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From the U.S.
newspaper Socialist Action, Oct. 26, 2010
France
has been in the grip of a spreading wave of strikes, which at the end
of October shows no evidence of subsiding. Throughout the month,
factories and schools have been shut down in increasing numbers, with a
severe impact on oil refining and distribution and rail and truck
transport.
The strikes grew out of repeated “Days
of Action” called by the official union bureaucracies against the
proposed pension “reform” of President Nicolas Sarkozy. But the turnout
of millions on each day convinced workers that more militant action was
both necessary and possible. Two more “Days of Action” have been called
for Oct. 28 and Nov. 6.
Shutdowns of oil, transport, garbage
pickup and other services have been enforced by roving pickets. At one
point all 12 of the country's oil refineries were shut, and commercial
and passenger rail and road transport has been severely reduced, which
in turn means factories are being gradually starved of material for
production. When 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.
In addition to violent police attacks
on picketers, the government has threatened strikers with five-year
jail terms. Such repressive measures, coming in the midst of a mass
upsurge, and in a context where workers from many industries are
staffing the picket lines, can just as easily lead to spreading of
strikes to new industries and to new self-defense measures by workers
to protect themselves and their pickets.
An inspiring feel for the day-to-day
dynamics of the revolt can 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 nightly 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.
According to the railway companies, he
reports, less than 10 percent of freight trains reached their intended
destination in mid-October. France
has started importing refined petrol from neighboring countries.
Roadblocks were repeatedly set up in
the early morning, sometimes to shut important
transit routes, in other cases to try
to lure police away from other targets. Local unions called upon their
members to join these roadblocks, and students 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.”
Part of this cat-and-mouse game also involved
choosing alternative chokepoints: “The police can't intervene, because
the truckers have established road blocks on the major roads leading to
the oil depot.”
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.
“And yes, we have to really start
talking about the logical implications of what we've been doing, i.e.
refusing to obey and actively fighting the government and the bosses.
Although everybody is saying that the bourgeois-backed government is
illegitimate, few are actually saying that workers should start taking
steps towards managing things themselves. At the moment, the aim is to
force Sarkozy to back down, and yet we all know that the anger and
frustration that is fueling this strike runs far deeper than a simple
political exercise.
“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.”
Yet, as Koechlin correctly pointed out,
a situation where one part of the working class seems to be striking on
behalf of the rest can’t last. And the cross-industry democratic
structures proposed by all revolutionary currents in France are
intended precisely so the working class as a whole can assess how to
spread the strikes, what new
demands to raise, and decide what are
the obstacles both objective and subjective to doing so.
The upsurge has also been 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 have fought running battles with
riot police. Police in Lyon
fired tear gas when hundreds of high school students tried to join a
workers’ rally. Police have arrested children as young as 10.
The strikes are 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., suffer ing from the productivity
squeezing, speed-up inducing regime of standardized testing!)
Yet progressive economist Mark Weisbrot
has pointed out that since the current retirement age was last set in
1983, GDP per person in France has increased by 45percent, far
outstripping the pe nsion payouts required by the increase in population
size and life expectancy.
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.”
There is a strong fear that union
leaders will try to use the Senate’s approval of the retirement reform
on Oct. 22 to try to end the strikes. This is true even though 59 percent
of respondents told pollsters on Oct. 20 that they were in favor of
strikes continuing regardless of whether parliament approved of the
bill. Reformist parties have also been playing 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
discrimination in service provision showed the revolutionary potential
of the Arab and African communities.
Such alliances against racism are even
more needed given the attempt by Sarkozy in September to divert the
labor movement with his racist propaganda against Roma residents—which
the government followed by mass deportations. The spreading anti-immigrant
sentiment in Europe, the growing Islamophobia, and the increase in vote
totals of right-wing parties in several European countries all show
that the rulers of the continent will rely increasingly on racist and
fascist policies and movements to split the working class.
As the French revolt was spreading in
mid-October, the British government announced a huge package of cuts,
including elimination of half a million public-sector jobs and raising
the retirement age from 65 to 67. Through his handpicked commission,
Obama hopes to make cuts to Social Security at the same time that
public workers in the U.S. are facing calls for massive job and benefit
cuts.
Workers throughout Europe know, after months
of business and government demands for austerity to reduce public debts
and deficits, that the fight to save French pensions is only a
precursor to fights to save health care, education, housing, and jobs
throughout the continent. They know too that today’s revolt in France
follows on the heels of massive strikes and huge demonstrations in
Spain, Greece, Belgium, and elsewhere—and that the French revolt could
inspire a renewal of these actions, with coordination on a
continent-wide basis.
Perhaps such a revolt across Europe
could even break through the bipartisan deficit-reduction
scaremongering of U.S. politicians, aided and abetted by the Tea
Party-promoting media! All of this makes support for French workers and
youth—and, most of all, learning from their example—an immediate and
concrete necessity for workers worldwide.
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