Queer Liberation through Socialist Revolution!
Warmest solidarity greetings from Socialist Action/ Ligue pour l"Action Socialiste for Pride 2024. We are happy again to congratulate The No Pride in Policing coalition and allies for organizing. Over the past year the continuing growth of the hard right, both internationally and in "Canada" makes the struggle to defend queer and trans rights ever more urgent.
Attacks on trans rights have grown and intensified. Three provinces passed laws which aim to out trans youth and further repress them. After some initial trans rights gains came the ludicrously named Million march, effectively answered by counter protests. Fortunately, the second instalment of the bigots’ march was a bust. But the struggle for trans rights will be a long one.
Over the past year, attacks on queer people, Muslims, Blacks and Asians have increased again. Emboldened by unconditional support from the right wing yahoos at Queen's Park, and the cave-in by Toronto's 'progressive' mayor on cop funding, the police "Hate Crimes" unit in Toronto concentrates on targeting pro-Palestinian solidarity activists. This includes contrived charges and pre-dawn raids on people at home. To expect the cops to provide "protection" of our legal rights is a vanishing fantasy. Community self-protection is what we need.
Not all the news is bad. The unprecedented rapid growth of the pro-Palestinian global anti-war movement is impressive and encouraging. Queer and trans people are very much involved as we should be. The Palestinian struggle is our struggle!
Still, the homelessness crisis is worsening, with no serious solutions offered by capitalist governments. The private sector has no solution, and no interest in finding one, as Frederick Engels argued when he wrote On the Housing Question in 1872.
Only massive public sector construction will do, as it did in post-war Britain under the first Labour government, and under the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela. Renters are faced with rising, obscenely high rates. Urgently needed is a universal rent freeze, a rent rollback, and rent control. We demand that municipalities and provinces provide safe housing for all the homeless, especially street kids among whom queer and trans youth are heavily over-represented. Lives are at stake.
Health services are crucial. In Ontario privatization has now seen the government encourage private surgery clinics whose 'costs' are way above those of public hospitals. Just like the use of nurses by exploitative agencies. No respect for tax-payers here!
Queer members of SA/LAS participated in organizing the protest in February 2014 against Putin's anti-gay law. Our speaker at the event noted that the early Soviet republic was the first on the planet to decriminalize homosexuality and abortion. Sadly, these gains were lost in the 1930s with the consolidation in power of the privileged, self-serving party-state bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin and his murderous security apparatus, of which Putin is the direct descendant. While acknowledging its repressive past violations against queer people, it is no accident that today revolutionary Cuba leads the way forward among "less developed" countries.
We need to consider what kind of society we want, and what we have. Queer rights will never be secure under capitalism. Divide and rule is the method of the tiny, obscenely rich minority who call the shots in the economy and the state. The huge inequality gap continues to grow. Carbon-fueled climate catastrophe is rapidly accelerating. These disasters cannot be reversed under the system which created them.
In a socialist society, housing, food, education and healthcare will be human rights, as they are today in Cuba, despite very limited resources and the murderous US blockade. Public ownership and workers' control of the commanding heights of the economy are essential for production to serve human needs, not private profit. We invite you to join us in the fight for a better world.