Why Trump wins a Second Term in 2020: An Analysis

With the 2020 general election less than a year off, the prospect of a Trump win are very credible.

Of course, I hope I am wrong, but I will not be so quick to rejoice the election of a moderate, Wall Street Democrat in his place, even though such a win will give me a brief, heavy sigh of relief.

Trump is not only all the retrograde things said about him - slum lord, racist, tax cheat, sexual predator - but he is also a phenomenon to many white voters, and it is the phenomenon that has carried this debase human being and will carry him across the finish line next November 2020.

The phenomenon of Donald Trump comes out of  the roots of settler-colonialism and its foundational white racism. It is this white racism that is connected to the virulence of anti-communism in the United States. These links are key to understanding not only his persistent success, even among so-called evangelicals, but also to understanding the visceral, anti-socialism.

Yes, I am dismissing the polite narrative that says Trump's base is not racist. They are. I reject that they are simply the white working class abandoned by capitalism and Wall Street machinations: they are that too, but they are firmly joined at the hip to the contours of settler-colonialism. What sustains their support of this man, and nourishes their abhorrence of policies that will help the whole working class, despite the lowering standard of the lives of working people. is their need for a white superhero to win the so-called culture war - which is a race war by just another name. And it is this delusion that strengthens their support for Trump, and strengthens it many times over every time they see him attacked.

II

Several things have led me to conclude Trump's second term in 2020 is inevitable, none of them pretty, but all say what needs to be said about this Great American project and, implicitly, indicate what radicals must do to engage, confront, and dismantle this.

In ascending order of importance, consider the following:

Voters: Anecdotally, among family, friends, and coworkers for whom non-voting is a lifestyle choice, I have seen zero movement among these people to join whatever mobilization is happening to defeat Trump. Nothing he has done, or the things he has not done, have not resonated to their level to spark any interest in another election.

Non-voting for these people, broadly speaking, remains a lifestyle choice like abstaining from pork.

Socialists: to the extent that social media is a measure of anything at all, what I have been reading since the Democratic campaign started is not only a rejection of the Democratic Party as a whole, which is perfectly reasonable but tactically questionable, but also a rejection anything Bernie Sanders says, a persistent refrain that he's not a socialist at all, and therefore could not earn their votes even if he secured the Democratic nomination.

III

The Ronald Reagan Effect: Trump's appeal reminds me in many ways to a president we've had before. Ronald Reagan. Though not as brutish and ill-mannered as Trump, Reagan was no less willing to play on the wave of fears of white people that what they saw as "their country" was being seized by people who did not belong here - particularly Black and Brown people, two groups who had made some not insignificant gains in the late 60's and 70's.

Trump, like Reagan, exploited to the hilt these white fears at key moments in this country's remedying white racist policies. Reagan's administration emerged out of the so-called civil rights era aftermath, where pedestrian measures like school busing and affirmative action alarmed a white working class populace their apartheid-light regime was at its sunset Their counterattacks did not exclude throwing rocks a school buses of Black children in liberal Boston. Other attacks of the time included the infamous US Supreme Court decision instigated by a medical student rejected from admission with the University of California because of the narrative that Black men were stealing white men's places.

Reagan emerged from this white anxiety, cloaked as the white superhero who would stop the Black women welfare recipients he himself evoked from living like millionairesses in Beverly Hills.

Trump is their new superhero.

Reagan's function as pioneer territorial US marshal sent to pacify the native uprisings trumped the public reaction to his policies. By Reagan's second term, polls indicated the masses of people - read: white workers - did not favor his actual policies. But they re-elected him nonetheless.

This is the main connection I make with Trump. He's the 21st century Reagan, and he will similarly defy the public's view of his policies and be re-elected.

Both men should signify loudly the persistence of white racism in the US and alarm us into anti-racist coalitions. Both men produce policies that the broad electorate do not like, which should make us examine the quality of our democratic institutions. But we are neither coalescing or questioning the structural dysfunctions in our system.

What these masses of white workers are supporting is white nationalism's gains in the culture/race war. These people's calls to "take back their country" is to take it back from the people who they see do not belong here, have never been considered real citizens, are taking their jobs, exploiting the government, etc. [which is why it has been relatively easy to purge us from the voting roles and gerrymander us out of power].

We will have to face the nature of this settler-colonial project if we are to come up with actual countermeasures to reverse and defeat this deep-seeded trend.

Interestingly, both men are creatures of the Cold War obsessions with the labor movement and communism. Although Reagan had been a contentious pick as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), this mediocre, B-list actor and FDR Democrat was already veering towards being an FBI informant. His contested election to SAG mirrors that of another anti-communist Cold War liberal, Walter Reuther of the UAW and CIO. Radicals and Communists knew what lurked behind the facade of these men's supposed liberal values, and they opposed their candidacies.

Trump's mentor, Ray Cohn, was Sen. Joseph McCarthy's chief legal counsel for the anti-communist witch hunts.

Incidentally, all that can be disparaged about identity politics can be traced to the unfortunate successes of these anti-labor, anti-communist liberals, like Reagan and Reuther, since the core of their liberalism was mere tokenism without any class analysis.

IV

Similarly, the incongruous push back against this universal health care has its roots in anti-communism and settler-colonial racism.

The cry that "my health care is being taken" is disingenuous. The anger from some sectors of union members that the health care they negotiated is in jeopardy is garbage too.

The rank and file should want quality health care. Recall the rank and file not too long ago agitated when employers started making them pay a portion of their premiums. Now the costs the worker bears toward these premiums continue to go up. This cost sharing has now become a norm, so its strange to hear complaints from some that they do not want this sacrificed to a national health care policy.

So where is this angst over having their health care taken away coming from?

I go back to that evil seed of white racism and the meaning of this settler-colonial project. I think back to a liberal health care measure in my native St. Louis from the 90's - nothing radical, just expanding coverage to more people in the region. I remember hearing hotheaded white people in the grocery stores and public places, deeply engaged in opposing this policy measure. They were against it because they said "those people from the East side - " or from "the North side" - would take advantage of this system.

Of course the areas they were referring to were predominantly Black areas. The measure failed.

White racism is a tool by elites to keep the working class divided, but workers are not innocent bystanders. White racism is supposed to afford the white worker a status over his Black sisters and brothers that he may be poor, but at least he's not Black. And many white workers thrive on this. So powerful is this delusion that even pedestrian, liberal fights for "equality" stir white racism because they risk ideologically putting the whole working class on an equal footing.

If white, Black, and Brown workers have equal access to universal health care, what does this suggest of the settler-colonial project but threaten its erasure like the so-called civil rights measures threatened a few generations ago? Is this the same country once apartheid has been thoroughly eradicated, roots and all?

This is at the crux of the resistance to these measures, and Donald Trump is their current, necessary mascot.

V

If anything I have argued has any currency whatsoever, the thing for anti-fascists, radicals, socialists and communists to do is design the appropriate tactics and counter measures. The surgeon doesn't prescribe an aspirin for a tumor. Securing his tax returns to prove he's a gangster or impeaching him will have no awakening effect on this base, but just the opposite. This shouldn't exclude making tactical decisions in next year's general election or holding him to account. But any tactic must include coming to terms with the wide and reactionary dimensions of this settler-colonial project has on our national discourse, rejecting the so-called "revolutionary" war had nothing to do with the working class, nor was it revolutionary by any standard, and accepting that the white workers invested so heavily in Trump are reflexively invested in this white-settler project.

While there are white workers who reject any talk of racism or racist institutions, there are other white workers who accept this narrative. And there are Black and Brown workers who are always perfectly prepared to work in complete solidarity, as equals, with these white workers on facing this racism and countering it. Many radical movements have traditionally brought these forces together. Those are our opportunities. Those are the foundations of any political Front movement to end the rule of neo-Confederates and stop fascism in its tracks.

The Pivot of Margaret Sanger

"The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers could no longer, at least for me, ring with conviction," Margaret Sanger.


I

Margaret Sanger remains one of the most controversial figures of American activism. Moreover, she is probably not even well known outside certain, limited circles as an activist. Not even the far right-wing Phyllis Schlafly, of the American Eagle Forum, bears such enmity from both left and right alike.

Sanger has been relegated to a certain attic in our collective memories, and she is hardly alone, as I will name drop some of the other historical class warriors who've been similarly obscured.

But unlike a Leon Trotsky, Carlos Franqui, Karl Kautsky, or Rosa Luxemburg, Sanger's memory has been so carefully cobbled down as to make her inconsequential. This is a loss to feminism, the class war, and to Marxism; and it is probably deliberate.

Sanger, of course, is mostly known as the founder of Planned Parenthood and a proponent of abortion. But in the same breath she is also renowned as a racist and eugenicist. This has placed her in a No Man's Land [pun intended, as I shall show] where while Planned Parenthood and the so-framed "women's access to health care" are celebrated, its key protagonist must be carefully relegated to that attic of the crazies.

A passage of a 1939 letter she wrote to a friend has been cited often as proof of her racist feelings. It reads in part: "... We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the [Black] minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members " Scholars have widely discredited the spin put on this by anti-Sanger propagandists who have tried to argue Sanger wanted to use the Black ministers to hide Planned Parenthood's extermination plans.

But I would argue we know next to nothing about Sanger, and what we think we know has indeed been smears perpetrated by both the left and the right.

II

For almost a generation before founding Planned Parenthood [originally named the Birth Control League], Sanger was a young member of the Socialist Party USA, a suffragette, and a labor organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The tasks of these organizations took her to many parts of the US as well as Europe, and she is credited with leading two labor strikes, a textile worker strike in 1912 and silk workers strike in 1913.

Ironically, it was the actual work of labor organizing not only workers (mostly male) but also engaging with the strikers' wives, families, the children, and their conditions, which provoked Sanger into interrogating the effect of her work and the broader goals of activism.

It was these questions, the direction it took her, and the backlash that has exiled this former IWW labor organizer, Marxist, and suffragette to being a virtual non-entity to her former comrades and a pariah to everyone else.

Her 1922 work, the Pivot of Civilization (Brentano's NY) was written a year after founding Planned Parenthood with her sister, Edith Byrne. The book chronicles her "pivot" from almost a generation of labor organizing to women and children after women's suffrage [the 19th amendment] was won. Pivot of Civilization begins with how her eyes were opened and hints at the forces within her own proletarian movement who were against her.

First, for good measure, she sets up the tableau by taking a swipe at the part-time organizers who numbered many of her critics: "Of late we have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning ladies and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have gone out to work - for a week or a month - among the proletariat."

But she is humble about her own work, referring to the 15 years with the IWW and how this shaped her.

"Regarding myself I may say that my experience in the course of the past twelve to fifteen years has been of a type to force upon me certain convictions that demand expression. For years I believed that the solution of all our troubles was to be found in well-defined programs of political and legislative action.

"My own eyes were opened to the limitations of political action when, as an organizer for a political group in New York (IWW), I attended by chance a meeting of women laundry workers who were on strike. We believed we could help these women with a legislative measure and asked their support. ‘Oh that stuff!’ exclaimed one of these women. ‘Don’t you know that we women might be dead and buried if we waited for politicians and lawmakers to Right our wrongs?’ This set me to thinking - not merely of the immediate problem - but to asking myself how much any male politician could understand of the wrongs inflicted upon poor working women."

To frame what I believe happened to Sanger, one must not only understand the splits and sectarianism in the communist movement of the day but also how she responded to the trajectories that struggles took, and how men reacted.

The linear narratives of history, often written by men, marginalize the splits that disagree with their own and erase the women they cannot vilify.

In Pivot of Civilization, Sanger credits some thinkers and activists who "encouraged and strengthened" her probably just as much as being in the homes of the striking workers and talking to their wives. She sites Rudolf Rocker, Lorenzo Portet, Francisco Ferrer, Enrico Malatesta.

Of them, perhaps Rocker is the best known and most illustrative.

After Karl Kautsky, deemed the "pope" of Marxism internationally until 1917, Rudolf Rocker is sort of a founding thinker of council communism, left libertarianism, and anarcho-syndicalism. In fact, his highly readable and engaging book, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice remains a key document in this genre. As Sanger describes Rocker, he "was engaged in the thankless task of puncturing the articles of faith of the orthodox Marxian religion." 

For veering off doctrine and challenging some presumptions – and policies – of the Bolsheviks, Rocker was marginalized.

Sanger assesses all four: "It is quite needless to add that these men who had probed beneath the surface of the problem and had diagnosed so much more completely the complex malady of contemporary society were intensely disliked by the superficial theorists of the neo-Marxian school."

Remember, Sanger is writing this in 1922. "Neo-Marxian" is not the Euro-communism of the 60's or flirtations with social democracy of the 70's. It is better explained as the transgressions criticized by the likes of Bakunin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Rocker, and others who had sharp criticisms of the communist movement and, later, of Bolshevik measures in Revolutionary Russia.

To Sanger, the "complex malady" had been reduced by many labor leaders to simply changing the economic system and holding out a Utopia.

Sanger argued the role of women had been forgotten, their subservient role in patriarchal families dismissed, and the male assumption promoted that one must have many children and this disconnect from economics. Moreover, the lives of working women and children were worsening.

"We saw that in the final analysis the real burden of industrial warfare was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children ..." writes Sanger.

III

Whatever one thinks of these opposing views - i.e., the syndicalists vs the communists - the point in this piece is to contextualize the banishing of Margaret Sanger as a purely masculine attack to marginalize her in my hopes of rehabilitating her as the Marxist and feminist she was.

That turn-of-the-century communist history deserves another article or further reading elsewhere. Suffice it to say, Sanger, like Luxemburg, Kautsky, and Rocker, found herself on the wrong side of the war of ideas when faced with what she describes in her book as "purely masculine reasoning."

This "purely masculine reasoning" put the struggle of the workers [mostly seen as men], organizing industrial actions, and the inevitability of the better world "just around the corner" as central to the labor movement, while obscuring the effects on "the sight of the overburdened wives of the strikers, with their puny babies and their broods of underfed children."

"The bitter struggle for bread, for a home, and material comfort was but one phase of the problem," wrote Sanger. But there was another.

Not an abortionist, Sanger advocated the unthinkable: that poor men stop having sex with their wives, the result of which were more starving babies and greater deprivations on working class families, the burdens of which fell almost entirely on women.

But Sanger went a step worse, advocating that wives needn't submit to their husbands sexual whims - as the current Southern Baptists instruct - or to the ideas propagated at the time that the larger and more desperate the proletariat, the speedier the revolution would come "just around the corner." Sanger ridiculed this.

The empowerment of women and telling them how to regulate their family size, we are loath to forget, is what got Sanger in trouble for her tenure at the helm of Planned Parenthood, not abortion.

Sanger and her sister smuggled in contraceptive devices from Europe and provided them to women. For this, they were arrested. For teaching women about contraceptives was an added charge.

Some facts. Sanger was not an abortionist. Planned Parenthood did not start performing abortions until 1973, after Sanger was dead and buried and her name already smeared. That smearing included being called a racist and eugenicist, which are not only belied by the facts that she was a labor organizer of Black and white workers, that her clinics were fully integrated with Black and white medical staff but also that she counted among her friends WEB DuBois, who sat on the board of Planned Parenthood in its early days.

Academic research by Marxist historian Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch: Woman, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, AK Press, 2004) and Charles Valenza ["Was Margaret Sanger a racist," Family Planning Perspectives, Vol 17 No. 1, 1985] have dispelled the wild assertions against Sanger.

Further, Valenza has found that the virulent, racist quotes attributed to Sanger were actually authored by other people but indeed published in her magazines (Valenza argues it was the name recognition of some of these authors, not their messages that put them in the pages of her periodicals).

To sum up, Sanger's heresies were, first, being a Marxist and daring to stand on the side of the working class in a militant posture; but her second was essentially becoming a radical feminist, turning against the masculinist narrative of the labor movement and daring to stand on the side of poor women.

These sorts of apostasies are unforgivable and have obscured Sanger's role as a leftist and a radical but also among that anti-communist mainstream.

IV

Radical feminist women, we forget, always come up against, the "fallacy" of the "all-too-masculine" insight, as Sanger bemoans it. Be it Sylvia Pankhurst, the most radical and controversial of the Pankhurst daughters who was not only more militant than her famous mother but also embraced anti-colonialism even when the post WWII European left abandoned it, was a socialist, and is considered a rare, early white Pan-African; Edith Byrne, Sanger's more militant sister whose direct action tactics landed her in jail and with the distinction of being the first inmate in the US force-fed when Byrne went on a hunger strike for the cause of women's rights; or later, some of the Black women who joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) and found their roles to be not in the ideological trenches but in the kitchen or bed - those "all-too-masculine" gender roles assigned them.

The Right is not alone guilty of misogyny. Left is often turning on and ridiculing its feminists as apostates for not playing their designated gender roles.

Angela Davis describes in her Autobiography considering joining the BPP, seeing how her role was to be to "support the Black man," and stay two paces behind. Without a second thought, Davis made a u-turn and joined the Communist Party that she knew growing up, even though she found the Party "conservative."

Federici notes "As we learned in the feminist movement, often the first obstacle a woman encounters when she wants to make a fight is not directly the state but the man in the family." (interview, Race, Poverty & the Environment, Vol. 19 No. 2, 2012).

To dare to tread into dangerous water for a moment, there are legitimate and historical reasons why militant women sometimes demand women-only spaces within which to strategize and commune.

At any rate, regardless of one's final judgments about left-communists, syndicalism, left libertarianism, or radical feminism we should not sideline too quickly its proponents. Their contribution to the class struggle cannot be denied, and we can gain much from their insights. It is unfortunate to say that Sanger was ahead of her time in daring to see beyond the noble striking worker and raise the humanity of the "overburdened wives ... with their puny babies and their broods of underfed children" and tell women they needn't obey their husbands and intensify their own poverty. That says a lot about how conforming we are with the "fallacy" of the "all-too-masculine."

Then we are quick to bemoan first-wave feminism after women like Sanger, her sister, and Sylvia Pankhurst are removed, and we dare wonder why our movements and club meetings have so few women in them.

Sanger's rehabilitation is overdue. The class struggle needs all the radical ideas and insights it can get. And it needs them from such women who got their hands dirty, beaten up, and gagged [literally] for the practical experience they can offer us.

The Special Question of Lenin, Harry Hay, and Trans Liberation: An Argument

Not a week goes by where a shit-storm over the recognition of trans women doesn't explode on social media. On one side, there are the so-maligned TERFS [Trans-exclusionary radical feminists], who fight against what they claim is the infringement of space of real women by trans women. The other side fights for the recognition that trans women are in fact women and are accused of ignoring basic science.

And at ground level from these raucous seminar debates, scarcely a day goes by when a trans woman, particularly a trans woman of color, is not assaulted or murdered for being a trans woman.

This makes trans liberation a critical and urgent discussion among radicals and not one to be put off "until later," as many marginalized people are used to hearing from some of our so-called friends in privileged places.

The murders and assaults don't care about our panel discussions.

These debates on social media are rarely productive because the so-called defenders of trans women as women do not go beyond the strident demand that "trans women are women" and maintain anyone who says different is transphobic - the TERFS - and is complicit in the brutalization of trans women. For the other side there seems to be no end of news stories about how a trans woman athlete displaced a cis-woman athlete, and the sky is falling.

It is not helpful that many of the opponents do in fact oppose the existence of transgenders for their very existence, even going to far as to call it a psychiatric disorder.

While solidarity is over due to those activists engaged in the on-the-ground work to stop these assaults against trans women, I will try here to further this rhetorical debate, hopefully break new ground with some more classic references, and bring this argument back to the struggle for liberation.

First, to be clear, I am for the liberation of trans women - and trans men. I don't consider those who think transgender a psychiatric condition any more than I would consider those who consider same-sex attraction a psychiatric condition.

I am similarly for the liberation of lesbians, of gays, of queers, of Same-Gender Loving people, and of women. I am for the liberation of the working class. It is important to put it like this, because I do not pretend that there is an "LGBTQ" community as such - ask an HIV+ Black gay/SGL man or working-class Latina lesbian where this "community" is. But I do acknowledge we face some common obstacles - from the Left and from the Right, just as workers we face common obstacles - from the Left and from the Right.

These are distinct communities with distinct histories they carry to the present times, but we do share common struggles.

I already know my argument will be dismissed by some out of hand, and that I will be accused of making an excuse to hate trans women, etc. Some or all of the people I reference may be dismissed as well. However exact I craft my arguments, I know this cannot be avoided, but I hope some others, whether their minds are changed or not, will appreciate another perspective that does seek liberation, draws from a radical tradition, but rejects out of hand the notion that trans women are women (or that trans men are men) and that this is in any way a radical move toward liberation.

That's why I call this piece "an argument." It is not the last word or a prophecy chiseled into stone tablets.

My thesis is that the call that "trans women are women," despite its radical appearance, is a reactionary position that undermines the liberation not only of women in particular but also trans women in general.

Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Special Questions

These marginalized communities fall under what is sometimes called "Special Questions," with its nod to Marxism-Leninism and Joseph Stalin and the "National Question."

In Lenin's day, transgenders, lesbians and gays were not considered in his discourse, but concepts behind the National Question thesis inspired communists and were progressively expanded from the ethnic minorities of the Russian Empire to ethnic minorities generally, to women, and to Blacks, and eventually to sexual and cultural minorities.

According to Stalin, "a nation is a historically-evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a community of culture." [Stalin, Joseph. "Marxism and the National Question: Selected Writings"]

Generally, this short set of criteria constituted a nation, or a national minority, in Marxist-Leninist terms, but as with any idea and any Marxist, it would find broader applications.

The National Question was a debate that even found its way to Territorial, US-occupied Hawaii, where members of the Communist Party of Hawaii debated its application [Reinecke, John. "Hawaii Nationalism: a Non-Question". 1981]

Hay and the Liberation of Cultural Minorities

Cde. Harry Hay of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was inspired by this concept and expanded it. Hay joined the CPUSA in the early 1930's, though he had been involved in the labor movement before that. Hay, a gay man, was not only a labor organizer but became one of the Party's Marxist educators until his departure in 1951. He was in a unique place not only as a student of Marxism but also a Party educator, and he took the Special Question further than Lenin and Stalin to construct a space within it for lesbians and gays.

The impact of Hay's contribution on the lesbian and gay movement has been glossed over but bears repeating. As Hay biographer, Will Roscoe, notes "without the idea of Gays as a cultural minority there would be no gay identity and no Lesbian/Gay movement." [Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the words of its founder, Roscoe. 1996]

In contrast to Hay rendering lesbians and gays a cultural minority, if you read the anti-gay laws of Hay's day and of the last 100 years, they do not target gay men as such. Rather, these laws specifically prohibit our sexual acts as being illicit. This is because society long viewed gay men not as gay men but rather as heterosexual men with a mental illness or with a perversion. So the laws often prescribed either imprisonment or chemical castration for the offender.

For example, the infamous US Supreme Court case, Bowers v Hardwick [1986] upheld a Texas anti-sodomy statute designed to proscribe gay sex; it did not prohibit gay men as a group. Such anti-sodomy statutes existed in most states and were used in such disparate ways as denying employment, housing, or allowing some public universities to deny funding for lesbian and gay student groups.

While it seems quaint today, what made Hay's contribution unique in this struggle is he did not accept that lesbians and gay men were mentally ill heterosexuals but rather that we were special and unique persons unto ourselves with special and unique things to contribute.

As Roscoe describes it:

"The cultural minority thesis has been Hay's most profound and lasting contributions to Lesbian/Gay political theory. Hay argues that Lesbians and Gay men differ from heterosexuals much as African Americans, Latinos, Japanese Americans, and other ethnic groups differ from Euro-Americans - in terms of shared values, modes of communication, historical heritage, psychological orientations, and behavioral patterns." [Roscoe, ibid]

Mostly drawing from Marxism-Leninism, Hay's ideas blossomed over time. He also drew from non-Marxist texts, but one work he used in his curriculum had a notable impact. Joseph Stalin's 1913 pamphlet, Marxism and the National Question. To those trained like Pavlov's dogs to growl at the mention of Stalin's name, it must be reminded that all this is well before the so-called Secret Speech by Stalin's successor. In Hay's days in the Party, Stalin was an able theoretician and an international class warrior. Even the leaders of the CPUSA praised him.

At any rate, Hay rejected the Old World, Tsarist paradigm and racist constructs toward national minorities, which was to lessen their cultural differences, obliterate their native language, maintain them as subjects to a racially/culturally superior master class - in the Tsar's case, that was Russian culture and Russian language.

Hay gleaned from the liberatory language afforded from the Special Question an explanation for lesbians and gays and new areas in which to struggle within the broader communist movement. And he had a precedent for expanding the ideas of the National Question right in front of him.

While Stalin had insisted on a firm set of criteria to constitute a nation, the CPUSA had itself for a time expanded this to include Blacks in the US South as an oppressed national minority. According to Roscoe, the Party "hoped to threaten the ruling class with the specter of a peasant war in the rural South allied with proletarian revolution in the industrial North.

Rejecting the reactionary mindset of pre-Revolution Russia, Hay employed the tenets of the Bolsheviks and argued all his life that lesbians and gay men were special beings with a special language and a special culture. So while it would be wrong to say he was alone, Hay was among the first and loudest to protest when the emerging "LGBT" movement veered into the mainstream to aspire to be like heterosexuals - seeking marriage, cleaving away its more risque subcultures, etc.

To Hay, these reactionary fights were not unlike the earlier presumptions that lesbians and gay men were actually heterosexuals.

Most pro-LGBT allies today would reject the notion that gay men were heteros with a mental illness, missing chromosomes, or having a sick perversion, but the tendency toward assimilation, which Hay vigorously rejected, is in affect leading to the same thing. But these same allies would promote the idea that trans women are women.

Trans women as Women a form of Violence

It's strange that just as we once could only conceive gay men as actually straight men, that some now can only conceive various gender identities restricted to just the two which have served very defined roles within developing and late-stage capitalism.

Wouldn't it be interesting if part of our struggle to dismantle capitalism included connecting the dots between accepted, dominant-class gender identities, their designed oppression, and their integral part in building capitalism, and that we dismantled them too? Not by erasing them, but rather by widening the terrain to include other identities. This is essentially Hay's pioneering contribution to the lesbian/gay movement.

"Socialists, " Isabelle Bartter of the former ISO writes, "are fighting for a world where bodies are not forced into this or that type labor or class position based on birth lottery. Fundamentally, we are fighting for bodily autonomy, which underpins the fights for abortion, for trans liberation, and for sexual freedom ... " ["How Can We Win Trans and Queer Liberation," from The Socialist Worker, Dec 3, 2018]

What is wrong with being a trans woman?

What would Hay say about the call that "trans women are women"? Just as I am not aware that Lenin or Stalin mused on lesbians and gays, I'm not aware of any exact writings on this by Hay. But given his decades of argument, Hay would apply the same Marxist-Leninist, Special Question to transgender liberation.

Hay would argue that they too, like lesbians, like gay men, were a special and unique being and that this uniqueness is not enhance by, nor is their liberation attained, from imposing established dominant norms on them. They are no more destined to fit into gender norms as gay men are or as Kazakhs were supposed to speak only Russian.

Hay began with Lenin and Stalin, but later complemented those ideas with his study and life among First Nations communities, communities who for thousands of years developed outside of early capitalism and appreciated much broader notions of gender roles. The trans community in general, and trans women in particular, fit his notion of a cultural minority which is defended by his reading of Marxists and those indigenous communities.

The answer is to let transgenders develop their own path, mindful how all of our oppression within pre-defined gender roles are linked to the development of capitalism. White racism against Blacks, for example, is not because we are of African descent but because of the prescribed roles we are supposed to play under this economic system.

While acts of physical violence are abhorrent we must all unite to stop, arguing that "trans women are women" as a form of assimilation and reactionary is a form of cultural violence. Moreover, I further argue it is a form of social violence against women. It quashes the development of s social identity and cultural vocabulary that is the right of national minorities.

Many of the de-platformers and anti-"TERF" people are not part of the resistance but rather more like those supposed friends of the left - friends of Blacks, of Indigenous, of queers - who tell us if we just "toned it down" and weren't "so angry," things would improve. They might mean well - bless their hearts - but their goals are far from liberation and more about accommodation.

While the only thing we share is an abhorrence to violence and marginalization of trans women, and the trans community, rather than accept the diversification of the working class they seek to groom this community to conform to a dominant paradigm with patriarchal scientific thinking.

Liberation is not an all or nothing fight. While I am not an "equality feminist," placing liberation and the dismantling of capitalism as priorities does not negate that civil rights today must be afforded all of these communities. Equality is worthy in itself, but it always risks becoming a panacea from which we cease struggle.

Pessimism for the Future?

Given the furor this issue continues to ignite, I expect vitriol to be heaped upon me. But I hope some others might ponder the argument and trace the roots that Harry Hay established from his time as a studied Marxist-Leninist and engage the arguments. Without these roots there would have never been a lesbian and gay movement at all, and without which there will never be a trans liberation movement. And without such a movement, a nascent vocabulary will not be born and refined.

Trans liberation will demand deeper questions for the roles we assign men and women in capitalist society, and this is why it is intolerable to making them fit into dominant-cultural roles.

I should be pessimistic that this piece will ignite a trans liberation movement, or new levels of discussion between radicals and Marxists, given Hay's own trajectory in radical struggle.

These struggles seem not to bode well.

Bartter directs that "queer and trans people, and everyone fighting for our liberation, need to break from the Democratic Party, which had never thought twice about abandoning us." She correctly notes how the Democrats use "the shallowest gestures" as "collateral" "to keep voter booths full."

But the disaffected, maligned, and misused are just as likely to fill the rolls of that 50% who boycott elections altogether and potentially make way for greater dangers than those "shallowest gestures."

Before Hay, Chuck Rowland, and other gay Party members were expelled from the CPUSA under Cold War fears around lesbian and gay comrades being blackmailed by the FBI, Hay was already organizing a front group from within the Party, formed from his ideas, and aiming to lobby CPUSA-endorsed presidential candidate Henry Wallace. This front group ended with his expulsion.

When they did leave the Party, they went on with their project independently and formed the first gay rights organization in the US in 1951, the Mattachine Society. The Communist Party would not rectify its position against lesbians and gays for more than 50 years, placing it outside some key struggles within the gay liberation movement.

Hay's role as a pioneer is a fact even few lesbians and gays know. Hay, Rowland, and the Communist founders of Mattachine were expelled from that group after just a few years later for being Marxists. The other foot of the Cold War dropping. Many of those comrades disappeared into history.

Not Hay. He would keep reasserting his message until his death in 2002, both within the Gay Liberation Front, railing against continued assimilation tendencies in the 70's and 80's, and later by founding the Radical Faeries in 1979. His mark has been overshadowed by the reactionary counter-revolt that expelled him from Mattachine and has fought for inclusion - rather than eradication - of the dominant, economic paradigm of capitalism. But Hay's ghost overwhelms my abject pessimism and inspires me to write even though it's hard to conceive the trans community being liberated when Gay Marriage, Gay Families, Gay Service members, and Gay Homeowners have overwhelmed our sense of direction.

Contexts of the Border Crisis, the USSR, and the Struggle Ahead

It's not an honest discussion of the border crisis without bringing in the Soviet Union. Yes, I refer to that much-maligned country that was destroyed by external and internal forces over a generation ago, but who absence is strongly felt in so many areas of our struggle to this day. And because it has been so maligned - for very deliberate, political reasons - it's hard to even bring up its name let alone suggest - as I will - it's significant and power role in geopolitics in general, the migration crises here in the US and in Europe in particular.

The left has done us a great disservice co-conspiring in the campaign of lies and vilification of that Bolshevik experiment. In doing so, it has harmed itself and, by extension, the people it presumes to be fighting for: the working class, Blacks and racial and ethnic minorities, lesbians and gays, the poor.

Because by not appreciating the role the USSR had overall, any analysis to what is happening in any realm of our political life is sorely lacking and plays into the very hands of our captors.

The escalated erosion in the labor movement, for one, can be directly connected to the disappearance of the Soviet Union, as can the brazenness of Western wars for resources, and internal attacks on women's rights. Recall its was just months after the collapse of the USSR that Bush I had the US invade Panama and kidnap its head of state to stand trial in the US on supposed drug charges.

As Fidel noted in his initial speech to the United Nations General Assembly, "the purpose of the United States is the monopolies." That is, the US government functions as the Wise Guy, the errand boy, the fixer for all that is state capitalism and its need for cheap labor and cheap accessible resources.

This meant that any given global South country where the US was doing its dirty business, it required what state department functionaries call "stability." Stability is code for sure and open markets.

Free elections, grassroots organizing, and trade-union movements are existential obstacles to US goals - which are the goals of domestic corporations and the global order. The US liked to employ various tactics to ensure this "stability." Having grassroots and trades-unionists jailed or murdered was not beyond the US scope. Rigging elections was a norm. Having militant, left-wing political parties made illegal was another tactic. Assassinating or removing presidents. And of course invasion and occupation if needed.

Additionally, the US and Europe implemented an immigration policy during the so-called Cold War that annually took in swathes of the global South in order to ease any social tensions in the respective countries.

Where would these social tensions escalate takes us back to the role of the Soviet Union. Because just as the US had its involvement in these countries, the Soviet Union acted as a spiritual, ideological, and material fund for the global South.

All of the post-World War II liberation movements in Africa, including and especially the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, can trace material and ideological support from the USSR and the East Bloc countries, like the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and even the DPRK [North Korea].

It was part of Cold War realpolitik that the US and Western Europe - the former empires - employed all the tactics I just named, and included taking waves of migrants from their former colonies. This was also a propaganda ploy to those former colonies that they too could aspire to immigrate to greener pastures of the West and, thereby, reject the "menace" of communism as a viable alternative.

Since the early 1990's fall of the Soviet Union, not coincidentally, we've seen a synchronized demand to end immigration and a rise in nationalism and white racism in the West. This white racist nationalism has gotten more open, more brazen, more outspoken and more defined. We hear once liberal leaders make excuses for this phenomenon and campaign to it. National leaders, left and right, have all lurched to the right in accommodation of this disturbing tendency.

But the resurgence of white nationalism makes perfect sense.

Ostensibly, disgruntled peoples of the global South no longer present the existential threat to the global market system of the Western countries. There is no longer a need for the safety valve. Ostensibly, without that material and ideological assistance of the Reds, these desperate peoples are no threat.

(As you should see, this view is itself racist since it presumes the global South only took commands from Moscow - the US State Department line, by the way - and that it had no natural impulse of its own to rid itself of colonial domination.)

The Western elites now are perfectly happy feeding the fires of white racism and nationalism because they themselves no longer see a value in that Cold War release valve. So they are perfectly happy keeping migrants of any kind in inhuman camps, on slave auction blocs, and drowning in the Rio Grande or the Mediterranean.

To underline my point, consider what lost in World War II was not fascism broadly but rather German, Third Reich fascism. The fascism of the rest of the Western countries - easily seen in pronouncements and policy of the French, British, and US governments in favor of Hitler - thrived on only to the point it was curbed by the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union disappeared, the fascism of the rest of the Allies resumed unobstructed.

Sadly, the left I referred to above will not appreciate this because it has abandoned the class war for making accommodations with these national governments and their global market system in order to make gains. This means it keeps getting into bed with some unsavory sorts; worse, it does so and brings nothing to the working class.

This means this left cannot and will not call a spade a spade. It has to pretend and convince the masses that the fascists that comprised the rest of the Allies in WWII are in fact democrats. This left has had to compartmentalize the postwar retaliation against the Communists and Socialists, student activists, Black and Brown and Native activists, and union militants as if it did not come from the same corroded place.

This also implies, and requires a essay on its own, the leaders of the leftist groups and parties must have the mental capacities of intellectual nincompoops, dull blades, butterflies reverse-developing into worms. This is a must because you cannot have this objective analysis within the left any more than you can acknowledge the role of the USSR generally. The left I refer is ultimately but an appendage of the Democratic Party and these liberal movements, which means it's a cohort of state power. Lenin might have already said something about that. Whether they forge a circuitous path or a straight line, it is the same anti-communist liberal Democratic Party that is the default position.

That is why our left organizations are imploding one after another. They are led by the simplest, anti-intellectual thinkers: you need only compare the nonsense they write and say, the strange positions they take, with the leaders that led these movements before the collapse of the USSR.

Nevertheless, the coming chapters of these border crises have already been foretold in the Third Reich. That's why our discourse must be precise and not be led down winding paths to nowhere by people who have nothing to say. The West sees no utility in these Third World peoples, cares nothing about their conditions in their countries of origin, and has been resorting to installing former generals turned presidents to ensure the "stability" the US and Western Europe care about. Rather than hitch our wagon to their death trains, we must be reminded in our internationalism that our common task is as workers, that the injuries done to them today await us tomorrow and will befall other workers the next day, and that left or right capitalism will not resolve this.

The Problem of Reparations

Reparations was a subject easier to digest when it was a fringe subject among certain Black people I grew up around. We used to call the advocates “Hoteps,” but never to their faces. They were older, very eager, very strident "Afrocentrists". They were among the first to call themselves African before it became more fashionable. Some had the goal to return to Africa, long before we had the benefit of DNA tests to tell us where we were specifically from, but they never seemed to make it there. And also on their list was how the United States owed us descendants of slaves reparations. The Hoteps were part wise, well-read sages, and part comical dashiki-wearers who spiced their conversation with broken Swahili, so I didn't put too much thought in them and selected what I could from their experience. Now that the topic of reparations is mainstreamed, not only by Congressional Hearings but also its advocacy by presidential candidate/Oprah guru Marianne Williamson, my unease with the subject has focused and come down in a surprising place. While hindsight is 20/20, and those Hoteps in retrospect were much wiser women and men ahead of their time, with reparations, I am on the opposition - for principled and practical reasons. An Approach of the South African Communist Party An editorial from the South African Communist Party [SACP] published in 1993 in its journal, The African Communist, tackles an aspect of the reparations issue with a discussion on affirmative action, which is arguably one form of reparations. Entitled "Affirmative Action - Time for a Class Approach," the SACP, the oldest communist party in Africa, makes the analysis of affirmative action that we should to reparations. The SACP "thoroughly rejects" "the promotion of individuals into managerial posts and into shareholding," it writes. The Party then goes on to list issues pertinent to the working class of South Africa, like pensions for the elderly, paving roads and electrifying rural communities, free health care, and free, guaranteed education. "Once you speak of affirmative action in this way, you are on the right track," the article says emphatically. The urgency of the debate, the article goes on to contextualize, was provoked by maneuvers of the leadership of the ANC Youth League of the time, which was reportedly vying for dominant shareholder status in a cellular phone company in order to be financially independent of the ANC itself. "Is financial dependence on the ANC worse than financial dependence on the profitability of the cellular phone business? ... Most progressive formations," the SACP instructs further, "try to build financial independence by relying on their organized base." The SACP nears its conclusion with this warning: "We have said in the past that the imperialists and the local ruling bloc, having failed to smash the ANC, now have as their prime objective the transformation of the ANC. A key component of this strategy is, precisely, to transform leadership elements into a bureaucratic bourgeois stratum by giving them 'a slice of the action'." Keeping the interests of the working class central I relate this analysis to reparations because while the debate is still somewhat in the embryonic stage for some, in the hands of a capitalist country run by two capitalist parties, its unions weakened and labor movement attacked, any reparations risks totally overlooking the negative beneficiaries of chattel slavery - the working class, and this not only includes the Black working class and poor but also the white working class and poor and the First Nations, who have been overwhelmingly devastated at the disruption of their societies and total loss of their lands in order that those plantations be built in the first place. The dominant forces in this country are reactionary and cannot be trusted to implement a correct policy. African descendants in the US are owed reparations. Let's get that clear. But what was pushed by the Hoteps of my youth and being pushed now is not the way. I daresay most in the US give little thought to the several hundreds of years of forced labor; our ignorance about chattel slavery is largely the fault of our so-called educational institutions, the textbook industry, and a political class who resolutely do not want us to think much about the history of slavery, the slave trade, and its consequent enrichment of the West. But this ignorance is deepened when we look further. Reparations are also owed Africans throughout this continent. We’re familiar with the arguments for why reparations are needed here in the US; but the whole of the American continent benefited from African forced labor and our social units broken apart so we could be bought and sold like cattle. And as internationalists we must go even further in this discussion. Reparations must also be paid to Africa itself. Millions of young people - and they were young, many children - were kidnapped from complex, developing societies as part of the “underdeveloping” by Europe of Africa by white colonialism and capitalism. These kidnappings retarded immeasurably the organic processes these various civilizations were going through by depleting countless generations of brain trust from their progressively evolving communities. So justifiably we’ve just doubled or trebled or quadrupled the reparations bill due. Who’s going to write these checks? The Congress of the United States? Even if you believe the Democrats in the House are serious about this issue - and I for one do not - what chance will it have in the Republican Senate? Furthermore, what does it mean to give me a check? And what does this check really mean with this capitalist system still in place? A Black woman working in a typical service-industry job, very low pay, will absorb that check quickly and be no better the next month, or next year, when bills are due; whereas someone of more financial means might be able to invest the check in his 401[k]. By ignoring the class dimensions, the supposed benefit of reparations will be horribly lopsided.

That is why the SACP nailed it: "Once you speak of affirmative action in this way, you are on the right track" - social and physical infrastructures The push of AFRICOM, the French intrusions into their former "Francophone" colonies, apartheid Israel wanting membership in the African Union, and even the Chinese "investments" show the continent is still in play globally. And it is dubious whether any of these entities cares about Africans. Rather, it is what the Africans have that they care about. So what does my reparations check mean in the US when it purchases the continued rape of that Mother Continent as a source of cheap, mineral resources? Again, the SACP "thoroughly rejects" "the promotion of individuals into managerial posts and into shareholding,"
"Collective empowerment, not Black yuppies"

No, like the SACP we too must "thoroughly reject" this current reparation stance, and we must do so with internationalist, anti-capitalist principles and remember where our struggle is. Capitalism has always sought to "transform" sectors of Black and marginalized communities "into a bureaucratic bourgeois stratum by giving them 'a slice of the action'." We have much less polite names for these people too in the Black community.
The SACP directs in its 1993 editorial that "we must never allow ourselves to confuse the advancement of a new middle stratum with the totality of national liberation. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union," the analysis continues, "socialism collapsed because the party and the state increasingly substituted for the class they claimed to represent." "We want collective empowerment, not the individual enrichment of a small band of Black yuppies," concludes the SACP in its editorial, clarifying the right stance we should take towards the working class and poor, Black or white, Latin or Asian, First Nation or conquered Pacific Islander Besides that, I suspect this whole reparations production hearing in the House is not about reparations at all, and certainly not about resolving the issues of the working class and poor: it's about steering Black voters to 2020 and delivering us to another bad nominee.


Postscript:
This article was declined by the "editorial collective" of the Communist Party USA's People's World. The rejection doubted the historical accuracy of my work. Excluding my own experience with the Hoteps, I can only speculate what they meant since there was no elaboration. I'm old school. Old school journalism and old school educated in political science and history. I do not make assertions I cannot prove. My own experience was the Hoteps as the ones advocating reparations, and that is why it features in my opinion piece. It was not until much, much later I learned of Audley Moore - Queen Mother Moore - who had been very active as a member and organizer with the Communist Party but quit the Party in the 50's for what she perceived as the Party's abandonment of Black issues. Solid members of the Party dispute this contention that Black issues were ever abandoned, yet this is the contention of those who left and of many academic discourses. It was after quitting Moore was free to take up reparations and other issues once encouraged within the Party, and she is a pioneer. But growing up Queen Mother Moore was not the person I associated with reparations: this, unlike the underdevelopment of Africa by Europe by its thieving of Black generations and resources, cannot be debated.

Here Queen Mother Moore is with Winnie Mandela and Kwame Ture.

On "No Room for Patriotism in Capitalism Imperialism Colonialism" by the YCL

This position piece was originally published by the Young Communists League of Southern California on its site. As the YCL was dissolved by the CPUSA [and re-instituted in the recent 31st Convention], the site no longer exists, but the article has been posted on a few other sites and discussed widely. Today being the supposed "Independence Day," and this occupied land from which I write being the site of a US overthrow of a sovereign nation, it seems relevant to re-post it here. The thesis of the piece was highly contested at the time, and is highly contested today. The YCL, drawing from Marx, Lenin, and a bit of Mao and Frederick Douglas who reinforce the Marxist point, write " ... the U.S. is distinct in its nation-statehood for its nature in being an oppressor nation with oppressed nations within it, such as African Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans/Chicana/os, Puerto Ricans, other people of Latin American descent (which really just means indigenous/native people of non-U.S. territory) and indigenous people to both the territory of the U.S. and also below its border." The question being: are Africans in the diaspora, Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiians], the Lakota or Couer d'Alene merely ingredients in a melting pot or distinct nations deserving self-determination, language, and cultural integrity like Georgia, Kazakhstan, or Uzbekistan were to those Marxist Bolsheviks? Since the YCL opines to the former - that is, we are oppressed NATIONS within an oppressor, it is our self-determination, liberation, and collective overthrow of imperialism that must be endorsed and fought for. Joseph Stalin, in his Marxism and the National Question [1913] states among his prerequisites "common language," but this would not only exclude the Native Hawaiians, who were prohibited for generations for speaking their language, and the African diaspora who are several hundred years away from their native tongue only due to the exploit of capitalism, but this qualification must exclude the Jewish diaspora who were millennia away from their native language and region - but yet above almost any other despised and harassed minority have nonetheless been afforded this Special Question. So, why not the Africa diaspora, Hawaiians, Chamorros of Guam, et al? The push for patriotism and squeezing the shroud of it around radical archetypes - "communism is as American as apple pie" - in order to make a proof that these disparate and conquered peoples somehow share a role in white-settler colonial independence is profane. This nation-state was founded on genocide and enslavement, and it is its fuel for existence. This is why the liberation of these peoples, the collective upending of capitalism, must necessarily make the United States disappear. As the Lakota American Indian Movement co-founder famously stated: "for America to live Europe must die." As an aside, this YCL chapter shows unusual astuteness noting that people of "Latin American descent" are really indigenous. This also shows a consistency in their argument. The fact that the Otomi people became "Latino" because their civilization lays south of the Rio Grande, while the Choctaw or Navajo are not, is a function of European colonialism and nothing else. The great masses of people fleeing to El Norte are the descendants of those indigenous peoples, not of Spain, whose descendants make up the ruling class of Mexico. So calling them Latin American as distinct from First Nation or Native American is at best problematic. "Patriotism for the U.S. as the world’s leading oppressor nation is irreconcilable with promoting proletarian internationalism," the Southern California YCL writes here. Subsequent to this publication, heated exchanges followed, YCL members were expelled by the CPUSA, and, en mass, the YCL chapter quit the Party altogether. But the debate, like a Donna Summer melody, lingers on ...

Prostitution is not work. A Communist Party should stand behind women's liberation, not oppression

Below is a contribution of mine to the discussions ahead of the Communist Party's 35th Convention this June]

A raucous debate persists in social media and in the pages of many political magazines. It persists between radical feminists with good intentions. The debate is whether prostitution is a scourge of exploitation against women by capitalist patriarchy or something to be organized as a workforce with trade-unions. The former call the phenomenon prostitution; the latter deem it sex work.

My radical feminism informs me that this is a scourge, and that a communist party that truly believes in liberating women [and men] from the chains of capitalism and exploitation must come out squarely opposed to prostitution as an equally abhorrent phenomenon as chattel slavery or child labor.

My radical feminism, and the radical feminists who've influenced me, inform me that the advocates of so-called sex work have lost their way.

How did they get there, and what do the anti-prostitution proponents want to remind all of us about?

The first- and second-wave radical feminists who fought for women's liberation against capitalism struggled in a very different labor force than the recent feminists, which I more or less date after 1980 and Ronald Reagan. Those earlier, pre-Reagan radical feminists, who comprise over a 100 years of struggle, faced legal and cultural bans from the traditional labor force. Their labor force was not even recognized as such by the broader community. The Communist Party should be proud that up until the Popular Front period, it provided the terrain for women and men members to explore these liberatory tactics [unfortunately, the Popular Front diversion silenced this counter-cultural, anti-patriarchal narrative and turned on women members who dared push it]. I refer to traditional labor force because as the earlier radical feminists will remind you, so-called "women's work" was integral to the labor force and moreover it was free labor [see Selma James, Silvia Federicci].

The traditional labor force was dominated by men, be it the farm or the factory. Women were barred from these areas and whatever meager status that came with it. Even those women who fought their way into higher education to attain medical and law degrees faced legal boundaries.

It is in this context, which persisted into my lifetime, that prostitution was viewed as a social evil because it showed in great contrast how women had to resort to selling their sex for wages with no other recourse. I used to have to remind my high school students that a single woman, living in many major cities of this country, could not rent an apartment or purchase a car in 1970 without the co-sign of a male relative.

The post-1980 radical feminists have struggled in a different world. Civil Rights laws have broken down the legal barriers; in fact, many have been demolished and whereas affirmative action has had a bad rap for Black and Brown people, its greatest beneficiaries have been women. Women are now in every sector of the labor force and are even CEO's or major weapons manufacturers.

The question is now: is this breaking of barriers an advancement or a regression? The first- and second-wave radical feminists argue this is a further regression. And I agree.

But it is within this context that the post-1980 radical feminists argue on behalf of sex workers instead of struggling to upend it. The post-1980 radicals see this as just another of the spaces women deserve equality.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We first- and second-wave radicals would argue that the exploitation has just been more generalized. This is why radical feminists, like early heroines Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Pankhurst, or later ones like Germaine Greer and Andrea Dworkin, argued against fighting for Equality. Further, this is why gay liberation's prouder days also argued against it. None of us wanted access into capitalism but rather its obliteration, or t find ways outside of it [see Harry Hay].

The post-1980 radicals are actually accommodationists. If you understand and accept the construction of femininity [Greer] within a capitalist patriarchy, this is the reactionary image that prostitution/sex work promotes. This is what we still teach our little girls [and our little boys]. The post-1980 radical feminists miss this fact and argue that sex workers are like any workers: they are like retail workers having to sell their labor.

I maintain if we argue that sex work is work on that level we as a communist party are promoting a gender role that was invented by men to disadvantage women. The underpaid retail worker is an area for radical struggle, but the retail worker is not having to normalize the self-hating, psychological duress of being a Barbie doll, which is just as grotesque as how some Black, male prostitutes have internalized a "Mandingo" self-hatred to allure white male patrons.

Barbara Smith

bell hooks

Actress Bea Richards [formerly CPUSA]

Audley Moore [formerly CPUSA]

Of course, everything in this narrative has to contain the parenthetical that it references the white world. The labor forces mostly referred to are white. Within Black and Brown communities, the limited range of work was accessible by women and men both. Black women have always worked and for many more years than not our labor, both male and female, was unpaid labor. Worse, the horrors visited upon Black women's bodies by white settlers is domestic terrorism; the fact it was unpaid is inconsequential at this point. And first- and second-wave Black women radical feminists, inside the Communist Party USA and outside, have fought for liberation over accommodation [see Grace Campbell, Williana Burroughs, Claudia Jones, Audely "Queen Mother" Moore, Bea Richards, bell hooks, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde].

The Black and white examples of first- and second-wave radicals are the examples the Communist Party should draw from if it is to garner and maintain a stature of a radical party and not one that further seeks accommodation not only with capitalism and patriarchy but also promoting the gender and racial castes designed by the master class for its subject workers. Opposing prostitution is not equal to vilifying its victims; this is not about advocating incarceration. But we should take a principled, radical position on the range of ways capitalism oppresses women, Black, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Island, and white workers, physically and psychologically. We should always seek liberatory forms, even rhetorically. And of course this includes our discourse around retail workers too.