By Alan Sears*
Developing
a new left requires a process of queering. For an individual, "coming
out" involves a re-envisioning through engaging with a new political
community. We are raised to be straight, but begin to recognize we are
something else. Over time, this means developing capacities to see the world in
new ways. Rather than seeing ourselves as a flawed version of the straight
person we thought we were supposed to be, we begin to see and live new
possibilities. As our vision is queered, we actually see more, as the
oppressive character of heterosexual dominance is relatively invisible to those
who participate in it and take it for granted.
Socialist-feminist
perspectives on standpoint remind us that our view of the world depends in part
on where we stand in it. This does not mean reducing politics to a set of
fragmented and mutually incomprehensible identities, but rather understanding
that those who experience oppression and exploitation see those relations from
below with special clarity. Anti-capitalist organizations rightly aspire to a
big picture view of the overall terrain of struggle, but this does not come
through a single all-seeing perspective. Recognizing the limits and partiality
of the politics we have developed does not mean simply tossing them out, but
recognizing that like all human knowledge they are products of particular times
and places.
(...)
Part
of getting a broader view, then, is liberating our analytical tools, learning
through engagement with queer, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonialist
perspectives. Queering also means developing deliberate strategies to counter
the dominant power relations as they get echoed within our organizations. If we
don't work consciously against the dominant power relations within our
organizations, they are all the more likely to re-emerge, since activists are
people within this society.
The
complex relations of comradeship can often nurture sexism, racism,
heterosexism, transphobia, and settler colonial perspectives if organizations
don't work deliberately against reproducing them. Comradeship is a crucial dimension
of anti-capitalist organizing, marked by shared experiences, passions, dreams,
trust, and pain. It can be an incubator for beautiful and supportive human
relationships that sustain us through the struggle, but also for relations of
assault and abuse that reflect dominant power structures. It requires work to
keep different forms of oppression from distorting relations of comradeship, as
people will draw upon the ways of behaving and attitudes they developed in
their everyday lives in capitalist society.
Queering
is not a one-time action, but an ongoing process of learning from the world and
challenging what we thought we knew. It does not mean simply rejecting the
experience anti-capitalists have amassed over the past 150 years as it is
crystallized in theory. Nor does it mean confining ourselves within the limits
of historical frames without acknowledging their limitations. Queering offers
the joy of discovery as well as the challenge of recognizing we still have a
lot to learn.
*Alan Sears is a member of New Socialist Group in Toronto.
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