Statement on Club Q Terrorist Attack

Cincinnati Socialists condemns the November 19 attack on Club Q in Colorado Springs and terrorist Anderson Lee Aldrich. We offer our solidarity to the LGBTQ+ community of Colorado Springs and all oppressed sexual and gender communities. We demand that the capitalist state take immediate steps to ensure the safety and freedom of LGBTQ+ people in the US and throughout the world. We call on the broad Left and all oppressed people to set aside sectarian differences and to recommit ourselves to the sexual and reproductive liberation of humankind. We oppose and condemn any attempts to undermine or obstruct the rights of LGBTQ+ people or any oppressed people to self-defense, including armed self-defense. 

Historical materialism, the interpretive framework of Marxism, teaches us that reactionary violence, including violence against marginalized people, is a product of the breakdown of capitalism. Capitalism, like an organism, produces noxious compounds in the process of death and putrefaction. Anderson Lee Aldrich is themselves just such a waste product of a dying economic and political system. It is no coincidence that so-called stochastic right-wing terrorism has been carried out almost exclusively by white men, and overwhelmingly by white men from the suburban small property-owning and clerical-professional social layers. These privileged social layers are predisposed to respond to the putrefaction of capital with selfishness and paranoia, not reason and empathy. Therefore, they often lash out with hatred, fear, and violence. Moreover, as Karl Marx and countless others have pointed out, capitalism is fated forever to be trapped in this entropic cycle. Capital is both rotting and undead, endlessly driving humanity toward fascism and war. Consequently, Cincinnati Socialists insists that the permanent solution to reactionary violence is the foundation of a revolutionary people’s state, a new type of political formation with the power to end permanently capital’s death drive. As German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote, “Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism, who lament the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf.” We propose to end fascist violence by ending its cause, the inhuman and irrational capitalist mode of production.

In the short term, we say that the immediate remedy for this violence is massive, militant, organized, public, and committed people’s solidarity. We applaud those in the Left milieu who have already begun to mobilize for community self-defense, and encourage others to follow suit. We affirm that an injury to a single member of the international working class or any oppressed person is an injury to all oppressed people. We pledge not to forget the victims of November 19, and we will never forgive Anderson Lee Aldrich, those who encouraged them, or those who make common cause with them. Workers and oppressed people of all lands, unite! You have nothing but your chains to lose, and a world to win!