The budget cuts announced in social assistance by the Barnier government
particularly impact people in precarious situations, including transpeople. Our fight against capital is thus linked to our fight for the
rights of trans people and all other precarious populations. ---- At the
beginning of October, Barnier, Prime Minister affiliated with LR,
declared his intention to overhaul the social allowance system to
"debureaucratize" it. However, behind the language elements lies a
desire, common to the liberal right and the extreme right, to destroy
our social protection system even more through their austerity policy.
The project is clear for Macron and his government: it is indeed a
question of "encouraging work and merit, to the detriment of welfare"
and "limiting welfare income, in particular with a ceiling between the
RSA and the APL"[1].
Anti-social reforms
The idea is not new among capitalists. The money thus saved at the
expense of workers[2]can go into the pockets of capitalists and
companies, to whom bourgeois governments do not hesitate to give tax breaks.
But the real objective behind these anti-social reforms is to make
unemployed workers precarious in order to create real blackmail over
employment: if being unemployed implies a lack of income and therefore a
brutal deterioration in material living conditions, then workers will be
forced to accept difficult, violent, poorly paid or even dangerous work
for fear of no longer being able to feed themselves or ending up on the
street.
Capital's reserve army
This is why the fight for workers' rights must integrate that for
unemployed workers. The destruction of our rights is always done jointly
and the bourgeoisie tries to convince that the enemy of workers is not
the one who earns millions and owns the means of production, but the one
who earns less than a minimum wage per month and lives in a council house.
Although this concept of Marx is almost two hundred years old, the
analysis of unemployed workers as a "reserve army of capital"[3]is still
correct, and already described the interest for the bourgeoisie to have
a surplus of workers compared to possible production. This allows to
justify the existence of degraded social conditions by pointing out the
scapegoat of the "unemployed" as well as to have an inexhaustible
reserve of labor to overcome strikes and deaths at work.
Trans people regularly impacted
For trans people, this destruction of labor rights is extremely
impactful. Isolated and oppressed within our own class, people who
transition gender experience precarious and unstable living conditions:
discrimination in employment, hiring, housing, institutions, health,
exclusion from community, religious, family, and friendly circles,
increased police violence in addition to the physical and psychological
violence suffered in all these settings[4]. Indeed, from the beginning
of their transition, many trans people, especially women, will see their
living conditions deteriorate, sometimes to the point of homelessness.
At work, dismissal or harassment to the point of resignation of trans
women is commonplace, forcing them into unemployment or sex work. At the
same time, they are often rejected from the family home, with no
possibility of turning to their friends or their community[5]. They
therefore survive, often for several years, thanks to aid such as that
of the CAF, the RSA, the AAH and the APL, in conditions of sometimes
extreme precariousness. They are dependent on the goodwill of the
institutions that violate them to survive.
Social security is also under threat
However, austerity policies, real attacks on our class, do not only
affect social benefits but also Social Security and public hospitals.
Social Security is a communist project. It is a socialized social
protection for employees that was born within the workers' movement.
This project was able to see the light of day because of the enormous
share of unionization and a strong class consciousness among working
women on the one hand and on the other hand the political power of the
communists in the aftermath of a war in which most capitalists had
collaborated. Since then, the various bourgeois governments have never
stopped stifling the project of socialized medicine: the health of
working women is affected more quickly than that of the bourgeoisie. In
fact, the life expectancy of the latter is longer[5]and they can afford
to pay for private clinics with money stolen from the exploited.
These attacks on Social Security affect trans people even more strongly.
Indeed, they are dependent on care for their survival and, like most
workers, they do not have the means to pay for it. Beyond the medical
violence suffered, each attack on Social Security and public hospitals
is thus an additional danger for them. When every euro counts to last
another month, the projects to make transition care, which is the only
thing that keeps them alive, chargeable are murderous projects[6].
Converging interests and struggles
Trans and cis, workers, we have similar conditions and common interests:
fighting against the deadly companies of capitalists, against austerity
policies, against the destruction of labor rights, social security and
public hospitals, against attacks on the rights of workers deprived of
employment. For our trans siblings, our comrades and our class, we will
lead the fight side by side.
We will lead it in our fighting unions where we must carry out offensive
struggles. We will lead it in our feminist counter-powers like the
Family Planning and the Trans Solidarity Organization (OST), where more
than ever we must allow self-management of the health of women and trans
people. More than ever we will fight for our rights and to ensure our
survival.
Lou (UCL Grenoble)
Validate
[1]"What is the single social allowance that Michel Barnier is calling
for?», France info, October 9, 2024.
[2]This article is written in the neutral feminine.
[3]Karl Marx, Capital (chapter 25, part iii), 1867.
[4]James S. E., et al., «The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.
Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality», 2016.
[5]Maurin L., «What are the inequalities in life expectancy according to
income?», Observatoire des inégalités, October 6, 2022.
[6]Lee, Wilson Y., et al., «State-level anti-transgender laws increase
past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people
in the USA.», Nature human behavior, September 26, 2024.
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Coupes-budgetaires-Des-consequences-desastreuses-pour-les-personnes-trans
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