and compassion in men, and assertiveness and strength in women. Supporters of sex-based restrictions do not do that. Instead, they reinforce the idea men are strong, dominating and predatory, and women are delicate, weak and nurturing. This isn’t feminism. In fact, it’s quite the opposite—it is merely the inverse of patriarchal “values.”

Homophobia and transphobia are sexism. Neither should be welcome in a tolerant society.

  1. (Come to think about it, the constant use of “sex” feels very old-fashioned, too—feminist activists started shifting towards “gender” fifty years ago. I prefer this not just for political reasons—“sex” is too easily confused with sexual intercourse.)

 

LGBTQ+ organisations in Russia

Despite the intense repression that LGBTQ+ Russians have suffered under Putin’s regime, there are still brave people out there fighting the good fight. Here are just a few (all links are in Russian, though some include English translations—I used machine translations for a lot of it, since my Russian isn’t great yet):

  • Centre-T is a Moscow-based organisation that provides social support, legal help, education, and more to trans people and their allies. They have resources for neurodivergent trans and nonbinary people, too!
  • The Russian LGBT Network (Российская ЛГБТ-сеть) provides emotional, psychological, legal, and community support to queer Russians across the country.
  • Delo LGBT+ (Дело ЛГБТ+/LGBT+ Affairs) is a legal advocacy agency that helps people across Russia.
  • Doxa is an online magazine that devotes a lot of its coverage to the struggles of LGBTQ+ Russians, though that’s not all: Doxa articles include content about creeping authoritarianism around the world, the war in Ukraine, mental health, bullying in schools, and more.
  • Holod (Холод, “Cold”) is similar to Doxa—a lot of LGBTQ+ content along with articles about politics and society.
  • SOS North Caucasus supports LGBTQ+ people in one of the most dangerous parts of Russia: Chechnya.
  • Quarteera, based in Germany, offers support to Russian-speakers, including Russians and Ukrainians. They have a great podcast miniseries, Queer Conversations (Квир-беседы, Kvir-besedy), that features queer people from Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and more. (I was able to get the gist of what they were saying—and it’s been great practice for my oral comprehension!)
  • Coming Out (Выход/Vykhod) is a nationwide advocacy and support organisation.

If you’re able to send money to Russian organisations, I would encourage you to do so. I can’t do that from over here—our sanctions have made that impossible—but they can use all the help they can get, especially in this hostile climate.