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    Re: The French quagmire Jad Bouharoun 3 Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on April 27, 2019, 11:54 am, in reply to "Re: The French quagmire Jad Bouharoun 2"

    This is clearly and objectively a working class movement driven by those who have found themselves on the receiving end of the economic crisis and its neoliberal “solution” in the past decades. However, the paradox lies in the fact that, first, the demands focused mainly on taxation issues and, secondly, national symbols predominated inside the mobilisation.

    The early focus on taxes rather than wages, unusual for the traditional labour movement, is symptomatic of a mobilisation outside the—usually small—­workplace, which can immediately draw in the unemployed and the retired. This is in the context of the relative retreat (and in some cases, disappearance) of local trade union presence and of the pull that a large, combative workplace can exert on its surroundings. But tax issues are underlined by class: the demands around the reinstatement of the wealth tax, on fighting tax evasion by big multinationals and on public services all concern the state-driven reforms of capitalism that have reduced the working class’s indirect wages and favoured the very rich.

    The other, more problematic contradiction concerns the use of nationalist symbols long rejected by the French left and working class movement. French flags, the Marseillaise and “Marianne”—the gendered personification of the French nation—are foreign to the French left and traditionally prevalent on right-wing mobilisations (apart from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s 2017 presidential election campaign). If it is quite obvious to everyone other than pedantic formalists that the movement is not a fascist or even predominantly nationalist mobilisation masquerading behind social demands, the question remains, how do we interpret the contradiction between the social engine of the mobilisation and its use of national ideological symbols?

    In this we can turn to Antonio Gramsci, who, following Karl Marx, affirmed that “the claim that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism”.33 On the contrary, what is needed is a concrete study of the ideology and the role it plays in people’s actual practice.

    The coherent, united French nation that the ruling class invokes to justify its rule is “nothing but a metaphor”. It is in reality akin to the “coexistence and juxtaposition of different civilizations and cultures, linked by state coercion and culturally organised as a ‘moral consciousness’, at once contradictory and ‘syncretic’”.34 This “moral consciousness” appears to be taken for granted by the Gilets Jaunes in their dissent against the ruling class. In their adoption of national symbols and rhetoric, they reproduce a classic phenomenon whereby rebels use the ethical symbols and discourse of the rulers and turn them against them. Martin Luther’s followers rose against the Catholic pope in the name of “true” Christianity, the Gilets Jaunes rise against their rulers using some of the classic symbols with which the heroic 18th century bourgeoisie has burdened its conservative, decidedly unheroic heirs: “Liberty, equality, fraternity”, and a national anthem, the Marseillaise, that smells terribly of revolution. The Gilets Jaunes have thus decreed that the current French rulers have betrayed their own “moral consciousness”, and proclaim themselves to be the “people”, the custodians of a “real France” where this moral consciousness is actually applied.

    Naturally, such a France has never existed. While it is not the sign of an inherently racist, reactionary movement, the use of nationalist symbols nevertheless reveals the movement’s weaknesses and limitations: first and most obviously, the French flag and the Marseillaise, while they attract working class people who would never have marched under a party banner, also attract the organised far right like flies to manure.

    Second, the use of the French flag, of the national anthem, of an overwhelmingly “French” discourse, betrays the movement’s reformism and a conciliatory approach to class society. What is implied is that the French values of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” and the famous “French social system”, which is being dismantled, can provide the umbrella under which one can have a conciliation between rich and poor and a mitigation of inequalities and antagonisms. France is then seen as an abstract idea, endowed with an almost religious quality which puts it above social classes and history itself.

    An evolving movement

    But if there is one thing we can learn from the Yellow Vests movement, it is that ideas can change. Ideas change when people start to move, when they stress test in practice the common sense they had hitherto uncritically accepted, thus challenging their own beliefs—such as the existence of an interest common to all French, or the neutral role of the police and the judiciary.

    Sociologist Benoît Coquard reminds us that daily life in rural areas, among the centres of the early mobilisations, can tend to “blur class distinctions”, particularly as many workers are employed in small companies where there is a perceived sense of proximity to the boss, which may spill over into the sphere of leisure and cultural life outside the workplace. However, things began to change on the “filtering roadblocks”, a rural, non-workplace equivalent of picket lines where the Gilets Jaunes argue, agitate and try to convince motorists to join their mobilisation: “As cars cross the roadblocks and the roundabouts, we gradually see a dichotomy of the world that emerges between the ‘friendlies’, those who are ‘like us’, and the rich, ‘the fat bourges who don’t give a damn’”.35

    The reactions of the “fat bourges” and their representatives alternated between disbelief, hysteria and resignation, particularly when the movement created insurrectionary scenes in central Paris in December, sending shockwaves around the world. Philosopher and former education minister Luc Ferry urged the police to “use their weapons once and for all”, while gender equality minister Marlène Schiappa, the feminist, liberal face of Macronism, reacted to the crowdfunding campaign in favour of Christophe Dettinger, the “boxer of CRS”,36 by demanding a register of the 9,000 contributors.

    But the most lucid and telling reaction came from Xavier Bertrand, also a former minister, who sighed that “Sarkozy did not win a second mandate, Hollande couldn’t even run, and now we are wondering whether Macron will be able to finish his term”.37 Some of Macron’s MPs, who won’t risk showing their faces in their own constituencies, have attempted a diversion by attacking the high-ranking civil servants of the ministry of finance at Bercy and branding them responsible for Macron’s tax policies, just as the latter was yielding and announcing concessions. A series of articles by Le Monde have revealed the disarray at the top of the ministry: “If the Gilets Jaunes’ demands have provoked such emotions among Bercy’s cadres, it is because they thought their hour had finally come with Macron’s election. A former finance ministry inspector reaching the Elysée, what a triumph! ‘He knew how to talk to us, he understood us’, a member of the administration explains”.38

    The movement alternates roadblocks and roadside pickets during the week before converging on local cities for the traditional Saturday demonstration. The savage violence of the police and the judiciary’s expedited severity, the contempt that spurts from columnists and editorial boards and the outright rage of the very rich and their pundits, and every one of the movement’s jerky steps forward reveals unpleasant truths about society. Police repression in particular acts as a catalyst for political consciousness, as it is directly experienced by hundreds of thousands and witnessed via social media by millions of sympathetic supporters of the movement. One of the many turning points was a video which emerged in December of hundreds of high school students from Mantes-la-Jolie, a suburb of Paris, forced to kneel for hours and sneered at by the police who had arrested them en masse for blocking a road outside their school. In normal times, those overwhelmingly black and Muslim students are typically on the receiving end of the everyday violence of the French state under the cover of racism. But these are not normal times: while ministers and their media lackeys recycled their old racist talking points about the “banlieues thugs”, white Yellow Vest demonstrators all over the country kneeled in front of police lines in solidarity with their unlikely suburban comrades.39

    Concrete developments have nailed questions of class, police violence and the role of the state to the centre of debates, positioning the movement on favourable ground for the radical left. Naturally, it is quite useless to stand on favourable ground without an army: the initiative actively to intervene in the Gilets Jaunes movement came not from the traditional, politically passive far-left organisations, but from a recently formed anti-racist group, the “Comité Adama”. Formed in 2016 in reaction to the killing of black youth Adama Traoré at the hands of the police in a Paris suburb, this group has since put itself at the centre of the fight against structural racism and police violence. As Adama’s sister Assa Traoré said: “who can better speak of poverty and unemployment than us who live in the suburbs? The police who are mutilating the Gilets Jaunes today spent decades training on impoverished Black and Arab youths.” Cutting through the pedantic debates about the “true nature” of the movement, she declared: “Our legitimate place is in this movement. Either we join or we run the risk of allowing this movement to be turned against us by the far right”.40 Thus on 1 December in a barricaded Paris, a thousands-strong far-left contingent brought together the Comité Adama and its close allies (notably the “Collectif intergare”, a group of radical railway workers forged in the 2017 strike and autonomous anti-fascists) with more traditional organisations such as the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA) to join the Yellow Vests demonstration that day.

    The explicitly political intervention by the far left in Paris, emulated across the country, is of crucial importance given the far right too is attempting to lead the movement. In its early days, it appeared that the movement’s poor, predominantly rural anchorage perfectly fitted the Front National’s rhetoric of the “forgotten France” outside the large cities. The presence of petty-bourgeois elements and their lumping together of billionaire bankers and poor “benefits profiteers” in the category of “parasites” also echoed a classical fascist discourse. An early study showed that there were as many Le Pen as Mélenchon voters mobilised under a yellow vest (although abstentionists and blank voters were even more numerous).41 In some instances openly racist actions were undertaken; some Gilets Jaunes called the police on migrants hidden inside a truck they had stopped, and others blockaded a company that had apparently “hired three immigrants instead of locals”.

    So racists and Le Pen voters are mobilised, but even their “engine” is social demands. This puts Le Pen herself in an embarrassing position: on the one hand, she publicly supports the movement against the “elites”; however, the Front National cannot put its money where its mouth is when it comes to social justice demands. Le Pen, who is only too aware of her core petty-bourgeois base, had to repeat her opposition to any increase to the national minimum wage publicly. She also declared: “I suppose the movement has to stop now” after the terrorist attack on the Strasbourg Christmas market in December, and finally she felt compelled to remind readers that “people also speak of immigration on the roundabouts you know” in an interview in far-right publication Causeur. This is undoubtedly true because social demands are not a magic wand that makes racism disappear, but the predominance of the former as well as the growing popular resentment against the police has thrown the ball out of the FN’s court. Where the FN has tried ostentatiously to support the Gilets Jaunes, like in former mining areas in the North where it holds four MP seats and a city ­council, the movement has died down.42

    The other far-right intervention in the movement comes from the smaller, street-oriented fascist groups. They have notably attempted to “solve” the question of violence during demonstrations by coordinating with the police and investing a self-proclaimed “Service d’Ordre” (steward and security service) for the demonstrations; naturally they used this position to try and play on the movement’s desire to remain “politically neutral” in order to kick the trade unionists off the demonstrations.43 However, this has backfired as many individuals forming the SO were identified by the media (with the help of radical left activists) as fascists. Therefore their preferred mode of intervention has been direct action in Lyon, Nantes, Toulouse, Marseille, Bordeaux and of course Paris, where they have attacked far-left activists including the NPA contingent on 27 January.

    Almost every Saturday demonstration is the scene of serious street fighting between the fascists and mostly autonomist anti-fascist groups, both having grown on the back of the struggles and the accelerating crisis of the past few years. While the fascist groups need to be physically kicked out of the Gilets Jaunes protests, the culture of secrecy inherent to the autonomists means that they seldom provide any political cover for their direct actions. The Gilets Jaunes movement nevertheless offers a concrete opportunity to develop a united front tactic which complements physical confrontation with a political mobilisation, through “the diffusion of a mass anti-racist and anti-fascist message, revealing to every Gilet Jaune the truth about these Nazi groups and explaining why they need to be kicked out of protests by any means necessary”.44 However, when it comes to fighting fascism, traditional organisations stick to commonplace ­platitudes with no real follow-up in practice,45 which means that autonomist groups remain the only significant force on the left to propose a veneer of strategy to deal with the fascist danger.

    On the eve of 17 November, the first Gilets Jaunes day of action, the CGT’s general secretary Philippe Martinez explicitly dissociated his union from the coming movement, stating that it was “impossible to imagine the CGT marching together with the Front National” and accusing bosses of manipulating an anti-tax mobilisation. He reflected the uneasiness with which the radical left and the labour movement apprehended a movement mobilising outside their traditional bases, and which appeared to be driven by social media networks harbouring suspicious links to the far-right. In return, a certain mistrust of trade unions seemed to pervade among Gilets Jaunes wary of seeing their “citizens movement” hijacked by any organisation. Ctd....

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