THE CONFESSION BOX

Each week Megan Nicol Reed asks a public figure to choose three of the seven deadly sins to confess to. This week Emilie Rakete enters the box.

Emilie Rakete is the press spokesperson for People Against Prisons Aotearoa. One of the activists behind protests against the participation of uniformed police in the Pride Parade, the 26-year-old is completing her Masters at the University of Auckland, studying the political economy of our prisons.

GREED

After the police pulled out of Pride, a lot of corporates followed suit. Good riddance, said some, greedy big business was just cashing in on the GLBTQI+ movement, without doing anything to further inclusivity anyway. Do you agree?

Pride had ended up in the position of supporting businesses — by providing a un-confrontational, mild, non-political advertising platform for these companies to pursue their PR strategies. Could we describe the subordination of culture to business interests as “greed”? Probably, but this problem isn’t one caused by individual sinners — it’s the inevitable outcome of a system in which the interests of the rich predominate.

You are also a spokesperson for Organise Aotearoa, a new socialist group. I assume greed is anathema to you?

I don’t think we can think of greed, or of taking more than one needs, as being an individual moral problem. Instead we should think of greed as being a structural problem of the kind of society we live in, where someone like Jeff Bezos can make $100 billion while people are freezing to death on the streets of Chicago.

So you’re not remotely motivated by money?

Money is a means towards an end, right? There are things every human being needs to survive. I’d like a better car. I’d like a Big Mac, right now.

I don’t think it’s completely normal human behaviour for all of us to spend all our lives pursuing the most wealth we can possibly acquire.

GLUTTONY

Gluttony and greed are close bedfellows. You say you’re not greedy, are you gluttonous?

Only for Big Macs. Anything I’ve ever said about socialism doesn’t apply to the clown, to Ronald McDonald. No, I’m exaggerating. I think what most people are really hungry for is the ability to sustain their life. But when we don’t know what we need to sustain our lives we start thinking, maybe what I really need to be happy is $200,000, or a really, really expensive handbag, or some kind of horrible, genetically-engineered dog that can’t breathe properly.

You’re often quoted in the media talking about the working class. Growing up with a successful media personality like Robbie Rakete as your father, I don’t imagine you ever went to school with no lunch. Is it tricky to speak for those for whom that’s their reality?

I’m a junior, junior assistant academic peon at the university. It’s not a particularly glamorous job and it’s not a particularly well-paid job. I think when we’re talking about poverty the most important thing to keep in mind is the relations of production governing this country. So whether we’re in control of capital, whether we’re in control of production, or whether we work for a wage and value is extracted from our labour.

Most of us, and I include myself in that, are on the side of labour. We sell our ability to do useful work and we get a wage for it which we use to sustain our own existence.

How do you put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s hungry, though, if you’ve never experienced it?

I would say I’m not putting on anyone else’s shoes.

SLOTH

With everything you’re involved in, how do you find the time to be slothful?

There was an article on BuzzFeed about millennial burnout, and the author was arguing as the number of things we need to do, the side hustles we need to keep going at all times to pay rent, to buy food, as all these things pile up and up, when you’re living under that constant grind … you end up putting off simple things in your day-to-day life as a way of getting away from this constant to-do list all of us have had implanted in our minds over the last few decades. I think that’s how most people my age relax now, by not doing course work for uni, by not leaving for the bus until the absolute last minute. Procrastination; this kind of micro-sloth is the only thing really available to us anymore. I’m not sure relaxation is a luxury many people get to have in 2019.

Maybe we can have it one day again but I think we’ll need to take up the struggle for relaxation like previous unions did for the eight-hour day. I think time off from work has to become a new territory in political struggle.