Tag Archives: Gilets Jaunes

Macron minister in French farce after false May Day demo claim

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France’s minister for machismo, Christophe Castaner, has covered himself in ridicule by falsely claiming that a group of demonstrators attacked a hospital during this week’s May Day demonstration in Paris.

Police stop demonstrators by the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital

Castaner, a former Socialist who lobbied hard to become interior minister in the Macron government after another Socialist defector, Gérard Collomb, ducked out, has seized on any pretext to try to discredit protests against the government, whether they be the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), the trade unions or the left.

On May Day they all marched together and Castaner’s twitter finger was clearly itching. Before the day was out he had announced that a group of demonstrators had “attacked” the famous Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, assaulted a member of the hospital staff and forced entry into the resuscitation unit.

Unfortunately for Monsieur le Ministre, hospital staff denied his version of events and video shot at the scene showed demonstrators fleeing teargas and stun grenades fired by the police. They had blocked a section of the demonstration from advancing towards the Place d’Italie, as their colleagues came to grips with demonstrators further up the road (see my account of those events here).

Thirty-four demonstrators were arrested and detained for nearly 30 hours but then released without charge.

On Sunday they presented a joint statement to the media, complaining of Castaner’s attempts to exploit their case for political purposes and thanking the hospital staff who came forward to give an accurate account of what had gone on.

Castaner is one of a long line of Socialist defectors who seem to believe they must prove some sort of political manhood by declaring their undying love for the police and all their works.

The now utterly unloved Manuel Valls, who was interior minister before becoming prime minister and is currently a soon-to-be unsuccessful mayoral candidate in Barcelona, suffered from the same syndrome.

By coincidence, today I read an account of German Social Democrat Gustav Noske’s suppression of the 1919 “Spartakist uprising” in Berlin.

“Someone must play the bloodhound I will not shirk my duty,” he declared as he led the Freikorps into the city to massacre over 1,000 rebels and assassinate Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Formally dissolved in 1921, the Freikorps were the soil from which the Nazi militias and the Waffen-SS grew.

The Nazis later booted Noske out of his minister’s position and he retired from politics after Hitler became German chancellor. He was arrested by the Nazis in 1937 but released after a few months, only to be detained again in 1944 after the attempt on Hitler’s life.

He was interned in Fürstenberg/Havel concentration camp, then in Ravensbrück, before being transferred to Berlin’s Lehrter Strasse priso, from which he was liberated by Soviet troops in May 1945.

Be careful what demons you unleash!

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An open letter to AOC from some guy nobody’s heard of

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The Democratic Socialist Congresswoman’s answer to well-heeled Republicans who claim that environmental concerns are “elitist” was inspiring. But …

Dear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes,

You probably won’t read this, which is fair enough, given that I’m an OWM living in France who has never set foot in the US.

What’s more, not only do I have zero influence on American politics, my influence over the politics of the country where I was born (the UK) and the one where I now live is pretty much zero, too. But then I have that in common with most citizens of those countries.

Nevertheless, as a lifelong left-winger, I would like to say how encouraging it is to see a professed socialist elected to the US Congress and how impressed I was by your takedown of Republican sneers that concern over climate change is “elitist”.

But – you knew there was going to be a “but”, didn’t you? – I must take issue with your statement that climate change “should not be a partisan issue”.

Of course many US politicians, and practitioners of other equally respectable professions, are “more concerned about helping oil companies than helping their own families”. Not only are they corrupted by lobbies, as you showed so effectively in another gone-viral speech, but defending the rich and powerful is actually what their politics is about.

True, in the long term climate change will threaten all human civilisation but capitalism is all about the short-term. Increasingly so, as Thomas Piketty has shown, with companies frittering away their own future by paying out bigger and bigger dividends to shareholders.

Furthermore, interests that will in the long-run endanger the whole kit and caboodle of humanity have become so entrenched they can dictate current policy.

And, let’s be honest, politics, like human consciousness, is formed by the past, which is a handicap when it comes to planning for the future.

I was tempted to describe Sean Duffy’s remarks as “stupid crap” but it’s not, it’s cunning and disingenuous crap designed to convince middle-class and working-class people that their interests converge with those of big business and its political, legal and media courtesans.

That’s what their politics is about.

So climate change, like everything else of any importance, is a partisan issue, although the partisan divide may also appear within the Democratic Party.

This may seem like nitpicking but in France we have an illustration of why it is important to be clear about what are left-wing values and what are right-wing ones.

That’s the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement.

Yellow Vests campaign on a market near Paris. Photo: Tony Cross

Starting as a reaction to a decree from on high that adversely affects the vulnerable, the kind of action your Green New Deal warns against, it has become a mass protest that is diffuse and difficult to define but essentially against inequality.

That’s a left-wing concern, right? Fighting inequality and eventually establishing a classless society is what socialism is all about, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, not for many Gilets Jaunes. As one young activist told me the other day, the experience of France’s Socialist Party in government, carrying out a pro-business programme that has increased inequality and left many feeling ignored or despised, has emptied the idea of socialism of its meaning for a large number of the people it is supposed to be fighting for.

So, at the same time as that young man outlined what seems to me a very clear-sighted analysis, an older woman was declaring that the fight against inequality is “above politics”.

In France today the chattering classes have a tendency to throw around the terms left and right without any reference to actual policies, as if they were tribal loyalties. The disillusionment with that sort of politics is such that both candidates in the final round of the last presidential election – one a far-right hate-monger, the other a social liberal with a right-wing economic programme – declared themselves to be neither on the left or right. (They are also both millionaires, by the way.)

We on the radical left used to think that after attempts to reform capitalism had failed the masses would turn to us. It’s proved a little more complicated than that. Various experiences of “socialists” and “communists” in office, as well as the arrogance and callous indifference of EU bureaucrats and traditional politicians, have led to a kind of anti-political demagogy that exploits disillusion and has allowed xenophobic, far-right movements to grow in several European countries.

So I don’t think we should make any concessions to the idea that because something’s important it is non-partisan or not political.

Socialist politics are about serving the interests of the majority and protecting the future of all humanity.

I imagine that’s why you took up the political cudgels.

We owe it to our adversaries to refrain from distorting what they stand for. But we owe it to humanity not to give them credit where credit is not due.

Yours in solidarity,

Tony Cross

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Gilets Jaunes – does anyone really understand France’s high-vis revolt?

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The French Gilets Jaunes revolt is something of a magic mirror. Anyone looking at it sees whatever they want to see.

On the first Paris demonstration. Photo: Tony Cross

The left, in France and abroad, has seen a popular uprising against President Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal economic policies; the right an explosion of discontent by overburdened taxpayers; Macron’s ministers portray it as a lumpenproletarian riot, inspired by conspiracy theories, manipulated by the far right and the far left and, latterly, infected with anti-Semitism; and many journalists, committed to their own versions of conspiracy theories, have searched desperately for leaders, plotters and hidden agendas.

But how do you find a coherent definition of a movement that anyone can join simply by donning a high-visibility jacket and going on a protest or, for that matter, taking to the battlefield on their keyboard?

You can’t. That seems pretty obvious  but it hasn’t stopped the pundits, politicians and armchair activists from crowbarring the phenomenon into their own preconceived scenarios.

The lack of structure, a result of the movement’s online origins, means that anyone could be a Gilet Jaune – the casseur who smashes a shopfront on the Champs Elysées as much as the young mother camped out on a roundabout in the provinces – and anyone can declare themselves a spokesperson, as I found when trying to track down a Toulouse area representative for RFI.

At the start, all we could be sure the protesters had in common was opposition to the government’s green tax on fuel, although it soon became clear that they all hated Macron.

As the movement appears to be drawing to a close, the call for referendums on sufficiently large demand has come to the fore.

So what does characterise this movement, apart from those basic demands?

Here are a few of my observations/hypotheses:

  • Solidarity and the internal combustion engine:  As anyone who has ever sat behind a steering wheel has to admit, the automobile is an individualist, not to say egoist, form of transport – a strange basis on which to build solidarity. In its 100-odd years of existence, the internal combustion engine has radically restructured our lives and our attitudes. No more need to live within walking distance of your workplace, shops or other basic facilities. That has made many people regard a car as an essential part of their lives, if not a basic human right. Frankly, that can bring the worst out in people – just try living in a place with limited parking facilities, as I do. But the government’s decision to tax a form of transport people have come to rely on, while letting off big polluters like airlines and ships (taxing them would mean job losses, one minister, predictable, argued), drew attention to Macronism’s class bias. ” People see it as a class war, because it is,” as Naomi Klein pointed out in a tweet. As is now well-known, the Gilets Jaunes shock troops come from rural areas, small towns or the outskirts of larger ones, where public transport and other facilities are poor to non-existent. (That is likely to become worse, by the way, when the government has opened up the rail network to competition, in enthusiastic compliance with an EU directive, and neglected branch lines are found to be unprofitable). So the response has been collective and demands for better public transport and facilities have surfaced.
  • Taxes: Nobody actually likes paying taxes and, given the percentage of would-be fiscal freeloaders in the population, there are almost certainly a number in the ranks of the Gilets Jaunes. The right-wing Republicans tried to interpret the protests as a taxpayers’ revolt, something they, their voters and their friends in big business can identify with. That was the government’s spin, too, once TV footage of Paris in flames had convinced it that concessions had to be made.  Ministers promised more tax cuts, a now time-honoured way to tie the less well-off to the agenda of the wealthy, accompanied by an it’s-all-your-fault rider that this would mean cuts in services. But all the Gilets Jaunes I asked insisted they were ready to pay what they regarded as fair taxation and a key demand has been for the reversal of Macron’s cut in the wealth tax. To nobody’s astonishment, the government has absolutely ruled out any such move.
  • Macron and elitism: With his declaration that you only have to cross the road to find a job, his lectures to a teenager on the appropriate way to address his august person, his apparent belief that those who have not “succeeded” are “nothing”, Macron, elected on a promise to break the French political mould, has personified the arrogance of the French elite once in power. “It’s the contempt he has for people,” Jean-Pierre, a middle-aged former Macron voter told me as teargas wafted around us on the first national demonstration in Paris in November. To sociologist Laurent Mucchielli, Macron is “a typical representative of that technocracy … someone who has never held elected office, has never had the experience of running a local council … not used to being in contact with either the voters or trade unionists or local councillors, all he’s used to is ministries, technocrats, top civil servants, MPs and journalists.” But it’s not just about style. Macron’s policies have been a continuation of previous governments’ applications of trickle-down theory, regardless of their failure to deliver on promises of a better life for all. To the government, and many media commentators, resentment of technocratic arrogance is populism, raising the spectre of “the white working class” and, with it, bigotry, xenophobia and anti-Semitism (although, confusingly, that seems to be coming from Salafists). There have been instances of these but such excesses seem to be an integral part of today’s world of online invective, rather than a specific property of the Gilets Jaunes. When Macron’s supporters, adopting the elegant soubriquet “the Red Scarves”, took to the streets and the keyboards, class hatred seemed to be pretty much the order of the day.
  • Left, right or apolitical? Impossible as it is to establish who can really speak for the Gilets Jaunes – some who’ve tried have received death threats for their pains – a list of 42 demands published after online consultation seems to be generally accepted as representative. The highest number, 22, featured in the programme of left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, while 21 featured in that of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Justification for the old platitude about the extremes meeting? Not really, if you factor in the relative importance given to the questions in these politicians’ rhetoric. Le Pen’s hobbyhorse of Islam is not raised and immigration hardly gets a mention in the list of demands, although there have been flurries of fake news and on the question and some sings of racism on Gilet Jaune social media networks. The key concern is inequality, with calls for progressive taxation, a rise in the minimum wage and pensions, a maximum wage and a reversal of tax handouts to the rich. A left-wing programme, one might say. But in January a group of researchers found that 60 percent of Gilets Jaunes declared themselves to be neither left-wing nor right-wing (as did both candidates in the final round of the 2017 presidential election – Emmanuel Macron and … Marine Le Pen). This should seriously worry the left. How is it that so many people no longer identify the core concern of socialism – the eradication of inequality – as a left-wing value, or even a political question? 
  • Media: Many Gilets Jaunes might be surprised to know that their belief that the numbers on their demonstrations have been underreported and their activity misrepresented is common to practically all activists. Nobody is ever happy with how their cause is reported, leading the committed nowadays to seek consolation in the social media echo chamber, where there is distortion on demand. That said, the sensationalist reflex that leads to non-stop images of isolated cases of violence is automatic in certain media, and could be seen during the demonstrations against Macron’s labour law reform, for example. If you compare the official figures, or the organisers’ claims, those protests at their height mobilised higher numbers than the Gilets Jaunes but you wouldn’t guess it from the coverage, so maybe some of the sensationalism worked in the latter’s favour. Both movements were also on the receiving end of the attentions of law and order, which proved a great shock to many Gilets Jaunes. In both cases, establishment politicians’ cries of indignation about police injuries has obscured the fact that a greater number of demonstrators were injured.
  • Democracy, representation: “Be careful what you wish for,” is my own response to the call for referendums on demand. Whether you are in favour of Brexit or not, nobody in their right mind can claim that the debate preceding the UK referendum was balanced and well-informed. Social media have added to the capacity for disinformation that was already amply exploited by certain media moghuls and their outlets. It is not a coincidence that referendums are popular with dictators, who can manipulate the debate and engineer the required result. But the demand does highlight the fact that parliamentary democracy as it is currently practiced is not serving the interests of the majority. Paying MPs the average wage, one of the 42 demands as well as a lonsgstanding hard-left proposal, would surely inspire them with more empathy with their constituents. An interesting proposal for preparing legislation is the establishment of commissions of citizens, a kind of political jury service, that would draw up proposals after interviewing experts and interested parties, thus drawing informed conclusions. 
Teargas on Paris streets on the first national demonstration. Photo: Tony Crosss
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