``So what do you think? Do queers have a better opportunity to achieve broad-ranging goals in a progressive multi-issue movement that right now is not very queer-inclusive, or within an identity-politics-focused GLBT movement? This relates to what we've been discussing here recently about whether issues of people of color, youth, poor and working people, the enviroment, death penalty, etc. can ever feel more that tacked on to the GLBT movement. Well, then, is the GLBT movement the best place to address these issues, or should we work as out queers in a movement that is already focused on multiple issues? Or is there a third way?'' -Liz
``It may be a little premature to speak of the multi-issue convergence movement, in that folks who have participated in Seattle, A16 in Washington D.C., Prague, Porto Alegre, etc. do not have a coherent political program or even shared political vision. It's been a convergence of many groups with disparate ideologies & objectives. There exists a common ground of sorts in an idea that the WB, the IMF, etc. do not serve the interest of the working people, but theoretical frameworks from which criticisms of such institutions are offered, political remedies proposed, etc. differ greatly, depending on participating individuals & groups (some of whom from the Global North are just protectionist or social-imperialist, rather than anti-capitalist).'' Yoshie
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The issues of an anti-corporate globalization movement haven't been sufficiently developed into expressions of their local, personal, and immediate impact. That has already been said by some one else on this thread. But if that kind of local manifestation hasn't been done, then a lot of people may not see the relationship between their world and lives and such a movement.
I think you have to see something directly in order to understand it enough to want to do something about it. For young people with a certain amount of perhaps temporary privilege and protection, it seems that just discovering that the world is actually a pretty nasty place might be enough.
For others, the underlying difficulty of inclusion in these developing movements is a question of relevance; how are these issues effecting people's lives? The problem isn't really a tactical one of building coalitions of mutual interest, but of creating the rhetorical ground within which coalitions naturally arise. But the specific linkages are missing.
I see it as an issue of developing the appropriate rhetoric on material conditions that automatically opens up such a movement. In the case of existing gay and lesbian groups, parts of the women's movement, some of the minority movements, the so-called identity movements--these were all and still are involved in extensions of civil rights. So the question is how do local civil rights link to the international economic institutions that are the concrete targets?
I think part of that link is through embedding civil rights in the domain of fundamental human rights which include the right to exist, the right to collective self-determination, and then developing an understanding of the relationship between these: that one is local and specific and the other is foundational.
Part of this rhetoric has to include a more detailed conceptualization of Human Rights, and how these are systematically suppressed and then the resulting human disasters are then systematically exploited. In other words Capital/Neo-liberalism creates the problem then turns around and sells the solution, by developing and organizing dysfunctional societies, then exploiting them.
The difficult part here is understanding and making the move from a socially constructed identity and its concomitant oppression, to politically re-constructed fundamental human rights. It is a difficult move because most oppressed groups are still struggling with the concrete conditions in the first place. It is a matter of raising consciousness to see above the results of exclusion (low social standing, consequent low economic standing, miserable lives, high disease, and early death) and into the basic human right of inclusion together with its political civil rights--that is the right to exist as an effective political voice. But this movement or raise in consciousness has to take place in the living dialectic of the people involved, since that historical movement is in some sense the formative process of their collective identity and means to their collective self-determination.
It is very complicated stuff to work out in real life. The first step is getting the rhetorical link established between the foreclosure of foundational human rights, and the oppressive socio-economic organization of capitalism and its neo-liberal political doctrines.
Just read Ian Murray's forwarded announcement on Trade and Gender. Yeah. Like that kind of stuff.
Chuck Grimes