A story of the migrants who built Britain

Artist and author Miriam Gold talks to Judy Cox about her new graphic memoir, Elena–A Hand Made Life, and how such histories can be used to defend refugees and migrants today

Miriam’s great grandparents, Sonia and Moshe Matskevich, who died in Auschwitz

By Judy Cox

Tuesday 19 November 2024

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue

My grandmother was a refugee twice when she was still a teenager. She gave 40 years’ service to the NHS. She said the day the NHS was founded was the best day of her life, even better than giving birth to her own children.

That story has to be part of how we oppose the racist violence that happened over the summer. Refugees have made such a positive difference.

My grandfather was a Jewish refugee from Germany who fled to Britain. During the war he was classed as an “enemy alien” and the British government sent him to an internment camp in Canada then to the Isle of Wight.

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Imagine a government thinking it was a priority to send German Jews miles over the sea to Canada—what an incredible misuse of resources. We still dehumanise refugees by putting them on barges or sending them to Rwanda today.

When I started writing seriously, I stopped taking my family stories for granted. Part of growing up is ­starting to interrogate our family histories.

Our family histories are connected to where we find ourselves now, to how we talk about refugees and public services.

Since the book came out, it has been lovely to meet people who don’t have the same experience of seeking refuge still relating my book to their own grannies and their own memories. We know our families through their homes, their furniture, their curtains.

People recognise their ­grandparents’ homes in the book. The visual elements of the book help retrieve those memories. We all live our lives within our domestic concerns and wider social and political concerns.

There is often a ­shocking disconnect between the people I knew and the history they carried. I knew my grandparents as old people. It was difficult to think of some of the horrible things they went through when they were young.

My grandparents got married in 1941. My grandfather had been stripped of his German citizenship because he was Jewish.

But when my grandmother married him she became a German citizen and an “enemy alien”. It was labyrinthine.

My great grandparents could not escape from Germany because they had to settle debts. They fled to France and enjoyed a brief period of peace.

But they were living under the Vichy regime and a neighbour denounced them to the authorities. Early in 1944 they were sent to the Drancy internment camp then deported to the Auschwitz ­concentration camp.

Both sides of my family have ­stories of internment, of dehumanisation. I have always felt aware that my ­existence is down to the wheels of fate.

My father was a Hungarian Jew. He was saved by Raoul Wallenberg, a man from a wealthy Swedish family who saved tens of thousands of Jews from Hungary.

People’s lives hung by the tiniest of threads. An administrative error could save your life.

I have always rejected a narrative that migrants come here and then move to the right, become self-made business owners and oppose other migrants being allowed in. I was brought up in an anti-racist family.

My grandmother lived in a ­working class area in Sheffield and then in Leigh, a coal and cotton town in Lancashire. She hated snobbery. She was a doctor who was absolutely committed to her patients. This was back when the system allowed you to get to know your patients.

Those ­relationships gave her a real sense of belonging. My grandparents lived in Sheffield, but they were not urban sophisticates. They loved walking in the Peak District.

This was the time of mass trespasses like the Kinder Scout Trespass. So you had two stateless, penniless young people, ­building a new life together, ­walking land whose ownership was being contested.

My grandmother’s Jewish identity was important to her, but she wore it lightly in terms of observance. ­Sometimes she went to the synagogue but not always. Towards the end, she was involved in a reform synagogue in Manchester.

Being Jewish was at the core of who she was. The ­importance of community is the thread that runs through the book. The Jewish community in Sheffield. The community of Leigh, which was a mining town and was so brutally attacked during the Miners’ Strike. And the community at her medical centre and, of course, her large family.

Now we have language around things like trauma, PTSD and survivors’ guilt. My grandmother had an abhorrence of sitting still and being quiet.

This helped her keep ­unhelpful reflections at bay. Keeping busy, ­knitting, crocheting, making everything by hand, it was her trauma response.

I have always been drawn to novels and graphic novels. The images do the storytelling. I came of age in a political area—in inner London, a ­multicultural area with Irish and South Asian communities.

It is exciting when people find new ways to tell their stories in music, in literature or film.

I think it so important to tell ­positive stories about refugees. We need a very different conversation about refugees and asylum seekers.

We need people to come and work, we need people. Today, people are recycling old arguments about refugees, which were not fit for purpose in the first place.

I am a teacher. I work in an area with huge levels of transient ­communities, from all over the world.

The language we are using now is like the language we were using about Jews then. Conversations about refugees and migrants are spiralling.

My memories of my grandmother remind of that phrase about the banality of evil.

My family story is a Jewish story, a Holocaust story. But it is also a story of one of the many migrants who built post-war Britain, the Windrush Generation, the people from Uganda, who all came and built our public services.

Suriname’s Debt Crisis Shows Us How Global Capitalism Works

With rich Amazon forests and fewer than a million people, Suriname is one of the few countries that absorbs more carbon than it produces. But the former Dutch colony is now being forced to implement destructive austerity by global financial interests.

By Sharda Ganga, Jerome Phelps 

November 18, 2024

Source: Jacobin


A meeting of civil society group, Projekta Suriname. Image Credit: Projekta Suriname



Suriname is a former Dutch colony in South America, best known for the pristine Amazon forests that cover 93 percent of the country and make it one of only three countries that absorb more carbon emissions than they produce. It has recently become more interesting to the rest of the world for two main reasons: the fact that it is experiencing one of the world’s worst debt crises, and the discovery of offshore oil and gas in immense quantities.

The people of Suriname find themselves living in a dual reality. In the present, there is a brutal austerity program imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), wreaking the usual havoc on people’s lives. At the same time, politicians assure them that the country has a bright future ahead in which abundant oil revenues will solve all problems and benefit everyone.

Suriname is an important case study in the way financialized neocolonialism works in the twenty-first century. A feminist perspective on debt can supply us with invaluable tools for thinking about the destructive impact of debt and finding ways to combat it.
Debt and Neocolonialism

Suriname’s fertile land and navigable rivers have for centuries been profitable for powerful foreigners. Dutch settlers took over coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations from the British in 1667 and established what was arguably the most brutal slave economy in the region. However, the Dutch colonizers did not stray very far into the forested interior, where indigenous people and Maroon communities of people who escaped slavery defended their autonomy.

Yet even before the country gained its independence from the Netherlands, US commercial interests were transforming the landscape. Vast tracts of forest were flooded, forcing the Maroon Saamaka community from its lands in order to build the Afobaka Dam, which would generate hydroelectric power for the bauxite factory of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa).

When Suriname was no longer sufficiently profitable to Alcoa, the company packed up and left, having managed to sell the dam back to Suriname. Thanks to unfair deals that doubled electricity prices and left Suriname exposed to swings in commodity markets, the country even owed Alcoa more than $100 million for electricity that was produced using its own natural resources.

This debt reached crisis proportions in the 2010s with the spending spree of the Dési Bouterse administration. Private lenders and international financial institutions queued up to make loans, often at high interest, amid the deep crash of global commodity prices. Although Bouterse is currently on the run from a twenty-year sentence for murdering political opponents, the Surinamese people still remain liable for the debts and at the mercy of anyone willing to lend money.

Having said no to the conditions set by the IMF in 2018, the government was forced to borrow from a variety of capital market instruments and multilateral creditors such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the Chinese state, again at high interest rates. After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Suriname defaulted in November 2020.

States are not able to declare bankruptcy in the way that individuals or companies can. Suriname is considered too wealthy to access the Common Framework, the limited and inadequate process for debt relief and restructuring set up by the G20 in the wake of the pandemic. The result, for Suriname and countries across the Global South, is that precious resources needed for health and education drain away to pay the interest on loans.

When countries default, they have to negotiate with their creditors to reduce their debts. Private creditors receive 46 percent of external debt payments from the Global South and own 38 percent of Suriname’s debts. These actors are not used to taking losses when their risky loans go wrong. Private creditors held out in debt-restructuring negotiations with Suriname for an amazingly sweet deal that amounted to canceling just 2 percent of the debt owed. When interest is taken into account, Debt Justice estimates that bondholders will make profits of 80 percent.

Even worse, the bondholders have laid claim to Suriname’s future oil revenues through a value-recovery instrument. If all goes according to plan, this will line their pockets with a staggering windfall of 30 percent of future oil revenues, up to a total of £689 million. Meanwhile, Suriname will continue to spend 27 percent of its government revenues on external debt payments over the next five years.

In order to safeguard this windfall, the agreement with the bondholders is dependent on Suriname changing the legislation of its sovereign wealth fund by December 2024. Fifty years after Suriname’s official independence from the Netherlands, foreign bodies are once again dictating how Suriname uses its resources and what legislation it should pass. This is the new form of colonialism, using debt to gain access to resources.
Debt-Fueled Austerity

The result, for the people of Suriname, is austerity. The IMF demanded savage cuts, based on a flawed methodology that prioritizes capital flows over human rights and the sustainability of life.

These cuts have had a deep impact on people’s lives, plunging the country into political, economic, and social chaos, with strikes and uprisings. Health care has collapsed, medicines are scarce, and operating rooms are empty for lack of materials and qualified personnel. Essential workers such as teachers and health care workers have left the country in droves, poached by institutions in the Netherlands, the former colonizer.

These austerity policies have had a particularly harsh impact on Surinamese women and LGBTQ people, who must pick up the burden of care as the state withdraws. Such feminized care work, disavowed and unpaid, has always been an essential precondition for capitalist profits, even though it is ignored in economic models or deemed “unproductive” in contrast with “productive” paid labor. Debt crises bring this to the fore, as carers have to find money to pay for privatized health services, the skyrocketing prices of essentials, or taxis for children to attend school after school buses and wider networks of public transport have been cut.

Susan Doorson of Women’s Way Foundation highlights the situation of LGBTQ women who face the prospect of going into debt to pay for mental and sexual health services: “How many people in Suriname die because they don’t have access to services? They have to think, am I going to feed the family today or am I going to get this checked out?”

Historic neglect of rural indigenous areas means that health care services are concentrated in the capital, Paramaribo, which is a fifteen-hour boat journey from some communities. According to Audrey Christiaan, ambassador of indigenous cultural group Juku Jume Maro, indigenous communities that “don’t have the luxury of public transport” because of spending cuts and lose access to vital services. In the event of a medical emergency, they face the dramatic expense of hiring a plane to bring people for treatment, which in some cases can be too late.

Austerity forces carers to work longer hours, in more precarious conditions, for lower salaries. Women are disproportionately employed in the public services that face redundancies due to IMF demands to balance the books. The informal sector jobs in which women and LGBTQ people often work also shrink as people cut back on discretionary spending. Inflation in Suriname has meant an 11 percent reduction in purchasing power over the space of a year.

As a result, carers are less able than ever to bear the sudden costs that fall upon them and have to go into debt themselves, as the cycle of debt moves from the state to the household level. At the same time, they have less and less time and resources to provide the unpaid care that service cuts increasingly load onto them, and that society depends on.

A Global Phenomenon

This scenario is not confined to countries like Suriname. We have also seen it play out for communities in the Global North, especially since the 2008 crash, as the governments of rich countries inflict austerity policies with similar narratives to justify them. The crisis of care is now a global phenomenon. As Nancy Fraser has argued, by pushing the unpaid carers on which it depends to the edge of survival while destroying the natural environment it pillages for free resources, global financial capitalism is increasingly cannibalizing the conditions of its own profiteering.

Debt-driven austerity is destabilizing countries across the world. In Suriname, unprecedented protests filled the main square of Paramaribo. But they had limited impact: the Surinamese government has little power in an unfair global system, and it has continued to implement the diktats of creditors and the IMF, despite their deep domestic unpopularity.

As Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago have explained, drawing on the experiences of the Ni Una Menos feminist movement in Argentina, debt-driven exploitation enforces obedience at the same time as it generates profits. In contrast to the expense of maintaining a colonial army, debt generates profits even as it controls and coerces.

The same tool that drains resources from communities simultaneously works to make that process of extraction invisible, individual, and shameful, in stark contrast to the collective exploitation of workers on the factory floor. Whereas unionized workers have strength in numbers for their collective struggle against identifiable exploitative employers, the individual stands alone with their debts before the invisible ranks of banks and creditors, while society tells them that it is their own fault.

States also stand alone against their creditors and the IMF, fearing the judgments of credit-rating agencies and stigmatized by a moralizing narrative that debts are the result of irresponsible borrowing, wastefulness, and corruption. When Burkina Faso’s president Thomas Sankara attempted to organize African states to stand in solidarity against neocolonial debt, he was swiftly deposed in a coup and murdered, allegedly with the support of the French state.

A Feminist Issue

We need a feminist perspective to understand and resist the new wave of debt-based expropriation. Feminism has always worked to make the private sphere politically visible and to build forms of collective solidarity against individualized stigma and exploitation. Financialized capitalism is enveloped in mystification: its workings seem opaque even to specialists, and incomprehensible to the people at the sharp end. Movements like Ni Una Menos have focused on demystifying this process, taking debt “out of the closet” and “challenging its power to shame,” in Cavallero and Gago’s powerful words.

We need an internationalist feminism of the 99 percent that can make connections between the impact of the debt and care crises on communities, women, and LGBTQ people in the Global South and North alike. The overlapping crises we face — debt, climate, and care — can only be addressed through international coordination by governments held accountable to and by their people.

Protests against austerity and irresponsible borrowing in the Global South must be combined with demands for solidarity and justice in the Global North. Examples include new laws in the UK and New York that would prevent private creditors from using the courts to demand payment in full from countries in default.

2025 will be a jubilee year, part of a long tradition of periodic debt amnesties that led to large-scale debt cancelation following the global Jubilee 2000 campaign. Twenty-five years on, we need internationalist feminist solidarity to drive the wave of civil society mobilizations that are demanding debt cancellation and a just international debt system.


Sharda Ganga  is the director of Projekta Suriname, a civil society organization focusing on the interlinkage between human rights, democracy, and governance, with a specific focus on women's rights and gender equality. She is also a playwright and newspaper columnist.

“It’s the System, Stupid!” The Underlying Causes of Trump’s Victory

Richard Rubenstein

November 15, 2024
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Photo by The Now Time

In 2016 Steve Bannon told Donald Trump that if he played his cards right, he could become
“the Roosevelt of the Right.”  That is, he could create a coalition of ultra-wealthy capitalists, small entrepreneurs, and discontented workers and bind them together under the flag of cultural nationalism.  The key to doing this was to campaign against “the System” – not the system of capitalist oligarchy, of course, but the structures of administrative regulation, relatively free trade, and military commitments abroad that defined what Trump and Bannon called the “Deep State.”  They key to their electoral success was to cast MAGA as the movement of systemic change and the Democrats as the party of the status quo – a trap into which the supporters of Biden and Harris easily fell.  If Trump took steps toward becoming the Roosevelt of the Right, the Democrats looked more and more like Herbert Hoovers of the Left.

The pain and suffering inflicted on defeated Democrats and independent liberals by the train wreck of November 5^th is real and understandable.  That many of them have learned very little from this experience is revealed each night on CNN and MSNBC, whose anchors and guests can’t stop complaining about Trump’s rude attacks on established bureaucratic practices and foreign policy norms.  For example, they repeatedly call him a “felon,” unwilling to admit that trying to use the judicial system to discredit him was not only a failure but a serious political mistake and a diversion.  Liberals turn to the courts when they are losing the battle for hearts and minds in the streets, workplaces, and legislatures. Unfortunately, Stormy Daniels did not supply them with a program to win back the alienated working class.

What did the voters want?

Exit interviews and other analyses reveal that those who voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all were reacting to two major problem-sets, one socioeconomic, the other ethnocultural.  The socioeconomic issues included high prices and stagnant wages, growing personal debt, lack of opportunities to get ahead, the impact of deindustrialization and automation, skyrocketing inequality, and feelings of being abandoned and disrespected by the “elites”.  The ethnocultural problems involved perceived threats to people’s identities as Americans, males, whites, Christians, non-college educated workers, Arab-Americans, country people, or members of other groups sensing a decline in their status and opportunities relative to those of more favored groups.

What would it take to solve problems like these?  Clearly —  or so it seems to me – these are structural problems requiring changes  in existing socioeconomic and ethnocultural systems.  But the Democrats licking their wounds would rather debate whether Kamala Harris lost because she was too progressive, as conservatives or centrists say, or because she wasn’t progressive enough, as Bernie Sanders and others on the Left believe.

The answer, I’m sorry to say, is “both.”

With respect to socioeconomic issues, Harris was not progressive enough.  She pointed to reforms adopted by the Biden Administration that were helpful to working people but not remotely adequate to solve the underlying problems causing mass insecurity and suffering.  Harris would not even commit to increasing taxes on the super-rich – but, if she had, she would still have had a credibility deficit.  This is because the measures advocated by progressives like Sanders – reforms such as taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage – do not have the power to correct major structural malfunctions related to deindustrialization, automation, or even the challenge of low-wage immigration.  More radical change is needed.

What sort of change?  Consider the undocumented worker issue, so potent in influencing even the votes of Hispanic Americans.  The economists agree that the U.S. has a serious labor shortage – but low-wage immigration clearly undermines the income levels of low-wage workers living in the same region. This problem could be mitigated, even eliminated, by adopting the sort of economic planning, with input from local communities, that would permit the government to guarantee high-wage jobs and public welfare subsidies in areas of high immigration.  But so long as progressivism as defined by Democratic neoliberals excludes the possibility of serious economic planning and collective action, the Dems will be incapable of offering credible solutions to the real problems of our market-driven system.

What about the ethnocultural problems – the identity-based insecurities and ambitions mentioned earlier? Some say that, with regard to these issues, the Harris campaign was too progressive, in the sense that, in addition to economic reforms, it advocated women’s reproductive and workplace rights, racial equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and protection of the interests of other marginalized groups such as undocumented workers and prisoners.  But the problem is not that liberals fight for the rights and interests of historically oppressed groups.  It is that, by accepting the zero-sum rules of the existing oligarchical system, they declare less oppressed groups to be “privileged” and lump them in with elite oppressors.  Not surprisingly, this threatens and alienates groups that are only relatively privileged, and who are actually potential allies against the oligarchy and its political camp followers.

Let’s be clear about this.  The historic oppression of some groups, continuing into the present, is a fact.  It is also a fact that systemic oppression to some extent benefits everyone who is not a member of the most oppressed group.  For example, the cheap cotton produced by slaves provided jobs for white workers in the clothing industry as well as consumer goods for everyone who could afford them.  But to be white rather than Black, male rather than female, straight rather than gay, gives straight white males only relative advantages over the members of more oppressed groups.  It clearly does not relieve them of oppression by far more powerful elites.  In fact, their relative superiority over other groups is part of a sleazy divide-and-conquer game used by those with oligarchical power to keep them in line.

People do not live “by bread alone”; even if relatively comfortable, they will fight to defend the existence and interests of the groups they strongly identify with.  Even so, it seems undeniable that socioeconomic struggles and precarity incline many of those suffering either to challenge more powerful groups or to seek scapegoats among groups considered their social inferiors or pariahs.  MAGA’s identification of immigrants as rapists and criminals was a classic exercise in such scapegoating.

Cui bono?  Who benefits from such a conflation of economic and moral threats?  Of course, those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder would much rather have troubled workers and insecure middleclass folks punching down than punching up!  The MAGA movement thrives on this dynamic, and the Democrats do not yet seem to understand that the way to challenge it is not just to defend the interests of the most downtrodden groups but to relieve their suffering – and that of the slightly less downtrodden – by punching up!

The enemy is the oligarchy

How to punch up?  Consider that our political system offers voters a choice between two parties, one more “liberal” and the other more “conservative,” both of which claim to represent all classes of Americans, from workers and small entrepreneurs to the great capitalists who control our key financial, manufacturing, communications, and service companies.  The roughneck working on an oil rig and Elon Musk in his Austin, Texas compound are both Republicans. The scholarship student at a march against genocide and the CEO of Lockheed Martin are both Democrats.  Some bargaining between the elements of each party coalition is permitted, but the masters of the economy maintain and modify the basic rules of the game.  So, whichever party citizens vote for, the wealthiest, most powerful groups in our society remain in the driver’s seat.  Whichever party is elected, the solutions to certain problems that might alter the system to the elites’ disadvantage are automatically placed out of bounds, and thinking seriously about them becomes taboo.

Consider the weapons industry.  Producing weapons and weapons delivery systems is the healthiest, most profitable sector of the U.S. manufacturing economy.  The military-industrial complex is an oligarchical industry, with profits guaranteed by the government, that kills millions of people and destroys property around the globe.  Suppose that you don’t like this situation and want to slash the military budgets and redirect this production to peacetime uses.  Forget it!  You will be called irresponsible, pro-Russian, pro-Chinese, AND anti-worker, since you will be threatening jobs as well as investments.  The Democrats will be as opposed to your proposal as the Republicans – if not more so.  This is because the same oligarchs owning the same or related companies and financing the careers of the same or related politicians set the rules and define the limits of permissible discussion in both political parties.

What is vicious about this is not merely that elite power makes a farce of democracy, but also that it continually generates solution-less problems.  Thus, we export weapons of destruction as if there were no possibility of converting military production into a program to produce goods and services to satisfy basic human needs.  We fight over immigration as if there were no such thing as a planned economy capable of remedying our labor shortage without lowering wage rates and bankrupting social services.  And we choose sides in disputes between relatively oppressed and less oppressed identity groups as if there were no way to reduce competition between them for unnecessarily scarce resources and economic opportunities.

What James Carville might say, if he understood the situation better, is “It’s the system, stupid!”  If we do not recognize that it is the system of capitalist oligarchy and its political servants that limit the possibilities of conflict resolution and generate most of this discontent, we will keep fighting unnecessary battles that Democrats are unlikely to win against a movement that claims (however falsely) to be anti-system.

In a nutshell: the Republican victory of November 5 was not a rejection of the Left – it was the result of a vacuum on the Left.  The MAGA Republicans allowed themselves to consider forms of change that many consider taboo, for example, making radical cuts in federal regulatory agencies.  These changes will make the plight of working people worse, not better, but they point in an instructive direction.  Those on the Left must also permit themselves to consider forms of system change that are now taboo.

Critics may brand proposals to reconstruct a destructive neoliberal system “socialist,” “communist,” “anarchist,” or what have you, but if they point the way to shifting power from the oligarchs to the people, working people will respond positively.  They are already anti-system.  The challenge now is to make it clear to everyone that Trumpism is nothing more than a disguise for oligarchical tyranny, and that we can only control the economy by owning it and operating it collectively.

“The high cost of living in Martinique is the consequence of the colonial system”

Interview with Philippe Pierre-Charles

Wednesday 13 November 2024, by Ulysses, Philippe Pierre-Charles

A political, union and community activist from Martinique, he denounces the injustice of the high cost of living and economic practices inherited from colonialism in Martinique. According to him, high prices are due to local monopolies controlled by the béké caste (white Creoles descended from the first slave-owning settlers), which limit local production and impose uncontrolled profit margins. Although the general strike of 2009 made it possible to obtain some gains, such as a wage bonus and price reductions, these advances have been eroded, as large enterprises have resumed their exploitative practices.

Pierre-Charles also criticizes the current repression of social movements in Martinique. The dispatch of the CRS 8 , a special police unit, recalls the colonial history of repression. Police violence during recent demonstrations even led the Martinique Assembly to call for their withdrawal.

As spokesperson for the collective against chlordecone, Pierre-Charles campaigns for the recognition of the health scandal and compensation for the victims [1]. He emphasizes the importance of a reparation law to address the economic, health and environmental consequences of this pollution. For him, a mobilization in France is essential in order to push the state to recognize and repair this lasting poisoning that affects all of Martinique society. Our exclusive interview.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us what are your political commitments in the broad sense, today?

I am Philippe Pierre-Charles, I am a political, union and community activist. Union-wise, I was the general secretary of the Martinique Democratic Workers’ Centre (CDMT), which is one of the country’s major union confederations. Politically, I belong to the Révolution socialiste group. And I am in various associations, including one that is involved in the fight against chlordecone and is called Lyannaj pou depolye Matinik

The high cost of living in Martinique is a legacy of the exclusive system

The high cost of living is a structural problem in Martinique. What are the root causes?

Today, for food, the price differential with France is around 40 per cent. Overall, prices are 17 per cent higher on average.

The causes take us back to the colonial system. The colonial system restricted local production, organized everything around imports and where monopolies reigned supreme.. Local production was restricted because in the system of "exclusivity", the role of the colony was to provide materials that interested the metropolis. These were cane, sugar, cotton, etc.

This made local production very constrained. The colony was not allowed to produce a nail if the metropolis produced nails.

So there remains from this history, a certain number of very strong practices. This is why local production only contributes to 20 per cent of the population’s food. Added to this is the problem of the colonial caste that we call here the békés. They are former colonists, large landowners who reign over import-export. They make the law and set prices by reserving profit margins over which we have absolutely no control. All this combined makes the prices exorbitant.

Added to this are cyclical causes that are linked to the situation in the country. For example, the transition to the euro led to an increase in the cost of living. Then, events such as the war in Ukraine serve as pretexts for huge increases. Same thing for Covid. We end up in a situation where prices are high.

In the 1950s, there was a major strike by civil servants demanding a cost-of-living allowance. This movement resulted in a 40 per cent bonus for "metropolitan" civil servants [2]. but not for the rest of the population. The fight against the high cost of living is therefore an old battle that resurfaces regularly.

In 2009, there was a general strike against the high cost of living that shook Martinique. What did this general strike movement achieve and what are the limits that explain why a new revolt broke out fifteen years later?

The great strike of 2009 that shook Martinique and Guadeloupe was not only a strike against the high cost of living. It was a strike against what we called "profytasion", that is to say against exploitation and outrageous oppression. The demands concerned the high cost of living but also low wages, public services, and a whole series of popular causes. This movement, through its power, had made it possible to win a certain number of things. In Martinique as in Guadeloupe, the social movement had created a powerful negotiating position in the face of economic and political power.

The first victory was a 200 euro increase in salaries up to 1.4 times the minimum wage. Part of it was paid by employers, part by the state and part by local authorities. The second victory was a reduction in the price of basic necessities of around 20 per cent. This concerned 2,586 products, the list of which had been published in the press. Making this reduction effective was a real social struggle. Teams of union activists went to supermarkets to check that they were applying the right prices.

We also obtained price controls for the telephone, banking services, water and electricity. For example, for water and electricity, the first quantities, necessary for life, were cheaper than the following ones. Finally, we won on new principles: such as priority hiring for natives in the civil service, particularly in education, and full recognition of the Martinican trade-union movement.

Once the social movement weakened, we lost our negotiating position. Immediately, the large retailers took advantage of this to start raising prices again. Some employers began to contest the share they had to pay of the 200 euros. Finally, the benefits of this fight were eroded by the fact that the economic actors remained the same, the large retail groups did not change, and so they put the same practices of profytasion back in place.

Lessons from 2009: Victory is possible, but sustainable victory requires structural reforms

The first lesson to be learned from 2009 is that victories are possible when there is strong mobilization. The second is that for these victories to be sustainable, we must aim for structural reforms to give the people the means to influence economic and political power.

This is a very useful lesson for today’s movement . The memorandum of understanding that was signed by a certain number of actors, with the exception of the RPPRAC (Rally for the Protection of Afro-Caribbean Peoples and Resources, editor’s note ), which initiated the struggle, does not contain any sure means to guarantee its application. The protocol contains affirmations of principles.

It stipulates that the state must control the profit margins of large companies, that the territorial institution will set up a price control service. But there is no mechanism for the social movement, unions, and associations to take part in this control, nor any questioning of the principle of business secrecy. It will always be impossible to see what is inside the safes of big capital. It will therefore not be possible to formulate demands for sharing wealth that are in line with the possibilities.

This business secret is a taboo subject. Large-scale distribution permits itself not to submit its accounts as required by law. One of the major demands today for a certain number of bodies such as the CDMT (is the application of the principle of opening account books.

Repression has punctuated all popular struggles in Martinique

In September, faced with this revolt, Bruno Retailleau, the new Minister of the Interior, sent the CRS8, a special unit described as "warmongering" by a prefect. How is this response, mainly repressive, the continuation of a long history of colonial repression in Martinique?

In December 1959, a popular revolt broke out following a trivial traffic accident. The government called in the CRS. There were clashes for three nights. Three young people were killed. Even though they were not even taking part in the clashes. This triggered immense anger. A slogan appeared: "CRS out".

This movement was so powerful that even the general council (elected assembly) demanded that the CRS be re-embarked. And they won their case. Which means that Martinique has been free of CRS since 1959. The return of the CRS to Martinique imposed by Bruno Retailleau is therefore a very strong symbol.

Repression has punctuated all popular struggles in Martinique. From the beginning, the enslaved refused their condition. They revolted and were repressed. There were deaths during the insurrection that led to the abolition of slavery in 1848; when the abolition was imposed by a slave deputy, it was at the cost of blood.
Another insurrection took place in 1870, called the "Southern insurrection ", it ended in a real massacre, not only immediately but also afterwards; there were death sentences, and imprisonment in a penal colony. A real terror was installed which led to burying this revolt in popular memory for a long time.

Later, the workers’ movement, which was born among the agricultural workers, paid a heavy price during strikes. In February 1900, there were eleven victims when the army opened fire on the strikers. And since then, periodically, about every ten years, there have been repressed movements, in 1923, in 1953, in 1961… Each strike of agricultural workers became the occasion for a new massacre. The last one took place in February 1974, during which two strikers were killed.

In addition to the deaths, there were also legal proceedings , also during demonstrations. The colonial system was maintained through repression. Not only that, since the government also sought to lull the population into the assimilationist dream. What we are witnessing today is therefore the continuation of this colonial repression.

The CRS who arrived in September on the orders of Bruno Retailleau did not hesitate to provoke the people manning the roadblocks. We saw gassings and beatings that were out of proportion. In Carbet, even the mayor was gassed. On Friday, October 25, a demonstration was organized by the RPPRAC and the unions of the CGTM (General Confederation of Workers of Martinique) and the CDMT.

The procession was blocked when it arrived from the headquarters of the Bernard Hayot Group (GBH), one of the main companies engaged in mass retail distribution. The demonstration had been taking place peacefully since 1.30 pm. The blocking of the cortege led to a rise in tensions, then to the tear gas and batoning of the demonstrators by the CRS. This is the reality today. This is the reason why even the assembly of the Territorial Collectivity of Martinique demanded in a motion the departure of the CRS.

Chlordecone, a fight for truth, justice and reparation

Finally, you are the spokesperson for the collective to depollute Martinique. The appeal trial for chlordecone poisoning opened on October 22 in Paris. What is the objective of this collective, for which you are the spokesperson? Why is this qualification of poisoning essential in this trial and what are the impacts, the effects of chlordecone poisoning in Martinique?

The fight over the chlordecone issue is a multifaceted fight with three essential objectives. First, the truth. Up until now, there have been grey areas. We need scientific truth, we need research to develop.

Secondly, justice. It is not normal that a series of crimes of this type remain absolutely unpunished, without any penalty, as if there were no perpetrators. Emmanuel Macron once said that there was no state responsibility but a collective responsibility. The fact remains that nothing happened to the people who spread this product that was known to be harmful, dangerous, and probably carcinogenic. They are not even clearly named by the government.

The third part is that of compensation. It concerns the farm workers who are the first victims of this tragedy. But also the population which is largely impacted, with the explosion of cases of prostate cancer, endometriosis, and other diseases that we have not yet documented. But we already know that a series of diseases result from this.

Chlordecone has been recognized as an occupational disease but until now, there are only barely a hundred employees or families of farm workers who are compensated and in a very insufficient way.
We are demanding much broader compensation for all economic victims since the land, the water, the coastal sea, everything is poisoned. So all the jobs that are linked to these areas are affected and what exists as a means of reparation is practically non-existent.

Our collective is fighting for all three of these objectives. On the legal front, a series of associations have managed to file complaints since 2006-2007, even before the existence of Lyannaj pou depolye Matinik. When we saw the risk of dismissal , we launched a campaign to constitute civil parties for the population. Our collective is part of a broader movement, Gaoulé Kont chlordécone.

We managed to bring together 800 people who have joined as civil parties and who are therefore engaged in legal actions today. We are at a particular stage. In order to win their case, the lawyers have asked preliminary questions of constitutionality (QPC) to have it recognized that this constitutes poisoning even if there is no intention to kill.

The purpose of the trial on October 22 was to plead these QPCs. We await the result. If the questions are accepted, this will mean that the case will go before the Court of Cassation, which will decide whether or not to refer it to the Constitutional Council, which will say whether there is reason to review the existing case law on poisoning.

The complaint that was filed against the dismissal will only be examined following this process. It may therefore take time.

October 22 was also an important date in our fight since for the first time, there was a gathering in front of the court that brought together a hundred people. However, we are convinced that it is essential that we are joined by the workers’, democratic and progressive movement in France.
 [3]

As long as the state has the impression that this is a matter that only concerns the "colonial stables", it will always have contempt for our mobilization. We hope that popular mobilization grows throughout the country. We are convinced that this is necessary for us to win our case.

And we will also ultimately need a law that addresses the issue of reparations. Our collective’s demand is for a programme law. That is to say, not something cobbled together but a law that sets up a real reparation plan that takes into account all the economic, social, societal, scientific, medical and health aspects that this chlordecone problem poses.

It is a vast combat. It is rare for Guadeloupe and Martinique to mobilize over such a long period on the same problem. This proves that this problem is serious. All the efforts that have been made to create a diversion have never succeeded. Today, it is an essential fight for all Guadeloupeans and Martinicans.

November 11 , 2024

L’insoumission

Attached documents

• the-high-cost-of-living-in-martinique-is-the-consequence-of_a8738.pdf (PDF - 926.8 KiB)
  Extraction PDF [->article8738]

Footnotes

[1] Chlordecone is a highly toxic pesticide, which has been widely used in agriculture in Martinique and Guadeloupe

[2] “Metropolitan”civil servants are those directly employed by the French state.

[3] https://twitter.com/jlmelenchon/status/1472313740246855683

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