Why France Matters Here Too
For many weeks now, the historic social change sweeping across France has drawn increasing attention globally. It should. A genuine, mass democratic upsurge has surprised all those who thought, hoped, or feared that such things could no longer happen in countries like France or the US. Millions of French people -- in left political parties, church, and student groups -- have accepted and cheered on the leadership of a unified trade union movement. They have recomposed and reinserted a powerful left into French politics. They are profoundly challenging President Sarkozy, his conservative political allies in both houses of the French legislature, and the entire twenty-five-year neo-liberal drift of economics and politics in France. Along the way, they have demonstrated a strength and cohesion that renders the existing French right an annoying small noise in comparison.
Depending on who counts, the French left has repeatedly mobilized between 1.3 and 2.9 million people into action in over 240 cities and towns across the country. Given that the US has five times the total population of France, the equivalent mass mobilization in the US would entail between 6.5 and 14.4 million. No political movement in US history has so far come close to such numbers of mobilized, active participants. This truly mass mobilization in France began with the general strike on September 7. That action garnered a public opinion poll of 70 per cent either "supporting" or "sympathetic to" the strike movement. That level of public opinion favoring the French strikers and demonstrators has held constant to this day despite escalating government and corporate threats, intimidations, and a defiant Sarkozy's barking about never compromising. France's "silent majority" is no longer quiet, thereby exposing the regime as a minority in power that seeks to maintain and exploit its self-serving political and economic positions.
The tension mounts with each passing week. So do the stakes. Behind the intense dispute over details of retirement eligibility, the government's austerity program, etc., there looms the more basic question of whether France's majority will continue to absorb the instabilities, inefficiencies, immense costs, and injustice of the country's capitalist economic system.
The relevance of all this to everyone in this country should be clear. Average working people in the US have suffered since the crisis began in 2007 much as their French counterparts did; indeed, it hit harder here than there. The same issues that concern the French (unemployment, precarious jobs, declining benefits, huge government bailouts of the rich and well-connected, etc.) likewise agitate most people here. France's experience suggests the potential in other countries for the parallel emergence there of huge left movements opposing policies that burden average citizens with the costs of capitalism's crisis and of bailouts rewarding the same enterprises that contributed to the crisis. France today suggests that when you further push a population to suffer reduced public payrolls and thus government services (in "austerity" programs to pay for overcoming the crisis), you risk provoking a mass left upheaval into the political, cultural, and ideological life of a country. France will not be the same in the future, no matter how this crisis ends.
The French strikes and demonstrations are coalescing around some basic demands that go far beyond the rejection of Sarkozy's demand for a two-year postponement of retirements for French workers. Contrary to so many US media reports, that particular issue was never what brought out millions of demonstrators and strikers; that was the bare tip of an iceberg. The issue that mobilizes the French is the basic question of who is to pay for (1) the collapse of global capitalism in 2008 and 2009, (2) the ongoing social and personal costs of high unemployment, loss of homes, reduction of job benefits, and the general assault on most citizens' standards of living, and (3) the costs of ending the crisis. The French masses have already absorbed and suffered the costs of (1) and (2). They have drawn the line at (3). That they now refuse.
Instead, they demand that the costs of fixing capitalism's crisis be borne chiefly by taxes on the banks, large corporations, and the wealthy. Those groups are declared to be (1) those most able to pay, (2) those who benefited most from speculations and stock market booms before the crisis began in 2007, (3) those whose investment and business activities were key causes of the crisis, and (4) those who got the biggest, earliest bailouts from governments subservient to them. As the Sarkozy government becomes increasingly isolated and reviled, the French capitalist elite -- known there as the "patronat" -- must begin to worry. That elite wants Sarkozy to preside effectively over a peaceful, docile, and profitable France, not one convulsed by such powerful oppositions. For them, he is not doing his job well.
Meanwhile, French workers re-learn -- and remind everyone else -- that, without their work, the economy stops. Corporate executives and politicians bark orders, but nothing happens unless and until workers comply. In their solidarity, the French rediscover the taproots of their political power. And their rediscovery ramifies everywhere, including among US workers, students, and others eager for a mass movement against capitalism's crisis and the social costs it imposes. US citizens are seeking ways to articulate an attractive left economic and political criticism of the crisis and of the government's response, and they are seeking a left alternative program to propose. France matters because it suggests a concrete form and substance for what such US citizens seek. Perhaps the best way to undercut the appeal and influence of the Tea Party Right in the US would be, as in France, the upsurge of a comparable left alternative.
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Comparison and a reformist terrain
By Agnostic, Justin at Oct 31, 2010 00:58 AM
It is heartening to see a play for a hegemonic position by the working class of various countries in the Eurozone. I have two comments: one dealing with the comparison between France and the United States; and the other being a suggestion on a demand the national lefts which are in stronger positions (such as the French Left) can make now, which I believe would lead to meaningful reform now, within in the confines of capitalism, but would also strengthen the working class' position in the long term trajectory toward a revolutionary moment.
1. The comparison of France and the United States. I think it is instructive to see the difference in zeitgeist of the American mind and that of the French. Both countries, as you have noted, have the mass of working people being asked to pay for the financial crisis, and to accept a deeper neoliberal logic as the only potential solution to the crisis in capital. In France, a country with a stronger labor and revolutionary history, there was enough of a left on the ground to educate and coordinate the feelings of anger and abandonment that the public felt at these demands, into productive political organization on class terms. In the United States, where there is no left on the ground to speak of, the progressive sentiments were shunted into the dead end of the Democratic Party, and when that did not work the anger, confusion and frustration have been coordinated by a radical right fiscally supported by corporate power (the Tea Party). In a crisis politics will always move, either right or left. It is fertile ground for a left if it has the tools to confront the crisis, but if there is not a left capable of this, historically the right will fill this space. This situation brings forth the specter of Fascism.
What I think this means for us on the left in the United States is that we have lost this crisis as an opportunity to make policy, and we must scramble to play a defensive game in the realm of policy, but gain politically from our efforts. In my opinion, this means as quickly as possible engaging in radical education projects on as large of a scale as possible to bring as many of the people primed by brutal realities of the moment into our fold. Simultaneously we must marshal the power we do have to defend against the threat of a rise of Fascism, which I think is currently very real in the United States. In opposing the Fascist possibility, we run the risk of being dissolved into the liberal forces, which are also alined against the movement toward Fascism, and are currently more significant than the forces of the left. To militant against being dissolved into the liberal forces, we must oppose the Fascist forces from within organizations independent from the liberal organizations. We must as much as feasible be vocal and straight forward within our own organizations and communities about why we need to be allied with the liberal forces but distinct from them. In so doing we can rebuild the basic forces of a left, while contributing to averting the Fascist possibility.
2. A fruitful demand for stronger national lefts. In countries like France or Greece the left has managed to make political gains in the crisis, by being able to speak to a large section of the working class. The danger for the left in such countries is gaining enough power that the public will hold it responsible for their fortunes, but either lacking the policies or the power to actually be able to change the logic of the current crisis and prevent the living standards of the masses from being seriously reduced. What the left needs to do is to identify a reformist terrain of struggle that can both help working class people today, and strengthen a revolutionary potential. Two goals are fairly obvious: defending or strengthening welfare systems (social security, aid to low income people, access to healthcare and education, a various types of social wages), and investment in public infrastructure for the next technological epoch (i.e. green infrastructure); in other words, welfare policies and green Keynesianism. However the traditional means of paying for these policies will not work. The traditional means is debt financing, in which the government borrows money from the capital class, spends it, spurring an expansion the economy. The expansion of the economy expands the tax base, and allows the state to then pay the debt back to the capital class. This is not possible in the current crisis, because national states are already suffocating under massive debt, and even if the current crisis is alleviated there is no credible promise of any protracted period of economic expansion to follow. So the trick is to device a policy to demand that can accomplish expansion of the welfare system and investment in green green infrastructure in the context of a capital contraction, and debt burdened national states. The policy needs to also be within the realm of political possibility of the short to medium term.
My suggestion is demanding the implementation of a wealth tax. By wealth I mean accumulated wealth not income. This would allow states to maintain or increase welfare systems and invest in green infrastructure thereby adding to the aggregate demand, potentially solving the current crisis along Keynesian lines. But, do this without adding to immense debt that national states are already coping with. A wealth tax can also be levied without discouraging investment (i.e. triggering a capital strike). Where a tax on corporate income reduces profit rates and can make investment irrational for the individual capitalist, a wealth tax taxes wealth weather or not it is engaged in productive activity and does not reduce the profit rate of enterprises. I am not familiar with the liquid holdings of European businesses, but here in the United States, businesses are sitting on billions of dollars and not hiring or expanding production because there is no market for their goods and services. A wealth tax could take a portion of that and put it to immediate use in the welfare system and infrastructure projects, serving human needs now, and increasing aggregate demand which would create more profitable opportunities for the remaining private liquid assets.
This is all well and good on reformist terms, but a forward thinking revolutionary would likely ask if this will strengthen the working class over the long term, or just be another example of the left solving capitals problems, thereby saving the system but not increasing the our ability to replace capitalism. T he reason, I believe creating systems of wealth tax would strengthen the political position of the working class in the long term is two fold. First as described above, I think it creates a basis by which crises in capital can be solved, while forcing the capital class to pay for it. In other words solving the crisis in capital by transferring wealth into public hands, potentially strengthening the working class with every successive crisis. Second, once capital tax systems are in place they can be used as means of investing in productive assets in a manner which is not dependent capitalist profits, this opens up the field to many possibilities of appropriation of bourgeois class power. (See the work David Schiekcart and other "market socialist" models for a system transitioning out of Capitalism which uses a wealth tax as central instrument).
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