With my pedantic proofreader's hat on here, do you actually mean the Edinburgh AF statement, or do you mean what became the ACG founding statement, the "class struggle anarchist" one that was kind of a rejection of the Edinburgh one?
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i suspect so, and your correction explains why i couldnt find said statement
Is this really your first encounter with the ultra-left? You'll be proper shocked when you hear what anarchist communists think about wars between nations.
I can easily understand 'turn
nation war into class war' - it makes clear sense and I can see how it can work out in practise. How does that work in this case? Beyond saying we dont care about seats on company boards, I dont see how it practically applies in any of the situations that the terf/trans argument raises. [well, I can, but only in a way that anyone else would say 'well, he would say that, wouldnt he?' way, so there's no point.]
See, it would never have occurred to me to criticise the ACG statement for not including "trans women are women" in it, cos that to me does seem like a fairly abstract slogan that's perfectly compatible with defending transphobia in practice. Like, I think the ACG's politics on this could be better but I don't really think that's cos there's anything wrong with the statement itself, more that they need to move beyond just having a statement and incorporate it into their practice a bit more. For instance,
SolFed have been flyering Pride with trans healthcare know your rights stuff - that to me is moving to address actual practical issues, in a way that just saying "trans women are women" isn't.
It is symbolic, absolutely. But symbols are important (as long as they're not a simple substitute for practical action), This is why, I presume, that Solfed twitter feed says, above the post you posted, that they'll be proudly flying the trans solidarity flag. It's akin to the need to say you need to show sensitivity; it's not enough, but it's a good starting point.
We could also get into the whole question of issuing 'statements.' They'll always be a hostage to fortune and I'd think they were generally best avoided unless you want to be absolutely adamant about particular issues. They should be either a symbolic act of solidarity or a general guide to action, imo. And then followed up with examples of that action.
I had actually been thinking about NI in relation to trans stuff as well recently, in particular cos of reading this, which I thought was really decent:
Workers in Northern Ireland - Angry Workers Would you also see that as being fence-sitting acceptance of the status quo?
It's a really good piece of journalism. I am somewhat dubious about the claim that catholics dont really face much discrimination any more, but dont know enough to say its wrong. Some of the maths is dodgy af too (103% of the private economy is apparently based in three sectors) The real issue lies with the final section. At the moment, they can probably get away with saying raising a border poll now would just be a splitting tactic. But it isnt true that such a poll is an entirely ruling class idea. The Irish state is explicitly not raising it, the leadership of the political class of the nationalists aren't even raising it significantly. When it does get raised, its from ordinary folk, frmo below.
The movement for irish unity is definitely not just a ruling class movement. When the (mainly catholic) workers start demanding a poll, arguing its just a bourgeois distraction wont cut it and I suspect they'd start losing their audience (this is, again based on what happened with Militant/SP).
I am very tempted to go on and describe just why I think NI is a good analogy for the questions around trans rights (essentially 'competing' interests among the working-class, where we should be 'on one side' but without saying all the other side are scum), but despite all appearances I really dont want to get into an argument about 'trans rights' per se. It's the obfuscation that really bugs me. If you got nothing to say, ffs, say nothing.
