Janie found out very soon that her widowhood and property was a great challenge in South Florida. Before Jody had been dead a month, she noticed how often men who had never been intimates of Joe, drove considerable distances to ask after her welfare and offer their services as advisor.

“Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing,” she was told over and again. “Dey needs aid and assistance. God never meant ’em tuh try tuh stand by theirselves. You ain’t been used tuh knockin’ round and doin’ fuh yo’self, Mis’ Starks. You been well taken keer of, you needs uh man.”

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

The representation of her sources of language seems to be her principal concern, as she consciously shifts back and forth between her “literate” narrator’s voice and a highly idiomatic black [sic] voice found in wonderful passages of free indirect discourse. Hurston moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly … It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W.E.B. DuBois’s metaphor of “double-consciousness” for the hyphenated African-American.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the Afterword

Binaries are false, and suck in many ways. Categories, even when there are more than two (black white yellow red brown; astrological signs) still inherently oversimplify. And yet, in the midst of an embattled year of trying to figure out where I belong within radical traditions, what a great relief it is to me to create two nice neat columns and try to map out some ideas. (Non-column schemas in the works.)

These categories came as blessings from this weekend’s Everything For Everyone conference, a festival for radical anti-capitalists that was hosted in Seattle and attracted militants from across the country. In their closing plenary speeches, Mike Ely of the Kasama blog and Kali Akuno of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement each raised the importance of “building alliances” between the oppressed and the employed working class.

But before I can think about building alliances, I want to try to understand the two groups. Who are they, exactly? How are they delineated — different from one another? As a first step I want to deeply and compassionately ‘interview’ these groups. Ask, in my mind, what they want. And to be clear, these groups and their characteristics Do Not Exist In The Real World in any sort of neat and tidy way. It’s just that the categories represent patterns I’ve witnessed in the Left/radical movements I’ve been around, and witnessed within myself, too.

These categories are not necessarily or always in opposition to one another! Which is what makes them tricky to puzzle out. I’ve seen revolutionaries try to reconcile them by pointing to certain common examples of overlap.

1. Indigenous/Latin@ Immigrants & Economically Displaced People
In the US, economically displaced workers from central and south america who toil at miserable jobs play a key role in the national economy. They are both “most affected” by and “vulnerable” to certain strands of racist, gender-oppressive, and economic persecution, and strategically positioned within the economy to fuck shit up for capitalism for real, as we’ve seen in beautiful explosions like the enormous immigrant strike on May Day 2006.

2. Queers
Queer Liberation Is Class Struggle, a piece put out a minute ago by members of Unity and Struggle, lays out this argument super thoroughly, and in many dimensions: critique of the heteropatriarchal family, re-visibilizing the queer working class, exposing the ways labor disciplines our gender expressions, etc. One part I’ll come back to in a second:

I’ve heard vague calls for queers to [ally] with labor.
…
An “alliance” or “intersection” should not even be necessary, it is only made necessary by the fact that the union bureaucracy dominates “labor” and the gay elites dominate “queerness.” If we can break down these twin dominations then it will be much easier to build an “alliance” because most queers already are labor and many laborers are queer. This involves struggle and organizing.

3. Women
Women make up the majority of the world proletariat, comrades remind us. Furthermore, capitalism deploys patriarchy as a kind of leverage or bonus round for surplus labor, systematically labeling women’s work as “unskilled” and “domestic,” which conveniently justifies paying little or no wages for it. To organize for the liberation of women as a group, or even just “Black and Brown” women, the argument goes, is to make tremendous headway in organizing the working class as a whole.

But the working class is not a monolith. Over the weekend, for the first time in my memory, I heard revolutionary comrades start to use the term “employed working class” as a way of being more specific about which part of the working class they’re talking about. Before, I’d usually hear a broad-sweeping definition of the working class as “Those of us who have nothing to sell but our ability to work.” This broader definition, while sometimes helpful in pointing out what we share in common, and who our opposition is, frequently glosses over important strategic differences within the working class.

Some of us, whether because of racist systems of criminalization (got a felony? much harder finding a job), heteropatriarchal gender coercion (want to present transgressive gender or dramatically transition your gender at work? again, not easy in most cases), disabilities, or other reasons, cannot sell our ability to work. When the U&S piece says that “most queers already are labor and many laborers are queer,” this may be true, and yet transgender folks face double the average rate of unemployment in the US. Folks with non-normative gender or sexuality presentations are often only precariously employed.

It is this harsh material reality that helps maintain informal economies (selling sex, drugs, under-the-table labor) and is also prompting large-scale experimentation in solidarity economies: ways of taking care of one another when the labor market rejects us. Networks of survival have always existed for those on the margins, but as Kali from MXGM pointed out, at this moment even more Black and Brown people are transitioning out of “surplus labor” populations (think: bringing in scabs of color to break up white strikes) into “disposable” populations, more like First Nations people and other resisters of genocide. No longer are Black folks needed in the US as a labor-substitute threat which helps maintain downward pressure on working conditions. Increasingly, this is a role brown migrant and undocumented workers play, terrorized under the threat of ICE. (again, i’m oversimplifying since black and brown aren’t always separate. Also, it’s possible that if and when the migrant surplus population organizes to strike as well, capital will call in a second reserve army: people in cages / prisons.)

The scale and speed of this process, marginalizing the criminalized and oppressed poor to the point of barring access to basics like food and shelter, is serious enough that oppressed groups are innovating systemic new ways of coping, or new versions of old forms. These innovations fit the logic of survival and sometimes even self-determination (Maker movement, urban farming), but rarely do they seem to translate into revolutionary threats to the capitalist system as a whole.

And this is where I often feel stuck, or torn. As a person of African descent in the US, should I set aside my people’s struggles simply because large numbers of us no longer occupy a central or strategic place as the employed working class, like we did in auto plants of Detroit in the 60s? Should revolutionary queers de-emphasize queer liberation just because anti-assimilationist queers are excluded from the formal labor market? Should people with disabilities that make wage labor impossible sit on the sidelines of revolutionary transformation?  How will the dispossessed fight both to stay alive and to help make communist revolution in the US?

I feel this double-consciousness within myself. I don’t know how to choose between, nor how to reconcile the two.

I read and read, but nothing seems to quite capture it. Blogs like Mia McKenzie’s Black Girl Dangerous exemplify the Self-Determination-Of-The-Oppressed logic, quite beautifully and sharply at times, as in her Open Letter to Folks of Color.

Despite your children being gunned down by cops like every single day, despite your mothers being sent to prison for “stealing” public education, despite your sisters dying in the heat of the desert while “sneaking” into a land that belongs to your own ancestors, not to mention being deported from that same land in record numbers, despite the CONSTANT beatings inflicted on your souls, you somehow still have souls. That’s fucking amazing. I mean, I’m not surprised. Your ancestors couldn’t have survived slavery and genocide without some damn serious sturdy genes. But still. It’s impressive.

I love you for all of these things.

From cultural workers and artists to Non-Profit-Industrial-Complex warriors, I see oppressed people and allies pouring heart and soul into defending and uplifting one another: trying to fight off reactionary laws, plant community gardens, bash back, feed bellies that need filling, pull teeth that need pulling. Not always doing it wisely, but coming on some level from different types of love.

Other pieces of McKenzie’s take a flip side of the POC-love coin, throwing a sharp tongue at ignorant white people and white queers. Today on a Facebook thread, two talented Bay Area queer revolutionaries called on McKenzie for “a bigger analysis” of white supremacy that “strives to look at the totality of the system, the capitalist patriarchal system, and the ways it has created and oppressed queers through placing us outside of the system.” Defying my categorized columns above, one of them argues, “Writing and writing our truths in particular is healing and important work. But I am also needing some strategy for liberation.”

But despite the brilliance that comes from so many writers, cultural workers, and organizers resisting oppression and developing new ways of being together, I have yet to see anywhere a strategy of communist revolution, even from revolutionaries in a Marxist tradition, that stems from an anti-oppression analysis, framework, and spirit more deeply rooted than the happenstance overlap of the oppressed and the employed working class. Folks in the anti-oppression liberation tradition tend to be amazing at critiquing the system, often with highly sophisticated analysis. Oppressed people articulate the cruel ironies of capitalism, a system that supposedly generates innovation and abundance but in practice murders, exploits, degrades and immiserates the majority of beings and the earth, reserving special forms of torture for different groups. This is true and important. But I don’t know how we propose to move from critique to strategy, without switching modes and focusing by default on the employed working class. I haven’t seen this done in the US. Have you?

I can’t reconcile the contradiction here. My impression is that many communist revolutionaries believe that the employed working class is in the best strategic position to overtake the means of production, a key step in making a worldwide revolution to overthrow capitalism and usher in a better system of social relations. This, then, becomes the focus of their strategy.  Although many groups aim to “race, gender, and sexuality seriously,” this cannot ever equal the commitment of a Black person to the Black Liberation Movement, or a queer mujerista to the abolition of gender oppression.

Meanwhile, I am not sure what the focus of revolutionary strategy is for oppressed people seeking to overthrow oppression. A lot of the work seems to be in building faith in the worthiness of the oppressed (so systemically denied and crushed, ideologically and in the stupidity of everyday work — that’s real), building their/our autonomy, resisting attacks from capitalists and fellow working-class people, and having faith that they/we will discover for ourselves how to build new systems of social relations autonomously, even under capitalism. Eventually, we will transform society for the better. At the very least, we want to survive with dignity and exuberance.

I do not take this goal lightly. And yet, and still, I feel stuck.

When Skip Gates lauds Hurston for achieving unity of two unreconciled voices in her writing, he fails to mention that even within this double-ness, hierarchy persists. There is a reason that the white voice is the narrator (third person, omniscient) and the Black voice is the dialogue. Can you imagine reversing them? Can you imagine that a book with a Black-idiom omniscient narrator and white dialogue would make it in a white-controlled publishing market? Can you imagine it would sell in a white-dominated literary industry, as anything other than a curiosity (probably with porn themes)?

Similarly with revolutionary double-consciousness, I sense an implicit hierarchy. When people call for building alliances between the oppressed and the employed working class, I think oftentimes they really mean, organize the oppressed to support the employed working class so it can make the biggest moves to abolish class altogether.

I can empathize with this reasoning.

At this moment, I believe that the Employed Working Class perspective has a more plausible strategy for putting an end to the exploitative social relations of capitalism.

But this perspective seems extremely weak in its methods and strategy for sustaining healing and liberation from social oppressions that won’t automatically disappear even if we someday kick out capitalism. And it is therefore fundamentally limited in its ability to transform the world for the better. Not only limited, but self-undermining in its own quest for freedom, and tending to subordinate the struggles of the oppressed. They matter strategically only insofar as they link up to the employed working class.

This is not only a problem for the future, but a conflict right now.

Am I alone in thinking and feeling this? Do you agree? Disagree? Have you felt this revolutionary double-consciousness? Is Maoism an attempt to reconcile these two logics?  What the fuck is even going on?  Please help — I am rambling on too long. :)

love,

katie