The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Uncategorised

Sisyphus and the Anmeldung – Migrants in Berlin

The Spiral of Migrant Housing Precarization in Berlin


14/05/2023

Migrants and royalty don’t usually have much in common, but Berlin is a special place. In Greek mythology, the gods condemned the monarch Sisyphus to push a massive boulder up a steep hillside. Just before reaching the top, however, the great stone rolled back down, and the accused had to start again from the beginning, over and over again for eternity. In the same absurd and frustrating way, most migrants who arrive in Berlin and cannot register their address [Anmeldung] are destined to face one rejection after another. Whether to open a bank account, get health insurance, sign an employment contract, obtain a tax ID or have an official address to receive mail – in Germany, an Anmeldung is required for almost every paperwork.

This bureaucratic obstacle is intensified by the most urgent social problem now: 700.000 housing units are needed in Germany [1]. Especially in Berlin, the increase in rents and the minimal supply of apartments in the city centre increasingly drive the inhabitants to the city’s outskirts. This isolates them from the main places of work, culture, health and sociability. Housing has ceased to be a social right aimed at satisfying a fundamental human need – to inhabit. It has become a commodity, something produced and sold on the market in order to generate profits.

The commodification of housing is the result of a relatively new historical form of capital accumulation, marked by the hegemony of finance and rent extraction over productive capital. This process of global financialization of the real estate market affects, of course, all people living under capitalism. It is tied to the transition from an industrial economy to a service economy,  as financial services belong to the tertiary sector of the economy.

But the violence of it, combined with the bureaucratic functioning of German institutions, affects migrants in Berlin particularly severely.  Fragile work visas, poor language skills and low-paid jobs in the cleaning, delivery and care sectors, make migrants the main victims of discrimination when applying for an apartment. They lack contacts and support networks to cope with this situation. Their only alternative is to pay exorbitant prices for tiny rooms that they can usually only sublet or rent temporarily. Under such precarious living conditions, it is practically impossible to register their address in public offices. This obstacle becomes a vicious circle of precariousness that consumes migrant life in Berlin. Without Anmeldung, new citizens remain excluded from the most essential urban goods and services and, above all, from the possibility of access to formal employment.

Anmeldung. Picture; Victoria Rodriguez

Berlin’s struggles for the Right to the City and the new role of Migrants

Berlin has a long tradition of urban protest. At various times since the 1970s, broad sectors of the population have organized to stop the demolition of old houses in working-class neighbourhoods [Altbauviertel]; to stop the construction of highways and large infrastructure projects; and to preserve the public character of spaces such as the Gleisdreick, Görlitzer Park and, the Tempelhofer Feld. One of the main protagonists in these struggles was the autonomist left sector. Together with students, unemployed and marginalized people, that organized a squatters’ movement [Hausbesetzerbewegung].  That came to control, during the 1980s, more than 200 houses in the Kreuzberg district and, after the fall of the wall, 130 in Friedrichshain. Women and non-conforming persons wrote an important but often forgotten chapter in this history of urban struggle. These sectors tried out various anti-patriarchal housing experiments based on cooperation, which took the form of legendary experiences such as Hexenhaus, Bülowstraße 55 and Tuntenhaus Forellenhof.

During the 1990s, the vast majority of Berlin’s self-managed housing projects were being legalized by the political power or evicted by the police. At the same time city government initiated an extensive and systematic sell-off of buildable lots and social housing to private investors. Between 1990 and 2017, a total of 21 million square meters of public land was sold, an area equal to the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district. Of 590,000 social housing units available at the beginning of that period, only about 270,000 remained in 2010. Crucially most of these 320,000 homes were not transferred to individual owners but to large real estate consortiums such as Deutsche Wohnen, Akelius & Co. and Vonovia. These consortia had one objective – the constant increase in the value of their shares, which deepened the processes of housing commodification and urban segregation.

As a result of social and political pressure exerted by the public and organizations representing the interests of tenants, the Berlin Senate enacted a law on February 24, 2020, setting a limit on the price of rent for certain types of housing [Mietendeckel]. The great concerns that this raised within the real estate lobby and the liberal party (FDP), the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the extreme right (AfD) were decisive for the legislation to be declared null and void by the German supreme court [Bundesverfassungsgericht] after approximately one year of being in force. However, in the context of the generalized crisis unleashed by Covid-19, the social discontent caused by the retroactive payment of the differences that had been received by the tenants benefiting from the Mietendeckel generated a favourable climate for the triumph of the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen. Organized by various individual and collective participants, this initiative succeeded in passing on September 26, 2021, a referendum proposing the expropriation of 243.000 housing units in Berlin that are in the hands of the three large consortiums mentioned above. The bill consists of creating a public law institution [Anstalt des öffentlichen Rechts] to administer the properties and carry out a progressive compensation to the shareholders for an amount significantly lower than the market value of the properties. However, the real estate lobby and the aforementioned parliamentary alliance, in which the Social Democracy (SPD) is also an accomplice, have succeeded in blocking its implementation over the past two years.

A novel historical feature of the struggles for the right to the city was  the political participation of migrants. The conflicts over the occupations in Kreuzberg during the 1980s were led by German leftist groups. But the protests of the new century highlight, instead, the role that racialized families in neighbourhood initiatives such as Kotti & Co or the encampment at Oranienplatz and the occupation of the Gerhard-Hauptmann school building. These were carried out by migrants and illegalized people between 2012 and 2014. These experiences are meaningful because they confer visibility, for the first time, to different groups that had previously been marginalized from urban debates. It gave them the possibility to demand answers to the problems that afflict them: “Who has the right to live in the “centre” of the city? Those with more economic resources, those who have lived here for generations, or those who identify with a particular urban lifestyle? On what criteria are these habits and lifestyles defined? Is it possible to defend them against commodification? What does the exclusion from the right to vote mean and, how does that affect democracy in the city?”

Translating the Language of Struggle on the Social Production of Habitat

Ciudad Migrante is a space organized by the “Bloque Latinoamericano“, in which anyone can participate to reflect on  the real estate market and bureaucracy effects on migrant life in Berlin. Its main objective is self-organization and mutual aid, to develop collective solutions to the housing access problem. Over the past year, the participants of the initiative have developed communication tools to help migrants to better understand their rights as tenants and, above all, to defend them. In collaboration with artists and geographers, illustrations, videos, texts and maps were produced to provide critical guidance on navigating the process of finding an apartment in Berlin. In a practical and accessible way, these resources explain key mechanisms. These include how a room can be obtained;  the characteristics, rights and obligations of the different types of rental contracts; the common scams to watch out for; directions to resources to counter gender-based violence in the home; and many other indispensable informations that are required when arriving in an unfamiliar city.

But beyond their analytical and communicative function, Ciudad Migrante’s tools are conceived as instruments for training and political action to fight against the precariousness generated by bureaucracy and the real estate market. These resources express the concrete needs of the Latino population in Berlin. Their political inspirations are borrowed from Consejos Comunales de Venezuela, Federación Uruguaya de Cooperativas por la Ayuda Mutua (FUCVAM), Movimiento de Ocupantes e Inquilinos (MOI) of Argentina and Movimiento de Trabajadores sin Techo (MTST) of Brazil. Those are  just a few of the best-known experiences of urban struggle in the South America. Despite the vast diversity of political traditions, all these organizations resulted from the engagement of the people in the processes of social production of habitat. It is the common language of self-organization that the Bloque Latinoamericano chooses to articulate, with its own voice, before the State and the parliamentary parties in Berlin, terms and conditions of the migrant struggle for the right to the city.

Footnote

[1] This is the main conclusion of the study “Building and Living in the Crisis – Current Developments and Implications for Construction and Housing Markets“, presented on 12.01.2023. The analysis was commissioned by the Berlin “social housing” initiative [Soziales Wohnen], in which the IG BAU trade union, the tenants’ association [Mieterbund], a Caritas social unit and two builder’s associations are involved.

This article originally appeared in Spanish on the Bloque Latinoamericano website. Reproduced with permisson.

Macron vs the French Workers – who is winning?

Protests against Macron are at a stalemate. They must escalate if they are to retain their momentum


12/05/2023

First the good news. The thirteenth day of action to defend pensions, on 1st May, brought two million people onto the streets. Every day for weeks before and since, there have been energetic protests around the country. Strikers occupy motorway toll booths and let drivers through for free, while collecting large amounts of money for strike funds. Ministers, down to Macron’s most lowly assistant secretary of state visiting the most out of the way village, are greeted by rapidly organized demonstrations, with crowds banging saucepans and chanting “Macron, resign!” In recent weeks, at least eighty ministerial visits have been disrupted, and a couple of dozen have been cancelled for fear of disruption, according to activist organization ATTAC. Many ministers have suddenly found  that the electricity has been cut off by power workers in the places they are visiting.

On 6th May, the radical left France Insoumise organized “the March of all our Anger” in Marseilles.  On the same day, activists bricked up the entrance of the headquarters of the bosses” federation, the MEDEF. On 8th May, Macron was only able to attend the World War Two victory celebration on the Champs Elysees by banning all spectators from the zone. Later the same day he laid a wreath in Lyon, in homage to resistance hero Jean Moulin, while banning all demonstrations in the centre of the town. Macron is humiliated, isolated, lost. Polls show that eighty two percent of the population consider that “he is not close to the concerns of ordinary people”. Although he announced three weeks ago “a hundred days to calm things down”, this has not been a wild success so far.

Under pressure, and no longer able to count on his traditional right-wing allies who are scared by his stunning unpopularity, Macron has had to shelve many of his planned attacks, as well as making minor concessions. A racist immigration law is being postponed, a new crackdown on tax fraud by the very rich is being put into motion, and money has been found for student grants. In a war of position, Macron is having to retreat in a number of small ways.

Dynamism

The movement has brought millions of people into action, many of whom were not in the habit of protesting. This radicalization has helped our class on other issues. A number of protests have been called to defend the environment against huge new roads, and to to defend farmers against multinationals stealing their water, and so on. These have been tremendously dynamic. Antiracist and antifascist protests have been larger than usual. And strikes over wages are breaking out in many workplaces, sometimes with rapid success.

Meanwhile, Macron’s police have stepped up violence and repression, claiming that the activities of the Black Bloc leave them with no choice. Interior minister Gérard Darmanin claimed that thousands were coming to demonstrations “with one aim:  to kill cops and damage other people’s property”. Apart from the fact that he seems incapable of counting as far as two, the reality is that practically all those gravely injured at demonstrations are protesters attacked by the police. The government is planning a new law to make it easier to harass protestors (though, in the present atmosphere of political crisis, even some of Macron’s own MPs are objecting).

The government is also very much playing the racist card, with a series of declarations from interior minister Darmanin about immigrant “spongers”. The racist police are getting ever more confident – last month a police car in Paris deliberately rammed a scooter with three Black teenagers on it, gravely injuring them.

Strategy and leadership

Macron’s attack on pensions has been signed into law and, in theory, will apply from September. A 14th union day of action has been called for 6th June, two days before a vote in parliament on an opposition motion to cancel the pensions reform (a vote which has almost zero chance of being successful). But even the slowest demonstrator is thinking “if we have tried a tactic thirteen times without success, perhaps we need a new tactic!”

The national union leaderships have refused to go further than single days of action. The obvious option of organizing a 24-hour general strike, followed by 48 hours, 72 hours and so on, in a context of unheard-of levels of public support, did not fit with the perspectives of these professional negotiators. And now, the leaders of the biggest unions have announced that they will meet the Prime Minister for talks next week. Previously they had rightly refused to meet until the law was withdrawn. In theory, the meeting is to discuss other matters, but it is bound to give the impression that relations are on their way “back to normal”, an idea which can only help Macron.

Some sectors of the working class are keen to move beyond the national leaders’ playbook: there are still regular one day sectorial strikes and school blockades against the pension reform. A few workplaces have been on strike for months, and demonstrations continue.

Faced with the intransigence and disdain of the government, a section of young people is tempted by Black Bloc rioting. The rioting is approved of by an increasing number of people, even though it is fundamentally a dead end whose main effect is to help the government build up repression.

Most revolutionaries here are convinced that single days of action will not bring us victory. In general, however, they believe that their role is just to do as much as they can, each in their own workplace, to encourage further strikes. What is missing is a determined mass attempt to pressure the national union leaderships into escalating the strikes.

Born of Conflict, Battle-Proven for Profit

Israeli arms’ trades to Africa bear prolonged oppression of Palestinians and Africans alike


10/05/2023

In today’s world, access to arms goes hand in hand with political strategy – and for those desperate enough, no price is too high to sell or buy arms.

This becomes blatantly obvious in the case of Israel, a country well-known for its breaches of international law and active displacement of Palestinians. But Israel and its mercenaries have made headlines for many other reasons in recent years: from the current revelation of bribes to Liberian officials in exchange for political support, the supply of arms to the regime of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines during an ongoing ICC investigation, to the EU and the US turning a blind eye to Israel selling arms to Myanmar, despite an ongoing arms embargo.

The price of political favors in exchange for weapons is not too high – not even when a country’s own people are publicly outraged about it – and most especially not when one is desperate to keep their forced control over a population.

Following the recent expansion of the Abraham Accords between Arab countries and Israel to include Morocco in its cooperation in the fields of intelligence, air defense and electronic warfare, renewed anger has been voiced across social media platforms by Moroccans, Palestinians and those allied to the Palestinian cause. At least 64% of Moroccans are in opposition to normalization, despite bringing with it the recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Occupied Western Sahara by both Israel and the US. While this is not a new development, it is crucial to recognize that this has been the State of Israel’s (SoI) strategy since its foundation in 1948 and is inherently tied to colonial structures.

Already in 2014, in the aftermath of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Khury Peterson-Smith, stated that “The US and Israel make the connections for us”, having faced brutal repression through the police in the form of the chemical malodorant skunk water, that was acquired for use in Ferguson after the 2014 unrests. Skunk water was developed as a tool of “crowd-control”, for usage in the Occupied West Bank. Although not physically dangerous, it is considered inhumane, as the smell of feces and other contents will stick to the skin for weeks after use – a characteristic sometimes utilized to mark people.

The activist also pointed out the urban police forces, which violently suppressed protestors in Ferguson, were the same ones trained in Israel, as part of an ongoing military exchange. Israel, in turn, is set to receive $38 B in military aid from the USA across ten years, following a 2016 deal.

While the USA may be Israel’s main supplier of arms, Israel’s arms sales have long since expanded to the Global South. Israel itself has not ratified the Arms Trade Treaty, which prohibits the sales of weapons at risk of being used in genocide and crimes against humanity. Israel, under signatory status, has not implemented accountability mechanisms to oversee arms sales, even though SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) had pointed out Israel’s refusal to disclose its sales, most of which were done by intermediaries and private expats. Reports by NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and other investigations show the various recipients of Israel’s arms, e.g. in visual proof of Galil rifles in South Sudan. Although Amnesty International suspects that these were imported prior to the 2015 arms embargo included in the sanctions, rifles originally sold to Uganda in 2007 were seen used by South Sudanese forces following the embargo, constituting a further breach of the ban on arms transfers. Only months after the embargo, Israel invited South Sudanese officials to its 2015 weapons expo in Tel Aviv.

In 2017 Israeli lawyer Eitay Mack inquired about the nature of these sales to countries falling under arms embargoes, such as South Sudan, as export licenses continued to be issued for “military equipment deemed defensive”. He also called upon Israeli officials to immediately revoke the licenses and lead a criminal investigation of the issue. After receiving all relevant information from the defense ministry, the Israeli high court agreed there was nothing unlawful about these sales, and kept court procedures under a gag order. Israel is renowned for its secrecy agreements with various states, and its refusal to comment on the nature of recent sales to Sri Lanka.

Most recently, access to free information was provoked by Mack and historian Yair Auron, who filed access via the Israeli Freedom of Information Act to uncover Israel’s history of arms trade to Rwanda during the genocide. This enterprise was cut short, as the court argued that information on Israel’s trainings of militias and government forces ahead of the genocide, just like its role in providing arms during the genocide, would fall under Section 9 of Israel’s Freedom of Information Act and, on grounds of harming its foreign relations and furthermore concerning the actions of the Defense Ministry, shall not be disclosed.

The story, however, does not end with aiding militias and forces involved in the Rwandan genocide: Israel has provided military training to African countries for decades. As early as 1959, Israeli support was requested by the Belgians who found Israeli techniques to be “useful” to their rule over the Congo – while asserting that Africa provided great economic potential to Israel. Later, Zaire’s connection to Israel remained friendly in nature, due to military support in exchange for access to Zaire’s diamonds. Israel, however, saw its greatest profit in the nature of these exchanges turning “quasi diplomatic”.

Notably, the profitability of Israeli arms is inherently linked to the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, and specifically the siege on Gaza, as shown by the UK based Campaign Against Arms Trade in 2021.

This profitability of frequent attacks on the besieged Gaza strip not only play into the hands of the Israeli arms industry and political rhetoric at large, which profit immensely from the ongoing siege of Gaza, but directly benefit arms companies, too. A striking example of this was the increase in profits during the first month of the 2014 war on Gaza – euphemistically titled “Operation Protective Edge” by Israel. Israel’s largest weapons provider, Elbit Systems, observed a profit increase of 6.4%. Having been ‘tested’ upon the captive population of Gaza, Israeli weapons then enter the global arena, marketed as “battle-proven”. This distinguishing fact boosts trade to repressive regimes, worldwide.

Retaliatory measures and acts of collective punishment, such as further limitations on freedom of movement and economic pressure, are to be expected from the SoI should Palestinian officials demand accountability from international institutions, such as the ICC, the ICJ and the UN. The Palestinian Authority’s appeal at UNGA was considered “political and legal war against the State of Israel”, according to a statement released by the Israeli Prime Minister on January 6th.

This type of threatened punishment by means of political and/or economic sanctions extends into pushing and mobilizing for the withdrawal of international support for the independence of the State of Palestine through the normalization of state relations between Arab or African states with Israel. Nevertheless, many of these states, who previously had NDAs with Israel, were already actively engaged in purchasing weapons. Despite not being formalized for years to come, relations of this type constituted not only a form of trade but also a type of political alliance themselves.

One of the many results of this informal building of relations was the attempt by Israel to persuade the U.S. and European states to lift the sanctions against Sudan, following the end of Sudan’s alliance with Iran.

Looking at the conditions on the ground in Palestine, there are claims that Israel’s global fight against antisemitism had been “null and void” from the beginning in light of the apartheid-like structures and racist laws. To genuinely fight against antisemitism, it would be necessary to end racism inside and outside Israel – and this would effectively mean putting an end to Israeli support for racist and genocidal regimes across the world.

With regards to normalization, it is evident that severing the ties with undemocratic or repressive regimes and those actively engaging in genocidal warfare is not in Israel’s interest. Following joint military trainings, a Nigerian government spokesman noted seeing Israel as an ally in fighting Boko Haram in 2015, citing Israel’s experience “fighting terror within its own borders“. While the Nigerian government has gained notoriety for indiscriminate arrests and mass imprisonment on suspicion of aiding and abetting terror, it has additionally begun to employ Elbit’s cybersecurity software, increasing suspicions of possible human rights violations and misuse of the technology. Given the Israeli armed forces’ egregious and illegal occupation of the West Bank and besiegement of Gaza, this leaves the question: is Nigeria, despite its alleged support for the Two-State Solution, giving Israel the green light for further annexation of the occupied West Bank?

Internationally, Palestine solidarity activists, environmental activists and groups campaigning against the international arms trade have been disrupting the expansion of weapons sales, affecting Israeli manufacturers specifically. The most notable of such campaigns is the ongoing effort by the U.K-based direct action network Palestine Action, who vow to dismantle British support for the apartheid state’s continued genocide of Palestinian people by targeting Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer with a strong presence in the U.K. Elbit’s two permanently closed premises, in London and Manchester, as well as the multi-million-pound contract losses with the British Ministry of Defense, testify to the success of the sustained and relentless direct action technique employed by Palestine Action. Further underscoring the link between Israeli crimes and negative environmental impact, the group also collaborated with local chapters of Extinction Rebellion in the occupation of Elbit’s now-abandoned headquarters in London, in April 2022.

Meanwhile, in Weelaunee Forest, Atlanta one activist has been murdered and many more brutalized in the efforts to Stop Cop City, a ‘police training facility’ which will train and accommodate police forces also trained by Isaeli forces. Police forces in Atlanta, Georgia, have long been part of a training program titled “GILEE”, in which they are trained in “counter-terrorism tactics”. What started out as a brief program in 1996, in preparation for the Olympics, has developed into a program of multiple training excursions a year. Organizers and anti-racist activists, such as the Community Movement Builders, however, have kept an eye on this training program in their fight for the de-funding and abolition of the police and demand that,

“Police Departments will terminate all contracts with military and mercenary consultants. In particular, any and all contracts with the Israeli Defense Force or any subsidiary that trains police in the U.S. to use the same deadly tactics used against Palestinians fighting for their human rights.”

As pointed out by the campaign End the Deadly Exchange, a campaign against mutual training programs between the USA and Israel, “In these programs, ‘worst practices’ are shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing in both countries. These include racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on human rights defenders.”

To better understand the global effect of the spread of Israeli arms, technology, and methodology, it is paramount to extend our gaze beyond this most obvious connection.

In pursuit of democracy, we should follow the links created through the transfer of arms and military knowledge, especially those included in NDAs. Obstruction of access to information to its own population, measures have to be undertaken to ensure necessary information is provided internationally in a timely manner, regardless of whether or not this is considered to be putting Israel’s foreign relations at risk. After all, the international community must follow its obligation to protect people, not profit, and counteract Israel’s deliberate sidelining of human rights violations as it does globally.

First steps have also been taken by the Pan-African Palestine Solidarity network, founded in 2021 with members across 20 countries, that calls for the removal of Israel as an observer state to the African Union in accordance with the AU’s anticolonial nature. Israel is hereby identified as a danger to anti-colonial movements and, based on its repeated violation of international law, to the AU.

Alys Samson Estapé warns: “The crimes Israel commits against the Palestinian people do not stay in the Occupied Territories. They are transformed into knowledge which is then sold so that other Israeli and international companies can profit off of them.“

 

Open Letter from Sudan Uprising to the German Foreign Office

People cannot escape the war in Sudan because their passports are trapped in the German Embassy.


08/05/2023

Dear employees of the German Foreign Office

We, members of the Sudanese Diaspora in Germany, and people with friends and family in Sudan, appeal to you with the urgent request that you release the passports of Sudanese citizens, which were inside the German embassy in Khartoum at the outbreak of war, and that you return them to their owners.

On 15th April, 2023, war broke out in Sudan. In Khartoum and other cities military and militia are fighting against each other, at the expense of the civil population. They are destroying the country with firearms and air fire, and buildings are burning as a result of explosives. Already over 500 people have been killed.

The war has caused 330,000 people to flee, and over 100,000 have already crossed the border into other countries. People whose passports were in the German embassy on 15th April for processing and visa issue have been unable to cross the border. The situation in Sudan is very critical. There are no administrative structures and prices are rising drastically, making it impossible for people to apply for new passports.

This puts them in a difficult situation and forces them to stay trapped by the war. Even in places where there is currently no fighting, the humanitarian situation is getting worse. This means that people without passports are being left behind.

In your press release on 3rd Mai 2023, you accepted that “a three-digit number of passports” is affected. Despite personal inquiries, the number of people who are directly affected has not been released. It is incomprehensible how – in the globally networked and digitalised world of the 21st Century – passports cannot be quickly returned, at the very least in digital format.

We request you to perform the following actions immediately:

  • Immediate return of all Sudanese passports to their owners

  • Enable people to flee from Sudan

  • Evacuate all Sudanese citizens with German passports or visas to Germany.

  • Publish the exact number of affected people and transparently explain how these cases will proceed.

  • Facilitate family reunions immediately, not just for Sudanese people in Germany, but also for people from other countries who have family members in Sudan and are living here, for example, people from Syria, Eritrea, Ethiopia or Yemen.

We unequivocally urge you to act quickly. We are worried about our families and friends, whose lives are in danger. The large-scale evacuation of German citizens showed that Germany is able to act quickly and professionally. We ask you urgently to also do this for non-German citizens. Not least, we want to make you aware of the ethical responsible of Germany. We find ourselves in a situation in which the lives of human beings are being put into danger by bureaucratic procedures.

Yours sincerely

Sudan Uprising Germany

Notes from ‘Terf island’

Tories, gender critics and the far right’s war on trans.


07/05/2023

On February 11, 16 year-old Brianna Ghey, a trans school student, was stabbed to death in a Warrington park in the North of England. Two teenagers were arrested for her murder. At first the police claimed there was no transphobic motive but they later suggested that it might indeed have been a hate crime.

Over the following week, dozens of large and angry vigils were organised in towns and cities across the UK. In Manchester three thousand people queued to get into the vigil, there were six hundred in Liverpool, over five hundred in York, over four hundred in Leeds.

Speeches at the vigils expressed rage and sadness at her murder. They clearly tapped a vein of visceral anger that has been building over the accelerating attacks on trans people in the UK and elsewhere. These attacks are driven by the right, even if some feminists and even some on the left allow themselves to be drawn in.

Tories, bigots and whole sections of the media in the UK give free rein to transphobic tropes and gender critical voices. Rarely – vanishingly rarely – do they allow trans people’s voices to be heard. The attacks increase trans people’s fears for the future, but also generate resistance and significant radicalisation among young trans people and their supporters.

Brianna’s murder was shocking but sadly, not such a surprise. Hate words inevitably lead to violence and hateful actions. These grow more serious. In late April there was an arson attack on the home of two trans people and a gay man in Whitechapel, London. Trans people are increasingly a community under attack. Trans health care is being steadily and stealthily undermined; funding for support organisations curtailed and rights challenged by crowd-funded legal assaults which have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds. Many trans people justifiably feel their very existence is under direct threat.

Murders like that of Brianna Ghey may be rare in Britain, but tragic and avoidable suicides of desperate and marginalised trans people are far from rare.

Culture Wars

At the vigils many trans people said it felt like a moment had been reached, in the fightback against the transphobic moral panic. Desires for active resistance to transphobia coincide with a wave of strikes fuelled by high inflation, soaring consumer energy prices and cuts in real pay.

The strikes that began nearly a year ago are immensely popular drew hundreds of thousands of workers into action against a Tory government which trails by 20 points in polls. The Tories just lost hundreds of councillors in the local elections in England. The standard response of governments and regimes in crisis is to ramp up oppression and scapegoat vulnerable groups to divert from their problems.

Resistance to attacks on living standards, transphobia and racist attacks on refugees and migrants has never been so important or so interlinked. ‘Culture wars’ are intended to divide our side, to pit one oppressed group against others and divert anger away from the real culprits, the bosses, the rich and the Tories. Yet there’s a truth that history teaches us – one oppressed group never betters itself by attacking the rights of another or siding with a ruling class against a vulnerable minority. The fortunes of oppressed groups rise together or they fall together.

On the right, the organisations and individuals who attack trans rights also attack women’s rights. Women’s lives don’t improve as the lives of trans people come under attack. In Hungary Viktor Orban’s right wing populist government followed up attacks on trans people by restricting abortion rights, banning gender studies at universities, and declaring LGBT+ rights to be inimical to the nuclear family. In Russia Putin’s government has for years attacked trans and LGBT+ rights. Putin’s tame parliament, the Duma, is now considering a new law to declare feminism an ‘extremist ideology’.

In the US right-wing zealots pushed over 450 anti-trans bills at state level, including genital inspections of children playing school sports if suspected of ‘being trans’, or prosecuting parents of trans children for supporting their child. They also celebrate the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade. They also campaign to ban sex and relationship education in schools.

In the UK, the Tory government blocked the vote in the Scottish parliament earlier this year to update and amend the Gender Recognition Act to introduce self-ID. The same government continues to cut funding for domestic violence refuges and refuses to address the gender pay gap. Sunak’s weak and unpopular government plans to force schools and teachers to report LGBT+ children to their parents, directly putting many such children at risk. They drawing from the playbook of anti-trans zealots like governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. De Santis just visited the UK and heaped praise on Tory transphobes like Kemi Badenoch, the Equality Minister.

The fake-feminist gender critical organisations that emerged in the past six or seven years (Fair Play for Women, Women’s Place UK, the LGB Alliance, For Women UK and so on) do not speak for women or even a majority of feminists despite their claims. The vast majority of women’s organisations offering support in areas like domestic violence and rape remain trans inclusive. Indeed, at least one of these organisations was sued by gender critical groups because it employs a trans person.

This in itself gives the lie to the notion that gender critics and transphobes are only interested in protecting women and girls. It comprehensively reveals the hypocrisy of their claims to defend women’s rights. In reality their only purpose is to focus their ideological hostility and political energies on attacking trans people’s legal and human rights, and exclude them from the social spaces they have used for decades.

They ignore the very real threats to women’s rights. They often work with the most reactionary defenders of traditional values and the nuclear family. This includes accepting funding for legal challenges, conferences and so on from the very organisations that work to undermine women’s reproductive rights, bodily autonomy and equal rights.

They bring together people who may claim that they just ‘have concerns’, or just ‘want to debate’ or ‘just want to safeguard women and girls’. But as they become right-radicalised, their resistance to rational argument; their unwillingness to accept credible scientific evidence; and their ideological dogmatism underpinned by sex essentialism and shared hostility to ‘gender ideology’ – tag them as a cult-like hate movement.

Cover for Fascists

Many provide political cover for fascists and antisemites. Their enabling of the far right is the price they pay to promote their shared transphobic aims. Gender critics are notoriously slow to distance themselves from fascists and the right, including their antisemitism. Many legitimise the far right’s transphobia by citing their right to ‘free speech’.

Their shameful political blindness to the far right and fascist organisations constitutes a dangerous entry point for the right’s views. Their ‘anti-woke’, conspiracy theory, anti-working-class agenda, opens the door to fascists – who see trans rights, and anti-migrant agitation, as wedge issues to attract a larger audience.

Since mid-2022 fascist groups like Patriotic Alternative, Hearts of Oak and individuals like Tommy Robinson, often posing as ‘concerned parents’, have been trying to shut down Drag Queen Story Hour events. They and the gender critics have attacked those as examples of ‘grooming’ by ‘gender and sexual perverts’ undermining the nuclear family.

In Australia sieg heiling neo-Nazis supported Posey Parker’s recent ‘Let Women Speak’ tour, was funded by wealthy US organisations like CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Coalition. The protests in Australia and New Zealand were large, angry and successful. Parker (real name Kelley-Jay Keen-Minshull) was forced to cut short her tour and scuttle home.

Yet despite the press and media showcasing of ‘gender critics’, they’ve actually had limited impact on public attitudes towards trans people.  Large UK surveys in 2022 – the ‘More In Common study’ – showed attitudes to trans people remain broadly either supportive or non-committal. A recent Fox News poll in the US found that 57 percent of the population are unhappy with the attacks on trans children.

What’s also been great has been the size of many of the counter-protests in support of Drag Queen Story Hour which have severely blunted the campaigns to shut them down. This is not restricted to the UK. A recent counter-protest in Vienna on April 19 drew over 1000 people to defend the event against around 200 assorted fascists, Catholic bigots and members of the youth wing of the far-right Freedom Party.

Building Resistance

Trans people and their supporters are angry and there’s a growing sense of urgency about building resistance to the onslaught. The minimum waiting time for an appointment at a UK gender clinic is now around 5 years; reported hate crimes against trans people jumped by 56% in one year; gender clinics can’t find staff because applicants fear they’ll attract hate press and social media pile-ons. It’s time to fight back.

Socialists start not from weighing up who’s more oppressed than someone else but from a position of unconditional support for all the oppressed. We aim to be, as Lenin urged over a century ago, tribunes of all the oppressed and exploited. We recognise that oppression in the capitalist system is endemic. It stems from social class, class struggle and the social relations of production and reproduction that arise from this exploitative system. The blind drive to maximise the accumulation of capital spawns one existential threat to humanity after another, encouraging those in power to ‘divide and rule’ and ramp up the oppression of vulnerable sections of society.

The ideology of the nuclear family and the heteronormativity and gender binary assumptions inherent to it are why sexism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are so deeply rooted in capitalism. Women’s liberation, gay liberation and trans liberation require the overthrow of the system before they can be achieved.

Building united fronts to defend trans rights is an urgent necessity. These must pull together trans and cisgender people with quite diverse understandings of oppression but who recognise we must stand together against the bigots. For Marxists we go further – we understand the need to see what Marx called the totality of the capitalist system. That requires collective class resistance to fight oppression, and goes hand in hand with fighting the exploitation we face in the workplace.

We argue for building a revolutionary political organisation to unite the most class conscious workers organised to overturn the power of the capitalist ruling class. We need organisations to mobilise the tremendous collective power of workers. Most trans people are also working class and it’s in the interests of not just them but the whole working class to fight transphobia. Just as it is in the class’s interests to fight racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism and sexism.

That’s one reason why it’s so important to fight for trade union involvement in the protests against transphobia, to get banners and delegations from workplaces and unions along to trans pride events, vigils and commemorations. That’s not always a popular position to hold today among trans people. Some activists influenced by identity theory and privilege theory think that trans people should only organise by themselves. But this hardly makes sense when trans people are probably less than one percent of the population. It also relegates cis supporters to the status of ‘allies’, a concept that runs counter to the socialist notion of solidarity.

Some trans activists, especially if influenced by autonomist politics, can be suspicious of trade union and socialist involvement in the fightback. This runs against the need to build the broadest possible working class united fronts against transphobia. We are stronger together, and we need to recognise and involve the potential power of workers in the workplaces. Not least because much trans hostility happens in the workplace and in employment discrimination. Fundamentally a divided working class risks catastrophic defeats.

We socialists say that history is not on the side of the transphobes. We can and will organise to roll back attacks, and we can win. But to permanently stop reactionaries from attacking our gains, we have to pose the big questions. That is how to achieve not just ‘tolerance’ or even ‘acceptance’, but respect and liberation. As capitalism continues to give rise to ever more existential crises for humanity those questions, and the answers that Marxists offer, can no longer be ducked or postponed.