The first McDonalds strike ever in Wellington happened today.

At 8am 5 of the 7 workers on shift came off the job and joined the picket line that had been set up outside Bunny St McDonalds. It was a noisy, lively affair, with Fightback member and Wellington Unite Union organizer Heleyni Pratley leading the way with chants, songs and the occasional speech to the people passing by, explaining why the strike was being held and why the public needed to respect the picket line. Few people tried to break the picket line set up outside the main door and fewer still managed to force their way in.

Management had at the last moment rostered on more non-union staff in an attempt to keep the store running. Yet with few people in the store, the level of staffing was irrelevant. With numerous cars tooting their support, McDonalds management attempted to give out free vouchers to try and entice members of the public to break the picket and come into the store, but after a public service announcement over the megaphone explaining what these vouchers represented, a large amount of people were seen to chuck them in the gutters, still wet from the sporadic rain.

A member of the striking staff spoke briefly on the megaphone about their experiences on the floor, of being paid minimum wage.

The picket was a lively affair, with about 25 present a mix of socialists, activists and trade unionists from FIRST Union, the Postal Workers Union of Aotearoa, the NZ Nurses Organisation and the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union.

After half an hour, the members went back into the store with Heleyni accompanying them to make sure that management (including the franchise owner, who had arrived and stood at the back of the store looking darkly at the picket line outside) didn’t threaten or attempt to discipline the workers for standing up and striking.

While it was a short demonstration, this is an escalation of the struggle for increased conditions for Unite members in McDonalds and in the wider fast food industry. A number of KFC members have already made it clear that a weak McDonalds collective, undermines their own ability to fight for better wages and conditions. 85% of unionised McDonalds workers nationwide have voted for strike action.

A Unite Union ‘War Council’ has been formed in Wellington to coordinate demonstrations and strikes amongst members and supporters.

In April, Victoria University of Wellington Students Association (VUWSA) launched its “Fairer Fares” campaign, lobbying the council to reduce public transport fares for students. VUWSA has conducted well-attended student forums on the issue, and the campaign has received coverage on TV One’s Seven Sharp.

Salient, Victoria’s student magazine, ran a debate on the campaign. Critics argued that the campaign “stinks of elitism and privilege” and that students should pay their “fair share,” while campaign head Rick Zwaan responded that students are “among the hundreds of thousands who are struggling” and pointed out that 90% of students are entitled to a Community Services Card. By Zwaan’s logic, arguably anyone with a Community Services Card should have subsidised fares.

Public transport is not just a student issue. Rising petrol costs, the necessity of ecologically sustainable transport solutions, and the commercialisation of public transport are key issues for workers and progressives generally.

Subsidised fares for students is an achievable goal. However, the wider issue is a privatised or commercialised public transport sector that regularly increases prices, cutting back access for low-income workers, beneficiaries and students. Council spends around 70% of its budget on public transport, much of it subsidising private business in its profit-gouging.

VUWSA has recently come under fire for campaigning on “non-student” issues. Conservatives criticised the organisation’s support for same-sex marriage rights, which won around 80% support from students – ironically this policy was introduced at the same time as VUWSA restructured its executive to abolish the Women’s, International and Queer Officers. Students associations are pressured to play an increasingly managerial and mediating role, especially in the context of Voluntary Student Membership (Voluntary Student Membership – A Socialist Perspective, Joel Cosgrove, December 2010 Spark).

Although universities act in large part as training for the managerial class, and production of research for market purposes, most students are indebted and work part-time. Public transport fares affect students as members of a wider community of workers, not simply as students.

Students cannot limit ourselves solely to sectoral issues, “student issues” (although action on student issues is important). A broader campaign for free or affordable, improved public transport could build solidarity with the wider community. Ultimately to address the underlying problem of “fairer fares,” public transport must be made truly public, placing it under community control.

Daphne Lawless will present on Ecosocialism at our upcoming conference, Fightback 2013.

It seems to be common sense that socialism and green politics go together. “Green is red”, wrote English socialist Paul McGarr more than ten years ago. On the other side of the aisle, the Right often refer to the Green Party as “watermelons” (that is, red on the inside – secretly socialist). The Green Parties, for their turn, like to deny this connection, often declaring themselves “neither left nor right but out in front”. And many Marxists don’t want to have anything to do with this supposedly privileged middle-class movement for that very reason.

However, ecosocialism is – in brief – the idea that you can’t have green politics without red politics. That is: that you can’t have an environmentally sustainable society under capitalism and its almight profit motives. And you can’t have a socialist society which ignores ecological sustainability and quality of life in favour of producing mass quantities of consumer goods. I want to argue that, while ecosocialism has been for the last 25 years or so “the wave of the future”, it is now very much the wave of the present.

Marx and Ecology

Ecosocialism is the descendant of a Marxism which comes from “bottom up” – a Marxism which takes as its start and end point the lived experience of human beings on this planet. Marxism, as a philosophy which seeks to liberate humanity from alienation, is most widely known as the theory of how capitalism alienates the working class from the produce of their labour. But Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also discussed how it alienates human beings from nature.

The American socialist writer John Bellamy Foster has shown that Marx’s early writings are very clear that capitalism creates a “metabolic rift” between social systems and ecological systems. Through the town-country division of labour, natural resources, including the plant and animal kingdoms, waterways and space itself, become seen as inert objects waiting to be transformed into goods for profit. And of course this applied also to the workers themselves – the worker is not valued for her or his humanity, but only as a source of potential profit for the boss. Capitalism is a system of exploitation of all of nature – including people.

The increasing push for resources under industrial capitalism leads to both environmental damage and heightening of capitalist competition. For example, in 19th century England farming was transformed by the increased use of chemical fertiliser – but the increasing yield of crops led to soil degradation. Meanwhile, imperialist wars were fought over tiny islands rich in guano (bird droppings) which could be used to make fertiliser.

However, this also has an effect on human well-being. The growth of industrial cities led to an urban environment fouled and polluted as much as a rural environment – especially for the working masses who flocked to these cities from the country. We can see a very similar process (the wearing out of the countryside under exploitation combined with the growth of tenement cities) in modern China. Foul, cramped, soulless working and living conditions are as much a product of capitalist alienation as the expropriation of surplus value.

degradation of the Aral Sea

Soviet Russia’s eco-disaster

The first argument which is thrown back at ecosocialists is that the 20th century European and Asian states which called themselves socialist were hardly environmental success stories. This is true. But in this lies the fundamental difference between ecosocialism and these bureaucratically mismanaged state-run economies.

Just like capitalist economies, the Soviet Union was determined to push for economic growth at all costs – to keep up with the West and defend itself. Referring to industrialisation, Josef Stalin is reported to have said: “We must do in ten years what England did in a hundred”. And a process running at ten times the speed was ten times as brutal.

We need only mention a few examples – the mass famines following the collectivization of agriculture, which killed millions in the Ukraine. The Aral Sea in Asian Russia has virtually ceased to exist after the rivers feeding it were diverted for irrigation. Consumers stood in line for basic necessities while priority was given to building heavy machinery, space vehicles and nuclear weapons. And countries in the Soviet orbit – such as East Germany – became notorious for their greyness and dirtyness, due to burning cheaper “brown coal” (lignite) or using shoddy concrete.

No wonder that in the late 1980s, the workers didn’t lift a finger to defend these so-called “workers’ states”.Their actual, human needs were never a priority for their bureaucratic rulers.

Against productivism

So ecosocialism is opposed not only to free-market capitalism, but to productivism in all its forms – the push for economic growth, whether measured in profits or in raw production numbers, at all costs. Productivism is the triumph of the abstract (numbers of currency or objects) over the concrete (the real quality of life of the masses). Ecosocialism believes that socialism must run on a triple bottom line – not only must a new society restore political and economic power to the workers, but it must also work to heal social alienation and the alienation of humanity from the rest of nature.

So why is ecosocialism becoming so vital at this point in history? It’s well known that “Marx is back” since the near-collapse of financial capitalism in 2008 and the subsequent “recovery for the rich only”, which have laid bare the continuous reality of class warfare and exploitation. But the massive economic crisis only one of the problems facing the current world system.

PERIL syndrome

New Zealand socialist Peter de Waal came up with the concept of the “PERIL syndrome”. PERIL here stands for five integrated crises that capitalism faces at the current time. The Profitability crisis is only the first: there is also:
• an Ecological crisis involving global warming, polar melting and other such imminent fundamental changes to the environment;
• a Resources crisis as fossil fuels get rare, and battles loom over other scarces resources, such as rare-earth minerals in the Congo;
• a crisis of Imperialism as the United States and its allies such as Israel increasingly find it difficult to exert their hegemony over such up-and-coming economies as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa);
• a Legitimacy crisis as the veil is increasingly stripped away from the naked greed of the ruling classes, as the working classes in the rich countries are progressively stripped of their social gains, while the working classes in developing countries become aware of their potential collective power.

This combination of crises suggests that the global capitalist order is now fragile in a way it has not been since the Second World War. Some theorists – like the New Zealand socialist Grant Morgan or the Russian-American Dmitry Orlov – have gone as far as to argue that global capitalism is doomed to collapse within a few decades.

However, ecosocialism doesn’t necessarily hold to this apocalyptic scenario. Whether globalised capitalism is sustainable – and what social order or orders might replace it – is a question which has an objective as well as a subjective factor. The crises mean that the global order must change and compensate – but the balance of class forces will determine exactly how that comes about.

Socialist organisation for human beings

So how shall ecosocialists organise? The first point to answer is that the last thing that ecosocialists in New Zealand want is another “sect”. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said that communists do not form another party opposed to working-class parties. Similarly, ecosocialists have not been forming groups opposed to other socialist groups.

Some existing socialist parties – such as the Left Party in France or the Socialist Alliance in Australia – have explicitly declared themselves “ecosocialists”. But in the rest of the world, ecosocialists are forming networks for discussion and common action, while still working within the existing left, socialist and green parties. The concrete form this take depends on the circumstances. For instance, the Green Left in England continues to work within the Green Party, whereas ecosocialists in New Zealand have largely abandoned our own Greens, especially since Sue Bradford was defeated within that party.

But the crucial distinction is that ecosocialism – being based on the concept of ending the alienation of the whole human being, not just from the means of production – is careful to not perpetuate that alienation within its own structures. The “sect” model of organisation which has been standard on the small-group radical left in the developed countries has become a dead end. A holistic view of politics, such as that which ecosocialism provides, argues that no organisation can shut itself off from capitalist society and claim to be proof against its abuses.

We must increasingly admit that the actually-existing radical left is not an affirming and nurtuing place for workers, in particular queer, non-white and female workers. We are all familiar with recent scandals – here and overseas – with sexually abusive behaviour in radical organisations. This happens in organisations which have sucked in the productivist logic of capitalism – where comrades are “burned for fuel” to fulfil the schemes of a self-perpetuating leadership.

Therefore, ecosocialism isn’t just about adding ecological demands to our existing Marxist programmes. It’s about a method of organisation which is sustainable on the human level for revolutionary cadre – which neither burns them out or turns them into automatons carrying out leadership commands. This is perhaps the main reason why I think it is good for ecosocialists not to separate themselves from other radical parties – that not only does ecosocialist politics complement rather than challenge socialism-from-below, but ecosocialist organisational principles can save many good activists from being burned out and alienated by small-group leaders gone berserk.

Where to from here?

The Green Party in New Zealand has completely abased itself before the profit motive. It is now the party of “greenwashing”, of middle-class consumer activism, of the relatively well-off under capitalism seeking some kind of moral basis for their consumption habits. The voting numbers for the Greens in South Auckland show how relevant this is to the working class.

Socialists must challenge Green politics from the left, showing how ecological issues are of top relevance to the quality of life of working people. But we must also challenge bureaucratic and schematic politics from a holistic viewpoint – “green is the tree of life”, said Lenin quoting Goethe, and socialism which exploits activists and crushes their spirits is nothing worthy of the name.

Over Queen’s Birthday Weekend, the 31st of May to the 2nd of June, Fightback will be holding its annual public conference in Wellington. Turn to the back page or visit fightback.org.nz for more information.

In April, thousands rallied across Aotearoa against attacks on public schools. Fightback member Rebecca Broad covers the background of the dispute and argues the need for industrial action to defend and extend public education.

The campaign against further privatisation of power companies has also won some apparent victories lately, with the petition for a Citizens-Initiated Referendum achieving its goal of a non-binding referendum and with the Labour-Green opposition announcing a policy of bulk-buying power to reduce consumer prices. Fightback member Daphne Lawless argues the need for abolition of for-profit “State-Owned Enterprises,” introduced by the fourth Labour government, in favour of democratic community control.

In late March, racist group Right Wing Resistance were outnumbered by an anti-racist rally in Christchurch. Fightback member Byron Clark discusses the role of mainstream racism in fostering racist views.

In the April issue of Fightback, we covered the “peaceful revolution” in Iceland, (http://tinyurl.com/cu694hy) arguing while it has received little coverage in the capitalist press, it has conversely been exaggerated in some circles concerned with economic justice. Fightback reader Jessica Ward submitted an article for this issue, commending the inspirational nature of the struggle in Iceland. Fightback member Ian Anderson responds, contending that while the people of Iceland have won important concessions, international supporters have distorted the realities on the ground, the capitalist state in Iceland retains a monopoly on violence, and there are no “peaceful revolutions.”

On April 17th 2013, a bill passed its final reading in parliament extending marriage rights to same-sex couples in Aotearoa/NZ. This was the result of decades of struggle by supporters of queer rights. In an article reprinted from Scoop, Anne Russell discusses the limitations of this reform for dispossessed queers, while acknowledging that it can act as a spur to further action.
Sexism (like other forms of oppression) is deeply embedded in the daily lived realities of capitalism. Fightback supporter Robyn Kenealy discusses the role of everyday humour and irony in both reinforcing, and undermining sexism.

We also print two obituaries in this issue. Byron Clark explains the background behind celebrations of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s death; her devastating attacks on the working class, repression of resistance, and backing of violent counter-revolutions internationally. We also reprint a piece by MANA leader Hone Harawira, paying tribute to our comrade Mike Kyriazopolous, a unionist and Fightback member.

2013 May Fightback

20,000 union members rally on 20 October 2010 to protest the first round of National’s attacks on workers’ rights.

This piece was originally posted by Socialist Aotearoa

On Thursday 16 May the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) National Affiliates Council meets in Wellington. On their agenda will be the latest attacks on workers’ rights being pushed through by National and the CTU’s newly launched campaign Why Cut Our Pay.

The cuts are targeted attacks on specific unions. The removal of the obligation to collective bargaining will first be used to allow Ports of Auckland to break off negotiations with the Maritime Union and break down job security for hundreds of wharfies. The removal of collective agreement protections for workers in the first 30 days of their job is an attempt to further casualise the service and retail industry workforce and allow unfair dismissals of workers starting off. The attacks on multi-employer bargaining will be used against nurses to break up their nationwide collective agreement.

The CTU represents some 350,000 members in over 35 unions. It is the single biggest democratic organisation in the country and its members work across the country in positions as diverse as bus drivers, nurses, scientists and fire fighters. Without the physical and intellectual labour of these workers the country would grind to a halt. Prisons, schools and hospitals would be unstaffed. Airports, ports and transportation networks would be shut down. Government departments, retail stores and cleaning companies would find their work hobbled.

The unions which must take the lead on these attacks are the three unions that will be first and most severely affected. The Maritime Union, the Nurses’ Organisation and the three main service and retail unions, First Union, SFWU and Unite should all push the CTU on 16 May for a national day of action to fight these changes and commit to a joint stop work to rally the fight against National’s employment relations policy of cutting workers’ rights and pay.

The union movement needs to stop mucking about and get its members organising again to fight the government. The Nats are happy to pick unions off one by one as long as workers don’t start generalising their workplace problems with others and start realising their very real power. Teachers worried by charter schools, doctors by lengthening waiting lists, building workers facing poor health and safety, supermarket workers facing youth rates need to rub shoulders in the streets.

Between now and joint union action we need a massive co-ordinated education campaign by the CTU unions not just explaining these attacks but arguing for a new deal on employment relations with industry awards from a centre-left government after 2014. But the focus of this education campaign must also be mobilisation that defends our current work rights but also builds and mobilises union power.

What unions do now against the government will set the scene for 2014. Defeating the Nats is going to need the support of thousands of mobilised union members who can enrol their friends and whanau to vote, get them to the polls on polling day, give out leaflets, put up posters and talk politics with their workmate. This cohort of experienced activists cannot be created from thin air. It has to be built over weeks and months. In Australia it was the union movements Your Rights at Work campaign that brought down the John Howard’s right-wing government in 2007. But it wouldn’t have happened without sustained education and mobilisation of union members from the beginning. Without the aggressive campaign workers’ rights in Australia would have been severely weakened.

That’s why the CTU’s National Affiliates Council meeting on 16 May naming the date for a stop work meeting to stop National and committing to a sustained campaign to destabilise the National government is absolutely essential.

These attacks if allowed to proceed will inevitably lead to understaffed hospital wards, precarious ports and casualised casinos. The fight back must begin from there and when John Key asks the public ‘Who runs the country?’ the union movement must answer, ‘Not you mate.’

- Socialist Aotearoa

Kelly Pope

As a socialist and mental health consumer, I was recently excited to discover ‘The C Word,’ a blog on the Changing Minds website.

Changing Minds is a consumer organisation based in Auckland. Engaging in systemic advocacy and activism, the group acts as a network of mutual support for people who have used mental health services and want to be involved in improving the health system.

What’s exciting about this organisation and the information they’re providing for mental health consumers, is that they seem to be taking an openly political approach to their work, recognising the impact our material conditions have on all other aspects of our lives – including health and wellbeing.

The first C word examined in the changing minds blog is Capitalism.

“Capitalism” the author states, “is bad for my health. And in my opinion, it’s bad for everyone’s health”. Issues related to low wages and systemic unemployment are raised, and the inability to maintain a work-life balance within the present economic system is related to the people’s needs for rest, particularly where someone is managing mental distress.

The article goes on to discuss how the polarities of full-time or over-employment and unemployment are legitimised through an ideological equation of full-time work with full citizenship – a status unattainable to many mental health consumers due to the demanding nature of work under capitalism.

It is interesting to consider this blog post in relation to the politics of the wider mental health consumer movement.

The beginnings of the consumer movement worldwide were politically radical. Forming in the 1960’s and 1970’s out of the atmosphere of the civil rights movement, the mental health consumer movement began as the Psychiatric Survivors movement.

Organisations formed with names like the Mental Patients’ Union and the Mental Patients’ Liberation Front, indicating their strong stance against the oppressive and alienating system of psychiatric confinement and care.

The psychiatric survivor movement at the time was in many ways linked to a new theoretical approach to mental health and illness. Anti-psychiatry challenged the medical model of mental illness, seeing distress as something very much tied up with a person’s social environment, not merely a case of brain chemistry.

With its new conception of unwellness, anti-psychiatry also made new demands of treatment – to understand people and their symptoms in a social context of the family or community, and to support people within society rather than isolating people away in institutions. It also made demands of wider society to no longer disadvantage, oppress and marginalise the mental health community.

In the last few decades, the psychiatric survivors’ movement evolved, becoming the consumer movement. The consumer movement has reflected the politics of its time, being more individually focussed, seeing legislation and policy establishing patient rights as a major way forward, and reframing people who experience distress as active consumers of services, rather than passive patients.

Informed choice has been a central pillar of how this movement sees the lives of service-users improving. If everyone has access to full information about the treatment options available, we can be considered more personally responsible for our wellbeing and are thus more empowered.

Radical critiques of this movement find its obvious flaws. Situated within the political context of neo-liberalism, the consumer movement over-emphasises individuals’ rights to ‘shop around’ for good mental health care, while neglecting to develop a more systemic analysis of the disadvantages faced by people with mental illness.

Such a systemic analysis might take into consideration the poverty faced by many with mental illness, which creates real, structural barriers to the informed free-market consumer ideal of recent mental health movements.

Along with poverty, the mental health community also anecdotally reports structural barriers to attaining education, engaging in work, having our physical health needs met, finding secure housing and maintaining social connections due to societal stigma and discrimination.

With these significant issues illuminated, further limitations of the consumer movement, with its predominant focus on mental health care options, become apparent. In fact, even the approach to health care options is problematic when we consider how these options are created – usually in the interest of established corporate powers such as the pharmaceutical industry.

Despite the general shift in politics over time, there has never been one blanket ideology of the mental health movement, and it is arguable whether we can even refer to a singular movement of people with lived experience at all. There have always been different priorities for different groups, often impacted by the local political context and the ideals of members involved.

What I hope is happening at the moment though, is that the pockets of radicalism that have existed in organisations like the Icarus Project and Mad Pride, are growing, and flavouring the broad collective of mental health movements, and mental health discourse on the whole.

What makes me excited reading The C Word, and recently talking to consumers involved in VOX a Scottish network who are actively protesting welfare reforms, is that I sense, and hope, that consumer movement is evolving again.

The global political context is one of recession and austerity, of uprising, refusal to accept the status quo and community action. A mental health movement that reflects the world we are living in is needed, and the possibilities for this kind of movement are extensive.

Let’s continue the conversation that Changing Minds has boldly started, and consider how radical politics can be a focus for people involved in mental health, and vice versa.

Sean Bailey, who faced homophobia at Quay St McDonalds, Auckland

Ian Anderson

While negotiations between McDonalds and Unite Union have broken down, a recent case of homophobia has also inflamed solidarity actions across Aotearoa/NZ.

Sean Bailey, a worker at the Quay Street McDonalds in Auckland, reported to the Herald:

“One of my managers said, ‘if you act gay on my shift, I will discipline you’.

“He also said, ‘if you turn anyone else in the store gay, I will punish you and make you lose your job’.”

Bailey said the comments made him embarrassed to return to work.

“I had to call in sick just because I couldn’t work with him, which meant I lost work hours and money.”

Once the managers’ behavior was exposed, McDonalds moved him to another store, in a move described as the “Catholic church solution” to homophobia.

Demonstrations against homophobia in Auckland and Wellington

In Auckland, Unite called a “Turn McDonalds Gay” action outside Britomart McDonalds. Dozens of supporters chanted and danced to pop songs including YMCA. According to GayNZ, Sean Bailey thanked the group and commented, “McDonald’s need to sort out the discrimination in the workforce. It needs to make sure it’s not allowed in our restaurants.”

In Wellington, the Queer Avengers held a small but solid action outside Manners Mall McDonalds. Demonstrators chanted, “Queer power! Union power!” and “When queer workers are under attack, stand up fight back.” Liaising with Unite delegates, Fightback played an active role in organizing and supporting this action.

The coming weeks will see more demonstrations and industrial action across the country.

Gay-friendly McDonalds ad

McDonalds: Corporate “gay rights” stance

At a corporate level, McDonalds appear to support lesbian & gay rights. The company has run gay-friendly ads in France, has a relationship with the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce in the USA, and corporate heads such as former CEO Jim Skinner have spoken out in support of gay rights.

However, queer workers still face multiple-oppression. Since queer workers do not control the means of production, they are forced to rely on bosses who will use whatever tools are available to crush fightback.

Homophobia is part of the arsenal of bullying tactics used by managers to control workers. Especially at franchisee-owned McDonalds stores, reports of bullying behaviour from managers are routine.

Aotearoa/NZ: Legal equality, social oppression
Recently in Aotearoa/NZ, the basic democratic demand of same-sex marriage rights passed through parliament. Adult, monogamous same-sex couples now have the same legal rights as their heterosexual counterparts.

However, gender and sexual oppression remains embedded in social relations. It reveals itself when a manager tells a worker not to “act gay,” when parents kick their children out for their gender identity, when schools tolerate bullying of queer/trans youth.

Capitalism demands certain performances, certain embodiments of gender. It demands that we perform certain kinds of work; that women perform the bulk of unpaid work, with little assistance from the state, while men perform the bulk of paid work; and it tries to fit a wide spectrum of gender and sexuality into these boxes.

Queer power, workers’ power
McDonalds’ workers struggle is connected to the struggle against homophobia. Workers’ rights must mean the right to be open about our sexual orientation, our political associations, and other parts of our life that managers don’t happen to like. Technically discrimination against gay employees is illegal, but just like neglect of wage rights, it is also normal in hospitality and retail.

Unite is currently struggling for parity between McDonalds and KFC, while McDonalds has offered a miniscule 25 cents over the next two years. Winning this dispute will not end oppression. However, with each victory and each defeat, we must aim to build a socialist movement that actively challenges all forms of oppression.

Currently McDonalds makes millions from exploiting and oppressing workers. If this wealth were socialised, it could be directed towards support for queer youth among other social purposes.

This is a struggle for self-determination, for a world in which our work and our gender presentation is not micro-managed for profit. To borrow a phrase from Marx, we fight for a world where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

["Discrimination has to stop," McD's protest hears]