Reject Biden & Trump: We Need a New Party for Working and Oppressed People!
By Joan Wright & Margot Stewart
Since 2016, there has been an escalating right-wing assault on the queer community and on trans people in particular, with a massive campaign of attacks on gender and bodily autonomy. More than a thousand anti-trans bills have been put forward across 49 states since the beginning of 2023 alone. Two years ago, Roe v Wade —the most important and historic victory for women’s rights—was overturned by a conservative and right-wing Supreme Court. Twenty six states have either totally banned or restricted abortion access.
These sharp attacks come on top of drastically declining standards of living for working-class people and youth, as a whole. Inflation and especially the cost of housing are the top pressing issues for all demographics, but particularly acute for young people. And the U.S-backed genocidal war on Gaza by the Israeli state has continued for eight months.
All of this is happening despite the fact that millions of people, especially young people, have moved to the Left, and a majority of people support abortion rights and queer rights, and are calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. A majority of working people are disgusted and disturbed by the right-wing attacks against trans people, including book-bannings, the revocation of healthcare, and attacks on transgender children in schools.
Republicans and the right wing see trans people as an easy target to scapegoat as part of a divisive agenda meant to mask the fact that they are as tied to billionaire and capitalist interests as are Biden and the Democrats. The right wing have increasingly been emboldened in their assault due to the failure of Biden and the Democrats to fight back against these horrendous attacks—the failure to prevent the dismantling of Roe v Wade, and the betrayal of working people and our needs. Biden and the Democrats have failed to address the unprecedented cost-of-living crisis that is affecting the queer community and tens of millions of working and young people. It is in the logic of the capitalist system itself to try and divide the working class in order to continue exploiting us, and neither of the bosses’ parties – Republicans and Democrats – represent the interests of working people, queer or otherwise.
What Can Queer and Working People Do to Fight Back?
Workers and youth haven’t taken these attacks lying down. Students have walked out and occupied state houses to protest the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ attacks. Tens of thousands have participated in protests to end the war on Gaza. But it’s clear that a serious escalation with a fighting strategy is necessary in order to defend queer and other oppressed people and end the war on Gaza and U.S. military funding for the Israeli state.
The best tool we have at our disposal is the organized power of the working class. Nearly half a million American workers carried out major strikes in 2023, winning the highest wage increases in 20 years. Some of the most effective resistance to the anti-LGBTQ laws has been counselors, teachers, and social workers refusing to implement them in their workplaces.
Queer and trans people especially need to see the organized labor movement showing up to fight for their rights in solidarity. The palpable sense of isolation among young queer and trans people is reflected in the dire mental health crisis in these communities, and the best remedy is working-class solidarity against oppression. The labor movement and the queer and trans rights movement are deeply interconnected: most LGBTQ people are workers, not millionaires or billionaires.
It is true that some working-class people do harbor real prejudices, but the best way to win over non-queer working people away from those ideas is to build principled unity on the basis of movements to fight for working-class demands that also stand against discrimination and oppression. It’s actually the same right-wing, Republican-led state legislatures that have pushed the anti-trans and anti-queer bills that are at the forefront of the most virulent and blatant attacks on the labor movement. Just look at how Republican governors from six states openly ganged up against the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the rank-and-file workers fighting to unionize with them.
At root, the main issues affecting trans people, historically and now, such as healthcare, housing, and wages are similarly affecting all working people. Militant workplace struggles fighting for workers’ most basic demands, including against all discrimination, is the strongest basis for beating back the right wing.
We urgently need to build mass working-class movements to fight back against these attacks, and to go on the offensive to win real gains for both trans people specifically and the working class as a whole.
Lessons from the Queer Movement
The history of the queer movement is very different from the corporatized Pride events we see today. The Stonewall Rebellion in June-July 1969 was the starting point for Pride as we know it. This was an uprising that broke out in New York in response to repeated police raids on the few queer establishments that were able to operate, during which people were harassed, humiliated, groped, and beaten by the cops. That night in June, working-class queer people waged a serious fightback, and it broadened out into protests that lasted several days engaging all sorts of working people, not just those who identified as queer.
There hadn’t really been an organized expression of the queer movement in the U.S. before then. Unfortunately, even the Stonewall Rebellion has been depoliticized in the corporate media to put forward a narrative that Stonewall was just some kind of spontaneous and isolated event. In reality, though, you cannot understand the Stonewall Rebellion outside the context of the momentous movements of that decade: the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and of course, the anti-Vietnam war struggle. These mass movements happened in the context of international events like the revolutionary struggle in France a year earlier, in 1968, where there were repeated general strikes, and there was real potential for a working-class revolution against capitalism.
The explosive energy of the 1970s movements was cut across sharply by the ferocity of the AIDS epidemic, which decimated a generation of queer activists. Republican President Reagan’s administration dramatically worsened this by denying the existence of AIDS, and gutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), negatively impacting HIV/AIDS research. This was followed by other attacks on queer people, with Democratic President Clinton doubling down on austerity and budget cuts, and codifying homophobic policies like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
Like other queer rights, marriage equality was not won by the Democrats and the NGO leaders cozy with them. Let’s not forget that it was Democratic President Clinton who signed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act into law, federally banning the recognition of same-sex marriage, a blatant attack on queer rights. Marriage equality was won despite the attacks by the Democratic Party. It was won by ordinary people, queer and otherwise, marching on the streets. And it was not about symbolic acceptance in society, it was about economic and legal rights, including hospital visitation rights, that were denied to gay couples before marriage equality was won. Democrats and their billionaire backers then used gay marriage as an opportunity to water down and co-opt queer struggle.
Our Movements Need to Break with the Democrats NOW!
We need to break with Biden and the Democrats, and build an organized, militant struggle that links the specific needs of the queer community with the fight for free healthcare for all, a $25/hour minimum wage, and quality affordable housing.
Racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are all tools that the bosses use to divide working people in our daily lives, but especially in the workplace. A recent example of this was when, in one of their countless union-busting tactics, Starbucks executives threatened that trans workers might lose their gender-affirming healthcare coverage if they unionized. We also see things like the targeted attacks on immigrant workers by Amazon at facilities fighting for a union like KCVG in Northern Kentucky, where Workers Strike Back has been actively supporting the struggle. These attacks are designed to distract from the reality that it is the bosses who are pushing these divisions and mistreating queer, immigrant, and Black workers, because working people uniting to fight back is a threat to the bosses’ profits and to their capitalist system!
The labor movement needs to have a real answer to attacks on queer and other oppressed communities if we want to urgently organize the unorganized. This requires a bottom-up fight for concrete demands that will benefit queer workers, like access to gender-affirming care and protections against workplace harassment and discrimination.
The two corporate parties will sabotage anything that cuts across the profits of their big-business donors. Our movements need independence from the two warmongering parties of the capitalist class, and must instead base our strength on mass action on the streets, and strikes which directly target profits.
Nine out of ten workers don’t have a union, but that is starting to change. Unions are more popular among working people now than in many decades. However, breaking with the parties of the bosses is integral to building a fighting labor movement. The organized labor movement needs to urgently stop spending millions to elect Democratic Party politicians who then turn around and betray working people. Instead, that money should be used to unionize workers and organize a fightback, including strike actions, to win historic improvements in wages and working conditions for tens of millions of workers.
The fight to win workplace rights should also be joined with broader political struggles. The fact that many unions have called for a ceasefire for the massacre in Gaza is a positive step forward, though it is marred by the fact that the leaders of many of these same unions have endorsed Biden, the warmonger-in-chief.
Over the next few months, rank-and-file members need to fight for resolutions in their unions to break with Biden and the Democratic Party. In this Presidential election, working people need to reject both Biden and Trump, and fight for the strongest vote for Left, independent, anti-war candidate Jill Stein, as a concrete step towards building a new party for working people, which is urgently needed not only to end the war but to defend queer workers and youth from right-wing attacks. The opening for a possible second Trump presidency has been created precisely because of Biden’s failure to stand up working people. Even if Trump is defeated this year, Trumpism and right-wing ideas will continue to grow as long as working people have no alternative to the two parties of the bosses.
Concretely, we need to move towards the kind of independent movement that can organize coordinated days of action, walkouts, and strikes in response to any attacks from the right wing or, for instance, an attempt to overturn gay marriage. We need to lead the way in making these calls in our unions, workplaces, campuses, and communities.
Queer Oppression Will Not End On the Basis of Capitalism: We Need Socialism
Our movements will need to overcome big business and the political establishment, who have and will continue to oppose tooth and nail any effort to improve the lives of the vast majority of people, and will continue to try and divide us. And what we win is constantly under threat under capitalism, a system that is geared towards profits for a few at the expense of the rest of us. Neither the economic exploitation faced by working people, nor the oppression experienced by queer people, women, and communities of color will be ended on the basis of capitalism. We need socialism, a system in which the resources and wealth of society are owned by working people and harnessed to address our needs.
Workers Strike Back is calling for national protests and strikes on Monday, August 19, to coincide with protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which will run from August 19 through 22. If you’re going to be at the protests in Chicago, join us at our rally there on August 20, at 6:00PM, where we will be joined by Jill Stein. Stein has taken a consistent stand against the war, and was arrested alongside other protesters for refusing to back down in the face of police repression against the antiwar movement.
This includes mobilizing our unions to the DNC and out on strikes and walkouts, passing ceasefire resolutions, and rescinding union endorsements of Biden
Get in touch with Workers Strike Back if you’d like to begin building for a rally in your city on August 19.
solidarity@workersstrikeback.org
Workers Strike Back was co-founded by Kshama Sawant, who was an independent socialist on the Seattle City Council for ten years, winning what's now the nation's highest minimum wage at $20/hour, the Amazon Tax, and historic renters' rights. WorkersStrikeBack.Org/Join
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