Grant writes:
> What I said was: "the US left is not in a "revolutionary
condition"and --- my personal sympathies for same-sex
rights and unemployed rights aside --- it never will be as
long as it spends so much time on issues which are
marginal to the vast majority of wage earners." Perhaps
this is too blunt.
Not too blunt, but perhaps misframed (to follow up on a post of Chuck's a few days back).
These concerns are marginal only because they have been defined that way in an effort to cause a schism.
Queer rights are a subset of the rights concerning the sexual self-determination of all people. To mark them as marginal is to create the superior identity of "heterosexual." It is this marking/framing that starts the chain of trouble.
It is in the interest of wage earners to be able to enter into as many frames as possible (horizontally) in order to create as cohesive and powerful a movement as possible.
What needs to be avoided is vertical framing where people are seeking a) to determine where they are in the hierarchy and b) how they can move up. The more status conscious they become, the more rigid/exclusive they make their frames.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister
This reminds me of being given a leaflet by a member of a Trot group -- out on a recruiting drive --- at my uni a few years ago. It was full of slogans about racism, sexism, homphobia, etc. Not one word about class. So it's not just a problem of the US left. I was later told that the group in question did make occasional attempts at dialogue with unions, and some progress had been made, but it was a little like a married couple who had spent so long apart, that they no longer knew how to talk to each other.
Or we can put forward the idea of a society in which all of the above needs and more would be taken care of. And explain what the major obstacle to that is. And which class is the natural enemy of that system. And so on.