[rad-green] France at a Crossroads

*https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/
<https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/>New Politics
         January 13, 2020France at a CrossroadsBy Richard Greeman*

The nationwide general strike in France, now entering its record seventh
week, seems to be approaching its crisis point. Despite savage police
repression, about a million people are in the streets protesting President
Macron’s proposed neoliberal “reform” of France’s retirement system,
established at the end of World War II and considered one of the best in
the world. At bottom, what is at stake is a whole vision of what kind of
society people want to live in – one based on cold market calculation or
one based on human solidarity ­– and neither side shows any sign of
willingness to compromise.

Now or Never?

On one side, the Macron government has staked its legitimacy on pushing
through this key “reform” intact as a matter of principle, however
unpopular. On the other side stand the striking railroad and transit
workers, who are bearing the brunt of this conflict and have already
sacrificed thousands of Euros in lost pay since the strike began last Dec.
5. After six weeks, they cannot accept the prospect of returning to work
empty-handed, and they have set their sights high: withdrawal of the whole
government project.

This looks like a “now or never” situation. Moreover, it seems clear that
the transport workers mean business. When the government (and the union
leaders) proposed a “truce” in the transport strike during the sacred
Christmas/New Year vacation period, the rank and file voted to continue the
struggle, and their leaders were obliged to eat their words.

Nor are the transport workers isolated, despite the inconvenience to
commuters and other travelers. They have been joined by emergency-room
nurses and doctors (who have been on strike for months over lack of beds,
personnel and materials), public school teachers (protesting undemocratic
and incomprehensible “reforms” to the national curriculum), lawyers and
judges (visible in their judicial robes), and the dancers at the Paris
Opera (visible in their tutus) among the other professions joining the
strike.

Strikers and “Yellow Vests” Together

Alongside the strikers, and quite visible among them, the so-called Yellow
Vests are a crucial element. For over a year, they have been setting a “bad
example” of self-organized, largely leaderless, social protest which
captured the public imagination and through direct action in the streets
won some real concessions from Macron in December 2018. This victory
impressed the rank-and-file of the French organized labor movement, which
after three months of disciplined, but limited, stop-and-go strikes in the
Spring of 2018, failed utterly to wring any concessions and went back to
work poor and empty-handed while Macron pushed through a series of
neoliberal privatizations and cuts in unemployment compensation. [1]
<https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/#_edn1>

Although their numbers diminished, the Yellow Vests continued their
spontaneous protests throughout 2019 despite savage government repression,
distorted media coverage stressing Black Bloc violence, and snubbing on the
part of the union leadership; but their “bad example” was not lost on the
union rank and file. Today’s general strike was originally sparked last
September by a spontaneous walkout by Paris subway workers, who, contrary
to custom, spontaneously shut down the system without asking permission
from their leaders and management.

Meanwhile, the Yellow Vests, initially suspicious of the unions but
isolated in their struggle with Macron, had begun to seek “convergence”
with the French labor movement. Finally, at the Yellow Vest national
“Assembly of Assemblies” last November, their delegates voted
near-unanimously to join the “unlimited general strike” proposed for Dec. 5
by the unions. Reversing his previous standoffishness, Philippe Martinez,
head of the CGT labor federation, immediately welcomed their participation.
[2] <https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/#_edn2>

Government Provocation

Today’s intractable nationwide confrontation over retirement – a sacred
cow, like Social Security in the U.S. – is best understood as a deliberate
provocation on the part of Macron, both in its form and its substance.
There was no urgent reason for pension reform, nor for abolishing the
venerable system outright and hastily replacing it from above with an
abstract neoliberal plan based on “universality.” The pension program was
not in debt, and the alleged need to replace the twenty-odd “special”
retirement funds – negotiated over the years with the representatives of
different trades and professions – with a single “point system” in the name
of fairness, efficiency and rationality was only a smokescreen.

In fact, these “special funds” cover only about one percent of retirees – a
million or so miners, railroad workers, transit workers, sailors, ballet
dancers and such – who get to retire early because of the physically or
mentally taxing nature of their specific labors. (Even if you include the
four million public employees as “special,” the figure rises to under 25%).
Moreover, Macron has himself recently violated this principle of
“universality” by giving special exceptions to the police and army (whom he
cannot afford to alienate) and the ballerinas of the Opera (whom no one can
imagine toe-dancing at the age of sixty).

Behind this confusing smokescreen of “fairness to all” is an old con:
equalize benefits by reducing them to the lowest common denominator.
Indeed, according to independent calculations, under Macron’s point system
the average pension would be reduced by about 30%. And since these “points”
would be calculated over the total lifetime number of years worked before
retirement, rather than on the current criterion of 75% of the worker’s
best or final years, Macron’s point system would particularly penalize
those whose careers were irregular – for example women who took off  years
for child-care. Yet the government brazenly claims that women will be “the
big winners” in this so-called reform!

A Pig in a Poke

However, the biggest con embodied in this point system is that the actual
cash value of each accumulated point would only be calculated at the time
of retirement. The sum in Euros would then be determined by the government
then in power on the basis of the economic situation at that moment (for
example in 2037 when the plan goes into full effect). Thus, under the
present system, every school-teacher, railroad worker and clerk can
calculate how much s/he will received when s/he retires at 62 and plan
accordingly (for example opting for early retirement). Macron’s point
system would leave her in total darkness until it is too late. His system
resembles a gambling casino where you buy 10 chips for a certain amount
(say 10 Euros each), place your bets, and later take your winning chips to
the cashier’s window only to discover that your chips are now worth only
five Euros each. Surprise! The house wins!

Today, thanks to their existing pension system, French people live on the
average five years longer than other Europeans. Moreover, according to the *New
York Times: *“In France the poverty rate among those older than 65 is less
than 5 percent, largely because of the pension system, while in the United
States it approaches 20 percent, according to the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development <https://www.oecd.org/>. In France, life
expectancy is increasing, while in the United States it is diminishing in
significant sectors of the population.”  And although the pro-government
French media have presented Macron’s confused and confusing reform in the
best possible light, it is a hard sell. So why change it?

Not an Ordinary President

When Emmanuel Macron took power in 2017, he vowed he would not be “an
ordinary president.” From the beginning he has openly proclaimed his iron
determination to revolutionize French society in order to bring it into
line with the neoliberal Thatcher/Reagan revolution of the 1980’s, and his
methods have been authoritarian. He has imposed his program of
privatizations and counter-reforms from above, mainly by decree,
deliberately circumventing negotiations with “intermediate bodies” like the
parliament, the political parties, the local authorities and above all the
labor unions, who have traditionally been the “social partners” (official
designation) of government along with the employers’ associations (who are
Macron’s main base of support).

Backed by the mainstream media (controlled by the government and three big
corporations) Macron has been so far largely successful in steam-rolling
through his neoliberal program, openly designed to improve French
“competitivity” (i.e. corporate profits) by lowering living standards (thus
increasing inequality).  If successful, his proposed “reform” of pensions
would open the gates to his ultimate goal, the “reform” of France’s
socialized healthcare system (Medicare for all), already on the road to
privatization.

Naturally, all these moves have been unpopular, but until now Macron, whose
executive style has been characterized as “imperial,” has been successful
in dividing and destabilizing his opposition – if necessary, through
massive use of police violence. This has been the fate of the spontaneous
movement of Yellow Vests, who have been subjected to routine beatings and
tear-gas attacks as well as hundreds of serious injuries (including
blindings, torn-off hands and several deaths) – all with police impunity
and media cover-ups. Now the government’s savage repressive methods –
condemned by the U.N. and the European Union ­– are being applied to
strikers and union demonstrators traditionally tolerated by the forces of
order in France.

This repression may turn out to be like throwing oil on the flames of
conflict. On January 9, at the end of the peaceful, legal, mass marches
(estimated half-million demonstrators nationwide), members of the
particularly brutal BAC (Anti-Criminal Brigade) in Paris, Rouen and Lille
were ordered to break off sections of the marches, surround them, inundate
them with teargas, and then charge in among them with truncheons and
flash-ball launchers fired at close range, resulting in 124 injuries (25 of
them serious), and 980 sickened by gas.

These brutal attacks, which focused particularly on journalists and females
(nurses and teachers) were captured on shocking videos, viewed millions of
times on YouTube, but pooh-poohed by government spokesmen.[3]
<https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/#_edn3> Far from discouraging
the strikers, this deliberate violence may only enrage them. And, what with
the “bad example” of the Yellow Vests,” the labor leaders may not be able
to reign them in.

The Center Cannot Hold

Why is Macron risking his prestige and his Presidency on this precarious
face-off with the labor leadership, traditionally viewed as the compliant
hand-maidens of the government on such occasions? Historians here recall
that in 1936 Maurice Thorez, leader of Communist-affiliated CGT (General
Confederation of Workers), brought the general strike and factory
occupations to an end with the slogan “We must learn how to end a strike”
and that at the Liberation of France in 1945 the same Thorez, fresh from
Moscow, told the workers to “roll up your sleeves” and rebuild French
capitalism before striking for socialism. Similarly, in 1968, during the
spontaneous student-worker uprising, the CGT negotiated a settlement with
De Gaulle and literally dragged reluctant strikers back to work.

Not for nothing are today’s government-subsidized French unions officially
designated as “social partners” (along with government and business), yet
Macron, loyal to neoliberal, Thatcherite doctrine, has consistently
humiliated the CGT’s Martinez and the other union leaders and excluded them
– along with the other “intermediary bodies – from the policy-making
process.

Something’s Got to Give

France’s “not-an-ordinary-President” has from the beginning remained
consistent with his vision of an imperial presidency. Although seen by many
abroad as a “progressive,” Macron, like Trump, Putin, and other
contemporary heads of state, adheres to the neoliberal doctrine of
“authoritarian democracy,” and he is apparently willing to stake his
future, and the future of France, on subduing his popular opposition,
particularly the unions, once and for all.

Thus, what is at stake today is not just a quarrel over pension rights,
which would normally be negotiated and adjudicated through a political
process including political parties, elected representatives, parliamentary
coalitions and collective bargaining with labor, but a question of what
kind of future society French people are going to live in:
social-democratic or neo-liberal authoritarian. The seasoned Paris bureau
chief of the *NY Times *Adam Nossiter put it simply in his revealing Jan. 9
article: “A fight between the rich and the poor amplified by 200 years of
French history.”[4] <https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/#_edn4>

A technocrat and former Rothschild banker, Macron rose to power
unexpectedly in 2017 when the traditional Left and Right parties fell apart
during the first round of the Presidential Election, leaving him alone as
the lesser of two evils candidate in a face-off with the proto-fascist
National Front of LePen. Considered “the President of the rich” by most
French people, Macron must remain inflexible because he has nothing behind
him but the *Bourse *(Stock Exchange), the *MEDEF *(Manufacturers’
Association), and the police.

Second Thoughts

On the other hand, as the struggle enters its seventh week, it occurs to me
that if this were true general strike, if all the organized workers had
walked out on December 5, if the railroads, the subways, the buses, the
schools and the hospitals – not to mention the refineries and the
electrical generators – had been shut down, it would all have been over in
a few days.

But this is not the U.S. where in Sept-Oct. 2019, 48,000 members of the
United Auto Workers recently shut down 50 General Motors plants for more
than six weeks, and where not a single worker, not a single delivery of
parts, not a single finished car crossed the picket lines until the strike
was settled.

In France, there are no “union shops” much less closed shops, few if any
strike funds, and as many as five different union federations competing for
representation in a given industry. Here picket lines, where they exist,
are purely informational, and anywhere from 10% to 90% of the workers may
show up on the job on any given day during a strike. Today, for example,
seven out of ten TGV high-speed bullet-trains were running as many railroad
workers returned to the job to pay their bills while planning to go back on
strike and join the demonstrations later in the week. How long can this go
on?

“When in irresistible force meets an immovable object, something’s got to
give,” goes the old saying, and a show-down seems to be in the offing. With
his arrogant intransigence over the retirement issue, Macron is apparently
risking his presidency on one throw of the dice. Only time will tell. And
Macron may be betting that time is on his side, waiting for the movement to
slowly peter out so as to push through his reforms later in the Spring.


[1] <https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/#_ednref1> For details on
2018 strikes, please see my http://divergences.be/spip.php?article3348

[2] <https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/#_ednref2> Please see
https://newpol.org/french-unions-yellow-vests-converge-launch-general-strike-today/
by
Richard Greeman.

[3] <https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/#_ednref3>
https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/110120/le-prefet-lallement-libere-l-extreme-violence-policiere

[4] <https://newpol.org/france-at-a-crossroads/#_ednref4>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/world/europe/france-strikes-pensions.html

--------------

Richard Greeman is a Marxist scholar long active in human rights, anti-war,
anti-nuclear <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear>, environmental
and labor struggles in the U.S., Latin America, France, and Russia. Greeman
is best known for his studies and translations of the Franco-Russian
novelist and revolutionary Victor Serge
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Serge> (1890–1947). Greeman also
writes regularly about politics, international class struggles and
revolutionary theory. Co-founder of the Praxis Research and Education Center
<https://www.praxiscenter.ru/about_us/english/> in Moscow, Russia, and
director of the International Victor Serge Foundation, Greeman splits his
time between Montpellier, France
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montpellier,_France> and New York City.

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