In May, the Struggle for Socialism Party (SSP) Los Angeles branch discussed the new book, “Against fascism: reclaiming populism’s legacy for today’s class struggle,” compiled by Louisiana socialist Gregory Williams.
Following is the first presentation of the final class on the trans struggle. Melinda Butterfield gave the second presentation.
Maggie Vascassenno: Today is our fourth in the four-part series on the book, “Against fascism: reclaiming populism’s legacy for today’s class struggle” by Gregory Williams.
And we have Gregory here, along with Melinda Butterfield. Melinda led the first national mobilization against this current wave of trans hate, taking place in one of the states at the epicenter of the attacks, Florida. And that was Oct. 7, 2023, so it kind of got lost in the shuffle a little bit.
We weren’t able to expand on it a lot then, but this is definitely a struggle that is really the focus of much of this fascist presidency. And Melinda organized a trip to Cuba of LGBTQ folk that learned there about how Cuba has advanced on the trans question and other LGBTQ+ questions, and really the question of families in general – family law.
So out of that came the book that Gregory put out called “Love is the Law: Cuba’s queer rights revolution.” I’ll turn this over to Gregory.
Gregory Williams: Since this is the final class, I’ll start with a summary of the book and where we’ve been. Then I want to open up some questions about the current trans struggle. Melinda will tell us more.
The book started with me writing about what was going on with governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Jeff Landry in Louisiana, in retrospect, leading up to Trump’s re-election.
I tried to expose what they’re really trying to do when they attack trans people or immigrants. Who do they really represent? And we tried to show in the book that they represent the rich ruling class and what they’re doing is fundamentally against the interests of the vast majority.
We looked at the question “what is populism?” because that word is used a lot. Almost every time I see a political commentary, somebody uses this word. And there’s no explanation usually. You have to really go out of your way to find any explanation of what the hell populism was historically.
They call people like Donald Trump a populist. And then they turn around and call somebody like Bernie Sanders a populist. Or even somebody who’s doing grassroots work for the people. So how could that be the same thing? How could somebody like Trump, who’s so clearly part of the ruling class and for the ruling class, how could that be the same as somebody who’s progressive, like the real movement organizers?
The original populist movement happened in the late 1800s, largely centered around farmers. And there was a large Black populist movement as well. It wasn’t just a white thing. The movement was overall anti-racist, and they were taking on the big monopolies developing at that time, as well as rich Southern landowners. They fought the big bank monopolies, the big industrialists, the people that farmers were indebted to, and so on.
They also tried to link up with organized labor, which was developing at that time. However, it was before the wave of socialist revolution that came to a head in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution and spread, not immediately, but through the anti-colonial, often socialist-oriented movements during and after World War II.
The populist movement was before that social wave. But later on, by the 1950s, some historians began using the word populism without any reference to this original historical progressive movement, and they would call fascism populism.
And words change, but it’s a very political change because with this confusion, they take away that history of struggle. We can’t understand that history because it’s been distorted, and we’re trying to correct some of that through the book.
And I analyzed a pamphlet written in the 1970s by Vince Copeland, one of the founders of our political tendency. It’s called “Black Labor and Southern Populism” and is included in the book. He was looking at these same questions because, in the early ‘70s, the media was calling the racist governor, George Wallace, a populist, and he was running for president.
They also called George McGovern a populist, and he was the centrist Democrat running against Wallace.
To me, “Black Labor” was really eye-opening. Copeland clearly spells out the interests of the rich, exposing why they make the attacks that they do.
Why trans panic?
How did the trans struggle come into the book? Because I was assembling a section on contemporary Southern governors and their attacks. We had just participated in this trans youth march in Orlando that Melinda helped initiate. She did a lot of pioneering work, just sounding the alarm about what was happening with this rising crescendo of trans panic.
What was happening in Florida really was sort of the snake’s head. A lot of it was centered around what DeSantis was doing. So that action, I think, was really important, and we included a lot of the speeches from it in the book.
But a lot’s transpired since then. It’s gotten much worse. The trans panic has become a center of the fascist onslaught, and not just in the U.S. It’s happening in Italy and Brazil and other places. The far right is leading it but “liberal” politicians like California Governor Gavin Newsome have taken it up, too. The same Democratic governor who’s viciously attacked unhoused people..
Why are trans people such a target right now? Why is this so resonant for the right? Why is it working for them like this?
Oppressed people advance, and claws come out
I’ve started to make connections to other parts of the book. There’s a lengthy section about how populism was defeated in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. At that time, Wilmington was still bucking the trend against Jim Crow by having Black and white people in the government together.
Black people were also relatively prosperous there. They were in skilled trades. They had a Black-owned newspaper. The city was governed by a coalition between the populist People’s Party and the Republican Party, which was still associated with the anti-slavery cause and had a strong Black base.
Wilmington was a beacon holding out against this onslaught of Jim Crow. The Democrats were still associated with the pro-slavery cause and were the party of the rich white ruling class in the South. They ultimately beat populism in Wilmington by organizing a White Supremacy Campaign. That’s actually what they called it.
They used all the media of the time, organizing groups throughout the state, arming Klan-type militias. They spent a lot of money, and it led to a massacre and a coup in Wilmington. That’s how they took over the reins again and installed an all-white, totally racist, fascistic government.
Sexist dimension of fascist hysteria
But also, there was a big sexual dimension to it, because what precipitated the massacre – what was especially potent – were these speakers and the newspaper editorials whipping up hysteria about Black men sexually seducing or assaulting white women.
Of course, these patriarchal racists weren’t concerned about women’s consent. The idea was like, “Black men are taking our women.” That’s the idea. But doesn’t this sound familiar? Because really, as far as I can tell, every fascist hysteria has this dimension to it.
The right wing says that queer and trans people are grooming children, seducing them into gender and sexual anarchy, so society must be protected.
In Britain right now, there is conspiratorial hysteria about immigrant “groomer gangs.” Not to mention the retro “Satanic Panic” fantasies of Q Anon, centering around ritualised child abuse.
In India, the Hindu nationalists say Muslim men are seducing Hindu women, depleting the stock of the pure Hindu nation. And Trump and Musk are obsessed with fertility rates – white fertility rates.
So there’s always a weird sex thing, as far as I can tell. And remember Comrade Gloria’s presentation in this class series about lynchings and the murder of Emmett Till. They claimed that this 14-year-old flirted with a white woman. And why is that so explosive? Just the idea of that in a racist, capitalist society.
Class society requires policing identities
The Marxist tradition coming out of Frederick Engels’ work in the late 1800s says that gender and sexual oppression come from the imposition of class society, which developed after the development of agriculture, in what is for us pre-history.
Once there was a surplus of food and goods, these conditions allowed some people to hoard the surplus and deny it to others. And this was the beginning of private property. Women’s oppression grew out of that.
Because an earlier egalitarian, communistic society gave way to a patriarchal, very hierarchical one, men became dominant in this scenario. And when there was property to pass down, they had to determine paternity, which wasn’t a factor before. They developed elaborate ways to control women and their sexuality.
I’m glad Bob McCubbin is on this Zoom call because he did pioneering work on this, writing about it back in the 1970s. So did Dorothy Ballan. That’s what I’m drawing from.
I think that with systems of private property and that type of hierarchy, there’s always going to be policing of identity. You have to know who you are, and you have to be able to put other people in a category.
When you have a society structured by racial oppression, you get anxiety about racial identity. You know, it’s totally absurd, really, that people in the Jim Crow South were worried about who used what water fountain or what bathroom.
It’s so ridiculous. But under that system, from the point of view of the ruling class, it made sense. Because when you’re policing people and keeping them down, the dominant group is afraid all the time. And they say, “What if my daughter falls in love with a Black man and has a baby?”
It’s this kind of status anxiety, fear of losing your status and falling down the rungs. I mean, not to mention the white slave-owning men – it’s all sort of projection, isn’t it? The white slave-owning men basically had harems and were committing all these sexual atrocities. So it’s all fine for them to do. But they’re paranoid that somebody’s going to do the same thing to them.
So by that same token, people say, “what if my child is trans? Then what? What does that mean for me? What does that do to my identity?” And the right-wing media plays this up seven days a week. Look at Elon Musk’s rejection of his trans daughter, Vivian, because he wants a son made in his own narcissistic vision as an heir. And Vivian has even stated that Musk used in vitro fertilization specifically to get boy children.
General crisis of gender and the family
So, I want to pose these general questions about gender and sexuality in our moment.
Because the trans panic is obviously very useful for the capitalists and the fascist politicians, and now the liberal ones emulating them. And to some extent, it doesn’t really matter who they target. Any scapegoat, theoretically, can get the job done. You find a scapegoat, and you distract people from the real problems caused by capitalism.
On the other hand, why is targeting certain groups so effective in a particular period? The anti-trans people are totally obsessed. Like, they must wake up in the morning thinking about trans people. Get a life!
In part, yeah, that could be explained just in terms of the propaganda and grift-disinformation machine, the algorithms are pushing it, all the right-wing influencers say the same things, using the same buzzwords.
But as Marxists, we tend to look for answers deeper in social structures. And I wonder if the current obsession with trans people is not an accident. Trans people have made advances, becoming visible in society. We saw the same dynamic in the populist period. Black people had made advances. And the rich ruling class tried to claw everything back.
And I also think that, right now, there’s a general crisis of gender and the family. That’s part of the crisis of capitalism. I think that’s part of this moment. And cisgender women – women who are not trans – they’re intensely under attack. So, what’s happening is all very gendered.
They’re trying to roll back everything that women have won through struggle, like with the abortion bans. Take the “trad wife” influencers and all this stuff that the right-wing is pushing. [These are social media accounts promoting “traditional” housewife roles, really “a world that only ever existed in 1950s vacuum cleaner commercials,” as a commenter said under one of their posts.]
And I think trans panic is tied up with the policing of women’s gender expressions, women in general. Just look at how they treated Algerian boxer, Iman Khalif. The transphobic writer, JK Rowling, recently tweeted, and this is really rich, “I’ve never attacked any woman for not being woman enough. That’s a concept that I don’t recognize.”
Then an X user named Thomas Willett responded, “You literally launched a campaign of abuse and hate against the female boxer, Iman Khalif.” Transphobia is deeply tied up with misogyny.
Men and boys socially alienated
And I think there’s a crisis of masculine identity in society too. Cis-men and boys are suffering from, for example, body dysmorphia like never before, seeing unattainable images of steroid-powered superheroes, and all these models with good lighting on Instagram.
And they’re also alienated and socially isolated. And the algorithms push them to “manosphere” influencers like the sex trafficker, Andrew Tate. This is what’s being offered to them to deal with their alienation and the deep anxiety they feel. And this goes all the way up to mass shooters.
So that’s happening, and I think it has to do with capitalism making life so unlivable. People can’t afford to own a home anymore. So the old nuclear family model that existed, maybe in the 1950s, for some people, even that is becoming unattainable. People don’t know what family life is supposed to be.
And it’s capitalism that’s doing this. We as revolutionaries aren’t saying you can’t have the kind of family you want, or you’re bad if your family looks more like the nuclear model, or you’re bad because your family doesn’t look like that.
Capitalism is making it hard for families to exist. And I think people are experiencing a lot of anxiety about what their role is. They don’t see a future for themselves. Then, coming out of that, there’s something very potent happening when these fascist influencers say, “I have an answer for you. The problem is feminism. The problem is trans people who are destroying the family.”
And if people don’t have an alternative from the left, then they are vulnerable to being pulled in that direction. They need to see an organized left that’s fighting, winning victories, and talking about a different kind of society, and explaining these things.
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Melinda Butterfield: I just wanna comment on what Gregory raised about why trans people are the targets right now, or how it’s happening. And I think he really hit on it with the focus on how they use the threat to children as a big way to influence people who wouldn’t otherwise necessarily be hostile or even care about the issue so much, if they didn’t have trans people in their own daily life.
But by making us into this bogey of corrupting children or stealing their children or something like that. Well, they did that also, particularly with gay men in an earlier period. And that fed a lot into the AIDS epidemic and how it was ignored by the official bodies and allowed to run rampant.
It also had to do with the scapegoating of Jewish people before the Holocaust. And also, as we talked about earlier, the lynching logic targeting Black men or people perceived as men having relations with white women, especially young white women and the daughters of the white supremacist class.
And this is a tactic that fascists use repeatedly when they’re targeting. And this was true 30 or 40 years ago of gay men and it’s true of trans people now is that, but when a movement pushes forward, that’s breaking a lot of the boundaries of what’s acceptable in society and pushing forward and winning people over and giving an example to people, that threatens the system.
You know, bodily autonomy is an issue that’s shared by cisgender women, trans men, trans women, and non-binary people as well. Whether we’re talking about reproductive rights or our right to alter our bodies and our sex and our gender. These are all things that are considered a threat to the patriarchal class basis of capitalism, which still relies on what Gregory talked about, this idea of passing on wealth through the father from generation to generation.
And you can see that with Trump and Elon Musk and the rest of these scumbags, how focused they are on that. And so, people who break that cycle, who show how rotten-ripe the capitalist family structure is, how ready it is to be undone and replaced with something better and more beautiful and more inclusive. That also makes us an easier target for scapegoating.
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