Comrade Sabine

Leaders of the bourgeois LGBT movement have declared it to be “lesbian visibility week.”

We are asked to fight for ‘inclusion,’ in the capitalist-imperialist system, to demand reforms and legal protections from the settler-colonial state apparatus; the movement for our liberation has taken the form of a cheap identity politics, emphasizing “visibility” and the legal recognition of (largely white and bourgeois) gay interests.

We do not deny the benefits afforded to our people from the legal struggle – hardly, as those benefits have directly impacted many of us, just as the shoddy protections granted to the working class through decades of trade union struggle certainly impact us as well. But these gains are cheap, piecemeal, and precarious, liable to be revoked at any moment by the bourgeois dictatorship. Likewise, it is our responsibility to ask who among us really see the impact of these reforms; just as the settler working class in the so-called u.s.a. have been bought off by white supremacy, has not the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois LGBT movement sold out their working class siblings across the globe?

It’s no coincidence that while bourgeois figureheads (media moguls like Ellen Degeneres) happily consort with imperialist war criminals, our trans women comrades are left to die in the gutters, that while our “legal rights” are touted in the courts and legislature, gays and lesbians are counted among the piling victims of u.s.a. imperialism abroad.

As revolutionaries and lesbians, we have learned from the fight against capitalism and euro-amerikan neocolonialism that our struggle and the broader anti-imperialist struggle are one and the same. We are united in the fight against every form of oppression and exploitation, across the globe; the name of this fight is the proletarian revolution, the international communist movement.

While, as lesbians, we face our own forms of oppression, we know that in the last analysis they are nothing more than expressions of bourgeois class domination themselves; likewise, our fight against homophobia and patriarchy must itself be integrated into the broader class struggle. As com. Ajith explains, forms of oppression like ours make the issue of liberation a specific one, and, “being specific they are also partial, in the context of the whole revolutionary project. But this is not the situation of the proletariat.”

Only by toppling the conditions which make necessary the oppression of women to extract reproductive labor through the institution of the family – the chief source of both women’s and lesbian’s oppression – and the forging of new social relations through the shared experience of protracted peoples war can our liberation be won.

Our place is in the communist movement!

All power to the lesbian revolutionaries!

Build lavender and red power!