Marxism and Queer Liberation: Why Socialism Needs Queer Liberation and Queer Liberation Needs Socialism

Achieving the liberation of the queer community requires realizing the intersecting nature of all U.S. cultural oppressions — including class oppression — ties the liberation of all to the end of capitalism. Today, queer oppression is being used not only to sustain capitalism but to help grow fascism. When so many people’s personal hierarchy of needs requires them to spend their limited resources struggling simply to survive an onslaught of existential attacks, how does a socialist movement grow and build class consciousness? How has capitalism infected liberal social analysis of so-called “identity politics” and activism in those realms? How can socialism provide a better analysis and reinvent activism in those realms? What can socialism, in general, learn from queer analysis and activism?

Genevieve R is the co-chair of DSA Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy. She's also a founding member of the Ithaca Tenants Union and the Ithaca Solidarity Slate, which has elected four organized socialists to the City Council.

Rashad X (he/him) is a proud member of Lakefront DSA in NE Illinois and a member of DSA's National Political Committee. Most of his work is focused on ensuring that DSA is fighting the imperial police state through political independence and ensuring DSA is a leader in winning the battle for Democracy. Both of these themes inspire his involvement in the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign, where DSA is fighting the unpopular far-right agenda implemented through the US's undemocratic political system.

Emma P is a published researcher in both neuroscience and engineering. Her love has always been philosophy, hence she has been a lifelong member of the working class. She has organized outside of socialist spaces, from multi-city protests to state-level building and leading, as well as collaborating with national organizations. She has contributed nationally behind the scenes for about 15 years. But several years ago, she lucked into an opportunity to join the socialist struggle, join DSA, and find comrades who mean the world to her. She has held a few local offices, is a member of NPEC’s committee, and is now on the TRBA steering committee. She likes to call this work applied philosophy, but no one else finds it funny. Reclaiming queer liberation as an inherently socialist struggle has been a dream of hers.

Get involved! Queer Socialists Working Group.

Also check out DSA’s recent Kickoff of the Trans Rights & Bodily Autonomy Mass Campaign Commission.   This commission will act as an organizing and resource hub for our over 150 chapters in 48 states. It will struggle on different fronts including for legislative reform, defense of queer community spaces, protection of queer people in the workplace, distribution of trans and abortion resources, and a national Day of Action on March 31, Trans Day of Visibility.

Become a member of Democratic Socialists of America.

Sign up to receive NPEC's newsletter, Red Letter. 

Transcript

Bonus Episode - Queer Liberation

Elton LK: [00:00:00] You're listening to CLASS, an official podcast of the Democratic Socialists of America National Political Education Committee. My name is Elton L. K. 

we have another bonus episode, an NPEC event that was held on March 2nd, 2024. Control of our bodies is a fundamental human right, which is why this year trans rights and bodily autonomy are joining labor. and climate work as national priorities for the Democratic Socialists of America. On February 3rd, DSA launched our National Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign Commission.

This commission will act as an organizing and resource hub for over 150 chapters in 48 states. It will struggle on different fronts, including for legislative reform, Defense of Queer Community Spaces, [00:01:00] Protection of Queer People in the Workplace, Distribution of Trans and Abortion Resources, and a National Day of Action on March 31st, Trans Day of Visibility.

Socialists believe an injury to one is an injury to all, which means we're all in this fight together. If you're trans, we want you to know that you are loved, you are worth defending. Today, we have a discussion about Marxism and queer liberation. Luke Pickrell, of our last episode, will be facilitating the discussion.

I will hand it over to him to introduce our guests. 

Luke Pickerel: Okay. So hello everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm going to go ahead and kick off our program here, but before that, I've got a few little housekeeping items. So first and foremost, welcome to Marxism and queer liberation. [00:02:00] Why Socialism Needs Queer Liberation and Queer Liberation Needs Socialism.

we're very thankful this event is co sponsored by the Queer Socialist Working Group and the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign Commission, uh, both part of DSA. So we're very thankful to Brie Bergen and a lot of folks, uh, for this event. NPEC. This is an NPEC event.

NPEC is the National Political Education Committee of DSA, Democratic Socialists of America. We're going to have one more event this term, so folks can look out for that. And when I say term, I mean that folks apply for an NPEC term. So applications are open right now actually for NPEC. So if you're interested in getting involved with NPEC, if you're interested in getting involved with any of the groups that folks are representing tonight, it's very easy.

Easy to do. So what I'll go ahead is, uh, read the description that we created for this event, then I'll go ahead [00:03:00]and, um, introduce our, uh, guests. I'll just, uh, give us a little preview of the schedule and then we'll. So, achieving the liberation of the queer community requires realizing the intersecting nature of all U.

S. cultural oppressions, including class oppression, ties the liberation of all, uh, to the end of capitalism. today queer oppression is being used not only to sustain capitalism, Uh, but to help grow fascism when so many people's personal, uh, hierarchy of needs requires them to spend their limited resources struggling simply to survive and on sought of existential attacks.

How does a socialist movement grow and build class consciousness? How does capitalism, uh, how has capitalism infected liberal social analysis of the so called, of so called identity politics and [00:04:00] activism in those realms? How can socialism? Provide a better analysis and reinvent activism in those realms.

And then finally, what can socialism in general learn from queer analysis? So we've got three folks to hear from today. First, uh, Genevieve is the coauthor of DSAs, uh, trans rights and, uh, bodily autonomy group, uh, or excuse me, the, uh, resolution. Uh, she's also a founding member of the Ithaca tenants union.

And the Ithaca solidarity slate, which has elected four organized socialists to the city council. So thanks so much for, for being here, Genevieve. We have, uh, just to give credit in the right place. I didn't go out there to resolution. I'm the co chair of the national campaign commission, co chair of the national campaign.

You're right. It does say co chair instead of co author. Thank you so much, folks, folks will be [00:05:00] able to correct all of my little, my little slip ups. Thank you. So Rashad X is a proud member of Lakefront DSA, um, in Northeast Illinois. and a member of DSA's National Political Committee. Most of his work is focused on ensuring that DSA is fighting the imperial police state through political independence and ensuring DSA is a leader in winning the battle for democracy.

Both of these themes inspire his involvement in the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy campaign. Where DSA is fighting the unpopular far right agenda implemented through the U. S. 's undemocratic political system. Thanks, Rashad. And we also are joined by Emma. Emma is a published researcher in both neuroscience and engineering.

Her love has always been philosophy, hence she's been a lifelong member of the working class. She's organized outside of socialist spaces from multi city protest to state level building and leading, [00:06:00] as well as collaborating with national organizations. And she has contributed nationally behind the scenes for 15 years, doing a whole variety of activities.

So thank you so much for being here. What we're going to do today is hear 10 minutes each from Genevieve, Rashad, and David. Emma, if you go over a little bit, that's fine. About The description that folks heard a general statement, if you will, then we'll go into a question and answer. I have several possible questions here.

We'll go back and forth between our panelists, discuss those for a little bit, and then we'll bring in the audience and audience. Thank you so much for being here. You can put your questions in the Q and a section. Hello. You can do that at any time. And then during the audience Q and a section, I'll read some of those out.

I'm willing and we'll engage in a conversation around that. [00:07:00] So due to our little, uh, technical debacles too strong of a word, but, but due to a little scrambling here, I never had a chance to ask our panelists who wanted to go first. So. Um, Genevieve, can I put you on the hot seat and ask if you'd like to kick us off?

You can, yeah. so much. So, I think very often in doing the, the queer liberation, like, transorganizing work about, um, A framing that I think Martin Luther King Jr is most famous for deploying about like that, that some people see peace as like the absence of war and, uh, that he was positing that it is in fact the presence of harmony.

And I think that when we talk about liberation. It's under the conditions that we're currently struggling, we are focused [00:08:00] very intently for obvious reasons on like anti oppression work and in our sort of practical and immediate reality, like the idea of creating liberation and creating harmony for ourselves is functionally equivalent with the idea of like stopping oppression and stopping, uh, this sort of systemic violence that's perpetrated against oppressed people.

But I, a lot of what we'll probably be talking about tonight is past the immediate circumstances of like these horrific attacks by the far right on trans rights, what does actually liberation in the longer term mean for queer people and for all people, um, in this country and across the world? I do want to though, in my opening comments, talk about actually what sort of queer and trans liberation means to our enemies.

I think that it's pretty fair to say that for a lot of recent human history, the philosophies of socialism and the philosophy of [00:09:00] fascism have been locked in a battle for control of society, and that even in places where, like, there's a neoliberal capitalist sort of like centrist, uh, quote, unquote, control of a government or an economy.

There are fascist fringes that are struggling for power. There are socialist fringes that are struggling for power. And that describes the state that we're in in America today, although fascists are much closer to control of our government than socialists are. Um, fascists have. Always focus very early on in their political organizing on targeting queer and trans people, um, folks may or may not know that when the Nazi party was coming to power in Germany, the 1st of many.

book burning raid type things that they did, uh, which became like an iconic symbol of their party's style of politics, was at what was in translated to English, the Institute [00:10:00] for Sex Research, which was at the time the world capital of research and like medical technology development around sex. Queer and trans healthcare.

They burned, uh, research that had been, that was the only place in the world that that existed in understanding trans healthcare. They took lists of the trans patients and then later used those, like took those back to their party and later used them to hunt down and exterminate trans people. They lynched the first ever transgender woman to receive sex reassignment surgery, uh, in the course of that book burning.

And there's a very, like, deliberate reason that they chose that target and that fascist movements have always chosen those targets very early on, and that's because fascism as an ideology is built on biological hierarchy, or I could say hierarchy in general, but they're very, very intent on biological hierarchy.

And they believe in men over women, they believe in [00:11:00] white people over black people, they believe in justifying and manifesting these hierarchies that are core to their ideology, in particular when it comes to gender oppression in their, like, In their mission to institute white male supremacist hierarchy and control of society, they are very, very threatened in establishing those hierarchies by anybody who crosses the lines of those sort of what they believe are biologically deterministic categories.

And so when it comes to like just queer people having same sex attractions and relationships, or even scarier to them, trans people actually changing our gender. That is threatening to a core foundation of fascist ideology, and they know that they have to eliminate it in order to enact their agenda.

What's hard about that for them is that queer identity, unlike other, you know, marginalized identities, uh, like particularly [00:12:00] race, is not in any way genetically inherited. So you could wipe out all the queer people, and then in a generation you're going to have just as many as you did before. So their strategy of like, physical extermination isn't effective with queer people.

They have to introduce, they have to institute cultural extermination that happens in perpetuity. And there's no ever, like, finishing or end to that project. So that's why it's one of the first things that they go for. It's why they're so intently focused on it. Um, and it's why they're attacking trans rights in America today.

And I think that as socialists, like, we are, uh, trying to stop fascism from happening all the time. And It, we'll talk about this a little bit later in the panel discussion, but the obvious question for us in getting into this area of organizing work and, and rights policy and so on is, what does this have to do with, uh, economic liberation and class and so on?

Um, and it's a, it's a [00:13:00] good and complicated question, but I actually think it's a lot easier to understand in terms of why is the existence of queer and trans people so threatening to fascists? And it's because. It is threatening to the very idea of instituting social hierarchy, and so in seeking to abolish social hierarchy, whether that's racial hierarchy, gender hierarchy, economic hierarchy, et cetera, the existence of trans people in society is in itself a protest of the institution and perpetuation of a hierarchical system like that.

Um, it's very, very threatening to it, and becoming trans is like, uh, you can become trans in a way that you can't just like, decide to become rich one day, right? It's a lot easier to maintain those boundaries with economic class. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think, I think that's what I'll add to it, and I'll turn it over to my other panelists for, for their, uh,

Awesome. Thanks so much, Genevieve. [00:14:00] Rashad, are you okay with going next?

Rather than answering the question, why queer liberation needs socialism, and why socialism needs queer liberation, I'll be addressing why queer liberation needs revolutionary social democracy. For the sake of more modern language, I'll refer to it as revolutionary democratic socialism. After all, this event was titled Marxism and Queer Liberation.

And one of the most important elements of Marxism is the centrality of democracy. From Marx stating that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class to win the battle for democracy. To Engels, stating that the Democratic Republic is the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat to lesser known comrades in the span of civil war, who not only limited their who did not limit their horizons.

When the bourgeois state co opted the framing of a democratic democratic [00:15:00] republic. They instead said we are not fighting for a democratic republic, a new day is dawning, which is the socialist republic. A Marxist politics that incorporates this history of recognizing the centrality of democracy to socialist transformation is what I call revolutionary democratic socialism.

Revolutionary because it opposes the current state form and seeks to smash it and install a government in service of the working class majority. It is to be compared to reformist democratic socialism, which limits its horizons on winning seats within the existing undemocratic state. And trying to use that existing state machinery to begin socialist transformation of society.

Queer liberation needs revolutionary democratic socialism. Because to eliminate the political conditions leading to queer oppression by the state means eliminating the tools the right is using to implement its minoritarian agenda. These tools, such as the Senate, the courts, and the Electoral College, each of these [00:16:00] institutions are bulwarks against the anti queer, anti trans, and anti bodily autonomy agenda, and they are all enshrined in our nation's undemocratic constitution.

A revolutionary democratic socialist approach seeks to unite the struggle for pro queer reforms and the defense against anti queer legislation, and merge that with the struggle for a new democratic constitution and to establish a democratic socialist republic, with universal and equal suffrage, with proportional representation, and a single federal legislature combining both chambers and the executive branch and the legislative branch, and ultimately ending the influence of money on politics.

Luckily, with the passing of our new 2024 program, DSA has declared its revolutionary democratic socialist orientation. We state that our mission is to win the battle for democracy. That our ultimate goal is to win a democratic constitution and that we seek to use this working class democracy for the [00:17:00] working class majority to transition to socialism.

So a revolutionary democratic socialist approach also needs the movement for queer liberation. Because it is a movement at the front lines of combating anti state democratic, uh, sorry, anti democratic state institutions. Proven time and time again through ballot initiatives, from Kansas to Ohio, and I know to my comrades in Florida who are going to win, that the working class majority doesn't agree with the right wing's culture war.

Merging the revolutionary democratic socialist movement with the clear liberation movement is a strategic necessity. Or else we risk leaving the energy that I saw Genevieve facilitate in our turbo call this morning, untapped. The energy that I see in my small chapter, and that was key to its growth, was a focus on queer liberation.

That energy would remain untapped. And the potential I see in my queer co workers, that revolutionary energy, Will remain untapped. Luckily, a revolutionary democratic socialist [00:18:00] approach is DSA's approach and the merger of the revolutionary democratic socialism movement and the queer liberation movement will happen within this beautiful, independent working class party we're building here.

Fight the Constitution, win the Socialist Republic, achieve queer liberation.

Thanks, Rashad. And Emma, we'll turn it over to you.

So just a little quick bookkeeping up front. I speak very slowly, unless you're from the South, in which case I speak normally. I also have trouble breathing. So if I pause, I'm getting to something. Just give me a second. Uh, I want to thank Impact for doing this. Uh, I really wanted this to happen. I'm very excited about it.

Uh, great group of people. Uh, Luke didn't hit it too hard, but applications were open. Been very lucky to [00:19:00]participate for almost a year now. I encourage you to to apply. Um, so I'm going to use some of my personal experience and work my way into, uh, an analogy that I suspect I'll probably use multiple times during this talk.

Uh, when I was a kid, you could still see headlines like, uh, uh, perverts march for, you know, to describe gay pride marches, right? Um, it's really hard to find information on, on, uh, queer organizing. What I, what I could find was information on, uh, black liberation. Uh, and, uh, one of the things I, I started running into reading about the, Uh, black liberation were these existential moments of, uh, of how can we win when there's all these other problems tied together, you know, poverty and and other things.

[00:20:00] Um, as a, as a liberal, uh, or in liberal trans organizing spaces, that was an issue that frequently came up as well. You know, you see, uh, uh, people being killed. Like, we, we know that, um, On, uh, uh, Trans Day of Remembrance, we're frequently talking about black trans women in the U. S., uh, and frequently sex workers.

And, you know, that's not an accident. You know, liberal spaces tend to act like there's some mysterious reason for this when we know it's really the intersections of various kinds of, uh, oppressions. Um, and, and you see these people get killed and then misgendered in the, in the news and, and, uh, you want to do something about it, but how do you, how do you liberate trans people, including [00:21:00] all trans people, you know, when you have to also end black oppression and, and poverty?

Um, uh, that's where liberal organizers run into their existential moment, and a lot of them quit at that point. Uh, some of them choose smaller things to focus on and live in that. Um, some of them become socialists. That's, that's, uh, that's where, uh, you know, I ran into socialists reading, uh, you know, like black liberation organizing.

That's the first time I encountered, well, there is an explanation, right? There are ways to approach it. Uh, that's not an existential moment for socialists. That's, that's everyday organizing for socialists. We know the answer to that stuff. Um, Uh, one, one of the, the, uh, references I use a lot in, in [00:22:00] talking about this, uh, the, I try to compare it to, uh, the seventies, you know, this, this very revolutionary moment where you had, uh, uh, a lot of capitalists and fascist afraid of, of what the kids were doing, right?

Um. But what you saw were a lot of socialists. It's not always well documented in the history books, particularly the LGBT mainstream history books that a lot of this stuff was being led by socialists, but it was. Right? And, and they worked together. Uh, the Black Panthers would, uh, be bodyguards for feminist events.

Uh, queer liberation socialists would go and work with unions. We saw these efforts being tied together and working together because they had a common language. They had a common understanding. They were comrades and they knew they were in the same fight. even if they [00:23:00] were focusing on different parts of it, they were in the same fight.

After that, suddenly there, there was this idea of being promulgated that, uh, it's unprofessional to somehow focus on or, or care about multiple topics at the same time. And, uh, I always thought the word professional there was a very operative word about who was pushing that idea. Um, We have to care about multiple things, right?

Um, I saw, uh, in a, in an article recently on a completely different topic, uh, uh, A, uh, a leading thinker dropping, uh, that, uh, Marxism, uh, is an economic theory, um, which sounds fairly benevolent. Um, I heard it a lot, uh, as a young adult. Um, when I would, when I would get, uh, uh, [00:24:00] invited to socialist events as a young adult, mostly in like, uh, philosophy department stuff, right?

Uh, you, what I would hear is that, uh, like, gay liberation was, uh, Western decadence and it wasn't really, wasn't really part of the fight. Um, I think sometimes you hear now people saying it's a second tier issue or some variation thereof, um, which is, you know, it's a certain level of understanding of what's going on, um, and, and in certain ways and that we have to fight an economic battle, you know, there's, uh, at least a moment of truth there, right?

This is, uh, uh, an economic, uh, ultimately an economic battle that we're, we're facing. But, uh, you know, Marx didn't write about economic issues [00:25:00] because, uh, he arbitrarily dreamed up A new economic theory, he investigated economics because he saw what was happening around them and cared about it. We can care about it too.

Um, the analogy that that I like to use is, uh. Uh, if you imagine a circus tech, 1 of those really big tents. Uh, that has, uh, a huge main tent pole in the center and a lot of little tent poles, uh, around it, holding it up. Um, if you imagine the, uh, the, uh, economic oppression of capitalism as the main tent pole, uh, you can see all these other oppressions as the, uh, surrounding tent poles holding up the edges and supporting the main one and making it an actual tent.

Um,

We [00:26:00] can with sufficient force batter the main tent pole and take the tent down. It's, it's certainly possible, but what's a lot easier is to start rocking all the tent poles like they did in the 70s and then they, these various things that support capitalism pull against each other and work against each other and it takes a lot less force and a lot less effort.

It's to our benefit and to everyone's benefit to pull these issues back into mainstream socialism where they belong, where there are trained leaders and organizers with good socialist analysis of what's happening. And, uh, I guess I'll let it go there. Uh, uh, thank you, Luke.[00:27:00]

Thanks, Emma. And thanks to all three of you for giving us these ideas to Lead us off, kick us off. So I have some preplanned discussion questions. I figure I can put a few of these out there. I know. Already folks have connected, uh, and discussed these issues a little bit. So there might be a little bit of overlap.

Um, but now I think is our opportunity to dive in a little bit. So I'll put the questions out there. Um, folks, the three of you, as you feel so moved to answer them can, can come off and we'll have a little bit of a discussion. We'll keep this going for. About 30 minutes or so. And then, um, we'll turn it over to the audience for Q and a, and, uh, just once again, folks in the audience, feel free to put your questions in the Q and a any provocative thing that comes up as we're having this conversation.

That's the spot to put it. So it doesn't, so it doesn't float [00:28:00] away. So this is to kind of continue what Emma was discussing a little bit, but I'm curious, how do you all think Marxism and the struggle for, for clear liberation interacts, do they have separate goals and ideologies, do they support one another or are they more intimately connected in some way, all three of you have touched on that a little bit, but I was, I was hoping we could, we could bring that out.

Should we just go in the same, same order, guys? Sure. Um, yeah, I, well, I'll start this by saying that I, the way that I see Marxism and have, and have come to understand it through like reading and like other people, you know, helping me read very dense content is that it is, To me, Marxism is [00:29:00] more about, like, an analysis and, uh, than about, like, specific prescriptions or goals, which I think have a fundamentally moral component to them.

Marxism I see as a tool to understand power, like Emma was saying, that it's often taught as an economic sort of ideology or analysis. I think even deeper than that, it's one about power. Like, it quantifies money as, like, a way of storing, transmitting. Uh, et cetera, power. And so I think that the, you know, so often, I mean, this is the clearest in financial stuff, if you look at how like the United States treasury, or how like the people who run global banks and things like that are talking about how they are setting up the economy to advantage capitalists and disadvantage the working class.

They themselves are using. Marxist analysis, because it is, it's a fundamentally like accurate and it's, [00:30:00] it's the best sort of like thought technology that we've developed for understanding how power and economy interact in the world. And so I see the struggle for queer liberation. As like best equipped to understand its own position in society, understand our oppression as queer people, understand that the solutions be go, go beyond sort of like liberal advocacy and like bodies and spaces stuff as requiring Marxism as an analysis of power in order to equip ourselves to, to organize for our liberation and to have, and to understand how our oppression intersects with other forms of oppression and understand that, for example, Like, it's not a coincidence that at the same, I mentioned on the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy kickoff call where we had a very famous trans legislator named Zoe Zephyr there, who was kicked out of Montana's state legislature by Republicans last year, that it's not a coincidence that at the same time that that was happening, in [00:31:00] Tennessee, they were removing a black legislator from that legislature for advocating For, uh, his children and his community's children and like, where Zoe Zephyr was advocating for her community's children.

It's not a coincidence that right now, as the state of Texas is trying to investigate a trans rights organization and like, get them to give up their membership list so they can investigate trans parents for their children, that the legal construct That those, that that organization is using to defend itself is the exact, the legal precedent for it was established when the radical right tried to subpoena the NAACP's membership list during the civil rights movement.

It's not a coincidence that, as Emma was saying, that in hate crimes against trans people, 80 percent of those are specifically against black transgender women. And the existing sort of, like, very, like, vibe y liberal analysis of, like, we should love everybody, that, that doesn't really fully answer the question of why are these [00:32:00] forms of oppression intersectional?

Why do, when you live in a so called safe state. For trans people, where you have, like, social and medical rights, why is it still that trans people are eight times more likely to be homeless than people who aren't trans? And from how I see it, a Marxist analysis of our economy and fundamentally of how power is arranged in society is the only way to accurately and fully link those things and understand the solving of all those problems as fundamentally interconnected.

Thanks Genevieve. Rashad or Emma, would either of you like to take a stab at this one?

Thanks for kicking us off, Jen. Uh, lots of themes to agree with there and, uh, would definitely want to build on. The one maybe where I think we may diverge a little bit is in terms of the idea of like [00:33:00] goals. And does it have like a, do each ideology have like a prescriptive set of what those goals are, what that looks like?

And I think what is common between the two is like the desire to like eliminate certain conditions that give rise to the oppression that, uh, Each that each system is seeks to combat imposes. So whether that's right, um, queer liberation, seeking to, uh, eliminate the conditions, both social, sorry, three types of conditions, right?

Social, political, and economic conditions that give rise to queer oppression and Marxism, right? Seeking to eliminate, um, you know, all social, political, um, And economic conditions that give rise to a worker oppression, alienation, exploitation, et cetera. So I think that focus on eliminating the conditions that give rise to the systems, both whether there be social hierarchy, or whether it be economic modes of production are [00:34:00] both innately tied to the goal of eliminating certain conditions and creating a new set of conditions that will give rise to a new set of outcomes, right?

What would it take for, uh, queer oppression to not be the dominant part of the contradiction, but, right, queer liberation to remain dominant and to, like, stay dominant? What would it take for working class rule to, like, Um, to not be, you know, in a position of not being the rulers of society. What would it take for us to maintain and stay rules of the society?

So again, answering those questions and thinking about conditions, uh, both social, economic and political, I think are two, uh, pretty similar things there. Secondly, both in terms of modes of analysis, really get at like the idea of. nothing being fixed, right? Whether it's someone's body and, and gender and, and sexuality and not, and not thinking of, you know, uh, the static or what is like, you know, socially, uh, mandated of us, for example, um, as like fixed or what has to be, [00:35:00] for example, right?

Queer, uh, queer, Um, you know, queer theory challenges that, Marxist theory challenges, challenges that as well. So I think those are pretty similar. Um, and I've personally found queer theory useful in thinking about Marxism, uh, because instead of trying to find, um, this type of Marxist or that type of Marxist, I've, I've joked in the past and said, uh, I think when Marxism has gotten way more non binary.

Because it allows me to look at the entire Marxist tradition, you know, before, uh, the Soviet Union, but it also allows me to look at the entire Marxist tradition, uh, you know, post the Soviet Union as well, and conflicting traditions within, um, things that maybe I used to say, oh, I'm a Marxist Leninist, and so I disagree with, you know, this Trotskyist thought or something like that.

But, uh, queering up my Marxism a bit has allowed me to really soak in and use our entire Marxist tradition.

That was fun, Rashad. Thank you. Uh, [00:36:00] so, uh, uh, like one thing I would start off with is, uh, is just pointing out that at the time of the Soviet Soviet revolution, one of the things that happened immediately was this, uh. Sudden queer liberation, uh, the sudden proliferation of, uh, of queer rights, uh, you had rights to marriage, you, you know, uh, suddenly there were, um, people doing trans, trans surgeries, uh, we've lost a lot of the records of this stuff and, and, uh, You can certainly point out that that later on, uh, in the Soviet system, things changed, but the, the people of the revolution understood queer liberation to be part of the event.

Um, so, I mean, uh, if you want to deny that, [00:37:00] go ahead. Uh, uh, the, the, one of the other things I would say, and I would encourage you not to, to, uh, To, uh, cite this and academic circles, because not enough of a historian to, uh, to really justify it. But if you, if you look at the, uh, advance of, uh, like World War 2 era, we're basically told that, uh.

The gay community developed because gay guys suddenly got together in the army and decided it'd be better if they lived closer to each other and started living in San Francisco and gay community grew from there. If you look at the Communist Party newsletters before that, the Communist Party was already debating queer rights for years, uh, have been for years, uh, were at least as good on it as we are [00:38:00] now, other than maybe, you know, like everybody else, they didn't know about the existence of trans people in particular.

Um, but, uh, to be fair, I think it was probably lack of knowledge. Um, I suspect, uh, and this is where, uh, Uh, you should be careful who you discuss it around if you don't want to be told you're wrong. Uh, I suspect that, uh, the, uh, the members of the Communist Party who were then interacting with all the other gay people in the army, who, uh, taught them what it was like to be open and free at a time when, uh, Uh, while we were treating the Soviets as friends, uh, rather than enemies, uh, started the, uh, the gay community.

Uh, I think the very origin of the gay community in the U. S. owes itself to the Communist Party. [00:39:00] Certainly. Certainly, the, uh, the, uh, active queer liberation movement of the 70s owes itself to socialist organizing, socialist organizers. If you, if you look, uh, at the leaders for decades there, they were socialists.

Um, uh, it, a lot of times in queer history or LGBT mainstream history, their socialist ties are. Aren't mentioned, but you can find it if you look for it, um, more what I would say is. Socialists, Marxists have often mentioned that American capitalism had special features and was difficult to, uh, to dismantle because of these special features.

And one of the most obvious of the special features was racism. You could split the [00:40:00] community, you could split people along the lines of race. And, and then since you could oppress some people a lot. You could oppress others as well. Uh, the queer oppression has played a similar role in American capitalism.

It is not well understood, uh, in that respect, but it's also an important part of separating the communities, separating people and sustaining capitalism. Um, one of my personal theories is that. If you, if you imagine a socialist revolution for tomorrow that leaves behind some form of oppression, even if it's not directly capitalist oppression, economic oppression, if it's racist oppression, if it's oppression of women or queer people or disabled people, [00:41:00] as long as you can justifiably and publicly oppress some people, you will wind up back with a capitalist system of oppression.

That's my answer. Luke, you can take it back.

Thanks, Emma. Thanks, everyone. I'm going to ask one more abstract is the right word, but one more broad question before I bring it into DSA and our political moment, because I do really want to speak to that. So in what ways have. What I'll term here, liberal approaches, uh, led the fight for queer liberation astray.

And, uh, what benefits would socialist approaches offer?

This is a really good question. I, I'm gonna take a very intentionally sort of like generous Uh, angle on [00:42:00] this, because I have, I feel like I owe my own existence to, uh, sort of like queer rights activist people, and many of whom were socialists, but existed and organized in a time where they didn't have the benefit that we do today of an, of like cultural validity of democratic socialism, the existence of DSA, et cetera.

I view it less as, like, that liberal approaches sort of led the movement astray. I do agree that the movement hasn't been explicitly socialist for, you know, a very long time. It used to be explicitly, like, socialist and communist and, In places where there have been like dramatic liberation of queer people, it has been by socialist and communist movements.

But in recent history, especially like in America, that hasn't been the case. And I view it sort of as there's like a chicken and egg to the liberalization of, of queer rights and, uh, to the, like, [00:43:00] a strangeness or suppression of the movement in general and of socialist organizing in the United States. The way that I choose to look at it.

choose, uh, so that I don't get mad at anybody that's sort of within the movement, is that for many decades, like, queer people have had to continue struggling for our liberation in order to, like, save our own lives and the lives of people we love. Under political circumstances where a large mass socialist organization was not sort of like viable in the way that it is today due to all sorts of kinds of suppression due to the like lasting cultural fear over the United States government's horrific and violent suppression of the civil rights movement in the black power movement.

Um, And, like, intentional erasure of the socialist characteristics of those movements. And so, the question, though, is, like, I, the way that I'll interpret it is, like, what are the limitations of the [00:44:00] liberal approach to fighting for queer liberation? And I think that the core limitation is, like I said before, if you live in a safe state, I live in New York, where trans people have, you know, Pretty decent social and medical rights.

There are some things we could improve. But for the people who like track national trans bills, they're annoyed with New York because all of their automatic alert systems put like every single bill that happens in New York into it because every single one talks about gender identity, specifically preventing discrimination against it.

And like, as annoying as that is, it's also because of how far we've come on the social rights and kind of like the liberal angle of this in New York. Yeah. But again, trans people here are eight times more likely than cis people to experience homelessness. Like there are still, we don't have universal access to healthcare.

So people who are poor and trans people are more likely to be poor don't have access to healthcare that ostensibly, like, are, the social rights about non discrimination are supposed to grant us. But we still have, Economic oppression and inequality under [00:45:00] capitalism that fundamentally like gates our community from accessing those things and so like that's the limitation to me is that without understanding the like economic liberation angle of it.

Like, the power to seek healthcare is economic, the power to have housing is economic, like, and you can guarantee non discrimination, but if you don't fix economic inequality, trans people don't have access to these things, and it's also like, it, a major obstacle for, for movements for socialism, for movements for like identity based liberation in America has been a A lack of intersectionality, so to speak.

That you can't have a mass political movement that isn't multiracial. You can't have a mass political movement that doesn't include queer people. Like, if you recreate these forms of oppression, like, sort of as Emma said, you're like, it's a tool to get us to oppress ourselves. And so, like, breaking that ceiling and connecting the [00:46:00] fight for queer liberation to broader struggles for economic liberation, for, uh, racial liberation, et cetera, like, is the only way that these things themselves can advance, is by being part of something together, which is sort of how we do it.

Socialists look at all sort of like organizing is that the only we're stronger together. We only have this mass collective power if we build it together.

Thanks Genevieve. Rashad, I don't know if you want to take this one. So building on, uh, what Jen said, I really like how Jen mentioned like the progress that like liberal, uh, you know, like pro queer movements have, have gotten us. And I think like where, you know, Those gains have gone in terms of like the social wins and, um, like a kind of a mass cultural, um, change and benefit like socialist job is to finish the job when it comes to, uh, the economic right [00:47:00] angles of it and the political angles of it as well.

Um, and barring from Emma, I'll use some parallels to like the black liberation movement and national liberation movements, for example. And I think about. France's France finance conception of cultural nationalism right versus revolutionary nationalism. And did the social inclusion or social inequality that that dropped that, you know, either led to the formerly like nationally like oppressed, or whether we know racially oppressed in the US or, you know, queer people who are oppressed, did it lead to a complete transformation?

of the economic and political system that gave rise to that, that oppression, or did it just put queer people in high places, black people in high places, right? The former colonized in, um, high places. And I think that's where liberalism has gotten us because it was meant to reconstitute the political and economic systems that gave rise to that pressure and the need for that oppression, um, in, in the first place, right?

It's how, in [00:48:00] the same vein, you got, uh, The first black president dropping some of the most bombs on, uh, you know, the nation that he was supposed to, you know, be from, played it up that he was from Kenya and dropped the most bombs on Africa. AFRICOM got ramped up. For example, uh, I was just in San Francisco for the MPC meeting and talking to them and hearing what they deal with is a lot of cops with pride flags, right?

Uh, you look at the, try to ramp up to, um, demonize the Palestinian liberation movement, right? And you see this like, right, like, oh, savages and different things like that. They don't believe in social, uh, Western values of, you know, queer people and queer expression and equality in that regard, right? Used to justify imperialism, used to, again, continue to like reconstitute, uh, the state that It's our job as socialists is to finish the job and transform and say, no, we are in opposition to the state in the political and economic system system that gave rise to this oppression in the first place.

No matter if it's queer [00:49:00] oppression, national oppression, or racial oppression, it's our job to finish the job when the liberals don't, uh, even if they take us far socially, it's us to take the economic fight and it's up to us to take the political fight.

So, uh, uh, I would, I, I have been, uh, uh, uh, organizing in liberal, uh, queer activist spaces. Um, a lot of what I saw, uh, and I will probably should say I do respect all the gains that, that, that have, uh, have come over the years and what people have done and what people have sacrificed and the unpaid work that they put in.

And, uh, one of the lessons of my life has been about terminology. So I [00:50:00] will say that when I'm using the, uh, the word liberal, uh, part of, uh, part of what is inherent to, in it to me, uh, which really ruins the surprise and the point I wanted to make later, part of what's embedded in the word liberal for me is an acceptance that some people are better than others.

Uh, and that's the point I'm going to drag through this. Uh, what I have seen in liberal organizing is, uh, LGB LG organizations, or at best, LGB organizations, actively organizing against trans rights, right? Uh, LGBT organizations organizing against, uh, prisoners rights, black rights, uh, prisoners rights. Or, or ignoring it, right?

Um, uh, this, this lack of [00:51:00] understanding of the intersectionality of it, uh, but more insidiously, uh, the idea that, uh, Like I said, some people are more deserving than others. And that's really the point I want to start hammering on now is that, to me, liberal organizing is still this kind of top down, uh, uh, Follow your leaders, follow the people that know best.

Uh, we're not organizing people. We're going to tell you what to do and you can contribute money to us because we want to live well while we're doing this stuff. And, uh, you can write the letters and you can do the work. Uh, but let us make the decisions because we know better. Um, and, uh, That to me is not queer organizing.

Um, uh, so I, [00:52:00] I think that Gets to what maybe make some people mad, but what I would want to say about it. Thank you. So before we get to our audience Q and a and thank you folks who have been putting Q and a comments. And it's going to be an awesome part of it. I want to kind of combine these last two questions.

So the first part of the question being, why do you think now is the time for DSA to directly enter the fight for queer liberation? The second part being, if you have any comment regarding the current electoral season and the struggle for clear liberation. So I'm imagining that there might be something within the current electorals, I guess, so to speak, that would necessitate DSA being involved.

So I wanted to combine those two. A little bit for folks, [00:53:00] and, uh, yeah, go ahead. Sorry, could you repeat that? I was typing in the chat a reply to Emma. Oh, no worries. No worries, Genevieve. No worries. So, why do we think, uh, that now is the time for DSA to fight for clear liberation? And at the same time, if you could comment a little bit on current, uh, the current electoral season and, and, and the struggle for clear liberation.

Um, it's, I mean, now is the time for DSA, DSA members. Have been involved in, uh, queer rights and bodily autonomy and so on work, you know, for as long as there have been DSA members and socialists and communists have been a part of struggles for for women's liberation for queer liberation, et cetera. Uh, for as long as we've had these political movements, so I, it's not now that, like, DSA is getting involved in this stuff, like, we, you know, at the launch of our trans rights and bodily autonomy thing, a [00:54:00] lot of it was people presenting the stuff they've already done, so we have been here, but now is the time for DSA to start diverting our national, like, resources towards it in a way that we haven't before, because the far right's attacks on, uh, uh, You know, these liberties are, are dramatically ramping up.

And for several years, we've, the right has invested more and more and more each year at the national and state levels in these political attacks. And I, you know, I have all of my theories that I could spend a long time saying about why that is. I, the short version of it is that I think it's an attack on the American public's capacity for solidarity in that, like, the goal is to demonize.

a very small proportion of the population and in the process like ramp up these sort of like You know, I don't invoke this lightly but like similar like nazi istic like blood libel y [00:55:00] things about like destroy like targeting children and doing sort of Clandestine rituals against them and stuff like that.

Um, but it's They're doing that because the goal is to get the American public to hate about 1 percent of its population into extinction and then build on that from there to like, turn that same energy towards larger minorities of people. And that campaign is ramping up and getting really aggressive and, uh, DSA is also at a point where.

DSA has about 80, 000 members spread across a little over 175 chapters in 48 states, and no other organization that's working on trans rights has anything close to that. And whenever, like, I, as somebody who's, like, coordinating this work nationally, meet with other national organizations, it's the first thing I say, is that this is what we have, this is what we can contribute to the space that nobody else is doing.

Like, you've been doing this for a long time, and Please, [00:56:00] like, send us information, like, if you are like, oh, this thing is happening in this state, and this state legislator needs to be targeted, but all I have is, like, researchers and lobbyists, we have people. And we're at a point in American history where, like, what is needed to deal with this is people.

Like just having, doing lobbying and like advocacy isn't enough. And other people who are working on this issue recognize that too. And the bottleneck is not like how much people care about it, it's how organized and mobilized the movement to defend and advance trans rights and bodily autonomy is. Um, And also, like, DSA, I don't know, I don't have data to support this, but I think that of all the sort of like big multi issue organizations in the country, I think we're the most proportionally trans.

That's my anecdotal observation. Um, and so, yeah, I, it's, it's, become the front lines of like the fascist rights attack on the American public's like conscious capacity for solidarity. And that matters for all of the other socialist work we want to do. And [00:57:00] so if we want to defend that capacity for solidarity, this is like the battlefield that that fight is happening on.

And if we don't show up, we're going to get beaten. Thanks, Genevieve. I'll turn it on over to you, Rashad.

Yeah, thanks for, thanks for kicking us off, Jen. And, um, you talked about the DSA difference and less of like what we can do externally. I'm more focused on like the DSA difference of how did we even get to, right, trans rights and bodily autonomy being at the front lines and the priority of our organization is because we have those democratic processes, right, in a convention as like our highest governing body to where members said, we want trans rights.

This to be the top fight that we take, and now they are seeing their organization go full throttle. Um, you know, thanks to the leadership of every, you know, all three of us that go on this, on this call, for example. Um, and I think that's such a critical tie to the elections. Show that we are such an alternative to the Democratic Party.

All right, [00:58:00] a party that you, that you, that, that, you know, the rank and file supporter or voter has absolutely no power over, right? There are plenty of people who have voted for Democrats in the last, however many federal elections who are completely fed up with the lack of a fight that we have seen around, right?

Trans rights and bodily autonomy more broadly, for example, right? DSA can be an organization that like, Our members control. We do not wait for these politicians to save us. We are agents. We are the protagonists. We set the terms of our struggle and we struggle how we want to struggle and what issues that we want to struggle on.

So if we deem that the fight against our capacity for solidarity as as Jen described is our priority, that's our priority. We don't wait for genocide, Joe. We don't wait for Nancy Pelosi. We don't wait for any of the Democratic Party. We set our own terms. And so more broadly than that. I think, again, it is our chance to lay the blame on not just the Republican Party.

Like, that's the easy answer. We need to be raising [00:59:00] consciousness and tapping into consciousness that exists, right? There is consciousness that exists already that properly lays the blame on the Democrats for relying on the Supreme Court when it comes to abortion rights, for not using its federal power that it has with Biden being in the president, and is completely fed up with the lack of the fight and the capitulations to Republicans, right?

There's already people fed up with that. And then there's people who are going to vote for Biden this election, vote for Democrats, right? And they're going to do so reluctantly. And DSA has the opportunity to speak to both of those audiences and say, no, we are opposed to both of these forces. We do not equate both of these forces, right?

And the Republican Democrats is the same, but we are opposed to both of them because neither of them is going to be our pathway towards liberation collectively. We need an independent force and DSA can present that independent force that Shows up and then also allows democratic input for people to become protagonists in the struggle, and it's no longer democratic politicians.

It's going to save us. It's DSA members ourselves. They're going to save us.[01:00:00]

Thanks. Rashad. Emma, can I pass it on over to you? Yeah, absolutely. I'm loving this, by the way. I don't get to talk to Rashad and Genevieve enough about this stuff. So I'm really digging here and all of it. Um, so I would say that, uh, Like, there are, are really kind of two questions maybe, uh, embedded in, in this.

Like, one is, there's a moral, ethical, whatever you want to call it, argument. And one is a practical argument, right? Um, uh, in a large extent, I think the moral argument kind of speaks for itself. Uh, shit's going down, so where the hell are we if we're not there? Um, but, uh, I mean, there, there is a, you know, a counterargument there about strategy and what, you know, [01:01:00] there's all kinds of stuff going down.

And there's always going to be a lot going down as part of how this works, as part of what we're trapped in. Uh, we have to think strategically and, uh, where we can spend our resources. Um, but like Genevieve said, we're a massive organization, uh, spread all over the U. S. I'm quite confident that, uh, we can do more than five different projects at the same time.

Um,

that being said, uh, this is a horrible moment in time for queer people. It's a horrible moment in time for a number of people, but it's a horrible moment in time for queer people. Uh, by standard, counting of the population, DSA is vastly disproportionately queer. Um, now if you look at some [01:02:00] recent, uh, studies, you know, like younger, younger age groups are getting up into 25 percent queer.

Um, and I'm, I should say mostly I try to use the word queer not as an umbrella term, but, uh, uh, In the way that activists from the seventies and eighties used it, uh, meaning that you were a radical leftist in, in addition to being LGBT ia, right? Uh, uh, but sometimes it just makes a, a handy, uh, a handy, uh, umbrella term.

Um, uh, so some younger age groups are pushing 25% now. Um, if we're trying to build a mass movement and, and we've got that many queer people in it and that many queer people in the, in the population, um, [01:03:00] you know, how do we do it if we don't tell them that, you know, their existential needs don't matter? Um, uh, you know, and that argument, it should be made, not could be made, but should be made for some other groups as well, right?

Um, but how do we do it if we, if we don't address what is a glaring existential moment? Uh, when Obama got into office, the U. S. And, uh, and Russia, uh, the, the population polling on, on gay rights was roughly equivalent. Um, uh, very shortly thereafter, uh, uh, in, in Russia, they started these kind of don't say gay kind of laws and that kind of stuff, um, and you quickly saw public polling go down on questions of gay, [01:04:00] gay rights, uh, until.

all of a sudden there were camps in Chechnya, right? Uh, we know what the Christian fascists want to do to us. It's not a big secret. Um, uh, you know, where, where queer people end up, like, like Genevieve was alluding to earlier, is where the rest of the country is going to go to. So if we care about, uh, democracy and opposing fascism, this is the moment to do it.

I think I better stop there. I appreciate it, Luke. Oh, thanks, Emma. So what I'm going to do is try and combine three of the questions that we have here in the Q& A, and I figure I'll pose the question, and I know when folks are hearing a question [01:05:00] live, it can take a little while to So I'm going to ask the question and I'll let you three sit on it just a tiny bit and then whoever feels so moved to respond to go ahead.

We don't necessarily have to go particular order, but I want to frame this question around talking with other people. Best practices, how do you do it, so on and so forth. So, there are multiple parts. How would you all talk with someone in the queer community who's against socialism? How would you integrate that?

How might you talk with folks in a way that brings them out of particular silos? So, working groups, commissions, and engages with issues together. You know, we've talked a lot about the connection of different issues. Thank you. And then more generally, how would you describe the relationship between queer liberation and, and a lot of these broader movements around [01:06:00] justice that includes cis and straight people, abortion access, HIV criminalization, and then how should queer people relate to the coalitions around them and how should socialists orient to them?

So in general, how should we imagine these different groups of people, different coalitions? Uh, so on and so forth, ideologies interacting, relating to each other. And how do you have that conversation? I suppose with folks is what I'm trying to get at here. So I'll give y'all just a little while to kind of stew on that one, and then please, as you feel so moved, go ahead and speak up.

I will say it's not me, go first, because I've gone first for all of these. Oh, I'll go first, and y'all can jump in when you want to. Uh, uh, I'm trying to keep everything that was just asked in my head. Uh, so, uh, uh, one thing I would say is that [01:07:00] the, uh, the queer community is still Uh, oddly, transparently, uh, socialist.

Right? Right. Yeah. Uh, and trans people in particular. Um, so there are certainly people that aren't. Um, but, uh, You know, as far as, uh, a singular community trying to pull from a singular community, uh, you know, a socialist approach to, to queer people is probably about as easy as it's going to get. Um, so, you know, let's do it.

But, uh, uh. What I often have been using, uh, inside DSA and I think it would work well outside DSA with other types of, of activists is that, is that circus tent analogy I was talking about, you know, how far are you going to go with what you're doing if you don't start addressing [01:08:00] the intersectionality and, uh, Uh, you know, the, the, uh, the idea of the main tentpole being economic oppression, um, sneaks, uh, sneaks, uh, as the socialist perspective in there, even if you don't name it, right?

Um, so, uh, I, I found that works pretty well and it gets people thinking and, uh, and, and kind of seeing how in a simple way that, that everything's tied together. Yeah. Um, there's there's some important I forgot Luke, uh, what am I missing

or I'll just let somebody else go. Somebody else is ready to jump in.

It's a, it's a complex question. I, I posed. I'll let folks continue on. [01:09:00] I'll, I'll say that, um, I mean, to answer really the question of like how to talk to like a trans person or a queer person who's like opposed to socialism very directly, I kind of like split this into three parts. The first part is like, look at who our enemies are.

It's the fascist, right? I am. I've never met a queer person who doesn't. Who isn't ready to acknowledge that these people are fascists, they know, they pay attention to what they say about us, and they know they want to exterminate us. And, so like, look at who our enemies are. Second, like, look at how just try trying to triangulate the centrist position, is When people are actively, like, have a deep ideological political movement around exterminating us, if the only opposition to that is just trying to, like, surface the majority public opinion, and just, like, represent that in order to get elected, that is exactly why there is this example, this [01:10:00] example, and this example of Democrats caving on trans rights.

Like, and again, every trans person is aware of these, is frightened by them, and is frustrated by them. So, like, the logical conclusion of this is that the only way to actually, like, put up meaningful opposition to a fascist right wing ascendant political movement is to have a strong left wing political movement.

Just having a fascist right in the center, like, it's just gonna drag that center towards that right. And I do, like, Trans people have all sorts of like different reasons. Trans people who aren't in DSA have all sorts of different reasons for not being in DSA, and I don't necessarily like push people super hard that like, you, I think there's a difference between agreeing that like something like this needs to exist, and like having to be a part of it personally.

I try to be gentle with people about that, but I, I, I think that that works really effectively at least getting them to agree that something like this has to exist. And then if they want to get politically active, come be a part of [01:11:00] this. Um, but as Emma said, I've actually not really had this experience of a trans, I don't want to, so I've talked to a lot of like trans organizational leaders of like policy organizations and people in like congressional offices and journalists and legislators and so on.

And I. I don't know, I won't blow up anybody's spot, but I, a lot of them, in private, agree with what we're doing. Um, and I actually, I want to say that on this call, because I, they're, the minority of these people are DSA members. The majority of them, Identify as democratic socialists. And I think that we should think seriously as an organization about why there are these people who are at the forefront of the struggle for trans rights in America who don't feel, I'm not gonna like air their specific reasons, but they're, they agree with us ideologically.

And they are skeptical of us organizationally. And, like, I think there are [01:12:00] things that we could do better to make ourselves, like, an environment that more people who agree with us ideologically and are ready to be politically active about this can feel comfortable being a part of DSA. Um, but that being said, like, there, there was another question, there was another sort of thing in there about how We, uh, interact with organizations outside of DSA.

That's the thing that you missed Emma. Um, and this is a, this is a topic that's really interesting to me because, like, for sort of areas of, like, organizing and, like, that, that DSA is really involved in and believes are really important. And I'll pull out the examples of labor organizing and Palestine solidarity organizing.

For those issue areas, the sort of the established kind of like vanguard of those movements are like we would consider them to be kind of like more politically radical than DSA in some ways, like we have, we have labor unions, and then we have like the, the, the [01:13:00] Palestinian solidarity organizations, and neither of those, you could really describe as like, Yeah, there are unions that have like leadership that is sort of complicatory and like isn't, you know, there's like reform that needs to happen but fundamentally like unions are class struggle organization with trans rights and queer rights in general, the the vanguard of this movement.

Is largely like liberal nonprofit organizations and that presents a struggle for us in like understanding how we relate to being a newcomer to this scene is like that the people have been leading this for a long time is not like banner waving like, uh, you know, like oppositional force to the Democratic Party, like, you know, meeting workers where they're at in their workplaces and organizing them.

It's liberal nonprofits and I, my position is that in the same way that we have to treat like the places where this movement has housed itself with the same respect that we do with unions [01:14:00] or with like Palestinian solidarity organizations. to, to continue these two examples. And that's not to say that we have to subsume ourselves into liberal politics, and we should keep our identity as DSA.

We should like talk about how socialism like bridges this with other sort of fights for liberation. And like, again, like my experience is that so many people are instantly ready to hear that. And so like, I don't feel like there's a challenge with this. And I feel like we can only benefit from being like, Hey, we're here now come join us in addition to the thing that you're doing.

But like, I really fundamentally believe that if we want to be a positive contributor to this, and also that we want people who have been in those sort of like vanguard organizational positions to see DSA as viable as a place that they want to be to join us, we have to treat them with respect and like recognize that we're a relative newcomer.

To this policy space and that we're only going to gain their respect not by like telling them how to do what they're doing and insisting that like, oh, we've showed up now we're like more right than everybody like we believe that in our heads. [01:15:00] We're all socialist for a reason, but like. We have to show up and actually contribute materially, we have to actually like, do things, we have to not just like, table at their big coalition events, we have to kick fascist people off of school boards, and put democratic socialists there and have those people like, fight for trans kids in those schools, and like, say that we're doing this because we're democratic socialists, and I think that that's how we, that's how we relate to these other organizations.

I think is like, show up in the same places as them, respect them for the work that they've done, but contribute the unique things that DSA as a democratic socialist institution that has a shitload of people, a ton of organizing chops, etc. Contribute things that aren't happening right now. And, uh, You know, be a part of a multi tendency movement, so to speak, in that way.

Thanks, Jen. If you've, Emma or Rashad, Rashad, I don't know if you want to take this one too. Yeah, [01:16:00] excuse me as I try to get my, uh, congestion, um, out the way and not make faces at y'all this entire time. Uh, but I think, uh, Emma and Jen kind of covered, um, A lot, maybe the only two things I would kind of more quickly add is like, in terms of breaking down silos within DSA.

I think this is where having a political program is like a necessity and like, bringing a political program to life can really help to unite the struggles and strands within our organization. Right? Like our 2024 program. Uh, that's, you know, going to be released. MPC just passed last weekend. So we just have to, uh, release it onto the forums and whatnot and really begin to bring it to life.

It has a strong focus, right, on, um, trans rights and bodily autonomy, for example, right? And so as we think about, um, You know, our labor work and winning labor unions and rank and file workers to our program, for example, like that is the program that, you know, people would be going to try to win people over to, for example, those are the United politics that we are [01:17:00] expressing as DSA.

And so, yeah, just quickly want to add, I think a program would really help. And secondly, to, you know, what Jen was describing, for example. Um, about how we need to, like, show up, how we need to, like, uh, recognize that, like, there's other organizations that either, you know, have a, a membership base of people or, you know, like, uh, mobilize people in a structured manner for campaigns and different things like that.

Um, I would consider that similar to, like, we need to do with labor unions is execute, um, we're talking about Marxism, right? A merger theory, right? We need to, like, embed ourselves into those struggles as open socialists and win them over to our program and have that level of, like, persuasion, right? But again, Still being a part of the struggle, those things are mutually exclusive.

And so if we are doing that with an open socialist, like banner and seeking to both win leadership in organizations that are structured as such, and are capable of like us winning leadership, like labor union, for example, or when it comes to, especially [01:18:00] with the queer organizations and like NGOs. That's perfect energy to bring people into DSA as an organization for the first time, even different, um, than it would be for a labor union, for example, to where like the merger is kind of more complicated with some of these social movements because it's nothing to really join.

We can be a part of the campaigns and whatnot, but there's no real structure to join. And that's like part of the selling point is, you know, what, what do we do when this is done? Uh, who's making decisions on how this should operate. Come be a part of an organization type of thing. And so that's just all I would build on from what Jen said.

But yeah, appreciate both of y'all for covering a lot of that. Can I just jump in again real quick? I promise not to be a hog, uh, or any more of a hog than I am already. Uh, a recent evolution of mine that really just stems from, from this campaign and the name of it, uh, uh, is, [01:19:00] uh, you know, the power of language.

The way the bodily autonomy was listed as part of the campaign name, the, the more I looked at it. The more I saw it as a way to start breaking down the, the silos that, that have been put up around, uh, these different subjects that keep us from working together on it, uh, now, personally, I've come more and more to use this just bodily autonomy as a name for the work, um, but I do believe in the power of language and, uh, I do believe that, uh, Coming up with, with words that show our socialist analysis in this regard, uh, can, can produce a lot of change.

That's it. I also want to jump in and add one more thing. It's really short. This is super practical. If you're in a DSA chapter that has, like, a repro justice working group, a queer socialist [01:20:00] working group, a socialist feminist working group, like, we've had all of these sort of, like, ad hoc structures that all of this different work has been out that I have, like, so many chapters have come to me, people who want to do, like, the trans rights work have been, like, I'm struggling with all of these existing formations in my chapter, like, the best advice that I could give you guys as people listening to this for that is to be, like, Okay, now, like, this has existed in all these different sort of places, now DSA's membership has instituted at the national level an umbrella that contains all of these things.

So it's not that these other sort of, like, formations and working groups have to disappear, in fact, they shouldn't, like, but there should be, if you're gonna start, like, a trans rights and bodily autonomy organizing thing, like, all of those different things show up to that, and are all part of it. And, um.

You know, maybe that has structural implications for your chapter over time. Like it, my local chapter structure has like changed one way and changed back and whatever so many times over the decades. That's like normal and [01:21:00]natural, but for like our practical immediate task, it's like you don't actually have to deal with the question of like, which thing is this housed under?

Like, or do we have to like get rid of these things and create it? It's just like, we have an umbrella for all of this now. And we're like going to organize this day of action. We're going to maybe do some like campaigns this year or whatever. Yeah. Don't overthink it. Just bring everything under one umbrella, because that's what the DSA membership has voted to do.

That's my tip for you.

Thanks Genevieve. So, before we close out by hearing from Allison, who's gonna speak a little bit about the relaunch of the Queer Socialist Working Group, Um, I did wanna, See if I could tie in the remaining three questions into one and I just can't do it. So what I'm going to do instead is read them and just let you choose the one that speaks to you the most.

They are concerned with different topics, I think. Um, distinct enough that, you know, I'll just let folks respond to the one that speaks to them [01:22:00] the most. So the first one here, um, is the material causes of queer oppression. How do those arise? Um, and in tandem with that, why might it be that, that certain sections of the working class would buy into, um, an ideology that doesn't benefit them materially?

So that's one. I'll let that stand there. The second one being what lessons we can take from Marxism and queer liberation when it comes to social reproduction, and then how might that impact our campaigns. And then the third one, returning to the theme of fascism, how do we integrate our conceptions of queer liberation with a more, um, with George Jackson's conception of fascism perhaps, which holds that fascism is not an ideology, rather a method.

To allow capitalists to create a reaction. Based on the contradictions they themselves create. [01:23:00] So fascism, social reproduction, ideology a little bit. I'll let you all speak to those a little bit before we conclude. I'll, I'll jump in real fast and, and, uh, uh, and, And, uh, start with the first one, or try to address the first one anyway.

Uh, so, like, historically, our, our version of capitalism, like we touched on earlier, has been very heavily dependent on, like, racism, sexism, in very painfully obvious ways. Right? Uh, so, not to beat up on, on, this is not, Anyway, uh, I think we can, we can all be comfortable talking about like there was a reward for being a white man or at least ostensibly a reward for being a white man in America for, for quite a long time.[01:24:00]

But when you, when you have. Those systems of oppression where, uh, you know, a cis man is going to remain a cis man, that's what it means to be a cis man, right? A white man is going to remain a white man. You can't suddenly subject a white man to racial oppression. But, like, at the, uh, height of conformism, uh, or at least what I would call the height of conformism in America in the 50s, what you did see was, uh, a lot of people being ostracized, uh, for being queer.

And queer at the time, if you look at, uh, a lot of people who have analyzed this, wasn't simply Uh, being LGBT, right? Um, or gay and lesbian, uh, at the time, right? Uh, it would, uh, it would have been being odd. You didn't [01:25:00] fit in, right? Um, in this broader sense, you can start to understand why, uh, you know, people always attack socialists for being queer and queer people for being socialist.

Uh, you know, that, uh, that, uh, That McCarthyism duality carries to this day, if you're standing on the street corner with a sign, you're going to hear pejoratives from both angles, usually simultaneously, right? Um, you, you could attack people for, for not fitting in, and in that way, you didn't have to You know, while, uh, uh, uh, you know, a white guy could understand, uh, uh, that, uh, oppression was okay because they were seeing black people being oppressed.

So they knew that the system could oppress people. You know, how do you, how do you keep good control over them, [01:26:00] uh, if they, if there is not some form of oppression, you could subject them to at will. Um, uh, So there, there is that, that constant threat of, uh, being labeled as queer. And then, then you, you see that carry on to today.

I mean, that's one of the reasons why, uh, queer people have trouble landing good jobs, and, uh, receiving lower pay. And, uh, you know, one of the reasons why trans people are, uh, have such a hard time holding jobs and such a hard time holding jobs that interface with the public in particular. Um, you know, being visibly queer breaks that, that rule, uh, and, uh, makes life freer for everyone, which is not the goal of, of capitalism, right?

Um, so, uh, uh, [01:27:00] I said that rather roughly, but I think I got there. I'll let it go with that.

Thanks Emma. Genevieve or Rashad? Could you just repeat the two questions? I see the one in the Q& A, the one about fascism. What was the other one? Sure, sure. Um, the lessons that we can take from Marxism and queer liberation in regards to social reproduction and how might that impact our current campaigns.

And then, um, the Perhaps more material causes of queer oppression and how that might, uh, encourage someone to buy into an ideology that perhaps wouldn't ultimately benefit them.

Rashad, is it cool if I take this sort of link? The, the, the queer theory ish family one and you take the fascism one. Cool. Um, yeah, this is, uh, and I'm, I'm looking at the Q and a question here and it, it prefaces this by mentioning that in the hundreds of [01:28:00] anti trans bills we've seen in recent years, there's almost always an exception for intersex people.

So preventing adolescents and adults from getting gender, uh, Affirming health care while doing non consensual surgeries on children. It seems this is designed to enforce a cis heteropatriarchal binary where the fascist right sees as the foundation of the family. And then it's like, what lessons can we take from Marxism and queer liberation when it comes to social reproduction?

Um, this is a really interesting question, uh, that there's kind of like two threads for me. There's one is the, the social reproduction, and then the other is actually like the theory of. Sexuality because I think that the, this is heteropatriarchal, uh, sort of like conception here is not just about how, like, humanity reproduces itself and controlling the means by which it does that.

But it's actually there's this deep, like, psychosexual thing that that is, is separate from that. And it's about power and subjugation. But I'll start with the, the, um, the social [01:29:00] reproduction part, which is this, this, uh, Kind of, like, leads in nicely from what Emma was saying, which is that, and to some of the other questions that have been submitted here about, like, relating to, uh, struggle, like, finding things that can bring in cis and straight people that talk about abortion access, HIV criminalization, et cetera, um, And ties together what we've been talking about this whole time with why, like, a socialist perspective on this is necessary, something that links these different forms of oppression and, like, liberation under one ideology, because the enemies that we have, for them, like, the oppression intersects.

They are oppressing all of these, we have this common enemy, they see these things as intrinsically linked, um, and so do we. And for, when it comes to social reproduction, like, that is what. Robbing people of bodily autonomy ultimately exists to do is to take the people who are on top of the hierarchy and put them in a position to decide what happens with social reproduction and [01:30:00] by extension humanity's labor power.

I mentioned in the chat earlier while someone was talking that like, pretty objectively, the largest advance in bodily autonomy in human history is the abolition of slavery. And like that to this day, like the carceral system in the United States, the mass incarceration system exists fundamentally as like a racist theft of bodily autonomy from largely black Americans.

And like the what slavery did in robbing people of its bodily autonomy, like it was about the shadow slavery was about like reproduction of labor power. Uh, there was that was like the economic motive. It wasn't just that these were like evil white people who were just doing this to be mean. It was like, they wanted to do it so that they didn't have to work and they, like, didn't care what happened to other people in order to, like, make that happen.

Um, and even though that's not exactly the circumstance that we're under today, like, fundamentally, the motivation. Is the same. It's to like create this biological hierarchy in order to control how [01:31:00] humanity and thereby labor power is reproduced and then controlled once it's reproduced. So I, I think that that's like, how does this affect our campaigns?

I don't know. It's the thing that we've said the whole time about like, how we need to bring a socialist perspective to this so that it like, We don't just, like, win a bill and then our nonprofit, like, loses its funding because there's nothing else to fight for. It's like we have a, we have a sustained movement here that, that's building itself across kind of issue areas.

But the other thing, sorry to ramble about this, but I, I'm, uh, very excited to have an opportunity to bring this up on this call, is that there's this whole other dimension to the fascist view of, like, control of, of gender and bodily autonomy and so on, which is that they're, like, fasc, the fascist ideology.

Views both, like, power and sexuality as, like, fundamentally destructive forces. Like, the i the ideas of, like, enforcing cis or heterodermatophagy, whatever. Like, that it's it's about, like, uh, it's about [01:32:00] penetration and domination and, like, control and subjugation and ultimately, like, that these are, like, violent like ends and impulses and uh, the sort of like queer theory of like sexuality very intentionally and specifically rejects that and says that like sexuality can be a mechanism of like the the creation of like harmony and love and so on and that yes it can have like this reproductive function and whatever but that's not what it says.

Isolated too, that there is this whole other element of human relationality that leads people that like, there's all these like other components about like, uh, like polyamory and like, different levels of like, platonic and like sexual relationships between people and all of these are part of sexual liberation, that we should be free to love each other and to like, do with our bodies what we want, to have like, freedom as consenting adults to do that.

Um, and the fascist, like, opposition to that [01:33:00] is that sexuality exists as a mechanism of control, and it exists to control people and hurt people and harm people who are, like, low around the biological hierarchy rungs. Um. And the idea of sex being for anything other than that, as like this, really like, fucked up, like, dominational, like, drive to power and to destroy and subjugate, is in itself threatening to fascism as an ideology at its core.

And I, I could go on about this for a long time and probably should read more about it. But that, that feels important. To point out in the context of this question, um, of like how, you know, about why the fastest rate is enforcing this, is that it's not just about social reproduction, it's in part about that, but it's because a theory of sexuality, when they demonize trans people and gay people and so on, it's like that them having this sexuality is inherently harmful to other people around them, and to children, and that they're seeking to, to create pain and [01:34:00] destruction and whatever, because That is fundamentally the fascist, like, view of what sexuality is all about, period.

And this is where, like, when there's, like, TERFism and stuff come up, and this sort of, like, uh, like, gender critical, or like, radical, trans exclusionary, radical feminism, whatever, Like, the bridge, which bills itself as left wing and liberatory for women. But it's fundamentally, just like the fascist view of gender and sexuality, based on like, biological determinism of your like, sexual characteristics and attractions.

And also, it fundamentally views sexuality as destructive and harmful. And like, male sexuality in particular, as destructive and harmful. And the people who are, you know, I could go on about this forever, but it, that's like, why the, the TERFism, like, isn't actually left wing and isn't like, at, at the end of the day, becomes actually aligned with the far right, and like, they're, they're sort of like, social media influencers are hanging out with the right wing social [01:35:00] media influencers, is because at the end of the day, they view sexuality as harmful, and not like, a tool of like, I don't know, like, joy and liberation and whatever.

Yeah, I'll stop talking about it because we only have so much time. Thanks, Genevieve. I'll pass it on over to Rashad. Cool. Thanks, Jen. Yeah, I will pick up on the, um, kind of like the, the question about fascism and it being less like an ideology and more of like a tool and also asking about the like material, um, Kind of like what allows for this oppression to like materially occur.

Um, so first and foremost, I would start with, I think this, it was a historian like Gerald Horn. I've listened to a bunch of podcasts and uh, read some of his books about history and uh, there's, This common theme about right like fascism in the United States and, um, you know, racism and slavery and whatnot.

And, you know, one of the things that I've always kind of stuck with me is like fascism is inherently about some sort of [01:36:00] class collaboration, right? It's about like some sort of like collaboration to how do you exploit some social contradiction that exists. In order for that to then be this capitalist class is now you're going to side with, you know, these workers who are more riled up over, um, the social contradiction, as opposed to, uh, their economic contradiction, contradiction in like their class position, for example.

And so I think that can really go downstream to when we think about George Jackson's analysis of a fascist state, right? That like America as like a fascist state. And, you know, I think whether or not you agree with that exact terminology, I think there's a lot to be said there. To connect to where I was going in the beginning when I opened was we have minoritarian institutions that allow for that small minority of capitalist interest, and they only need a minority of the population because of the way our Senate is structured, right?

Because of the way the electoral colleges to really be bought in to this culture war. So what then allows for this? If a [01:37:00] minority of people are fighting for this, what are the actual institutions that allow for these policies to be implemented? This is where we have to point our eyes at our undemocratic political system and the underlying constitution that enshrines that political system.

So let's say we take the courts, for example, right? Yeah, that is a Christian court, right? That is a Christian nationalist fascist court. Um, that's going to, you know, right. Okay. overturn Roe v. Wades and things like that. But that is also capital's court at the same time. It is the Christian's court, it is the capital's court, but at the end of the day, it is capital's court first and foremost.

Um, and so just again, that level of class collaboration is used to legitimize, right, these minoritarian institutions as being in the interest of, you know, working class people that may be a part, um, You know, that may be a part of this base of some sort of social contradiction that, right, the capitalist class and, um, you know, again, like, you know, we think about like the Trump kind of [01:38:00] movement in that level of like the far right movement.

It's like advertising to like, keep stoking that, right? It's not even just to win, right? Jen was like they, you know, push, push, push, push. Legislation right for agitational purposes, for example, right, they do a lot of the tactics that, you know, we would want our electors to do and be pushing for, you know, agitational legislation to rile up a movement, but the biggest differences is our movement is in the interest of a multiracial working class majority, and theirs is in the interest of the capitalist class and minority of people who really buy into those social contradictions.

But again, If it's a minority of people, we have to ask the question, how the heck does it still get implemented? And we have a minoritarian state with institutions like the Supreme Court that will continually manifest minority rule. So as Jen was talking about, we have to have a horizon that's bigger than just our reforms.

And we have a caucus called Reform Revolution that can help us remember, uh, um, um, the saying, but we, again, revolutionary horizon has to attack smashing [01:39:00] you. Those minoritarian institutions so that the working class majorities, you know, a position, which is way more socially progressive than this minoritarian culture war, um, can be implemented in majority rule, uh, can be what is manifested as opposed to minority rule.

Thanks so much Rashad. And thanks to all three of our panelists for just engaging us in a really interesting conversation. This is definitely one that folks will want to listen back to once it's posted on YouTube. It's going to be on class as well, which is the DSA's podcast. So you can go out at half speed, you can pause, there's just so much, uh, content and, and really, uh, interesting and stimulating points that folks have made.

Before we wrap up, I did want to turn it over to Allie, who recently led the relaunch of the Queer Socialist Working Group, uh, and was hoping that, uh, Allie can spoke, uh, speak with us a little bit. All right! Hey comrades, can you hear me? Thank you so [01:40:00] much. Thank you so much to NPEC for being able to put this on, um, and I want to say thank you so much to the panelists, uh, for, um, giving your ideas tonight.

I think the intersection of Marxism and queer liberation is, uh, one that's not oft talked about, and, uh, I'm so happy to see that we have such a diversity of ideas here, um, and a such a diversity of thought and approach and action. One thing I wanted to seize on was, um, Jen talking about having, uh, a united queer umbrella under which, um, queer organizing and DSA can happen.

And that, uh, has, that, I'm here to represent, um, one of those, uh, umbrellas. Uh, I am, uh, one on the steering committee. Ex co chair of the, uh, Queer Socialist Working Group. It is a national working group throughout the entirety of DSA, um, across the whole country of chapters coming together. To discuss what it is that we are going to do locally for queer liberation.

How do we actually affect that, and how do we make that [01:41:00] possible? Um, we are a place of inspiration. We are a place where queer socialist working groups of different chapters have come together historically, even before, um, Convention of 2023 to come together to talk about our plans, our projects, how we were going to split that, um, and how we were going to be able to implement that and give each other ideas on how we were going to do that forward.

And the adoption of the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy campaign is definitely, uh, given a regiment to that, a very structured, um, regiment that we never really had before. Um, but Queer Socialist Working Group is still here. We still, uh, want to create a space where queer people in specific can come together to talk about how, uh, we are, about our own personal struggles and how they are interleaved and interconnected, like Emma was saying, intersectionally.

with each other. Um, we have monthly meetings. Um, we are still in the process of reformation. We passed bylaws, [01:42:00] um, last year. We have a solid core of people. Um, we've pioneered, uh, Still Here, Still Queer, um, a in depth look at what queer organizing in DSA has, um, Accomplished thus far and what we are looking to accomplish in the future.

I hope to see many of you there when we do that event again. And I would happily ask you to all join, um, Queer Socialist Working Group as well as participating in the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy campaign. Um, this is, uh, we are, uh, Uh, where queers are going to feel safe. We're going to feel comfortable.

We're going to feel inspired. We are going to feel active. We are going to feel, um, for people who feel like queer organizing just hasn't had a home in DSA before, we are here to make sure you never feel that way again. Um, so happy to have you here. Thank you so much to MPEC for giving me this time. Join Queer Socialist Working Group.

I'll make sure to give you, uh, all a link that you can, uh, send out. All [01:43:00] right. Thank you again. Thanks so much, Allie. And any links that folks have from our panelists or from Allie, I'll be able to email, uh, all of you who have attended. Before we conclude though, I do want to put two links in the chat myself.

The first one is DSA's, uh, NPEC's, uh, website. And there you can find the application, uh, to apply to NPEC. Help us, uh, continue to put on awesome events like this. I see. There's also, um, uh, another link in the chat here. And then the other one is class, uh, which I mentioned, which is DSAs podcast, uh, talked with the great producer of class, and they'd very much like to make the audio here into a podcast episode as well.

So we'll get spread far and wide. So, uh, with that said, I really want to, uh, give a thanks to our panelists, everyone who spoke to, uh, the folks who, uh, tuned in to listen and share your awesome questions. Really appreciate it. And [01:44:00] we'll look forward to seeing you all, uh, at our next event. So take care, everyone.