For the Old Mole Variety Hour 15 June 2015
This past weekend Portland Pride Northwest coordinated a series of events--including the trans and dyke marches, the pride parade, a festival at waterfront park, and more.
As KBOO listeners probably know, pride celebrations usually occur in June in commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall riots, when police raided the Stonewall bar in New York, and the patrons, especially drag queens of color, fought back. Clashes between police and the queer community continued for several days, and the incident is considered a turning point in the modern gay movement. Marches were held the next June in New York and San Francisco, and Pride Parades and events now occur around the world.
As KBOO listeners probably also know, there's been a good deal of criticism within queer and radical communities of the ways that, as with other movements of the 1960s and 70s, the call for liberation shifted over the years to a call for rights, and marches became parades. Pride northwest has a long list of corporate sponsors.
As Charlie Hinton puts it on dissidentvoice.org,
The idea behind gay liberation is that no one is free until all are free. The politics of liberation advocate building a united movement to overcome all forms of discrimination and oppression, if LGBT people are someday to be truly free. . . .
The idea behind gay rights is more limited -- build a movement that addresses strictly gay issues -- housing and job discrimination, military, marriage/partnership, etc. and unite solely on the basis that we’re gay.
This might also be thought as the difference between wanting a place in the existing system, and wanting to change the system.
But also last week as part of Pride festivities, the Hollywood theatre showed the 2014 British film Pride, a drama inspired by the events surrounding the 1984-85 miners strike in the UK and the support that lesbian and gay activists provided to the striking miners. The film is available on DVD at the Multnomah County Library, and well worth seeing if you haven't yet had the chance.
As Ragina Johnson notes on SocialistWorker.org, the film holds important lessons for activists today about "how solidarity and alliances across oppressed groups can be built actively and deliberatively."
Other viewers have described it with terms like "lovely," "brilliantly entertaining," "joyous, well-researched, and liberating," and similar superlatives. Detractors have pointed to some broadly drawn characters and easy culture-clash comedy, and some (potentially trivializing) narrative clichés.
Arguably, it also underplays the significance of the police violence against the miners (though we see some archival footage at the start), and omits other important historical context.
For instance, in the 70s, the Labour government had split the union by introducing 'Area Incentive Schemes' alongside the structure of national pay bargaining and against national ballots, so that wages and conditions were to be decided locally. Thus when the Thatcher government declared in 1984 it was going to close 20 mines it considered insufficiently profitable, at the cost of 20,000 jobs, some miners in areas, including Northern Wales who considered themselves less at risk of losing their jobs, continued working rather than supporting the strike. That's why the villagers in the film's south Wales town comment on their hatred for the northern Welsh.
In addition, it may not be entirely clear to all viewers how historically significant the strike was. Like Ronald Reagan's breaking of the air traffic controller's strike in the US, Thatcher's breaking of the miner's strike in the UK marked a turning point in the defeat of traditional organized labor unions.
Despite its flaws, some of us are perhaps suckers for the soundtrack of 80s dance club tunes and traditional workers anthems.
Ray Goodspeed, writing in LeftUnity about his experience in the original events, comments of the film that
The most obvious change is that the antagonism towards us in [the Welsh Mining town of] Dulais has been exaggerated for dramatic effect. The welcome we received was actually even better than in the film, which also downplays the extent to which the original members were actively involved in the organised left, and reduces the numbers of those involved to tell a manageable story. Most of the important things portrayed are true, however, and Pride stays true to the spirit of a wonderful episode of British labour history.
Excluding the political affiliations and savvy of the activists involved is the central ground of critique in the scathing review of the film on the World Socialist Web Site, which faults it for allying itself with gay identity politics rather than worker's class politics.
And indeed, the film downplays the extent to which the relation between the groups was intersectional, emphasizing instead the analogies in their shared experiences of vilification and oppression by press, public, and police.
Moreover, in the current era of climate chaos, the demand to keep digging coal has a painful edge. In practice, the choice was not between using coal and using less damaging sources of energy, since after the strike the UK turned to importing its coal. In that sense, the film points toward the need for something more.
The rearguard action to hold on to the benefits of the Keynesian-Fordist bargain of the postwar years failed in the face of the triumph of neoliberalism marked by the defeat of the longest miner's strike in UK history.
As Bill's guest today, Leo Panitch, commented in The Guardian last year,
‘Responsible capitalism’ is nonsense – the left must offer a real alternative
Merely blaming Thatcher free-market rhetoric and sheer force of will for the undoing of the Keynesian welfare state ignores the deep crisis it was already in by the time she came along. As the main parties of the left responded to the growing contradictions between capitalist markets and social reforms by trying to cling to the chimera of a responsible capitalism, neoliberalism triumphed everywhere. The misguided attempt to cling to a romanticised image of a stable responsible capitalism in the face of the rise of neoliberalism was recognised as a failure by New Labour. But by embracing so completely a financialised global capitalism centred in the City of London, it further contributed to the growth of this chaotic and increasingly irrational system – as 2008 proved.
But the grassroots connections that grew up in the face of the fragmentation of traditional trade unionism prefigure the kind of organizing that we need more of for the future. Many activists and theorists are at work on plans for the future, and many visionaries are trying to help us think beyond capitalism.
Ursula Le Guin, in a speech last year at the National Book Awards, said,
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.
all organizing is science fiction. When we talk about a world without prisons; a world without police violence; a world where everyone has food, clothing, shelter, quality education; a world free of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism; we are talking about a world that doesn’t currently exist. But collectively dreaming up one that does means we can begin building it into existence.
[But visionary fiction (she continues, alluding to Le Guin's comments)] allows us to imagine possibilities outside of what exists today. The only way we know we can challenge the divine right of kings is by being able to imagine a world where kings no longer rule us—or do not even exist.
Tonight at 7pm at The Independent Publishing Resource Center, 1001 SE Division, will be the Portland book release with readings by coeditor Imarisha and contributors Gabriel Teodros and David F Walker.
A listener calls attention to
another film that came out last year called 'Still the Enemy Within,' This film is a documentary from a rank and file miners perspective. I did a review of it for socialistworker.org.
http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/28/the-great-strikes-long -shadow
Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJF67Ma9VRs
The struggle for justice still carries on, particularly the demands for and official inquiry into the police violence at Orgreave- one of the most explosive episodes in UK labour history
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/12/andy-burnham -calls-for-hillsborough-style- inquiry-into-battle-of- orgreave
