The Struggle for Collective Liberation
Class, Oppression, and the Politics of Resistance
November 4, 2025
IN THIS EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF Spectre’s panel at the July 2025 Socialism Conference, three committed activists address a key challenge for liberation politics today: standing up for Black and Brown people, immigrants, and trans folks as essential to a movement of working-class resistance. The call has been heard in some quarters for people on the Left to downplay solidarity with those in oppressed groups in order to simply express broad economic demands. Eric Maroney, Donna Murch, and Jesse Sharkey contend that such a strategy weakens the resistance—it doesn’t build it. Our task, they argue, is to uphold the labor movement’s old slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” so that we forge the practical unity and solidarity necessary to wield our power.
Eric Maroney
My name is Eric Maroney, and I am a transgender man. I want to begin by thanking Spectre for the invitation to participate in this session and to acknowledge Spectre’s ongoing engagement with queer and trans issues—they may have one of the queerest editorial boards on the Left, and that bears out in their commitment to examining queer and trans politics, positioning trans lives not as ancillary to a left politics but central to it.
Trans politics are not a question of left morality; leftists are not performing solidarity or simply acting as a “tribune of the oppressed” when standing with trans people. Rather, responding to the reactionary attacks on queer and trans people is foundational to the kind of liberatory politics that can challenge Trump’s America-First authoritarianism. There is no resistance without trans people, in part because the trans experience brings so many of capitalism’s contradictions to light.
To illustrate the centrality of a queer/trans politics to any kind of meaningful resistance, I want to introduce three themes. First, trans people and state surveillance. Second, the attack on public goods or social programs and, relatedly, the attack on reproduction including what Marxist-feminists describe as social reproduction. Finally, I want to highlight the importance of challenging the class-reductionist “left” but also moving beyond the liberal human rights paradigm of trans inclusion.
The images of militarized ICE raids coming out of places like LA and elsewhere, the kidnapping off the streets of international students by masked agents, and the consolidation of identification and biometric markers in federal databases managed by Trump loyalist Peter Thiel’s company, Palantir, (Thiel is a gay man) conjures, and not metaphorically, Foucault’s panopticon. Each day brings news of a unique horror, illustrating the ways that state surveillance enables mass incarceration, deportation, and violence.
From the surveillance of Palestine solidarity activists to the deportation of US nationals and asylum holders or really any migrant to a Salvadorian super prison, to the brutal raids and mass detention of day laborers, it is evident that the empowerment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will have far-reaching implications for everyone. This rapidly developing surveillance apparatus already threatens civil liberties.
Of course, the surveillance apparatus is not new. We all know about McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, the Patriot Act, as well as the increased surveillance and repression of Palestine solidarity activists under the Biden administration.1COINTELPRO refers to the “Counter Intelligence Program” launched by the FBI in 1956 to infiltrate and undermine left groups. During the 1960s, the program focused particularly on the Black Panther Party and included arrests, imprisonment, and even assassinations of Panther leaders.
But the rapidly developing technology (particularly artificial intelligence), combined with the reactionary authoritarianism of the fully MAGA-tized Republican Party, have brought this surveillance to new heights.
Trans people know something about this. Historically, trans people have been granted civic personhood (through a politics of liberal inclusion) and have been granted or denied access to transition-related care only after submitting to extremely invasive state and medical surveillance.
In what has become the dominant model of transness (born in the wrong body and in need of medical correction), trans people’s very existence has required that we document histories of gender incongruencies or accept a narrative of pathologized gender dysphoria in order to gain access to hormones and gender-affirming surgery. In turn, trans people must then provide documentation of intimate medical procedures to obtain identification that appropriately matches our gender expression, handing over biometric and medical data to the state.
This kind of coerced assimilation asks the trans body to bend into its cis-gender correlation in exchange for a limited and precarious promise of inclusion. In the present authoritarian moment, this same data is used to identify trans people, deny our access to care and, in some cases, to employment. The military ban is one example of this, but not the only one. Recently, the Eleventh Circuit Court ruled that a trans teacher in the state of Florida could be barred from using female pronouns and titles.
Such state surveillance is never about safety. It is about categorizing and regulating bodies. An authoritarian state is particularly vested in categorizing and containing bodies of those who “don’t belong” or who “conditionally belong.” This is true of immigrants, this is true of Black and Brown people, this is true of poor people, and this is true of trans people. Toby Beauchamp writes about the relationship between state surveillance, trans bodies, and national security following 9/11 and the passage of the Real ID Act in 2003 (just being implemented now).
Beauchamp writes, “The monitoring of transgender and gender-nonconforming populations is inextricable from questions of national security and regulatory practices of the state, and state surveillance policies that may at first seem unrelated to transgender people are in fact deeply rooted in the maintenance and enforcement of normatively gendered bodies, behaviors, and identities.”2See Toby Beauchamp, Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). Paisley Currah writes similarly about state investment in the identification and the regulation of nonnormative bodies.
Immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, and trans people are not coincidental allies. We are surveilled using the same technologies and for similar purposes.
My point here is that there is much to gain by considering the present increase in state surveillance, including the increasingly violent practices of DHS and ICE, through a transgender experience. Immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, and trans people are not coincidental allies. We are surveilled using the same technologies and for similar purposes.
The attack on gender, or what has become known as anti-gender politics, is absolutely an attack on the last vestiges of the welfare state. Notice that many of the attacks on queer and trans people take place at sites of social reproduction, specifically schools and hospitals. Disinvestment and deregulation of these spaces have created real dissatisfaction with public goods and services.
However, instead of funding these crucial goods, the Right displaces very real grievances about neoliberalism onto the nonnormative gendered body. It’s not that schools are underfunded, but rather that woke teachers are preying upon vulnerable adolescents, encouraging them to hate America and question their gender. It’s not that hospitals are under-resourced or that resources are misappropriated, but rather that undeserving elites are accessing wasteful and unnecessary gender-affirming care while real Americans cannot afford an ambulance ride.
I find it notable, too, that these sites of public goods have also been sites of labor unrest and increased levels of worker combativity. The wave of wildcat education strikes that swept red states in 2018, as well as impressive gains won by more militant education unions in places like Chicago and Los Angeles, and in New Jersey at Rutgers University, indicate an increased level of worker confidence in the education sector.
Likewise, strike activity and advocacy among healthcare workers during the Covid–19 surges and the work of National Nurses United are part of a larger trend of worker combativity in the healthcare sector. In fact, in the last five years, over one hundred nursing strikes have taken place. Importantly, these workers are at the frontlines of resisting the anti-trans attacks from educators, refusing anti-queer mandates to physicians speaking out against care bans. But these sometimes-isolated responses have yet to produce a generalized impact on the anti-Trump resistance.
My point here is that the attack on trans people at these sites of public social goods is, yes, about denying trans people autonomy and, yes, about a revanchist culture war, but it is also about generating consent for the continual disinvestment in social welfare and the disciplining of workers in these sectors. It is telling that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which guts funding to Medicaid, also removes Medicaid coverage for any kind of transition-related care for both adults and minors.
Marxist-feminists have pointed to the ways that the ruling class has sought to solve the crisis of capitalism and stabilize profitability through attacks on social reproduction. For those unfamiliar with the term, social reproduction refers to the often unpaid and almost always underpaid labor that goes into reproducing the working class.
This includes things like care for children and the elderly, healthcare, education, and so on. To borrow a phrase from Spectre editor Tithi Bhattacharya, “social reproduction theory asks the question if workers produce the value of society, who then produces the worker?”
The fall of the Keynesian state, the Great Recession of 2008, Covid–19 shutdowns, and resulting waves of inflation have each, in unique ways, led to a further destabilization of profit. One way the ruling class seeks to restore that profitability is through demanding concessions from workers, the practice of extracting more labor in return for fewer wages, but this strategy can only be applied so far without restructuring global supply chains (think NAFTA), and this is particularly true in an inflationary moment when wages have already lost significant value.
The other method of restoring profitability is through attacks on social provisioning. The employer class maintains a vested interest in how social reproduction is managed, favoring a weakened welfare state that increasingly offloads the work of social reproduction onto the family, thus increasing profitability while also creating a more compliant workforce.
Here, too, we see retrenchment of traditionalist gender policies and a foregrounding of biological essentialism to shore up support for the nuclear family as a site of reproductive labor. It goes without saying that women and feminized people (which I would argue includes anyone of nonnormative gender expression) perform the lion’s share of that work.
This is where we see a confluence of policies regulating the bodies of these social reproductive laborers, including increasingly severe restrictions and outright bans on abortion, bans on nonnormative gender expression (drag bans), and bans on transition-related care, for example.
Following from these first two observations about the entanglement of the nonnormatively gendered body, state surveillance, and the defunding and disciplining of workers at sites of social reproduction, it becomes clear that the class reductionist crowd is amiss. Their claim that identity politics fragments working-class solidarity by taking up too much space in labor movements and elsewhere is not only factually inaccurate, but it also hampers our material understanding of the crises and the not-yet-fascist but fascistic MAGA response.
Overcoming this working-class fragmentation requires that the Left seriously address the identity-based struggles of marginalized people, including those of trans people. It’s telling that in their “opposition” to Trump’s economic bill, no Democrat (to my knowledge) has offered a criticism of the bill’s anti-trans healthcare provision.
And it’s not just the Democrats who are guilty of being weak-kneed. Some figures on the left have also distanced themselves from trans politics, flirting with biological essentialism, and some even downright embracing it. See Holly Lewis’s sharp-witted takedown of left-wing historian John Rees in Spectre on this.3Holly Lewis, “Against Bad Arguments for Bad Things: A Reply to John Rees,” Spectre (online), May 6, 2025.
I want to close by acknowledging that this is a difficult moment, a deeply sad moment. I often find myself sitting with a kind of hollow in my chest—something about to rupture, come undone. But this is also a moment in which a careful balance of sobriety and cautious hope can ground our organizing efforts. Indeed, we cannot lower our sights or turn away from the pursuit of genuine liberation.
As poet and scholar Kay Gabriel puts it, “Where the crises of the present seem to foreshorten the future, and force us to settle for something, so to speak, ‘less than a nightmare,’ our strength is our ability to conceive of demands equal to our ambition. Their common object must be nothing other than a life worth living for everyone.”
Donna Murch
I am going to talk about three themes. The first I want to address is the record of the leadership of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) over the past seven or eight years. One of the challenges facing the leadership has been addressing real material, social differences in the context of common struggles.
In both the Rutgers University local of the AAUP–AFP (American Federation of Teachers) and in the national AAUP, we must understand how capitalism’s material reality shapes, in the United States and around the world, social differences and identities. Class politics needs to grapple with forms of difference, in particular race, gender, and gender identity. Even in higher education struggles, tensions emerge not only along lines of job categories, but also along those of social difference and oppression.
The labor movement must take an explicit principled position against white supremacy at home. This includes foregrounding the importance of anti-imperialist struggles.
The second theme, which is a corollary to the first, is that the labor movement must take an explicit principled position against white supremacy at home. This includes foregrounding the importance of anti-imperialist struggles and, in particular, stopping US-funded genocide and war in the Middle East. Unfortunately, some parts of the labor movement defend the idea that it’s better not to address this at all. However, I think that in the United States, the genocide must become central to how we must organize and mobilize.
My third point is that we need to learn from the Global South’s left, particularly in Latin America, and their antifascist and anti-authoritarian struggles and histories. I think that in the Global South we can see the vibrancy and the kinds of fights that people have gone through, and that we should broaden our lens about what kind of history we look to in order to understand fascism and authoritarianism.
On my first theme—the difficulty of wedding together common struggles and attention to material differences—let me talk about the revival of the Rutgers local of the AAUP–AFT as a case study.
When I came to Rutgers in 2004, the local was led by a white male senior professor. It was a service union that had been unable to deliver cost-of-living raises for all faculty for more than eight years, despite having won them in previous contracts. For tenure-track faculty, cost-of-living raises came twice a year. But contingent faculty, who had a separate contract, were largely excluded from these raises.
So, a coalition between tenure-track and contingent faculty needed to be built. Even before the 2008 economic crisis, some key activists—in particular Deepa Kumar, a communications professor who had experience on the revolutionary socialist left—began organizing to transform the local. After the 2008 crisis, the older leadership proved unable to win union contracts that had any major benefits and wage increases. They went along with New Jersey’s governor at the time, Chris Christie, when he refused to grant contractual wage increases for two successive years.
The opposition was able to step into the breach created by the old leadership’s failures and put forward a different vision. Kumar and her supporters explicitly focused on issues of race and gender and their role in dividing the faculty, making these issues central to what a union does. The dissidents’ vision was antithetical to the older generation of leadership, which was committed to a technocratic, service-based model of unionism.
That old model wasn’t fighting for good contracts or even explaining what the union was doing. For instance, one former union president was in my own department of History. He and the department union representatives would only provide members with complicated summaries of what union grievances had been filed. These were always filled with acronyms and only partial explanations of the issues at stake. Not surprisingly, these were hard to understand and engage with. This allowed a relatively privileged sector of the workforce to keep control of the union.
The opposition’s strategy focused on building a new leadership recruited from all of the different job categories. In the years before Trump was elected the first time, Kumar and others began to recruit new leaders, including myself, before winning leadership after Trump took office. The new leadership chose a new logo for the local—a Black Power fist with a red pencil—to send a message that things had changed.
We also adopted the slogan of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), “our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.” We were deeply influenced by the vision of the CTU and the radical teachers movements that we’ve seen over the past decade-and-a-half.
One of the new local’s first campaigns was in response to Trump’s Muslim ban. We made this antifascist resistance and antiracist organizing part of our union struggle. As a result, a lot of Rutgers faculty became active and started to see the union as their political home. We still see plenty of unions, including in higher education, with conservative, non-representative leadership that do not understand the importance of race and gender.
Today, we are facing a terrible political situation in the US, but it also presents enormous opportunities. The liberal response is to focus solely on narrow, bread-and-butter issues. For the Left, we understand that we must confront the fragmentation of faculty and staff into highly unequal job categories—which are often racialized and gendered. These issues must be central to our organizing.
This is particularly important at Rutgers. About 75 percent of the workforce is contingent. They’re the majority, and their issues need to be foregrounded. We cannot ignore the disparities between tenured, contingent fulltime, and adjunct faculty. These disparities were at the center of our last, successful contract fight and strike.
However, this is not enough. We need to address larger questions of difference and international politics. The genocide in Palestine has produced a very profound social movement inside the US, especially on university campuses with the wave of encampments at schools. The Right targeted those as an opportunity to mobilize their forces against universities in a campaign to transform higher education as a whole and reverse the gains we have won.
There is a longstanding theory on the right that the university is not teaching our real history. They point to how the university was transformed in the 1960s and ’70s, with the establishment of Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and various other interdisciplinary studies. They know these programs were part of fights to desegregate society as a whole and the academic workforce in particular.
One of the most frightening things is the fact that it’s not just the Republican Party, the far right, and the oligarchs who hate the university as it currently exists. Many Democrats and liberals agree with them. Some have joined the Right’s attack. We need to take both head on.
In the national AFT, I was involved in founding a committee that is trying to organize international solidarity. We are trying to also take on the attacks on interdisciplinary studies, especially Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and Queer Studies—programs that came about because of social movements. But we are encountering a real tendency in the national AFT to understand union organizing in very narrow ways. If we are going to build an effective resistance in higher education, we must overcome that tendency.
At Rutgers we have been able to build our strength not by ignoring divisions but by organizing to address them. Even in the midst of this assault, we have been able to build strength at Rutgers. We are building our local by organizing—training people how to have organizing conversations and how to identify and talk to leaders in their departments—and finding the issues that activate our membership.
One example of this in our local and nationally is work we have done around Palestine. The national AFT leadership has been historically strongly Zionist. Even in the midst of the genocide, AFT leaders do not want to alienate powerful people in government who support the state of Israel.
We’ve started to challenge this by, for example, organizing in support of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) in the American Historical Association (AHA). At a recent business meeting, we were able to pass a pro-BDS resolution by a vote of almost five to one. Then, the AHA leadership decided not to send the resolution to the membership.
This fight is crucial, and it is not happening only in professional organizations but across higher education. Only through this and other fights against attacks the Right uses to divide us can we prevail.
Jesse Sharkey
I’ve been lucky to be the Chicago Teachers Union coordinator for Mayday Strong, which began as a coalition attempting to organize a series of demonstrations across the country on May 1. We had several hundred thousand people participate in those at over fourteen hundred locations.
While I will have more to say about that, I want to argue that we are seeing an authoritarian breakthrough in this country but not yet an authoritarian or fascist consolidation. What we need in order to prevent a consolidation from happening is a broad-based working-class front.
Specifically, such a front could help organize a general strike that can stop Trump and stop an authoritarian consolidation. This would be a political strike. At the moment, our forces are united around the goal of a political strike; but we have yet to develop a strategy to organize a general strike. We do, however, have things to say that will move towards that strategy.
First, we believe we have to understand the working-class movement as more than just labor unions. Most workers aren’t in unions. There are working-class people who are part of an immigrant rights group or movement. They may belong to a community organization or various kinds of advocacy groups. It is important to be inclusive when we talk about a working-class fightback.
Second, solidarity has to be central. We need the sort of organizing that can fight back against the attacks on all sections of our class, be they undocumented immigrants, be they trans people, be they federal workers, or others. And we know the courts are not going to be useful for us. The same goes for electoral politics, where waiting for the midterms is a terrible strategy. Unfortunately, that’s actually the strategy being pursued by people on our side who, in some ways, have control of the biggest levers, in particular funding for organizing.
Eric talked about what I would also call “the Big Ugly Bill,” for lack of a better term. It features massive cuts in Medicaid and nutrition in the form of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits—in order to pay for other things, including $46 billion for border wall construction, $45 billion for immigrant detention facilities, and another $30 billion for ICE staffing. The bill will also terminate the energy tax credits and fund an extension of tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy. And by the way, in doing so, it will add $3.4 trillion to the federal budget deficit.
What are the implications of this bill passing? I will focus on two things. First, the bill means real austerity. A number of programs in many communities depend on federal government dollars. Think, for example, about safety-net hospitals or nursing homes or home care facilities in rural areas. Cuts of 1 percent or 2 percent for those kinds of facilities mean they’re likely to close, and some have already been closing across this country.
We are going to see the loss of healthcare services in cities and other areas of high poverty, where providing healthcare is the least profitable. It is in these areas where our class has some organized forces. Healthcare is a well-organized industry in a lot of places. These communities are already engaged in ongoing fights to defend these services.
Second, the passage of the “Big Ugly Bill” makes the passage of the 2025 education bill likely. This will make into law all the cuts that have been initiated by the federal Department of Education. The official response of the labor movement has been to challenge these moves in court. None of the dozens of lawsuits against Trump’s cuts are going to work. They will fail when the Republican-dominated Congress passes the bill, and Trump signs it into law.
The alternative is the new social resistance we’ve seen emerge in the last few months. There have been a number of really inspiring and important mass demonstrations that have been organized online across the US, starting with the 50501 movement rallies. They were followed by even larger actions on April 5, with the “hands-off” protests. There have been a couple thousand actions organized by Indivisible, MoveOn, Public Citizen, the ACLU, and similar organizations.
While these organizations can mobilize large numbers for protests, they don’t have the social power we need to stop Trump. These are not predominantly working-class organizations. They are dominated by middle-class, professional people. They turned out millions of people on the broadest possible politics. The slogan was “hands off.” Hands off what? You could fill it in. I imagine that slogan allowed them to talk about Trump’s attacks as being illegal, violating democratic norms, and violating legal processes.
But what they didn’t do was make a series of difficult arguments about, for example, Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants. Nor did they take up the question of defending DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), which is impacting civil rights. They did not take up the question of defending trans people or the serious questions about Trump’s attacks on academic freedom at Harvard and elsewhere.
What we’ve tried to do in the Chicago Teachers Union is build a movement rooted among working people that argues that “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
What we need, and what we’ve tried to do in the Chicago Teachers Union, is to build a movement rooted among working people that argues that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Solidarity is still a basic watchword for the organizing we have to do. And so, we’re talking about building a united working-class response that understands that Trump’s program isn’t about violating legal process, but that his austerity program, his cuts, are very much in service of a billionaire agenda of maximizing profit.
This program, which has ruling-class support, will not be defeated with a milquetoast legalistic strategy—the courts have been completely ineffective. The media have gone along with big capital. The tech firms, for example, have gotten on board with Trump. Those forces won’t stop him.
We have to talk about a full-court press against the billionaires and the defense of immigrants. Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants are actually unpopular. The Republicans and mainstream Democrats can’t see that. They focus on polling that says 80 percent of people in this country support deporting immigrants that have broken the law. That’s true.
But what isn’t true is that people support the deportation of people they know, who they go to church with, who they work with, who live next door to and are part of their community. They do not support them being attacked and dragged away by unidentified, masked men dressed like paramilitary goons. Nor do people accept the building of concentration camps.
We cannot accept poll-driven politics, or one that waits for the midterm elections. This kind of politics by trying to avoid “controversial” issues actually gets in the way of building the solidarity needed for a meaningful fightback.
I understand the argument that Trump sent the National Guard and the Marines to LA because he was trying to provoke a crisis where only the hardest parts of our movement come out to the protests. Liberals and others argue we can’t have a confrontation simply between the Black Block and the US military, which will strengthen calls for more military action. For these forces, those sorts of street protests are playing into Trump’s hands.
I get that argument. We do need to avoid dumb confrontations. But we cannot sit there and let ICE agents round up folks from informal labor markets in front of Home Depots, in our neighborhoods. Instead, we need to bring the power of workers when they withhold their labor to this struggle.
The UAW did us all a favor when, in the midst of a standard strike last year, they began to talk about the May 1, 2028, general strike. We understand that general strikes are not organized by an international union putting it on their calendar. What the UAW’s call did was to raise the idea that workers have both an interest in withholding, and the ability to withhold, their labor together.
If we did, we could do more than stop Donald Trump and his lurch into authoritarianism and prevent him from stealing an election. We could bring forward a vision of a whole different kind of society, a better kind of society.
A general strike has to be a strategic goal around which we bring our forces together in strike schools, regional conferences, and other arenas to discuss what needs to be done.
A general strike has to be a strategic goal around which we bring our forces together in strike schools, regional conferences, and other arenas to discuss what needs to be done. We need to build a democratic space where working people can participate and learn how to build resistance to the attacks on all of us, including the most marginalized sectors of the working class.
The last thing I would like to say is when you look around, public sector unions—teachers, higher education workers and federal workers—are in the forefront of these fights today. However, that is not going to be enough to stop Trump. We’re going to have to figure out how to make connections with private sector labor and broaden our movement in many different ways.
At the moment, Trump and his allies have momentum right now—his “Big Ugly Bill” passed, and the Supreme Court is allowing his executive orders to stand. He was able to attack Iran without any immediate consequences. The US watchdog in the Middle East, Israel, has unleashed a devastating humanitarian disaster in Gaza and our movement has been unable to stop them.
Even worse is in store for us, both in terms of austerity and political repression. We need to be organizing for the long-term. Only by organizing can we stop him. But that organizing must be built on good political sense—on the basis of solidarity and a clear idea of how we can stop them, which is probably going to require a general strike way before May 1, 2028. ×
Notes & References
- COINTELPRO refers to the “Counter Intelligence Program” launched by the FBI in 1956 to infiltrate and undermine left groups. During the 1960s, the program focused particularly on the Black Panther Party and included arrests, imprisonment, and even assassinations of Panther leaders.
- See Toby Beauchamp, Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
- Holly Lewis, “Against Bad Arguments for Bad Things: A Reply to John Rees,” Spectre (online), May 6, 2025.