In memory of George A. Stotis and John Chapman
If you lived on Chicago’s north side any time between 1977 and the early 2000s, you were probably familiar with George Stotis and his famous Chicago Recycle Shop. Known to all simply as “George’s,” the store was a destination for theatre designers who could locate the vintage outfits and furniture they needed for their productions. Anyone else could find literally anything they wanted in the enormous space, its every corner stuffed and bristling with treasures. Prices were often absent, and depended on how much George liked you. The chaos only seemed like it: he knew exactly where to find something you wanted. (Further south, the much-loved John Chandler ran his famous Bookman’s Corner the same way).
George had a way of looking at newcomers over the top of his glasses and deciding, very quickly, whether to be welcoming or surly. Could you bargain? Sure, but if he didn’t want to sell, he wouldn’t. I watched more than one potential customer walk away in a huff after being refused. But the man was a well of curiosity, animated, loved conversations, and rarely took offence.
He and I were, for a while, close enough that he would take me to lunch or dinner in one of the last Greek diners in the area, and we would have long and sometimes argumentative conversations on a range of topics. I had come out recently, and was filled with queer radical political ideas which I took to my new found organising work.
During one of our meals together, I began furiously talking about a recent roadblock in a campaign. Lines had been drawn, and some of us were being asked to concede what we thought were crucial elements in the fight. “I won’t compromise, I won’t,” I said to George. He looked at me, his eyes twinkling in that characteristic way, leaned across the table, and said, “Compromise is okay. Surrender is bad.”
That sentence has stuck with me ever since. When do we compromise, when do we surrender?
I have been raised first by Jesuits, whose lives and work were examples of how to live in the world, and then by any number of queer, radical abolitionists and anti-capitalists in Chicago. When you’re in such groups, you and your tribe are inevitably the ones who are constantly asked to compromise—and sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. I can recall when leading housing activists everywhere decided to switch from the demand for low cost housing to affordable housing. Those of us working on specific campaigns in Uptown were told that the change was a reasonable compromise. This was not just a matter of language: new developments could now offer units to people whose higher incomes might previously not have qualified them for assistance. Did the change mean a loss, or did it help create more options for some? Was it compromise or was it surrender? Cities and towns across the country are still wrestling with the question and the fallout of a long-ago organising battle: the housing crisis in New York is a major point in the upcoming mayoral elections.
When does compromise become surrender?
Leftists, queer radicals among them, are often the ones told to “reach across the aisle” in political disagreements, and blamed for supposedly having been too obdurate in our demands. Following the 2024 election, various sections of the left exploded with podcasts and articles berating our “wokeness,” insisting that our commitment to matters like racial justice and trans and abortion rights had distracted us from a “class first” strategy that would surely have won the election, so we were told. We need to press forward on the needs of the working class, we are still told.
In fact, millions of trans people and people of colour are also working class or struggling economically. For trans people, coming out can hurl them out of the safety of cis life when they lose jobs and the support of friends and family. (For more, see “On Class, Identity, and the Working Class.”)
Landlords will routinely ignore or deny housing to trans individuals: this may be structurally illegal, but it happens all the time (any number of excuses can be made up). As for non-trans cis gays and lesbians: a significant part of the left holds on to a deeply homophobic idea that all queers are affluent, gala-attending, people with nary a care in the world. This stereotype allows straight lefties to rationalise their homophobia while all the while pretending to care about the working class: in this context, “Eat the Rich” is just code for “Fuck those Fags and Dykes.” (The complication and the irony is that affluent gays and lesbians routinely police, surveil, and expel queers of colour from their establishments.) Surely, access to medications, healthcare, and housing—regardless of who people are—is a leftist issue. Such matters cannot be separated from factors like race, sexuality, and gender.
Similarly, crying “class first” all the time and dismissing issues of race allows lefties to exercise the racism they can’t voice in public, by pretending that racial discrimination has nothing to do with class or economic issues. I live in Chicago, where the public transportation system runs on segregated lines in a segregated city. If you’re a Black or brown person and not rich enough to choose where you want to live, your access to employment opportunities and your ability to find housing are both influenced by your race (it can take an hour or more to get anywhere on the white-dominated north side on public transportation). Even when you do move to an affluent part of town, there is a strong chance that your entrance, bureaucratic and literal, will be policed more heavily and that you have to provide twice the amount of documentation to qualify for rentals. How do you extricate race from the economics of housing?
And yet, vocal parts of the left would like us to “compromise” on such matters by agreeing to a “class first” strategy. The argument is that once we get to where we need to be, wherever that is, we can turn to the supposedly frivolous stuff, like race and gender. 1Yes, I could name the specific outlets spewing this bilge, but a) it is easily found everywhere, in the major “left” places and b) naming only gives fodder to trolls who will use specifics to distract from the larger issues.
This is not compromise: this is surrender. The strategy, such as it is, demands that we sacrifice people to the whims of the right. Instead of insisting that everything is connected and that we will not leave anyone behind, the left keeps quibbling about how best to dump certain groups in order to move on. We see the results of such surrender in the case of issues like abortion, where the left routinely compromised its politics by defining a fundamental right as “bodily autonomy” and “healthcare.” But abortion is an economic issue, of absolute importance to the left. The only people vulnerable to the attrition of abortion rights are those too poor to find private doctors who will perform the operations. Anyone in that economic situation who is forced to carry a foetus to term and then also raise a child will not simply have their choice taken away: they will inevitably suffer a downslide into poverty, struggle in ill-paid jobs without healthcare, and their children will more than likely grow up in the kinds of circumstances that severely limit their educational and other choices. Abortion is nothing if not an economic issue. The broad left, by compromising so often on the issue and framing it as a matter of harm done to individual bodies, has failed a vast swath of the child-bearing population and abandoned it to the cruelty and misogyny of the right.
The core principle of the left is not “Class first,” but “We leave no one behind.” Yes, an anti-capitalist economic analysis is critical to left organising, but that is precisely what the left has ignored in matters like abortion.
In this, the second reign of Donald Trump, the left faces any number of challenges, most of all from within itself. There is a certain faction of the online left that loves to grouse that leftists create “circular shooting squads,” because we so often insist on, yes, arguing about strategies: this is not a weakness but a strength. A movement that is not self-reflective when it needs to be is a cult for the elite. The right has been successful because it plays a long game and because it is uncompromising in its vision of what the world should look like. We on the left may have some idea of what we want the world to look like, but we long ago decided that we could sacrifice entire groups of people—poor childbearers, people of colour, trans people, and many more—along the way to our utopia, and in that we are more like the right than we care to admit.
Certainly, compromise is often necessary, but there is a fine line between it and surrender. A true left leaves no one behind.
Image: Sōichirō Tomioka (Japanese, 1922–1994), “Trees”, 1961, Oil on Canvas, 74 × 93 cm.
Many thanks to A.B for the image.
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