ZCommunications Topic: Yellow Vest Protest Movement Exposes Inequality

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ZCommunications » Yellow Vest Protest Movement Exposes Inequality

Excerpt:

"The organized Left showed little sympathy for this, self-organized, autonomous (albeit amorphous) uprising of desperate and angry lower middle class people who, out of long experience, reject domination by union and party leaders. Plus, they live in places no one has heard of and sing the Marseillaise (originally a revolutionary song, but who remembers?) More, the color “Yellow” used to stand for “scab unions.” So the unions and Left parties, as usual embroiled in infighting among each other, instead of supporting the Yellow Vests’ struggle against Macron and offering leadership by example, left the field open to the Right. LePen’s people (also embroiled in internal squabbles) attempted to manipulate the movement and made little headway, as did belatedly Melanchon.
France in Crisis?
Hegemonic Balance Sheet:
An autocratic President without a party or a mandate. Crowds calling for him to resign. A desperate lower class population angry over growing economic inequality in a rich country and government indifference to their plight. A class of organized civil servants and unionized workers still licking their wounds and paying their bills after failing to block the President’s counter-reforms last Spring.
Traditional parties — Left (Socialists, etc.) and Right (Gaullists etc.) — that have alternated in power since the end of WWII diminished and eclipsed. The parties of the far Left (Melanchon, various Trotskyists, etc.) and the far Right (the former National Front) are too preoccupied with internal fights to play any significant role..
Powerful, effective mass media dominated by the interests of big business but viewed with suspicion by more and more of the population.
A brand-new “leaderless” spontaneous mass movement connected by social media, “finding its way by walking,” more or less consciously embedded in a long history of rebellions and struggle, finding its natural leaders (“good thinkers, good talkers” like old Guillaume Carle), putting forth its own ideas for the reorganization of society.
Here are the two latest proposals coming from the Yellow Vests and borrowed from the history the 18th Century French revolution. First, a call for a kind of democratic constituent assembly. Second, the creation of Cahiers de doléances (Grievance Notebooks) like the ones in 1788 listing all the people’s complaints and proposed remedies. Both great ideas. We can only hope that given the hollowness of the hegemony of the French political class, the convenience of social media for self-organization, and the desperate desire for dignity and participatory democracy incarnated in this latest historical uprising, something good may come of it.
Meanwhile, here are excerpts from the 2018 Yellow Vest Grievance list[6]:
No one left homeless.
  • End the austerity policy. Cancel the interest on illegitimate debt. Don’t tax the poor to pay it back, find the 85 billion Euros of fiscal fraud uncollected.
  • Create a true integration policy, with French language, history and civics courses for immigrants.
  • Minimum salary €1500 per month
  • Privilege city and village centers. Stop building huge shopping centers.
  • More progressive income tax rates.
  • Big companies like Mac Donald’s, Google, Amazon and Carrefour should pay big taxes, and little artisans low taxes."

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