I've gone through this scenario a million fucking times before and it always seems to play out the same way. I meet some vanilla white progressive ally who feels my pain. You know the type; the non-profit industrial complex is crawling with them. The granola bro in vegan Chucks with a Bernie bumper sticker on his Prius just below a sticker for the latest Dempublican to cheat him out of another primary. The squeaky-clean Karen with the porcelain smile, surgically attached to an NPR tote bag full of positive affirmations and gluten-free cookies. They always start out super understanding. They have a lot of friends like me. They use all the right pronouns without missing a beat. But the moment shit gets complicated, that mask of wokeness slips and they start politely suggesting that I should just shut the fuck up and let my so-called allies carry my burden for me.
When I call them out for this micro-aggressive bullshit, they gaslight the shit out of me and tell me I'm getting "emotional" and that they "respect my feelings" but I didn't hear what I know I heard and I should just calm down. This is around the time when it dawns on me; it is way more goddamn important for these people to look woke than to be woke and that includes never having to apologize to people like me. This is also around the time when I have to step outside just to keep myself from proving them right by losing my fucking shit while they remain permanently Xanax calm. Fucking white people, right?
Here's the thing, I am fucking white people, at least according to the current census data definition of that label. But I'm also a very out-genderqueer person with five-alarm neurodiversity (five personalities and counting!) in a rural white community that has never exactly welcomed my existence. I grew up with white people; kids who repeatedly reminded me that I would never be one of them and adults who seemed convinced that I was dangerous because from a very young age there was something distinctly 'other' about me. This treatment continues to this day and it's exhausting, feeling like you are constantly under the surveillance of hateful eyes, holding your breath every time you pass a police car, and then having straight white people offer you help just to turn on you when your otherness becomes inconvenient to their hobby of playing savior with tranny lunatics like me.
I don't equate my experience with that of people of color, especially considering that Queer neurodivergent people of color are basically statistically born dead. However, I can't afford to ignore the fact that many of the straight Black and brown people I know are the only neurotypical straight people who seem to even understand what I'm talking about when I'm talking about shit like this. I've known Black people from Dixie who have literally moved back to the South because at least there the racists don't pretend to be your friend which is the same reason why I avoid organizing in the suburbs. So many of us are just sick and tired of the passive-aggressive culture of the mainstream left. That's because all of us are members of the lumpenproletariat and the leaders of the mainstream left in this country are not.
The lumpenproletariat is the outsider class, spit on even by Marx who referred to us as "social scum" and the "refuse of all classes." The term literally means "rag proletariat" and it includes all the poor people outside of the more traditional working class, the beggars, cripples, criminals, prostitutes, ex-cons and mental patients. The unemployed and the unemployable. The downwardly mobile. A genderfuck basket case eking out a meager existence on disability while cycling in and out of non-profits just to keep the demons at bay. Marx and Engels shit on all of us for lacking "class consciousness" but in reality, we are just poor people they can't unionize and govern beneath their leadership.
This prejudice is baked into the mainstream left across the west. The Social Democratic Party of Germany that set the pace for many progressives and social democrats across the globe during the late 19th and early 20th century made wide use of the term lumpenproletariat as a slur designed to exclude the "non-respectable poor" from those deemed worthy of proletariat status and create a more "desirable" working class. As the 20th century marched on and the SPD found themselves leading post-Imperial Germany, they came to view the lumpen as a biological threat to the health of a truly progressive society and much of the west followed suit with their asylums, reform schools, clinics, and other devices of social hygiene, much of which would also set the table for the Nazis.
In post-colonial America, the lumpenproletariat has always been overwhelmingly Black, brown, and/or Queer, and this isn't a coincidence. Trauma is the number one side-effect of white supremacy and the neurotypical gender binary, and this trauma keeps the lights on at the offices of the numerous industrial complexes that have kept white power alive and well long after the fall of Jim Crow. The Clinton Democrats, under the tutelage of Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmon, saw to that.
The National Institute of Health has consistently shown that the Black community suffers from the highest rate of PTSD out of any other racial group in this country and most studies generally show that just short of half of all LGBTQ+ identifying people suffer from that same psychic injury which is frequently misdiagnosed as any number of "mental illnesses." All of this seems to pave a road straight to the penitentiary for people who can't afford to be subdued by pharmaceuticals.
Roughly half of all inmates in this country have been found to be experiencing a "mental health condition" and pretty much all of them have experienced some form of childhood trauma. Uncoincidentally, Black Americans are more than 6 times as likely to be imprisoned than whites with Latinos twice as likely and Queer people right in between at 3 times as likely as straight people with 16% of all trans people having served time.
I've been fortunate enough to dodge prison in the sticks, but this relative privilege came with the constellation prize of being chewed up by a wide variety of for-profit mental health institutions that gave me dozens of diagnoses and God knows how many pills before I finally discovered that the primary source of my ailments was the trauma I suffered as a gender non-conforming child at a Catholic school that essentially served me up like a pudding to pedophile priests so those pillars of white heterosexuality could steer me in the right direction with their cocks.
The left did finally hear the cry of the lumpenproletariat, but it would take Queer thinkers like Michelle Foucault and thinkers of color like Frantz Fanon to articulate our pain in a language straight white people could understand. The latter, a psychiatrist by trade, would largely reinvent the word lumpenproletariat with his landmark manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, in which Fanon studied a number of asylums and discovered mental distress to largely be a symptom of capitalist and post-colonialist exploitation. Doctor Fanon also recognized that those suffering under such conditions were a lot less likely to suffer from colonial class indoctrination and were thus a lot more willing to revolt against the status quo.
This wasn't exactly news to barely closeted Queer anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and Max Stirner who had long preached way back in the 19th century that those of us in the rag class already represented a kind of actually existing anarchism simply by daring to exist outside the confines of mainstream society. They knew what Frantz and Foucault found out, that we were just crazy enough to kick ass without a manifesto to tell us how to do it and we proved this in spades during the sixties and seventies.
The last time the left brought this country to the brink of revolution it was under the leadership of the Black Power Movement that ignited the imagination of the entire lumpenproletariat by simply passing around the goddamn microphone. No organization embodied this spirit of revolutionary dialogue better than the Black Panther Party who openly courted the urban lumpenproles for support with Huey Newton lionizing this cadre as "street brothers"; an organized paramilitary force of ex-cons and ex-gangbangers turning their arms on the systems of oppression that alienated them from society.
Dozens of other armed revolutionaries from the gutters of Babylon followed suit, from the fags and dykes of the Gay Liberation Front to the streetwalking gender outlaws of STAR, from the reservation dog soldiers of AIM to the Latino lowriders of the Young Lords who even developed a "Lumpen Organization" within their ranks and captured the mood of the times when they boldly proclaimed "It's a law of revolution that the most oppressed group takes the leadership position."
The climax came when the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, led by a young visionary named Fred Hampton, tried to organize these tribes under a single Rainbow Coalition with the intention of not just confronting the state but replacing it with parallel institutions for community welfare that took the chronically unemployed off the government dole. The government couldn't have this, so they shot Fred Hampton. They shot Bunchy Carter, they shot Malcolm X, and they locked up Huey and Bobby Seale, and they framed Leonard Peltier and Geronimo Pratt, and they let an entire generation of Black Queer and Black and Queer revolutionaries die of AIDS.
Then the universities took over, and the big labor unions marched back in with the Democrats on speed dial along with a host of moneyed non-profits organized from the top down like corporations. All of these institutions, all of them, are overwhelmingly led by elderly straight white men and even their diversity programs are largely devices of gatekeeping and tokenization that only afford the most assimilated minorities, aka the least lumpen minorities, access to positions of power. And thus, I find myself getting gaslit and disenfranchised by cis-passing white transwomen who run DEI programs at fucking Raytheon (sadly, a true story.)
We the unwashed lumpenproletariat need to rediscover our voice. We need to get the fucking microphone back. Cointelpro stole it from us and I'm sick and tired of barrowing the DNC's in exchange for another slice of my pride.
The problem on the mainstream left today is almost identical to the problem on the right. They are both run by old white cis het men for old white cis het men. The only difference is that the right admits it while the left just uses minorities like human shields while they kill Muslims with drones and organize the global bourgeoisie beneath decaying relics of progressive internationalism like the EU and the UN. Well, no more. No more Weimar allies buttering us up with petty privileges while the Nazis gather their guns.
We need our own goddamn guns, our own clinics, our own schools, our own parties and organizations run from the bottom up by our own people. Paler Queer folk and neurodivergent trailer trash also need to abandon what's left of our white privilege and throw in our lot with our true comrades, with street brothers and reservation dog soldiers, in the name of lumpen power. The poor need to become a storm over the white pride parade of the two-party oligarchy. The lumpenproletariat must come together again like a rainbow fist and smash the pigfucker state once and for all.
Maybe then I can play nice with bougie vanilla leftists but I'm not making any promises.
Peace, Rage, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground
* I Against I by Bad Brains
* Down to Be Wrong by HAIM
* Rich Daddy by the Dicks
* Easier Said by Sunflower Bean
* Retard Girl by Hole
* Braille by Regina Spektor
* List of Demands by Saul Williams
* Wolf Like Me by TV On the Radio
* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski
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