For months working people all over
Europe have been mobilizing — more or less successfully — to defend
their livelihoods against austerity measures imposed by the central
banks. On the pretext of a sudden and exaggerated panic over the debt,
European capital is imposing a take-back of whatever social advances
working people may previously have won in terms of salaries, job
security, public services, health, retirement and unemployed benefits.
These austerity measures are embodied in directives from the European
Union and IMF, and the required cuts are being imposed by governments
of both Right and Left. (Greece’s Papandreou and Spain’s Zapatero are
both Socialists).
Popular resistance has been strong: Greece was in turmoil for most of
the Spring, and September 29 was marked by a one-day general strike in
Spain as well as a mass international demonstration at European Union
headquerters in Brussels. Nowhere has this conflict been sharper than
here in France, where an undefeated, un-Thatcherized working class
conscious of its long revolutionary traditions has for months been
defying the rigid right-wing government of Nicolas Sarkozy with a
series of nationwide general strikes and massive demonstrations of
historic dimensions.
Eerily Quiet Streets
However, as I write these lines, things are eerily quiet here in
Montpellier, with stores closed, highways un-crowded and city streets
near-empty. Alas, the reason for this vacuity has nothing (and
everything) to do with the mass agitation and national strikes over
pension cuts that have brought France to the brink of crisis over the
past few weeks. Today is le Toussaint, an obscure Roman Catholic
festival (think Tishibov) celebrated as a National Holiday by the
officially secular French Republic with a three-day weekend and a
two-week school vacation. The French, 90% of whom never see the inside
of a (tax supported) Catholic church, are nonetheless a pious people,
and Vacances (vacation) is the name of the god they worship.
This disappointing dénouement to the tension that has been building
here for months was alas all too predicable, and the Sarkozy
government was openly counting on the vacances-effect when it
deliberately brought the crisis to a boil by rushing the final version
of the pension-reform law through the Senate last week, creating a
fait-accompli. The angry, determined, consciously anti-capitalist
social movement that has been coming to a boil for months has now
dispersed, and it is difficult to imagine it resuming with the same
intensity ten days hence. On the other hand, Oliver Besancenot of the
New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) is confident the movement will
‘rebound’ on Saturday Nov. 6, when the unions have programmed yet
another one-day nationwide mobilization.
Be that as it may, last Thursday’s national strike/demonstration (Oct.
28), much less well-attended then the previous six, already had
something autumnal and valedictory about it. It was of course the
seventh in the series of spaced one-day general strikes orchestrated
by the leaderships of the various French union federations (CGT, FO,
CFDT, CFTC, Sud-Solidaires). This stop-and-go strategy of ‘attrition’
has mainly served to ‘let off steam’ — rather than building up the
pressure against the arrogant, intransigent Right-wing government of
the much-hated Sarkozy; it may well have run out of steam, as I feared
it would in my first report. Nonetheless, the level
of anti-capitalist consciousness, self-organization,
inter-professional and inter-generational solidarity attained by this
mass movement has reached historic levels with over three million in
the streets. This experience will not be forgotten...
What Kind of Society?
What I love about the French is that although more than two thirds
have consistently voiced support for the demonstrators and strikers
(despite real inconveniences like closed gas stations and cancelled
commuter trains) only 43% actually agree with their goal — withdrawal
of the ‘reforms’. Remember when U.S. liberals used to condemn our
anti-war and Civil Rights protests with bullshit about ’I agree with
your goals, but object to your methods’ ? Here the public approves of
the radical means, even when they don’t really believe in the goal!
What this not-so-silent French majority is saying to Sarkozy is
simple: ’Don’t play us for fools. We know you’re a bunch of corrupt
politicians and super-rich profiteers, and we refuse to work until we
die to pay off your gambling debts while you dine with bankers at
Fouquet’s and go off on their yacht.’
This was precisely how the arrogant President-elect celebrated his
2005 election victory (snubbing his own Party’s celebration), and
Sarkozy’s open contempt of democracy has not been forgotten. ‘Take a
good look at your Rolex: it’s time for revolt!’ is a popular slogan.
The French — both Right and Left — are very conscious of their
history, and this sense of history reinforces the very open
class-consciousness — and class hostility — on both sides. Ancestral
memories of civil wars between sans-culottes and aristos are part of
French identity. Indeed, the word ‘guillotine’ has recently been
bandied about (Sarkozy famously boasting it was out of style).
Obviously, these strikes have been about much more than pension cuts –
which in any case are generally perceived as the first of many such
‘reforms’ all designed to definitively tear up the post-WWII ‘social
contract’ between labor and capital. ‘Dignity’ is the word on
everyone’s lips. ‘If I can be tried as an adult at 13,’ reads a sign
held by a high school student ‘I’m old enough to demonstrate at 16.’
La Grogne (generalized popular grumbling) has been in the air for
months, as the pleasure-loving French see their lives getting worse
under this neo-liberal offensive. The economic slogan of the Sarkozy
administration is ‘Work More, Earn More,’ but work has become hell for
thousands of employees through the introduction of Kafka-esque
management techniques designed to isolate each individual worker and
make her personally responsible for constantly receding, arbitrary
‘goals.’ This management-imposed sense of failure, combined with
arbitrary re-assignments designed to de-skill and de-professionalize
employees, has lead to more and more frequent suicides in the Post
Office and the Electric company, where my neighbor, a highly skilled
line-man proud to work way up on high-tension transmission pylons, got
transferred to a humiliating job behind a computer keyboard with a
70-minute daily commute from his home. In ‘Suffering at Work,’ a book
and TV documentary, prominent psychiatrist Christophe Dejours revealed
how French management uses psychological pressure to destabilize its
employees and literally drives them crazy.
At stake ultimately for the French is the question of what kind of
society they want to live in: a society based on social solidarity or
one based on ‘greed-is-good’ individualism? The demonstrators’ answer
to Sarko’s ‘Work More, Earn More’ is ‘Work Less, Live Better.’ Like
Britain’s Thatcher in the ‘80s, the French President is aggressively
provoking class war from the top down in order to break the resistance
of the working classes and impose the neo-liberal agenda once and for
all. With two or three million in the streets and 70% against him in
the polls, the French people are telling Sarko: Fous le camp, pauvre
con! (‘Fuck off, Little Prick!’).
The Class-Conscious French
Another thing I love about France is the clarity with which class
interests get articulated in the political arena (as opposed to the
U.S. where bankers and bus drivers are all ‘middle class’). Since 1789
(and on through the revolutionary struggles of 1830, 1848, 1871, 1936
and 1968) France has been an ideal ‘Marxist laboratory’ for the study
of class conflict. Today, France is basically still ruled by the
legendary ‘200 Families’ — a restrictive caste of landed aristocrats
intermarried with industrialists and bankers who live in exclusive
neighborhoods, graduate from elite schools, belong to exclusive clubs
etc. It expands slowly by marriage, merger and cooptation and is
almost impossible to penetrate from the outside.
This financial and industrial oligarchy, today represented by Sarkozy
and the MEDEF (Chamber of Commerce) has been tightly organized since
the 19th Century, when it used its influence on the state not just to
discipline labor but to grant French industrialists profitable arms
contracts at higher than world-market prices. In June 1936, this tight
little oligarchy had the shit scared out of them when a wave of sit-in
strikes broke out all over France upon the election of a Popular Front
government led by Socialist Leon Blum. Blum immediately negotiated a
compromise including the 40 hour week and France’s first paid
vacations, and from then on, it was ‘Better Hitler the Blum’ as far as
the ‘200 Families’ were concerned. This attitude (reinforced by
traditional French Right-wing, anti-Semitic nationalism) goes a long
way toward explaining France’s 1940 military debacle and the willing
(and profitable) collaboration of French industrialists with the Nazi
occupiers while thousands of French workers were being deported to
slave labor in Germany. Yet today, Sarkosy’s party brazenly dares
advertize itself as the ‘Shameless Right.’
The oligarchy had a lot to answer for in 1944-45 when France was
liberated. The Resistance took power under the Gaullist-Communist
coalition, and collaborators were being tried and sometimes executed.
Some big industries were nationalized, but there was no general
expropriation of collaborators’ property. The Communists, under orders
from Moscow, supported de Gaulle in saving France for capitalism, but
at a price. The elite was forced to agree to the ‘social pact,’ and
the French Constitution that emerged from the Liberation defined
France as a ‘social republic’ under which workers have economic rights
and where salaries are defined as including both cash and a ‘social
salary’ of defined benefits — including retirement.
These benefits are considered constitutional rights, and since the
return to power of the Right in 1995, working people all over France
have been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve them. The issue is
clear to all: Sarkozy and the MEDEF are out to replace the social
republic with the dictatorship of the market, that is to say of the
banks. At last Thursday’s demo here in Montpellier I saw a little boy
carrying a sign that read La Bourse ou la Vie (‘Your Purse or Your
Life’) with a play on the word Bourse (‘Purse’) which also means ‘The
Stock Exchange.’ (He told me his father helped him).
Politics Rears its Ugly Head
Rather than gloating over his apparent victory, Sarkozy has for once
remained low key. With a view toward the 2012 election, the
paternalistic President is now hinting he might make a few unilateral
changes in the pension law (which cruelly punishes women, who
typically are out of the labor force for several years of
child-bearing and might not be eligible to retire until 70.)
Meanwhile, with the angry French masses forced to wait until the 2012
election to dethrone their hated President, the Socialist Party seems
to be emerging as the other ‘winner’ in this crisis. Sarkozy’s
potential Socialist presidential rivals, Ségolène Royale and Martine
Aubry, have recently promised to abrogate the pension cuts if elected
in 2012 — forgetting that they had previously accepted the cuts as
inevitable (with minor modifications). The other Socialist
presidential contender, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has made no such
promise. In 2007 on Sarkozy’s recommendation he was named President of
the IMF responsible for imposing these and similar austerity cuts on
the European level.
Thus the official Left plays party politics, using the strikers and
demonstrators as pawns on the electoral checkerboard. The millions of
angry workers and youth in the streets were not thinking about 2012
when they told the ‘Little Prick’ to ‘Fuck Off.’ On Sept. 23, at the
height of the movement in Paris, there was talk of coming back the
next day, surrounding the National Assembly and bringing down the
government. Didn’t strikers topple Juppé’s government in 1995 and
Villepin’s in 2006? Didn’t their great-great-great grandmothers march
with their kitchen-knives to the Palace at Versailles in 1789 and drag
the King and Queen back to Paris? However, the CGT vetoed this move on
the grounds that it would be too ‘political’ (!) Militants were
advised to lobby their representatives back in their constituencies
(although they were all in Paris, the Assembly being in session). I
guess there’s ‘politics’ and politics.
Whom Do Union Leaders Represent?
Thus, the union leaders have once again, as in 2003 and 2007, managed
to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by tactics designed to
disperse and dissipate, rather than unite the energies of three
million militant working people and students backed by the huge
majority of the population. How do they get away with these repeated
sell-outs? If one were paranoid, one might even imagine the union
leaders who imposed these defeatist tactics on the mass movement were
actually ‘in the pay of the government!’
Technically speaking they are. In France full-time officers and staff
of the various union federations (Communist, Socialist, Christian
etc.) are entitled to government-funded salaries as well as
professional expenses and something like civil servant status. French
‘pork-choppers’ are paid on the basis, not of their actual dues-paying
union memberships (which on the average are down to U.S. levels), but
of the number of votes their union gets in work-place elections. Union
reps may thus be seen as functionaries serving as transmission-belts
between groups of employees and government or management.
In case of conflict, these union bureaucrats represent their
federations on the intersyndical (inter-union committee) where,
through various compromises between more or less militant unions, they
come to agreement on both the objectives and the tactics of national
(or for that matter local) actions. It is this highly bureaucratized
intersyndical that has called this series of one-day national strikes
cum mass demonstrations, whose official goal was not the actual
withdrawal of Sarkozy’s reforms (which is what the strikers want) but
an official role for the union leaders in negotiating the cuts
(accepted in as inevitable).
It costs the intersyndical nothing to call a symbolic one-day strike
to pressure for inclusion. On the other hand, unlike unions in the
U.S. and U.K., French unions don’t have strike funds, so employees who
participate in these symbolic one-day national work-stoppages lose a
much-needed day’s pay – which is why the mobilizations are more
popular when called on a Saturday.
The problem for the union bureaucrats is to keep the pressure on while
keeping it from getting out of hand. So strikes are limited to one day
and widely spaced. Moreover, these mass mobilizations are organized in
such a way as to maintain the division between public and private
sector workers, between members of the various union federations,
between different trades and professions, between different regions
and between workers and students. They take the form of long parades
led by blaring sound systems, with the demonstrators herded into
successive separate ranks by category. Nobody gets to see the other
groups or measure the strength of the whole demonstration, and when
these marches reach their destination, they are dispersed before
people can get together to discuss the day, exchange information —
much less hold a rally or general assembly.
Another missing element in the unions’ dis-unity strategy is any
visible move toward uniting European workers’ resistance to these
cuts, which are imposed by the European Union and Central Bank. While
the European bankers and capitalists are united in making the workers
pay the bill for the Crash, the Left and the unions — whether in
Greece, Spain, France or Britain — confine their struggles within
narrow national limits. Their Leftist leaders sing ‘The
Internationale’ at rallies, but in practice the dis-unite the workers
of Europe, who face a united European bankers’ Internationale.
The great frustration in this situation is that, assuming I am not
totally misreading the ‘mood of the masses,’ there is a real potential
here in Europe for militant, international popular struggles,
including cross-border actions and mass strikes that aren’t just
one-day symbolic affairs. (Even a one-day international general strike
would scare the bejezus out of the ghoulish bankers attempting to suck
the life substance out of European labor.) The stage is set for a
showdown. On the one hand, ‘shameless’ Right does not deign to hide
its objectives. On the other, the masses are angry and ready for a
fight. It is the shameless Left, beginning with the Communist CGT,
that disarms the masses, diverting the power of the militant millions
into establishment channels like negotiations and elections, confining
it within local and sectorial boundries, and disregarding its most
potent weapon: the open-ended mass strike.
How do they get away with this scam? Many rank-and-file militants are
aware of the situation, but remain frustrated by a union apparatus
that holds most of the cards when it comes to controlling the
movement. However, they remain isolated because no organization unites
them. Neither Besancenot’s NPA, nor the Trotskyist Lutte ouvrière (LO)
have taken any initiatives to expand and intensify the movement, for
example by setting up rank-and-file coordinating committees or for
calling general assemblies or mass meeting at the end of the official
parades. On the contrary, rather than denouncing the defeatist tactics
of the CGT and its shameful history of sell-outs, the
‘anti-capitalist’ far-Left organizations uncritically endorse the
spaced, one-day symbolic strikes proposed by the unions, while
abstractly calling for greater militancy.
Despite the sell-outs of 1995 and 2003 (never mind 1936 and 1968!) the
CGT remains sacred cow, and no one on the Left dares criticize it much
less unmask the Communists’ historic role as what the U.S. Socialist
Daniel DeLeon used to call ‘labor lieutenants of the bourgeoisie.’
This self-censorship — call it ‘anti’ anti-communism — is a form of
political correctness left over from Cold War days, when the
Communists were persecuted and still got 25% of the vote and when
Sartre refrained from criticizing the gulag.
The cream of the jest is that the French CP, now down to 2% of the
vote, long remained the most rigidly Stalinist CP in the West,
ignoring Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin. The CPF
defended the Russian tanks crushing of the Hungarian workers’ councils
in 1956 and the invasion of reformist Czechoslovakia in 1968, remained
aloof from the reformist Eurocommunist trends of the ‘80s, and never
engaged in serious self-criticism. Yet the CGT remains a sacred cow,
and even the ‘Trotskyist’ NPA and L.O continue to tail-end it ‘from
the Left,’ concentrating their fire on the reformist Socialists (SP)
while seeking alliances with the equally reformist CP.
Of course, the struggle is far from over, and the French (and
European) workers remain full of surprises. One can only share Olivier
Besancenot’s hope that the mass movement will ‘rebound’ on Nov. 6 and
develop into a full-fledged, open-ended, Europe-wide general strike.
But if it does, it will not be thanks to any help from the official
Left or its far-Left apologists.
Update on French Strikes by Richard Greeman
(Montpellier, France. Oct. 21, 2010) I ended my last week’s report
with the hope the ‘the French people, who are always full of
surprises, will find some way out of this impasse in which their
“representatives” – the union leaders and the official Left parties –
are apparently their worst enemies.’ A week later, biggest ‘surprise’
is the entrance en masse of French youth, considered ‘apolitical,’
into the arena of the social struggle. All over France, high schools
are being blocked by their students, while the presence of beautiful
young faces is overwhelming in the huge nation-wide street
demonstrations that keep intensifying. I’m not sure you’re getting
these exciting images on U.S. and British TV, but you can view some at
http://www.liberation.fr/societe/01012297576-les-jeunes-en-renfort
A poll in yesterday’s Paris daily Libération indicated four out of
five French people think the government should give in and negotiate,
while 69% support the demonstrators, who are demanding the withdrawal
of the bill putting full retirement off to age 67. (Curiously, only
43% actually favor outright withdrawal. I assume most of the other
consider themselves ‘realists’ and hope for a favorable compromise
with the inevitable, considering the move toward ‘austerity’ all
across Europe).
"Youth+Labor=People Power?"
Actually, this massive mobilization of French youth should not come as
a surprise. Last year there were weeks of strikes and protests among
high school and university students against education cutbacks, and in
November 2005 there was serious rioting among mostly French-Arab and
French-African youth in the ghetto-like projects that surround Paris
and other French cities (when Sarkozy, then Minister of Interior, made
a name for himself by call them Racaille [‘Scum’] and threatening to
scrub them with a high-pressure hose.) In 2006 the French youth revolt
went more political, when the right-wing government passed the CPE
(First Job Contract) bill, a labor ‘reform’ (presumably aimed at
encouraging the hiring of youth) which deprived workers under 26 of
their legal rights as workers. All over France, students blockaded
schools, went down into the streets, attempted to block trains and
eventually dragged the reluctant unions to support their
demonstrations. In addition, the outpouring of us parents and
grandparents in support of the kids was massive, and after six weeks
of chaotic disruptions, the Villepin government was forced to throw in
the towel and withdraw the bill.
A recurrence of 2006 is Sarkozy’s worst nightmare, and he was recently
quoted as saying in private: ‘As long as the young people don’t get
involved, I can handle the movement against my pension reform.’ The
government’s response to the youth involvement has been to try to
drive a wedge between the generations by provoking violent incidents
around the high schools and encouraging mysterious ‘casseurs’ to burn
cars, presumably in the hope of alienating the adults with the specter
of ‘violence.’ At the same time, Sarkozy’s spokesmen paternalistically
maintain that teenagers shouldn’t be meddling with an adult issue they
don’t understand, especially since the reform is actually designed
help young workers by lowering Social Security payments. On the Left,
the head of the Force ouvrière union, equally paternalistic, was
quoted rejecting the help of the youth as ‘the weapon of the weak
(presumably like ‘women’s’ tears’)! On the other hand, generational
solidarity is strong in France, as witness a hand-made sign reading:
“(Son, 26): Mom, what’s work? (Mother, 57): You’ll find out when your
67!”
Elites versus Masses
The massive entrance of the youth into the arena has changed the
balance of forces in today’s stand-off between an intransigent
Right-wing administration and most of the population. The second
‘surprise’ since last week has been the mobilization of the truckers
(mostly independent) and the refinery workers, which has resulted in
gasoline shortages at service stations all over France and deliberate
slowdowns (‘snail actions’) by trucks on the highways. This is all the
more remarkable in that the French truckers, who can retire at 55
under a special dispensation, are striking purely out of solidarity.
More and more, the movement is in the hands of local committees and
worker assemblies, who vote to continue and expand the symbolic
one-day strikes called by the cautious national union leaderships. In
Marseille and elsewhere, there are ongoing tugs of war between
demonstrators, who block refineries and gas depots, and the police,
who disperse them only to find them back the next day.
The deepest fears of both the official Left (union leaders and
Socialist politicians) and the Right are that the movement will ‘get
out of hand.’ Editorialists wring their hands about a tragic descent
into chaos. In place of the traditional struggle between Left and
Right within the institutions, today’s struggles are between the
established elites and the rank-and-file, what in the U.S. we
prudishly call ‘the working middle class.’ The French, with typical
Gallic irony have adopted as their identity a government Minister’s
contemptuous slur by calling themselves ‘les Français d’en bas’ (‘the
Frenchmen at the bottom of the heap’).
Different Interests, Different Tactics
As I see it, these struggles — between establishment Rightist and
Leftist elites on the one hand and on the other between elites and
ranks — are being carried out in parallel, but they have different
goals, and thus need different tactics. The goal of the strikers and
the masses in the streets is clear. They want Sarkozy withdraw the
‘reforms.’ Period. Their most effective tactic is equally simple:
all-out unlimited mass strikes until the government yields — as it
did in 1995 (when the union-initiated movement against an earlier
pension ‘reform’ got out of hand) and in 2006 (when the CPE went down
in flames).
On the other hand, the goal of the official Left (Socialists,
Communists, and their affiliated unions) is to weaken Sarkozy, bring
the government to the negotiating table and re-legitimize themselves
as a viable alternative to the Right with a view toward the 2012
Presidential election. Their tactic: prolong the crisis by measured,
periodic shows of force. Of course, this delaying tactic resulted in
defeat for the workers in 2003, when the strikes predictably petered
out during summer vacation and the government raised the minimum
number of years you have to work to earn a pension from 37 to 42
(which particularly hurt women who have taken off years for
childbearing). Nonetheless, after the success of yesterday’s sixth
successive national mobilization of up to 3.5 million in the streets,
the union leaders are calling not one more but two more spaced
symbolic one-day national strikes: one in a week and the other in two
weeks!
Meanwhile, the whole country is going wild, and no one knows what will
happen between now and two weeks from now. On the government side
Sarkozy, ever more intransigent, is moving up the date of the final
vote of his reform in the Senate, while among the youth and workers in
transportation, petroleum, chemicals and other key industries the
ongoing strikes and spontaneous, daily, local actions are intensifying
all over France. One reformist union leader was quoted saying ‘by
marginalizing us, Sarkozy turned the power over to the streets.’ So
why did Sarkozy put his Presidency on the line by uniting the
fractious French unions against him, freezing them out of the action
and refusing to negotiate?
My Analysis
Short answer: ‘France has the stupidest Right in the world,’ well
represented by this little man with the big inferiority complex.
(Demonstrator’s slogan: ‘Carla, we’re like you: we both get screwed by
the head of state.’) Long answer: ever since 1995 when the Gaullists
got back into power after Mitterrand’s 14-year long ‘Plural Left’
(Socialist-Communist) administration, the Right has been looking for a
showdown with organized labor in an attempt to duplicate the
neo-liberal triumphs of the 1980’s when Thatcher (after stocking up on
coal for years) crushed the miners’ union in a prolonged strike and
Reagan fired all the Air Controllers. The Gaullists’ first attempt at
cutting benefits unilaterally under the Chirac administration was the
ill-fated Juppé Plan of 1995, which provoked a runaway general strike
and had to be rescinded. Villepin’s 2006 attack on the labor rights of
youth (CPE) had the same fate. In both cases, the Premier took the
rap, and the President saved face. It took an egomaniac like President
Sarkozy to take personal responsibility for the cuts and thus paint
himself into a corner.
Today’s Right forgets that the official Left is their best ally.
During the May-June 1968 General Strike, the Communist Party (CP) its
affiliated CGT union leaders saved capitalist France by blocking the
striking students from making contact with the striking workers,
negotiating a modest wage-hike with the government on behalf of the
strikers, declared the strike officially ‘ended’ (ignoring a massive
vote among the workers to continue it), and agreed to channel the
movement into parliamentary elections which the Right won.
Indeed, going further back in French labor history, in 1936 during the
general strike and factory occupations whose slogan was ‘Everything is
Possible,’ the CP/CGT leader Maurice Thorez famously declared: ‘You
have to know how to end a strike.’ The CP/CGT, allied with de Gaulle,
saved French capitalism in 1944-45 at the time of the Liberation when
the workers were still armed and French big business, having
collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, should have been expropriated.
The same Thorez told French workers to ‘roll up their sleeves,’
rebuild the country, and put off the revolution until after the
recovery. Despite these betrayals and sellouts by the official Left,
the French working class has not been seriously defeated by capitalism
– at least not in the way that British and American labor has, and the
French have learned the lessons that solidarity works, that resistance
pays off and that mass strikes are their strongest weapon.
There is no predicting what may happen as this conflict moves toward a
showdown – desired both by Sarkozy and by the vast majority of the
rank and file French, who in polls favor an unlimited general strike
to bring the crisis to a head (even if half of them accept the
necessity of pension cuts). So stay tuned for future developments.
Richard Greeman’s First Report on French Strikes
(Montpellier, France, Oct. 15, 2010) People ask me what’s it like
living in France during these massive one-day strikes and popular
mobilizations against the conservative Sarkozy government’s pension
‘reforms.’ These cuts would push the minimum retirement age forward
from age 60 to 62 and the minimum age for receiving full benefits from
65 to 67. For details:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/world/europe/14france.html?ref=todayspaper
On the one hand, it is thrilling to see millions of citizens taking to
the streets as well as hundreds of thousands of workers striking in
defense of their hard-won social rights defying an increasingly
reactionary government. Indeed, what is most heartening is that the
‘troops’ seem to be more radical than their official leaders, the
union chiefs and Socialist Party politicians. Recent polls showed the
French public not only supports the one-day strikes (which make life
Hell for commuters and parents of schoolchildren); nearly half are in
favor of an open-ended general strike to make the government yield —
a strategy advocated by the far-Left parties like the NPA as well as
by militant rank-and-file workers and local unions who are chomping at
the bit.
Once again I am reminded about what I love about France: a
still-living revolutionary tradition of popular mass mobilization and
struggle that goes back to the sans-culottes of 1789, the revolutions
of 1830, 1848, and 1871 (the Paris Commune), the sit-down strikes of
1936, and in my own lifetime, the nationwide student-worker uprising
of May-June 1968. More recently, there was the1995 nationwide strike
of public employees that went ‘wildcat,’ paralyzed France for two
months (during which Parisians cheerfully commuted by bike and event
boat) and forced an earlier conservative government to withdrawn its
unpopular welfare ‘reforms.’ It’s also a great pleasure to see a nasty
right-wing s.o.b. like Sarkozy humiliated by millions of angry,
jeering citizens blocking the trains and taking over the streets.
On the other hand, I also have a disheartening feeling of déjà vu.
Why? Because the unions used the same dilatory tactics of spaced
one-day work public sector stoppages in 2009, and the government
simply bided its time until summer, when the French go on vacation,
and rammed the cuts through parliament late one August night. And this
wasn’t the first time these tactics failed.
Indeed, ever since the runaway general strike of 1995, every time the
French have massively demonstrated and gone on national strikes in
opposition to government attacks on their labor and welfare rights (as
in 2009, 2008 and 2003), the official leaders of the unions have
imposed the delaying tactic of spaced one-day national work-stoppages
and demonstrations — marches and counter-marches designed quite
precisely to ‘demonstrate’ to the government their ability to call out
their troops (and thus presumably to reign them in). These
demonstrations are great for letting off steam, but inevitably they
run out of steam. Time is always on the side of the government and the
capitalists in the class struggle. The masses’ only strength is in
numbers and resoluteness, and their most effective tactic, once they
are mobilized, is to stay mobilized, spread the movement to all
sectors of the economy, go for broke and paralyze the country until
the bosses give in. As they did in 1936, 1968 and 1995, still in
living memory.
The apparent purpose of the leadership’s military-style maneuvers is
to make a show of force and induce the government to invite the union
leaders to a round table — thus recognizing their legitimacy as the
official representatives of labor. This plays out in the media through
competition over how many demonstrators went into the streets in each
successive demonstration. Social struggle reduced to sports
statistics. The unions count 3.5 million people, the police count less
than half. The union leaders go on TV and call it a success: the
government says it is not impressed and won’t budge. Then the
politicians get into the act. With presidential elections looming and
Sarkozy’s popularity at an all-time low, the Socialists, who in power
also imposed neo-liberal cuts, grandstand their support for the
movement. They, too, have an interest in prolonging the struggle
against Sarkozy as they hope of reaping the results of his
unpopularity at the polls. Former Socialist presidential candidate
Segolène Royale encourages the youth, specifically high schoolers, to
join the demonstrations. The Right (which has been cutting back
teachers like mad) cries ‘scandal.’ Another political horserace.
The goal of the mass movement quite different. The strikers and
demonstrators sincerely want to use their mass power to force the
government to rescind the cuts, as the Chirac-Juppé government was
forced to do in 1995, when rank-and-file assemblies ignored the
unions’ cautious tactics and took matters into their own hands. Those
1995 strikes got out of hand and continued for two weeks until they
achieved complete victory and the cuts were rescinded. Paradoxically,
this victory was a stinging defeat not just for the government but
also for the unions, who were de-legitimized as responsible ‘social
partners’ unable to control of their troops.
This is worrisome for the brass at the CGT, CDFT and other
federations, since only about 23% of French workers belong to unions,
which are supported not by dues but by government allocations. Since
1995, the unions have tightened their control over the movement to
prevent another wildcat breakaway. And you can’t cynically turn mass
enthusiasm and anger on and off like a water tap without exhausting
it, so such tactics inevitably spell defeat for working people whose
dream of retiring keeps receding into the future while they remain on
the treadmill.
Similar masses struggles are happening all over Europe, where the same
neo-liberal cutbacks are being imposed in the name of paying ‘the
debt’ (created by bailing out the banks). Yet here again, the Left
politicians and union leaders, far from seeking strength through
international solidarity, remain staunchly isolated within their
national boundaries, despite the obvious fact that the European Union
has created a common economic zone! But the unions and left parties
depend for their ‘franchise’ on the national state, which subsidizes
them directly.
One hopes the French people, who are always full of surprises, will
find some way out of this impasse in which their ‘representatives’ –
the union leaders and the official left parties – are apparently their
worst enemies.