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There is tons of worker right protests/riots, it as a thing long before pride, and untilcapitalist culture turned pried from riot to business friendly music festival. The worker protest were way more popular. I know that US are an outlier, but I am sure that even American do protest.
Most "Minority rights" aren't specific rights for minority but basic rights for everyone. If you can't dress as you like or be rejected for a job due to ryour private life it impacts more than just LGBTQ+
The Nazis came after the communists and trade unionists before they came for the Jews. At least according to the original version of "first they came".
There's a specific order to how rights can be established. Workers' rights are dismantled before minority rights, and minority rights are to be protected before workers' rights can be protected.
Hey go be pro-labor without trivializing gay rights. There is absolutely no call for that bullshit.
Labor Day.
As for pride, it's because they were (still are) stigmatized, shoved into the closet, persecuted, beat up, and even killed. It's a moment for them to say we're here and we belong. Maybe we'll get to the day when no one cares.
As for the rest of the list, I think you're vastly overestimating how much political time (as in Congress and similar state) this gets. It's a parade, it's not trying to write new legislation.
They took International Workers' Day (May Day) away from us and gave us red hot dogs and Labor Day that isn't a paid holiday and most people don't get off work.
All I see out there are gay rights, trans rights, whatever parades.
And people actually show up. like wth. given that it's 5% population max.
Because the playbook to destroy democracies has already been written. You don't destroy a democratic nation by attacking it, you destroy it by getting it to attack itself.
Fascist know that if they can just turn the majority against a specific minority, then they have a foot in the door. You can't uninvite the vampire from your home, once you let them have their way with the minority, the rules have changed, and those rules will eventually be changed for everyone.
If you protect the neediest minority group that protection extends to everyone. If we ignore that need, then it's only a matter of time before everyone needs that protection.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't have workers rights parades. I'm saying that gay rights and trans rights are workers rights parades, because they are our fellow workers. I think a lot of modern leftist groups think of minority rights as vestigial or as a distraction. When in reality every trans rights parade should be protected by a sea of factory workers willing to stomp on some fascist for attacking the solidarity or the working class.
I'm saying that gay rights and trans rights are workers rights parades, because they are our fellow workers.
Exactly. LGBTQ+ folks are the current target for the authoritarians and fascists, but all of us non-billionaires are on the target list.
We will all be abused, beaten, broken and sometimes murdered, unless we push the fascists back into their holes.
We must stand together.
Hell yeah. When the right asks you which group's rights you want to sacrifice to save your own rights, you tell them to eat shit. They're going to come for your rights too, especially if they succeed in taking away those other people's rights. There is no sufficiently small in group for conservatism.
Disagree that it’s “5% of the population max” — I’ve seen estimates that around 10% of the population are lgbtq… but even assuming it’s 5%, in a country of 340 mil, that comes out to 17 million people. And a bunch of people at pride are straight, so it’s no wonder why they draw in such huge numbers each year.
Regardless… what does gay pride have to do with workers rights? Why does that make you mad — they’re not preventing anyone else from organizing? And from my experience, lgbtq folks are very vocal about workers rights specifically (given the discrimination they face in the workplace for being gay/trans/etc)
And unlike some other movements, there is a very rooted history of public demonstration by the gay/trans community given laws specifically preventing them from gathering in public. In many ways, pride parades represent gay/trans people reaffirming their rights to literally just be in public together without being arrested.
So yeah… I get that there should be more public demonstrations — I’m all for that. But leave gay/trans rights alone please lol
I feel like ever since the term shifted from "gay liberation" to "gay pride" it has hindered the movement in a lot of ways. Liberation tells you what this is about, pride tells you... You're proud? Good for you. Lots of people are proud, but not all people need liberation (or, at least, not everyone thinks they need it).
I vote we go back to calling it Liberation, and instead of bickering over why people are at the queer event and not a workers event, we start organizing monthly or bimonthly events, a queer/LGBT liberation event, a women's liberation event, a worker's liberation event, Hispanic Liberation event... Let's pepper the calendar with parties and parades and protests while drilling into people's minds that we are all deserving of respect, autonomy, and liberation.
Not sure how well I said all that. I'm about 5 boozy horchatas in, and I hate to do the "as a gay man" thing, but I feel like I should mention I am, in fact, a gay, and I quite enjoy pride and what it stands for
I don't think they're angry at pride parades, they're angry that there's no similar parades/demonstrations for workers rights, and using pride parade as an example to be emulated...
Op:
And people actually show up. like wth. given that it's 5% population max.
Their view of pride parades sounds pretty negative to me.
OP compares it to 80% of the population being workers, yet no-one is showing up for those rallys. I guess OP fails to see why workers do not feel the same urgency to attend rallys that lgbtq people do.
I see where OP is coming from. Workers are being treated increasingly worse, but there seems to be no collective response so far. Sure, workers are not being discriminated against and murdered (yet), but if that's the standard for protests, it's unreasonably high.
Okay, it's a really complicated issue but you've got three big things that are all kind of working together here:
Political capture: the US' first past the post electoral system basically guarantees that there's going to only be two main parties. They were always vulnerable to capture by the wealthy, but the Citizens United decision functionally guaranteed their capture by the groups with the deepest pockets. The democrats themselves are shit scared of any serious left policy because they know it'll scare off their big donors, and despite the fact that fundraising has not directly translated into winning for them, they're terrified that they're going to lose the support of the wealthiest and that'll guarantee election losses. At least, that's the optimistic interpretation.
Cold war reaction: the US didn't just have one red scare, we've had two or three spread out over several decades. There was a huge cultural reaction against communism after WWII, and being an open communist during the Cold war would just get your ass disappeared (according to my now dead boomer dad, though I've seen no evidence to support it), beaten up or killed by locals, or shunned. A lot of folks were terrified of espousing left policies because they could easily be suspected of or painted as communist. While the cold war is passing out of living memory, the chill that it left on American leftism for the better part of 100 years is hard to overstate.
Our intelligence agencies have consistently worked across all levels of government (local, state, federal) to harass, discredit, and sometimes kill left leadership and organizations. The CIA itself ran a very successful multi-decade campaign of overthrowing peaceful, democratically elected left-wing governments across the global south by directly sponsoring, aiding, and training right wing reactionary movements, and there's not really any evidence that they stopped. There's no reason to think that they're not still working hard today to prevent any serious left movement.
Feel free to organize one.
Then you will have insight into why there are few. Or you will kick off a whole thing.
Organizing things is hard. I am sure there are lots of reasons.
“Why isn’t someone doing it for me already? You all suck.”
—OP
We’ve been convinced to slap fight about identity politics, many times necessarily so because unfair pressure is being applied via abuse by those in power
This results in blocking any dialogues about class consciousness
At the same time there is propaganda that goes against class consciousness: labor unions have been utterly destroyed both literally and from an optics standpoint (many Americans distrust the concept), consumerism runs deep in our blood to push the idea that we need more capital and glorify excessive “baller” lifestyles, poor is pushed to be seen as a moral failing, etc
A couple reasons:
There are other reasons too, and none of them are 'good' reasons, but they are all realities.
Have you ever tried getting multiple leftists to agree to the time of day let alone actual concrete, feasible policy and a plan for implementing and enforcing it? More pertinent, have you ever tried getting multiple workers from different industries to agree to anything either?
The right is looking for the stinkiest turd and don't care who gets nominated as long as they stink. The left is looking for a unicorn and will not compromise for a horse that will eventually grow a horn.
God forbid the left nominates candidates that do things one step at a time but are guaranteed success. Everything needs to be done correctly now.
Oh, maybe you missed it but it's because there's an asshole in office.
You ask a lot of legitimate questions there, causes that you and I could come to an agreement over. I would erase the starting point though. Pride movements and workers movements might both look like similar demonstrations. They are borne out of very different motivations. People might look down on manual laborers but you wouldn't have to fear for your safety in certain parts of your city for being one. LGBTQ+ folks can't say the same. Pride movements bring awareness that we have discriminated or are still discriminating against whole swaths of the population - mostly for silly reasons. That's different from a disagreement about how exploitative capitalism should be permitted to be.
Another negative connotation is that this "why are there LGBTQ+ pride parades but not ...?" is the leading question of people who think straight people need to have a pride parade as well. Like you couldn't live a heteronormative life every day without fear of retribution. And I'm hoping that you don't think along those lines and therefore would not want to be this close to that argumentative train of thought.
Have you ever noticed when you make a point there always someone saying well what about x, y and z? Or pointing out that something they personally relate to wasn’t directly called out so they’re being excluded? A lot of people would see something focused on workers rights/labor and go off on some tangent about how they’re unemployed so they’re being discriminated against or how it’s more important that we focus on trans issues or some other hot button identity politics issue and labor is just a distraction/you're purposefully trying to distract from other movements or the group that only wants to destroy because they don’t believe what we have is worth saving (these types are overwhelmingly abelist and don’t realize how much disabled people would suffer and die if we just threw the whole system out) we don’t have a labor focused movement because there’s so many voices that want center stage for their pet interests and they understand a large unifying movement that allows people they see as less morally righteous on the door is a threat to them and their imagined moral superiority
I agree, I think it’s a strategy to separate the left. We should have a workers movement because it will literally unite everyone that is not a 1 percenter
Your insight is incredibly important.