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Socialist Alternative publishes "China collapsing any day now" article.
(www.socialistalternative.org)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Bro, wtf is it with trots? I bought a book recently about trans history and politics, and it's written by trots.
90% of the book is fine. Good, even! But there's a chapter going over a brief history of transness, and there's a subsection called "Totalitarian transphobia" and it talks about Paragraph 175 under the Nazis, rollbacks on queer rights under Stalin, and the continuation of paragraph 175 in West Germany. So far, nothing objectionable.
But then it gets to East Germany, which repealed Paragraph 175 decades before the west, and made great strides in queer rights for the time. East Germany is such an interesting, complex, nuanced, and fascinating part of socialist and queer history. And how does this book handle it?
One paragraph that says "East Germany repealed Paragraph 175 much sooner than the west. But gay men were still arbitrarily imprisoned under stalinist rule".
BABE, WHAT? I get it, Trots have to label any ML socialist project as "Stalinist". It's a thought terminating cliche of theirs. But there's such an interesting contradiction in that sentence, and there's zero attempt to explore it's ramifications.
On the one hand, I respect my Trot comrades for their commitment to genuine labor militancy. But holy shit do they such a deep disinterest in grappling with any leftist tendency outside of their own, in good faith.
The concept of totalitarianism was conceived of and pushed by a number of influential losers who wanted to give their personal vendettas a grand philosophical justification, so this tracks
Who? Genuine question.
Hannah Arendt
what book was it
It's called Transgender Resistance: Socialism and The Fight for Trans Liberation by Laura Miles
I don't wanna completely rag on this book, Chapter 6: Trans Voices Around The World, for example, is genuinely really good, and brings into focus the histories and experiences of trans people in the global south.
Something that a book like Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg only briefly touches upon, outside of its main narrative, via pictures and short captions.
Speaking of Feinberg, this really gets me about Trot cognitive dissonance about "Stalinism". The book makes regular (and tbh unavoidable, given their importance) reference to Feinberg. And for that matter Sylvia Rivera is on the front cover.
Feinberg was in the Workers World Party, and Rivera was in the Young Lords. They're exactly the "Stalinists" the author condems in that subsection that I was complaining about! Yet they're on the cover of the book, and peppered throughout the reference notes, without a hint of irony.
Tbh it's a result of the western leftist cult of failure, that pervades everything. The best movements are the ones that are pure. Pure movements lost, and thus never had to contend with the complexities of actually governing. So a "stalinist" movement that never succeeded can be claimed as pure and good, rather than evil and totalitarian, despite them literally sharing an ideology.
yeah i know some people working on a book that surprisingly havent heard about this, handed it off to them
and yes, there is an ongoing issue in queer spaces that we have become severed from our radical traditions despite being radicals ourselves. a lot of our 'ancestors' died a little too early to properly teach and mentor the next generation on successes and failures, so we're picking up the scraps from people that were lucky enough to live long
honestly, upon reading this, there is very little original work here, its mostly citing a bunch of news articles (including quite a lot of washington post) and wagging her finger at global south countries. if you pay close attention to /r/transgender or something you could get most of this info yourself.
all so very english of her
a book like this really needs more input from other trans people as well, its unhelpful for her to expound on lgbt issues in africa when she herself is not african or has never visited africa or has never interviewed an african trans woman. there is also the issue of grouping all of africa into one section, when it is incredibly diverse. by not interviewing people directly, she is simply regurgitating information straight from western propaganda outlets and loses a lot of nuance in every story and the potential of learning secretive information about each trans community (re: historical information, justifications, etc.) .