MIDDLESBORO, KY, April 7—Members of Progressive Labor Party worked with the Redneck Coalition in organizing an antisexist rally in response to Senate Bill 150 that attacks trans youth. The small but mighty contingent of PL’ers distributed food and CHALLENGE, and spoke of how transgender workers’ struggle is linked to capitalism. A PLP organizer declared that revolution for communism is the only path for liberation. Communism will provide healthcare for all, while eliminating exploitative and sexist gender roles, enabling all working-class people to participate in the labor activities needed for the new society’s progress.
Capitalists need gender roles to turn workers against each other and divide our class into hostile camps. They rake in massive super profits from paying women less in the labor market, while at the same time often keeping them shackled to the home and limited to forms of reproductive labor. Gender divisions help the bosses organize society to reproduce future generations of cheap labor and maintain their political power over us.
Capitalism divides
Capitalism, not “transphobia,” is to blame for the latest attacks against trans youth. These attacks are a further intensification of divisiveness rooted in a deeply sexist and racist system that thrives on super-exploitation of Black and women workers. This is the same system that prematurely kills hundreds of millions of workers around the world through poverty and a horrifically substandard health care system that is depriving trans workers and youth of gender affirming care. Only a communist system run by the working class can grant us the life affirming care we all desperately need.
Today’s rally was specifically in response to the anti-trans legislation (Senate Bill 150) about to pass in Kentucky. Such a law will give teachers the right to misgender students, require doctors to deny gender-affirming care for working-class youth, and prohibit discussions on topics like sexual orientation, sexually transmitted diseases, and more. Attacking the working class based on gender and sexuality divides our natural unity as working people whose labor is exploited. Gutter sexists can only thrive when the society is built on sexism and treating a section of the population as “less than.”
In response, we are determined to build working-class solidarity in the resistance to fascism, where all workers can unite to smash this racist sexist capitalist system once and for all.
Distributing event flyers around town and publicizing on Facebook resulted in a strong attendance at this event, the first of its kind in this area. “When I saw that this was happening, I had to go because I’d never seen anything like this before around here!” said a new attendee.
The Redneck Coalition is made up of anti-capitalist workers from Appalachia who seek to bring the term “Redneck” back to its radical roots, which comes from a history of multiracial struggles of mine workers against company owners in the mountains. The term has been degraded to a negative term for southern white workers, but its original meaning is antiracist militancy against capitalism! (WVpublic.org, 5/18/2015).
PLP and organizers in the Redneck Coalition demonstrated how the fight against racism and sexism must attack their source in capitalist exploitation. Fascism uses lies to get workers to attack each other to keep workers divided. A PLP speaker noted that “trans people . . . make up a disproportionate share of the homeless and unemployed, because capitalism places profit over human decency and human life.”
Big and Small Fascists
The entire U.S. ruling class is floundering—economically, politically, and militarily—as China rises and the U.S. hegemony is under siege. In the U.S., there are two main camps of what we call the Big Fascists—representing the more powerful bosses like Chase and Citibank, multinational oil companies like ExxonMobil — and the Small Fascists — represented by domestically oriented U.S. capitalists like the Kochs, Mercer, DeVos.
The Small Fascists are reluctant to spend money fighting wars to defend the global U.S. empire. Their agenda includes a racist gutting of social services at home and a retreat from U.S. imperialist alliances and commitments internationally. This faction is making inroads into winning millions of workers to see the Big Fascists as their enemy. Workers correctly understand that many of their lives have worsened under the leadership of Democrats, but they are allowing themselves to be led by outright racist, sexist, nationalist ideas spread by the Small Fascists. This cynical scapegoating has the effect of misleading and confusing people about their common interests against capitalism as a whole.
Reject all shades of fascism
Still, the Big Fascists present the biggest danger for the working class in the U.S. because their liberal, “antiracist,” “antisexist” sounding jargon is pacifying millions by building the illusion that they can create a “nicer capitalism.” In reality they are attempting to win us to patriotically fight and die in the name of U.S. imperialism. We need to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal bosses. They are the leaders in attacks on healthcare, from attacking retired workers health insurance to slashing healthcare budgets to refusing to codify Roe vs. Wade.
The rally ended with a call to reject Republican and Democratic politicians because they represent respectively the open gutter racists like Trump and the slippery, dominant, liberal spokespeople for major financial capitalists like Biden. Both are poisonous! The liberal bosses stoke these culture wars for their own cynical purposes. They want to appear as the saviors so they can lead youth into world war.
Instead, building an antiracist, antisexist, internationalist communist movement is the path forward. Such organizing will create a hopeful vision for the future in an isolated area like rural Kentucky often written off by the rest of the U.S. A trans organizer with the Redneck Coalition declared the need for solidarity, saying, “We must build independent political power by and for the working class. If the fascists, like they would prefer, could ban trans people from even getting food at the grocery store, we must be able to feed them.”
The better world we require is communism, where we will take care of all of each other’s needs. Workers of the world, unite!