France's
"yellow vest" protests against fuel prices weren't
organized by the Left. But the fight to widen their demands is key to
blocking the growth of Marine Le Pen's far right.
by
Aurélie Dianara
Part
3 - Converging Interests?
The
movement is not limited to mainland France, but has also reached
France’s “ex”-colonies in the overseas territories and in
particular the island of Réunion. In a territory where unemployment
is sky-high and 42 percent of people live under the poverty line, the
prices of petrol, gas, and electricity have also continued to
increase. As in rural and peripheral France, such territories have
particularly suffered the degradation of public services over the
last decade or more, as governments close the hospitals, courts, and
train stations taxes are meant to pay for. The social contract
crumbles, and gives way to anger.
In
Réunion, in fact, the movement has assumed particularly impressive
proportions, with clashes with police, the torching of cars and
“self-discounts” (collective shoplifting) all leading to the
introduction, Tuesday last week, of a curfew imposed by the island’s
police prefect.
Indeed,
while the regional council announced on November 21 that it would
freeze fuel prices for the next three years, the tensions have not
abated and the gilets jaunes now demand a cut in petrol costs. The
movement’s demands have also spread to include the cost of living,
access to jobs, measures to tackle inequality, and a broader demand
for respect.
On
November 26 the gilets jaunes across France named eight “national
communicators” on Facebook, responsible for dialogue with the
government. While some in the movement question how representative
they are, these spokespersons have requested a meeting with the
government to carry forth the movement’s demands.
The main
proposals formulated thus far are a general decrease in taxation and
the creation of a “citizen’s assembly” to discuss the
ecological transition, respect for citizens’ voices, the increase
in purchasing power, and renewed value being attributed to labor. The
assembly would also discuss such diverse measures as a ban on
glyphosphate, the marketing of biofuels, the abolition of the senate,
the organization of frequent local and national-level referenda, the
increase in subsidies for the creation of jobs (and not precarious
ones), respect for gender parity and equal treatment, an increase in
the minimum wage, and the cutting of employers’ social
contributions.
Yesterday,
the gilets jaunes issued a press release including about forty
“peoples’ directives,” sent also to MPs. These included
measures such as the complete resolution of homelessness, a more
strongly progressive tax system, a universal social security system,
MPs on the average salary, forbidding outsourcing and posted work,
creating more open-ended contracts, abolition of the CICE, investment
in sustainable transport, the end of austerity policies, the
introduction of a maximum salary (at €15,000 a month), rent
controls, and an immediate end to the closing of rail lines, post
offices, schools and nurseries, and so on.
All this
seems like a challenge to the policies of the “anti–Robin Hood”
president who robs from the poor and gives to the rich. Countless
placards call for Macron’s resignation, and indeed this movement
follows after many others which began even before November 17, from
the fight against university reform and public-sector cuts to the
battle against the repression conducted in the name of “fighting
terrorism.” Yet it remains to be seen whether the much-sought-after
“convergence of the struggles” will finally come true.
The
gilets jaunes are looked at with a good deal of confusion, suspicion,
and mistrust — not only by a condescending media, but also across
large swathes of the comments coming from the varied world of the
Left. Criticisms of their behavior have been influenced by an evident
contempt for the “lower classes”: social media are awash with
jokes about the “pig-headed” “imbeciles” of the “France
d’en bas.” Such derision also appeared across the social networks
close to the autonomous “movement” left, before the powerful
demonstration of November 17.
Some
doubts are legitimate. Ecologists and the defenders of nature have
been, to say the least, disconcerted by the hubbub around a movement
that basically asks to be able to burn more fuel at a lower price and
that seemed initially uninterested in the government’s at least
explicit intention to use this “carbon tax” to fund the
ecological transition.
This is
one of the main reasons why the unions and leftist forces initially
did not support the movement. Faced with the extent of the
mobilization, however, many have reconsidered their positioning;
indeed, all the forces of the opposition from left to right (with the
exception of the Greens) have discreetly expressed their support for
the movement, while also being careful not to be accused of
opportunistically “recuperating” it for their own political ends.
Jean-Luc
Mélenchon, writer and MP François Ruffin, and other figures from
France Insoumise — as well as many of its grassroots militants —
took part in the mobilizations alongside the gilets jaunes. On
Tuesday November 20 the moderate trade union FO Transports voiced its
backing. Even Philippe Martinez, the general secretary of the main
French trade union, the initially skeptical CGT, has finally
expressed his cautious support and called for a joint demonstration
on December 1.
Support
has also begun to arrive from the left of the movements. For
instance, the Vérité pour Adama committee — which fights for
justice and truth on the death of Adama Traoré, a
twenty-four-year-old killed in a police station in July 2016 in
Beaumont-sur-Oise, a poor district in the Parisian suburbs — has
announced that it will join the gilets jaunes in the streets next
Saturday. Most of the “big names” of the activist and
intellectual French left – such as Assa Traoré, Frédéric Lordon,
and Edouard Louis – have now called to take to the street in
support of the movement.
Despite
these late expressions of support, many on the Left continue to doubt
this mobilization. The movement’s self-proclaimed apolitical
character, and the fact that many gilets jaunes claim to have never
taken to the streets before, attracts accusations of “selfishness”
or claims that the movement is “petty-bourgeois” in nature. Even
those who call for the “convergence of the struggles” found it
hard to support the demands of people who did not mobilize last year
against the government’s triple offensive against railway workers,
students, and migrants.
Above
all, there are suspicions of infiltration by Marine le Pen’s
Rassemblement National (RN, formerly known as Front National), or
even claims that fascists are providing direction to the movement.
Since the start of mobilization there have been occasional
expressions of racism and Islamophobia — incidents which have,
unusually, been given wide media coverage. On Friday, CGT leader
Martinez alerted his members that gilet jaunes blockades could
include “elements of the far right that mix up the demands made
with the question of immigration.”
Faced
with these doubts, many activists have called for caution, to wait
and see what will happen and what direction the movement will take.
It is undoubtedly true that the roadblockers include all sorts: above
all the “apolitical,” but also the fascists of the RN, supporters
of the hard conservative right behind Laurent Wauquiez (Les
Républicains), nationalists, Socialists, Insoumis, Communists, trade
unionists, anarchists, and so on. But precisely for this reason, the
wait-and-see attitude — “let’s see how it turns out” —
risks delivering the movement to reactionary tendencies.
Even the
moralistic criticisms that accuse the gilets jaunes of materialism
and selfishness can be called into question. Was not the increase
in the price of bread the main factor pushing the women of Paris to
mount their furious march on Versailles in October 1789? The history
of social struggles is peppered with movements arising from an
exasperation that owed to the material conditions of the popular
classes, movements that can give rise to greater awareness, bring out
wider demands, and which can converge with other struggles. Or not.
The
gilets jaunes’ situations are complex and multiform, but they
express a real discomfort. For the political left to participate in
the movement poses many difficulties, but it can at least try to
intercept this discomfort, to give it useful slogans, and to prevent
it from being recuperated by the far right. This will help the gilets
jaunes develop into a movement concerning not only tax but also
important ecological and redistributive demands.
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