This interview was conducted between our sibling organizations Die Plattform
(Germany) and Union Communiste Libertaire (France). It focuses on the recentlarge-scale strikes of French workers starting in January 2023 which wereorganized in opposition to a proposed 'reform' of the country's pensionsystem-effectively raising the age of retirement from 62 to 64. The situationbecame especially contentious as the government of Emmanuel Macron invokedarticle 49.3 of the French constitution, allowing it to bypass a parliamentaryvote and force through the reform with little oversight. ---- The originalversion of this interview can be heard (in English) on the YouTube page of DiePlafttform. ---- This interview has been edited for length and clarity. - BRRN -Die Plattform IntroductionSince the beginning of this year, a strong mass social movement has developed inFrance against the pension reform plans of the neoliberal President Macron.Millions of people took part in street mobilizations, strikes paralyzed variousindustries - in some cases for weeks - and there were militant clashes withpolice forces.Many leftists in Germany and beyond looked enthusiastically and enviously toFrance. But for some weeks now, hardly anything has been heard of the struggleagainst the pension reform, which was forced through parliament without a vote inmid-April. Is the movement dead? And if not, where does it stand today? To answerthese questions, we conducted a lengthy interview with comrade Guillaume fromFrance in mid-May. He is active in the CGT union and a member of our Frenchsister organization Union Communiste Libertaire (UCL). Guillaume offers anexciting perspective from inside the movement, highlighting its strengths andweaknesses and also providing valuable insights for the class struggle in Germanyand beyond.Die Plattform (DP): Who are you and where are you politically active?Guillaume (G): I am Guillaume and have been a member of Union CommunisteLibertaire (UCL) since its creation in 2019. Before that I was a member of one ofthe two organizations that merged to found UCL. We are a libertarian communistorganization. We come from the social anarchism current but we also would like tointegrate other traditions of social movements and the workers movement. But ourcore ideological system is social anarchism.As a revolutionary militant I am also a union organizer, like most of ourcomrades in UCL, because we believe that the first duty of a revolutionaryactivist is to organize the working class and the oppressed classes generally.And also I think it's more honest if I say precisely that being a union organizerhas been my job now for the past year and a half in the sports industry.So I'm a member and an organizer of CGT, which is the main class struggle union.For those who don't know what the CGT is, it used to be the union affiliated withthe Communist Party for decades but since the fall of the Communist Party and theso-called communist bloc, it is slightly more open and we can do activism from alibertarian perspective within CGT.DP: Which developments of the last few years are important in understanding thecurrent situation in France?G: As you know, Macron was re-elected last year. He was facing the far rightparty Rassemblement National against him. Usually it's much easier when a classicpolitician faces the far right. They usually win with a huge margin, but heactually did not. After that, we had the legislative elections and he couldn'twin a proper majority in parliament. So he is now in quite a difficult situationbecause he doesn't really have the majority to rule the country. It's politicallyimportant in France to have such a thing, we're not used to building coalitionsas it can be done in parliamentary democracies like Germany.This led to Macron being elected with the support of the left against the farright but also being deeply unpopular for his second term. During his firstfive-year term he led a very pro-business government, completely destroying thelabor court, passing laws against unemployed people, against immigrants, againstthe public welfare system and pushing neoliberal policies benefiting the rich,claiming it will trickle down to everyone. Obviously it didn't work. So he foughtreally hard against social movements like the Yellow Vest movement and theenvironmental movement.This created a kind of new polarization of the political scene. Before we used toknow two blocs: the left wing and the right wing. I grew up in a country where wecould not imagine there would be political options other than the right and left.The Communist Party was already down and we were used to either the left or theright ruling the country. When Macron arrived in power it completely transformedthe situation. We now have three blocs: the nationalist bloc on the far right,the liberalist center but mainly right wing bloc, and a left that is gettingcloser to our ideas. I mean not really our ideas, it's obviously a reformistleft, but it's becoming a bit more left than it used to be. So we have this newsituation right now.In 2019, the prime minister at the time, Eduard Philippe, tried to impose a newreform of the pension system and he had to face a really massive strike,especially in public transportation - in the nationwide railway company and inthe Paris transportation network. But when the COVID lockdowns started, hewithdrew it. He obviously pretended not to, but he withdrew it because the momentwas no longer about the pension reform but about the worldwide pandemic. So whenMacron got reelected he had to prove that he had the capacity to conduct economicreform. So attacking the pension system anew was a strong symbol and it really issomething that everyone cares about in France. Having the age of retirement setat 60[in the 1980s], it was really considered the main victory of socialmovements, of the class struggle unions. Also the pension system is part of whatwe call Sécurité Social (social security), which was implemented after World WarII in the context of a very strong Communist influence in government, thanks totheir participation in the French resistance against the Nazis.So it also has a kind of emotional and political background for many of us. Thatalso explains why they cannot clearly state that they are destroying this system,that they are aiming to dismantle it, so they pretend to be saving it.DP: What was the situation like immediately before the start of the struggleagainst the pension reform?G: More generally, the broader social context is rather tense. We've seen stronginflation and there's been no general salary increase from the government. Sothere has been quite a lot of local fights in companies around the wage question.Last autumn, for instance, there were fights in the refineries to increase wagesand these conflicts were partially successful and enjoyed public support. Thestruggles were mostly concentrated locally with the support of the union and thesocial organizations, but they never generalized across society.So basically at that moment, everyone was waiting for a general social movementaround this question of pension reform. Actually, the government postponed theofficial announcement of the reform. It was supposed to be in mid-December, butthey wanted to avoid it being one of the topics of family gatherings over thewinter holidays. They made the official announcement in January so we wouldn'tspeak together about it.DP: What was the extent of the movement in the first few months?G: We had like four months of very intense social movement activity. It wasmostly led by the unions. So from the first day of demonstrations, which wasmid-January, to May 1st, we had 1 million to 3 million people in the streets likeonce a week. It's the longest social movement we've had with that intensity. Ithink it's also interesting that we had demonstrations and actions in small- andmiddle-sized towns, which is not that usual. Like for instance in my region,which is quite a small and rural region in France. Usually people of the bigcities make fun of us because we are from the countryside and so on. And in mydépartement[similar to a county in the U.S.]we had up to six demonstrations onthe same day, in different cities. And the smallest city which had demonstrationswas not even 10,000 people. They had quite big demos for the size of the city. Sothis was one of the most important points of the movement.Aside from these demonstrations, on March 7th we had some sectors of industrybegin massive, unlimited strikes. We had these strikes in the railway sector, inenergy companies, in oil refineries, and also in waste collection companies -both state owned and private firms. There have been mobilizations, strikes,actions against this reform in every part of the working class. This is somethingwe have to point out too.Many private companies in sectors that usually do not show any sign ofmobilization when social movements happen have had strikes and actions, althoughit often happened only on the biggest days in the biggest demos. In that case,many people were not actually on strike but they were using their day off to cometo the demos or they were working from home and using two hours to come to thedemo. Some union members would attend by using their "union time," which we asunion organizers would instead advocate to use to help the comrades, workers,colleagues, rather than using it to go on demos.But there were at least some workers in every company and every workplace whowent on strike to go to the demos, even in places where we have no unionpresence. In some places, they really don't know what a union is and still therewere people on strike. It really has been a very long time since we've seen sucha massive movement. For instance, many old comrades would compare it to thestrikes of 1995, and some older comrades would say that it looks like May 1968.So it was and is clearly a very important movement.DP: What position did the unions take?G: It was quite interesting because all the unions of France are opposed to thisreform. It's been a long time since we had such unity in our camp. Even the mostreformist unions, like the CFDT, were against this reform. This front ofopposition was important and it's still united. It was quite an important pointbecause this unity is not only based on a minimal agreement between all of them,but they also managed to express support for more radical strategies like theunlimited strikes, although some unions that are part of this unity clearly havenot adopted this strategy. So overall it was quite a political victory for our camp.DP: But why has this movement not been able to prevent this pension reform?G: We did not succeed in generalizing the strike for real. It stuck to being ledby the most advanced sectors of our class. The railway, waste sectors, the energysector, the oil industry. Some sectors that have a strong unionist tradition, forexample the education sector, did not manage to start a massive unlimited strike.I think the education sector is interesting because it's one of the mostpoliticized sectors in France. But even though many left political activists werepushing for the generalization of the strike and to overcome the rhythm of onedemo each week, they did not manage to do it.That's related to my next point, which is that we noticed a worrying lack ofparticipation in general assemblies. We have several possible explanations inmind, though we cannot be completely sure, but we did not manage to bring ourcolleagues to the general assemblies. I believe that I've never seen such astrong movement in terms of the numbers of people in demos, of the support fromthe general population, but the fact that we did not manage to bring ourcoworkers into the assemblies meant that we couldn't decide the rhythm of themobilizations, the intensity of our movement, and we couldn't properlyself-organize the movement. So this situation gave the national unionorganization, what we call Intersyndicale, the power to dictate the rhythm.DP: What role did the general assemblies play in the struggle?G: The general assembly is what we call the gathering of our colleagues, where wedecide whether to go on strike or not. We usually organize strikes in this way.Usually the unions initiate the strikes, and then when we manage to create asuccessful strike movement, in every workplace where there is a real strikehappening, we have a council of workers who decide what time they go on strike,what action they will do in the next days, if they initiate a rotation in thestrike, and things like that. So these are not formal structures, they are morespontaneous gatherings of co-workers.These are really important also because we have a fragmented union landscape. Wehave like eight unions. So in the general assembly we gather workers from all ofthe unions so that everyone discusses things together. When we don't have thiskind of gathering, the workers cannot decide for themselves how they want tobuild the movement.In France there is a leftist trend right now to complain to the leadership of theunions that the movement is not strong enough, that the leadership doesn'tescalate it. In UCL we believe that such a discourse isn't fair. We believe thatit's a collective responsibility as a class to make the movement stronger, andthat at least for this movement, the problem was not how radical the unionleadership was or wasn't, but more the lack of capacity in the working class. Wehave not been able to bring our colleagues into more radical methods ofstruggles. For example, this united coalition of unions called for stoppingFrance on March 7th. At that moment we believed that it would be a good moment togrow into a stronger, more radical movement. But we did not manage to make theeconomy stop for real. We clearly managed to make a massive crack in the economy,but not enough to stop it for real.DP: Why were you not able to expand the movement to broader parts of the class?G: I would say the main reason is the weakness of the unions, because we're allfacing the same harsh economic conditions and yet there are parts of the class,like the garbage collectors, who make minimum wage and still manage to organizelong term strikes. Beyond this first issue of the weakness of union organizationand structures, the other main issue is the context of inflation and the cost ofliving becoming more and more expensive. This clearly made it more difficult forus to bring people out on strike to fight for a long time without getting theirdaily wage. But in my sector, in my industry, very often people don't even knowthat they can go on strike. They believe there has to be a union in the companyand they have to give a one week notice to their boss or something like that. Butin France, in the private sector, it's actually quite easy to go on strike. Ifyou're two people and you have a common claim, like you want to increase thewage, you can go on strike and you just give a notice to your boss when you stopworking and that's it. So it should be quite easy. But people don't know about it.DP: Why was it possible to expand the movement in other struggles before?G: I would say many people now are afraid of the repression that could happenafter being on strike. It was a very different cultural context before, Ibelieve. It was easier for the left to spread ideas. Even in the intellectual andcultural spheres it was much easier, though I clearly was not there. And at thattime there was a very strong Communist Party and far left tendencies were builtin opposition to that. If I can make it a bit schematic, the Communist Party wasquite strong in the industrial sectors and far left tendencies were strong in theyouth and in the student movement. So there were these two legs of the socialmovement that would make it quite strong.And back in 1995, the worker movement was already quite weak, weaker than it usedto be. But still it had some places where it was strong. But the student movementwas really much stronger than it is now in France. I think now the situation ofthe student movement is really catastrophic. And yes, there was this tradition, Ithink many people in 1995 knew how it was to be on strike. They would not fearit, at least in the places where the union was strong. They knew that if theywanted to win this fight, they would need to be on strike for at least one week,probably two or three weeks. And this was not such an obstacle as it is now.Now it is really difficult to bring people to that stage of consciousness. But Iwould say there is too much resignation, too much fatalism and people don'tbelieve they can actually win.DP: March 8th, International Women's Day, fell right into the middle of themobilisations. Were you able to link the strikes against the pension reform tothe feminist strike?G: We had a general strike on March 7th and as the class struggle unions, wetried to make a link to March 8th, saying general strike on the 7th, feministstrike on the 8th. It worked, but not as much as we had hoped. And unfortunatelythat's the consequence of a very masculine image of the working class that hasbeen around for decades and that was especially brought forward by the CommunistParty, by Stalinism.So the sectors where the unions are strong are mostly male-dominated sectors. Andthese are the sectors that started the unlimited strike. We did not manage tohave a massive strike that started in feminized sectors. But March 8th was stillnot a failure because it was bigger than it usually is. It was the first timethat the unions - at least the class struggle unions - clearly called for afeminist strike. And it happened in some regions, and in some sectors where wehave influence and where the unions are quite advanced.On these issues, we had some local successes, but it was not a complete success,to be honest.DP: What role did UCL as a political organization play in this movement?G: Basically, as UCL we were mostly trying to coordinate the info we had. Likesharing the experience, trying to feel the movement the best way we can. We havepeople in every big city and also in very small rural areas so we could feel thedifferences and so on. As I said, I think it's a very important topic of themovement. So that we could share the experience, we built collective analysis andtried to spread it as much as we could with our leaflets, with our newspapers andsocial networks and so on. But the main point, the main task we have asrevolutionary activists, is to support the grassroots movement. So being involvedin the unions and being self-organizers of the unions, trying to bring morecreativity into it.I think one of our duties, specifically as UCL, is that we can have differentcircles meet and communicate. For instance, we have connections in the autonomousscene and there has been strong conflict between the autonomous scene and theunions. So we had this in-between position for them to communicate. And also wetried to bring more holistic views on the pension reform analysis, like includingfeminist, environmentalist, decolonial, and LGBTI inclusive views, which isunfortunately not very common in the unions.DP: How did the movement develop after the first months of mobilizations?G: When we realized that we would not be able to bring more sectors intocontinuous struggle, many of us chose to reorient our efforts toward directaction, such as blocking the roads, blocking the industrial zones, and occupyingofficial buildings and headquarters of financial companies.The energy sector initiated electrical blackouts in some strategic places andafter March 23rd when Macron used constitutional trick 49.3 to bypass the vote ofthe parliament, the youth entered the movement for real. Many wild demos happenedday and night, especially in Paris and in the big cities. But also the repressiongrew much stronger. We saw it in the past years, but not as much in the first andsecond phase of this movement.So anyway, this movement still has very good points. We're seeing a strongre-politicization around the question of work and the distribution of wealth.There are many more rural places of the country that have been mobilized and thatwere not before.But on the other side of the movement, the level of organization - ofself-organization of the movement - was rather poor and it was quite worryingfrom our point of view. Seeing this weakness, a part of the movement was tryingto put pressure on the politicians and parliament not to vote in the law and soon. It was in some way doing a proxy struggle by trying to influence thepoliticians to make them vote in our views.DP: Where is the movement right now?G: Now the reform has been passed. It has finished its institutional way so itshould be applied in September. Though now we had a very massive May 1st which isvery good according to us. But now this coalition of unions, I think, are buryingthe movement and they are advocating for a further day of mobilization in June.But still the anger of the people is very high and the government is completelydiscredited. So although we did not manage to grow strong enough to win, we stillmanaged to take some steps forward in the level of conflict and organization ofour class.We had many, many people joining the unions during this movement. Now it's alsoone of our tasks to keep them in the unions and bring them more tools and moreenergy to build greater power against their bosses and against the state. Nowwe're in the fourth phase of the movement, I would say. The government cannotproperly rule. Each time a minister or the president moves somewhere they havecrowds waiting for them making a lot of noise and shouting slogans and so on. Wehave many small actions everywhere, like every day, it is a kind of harassmentstrategy.Macron was advocating 100 days to move forward, to go to another phase, apolitical phase, and the movement responded with 100 days of disorder. So we willnot let the phase pass peacefully. We will see what happens. I cannot pretend toknow the future but for sure the anger is still very high so maybe something willhappen in the coming months.For example, in the leftist scene many were pointing at the Olympic Games as atarget. The Olympic Games are going to happen in Paris next year and they had togentrify many poor neighborhoods in Paris for it. They also implemented facialrecognition with cameras. So there are many subjects around the Olympic Gamesthat could be the base for an outburst as happened in Brazil for the World Cup in2014. We'll see, but that could be one of the options we have.DP: What lessons can be learned from this movement?G: I think one of the interesting points is that, as I said, we managed to bringmore activity to the small cities, the very small cities. I hope it will renewthe social movement in these cities because I think this is one of the keys forthe left in general and the social movement in particular to regain our strength.We were mostly concentrated in the big cities for too long and we were gettingconcentrated in the high cultural classes and so on, and this movement can be oneof the strategic turns that we need to take in order to regain influence in thecountryside. I believe this is a lesson not only from this movement but from whatwe saw in the United States with Trump's election, and his support by the whiteworking class of the countryside.I would say the other point would be to try to understand better the reasons whywe could not bring people into structures of self-organization such as thegeneral assemblies of workers. I believe this is really a worrying point for us.We need such structures and, at least for now, we cannot imagine victoriousstruggles without such structures. So we need to understand better what happenedand why we missed the mark. We believe some things were broken during thepandemic, like social relationships. That's one of the reasons that has been usedto try to explain the situation.And I believe that the other main issue of this movement was the weakness of theunions in many sectors. So we have this long and hard work to rebuild theinfluence of the unions in every sector and not only focus on the male-dominatedhistorical sectors of the working class.DP: What is your perspective for the coming years?G: I would say this is one of the biggest movements we've known. Clearly, it'sbeen interesting in many ways.We do believe this movement brings to the forefront the social question. This isan important development in France, as the public debate has been dominated foryears with racist polemics and stupid shit like that. So this is really good forus. But also we believe this movement brings to the forefront the weaknesses ofour unions. We are facing a radicalized bourgeoisie and we cannot say that ourcurrent level of class organization and structure is sufficient for the comingtasks. When I say the coming tasks, I can say obviously there is the continuationof the class war as it has happened for the past two centuries against the bossesand against the state, but also the climate crisis, in which capitalism now isbuilding the conditions of our extinction.Now that the movement is declining, I believe the real hard work forrevolutionaries is beginning. We know what we need. We need stronger massmovements, stronger unions and for that we need to not fall into resignation andfatalism. We need political organizations to give balance to the movement and tomove forward and keep reinforcing them, to keep building the social organizationsthat we need.DP: Thank you very much for taking the time, comrade.https://blackrosefed.org/france-pension-strike-2023/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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