Stormé DeLarverie, born on December 24th in 1920, was a biracial queer icon whose reported scuffle with police was the spark that ignited the Stonewall Riots in 1969. She is sometimes referred to as the "Rosa Parks of the gay community" or "Rosa Parks of Stonewall".
DeLarverie was born in New Orleans to a black mother and a white father, and spent the 50s and 60s as a "male impersonator" in the Jewel Box Revue, the period's only racially integrated drag troupe. Her gender-bending style of zoot suits and black ties was groundbreaking for the era.
On June 28th, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, a scuffle broke out when a woman, believed to be Stormé, was roughly escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon. The woman fought with at least four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. When she shouted to the bystanders "Why don't you guys do something?", the crowd began rioting and clashed with police.
"It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience - it wasn’t no damn riot."
- Stormé DeLarverie
A Brief History of Stormé DeLarverie, Stonewall’s Suiting Icon
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i just finished reading David Harvey's "Anti-Capitalist Chronicles", which ended on some chapters reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic written during the pandemic. Overall, I thought it was good read, and I think it revealed a lot of new learnings from Marx for me, but the last few chapters linking capital and its future to COVID left me feeling really doomer.
Like, I remember believing so strongly that revolutionary change was possible in 2020. These last chapters shared a similar, optimistic tone to the one I had. Harvey, writing about a post-pandemic future in 2020, described different ways that society could be restructured to benefit the working class, and how in some ways COVID-19 proved that those changes were possible.
But now, three years later, nothing has really changed, at least not for the better. In many ways, things feel way more grim now. Revolutionary change feels as unlikely as ever (though seeing the strong support for Palestine and rejection of 'business as usual' Western imperialism gives me some hope). The massive collective calls for radical change of 2020, which were so loud they could not be ignored by mainstream culture feel almost completely forgotten, like a fever dream.
I'm also reading Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life, and his writings about "lost futures" and hauntology really resonate with me, and I think that feeling of having a better future *stolen *by capital is how I feel, both in general and in reaction to finishing Harvey's book.
The George Floyd riots were insane. But the working class still has their heads down and is keeping their nose to the grindstone. And as long as that'sthe case, nothing will be restructured to the benefit of the working class.
Reading through Clara Mattei's The Capital Order made me feel similar emotions in regards to lost futures. Like, the consensus among the working class and many government officials in the aftermath of WW1 throughout Europe was that the old world was dead, private industry was inefficient and cruel, and nationalisation was the way forward. The war was this gigantic traumatic event that fundamentally changed society. Until... it didn"t. Battles continued on and off but once 1919 and 1920 were over, it was just total liberal austerity reaction, leading to fascism when the population was too unruly. It wasn't a total failure of course, it birthed the Soviet Union, but it was one of those moments like coronavirus where things genuinely seemed to be FORCED to change whether the bourgeoisie wanted to or not, and then a couple years passed and... nope, actually.
I'm not necessarily pessimistic about it and I do try and keep a sense of perspective about current events - who knows what the people living under the Mongol Empire were feeling about the ongoing atrocities and potential for change and so on. Like, a thousand years from now, under communism, even the important events of the last few decades will be brushed out and forgotten and blended into a general sense of the period known as Late Capitalism or whatever the classification will be of our times. The transition from slavery to feudalism, then from feudalism to capitalism, were as spotty and violent and uncertain and unpredictable as the ongoing transition from capitalism to socialism is, and just as we marvel at miniature systems that resembled feudalism while in the time of antiquated slave empires, and of early capitalist systems that were then snuffed out as feudalism asserted its fundamental logic for a while longer, so too will the USSR and other prole experiments be seen as early indicators of the system to replace capitalism. Being a "capitalist realist" will be seen as comically as being a "divine right of kings realist". If something cannot continue, it won't.
Sucks living through it, though.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. It's really helpful for making sense of what I was feeling after reading Harvey's book
Oof, haha, that's the book my partner got me for christmas ☠️ I've been excited to read it for months though, since I heard her on Richard Wolf's podcast. And I bought myself "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution" By Vincent Bevins (Jakarta Method) which I suspect will stir up more of the same feelings
That was something that came to mind too: The heavily condensed versions of revolutionary stories that we can read on wiki often cite a specific day or year when change really kicked into gear - *when the revolution "started" *- which is probably a far cry from the experiences of those who fought for change, as you said. Even in my own readings, I usually focus on what happened during or after a revolution, and I skim or skip sections about the historical context or driving forces that led up to whatever specific day or year. I think that both reflects and feeds into my general propensity for immediate gratification or black/white thinking, lol.
It's a good reminder that revolution is a slow, intentional, but uncertain process. It's about building up forces for revolutionary change - pulling at the threads of bourgeois rule until it has no choice but to unravel. Challenges to the Western status quo from the periphery (e.g., another China W, the Palestinian resistance, etc.) or from within (e.g., unionization, spread of agit-prop online, etc.) are all pulling at the threads. It's those small victories we ought to celebrate, but they shouldn't distract us from the larger goals. We ought to use those to build momentum and strengthen our forces for change, to transition out of the capitalist hellscape and towards some kind of communism
A line I love, from Desai's Geopolitical Economy in 2013, is "Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be followed by surreal contuinity as the old order cadaverously fights back."
I've found that the solution isn't to embrace doomerism whenever a political or geopolitical setback occurs, but as you say, keep an eye on how, despite the lack of a sudden revolutionary moment, the threads of bourgeois rule came a little more undone. When you analyze these moments, whether that's postwar Italy or coronavirus or Palestine today, there's a tendency for a great swelling of hope that THIS is finally IT, then a pessismistic reaction when it doesn't actually change the world, then years later, with the benefit of a little temporal distance and seeing consequences unfold, somebody will incorporate it into a wider theory on how it was actually a very meaningful event after all. The challenge is to not fall into undue optimism OR pessimism at the time as Gramsci alluded to, and instead maintain a sense of perspective even while the event is ongoing.
If you're not careful with this, you can fall into a sense that (especially local) events are determined and unchangeable despite your own potential actions, so you can't just surrender all agency, but nonetheless it's a worldview that I am intentionally trying to cultivate. I mean, it's a coping mechanism, but everything is when you don't wield any power directly.