Pride has its roots in the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, when the LGBTQ+ community, Black and Latino youth, and trans and gender-nonconforming people fought back against police brutality, state harassment, and the criminalization of their lives. This year, we must honor this spirit, recognizing that the fight for sexual and gender liberation is part of the international struggle to overthrow the exploitative and oppressive capitalist system.

Far-Right Attacks on LGBTQ+ People

In recent decades, the crisis of neoliberalism has led governments across the world to attack the living conditions of the working majority, all while ramping up its imperialist wars and plunder. The global Far Right — the “Reactionary International” — has channeled this crisis and frustration by lashing out against the working class, immigrants, and people of color, as well as against the gains achieved through decades of feminist and LGBTQ+ struggle.

In the United States, President Trump is leading an offensive to erase trans identity from legal records, restrict gender-affirming healthcare, and criminalize trans organizations. This agenda is being replicated across the world. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni has sought to limit recognition of LGBTQ+ parents. In the United Kingdom, Conservative and Labour politicians alike have attacked trans rights. In Latin America, leaders including Javier Milei in Argentina and José Antonio Kast in Chile are rolling back LGBTQ+ rights. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has banned gender transition and labeled the LGBTQ+ movement an “extremist organization.”

And around the world, more than 60 countries punish sexual diversity with imprisonment, including in Niger, Senegal, and Uganda. Many of these laws that criminalize LGBTQ+ people are based on European colonial codes.

We must transform our anger at anti-LGBTQ and sexist attacks into militant strength, understanding that the non-negotiable fight for our right to be ourselves and decide over our own bodies is inseparable from the struggle to destroy the capitalist system that exploits and divides us. And all over the world, the queer community is standing up to show that we will not remain silent.

Queer Resistance to the Far Right

The LGBTQ+ and feminist movements’ response to these attacks is serving as a foundation for uniting the working class and confronting the Far Right’s racist and anti-worker agenda.

An example of this resistance occurred in Argentina following Milei’s attack on the LGBTQ+ community in Davos in 2025. The immediate response was a massive march on February 1  — a mobilization of tens of thousands of people that united the queer community with social movements, retirees, precariously employed workers, militant trade unionists, and healthcare workers facing layoffs.

This momentum is being replicated across the rest of Latin America: in Mexico, activists are combating trans-femicidal violence, rejecting the corporatization of Pride, and standing in solidarity with the immigrant struggle and the Palestinian cause. In Brazil, a march in São Paulo called for halting the advance of the Far Right and religious Right.

In recent years, the United States and Canada have also seen large marches and mobilizations in defense of trans youth. In New York City, thousands are now marching as part of the annual Queer Liberation March — without corporate sponsorships, and denouncing Trump, ICE, and the genocide in Palestine.

In Hungary, Budapest Pride was a focal point of mass resistance against the Orbán government’s repressive laws and homophobic agenda. Workers and oppressed sectors across Europe have also mobilized during Pride against the Far Right in the Spanish State and UK, and in France and Belgium, tens of thousands — including from socialist feminist organization Du Pain et Des Rose (Bread and Roses) — fought against healthcare cuts affecting trans people.

We fight against the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights around the world, but we know that in the face of this violent, patriarchal onslaught, the answer will not come from governments that implement the capitalists’ austerity and repression.

Sexual and Gender Liberation Are Part of Class Struggle

Capitalism employed a two-pronged strategy to neutralize the sexual liberation movement: direct repression in much of the world, and state co-optation in Western democracies.

Over the past few decades, parts of the world have seen gains from the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, including marriage equality, the right to abortion, and policies allowing gender transition. But the flip side of the recognition has been our integration into the institutions of the political regime. We’ve left the streets, blunting our movement’s combative edge and isolating its demands from a broader challenge to the capitalist system.

This assimilation fueled “pink capitalism,” where corporations turned Pride into a niche market and a tool for image laundering, and led to homonationalism, through which imperialist countries use LGBTQ+ rights to justify border closures and military intervention. The system co-opted portions of the queer and feminist movements as accomplices to its own cruelties.

“Progressive” governments and LGBTQ+ groups promised that integration into the state would save us, but reality proved otherwise.

While claiming to defend women and LGBTQ+ people, these governments did nothing to address the housing crisis, precarious living conditions, or low wages. This made it easy for the right wing to attack the LGBTQ+ and feminist movements by linking them to these governments that failed to improve conditions for the masses.

We’ve seen this play out in Spain under the PSOE-Unidas Podemos and Sumar coalitions, in Chile under Gabriel Boric, in Argentina under Kirchnerism, in Brazil under President Lula, and in the United States under President Biden, and elsewhere. We cannot keep repeating this same formula, which ultimately leads to betrayal and strengthens the Far Right and its anti-LGBTQ agenda.

Sexual liberation will not be achieved in isolation, through identity politics, or by integrating into a state that — in the face of a global crisis marked by wars and debt that drives people into hunger — promises even fewer concessions. In the face of the fragmentation imposed on us by the system, we must organize ourselves independently of governments and merge the LGBTQ+ struggle with that of the entire working class to change society from the ground up.

An International Solution Against Imperialism, War, and Rearmament

We fully reject imperialism and military aggression — whether from NATO, in the war in Iran, or in Putin’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine. We reject Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide against Palestine. We support the working class, women, and the LGBTQ+ communities who are confronting war and imperialism. There is no progressive alternative, whether led by the EU, the United States, Russia, or China, particularly amid their competition for the world’s resources and markets.

We organize against their imperialist rearmament and against the reactionary ideology that glorifies warlike masculinity and the patriarchal family, all while cutting healthcare, education, gender-affirming care, international HIV care, and domestic violence shelters. We draw on the anti-imperialist tradition of the labor, women’s, and LGBTQ+ movements and declare: War on war! The enemy is at home!

We also denounce imperialist interference in Cuba and Venezuela, imperialist plunder, and reject the IMF’s austerity measures, which are plunging precarious youth and the LGBTQ+ community in semicolonial countries into poverty. In Latin America, alongside the rainbow flag, we raise the colors of the Wiphalas — the flags of the workers’, peasant, and Indigenous rebellion in Bolivia — fighting against repression and forging a workers’ solution through self-organization.

In the face of the crisis, the global working class and the oppressed are not sitting idly by. Proof of this can be seen in the Italian dockworkers blocking weapons destined for Israel, and the Minneapolis youth who succeeded in driving out ICE.

These examples show that we have the strength to confront their attacks if we organize independently from the bottom up. We stand in solidarity with immigrants facing raids, racist murders, and deportations. Our pride is anti-racist and anti-imperialist.

Sexual Liberation with an Anti-Capitalist, Working-Class Perspective

We organize through struggles, in workplaces, and on campuses to merge sexual liberation with a working-class and anti-capitalist perspective.

This means fighting gender-based and queerphobic violence, and demanding the right to housing, the expropriation of vacant apartments, and the creation of state-run shelters. It means universal, public, and free access to gender-affirming care and comprehensive healthcare, under workers’ control, and the creation of free public cafeterias, laundromats, and daycare centers to socialize care work under public and collective management.

Amid these demands, we must also fight exploitation and precarity: reduction of the work week without cuts to wages, redistribution of working hours among workers, wage and pension increases in line with the cost of living, and an end to layoffs.

We do not seek to reform the capitalist state, but to link every right won by the LGBTQ+ and feminist movements to the struggle to transform everything from the ground up. We want a new culture and a mindset rooted in solidarity, uniting the labor movement, the feminist movement, the movement for immigrants rights, and the youth and student movement.

But just as the Right and capitalists organize internationally, resistance and the organization of workers and the LGBTQ+ community must also be deeply international and internationalist. We — militant youth, queer and trans workers, and feminist activists — must actively build a political framework for the new and diverse working class.

We build upon the legacy of generations around the world who have faced repression, violence, exclusion, and precariousness while organizing to confront patriarchal and racist capitalism. We want to write a new chapter in this history, fighting for a communist society where the liberation of affections, genders, and sexualities is total, torn from the chains of private property and the patriarchal family. We want to organize internationally against all exploitation and oppression.

This article was originally published in Spanish on June 28 in Contrapunto.

The post For a Pride Against Capitalism, Imperialism, and the Far Right appeared first on Left Voice.

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