The Digger

There is a role for intellectuals in these new movements, certainly, but it will have to involve a little less talking and a lot more listening. via  La Monde by David Graeber Our full coverage:  Yellow Vests Movement Rocks France If one feature of any truly revolutionary moment is the complete failure of conventional categories to describe what’s happening around us, then that’s a pretty good sign we’re living in revolutionary times. It strikes me that the profound confusion, even incredulity, displayed by the French commentariat—and even more, the world commentariat—in the face of each successive “Acte” of the Gilets Jaunes drama, now rapidly approaching its insurrectionary climax, is a result of a near total inability to take account of the ways that power, labour, and the movements ranged against power, have changed over the last 50 years, and particularly, since 2008. Intellectuals have for the most part done an extremely poor job understanding these chang...

The Yellow Vests movement has faced shocking police violence. And it’s not just from a few bad apples: it’s part of President Macron’s strategy to silence protest. Since November 17 the  gilets jaunes  movement has been spreading across France. Protesters from all around the country are demanding fairer taxes, wealth redistribution, and more direct democracy, with demonstrations in multiple cities every Saturday. According to polls, the movement is supported by a majority of the population. So far, the government’s response to all this has essentially been repressive,  More than  1,700 people have been injured , of which at least eighty-two are  seriously  hurt, and ten fatalities have been confirmed since the beginning of the movement. (A constantly updated list can be found  here ). The deaths mainly owed to road accidents, where angry drivers, blocked in their cars, drove over protesters. But one was caused by the use of po...

Morsels: Published on  Jan, 27, 2019  :  The fight for democracy in the deep countryside Nor is this support simply confined to what could be loosely termed working class people. Support, at least in my area, covers everyone, working and middle class people alike. It includes for instance the woman PA for a managing director of quite a big company; a woman who, despite having worked at the company for 16 years, is still being paid what is colloquially referred to as the ‘smic’, the minimum wage. Indeed almost all the people around here are paid the bare ‘smic’ no matter what their qualifications, something true of 80% of provincial France. Another woman described as basically running a large storage facility, performing all admin, doing the accounts is, despite her university degree, similarly only earning ‘smic’. For this middle class social capital she travels almost two hours a day. All complain constantly about taxes; uniformly they claim to have nothing lef...

Excerpt: By Isabel Roy and Johannes Stern  17 January 2019 The protests by “yellow vests” in France have exposed the anti-working class character of the Left Party in Germany. The Left Party leadership and its affiliated media reacted with hostility to the first mass demonstrations which took place in late November in Paris and other French cities. “Language of Violence” was the title of the Left Party daily  Neues Deutschland (ND) on November 26. The paper was not referring to the brutal actions of the French police and security forces, but rather to the mostly peaceful demonstrators who took to the streets to protest against higher fuel taxes and for higher wages and more social justice. “The ‘Yellow vest’ demonstrations which were not approved by the police have” degenerated into violence “and it took hours for the police ‘to restore calm,’” the paper complained. For the Left Party leadership the biggest social protests in France since the general strike of 1968,...

The Russia collusion narrative is on its last legs. Brexit has vaguely shown up in the MSM while the ‘gilets jaunes’ movement has been unceremoniously buried. As expected, Theresa May has survived Corbyn’ no-confidence vote in her government by 19 votes. Of the 256 Labour MPs 81 (the neoliberal Blairite wing) support a fresh Brexit referendum. The Maastricht model rules their undemocratic World Order.   And two socialist strategists; “pragmatic” reformist Leo Panitch and revolutionary socialist Costas Lapavitsas’ diverging tactics indirectly butt heads on Labour’s socialist path to socialism in the Brexit context. The differences in their respective understanding of the fierce and indomitable power of the anti-democratic, liberal-illiberal, neoliberal EU technocracy confronting socialists seem to lie at the core of their irreconcilably divergent opinions. If socialism in its final democratic form is to have a chance socialists must come down from their lofty ac...

Front page in the Italian media, spreading across the EU and a near-total blackout on this side of the pond. Gilet Gialli, scontri e fumogeni a Parigi | La diretta video - Corriere TV • • • France Ablaze Again; Yellow Vests Rage After Founder Arrested; Cops Punched, Tear Gas Deployed France Ablaze Again; Yellow Vests Rage After Founder Arrested; Cops Punched, Tear Gas Deployed | Zero Hedge

Yellow Vests, Italian Budget  Battles & Silent Labor Unions   "While organized labor restrains itself, both right- and left-wing populists take the helm on EU on economic issues, many claiming they are not anti-European as such, but merely determined to stop the austerity policies that have done so much harm to the population." Excerpts: " Since mid-September, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, has been battling with Italy over its budget.  The populist government in Rome—led by the  Five-Star Movement , orM5S, and the  League —have decided to stimulate the economy by giving money to the poor, lowering taxes and increasing public investment. With an assist from financial markets that are penalizing Italian government bonds, the Commission has been threatening an “excessive deficit procedure” if Italy doesn’t reduce spending and resume measures to balance its budget. In theory this austerity policy will make the country more sta...

I have two Aussies, excellent herders. If Marxists were sheep my Aussies would prove useless. So here is Alan Woods* commenting on the "gilets jaunes' movement and he sounds nothing like the several self-identified "Marxists" who are embracing the capitalist politics of division, which finds them nasally railing against 90% of the (lumpenproles?)working class, in several threads at The Digger, with (irrational?)passion and gusto. and  * Alan Woods  (born 23 October 1944) [1]  is a British  Trotskyist   political theorist  and author. [2]  He is one of the  leading  members of the  International Marxist Tendency  (IMT), as well as of its British affiliate group  Socialist Appeal . [3]  He is political editor of the IMT's  In Defence of Marxism  website. Woods was a leading supporter within the  Militant tendency  within the UK  Labour Party  and its parent group the  Co...

"After years of momentum, the Spanish left has stalled — clearing the way for the dangerous rise of the Franco-nostalgist right." Link:   A Darkening Horizon In Spain, a fake, self-serving, pseudo-leftist elite a la Syriza and Tsipras in Greece, much like Bernie and his BS "political revolution," understand their place and role in the political spectacle: demobilize the left with failure. Fuck all these "leftist" misleaders! Carpe diem! Just get yourself a "gilet jaune" and flaunt it:  Neiko 53942A High Visibility Safety Vest, X-Large, Neon Yellow - Refective Vest - Amazon.com I have no problem, this once, in making Amazon an unwitting enabler of a populist backlash against the entrenched, rightwing, duopoly. If you want to save the economy for the working class, go shop!

Link:  A Movement With a Future Excerpt: "Contradictions Among the “Gilets Jaunes” People One of the singularities of this movement is that it raises the question of power head-on. “Macron resign!” is a unanimous slogan that towers above all others. But the social content of this demand remains indefinite. A battle for this is being played out on social media, in speeches, on yellow sweaters, on posters, on walls. This is obviously a major difficulty. In this movement, left- and right-wing emotions coexist in great confusion — a large mass of people who are not very politicized, anticapitalist activists, and fascists. Besides, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the accession to power of Bolsonaro in Brazil, of the M5S-Lega alliance in Italy, and even of Trump in the United States, were all to varying degrees examples of social mobilization with an initially indefinite content: against the rise in bus fares in Brazil, against corruption and taxes considered unfair i...

Link:  ROAR Magazine   — by Jerome Roos "… the most beautiful of all doubts Is when the downtrodden and despondent raise their heads and Stop believing in the strength Of their oppressors." - Bertold Brecht Excerpts: "Four weeks in, the uprising also continues to confound mainstream journalists and experts. “The gilets jaunes have blown up the old political categories,” one French media activist told ROAR on Saturday night, after a long day of riots in the capital. “They reject all political leaders, all political parties and any form of political mediation. No one really knows how to confront or deal with this movement — not the media, not the government, nor anyone else. What we are witnessing is unprecedented in French history.” While the outcome of these dramatic developments remains uncertain, it is clear that France is currently living through a rupture of historic proportions, taking the country onto uncharted terrain. For the left, the emerging scenari...