Cooking the Books: Some reformists never learn (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

When, after losing the European elections to the National Rally (formerly the Front National), Macron called a snap election, the politicians regrouped to contest it. On the left, the hard-left breakaway from the ‘Parti Socialiste’ France Unbowed, the Communist Party, the Greens and the PS itself formed a New Popular Front (NFP) which emerged as the largest group in the National Assembly.

In an article in the Guardian (2 July), Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty (yes, him) described its economic policy and the logic behind it. They wrote of its:

‘ambitious policies to improve the purchasing power of poor and lower-middle-class people. These reforms include a substantial increase in the minimum wage, wages indexed to prices and free school lunches. Most importantly the NFP wants to prioritise investment in the future by increasing public spending on infrastructure – throughout the country, including in isolated rural areas – as well as in health, education and research’.

The two are co-authors of a book about elections in France since 1789 in which they concluded that it was people in small towns and rural areas that tended to vote far-right ‘first and foremost because of socio-economic concerns: they lack purchasing power, they suffer most from the lack of investment in public infrastructure’, adding ‘and they feel that they have been abandoned by governments of all stripes in recent decades’. Hence the rise of the far-right.

This seems plausible enough; it’s unlikely to be just because they want to kick immigrants out or stop more coming in (that’s only the false solution proposed by the far-right). Cagé and Piketty reckon that, if the parties of the left increase purchasing power and spending on public infrastructure they can win people away from the ex-Front National.

An increase in people’s purchasing power through higher and indexed wages and benefits and more government spending on public services and amenities is all very well but where is the money to come from? Ultimately, there is only one source: the profits of business enterprises. But the pursuit of profits is what drives the capitalist economy and if you tax them too much to redistribute income to the ‘poor and lower-middle-class’ or to pay for first class health care and education that will provoke an economic slowdown, making this unsustainable. That’s the way capitalism works and can only work: by giving priority to profits over satisfying people’s needs. Despite the political slogan, profits cannot be put before people.

The last time this was tried in France was in 1981 after Mitterrand was elected President and a government including the Communist Party came into office. In June the new government increased people’s purchasing power by putting up the minimum wage, pensions, family allowances and housing benefit but the result was a disastrous failure compared to which what happened under Truss was a storm in a teacup.

The increase in benefits had been paid for by recourse to the printing press; as a result, the internal price level in France got out of line with the international level. The franc was devalued in October and again in June 1982. By this time, the government had learned the lesson that if you are in office under capitalism you must respect its economic laws, and rowed back on its reforms, giving priority instead to trying to revive the profits of business enterprises and adopting a policy of ‘rigueur’ regarding wages and benefits. In March 1983 the franc had to be devalued for a third time.

While, to judge by the programme of the NFP, reformists in France have not learned by their previous failures to improve people’s lives by increasing their purchasing power, reformists in Britain have. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer here is skipping trying to do this and going straight to the ‘rigueur’ stage, called here fiscal responsibility.

Material World: Live to work or work to live? (2023)

The Material World column from the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the UK raised the age of retirement and heightened the national insurance contribution criteria to be eligible for a state pension, there were complaints from women who were particularly affected by the changes but very little wider protest.

It has not been as easy for the French government plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. Trade unions have held nationwide strikes that have brought France to standstills, hoping that strikes and accompanying demonstrations will bring about a similar outcome as in 1995 when then-president Jacques Chirac abandoned his pension change proposals. Millions of workers have been involved to disrupt industry and transport across France. However, unlike the previous five strikes, trade unions declared the 7th March strike, ‘grèves reconductibles’, meaning workers will vote at the end of each strike day on whether to continue industrial action. With no fixed end date, unions hope to damage the economy so severely that it defeats the government.

Although the country’s current retirement age is one of the lowest in the European Union, the existing rules already require most people to work past the age of 64 in order to qualify for the full pension. By raising the retirement age by two years most workers would need to work 43 years, rather than 42, to be eligible for a full pension.

The government claims postponing the retirement age by two years and extending the pay-in period would yield an additional €17.7 billion in annual pension contributions, allowing the budget to break even by 2027 and safeguarding what they say would be a failing system. But not all economists agree.

In September 2022, a report by the French Pensions Advisory Council found the pensions system actually produced surpluses in 2021 (€900 million) and 2022 (€3.2 billion), although it did predict the system would run a deficit on average over the next quarter of a century. According to its calculations, ‘between 2023 and 2027, the pension system’s finances will deteriorate’, reaching a deficit of between 0.3 and 0.4 percent of GDP, or just over €10 billion a year, until 2032. But the Council predicted an eventual balance beginning in the mid-2030s.

A deficit of €10-12 billion per year is not necessarily excessive for a pension system whose total annual expenditure amounts to around €340 billion. ‘The results of this report do not support the claim that pensions spending is out of control,’ the Council wrote. Pension spending as a proportion of GDP is expected to remain stable, at around 14 percent of GDP, before rising to up to 14.7 percent by 2032.

Pensions expert Michaël Zemmour said, ‘It has become a form of political discourse to exaggerate and dramatise the deficit issue, to claim the system urgently needs to be reformed, when in fact the deficit is rather moderate’.

He explained, ‘It’s not about saving the pension system, it’s about financing tax cuts for businesses,’ highlighting France’s intention to finance tax cuts with structural reforms to bring the national deficit under 3 percent by 2027, a requirement of EU member states (bit.ly/3kUXHlx).

Government attempts to appeal to younger generations on the grounds that it is they who carry the burden of supporting the elderly have not been successful. Despite retirement being a distant prospect, France’s younger workers have been active in the protests.

One student said, ‘We live in a productivity-obsessed society that is preoccupied with economic growth and which has been destroying our planet for decades. Now we’re being asked to work for two more years so we can produce even more.’ Another explained, ‘We should be able to live longer and in better health without working ourselves to death. Besides, if they’re talking about retiring at 64 now, what will it be when I’m 60? Will I have to work until I’m 70 or 75? ’ (bit.ly/3JofydM).

In the United States, where the retirement age for Social Security is already transitioning to 67, a Republican Party committee has called for the retirement age to increase by three years so that people born on or after 1978 will have to wait until the age of 70 for a full pension (bit.ly/3mFHwcg).

In Germany, the Federation of German Employers’ Associations in the Metal and Electrical Engineering Industries has also suggested raising its retirement age to 70. However, Johannes Geyer of the German Institute for Economic Research believes ‘Raising the retirement age puts a lot of pressure on the working population. People with low life expectancy, and those with health problems, will suffer more; a relevant part of the population dies before reaching retirement age.’ He seeks an alternative solution. ‘We need migration. It’s essential that we have enough people coming from abroad to work in Germany’ (bit.ly/3mCFM3r).

Working people must reject this capitalist imposition – ‘live longer, work longer’. We should have a society where we can appreciate the added years of our lives and not be made to work until we drop.

ALJO

Managerial Politics (2022)

From the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics is currently infested with a breed of managerialism. We can see the sort of thing on social media, with people crying out for the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, to ‘make Boris stop lying’ as if he were some sort of manager that could compel Johnson to speak the truth.

This reflects people’s experience of living in a society where ‘calling someone’s manager’ is a way to get satisfaction as a consumer, or to resolve a dispute between colleagues at work. Everything can be fixed by an appeal to authority.

The role of such managers, by definition, is to keep the shop, restaurant or office running smoothly and performing its function. Their intervention is meant to stop disputes getting in the way of the mission of the organisation.

For workers who find themselves trapped in these workplaces, it means grievance processes, investigations and the whole soul-sapping rigmarole of official-ese whenever they fall out with someone they can’t simply get away from, because they are also stuck in the same office.

Grievance procedures were legislated for by New Labour under the Blair government, and are part and parcel of how they view the world and politics: about fairness and process. There’s no intrinsic harm in them, but they are a part of the system that’s meant to slot humans into precise functions of a working machine, rather than promote human happiness, and are more about keeping a lid on relations, rather than making people happy or resolving the underlying problems.

This is the problem with managerialism as politics, it is about containing or smoothing over disputes as part of a permanent hegemony, rather than taking sides. The reality of politics is precisely about taking sides and picking winners in disputes. The only political question is: who rules? In managerialism, that question is effaced, there’s no dispute about taking sides, no deliberate picking of winners, only the continuation of the management is on the table, with no capacity to re-write the rules or relationships being allowed.

For example, Wes Streeting (seen as a rising star of the Labour Party right) got in trouble for stating that if he were in the RMT he would vote to strike, but if he were in government, he would be about trying to avert the strikes and bringing the two sides together, as a neutral. The trouble he got in was for going as far as saying if he were a union member he’d support strikes, but in the latter half of his comment he was clearly annunciating the Labour Party’s ideological position: they will not take sides, and will try to manage the dispute to stop it causing trouble in the overall mission of the organisation.

The problem is, in the world, there are sides to disputes, and any resolution will inevitably mean one side has won and one side has lost, refusing to take sides and ‘representing everyone’s interest’ means, objectively, that when they are not siding with tenants versus landlords, employees versus employers, the weak against the powerful, they are actually batting for the other side.

This leaves Labour trying to win the election through the appearance of competence and responsibility, avoiding any big picture or ideological discussion. They cannot oppose the Tories on any major point of principle, just on personal integrity and ethics. Hence why they are focussing on the Prime Minister’s personal behaviour (as reprehensible as it is: it does not fundamentally question the structures of our society or government).

Whether by design or coincidence, the press are able to effectively reward them for this decision to not question the structures and relations of power in our society, by suddenly discovering a string of apolitical scandals that they have known about for ages, to give an alternative management the chance to show that they can run the machinery of state just as well. Even if they don’t go so far as to actively campaign against the Tories, they can use the threat of Labour to discipline them, and keep them in line as well, on behalf of their wealthy friends and backers.

Labour, for their part, are hoping that the Tories will lose the election through their in-fighting. For their own part, they are quietly using managerial/bureaucratic techniques to sideline people associated with the leadership of Corbyn and quietly crush any rival internal factions: again, had this happened under the previous leader, the press would have been in full cry, but as the cause is bringing the machinery of the Labour Party to heel, their silence is now deafening.

As with the Wakefield by-election, they seem to be preferring that people don’t turn out for the Tories, and they can win by default, rather than trying, as Corbyn did, to activate new voters and build a new electoral coalition. If some of the Tory vote goes to the Liberal Democrats, then the managerialists will achieve their Nirvana, of ensuring that a change of government can occur without any appreciable change in society.

How long such an approach can keep a lid on things is anyone’s guess. But over the Channel, in France, Emmanuel Macron has been trying something similar for five years, using the threat of the old Front National as a means of disciplining the voters into accepting his managerialist bloc, and there are signs that that may be beginning to backfire, with the successor of the FN getting its highest ever number of Parliamentary seats.

Pik Smeet

Cooking the Books: An arms economy? (2022)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speaking in June at Eurosatory, a weapons industry fair, French President Macron said that France ‘has entered into a war economy’ (bit.ly/3AI99pQ).

Strictly speaking, this is not true as a ‘war economy’ is when a state at war mobilises its economy for the one aim of winning the war. France is not currently at war, even though it is playing its part in arming NATO’s proxies in Ukraine. All he seemed to mean was that the French state should devote more resources to equipping its armed forces with the most up-to-date weapons of death and destruction and, as he was speaking at a merchants of death trade fair, selling some to other states.

There is another sense in which the term ‘war economy’ has been used – ‘military Keynesianism’. Keynes argued that there was no tendency under capitalism towards full employment and that the situation could occur, as in a slump, where not enough paying demand was being generated to bring about full employment. His answer was that the state should step in and increase its spending so as to boost demand. ‘Military Keynesianism’ is if this spending is on arms.

This appeared to work in Germany where the Hitler government’s spending on re-armament did reduce unemployment. In the US, too, the mass unemployment of the 1930s was not eliminated till the US entered the war. When the war ended this was not followed by a slump as many expected (including ourselves). One explanation that was offered for this was the continuing high level of government military spending.

One variety of this was the ‘permanent arms economy’ theory, espoused in Britain by the SWP’s predecessor, the International Socialists, and expounded by its economic expert, Michael Kidron. In an article with this title in 1967 (bit.ly/3c8gEfM) and repeated in his 1968 book Western Capitalism since the War, Kidron said he shared ‘the assumption that we should collapse into over-production and unemployment were it not for some special offsetting factor’. That factor, he went on to argue, was a ‘permanent arms budget’.

He offered two explanations of how this worked to save capitalism. The first was pure military Keynesianism. ‘Expenditure on arms is expenditure on a fast-wasting end-product’, he wrote, that ‘constitutes a net addition to the market for ‘end’ goods’ and that ‘one obvious result of such expenditure is high employment and, as a direct consequence of that, rates of growth amongst the highest ever’.

But he also advanced the opposite view that arms spending slowed down the rate of capital accumulation and the fall in the rate of profit this caused and saved capitalism in that way. ‘Were capitalism left alone to invest its entire pre-tax profit, the state creating demand as and when necessary, growth rates would be very much higher’. It was this over-accumulation which, if unchecked, would lead to ‘collapse into over-production and unemployment’.

He was right about government arms spending slowing down capital accumulation as, having to be paid for out of taxes on profits, it reduced the amount of profits available for re-investment. But he was wrong that this saved capitalism from collapse. For, while there is indeed ‘a permanent threat of over-production’ under capitalism this is for other reasons than any long-term trend for too much capital accumulation leading to a fall in the overall rate of profit.

In any event, the permanent arms economy turned out to be not so permanent. It did not prevent the post-war boom, caused by reconstruction and the expansion of world markets, coming to an end in 1973 and replaced by a two-year period of slump that no government expenditure on arms or anything else was able to end. Keynes was wrong and so was military Keynesianism as an explanation of the post-war boom.

Blogger's Note:

A review of Michael Kidron's Western Capitalism Since the War appeared in the October 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Saving what’s Left: Mélenchon bucks the trend? (2022)

Mélenchon in Toulouse

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent Presidential ballots in France have ended as everyone predicted they would do: in the second round run-off Emmanuel Macron clearly defeated Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing Rasssemblement Nationale (RN). Although Le Pen’s performance in the important pre-vote TV debate with Macron was not quite as bad as her efforts of five years ago, she remained incapable of countering Macron’s grasp of detail and his schoolboy enthusiasm for all things technical. The prior elimination of candidates representing what remains of the mainstream in French politics, made the electoral outcome horribly inevitable. Although Le Pen looked very confident about the effects of her rhetorical flourishes, her defeat represents the normal outcome of latter day Fifth Republican politics. Even if we take into account the seeming originality of Macron’s electoral majority formed around his République en March Party (LREM), it is still business as usual.

The LREM is a grouping of left and right politicians fleeing from the existing party structures; a kind of Blairite big-tent of perplexed opportunists and old sweats seeking a second youth. Its existence underlines the gradual shrinkage and fragmentation of the conventional republican centre right and a parallel demise of putatively socialist and communist parties. In reality, the supposedly left/right centre of Macronism only looks novel when contrasted with the continuing presence – indeed growth – of the party formerly led by Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen. Her father set up the openly racist Front National (FN) to give vent to his visceral hatred of Arab immigrants, blacks and Jews. The space he created for this putrid style of politics opened the way for the somewhat less vociferous RN. A recent dalliance with respectability means that the RN remains largely bankrupt both in terms of ideas and in strictly financial terms.

Contemporary French politics, in fact, boils down to how the centre have used this extreme right excrescence to their own advantage. For conventional parties, the fact that the FN/RN persistently falls at the last hurdle of the presidential run-off is all to the good: its existence creates a feedback loop which unfailingly returns the system to its original (centrist) point of departure. This is especially true when a particularly close result provides a frisson of excitement in an otherwise stagnant body politic. This strange situation is partly due to the fact that de Gaulle’s plebiscitary monarchy established in the 1950s was designed for stability. Under its umbrella voters are gently enjoined to vote for the least-worst candidate in the two-person run-off. To begin with, the perversity of the system was hardly visible: tailor-made for the grand Charles, it offered little scope for competitors. But with some tweaking it could be made to work for politicians who lacked the general’s post-war charisma. The needed refinement was introduced by Mitterrand who – working in cahoots with Chirac – introduced dodgy reforms to the electoral system in order to maintain the FN as a looming death-star aimed at the centre of the universe. So it is that with national service long gone, the militaristic superb of the General has given way to the charmless style of one Emmanuel Macron who came to power from the élite schools and the banking sector. He is hardly a hero of the resistance. But the message for conventional politicians is clear: cynics, nincompoops and technocrats can sneak into power simply on the back of the presence of an ageing cohort of scruffy xenophobes. What a system! But it is one which has been used equally by Chirac, Sarkozy and Francois Hollande.

Scarecrows

The Le Pen clan then, father and daughter, have operated as scarecrows – répoussoirs – who make the centre position preferable. The result, over time, has been the creation of an inward-looking political caste of untouchable top-level functionaries and corporate tycoons linked at the hip by the spinning of the revolving door leading from public sector to financial opulence. The ‘Caste’ – the title of a recent book – try to hold both ends of the political spectrum. This creates a kind of see-saw arrangement where no one is really happy to make the first risky move away from the centre. The only perspective is found in the rear-view mirror: for example, wannabe presidential candidates like to imitate the distinctive gestures of the grand Charles in the hope of squatting the comfortable middle-ground. This was easy enough for Mitterrand (who famously once denounced the system as a permanent coup-d’état), easy for Chirac but far more difficult for the twitchy and corrupt Sarkozy who in another life was a slick corporate lawyer. Macron’s youth gave him something of a Kennedy style which he used to pull off this scam. But his later success is more of a homage to the working of the system than it is to his tactical perspicacity. In reality Macron is an accident-prone youngster who believes in his own propaganda (‘France, the start-up nation’ was one of his slogans).

Can Mélenchon Save the Left?

Now we are in the run up to the elections to the legislature. This is where things could get interesting. The novelty here is the presence of Jean Luc Mélenchon’s, France Insoumise Party: France Unbowed (what a horrible name!). JLM is a politician who started his political career in the early Mitterrand days when the left adopted reforms meant to be of benefit to ordinary people. These included the lowering of the retirement age to 60, longer holidays, the strengthening of protective labour law, a shortened working week and more statutory rights for part-time workers. In these years JLM was a senator, a professional politician unfazed by Mitterrand’s shift to the right. But he gradually moved away from the French Socialist Party as it adopted policies which put into question many of its more popular reforms. In the end, he established his own small grouping under various guises and enjoyed some moderate success as a gadfly working against a hostile political environment.

He owes his credibility on the left to his unflagging support for popular causes, his vocal anti-racism, and his genuine talent as an orator. He has correctly diagnosed the stagnation induced by the Fifth Republic and proposes a referendum to revive the legislature by switching away from the existing constitution. The constitution tends to favour the rubber-stamping of decisions made by technocrats and applied by presidential fiat. But he was narrowly defeated in the first round of the last two presidential elections partly because of his inability to handle a hostile media. Nonetheless he has a small active group in the Chambre de Deputés, support in the working-class suburbs and a growing influence outside the metropolis.

Things are now working in his favour. The mainstream Socialist Party’s presidential candidate Hidalgo harvested a catastrophically low score in the election (1.7%) and lost her deposit. Similarly low scores were recorded by the Communist Party. The unbelievably uncharismatic leader of the ecologists, Jadot, and other left parties, picked up a few crumbs. For ordinary voters, the left is weak and divided and the political centre of gravity is pulling towards the right. The Socialist Party is suffering from the legacy of weakness and a lengthening series of betrayals. Conventional politicians are now seriously working out how to the raise the retirement age back to 65 and legislation to weaken protective labour law has been adopted largely thanks to François Hollande’s government. So people are looking elsewhere.

At the time of writing, Mélenchon is trying to get the left to unite around a loose coalition under the clumsy acronym of NUPES. This means getting most of the left into his improbable and leaky lifeboat: a coalition of the communists, socialists, and ecologists. So far JLM has managed to neutralise the spoiling tactics of the various party leaders and complacent party hacks. The brutal fact is the left has nowhere else to go. The left coalition will be up against a macrocosm of centrist opportunists and neo-liberals, a deeply divided republican right and the inevitable presence of the spectre on the extreme right. It will be a bumpy ride but things could work out better for him this time. JLM is an unlikely candidate for the supreme office and one who openly dislikes this presidential system. But so far he has managed to pull off an impossible movement towards the union of the left in a very hostile environment. This should give the centre some reason to be afraid. For it could spell the end of the terrible legacy of de Gaulle. Whether Mélenchon is willing to shake off the darker side of Mitterrand’s legacy is another matter.

M.M., 

Paris.

Editorial: Discontented workers choose the devil they know (2022)

Editorial from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 2022 French presidential election took place against the backdrop of deep working-class dissatisfaction with the political status quo. As in 2017, the first round of results gave French workers the choice between Emmanuel Macron and the far-right nationalist, Marine Le Pen in the second round. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left-wing reformer, came in a close third at 22 percent of the votes cast (Le Pen came in second at 23 percent and Macron on top at 28 percent). What is striking is how the established capitalist parties, Les Républicains and so-called Parti Socialiste, were reduced to insignificance electorally, gaining between them about 6.5 percent of the vote less than the total cast for Eric Zemmour, the other far-right candidate at 7.1 percent. There were six other candidates.

Macron is no longer the new kid on the block. He has been the President for the last five years and has revealed himself as the faithful servant of French capitalism. In this time, he has introduced anti-working class austerity policies which provoked strikes and protests from the workers and also the Gilets jaunes protests which, although small-business led, had drawn in discontented workers. No wonder he is known as the ‘president of the rich’.

Le Pen continues in her attempt to make her party less toxic. She has changed its name to the Rassemblement National (National Rally) and has dropped her opposition to the EU and the Euro. She wants to reform it and reduce France’s contribution to the EU budget. French law would take precedence over EU law. For all her efforts to soften her party’s image, there are still her noxious xenophobic and racist policies – French nationals given priority over immigrants in jobs, housing and social services and tougher immigration policies and the banning of Muslim headscarves in public. She was helped by the fact that her rival on the far right, Zemmour, who is more obnoxious than she, is had helped her to appear more ‘moderate’. She poses as the workers’ friend by focussing on the cost-of-living crisis, with pledges like abolishing income tax for the under-thirties. However, she has had to play down her former close links with Putin by condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and faced taunts that her party had accepted loans from Russian banks.

It is not surprising that there is little enthusiasm for either of these candidates. Both Macron and Le Pen had gone after the votes that went to Mélenchon. Macron had sold himself to younger voters as a keen supporter of a pro-environment agenda.

After the second round of voting on 24 April, Emmanuel Macron was declared the final winner. Many French workers stayed with the devil they knew. Although profoundly dissatisfied with his political leadership, they reckoned that the alternative was far too unpalatable and decided to hold their noses and vote for him. There will be a sigh of relief among the world’s capitalists, especially those from the EU area, that the French workers had opted for a safe pair of hands. However for the French workers, there is little change, the same old drudgery and the struggle to make ends meet, which is the fate of workers all over the world.

Refugees: No safe place (2022)

From the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

To be a worker in capitalist society is to be deprived of any form of ownership of the means of living and therefore of having any real control of your own life. Being forced to sell your labour-power to an employer can lead to a precarious existence where you may end up becoming unemployed or even homeless. If you are unlucky enough to live in a war zone, you may be forced to flee your home and attempt to seek a new life elsewhere. You would then fall prey to ruthless smuggling gangs and come up against the brutality of state forces ranged against you. Sadly, this was the fate of 27 refugees who drowned while trying to make the treacherous crossing over the Channel on 24 November. This tragedy was not unforeseen, in fact it was one waiting to happen given the heavy traffic in the Channel. These were not the first deaths arising from these crossings nor will they be the last. Like the unemployed and the homeless, refugees and migrants are vilified as scroungers and ne’er-do-wells.

Political pawns

The response of the political leaders to the refugee crisis in Calais reveals the paucity of thinking that characterises modern capitalist politics. The rational course of action would have been for the UK and French governments to co-operate to find a solution to this problem. However, Boris Johnson’s government came to power on the basis of ‘Get Brexit Done’ and ‘to take back control of the UK’s borders’. To keep his more xenophobic supporters on board a little bit of Euro bashing did not go amiss. Emmanuel Macron, with his eye on next April’s presidential election and the need to play the patriotic card to see off his rivals on the far right, Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, was more than eager to pick up the gauntlet. Boris Johnson sent Macron an open letter outlining proposals he knew that he would not accept, such as joint patrols by both British and French forces on the French coast. Macron’s response was to withdraw an invitation for the British Home Secretary to attend a meeting to discuss the movement between people in the sea between France and the UK. The refugees in Calais had become pawns in this game of tit for tat.

The UK government has used demeaning terms such as ‘economic migrants’ to refer to refugees and when they do arrive on British shores they are classified as illegal immigrants. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, had the not too bright idea of the British Border patrol to push back the refugee boats to France. Any ramming by ships of these overloaded dinghies would likely cause them to capsize and their occupants drown. It is unlikely that many skippers would want to stand trial for murder or manslaughter. The forthcoming Nationalities and Borders bill will further tighten restrictions. One clause seeks to deport refugees if it is found that they passed through a ‘safe’ country.

Boris Johnson’s government shed crocodile tears over the drownings and offered their condolences to the victims’ families. Both the French and UK governments diverted attention from their own culpability by blaming the people smugglers, which ignored the fact that closing off the legal routes for refugees to come to the UK had gifted opportunities to the smugglers to make profits out of people’s miseries.

Demonisation

This tragedy has not ended the demonisation of refugees. In this op-ed piece for RT dated 25 November: ‘The four star hotels, the free healthcare and the generous benefits system have, according to French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, made the UK an ‘El Dorado’ for would-be migrants. I hate to say it, but I agree with him’ (‘I predicted a migrant tragedy months ago. Why didn’t the UK and France prevent it?’, former UKIP leader Paul Nuttall).

Kevin Hurley, a retired British police officer, in another op-ed piece about the situation in Calais, seems to suggest that the local people find many of the refugees menacing: ‘Yes, I saw some tragic Kurdish families, but they were few and far between compared to the hordes of young men loitering about or just staring. I found it frightening (‘As an ex-cop, I know how hard it is to stop the flow of illegal migrants into Britain’, RT, 30 November).

If you read the press and listen to the politicians all you will learn is that the refugees want to come here to help themselves to our goodies and what measures can we take to stop them. What you do not hear so much of is what drives them to risk their lives to come to the West.

Forced to migrate

It is no surprise to find that most of the refugees come from these countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Three of them have been embroiled in wars of various kinds. Two of them were occupied by the US and the UK. However, it is not just the military warfare that is driving some of the workers in these countries to seek a better life abroad, but the economic warfare waged mainly by the Western powers. Since the first Gulf war, the US and Britain have imposed economic sanctions on the Iraqi regime. Sanctions were also imposed on Syria and Iran. The economic cost weighed most heavily on the workers, with the political leaders remaining relatively unaffected. Many of the 27 who drowned were Kurds from northern Iraq. That many of the refugees are Kurds from Iraq, Syria and Iran is no accident. They are oppressed minorities in these countries. In Iraq and Syria Kurdish forces fought with western forces against Isis. When they were no longer of use to the West, they were abandoned to their fate (‘The West has played its part in driving migrants from home’, Patrick Cockburn, i weekend, 27/28 November 2021).

The liberal left talk about how refugees should be treated more humanely and that more legal channels should be opened up for them to come to the UK and make their claims. This, they argue, would reduce the risk of deaths. The SWP blames the Tory government for the deaths in the Channel. They claim ‘Anti-racists have to demand open borders and a welcome for refugees’ (Socialist Worker, 24 November). However, even the SWP acknowledges that the Labour Party is also in favour of taking action to stop Channel crossings.

More political pawns

Sadly, it is not just Calais that is a flashpoint in the refugee crisis. We have witnessed violent confrontations between refugees and border guards on the border between Poland and Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, cynically encouraged refugees to come into Belarus and attempt to cross the Polish border, where they have met fierce resistance from the Polish border patrols. As we have seen with the situation in Calais, the refugees are being used as pawns in a dispute between two capitalist powers. Lukashenko wishes to put pressure on the EU to remove the sanctions that they imposed on his regime following his rigged election last year. It appears that Russia is backing him and may have their own interests in this game.

This conflict affords an opportunity for the Polish capitalist leaders to gain political kudos from the EU, with which they have been in dispute over their judicial reforms, by appearing to be defending the EU border against outsiders. The EU’s high-minded ideals of freedom of movement and respect for human dignity do not seem to apply to these refugees. They are hell-bent on keeping them out and there was even talk of building a wall (sounds familiar). Erdoğan, the Turkish president, also used the refugees as bargaining chips when he threatened to unleash them on the Greek border. The Moroccan government also made similar threats of doing the same at the Spanish border.

World-wide

As with every crisis in capitalist society – unemployment, homelessness and workers relying on food banks – the refugee crisis has become ‘normalised’, yet there is nothing normal about it.

The refugee crisis spans the globe. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees there are more than 20 million refugees worldwide. As we have seen, war is a major driver for migration, but it is not the only one. Climate change is another which is rendering large parts of the globe, particularly the poorer parts, uninhabitable. And there is large-scale poverty.

The response of the major capitalist powers has been to tighten up their borders. Workers in these countries are encouraged to view immigrants and refugees as the other. Rather than see them as fellow workers with common interests, they regard them as competitors for jobs, welfare and health services. In the US, under Trump, a wall on the border with Mexico was partially built and migrant children were locked in cages. In the UK, a hostile environment towards immigrants was created which led to the Windrush scandal. The worldwide refugee crisis lays bare the utter brutality and cynicism of capitalism.

The leftist demands to create legal processes that treat migrants more humanely and calls for the sacking of right-wing governments can only scratch the surface. The fundamental problem is capitalism itself. In its drive for profits and division of the world into competing nation states, it creates the conditions that give rise to the wars, climate disasters and poverty that compel workers to leave their homes and seek sanctuary in safer places. What the world working class needs to do is combine democratically to obtain political power on a world scale to abolish capitalism and replace it with world socialism. National frontiers will be abolished and there will be one world community where everyone will be able to participate equally. There will be no wars or poverty and no need for people to flee their homes and seek refuge elsewhere.

Oliver Bond

Resource War: Oil, Gas and Aphrodite (2020)

From the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another Regional Resource War?

For decades the relationship between Turkey, Greece and the divided island of Cyprus has been volatile. Now with the discovery of gas fields and the development of pipelines to supply the lucrative markets of Europe, the eastern Mediterranean is growing increasingly more unstable. The gas field off the southern coast of Cyprus is called Aphrodite, named after the Greek goddess of love, but there is no love lost between the rivals for possession of that energy.

Cyprus was divided in a Turkish invasion in 1974 in response to a Greek-inspired coup. Turkey is the only nation to recognise a breakaway state on the island, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Cyprus’s internationally recognised government subsequently discovered offshore gas in 2011 and has granted licences to multinational companies for oil and gas research, commissioning international energy companies, including the French multinational Total and Italy’s ENI to explore allocated blocs off the island for underwater resources.

Turkey claims that some of the drilling operations are either on the Turkish continental shelf or in areas where the TRNC has rights over any finds and has called for a fair and equal distribution of the energy resources. Starting last summer Turkey deployed two exploration and drilling ships accompanied by military escorts. Turkey has called for a fair and equal distribution of the energy resources discovered, insisting that they should not be excluded and stress that their drilling activities are legal and within territorial waters.

Also featuring in the strategic rivalry is the 2,200-kilometre pipeline, called the EastMed, which is planned to transport gas from Israel through Cyprus and Greece into Italy, where it would be distributed to the rest of Europe. Turkey is already part of the TurkStream pipeline which feeds Europe with natural gas coming from Russia. This has provided both Turkey and Russia not only an economic benefit but geo-political leverage as well. If the EastMed pipeline becomes a reality then Turkey and Russia will stand to lose something many in the EU are eager to see – a loosening of that dependency.

The possibility of a military conflict cannot be ignored. The Greek defence minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, recently warned that its armed forces were ‘examining all scenarios, even that of military engagement’ and rejected Turkish demands that Greece demilitarise sixteen Aegean islands. He accused Turkey of displaying unusually provocative behaviour such as the rise in the number of violations of Greek airspace by Turkish fighter jets.

France’s President Macron pledged he would strengthen the alliance with Greece. France has dispatched frigates to the eastern Mediterranean as the stand-off with Turkey intensifies and the feud over exploration rights has deepened. Although supposedly to participate in the war against ISIS, the French aircraft carrier will make port at Limassol in Cyprus. The French Ambassador to Cyprus Isabelle Dumont said the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier’s presence was intended ‘to stabilise the region’. France is also planning to enlarge its naval footprint in the eastern Mediterranean and last year signed an agreement with Cyprus to use the Evangelos Florakis naval base in Mari, on the island’s south coast.

Turkey retaliated in early December, 2019, by signing a maritime border deal with Libya’s internationally recognised Government of National Accord (GNA), making a military commitment to send military support in the form of Syrian mercenaries to help in the fight against forces loyal to General Khalifa Haftar who has the aid of Sudanese mercenaries plus the diplomatic support of several foreign powers such as France, Italy, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The December deal, which would expand Turkish influence in the region, has been deeply criticised by Libya’s neighbours in the Mediterranean. A maritime border agreement between Turkey and Libya’s U.N-backed government is ‘unacceptable’, violates international law and flouts the sovereign rights of other countries, Luigi Di Maio, the foreign minister of Italy, declared. Egypt called it illegal, denouncing the Turkey-Libya deal as infringing on waters where they claim economic rights.

Fuat Oktay, Turkey’s Vice-President, answered that ‘Turkey will not permit any activity that is against its own interests in the region,’ adding that ‘any plan that disregards Turkey has absolutely no chance of success.’

So once again the world is faced with the possible threat of war. The Socialist Party maintains that modern war is an inevitable consequence of capitalist competition for the domination of markets, trade routes, favourable treaties, and possession of valuable resources. Our opposition has a simple basis: wars are fought over issues of interest to the capitalist class while it is workers, either in uniform or in civilian clothes, who are the cannon-fodder. The global working class has no interests at stake worth shedding a single drop of blood. Why should we die defending what is not ours and which we will never benefit from? The only war that need concern us is the class war between the parasites who possess and the workers who produce. Mere moralising against the war is not enough. What we advocate is a war on war to be waged on the battlefield of ideas, for the hearts and minds of the world’s people. And once we unite there will be no force that will stop us.

ALJO

The Pensions Struggle: The Financial Iceberg (2020)

From the February 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pensions have loomed large into the political landscape again. As an issue for our masters, they are like submerged icebergs that from time to time bob to the surface to impede ongoing profitability: agreements that stretch far into the future, which hamper the capitalists’ ability to invest today.

In December, France was gripped by days of a General Strike, which featured riots in the streets, and ongoing clashes between police and protestors. These clashes had all the appearances of being a continuation of the running battles between police and Gilets Jaunes that have been happening in France all year.

(As an aside, this situation is an instructive illustration of how propaganda in the media works. Clashes between police and protestors in Hong Kong made the top of the UK news schedule, but similar clashes in France, Haiti, Iraq and other countries around the world only made footnotes in an online resource to show that coverage is comprehensive.)

President Macron has sought to create a unified pension system, with an effective higher retirement age, to try to curb the cost of the French pension system, with workers getting points based on days worked (which will be to the advantage of those workers with broken career patterns, such as women who take maternity leave).This would replace a maze of different retirement ages and calculation methods. At the same time, some people will have their expectations lowered, and find themselves working longer for less.

Reform of pensions is the iceberg the Juppé government foundered upon, faced down with mass action by the trade unions in the 1990s. Small changes in pensions mean vast effects on the life expectations of millions of workers, and whilst they are for many far in the future, the understanding that one day we will all be too old and tired to be able to work looms large for each of us. Further, that sliver of comfort and leisure is a quid pro quo incentive to keep on working until we can get out of the exploitation system.

Likewise, in this country, and also little reported, tens of thousands of university workers have been striking. This despite the tightening of laws over calling strike action, which require a double majority both of turnout and of those eligible to vote in the strike ballot as well. As we reported earlier this year, this strike action has previously brought employers back to the negotiating table, and saw off their initial schemes which would have greatly reduced the benefits accruing to members of the USS pension scheme.

It was understood at the time that this was only round one, and it was likely that a subsequent round of action would be required to bring matters to a conclusion, thus the UCU (University and College Union) has successfully won a second strike and action short of a strike ballot, with pay and equalities now included as a part of the dispute. At the time of writing, employers are refusing to discuss pay levels.

They maintain that USS is an excellent pension scheme, and note that employers have seen their contributions rise dramatically (50 percent increase in employer contributions over 10 years).They argue that to guarantee the pension is funded in line with state regulations, employees should contribute more than the current 8 percent (the fact that that 8 percent comes from employees in any case is neither here nor there, and cost of living will continue to dictate employers will have to pay in net terms in order to attract and retain staff).

It is clear that the little they are offering at all is only in response to the solid strike action by university workers, and even if the union eventually accepts some increase in employee contributions, it will represent a huge improvement over the original offer.

Similar arguments can be heard over the WASPI women (Women Against State Pension Inequality). The Tory government brought in legislation to raise the retirement age for women in the UK to 65 in 1995, the WASPI campaign notes that many women born in the 1950s weren’t even notified formally until 14 years later. This has led to great difficulties in retirement planning for millions of women. As the WASPI campaign notes, a 1 year difference in birthdate can now mean a 3 year difference in retirement date. In 2011 the Coalition Government sought to raise the retirement age for the same cohort again.

In an election bombshell, Labour promised £58 billion of extra money (above their published plans) to compensate the WASPI women effected. Television pundits wittered on about why should Theresa May (who would qualify) get the money, but the principle, Labour argued, was that what was agreed all those years ago when those women entered the workforce should stand.

Other pundits noted that the interaction between the policy, which would see the women given compensation, and the benefits system would see women in the lowest income groups getting no benefit from the scheme.

The theme running through all this is one of ‘affordability’, but that is not affordability relative to the productive capacity of society, but relative to profitability. Pensions are a part of wages, they are not paid out because of the goodness of employer’s hearts, but instead because of a recognition that workers who are too old to work would be more of a hindrance than a use in the workplace, and, ultimately, they would end up having to pay the cost of looking after such workers one way or another (either in higher wages to working family members with dependents, or through charity).

Legally, pensions are commitments with individuals, and past agreements cannot be unilaterally altered. They form a part of wages which employers agree to pay when they take on staff – like the cartoon character, they will gladly pay us Tuesday for a hamburger today. All of their efforts to structure pension payments this way and that is about trying to minimise the individual and collective cost to employers.

The pensions issue is not about us living longer, but is the class struggle red in tooth and claw.

Pik Smeet

French Presidential Elections: Capitalism Wins (2017)

From the May 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

There were eleven candidates standing in the first round of the French Presidential Elections on 23 April, a mishmash of left and right-wing populists and establishment parties, ranging from  the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière (Workers' Struggle), the nationalist and anti-US Union Populaire Républicaine (Popular Republic Union), the Gaullist Debout La France (Stand Up France) which is anti-EU, the New Anti-Capitalist Party headed by a Ford factory worker, and Jacques Cheminade, a follower of the American conspiracy theorist, Lyndon LaRouche. As no candidate secured more than 50 percent of the votes  (in fact no candidate obtained more than 25 percent) the contest is  going to a second round on 7 May.

What marked this election out from the others is that  the main front runners were outsiders – Marine Le Pen of the Front National, Emmanuel Macron with his new movement En Marche (On the Go) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the so-called hard Left  candidate.  What is also unprecedented is that, due to the deep unpopularity of his government, François Hollande, decided not to stand again.  Working class people are angry that  their living standards are stagnating and what they see as an indifferent and out of touch political elite.  Unemployment is running at 10 percent (about 25 percent among 18 to 25 year-olds) of the workforce  amidst a slow recovery from the 2008/2009 recession. Moreover, many are dissatisfied with the government's response to the recent terrorist incidents and there are concerns about immigration. This is not unique to France. We have seen how working class discontent has played a part in the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency and in the vote for  Brexit in the UK.

Because of the Hollande's failure to resolve the social and economic problems of  French capitalism, 'Socialist' Party members opted for Benoît Hamon, the more radical left winger, to be their party's candidate. His platform included a basic universal income, a tax on robots to pay for the retraining of workers that they replace, a tax on banks' 'super profits', raising the minimum wage. However, he only got a humiliating 6 percent of the vote.

Marine Le Pen worked tirelessly to rebrand the  Front National  as being more of  a patriotic party than a fascistic one, with having the same appeal as UKIP has in the United Kingdom, and even went as far as kicking her father out of the organisation. However, this has not precluded her from putting forward xenophobic proposals, such as giving priority to French nationals over non-nationals over jobs, houses and welfare and placing new restrictions on immigration. She is attempting to court the working class vote by promising to reduce the retirement age from 62 to 60 and reduce income tax for the lowest earners. She is anti-EU and  pledges to renegotiate the terms of EU membership and hold a referendum on whether to leave the EU.  A win for her could jeopardise the future of the EU and thus create instability within world markets.

François Fillon of the Les Républicains party was the favourite until he became embroiled in a financial scandal involving alleged payments to his wife for fake jobs. He was standing on a platform of austerity, pledging to reduce public spending and cut a half million public sector jobs. He wanted to increase the working week for some public sector employees, scrap the wealth tax, reduce corporation tax , raise the retirement age to 65, put a cap on unemployment benefits.

Now the favourite, Emmanuel Macron, who finished  top in the first round, is a former investment banker and economy minister in François Hollande's government. He claims that to be revolutionising French politics, but what he is proposing is pretty standard capitalist fare  – lower corporation tax, extending the working week for younger workers, reduce public spending by cutting 120,000 public sector jobs by 2022.  He is pro-EU and says he is in favour of a more open France which accommodates cultural and ethnic diversity.

Chavez-admirer Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was backed by the 'Communist' Party, did surprisingly well with nearly a fifth of the votes, catching up in the polls and challenging the other front runners. His programme included reducing the working week to 32 hours, increasing the minimum wage and social security, raising taxes on the highest earners, re-negotiate the EU treaties. Like Le Pen, he pledged to reduce the retirement age to 60. That some of his policies were similar to those of the Front National is no accident. Both he and Le Pen were trying to woo the so-called 'left behinds',  workers who have seen the demand for their skills eroded and their livelihoods disappear with the economic and technological changes of world capitalism.

We predict with confidence that, whatever the outcome in the second round, Macron is the favourite, but Hillary Clinton was  the favourite to win last year's US presidential and the pundits expected the remain side to win last year's EU referendum.  However, we can predict with confidence who the losers will be and that will be the working class. For all their differences and grand promises, none of the candidates, including the two who went through to the second round,  challenged the capitalist system, that is the private and state ownership of the means of production and production for profit,  they seek only to modify it.  Once  Whoever is elected, their priority would have to be to ensure that French capitalism is competitive and profitable, and if, under certain conditions, this requires that social provisions are cut and workers are laid off, then so be it. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

Oliver Bond

No longer invisible (2019)

From the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In hi-vis vests France’s semi-rural towns get stroppy

Over the last few years French sociology textbooks have been preoccupied with the fraught situation of a new class of worker; workers whose discrete presence in the workplace, low participation in trade union activity and variable hours render them largely invisible to the society they live in. They are, for this reason, very expendable and easily exploitable. Another, much older, type of working class invisibility devolves from the very organisation of the great cities of capitalism: spatial segregations being a tried-and-tested method to organise political marginality. Many ‘sink estates’ in Britain, for example, are located on the periphery of the big cities and are largely inaccessible given the scanty coverage of transport networks dominated by the privately owned car. Small rural towns with declining industries are also increasingly isolated by the scaling back of public transport and so on. Invisibility is, in itself, an important political issue in modern capitalism.

France, of course, is distinctive in having massive council estates surrounding the larger cities; estates where major social problems can be concentrated and accumulated with little risk to the everyday lives of the more prosperous populations living in the prestigious centres. The largely immigrant population of the suburbs in France gained a massive upsurge in visibility during the violent riots of the early years of this century. For their part, the small towns seemed until recently to have managed to retain a surprising level of political tranquillity despite the gradual accumulation of distinctive social problems. Their material situation seems to have declined in the years following the crisis of 2008 and some of the more perspicacious sociologists have taken to contrasting the lively economic situation of the suburbs around Paris to the continual economic decline of the smaller rural towns, even those not too far from Paris. Poor access to medical care or to legal redress, distant social service provision, haphazard retail outlets and so on are problems that can be found in most rural areas across Europe, of course – in Scotland, for example (which shares a similarly low population density with rural France). The problem then is not why have workers in provincial France suddenly donned fluorescent yellow jackets, interrupted the flow of traffic and orchestrated noisy demonstrations in the distant towns? The real question is not what took them so long but how did they manage to do it. What and who is behind this yellow jacquerie?

The emergence of this movement into high visibility started suddenly in November when President Macron’s government rolled out its plan to increase the tax on diesel fuel for cars, motorbikes and scooters under the (questionable) pretext that this would eventually limit carbon dioxide emissions. In line with this thinking, motorists were supposed to oblige by selling their existing bangers and buying hybrid or electrical cars, cost being no excuse. The tax was also to be laid on the heavy fuels used to heat houses and out-houses in the smaller rural areas, presumably an invitation to install solar panels. But this was a tax hike which hit a population far more dependent on the private car than their contemporaries in the large cities. These are people who can rarely rely on the kind of cheap and efficient public transport commonplace in the large metropolitan centres. Financial capitalism, in other words, had finally caught up with those workers who had sought to avoid the off-putting compromises of life in the big cities by resorting to long-distance commuting to work from one provincial town to another. It was a tax bullet they felt they couldn’t dodge. To make things worse, it came on top of the disastrous emptying out of rural life which has accelerated over the course of the last two decades: Rural railway services are being run down for lack of profitability. Doctors are leaving for the bigger towns, hospitals are few and far-between, post offices and banks are closing, cafés, bars and restaurants are being boarded up. Those who remain are often the elderly, seniors or those who have — as we have seen – constructed an increasingly absurd life of long-distant commuting. For the elderly, in particular, the current rural set-up promises little more. Pensions were de-indexed a few years ago (thank you François Holland) and not revised upwards by Macron. Indeed, Macron’s hike in the Contribution Générale de Solidarité (CSG) took even more money from the poorer pensioners. Even if rural transport was available in the rural areas, many of the elderly would be in no position to afford it.

The revolt of these provincial workers owed a lot to the possibilities opened up by social media, of course. The internet allowed the distances between the smaller towns to be shrunk down. The militants used social media to co-ordinate road blocks disrupting the smooth flow of supply across the various départements, playing cat and mouse with the police. The result was chaos. Surprisingly, these roadblocks encountered massive support from motorists and from a majority of lorry drivers despite the inconvenience. Most of the ‘militants’ seem to be middle-aged with a sprinkling of young people including many single mothers. Many ‘activists’ are drawing a pension. There are many wage-earners though some are currently unemployed. There are also many self-employed craftsmen and small businessmen. To begin with exchanges with motorists and lorry drivers were good-natured although there were some violent scenes. This seems to have remained the pattern: that of a friendly movement of people who know each other and who, for the vast majority, are undertaking unconventional political activity for the first time. Here it should be mentioned that small town rural France is generally conservative. It votes for moderate candidates in elections and is rarely impressed by the noisy extremist leftism one finds in the bigger cities. No wonder everyone is surprised.

In response Macron announced a rise in payments to those on the minimum wage and in the income level above which pensioners have to pay the CSG and promised to increase taxes on the ‘digital giants’ Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Nothing fundamental will change except perhaps the people themselves; ordinary people on barricades or on road blocks. Or those who have (amazingly) found themselves on television arguing for a fairer taxation regime which pursues the wealthy and counters tax evasion. Then there will be those who have discovered the power they have to co-ordinate political activity via social media. Perhaps that’s one reason why Macron wants to increase the tax on Facebook.

M.M. 

Paris.

Editorial: Here We Go Again? (2018)

Editorial from the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the May 1968 events in France. It all began on 22 March 1968 when, following the arrest of anti-Vietnam War protesters, students at Nanterre University staged a sit-in. Further conflict led the University authorities to close the University on 2 May. Students then occupied the Sorbonne University. The students were unhappy with recent educational reforms that geared French education towards the needs of industrial capitalism and the centralised nature of the Universities' governance and were opposed to the Vietnam War. Police repression and heavy handed action by the University authorities swelled the number of protesters. The French workers joined the students and called a general strike, which resulted in factory occupations. For the more radical workers, their grievances went beyond the issues of better wages and working conditions, and included demands for more workers' control in their workplaces. The unions, the government and the employers negotiated wage increases and more trade union rights in a bid to end the conflict. In the National Assembly elections of June 1968, an increased number of Gaullist MPs were returned. Soon thereafter, the protests and strikes died down.

However, this is just not to revisit these events, for France is witnessing another revolt by students and workers. On 22 March this year, timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary, the unions called a nationwide strike to oppose Emmanuel Macron's labour and welfare reforms. At the forefront of these struggles are the railway workers, who are resisting government attempts to scrap job security, automatic job promotions and early retirement at 52 for new workers, and have responded by arranging two-day strikes for each week for three months. Airline pilots are also striking over pay and public sector workers are taking industrial action in opposition to Government plans to cut 120,000 public sector jobs over five years. Care workers and pensioners are also in revolt. Students are protesting about the proposed introduction of selective University entry requirements, which they say will discriminate against students from poorer backgrounds. The left hope that they can achieve the same unity between the workers' and students' struggles as in May 1968.

Macron is trying to shift the balance of power from the working class to the capitalist class, so as to make French capitalism more competitive. In this respect, he is no different from other French political leaders. Both Jacques Chirac and Nicholas Sarkozy tried to introduce similar reforms, but were defeated by concerted strike action. François Hollande also faced resistance when he attempted to introduce legislation to make it easier for employers to make workers redundant.

Although the circumstances in May 1968 may be different from those at present, the underlying dynamic is the same. This is the struggle between the capitalist class and the working class over the material resources of society.

We have solidarity with the workers and students with their struggles, but we would urge them to take the next step to organise with workers in other countries to take political power so that they can convert private and state property into the common heritage of all human beings.