Tag: France Page 2 of 3

So, the Yellow Vests in France have French President Macron scared, and he has given to some of their demands, including raising the monthly minimum wage and getting rid of the diesel tax which sparked the original protests.

Joe Penney at the Intercept has a good overview of the current state of play, which I encourage you to read.

What I want to discuss, however, is WHY they are having some success where unions, for example, could not stop Macron.

No Centralized Control

The great weakness of modern unions is leadership, bank accounts, and law. They are easy to break if the state cooperates with corporations, or even by the state alone. You can bribe the leadership, you can scare the leadership, or you can break the union.

Because unions have things like headquarters, leaders, and bank accounts, the state can simply take all of those things away any time it wants to if the unions don’t have enough internal support in the government to prevent it.

This matters because unions tend to have centralized leadership: Take out the leadership, get rid of the strike funds, and the union can be broken.

The Yellow Vests have none of this. What tiny leadership they have is exercised through some Facebook pages. They have no united bank account, no buildings, no strike funds, etc. They cannot be broken by a strike on a few people and some pooled resources.

Instead the, Yellow Vests are just whoever wants to show up for any given protest and put on a yellow vest. This causes some problems, yes, but it means that they cannot easily be taken out.

Scare The Opposition (State/Corporate) Leadership

Why is Macron giving in to some demands? Well, perhaps because he’s scared (and, I suspect, personally a coward, which he has struck me as from the first.)

During the January 5 edition, protesters commandeered a forklift and broke open the office door of Macron spokesperson Benjamin Griveaux, forcing him to flee through the back entrance, while an ex-professional boxer was filmed punching and kicking a gendarme. Some reports have stated that Macron is worried for his personal safety. In December, protesters attempted to break through police lines that were guarding his home in Touquet, and his wife’s family has voiced concerns that their chocolate shop in their hometown, Amiens, will be attacked.

Cue laughter, because I have no sympathy for Macron or his lackeys. (I have a little sympathy for his family, but not much. I’ll discuss this further in a bit.)

Here’s the thing: Most protests get nowhere because they threaten no one and nothing. The elite, being rich and powerful, can wait out those harmless protests they cannot buy, scare, or break. They know it.

This is why the union protests against Macron also failed. He just waited them out. Unions cannot tell their members to try to attack political leaders. (Though sometimes such things happen and are “regrettable” and a good union then makes sure the people who did it have good lawyers.)

Macron is scared. He is scared for himself. For his family. For his staff and probably for his friends.

There are people he cares about who could wind up catching a good beating or worse. (Given that the police have killed a number of protesters, please spare me any wringing of hands.)

Normally, no one a politician cares about is threatened. Protesters get beaten, maybe the occasional cop gets a beating (being a cop is NOT dangerous compared to most manual labor jobs so also spare me the hand wringing about people who beat people for a living, very occasionally getting beaten themselves).

But politicians and corporate leaders are safe. The protesters suffer, strikers lose money, etc, etc.

The Yellow Vests have threatened Macron. He is personally frightened, and he is giving in.

Always, always find a way to threaten your opponents directly if the stakes merit it. Find something or someone they care about and go after it.

Now, because many people are wringing their hands, let’s deal with that directly.

There is a great essay by Mark Twain called “The Two Reigns of Terror.” Please go read it.

Macron’s policies and those of France’s elites have made poor French and many middl-class French poorer for two generations now. Macron, in particular, has made it easier to fire people, raised regressive taxes, and broken unions. He is a neoliberal’s neoliberal who believes that a more precarious, poorer workforce will lead to prosperity. The fact that this ideology has been tried since 1979 and not worked does not stop ideologues like Macron. Clearly, they reason, if it hasn’t worked, it hasn’t been tried in a pure enough form.

Macron and the French elites’ policies KILL people. These deaths show up in the statistics. They don’t have dramatic pictures. But there are more suicides, poorer people die younger, people under financial stress drink more, beat their wives more, and so on.

Death and suffering is what neoliberalism causes. Macron is a murderer, in the name of an ideology which has never worked–despite being tried in most of the First World and much of the developing world.

So, if Macron is scared, and if a few of his relatives or friends or employees (all of whom are very well-looked after), happen to catch a bit of the violence flying around, so be it. It didn’t bother Macron that people were suffering and dying when they were people he didn’t care about.

The Future

The problem with the Yellow Vests, to my mind, is that while the protests include left, right, and the formerly apathetic, they seem to be resounding more to the benefit of the hard right than the left.

One of the things I have been watching carefully is where various countries are going to land as neoliberalism collapses.

There are three primary choices: populist left, populist right, or repressive surveillance/police state.

Right now, I think that the US and Britain have a good chance to land on the populist left. I thought France might, with Melenchon’s left-wing party being very close to LaPen in the last election.

But I am beginning to wonder.

One of the problems is that, fundamentally, if neoliberals are going down, they’d rather surrender to fascists than the left. The fascists will let them keep most of their money and power, and will break the unions for them, and so on. (The Nazis were not socialists, despite their name. Under their reign, worker wages dropped, and executive wages skyrocketed.)

So we’ll see how this all plays out. However it does, the lessons are clear enough.

Hit the “masters” where they hurt, and make sure you have no center to target that they can destroy or subvert.

And if you do get them on the ground, which the Yellow Vests have yet to do, keep kicking. Rest assured, they will keep kicking if they can get to you.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The French Yellow Jacket Protests

By Ian Welsh

On December 2, 2018

Comments

So, there are major protests across France, protesting Macron’s policies. Macron has raised fuel taxes and removed worker protections, among other things. He is a neoliberal’s neoliberal, who believes in free labor markets (a.k.a. markets where workers can be easily fired, made to work overtime, and so on.)

His popularity rating is 20 percent, there is no chance that he will be re-elected, and he is unlikely to give in to any protests–both because he is a true believer and because his future is assured if he pushes through as much destruction of France’s social state as possible. He will be rewarded by the rich.

Some of the protests have been somewhat violent (I am not all that impressed by property violence as “terrible”), and, of course, the French police have brutally beaten many protestors. It always amuses me to watch the so-called brave surrounding a man to kick him while he’s down. Any man who participates in such a beating outs himself as a coward, the same as any man who tortures someone who cannot resist.

While it seems unlikely, it wouldn’t bother me if the current French state was overthrown.

More likely, what will matter is whether La Pen or Melenchon (who is a real left-winger) wins the next election. Hopefully the French are not so stupid as to vote for another pretty neoliberal.

Little that has been done by Macron, or other neoliberal twats, cannot be undone if a government is elected with a mandate to do so.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

France Ends Freedom

By Ian Welsh

On October 9, 2017

Comments

The terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, but if they did, well, they’d stop attacking France.

French parliament just passed an “antiterrorism” law that makes the state of emergency permanent. Police now no longer need a judge’s approval to place you under house arrest, search your person, belongings, or house, or shut down places of worship https://t.co/q3UWTQLgvM

— Snarls de Gaulle (@LevzOfGrass) October 3, 2017

Fifty seven percent of the French approve, according to a poll.

It takes so very little to get people to give up their freedom. Find an enemy, have a few atrocities, and they’ll squeal for you to take it from them. Shades of Goerring’s comment on how easy it is to get citizens to line up behind wars.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Such laws as France has passed, will be used against others. The anti-terrorism laws in the US have been used vigorously against environmental protestors, including entirely peaceful ones.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Centuries ago Machiavelli observed that some peoples lacked sufficient virtue for freedom. They could only be ruled by despots. Increasingly, the West has shown that they have fallen into this class.

While the young are quite good on issues of economic fairness (out of self interest), they are not particularly good on most civil liberties, so we cannot be sure that the tide moving through the Anglo-West, towards more equal economic arrangements and less corporate control will necessarily push back on civil liberties abuses.

Humans didn’t evolve to live in large societies. We are terrible at it, and our decision-making heuristics are not capable of handling it. We cannot evaluate threats properly, our enlarged senses of identity (like nationalism and ethnic identification) are easily hijacked and usually we are unable to change our minds about anything important once we become an adult unless there is a catastrophe which personally devastates us, and when there is, we simply pick up (as Friedman noted) whatever ideas are around, rather than think critically.

And so, so much for Liberte.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Marine Le Pen and the Problem of Nationalist Politics in Europe

By Mandos

On November 22, 2016

Comments

(This post is by Mandos)

Now that French politics are heating up, and France is increasingly likely to put up a Thatcherite against the Front National in the upcoming presidential elections, folks, particularly non-Europeans, might start to wonder what exactly is wrong with the Front National if the worst sort of neoliberal is representing the system. Fillon embodies the worst of Thatcherism while simultaneously embracing a reactionary cultural politics. That said, it’s still likely that left-wing French voters will hold their nose and vote for him over Marine Le Pen. Americans especially, after they read the differences in what they stand for, may be aghast in incomprehension at this, because on paper, MLP is, in many relevant dimensions, better than Fillon.

The problem with the FN is not really MLP herself, and relative to their own politicians–even the left-wing ones–American left-wingers will find in MLPs own program lots to like. I find her domestic economic program and objections to the European system to be mostly in the right direction, even if I don’t necessarily agree with her on how to fix the European-level issues.

The actual problem is one of political context. MLP is only the tip of an ultra-nationalist iceberg that has historically sought a confrontation with France’s large Arab Muslim/North African minority whose presence is a direct result of French colonialism. FN supporters wish to direct and control the inner cultural and religious life of the minority community without concomitantly doing anything about the sources of discrimination, etc., provoking counter-reactionary tendencies in the minority community (e.g., alienated youth joining ISIS or putting on niqabs or whatever), in a cycle of escalation that could make the occasional American race riot seem like a kaffeeklatsch. Even Trumpist America just believes in more reactionary policing.

But aside from that, MLP has successfully and perhaps even genuinely practised a strategy of dédiabolisation, i.e., the adoption of what would, in other circumstances, be a mainstream left-wing program and distancing from some of the more virulent elements of her party–including the very public shunning of her own father, the party’s elder statesman and nationalist ideologue.

The danger you run with movements in Europe with left-wing dirigiste economic programs and nationalist cultural politics is that they will find it hard to follow through on the former and be forced to rely on the latter. This is likely what will face an MLP presidency:

The Syriza Problem: Upon winning power, MLP will be faced with the problem that in order to implement her economic program, she will have to counteract European systems, particularly in the Eurozone. These systems have been tested against Greece, in that they are designed to punish deviants in a manner that maximizes short-term economic damage to the victim while minimizing short-term damage to or even benefiting the countries applying it (i.e. Germany). Even if there is damage done to the Eurozone as a whole by the confrontation, there’s considerable willingness to accept it in the short run to preserve the system in the long run (Americans underestimate this).
The Syriza/Brexit Problem: Disengagement from Euro systems requires massive technical knowledge and specialized staffing–a fact which both the Greece and the UK have discovered. The problem is, as Greece especially discovered, the people who have this knowledge and ability are almost completely Europeanists and convinced neoliberals. Because the Brexit-UK is still very neoliberal, they may be able to get over this problem eventually, but France will not, if the purpose of leaving the EU or Eurozone is to implement an economic-nationalist policy.
Parliament: The most likely outcome in which MLP wins the presidency is still likely one in which she does not control the Parliament, meaning, she will have a confrontation with Parliament that will likely frustrate her ability to bring any of her economic program at all. This is a problem that Trump likely shares to some extent, even if the Republicans control Congress. In this way, she would be forced to rely on her movement’s cultural-nationalist politics, which at the grassroots are still very reactionary.

That is the problem. What the FN says is in many ways less important than how they got there. Many left-wing French have basically no home in French politics, because they know that upon winning power, the FN will have to abandon the key elements of its economic program, while using the reactionary parts to stay in power. Think of the FN as somewhere between Syriza and (ironically) the Turkish AKP. My real-life left-wing French acquaintances believe that this condition risks leading very quickly to, effectively, civil war. Even if a crisis of this nature is eventually averted, the outcome would be a re-legitimization of the very systems in Europe alleged to be failing, a confirmation and return to the consensus of Europe.

You can think of all of this, from Greece onwards, as a stress test of the European system, and despite its economically inhumane outcomes and appearance of further instability, the system is proving resilient to nationalist attack. The loss of the UK is acceptable, as it was never properly integrated, and continental politicians believe that they can inflict sufficient cautionary pain and humiliation on the UK while removing an obstacle to further integration. It could be that Le Pen has the skills to buck the trend. It would be a huge risk.

I am starting to think that their strategy is probably correct, relative to their aims (whether their aims are good is another matter, although they genuinely believe they are). Nationalist politics as resistance to neoliberal economic ideology at the European level is certainly not a sure-fire success, and I still agree with Yanis Varoufakis’ approach, which requires pan-European solidarity to confront and reform pan-European systems, as difficult as that may sound. And there’s a reason why people in Europe are still afraid of the sort of cultural nationalism that the FN represents.

And…France Moves Hard Right

By Ian Welsh

On November 21, 2016

Comments

Here we go again:

Fillon, who has said he will cut public sector jobs and rein

Francois Fillon

in government spending, won 44 percent of votes in Sunday’s first-round of voting for the center-right’s nomination. He faces a second-round vote against another former prime minister, Alain Juppe, who trailed him by 15 percentage points.

Polls had him in third place. He came in first. Maybe pollsters should stop polling until they figure out how they keep getting it wrong. Customers might wish to demand refunds.

Fillon thinks Thatcher is the best thing ever and wants to cut 500,000 government jobs.

A neoliberal’s neoliberal, in other words, who is also socially conservative.

Assuming he wins the nomination, he will likely wind up head-to-head against the neo-fascist LaPen.

Here’s how that works:

If Fillon wins, his policies will hurt the French so much that LaPen will likely win the next election.
If LaPen wins, well, LaPen wins.
The left is not a factor because Hollande has betrayed everything they stand for and alienated the left-wing base completely.

Frankly, France should leave the Euro, at the very least, and quite possibly the EU. They are not winning from it any more. Because only LaPen will say that, and because the left continues to insist on irrelevance as they relate to real problems, LaPen is the future, whether Fillon wins this time or not.

This is the twilight of neoliberalism. As I have said for many years, what follows will be an age of war and revolution. This is where neoliberal policies inevitably lead, and we are now on the bleeding edge of that new era.

There will be a chance to do the correct, kind things starting in four to eight years, when the weight of demographics favors young people enough. In the meantime, the old will simply have to age out of politics.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Hollande Continues to Prove that a Fake Left-Winger Is Worse than Most Right-Wingers

By Ian Welsh

On May 11, 2016

Comments

The majority of French citizens are opposed to the relaxation of labour standards that Hollande wants to push through, and there have been massive demonstrations against it. So what does Hollande’s government do?

France’s government announced Tuesday that it would empower Prime Minister Manuel Valls to bypass parliament and push through controversial labour reforms by decree despite widespread public demonstrations against the bill.

And the French people had a party at the Bastille when Hollande won! Hollande is a far more loathsome individual than, say, British PM David Cameron. Cameron ran as a right-wing pig-fucker who intended to destroy the social state.

There are other options than neoliberalism, but people like Hollande are too intellectually cramped and too much products of “there is no alternative” to even know what they are, let alone consider them.

The people who run France are a small and inbred group. They make Britain’s elites look inclusive. In 80s, the foreign aid community’s joke about the French system was that it produced the best second-raters in the world.

Hollande doesn’t even rate as a “second-rater.” He’s incompetent as a neoliberal technocrat, unable to game the system.

I am tired of very intelligent, highly-educated morons running the world.

I suggest the French go riot at the Elysee palace, and by riot, I don’t mean demonstrate outside.

Demonstrate inside. Perhaps explain, personally, to Hollande, a soft-handed courtesan born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who has never soiled his hands with hard labor, why his ideas are bad ideas.

This sort of bullshit will continue until it is stopped by ordinary people making a ruckus in the halls of power.

And they aren’t going to be allowed in because they ask nicely.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or

The Bitter Harvest of Failure: France’s Far Right Takes the Lead in Regional Elections

By Ian Welsh

On December 6, 2015

Comments

Thirty percent to 29 percent for the Republican/UDI coalition, with the socialists (who aren’t actually socialists), coming in at 22 percent.

Key grafs:

Many political analysts stressed the impact of the Paris terror attacks could have on voters’ opinions. They contributed to raise the popularity of the three main parties, but the far right has also especially benefitted.

Another factor was the fact that the social democrat government of Francois Hollande has been losing more and more support among the population for failing to solve the issue of high unemployment rates while implementing measures of economic austerity (i.e. restrictions on public spendings). (sic)

There is nothing worse for the left than “center left” parties who follow right wing policies like austerity.

As I, and others, have warned repeatedly, if other groups cannot solve the very real problems exaggerated by austerity, voters will eventually hand power over to real radicals with a mandate to do “whatever it takes,” and I do mean “whatever.”

The radicals may be to the left or the right, but every time someone like Hollande takes power as “left” and then wimps out on actually fixing things, it discredits the left.

The fascist right will continue to rise as the center, right, and center-left all hue to neo-liberal orthodoxy, which got us into this mess and cannot get us out of it.

And so, the men and women on horseback are coming. In America we have Trump, in France they have LePen, and there will be many others.

A government which continually fails the people will be replaced, one way or another.

We live in a pre-revolutionary and pre-war world and the risks are ratcheting up every year. It is this that those of us who fought the ideological wars of the early 2000s were trying to avoid. We wanted changes made that would not require vast war and revolution, because we knew, and still know, the river of blood from which such change is born.

We had our chance. We failed, as those who came before us failed. Aye, and those before them.

And so the world will convulse in blood and terror. The old regimes are not yet dead, but they are bleeding out, and as they do so, they continue to loot and fornicate, pretending all is well enough.

And why not? Those who made this world are the richest rich the world has ever known. To them, this is the best of times.

They will reap as they have sown, but those who failed to stop them, or rather, their children, will reap an even more bitter harvest.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: France Page 2 of 3

Two Lessons from France’s Yellow Vest Protests

The French Yellow Jacket Protests

France Ends Freedom

Marine Le Pen and the Problem of Nationalist Politics in Europe

And…France Moves Hard Right

Hollande Continues to Prove that a Fake Left-Winger Is Worse than Most Right-Wingers

The Bitter Harvest of Failure: France’s Far Right Takes the Lead in Regional Elections