I got into this because I was listening to a podcast called Cool people who did cool stuff, specifically their episode about the Dil Pickle Club. One thing and another led me to a page about Utah Phillips, a folksinger and songwriter and labor activist and hobo who was, as Wikipedia would have it, one of the biggest voices of the IWW in the latter decades of the 20th century.
Which led me to listening to a lot of Wobblies songs that had been written by Joe Hill, as sung by ol' Utah, and I got to thinking -- at the heart of it a labor union is just a bunch of workers banding together to say "Where's our cut, asshole?" That's the core of it. Doesn't have to even be against capitalism, it's just people asking for a fair share of the take. If that's as far as the dispute between employees and the boss goes, then there's not a significant moral dimension beyond that, right? The IWW has all these songs standing on high principle about the evil of capitalism, the ruling class, we have fed you for a thousand years, blah blah blah, but really, it doesn't have to blow up every time, right?
And then I realized that I felt just the same way about a different struggle for rights, or what I thought was a different struggle. Because I've come to the conclusion that there is no inherent moral dimension to being queer. There's nothing in being a gay man that automatically makes one a good man, nor is every lesbian somehow on a mountaintop bathed in the light of Heaven, nor is every trans person automatically the baddest motherfucker in Baltimore, nor is every enby the envy of the world. Please! Do I need to know who you fuck or how? Does that matter to my business? Did this ever have to blow up?
And yet it keeps doing so, just like the labor unions. Because there are people who see both labor organizing and gay rights as threats to their order. In the case of labor unions, when you think about how very much money the top bosses want to be making, it makes sense that they would see the slightest increase in labor expense as an injury. It's a little harder to see when it comes to queer people, but the fact of that matter is there have always been, and stilll very much are all over the world, people who demand that everyone in society, and most especially their immediate family, make babies. They get super mad when anyone steps out of that system, even if it's simply to say they're not having sex, becaus their social and financial power is based in part on perpetuating a specific family line. If someone gets away with stepping out of the system, then everyone who didn't want to be a part of it will jump ship -- worst of all the womenfolk. (This is why conservatives rail and rant and rave against abortion. They don't want to let anyone know there are ways of getting out of being forced to make babies.)
Which is to say, Papa Patriarch who owns a hundred shoe factories doesn't want people to have bodily autonomy, whether by the means of production or the means of reproduction. He wants both means of creation in his hands, so that he can order the world about at his whim. We have to take both back from him.
Which is to say -- fair labor and free love are closer allies than you might think.