Pride cannot be ‘’reclaimed’’

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“Friendship, Vengeance and Contempt—these are the only guides worth following” – I Don’t Bash Back, I Shoot First

The efforts by groups such as LGSM and NCAFC to ‘’reclaim’’ 2015 London Pride are admirable, and are certainly better than the alternative, (Which would be for the ‘’LGBT calendar’’ to remain completely unpolicitised) but I really don’t see them getting anywhere.

Everyone who was attending Pride as a Protest is aware that Pride is a Capitalist Parade, and I won’t patronise anyone by pointing out what is obvious, but Pride is actually a lot worse than that. Pride is not shit because it’s a representation of a LGBT community that is generally formed of people that have attitudes we disagree with, (I.e Pro-Capitalist etc.) it shit because it is designed and operates as a corporate advert. There were more banks officially listed as attending Pride than Trans groups, this is not representative of the’’ LGBT community’’, this is the ‘’LGBT community’’ being sold for profit.

Pride is not a normal capitalist space in a capitalist society it’s one of the most hyper-capitalist spaces I have ever experienced. In the walk from the start of the Parade to the middle (Where us political lot had been safely hidden away) I had been more aggressively advertised to than I think I have ever been. And it’s all wrapped up in the sickeningly sweet rainbow flag that takes all comers, from Uber, whose entire premise is cutting away workers’ rights in order make taxi rides cheaper, to Barclays, who funds Elbit Systems, the main provider of the drones Israel uses to murder Palestinian Children.

Making a space this aggressively capitalist is inevitably followed by the control and violence that Capital always brings with it. On London Pride 2015 I received more instructions on how to walk than I had since I was three years old. Where and how we walked was entirely up to the ‘’Pride Organisers’’. It was apparent we were a spectacle, there to be observed and sold, not to express our ‘’pride’’. We were there to clean up the image of corporate sponsors, so they could more easily sell themselves to the rest of the ‘’LGBT community’’. And what happened when people defied these controls?

Violence, specifically the violence of the State. Police manhandled Class War activists who attempted to ‘take over’ the front of the protest, and another person protesting against Barclay’s inclusion was arrested with the assistance of the Pride Stewards.

Surely we all knew this though? We knew that Pride was a horrible capitalist parade when we choose to go there, maybe I have made more reasons why Pride is presently terrible apparent, but this doesn’t change that we know it’s horrible and shit, and want to take it back and make it better. But what I want to say is that how Pride is structured means that we can never change it from being a capitalist parade, and by participating in it we give it the illusion of balance.

What do we imagine ‘’Pride as a protest’’ would look like? I imagine that corporate sponsors will have been driven out, or at least pushed to the margins, and there will be a great mass of political people using Pride as a platform to push for things like Trans healthcare and an end to the detention and deportation of LGBT persons without papers. But this is something that simply cannot happen. Who organises Pride is not left up to chance, it is decided by the state, which then funds it, with the Mayor of London awarding the NGO which organises Pride (Also winners of Stonewall’s ‘Best Advert’ prize, which should tell you all you need to know about them really) 500,000 pounds over the next 10 years to organise Pride. Even if you imagine that we could accomplish some kind of coup d’état and take over the NGO, whatever corporate elements that were left would just form some new NGO, and petition that Pride be award to them, and the Capitalists in power would obviously award it to them.

Alternatively we could imagine that we would have sufficient popularity in order to put enough pressure on the Pride organisers in order to drive the corporations to the sidelines, but this would be an incorrect conception of why the organisers put Barclays at the front of the parade. They didn’t put Barclays at the front of the parade because they like capitalism, or because they enjoy the electronic banking system that Barclays offer, or because they are really for funding new and advanced drone technology, they did it because of the cold hard cash that Barclays offered them. This is money that the Pride organisers believe they need. While events can be organised on a shoe string if necessary, (It costs NCAFC something like 1/50 to organised a protest compared to what NUS spends) NGO’s like the one that organises Pride believe unmovingly that they need a massive advertising budget or things will simply not happen, and neither fire nor high water will convince them to part with it. The money that companies like Barclays can give to Pride is something we neither can, nor should desire to match, so any hopes of driving the corporate wank to the edge of Pride on this basis seem unlikely.

There are also more combative options like insisting our Pride was the real Pride regardless of statist permission, or driving the companies out of Pride physically, but these options require a much more militant queer community then the one we have presently in Britain, and would also suffer from severe state repression if we attempted it.

But not only do I believe our participation is ineffective, but I believe it can also be actively negative. By going to pride to reclaim it we give the illusion that there is a balance at pride, that everyone has their ‘place’, the lefties there, the companies there, the BDSM people over there, and that this system is ‘fair’. Of course this is not actually ‘fair’ or ‘representative’, but we can only make this apparent by attacking the very foundations of pride, and this is not something that can be done from within.

Having firmly rejected any possibility that we can get anywhere with Pride, what do I suggest instead? Post-Pride there were several suggestions of a ‘People’s Pride’ and this is something I would believe would be much more effective in pushing the ‘’LGBT Community’’ back in a political direction when most legal obstacles in the way of cis gay equality with the mainstream have been overcome. Organised on our own terms, by a ‘’coalition of the willing’’ of Queer groups, a ‘People’s Pride’ would allow us to celebrate ourselves and push for something more on our own terms, or at the very least it would allow us to walk on our own terms.