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    Re: The French quagmire Jad Bouharoun 4 Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on April 27, 2019, 11:56 am, in reply to "Re: The French quagmire Jad Bouharoun 3"

    The initial convergence had to be driven from below, through gradual and careful small steps. On 22 November, oil refinery workers went on a national strike to put pressure on their bosses during annual salary negotiations. In the southern Bouches-du-Rhône department, strikers joined Gilets Jaunes who had been manning a day and night filtering blockade outside their Total refinery, marking the first implicit convergence between trade unionists and Gilets Jaunes.46 As a reporter remarked, each side initially stood on opposite sections of the same roundabout, sending out scouts to break the ice. In the port town of Saint-Nazaire, a traditional bastion of working class struggle, the Gilets Jaunes occupied an empty building in late November to turn it into a “people’s house”. When the city council sent a bailiff to summon the occupiers to evacuate the premises, the dockers’ union threatened to go on strike; “la Maison du Peuple de St-Nazaire” remains to this day the headquarters of the local Gilets Jaunes, a place where working people come together and catch themselves red-handed dreaming of a different society:

    I find myself with youngsters who have fought on the ZAD [zone d’aménagement différée, a radical movement against a new airport near Nantes]. I’ve never really understood the meaning of their struggle, and I still don’t, to be honest. But we are here together, we debate, we yell at each other and we embrace. What is going on between us, this solidarity, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s unbelievable. It has become like a drug.47

    There were signs that the government was wary of any significant convergence too. When truck drivers’ unions put out a strike notice in early December around the payment of overtime, the labour minister herself quickly intervened in favour of the workers to scuttle the strike.

    On 13 December, an open letter was published by dozens of CGT shop stewards stating that:

    Our friends and colleagues are wearing yellow vests. Often, they are precarious workers, far from the large cities, working in small companies or out of work. They are working people who, like us, cannot make ends meet. They are in large parts those whom we fail to organise in our unions, to drag along in our usual struggles, to mobilise under our slogans. Must we not ask why?48

    This reflected a growing sentiment among militant trade unionists, who were alerted by the outcome of a meeting between a weakened Macron and national trade union leaders after a particularly riotous Saturday mobilisation in Paris, which managed to extort a common press statement “condemning violence”.

    Martinez in particular is caught in the classical trap of the trade union bureaucrat, torn between his position as a credible interlocutor of the government and being at the head of what is by far the largest combative trade union in France. Although he has generally adopted a more confrontational attitude than his predecessor, given the scale of the attacks of the past few years, he is wary of calling for an indefinite mobilisation as he knows the CGT cannot carry it on its own. The fact that the other large union confederation, the CFDT, is backing the government, seems to condemn Martinez to the almost apologetic, passive attitude of calling for punctuated days of trade union mobilisation, on 5 February and 19 March.

    But, regardless of oscillations at the top, the Gilets Jaunes movement has heightened the country’s political temperature and created favourable conditions for local strikes over bread and butter issues. In a speech after the December riots in Paris, Macron encouraged bosses to play their part and grant their workers end of year bonuses, in return for tax exemptions on bonuses up to €1,000. Almost every large French multinational, flush with cash and anxious to help a weakened Macron, has answered his call, but other bosses have not. This has encouraged a mushrooming of “Macron bonus” local strikes in companies with a well-established trade union presence, but not only them: workers at Derichebourg, an Airbus subcontractor, organised themselves in a “collective of angry workers” and went on strike with the belated support of one local trade union section, with two other unions siding with the bosses and citing the workers’ “irresponsible behaviour”49—their picket lines had more Yellow Vests than trade unionists on them. Apple retail workers unexpectedly went on strike on Christmas Eve, revitalising local unions, and ended up winning not a bonus but a permanent wage increase.

    These sparse and localised struggles shed light on the labour movement’s future tasks. As the El-Khomri law takes hold, attacks on pay and conditions will come increasingly from within the companies, particularly where the combative trade unions are weak, and will require the local building of resistance. Unions will need to take the task of local building much more seriously and will run into difficulties, but the “Macron bonus” strikes show that the general political situation can diffuse into a multitude of localised struggles that trade unions will need to seize.

    A crisis of hegemony

    The Gilets Jaunes are the latest symptom of the long organic crisis that the French ruling class is going through. Gramsci described an organic crisis as a long-term economic crisis that the ruling class fails to solve, allowing it gradually to infect the ideological and political field of society and compromising the hegemony of the ruling class.

    Among revolutionary Marxists it was indeed Gramsci who most systematically refuted the tendency to reduce the state to its “special bodies of armed men” (police, army, prisons, etc) and put forward the ways in which the bourgeoisie gained the consent of the subaltern classes—or at least of a majority within their ranks by claiming for its rule a universal validity that embodies the “common interest” in one way or another. To be sure, the theory of hegemony is a theory of the state, but of a state which is “no longer merely an instrument of coercion, imposing the interests of the dominant class from above. Now, in its integral form, it had become a network of social relations for the production of consent, for the integration of the subaltern classes into the expansive project of historical development of the leading social group”.50

    To paraphrase Gramsci’s famous metaphor, the fortress of the bourgeoisie is not only protected by walls patrolled by armed guards, but surrounded with trenches and imbricated mazes which serve to delude and demoralise potential assailants while work goes on as usual inside the fortress. This does not mean, however, that the rulers’ hegemony is an ideological con trick played on the gullible masses, a simple fool’s bargain which must be intellectually exorcised separately from, or in substitution to political struggle directed against the state.51 Rather, ruling class hegemony is secured through what Gramsci called “civil society”, a network formed of reformist parties of various types, trade unions, schools and universities, cultural associations, the media, etc, and which appears to give the rulers’ ideology a concrete, material realisation in people’s practical life.

    Although this is not the place for a comprehensive critique of Gramsci’s concept of civil society, we must nevertheless ask how today’s rulers maintain their hegemony—and how it is undermined. Writing in 1977, Chris Harman emphasised that advanced capitalism “has been characterised by the phenomenon of ‘apathy’—a falling away of mass participation in political and cultural associations …a centralisation of ideological power, to the atomisation of the masses—with the crucial exception of workplace-based union organisation—and to a weakening of old political and cultural organisations”.52 To this we must add public services and the so-called “welfare state”, which are not—normally—centres of ideological power but serve to give material legitimacy to the ideological claims of the integral state. Indeed, even as they had been wrenched from the ruling class through struggle, the state provision of public services and benefits in France has until recently been central to the ruling class’s political discourse around “the French social model” and the “Republican pact”.

    This tendency towards “atomisation” has evidently accelerated in the neoliberal era, undermining the capacity of large trade unions and reformist parties to give expression to popular discontent but also channel it away from the centres of power; in this way they played the role of a safety valve protecting the bourgeoisie from unexpected catastrophic explosions. This had happened most clearly in 1968 when the CGT and the Communist Party were able to defuse the revolutionary potential of what was at the time the largest general strike on record, not without securing, admittedly, significant material concessions from the ruling class.

    But this “safety valve” is not only active during periods of open struggle; even as apathy and atomisation progressed, the turning of electoral politics into a national spectacle covered passive consent with the veil of active adhesion, while the secular local implantation of reformist parties, this crucial but often overlooked thermometer, was gradually eaten away.

    None of this means that the “special bodies of armed men” will only intervene after all ideological dams have yielded. In Gramsci’s own words:

    The “normal” exercise of hegemony on what has become the classic terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent that balance each other in various ways, without force violating consent too much, even attempting to make force appear to be resting on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion—newspapers and associations—which, therefore, in certain situations, are multiplied artificially.53

    The production of majority consent in liberal democracies is therefore constantly combined with the forcible subjugation of a minority, or more precisely of a multitude of minorities under a centralised ideological barrage which aims, if not to gain the acquiescence of the majority, at least to secure its quiet indifference towards repression. State racism evidently plays a crucial role in covering the oppression of a minority while dividing working people.

    However, unlike brick and mortar trenches and mazes, civil society is a living organism, a tissue of social and political relations built on an economic base. The long-term economic crisis and its neoliberal “solutions”, which increase poverty and unemployment while shrinking public services, inflates the suffering of the subaltern classes and gradually eats away the credit of civil society and its material and ideological capacity to contain discontent; and thus the integral state’s scale tips more and more towards its repressive apparatus, strengthening it and widening its reach to deal with the multiplied hotbeds of dissent, as is evident since the beginning of the Gilets Jaunes movement.

    Conclusion

    This article’s emphasis on Macron’s weakness has stemmed from an analysis of the historic phase of class struggle in France which can be summed up as follows: Macron’s election came at a period when a radicalised ruling class was in dire need of further neoliberal reforms given the decline of French capitalism compared to its international rivals—that was Macron’s historic task. At the same time, the reforms of the past few decades and the resistance put up by the working class have gradually discredited the traditional parties of the ruling class, leading to their catastrophic collapse in 2017. This left it to Macron to enact further violent reforms over a political field that is increasingly polarising between the far right and the far left. In other words, the French ruling class was preparing for a full-scale assault on workers and the poor, but without its traditional hegemonic political tools which it had been forced to sacrifice in previous battles. Does this not constitute a recipe for crisis?

    Having said that, the scale, depth and endurance of the Gilets Jaunes movement surprised everyone—it showed how deeply the resentment against the ruling class, personified by the arrogant Macron, is rooted in popular soil. Whatever the future may hold for it, the movement has brought hundreds of thousands of working people out of apathy, atomisation and demoralisation, and onto the stage of history. A thousand times more effectively than far-left propaganda, the Gilets Jaunes revealed in practice and to a whole nation the ugly, coercive face of the state, of its police and its judiciary, as well as the class contempt and sheer hatred with which the bourgeoisie and its media lackeys consider the working masses. The Gilets Jaunes have also mercilessly lifted the veil on the weaknesses of our camp. It is a bitter irony of history, in a period so favourable to the dissemination of revolutionary ideas and practice, a period where whole sections of the working class are, consciously or not, looking for anti-capitalist answers, to see the traditional anti-capitalist left in a state of apathy and disorganisation, decidedly incapable of rising to the historical occasion.

    The crisis of the centre, of which the Gilets Jaunes are a symptom and an accelerator, can also benefit the far right. If they have nullified the most alarmist predictions that saw in them the new face of fascism, one could not expect the Gilets Jaunes to be impermeable to racism. That is why the intervention of the anti-racist far left was so important, and should serve as a stepping stone for the construction of a wide anti-racist united front to confront the Front National and the smaller fascist groups.

    So revolutionaries have an uphill battle ahead of them to rebuild their organisations and advance an anti-racist and anti-fascist agenda, but the task is far from desperate. In spite of the formal defeats of 2016 (El-Khomri) and spring 2018 (railway strike), the chapter opened by the struggle “against the labour law and its world” is far from over. The momentum gathered in 2016, 2017 and 2018 has defined the left’s uneven but enthusiastic intervention in the Gilets Jaunes movement, and will continue to grow as class antagonisms and the generalised political crisis intensify in the coming months and years.

    Jad Bouharoun is a Middle Eastern revolutionary socialist living in France.

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