[rad-green] French Popular Uprising: Revolution or Frozen Conflict?

*https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/17/french-popular-uprising-revolution-or-frozen-conflict/
<https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/17/french-popular-uprising-revolution-or-frozen-conflict/>*


*Consortium News          January 17, 2020*

French Popular Uprising: Revolution or Frozen Conflict?
*This conflict is essentially over policies that put the avaricious demands
of financial markets ahead of the needs of the people. *

*By Diana Johnstone*
*in Paris*

*Special to Consortium NewsStriking ballet dancers perform at the entrance
to the Opera Garnier in Paris, Dec. 24, 2019. (YouTube screenshot)*

The people are angry with their government.  Where? Just about everywhere.
So what makes ongoing strikes in France so special?  Nothing, perhaps,
except a certain expectation based on history that French uprisings can
produce important changes – or if not, can at least help clarify the issues
in contemporary social conflicts.

The current ongoing social unrest in France appears to pit a majority of
working people against President Emmanuel Macron.  But since Macron is
merely a technocratic tool of global financial governance, the conflict is
essentially an uprising against policies that put the avaricious demands of
financial markets ahead of the needs of the people.  This basic conflict is
at the root of the weekly demonstrations of Yellow Vest protesters who have
been demonstrating every Saturday for well over a year, despite brutal
police repression.  Now trade unionists, public sector workers and Yellow
Vests demonstrate together, as partial work stoppages continue to perturb
public transportation.

In the latest developments, teachers in Paris schools are joining the
revolt. Even the prestigious prep school, the Lycée Louis le Grand, went on
strike.  This is significant because even a government that shows no qualms
in smashing the heads of working class malcontents can hesitate before
bashing the brains of the future elite.

*Pension System*

However general the discontent, the direct cause for what has become the
longest period of unrest in memory is a single issue: the government’s
determination to overhaul the national social security pension system. This
is just one aspect of Macron’s anti-social program, but no other aspect
touches just about everybody’s lives as much as this one.

French retirement is financed in the same way as U.S. Social Security.
Employees and employers pay a proportion of wages into a fund that pays
current pensions, in the expectation that tomorrow’s workers will pay for
the pensions of those working today.

The existing system is complex, with particular regimes for 42 different
professions, but it works well enough. As things are, despite the growing
gap between the ultra-rich and those of modest means, there is less dire
poverty among the elderly in France than, for example, in Germany.

The Macron plan to unify and simplify the system by a universal point
system claims to improve “equality,” but it is a downward, not an upward
leveling. The general thrust of the reform is clearly to make people work
longer for smaller pensions. Bit by bit, the input and output of the social
security system are being squeezed. This would further reduce the
percentage of GDP going into wages and pensions.

The calculated result: as people fear the prospect of a penniless old age,
they will feel obliged to put their savings into private pension schemes.

*International Solidarity*

Yellow Vest protest in Brussels, December 2018. (Pelle De Brabander,
Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

In a rare display of old-fashioned working-class international solidarity,
Belgian trade unions have spoken out in strong support of French unions’
opposition to Macron’s reforms, even offering to contribute to a strike
fund for French workers.  Support by workers of one country for the
struggle of workers in another country is what international solidarity
used to mean.  It is largely forgotten by the contemporary left, which
tends to see it in terms of opening national borders.  This perfectly
reflects the aspirations of global capitalism.

The international solidarity of financial capital is structural.

Macron is an investment banker, whose campaign was financed and promoted by
investment bankers, including foreign investors.  These are the people who
helped inspire his policies, which are all designed to strengthen the power
of international finance and weaken the role of the State.

Their goal is to induce the State to surrender decision-making to the
impersonal power of “the markets,” whose mechanical criterion is profit
rather than subjective political considerations of social welfare.  This
has been the trend throughout the West since the 1980s and is simply
intensifying under the rule of Macron.

President Emmanuel Macron celebrating France’s victory over Croatia in the
2018 World Cup final in Moscow. (Kremlin)

The European Union has become the principal watch dog of this
transformation.  Totally under the influence of unelected experts, every
two years the EU Commission lays out “Broad Economic Policy Guidelines” –
in French GOPÉ (*Grandes Orientations des Politiques Économiques), *to be
followed by member states. The May 2018 GOPÉ for France “recommended” (this
is an order!) a set of “reforms,” including “uniformization” of retirement
schemes, ostensibly to improve “transparency,” “equity,” labor mobility and
– last but definitely not least – “better control of public
expenditures.”.  In short, government budget cuts.

The Macron economic reform policy was essentially defined in Brussels.

But Wall Street is interested too.  The team of experts assigned by Prime
Minister Edouard Philippe to devise the administration’s economic reforms
includes Jean-François Cirelli, head of the French branch of Black Rock,
the seven trillion-dollar New York-based investment manager. About two
thirds of Black Rock’s capital comes from pension funds all over the world.

Larry Fink, the American CEO of this monstrous heap of money, was a welcome
visitor at the Elysée Palace in June 2017, shortly after Macron’s election.
Two weeks later, economics minister Bruno Le Maire was in New York
consulting with Larry Fink. Then, in October 2017, Fink led a Wall Street
delegation to Paris for a confidential meeting (leaked to *Le Canard
Enchaîné*) with Macron and five top cabinet ministers to discuss how to
make France especially attractive to foreign investment.

Larry Fink has an obvious interest in Macron’s reforms. By gradually
impoverishing social security, the new system is designed to spur a boom in
private pension schemes, a field dominated by Black Rock.  These schemes
lack the guarantee of government social security. Private pensions depend
on stock market performance, and if there is a crash, there goes your
retirement. Meanwhile, the money managers play with your savings, taking
their cut whatever happens.

There is nothing conspiratorial about this.  It is simply international
finance at work. Macron and his cabinet ministers are eager to have Black
Rock invest in France.  For them, this is the way the world works.

Larry Fink, third from right, receiving a Woodrow Wilson Award in April
2010. (Wilson Center, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The most cynical pretext for Macron’s pension reform is that combining all
the various professional regimes into a universal point system favors
“equality” – even as it increases the growing gap between salaried people
and the super-rich, who don’t need pensions.

But professions *are *different. At Christmas, striking ballet dancers
illustrated this fact by performing a portion of Swan Lake on the cold
stones of the entrance to the Opera Garnier in Paris. They were calling
public attention to the fact that they cannot be expected to keep working
into their sixties, nor can other professions requiring extreme physical
effort.

The variations in the current French pension system perform a social
function.  Some professions, such as teaching and nursing, are essential to
society, but wages tend to be lower than in the private sector.  These
professions are able to renew themselves by ensuring job stability and the
promise of comfortable retirement.  Take away their “privileges” and
recruiting competent teachers and nurses will be even harder than it is
already.  At present, medical personnel are threatening to resign *en masse*,
because conditions in hospitals are becoming unbearable as a result of
drastic cuts in budgets and personnel.

*Is There an Alternative?*

The real issue is a choice of systems: to be precise, economic
globalization versus national sovereignty.

For historic reasons, most French people do not share the ardent faith of
British and Americans in the benevolence of the invisible hand of the
market.  There is a national leaning toward a mixed economy, where the
State plays a strong determining role.  The French do not easily believe
that privatization is better, least of all when they can see it doing worse.

Macron is an ardent devotee of the invisible hand. He seems to expect that
by draining French savings into an international investment giant such as
Black Rock, Black Rock will reciprocate by pumping investment into French
technological and industrial progress.

Nothing could be less certain.  In the West these days, there is lots of
low interest credit, lots of debt, but investment is rarely creative.
Money is used largely to buy what is already there – existing companies,
mergers, stock trading (massive in the U.S.) and, for individuals,
housing. Most foreign investment in France buys up things like vineyards or
goes into safe infrastructure such as ports, airports and autoroutes.  When
General Electric bought out Alstom, it soon broke its promise to preserve
jobs and began cutting back. It also is depriving France of control of an
essential aspect of its national independence, its nuclear energy.

In short, foreign investment may weaken the nation in terms in crucial
ways. In a mixed economy, profit-making assets such as autoroutes can
increase the government’s capacity to make up for periodic deficits in
social security, among other things. With privatization, foreign
shareholders must get their returns.

The United States, for all its ideological devotion to the invisible hand,
actually has a strongly State-supported military industrial sector,
dependent on Congressional appropriations, Pentagon contracts, favorable
legislation and pressure on “allies” to buy U.S.-made weaponry.  This is
indeed a form of planned economy, one that fails utterly to meet social
needs.

Demonstration in Montpellier, France, Dec. 8, 2018. (Valerian
Guillot/Flickr)

The rules of the European Union prohibit a Member State such as France from
developing its own civil-oriented industrial policy, since everything must
be open to unhindered international competition.  Utilities, services and
infrastructure must all be open to foreign owners.  Foreign investors may
feel no inhibition about taking their profits while allowing these public
services to deteriorate.

The ongoing disruption of daily life seems to be forcing Macron’s
government to make minor concessions. But nothing can change the basic aims
of this presidency.

At the same time, the arrogance and brutal repression of the Macron regime
increase demands for radical political change.  The Yellow Vest movement
has largely adopted the demand developed by Etienne Chouard for a new
Constitution empowering citizen-initiated referendums — in short, a
peaceful democratic revolution.

But how to get there? Overthrowing a monarch is one thing, but overthrowing
the power of international finance is another, especially in a nation bound
by EU and NATO treaties. Personal animosity toward Macron tends to shelter
the European Union from sharp criticism of its major responsibility.

A peaceful electoral revolution calls for popular leaders with a clear
program. François Asselineau continues to spread his radical critique of
the EU among the intelligentsia without his party, the *Union Populaire
Républicaine, *gaining any significant electoral strength.  Leftist leader
Jean-Luc Mélenchon has the oratorical punch to lead a revolution, but his
popularity seems to have suffered from attacks even harsher than those
unleashed against Jeremy Corbyn in Britain or Bernie Sanders in the U.S.
With Mélenchon weakened and no other strong personalities in sight, Marine
Le Pen has established herself as Macron’s main challenger in the 2022
presidential election, which risks presenting voters with the same choice
they had in 2017.

Asselineau’s analysis, Yellow Vest strategic mass, Mélenchon’s oratory,
Chouard’s institutional reforms – these are elements that could
theoretically combine (with others yet unknown) to produce a peaceful
revolution. But combining political elements is hard chemistry, especially
in individualistic France.  Without some big surprises, France appears
headed not for revolution but for a long frozen combat.

*Diana Johnstone* *is the author of “Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and
Western Delusions
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/158367084X/counterpunchmaga>.” Her
lates book is “Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton
<http://store.counterpunch.org/product/queen-of-chaos/>.”* *The memoirs of
Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, “**From MAD to Madness
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0997287098/counterpunchmaga>**,” was
published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached
at [email protected] <[email protected]> .*

-- 

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sid-l" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sid-l/CACKppcxr6YNxDhztHiitjXXBBU5kyht4XrnFDawy3M%3DsEJYE1w%40mail.gmail.com.

---
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
List help: <https://riseup.net/lists>