Update on French Strikes by Richard Greeman
 
(Montpellier, France. Oct. 21, 2010) I ended my last 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 Libérationindicated 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 Goals, Different Tactics
 
As I see it, these struggles — between establishment Leftist and Rightist on the one hand and on the other between elites andranks – 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 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 twomore 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 pushing 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.  (Demonstrators slogan: ‘Carla, we’re like you: we both get fucked 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 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 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, officially ‘ended’ the strike despite a mass vote 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, the CP-CGT leader Maurice Thorez famously declared: ‘You have to know how to end a strike.’ Ditto in 1944-45 at the time of the Liberation when the workers were still armed and the French capitalists, having collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, should have been expropriated. The same Thorez joined de Gaulle’s government and told French workers to ‘roll up their sleeves’ and rebuild the country under capitalism. Despite these betrayals and sellouts, the French working class has not been seriously defeated by capitalism 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 weapons.
 
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.

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