"Class struggle unionists, rather than seeing our worker-owner relationships as primarily cooperative but with occasional flare-ups, recognize that conflict is baked into an economic system that pits the interests of the working class against the employing class" (Joe Burns, Class Struggle Unionism, Haymarket Books, 2022).
Community has been a central tenant of my research. What is Community? How is community created? Where can Community be found? What can Community do? It is in this quote from Joe Burns in a book I have just recently picked up that I realized antagonist language is not inherently detrimental to community building. Allow me to explain:
- Conflict will always be wound up in community;
- Communities are a conglomeration of various ideas, perspectives, experiences, and bodies;
- Antagonistic language can help us recognize a cause and thus resolve the problem.
I don't necessarily know If I consider myself a pacifist; I love the tenants of non-violence. However, in reading Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Judy Cox's The Women's Revolution: Russia 1905-1917, I saw how sometimes enacting violence upon those who are enacting violence upon you can lead to new and inclusive worlds. It seems to redeploy the "shock" from Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine for progressive purposes by "shocking" the "shocker." But of course, this train of thought is in tension with the writings of James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time along with bell hooks All About Love: New Visions. It is from bot of these books I began to understand the value of intentionally driven love- intentional love towards the self and others. Furthermore, as a white individual, proximity to violent tactics is a privilege because I am not ascribed a certain "natural" tendency to commit violence; whereas people of color- black people specifically- are stabilized on our beliefs that they will commit violence against us. Therefore, any violence committed on them by us is justified because we cannot know just when they will attack us.
All this is to say that the racial demarcations of us-them are also translated into the economic sphere: an us-them subterfuge that plays on the racial fears of the white populace by the billionaire class to further divide all of us and maintain their own wealth and power. We, us white people, are far more likely to become the them we fear than the billionaires we already believes ourselves to be.
Additionally, divides among us within the working class are exacerbated by sexual and gender normalities. Think of the biggest known ideal to the American Dream: The Traditional Nuclear Family. You have the heterosexual, white family man who is always at work to gather his meager wage; maybe he'll be able to secure a nice commodity (a car or dishwasher) every know and then. The heterosexual, white mother- she loses who individual "woman" status upon marriage- is tied to the same meager wage her husband can acquire, spends all her days housebound (every once in a while engaging in a cordial luncheon with other heterosexual, white mothers in the copy-pasted neighborhood), and distributes all the energy of her labor to everyone but herself. Now of the children- one cisgender girl, hopefully, two cisgender boys, all heterosexual and "normal"- who have no fault in this narrative other than being born into "better" circumstances are expected to be thankful, grateful, and in no ways unsatisfied with their lot. Dissatisfaction is afront not only to their parents (false) construct of an identity but an afront to America.
Increasingly, thanks to my own readings of Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages and The Right To Main: Debility, Capacity, Disability. I've come to realize how the American Dream's Script has come to adapt the advancements of LGBT+ "progressive" legislation. This is to say that the traditional vision for the American Dream has been expanded to include the homosexual, white (people of color can be included based on their proximity to replicating whiteness, but only within certain circumstances, and with heavier surveillance), nuclear family. This is a family that so closely resembles the patriarchal demarcations of the heterosexual, white nuclear family that a simple substitution of "femme" for "mother" encapsulates a progressive bow placed upon the inclusivity package purported by the United States. The maintenance of this progressive image of course allows the United States to engage in various military surveillance and imperialistic practices internationally.
Critics of legalizing Same-Sex Marriage include, myself, Jack Halberstam (Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal), José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity), and Judith Butler. This is because what the legalization of same-sex marriage does is that is starts to establish certain conforming conditions that while provide much needed legal and social protections for the LGBT population do so at a cost of limiting the solidarity with and potentiality of queerness per se.
This is where we get into recognizability. Socio-legal recognizability is a tricky slope because on the one hand it does provide safety for targeted groups in society. On the other hand, legislation that is made within the framework of recognizability ("you are a homosexual because you have a penis and have anal sex with another person who identifies as a man and has a penis. Therefore, you are protected under Homosexual Law X"). I use the word recognizability but the term comes from my engagement with Mikki Kendall's Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That A Movement Forgot. In Kendall's book, the word is "respectability: "Every community has people who pick the status quo over the risks inherent in fighting for freedom. But the peculiar impact of white fragility on the dynamics between white women means that too often mainstream white feminists get hung op on being polite at the expense of being effective" (169). Whether the term by "respectability" or "recognizability," it all seems to boil down to that "stay in your lane" mentality that reproduces the systems of oppression for all of us- even those of us who drive in our lanes so long we get a small merger onto the road next to the road that is next to the main road.
So how do I end this? I think that I will return to the idea that us-them is not inherently detrimental to building community. Charlene A. Carruthers in Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements said it best:
" It is important to take great care and not compare oppression. That does not serve the goal of collective liberation. No one, besides our oppressors, wins in an argument about who got whipped the worst. Eradicating oppression requires us to identify connections, not sameness" (31-2).
We each have specific and unique experiences with oppression. We each respond to these oppressive forces in different ways (conforming, modeling, or (forced) rejection). Carruthers words remind me that these specific and unique encounters with oppression should not place in competition with one another, speaking over our fellow comrades because our voice has been silenced for longer and/or in much more violent/oppressive ways. No. Our true Communities are built on the recognition of difference and that this difference is connected to one another in such a way that no other is devalued. We are all in this together.