- Syndicalism has been the historical form of class consciousness. It has been a worldwide phenomenon, an existing internationalism. While the Party form has been implanted in working class mainly by external influences (ie. years of governmental politics), Syndicalism came from the working class itself. Indeed if Desire is a real productive force, Syndicalism has been the product of the Desire of organised labour struggles.
- Syndicalism has both been an emancipatory movement, and a tool of control, class collaboration, gender and sexual segregation, as well as white supremacy.
- Queer Syndicalism doesn’t look for a perfect, original, or authentic Syndicalism. It doesn’t select Syndicalism as a Praxis out of an idealized working class, nor does it believe that purely rejecting unions is a pragmatic political move. Queer Syndicalism merely tries to learn from a conflicted history of class struggles.
- Queer Syndicalism learns from the continuous failures of Unions to address class in a multidimensional way, misunderstanding how class and work affect queer lives, but also the lives of women, BIPOC, the disabled, the elderly, etc.
- Queer Syndicalism is strongly opposed to the mainstreaming movements of LGBT politics. The neoliberal integration of Gay lives, diversity management, and the international politics of homonationalism and gay hegemony are both an attack on indigenous sexual and gender diversities, a matter of statecraft and a project of class control.
- The Queer move has been to antagonize. The Queer (as a conscious Praxis) emerged from antagonism inside the seemingly homogeneous Gay and Lesbian movement. The Queer move is finding a certain political productivity in internal antagonisms.
- Queer antagonism is not open warfare against the rest of the movement(s). Queer antagonism is a fractionalisation. Not an aimless fractionalisation, but a fractionalisation that seeks to open ground for new creative forms of alliances.
- Queer Syndicalism, is the Queer move applied to Syndicalist forms and strategies.
- Contrary to the traditional IWW One Big Union, Queer Syndicalism wants to let “a thousand unions bloom”. While not being opposed to more traditional workplace organising, Queer Syndicalism, then, defends a variety of tactics.
- Queer Syndicalism can be at the same time, the Lesbians and Gays supporting the British Miners, the Black cleaners striking all over the hospitality sector, the women and queers organising a Women and Gender Strike. It is the Human Strike, and the General Strike. The tenants organising a rent strike, and the delivery drivers hacking their reporting softwares. It is the transnational solidarity network of sex workers, and the prison strike.
- Of course all of those things are neither queer nor clearly syndicalist in and of themselves. Nor are they “latently” queer syndicalist. They are merely forms of struggles, political inspirations, examples of the potential for a Queer Syndicalist political space.
- Organisations or militants might, or might not, define themselves as Queer Syndicalist, but Queer Syndicalism is not an identity nor a political program. It is the conjunction of a set of historical strategies (syndicalism) and a refusal of any rigid identities and normative politics.
- While it is not a program, it should be clear already that Queer Syndicalism is abolitionist, feminist, anti-authoritarian and in general aims at the integration of the largest array possible of working class struggles towards the abolition of capitalism.
- Finally, Queer Syndicalism is only abstract insofar as it can only take form in our political struggles. It is up to all of us to make something out of it, redefine it, forget it or embrace it.
Anti-authoritarian thoughts and post-identity politics. Original texts, translations and archives in French, English and Spanish. @riots_blog