Revolt in France

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6 Socialist Action November 2010 This article is an update of the report that appeared in socialistaction.org on Oct. 26. F a wave of strikes and mass demonstra- or over a month, France was shaken by tions on a scale that has not been equaled for decades. Factories and schools were closed down, and transportation of people and goods was severely crippled.

At the end of October, the bureaucratic leaderships of the major union federations announced that the strikes are over. On Oct. 29, the CFDT reported that the last of the oil refineries on strike would soon be re-opened; at one point all 12 of the country’s refineries had been shut down by strikers. The CGT said that striking dockworkers in Marseille, who had left about 80 ships stranded outside the harbor, had voted to return to their jobs.

The mass protest movement culminated with a national Day of Action on Oct. 28, the day after the National Assembly had ratified President Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposed pension “reform.” Over 2 million workers and students marched through the streets to protest this measure and the government’s entire program of cutbacks and layoffs. Many marchers shouted loudly: “It’s not over yet!”

The turnout of millions in the early mobilizations called by the union officialdom convinced workers that more militant action was both necessary and possible. Shutdowns of oil, transport, garbage pickup, and other services were enforced by roving pickets. Although police reopened some refineries, strikers often shut them down again as soon as the police had departed.

The French bosses began sending tank trucks to Belgium to ferry oil supplies back over the border. But their effort was frustrated on Oct. 26 by Belgian trade unionists who—in a tremendous act of working-class solidarity—blockaded some fuel depots in their country against the French trucks.

An inspiring feel for the day-to-day dynamics of the revolt could be seen in the daily posts on the Marxism e-mail list by self-described “council communist” Daniel Koechlin, an English teacher in France. Koechlin described the gatherings of workers from various industries at roadblocks and refinery gates, and the gathering of hundreds of strikers from various industries to establish or reinforce such choke points. Students often provided reinforcements.

A typical incident from his posts: “This morning, at 4:30 a.m., we were dislodged from the fuel depot we had been blockading by 700 riot police. The workers from the neighboring Renault factory night shift came rushing out but were repulsed by the police and confined to the factory. Attempts are currently underway to re-establish road blocks on the main roads, but the riot police are playing ‘cat and mouse’ with us.

“We block a point for two hours, the heavily armored cars arrive. We disperse and block another point, etc. Several groups (made up of railway workers, local council workers, truckers, energy workers, students, teachers and auto-workers) are operating in this manner. … Today, we got the main teachers’ union to call on striking teachers to come and help block all the remaining fuel depots.”

Koechlin also described the desire of workers from various industries to meet together in order to plan and coordinate actions: “Many workers agree to setting up a General Meeting of all the strikers from every industry every day, to collectively decide on matters of strategy and tactics. Some local union leaders too.

“The problem is exactly the lack of workers’ councils. Even though locally strikers are coordinating their activities, a lot of strategic decisions are made by the unions at the local and national level. But many workers are pushing for decisions involving all the workers in the municipality to be taken in general assemblies and then passed on to the local unions. … “What is incredible is that despite the fact that there is no more oil available, and therefore that people are blocked at home, a resounding 71% of the population approves of the strike. … When we block a freeway, drivers honk to support us, give us money, hand us daily newspapers, even though we are effectively blocking them.”

Ye t , as Koechlin correctly pointed out, a situation where one part of the working class seemed to be striking on behalf of the rest could not last. Now, the links that workers established during the struggle, spanning different industries and unions, must be consolidated and expanded for future battles.

The upsurge was swelled by youth, first from the lycées (high schools) and then the universities. A BBC report on youth participation was typical both in its mocking of students supposedly just wanting to have their own May ’68 (when mass student and worker strikes grew into a prerevolutionary situation), but also unintentionally revealing the seriousness of these youth: “Every morning for the last 10 days, the headmaster at the Lycée Sophie-Germain in the desirable Marais district of Paris has arrived to find a pyramid of rubbish containers piled up against the entrance to the building. Student leaders take it in turns to climb to the top of the pyramid and harangue their friends with talk of strikes and blockades. Those wishing to attend school are turned away.”

Karim Boursali, 17, a student at another Paris lycée, expressed the material necessity inspiring their admitted—and appropriate—joy in their newfound collective strength: “If older people have to work for longer, there won’t be any jobs left, and we will end up unemployed at the age of 25 and we won’t be able to contribute long enough to be able to get a pension.” Youths fought running battles with riot police. Police have arrested children as young as 10.

The strikes were about much more than the widely quoted “raising the retirement age from 60 to 62.” The figure of 62 is only when one would qualify for a partial pension. To get a full pension workers would have to work until 67, and down the road perhaps even longer, as the government also wants to raise the number of years in which workers must pay into the system before getting full pension. Working for that long is becoming increasingly difficult given the unemployment crisis, and becoming increasingly stressful as job pressures have escalated.

Said one teacher: “I still have to work for another 18 years, and in my industry, I don’t think I will be able to work much longer.” (That’s a sentiment that could be heard from any teacher in the U.S., suffering from the productivity squeezing, speed-up inducing regime of standardized testing!)

Claude Paris / AP (Above) Oct 16 protest in Marseille.

(Left) University students join striking workers at Oct. 26 rally in Paris.

Progressive economist Mark Weisbrot points out that since the current retirement age was last set in 1983, GDP per person in France has increased by 45 percent, far outstripping the pension payouts required by the increase in population size and life expectancy.

Revolutionary socialists emphasized the need to deepen the strike wave nationwide. In an interview in the Oct. 19 Le Monde, New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) leader Olivier Besancenot called for “indefinite general strikes” (i.e. bound neither by time nor industry). The expansion in scope of the strike would match its potential for expanding in substance: “The discontent goes beyond the retirement issue. ... Many workers and many young people are truly fed up with the government’s double standards.”

In response to a question about an NPA alternative to the “reform,” he called for “its abandonment pure and simple. We propose retirement at 60 with full benefits and the return to the contribution length of 37.5 years, for all. To finance this project, we propose to increase the share of employers’ contributions to Social Security.” He also called for a shorter workweek to eliminate unemployment. And he concluded that because “what we have is a crisis of overproduction in the Marxist sense of the term throughout the major capitalist economies, one day we’ll have to invent a new mode of production and consumption that can meet the needs of humanity.”

But throughout the struggle, the reformist parties have played their traditional role of trying to weaken or derail the movement. The Socialist Party, while supporting retention of the 60-year benchmark, approved the government’s attempt to require more years of work before qualifying for the full pension.

Sandra Demarcq, a leader of the NPA, wrote in the Fourth International’s on-line journal: “The SP is also asking the movement to stop mobilizations and wait for the next presidential elections in 2012, while the Communist Party and Parti de gauche (Left Party) and other political forces demand a referendum, turning the class struggle into an institutional question” (see internationalviewpoint.org). The same type of compromise and maneuvering, combined with the absence of a sufficiently large revolutionary party, allowed the reformist parties in 1968 to end a mobilization that had reached a pre-revolutionary stage.

While fighting diversion from its right, the movement must also devote special attention to maximizing the participation of the most revolutionary element of the class: the Arab and African immigrant workers and youth clustered in France’s cities. It must not be forgotten that Sarkozy’s rise to national fame came as a result of his openly racist policy of police repression against them. And on the flip side, their repeated broad and militant revolts against such policies, as well as against the underlying super-exploitation on the job, higher unemployment rates, and discrimina(continued on page 8, in “Why Canada lost its bid for a UN Security Council seat”)