We at Trans*Mission, an autonomous working group of Anti*Capitalist Resistance, as well as A*CR, agree with rs21’s recent statement ‘On Counterfire and trans oppression’. Furthermore, our two organisations ought to work more closely together around the issues raised in this article, and do so at both national and local levels.
We agree that criticisms between left groups be reserved for the most egregious errors. However, Mike Wayne’s Counterfire article ‘Liberalism’s hegemony over the left’ requires public criticism. We agree the left must stand in solidarity with the trans community as it mourns the murder of Brianna Ghey and that the failure to show solidarity potentially leads us into a red-brown configuration with fascist coalitions such as Patriotic Alternative.
We additionally agree that failures to show solidarity in one struggle easily collapse into other shortcomings, such as overt racism or in the expression of anti-sex worker prejudices; that nobody on the left should express faux solidarity with opportunists such as Kathleen Stock; and, finally, that Counterfire should ‘remove this transphobic article from their website, and[…] re-evaluate their approach to trans liberation’.
Many on the left misunderstand socialism’s proper relationship to liberalism. Socialism does not aim to regress society towards fascist myths of a halcyon and reactionary past any more than it accepts the claims of liberal utopians. Instead, socialism seeks the complete emancipation and liberation of all of humanity as liberal philosophers, influenced by both religious ideas and the real struggles of human beings, falsely professed to have already achieved.
Socialism is not liberal, but nor is it anti-liberal. Instead, socialism seeks neither this world nor the old one but a new one built on the diversity of the working class as it overcomes its class limits. The exact nature of that world is obscured by its very newness, but that does not make the struggle to realise it an arbitrary grab bag of the prejudices of any self-professed socialist.
Signed in camaraderie,
A*CR Steering Committee, and the Trans*Mission Collective
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