 Hello, hello, hello and welcome. I'm Meryn Khalili. We are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is once again our live coordinating call featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. It's June, a bloody hot June here in Greece. And that means Pride Month, call for unity, visibility and respect for LGBT people. And here, oops, I'm hearing my own voice. Sorry, there we go, the black echo there. Fix. So here in Europe, let's talk about LGBT issues. Almost half of the countries on the continent still have no legal protection against hate crime based on sexual orientation or gender identity. And in many European countries, gay marriage is still illegal. Hungary has banned adoption for same-sex couples within its constitution. And Poland, Bulgaria and Romania are at the very bottom of the pack in terms of rights and protections for LGBT people according to the NGO ILGA Europe. But Pride Month is also the month when corporations remind us just how very queer-friendly they are. It doesn't always come across as genuine. Establishment institutions too, like the US Marines that promoted itself recently with a picture of some rainbow bullets. Well, Volkswagen gave its logo the multicolored treatment and posted it across all its Instagram accounts except in Saudi Arabia. Is Pride Month still true to its original goals of celebrating and raising visibility for LGBT people? What's the current state of that cause in Europe and what should we as a political movement that stands against all oppressions be doing to advance it? These are the kind of questions I'll be putting to our panel today. You out there watching this, this is live on YouTube. So please, if you've got questions, comments, rants, thoughts, concerns, anything you want to throw at us, please put them in the YouTube chat and we'll put them to our panel. Let us kick off with Dushan Paevich from Montenegro. Over to you, Dushan. Thank you, Mecham. So I think that LGBTQ plus movement needs to be back to its roots. And what does that mean? It means intersectionality with class as a base for the social activism. The history of LGBTQ plus movement has been enlarged, white washed, cis washed and class washed out of the history. Look at the Stonewall riot, for example. We need to be doing that. I don't care if Israel holds good prides if they have really big prides in Tel Aviv and then they go on with killing Palestinians and saying that Palestinians don't reorganize prides. We need to be intersexual in those demands, meaning that first LGBT community and then all of our allies shouldn't allow this type of pink washing. The same goes for example, for vegan leather boots for Israeli army. We should say loud and clear, even though I'm vegan, I should say I don't really care if you are going to go on and kill Palestinians with those boots, stamp on their faces with those boots. Bottom line, corporations are not our friends. They are just using this for the profits. As you can see, they are not putting LGBTQ plus flag in the markets where it's not profitable in Saudi Arabia, for example. Also what I really need to mention is that Google advertisements led corporations to opt out of advertising for non-binary people. Now, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't mind ever seeing an ad again, but this means that they are constantly, constantly, systemically allowing gender discrimination. And this practice proves that heterosexism and transphobia are valid to them if their consumers and customers see it as such. Systemic oppression is that way, is being completely authorized by Google and other corporations. We need to call for total liberation, meaning that none of us are free if all of us are. I graduated in psychology of intercultural relations and there they taught me about LGBTQ plus inclusion during promotion and employment on jobs, for example. The thing is, I don't want my boss to be trans, gay, vegan, whatever. I don't want them to be cis, hetero, meat eater, or anything like that. I just don't want to have a boss. And that's what we need to say loud and clear. We need to abolish hierarchies and this is what DM25 is fighting for. We are also fighting for gender justice, sexual orientation justice, race justice, and equality. And those stuff will be fought for in the future as well. I also, for the very end, need to give self-critique towards the LGBTQ plus movement as you might assume, or as you already know, I'm non-binary man, I'm also demisexual and I need to say that I would gladly hear and allow, quote unquote, my comrades that are also, that are, for example, cisgender, heterosexual, white, male, whatever, to express their opinions. And that is what the left LGBTQ plus activists need to do because a lot of people are feeling anxious even before panels to talk about these stuffs. As you know, our comrades, my comrades from LGBTQ plus movement, gender theory is a big philosophical field. We cannot be all educated in these terms. Therefore we need to speak freely and educate people about our identities. Of course, when I say this, I don't accept or I don't push for people to neglect our identities or deny our identities, but we need to all together debate on the most efficient ways our rights need to be defended and put forward. And that's it for me today, at least for now. Thank you, Dushan, for setting the scene. Ivana Nenadovich from Serbia. Thanks and thank you, Dushan, for setting the scene. There is a lot to cover, of course, but I will try to maybe shift a little bit to what DM represents or what is our answer to the question we sometimes get that is why aren't we addressing enough? Sometimes environmental issues or, I don't know, animal rights or being a vegan, as you said, Dushan, or other, or LGBT struggle. So I think that most important thing is also something that you mentioned and that there is no LGBT or environmental or any other struggle without the class struggle. And that is something that I think DM is more broadly covering without focusing so much on the, I don't want to diminish them, but smaller issues of subgroups or minorities. So in this context of corporations using the optics when they need them, when they need consumers from whichever spectrum they come from, there are also government PRs or optics because, for example, in Serbia, the prime minister is a lesbian and that there is literally zero contribution or improvement for LGBTQ plus community in Serbia. She even adopted a child with her partner in the United States, which is not possible in Serbia, sending a very clear message that this is just for privileged and not doing it for the community, right? The other absurd example while we are listing countries is in Croatia where the abortion is being banned, quite violently, I would say in the narrative, in the media, while allowing gay marriages. So it's the optics again and which news will be used to create the better optics for the company or the country in this case. Also, I would like to point out that in this culture of polarization, it is very dangerous to be so stuck in some, I would say, ideologies because we can kind of call all of this ideology and not being able to discuss it openly as long as we are not all educated enough to be comfortable discussing these topics. And I think that's the main goal, I would say, for DM to be the open space and not to be self-censoring while covering these topics. Thanks, Ivana, Johannes Pehr from Berlin. Thank you. I think I can speak a little bit from what Meta25 in Germany, our political party here is standing for or at least try to do that. For example, of course, as Dushan said, we want to fully fight for the rights for everyone, total liberation for everyone. So if someone is not liberated and free and has the same rights, then someone else, we are not there yet. So this is something we are struggling for. I think additionally to looking at the topic superficially, I think we are trying to connect all the different issues. If there's, for example, discrimination against LGBTQI people, we of course want to fight them and erase them both in the legislation of the country, but also I think in the cooperation in our, in the whole systemic structures that we live under. And to do that, I think we cannot look at single issues. We have to bring these issues together, something like LGBTQI for the 99%, right? Where that fight is connected with the fight for economic freedom and liberty for everyone. And we're also, it's clear that trans women are women. We're not putting one group against the other group and we are fighting for the many. And looking at all these things also not only from a liberal perspective of saying, we need to make sure that everyone has the same rights. We also need to look at it from a materialist perspective. So looking at who actually owns what, who has which kind of power, for example, in corporations, it's not enough to just see that at the level of the bosses in some corporations, we have a better representation of different people there. No, we need to look at this whole system of why bosses exist. And yeah, look at the whole structure of companies, for example, one share, one workplace, one vote democratization, so that we can reach this liberation of everyone and not pick on a single issue that will not in the end solve all the problems that we have, including the ones of discrimination against queer, trans, different groups. So that's I think what Dianne 25 is about and also Merlin 25 here in Germany. Thanks, Johannes. And let me just cite something from an article that you did send us our colleague, who unfortunately can't join us here tonight, but it was a piece by a New York Times piece by Jay Caspian Kang, and one of the things he's arguing with regard to this idea of pink washing or work washing corporations that we talked about is that at the very least it's a sign that homophobia is bad and that we agree on that. So even if perhaps it's for the wrong reasons, it still advances the debate. What would you guys say to that? Johannes, perhaps I could bring you in here with regard to this issue of corporations sending out messages which perhaps they're not doing exactly for the right reasons, but maybe the messages themselves are not bad and it's not bad that they're out there. I agree. It's not bad that there are corporations that wax lyrical against racism, against the homophobia, against the discrimination against lesbians and trans people and so on and so forth. That's a good thing. It's not bad at all that we have had demonstrations, for instance in places like Bristol, that tear up statutes and monuments to slave drivers and slave owners and throw them in the water. These are all signs that there is a degree of progress. But I have to say that at the very same time a family that or a person, whether trans or gay or straight or whatever, who is finding very hard to pay their electricity bill as we speak and who can't put food on the table and doesn't know how to pay for the medical bill for their kids, the idea that a statute has been thrown into the water or that Harvard may be considered or Yale may be considering to change its name or that Elon Musk is making very nice proclamations against homophobia. I don't think they're helped by that. But we should never ever pit one discrimination against another. I think that one of the big mistakes that the left has made, I mean the left, we have a plethora of mistakes in our past, in our record. But here are two as an example. One is to say that discrimination on the basis of class, discrimination of labor by capital should have a priority over discrimination, over sexual orientation. That's a big mistake because if you're a 16-year-old trans kid, you really don't give a shit about the way in which capital treats proletarians. It doesn't care. What this person cares about, what they care about is that they go to school and they're scared and they get bullied and they get beaten up outside the toilets or inside the toilets. So to say to them that there is a hierarchy of discriminations, first comes class discrimination, then comes race, then comes sexual orientation, then at the bottom comes discrimination on the basis of whether you're left-handed or right-handed. That's completely another rubbish to the person who is suffering with discrimination. So that's one example of the mistakes that the left has made. Another example is to ignore the cross-sectionality, as Dusan said, of discriminations. The fact that there is positive discrimination for black kids to go to Harvard is a good thing. We should defend it. We should defend positive discrimination for black kids or Jewish kids, whatever, or Arab kids. But at the same time, at the same time, we know hierarchy. We should be very concerned that it is easier to get into Harvard if you're black than if you're poor. So, you know, these are two opposing errors that the left has made. One is to forget about class and the other is to prioritize class. That's the gist of it, I think. Neither prioritize nor ignore any sort of discrimination. Two more points if I may, Maren. One is that, you know what, when you live in a society where people are forced to compete for scarce resources because of the way that society is organized, discrimination is a natural evolutionary outcome of having to play these games. And, you know, feminists have always asked the question, you know, why is it that women have been discriminated against everywhere? Well, because these patterns of discrimination, when we play distributional games that are zero sum and therefore will always have winners and losers instead of playing cooperative games, will always select discriminatory patterns on the basis of some arbitrary convention that has to do with, you know, taking a small disadvantage. For instance, women having to spend more time breastfeeding when men don't have to. Small differences then magnify them. And then what capitalism does, class-based society does, these distributional games do, is there is a tendency for patterns of discrimination to divide and multiply. So the way that labor is being kept under the yoke of capital is by dividing labor, dividing labor between men and women. And giving, you know, one of the two genders, usually, if not always, the male gender, a feeling that they have women under their thumb. So the way a pattern of discrimination solidifies, stabilizes, and it produces itself is by having always somebody under you. Somebody who is in a worse situation than you are because you feel you have a certain kind of privilege, so you have a vested interest in the maintenance of a system which, in the end, only does it, it divides and multiplies the plethora of discrimination patterns. And then the last thing I would say, I wanted to brag about Mera25 here in Greece, if I may, because we were the first party in Greece to have an LBGD candidate in Athens in the parliament in 2019, who remains a very active member of the party, who will be candidate again, a trans sex worker who became a trans sex worker in the 1960s, early 1960s. The oldest trans sex worker around in Greece is a candidate for Greece's parliament by Mera25. Her name is Paola Revenoti. She has actually recently produced a fantastic film when she's walking around with other trans women of her generation who are now in their 70s, walking around Athens, recounting their lives as sex workers. And you know, I think that that film went to Berlin at the Berlin Film Festival, but this film that we must promote, because firstly, it is delightful, and secondly, one of the reasons why it's delightful is because there is no culture of spirit, of victimhood. You know, Paola, she's been beaten up, arrested a million times, but her life is one to envy, because it's full. She never lost her Juada Vivre. She has produced films. She has edited journals. She maintained her connection with sex work on the street. And you know, for her, she's never been a victim, even though she justizes patriarchal society, capitalism, and so on. That spirit of Paola Revenoti should be a guiding principle for DM25 across Europe. Thanks, Yanis. Just while you're speaking, a quick question I've got for you. I mean, if we're, if someone's watching this and they're active in, for example, trans rights issues, and they look like, well, like Hungary, last year they banned the right to legally change one's gender. So that makes life a lot more complicated in Hungary for trans people in general. What would then be DM25's answer to that in the context of what you're saying, the more sort of class-based approach to lifting everybody out of, you know, helping people to be upwardly mobile, which hopefully will resolve many other oppressions? I mean, what would you say to them? How could we do that? What would DM do about that? Well, firstly, we need to campaign against urban, against this law. Across Europe. Secondly, we need to pressurize Brussels to send the Troika to Budapest, to close down their banks, right? If they close down our banks here in Greece because we dared pay 300 euros to really poor pensioners. Well, close, I'm joking, but you know what I mean, right? They showed immense, immense misanthropy when it came to, you know, our government here in really very simple straightforward humanistic things. But when it comes to inhuman behavior by the Polish government, the Hungarian government, and so on, you know, or, you know, the imprisoned politicians in Catalonia, whatever you may think about Catalan independence, you know, Brussels pretends it's none of its business. So we need to call them out. And the third thing we need to do is we need to introduce solidarity mechanisms so that if a trans person in Hungary needs to have a sex change, they should come to our country and do it for free in the same way that, you know, women now cannot have an abortion in Texas. They have to go to, you know, to Washington or to New York state. We have to do that until we change every country. Okay. Thanks, Janice. Dushan, get your hand up. Bring you back in. No, I can't hear you. You're muted. Sorry, just to highlight some stuff and paint them with some examples and to mention two things basically. First, I really liked what Janice said that left is unfortunately usually like measuring oppressions, which one is harder. And that's really, really problematic. As I said, none of us are free until all of us are free. And what I wanted to say in the first part is that in Eastern Europe, for example, and in the vast majority of the world, especially global south, LGBTQ plus issue is a class issue. So once you come out to your parents as trans, as non-binary, as gay, lesbian, you more often than not end up on the streets, especially with trans people. I know more than few of those examples in Montenegro, in Europe. We can imagine what is the situation in global south where majority of countries criminalize being gay. So you end up in prison for a long, long time. So it is a matter of class issue and we need to acknowledge social categories and class categories. So focusing on social categories with materialism perspective. Finally, to put an end to that point with one very simple example, I wouldn't endorse Pete Buttigan for US president just because he's gay. He said that the lack of baby formulas and the problem with breastfeeding and all of it is something that just need to be put up with for the purpose of free market. So it's something that we need to endure. So he's a pure example of neoliberalism even though he's gay. And that brings me to the next point. It's much, much more a question of energy than pure identity and self-identification. I don't deny anyone's identity. Don't get me wrong. But I need to highlight something that I said many, many times already. I'm probably much more of a feminine woman than Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton together, all together. So it's not a matter of woman representation in parliament only, only. We need to have a quotas for starters. But as Ivana said, Anna Bernabic, Prime Minister of Serbia definitely didn't do anything for LGBTQ plus or women rights. So we need to see what is someone's energy, what is someone's attitudes, not just identity. Identity can be a starting point for some quotas and to have the visibility and for people to finally acknowledge that they are LGBTQ plus people around us. Even though it may sound strange for some of our viewers coming from more wealthy and quote-unquote progressive countries. But what Pride did in Montenegro, I was, for example, in the Coordinated Collective of Pride for the last year, is that Montenegro people acknowledged that there are LGBTQ plus people among them. They were literally, literally saying in Montenegro there is no such thing. That's the thing of the West before Pride. And visibility is a big point because of that. So let's all fight for all of these points, including gender identity laws, including the right to adopt children, the right for marriage, and the right to change your sex without sterilization. Thank you, Dushan. And to pick up on something you just said, I mean, yes, it is one, at one level it's important to have those kinds of legal protections, anti-discrimination laws, et cetera. But this is also a cultural challenge, isn't it? How, you know, there's a, I think Yvonne has spoke to this a little bit as well, but there is an awkwardness, especially with people who haven't necessarily grown up with these things and grown up with, I mean, the world is changing pretty fast. I also feel a little, sometimes uncomfortable, but I don't have the right terminology, et cetera. I mean, Johannes has said LGBTQ plus, you've said LGBTQ, I said LGBT, et cetera. And I think that we need to be, as Yvonne has said, open to the idea that not everybody is in the same place in terms of their understanding and awareness of the issues that people face and the issues with queer people in general. So I think there's a cultural element to that, and that's probably a much softer form of activism that involves, I don't know, how trans people, LGBT people are portrayed, for example, in film and so on. And I'm not sure that's something that we here can do. It's a shame Maya actually isn't in that in this call because she might have some comments on that. David Castro, Portuguese based in Belgium, go for it. Thanks, Mehran. Yeah, I just wanted to, I was looking at a study today by Ilga Europe that we were talking about. That's the European LGBT network, which this study measured the legal and policy situation in Europe in regard to the respect of LGBT to plus people across the European Union and not just the European Union, but also outside of it. And as it turns out, Portugal is one of the best countries in Europe for LGBT plus communities at a legal level at least. And that's what you're talking about now, which is it's not just about the legalities, it's also about culture and society. Whilst laws definitely helped push society forward in terms of what opinions are acceptable and which ones aren't. And obviously that's a good thing. What we're seeing with André Ventura and Xiega is a reaction by a significant number of Portuguese people against this kind of progress while feeling like their own economic and social conditions haven't changed all that much. And if they have changed, they've changed for the worse. By the way, André Ventura is the far right candidate, is a member of parliament now, is the leader of the party Xiega that I just mentioned. 10 years ago they didn't even exist just to give you a hint and now they're the third largest party in the Portuguese parliament. So you end up with a kind of winner-loser dynamic that just fits people against one another. So yes, there's been legal and social progress at the level of LGBT as this study confirms. But when that progress isn't accompanied by lifting the general population out of poverty to better conditions, those people who feel like they've been left behind turn against the other, whether it's the LGBT community, migrants, refugees, it doesn't matter. They turn against anyone that they can categorize as the other who in their eyes are the only ones who have benefited over the last 10, 15 years. That's kind of effectively what has happened in Portugal and why the far right has become the third largest party in the country. Like I said, 10 years ago it didn't even exist and everyone was so proud of it that there was no racism in the country, that there was no potential for a far-right victory there. Obviously the answer, just to get to my point, the answer is not that those advancements for the LGBT community shouldn't have been made. Of course they should have. It's just that successive governments, left district governments often, as they call themselves leftists, center-left, center-right, have prioritized legally trying to eliminate one form of discrimination whilst forgetting all about the other. This is something that everybody's been talking about right now. We either look at this as a comprehensive holistic thing or we don't. That's it. Thanks, David. A comment from the chat on what you just said. Those people who support Ventura, they were already racist and homophobic. They just found a voice to express their prejudices. Eric Edmund. Go for it. Thanks, Matt. Hi, everybody. You know, I'm one of these really... Sorry. I muted myself. I'm one of these really tiresome, self-hating leftists. And I'm going to use this opportunity to also lash out once again at some fellow leftists who are involved in the LGBTQI movement. And I'm specifically speaking about people from the left, progressives, poor part of the movement, not liberals who are hopeless, more hopeless than conservatives, because I'm not quite sure they even know what their way they stand for. But, you know, the left, we have two big pitfalls, among others. One is, you know, Alain Bourdieu talked about the little fascist in all of us, right? And very often, people in the LGBTQI movement and in the left in general are guided by this major sense of moral superiority towards society and community in general about their positions and the superiority of their positions. These are the positions and their opinions of others, which very often results in the complete alienation of any possible future ally and the polarization of debates rather than this sense of community and this sense of trying to bring more people onto the struggle, more people onto the debate to try and inform this new society, not through force, but through discussion and through democracy and through this sense of togetherness that one needs in order to live in a society. So that is often a very dangerous instinct that we have as leftists, regardless of whether we pursue, you know, fiscal justice or equal rights for people regardless of gender, sexual orientation. And that also is connected to the second thing, which is that often we miss the mark. And of course, there are plenty of liberals and conservatives in the LGBTQI movement, plus movement. So it's also due to them, but often instead of really aiming for true emancipation, the movement instead aims for, how to put it, for the right to be abused on an equal footing to everybody else. So instead of really aiming for true freedom and true emancipation from patriarchy, from capitalism, we are simply trying to get the same rights to be abused by the capitalist system as our cis straight colleagues. And that's really missing the point in to, for example, you know, flying with Ryanair because they put, or uploading Ryanair because they put a rainbow flag on their logo because of their policy to not discriminate who they hire, while at the same time, you know, being a company that completely abuses and walks over the dead bodies of metaphorically of its employees. So the point here being that by missing this point, by watering down the goal of the movement, not only does it do the people that it tries to help an injustice by not truly emancipating and liberating them, but it also misses an opportunity to connect with a much broader ecosystem of other political movements that are also fighting for this true emancipation from different perspectives. So this is this link that is often missing in the framing of this particular struggle. And slowly it's encouraging to see that there is this growing realization that the struggle is bigger, that it's not good enough to settle for capitalist exploitation, but for true emancipation. And that is something that's being recognized by younger generations, but older waves of the movement have missed this more unfortunately. Thanks, Eric. A comment on that and maybe a question for you. Can we not say that some of the more I mean, this is also what Dushan alluded to in the beginning, that some of the more, let's say, liberal tactics, because our disagreement here is on tactics. We're all in favor of equal rights, but it's about tactics with certain LGBT activist groups. Can we not say that that is kind of a, I mean, if I'm playing the devil's advocate, kind of like an overcorrection, which will get balanced out over time. And yes, it might be, it might be irritating and it might rub up against rights of other groups and it might create internal wars on the left, but at the same time, we're dealing with people who have been feeling oppressed for a long time and things have changed very, very quickly in the last 20 or so years. So perhaps that is just that kind of overcorrection, which itself will get balanced. I don't know, what do you think? I think it really depends on who you ask. Now, in this case, you're asking me, so I'll respond on a personal note. I think that if anything, this particular approach delays true emancipation and it's counterproductive because it mislabels the oppressors as allies. And that is problematic because it misdirects people's focus away from the people who are really the ones pulling the strings with the real social and economic power who are maintaining this status, the current status quo and labels them as part of the solution when in fact they are part of the problem. So that I think it isn't as simple as you put it. I don't think it's something that with time will then be auto-corrected. I think we need to consciously be aware of these power dynamics and really integrate them in the way that we pursue real radical social change and identify who is truly with us genuinely, morally and ideologically and who is with us simply for profit, which means that they're with us today but might not be with us tomorrow or are with us in America, like you said, with us when we live in Saudi Arabia. Okay. Thanks. A couple of comments from the chat. Ross Coyle says, I think that polarization, one you're talking about is intentionally fabricated. Right wing tabloids did a lot of it in the 1990s. Giblett says, the left has failed in many ways to rise to the challenge of the changing nature, experience of all kinds of political identity. Class reductionism doesn't deal with the question. It rejects the discussion and creative experiments says, don't get fooled by Tim Cook, referring to the openly gay CEO of Apple. Boral Madras, sorry. Dushan, can I bring you in after Dushan to respond and then we'll bring in Boral. Boral Madra from Turkey. Thank you, Mehram. I think I will give you an example from Turkey about the schizophrenic situation about gender rights and et cetera. The most popular two singers in Turkey are gay and they are admired by millions of people. So I think even if majority don't accept gender rights or gay marriage or whatever the issue, when they go to concerts and see, for example, in the past who is dead now, Zeki Miran was one of the most, most popular singer of Turkey. So they were, I mean, so happy to see these singers. Under Islamic rules, it is forbidden. But let's remember what happened during the Ottoman Empire. I mean, the palace had boy courtesans. It's very well known historically. I mean, very well known issue. I think there is strong resistance for the rights of LGBTQI people in Turkey to some NGOs. And I think the M25 will be a stronghold for their goals and for their work against this prejudices. And I think the perception in Turkey is very controversial and it needs a big reform. That's what I think for Turkey. Thank you Bural for that perspective from Turkey. Dushan, let's bring you back in. Okay, me again. Thanks just to answer some stuff that really caught, that I really caught in my ear. What Mehran and David were talking regarding the culture and educating people. For sure, we need to educate people a lot about these issues. It's a really complicated theory, even though it's about our identities at the end of the day. And we need more visibility happening. Now, what David was talking about is really interesting because in anthropology it's called the Overtraction theory where if we are going too fast with some progress, there is going to be a reaction that's negative. However, what I need to point out is that we shouldn't slow down if you ask me because that kid who is going to be expelled out of their parents' home is certainly not going to wait in front of the door until we all just slow down a bit with progress and with education. So we need to go all in just like we did with Black rights. So with Black rights, it became apparent in a few decades only that it's not a matter of fed, it's not a matter of... I don't know, something that's just there for the sake of it, but that it's a human right. Now where I don't agree with Eric in large is where he said that we are trying to see who is being oppressed more in terms of if you are not a working class then you are going to identify with some of the identity which is oppressed in order to feel oppressed if I got you right. But I cannot really be a class reductionism in that terms and I know way too many people that suffered greatly because of their identity just to say that they went through it only to be oppressed as it is modern to be oppressed. I don't think anyone likes to be oppressed. I think that we would all very much enjoy classless society, genderless society, raceless society and so on because gender just like race is a social constant at the end of the day and that needs to be abolished if you ask me. And regarding Ryanair I hear you and I agree as you can assume because I talked a lot about pink washing I even did a lot of workshops in my past about pink washing but I would very much state one thing that I couldn't really blame LGBTQ plus person from Montenegro going to Ryanair because he or she or them wouldn't feel discrimination there. I mean they felt discrimination for all of their life in their home, in their streets, in their favorite bars they got beaten up, called names and so on and so on so they would just need a bit of a break of that and I couldn't attack them because of it. Of course I would say that they would need to bear in mind that Ryanair is polluting the earth that Ryanair is not treating their employees fairly but as Yanis said at the very beginning of his speech we need to say that even though they are rainbow washing they are still doing something good even because of the bad reasons but it's far better than not doing that and still exploiting workers. Thank you Dushan important points I'm very nuanced I'm not sure it works on social media the way you put it but it's an important point and I like the way you say a comment from someone else here class is alive and well in queer communities it's a reference to the debate we were having earlier it would be better to engage and highlight that in good faith rather than create false ideological polarities that mimic the culture wars. Lucas Fibraro Thanks madam I think some great points have been made and I wanted to go back because something that was mentioned here got me thinking a little bit you mentioned that article a few minutes ago I forgot where it appeared I think it was in the New York Times I forgot who wrote it but essentially it was arguing that it's a good thing that corporations are embracing LGBT rights is it the most sincere of embraces that's up for debate but it's better if it's that way than if they didn't essentially and that got me thinking and it took me way back to when I was a kid and I was in school in Brazil and you were learning about our history a huge part of our history is permeated by the shadow of slavery among other terrible injustices but this is certainly the worst of all just centuries and centuries of things that you learn as you're a child and horrible things that were done things that make you embarrassed of being a human being essentially and then I remember learning that towards the end of the 19th century when our colonizers were still sort of reticent about getting rid of slavery even though all other countries in America had and then Britain stepped in and they started blocking slave ships in the Atlantic because they really wanted to pressurize Portugal and Brazil to end slavery and I remember thinking what a wonderful thing after all these horrors eventually people woke up and they saw that there was a huge terrible injustice that was being committed and I had to stop and Portugal might not have seen it but people in Britain did and then they went out of their way to step in and stop it from happening and then our teacher would go no, no, no, that's not what happened at all it's just that capitalism was developing and Britain wanted markets to sell its goods to and wanted people to buy their products slaves, they don't get wages so they can buy any products so they wanted slavery eliminated so that new markets would open up of sell their workers essentially and I thought that memory sort of came back to me now because it just sort of drives on the point that the the elites in a class-based society especially in capitalism, they will only show solidarity or a lieship when it's profitable to do so and is it better to live in a society in which the elites are blocking slave ships instead of trading in slaves of course it is, is it better to live in a society in which corporations are showing their support for LGBT rights and for fights against racism rather than the opposite of course it is, but I don't want to live in a society in which we have to wait until those things become profitable for the elites to superficially anyway to start supporting them only to help them entrench their positions even more so that they can obfuscate the real types of oppression that are necessitated by this class-based society, any class-based society that exists and that has ever existed. Thank you Lucas and this is such a vast topic and we've only scratched the surface but if no one else has got anything to add on LGBT issues and pride I think we'd like to switch gears a little bit at the top of the hour and have a few words about the upcoming French legislative elections so I know that might seem quite abrupt because we're really getting into the debate but we will pick this up again because it's an important topic for DiEM25 and I think we've really made some progress on it today so Eric can I hand it over to you to share a few words about Franz? For the palette cleanser of French elections so yeah I mean look French elections coming up second round will be on the 19th so the final result will be on the 19th of June but really here we're looking at a result or rather at a political phenomenon that is growing in France that is about the left in general it's not just about the French elections because what has happened is fairly historic it's only happened a handful of times in France's history and indeed probably Europe's history so the vast majority of left parties in the country have managed to form a single electoral union called NUP a new popular union so the new union popular union of ecology social and ecological union whatever excuse my French now they basically have rallied around the France Insoumise Jean-Luc Mélenchon's political party which means that the apparent candidate for the prime ministerial position in France of this group would be Jean-Luc Mélenchon this is a quite important political move by Mélenchon because it means he will not be running as the MP and making this move with quite the political risk because if they fail to come first in the elections then Jean-Luc Mélenchon's immediate electoral engagement as MP will be over in a matter of a couple of weeks so it's kind of an all in move at this stage and quite impressive for that now the bigger question here and really where we as DiEM should come in and discuss is does this truly constitute a real union of the left so what we've been talking about since our inception was this need to unify progressive forces so when one looks at France is that what has happened is that what we're looking at and the answer from where I'm standing at least and that would be interesting if we have the time to jump in on this is yes and no because although they have managed to create a political program of 650 policies and in that program are really impressive fiscal policies that haven't been seen in France in a while and social policies and really major logical policies as well such as for example stopping nuclear energy production in France which is a massive thing at the same time two things first of all it is rather unlikely it's not impossible so I don't want to be a Cassandra but it's rather unlikely that we will ever see the materializing of this program so it's also a question of whether they were a bit they went a bit the extra mile with these policies and at the same time they also have 33 policy differences which they have termed shades so there are 33 shades on top of this 650 policies that they have agreed on and these 33 shades are areas in which they could not agree when forming this agreement to run together in the elections and one of these shades is indeed as expected Europe so how to approach the European Union and you know on the one hand you have La France Assoumise which is basically the air of the movement in 2005 to reject the constitutional treaty you know the referendum that happened in France 2005 around the constitutional treaty and to be honest France Assoumise has shifted a bit their message from completely anti-U to closer to the DM's position which is essentially a position of disobeying and coming into conflict with the European Union and moving forward with policy implementation even though it might go against European Union law and refusing to obey to rules that they consider to be anti-social and the other one of the other shades is NATO so Melanchon had to back away from his position that he would campaign to remove France from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance in order to be able to form this this electoral conglomeration ahead of the elections and this at the time when NATO is more important than ever we have a war in Eastern Europe and a reinvigoration of NATO's presence and at this moment Melanchon has lost the NATO topic in order to form this kind of electoral coalition so basically the answer is yes there is a kind of alliance we will never see it truly tested most probably so we can't really know whether or not this is more of a communications victory for La France Assoumise and the French left rather than actual political victory whether it is resting on solid pillars that could make a real political change in France and very important topics were sacrificed in order to make it so is this truly unity the good thing is that at least they were very straightforward about the areas in which they disagree so they didn't try to hide it and they made it part of the narrative of this coalition which has worked to their advantage so to end basically we're saying that it's not clear whether or not this is truly a solid political structure my guess would be that actually it isn't and at the first science of pressure it will be truly tested and that it is a major communications victory if nothing else for Melanchon and the left it's also huge risk because if they don't win Melanchon's career will really be in jeopardy but it also has managed to do something that has not been done in a while in France and indeed in Europe which is to re-energize the left and create a new sense of purpose and a new sense of plausibility and possibility for supporters of the left that might try might drive electoral engagement in the future and that shouldn't be underestimated you know just this victory if nothing else to get people to think about left politics not just as a side voice but really as a main political player thanks for that Eric Janis let me bring you into some closing words on France please this coalition must be supported I personally support it I think that DiEM25 supports it if we were in France we would vote for it and we recommend to our comrades in France to vote for it Jean-Luc Melanchon needs to be congratulated for managing to put it together having said all that it's a creation of the electoral system we have an electoral system in France which is not exactly first passed but it's very majoritarian which means that if the left had not banded together they wouldn't elect more than 50 people in the National Assembly so it was a creation of an electoral system it's clearly an alliance of convenience there is the program that they've put together it's not worth the paper that it is written on it's irrelevant it's the lowest common denominator with lots of bits and pieces that got into there no structure no answer to big questions such as if you were to form a government tomorrow what would you do about electricity prices say that they would end nuclear energy and so on it's irrelevant at least for the next 10 years how would you reduce electricity prices how would you go against the target system of the European Union in terms of pricing electricity what would you do about the European Central Bank what should the policies of the European Central Bank be given that we have a crazy situation almost 10% inflation and minus 0.5% interest rates which is the result of 13 years of pretending that the bankruptcy problem didn't exist so there are no answers in this policy document and there could never be answers because the Socialist Party the Greens the Renaissance Party the Communists and so on they can never agree on these things they have fundamental profound deep-seated differences of opinion and also none of them have a policy about Europe none of them have a European Green New Deal within which to embed a plan for France but that let's be clear everybody in France knows that this common program is irrelevant they had to have a common program ticket and it was important to have a common ticket so they could have ripped out a few pages from a telephone catalogue from a telephone book it had exactly the same substance looking ahead the situation is very clear they are not going to win they are going to manage to elect a lot more members of parliament otherwise and the next day this alliance is going to dissolve they will go back to the parties that elected them in the first place and you can't blame Mellon for that it was the only way that the number of members of parliament that support Macron and Le Pen could be diminished so all strength to them for doing this but have absolutely no illusion the day after the election this alliance goes disappears, collapses, fragments but let's just let me finish with a hypothetical imagine they were to win what would win mean what would victory look like well the absolute majority in the national assembly now that would be spectacular I wish it could happen because Mellon Chaun whatever qualms I may have about him would become prime minister and that would throw a serious panel in the works of the cohabitation between Macron and Mellon Chaun and life would be a lot more fun if Macron's power is usurped by having to appoint Mellon Chaun as his prime minister Europe would be far more interesting but whatever happens under that hypothetical scenario it won't be the implementation of any program we would have a government that is constantly at odds with the presidency with the Elysée Macron would maintain complete control of foreign and defence policy it doesn't matter what Mellon Chaun wanted to do when it comes to these things this is how the French constitution works and Mellon Chaun would have to run the economy without the levers of economic control without monetary policy and without fiscal policy because believe me the moment a Mellon Chaun government is formed interest rates on French debt go through the roof immediately just immediately not only because the finances are going to sell bonds and reduce their price and therefore increase the interest rates that the French state pays in order to borrow money but also because the European central bank would immediately to stop buying French debt or to start unloading French debt so this is going to be a government Mellon Chaun government if it were formed it would immediately find itself in a deep crisis now the question is would that give rise to the possibility of a solidarity movement across Europe solidarity with the new French government would the rest of us in Germany, in Greece, in Portugal and so on rally to the cause of supporting a government which doesn't have the support of its own president remember that the best in other words we can hope for if Mellon Chaun wins an absolute majority in the National Assembly is a beautiful chaos it's not a bad thing it could be a splendid chaos but that's you know the only thing that the only good thing that could come out of it is that, you know, everything would be blown up and this normalization of stupidity which has been happening for years in Europe that would implode and all sorts of possibilities would open up some good some mediocre, some awful Thank you Yannis what does victory look like such an important question and the essential question of strategic activism those words are echoing okay thank you for joining us out there, we've gone past the top of the hour we've had an interesting chat today we've talked about corporate pinkwashing a class based approach to LGBT issues the illiberal excesses of some LGBT activists and in a totally disconnected but nonetheless very important segment we've talked about the upcoming French legislative elections I've obviously lost the power of speech so I'm going to leave you very soon, we did a lot of talking on this call but please remember we are not just a movement of talking we're a movement of action and if you'd like to join the action part then please do the website is dm25.org slash join the website address and in a couple of seconds you can be a dm25 member and work with us on these issues, thank you again we will be with you at the same time same place