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    Re: The French quagmire Jad Bouharoun 2 Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on April 27, 2019, 11:53 am, in reply to "The French quagmire Jad Bouharoun 1"

    The most obvious paradox of French trade unionism is that its level of achievement is in spite of a very low aggregate density. Not more than 11 percent of French workers are members of a trade union, yet over nine tenths of them are covered by a collective bargaining agreement.16 This is another explanation for persistently high wages across the board, since pay and conditions resulting from national or sectoral agreements apply as a minimum to all companies, regardless of local union strength. Trade unions therefore perceive little immediate incentive for mass recruitment drives, as they are still capable of mobilising workers without recruiting them as members; the correlation between the presence of union activists on a site and the likelihood of strikes remains solid.17

    In the light of this reality of stubbornly high wages, the strategy adopted by the French ruling class since Hollande becomes clear: after decades of temporary fixes, a radicalised ruling class seeks decisively to shift the balance of power towards the bosses.

    Hollande: the crisis accelerates

    After a largely oratorical flirtation with anti-austerity, in 2014 Hollande announced a sharp turn to the right by promoting interior minister Manuel Valls to prime minister.

    Valls never hid his affinities with MEDEF, and its idée fixe of reducing the “cost of labour” at any price. He kicked off a vast programme of state subsidies for companies, and MEDEF chief Pierre Gattaz embarked on a media tour to promise the creation of “one million jobs” in return for the subsidies programme, which reached a yearly total of 172 billion euros in 2017 according to the CGT union confederation.18 A report mandated by the PM’s office found that the money “went primarily into restoring the business sector’s profit margins and to a lesser extent towards wage increases, without favouring mass job creations. No notable effect on investment has been observed”.19

    After the November 2015 terrorist attacks, Hollande sought to unite the country behind the ruling class through nationalist rhetoric, notably organising a giant “republican march against terrorism”. As Ugo Palheta has argued: “It has become clear that the government has exploited the terrorist attacks to impose an authoritarian agenda around which the principal French political parties converge”.20

    It was in this context, when it appeared as if a police state had suddenly descended upon society and filled the air with a deafening chauvinistic and Islamophobic racket, that Hollande launched his frontal attack against the working class with the “El Khomri” labour law. From the point of view of the ruling class and the state, the timing of the attack could not have been better, for “the eruption of the movement against the El Khomri law actually surprised union activists in the political context of the rise of the Front National and the security measures which had been reinforced following the 2015 terrorist attacks”.21

    The fight against the labour law lasted several months and saw several different sectors of society throw themselves into struggle. Some strikes and demonstrations built from below fed into a high school and university movement. At the same time, the occupation of squares began in March 2016 with the Nuit Debout (“night on our feet”) movement before the heavyweight trade union federations began strikes in strategic sectors. All converged in massive demonstrations “against the labour law and its world” in the face of savage police repression. This in turn fed into a new phenomenon, the “head contingents” with hundreds of members of the radical left going ahead of the official demonstrations in a bid to confront the police directly.

    Strikes among cleaners, whose working conditions are already worse than anything outlined in the El Khomri law, have continued to flash up, with small but high profile and victorious actions in hotels, hospitals and train stations, a significant development for this notoriously under-organised sector, with a largely black, female workforce.

    However, the movement as a whole did not reach the critical mass needed to force the government to yield. In addition to the extraordinary police and judicial repression unleashed against striking workers, picket lines and demonstrations, militant trade unionists ultimately failed to mobilise sufficiently at company level. The sequence of events of 2016 shows that, although the slogan of the “general strike”, and behind it the recognition of the objective power of the working class, remain central even to “new” types of mobilisations like Nuit Debout, the translation of this slogan into reality cannot rely on national trade union leaderships.

    But the rulers’ victory in the battle for the labour law came at a great political price. The imposition of the harshest neoliberal reforms turned into a kamikaze operation in which Hollande sacrificed not only what remained of his own popularity, but the Socialist Party itself, which definitively collapsed after a last stab in the back of the working class and the poor. This opened the door for Macron.

    The rise of Macron

    An up-and-coming former civil servant, economy minister Macron succeeded in building a solid reputation among the French ruling class, from the employers’ federation to politicians and high-ranking civil servants, quickly becoming a media favourite. He surrounded himself with communication advisors, founding the “La République En Marche!” (LREM) movement with the sole aim of marketing the “Macron candidate” brand. Shrewdly, he left the sinking Hollande-Valls ship on time and announced his candidacy as what remained of both the president and his prime minister’s electoral credentials melted into air.

    At the same time, members of the conservative “Les Républicains” (or LR, a rebranding of the UMP, Chirac’s and Sarkozy’s presidential vehicle) overwhelmingly and unexpectedly chose François Fillon, Sarkozy’s former PM, to represent their formation in the 2017 elections. Ideologically, Fillon represents the reactionary, pro-Catholic, anti-Muslim and anti-gay provincial French bourgeoisie. His open Islamophobia, homophobia and nostalgia for the French colonial empire hid a no less significant radicalisation: in a speech given before a charmed employers’ federation, François Fillon promised a “blitzkrieg”22 of violent neoliberal measures that would radically transform the French economy in a matter of months.

    The designation of Fillon as the candidate for Les Républicains was only another indicator of the strategic, inescapable right-wing turn taken by the French state as a whole. But Fillon’s campaign unravelled spectacularly when it was revealed that this moralising Catholic had paid his wife nearly a million euros in public money for a job she evidently did not do. Battered on all sides by the media and his own party’s cadres who demanded his withdrawal, Fillon hung on desperately and fell back on his reactionary supporters to weather the storm, steering his campaign further rightwards and accelerating the defection of voters towards the new media favourite, Macron. This left the former prime minister unable to cross the first round threshold in spite of an impressive—all things considered—score of 20 percent.

    If Fillon’s campaign appealed to the hardened provincial reactionaries, Macron sought to flatter their polar opposites on the bourgeois spectrum: young, urban, well-to-do executives who hide their intellectual indigence behind deluded, LinkedIn-savvy talk of “disrupting” the French political field and turning their country into a “start-up nation”. Macron played the comedian and attuned all his discourse to this pitch; the pathetic punchlines in his bizarre speeches were welcomed with constant, and, as has been revealed, scripted applause.23

    Macron’s meteoric rise dazzled the mainstream media, who started zealously to look for the secret to the young man’s success in his own persona. It would be difficult, however, to conceive of a figure who passively embodies the French political disarray as well as Macron; he did not “make history” but is the product of impersonal historical forces in which he played only a supporting role.

    Indeed, the Socialist Party’s self-immolation on the altar of capital, the crisis of the mainstream right—of which the Fillon scandal was only a catalyst—and the rise of Marine Le Pen, which frightened enough left voters into turning towards the media favourite, and finally the record abstention rate, all those symptoms of the organic crisis of the French ruling class poured into the swamp of the “candidate Macron”. This is how a cunning opportunist was carried to the head of a major imperialist state to the stormy applause of starry-eyed halfwits.

    Upon his election, Macron quickly exchanged his start-up sales manager costume for that, more solemn but no less pathetic, of the head of the French Republic. The executive army of the state replaced what remained of the naïve LREM activists.

    Macron stayed on Hollande’s course full steam: on the one hand, he reinforced the state’s repressive apparatus, particularly against migrants and refugees, and on the other, he pursued a series of pro-capitalist fiscal and labour reforms. He set out to attack a bastion of the working class by announcing the coming privatisation of the railway company SNCF and the end of the railway workers’ hard-won terms and conditions. Even if the railway strike, which lasted three months, did not hit the government hard enough to make it blink, it produced a reaction similar to the struggle against the El-Khomri law: a great national strike occupying the front pages of the newspapers, a fierce high school and university student struggle and rising migrant and anti-racist movements, organising and converging on the streets in the face of an escalating police repression. All showed an ongoing accumulation of left-wing radicalism that was not stifled by the defeats of the labour movement of the past few years.

    However, society will not simply tip to the left until power falls on our laps. The leftwards radicalisation is counterbalanced by a polarisation to the far right, most notably around the National Front (rebranded last year as Rassemblement National) and the 11 million votes it gathered at the 2017 presidential elections.

    The far-right: republican racism nurturing a fascist core

    In the midst of the long economic and political crisis, it has appeared to many commentators as if the principal French fascist party, the Front National, had succeeded in shaking off its fascist remains to become a “republican” party, republicanism being understood here as a French idiom for democratically legitimate. This analysis has justified an end to the effective boycott of the FN by nearly all mainstream bourgeois parties: Macron agreed to hold a televised confrontation with Marine Le Pen before the second round of the presidential election, while Chirac, hardly an anti-fascist activist, had refused to hold a similar debate with Marine’s father Jean-Marie, the Front’s candidate in 2002.

    Like all political organisations, fascist parties are living organisms that are subject to evolution as they react and adapt to the concrete political situation they find themselves in, particularly when the possibility of a direct bid for power is excluded from the short-term agenda. The Front National, which was founded in the early 1970s as an attempt to unite small Nazi organisations and—already at the time—endow them with a mainstream electoral legitimacy, is certainly no exception to this rule. It has gone through multiple crises and transformation, but without estranging itself from its fascist nature.

    This is not the place to go through a detailed history of the Front National and French fascism, but let us describe it in its current state, under Marine Le Pen, as a far-right electoral organisation around a fascist core. Over the past decade, Le Pen has sought to widen the influence and the electoral appeal of the FN by adopting a renewed racist discourse that puts Islamophobia, rather than antisemitism, at the forefront. That such a move has “detoxified” the FN and endowed it with a so-called republican veneer in the eyes of bourgeois commentators and politicians only shows to what extent French mainstream politics has moved to the right. Indeed, the FN’s racism was legitimised by the state, the mainstream parties and by a whole coterie of intellectuals, professors and journalists who have found in Islamophobia a way to advance their careers. This has led Le Pen to boast that the FN has “already won the ideological battle”. Le Pen only had to modulate the Front National’s discourse to adapt to the new “Islamic” scarecrow, and join a racist front “stretching right from the [Valls] government to the FN and taking in LR”.24

    Naturally, the Front National also profits from the long economic crisis and its corollaries—unemployment, inequality and austerity—to woo voters from the working class and the poor who felt cheated by the promises of the mainstream right and left parties that have brought them nothing but more destitution. But the economic tree must not screen the racist forest: “Parts of the left were led to believe that what was at stake with Marine Le Pen’s so-called ‘social turn’ was to unveil…the pro-capitalist nature of the FN”25 at the price of neglecting its racism, the real engine behind the FN’s advance and its ideological cement. As Denis Godard has pointed out, “the whole history of the FN is marked by a double-dealing: turning towards anything that legitimises the Front (parliamentary work, media exposure, reaching out to sections of the right) to widen its appeal, and openly racist and fascist declarations and actions that aim to consolidate and develop an ideologically fascist heart”.26 This tactic, initiated by Jean-Marie Le Pen, was pursued by his daughter Marine during both the 2012 and 2017 elections27 to consolidate and flatter the party’s fascist, antisemitic core.

    And what a core! An overly bloated “protection and security department” recruited among veterans of the French army’s imperialist escapades and organised along paramilitary lines through which real links are maintained with smaller Nazi groups, a string of small service provider companies whose owners’ list reads like a who’s who of the 1980s French far-right street-fighting scene, the odd nostalgics of Nazism and the regular antisemites… the Front National remains the undisputed gravitational centre for French fascists. According to Vanina Giudicelli, Marine Le Pen represents a middle way “between those who believe that the time has come to try and take power and those who believe that they are cruelly lacking a mass movement—that is, that it’s not enough to have influence inside the state [the FN is very popular in the police and the military], but that really, to put their political project into action they need a movement that can take it to the streets”.28

    The accelerating crisis of the past few years has favoured the proliferation of Nazi street organisations like Génération Identitaire and Bastion Social. With a wide internet audience on the “fachosphere” attracted by antisemitic, homophobic and Islamophobic fantasies and conspiracy theories like the so-called “great replacement” of white Europeans by Muslim migrants, these groups number hundreds of active militants implanted in cities like Lyon, Marseille, Paris, Nantes and others. Focused on anti-migrant campaigns, street pogroms, attacks against left-wing movements and student occupations,29 their actions stem from the classic repertoire of older Nazi groups from whom they descend. Although they are not formally part of the Front National, an Al Jazeera undercover investigation into the Nazi groups has brought concrete proof of what the anti-fascist left had been warning against for a long time: the existence of ideological and organisational revolving doors between the two spheres. A member of Generation Identity even claimed that the “Front National does its work, which is politics. And we do our work, which is the streets”.30 This implicit division of labour, which does not need to be actively coordinated, is apparent in the patterns of intervention of the far-right in the Yellow Vests movement, to which we will return later.

    Who are the Gilets Jaunes?

    The question of who the Gilet Jaunes are tormented the left in the weeks running up to 17 November; a movement against “green taxes”, growing outside the left—outside unions, even outside known social media networks—whose only known spokespeople dangerously leant towards the far right, taking hold in small town and rural areas with a strong FN presence. Fears, both legitimate and fantastical, of the emergence of a mass petty-bourgeois reactionary movement dominated the left in the run-up to the first day of mobilisation. Thankfully, those fears were soon proven wrong.

    The Gilets Jaunes are majority working class people organising outside the workplace and independently of existing working class organisations such as trade unions, political parties and other associations. Studies show that the working class, as well as the unemployed, form the bulk of those who declare themselves supportive of the mobilisation. A study found that 62 percent of the mobilised Gilets Jaunes had a negative balance on their bank account at the end of every single month.31

    The working class Gilets Jaunes, including retired and unemployed workers, organised geographically and initially focused their grievances on a wide range of fiscal demands: reverting tax cuts for the very rich, fighting tax evasion, reducing taxes on pensions and essential products and, finally, increasing the minimum wage. Some saw the influence of the petty bourgeoisie behind the movement’s focus on the state and taxation. Indeed, the early phases of the movement saw small business owners join, with their specific grievances around company taxes and taxes on wages. But the subsequent development of the movement, with hundreds of different demands emerging from general assemblies organised democratically all over the country, shows a clear pattern of the predominance of working class concerns such as unemployment, public services, housing and pensions, as well as poverty among working women32 and little to no word on taxes on small firms. Ctd....

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