After stripping away the false objectivity of Marxism, and the resentment lying behind socialist moral judgement, anticapitalism is revealed to be an identity more than anything. 


Far from discrediting it, this should make you take it more seriously. The weaker claim is harder to disprove. 


We are used to identity being tied to sexuality, thought of as our most personal expression of self. But what could be more personal expression of self than labor, how one spends the majority of one’s time?


Capitalist labor-normativity demands identification with your employer, synchronization with their corporate identity, values and mission. Some approved forms of subversion are allowed and even encouraged. “Working hard or hardly working?” - this serves the same purpose as gay jokes among straight men. Dissent is anticipated as part of the hegemony. 


But laborqueer anticapitalist identities do not find a ready place for their identity within the forms usually considered necessary for maximizing profit for their employer. They may find it actively hostile to what they value and how they would prefer to spend their time, whether that is with art, charity, sports, or making video games. 


This does not need to manifest as “anti-work” (although that may be valid too, akin to being asexual). It can pro- labor which is directed towards some end having nothing to do with profit, and which is deemed to have higher personal or social value. 


Marxists believe that their strength lies in the proofs of capitalist exploitation and the universal condition of the proletariat described in Marx’s capital. But this political substitute for a religion is actually a weakness in our modern secular liberal age. They are taking away anti-capitalisms most powerful and relevant message in the context where queer identity theory is lingua franca, not Hegelianism merged with classical economics. 


How far would the gay rights movement have gotten if it insisted the only path to liberation is if everyone realizes that heterosexuality is inherently oppressive, and even that straight people are secretly gay? Such maximalism is inherently counterproductive, and in exaggerating the universality of antagonism, it actually conceals the contours of actually-existing antagonism. That is effectively what Marxist communism is doing with respect to labor rights and freedom in work. 


The concept of laborqueerness has the potential to completely change the anti-capitalist game, a symbolic intervention which problematizes the false binary between Real Socialist Politics versus Fake Identity Politics which currently splits the left in two. And simultaneously challenges corporate appropriation of LGBTQ rhetoric.


Let’s see how many corporate sponsored Pride events there are when pride isn’t just about what you do in the privacy of your bedroom, but pride in your labor time as an expression of you that corporations are not inherently entitled to.