thanks to @iridaniotter@hexbear.net for telling me abt this essay! its been posted on HB before, but not in a while.

read feminist theory you libs! uphold TC69 thought!

  • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    Queer people do not carry out their social existence by leeching off the produced labor of the "prole" equivalent here (women), unlike actual lumpenproletariat. They are fundamentally more 'revolutionary' than the lumpenproletariat because no such option is available, beyond simply adopting the social roles of a man. Most queer people choose to live in entirely different novel family configurations which often still take on the labor of child rearing and sometimes even birth, which shows the fundamental difference between queer people and some sort of "gender lumpenproletariat" which would somehow leech off of women giving childbirth (they would have to be literal baby snatchers, arguably)

    • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
      ·
      18 hours ago

      My understanding of reproductive labor is limited, but it isn't just birth and childrearing, it's also stuff like housekeeping which enables wage laborers to work. Both expansion and maintenance of labor. Although queer people engage in that sort of thing (we all do to some extent) more than lumpen are economically productive, the reason I made the comparison is numbers. Lumpen are only a small fraction of society and capitalism tends to maintain a constant reserve army of labor, in contrast to the ever-increasing share of proletarians. Artisans would have been a less loaded example, a small class of laborers that doesn't have much power (except that nobody thinks artisans will lead the revolution). My problem is the authors don't really explain why the fraction of queer people might expand until they are doing enough reproductive labor to take the reins. They just handwave "gender's process of decay".