Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the conservative group, finally put its fingers on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, organizing events in an effort to spread its propaganda. In the face of this new development of our on-campus conservatism, and the global rise of neo-fascism among the youth, it is a great time for us to take a look at their ideology.
The TPUSA advocates conservatism in various affairs, the most noticeable of which is the call for the resurrection of the traditional Catholic values towards family and marriage, followed by an attack on gender minorities. According to “Independent Women’s Forum,” another conservative institution that was invited by TPUSA to speak on our campus, gender should be defined strictly in a biological manner and reinforced by law. Both organizations emphasize “womanhood”, the duty to reproduce and bring up a child, together with the duty to marry her mate and follow her man.
By putting relationships with males as the result of women’s biological nature, marriage as the aim of relationship, and reproduction as the aim of marriage, the conservatives secure reproduction as a biological and moral necessity. Why do they crave babies so much as if they are the most loving people in our society? According to the classic bourgeois economic theory, an increase in the birth rate inevitably means more laborers in the years when they enter adulthood, more supply of labor in the labor market, lower prices for labor, and a higher rate of profit for the million-dollar donors of TPUSA, as well as lower wages, or in other words a higher rate of exploitation of the working class. But why again does the supply of labor in such distant years worry the capitalists so much now? The capitalist society runs not only on the appropriation of value already produced by labor-power but also on the appropriation of future labor. The economy today is highly financialized, where capitalists trade on bonds and debts that claim the value that is yet to be valorized in future production. The capital they put into these markets would valorize only if production and exchange go smoothly in the future, and they are only valuable at present insofar as they continue to appeal to investment only so long as the future production that is being speculated and the exchange (if it produces physical goods) is secured. Through the layered operations of imaginary capital, the capitalist is able to appropriate the imaginary labor that would be carried out by our children by speculating on the imaginary value that they will produce with their labor power. But what if the child is never born and the imaginary capital could never be valorized as desired? The capitalist society creates “bubbles” as such, that become more unstable over time until a disturbance of some kind, slaps the capitalist in the face and kicks them out of the imagination of the value of their financial capital, producing an economic crisis, like what have seen in 2008, which always endangers the profits of the capitalists, serves the agitation of laborers, shaking the very foundation of the capitalist society itself.
Now global capitalism is in decline. With the economic boost from China entering the world market gradually fading, the big capitalists can no longer chill with a fire burning under their chair but seek the more exploitable labor force and invest in their running dogs such as TPUSA, and shout in our ears: “Your gender is bullshit! Give me more babies, give me a cheap labor force! Produce! Save me from crisis!” Even when there’s no evidence that transgenderism is to be blamed for the problem that the capitalists meet regarding the “productivity” of children, these conservatives sacrifice the gender minority as the external to their ideology, a tool perfect for their propaganda. As the old Chinese saying goes: “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey (into obedience)”. The conservatives get the spirit of this slam very well.
