Today's Selection: French edition

Readers in the Home Counties reassure themselves that there will be no pictures of black people in this post.

• There's an excellent debate on the hijab between Salma Yaqoob and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown here, where Yasmin utters the incredible phrase "The French are racist" for doing something she agrees with but for the wrong reason.
• The burka ban is about to come into force and Islamophobia Watch have noted the criticism Sarkozy is getting for trying to broaden the debate.
• The European Union has rapped France over its immigration policies.
• The French local elections have seen a massive shift away from Sarkozy. Comparing the 2011 results with the 2008 results we see the Greens vote double to 8.2% putting it higher in the polls than the Communist Party or the other left regroupments. Sadly while Sarkozy's vote dipped the far-right vote rocketed from just over 4% to over 15% as their new leader has tried to detoxify the FN.
• Red Pepper says we should look to France for strategies to beat austerity.
• And lastly Air France have revealed how aviation could be greener. No, they have.
  

Winter Lights

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that there is one bizarre passion that both the British and French share at Christmas time, and that's the noble breed who cover their houses with wasteful, gaudy Christmas lights. Père Noel climbing into a chimney seems to be a favourite round here.

The fine example of the tradition pictured right is taken from the local (Autun) paper but it does bring up that perennial 'eco-question' which is; what should those who are for a more environmentally sustainable society say about this kind of flagrant and wanton waste?

Well, I suppose we could say that people should do something more environmentally friendly to celebrate the season - plant some lovely trees or make decorations out of recycled tat, but somehow that all feels a bit too worthy.

I mean if people want to do those things please do, I'm sure it will give pleasure to all, but let's not se them to claim individual moral high grounds instead of trying to develop a social conscience.

What I like about this sort of tradition is that it feels like a genuine expression of fun, aimed at giving the community a sense of shared warmth. It feels like people trying to make a contribution to their area, and an alloyed positive one. There's no TV station, national newspaper or radio station telling people they have to do this, in fact this kind of behaviour is often mocked, it's more grassroots than that I think.

It's about people using their part of public space. At least I think it is.

I understand that some people are uncomfortable with the consumerist, meaningless consumption side of these displays, and I'm not claiming they're anti-capitalist or politically charged, but it seems to me that we need to keep it in perspective. In terms of household energy use at this time of year heating makes up the vast majority of the consumption. Christmas lights are a tiny fraction of the total (although those houses that go bonkers certainly notice the effect on their bills).

If we want to bring down energy use then insulation and home improvements are still the easy ways to make the big gains, and that's about improving the quality of our lives, not lecturing people to cut back. Even if we seriously tried to end these lights displays we'd be making next to no difference on December's national energy use. Social attitudes changes *can* make a big difference - but not this one.

Perhaps these displays encourage people to think of themselves as part of a community in a way that telling people to stop enjoying their holidays might not. If we're to save ourselves (and it is an 'if' I think) it will be through the understanding that we're more than just a collection of individuals buying this and watching that, and expressions of love like these light displays help us do just that.

Guest post: Islamophobia and the French Left

Recently, 12 activists in the French New Anti-Capitalist Party, including Ilham Moussaid - whose candidacy for the regional elections caused controversy both within and without the party on the basis that she wears a hijab – resigned from the NPA. John Mullen, a member of the NPA in the Paris region, spoke to the Australian left organisation Socialist Alternative about the issue of Islamophobia in France, and the debates within the NPA that led to these resignations. He's kindly allowed me to repost the discussion here.

First of all, John, could you elaborate on what caused these members to resign and the contours of the debates within the NPA about the rights of its Muslim membership?

Ilham was chosen as one of a list of candidates in the regional elections last year. This decision was made in the region - the NPA is very much a federal organization. The NPA was attacked from all sides for giving in to Islamicists, fundamentalists and for abandoning secularism. The national spokesperson Olivier Besancenot defended Ilham’s right to be a candidate, but a vocal minority inside the NPA is hostile to having members with a hijab.

For the upcoming conference, this minority has put forward a motion that hijab wearers can’t be candidates for the party. A counter-motion defends equal rights for all members to apply to be a candidate, and a third motion suggests a dreadful compromise (that hijab wearers can be candidates if approved by special commissions).

The group of comrades of which Ilham is part, near Avignon, have been running dynamic local campaigns on different issues, including the question of Islamophobia. A campaign against them inside the party has worn them out and rather than fight at the conference, they have chosen to continue their activism outside the party - it’s very sad. The very real, and slowly growing support they have had from a minority of comrades around the country has not been enough to keep them in our party.

One of the things Moussaid stated on her resignation was, "We need to concentrate on what unites us, on the fight for equality between men and women, and not to say we should all dress the same way, that you can't wear a headscarf because otherwise you're not a feminist.” What do you say to the argument so often employed in these debates, that wearing the hijab is, ‘an assault on feminism’?

The majority of the Left in France believe that the hijab is an assault on women’s rights, and this position quickly moves into the prejudice that Muslim women in France are more oppressed than non-Muslim women, that the experience of women in –say- Saudi Arabia is merely an extreme case of an oppression which is inherent in Islam, and other such ideas. Muslim and Arab men are then presented as the major source of women’s oppression and contrasted with the progressive white values of Republican France. So opposition to religious practices on the basis of progressive values can easily turn into a thinly disguised form of racism – and often does.

In fact, if Muslim women in France suffer oppression, get mostly low-paid jobs and bad housing, this is not usually because of their husbands and big brothers, but because capitalism wants cheap labour, and treating ethnic minorities badly is good for profits.

Pieces of clothing have symbolic meanings in all cultures. In many cultures, women must cover their breasts, men must not wear dresses. In Sikh culture men must not cut their hair. And in many Muslim cultures women must cover their hair. When French Muslim women cover their hair to please their God, they are not saying “treat me as an inferior”.

There is another point : in France, where anti-Arab and anti-muslim racism is at a high level (which has a lot to fo with France’s imperial past and neo-colonial present), wearing the hijab is about showing you are proud to be a Muslim, (and often proud to be an Arab) in a fairly hostile situation. Tragically the opinion of the women who wear the hijab, or the niqab, is practically never asked. “Enlightened” left antisexists speak for them and tell them how they should dress. It’s an old colonial tradition, telling oppressed groups what is good for them.

The right-wing Sarkozy Government, with the support of the Socialist Party, recently banned the wearing of the hijab in state schools and the public service, and the full veil is now illegal in the streets. How is this issue exploited by France’s politicians and how prevalent is racist abuse of Muslims in France today?

A few months ago, researchers sent out to French companies applications for jobs accompanied by CVs. They wanted to compare how a young black Catholic woman fared in comparison with a young black Muslim woman. The CVs were identical except for first names and a mention of their religion (one said she was active with a Catholic organization, the other with a Muslim one).

The “Catholic” black woman got asked to an interview 21% of the time. The “Muslim” Black woman got asked to an interview 8% of the time. That’s how bad it is. The mainstream press covered this story, the Left press almost totally ignored it. That’s how bad it is.

Meanwhile racist grafitti on mosques, and desecration of Muslim graves are becoming more common – there have been at least twenty cases of vandalizing Muslim graves this year. A mosque and a halal butchers were shot at earlier this year – 32 bullet holes were left in the mosque walls. And a number of veiled women have been attacked in the streets.

The recent law to ban women who wear the “full veil” from leaving their homes was initially a proposal of a Communist MP! And the law in 2004, banning high school students from wearing a hijab was initiated by a campaign against two young Muslim women in which Trotskyist teachers were very active! Two months ago, when the Senate was debating the law against the “full veil”, a group of Muslims and left wing supporters organized a rally outside.

We got sixty activists there : not many, but in the French context quite an achievement. Almost all of the left organizations ignored it. The NPA leadership decided to “support” the rally … seven hours before it was due to start, although it had been planned for weeks. Internal division paralyzes the NPA and many other organizations on anything to do with Islamophobia.

We understand the issue of the hijab will be debated at the NPA’s upcoming conference. How do you think socialists should respond to Islamophobia in society?

The radical Left should launch an active and dynamic campaign against Islamophobia, and not just “debate “ the issue. This means allying itself with Muslim organizations. This is a very obvious point, but highly controversial on the French Left. In Britain, the biggest Trade Union confederation, the TUC, has run a joint campaign against Islamophobia along with Muslim organizations. Islamophobia is tremendously useful to Sarkozy to divide us, to point the finger at the Muslims as a threat to “our culture” in order to divert our attention from the real enemy.

Islamophobia is a gigantic blind spot of the French Left. The NPA is better than the other organizations of the radical Left, (which is not hard). The upcoming “Conference against the Islamic domination” in December, run by groups which came from the Left but have ended up on the far right, will see sections of the NPA mobilizing against it. And at the party conference we have a good chance of winning the demand for equal rights for Muslim party members.

But tragically, the conference will debate almost exclusively about the rights of Muslim members of the NPA. Only a few isolated voices are calling for an active NPA campaign against Islamophobia. This is a tragedy. In the mass strike campaign to defend pensions, these last few months in France, NPA activists everywhere played an excellent role, in the forefront of building the strikes and building unity between different sections of the working class and different generations.

It is a party with tremendous positive potential. But old French traditions of left wingers mocking or hating those who believe in God, and more recent trends towards demonizing Muslims since 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be blinding comrades and they are falling for old divide and rule tactics. Progress is slow, but this question will have to be faced. We have to actively fight Islamophobia both because of how hard it makes life for many of our Muslim sisters and brother, but also because working class rebellion is made harder every time workers believe that “Muslim threats to our culture” are what we need to be fighting, not the capitalists.

Guest Post: Is Sarkozy setting off a new May 68 in France?

Many socialist eyes are looking jealously across the channel to France at the moment (my photos). Here my regular correspondent on French affairs, John Mullen, the editor of Socialisme International, writes a really useful report on what's actually happening and why.

Class struggle is hitting France in a big way, as Tuesday 12th and Saturday 16th October saw the seventh and eighth day of action to defend retirement pensions. Two hundred and forty demonstrations were organized on each day across France along with mass strikes in transport, electricity, oil, airports, telecoms, education, and the civil service. The unions say there were three and a half million demonstrators Tuesday ; the government say a million and a quarter, but even one of the police staff associations said the government was fiddling the figures.

For the first time, students and school students joined the pensions struggle in large numbers, concerned both about their parents, and that later retirement for older workers means fewer jobs for the young. According to polls, eighty four per cent of 18 to 24 year olds think the strikers are right. “Sarkozy, you're screwed, the youth is on the street,” was the chant in Toulouse in the South West. Two days later the number of high schools involved in the strike had risen from 200 to 700. As young people moved into action, government ministers squealed that fifteen-year-olds were too young to demonstrate and strike, that they must be being manipulated. This from a government whose justice minister recently proposed to lower to twelve years old the age at which a young person can be imprisoned for committing a crime!

The movement is not just a series of one-day strikes controlled by union leaders. Since last Wednesday, daily striker meetings in the most active sectors vote each day on continuing the strike for 24 hours more. Already, all of the twelve oil refineries in France have taken up these “renewable strikes”, half of the country’s trains are not running, and some libraries and school canteens are closed, while in other sectors hundreds of mass meetings are being held to decide on next steps. Lorry drivers have started blocking industrial zones in solidarity with the movement despite the fact that they themselves can retire at 55. One of the leaders of the drivers pointed out that drivers care about what happens to the support and administrative workers in transport firms, who are mostly women, and don’t get early retirement like the drivers do. Dockers in Marseilles have walked out, too and another national day of strikes and demonstrations for everyone is planned for Tuesday 19th.

Union members make up under ten per cent of French workers, though many millions more vote for union representatives as staff reps on works committees, and in polls 53% of the population and 60% of manual workers say they trust unions. The result of low union density is that most workplaces are only partly unionized, so regular meetings where everyone can express themselves and vote on the strike are essential. Such meetings can also make it harder for union leaders to sell out strikes.

Public Support

Public opinion is absolutely on our side - Fully 71% of the population opposes Sarkozy’s “reform”, and that support for the movement rises to 87% among manual workers and routine office workers. A poll last week even reckoned that two thirds of the population thought the strike movement needed to get tougher on the government, while 53% of the population and 70% of manual workers wanted a general strike! This support needs to be transformed into active confidence to strike in those sectors not yet mobilized.

In France, 13 per cent of retired people are living in poverty according to a recent Eurostat survey, as against seventeen per cent in Germany, and thirty per cent in Britain, where neoliberal “reforms” have gone much further. French workers are determined not to catch up to other countries in the poverty stakes. But over the last twenty years, pensions have come gradually under attack. The official retirement age is still 60, but a few years back, despite being slowed by strikes, the government managed to force through an increase in the number of quarterly stamps needed to get a full pension. In 1990, thirty seven and a half years’ worth were enough; by 2012 you will need forty one years’ worth. If you have less than this, they chop a bit off your pension for each year “missing”, unless you retire at 65, in that case you get a full pension. Sarkozy’s new law, just being voted through parliament, adds two years both to the official retirement age (making it 62) and to the age you need to retire at to get a guaranteed full pension (making it 67).

Sarkozy, weakened by disgusting corruption scandals involving his ministers (including Eric Woerth the head of pension reform) over the summer, is desperately looking for his “Thatcher moment”, a moment which has eluded recent right wing governments in France. In 1995 a month of strikes saw off a drastic attack on pensions. And most famously, in 2006, the First Employment Contract, voted though by a right wing government to impose inferior working conditions on young adults under 26 years old, was an unmitigated disaster for the government. After the law had been voted, a massive student movement backed up by the unions forced the Prime Minister into a humiliating climbdown. This happening again is Sarkozy’s nightmare. He has been quoted recently as saying in private “As long as the young people don’t get involved, I can handle the movement against my pension reform.” Traditionally, presidents allow their prime ministers to take the main responsibility for unpopular reforms, and sack them if the movement against gets too strong, but this time Sarkozy has put himself in the forefront, a move we hope to make him regret.

Union leaders and Left parties

You might think that with such levels of public support, union leaders would pull out all the stops for a General strike, but professional negotiators don’t think like that. The main trade union confederations have so far been united about the need for one day mass strikes, which has made impossible the standard government tactic of getting one confederation on their side through minor concessions and using that fact in propaganda to reduce public support for the strikers. But they are not pushing for renewable strikes, and are calling for negotiations, not for the simple binning of Sarkozy’s pension law. The union leaders’ banner at the head of Saturday’s demonstration read “Pensions, jobs and wages are important to society” when it should have read “General strike to beat Sarkozy”! So it’s up to the rank and file to build up to a general strike, though some regional leaders are supporting the idea.

The rock bottom support for Sarkozy in the opinion polls, and the fact that there are only 18 months left till the next presidential elections, has led the Socialist Party to be more active (though far from central) in this movement. They have promised to reinstate retirement at 60 if they are elected in 2012. The Socialist Party today is like the Labour Party in Britain twenty years ago, deeply divided between a Blairite wing who would abandon even weak links with an active workers’ movement, and a left wing who see a mix of parliamentary action and movements on the streets as the best way forward to more social justice. The Blairite Dominique Strauss Kahn, one of the hopefuls for the Socialist Party presidential candidacy in 2012 is presently Director General of the International Monetary Fund, the financial gangsters who are pushing across the world for later retirement and public sector cuts!

The Left reformist “Left Party”, and the Communist Party are actively building the movement, though many activists are being diverted into campaigning for a referendum on the issue of pensions. Since Sarkozy would only grant a referendum if he was terrified by the power of the movement, and if he scare him enough he will junk his reform anyway, the referendum idea is a waste of time. Anticapitalist groups such as the New Anticapitalist Party are completely committed to building for a general strike. Olivier Besancenot, spokesperson for the NAP said “We need a twenty first century version of May 1968.”

So far Sarkozy has been forced to make minor concessions (concerning for example women who have taken time off work to raise children). He has also made concessions in other areas hoping to calm the anger of certain parts of the population - for example an announced plan to cut housing benefit for students was abandoned . And a few days ago, he announced plans to look again at a whole raft of tax cuts for the rich instituted only three years back.

But the main battle is still on. Now the attack has been voted through parliament, the stakes are high - the unions are not negotiating : the new law will stand or be broken. If it is broken, Sarkozy is unlike to survive as president beyond the next elections in 2012.

Divide and rule

All year, Sarkozy has been using classic divide and rule tactics and playing the racist card. Mass expulsions of gypsies and threats to remove French nationality from naturalized immigrants convicted of certain crimes have led to protest movements. Tragically, the passage of a law banning women wearing a “full” muslim veil from walking the streets was supported by most of the parliamentary Left, while the far left remained practically silent, afraid of islamophobic sentiments among its own supporters. These racist tactics have had some effect, and racist attacks are on the rise. A sharp defeat for Sarkozy on pensions could help build a fighting Left which could then roll back some of the Right’s racist ploys, and encourage united action on the radical Left...

The movement is still on the rise, and Friday police thugs attacked high school students in a series of towns across France. In Montreuil, where I live, a high school student is in hospital having an operation on his eye after police fired plastic bullets at students who were blockading their school. In other parts of France, police forced the blockade of oil supply depots Friday.

Only two years ago in 2008, Sarkozy could be heard to gloat “These days, when there is a strike in France, no-one notices. ” He has been made to notice now, and if a rising wave of strikes can kill his attack on pensions, it will be a major step forward in the defence of workers in France, and an encouragement for workers around the world. Already, Spain’s recent general strike and Greece’s mass strikes against austerity have shown that European workers are ready to fight.

Bibracte: Memories of a past that didn't exist

It's a strange experience wondering round Bibracte, the ancient Gaulish city that served as a center for much of the south before Julius Caesar stomped his muddy sandals all over the place. For a start it's a huge site that you couldn't possibly cover in a day.

Within the city walls you not only had housing and commerce but they also grow crops and farmed animals - ensuring that under any siege the city could last out almost indefinitely. As a space it sprawls and, unlike Roman towns and cities of the day it sat on top of a set of rolling hills making it difficult to attack, particularly with siege machinery.

So different from Roman towns was it, and its ilk, that the Romans even gave them a specific word, Oppidum.

There's wonderful exhibition in Bribracte which Natalie has reviewed here and the fact you can explore to your heart's content around the part excavated mansions, walls and market places as well as its ancient stones and trees makes it a fascinating place to visit - although a car is absolutely essential.

One of the things that got me thinking about the place though was more tangential. Much of what we see of the distant past is in ruins, half covered with earth and nature, the artifacts of the past are battered, worn and made of stone or metal on the whole as wood, leather and the like have long rotted away.

This skews the way we think of these times in interesting ways. For example I certainly tend to think of Roman structures as pure white, elegantly simple when, of course, we actually know many of them were painted garish colours and/or surrounded by wooden structures or flowing material. The aesthetic look may suit the idea of a long dead past but at the time the living breathing people were having much more fun.

Likewise as I sat having a picnic in the centre of what was Bibracte I was basically sitting in a spooky and empty forest. Combined with the mist it was very easy to imagine a Celtic warrior strolling out of the dark all muscle and hair - but the forest came centuries after Bibracte's decline as a city. When in use it would have been made up of very Roman looking buildings, square stone walls and streets with thousands of people coming and going with their business.

The internal image of the past in my mind's eye is in reality a fantasy, completely unlike the reality of what would have been instantly recognisable as a relative of a modern city. It brings to mind a phrase of Victor Serge when he talked about those separated from us by time as "infinitely like us, infinitely different from us".

These are people who had decent beds, enjoyed a drink, and fell in love. Quite unbarbarian-like they shaved and understood personal grooming in a very modern sense. They also had laws, ethics and spent the majority of their time basically getting along. However, they also sold slaves without a qualm and clearly had a fetish for trepanning (drilling holes in the skull) - if you were transported back in time they'd be things you'd have to get used to.

Gaul was rich, civilised and ordered long before the Romans came, saw and conquered but our vision of the place is distorted by Caesar's history and Roman bigotry as well as the way we inevitably see the past through it's silent ruins not in living, noisy motion. In fact I suspect the ancient Gaul's would be far more familiar to us if we met them face to face than we often believe.

French protests continue: some photos

French protests defending the attack on their pension rights have been continuing today, and for once I was privileged enough to catch the tail end of the demonstration in Paris. Sadly I didn't get there for the main event, but saw the end anyway.

I don't go on holiday very often, but for the last five days I've been away in rural France chilling out, eating cheeses and looking over Roman and pre-Roman archeology. As it happens we were coming back through Paris today, the day of the big mobilisation against the right's attacks on workers rights. I just had to get my camera and check it out.

The Socialist Party (Labour) holding a mini-rally to cheering supporters

Anti-Sarkozy hot dogs were for sale

We stop and harrass some Greens, who in turn were very happy to see us

If you have information on Eric the Worst please call crime stoppers

The CGT, one of the trade union federations in France, were the largest contingent that we saw. All the unions and parties had these hot air balloon things. They all had flags too, which were much cooler.

This man is an angry archeologist.

One union had these equal rights posters.

This sort of thing made me feel at home. Man with home made screed.

Some protesters took a rest break on top of this statue.


I saw a fair few of these for the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party) but didn't see a block of them, so this woman dutifully waving her flag will have to represent them all.

I did however see the Lutte Ouvierre (Workers' Struggle) block complete with paper sellers (their hot air balloon is out of shot, but they did have one).

I can't tell you how big the main thing was but I can say that the local papers were covering the event days before Saturday and even in a sleepy and very small rural village we saw a CGT sticker advertising the campaign - so I think it was big, although whether it's big enough to win we shall have to see.

Certainly they are facing the same problems in France as we are here, it's just they're more advanced than we are. They've been able to keep more rights and when they're threatened they're able to mobilise in a very serious way. I'd love to see thousands upon tens of thousands of people wearing TUC stickers denouncing the government's cuts... is it just a dream?

Taking a break: tops and flops

I'm taking a break in France from today until Saturday. I'm going to do an hour's work a day anyway so I may do some recreational blogging while I' at it, but don't count on hearing much from me as I do need to recharge my batteries for some hardcore by-election winning when I get back.

France is so far, so good. On the positive side;

• The Metro newspaper may, theoretically, look like London's Metro but the Paris version is actually a newspaper not a string of celebrity gossip and gardening tips.
• I'm really liking the double decker trains - really smart way to do things. Although after a full six hours journey they had to wring their hands in apology. Six minutes late you see!
• Fonts. Perhaps this is just what you're used to, but I'm quite taken with the fonts they use for signs.
• The incredible heart warming and genuine smiles of people in Paris was wonderful, particularly as we passed through it in the morning rush hour. The London tube it ain't.

On the same old, same old side;

• For some reason I was expecting the coffee to be something special. So far it's basically just coffee.
• Probably to do with the time of day we went through Paris but basically people seemed to dress pretty much the same as they do in London.
• Pain au Chocolat. I'd been led to believe that the French were very protective of their language but here they are using exactly the same word as we use.

Me being me. Negatives;

• Puddles. There seems to be a lot of them.
• Power lines. The countryside seems dominated by them, although that could just be chance, obviously.
• I saw five fields of sheep. All of them had one black member. Tokenism gone mad.

I also saw the most hilarious bit of parking with a sports car in a busy car park parked across two bays. And yes, they were both disabled parking spots.

The last sane man in France

With the news that the French Assembly has overwhelmingly passed a law against the wearing of the veil I've been in a blistering, fuming rage. The law, which was introduced by a "delegation for the rights of women" criminalised women who choose to wear the "wrong" clothes.

If the senate passes the law it will be illegal to wear a full face-veil and you can be fined and forced to go to citizenship classes. It's also a crime (rightly) to force someone to wear a veil, including your children.

The fact that there is no distinction between criminalising someone who forces a woman to wear a veil and criminalising a woman who wants to wear a veil is a complete disgrace, but the worst of it is that this law had almost no opposition in Parliament.

Obviously the right voted for the measures but the left just gave these racist measures a free pass either voting for them or, more often, abstaining. Just one Parliamentarian voted against, just one. Daniel Garrigue.

Garrigue is a former UMP (Tory) member who resigned the whip in 2008 citing undemocratic processes in the party, some tax law I know nothing about and disagreeing with his party's support for Nato.

On his blog Garrigue explained that he’s happy for there to be laws against people forcing others to wear the veil and for a law to prohibit the veil on the grounds of security in particular places – but in general he sees it as a massive restriction of liberty, which it is.

He believes there is a climate of racism growing across Europe and this law will legitimise the National Front. The stunning thing is that he is the only one of the lot of them that accepted these blatantly obvious arguments.

This law will entrench the ever deepening racism in French society and embolden the Islamophobes across the continent, not to mention criminalising women for daring to wear what they like.

French regional elections see center weaken

On Sunday the French regional elections saw the ruling right wing UMP take a beating and the Socialist Party (PS) extend its already extensive reach across French regional government. The elections shine a light on exactly how unpopular Sarkozy’s government has become.

PS - Center left. UMP - Center right. EE - Greens. FN - far right. FDG, NPA, LO - far left. MoD - center.

The right were determined to make this election about national identity and Islam and the vote was conducted in the context of proposed laws to ban the Burka. Whilst playing the race card backfired for Sarkozy the dangerous game that the right were playing stoked the fascist vote and saw the National Front (FN) resurrected, gaining 12%.

The FN’s campaign focused on the ‘danger’ that Islam posed to France and, as Sarkozy has just found out, if you encourage people to be racists they will vote for the down the line racists.

The results had added significance for the FN as long time leader Le Pen is 81 and is expected to step down from the party’s leadership soon. The regional elections were an opportunity for potential leaders to jockey for position and Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, who is already an MEP, has emerged as the likely successor.

The election’s Islamophobic rhetoric spilled over into direct action with dozens of pig masked protesters raiding a restaurant last week for the ‘offense’ of selling halal burgers. Commenting on Sarkozy’s tactics Green leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit pointed to the FN rise and said "Bravo Mr. Sarkozy, here's the result."

However the story was not one sided and the French left, which has not always been strong on these issues, were able to confront these racist ideas with mixed success. The New Anti-Capitalist Party ran a Hijab wearing candidate to national uproar and most parties of the left refused to compromise with the anti-Islam mood.

The Greens ran a very clear anti-racist campaign and saw their vote skyrocket, leaving them as the nation’s third party. It’s clear that whilst French society is seeing a rise in racism, there is a powerful counter trend of anti-racism.

Martine Aubry, leader of the victorious Socialist Party, stressed that “the French sent a clear and strong message. They today expressed their refusal to see a divided France.” That may be overstating the case, but certainly Sarkozy’s poor performance is a real victory for the left.

The rise of Greens was not wholly unexpected though as the Greens first won third place last year at the European elections but their impressive result of 13%, including over 20% in Paris, is a massive leap forward from the last regional elections six years ago in 2004 where the Greens polled just 2%.

When the second round of voting takes place next Sunday this puts the left in a formidable position because the Greens explicitly position themselves as a party of the left and take part in Socialist Party led coalitions. Negotiations have already begun between the PS and the Greens for joint lists in the second round elections which will see unprecedented Green representation. This means that while the left won 20 of the 22 French regions last time they are in position to extend that already impressive hold on regional government.

However, one of the headlines of the election is the record low turnout with over half the electorate refusing to cast their vote. A closer look at the Socialist Party support sees that they have had a successful night because their vote has collapsed less spectacularly than Sarkozy’s vote rather than because of some revival in their fortunes.

The Socialist Party has been riven with splits and rows over the last few years, that saw some leading members leave the party. Likewise Sarkozy’s leadership has been consistently rocked by internal rows and disaffection – including court cases and high profile walk outs. However, unlike the PS, Sarkozy has no potential coalition partners on the right with the FN adamant that they will not lend them support in the second round.

With the center parties losing ground and the good results for the Greens and the FN it’s clear that French society is becoming increasingly polarised, a pattern we’ve seen recently in a number of elections in Europe.

However, the parties of the far left, who stood on a number of unity tickets, did not significantly benefit from the collapse of the center. The left vote was, as usual, split – but this time between left unity coalitions. The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NAP), whose most recognizable figure Olivier Besancenot was the highest polling far left candidate at the last Presidential election, polled a disappointing 2% at their first electoral outing.

Much of the press attention was focused on the fact that one region selected a young female activist who wears the hijab. The party’s leadership were supportive of their candidate but there is no doubt that this was a controversial decision both inside and outside of the party.

The NAP were outshone by the “Face of the Left”, a coalition between disaffected
Socialist Party members, Communists and some smaller parties. They polled a more respectable 6.2%, however both parties will no doubt be disappointed with the results.

What all this means for French politics is clear – that the future is unclear. With racism on the rise and the FN renewal of fortunes the threat of the far right is still very much present. However the right wing government is unloved and faces opposition both at the ballot box and in the streets.

It’s quite possible that this period could see the Socialist Party put their troubles behind them and go on to win the Presidency at the next election, but nothing is certain both because of threats to their right and to their left.

Although those left coalitions to the Socialist Party’s left did not perform very well at this election, their vote did not collapse either and they may still be able to capitalise on the problems of the centre. Certainly the extraordinary rise of the Green vote shows that French voters are willing to look to alternatives and to oppose the growing tide of racism.

French Greens statement on Calais jungle

Yesterday there was a small but lively protest outside the French embassy in protest against the events in Calais. Below is a picture of some Greens with the embassy behind them taken by Louise who has some more here.


The French Greens have issued a statement on the events which I thought you might be interested in seeing.

Calais: hide the misery that we could not see

The dramatic evacuation of the "jungle" is an inhumane and unnecessary PR exercise that does not solve the underlying problem.

The closure of Sangatte, as we predicted, merely moved the problem. It will be the same for the sweep of Calais.

The vast majority of refugees had left before the police arrived. As for those arrested, what will become of them? Will they be returned to countries at war where they risk death, in spite of international conventions. What will happen to the children? The problem has been masked temporarily and will reappear.

The French and European governments must accept their responsibilities towards the human drama of the Kurdish and Afghan refugees and give them asylum, rather than sweeping them away with bulldozers.

We must fully restore the Geneva Convention in Europe instead of choosing the strategy of terror and despair.

This media event was highly political. As with every election, the government is quick to stir up migration issues.

Djamila Sonzogni, Jean-Louis Roumégas

Bardot a feminist icon?

Agnès Poirier has been lavishing Brigitte Bardot with praise in the pages of the Guardian, which is billed on the front page as "And God created Bardot; The unlikely feminist". Unlikely? Bloody impossible more like!

There was a lot of it to wade through but evidence for this bizarre assertion did not rely on anything she'd ever said or spoken out on but the fact that there was a movement against racy films and she was quite good in them. Therefore she (not the films) was a danger to the entire bourgeois establishment. Really.

For example, at one point we are told she surpassed her contemporaries because "The beautiful thing about her is that, although she had marvellous breasts, she wouldn't flaunt them like Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida did with plunging décolletages". To the right we have a picture of Bardot not in anyway flaunting her breasts.

Incidentally, when going looking for a picture of her in a tight top I did happen to notice that she did not exactly shun "plunging décolletages" so I'd take that with a pinch of salt as well (you can try your own google search if you like, although why you'd want to heaven knows).

The most outrageous element of the piece though is just that Bardot is held up to be some sort of feminist. AC Grayling that well known feminist philosopher (ummm)says "I think Bardot represents one trend of feminism," Oh, do tell us which trend AC! "She represents the power of women. What's iconic about her is her shape, the way she occupies space." What? She's a feminist because she's got T and A? This would be new feminism would it?

Actually the game is given away when she is praised as "a thing of mobile contours". I mean that was what feminism has always been about hasn't it? The struggle to be seen as a thing with curves. Until men see women as simple objects of sexuality feminism's objects just will not have been achieved, will they?

Look, obviously, I don't object to G2 having lightweight, readable articles on subjects that don't actually matter, like Bardot, but I do not accept that those articles have to be such outrageous bollocks.

In order to paint Bardot as this laudable and progressive figure the author has had to paint over some bloody enormous cracks. For instance we're told that she did "make some ill-advised comments about immigration" which is certainly one way to describe the fact that she has five convictions for inciting racial hatred.

I think five convictions stretching over a number of years is an ideological commitment not a thoughtless, offhand comment frankly. We're told from the start that it would be ludicrous to even suggest she has ever been a sympathiser of the far right Front Nationale (FN), which must have made being married to one of their leading figures and attending their functions a touch awkward (right, pictured serenading fascist in chief Jean Marie Le Pen).

Did her husband have to lean over to her and say "Now don't cause a scene dear, just stick to uncontroversial subjects like your love of race hate. For god's sake don't start on your differences on potato quotas."

Actually she could have also chatted away about gay people because in her book A cry in the silence she bemoaned how modern gay people would "jiggle their bottoms, put their little fingers in the air and with their little castrato voices moan about what those ghastly heteros put them through". Yes, if she just stuck to those subjects she'd be able to get through a fund raising dinner without getting into a row with all those terrible FN people she disagreed with so much.

Come on, does the word feminism mean so little now that a racist who used to wear tight tops in films gets to be lauded as a ground breaking icon of liberation? Has something been lost in translation here? I understand feminism is a broad church and I've no time for gate keepers but Bardot? A feminist? No.

France: the New Anti-Capitalist Party

There's been surprisingly little discussion in the UK on the launching of the New Anti-Capitalist Party over the water in France. I thought I'd take a look at this interesting and significant new development and so I spoke to John Mullen, the editor of Socialisme International, to see if I could find out more.

Q1. You recently attended the French launch of the "New Anti-Capitalist Party". How did it go?

The official founding conference will be in January 2009. For the moment there are 400 “committees for a new anti-capitalist party” all over France. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire was the force which proposed and coordinated the foundation, and will dissolve itself into it in a couple of months time. I attended the November national delegate meeting as one of the delegates for my town.

The meeting was very encouraging. The new party initiative is obviously attracting a lot of people, many of them young, others experienced union activists, mostly (apart from the LCR members), people who have not been in a party as such before. Obviously for the moment, there is quite a lot of concentration on the preparation of a programme to be voted at the founding conference. Nevertheless many committees have been active in campaigning on the issue of the financial crisis, defending schools and universities against budget cuts, defending illegal immigrants against expulsions and so on.


Q2: 400 committees seems like an impressive number of groups for an organisation that hasn't even launched yet. How do these committees operate? How large are they, for instance would you have more than one in a town? Essentially are they the new party in waiting or are they the *campaign* for the new party?

It is impressive. In Montpellier, a day long regional meeting got two thousand people to it, a similar regional meeting in Marseilles got 1500, other towns had huge meetings. National commission meetings on ecology, on politics in working class neighborhoods and so on have produced wide debates and proposals. Essentially the committees are already the new party in embryo – every week there is a national political leaflet given out in almost all the towns. But the committees also have a lot of autonomy. In one town there will be a public meeting on the financial crisis, in another a symbolic invasion on the local hypermarket to protest against the government’s refusal to raise the minimum wage. The LCR already had very much a federal sort of organization (for better and worse), and this will no doubt continue.

But the party-in-embryo does not yet have a regular publication, an essential element for a campaigning party. Nor does it yet have a proper financial structure, though plans have been made for subs based on income. There is a website, and a weekly paper should be set up two months after the founding conference.


Q3. So what's the thinking behind the new organisation? After all even more than the UK there's no shortage of left-wing groupings.

The massive strike waves and political movements of the last few years have shown that there are many, many people in France who would like to build a political alternative on the radical Left. Olivier Besancenot, the spokesperson of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has recently had significantly higher popularity ratings than Sarkozy or his Prime Minister Fillon. But this widespread sympathy for radical Left ideas has not led people to join far left parties to anything like the extent one might think. And the Socialist and Communist parties are generally identified as “the parties who don’t change much when they’re in government”, even if the Socialist Party has not yet been fully converted to Blairism.

The New anti-capitalist party was called for by the LCR (and the LCR will be dissolving and merging with it). The idea was a party which is based on struggle, where elections are secondary, but which does not ask members to all identify with a specific revolutionary or Trotskyist position.


Q4. Who's currently involved in this initiative?

The only big organization involved is the (soon to be ex-) LCR. And a few thousand individuals, quite a few of them well known local or even national leaders of the non-party radical Left, which has been quite big here for a number of years. Inside the NPA, some activists want to draw the lines of the party fairly narrow, to be absolutely sure not to include people who are too quick to ally in local or regional government with the Socialist Party and their acceptance of neo-liberalism. Others would like to make the party considerably broader, because they are worried that people who put mass movements and strikes at the centre of their politics, and are firmly opposed to the dictatorship of profit, will be kept out of the party if the lines are drawn too narrowly. Discussions continue on this. But the present name of the party “anti-capitalist” represents the compromise position at present. We want people who are opposed to capitalism, who generally believe that capitalism cannot be durably given a human face.

This means that inside the party you have people close to anarchism, close to radical green politics, close to Guevara’s ideas etc etc. The debates are very interesting every time each current avoids simply affirming its identity and makes sure the questions are looked at in depth.


Q5: Do you think the current crisis in the Socialist Party is something that might bring dividends to the new project? The Left Party in Germany certainly benefited from having a leading SPD member behind the project from the start. What are the prospects for attracting the best parts of the Communists, Socialists, LO and, I guess, the Greens?

Recent economic and political events certainly will boost the new party. It is not hard to get people to listen to anti-capitalism these days – waves of sackings are making sure of that. And the relative paralysis of the Socialist Party, and the Communist party will certainly make it easier for the NPA to build support.

The situation is however complex, and the NPA is not the only organization trying to crystallize the radical Left. To go through the parties one by one, but briefly:

The trotskyist organization of a few thousand activists, Lutte Ouvrière is opposed to the new anti-capitalist party to such an extent that it broke with a very long tradition by allying itself with the Socialist Party in the municipal elections last April, rather than risking an alliance with the LCR and the non-party radical Left.

For Lutte Ouvrière, all these people in the NPA are not revolutionaries and therefore not interesting. Over the last few years, Lutte Ouvrière has been completely cut off from any of the big unity political campaigns (Against the European Constitution, against Le Pen etc). They stick strictly to “workplace issues” and are in decline because of this. They have just expelled the minority current from their ranks because this current wanted to work with the New Anti-Capitalist Party.

The leadership of the Communist Party won a good majority at its conference for a “business as usual” motion putting alliances with the Socialist Party at the centre of its strategy. All minority motions did very well though. Whole sections of communists are leaving the party (many favourable to a federation of the radical Left). But their paper and their good analyses of the economic crisis mean they still have an audience.

The Socialist Party has seen two historic events in the last six months. Firstly a significant split to the Left by Mr Mélenchon, who has now established a new party “Le parti de gauche” on the model, he says (but much smaller) than the German Die Linke. It will be founded very soon, and will attempt to fill the gap between the Socialist Party “let’s manage capitalism more humanly” line and the “almost revolutionary” line of the New Anti-Capitalist Party. It could become an important force, it’s hard to say.

The second key event is that Ségolène Royal, the Tony Blair of the Socialist Party, was defeated by an alliance much to the Left of her (though not that Left), on a very close poll. This is excellent news, and means that left arguments will be more audible. The radical left should be able to point up the difference between the left speeches of Martine Aubry, the new leader, and the lack of support for key struggles from this absolutely electoralist party.

Finally, some of these fragments, as well as teams from the non-party Left have just set up a “Federation” of Left forces and activists, to try to overcome the bittiness of the radical Left. The idea is that different forces and individuals can join it to run joint campaigns, but don’t need to leave their own organizations – dual membership is encouraged. This Federation is backed by a number of important figures.

The upshot of all this is that the New Anti-Capitalist Party has a lot of decisions to make about who to work with on what. For example, for the European elections in 2009 – is it better to have united slates of candidates across the radical Left (I think so) or to have an independent “New Anti-Capitalist Party” slate so as to be able to put forward a clearer platform.

The tendency within the New Anti-Capitalist Party is to rock forwards and backwards between sectarianism and unity politics. I am not talking about mad small-group sectarianism (because the new party will start with many thousands of people). But that sectarianism which always emphasizes first of all our differences with other groups, and finds a host of reasons why we cannot work with them even for limited aims. There is a real tendency inside the NPA to think “we are the only real Left” or “of course we want unity: people from other organizations should leave them and join us instead, then we’ll be united.” The tendency towards sectarianism is the biggest danger for the NPA. The numbers, relative youth, enthusiasm, energy and real pedagogy for explaining key issues are the most important positive points.

Q6: In this country there has been an ongoing difficulty with left unity projects where revolutionaries have been determined to hang onto their autonomy within the broader alliance to the extent that it can create, to my mind, unnecessary conflicts and distrust of separate agendas. What's the position of the LCR, as the most significant organised current in the NPA, on this tricky balancing act between retaining distinct organisation within the NPA and submerging their efforts into it?

An old and tricky problem, and you and me won’t necessarily see it in the same way. In my opinion the problem comes when differences are not discussed but separate agendas are pushed forward in rather hidden ways.

I personally would like to see the NPA declare “The NPA is a party which has some people who are revolutionaries and others are not. Debate will continue within the party on these issues, while together we build all the struggles which are needed to oppose the dictatorship of profit.” This is not really happening. There is a tendency to hide differences. So for example, on the question of whether the NPA is a revolutionary party or not the posters will say “A party to revolutionize society” and a whole number of other formulations which avoid the question.

This “formulation politics” was already one of the banes of the LCR. On a difficult question, find a formulation which upsets no-one, instead of deciding the question. Some of the formulations had no meaning…

So, it is an ongoing question. To emphasize that the aim of the LCR is not to control the NPA, the LCR is officially dissolving itself just before the foundation of the NPA, and there is no plan to maintain an LCR current inside the NPA. I think it likely that the different currents there were in the LCR will end up setting up three or four currents in the NPA, which seems fine to me. As Socialisme International, our tiny group of comrades, along with a couple of dozen others will certainly set up openly a current based on IS ideas (close to SWP theories).

To sum up, the New Anti-Capitalist Party is a very exciting initiative and everyone should build it. The new economic crisis means workers have even more of a need for a party based on class struggle, and there is a new generation of young activists being built very quickly. I hope the NPA will quickly work with wider federations, and in this way help to win partial victories on important points, while continuing the debate on how to definitively eliminate capitalism.


John Mullen is an anticapitalist activist in the South West of France and editor of the review Socialisme International.

Three stories sort of connected by race

1. Well, Obama should be the head honcho today, but who's going to be his significant other? Please, please, please God do not let it be Hillary Clinton. I'll start going to church and everything - even that dodgy one Barack goes to. Thanks mate.

The most audacious guess at the Democratic VP spot I've seen so far is Oprah Winfrey and, despite all my perfectionist-sectarian tendencies, I've warmed to the idea. Personally I think it is going to be a woman, and Oprah is very popular and was being pressed to stand for President by her supporters only last year.

I also doubt it will be Hillary - particularly after her "you know I might get lucky and he'll be assassinated" quip. I don't want a VP who's mooted the lovely day of getting the President's job because of a racist assassins bullet frankly. I mean I'm not saying she'd actively arrange it. I'm thinking it - but I'd never say it.

2. According to Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski the reason there's been a rise in racist attacks on Poles is because the BBC is not racist enough. Fact.

You see, according to the Shrewsbury MP, racism against Polish people is on the rise because the BBC has focused on "White Christians" who don't deserve to be beaten up - rather than nig nogs who do. Cough.

Although another reason for the statistical increase in attacks could be that there are more Polish people here than there were a few years ago. Added to that the media has completely kow-towed to the racist agenda on immigration albeit in a respectable, middle class "we know what we can and cannot say" way.

Personally I don't care which side of a line on a map you come from and I think it's distasteful to think that you can protect "your own" by ensuring others are victimised first. His whole argument rests on the repulsive idea that it's not the Poles you should be racist against - it's all the non-white non-Christians - they're the buggers. Pick on them.

3. Animal rights activist and National Front supporter Brigitte Bardot has come a cropper in the courts again for being a foul racist.

She's been convicted in a French court for inciting racial hatred. She is really fed up with all these naughty brown folk “I’ve had enough of being led by the nose by this whole population which is destroying us, and destroying our country by imposing their ways.”

I expect there are quite a few people who've had enough of you too Brigitte, it is your fifth racist offence after all. It's sad they only saw fit to impose a fine.

She's also landed up in court on other occasions, apart from when baiting Muslims. Like the time she had a neighbor's donkey castrated (while she was "looking after it") on the grounds that it was sexually harassing her own donkey.

Come on. Leave the donkeys alone.

John Mullen: Towards an explosion of struggle in France?

My thanks again to John Mullen who wrote a shorter piece on the events in France earlier in the week. This second piece is a further, more analytical look at where these events are going. John is editor of Socialisme International and you can also find him here.

A wave of strikes and protests is blossoming in France as I write. The new government, determined to « reform France », to « end once and for all the legacy of 1968 » but extra-careful to take it step by step, is finding mass resistance rising up in its path. It is impossible for the moment to know what will be the result a month or two from now.

The first battleground is pension rights. In France, although it does exist, poverty among old age pensioners is far far less common than in Britain, because workers have been able over the years to defend, more or less, a decent system. Then in 1993 pensions in the private sector were cut back. It was no longer enough to work 37 and a half years to get a full pension - you had to work forty years. In 2003, despite strikes and demonstrations by millions, that cutback was extended to the public sector. Forty years working life for everyone, and scary plans to increase that at the next Pensions Review in 2008. The idea was not really to make people work longer (in any case employers try to get rid of you after you’re fifty five), but more to make sure as few people as possible retire on a full pension, so as to save money on pensions.

But a few sectors were not included in the 2003 pension cuts - railway workers; metro workers, electricity and gas, the Paris Opera (!) and a couple of other groups of public sector workers were still on thirty seven and a half years. Sarkozy declared that it was essential to change this (« in the name of fairness »). The SNCF general manager went on TV to explain. The nice polite interviewer didn’t ask her about the difference in life expectancy between train drivers and General Managers, nor about whether she had to get up at three or four in the morning.

Defending their pension scheme is the reason for the transport strikes which began last Tuesday. Sarkozy chose this battlefield carefully, knowing that a lot of workers accept that everyone should move to forty years.

Meanwhile in the universities, students are boycotting lectures and voting to blockade the campuses in almost half of the universities across France. This is a situation which could change from day to day. The beginning of the movement, however, has started up much more rapidly than was the case two years ago with the victorious movement against the First Employment Contract (a movement which ended with a delicious humiliation for the Conservative government). The issue for students this time is the new Law on Universities. This has been carefully written so as to present only a first step in Conservative counter-reform. Nevertheless, its clear aim is to increase private funding in universities, to make universities compete against each other for funding and students, to cut financing of arts and humanities and increase the financing of subjects closer to the hearts of profit. It also aims to create a real management structure in universities - giving much more power to the Rectors, who up to now have had to manage universities hand-in-hand with powerful committees of professors. The professorial committees could be pretty dusty - but better than being managed by a big boss who always has an eye on private sector funding.

This time round there has been much more of an attempt by anti-strike students to organize against the strikes. And a few cases of radical students being satisfied with small group action instead of wanting to draw in as many as possible. For example the national student coordinating committee declared they would block the railway stations the day before the rail strike - until rail union leaders asked them not to.

Finally, the public sector workers (teachers, hospitals and civil servants) are planning a one-day strike next Tuesday for wage rises and against job cuts. The government has been trumpeting about the need to reduce the numbers of state employees, who are badly paid compared with the private sector but have real job security. Sarkozy’s slogan has been « only half of state employees who retire will be replaced. »

It is difficult to know how solid this public sector strike will be, and whether there is a chance it will be renewed after the first twenty four hours. This will fundamentally depend on how far the transport strikes and student revolts have risen by next Tuesday.

The transport union leaders are desperately looking for a way out. A very minor concession by Sarkozy saying he was willing to have governmental representatives attend negotiations between public transport managers and unions, is being used as an excuse by union leaders to say that the strike could end soon. The most conservative union - the CFDT - has called for an end to the strike. The major more radical union leaders - those of the CGT - have not dared to do this, not wanting to cut themselves off from an angry rank and file. But they have been saying how wonderful it is that these negotiations will allow them to talk directly to government representatives.

The stakes are high. If the railway and metro workers are beaten, demoralization could easily set in in all the other sectors, including students. The struggle, today Friday, hangs in the balance. If the strike stake off next week, we are in for a big explosion.

Already, it is excellent news that the struggle has risen so high. If the unions had given in without a strike, the government would have automatically accelerated their attacks in every area of economic and social life. But what we really need is not just proof that we can fight, to make the bosses wary, but proof that we can win, to make them terrified.

The major defeat for our side in 2003 on pensions, and the major victory for the workers in 2006 against the First Employment Contract, give the context - it could go either way. All radicals in France should be doing everything they can to make it go our way.

John Mullen: Class struggle in France

My thanks to John Mullen my, cough, cough, correspondent in France for this guest post on the current industrial action taking place across the channel. John is editor of Socialisme International and you can also find him here. John previously wrote a piece at the Daily (Maybe) on the French Presidential elections.

Though of course the election of Sarkozy was a big blow to workers here, the resistance is beginning to crank up.

Train workers are striking against the destruction of their pension deal, civil servants are aiming at pay rises and job creations, students are angry at the imposition of influence from private companies in universities, magistrates are campaigning against cuts.

The transport strikes started Tuesday, and are looking pretty solid, at least at first. The trains and metro have called « renewable strikes ». This is a French thingy,a nd it means that every evening the strikers have a big meeting in each depot and vote to continue or not. The advantage is that it is very difficult for union bureaucrats to call off strikes without persuading the rank and file strikers. The disadvantage is that every mass meeting is isolated from the rest and doesn't always know how strong the fight is elsewhere. This is why we press for « interpro » mass meetings, with strikers from different sectors deciding together. In any case it is all very class struggle. In October's strike, there was a meeting of railwaymen and school teachers organized. It is pretty brilliant.

The trains are on strike from Tuesday evening, electricity and gas from Wednesday. The following Tuesday the civil servants (hospitals local government and teachers) are on strike for the day - it might just be « renewable » but it usually isn't.

Meanwhile the students are getting organized - there are fifteen or so universities blockaded to protest against the new law on universities. The issue is not as clear and simple as the First Labour Contract was, but the universities have moved faster at the beginning because of the experience two years ago.

So, pretty exciting all in all.

Sarkozy victory

Newly elected President of France Sarkozy has made a big deal out of wanting to slash the number of unemployed (as Thatcher did when she was elected in '79 and then presided over a massive rise in unemployment and homelessness), develop hard line neo-liberal economic policy and hopes to "unite the nation" - as the riot police are immediately deployed, just to ensure everyone feels really, really united.

Some thoughts from around the blogosphere;

Tory blogger Iain Dale "I've said before that I am not a fan of Sarkozy. He looks to me to be slightly unbalanced and a bit of a bastard. I suppose I should console myself by the fact that as a man of the Right he is at least OUR bastard." Although Iain should take note that Sarkozy praised Tony Blair on more than one occasion during the campaign - perhaps that makes him everyone's bastard?

Lenin "Sarkozy means the unemployed youths, the low-paid workers, the immigrants and every other marginalised, exploited, oppressed group in society nothing but harm, a few riots would be a healthy sign of life. Write it down and pass it on, I'm backing the Paris jihad the second it hits the streets."

Martin "No more 35 hour workweek for those spoiled lazy bastards, no more luxury benefits, finally a French economy in line with the rest of the EU."

The Nation on the other hand points out that whilst Sarko was the "Bush-friendly candidate for the presidency" he "was never going to be George Bush's "poodle" in the way that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had been in the run-up to the Iraq war. During the campaign, Sarkozy pointedly stated his opposition to the war, backed moves to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan, and allowed as how "the messianic side of Americans can be tiresome.""

Bum. Let's hope the elections next month are more cheering.

Guest Post on France

I think this is my first ever guest post, and it's from my correspondant in France (cough) John Mullen. I don't necessarily agree with it all but I think it's a very useful piece, sorry about the length.
_________________________________________


The Presidential elections in France : Polarization and crisis

This not-very-short article (1) is an attempt to explain the election results of the first round and the perspectives for the radical Left in France. Right now all French political parties are in serious crisis, because of the fact that neither the ruling class nor the working class has managed to make a decisive breakthrough over the last few years. What is going on in these parties in crisis can be particularly opaque to outsiders, and more than usual, foreign newspapers were misleading about many aspects of the crisis. So here goes.


Massive politicization

The first round of the presidential elections in France on Sunday April 22 saw a record turnout. The shock of seeing the far right candidate make it through, in 2002, to the second round run-off galvanized voters to turn out to make sure this could not happen again. In addition, the fact that these elections marked the end of the reign of old man Chirac, and the fact that the two favourite candidates, Sarkozy (right) and Royal (Socialist) were newcomers to the presidential race encouraged interest. Just as important was the fact that the mass movements of recent years – to defend pensions in 2004, against the ultraliberal European constitution in 2005, against the First Employment Contract in 2006 – have increased and deepened popular interest in politics.

Indeed, the campaign was followed closely by many millions of workers. Peak time political interviews of more than an hour in length got TV audiences of eight or nine million watching them. Mass meetings of all candidates attracted record numbers.

This interest helped not just the mainstream parties but also the radical Left. Rallies of the radical Left candidates (there were four of them, five if you include the Greens) drew thousands at a time, night after night. The websites of the radical Left were inundated with visits. The political situation was highly polarized.

From the point of view of the Left the main element to keep in mind is the huge gap between the level of anger and class struggle, and the implantation and influence of Left political organizations. Despite huge mass movements in 2003 and 2006, the victory against the European constitution in 2005 and the riots in 2005, no Left organization has become significantly larger and more influential. This is the background for the general desire for a new united political force, which is harder to get than to dream of .

Poor election results for the radical Left

Taken as a whole, the results of the radical Left were not good compared to 2002. Three million more people voted this time round, but the radical Left as a whole got two million fewer votes. This is the lowest radical Left vote for a decade. This despite our much higher profile during the campaign, and the stunning success of many of the mass meetings, in particular those of Bové and of Besancenot.


The results of the first round (2)

(Bear in mind that we can never know how many votes are “protest votes”, how many are “tactical votes” and how many reflect real agreement with programmes and principles. Everybody understands that they are not electing someone when they vote in the first round)

Besancenot (LCR)	1 498 581	4.08%
Buffet (Communist)	707 268	1.93%
Bayrou (“Centre-Right”)	6 820 119	18.57%
Bové (For a United Radical Left)	483 008	1.32%
Laguiller (Workers Struggle)	487 857	1,33%
Voynet (Greens)	576 666	1.57%
De Villiers (Far right)	818 407	2.23%
Royal (Socialist Party)	9 500 112	25.87%
Sarkozy (Right)	11 448 663	31.18%
Le Pen (Front national)	3 834 530	10.44%

Let’s look at the most important results from Right to Left before exploring the lessons to be drawn for anticapitalists.

First the fascists. The very high turnout helped ensure that the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen was down from 17% last time to 10.4% this time (and he lost a million votes compared to 2002). This is naturally excellent news, as is the fact that he ran a very passive campaign with very few mass meetings, but his electoral support is still dangerously high and he is capable of pushing the whole political debate rightwards in particular on questions of immigration. Cases in recent weeks of Muslim and Jewish graves being desecrated and of other racist attacks confirm what we have always known – every vote for Le Pen is an encouragement for some racist thug to beat up or kill an immigrant, a Muslim, a gay person or some other scapegoat. For those tempted to think that Le Pen is becoming more moderate, remember he made the headlines during the campaign by saying that Sarkozy could not make a good French president, since his grandparents were Hungarian and Jewish. As one commentator pointed out, if we add the votes of Le Pen and De Villiers “ despite Sarkozy’s hard-line on immigration and law and order, 4.6 million French voters (one person in eight) still supported far right and ultra-conservative candidates.”

The favourite for becoming the new president next week is obviously the Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, who would like to become the Margaret Thatcher of French politics and push the neoliberal agenda decisively further. He got more than 30% in the first round.

He wants to overcome the waves of workers’ resistance which since 1995 have very much slowed down the attacks on workers living standards, without ever coming near to reversing the steam. Fast-talking, sharp-tongued and abrasive, Sarkozy unlike Thatcher claims to look forward to a New Conservatism, not back to Victorian values. He has won quite a lot of votes which previously went to Le Pen, through a series of media coups. He has been denouncing young disaffected youth as “scum”, backing police violence to the hilt, and most recently proposing the setting up of a “Ministry for immigration and national identity”. In this way he wants to wink to Le Pen’s voters that he too sees immigrants as a threat to “our” national identity – classic scapegoat stuff. At the same time he woos Muslim leaders with talk of measures of multiculturalism normally taboo in France across the whole of the political spectrum.

Sarkozy is a dangerous man: a rabid supporter of Bush’s war for oil in Iraq, and a great believer that workers should work harder for less money. All the Left will have to mobilize to keep him out of the president’s palace, and it will be an uphill struggle.

The surprise “third man” of the election was François Bayrou, with 18.5 %, a man described by a rather unsympathetic Times journalist as “a part-time horse breeder from the Pyrenees”. A right wing old-timer, he gained a lot of support on a “neither right nor left” platform, claiming that such divisions were old-fashioned now and calling for the establishment of a US-style Democratic Party. When neither Right nor Left are convincing, these arguments can work. In addition, he obtained a huge number of votes from right wingers who do not like Sarkozy’s aggressive and parvenu style, and he obtained a lot of Left wing – and even far left - tactical votes from people who believed (as the polls said) that Bayrou would have a better chance of winning against Sarkozy in the second round than the Socialist Royal. Finally he gained a good part of the vote of sexists who normally vote Left but refuse to vote for a woman.

Let’s move onto the other candidate who will be in the second-round run-off, the Socialist Party candidate, who is running at around 47% in the opinion polls. Ségolène Royal, and her programme, are the result of a compromise inside her party. Royal is not Blair from 1997. Blair had already crushed the Left of his party and was busy holidaying with billionaires and declaring New Labour to be “the party of business” before 1997. Royal is only at the very beginning of such a process. The internal life of the Socialist Party remains a (distorted) reflection of class struggle and the Left still has a lot of influence. The Left of the PS was very influential in the 2005 victory against the ultraliberal European Constitution. The strength of this Left and, even more, the mass strikes and movements of the last few years have obliged Royal to include several clearly Left-wing measures in her programme. She proposes building 120 000 units of social housing a year and making pension increases for poorer pensioners. She proposes reserving development grants to companies who promise not to lay off workers, and she says she will massively increase the number of crèche places available in public nurseries.

At the same time, she has been playing very hard some right wing policies military-style camps for young ‘delinquents’…), and has been praising the French flag to the heavens (“every family should have one”). More importantly there are almost no promises to reverse key right wing laws brought in over the last few years. No-one thinks Royal will be renationalizing public industries. No-one thinks she won’t continue to attack pensions “because they cost too much”. No one thinks she will withdraw French troops from Afghanistan and elsewhere. And she is clearly declaring that “economic competitiveness” is her central principle.

Royal gave her speeches to packed houses (and in sports stadiums) of up to 20 000 at a time in the highly charged atmosphere of this campaign. Even so, the most notable fact about Royal’s campaign may have been its emptiness. After 5 000 neighbourhood meetings “to discover what the people want”, in the name of “participatory democracy”, she claimed to have found that the French people have “a deep desire for a future” (good sign, I suppose), and she has therefore decided to promise “Justice and order so that France can get back on her feet”.

The “participatory democracy” circus, along with a recruitment campaign to the Socialist Party (new cut-price joining costs 20 euros by internet) aim at diluting the weight of the PS activist base, on average more Left wing than its leaders.

The Green candidate Dominique Voynet, from the least-Left wing section of the party, close in fact to the Socialist Party, did not do well, and went down from 5.2% in 2002 to 1.6% this time. It seemed that now every candidate claimed to be interested in the environment, and tactical voters preferred Royal, while radical Left Greens preferred Bové, the space left for Voynet had been squeezed down considerably.

The radical Left – the dangers of purism and sectarianism

The story of the radical Left – all those to the Left of the Socialist Party - in France since 2005 is a little complex but needs to be understood. The ultraliberal European constitution was defeated at a referendum in 2005 due to the efforts of the radical Left, who ran an extraordinary united campaign where dissident Greens, dissident Socialists, and Trotskyists and Communists, along with a massive non-party Left, worked closely and enthusiastically together.

After this victory, and this new deepening of joint mass work, the hundreds of United Radical Left committees around the country did not disband. Instead they wrote a programme (known as the 125 proposals) and transformed themselves into committees for a United Radical Left candidacy for the presidential elections and for the following parliamentary elections set for June 2007. The idea was a collective candidacy, both moving away from the dangerous personalizing of these elections, and allowing for a strong voice for radical change.

The 125 proposals are pretty radical stuff : indexing wages on prices, banning stock options, banning redundancies in companies that are making a profit; a move towards the 32 hour week, papers for all illegal immigrants, a reversal of recent attacks on education, higher taxes for the rich, to cite just a few examples.

However, the functioning of the committees was not without its problems. The Communist party generally worked in inside them, but most of it hoped and planned that the CP general secretary, Marie-George Buffet, would be chosen as the candidate of unity.

The LCR majority faction refused to work seriously with the committees, emphasized (sometimes imaginary) divisions, and frequently remained “as an observer” at the meetings nationally and locally in order to lecture everyone on pure anticapitalist politics. The LCR minority (almost a third of the organization) worked enthusiastically in the United Radical Left committees, trying to minimize the damage done by the sectarian majority.

As the election came closer, both the Communist Party and the LCR decided to run standalone candidates, basically for sectarian reasons, after a good old fashioned Stalinist attempt by the Communist Party to hijack the decision making process in the federation of United Radical Left committees. This decision led to a severe crisis in each of these parties (more on that in a moment).

At this point, the United Radical Left committees, reduced to the non-party Left and a fair number of dissident Communists, dissident LCR, and dissident Greens, were thrown into crisis. The PCF and the LCR leaders were convinced that what was left was a rump that would be unable to run a candidate, and in particular be unable to organize the visiting of many thousands of mayors to be able to collect the five hundred signatures of mayors necessary to have the right to run.

They were completely wrong. At the eleventh hour the majority of the United Radical Left committees decided to ask José Bové (leader of a small-farmers’ Union and well-known campaigner for ecology and for other issues such as Palestine) to stand as the candidate of unity. Twenty spokespeople were named for the collective campaign, including leading dissident Greens, Communists and LCR, as well as union and other campaigning leaders. The idea was not to run a campaign claiming to have a different programme to those of the other radical Left candidates, but on the contrary, to say that separate candidacies were stupid and that only with unity could a real difference be made. That then is the background. Let’s look at what happened on polling day. The whole problematic of anticapitalists and elections is that elections do count, but of course social struggle counts more. This is why, for each candidate we have to look both at how the electorate, and in particular the working class, reacted to their programme, but also, and crucially, what effect their programme and strategy had on activist circles and on people who are ready to get stuck into struggle. If we don’t look at both, we can fall into electoralism. And it is particularly important in France to look at both, because first round voting has a tradition of including a large number of “protest voters” whose attachment to the long term aims of the candidate they are voting for is in fact pretty weak.


Radical Left campaigns and results

So let’s take a look at the significant (3) Left candidates one by one. Much to the Left of Royal there was Buffet (Communist Party), Laguiller (Lutte Ouvrière), Besancenot (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire), Bové (For a United Radical Left <4>)

Marie-George Buffet, the Communist Party candidate saw the CP vote collapse (from 3.37% in 2002 to 1.93% today). In part this was just the continuation of a practically continuous decline over the last thirty years. The PCF this time lost votes both to its right, where people who felt Buffet had distanced herself too much from the Socialist Party and governmental options preferred to vote for Royal, and also to its Left, where people who had been disgusted with the party’s manipulations around the United Radical Left candidacy abandoned the Communist Party. The balancing act between an institutional approach and an approach based on struggle was too difficult. In addition, the PCF still runs many town councils, and in the crisis the difference they make there is smaller and smaller and can give rise to much disillusion. The press are all talking about “the death of the Communist party”, no doubt a little prematurely, since it still has over 60 000 members and over 10 000 elected representatives (town councillors, mayors etc).

This historically low score has deepened the internal crisis in the PCF. Quite a number of long-term activists have left to join forces with the United Radical Left committees. “Communists for Unity” a new current including a number of national leaders is slowly becoming an autonomous organization, with its own meetings, conferences etc. appealing to « all those who identify with Communist culture, who have helped build the United Radical Left or who would like to get involved ».

Arlette Laguiller, representing the Trotskyist organization “Workers Struggle” (Lutte Ouvrière) also made a poor showing. From 5.7% in 2002, her vote fell to 1.4%.The tactical voting tide is obviously one reason. A certain switching of votes to Olivier Besancenot is another. Besancenot’s younger image and much better communicated programme assisted this, as no doubt did the tendency of the LCR despite their name to avoid using the word “revolution”.

In addition, Lutte Ouvrière have been on a very sectarian line these last ten years. They were fairly active in the mass movement against the First Employment Contract in 2006, but have been totally absent from - and sometimes even opposed to – some of the biggest and most popular mobilizations of recent years, since “non-workplace issues” hardly interest them. So they didn’t join the committees to fight for a No vote on the European referendum, they didn’t help organize the mass demos against Le Pen in 2002, and they all-but-denounced the huge European Social Forums in 2003 and 2004. Finally the initial slogan of LO’s campaign this time round, plastered on huge expensive billboards was (under a photograph of Arlette Laguiller) “Who else can sincerely say they are on the workers’ side”. During an election campaign featuring three Trotskyists, a Communist and another radical anticapitalist, this slogan did seem to be pushing it.

Of all the organizations of the Radical Left, the LCR would seem, on the surface to have the most to celebrate this week.

Olivier Besancenot’s strategy and campaign resulted ( as always in the LCR) from a compromise between different factions inside the organization, which explains an occasional lack of coherence. In general one can say that the electoral result was good, but that the effect of the strategy and the campaign on activist circles, union militants and the non-party Left was little short of catastrophic.

First the positive side. Besancenot got 4.08% of the vote. The deep involvement of the LCR in recent mass movements must have helped, and the score was particularly high in some working class areas and among young people. The campaign emphasized independence from the Socialist Party, and economic issues such as taxing the rich, and an immediate, substantial rise in the minimum wage. Olivier Besancenot was certainly the most talented speaker and interviewee among the radical Left candidates, and this counted too in a campaign dominated by the mass media.

As a result of all this, he was able to resist to some extent the tide of tactical voting for the Socialist party or for Bayrou.

For the mass of the electorate, of course, the LCR’s major mistake in scuppering the possibility of a United Radical Left Candidacy a few months earlier meant little, if they even knew about this episode. But in activist circles and among the very large non-party Left, the LCR has gained itself an image as a sectarian organisation which ignored a real dynamic of unity which could have allowed the Radical Left to get a much higher score and laid the first foundations for a mass Radical Left alternative.

The reasonably good score of the LCR candidate has reinforced the most sectarian currents in the LCR (some to the point of caricature). The LCR has therefore, incredibly, refused to hold joint “anti-Sarkozy” meetings, concerts and other events along with other forces between the two rounds of the elections. In addition, the LCR leadership looks set on avoiding as far as possible having United Radical Left candidacies in the June parliamentary elections.

Some of the LCR declarations need interpretation. In his post-first-round declaration, Olivier Besancenot called for anticapitalist unity. But this was clearly meant and understood in activist circles as “unity behind our organization”, an abstract and ineffective appeal. One of the ways of camouflaging this fact was to make a call for unity to “the PCF, Lutte Ouvrière and others”. Seeing that Lutte Ouvrière is completely opposed to a new anticapitalist force, the appeal is essentially falsely naïve pretence.

This situation is exacerbating the tension in the LCR between the 5 – 10 % or so of its members (including your humble servant) who actively supported the Bové campaign, the majority, who ran the Besancenot campaign, and a significant minority who did nothing, though sympathizing with the Bové campaign, for fear of becoming painfully isolated inside the LCR . Quite a number of members including one historic leading member, Michel Husson, have left the organization in disgust at its sectarian course.

A final word on the Besancenot campaign. It had a rather bizarre attitude to the question of calling for a Left vote in the second round. The line was to refuse absolutely to deal with this question until after the first round (a source of some frustration to many ordinary workers for whom a Left vote is a matter of principle rather than tactics). On the evening of the first round, the LCR called “to beat Sarkozy in the streets and in the ballot boxes”, in my view a genuinely bizarre slogan, half-heartedly calling for a vote for Royal.

José Bové and the committees for a United Radical Left

The campaign of José Bové was a surprise. Bové hesitated before accepting a widespread desire within the United Radical Left committees that he take up the banner for them. The campaign began with no party structure and a very heterogeneous base including some Communists, some Greens, some LCR, a lot of non-party Left (sometimes ex-Communists) and a few anti-party people. To everyone’s amazement, it managed to mobilize eight hundred activists to go round towns and villages visiting thousands of mayors to obtain, with great difficulty and at the last moment, 500 endorsements from mayors just before the deadline. The rest of the radical left were nonplussed. For Lutte Ouvrière he was just another reformist, the LCR preferred not to mention his campaign because it was so clearly independent of the Socialist Party that the LCR’s objections to unity were shown up as idiotic.

The Bové campaign was based on the 125 proposals, the twenty spokespeople and was very much a collective campaign. The tone was generally “we all need to rise up” rather than “This is what we could do for you”. The meetings were a great success. Up to one hundred thousand people participated, with very many young people and very noticeably multi-ethnic crowds. Citizens’ organizations from the poorer suburbs were very much present. Some Muslim organizations joined the coalition – Bové being the only one of the candidates with a clear understanding of islamophobia and the only one who had openly and actively opposed the racist ban on Muslim headscarves in schools a couple of years back. Committees across the country organized imaginative street parties and concerts, while “Radical Left wine” was sold in the South, and in my town “Radical Left organic chickens”! Bové also made clear from the beginning that the main enemy was the right wing and that voting Left in the second round was a matter of principle.

The problem was that the United Radical Left idea is still very young in the minds of the mass of the people, and there was little time to profoundly change this. Bové’s vote (483 000 votes, 1.32%) was disappointing, but the campaign dynamic was really interesting and has built a precious based for the fight for a wider Radical Left Unity alternative.

LCR attempts to claim that the Bové campaign was different from their own had limited success, since on measure after measure, the two candidates were saying the same thing. The more sectarian members of the LCR were reduced to deliberately misunderstanding some of Bové’s jokes…

Bové’s was the only campaign which brought together activists from different organizations or none to work together. Its lack of party structure and tendency to spontaneity led to a certain amateurism and some mistakes. And the manipulations of the PCF leadership and the sectarian errors of the LCR leadership have strengthened the hand of anti-party current within the United Radical Left committees.

These committees, which are now organizing “United against Sarkozy” events and pushing for United Radical Left candidacies in the parliamentary elections are heterogeneous but very promising structures. Along with the “Communists for Unity” (Communistes unitaires) they no doubt represent the most interesting new developments in Left political organization in France for many years.

Obviously there is no guarantee that they will be able to grow significantly and to oblige sections of established organizations to join forces with them to produce a credible political alternative.

Conclusions

If the reader has the impression that the French radical Left is one almighty mess in the midst of a very promising situation, then he or she has probably correctly understood my article. Nevertheless, many questions remain open.

- If Sarkozy is elected, will the consequent demoralization of Left and union militants be so deep that any progress building an alternative will be slowed down massively?
- If Royal is elected, with the help of some sort of alliance with the centre, will the Socialist Party see a split to its Left?
- Will the LCR continue moving into sectarianism, or will their dominant position electorally push them, in this crisis situation to make some genuine initiative towards anticapitalist unity
- How quickly will the collapse of the Communist party progress, opening up a space to its Left?
- Will the “Communists for Unity” get stuck as a talking shop and too much of a mixed bag to build anything serious enough for action?
- Will the Bové committees continue their dynamic and replace the amateurism and spontaneism with a more serious approach ?
- Will anybody have a go at recruiting the next generation?

Certainly practically the whole of the radical Left is very weak on looking outwards, engaging with large numbers of people, and trying to bring in the new generation of activists. It is as though old activists who have survived the hard times when there were few struggles, have got stuck in a rut of long meetings and waiting sceptically for anyone new to force their way in the door.

I know it’s easy for a member of a tiny group to give good or bad grades to the whole of the rest of the Left who are hundreds of times bigger, but still… one example :

After the marvellous mass movement against the First Employment Contract in 2006, a movement which blockaded over sixty universities and hundreds of high schools, all the organizations seemed to go back to business-as-usual. Lots of dusty internal meetings and long explanatory texts. No doubt indispensable. But there were practically no meetings on campuses to address the political issues raised by the movement, very few attempts to set up active Student Left organizations, concerts, rallies, exhibitions, bookstalls… The radical left is in need of a lot of new vitality if it is to measure up to the situation of class polarization which France is deeply immersed in. The election campaign period has been marked by several important strikes and the struggle of undocumented immigrants, and it is very clear that on the ground, there is no class truce on the horizon.

John Mullen
Editor of Socialisme International http://www.revue-socialisme.org

Personal website http://www.johncmullen.net
Comments welcome john.mullen@wanadoo.fr

Footnotes

i) Nevertheless the article contains a number of in my view necessary simplifications for pedagogical reasons.
ii) I have omitted two small candidates I have nothing to say about.
iii) I have omitted one Trotskyist candidate, Gérard Schivardi. Look him up on wikipedia if you think he has any significance. I don’t.
iv) This was not his official label.