Alain Krivine, a leader of the student revolt of May 1968, passed away on 12 March at the age of 80. Many of the other key student leaders of the May ‘68 uprising, like Daniel Bensaïd, have also already taken their leave. Krivine’s death marks the symbolic end of a generation of French Trotskyism. With his death, we not only lose one of the key student leaders of the ‘68 events, but also a revolutionary without whom the old heritage and tradition of the earliest anti-Stalinism may not have survived into a new generation.
Krivine had a unique relation to French Trotskyism. In his memoirs, Krivine tells a story that captures the relationship to the French Trotskyists of the first hour—those who had fought through the “midnight of the century”, a time when Stalinism and Nazism were crushing all opposition. Krivine tells of being trained by Pierre Frank, who himself had been one of Trotsky’s secretaries during his first years of exile in Turkey. Each time a Trotskyist of the first hour died, Krivine would accompany Frank to the funeral, the grave and the ceremonies. Frank would recount the contributions, the character, politics and struggles of the first generation Trotskyists to Krivine.
This was a lesson in political tradition—revolutionary, not conservative, because it was about passing on the memory of courageous and honourable struggles for emancipation. Krivine stood at the intersection between an old Trotskyism with its links to the pre-war anti-Stalinist, anti-militarist and anti-fascist struggles, and the tradition rejuvenated by the May ‘68 student-worker uprising, as part of which he went on to lead the Revolutionary Communist League.
Krivine’s family was political. The many brothers of his household joined the communists from an early age, as did he, and he soon became a Trotskyist. Krivine threw himself into the struggle for Algerian liberation, and in his memoirs some of the most fascinating sections are dedicated to the work these young Trotskyists carried out in support of the Algerian resistance.
Krivine was excluded from the French Communist Party along with the communist youth. He threw himself into the campaigns against the war in Vietnam. He led the student fights at the Sorbonne and the efforts to build links between the students and workers. He served prison time throughout 1968 for his involvement in the student-worker uprising. And after founding the Revolutionary Communist League (the state had outlawed the Revolutionary Communist Youth) he became the lead presidential candidate and public spokesperson for the group.
From workers’ solidarity, through to anti-fascist struggles (which would land Krivine back in prison), through to the anti-colonial struggles from Martinique to New Caledonia—Krivine consistently gave voice to struggles of the exploited and oppressed. When he intervened on the floor, the man was a force, with poise and presence.
I got to know Krivine in Paris. He was based in Saint-Denis, where I had just relocated, and I joined his branch of the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (New Anticapitalist Party—NPA). Every Sunday, Krivine would sell L’Anticapitaliste (the NPA’s weekly) next to the Saint-Denis food market. Krivine would take me on tours giving little history lessons about local struggles and the area’s history of communist politics. We spoke at length about the history of the Revolutionary Communist League, and in particular about his good friend and comrade Daniel Bensaïd, whose revolutionary legacy Krivine tried to ensure would be remembered.
One evening, when Krivine co-hosted the speakers’ session of the premiere of Carmen Castillo’s We Are Alive, has remained in my memory. The film—a beautiful balance sheet of the dignity of revolutionary politics—brought out the rebellious youth of all in the room. Krivine set the tone of the discussion (alongside Olivier Besancenot), and the take home message was driven home: no matter what errors or obstacles are in the way of a politics of human emancipation, it is always right to fight and resist.
From the little I knew of him, it was clear he was a man who had the constancy required for a prolonged decision in the direction of revolutionary politics, and he combined this commitment with a sense of humour, laughter and jokes. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him, but his revolutionary legacy will live on.

Darren Roso

Alain Krivine (1941-2022)

French historian Pierre de Vaissi<a>è</a>re’s description of a slave ship working the Atlantic trade in Saint-Domingue: Creole society and life under the Ancièn Regime, 1629-1789 cannot be forgotten: the hold below is hellish, naked bodies are chained, thrown back and forth by the middle passage seas, excrement is smeared about, and death feels a mere breath away. The captain decides to execute a Black man and woman for insubordination. The captain slits the man’s throat, before ripping out his heart, liver and entrails, cutting them up into 300 pieces and forcing the slaves aboard to eat them. The captain then has the woman suspended on a mast and whipped, and a crewman slices a hundred cuts straight to the bone, draining her body of blood. 
Such gruesome acts were designed to crush the ship’s captive souls and to ensure their bodies would labour obediently under the master’s whip when they were offloaded in the “new world”. Only in this way could traders effectively perform their role in the slave system of newly developing capitalism, supplying Europe’s coffee houses and its sugar and tobacco addictions. 
An estimated 12 million people were taken at gunpoint from West Africa and sold into slavery, forced to work on the colonial plantations producing the raw materials for European industry—a practice that shaped the modern world. It was an indispensable feature of modern capitalism’s development and gave rise to a particular form of racism rooted in the racialised nature of exploitation on the sugar, cotton, tobacco and coffee plantations. 
• • •
Black resistance to slavery occurred wherever the institutionalised barbarism of the slave trade settled, although you wouldn’t pick that up from most histories. As the Black Trotskyist C.L.R. James put it, the “only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of the capitalist historians”. These revolts were far from minor—uprisings on board slave ships saved an estimated 500,000 Africans from the traumatic middle passage and from being worked to death on the plantations. In 1760, a major revolt by slaves in Jamaica rocked the British Empire’s control of the Caribbean, coinciding as it did with the Seven Years War in which Britain and its allies were fighting a bloc led by France. 
Slavery was ended through a combination of this sort of resistance in the Caribbean and revolutionary struggle in the “metropolis” (capitalist centres like Paris). The emerging capitalist ruling class did not just spontaneously decide to oppose slavery – its deeply entrenched institutional and economic structures had to be broken by uprisings from below, leading to revolutionary crises, or at least their threat, to be successful.
Liberal abolitionist circles like the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (founded in France in 1788) were no substitute for the mass struggles of the Great French Revolution of 1789, for example. Two-thirds of French trade was with colonies, and the slave system that underlay it would not be easily given up. Throughout the revolution, many liberal abolitionists favoured a compromise whereby property owning “mulattoes” (free people of mixed race) would be given equal rights, while 500,000 slaves remained in chains. 
The outbreak of revolution<a>—</a>in France in 1789 and two years later in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti)—fundamentally altered the terrain. The Black slaves of Saint-Domingue faced severe repression, but they refused to be cowed. “Led from beginning to end by men who had themselves been slaves and were unable to read or write, they fought one of the greatest revolutionary battles in history”, wrote C.L.R. James in his classic account of the revolution, The Black Jacobins. “Before the revolution they had seemed subhuman. Many a slave had to be whipped before he could be got to move from where he sat. The revolution transformed them into heroes.”
The revolt on Saint-Domingue forced the issue of abolition into a prominent position amid the revolutionary tumult back in France. The French National Convention passed the “Universal Emancipation decree” in 1794, which granted freedom and equal rights to slaves in all French colonies. This put a major dent in the most lucrative sources of wealth provided by the Atlantic slave trade, shaking early capitalism to its core.
For the Black slaves fighting to overthrow their white masters, the slogan “liberty or death” was all too real. They fought with a courage and passion that inspired radicals around the world, and went well beyond their European contemporaries in their commitment to human liberation. Historian Laurent Dubois argues that the Haitian Revolution was “the most radical (and therefore one of the most important) assertions of the right to have rights in human history”. The revolution invented the notion of universal emancipation, which until then had been limited by the blindness of European thinkers to the humanity of slaves and other subjugated peoples.
The limitations of the French Revolution itself in this regard were brought home by the fact that, while the Jacobins decreed the abolition of slavery in 1794, in 1801 Napoleon sent an invading force to Haiti to restore it. As the new century dawned, the need to establish order on an exploitative capitalist basis was paramount, and the high ideals of the first years of the revolution were left behind. “The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution”, James wrote, “and liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more to them than to any Frenchman”. Unlike the French bourgeois gentleman, who would hide the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in his pocket if it clashed with the lucrative colonial trade, freedom was more than a slogan for the Haitian slaves.
Revolutionary anti-slavery put an end to the most lucrative sources of wealth for European capitalism. The defeat of the British Empire and Napoleon’s armies (as well as the French colonists and nobility) was a precondition for abolition and emancipation. It is the greatest of modernity’s traditions, making the notions of equality, freedom and universality far more concrete than struggles in the European cities ever did. 
The Haitian Revolution went further than the American War of Independence and the Great French Revolution in its commitment to universal human emancipation. Haiti was the first nation to abolish slavery unconditionally and deliver on the promise of emancipation. Too often this fact is forgotten: that the greatest revolution of the era was Black. 
• • •
Like today, slavery-era capitalism thrived on the racialised as well as class-based division of human beings. Blacks and whites were divided. Those stolen from one part of the world were separated after transportation. Africans were separated from creoles: the upper echelon of slaves from the field workers, blacks from mulattoes, slaves from free people of colour. Because of this, class solidarity and anti-racism tended to feed off each other.
This was brought to light by the “freedom suits” of the 1760s and 1770s, which were legal actions brought against wrongful enslavement in England, North America and France. As historian Robin Blackburn writes in The American Crucible:
“The plantation boom had given rise to hundreds of thousands of mariners and dock workers, mainly white but also significant numbers of people of colour. Those of different backgrounds learned from one another. Faced with the rigours of shipboard discipline, they also learned to stick together. When the sailors in the Port of London went ‘on strike’ in 1768—that is, struck their ships’ sails—they added a word to the English language. They could easily see that it was better to negotiate with employers who did not have slaves. Slaves in such major ports as London, Glasgow, Boston, Philadelphia and New York found supporters willing to help them bring freedom suits. And there were enough victories to deter slave owners from bringing more slaves to these centres. This helped check the spread of slavery ... and served as a necessary prelude to abolitionism. The proportion of slaves fell, and the proportion of free coloured workers grew, in most of the major Atlantic ports. By the last decades of the eighteenth century the authorities were worried that these concentrations of ‘masterless men’ (and women) constituted a danger to the status quo and that the port towns were a haven for runaways.”
A similar dynamic is evident during the second upsurge of abolitionism in the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the US Civil War. Links of solidarity between Black and white workers in the northern US states had already been evident before the outbreak of the war. This process was accelerated by the war itself, in which hundreds of thousands of Blacks and former slaves joined the fight on the side of the Union.
This solidarity extended to divisions beyond race and class. As leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in 1881: “When the true history of the anti-slavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages; for the cause of the slave has been particularly women’s cause”. The Grimke sisters, pioneers of women’s liberation and abolition, also recognised this. “Until he [the Black slave] gets his rights”, proclaimed Angelina Grimke at a meeting in support of the Civil War effort in 1863, “we shall never have ours”. 
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Lancashire textile workers—hungry and impoverished—gave their undying support to the North to end slavery during the Civil War. At London’s largest pro-North demonstration, an Irish stonemason named Connolly said, “Like our brothers in Lancashire, we would rather perish than band ourselves in unholy alliance with the South and slavery”. 
• • •
Racism today is no longer underpinned by slavery. But the struggle that was required to win abolition nevertheless has relevance to modern struggles for racial equality. 
Racism is a material and social fact built into the structure of capitalism. It will not wither away without struggle. This is why movements like Black Lives Matter, whatever their weaknesses, remain absolutely central to any strategy for change. In contrast to those who dismiss such struggles as distractions from the workers’ movement, the anti-slavery struggle shows how the two are symbiotically related. 
C.L.R. James once said that revolutionary Marxists had to grasp the role Black struggle played in the transformation of Western society from feudalism to capitalism, because “It is only from this vantage-ground that we shall be able to appreciate (and prepare for) the still greater role they must of necessity play in the transition from capitalism to socialism”.
Racial division remains central to the maintenance of bourgeois power in modern capitalism. Those wanting to overthrow this system must be a part of mass anti-racist struggles when they arise, and play a role in pushing them forward and deepening their understanding of the enemy they are up against and what it will take to defeat it.

The revolutionary struggle against slavery

Lucien Sève succumbed to the coronavirus in late March, but you could say that he was killed by France’s under-resourced health system. Deprived of a ventilator, the Marxist philosopher was left to die at the Béclère hospital in Clamart, Paris, deemed “not a priority” because his body was 93 years old. Sève spent decades fighting against the degradation of the health care system. In his view, the human body is not simply a natural biological entity. It is the place in which the dignity of a person takes shape amid the practices of a society – so a person’s worth is bound up with how society takes care of their body.
The French health care system deemed Sève unworthy, practically and institutionally robbing his life of dignity, illustrating that human beings are treated simply as means to profitable ends in the general dehumanisation in president Emmanuel Macron’s France, where the hospitals are overwhelmed.
All the warning signs were there. Last December, before anyone knew about the coming coronavirus, underpaid hospital workers were on the streets with banners reading: “The state will count its cash; we’ll count the dead”. Right now, more than 500 people are dying per day in the pandemic’s early stages. The north-east of the country, and the north-central region, where Paris is located, are being ravaged. 
The practice of patient “sorting” is already under way, as Lucien Sève’s case shows. It is becoming clear that nobody over 70 will receive the care they need in overloaded hospitals. The French use the verb trier to denote this sorting process. It’s versatile enough to apply to waste and human beings alike. Dostoevsky wrote that a society’s level of civilisation can be judged by walking into its prisons. Today we can judge our society by the way it sorts its human waste – in hospitals, in nursing homes and in poorer working-class neighbourhoods. Yet despite the death rate from the virus being low among young people, 35 percent of intensive care patients are under 60. The youngest death was a 16 year old.
Health workers are demanding more protections and more human and material resources to cope with the crisis, but Macron has turned a blind eye. The situation is a disaster: masks, gloves, hand sanitiser and testing kits are not available to carers and workers in general.
The lack of protective equipment has led to the deaths of doctors, nurses and carers. Women are on the frontlines of the fight against the pandemic: they make up 88 percent of the nurses, 90 percent of the cashiers, 82 percent of the primary school teachers and 90 percent of the nursing home workers. Without protective gel, masks, gloves and social distancing measures, women on the front lines will disproportionately suffer. Many of these women will been workplace leaders, like Aïcha, the General Confederation of Labour delegate at Carrefour Saint-Denis Basilique (a supermarket triple the size of the average Coles), who died last Friday. 
The French government undermined the fight against COVID-19 from the beginning. Macron’s widely publicised visit to the theatre in early March, to “encourage the French to venture outside despite the coronavirus”, symbolised the disregard, as did the decision to push ahead with municipal elections on 15 March despite the closure of non-essential retail. As Marina Garrisi, an editorial committee member of the Révolution Permanente website, explained early this week from Paris, the authorities were criminally negligent: “The French government refused to test patients even when all the symptoms were present (headaches, fever, cough, wheezing, etc.) because there weren’t enough tests and “it costs too much”(!). The other consequence of this strategy of ‘minimalist testing’ is that it is impossible to know exactly how many people in France are really infected”. 
Many believe Macron is responsible for the situation. After an initial bump in popularity as the virus hit and emergency measures were finally taken, his support has fallen again. A national poll taken one week after confinement measures were announced found that 71 percent of respondents think the government didn’t act fast enough, and 61 percent believe that the government has not delivered enough health infrastructure and personnel to fight the virus.
Meanwhile, Macron is using the health crisis to smash up the historic labour code, legislate by degree, enact a state of emergency to circumvent parliamentary debate and is allowing employers in power, telecommunications, transport and logistics and farming to impose a 60-hour work week with only nine hours of rest between shifts. This is shock doctrine stuff – the scale of it is staggering. According to Gerard Filoche, a well-known labour inspector, the 60-hour week takes labour legislation back to 1841. 
**********
The north-central region has the best equipped hospitals in the country. Yet the Seine-Saint-Denis, north-east of Paris, is overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Known locally as quatre-vingt treize, Seine-Saint-Denis is working class and multiracial, with a population of 1.8 million. Already lacking beds, doctors and resources, the area gives a glimpse of the horrors that may come.
Hospitals such as Aulnay-Sou-Bois were understaffed and in a difficult position before the coronavirus. It has now reached its limit. “Many nurses and health assistants were hit by COVID-19 from the very start, because we didn’t have the protective equipment they needed”, Hélène Gros, head of infectious diseases at the hospital, told online newspaper Mediapart on 30 March: “The sickness has already paralysed teams of workers. Every day we are wondering how we’ll be able to fill the workstations. We have even had to decline opening new COVID-19 beds for this very reason.” 
At the Delafontaine hospital in Saint-Denis, the first patients were welcomed three weeks ago. But nobody yet has left intensive care. “Some died, others are stagnating, very few are recovering”, Dr Laurent Lainé, from the intensive care department at the Delafontaine hospital told Mediapart last Sunday. “Those with more experience dealing with this illness speak of intensive care lasting at least three weeks.”
Every evening at 8 o’clock, confined residents across France bang on pots, chant and give their support to the health workers, and others, on the front lines. This is a rejection of the attacks on public health as much as it is support for the heroism of health workers. Public hospitals have lost tens of thousands of beds over the last two decades. Between 2003 and 2016, 64,000 beds were lost – 13 percent of the total. If neoliberal attacks degrade working conditions inside the workplaces, they also degrade the quality of life of workers who rely on public services: two-thirds of maternity wards have disappeared since 1989, and 7 percent of public hospitals closed between 2013 and 2017.
Between 1998 and 2018, the number of intensive care beds has dropped by 30 percent. With just 3.1 beds for every 1,000 inhabitants, France has fewer intensive care beds than Lithuania (5.5), the Slovak Republic (4.9), Poland (4.8), Hungary (4.3), Slovenia (4.2), the Czech Republic (4.1) and Estonia (3.5) -- all of which are less developed countries. With respect to the lack of masks, University of Paris anthropologist Alain Bertho wrote on 25 March, in a piece titled “Health crisis and political failure”:
“The shortage of masks is global. But this situation of crisis was anticipated by the state’s stock in the past. Following the crisis of H1N1 [“swine flu”] in 2009, France had 723 million FFP2 surgical masks at its disposal. What ever happened to this stock that wasn’t renewed after the expiration of the material? … On the recommendation of a report from the General Secretariat of the Defence and National Security in May 2013, the FFP2 stock was handed over to the ‘employers’ and not to the state. In a 2015 report, the Senate noted that this would lead to savings in terms of purchasing costs, stock and destruction, all the while noting the risk of a deficiency of capacity of production in the event of a crisis”. 
The precarity of the health care workforce has compounded cuts to beds and the self-imposed shortage of surgical masks. France pays its nurses less than elsewhere in Europe; their pay is even behind Brazil and Argentina. Nurses worked extremely long hours before the pandemic, and now they are working more hours. This is creating a sense of powerlessness among health care workers – they do the job to save lives, and are working like mad to save lives, but often they are unable to do so. Twenty-four-hour shifts, sometimes standing the whole time, will take a toll physically and psychologically, without even beginning to address the trauma this event will produce.
Health care workers mobilised and fought last year to denounce the policies of austerity that led to this crisis. Macron responded with more austerity and more repression. The nurses and health care assistants who painted “the state will count its cash; we’ll count the dead” onto their banners were attacked by the same police who are now enforcing confinement. 
The interior minister sent the riot squad in to beat up hospital workers just a few weeks before this health crisis. Emergency health care workers were already well ahead of the curve: they began striking in the emergency rooms last March. The present spike in deaths and hospitalisations marks the one-year anniversary of their struggle against pay freezes and overcrowding. The strike movement hit 203 public emergency rooms out of 478, and workplace activists set up collectives to coordinate the action outside the formal trade unions. One of their demands was to hire 10,000 new workers in the emergency rooms. 
The courage, principle, experience and collective expertise of these health workers will make all the difference in coming weeks, as will the labour of others like Aïcha who will ensure people are fed. They should oversee the response, not the garbage politicians and business leaders who have botched it and will continue to do so.

France's pandemic disaster was decades in the making

<blockquote>Axel Persson is a train driver and secretary of the railworkers' branch of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) union federation in Trappes. He was interviewed for Red Flag by Darren Roso.
</blockquote>
 
Can you explain the differences and similarities of this strike wave as compared to the December 1995 strikes? 
Both strikes were organised as a reaction against the government’s plan to smash the pension schemes. The difference between 1995 and 2019 is that the 1995 pension reform specifically targeted public sector workers, while the 2019 reform attacks all workers, both from the public and private sector. The situation in 2019 is much different from 1995 in the sense that organised labour (particularly the CGT union federation), while still able to wield considerable industrial muscles, has been considerably weakened in the private industrial sector as a result of decades of layoffs, redundancies, the multiplication of subcontracting, agency work, etc.
 
Tell us about the workers’ movement: who are in the vanguard of this struggle? Why are they at the forefront, and how are they organising? 
Transport workers from the Parisian urban network are in the vanguard of the struggle. Railway workers in particular (alongside mineworkers, dockworkers, energy workers etc.) have historically been the most organised and militant section of the working class, heavily influenced by a strong militant tradition that has long been one of the strongholds of the communist movement in France.
This is reflected in working conditions. For a long time, their conditions served as a benchmark for the rest of organised labour. For example, the right to paid holidays, and the right to retire with a pension, were already won in the late 19th century or early 20th century by these workers.
The right to union representation and the first forms of collective agreements were first implemented in the railway. Organised labour, most notably within the metal industry, then took these rights as an example and organised struggles for their expansion into the other branches.
Also, given the important role of transportation in society, workers within these branches have a particular clear consciousness of the collective strength the withdrawal of their labour represents. They organise in general daily assemblies where they decide whether and how to to pursue the strike. They can also elect, depending on the specifics of their workplace, strike committees encompassing union members and non-union members, to lead and organise the strike within their specific plant, depot, station and so forth.
All decisions (including the decision to continue the strike) are taken by vote in these assemblies open to all strikers, regardless of union affiliation or not. While transport workers are at the forefront of the strike and have been so for 45 days, it is important to underline that other industries are now joining in the strike, relieving the transport workers who have gone for more than 45 days without pay. The strike was massively followed in the transport industry up until mid-January. Dockworkers started striking massively all across the country from mid-January.
 
What is the political significance of the strikes in France, especially after the defeat of Corbyn in Britain? How are the different political parties responding? 
The political significance of the strike is tremendous in the sense that it underlines the strength the working class can act and has the potential to defeat the government.
It has also showed that it can force the government to retreat – even though the retreat has been partial. For example, the government planned to implement the reform on workers born from 1963 and onwards. The government then announced workers born before 1975 would be spared. Then the government started telling the workers who were most involved in the strikes (including railway workers and Parisian metro drivers) that only those born after 1985 would see the reform implemented, and that those who would see the reform implemented would get some kind of compensation. Many other categories (opera dancers, seafarers, air traffic controllers) got special guarantees.
The government then announced a “temporary” (implying it would be reintroduced at a later date) withdrawal from the planned bill to increase the retirement age. However, railway workers and urban transit workers in Paris refused to yield and go back to work. They vowed to pursue the fight for the entire working class and not only specific generations within specific industries. But in order to achieve that, the strike must expand and generalise across all branches and sectors.
The different political parties are responding quite differently. The traditional right wing is opportunistically saying the government has “caved in too much” to the strikers, and touts that it would implement an even harsher reform than Macron. The far right – very opportunistically so with the presidential 2022 election in mind – is paying lip service to the strikers given the unpopularity of Macron and his pension reform. The far right pretty much says what anyone wants to hear. Their different spokespersons have defined roles : some are tasked with insulting the strikers and describing them as “radicalized Muslims” with no respect for Christian traditions who even refused the “Christmas truce” called for by the government in December to halt the strike. Others call for the defence of “small businesses heavily affected by the strike”. Others support the strike all the while insisting that they “despise the trade unions and in particular the CGT”.
The left supports the strikes but has failed to effectively intervene politically beyond statements.
The far left has a certain influence amongst the strikers, particularly so in the Parisian region, with many of them playing leading roles in the strike and organizing the strikers in structures encompassing non-union and union members, developing a policy that is independent (not necessarily hostile per se) from the national union leadership.
 
What is the relationship between rank and file unionism, and the trade union officials from the different unions? Can you explain to an Australian audience why different unions exist in France, and what their political roles are? 
Union density in France is low. An average of 11% of workers in France are unionized. Within the railway, approximately 20% are unionized. However, labor law and tradition is significantly different from many other western countries. The entire workforce takes part, for example, in general elections within the workplaces and to elect the union representatives.
Non-union members can benefit from union assistance, from the union agreements, even benefit from strike pay from the strike funds and of course, go on strike. Joining a union in France is thus often a militant act – it means you want to financially and politically support the union.
You will not get preferential treatment compared to a non-union member. You join the union because you want either to become active in it as an activist or because you want to support it financially or politically. So it is important to note that while unions have a decisive role in organizing the struggle, the success resides in their ability to organise ... non-union members! Which is the big paradox of the French labour movement.
The rank and file thus organises in general assemblies and expect the trade union officials to be held to account in front of all workers and not just the union members.
Historically speaking, the CGT union is the “mother” of the trade union movement in France. Founded in 1895 as a merger of the pre-existing federations into a unique and united federation, it has been widely influenced by anarcho-syndicalism in its beginnings, and then by the communist movement that organised around the Third International.
In response to that, the bourgeoisie has since fought to set up yellow trade unions or organise splits within the CGT and has of course over time then spent a lot of effort in “integrating” the CGT in “social dialogue”. In 1920, the Vatican decided to establish its own union to combat the influence of Marxism within the working class: the CFDT, Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens, "French Confederation of Christian Workers". It later split and gave birth to the CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail, "French Democratic Confederation of Labour") that became non-confessional. While this CFDT union at a time (up until 1980) had a libertarian streak, its leadership organised massive purges to transform it into a yellow trade union bent on supporting the liberal agenda on the political grounds that “there is no alternative to capitalism” and workers have no choice but to try to limit the damage through social dialogue
In the current strike, it has been supporting the governments plan to implement the reform. At every concession made by the government to the strikers, the CFDT, whose national leadership has never called for any strike, has continuously called for the workers to go back to work...but to no avail.
FO (Force Ouvrière, “Workers’ Force”) was initially set up by the CIA in 1947 during the Marshall plan as a split from the CGT. The promoters of the Marshall plan insisted on the eviction of communist ministers from the post-World War II governments, and the creation of splits within the CGT. FO thus has many similarities in its structures with the CGT, albeit historically impregnated with a strong anti-communist tradition. In this strike though, it stands alongside the CGT.
UNSA (Union nationale des syndicats autonomes, “national federation of autonomous unions”) is a smaller union but that is heavily represented within the RATP (urban transit workers metro in Paris). While traditionally seen as a right wing union, mainly from the public sector, it has grown in the RATP, particularly amongst the newer generations of metro drivers. The CGT, while remaining very influential within the RATP, has lost grounds for a number of reasons and disillusioned newer generations have sought refuge in this new “autonomous” federation. Most remarkably so, the UNSA branch within the RATP has very clearly smashed the national UNSA leadership and has in reality completely ignored the national UNSA leadership's directives. The strike is, in short, in the hands of the rank and file, particularly within the transport industry.
 
Can you explain the way the Yellow Vest movement has intersected with the strike wave?
The Yellow Vest movement has intersected with the strike, in the sense that it has encouraged the workers to resort to an all-out fight against the government. Also, the defiance against the national union leaderships expressed by many Yellow Vests has been seen also amongst strikers, who are very determined to lead the strike and not let anybody decide for them when to stop or on what actions to take. While the Yellow Vest movement was not a strike movement per se, and that is its biggest weakness, the general atmosphere of resistance it has created, has bolstered the strikers as a whole.
 
Also on Red Flag: <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6996">France's general strike: 21st century class struggle</a>

Axel Persson

roA French railworker speaks about their strike

Prime minister Scott Morrison, an evangelical who is adamant that coal comes before Christ, is under the delusion that the combustible rock is “a heaven born gift to man”, as John Leifchild, author of Our Coal and Coal Pits, wrote. Without coal, the heavens themselves would fall in.
Morrison’s coal worship is just one case of fossil fuel fetishism. Fetishism obscures the social role of an object like coal. Coal fetishism believes coal “maintained the state or spread miracles” through its own powers. Coal has awakened perils enough to destroy much life on this planet. But coal itself never did anyone harm. When left in the ground, it performs valuable ecological work absorbing toxins, carbon and substances dissolved in ground water – from uranium to cadmium and mercury. It is poisonous when recovered from the depths of the Earth and burned. 
British colonists in India were gobsmacked that local tribes in the Khasi Hills, in the country’s north-east, had no interest in exploiting deposits on a large scale. Locals knew that coal lay in the subterranean depths, but only with the British Empire’s extraction in the service of the steamboats plying up and down the Ganges did coal become an item of colonial power as the fossil economy was born. The steamboat was one of the most important inventions in the history of imperialism; it carried the European powers into Asia and Africa. As such, coal was foundational to the 19th century colonial dream of global domination.
Daniel Headrick, a historian of technologies, wrote in his book Tools of Empire that “no single piece of equipment is so closely associated with the idea of imperialism as is the armed shallow draft steamer, in other words, the gunboat”. The British won the Opium Wars in China on the back of the gunboat. Steamboat imperialism was also deployed in the frenzied “scramble for Africa”. Winston Churchill’s description of the 1899 conquest of Sudan, The River War, written during his time as an army officer, put the gunboat front and centre of the British victory:
“But at the critical moment the gunboat arrived on the scene and began suddenly to blaze and flame from Maxim guns, quick firing guns and rifles. The range was short; the effect tremendous. The terrible machine floating gracefully on the waters – a beautiful white devil – wreathed itself in smoke. The river slopes of the Kerreri Hills, crowded with the advancing thousands, sprang up into clouds of dust and splinters of rock. The charging Dervishes [the fiercest military force in Africa at the time] sank down in tangled heaps. The masses in the rear paused, irresolute. It was too hot even for them.”
International conquest wasn’t the only thing driving the energy revolution. Class power and factory discipline – the manufacturers’ need to keep control of those who made their profits – were at the root of the rise of steam power. As Andreas Malm argues forcefully in Fossil Capital, the class basis of fossil fuels is essential to their history:
 “No piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself into fuel, and no humans have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of either to satisfy subsistence needs: fossil fuels necessitate waged or forced labour – the power of some to direct the labour of others – as conditions of their very existence. If we take the message of climate science seriously, we should direct our attention to power in the dual sense [energy and social domination], first of all in the process of labour. That is the point of contact between humans and the rest of nature, where biophysical resources pass into circuits of social metabolism, where coal and oil and gas are extracted, transported, coupled to machines: burnt. The process is peopled ... [the labour process] is the sphere where the fossil economy must have originated.”
Historians too often miss this important point, taking the social conditions of capitalist society to be eternal natural laws. For example, economists influenced by David Ricardo, a 19th century British political economist, say that coal was adopted because there wasn’t enough fertile land for continuing economic growth. Others, influenced by English cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus, say that coal’s adoption resolved a so-called crisis of overpopulation. Such explanations are complemented by technologically deterministic arguments that assume that the supposed intrinsic superiority of the rotation engine – as opposed to wind and water-based mechanics – automatically ensured steam power a cheap and bright future. 
Yet the transition took place despite other energy sources remaining abundant and cheaper. The shift to steam in the British cotton industry, for example, occurred despite water power being consistently cheaper. The technologies competing with the steam engine, Malm notes, “retained considerable potential for technological prowess unrealised at the time of the transition, and steam power even lacked the edge in instrumental terms of performance”. The largest cotton mills were water powered during the transition years of the 1820s to the 1840s. Waterwheels were on par with steam engines in absolute capacity and energy efficiency. As Malm argues, “steam gained supremacy in spite of water being abundant, cheaper and at least as powerful, even and efficient”.
An alternative explanation for the transition to steam is that it arose as a form of power exercised by some people against others. British capitalists killed any possibility of a hydraulic renaissance in the 1830s as manufacturers switched from the water wheel, which used the natural flow of river water to generate power, to the steam engine because of competition among them and the struggle between bosses and workers in the factories. 
Take the Irwell Scheme, a plan to power the cotton mills using water power. Mills for cotton, wool, paper, timber, iron, bleaching and printing lined the River Irwell from Bacup, Lancashire, to Manchester. If every business were to use water power, there needed to be cooperation between rival mill owners up and down the river. But competition among manufacturers pushed in the opposite direction. Steam power gave each capitalist independence from the other. 
Capitalist private property did not mix with the flowing waters of the commons; the ability to cart coal from the marketplace into the mill to fuel the competition made steam power more congenial to capitalism’s competitive logic. Instead of a renaissance of water power, British capital moved sharply toward steam. This was not because steam power was a more advanced technology. As Malm writes, the opposite was true: “the engine won over the wheel because it was the less advanced productive force”.
The watermill, inherited from Asia and the Roman Empire, gave us industrial capitalism. But the steam engine, Karl Marx wrote, was “an antagonist that enabled the capitalists to tread underfoot the growing demands of the workers, which threatened to drive the infant factory system into crisis”. The transition to steam power, within the framework of capitalist domination, was facilitated by its mobility and reliability, two key ingredients of profit making and class domination. Cotton mills reliant on waterways were situated outside of the cities and were geographically fixed – they had to procure, train and discipline their exploited workforce and build costly riverside colonies. But the extraction of coal and its conversion into mechanical motion via the steam engine were separated – unlike water power, which required the river and the wheel to be in the same place. 
“Instead of carrying the work to the power, the prime agent is placed wherever it is most convenient to the manufacturers”, wrote mechanical engineer John Farey in his 1827 work A Treatise on the Steam Engine. And instead of relying on the personalised relations between masters and servants in the riverside mills, cotton manufacturers drew on the hungry and undernourished labourers in the cities, hiring and firing at ease to discipline them. Where river water ebbed and flowed with the upstream rainfall, coal provided reliability: it could be stored and used on demand. The steam engine was a more efficient means of extracting surplus wealth from the working class, rather than being a more efficient technology 
In response to the Lancashire handloom weavers’ rebellion in 1826, the government went to great lengths to protect the source of capitalist power. The 1827 Administration of Justice statute relating to malicious injuries to property made punishable by death any collective attempt to damage manufacturers’ buildings and steam engines. The act also made it a transportable offence of seven years for causing water damage to a mine (i.e. made a convict of someone found guilty). But it was greater punishment for seriously damaging a mine: “If any Person shall unlawfully and maliciously set fire to any Mine of Coal or Canal Coal, every such Offender shall be guilty of Felony, and, being convicted thereof, shall suffer Death”. This also went for anyone who tried to “pull down or destroy ... any Steam Engine”.
Draconian as these penalties were, they didn’t stop workers resisting. Steam was written about as despotic, degrading and filled with doom. Working class writers penned their hatred of steam power and linked it to their own class struggles. For example, mechanics relayed to the London and Westminster Review that “steam is our enemy; it is the servant of the rich man, and does nothing to serve us, but, on the contrary, throws us out of work by giving its labour at a cheaper rate”.
Sabotage is often written about as a sporadic and unconscious act, but Malm shows that sabotage of steam engines during the general strike of 1842 – which combined demands for democratic reforms with demands to end pay cuts – “was not incidental but constitutive of the general strike”. He quotes a striker’s speech to thousands of assembled workers: “And now I ax ye, will ye pull the plugs out?” “Aye, we’l do’t for ’em”, the crowd roared back. The Leeds Times called this “the plug doctrine”. When strikers marched through the manufacturing districts, they pulled out plugs affixed to the steam engine boilers, bringing them to an abrupt halt.
The 1842 movement showed that strike action could bring the fossil economy to a standstill, defy authority and set up parallel forms of power. When the military was brought in to quell the uprising, the strike was defeated. But this was the most cooperative, collective and extensive arrest of steam power at the heart of the empire. The Chartists wrote about steam power being the organising centre of class power. Their newspaper, the Northern Star, argued: “Already do we find our army, our navy, our pulpits, our offices, and our senate house filled with scions of the steam aristocracy”. 
There are two take home points about this history. First, capitalism gave us the fossil fuel economy now threatening humanity’s place on the planet, and it has always harmed the labouring classes most severely. Second, class struggle demonstrates that workers have the power to confront the fossil fuel economy. The 1842 strike, Malm writes, “was an uprising for decent living standards and political power – ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’, plus the Charter – in which the fossil economy figured as the material terrain of the struggle, one party rolling forth its ragged brigades to seize and close it, the other its uniformed soldier, to retake and open it”. 
In the 19th century, the forcible retaking and opening of the coal pits and the use of the steam engine were about enforcing class domination in the name of profit, but also were about securing Britain’s colonial domination. Today, class domination and imperialism are bringing our way of life into question; capitalism has developed into a manufacturer of economic and geopolitical rivalry on an unprecedented scale. The fossil fuel economy is wreaking havoc on the natural environment and those of us inhabiting it, through both exploitation and conquest driven by polluting militarism. Brown University’s Costs of War, for example, has revealed that the US Department of Defence is “the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world”, after the major polluting economies. 
The lessons of the past are crucial for informing the campaigns of the present. The road to zero emissions will not be an easy path of lobbying, awareness raising and changed consumer behaviour. It will require a major class confrontation by workers to take over and run the economy in our interests and a fight against imperialism and the military-industrial complex.

The fossil fuel economy is about class domination and imperialist conquest

Karl Marx hated servility. Devoting his life to ending exploitation and oppression, the revolutionary journalist, agitator and theorist could think of nothing more miserable than submission. 
Marx was editor in chief of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (New Rhineland Times) during the German Revolution of 1848-49. The newspaper remains an ideal of revolutionary journalism, known for its acute analysis, breadth and audacity. As a leader of the International Workingmen’s Association from 1864 to 1874, he tried to build an organisation to lead the struggle for socialism against the ruling economic elite and the states protecting them. And in Capital, his monumental thesis on political economy, Marx produced a groundbreaking explanation and critique of capitalist society, which remains mandatory reading to this day. 
Marx changed the way we think about the world. But his originality was possible only because the world itself was changing around him. Parts of Western Europe and North America had experienced revolutions that replaced absolutist, colonial and feudal forms of rule with modern forms of political representation. These revolutions cemented the liberal political language of freedom, equality and property within newly emerging capitalist societies. 
But the Dutch revolt, the English and French revolutions and the North American colonists’ rebellion produced contradictory effects. While they often used universalist phrases – “we, the people”, “the rights of man” – they didn’t do away with oppression: women remained second class citizens, non-property-owners were denied democratic rights, and blacks were considered little more than animals. The Dutch, who produced one of the Enlightenment’s greatest philosophers, Baruch Spinoza, brutalised and kidnapped the Javanese in the name of commerce. The English dominated the slave trade after the revolution of 1688 that overthrew King James II. And the newly formed United States built its economy through slave labour. 
Within the new societies, wage labour became a prominent part of urban life. This modern form of exploitation required a vast mass of people with nothing to sell but their own ability to labour – usually ex-peasants driven from their own patches of land. With wage labour came unemployment, draconian penalties for vagrancy, the dreaded work houses (which welcomed the destitute only to terrorise them into work and slavery) and their liberal ethic eulogising toil. 
On top of this was the criminalisation of the labouring classes, hundreds of thousands sent to America or Australia as convicts or indentured servants or hanged for minor “crimes”. Marx wrote in Capital of the common “kidnappings perpetrated in the early days of the factory system, when children were stolen from the work houses and orphanages … incorporated [into] a mass of unresisting human material”.
Marx was raised in Germany, which had not experienced a successful bourgeois revolution like England or France. Germany was not the unified state we know today, but a patchwork of confederated states. Prussia, its then dominant power, was still a Christian monarchy. But Marx came from the Rhineland, the most economically advanced area, and was deeply affected by the ideals of the French Revolution, which predisposed him to progressive authors. Initially, he rebelled against the religious character of the state, the government’s censorship of the press and the distress of poverty-stricken wine growers. But he came to realise, when Prussia suppressed the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, that the government couldn’t be reformed. 
*****
What Germany lacked in political and economic development, it made up for in the production of theory. Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel reflected on the characteristics of modern bourgeois life and its economic and political paradoxes. To this day, their works are considered touchstones of philosophy. In his day, Marx read them and tried to go beyond them.
When facing a political problem, he studied everything he could get his hands on to bring to it a coherent answer: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Phenomenology of Spirit, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Machiavelli’s Discourses, the French political economists and the English socialist critics of the economist Ricardo such as John Francis Bray. This gave him the intellectual foundation to overcome the thinking of his time.
In his reading of history, Marx focused on the French Revolution, but also read about contemporary US society and its inequalities, the Venetian republic and its downfall, and histories of Germany and England. He tried to understand the connection between property and social class, and the relationship of the state to society. Through his studies, Marx came to understand how the bourgeois revolutions had failed to create a world of genuine equality and freedom. 
The fruits of Marx’s labour are present in his Kreuznach (a district in the Rhineland), Paris, Brussels and Manchester notebooks written between 1843 and 1845. In Manchester, he encountered the most industrialised city in the world, and Chartists, members of one of the first mass working class movements, who in 1842 led a general strike for political rights. 
Marx wanted to understand the historical and political condition of the growing mass of wage labourers. He read Eugene Buret’s On the Poverty of the Labouring Classes in England and France, a popular work at the time, to come to grips with the labour theory of value and the early socialist critiques of the industrial system. One Marx biographer, Sven-Eric Liedman, wrote that central for Marx was “his requirement for scholarly scientific exactitude and comprehensive reading … He read copiously and took careful, detailed notes on what he read … and was scornful and ruthless towards those who wanted to skate by more easily”.
Marx’s reading of John Francis Bray’s Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy was important in developing his attitude towards class struggle – the self-emancipation of the working class – and recognising the limitations of contemporary socialist thought. Bray, an early critic of the industrial system, argued that “life is dependent upon food, and that food is dependent upon labour”, and that the “various institutions by which man is surrounded, trace out the orbit in which his thoughts, and feelings, and actions are to move”. In both statements we can glean themes later fully developed by Marx – a theory of economic value and of ideology’s material base and social role. 
Marx filled his notebooks with passages from Bray, whose fundamental idea was that equal rights could never meaningfully exist alongside inequality of wealth (divided between a labouring class and another class controlling labour). Marx carefully translated his argument:
“The wrongs inflicted upon the working classes by each [monarchies and republics] are the same. By thus going to the origin of the thing, we shall find that every form of government, and every social and governmental wrong, owes its rise to the existing social system – to the institutions of property as it at present exists – and that, therefore, if we would end our wrongs and our miseries at once and for ever, THE PRESENT ARRANGEMENTS OF SOCIETY MUST BE TOTALLY SUBVERTED, and supplanted with the principles of justice and the rationality of man [sic].” 
The most politically advanced working classes of Marx’s time were demanding equal rights, and Marx was surrounded by people with something to say about the unjust state of the world and who wanted something better: French radicals, German émigré socialists, Italian national-democrats, English Chartists and Russian revolutionary exiles. Marx believed that anyone making an argument about a new world needed to use clear expression. 
He criticised other radical currents of his time – the German “True Socialists” – who indulged in a discourse of love and feeling. Moses Hess, who professed the ideal of communism for much of his life and had a great influence on the young Frederick Engels, and even blocked with Marx against the anarchists in the First International, developed a theory that love unified humanity. But his lovely idea could not bridge the real divide between the classes, based on systematic theft and violence, and so failed to realise his own communist ideal. His version of “True Socialism” was the object of harsh critique in the Communist Manifesto.
Marx also criticised those who restricted the horizon of the workers’ movement to equal rights and equality before the law (as important as these demands were). No matter how radical the rhetoric of political equality sounded, equal rights are compatible with exploitation. 
Capitalism is based upon the production of commodities, which are exchanged for their equivalents, their economic equals. This includes the ability of workers to labour, which under capitalism is a commodity like any other. The entire secret to capitalism, Marx explained, is that exploitation occurs under conditions of equality: workers in the labour market exchange their capacity to work for a wage from a boss. 
Legally, it is a “free association” between worker and boss. But what the workers receive in a wage is less than what they produce in value – the difference is pocketed by the boss as profit. That is the entire basis for the perpetuation of class divisions. “Equality” limits the possibilities for human freedom to the confines of capitalist exchange. 
Many arguments of Marx’s contemporaries were ideological. They thought grand principles were the motor forces of history. But the history of ideas – or idealist history – cannot show how the actions of different classes and parties, and their political phrases, originate in the real world struggle between classes: the struggle over who gets what out of any society. Theory, the Communist Manifesto declared, is only the general expression of the “actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes”. 
*****
Capital was a book for socialists and activists in the workers’ movement. Marx wanted to convince other activists that capitalism was fatally flawed, unreformable, and that only the working class had the power to overthrow it. But workers’ power derived from their economic position, not their thoughts about themselves, and could be won not simply as an act of will, but under circumstances of capitalist crisis.
His literary production was dedicated to a sustained and decades-long polemic with rival schools of thought in the socialist movement. Marx was brutally critical when it came to the naïveté of early and contemporary socialist economic and political theory. William Clare Roberts, author of Marx’s Inferno, put it in these terms: 
“[Marx’s] fundamental criticism was that other socialists had terrifically oversimplified the operations and the harms of modern capitalism by individualising and moralising both. As a consequence, that had also massively oversimplified the task facing the workers’ movement, reducing it now to a problem of moral or scientific education, now to one of will power.”
Marx fought death and disease to write Capital because he wanted to provide the workers’ movement with a theory capable of countering the best ideas of the ruling class. The project of writing the book was inseparable from building a working class movement politically independent from bourgeois parties and their ideologues. 
The capitalist mode of production is an exploitative, but historically transient social form. Revolutionary politics aims to overturn this social form. This is what Marx meant by communism: a movement continuously pushing against and beyond capitalism to win human freedom.

Karl Marx and the birth of modern socialism

Exceptional political events teach valuable and enduring lessons. Arguments that previously appeared abstract, or removed from reality, become concrete and relevant to millions of people. Latent antagonisms that slowly matured before the political crisis are brought to the surface and revealed.
The 1 October Catalonian independence referendum was such an event, leading to the suspension of Catalan autonomy, and a lesson in what a capitalist state is and how it functions. “You see the very authoritarian behaviour of the state, you see all the people who are in jail illegally, accused of things they haven’t done”, Antentas says. “It is as Carl Schmitt said: the sovereign power decides the state of exception. The Spanish legal system [is] behaving illegally but you cannot do anything because it is a power of force at the end of the day.”
<a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/speakers/josep-mara-antentas-/"><img alt="Marxism Conference 2018" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/RF%20articles_1.jpg" /></a>
History and continuity
The Catalonian crisis is bound to the post-Franco Spanish state, which was underpinned by a new constitution in 1978, three years after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. That document “recognises and guarantees the right to self-government of the nationalities and regions of which [Spain] is composed”. But it also declares the “indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation” and contains a provision – article 155 – that gives the central government the ability to suspend a region’s autonomy.
The stand-off between Catalonia and the Spanish government highlights not only the limits to regional self-government. It has also shown the contradictions of the transition from dictatorship to democracy, between the authoritarian continuity of the Franco years and the new era of so-called democratic transition.
“With this crisis you see that what happened was a self-reform of the Franco system. You never had a break, a rupture, in the 1970s”, Antentas says. “And the core of the state apparatus remained more or less the same. The legal power is one of the most reactionary arms of the state, and it is the part of the state that had the least reforms after Franco. Finally what you have is a kind of reform from above in the ’70s, which all of the left – except the far left – agreed to, and you never had a break or rupture in the political system. The dominant bloc of power never changed, and you see this now very clearly.”
Unlike post-revolutionary France, the Spanish state could not nationally unify the peripheral nations such as Catalonia. Throughout the 19th century, the state failed to unify the different sections of the bourgeoisie, the free traders and the protectionists, and the institutional pillars of the state – the education system, crown and army – were too weak to “nationalise” the masses.
The 19th and 20th century Spanish state was relatively small in size, with permanent tensions between its centre and periphery. The Catalan ruling classes were excluded from the Spanish project even though they had been at the forefront of economic development since the Industrial Revolution. The emerging Catalan industrial bourgeoisie was unable to secure a protectionist policy to develop national industry against the free trade policy followed by the Castilian landowning oligarchy.
Catalan nationalism developed in the aftermath of the failure of the first Spanish republic (1874). With its defence of the Catalan language, this nationalism sank popular roots, but it was not generally in favour of independence. Rather, people wanted federated self-government. Catalanism won a victory with the granting of autonomy in 1932 during the Second Republic, but it was crushed by Franco during the civil war (1936-39).
For almost 40 years, Franco suppressed any semblance of autonomy. He “cleansed” – his policy was known as limpieza, Spanish for tidying up what is dirty – Catalonia of its language, flag and regional holiday and threw Catalan nationalists into jail.
With the death of Franco and the restoration of a degree of autonomy for Catalonia, article 155 was written into the 1978 constitution to secure Madrid’s rule in situations of emergency and crisis. Those supervising the ’78 constitution had a history in the dictatorship and the army. The triggering of article 155 is a throwback to the Francoist era.
Why independence emerged
Catalan independence has traditionally been a minority position within the national movement. In the fight against Franco, the left hegemonised the Catalan question by combining class with national demands. In the post-Franco period, however, the middle classes and the right played a more prominent role, the idea of independence becoming more popular at the turn of the century.
“In the early 2000s the Spanish right strengthened Spanish nationalism, which in practice is anti-Catalanism and anti-Basquism”, Antentas says. “They made Spanish nationalism one of the main elements to draw their social base together. Aggressive Spanish nationalism created a lot of distress in Catalonia, which [partly] explains why you now have a strong independence movement.”
The Socialist Party (PSOE) combined a pluralist Spain with its version of Spanish nationalism during the 1980s. Most Catalans accepted this compromise. But the Spanish right has pursued an anti-democratic course, entrenching a non-inclusive idea of Spain. “That pushes people outside”, Antentas says. If an independence referendum had been held 10 years ago, only a minority would have voted yes. If a “legal” referendum were held today, with 90 percent of people voting, the no vote would probably win. But the government’s heavy handed approach means that the number of people in favour of independence has grown.
Dilemmas on the left
The left in the Spanish state is confused and divided about Catalonia. Only a few minority currents – such as Anticapitalistas, of which Antentas is a member – are defending the right of self-determination in a concrete way. The divisions on the left, between the forces inside the independence movement, such as the Popular Unity Candidacy (an anti-capitalist group with 10 MPs and 7 percent of the vote), and forces outside the movement, such as the Barcelona mayor Ada Colau and Podemos, have reinforced the strategic limits of the movement.
The division of the Catalan left reflects broader social divisions. The independence movement is made up of the middle classes, young people, teachers and civil servants, while the working class has traditionally been outside the movement. The sections of the traditional working class that migrated to Catalonia looking for work have always been indifferent to independence, except during the later anti-Franco struggle, when the left hegemonised the national question.
“The independence movement never really wanted to make a real alliance with the part of the left that is not for independence but is for self-determination”, Antentas explains. “It was independence or not. And the part of the left which is not for independence, but defends the right to self-determination, never explored how they could ally with the independence movement. They simply said that is not our goal, ‘We’ll watch the movie and they will collapse; then it will be our moment’.”
But such an alliance would have put the right wing of the movement into a minority and could have aligned independence with social questions – anti-austerity policies – to broaden and strengthen the social base of independence.
Small groups on the radical left, such as Anticapitalistas, have had to do two things at once, with one leg inside the movement and one leg outside. Antentas explains the logic:
“You support the movement, you support the democratic claim of referendum, you vote yes for independence because it is strategically the most explosive issue. At the same time, you are outside the movement and with the social base of the moment which is outside, saying that independence is not the final goal.”
This nuanced political positioning – which, to reiterate, the mainstream left itself had abandoned – is educative. “If you are inside the movement, it is complicated to think about what is happening outside the movement. And if you are outside you don’t want to meet with the independents, because the social base is divided”.
Antentas says that it was necessary to support the declaration of independence because of the mass democratic element. However, he also talks about “strategic limits”. A movement in which the middle class plays the lead role is often a movement with personnel who do not know how to fight.
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The Spanish state has proved strong, undermining both the official narrative of the Catalan independence movement – that it would come easily, after a yearly demonstration and referendum was called – and the narrative of Podemos and Ada Colau – who say they would build a new majority in Spain to solve Catalan self-government along democratic lines.
“There is no clear roadmap for anyone”, Antentas says.
The movement is on the defensive, and its social base is disoriented. Struggles for democratic rights and against repression bring people together, “but on a broader perspective there is no clear answer about what the independence movement has to do”, he says.
“There is kind of like a fake showdown. Prime minister Rajoy made a clever move when he called a regional election for 21 December. Everybody has accepted these elections because there is no other plan. So now the independence movement is facing this election without a real plan. If pro-independence candidates get a new majority in the parliament, it would show the world that there is an important part of society that wants its independence.
“But they have no concrete plan, apart from a very defensive one: let out the prisoners, restore Catalan self-government. But beyond this they have no plan. If they win on 21 December, what can they do? Declare independence again? It is impossible because they have shown that they have declared independence but they have no capacity to make it a reality. So all the narrative of the movement is out. It has collapsed.”

Catalonia at a crossroads

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and Martin Schulz’s Social Democrats, the ruling coalition in Germany’s Bundestag, each suffered heavy losses in the country’s federal elections in late September.
The Social Democrats’ vote fell to a historic low of 20.5 percent, and the party announced that it would not be a junior partner in another coalition government. Merkel, who led the CDU to its worst result (33 percent of the vote) since 1949, now must negotiate with smaller parties the Greens (9 percent) and the Free Democratic Party (10.7 percent) to form a governing majority.
The most significant development was the breakthrough 12.6 percent for far right Islamophobic party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is now the third largest force in the Bundestag. Die Linke, to the left of the Social Democrats, though not achieving the third party status it had hoped for, gained a small swing and received more than 9 percent of the vote.
The results are part of a general trend in Europe. Phil Butland, speaker of Die Linke Berlin Internationals group and a member of marx21, told Red Flag, “The move away from the centre has benefited parties of both the left and the right, depending on local circumstances. In Greece, Spain and Ireland, left parties like Syriza, Podemos and People Before Profit could poll very good results”.
In other countries, such as Austria, France and now Germany, the right has made greater gains. The AfD vote was, according to Loren Balhorn, a Die Linke member in Berlin, a “classic protest vote tinged with racist sentiment, overshadowed as all German politics are these days by the so-called refugee crisis”.
The AfD’s election result is historic. For the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949, an extreme right wing racist party with a strong neo-fascist wing has made it into the Bundestag. More than half the party’s MPs are Nazis. “This neo-fascist wing has increasingly become more powerful, and seems to pull former CDU figures like Alexander Gauland [the AfD leader in Brandenburg] further to the right”, Balhorn said. “So far they are maintaining outward unity, but the exit of [AfD co-leader] Frauke Petry and now her lieutenant Mario Mieruch suggest that more turbulence is on the horizon.”
The AfD fared well in Germany’s east – in Saxony it polled ahead of the CDU – where there are higher rates of unemployment in areas that are mostly white, provincial and suffering economic decline. It won support from all classes of society, workers and trade unionists included (15 percent of trade unionists voted AfD).
The AfD did best where Die Linke did worst. In the eastern states, Die Linke is a member of three coalition governments, which makes it difficult to present as an anti-establishment force. The party had positive results in the western urban areas, and particularly among young, urban, educated workers.
For example, in Berlin’s Neukölln – dominated by a radical left with Trotskyist origins – the party scored some of its highest votes after campaigning for rent controls, against building speculators, in support of refugees and against racism. In Hamburg, the party challenged the AfD’s message of hate.
“The places where Die Linke made the greatest gains were in places where the party was an integral part of active movements”, said Einde O’Callaghan, also a Die Linke member. For example, in Münster, where the party was central to mobilising against the AfD earlier in the year, and in Leipzig, “Mobilisations against the anti-refugee movement Legida, the local offshoot of the racist Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (Pegida), were large and successful, and Die Linke played a highly visible central role in the mobilisation”, O’Callaghan said.
Islamophobia is also an important battleground. As in many other countries across the globe, it has become the lingua franca of mainstream politics. O’Callaghan noted its place in Germany:
“There are two aspects to Islamophobia here. One is a longer standing hostility towards the Turkish and Kurdish communities, which together number about 3 million and are the largest group of immigrant origin. These communities have their origin in the West German ‘guest worker’ programme of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a labour shortage during the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ (economic miracle).
“About half of them now have German citizenship or are dual citizens. As a poorer section of the working class, they tended to concentrate in areas with low rents, and gradually they came to visually dominate certain areas in all major cities.
“For certain German nationalists, anti-Turkish racism didn’t really have that much of a religious element, more a cultural one – although since 9/11 the anti-Islamic element has grown and open racism has become almost socially acceptable.
“The second element is the large influx of refugees in 2015, when Merkel temporarily opened the borders.”
With the entrance of the AfD into the Bundestag, it is more important than ever to combine a clear anti-racist line with the broader fight for workers’ right. Though the level of class struggle remains low, the situation is open.

Far right gains in German elections

The 23 April first round French presidential election revealed the political effects of inequality and attacks on social welfare, with the electoral routing of the Socialist and Republican parties. Neither made it through to this weekend’s second round. Between them, the traditional parties won just over a quarter of the vote, with the fascist Marine Le Pen and left-populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon making serious gains.
Instability
The French electoral system was designed to prevent this kind of result. But the institutional arrangements of the Fifth Republic couldn’t circumvent popular rage against the “extreme centre” – the full-throttle pursuit of neoliberal policy – and its political representatives. Mathieu Bonzom, an editor of the online socialist magazine Contretemps explains via email:
“At the root of it all lie the contradictions of neoliberalism, worsened by the economic and social crisis sparked about 10 years ago, which has had deep consequences even while mainstream politicians tried to pretend the crisis was over. Mainstream parties have responded to the crisis by accelerating neoliberal attacks, which made them increasingly unpopular.
“They also resorted to a racist, patriotic and imperialistic strategy along the lines of the global war on terror, which delayed their decline but also accelerated the rise of the fascist National Front (FN). This race to the right of the political spectrum has negatively influenced even the left, but also opened up space for a left alternative.”
The neoliberal race to the bottom created a paradox. There was an unprecedented level of lesser evil “strategic” voting, with some polls showing that more than half the support going to Emmanuel Macron, who won the first round of voting and is now favourite to win the presidency, came from people who don’t actually support his broader program of neoliberalism-as-usual.
Yet strategic voting could not stop the National Front’s challenge, or the independent, anti-neoliberal left. There is nothing surprising in this. For years, the two main government parties have increasingly stood for the same rotten policies. Discontent had already taken the fascists to the second round in 2002 when the Socialist Party (PS) vote dropped after five years of a very neoliberal socialist government.
“The similarities between 2002 and today are obvious”, Bonzom says. “Long before the election, the popularity of the PS under president Hollande and prime minister Valls had sunk to an all-time low, and most people pretty much expected the FN to reach the second round.” However, people assumed that a Republican candidate would run off against Le Pen in a re-run of 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen was beaten by Jacques Chirac. But, mired in corruption scandals, the Republicans lost votes to Macron.
None of this means that the traditional parties are finished. Bonzom argues that the Republicans will probably make a comeback in the June legislative elections. And if Macron claims victory in the presidential race, “he is probably going to rely on many PS incumbents”. Whatever combination of president and parliament – it is unlikely that Macron could garner a majority in parliament – there will be pressure from the FN and the left-populist Mélenchon. It will be an unstable government.
The left
Forces to the left of the PS had a significant breakthrough in the first round. “It was the most successful electoral initiative of the left running independently of the PS in decades”, Bonzom says. “It’s one of the rare pieces of good news in the 23 April results.”
One of the key debates on the French left is about the nature of Mélenchon’s “Insubordinate France” movement. Mélenchon is controversial – a former Trotskyist and confessed Freemason who spent decades in the PS before creating the Left Party in 2009. The Left Party then formed the Left Front with the French Communist Party, but serious disagreements plagued the formation: the communists were far softer on the PS than Mélenchon’s group.
Mélenchon, Bonzom says, has “replaced explicit references to class with rhetoric about the French people (opposed to the elites), and replaced the symbols of the labour movement with those of the French Republic (flags, anthems, mottos and all)”. He even refuses to use the word “left”. Most people associate the left with the PS, so a rejection of the label was part of distancing his campaign from Hollande and Valls. But there is more to it:
“It was also a matter of strategy in the face of a nationalist, racist opposition to neoliberalism – in the FN and beyond. It seems that the strategy was meant to recapture ‘the Republic’ for ‘us’, but it meant imitating some of the right’s or even the far right’s language, in the hope of ‘taking back’ part of the FN vote. Mélenchon’s platform and campaign on issues like immigration were a mix of solidarity and insistence that it be reduced.
“Mélenchon once blamed immigrant guest workers for lower wages and working conditions, but also had a mass rally in Marseille and held a minute’s silence in memory of the many migrants who died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. His anti-FN credentials are real, and yet he inserted a well-known and decades-old FN motto in the conclusion of one of his televised speeches, ‘Giving back France to French people’, which he tried to reframe within his denunciation of the ‘oligarchy’.
“At the same time, the weaknesses of his campaign on the issue of racism and especially Islamophobia are reflections of similar weaknesses of the French left on those issues, despite some recent advances of independent and radical anti-racist mobilisations. This aspect of the Mélenchon campaign was bound to repel some of the people that Mélenchon aims to represent, especially immigrants and people of colour.”
Mélenchon both opens a space and creates an obstacle for the radical left. The rest of the left was outflanked – despite brilliant interventions against the rich in various debates – by Insubordinate France. The argument for an uncompromising and intransigent struggle of class against class, rather than a watered down populist discourse, was sidelined. The space opened is not only constrained by the political limitations of Mélenchon, but by whether he will squander his momentum after this weekend. Bonzom believes that the far left should not, however, get fixated on his shortcomings:
“The future of the left depends on its ability to create a lasting, independent, democratic force that is willing and big enough to take on neoliberal austerity and racist authoritarianism at once – fighting the ruling class while keeping the FN at bay. Much as the far left likes to insist on the role of ‘the street’ (social struggles) as opposed to ’the ballot boxes’, the electoral and institutional arena should not be left out of a strategy for the renewal of anti-capitalist struggles.
“Our struggles have not been hampered only by concession-prone leaders: the labour movement itself has been declining. Meanwhile, the economic conjuncture does not leave the ruling class with a lot of leeway, which means that the bar is set higher; our struggles have to be much more powerful than at other times to have a shot at any significant victory or advance. Such a high level of struggle is much harder to reach today.”
Le Pen’s neo-fascism
Nearly every article written about Marine Le Pen peddles garbage about a so-called detoxification process in the FN, implying that the fascist core and history of the party has been broken with simply because it has changed the way it talks and because it has become more media savvy:
“The best way to understand words like ‘detoxification’ is to see that the FN has made some real changes without giving us any reason to believe that its leadership has renounced fascist views and goals. We are dealing with a leadership that has been very good at using every opening offered by the ruling class’ strategy … A lot of what’s going on regarding the war on terror, Islamophobia, discrimination in the name of the Republic, denial of racist police brutality, etc. plays into the FN’s hands.”
The party has waged an ideological battle for decades and constantly points to the fact that its ideas are spreading and being imitated by politicians on the right and left and that people “prefer the original rather than the copy”.
Its republican discourse – presenting the party as the heir of Charles De Gaulle rather than Phillipe Pétain – is a means to combat a republican front that itself is falling apart in the neoliberal decay. The party, under Le Pen’s leadership, has also engaged in a more aggressive fight over economic issues as a way to promote its “French First” solutions to unemployment, distress and poverty. There is no doubt that this discourse speaks to real anger and has won the party electoral influence in the de-industrialised north and north-east beyond its historic strongholds.
“We could say that they have made some changes as a way to increase their influence”, Bonzom says. “But the leadership is arguably looking for ways to carve out a new path to fascism. Even people who argue that there has been a kind of ‘right-republican conversion’ of the FN do not necessarily conclude that it is incompatible with fascism … If elected, Le Pen could do a lot of damage with the existing institutions, which give a lot of powers to the president.”
Le Pen is confident that she will win a sizeable slice of failed Republican Party candidate François Fillon’s voters who aren’t going to vote Macron. Indeed, she has already taken a significant section of the traditional right wing vote. She’d like to build on this – as she has done through a deal struck with the reactionary Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who won around 5 percent of the first round vote.
But Le Pen is also fighting for voters who backed Mélenchon, arguing that they should reject Macron. The FN has release point-by-point comparisons of both platforms, attempting to place Mélenchon’s policies closer to the FN’s than they actually are. In the northern city of Amiens, she upstaged Macron at a Whirlpool plant – which is likely to close – by greeting crowds of disgruntled workers while he was downtown having a meeting with a few union representatives.
Her argument to the popular classes is that Macron is their worst enemy: the system, with Macron as its official representative, is corrupt to the core and the FN is the only party that fights in the name of “the forgotten”. This is part of the far right’s strategy of creating a new electoral alliance of the middle classes and sections of the working class.
Where is the resistance?
Anti-fascist organising in France has been weaker and less coherent than in Britain, where the Anti-Nazi League and Unite Against Fascism had successful campaigns to beat back the far right. There has also been a decline in anti-fascist campaigning since 2002. At that time, when Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round run-offs, many people understood that the FN was a fascist threat. Many had been to or seen demonstrations protesting against FN leaders who visited their towns. And many people thought the FN was weaker and destabilised after a split in the late 1990s. But today, Bonzom says, things are different:
“This time, the FN’s result hardly surprised anyone … Most people expected a Fillon-Le Pen second round. Yet attempts to build the anti-fascist movement have had limited success. This is one of the reasons why the wave of protest has been much smaller so far. It also has to do with the success of the detoxification strategies, which seems to have erased, especially among younger generations, what used to be obvious: the FN is racist, very reactionary and dangerous. Some people who would never think of voting for the party, including some people on the left, don’t seem to believe that it poses a specific threat or that it is indeed the worst enemy of non-white people, women and the working class.”
It is an open debate on the left about whether or not to vote for Macron against Le Pen – even among those who do not accept the republican consensus. Macron is weakened by the fact that he is hardly a convincing figure. Few actually believe that his policies would better the lives of ordinary people. According to Bonzom, it would be a disastrous policy to uncritically back him against Le Pen:
“The anti-fascist movement we need cannot follow the path of the ‘republican front’ and avoid criticising Macron and everything he represents. It cannot call (or even appear to call) for abstention, otherwise it would cut itself off from most people of colour for example, who realise what the FN is; but it cannot support (or even appear to support) Macron, otherwise it would cut itself off from broad sections of the working class that are tempted to put Le Pen and Macron on the same level, and who must be convinced first and foremost not to vote for Le Pen. ‘Not one vote for Le Pen’ should be the most unifying slogan.
“The relatively small but energetic youth protests of the last few days have been organised with a ‘neither Le Pen nor Macron’ line. In this, the tendency to underestimate the FN is mixed with something else: many of these young people don’t have the right to vote yet, or got it recently, and this slogan best expresses their disgust at a political system which tries to force them to choose between two options they instinctively reject, especially following last year’s protest movement aimed mainly against the neoliberal order.
“Yet it remains necessary to convince them not to place Macron and Le Pen on the same footing. That should be possible, if political and labour leaders who have expressed themselves along the lines of ‘not one vote for Le Pen’ try their best, and succeed, in bringing out larger crowds. However, because the labour movement remains in crisis … they may be having a hard time connecting to their base while walking the line I’ve just explained, which may be a thin line in some unions.”
The dangers of the situation are manifold. In 2002, the massive vote for Chirac – more than 80 percent – was a May ’68 for the right. The new president used his mandate to attack workers and students. So a weaker vote for Macron – if Le Pen is kept out of power – is a weaker mandate to rip up social welfare and attack workers.
Yet if a weaker Macron vote were seen as (or actually is) a result of a surge in Le Pen votes, this would only boost the momentum of the FN. In any case, Macron’s program will not have mass legitimacy – he will be attacked from the left, the social movements and the far right. This could open serious fractures in his government if it tries to face down resistance. If Macron wins, his will be a turbulent reign.

Understanding the French elections

Frantz Fanon wrote of the French occupation of Algeria: “[The] veil, one of the elements of the traditional Algerian garb, was to become the bone of contention in a grandiose battle, on account of which the occupation forces were to mobilise their most powerful and most varied resources, and in the course of which the colonised were to display a surprising force of inertia”.
Under the colonial administration of the 1930s, ethnologists and sociologists – officials of French administration who were committed to destroying any cultural and religious symbol that could form the material for a national struggle – turned the veil into an object of “rational enquiry”.
It was a strategy to domesticate resistance. Social workers advised women to take off the garment, as they handed out crumbs of charity. The French Republic attacked the colonised, their habits of dress and religious symbols, in the name of “emancipating” them from archaic social practices. This was an effort to destroy a culture – when veils weren’t being torn off, this was the “soft” side of brutal carnage that took over a million Algerian lives.
Forty years after the Algerians finally won their independence, the veil again came under ferocious attack in France, in the guise of defending laïcité and the republic. Pierre Bourdieu called it “the imperialism of the universal … the idea that France was the bearer of reason and universal values”. Former prime minister François Fillon, the conservative right’s candidate in this year’s presidential elections, captured this idea when he said that “colonisation was about sharing the culture of France with other people”.
“A lot of people do not see that there was a huge rupture in the conception of laïcité in France, at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s”, says Ugo Palheta, editor of the journal Contretemps, referring to the banning of religious signs in schools, which led to the Islamophobic ban on the veil in 2004.
Classical laïcité had not been about imposing religious neutrality on pupils or their parents. The separation of church and state, established in 1905, upheld two principles of laïcité: the guarantee of freedom of conscience and equality before the state. The law of 1905 targeted agents and employees of the state – especially teachers. It did not concern the pupils, but the school curriculum, the textbook material and the insignia of the local schools. However, there was a shift in the late 1980s and early 1990s:
“The debate around laïcité turned from one debate, which was about the private schools and how … the state funds them. The debate moves from this onto another debate, which was brought about in the late 1980s, especially in 1989 with what has been called ‘the veil affair of Creil’, a place in the Oise [a department in the north of France], where two girls were expelled from junior high school.
“At that time, and this is interesting because you see how there was a rupture afterwards, the Council of State, which is the highest juridical authority in France, said that it wasn’t legal to expel the two girls because they were wearing the hijab. So at that point the Council of State still upheld that laïcité was about guaranteeing the freedom of conscience and not prohibition. Laïcité was called a ‘regime of freedom’ by its founders … It was not conceived as a regime of constraint.”
Palheta refers to Jean Baubérot, a historian of laïcité. He was the sole member of the Stasi Commission (established in 2003) to refuse to vote for the ban on the veil in schools. His work demonstrates that by the 2004 ban, a new, thoroughly Islamophobic, version of laïcité had been established.
This is not to idealise early laïcité. The Ferry laws of 1881-82 – measures that introduced the principle that primary education should be free, compulsory and secular – were a crucial ingredient in the formation of a French national identity inseparable from the project of colonialism and class discipline.
The ideal was always in the service of capital, but today, when sections of the left in France consent to Islamophobia in the name of this ideal, it is important to see how this new laïcité emerged, and understand the role it plays for the French capitalist class and its political representatives. Palheta explains:
“In the beginning of the 2000s, in an international context of rising Islamophobia (coming especially from intellectuals and politicians), we’ve seen in France a new convergence between the Socialist Party and Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy’s right wing party [the Republicans]. One figure, François Baroin [a former minister and currently the mayor of Troyes], said that what was needed was a ‘new laïcité’. At least he was honest on that, and he is one of the only to be honest on that – that the laïcité in France since the 2004 law is the product of a political rupture. The figures from the Socialist Party or the right wing parties always say that they are in continuity with the tradition of laïcité in France … The conception of laïcité was changed and it became completely out of control from that point onwards.
“For example, in 2012, the minister of education put out an administrative document, saying that parents shouldn’t be allowed to accompany students on school visits – for example in museums, or public places – while expressing religious beliefs, or wearing some ostensible signs of religious belonging. It was directed against Muslim mothers who wear the hijab. Another example is the debate over the long black skirts that some girls wear: in some schools, girls wearing this kind of skirt have been expelled because it was considered a religious sign. Same thing for the bandana: in some schools it is measured to see if it is a religious sign or not. It is getting really crazy and, as you can see, absurd.
“The most absurd thing is the huge public debate that has taken place for years now over the food in school canteens. In one of his last speeches during the right wing primaries last year, Sarkozy said that those students – especially Muslim pupils – who don’t eat pork should be given a second serve of potato chips … While the far right was violently opposed to ‘classical laïcité’ during the 20th century, the National Front is in favour of this new laïcité because it is directed against Muslims. Mainstream parties created a laïcité that the National Front can accept, and which reinforces them because it gives them a lot of new and acceptable ‘arguments’ against migrants and their descendants from the ex-colonies of France.”
So if Islamophobia now plays a central role in the new laïcité, what function does it serve?
Prior to the 2004 ban, the conservative Chirac-Raffarin government had been weakened by working class mobilisations against attacks on pensions. Its members cultivated the conversation about laïcité because they knew that the issue would divide the left politically. “It divided the Socialist Party. It divided the Communist Party. It divided the far left”, says Palheta. “It divided everyone on the left, every organisation, every union, even the anti-racist associations and the human rights leagues. Everyone was divided on this question. It was a strategic move. And they knew that this division was going to last. They did it, and it worked very well for them.”
Before the pension struggle and the ban on the hijab, voguish and hack intellectuals – like Alain Finkielkraut and Regis Debray (who turned militant nationalist after being a theoretician of the foquista guerrilla struggle) – had already done a great deal of work to convince people that the veil should be banned from schools. They fomented a moral panic, and charged that then education minister Lionel Jospin’s decision not to expel the students in the 1989 veil affair of Creil was akin to a Munich Agreement (when France and England accepted Nazi Germany’s claim over part of Czechoslovakia in 1938) against the republic.
National identity is now being redefined in France. Islamophobia is the key weapon being used by the ruling class to deepen divisions through structural discrimination in schools, health, housing and the labour force. The aim, according to Palheta, is to “build a new alliance, a new bloc between the ruling class and some fractions of the working class … It is a way of building an [imaginary] alliance with people who are suffering from exploitation on the basis of hatred for Muslims”.
Palheta ties the specificity of Islamophobic oppression to France’s class structure. This is important. It isn’t enough to see Islamophobia as tied to its earlier imperialist project, without taking into consideration the present domestic needs of the ruling class and their neoliberal vision of French society:
“What explains the violence of Islamophobic attacks and the racist offensive of the ruling class is that they were unable to fully impose the neoliberal agenda because of the cycle of mass struggles that took place in France mostly between 1995 and 2010. The imposition of the neoliberal agenda was delayed, and the only way to build political legitimacy and a hegemonic bloc was to rely on nationalist and racist ideas. Islamophobia appeared as the main tool they had at their disposal.
“They were unable to convert the French social formation to neoliberalism like the ruling classes did in Britain with Thatcher and Blair, or Schröder in Germany, so they had to figure out a way of building a new hegemony in France. That’s why racism became so prominent here in the political strategies of the French ruling class, which has rebuilt the national identity around Islamophobia. There’s a paradox here: it’s because of the strength of social struggles – even if they were not strong enough to put up an alternative to the austerity and neoliberal agenda, but strong enough to delay the imposition of the neoliberal agenda – that France became the capital of reaction in Europe.”
It is therefore urgent to struggle against Islamophobia and to link it to the broader class struggle. Attacks against Muslims are increasing – from street assaults on girls and women wearing the hijab, to the hundreds of girls who can’t go to school because of the veil ban. For Palheta, “leading struggles to end the attacks and protect Muslims and be part of Muslims protecting themselves against attacks” is a priority. “The first thing is this: struggling against a specific form of oppression that hurts millions of people.”
Piled onto the wave of Islamophobia is the state of emergency, in effect since the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which gives exceptional powers to the president and has intensified the state’s targeting of people living and working in working class neighbourhoods, and especially Muslims working and living in segregated working class and non-white neighbourhoods.
The new nationalism is strengthened by the idea of an internal enemy; a fifth column threatening national cohesion. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission (which imagined a dystopian France led by Muslims) and Eric Zemmour’s (the French equivalent of Australia’s Andrew Bolt or the US’s Ann Coulter) litany of best sellers are examples of a nationalist panic. Recent developments have added a new layer to the racism that already existed in the post-colonial state, which stigmatised Black and North African populations. The far right, the right and the republican left are now on the offensive.
All this makes for high stakes in the fight against Islamophobia.

Alain Krivine (1941-2022)

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