Living Outside The Rainbow: Queerness and the Housing Crisis

February 17, 2015 by
LGBT youth homelessness protest, USA

LGBT youth homelessness protest, USA

Fightback is running a series of articles on the housing crisis in Aotearoa/NZ.

Kassie Hartendorp (Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington) explores the specific housing problems faced by queer youth.

When you start to peer past the rainbow flags and glitter shine of LGBTIQ ‘issues’, there are many more stories to be told that don’t end with a marriage certificate and picket fences. While more privileged people along the rainbow have been able to make gains, it’s easy to forget about those who are nowhere near that pot of gold, despite ‘heartwarming’ Youtube clips from rightwing politicians and banks showing their ‘diversity and inclusion’ with their rhinestone adorned cash machines. There have been important gains made, and each one through great struggle – but we are not at the final frontier yet.

One key issue that often gets swept under the rug is housing and homelessness. The very fact that housing continues to be a need for high numbers of people across the globe means, naturally, that it affects sex, sexuality and gender diverse people as well. But the nature of homelessness can look different for our communities, and have more complex factors taking place.

The NZ Government defines homelessness as “living situations where people have no other options to acquire safe and secure housing. This includes people who are:

• without shelter

• in temporary accommodation

• sharing accommodation with a household

• living in uninhabitable housing.

This definition goes further than the stereotype of people living on the street, and can encompass many forms of housing instability. Homelessness figures are difficult to record and track easily. Most people who are in transitional housing or are couchsurfing may not associate themselves with the label of ‘homeless’ which carries a heavy stigma – despite the fact that many have experienced it at some point in their lives. In 2009, the Housing Shareholders Advisory Group estimated that the ‘urban homeless’ or those sleeping rough, numbered less than 300 across the country, yet between 8,000 and 20,000 people were living in temporary accommodation unsuited for long term habitation. Within the past year, service providers say that homelessness is ‘on the rise’ with an Auckland Council report claiming that about 15,000 people in Auckland are “severely housing deprived.”

With housing being a key commodity often left to a profit driven market, it is hard to envision a world under capitalism that would not have high levels of poverty, poor health and homelessness. The gap between the rich and the poor, and reliance on a ‘user pays’ system that means paying for almost everything we need to survive, create exactly the kind of conditions that leave many without affordable, stable and secure accommodation. The causes of homelessness can be heavily linked to and influenced by poverty, mental health experiences, disabilities, addiction issues, emotional health and trauma, sexuality and gender, convictions and imprisonment, unemployment or low wages, a lack of affordable housing and are underpinned by the forces of colonisation, patriarchy, racism and capitalism.

This already shows a complicated snapshot of the context that homelessness takes place in – how does this look for people who are sex, sexuality and/or gender diverse? Figures from the USA show that 40% of homeless young people are LGBTIQ (despite being 10% of the population), yet here in Aotearoa, we don’t have statistics on the state of homelessness for our communities of any age range. Anecdotally, when our friends or whānau struggle to find housing, we often take them in and support each other, but this isn’t reflected on any national database.

Some of the key themes that play out in sex, sexuality and gender diverse homelessness are family breakdowns, discrimination (overt and covert) and isolation. It is a sadly normal occurrence for young people to come out and face family rejection, particularly when they are gender diverse. A common scenario exists where parents will only accept a young person back into their home if they commit to living as the gender they were assigned at birth. It is not a safe or healthy option to force someone to ‘go back in the closet’ or live as someone they are not, for the sake of shelter. Yet agencies such as WINZ have had trouble recognising this as a true ‘relationship breakdown’ in the past and have therefore refused youth payments for teenagers who cannot live in such an oppressive environment.

While poverty is almost always a key factor of general homelessness, a person of any socio-economic status can find themselves unwelcome or kicked out of a family home for their sexuality or gender identity. One of the people I spoke with, who has faced an abusive home life says:

I’m a migrant with rich parents who’s under 21. Is anyone going to think I’m genuinely in need? My parents are pulling the “please come home” act, refusing to give me access to my health insurance policy and telling me instead that if I’m ill they can nurse me back to health if I would only come home, and what am I meant to do?

When family and whānau become a site of pain and trauma for LGBTIQ people, often the only option becomes to find new homes and families that will validate the parts of them that are not accepted in their former home.

Homelessness doesn’t just affect young people, and there are further layers that add complexity to the issue such as race, disability and gender. With a shortage of accommodation in urban areas in particular, if you don’t look ‘normative’, you’re a person of colour, you have children or a disability – the chances are low that you will be the first pick of landlords, housing agencies or even most flatmates. Many gay or queer identifying people can downplay their sexuality, but if someone is ‘non-passing’ as a transgender flat-hunter, they are more likely to experience discrimination.

One interviewee based in Auckland currently shares a single bed with their girlfriend while staying in a person’s storage room. They’ve been told they need to leave soon to make way for another transgender person, with the plan to find a new flat with three other likeminded people. So far, they have had no success in finding a safe, affordable and secure flat to move into.

“Nobody wants to rent to a bunch of visibly trans/queer disabled teenagers even if we weren’t fighting a housing market that’s totally against us at the moment? Forty people showing up to flat viewings, most of whom in suit and tie or with parents as guarantors (which, as queer babies most of us are estranged from ours, or they’re really poor) ….. I can’t hide how brown and neurodivergent I am, my girlfriend can’t really pass for a masculine cis dude any more as much as she tries… I’m scared. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

Another interviewee who identifies as takataapui taahine and is identified by others as transgender, queer and Māori, says that homelessness is something they are “intimately acquainted with.” From crashing on sofas, staying in vans and squatting in old sheds and abandoned homes as a teenager, their housing stability as an adult started improving after becoming a sex worker, which helped clear their debt and provided an income that didn’t depend on seasonal opportunities. They state that:

Even now though, with my stable job working at an NGO, I am aware that my position is always precarious… I definitely see my expendability as intrinsically linked to being poor, brown, visibly not a heterosexual cis person. It’s indisputably also linked to disability, or directly because of discrimination against it…  My family have no money for me to fall back on. I’ve recently been kicked out of my house because my neighbor complained that my autistic son throws toys and fruit over the fence. I don’t imagine this situation unfolding in this way if I were a more wealthy, middle aged, white, cis, man or woman.

There are almost no safety nets for people who have intersecting battles and experiences, that don’t fit neatly into common ‘gay’ experience. While communities try hard to support each other, there are not many official options. In Wellington, there is already a shortage of temporary emergency accommodation and many of the services that do exist are run by faith-based organisations that have a chequered history with sexual and gender minorities. What is available for those that cannot viably utilise the Men’s Night Shelter or Women’s Boarding House due to their gender identity? How is the safety of LGBTIQ people guaranteed, particularly when they may be fleeing trauma, discrimination and violence in the first place?

Sandra Dickson, a longtime advocate for sexual violence prevention also notes that abusive domestic partnerships can become even more dangerous to those that do not have alternative housing options. Dickson says that the impact of ‘having no family of origin to return to because of homo/bi/transphobia and gender policing’ on people who experience intimate partner violence is under-discussed. Statistics from the UK show that same sex attracted people experience intimate partner violence at the same rate or higher than heterosexual people, bisexual women experience higher rates of sexual violence, and transgender people are most likely of all to experience any form of violence. Without the resources to quantify this information in Aotearoa, it’s difficult to piece together a formal picture on how domestic violence looks for LGBTIQ+ communities, let alone to begin to work on strategies for support and prevention.

“He kokonga whare e kitea, he kokonga ngākau e kore e kitea”

The corners of a house can be seen, but not the corners of the heart.

Te Mahana, the Strategy to End Homelessness in Wellington, writes that “if the issue of homelessness is to be adequately addressed for Māori, it is vital that deeper needs such as spiritual, relationships and cultural connection must also be identified, considered and satisfied” and that the heart of the issue is “cultural dislocation and loss of cultural connection.” The link between colonisation, poverty and homelessness runs strong and is hard to address within a setting of profit driven capitalism and a collective historical amnesia regarding land theft and severe cultural grievances at the hands of colonisers.

The ability to find a safe and secure place to rest one’s head goes further than physical walls, it is about having a papakainga, turangawaewae and a place to physically and spiritually rest, settle and heal. Capitalism doesn’t, by nature, build us homes or papakainga. It doesn’t instinctively nurture us culturally, physically, emotionally, socially or spiritually – we have to fight to be seen as anything other than one-dimensional beings that must spend the majority of our time doing meaningless work to survive, rather than living, exploring, creating and re-generating ourselves, our families and our communities. Sara Fraser, Housing Research Assistant says that one of the things she has learnt whilst working in housing research is:

“Providing people with good tenure of housing is a pathway to better health and this is as important in our queer communities as elsewhere. We are overrepresented in the suicide and mental health statistics; social housing is one avenue which provides secure tenure, but with the current government having a hands-off approach to housing, I don’t see how the statistics will drop.”

With the National Government’s plans to sell off state housing to NGOs, rather than focusing on building new homes, the housing crisis around Aotearoa doesn’t look set to ease in the near future. Creating safe, secure and stable housing for sexual and gender minorities isn’t compatible with a housing market that is highly competitive when non-normative bodies and existences are policed or discriminated against. A democratic, public housing solution must ensure both free universal access and specific kinds of support; ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. When asked what safe and secure housing would like to an interviewee, they replied:

“I imagine housing security for me personally, looks like living in a community where people care about each others’ well being, where a homeless person doesn’t exist because resources are shared, and where circumstances are recognised and we don’t imagine that we all exist from a zero sum starting point.“

Let’s continue to create more room for possibilities and imaginings as this, where we dream and demand of more than the narrow, and damaging options that are currently given to us. Let’s question the economic conditions that prioritise profits over quality of life, and let’s continue in creating true papakainga for our communities.

* Thank you to those who shared their stories, thoughts and research as contribution to this article. Arohanui to those who live this, and to those who dedicate their lives to supporting others through this.

** This article is used in reference to, inspired and shaped by Te Whare Tapa Wha, the Māori health model developed by Professor Mason Durie.

If you are sex or gender diverse (intersex or transgender) and currently needing emergency accommodation in Wellington/Te Whanganui-a-Tara, feel free to contact the Temporary Emergency Accommodation Project at the 128 Radical Community Social Centre.

Filed Under: Queer, Uncategorized

Urban Housing is an Ecosocialist Issue

February 13, 2015 by

urban green

Fightback is running a series of articles on the housing crisis in Aotearoa/NZ.

Daphne Lawless (Fightback Tamaki Makarau) argues that we need green, sustainable and affordable solutions to the housing problem. But that means more urbanisation, not less.

It’s obvious that there is a great shortage of quality, affordable housing in Aotearoa. Or to be more precise, there’s a shortage in those places where people want to live. There are regular stories about houses going on TradeMe for a few hundred dollars, in places like Balclutha or other isolated rural zones.

Rural houses are great for people who can support themselves in a rural lifestyle, like farm workers or independent writers or artists. But the facts of life in a modern economy are that most of the economic growth, and therefore new jobs and opportunities, will happen in the cities – Auckland in particular, but Wellington, Christchurch and Hamilton as well. Because Auckland is where I live and expect to raise my family, it’s that town which I will concentrate on in this article.

Explosive growth

Auckland’s explosive growth to near 1.5 million inhabitants is also exacerbated, not only by its milder climate compared to our other urban centres, but by immigration. New settlers in our country prefer to live near to people who share their culture, hence Auckland’s massively high levels of cultural diversity compared to the rest of the country. Whether Pasifika peoples in Mangere, Chinese in Botany or people from the Indian subcontinent in Sandringham, Auckland’s cultural mosaic gets more complicated and colourful all the time.

But Auckland’s expanding population needs somewhere to live. The latest survey shows that the median house price in Auckland has passed $670,000 – almost 15 times the median yearly income. Historically, that ratio has been stable at around 4. So a house in Auckland costs almost 4 times as much as it should.

The media blame this on “a shortage of new housing”, mainly blaming Auckland Council’s planning tools, like the Metropolitan Urban Limit – refusing to rezone rural areas bordering the city for new housing. But this is unfair, and pushes a political ideology which is both anti-worker, and anti-green.

One of the main problems of neoliberal capitalism is that, when wages are pushed down, workers can’t buy things and the economy slows. One of the solutions – in virtually every advanced country in the world – has been to semi-deliberately create a housing bubble. Loans for buying houses have become cheap and plentiful, pushing up prices. And when house prices go up, those who already own houses (the middle and upper classes) benefit. They can buy cars or go on holidays and “put it on the mortgage”.

But even capitalist economics understands what happens when you just pump more money into a market – prices go up overall. The longer the bubble goes on, the less hope for the people at the bottom of the “housing ladder”. A similar thing happens in the rental market with WINZ giving out Accomodation Supplement, a rent subsidy for those on low-to-average incomes. This money just goes to boost the landlord’s profits, and rents rise to match.

Pricking the bubble

The housing bubble is therefore just another way of transferring wealth from the property-less to the property-owners. But even our bosses are getting nervous that we could end up in a situation like the United States or Ireland, where after the bubble burst, entire neighbourhoods became vacant after their mortgages were foreclosed on. Hence, the Reserve Bank has recently cut the availability of loans for new home-owners (once again punishing the needy so as to safeguard the gains of the greedy).

So what’s a pro-worker, pro-environment solution to the housing crisis? A bursting housing bubble might bring prices down, but would also cause massive economic recession. The right-wing media and the National Government want us to think that the answer is building new housing zones on the fringes of the urban area at “affordable prices”.

Let’s go through all the ways that this kind of urban sprawl is ecological and economic bad news:

  • New fringe suburbs encroach onto fertile farming land. Some of Auckland’s best volcanic soils (such as the market gardens in Avondale) have long since been built over. Pushing development towards Pukekohe would put the food sustainability of the region under severe pressure.
  • New developments require brand new services such as telephone, stormwater and electricity to be built, at a high cost.
  • In New Zealand, new housing areas are generally built without any thought as to public transport – and generally nowhere near workplaces. Not only does this require that everyone who lives there has to own a car, but they have to commute for stupid distances across our already-clogged motorway network, turning expensive fossil fuels into air pollution as they do so.

The National Government’s “special housing areas”, such as Hobsonville Point, Flat Bush or Hingaia, are nowhere near the recently upgraded electric train services, and will all need new bus or ferry services to make it possible to live there without a car. This isn’t solving the housing crisis – just opening it up to developers to profit from.

Up, not out

The alternative – as many insightful commenters on Auckland’s housing issues have identified, for example, the Generation Zero pressure group – is for Auckland to grow up, not out. That is, new affordable, high-density (flat or apartment) housing should be build in and around the Central City and central suburbs. Amazingly enough, it’s only been legal to build apartments in the Auckland CBD since 1995, and since then its population has grown to 25,000 – and, with a large population of students and creative types, it’s generally a lower-income and more culturally diverse population than the ultra-rich inner ‘burbs like Remuera or Herne Bay.

The rich absolutely hate this idea. The working-class population of central Auckland were systematically moved out between the 1950s and 1970s, when “slums” like Freemans Bay and Newton were gutted to build the Central Motorway junction, and surrounding suburbs like Ponsonby or Grey Lynn were gentrified.

The old working-men’s cottages of Auckland’s central fringe suburbs can now fetch more than $1 million. The last thing that their privileged current owners want is for the price to be brought down by affordable apartments being built round the corner – or indeed, for working-class (or non-white) people to live in their area at all. They’d much prefer working people out of sight and out of mind, in the far-flung fringes. Which is of course precisely what happened to the inhabitants of “old” Ponsonby – Mangere or Otara were settled by refugees from “slum clearances” and motorway madness around the CBD.

Housing and transport are both aspects of the same question, as is access to public services. Auckland’s liberal mayor Len Brown, elected by the working-class outer suburbs over the screams of the Parnell and Newmarket ruling classes, has staked his credibility on the Central Rail Link, an underground railway through the CBD which would greatly increase the efficiency of public transport. Auckland’s inner-suburb privileged class, though, see this as part and parcel of intensified housing, and their representatives on Council have tried to sabotage it at every turn. Making urban life in Auckland more accessible, affordable and vibrant is the last thing that the ultra-exclusive, financially-segregated communities of the city fringe want.

Anti-urbanism

Studying the facts, it becomes clear that to improve quality of life in Auckland, to reduce social equalities and make life richer and more affordable for working people, the affordable as well as the green solution is centralisation and intensification combined with much better public transport. However, many who see themselves on the liberal side or even the Left of politics wouldn’t agree.

When I interviewed MANA co-vice-president John Minto in this paper a couple of years ago, when he was running for Mayor of Auckland, he had this to say:

“They’re replacing existing state housing with 8-story slums in the town centre. We’ve seen this happen overseas – they’ll be rubbish-quality… Families need wide spaces to grow up in – they’re not growing to grow up on the sixth floor of an apartment building.”

There is absolutely no reason why – excluding the greed of developers and the ignorance of planners – high-density living should become a “slum” nightmare like an English “estate” or a French “cité”. All that is required is people-centred and eco-friendly planning. Attention to green space, sustainable transport links, and integration to the broader culture of the city can prevent affordable housing becoming a shunned slum.

Large apartment buildings can even be more environmentally friendly than a traditional, draughty, uninsulated Kiwi single-dweller property – especially in, as has happened in Chicago and other places, they become self-sufficient in energy by installing solar panels on their roofs. The biggest barrier to children being raised in the Auckland CBD is the lack of schools – which could be fixed by a people-centred education policy.

Detroit

While John is motivated by concern for the poor, other anti-intensificationists have less savoury motivations. “Big cities” are something, for these people, which happen in other countries. Auckland, to them, is something like a cancer or a parasite on the country, and should never have been allowed to grow to its giant sprawling size (and certainly not with such ethnic diversity!)

Some of them even suggest deliberately letting it run down and become uninhabitable, provoking a Detroit-style exodus to the other centres or the regions. This kind of ruralist or small town mythology makes one remember Karl Marx’s comment about the “idiocy of rural life” – by which he did not mean stupidity, but self-absorbed parochialism.

Ecosocialism concentrates on quality of life as well as income for working people. “Agglomeration benefits” – the economic, cultural and environmental benefits of concentrating and enhancing the central areas of large cities – are very real. Although some will always prefer a suburban big back-yard lifestyle, the cultural benefits of living in a teeming, vibrant, culturally rich community should be open to all working people of Aotearoa/New Zealand. This is the future that the “Remuera brigade” (you’d say Thorndon or Fendalton in other cities, I suppose) hate and fear.

When they “cleared” Freeman’s Bay and Newton in the 1960s, they told the working-class and Pasifika residents that they’d never miss their old “slums” in their brand new houses in far-away Mangere and Otara. We can see how that turned out – economic apartheid, auto-dependent isolation, and a downward spiralling local economy leading to crime. It’s time to put an end to economic apartheid, and bring working people back into the centre of our urban life and culture – where they belong. The only way we can all fit sustainably is by growing our cities upwards.

A national hui on the state housing crisis will be held in Auckland on February the 21st.
Register at statehousinghui@gmail.com
[Facebook event]

Filed Under: Environment, Housing

Desperate people: Christchurch’s slum dwellers

February 10, 2015 by
Brownlee is a landlord in Christchurch.

Brownlee is a landlord in Christchurch.

Fightback is running a series of articles on the housing crisis in Aotearoa/NZ.

This article by Byron Clark examines the housing situation in Christchurch.

Desperation is the word that best describes the situation in Christchurch for those with insecure housing. In the years following the series of earthquakes that destroyed a third of buildings in the central city, as well as many in the suburbs particularly in the east of the city, large numbers of people were displaced. At first housing-related protests were held frequently, however the core of these protests were homeowners angry with insurance companies or the Earthquake Commission (EQC) for slow speeds with repairs and rebuilds.

It was not unusual to hear a speaker at one of these rallies talk about having to move out of their home and into their investment property – what happened to their now former tenants was not mentioned. The plight of the homeless was discussed only at these rallies as a sort of add-on at the end of a list of grievances, to add weight to the ‘main issues’.

One of the last major actions of Occupy Christchurch was a rally around the theme of housing as a human right, taking place at the electorate office of Earthquake Recovery minister Gerry Brownlee, a local landlord. The Occupy movement had become a place welcome to the city’s homeless, but had been deliberately excluded from EQC related protests by organisers concerned about the public image of their events.

With the internal problems of Occupy Christchurch at that stage, and the difficulties that come with having no fixed abode, no larger movement grew out of the brief occupation of Brownlees lawn.

Many people adapted to the ‘new normal’. The population of North Canterbury swelled as people moved further away from their workplaces (plans for a commuter train were made by the regional council, but ultimately scrapped) caravans and portable buildings popped up on front lawns, students decided living with their parents another year was their best bet and young couples kept flatting rather than renting a place to themselves.

Meanwhile, workers flooded in from around the country and overseas to rebuild the city, all of them also in need of accommodation. Building consents have been granted to create villages of single-bedroom units to house these workers, such as Cressy, (named after the ship which carried labourers to build the city in the 1850s). But for the most part these villages have yet to open.

With much of the city’s social housing damaged, and recently arrived tradespeople filling boarding houses, the people who pre-quake were at the bottom of the heap – recovering addicts, recently released prisoners, people discharged from psychiatric wards without the needed level of care in the community, were still at the bottom of the heap, only now the bottom was lower than it had been before, when at least a council flat was a possibility.

Into this situation stepped opportunists like Craig Skilling. Skilling, a former car wrecker who filled the former site of his business with chemical toilets, caravans, converted buses and shipping containers, told The Press he housed people “no-one else wants”.

“I have no problems because I run it like a jail. The tenants ring the police on me. I have had the cops down here with guns to my head and everything. I’m not doing this for no c..t except me. It’s called survival.” he told the paper when it reported his “hovel” was likely to face closure. “I’m the one who is going to lose the most. I don’t care where they go. These people don’t care about me. I don’t care about them. I’m providing a service.”

In the article Skilling comes across as a horrible person, but there are hints he was not always that way, “I have to go out my door and flick a switch in my brain and turn into a totally different person.” he told the reporter. He also lives on the site himself, with his partner and three children.

Skilling is a failed businessman who became a slumlord, but in Wellington more successful businessmen – and Brownlee is not the only landlord – are privatising state housing and blocking attempts at policies like a rental warrant of fitness. Skilling’s site is being closed not because it is a slum, but primarily because regulations only permit one residence on a commercial site.

Social housing NGO’s (non-government organisations) are in line to purchase privatised housing and take advantage of income-related rents previously only available to state house tenants, and are therefore unlikely to kick up a fuss. The left-leaning city council voters elected in 2013 has talked of more social housing, but this has been delayed, in part due to a $1.2 billion funding shortfall which is seeing the council abruptly change course and embarking on a there-is-no-alternative style austerity and privatisation agenda which could see charges for water use while rates increase (and be sure those increases will be passed on to tenants).

A national hui on the state housing crisis will be held in Auckland on February the 21st.
Register at statehousinghui@gmail.com
[Facebook event]

Filed Under: Christchurch, Housing

Fightback plans for 2015 and beyond

January 30, 2015 by

Fightback members gathered in Akaroa over the weekend of the 23rd-25th of January, to discuss the future direction of the organisation. Although turnout was certainly modest, participants made a number of resolutions which we hope will provide a firm strategic basis for Fightback’s work in the coming period.

Programme

The conference resolved that Fightback is based on a political programme, which is not only a set of goals for social change but a plan of action to bring them around. Fightback seeks alliances with other progressive forces and organisations of the oppressed and working class, to develop and enact this programme. The purpose of Fightback is putting our programme into action in political activism, amending that programme in line with experience, and training its membership in Marxist theory and practice.

As a basis for this work, members passed the following 10 Point Programme:

  1. Constitutional transformation based on Tino Rangatiratanga, Mana Motuhake and workers power. Tangata whenua and community co-ops to operate as kaitiaki over public resources.
  2. Secure jobs for all who are ready to work, with a living wage and a shorter working week.
  3. The benefit system to be replaced with a universal basic income.
  4. Full rights for migrant workers.
  5. Opposition to all imperialist intervention and alliances, including New Zealand state’s participation in military occupations and the Five Eyes agreement.
  6. No revolution without women’s liberation. Full funding for sexual violence prevention and survivor support, free access to all reproductive technologies. For socialist-feminist solutions to the marginalisation of all gender minorities, within the movement and in society.
  7. For an ecosocialist solution to climate change. End fossil fuel extraction, expand green technology and public transport.
  8. For freedom of technology and information. Expansion of affordable broadband internet to the whole country. An end to Government spying on our own citizens and on others. End corporate copyright policies in favour of creative commons centred on producers and users.
  9. Abolish prisons, replace with restorative justice and rehabilitation.
  10. Free health-care and education at every level, run by those directly affected. In healthcare; remove inequities in accident compensation, move towards health system based on informed consent, opposition to “top-down” efforts to change working people’s behaviour. In education; full public funding for all forms of education and research, enshrining education in te tiriti and te reo.

Recent years have seen an offensive struggle against casualization in previously unorganised sectors such as hospitality, alongside a defensive struggle against casualization in ‘traditional’ union sectors. This accompanies a decline in participation in mass organisations, in a period of neoliberal entrenchment. Fightback passed a basic Union/Workplace Policy as a guideline for members in various sectors of the workforce and union movement.

Alliances

Comrades agreed to initiate a series of broad monthly forums with groups including the ISO, Hobgoblin, MANA, the ‘Left Thinktank’, and other individuals and groups.

Additionally, comrades resolved to initiate a process of debate and discussion with the ISO to test strategic possibilities for organisational unity.

Fightback also recommitted to participating in the MANA movement, as a vehicle for linking the struggles for Maori Sovereignty and socialism. As members of this movement, Fightback committed to developing a Mana Wahine policy and wahine caucuses. Finally, in line with the aim of supporting Maori sovereignty, Fightback committed to sending members to the 175th anniversary of Te Tiriti at Waitangi.

Fightback aims to be a socialist-feminist organisation. In line with this, the conference passed a Safer Spaces policy, as part of an attempt to challenge sexism within the movement. Comrades also resolved to investigate possibilities for a nationwide campaign for consent education in primary, secondary and tertiary education.

Finally, Fightback endorsed Sue Bradford’s proposal for a left-wing think-tank, and committed to a small monthly financial contribution to this project.

Organisation

Online forums offer opportunities for participation aside from weekly branch meetings. Participants amended the membership policy from a requirement to “attend branch meetings” to “work in collaboration with Fightback structures,” alongside agreement with the 10 Point Programme, and minimum dues of a $10 monthly sustaining subscription to the magazine.

Fightback continues to publish a printed magazine, but the bulk of readers engage through the website and social media. Participants resolved to use our social media platforms for more rapid tactical responses, while using the magazine for longer-term analysis. Fightback therefore endorsed a less regular magazine publication schedule, with themed issues including a crowd-funded issue dedicated to women’s writing.

Filed Under: Events

I am not Charlie, and I’m just as sad as you are

January 14, 2015 by

By BC, @sinaute

translated by Daphne Lawless, translation originally published here.

“I didn’t go down into the crowd.” One @sinaute expresses, in the comments section of Daniel Schneidermann’s latest article, his unease with respect to the discourse of “national unity” after the murderous attacks against Charlie Hebdo. Under discussion, the “Islamophobic drift” of the magazine and of the “Michel Onfray/Charlie Hebdo/Caroline Fourest secularist” left.

Great unease. I didn’t go down into the crowd. I am not Charlie. And believe me, I am as sad as you are.

But this emotional unanimity, almost compulsory for those who listen to public-service radio and read the mainstream media, I get the feeling that they’ve already tried to shove me into it, twice. French society is completely alienated, but it keeps telling itself its stories. First story: France winning the FIFA World Cup in 1998. Unanimity: Lilian Thuram for President, Black-White-Arab [United], etc. Then, I was in the crowd. A few years later: Player walkouts at the 2010 FIFA World Cup, [commentator Alain] Finkelkraut and his “Black-Black-Black” [comments on the racial composition of the French team – trans.], an outburst of hate against those millionaire ghetto punks, a systematic distrust of illiterate sportspeople emerging from the post-colonial lumpen-proletariat. Wonderful, this “national unity”.

L’Observateur cover on anti-National Front demonstrations in 2002

L’Observateur cover on anti-National Front demonstrations in 2002

Second story: between the first and second rounds of the Presidential election in 2002 [where conservative Jacques Chirac faced off against fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen – trans.] Unanimity: the National Front would not pass, “clothespegs [on the nose to vote for Chirac]”, “survival of the Republic”, a “multicoloured” crowd and Moroccan flags on the night of the second round in front of “super-liar” Chirac, the unexpected “saviour” of the Republic, and [his wife] Bernadette sulking, great national relief. I was in the crowd on the demonstrations between the two rounds.

A few years later: the National Front surging to new heights, the invention of “anti-white racism”, the creation of a secular-Leftist coalition including Charlie Hebdo and a hard-Right defending “national identity” against radical Islam in France, people talking about “washing the scum off the streets with a power-hose”, hijab derangement syndrome, prayers in the street, mosques, riots in the suburbs, shots fired at police, curfew, hijacking of secularism by the extreme Right, [anti-immigration journalist] Zemmour, [anti-Semitic commentators] Dieudonné and Soral… Wonderful, this “national unity”. Third story: national survival after the inexcusable massacre at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Unanimity: national mourning, “we are all Charlie”, massive demonstrations to defend freedom of expression all over the country. Charlie? No-one read it any more. For people on the left who thought about it a bit, their Islamophobic drift under cover of “secularism” and “the right to mock everything” was too obvious. For people on the right: they detested this kind of post-1968 culture, but it was always nice to take the piss out of those Middle Eastern mediaevals. For the extreme right: not read, its writers and cartoonists detested culturally and politically, but very useful, its cartoons reprinted in “Secular Response” [an extreme-right Islamophobic website – author’s note]. For a lot of Muslims: a weekly insult, but you keep your mouth shut, that’s “French culture”.

Charlie Hebdo cover mocking National Front leaders Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen

Charlie Hebdo cover mocking National Front leaders Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen

Result: hundreds of thousands of Muslims summoned to prove their bona fides, scarcely a few years after the official purge around national identity. Year after year with the same insistent message: damn you, when are you going to integrate? And you, “moderate” Muslims, why don’t we hear from you more? Starting from today, “you are either for us or against us”. Cabu [one of the murdered cartoonists – trans.] didn’t say any different: “They have to accept caricature, it’s part of French culture”. Wonderful, this “national unity”.

Angry reactions from kids in the neighbourhoods heard on the radio: “it’s not possible, it’s too gross, it must be a false flag”. [Anti-Semitic commentators] Dieudonné, Soral and the conspiracy theorists went that way: obviously some don’t believe in January 7th any more than they believe in September 11th. The reality is that we already lost these people a long time ago, and we’re not going to get them back with public candlelit vigils, nor with calls to “resistance” – what are you “resisting”, really? Are you going to subscribe to Charlie Hebdo? What will that change?

Collective reassurance is a healthy and understandable impulse, faced with such a traumatic massacre. But its flip-side is collective denial, resulting in forgetfulness of the real and profound causes of alienation. The majority will feel better, it will do them good, like it did them good in 1998 and 2002, and that’s precious. But the split in society is complete. And ideological confusion is at its height. No-one asks how we got here, how young Paris kids ended up massacring journalists and artists with a Kalashnikov after a stint in Syria, with no idea about the life or the ideas of the people they killed: they were just on the hit-list of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. No-one can see that French society, behind a façade of unity faced with a horrific event, is really more than ever completely alienated, that it’s desperately pitting the most deprived against each other, and that in just over a decade it has produced its own internal enemies.

No-one wants to see that the biggest producer of Al Qaeda soldiers on our territory is PRISON. No-one understands that France didn’t break down in 2015, but ten years earlier, during the riots. No-one wants to see that we are still suffering the long-term consequences of the immense colonial and post-colonial humiliation, and that because of this, your lectures about “civilisation” and “freedom of expression” fall on deaf ears for some of those who suffered this humiliation, and STILL suffer it.

Libération newspaper front page: “Prison, just a stop on the road of jihad”

Libération newspaper front page: “Prison, just a stop on the road of jihad”

And they continue to tell themselves their stories, after the World Cup fiction of 1998, after the “Republican Front” myth of 2002, this time repeating “freedom of expression” over and over like a hiccup, the last resort of a society which can no longer find any reason for existence than the fundamental right to take the piss out of “others”, like a deus ex machina which will miraculously repair this “national unity” which has been ripped to shreds.

You will not be able to rebuild a “national community” on this principle alone, even if it’s essential. I tell you, you won’t be able to. Because THAT is not our problem. Our problem is to make it so that there is no longer anyone in France who has so little to hope for and expect from the land of their birth, that they are reduced to having no more reason to live than to kill people en masse, either here or elsewhere. Because we can’t do anything against those who give them their list of targets, once they are conditioned. So we have to put EVERYTHING into action before they get that far: it’s not easy, but it’s the only thing that counts, if we don’t want to go on slipping into the gulf of civil war, which is the final consequence of alienation. After that, it’s too late. And it’s already too late…

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