In less than a year France experienced
three major upheavals which have pushed
it to the centre of international attention
: the ‘No’ victory in the referendum on
the European Constitution, the riots in
the suburbs in autumn 2005 and the
anti-CPE (contrat première embauche -
First Employment Contract) movement
in March and April 2006.
Although very different from each
other, all three are evidence of the fact
that definitely, in this country, ‘things
cannot go on as before’. If it is certain
that an awareness of a profound social
and political crisis preceded these
events, it is nonetheless true that on
each occasion significant boundaries
were crossed.
Thus if we simply look at the social
movement of this spring, even the least
well-informed observer could have
picked up at random: youth from the
lycées [high schools] and universities on
the streets for several months, joint
action by these youth and workers, a
trade-union united front of the sort not
seen since the Liberation, new record
sizes of demonstrations and the splits at
the very top of the state machine being
in full view...
This coming together of a crisis which
takes various forms and gets ever deeper
with direct popular involvement, interrupting
the ‘normal’ course of events,
has led people to see it as an ‘unprecedented
situation, with the potential of a
historical break’, whatever may be the
outcome of a situation which, precisely,
remains open.
Faced with an unprecedented situation,
the first conclusion we must draw is
the necessity, an urgent one, of renewing
our means of comprehension and analysis,
since the first distinctive sign of a new
situation lies in its ability to cause problems
for our pre-existing schemas of interpretation.
This job does not promise to be an
easy one, yet we have no choice other
than to embark on it immediately, for the
only way to obtain these new necessary
means is to forge them as we advance,
striving to achieve a way of thought
which can intervene on the basis of and
into a new situation which is evolving
rapidly.
CRISIS OF THE REGIME OR CRISIS OF THE STATE?
We shall start from the following hypothesis:
the revolt of March-April 2006
indicates the crossing of a boundary in
the crisis of French society and its system
of power: the social and political crisis is
turning into a crisis of the state, which
includes aspects of an institutional crisis
(‘of the regime’), but of which the institutional
crisis is not the centre and is not
the question which is directly at stake.
We shall therefore refer not to a ‘crisis
of the regime’ but to a ‘crisis of state’ in
the sense of a destabilisation of the political
capacity of the state apparatus and
those who staff its leading positions to
guarantee the ‘normal’ functions of class
domination (to put it simply: leadership
and repression) [1].
In fact, rather than a paralysis of institutions
in the strict sense (after the fashion
of a parliamentary system which had
become unworkable as in the last years
of the Third or Fourth Republics) we are
seeing a long-term disordering of the
strategic behaviour of those who hold
political power. And even more: it is the
‘authority’ of the state as such, the legitimacy
of its action, which seem to be
profoundly affected.
In this direction a previous boundary
had been crossed at the time of the riots
in the suburbs in autumn 2005. In their
most spectacular aspect - the challenging
in practice of the legitimacy of state violence
(and thereby of the hard core of the
action of the state as holder of the monopoly
of this legitimate violence) - the
very fact of these riots was evidence of
the weakening of this state authority that
was already in progress, a weakening that
the rioters understood much better, in
order to accelerate it, than the political
elites.
This was all the more true in that the
young rebels from the deprived districts
did not merely attack the repressive apparatuses
but also other symbols of
places which indicated the presence of
the state in these parts of the territory
(schools, transport, equipment), which
were perceived as being so many cogs in
the same mechanism of social domination
and violence.
These proto-political actions, of a
‘serial’ type (see the analysis of collective
action by Jean-Paul Sartre in the Critique
of Dialectical Reason), anticipate in practice
– and even, in some cases, prepare
the ground for - examples of ‘direct
action’, pushing legality to the limit or
openly infringing it; such actions, more
concerted and organised, marked the
final phase of the anti-CPE movement
(between the last day of demonstrations
on 4 April and the announcement that
the measure had been rescinded). [2]
This also explains an infallible sign of
situations of profound crisis, the violence
which marked the movement. Massive
state violence above all, culminating in
the heavy judicial repression which is currently
being exercised against thousands
of participants brought before the
courts. [3]
This violence from above provoked in
response a popular counter-violence, relatively
limited but significant: not so
much that, predictable and repetitive, of
small organised groups, which were in
fact external to the movement, but
rather that which was linked to mass
practices, sometimes spontaneous,
sometimes organised. [4]
A counter-violence which was directed
essentially against the police and
the repressive apparatuses, without forgetting
its targeted (and concerted) use
with the aim of ensuring the continuation
of collective action (maintenance
of ‘blockades’, prevention of the activity
of ‘wreckers’ by the demonstration
stewards).
Despite the almost total absence of organised
political response to the declaration
of the state of emergency, it seems in
this sense justified to regard the riots of
November 2005 as the starting-point of
the transformation of the pre-existing
political crisis into a crisis of the state, a
transformation which will be confirmed
in the course of the anti-CPE movement
and will subsequently return and become
stronger.
At this point we should remove one
interpretative obstacle, widely promoted
by the media and apparently by common
sense throughout the CPE conflict. This
is the idea that all this agitation could
have easily been avoided but for the ‘obstinacy’,
the ‘failure to listen’ (or the absence
of ‘dialogue’) , the notorious
‘method’, in short the particular ‘temperament’
or ‘style’ of the Prime Minister,
Dominique de Villepin.
The explanation of events by the role
of unique individuals, that is, by factors
of a psychological and/or personal
nature, has a long history, linked to the
previously mentioned difficulties in producing
a ‘cognitive mapping’ of a new
situation.
Let us merely recall that virtually identical
reasons were adduced with regard
to events which in many ways anticipated
those we are dealing with here, namely
the strikes of November-December
1995, which were blamed on the ‘intransigence’
or the bad ‘method’ (the alleged
lack of ‘communication’) of the
then Prime Minister, Alain Juppé, said to
be ‘unbending’.
But the real question posed here is not
so much the refutation - quite legitimate
of course - of the attempt to explain the
mechanism of a political conjuncture by
individual factors deriving from the personality
of one of the protagonists.
It is rather a question of understanding
how the very fact that characters as
‘inadequate’ or ‘dysfunctional’ as Juppé
or de Villepin can be in positions of command
at this precise moment is a contributory
factor to a broader crisis that
transcends them and that the latter, by a
sort of ‘ruse of reason’ (i.e. by turning
the consequences of their actions against
their intentions) help to make worse.
So what it is important to stress above
all, in particular against those who try to
deduce the logic of government action
directly from the economic requirements
of capital, is the determining role in this
matter of the constraints imposed by the
specifically political conjuncture, by the
process of what we are here calling ‘crisis
of the state’.
In this trajectory of radicalisation and
polarisation of positions we shall look
more closely at two elements: first, we
should stress that the notorious ‘intransigence’
or “absence of dialogue” which
are invoked on each occasion do not
refer to an individual inadequacy or a
mere accident. They derive from political
choices which have been made.
Here method comes together with
content: the inability of neo-liberal
counter-reform to inspire genuine support
is written into the very nature of its
project: to restore the power of capital
by destroying the gains won from the
ruling class during the period of the
thirty-year Keynesian boom, and smashing
the very possibility of a compromise
leaving some space (however limited) for
the interests of the dominated classes.
The government’s obstinacy, apparently
excessive’ or even ‘counterproductive’,
is therefore in no way a question of
personal whim on the part of the Prime
Minister (or of the President of the Republic
telling him what to do), but
springs from the fact that neo-liberalism
leaves no space for ‘negotiations’ in any
way comparable to those which shaped
the compromises of the Keynesian
period. [5]
Hence the sense of sham created by the
‘contractual policy’ advocated by the
CFDT, which is in fact simply a synonym
for the joint management of social regression
by docile trade-union machines. [6]
Nonetheless it is a fact that in the case
of the CPE even this option was unavailable:
by slamming the door in the face of
the CFDT, Villepin deprived himself in
advance of any trade-union partner.
It is also true that, especially after the
failure of the movement of spring 2003,
the price of sham-negotiation had
tended to become prohibitive, including
for the CFDT, which paid for its ‘abandonment’
and the breaking of the tradeunion
front with a substantial
haemorrhage of members.
This brings us back to the second element
at the root of the current crisis of
the state: the headlong rush in which the
political powers have engaged after the
defeat in the referendum on the European
Constitution.
It is clear that this headlong rush was
above all a reaction to the shock wave
created by the ‘No’ victory. Destabilised
by the popular rejection of a long-term
strategic choice of the ruling classes, divided
as to the strategy to follow, the
Villepin government rapidly embarked
on an offensive escalation, aiming to
create immediately a social base supporting
its policy.
The hypothesis of the ‘break’, of a
muscular and Atlanticist neo-liberalism,
was taken up in practice by the whole of
the right, emboldened by its victory on
the social front in spring 2003. And it was
Villepin, supposed heir of ‘social
Gaullism’, who took on the job of putting
the agenda of his rival Sarkozy to the test.
Actually this had some initial successes
(privatisations, the SNCM [Mediterranean
ferries] conflict, the absence of
any organised reaction to the proclamation
of the state of emergency in the suburbs),
successes largely attributable to the
inertia and passivity of the trade-union
leaderships and of the parties of the parliamentary
left.
A further step was thus taken towards
the crisis of the state potentially contained
within the result of the presidential
election in 2002.
Nonetheless, contrary to the claims of
the media, lawyers and players in the parliamentary
game, the vital point does not
lie so much in the institutional aspects,
which were significant and even unprecedented,
although at a very much lower
level than in a crisis of the regime like that
of 1958, but in the manner in which the
social and political crisis challenges the
very logic of the Fifth Republic. [7]
The weakness of all the intermediate
links (the party in power and, more generally,
the party system, parliament ...)
concentrates the whole set of contradictions
onto a presidency of the republic
that itself is without any real political legitimacy
(since it results from the transformation
of the second round of the
2002 presidential election into an ‘anti-
Le Pen referendum’.)
The presidentialisation of the regime,
intended to stabilise bourgeois hegemony
(which it succeeded in doing for a
whole period) by protecting the executive
from popular pressure, has turned
into its opposite: the executive, and more
particularly the presidency, has found
itself obliged to ‘go into the front line’ as
soon as there is the slightest upheaval,
and thus finds itself particularly overexposed
in the event of a crisis. Henceforth
this tends to become a frontal conflict directly
opposing the popular mobilisation
to the top of the state machine.
As a result, and more than the strictly
institutional aspects (which are part of it),
the central fact is that the presidency is
succeeding less and less in playing its role
as a political centre, encouraging unity
and cohesion, for the bloc in power, and
tends, on the contrary, to become the
weak link in the set-up.
This phenomenon, the origins of
which doubtless go back to the successive
periods of cohabitation, is aggravated
by Chirac’s loss of control of the
majority party, which was created, we
should not forget, after the 2002 elections
to play the role of ‘presidential
party’, and which has fallen into the
hands of his sworn enemy. [8]
The hegemonic instability of French
society, whose epicentre lies in the more
or less open and active rejection of neoliberalism
by a growing section of the
dominated classes, is now continued by
an exacerbation of the divisions and contradiction
within the dominant bloc.
In a situation of rising popular mobilisation,
it then becomes a crisis of the
state (rather than a crisis of the regime) a
crisis of which the condensed expression
is the confrontation between the Chirac-
Villepin couple on the one hand and
Sarkozy and the majority of the UMP apparatus
on the other.
We thus come to a configuration
where the conflict between fractions of
the ruling blocs encourages a logic of
headlong rush into social confrontation,
which itself generates an even greater
destabilisation - above all in the event of
defeat when faced with the popular upsurge.
Hence the fact, which at first sight
may seem paradoxical, that the immediate
consequence of this defeat takes the
form of a very deep governmental crisis,
which is proof of the fact that the ‘duality
of power’ within the French right is
now out of control.
A HISTORIC ENCOUNTER
As the product (in the last analysis) of the
persistence of popular opposition, the
crisis in its turn creates the ‘indirect’ conditions
for its growing strength, especially
after the assault against the state
launched by the youth from the deprived
districts in November 2005.
In this sense, the referendum, the
revolt of the suburbs and the anti-CPE
movement form three moments of the
same political sequence. To put it another
way, despite the setbacks that they
have suffered and the harshness of the
context, the remobilisation of popular
forces is asserting itself as the lasting and
essential feature of the period.
Its dynamic has shown itself capable
of giving a lead, certainly in an uneven
fashion and according to varied rhythms,
to a growing number of the sectors of
French society. In itself the appearance of
a new generation, embarked since 2002
on an accelerated apprenticeship in collective
action, would be sufficient to give
credence to the idea of a major turningpoint.
But there is more: in the movement
of March-April 2006 there was the convergence
and even, on a more limited but
nonetheless significant scale, the direct
encounter between youth from the lycées
and the universities and wage-earners,
the trade-union movement and certain
sectors of the working class.
Unprecedented since the 1970s, this
convergence and encounter mark the
transition to an offensive configuration
of social struggles, and that despite the
defensive character of the demands of the
anti-CPE movement.
Nonetheless, and it should also be
stressed, the burden of past defeats continues
to weigh on the relation of forces,
and more particularly on the ability to
mobilise of a crucial sector, the working
class in the private sector, despite the encouraging
signs noted on the occasion of
the mass demonstrations of 28 March
and 4 April.
The extent of the victory won by the
workers and youth is thus all the more
decisive. The first major success of the
social movement since December 1995,
it is certainly not in itself sufficient to
cancel out the effects of the long years of
liberal counter-reforms.
It nonetheless has the taste of revenge
for the miscarried movement of spring
2003, the outcome of which gave a decisive
advantage (and an unconcealed sense
of confidence) to a government determinedly
carrying out the neo-liberal restructuring
of French society. Confidence
has now passed to the other side, and
that alone would be sufficient to be seen
as a gain won by the movement. But
without overstating the point, we can
also see here the confirmation of the beginning
of a rising and sustained cycle of
mobilisations.
Three sets of indications point in this
direction. First of all, this movement is
part of a sequence begun by the political
victory in the referendum on the European
Constitution, a victory made possible
by a popular mobilisation which came
out of the melting-pot of the campaign
for the ‘No’ vote organised by the antiliberal
left.
Secondly, the expansive nature of this
wave of mobilisation, with the emergence
of the supreme ‘sensitive plate’ of
the deep currents of society, the youth
from the schools and universities.
An emergence which had already
begun, it should be said, with the anti-Le
Pen demonstrations in April 2002, the
movement of lycée students in 2005
against the Fillon law and the swing of
the majority of the youth into the ‘No’
camp at the time of the referendum.
We should note in passing one of the
consequences of the coming together of
these first two tendencies: the going over
of the leadership of youth organisations
traditionally close to the Socialist Party
(UNEF, UNL) to the minority left currents
of this party which were involved
in the left’s ‘No’ campaign.
Finally the participation on an unprecedented
scale by workers from the
private sector in the demonstrations (especially
the last two) shows that it was
indeed in the context of the effervescence
created by the youth mobilisation
that sectors without any strong union organisation
and without any recent experience
of large-scale struggles were able
to feel sufficiently drawn on by the
movement to engage in the first forms,
albeit limited (no strikes but sometimes
mere stoppages in order to join the
marches) but with great potential, of collective
mass action.
A final point must be clarified with
regard to the overall political meaning of
the movement: in face of conservative
and ‘leftist’ criticisms, which saw in the
unifying demand of the struggle (rejection
of the CPE) an absence or limitation
of radical character (either so as to deny
it any ‘subversive’ aspect and to devalue
it in comparison with the supposedly
‘Utopian’ dimension of the 1968 movements,
or so as to push for the ‘broadening’
of the basis of demands in order to
make it more radical), it should be
stressed that the really radical nature of
the movement lay precisely in its obstinate
concentration on the question of
the CPE. [9]
And this was not merely for reasons of
a pragmatic nature (‘it is easier to win if
we concentrate on a single demand’, although
in the given context that would
have been a perfectly legitimate explanation),
but because of the way in which the
politicisation of contradictions operates
concretely in the course of a movement.
In other words the political significance
of the struggle consisted in its ability
to make its central demand (the CPE)
into the point of condensation of neoliberal
policies as such. In a sense the
demonstrators took literally de Villepin’s
claim that the presidential election, and,
more generally, the whole government
policy ‘turn on the CPE’.
The movement thus showed that
what was really at stake with the CPE was
providing a young, docile and entirely
‘flexible’ supply of labour, and institutionalising
the segmentation of the
labour force (already operating in the
CNE and in the ways in which the 35-
hour week is being applied), in short the
affirmation of unlimited power by the
employers. [10]
Through a particular demand (the
CPE as institutionalisation of lack of job
security for those under 26), what was at
stake therefore was the ability of capital
to strengthen its grip in all areas of social
life, starting with the workplace.
It is in this sense that that the movement
of March-April 2006 was a class
(struggle) movement, an anti-liberal and
anti-capitalist statement ‘a in practical
state’. This is shown by, among other
things, the extraordinary spread of slogans
in the student and lycée marches of
slogans directly aimed at ‘exploitation’
(seen as the ‘E’ in ‘CPE’) and employers’
power (‘we are not bosses’ fodder’).
THE ‘STUDENT MASS’ AS A FRACTION OF THE CLASS
This focus on the question of the conditions
of exploitation was all the more remarkable
given that the dynamic of the
movement came from among the youth
in schools and universities.
It is hard not to see in this a vivid indication
of the extent of the transformation
of this social category in the new
social division of labour imposed by neoliberal
capitalist restructuring. The radicalisation
of youth now in progress
therefore reveals new features, relatively
distinct from both challenging of the ideological
function of schools and universities
(as in the student radicalism of the
years around 1968) and criticizing its
functioning in the distribution of wealth
and social mobility (registration fees, material
conditions and access to study) in
the context of the movements of the
years 1980-1990. [11]
This time the school and university
youth has acted as part of the world of
labour, of course in ‘the process of integration’
(hence the almost total absence
of those sectors which see themselves as
being already integrated into the world
of the ruling class: preparatory classes for
the grandes écoles [elite universities], a
fortiori the grandes écoles themselves),
but nonetheless carrying a ‘class point of
view’. A class point of view that , we must
make clear, is not, or is no longer, that
of a supposed ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ or
of ‘young professionals’ aspiring to take
on higher functions of command, design
or cultural influence.
Reflecting a French society that, since
the middle of the 1970s has experienced
declining intergenerational social mobility
and a more and more polarised social
division of labour, the students and lycée
pupils of today see themselves much
more, and quite rightly, as sharing the
fate of middle-level employees. [12]
Typical in this respect was the strongly
asserted concern of the student movement
to link the abolition of the CPE to
that of the CNE, which only affects firms
with less than 20 wage-earners and is of
little relevance to those holding university
degrees.
Nonetheless, and contrary to what is
claimed by a certain sort of sociology
(which focuses on academic qualifications
and the competition between those
who hold them) the transformation in
question cannot be reduced to a shift
downwards of the terms of reproduction/
class mobility via the schools and
universities.
It is more generally the very site of
this reproduction, to be more precise,
the relative (but real) separation between
reproduction and production given material
form by the very existence (and increased
role) of the schools and
universities that is at stake here.
This separation tends in fact to
become blurred under the impact of the
dual basic tendency borne by the neo-liberal
restructuring of capitalism: on the
one hand, the growing subordination of
the schools and universities to the capitalist-
commodity logic that transforms
those parts which are most massified and
least ‘competitive’ into training centres
that are more and more governed by the
same logic as that of the positions
(scarcely enviable) in the labour market
for which they are the providers; on the
other hand, the reduction of the gap between
youth in schools and universities
and young workers due to the increase
in wage-earning activity among lycée and
above all university students.
Certain branches or sectors of activity
(fast food, call centres, supermarket
chains, department stores) even specialise
in this category of labour. If we add to
this the extraordinary proportion of
short-term contracts, sham probations,
periods of unemployment etc that in
France are imposed particularly on those
between 18 and 26, we end up with a
range of positions which embody a violent
movement of reproletarianisation of
this part of the labour force.
Such a shift thrusts into the distant
past the old gap between a minority of
young people from well-off families with
access to the baccalauréat and to university,
and a majority who are involved in
production.
This ‘great transformation’ has, of
course (in comparison with 1968) not
only made easier the link with workers
but, above all, has given this an ‘organic’
character, the character of the building
of a common struggle, and not of an alliance
or solidarity between separate
movements.
It also explains the main form taken
by the student movement itself, which
brings it closer, including in this perspective,
to working-class struggle: the
‘blockade’ (and not ‘occupation’, an interesting
semantic distinction despite aspects
that are often comparable) of lycées
and universities that are seen as being a
place and tool of labour (and being intended
for it) whose production flow
(lectures, examinations) is to be interrupted.
[13]
Hence too the division of the student
population between ‘pro’ and ‘anti’
blockade, according to a line (and a
logic) close to that between strikers and
non-strikers (who are not necessarily hostile
to the demands of the former, but are
not willing to pay the price of taking part
in the mobilisation).
The movement of March-April thus
marks the appearance of the ‘mass student’,
not in the sense of a convergence
‘upwards’ with the wage-earning population
through the generalised intellectualisation
of labour, but rather in the
opposite direction: that of a massification
which is part of the fundamental drive towards
reproletarianisation/ recommodification
of the labour force that
characterises neo-liberal capitalism. [14]
That is why the anti-CPE struggle of
lycée and university students cannot be
reduced to a protest against the ‘devaluation
of degrees’. Its truly political meaning
lies in the assertion of a subjective
position that links the specificity of the
student struggle to the liberal restructuring
of the whole set of capital-labour relationships.
THE WORKERS’ MOVEMENT: AN UNEXPECTED AND CONTRADICTORY RESUMPTION
The ability of the workers’ movement to
respond to the ‘signal’ sent by the youth
had nothing obvious about it: the weight
of the defeat in spring 2003, made worse
by the partial defeats which followed it
(privatisation of electricity, SNCM), was
a very heavy burden, above all on the
most highly mobilised trade-union sectors
(transport, education, public sector),
and therefore also on those most affected
by the setbacks suffered in the course of
recent years.
The situation became even more complicated
as a result of the coming together
of this retreat and the effects of
the current ‘recentring’ of what remains
the central force of French trade unionism,
the CGT. [15]
We must therefore make some clarification
of the meaning of this profound
transformation of the trade-union landscape,
especially since it excluded in advance,
as the students and their
coordination rapidly discovered to their
cost, what was still possible in December
1995: the perspective of a renewable strike
by the most highly unionised sectors.
Put to the test by the movement of
Spring 2003 (with the results we know
of ... ) the line of ‘united trade unionism’
advocated by its leadership aims to
put the CGT on the track of European
reformist trade unionism with its ritualised
social confrontations, carefully set
in a framework of long ‘negotiation’ procedures,
during which the trade-union
forces, generally divided, find themselves
obliged to level down their already ‘very
reasonable’ demands. [16]
We should make no mistake about
this: the recentring of the CGT is a longterm
project, not just a tactical manœuvre.
It corresponds to basic tendencies in
social relations (the overall weakening of
the trade-union movement, the decline
of the Communist Party, the new strategies
of the employers and the state), and
its pursuit will lead to a clean break with
the class-struggle trade unionism that is
deeply embedded in the French workingclass
movement.
This is also the reason why convergence
with the CFDT is, for the CGT
leadership, a permanent objective that has
survived and will survive despite episodes
of conflict (over pensions, for example)
because it is now being carried forward
on ground which is largely shared, at least
by the confederal machines.
Yet the new orientation is still certainly
far from having been stabilised, because
of resistance from below, including
from a section of the apparatus of the
federations (thus the case of the constitutional
referendum, which led the confederal
leadership to get its own back by
diverting the resources of the federations
to its own advantage). But also because it
is quite doubtful whether the landscape
of ‘industrial relations’ in France - dominated
by aggressive employers accustomed
to dealing with unions that are
weak, divided and, in some cases, manipulable
(the CFDT having now taken over
this role from FO) - leaves even a limited
margin of success for any trade-union negotiator
eager to import the customs of
Northern Europe. [17]
The tendencies referred to above had
a major impact on the ambivalences and
hesitations of the trade-union front as it
was formed during the anti-CPE mobilisation.
Certainly it was a trade-union front
united as had never been the case since
the Liberation, but on a minimum basis,
both in terms of demands (withdrawal of
the CPE) and above all in terms of the
organisation of the mobilisation: scarcely
concealed distrust towards student selforganisation
(the student coordination
was marginalised in favour of the official
university and lycée student unions),
lack of any initiative encouraging joint
action by students, lycéens and wage
earners beyond calls for demonstrations,
strict channelling of action by wage-earners
into the framework of ‘days of action’
fixed as far as possible apart in time (in
particular the refusal to call for a day of
action on 23 March, as the student coordination
had explicitly requested), in
order to avoid any dynamic of renewable
strikes.
On the evening when the withdrawal
of the CPE was announced, CGT general
secretary Bernard Thibault summed
up this line of strict separation of spheres
(the union confederations deal with
wage-earners, the student and lycéen organisations
deal with the youth, and
everyone paddles their own canoe) by responding
with the formulation ‘everyone
is master in their own home’ to the question
of what he thought of the calls by
the student coordination for the continuation
of the blockades. [18]
He also recalled that the CGT as such
had never taken a position on the blockades
of the lycées and universities, and
that, in return, it strongly disapproved of
the students directing slogans towards
wage-earners.
In short, on the trade-union side, everything
possible was done to continue on the
same lines as in spring 2003. So it is not
surprising that, at the recent CGT congress,
two weeks after the end of the movement,
Thibault considered that the result
obtained confirmed that it was correct.
François Chérèque and the leadership
of the CFDT were even more clear: if
the movement won, then this was
indeed proof that it is possible to win
without striking. [19]
However paradoxical it may seem,
especially in the eyes of the right-wing
press, in France and abroad, which saw
in this movement a definitive proof of
the ‘archaic nature’ of French society
and of the persistence of ‘radicalism’
within it, the leaderships of the CFDT
and the CGT are striving, not without
arguments, to make the movement fit
in with the logic of adaptating trade
unionism to the norms of neo-liberal
capitalism.
It therefore becomes necessary to
recall that if this struggle ended in victory,
it was essentially despite this tradeunion
strategy. [20]
And this for two reasons: first of all,
unlike spring 2003, the unions were
under the constant and even growing
pressure of a student and lycéen movement;
an external pressure, in some
sense, and one that was very effective,
that did not let the movement fall back
and that enabled it to outwit the manœuvres
of the government, which
aimed to involve the inter-union body in
a long-term pseudo-negotiation that
would push the CPE to one side.
Moreover, it is important to make
clear that if the maintenance of the unity
of the trade-union front undoubtedly
weighed in the relationship of forces
facing the government (of course it is
here that we find the core of truth of the
idea of ‘concerted trade unionism’), its
most decisive contribution is to be found
elsewhere, namely in what it enabled to
be accomplished in a sense despite itself:
the encounter between the students, lycéens
and workers, an encounter which
could not have taken place, concretely, at
the regional, local and workplace level,
without the support of the trade-union
teams.
A support which was conditioned -
and this must also be stressed, in opposition
to any reductive ‘rank and filism’
(which at every point juxtaposes initiative
from ‘below’ to that from above) -
by the existence of this unifying ‘umbrella’
formed by the inter-union coordination
body, itself opened up to
include student and lycéen organisations,
thus legitimising de facto the radical
forms of action coming from the blockaded
universities and lycées. [21]
This was the price the movement had
to pay in order to be able to bounce back
at every turn and construct the dynamic
of a movement that became, despite its
limits, genuinely ‘multi-sector’.
Thus when it became clear that the
major union leaderships would do nothing
to make the movement part of a perspective
of a renewable strike (broadly,
that is, after18 March, and more particularly
after the refusal to call for a day of
action on 23 March that could have
stepped up the tempo of the mobilisation),
the tendency to strike declined
markedly in the sectors with the highest
levels of unionisation (essentially the
public sector), which had already had
their fingers burnt by the experience of
spring 2003.
But this downturn was immediately
made up for by a sort of shift in the centre
of gravity of the movement towards the
demonstrations, and by a no less significant
increase in the participation of workers
from the private sector, who felt in this
climate of general effervescence, powerfully
encouraged by the actions on the
ground and outside workplaces by students
and lycéens, sufficiently strong to
overcome a frequently long period of passivity
and demoralisation.
The point is important because it gave
a glimpse of the possibility of a radicalisation
of the movement in the event of
the government’s refusal rapidly to withdraw
the CPE after 4 April, that is when
the dynamic of ‘demonstrations without
renewable strike’ had itself come to an
end.
At this moment, in the course of this
critical phase, we can see in the examples
of so-called ‘direct action’ by the students
and lycéens, not a minority radicalisation
(of the type which the student
coordination attempted, in vain, to
launch after the withdrawal of the CPE)
but an original model (in Europe, at
least, for the Argentineans have been experimenting
with it for some time ...) of
occupying the ground uninterruptedly,
including that of the factories and of
economic flows (transport), and a
‘bridge’ preparing a subsequent stage of
the mobilisation.
It is thanks to such actions that the
possibility, in the event of the refusal of
the authorities to yield, of the launching
of a renewable strike, raised by certain
sections of the trade unions after 4 April,
became a serious threat, obliging the
unions to give the government ultimatums
at ever shorter intervals (first of all
on 17 March, then, de facto, on Monday
10 April), leaving it no choice other than
withdrawal. [22]
Decidedly, we are a long way away
from the scenario of anodyne negotiations
as envisaged by the supporters of
reformist trade unionism in the European
Trade Union Confederation style.
In the end, the signal which the students
and lycéens sent to the workingclass
and trade-union movement offered
the latter an unexpected breath of life,
radically outside the forecasts and routines
of the union leaderships.
It confirms the idea that the opportunity
for renewing the workers’ movement
is to be found in its immersion in
the multi-faceted struggles that are running
through our society, and not in a retreat
towards its (supposed) strongholds,
nor in adaptation to logics of institutions
or employers.
It gives a powerful impulse to the
forces opposed to recentring that are to
be found in many forms at the centre of
gravity of the trade-union movement.
But the confrontation will be a long one.
In other words: the April 2006 victory
demonstrates negatively that the adapta-
tion of French trade unionism to the liberal
order (under the aegis of the European
Union, whence the importance of
integration into the European Trade
Union Confederation) can only be another
way of describing the joint management
of social retreat and the
growing autonomisation of apparatuses
that are more or less detached from the
defence of the interests of the great majority
of working people.
In the particular case of the CGT, the
pursuit of such an orientation would
eventually make it redundant in relation
to the CFDT - whence the perspective
of a bureaucratic type of trade-union
unification, following the European pattern
of ‘fusions’ between large union
apparatuses.
It cannot fail, in a prolonged and
often diffuse manner, to come up against
the resistance of rank and file trade-union
teams (and some of the federations) that
continue to bring together the most
battle-hardened and combative militants
in the labour movement. These now
know that they can find support and considerable
reserves in the most diverse sectors
of French society, beginning with
the students and lycéens.
SYSTEMIC REACTION
The defeat of the authorities by the prolonged
mobilisation of the workers and
youth leads on quite logically to a period
of increased instability, of which the visible
disintegration of the Villepin government
and the death agony of the Chirac system
are the most visible consequences.
In general, social and political forces
must confront the reinforced action of
elements pushing towards the enlargement
of lines of fracture which have appeared
during the last period. The
question of the maintenance and/or recomposition
of their cohesion is therefore
crucial.
To begin with that of the social-liberal
bloc, seriously shaken by the referendum
and which has still not succeeded in resolving
certain key problems. First of all
that of its own leadership, despite the
‘synthesis’ at the Socialist Party congress
at Le Mans last November.
Will the appointment of a presidential
candidate be able to resolve its difficulties
and renew the voluntary
submission of the anti-liberal minorities
of the party to its leadership as occurred
at the last congress?
It seems the task will be a difficult
one, but we shall see that it is not impossible
that the Socialist Party leadership
will be able to carry it off thanks to
the ‘objective’ assistance of the forces of
the radical and anti-liberal left, bogged
down in strategies of self-affirmation and
of apparatus survival.
It looks as if things will be just as complicated
for the parliamentary right.
Made worse by the prolonged nature of
the battle and the great determination it
showed, the defeat of the Villepin government
leaves behind it a devastated
landscape, with none of the components
of the current majority being untouched.
Certainly the Chirac clique seems to be
in an advanced state of decay, but despite
a few tactical advantages, Sarkozy
emerges strategically weakened.
For as we have already noted, the
defeat of the CPE is above all the defeat
of the ‘break’ that he has been championing.
Now what is certain is that things
cannot remain in heir present state - this
was in fact the core of truth in the hypothesis
of the ‘break’ (and the strategic
advantage it provided for its promoter).
The worsening of the crisis of the
state, in a context marked by the increased
presence of popular mobilisation,
cannot fail to powerfully strengthen authoritarian
tendencies, both ‘from above’
and ‘from below’.
From above, in the sense of another
turn of the screw for the ‘liberal/lawand-
order’ penal state, which the neoliberal
policies are putting in place by
successive batterings of the ruins of the
welfare state.
That the withdrawal of the CPE should
be immediately followed on the parliamentary
level by a new repressive law attacking
so-called ‘immigrant’ workers has
a symptomatic value in this respect, all the
more so inasmuch as the attitude of the
Socialist Party deputies illustrates perfectly
how far the social-liberal bloc has gone
over to the penal state. [23]
But we should make no mistake about
it: this movement from above is also a response
to a movement ‘from below’,
which in return it helps to legitimise and
amplify. This movement expresses a real
‘moral panic’ fed by the trauma which
neo-liberal capitalist restructuring and
the accompanying demolition of the
Keynesian state are provoking in a growing
number of social sectors. [24]
We should stress here the importance,
often neglected by sociological and/or
economic analyses, of the specifically political
dimension of this process, which
involves the growing impotence and disorganisation
of state action in face of a
general environment that becomes more
and more unstable and threatening.
The crisis of the state gives it a particular
acuteness, which makes plausible the
hypothesis of a ‘rightward radicalisation’
within an electorate which has had its fingers
burnt by the withdrawal of government
and its inability to block
“disorder”.
This is also shown by the feverish atmosphere
among the Le Pen far right,
which has already sucked the blood of
the main part of the popular electorate
of the right and a good proportion of its
‘traditional’ petty bourgeois component
(small traders, artisans, small employers,
farmers ...). Closely marked by a Sarkozy
who is constantly obliged to shift to his
right (which poses certain problems of coherence
for someone who in practice supported
a conciliatory’ line in the CPE
crisis), the National Front now finds itself
with a competitor from the extreme right
(Philippe de Villiers’s Mouvement pour la
France), which tries to imitate it but above
all is trying to win over to the classic right
a part of its reactionary and traditionalist
‘hard core’ (middle and upper layers of
Catholics of a ‘rural’ type etc.).
Faced with these tendencies, pregnant
with polarisation and destabilisation, and
above all faced with a possible growth in
strength of the anti-liberal and radical left
(of which we shall say more below) the
current configuration of the crisis is producing
powerful countertendencies
which aim to create a new point of equilibrium
between social forces and the political
system.
This is what we are calling here the
‘systemic reaction’ and which, rather
than support for a particular political
bloc (the social-liberal left or Sarkozy’s
UMP) must be understood as a ‘change
of terrain’, a restructuring of the political
space around a reorganised and displaced
line of demarcation.
A schema of this sort had already
made possible a (partial and temporary)
stabilisation of the system of political representation
after the shock of the first
round of the presidential election in
2002, thanks to the construction of an
anti-Le Pen ‘sacred union’ stretching
from Chirac to the LCR.
At present it is the staging of the Ségolène
Royal/Nicolas Sarkozy confrontation
which provides the condensed
expression of this. [25]
Its possible success would represent a
large-scale shift to the right of the political
axis, which would see an opposition
between two converging versions
(‘centre left’ and ‘hard right’) not simply
of neo-liberalism (this was already the
case since the Socialist Party and then the
‘plural left’ went over to the loyal management
of the affairs of capital) but of a
neo-conservative project aiming to remodel
French society in depth.
So it is not just a question of the pursuit
of liberal counter-reform, but of its
qualitative deepening, after the fashion
of a Bush or a Blair. This implies confronting
and methodically extirpating the
resistances which it provokes and which,
at least in the French case, have suc-
ceeded in putting it in difficulties on several
occasions and delaying certain aspects
of it.
Hence the determination to finish off,
in some sense, the Socialist Party such as
it is, as an organised party (with activists,
tendencies, congresses etc.) which possesses
an autonomy, however limited,
which allows the expression, although
limited and highly distorted, of class contradictions.
Such a reality is no longer tolerable by
the system, especially after the 40 percent
of internal votes won by the supporters
of the ‘No’ to the European Constitution,
which the synthesis of the Le Mans
congress is not sufficient to erase.
For such is indeed the aim of the ‘Ségolène
Royal operation’: to assert, on a
scale which is unprecedented in France,
the capacity of the media and of sections
of the ruling class bloc to impose their
choices on a party system which is both
weakened and unreliable. In this sense, if
it achieves its aims, systemic reaction
would put France in the age of ‘post-politics’,
after the fashion of Berlusconi in
Italy, who, we may recall, began his entry
into the arena of political power under
the wing of his friend Bettino Craxi, the
then Socialist prime minister.
THE RADICAL LEFT AT THE (STRATEGIC) CROSSROADS
For the radical and anti-liberal left there
could be no greater error than to believe
that it is sufficient to be carried onwards
by the rising tide of mobilisation and that
the only discussion worth having is about
concrete details, more or less ‘self-centred’
or ‘unitary’ according to one’s
point of view.
In reality, the difficulty is much
deeper: since 2002, and much more
clearly since the referendum on the European
Constitution, the forces advocating,
to differing extents, a break with
neo-liberalism (including its social-liberal,
or centre-left, variant) have been
striving politically to structure the antiliberal
popular bloc that is developing
‘from below’ in the course of struggles
and of the repoliticisation that has notably
been impelled by the referendum
campaign.
This difficulty is at least double: the
weakness and fragmentation of the organised
forces in their current configuration
and the concomitant absence of a
political project making the conditions
clear for a break with the neo-liberal
course.
Now only such a political structuring
can permit the popular struggles to cross
a decisive boundary: that which consists
in being able to impose their own solutions
and not simply to block those of
the enemy. Without that, even the victories
won will rapidly come up against
their limits, and will prove to be fragile
and temporary, as were those won in the
past, for example in 1995 against the
Juppé plan.
So if it does not resolve everything automatically,
the victory won by the workers
and youth creates conditions that are
exceptionally favourable for an initiative
capable of beating social liberalism within
the left, a necessary condition for inflicting
a large-scale defeat on neo-liberalism
as such and opening up the way for a
confrontation with the hard core of the
capitalist system.
Such an intervention is therefore destined
to develop on two fronts, closely
linked to each other. That of the organisational
disposition, which does not
necessarily mean, at least in the short
term, new organisations (in the sense of
‘parties’) but nonetheless implies the
creation of new crystallisations that are
flexible but possess their own organisational
consistency (that is alliances,
fronts etc., with adequate structures at
the base).
Whatever may be their limits, the
committees created by the left in the
course of the campaign for a ‘No’ in the
referendum give a valuable indication in
this direction, enabling us to envisage a
concrete fashion of going beyond the
current divisions and obstacles.
In the situation of crisis that we are
experiencing, the presidential and parliamentary
elections fixed for 2007 will be
decisive and form an inescapable stage of
this process.
If it fails, repeating the division we saw
in 2002 (and the terms of which will
depend this time essentially on the
choices that the Communist Party and
the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire
are led to make), then ‘systemic reaction’
pushing for the neoconservative restructuring
of the French political landscape
will find its task made greatly easier.
On the second level, of political project,
the essential difference comes down
to going beyond the logic - deeply embedded
in organisations that have
broadly conceived their role as being
sound boxes for struggles - that consists
of drawing up a ‘programme’ by lumping
together demands made in recent
mobilisations.
Such a programme is usually
justaposed juxtaposed abstract discourses
and incantations about the necessity of
immediately attacking capitalism or the
institutions of bourgeois society. In other
words, the question of the political alternative
is not today posed in the first instance
as the drawing up of a
‘programme’ which will supposedly
guard against the surrenders required to
obtain power (or inversely , of sectarian
maximalism).
It no longer comes down to a mere
drawing up of a set of ‘constructive proposals’
that are believed to confer on
their supporters credibility and a decisive
ability to convince. To think the alternative
means a collective effort to elucidate
political conditions for an effective break
with the liberal course adopted by the
governmental left since 1983.
It is only inasmuch as they take on
fully this demand for a break that these
conditions can be articulated as concrete
measures and proposals, tracing the plausible
contours of a ‘new order’.
This is to say that such proposals will
never be completely ‘positive’ because
they are precisely aiming at the ‘impossible’,
at pushing back the horizon of
the possible, or else at creating a new
possibility.
That is why the injunction constantly
addressed to us by the supporters of the
existing order in the form of the question
‘So what do you propose?’ should
not discourage us. It reminds us in fact
that the very condition of a ‘proposal’
which is any way ‘new’, capable of going
beyond the existing situation, lies in the
refusal, the radical negation of the fundamental
coordinates of that condition.
That is why, and it can never be said
too often, there is no Chinese Wall separating
anti-liberalism from anti-capitalism:
the decisive advantage in this respect
for revolutionaries is to understand that
any serious anti-liberal course of action,
as dictated by the demands of the present
conjuncture, any measure which attacks,
even partially, the dominant choices and
does not run away from its own consequences,
leads by internal necessity to an
overall break with capitalism.
In other words, only the concrete experience,
begun afresh each time, of the
class struggle, will enable us to prove
again that nothing in particular can be
really changed without changing the
whole.
Now today, in a country like France,
this course of action cannot be merely
‘national’. It directly affects the framework
of the EU, and, more broadly, the
positions of France within the world
order under the domination of the
United States.
We can even say that it is these latter
elements, laid down in the various European
treaties and in the way France is incorporated
in the world capitalist and
imperialist system (from the presence of
French troops in Afghanistan or Haiti to
the role of the French state and French
capital in international bodies or in countries
of the South, especially Latin America),
that draw the true line of
demarcation between the forces in favour
of a break and those oriented towards a
mere reform of the neo-liberal and imperialist
order.
The task is thus made even heavier by
the inclusion of a strategy of coordinating
struggles and political forces on the
European level as a constitutive component
of any ‘national’ political project
(operating on the level of a determinate
social formation) aiming to break radically
with the existing framework.
The worst is never certain, but it
cannot be ruled out in advance. We must
therefore consider that, for the forces of
the anti-liberal and radical left, the principal
risk today is to fail to be up to the
demands of the new situation, to miss
the possibilities it contains by refusing to
take on the (heavy) responsibilities which
are theirs.
There are, to put it schematically, two
ways of not being up to the challenge:
first of all, an impatient and opportunist
way, which consists of giving way on the
lines of demarcation corresponding to
the main contradiction.
Thus, for example, the illusion of certain
sectors of the anti-liberal left according
to whom it is possible to break
with the Maastricht Pact without calling
into question the institutional edifice of
the EU, of the European Central Bank,
the euro etc.
Or again the illusion that consists in
wanting ‘to shift the entire left in an antiliberal
direction’, including apparently
the Socialist Party leadership or Ségolène
Royal, as is sometimes suggested by the
PCF leadership.
This ‘right-wing’ approach is paralleled
symmetrically by a ‘conservative’
approach, which consists in repressing
the new demands posed by the situation
and seeking refuge in an attitude of withdrawal,
organisational self-proclamation
and political impotence.
Like Chirac promulgating a law and
blocking its implementation, this approach,
which seems to be an option for
the majority of the LCR, exerts itself to
talk about ‘rallying together’, about the
‘unitary’ manner of proceeding and even
about a ‘new anti-capitalist force’ while
immediately making it clear that it is
urgent to do nothing concretely to
progress in that direction.
This risk of paralysis must be taken all
the more seriously because the double
tendency (opportunist/conservative) referred
to above has, throughout the
period following the referendum, shown
itself to be powerful, running through
(certainly in an uneven and differentiated
fashion) all the components of the radical
anti-liberal left.
It has succeeded in blocking any effective
attempt at the political constitution
of the popular anti-liberal bloc and
in squandering a part of the capital accumulated
during the left’s ‘No’ campaign,
especially on the level of the unitary committees
(whose resilience nonetheless indicates
the potential that has been
preserved).
To remain obstinately in such passivity,
with merely a few rhetorical contortions
designed to create the illusion of an
initiative, would be a truly historic error,
since we are so close to a situation where
catastrophe and the possibility of a leap
forward exist side by side.
The time is now more than ripe to
move to effective action.
Notes
1 Here I am drawing freely on the analyses of
Nicos Poulantzas. Cf. his book State, Power,
Socialism (London, 1978) and the collection
edited by him, La crise de l’Etat (Paris, 1976).
2 See for example the dynamic of the distribution
of the mobilisation of lycée students in
certain areas of Seine-Saint-Denis, which developed
through genuine riots on the fringes
of the movement of groups of students from
one establishment to another, in order to
extend the ‘blockades’ (and hence the spatial
control of the movement) to the whole of the
local territory.
3 The figures which are available, and which are
doubtless incomplete, are nonetheless striking:
more than 4000 arrests, nearly 1300 people
prosecuted, and already, in mid-April, 68
people imprisoned and 167 with suspended
sentences or fines. (Source: L’Humanité, 13
April 2006.)
4 The case of the occupation of the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales by an ‘autonomous’
gang is an example pushed to the
point of caricature.
5 Let us recall the obstinate refusal of Alain Juppé
to utter the word ‘negotiation’, comparable to
Villepin’s rejection of ‘withdrawal’ or even
‘suspension’ of the CPE.
6 Editorial Note: The Confédération française
démocratique du travail (Democratic French
Confederation of Labour, CFDT) is today the
French union federation most consistently
willing openly to take side of the employers
and the state. As Kouvelakis goes onto mention,
its leaders played a critical role in undermining
public sector workers’ resistance in
May-June 2003 to the government pension
‘reform’.
7 In the context of the CPE crisis, these institutional
aspects included destabilisation of the
functioning of the executive, rivalries at the
heart of the government, the promulgation
and de facto suspension of the law, and transfer
of responsibility, by presidential order, from
the Prime Minister to the UMP (Union pour
un Mouvement Populaire) parliamentarians.
8 Editorial Note: In 1986-8 and 1993-5 rightwing
governments ‘cohabited’ with a Socialist
Party president, François Mitterrand. In 1997-
2002 the situation was reversed, with Chirac
having to coexist with the plural left government
headed by Lionel Jospin. Jospin’s defeat
in the first round of the presidential election in
21 April 2002 gave Chirac an overwhelming
victory over Jean-Marie Le Pen in the run-off.
Nevertheless the governments Chirac subsequently
appointed have been weak and his
main rival on the right, Nicolas Sarkozy, controls
the UMP.
9 By ‘leftism’ we mean here not an organised political
current but rather a tendency of a ‘libertarian’
type, widespread among the youth
movement (essentially among the students)
tending towards minority radicalisation, hostile
towards political organisations and, more generally,
towards forms of centralised struggle.
10 Editorial Note: Imposed by decree by Villepin
in August 2005, the Contrat nouvelle embauche
(New Employment Contract, CNE)
applies to enterprises with 20 or less employees
and allows employers to sack workers without
giving any reason during the first two years
of employment. The CPE law sought to
extend this principle to all workers aged less
than 26.
11 The 1960s argument was echoed by (and
partly inspired by) the critique of technocratic
‘neo-capitalism’ by Henri Lefebvre (cf. his important
work The Explosion (New York, 1969)
or by the ‘ideological state apparatuses (ISA)’
of Louis Althusser (cf. his well-known "Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuse"s published
in Lenin and Philosophy (London,
1971), not forgetting the role of the Chinese
‘cultural revolution’. It was doubtless the Italian
far left that was to give them their most developed
formulation: cf. the ‘theses on
education’ by Rossana Rossanda, Marcello
Cini and Luigi Berlinguer in Il Manifesto :
analyses et thèses de la nouvelle extrême-gauche
italienne, (Paris, 1971), pp. 151-175.
12 Cf. Louis Chauvel, Le Destin des générations.
Structure sociale et cohortes en France au XXe
siècle (Paris, 2002).
13 The convergence may also work in the opposite
direction: Michelin workers from Roanne,
a town where the movement rose to an exceptional
degree of intensity with a remarkable
multi-sector dimension, describe their strike
with ‘filtering’ pickets in May 2006 as a ‘block-
ade’ of the factory. Such spill-over of forms of
struggle between youth and workers already
occurred in 1986-1990 with the adoption of
the ‘coordination’ form in the struggles of
wage-earners from various sectors (railway
workers, nurses, SNECMA [aircraft engine
manufacture] workers etc.).
14 The idea of the general intellectualization of
labour was put forward by the tendency inspired
by Italian workerism in the 1960s and
1970s, joined in this by most of the neo-Marxist
analyses of the period, and even (in an economistic
and technicist version) by the theory of
the ‘scientific and technological revolution’ in
vogue in the Communist Parties of the time.
15 Editorial Note: Confédération générale du travail
(General Labour Confederation, CGT),
historically the most militant French union
federation and the one with strongest base
among manual and industrial workers. Once
closely linked with the Communist Party, but
the connection is now much weaker.
16 Stoppages lasting a few hours, ‘warning’ or
sample strikes on the German model, at the
very most a few days of action, carefully separated
one from the others by at least a week.
17 Editorial Note: Force Ouvrière (Workers’
Force, FO), the product of a Cold War induced
right-wing breakaway from the CGT,
traditionally the most right-wing of the union
federations, but liable to episodic outbursts of
militancy.
18 JT (television news) of France 2, 10 April
2006.
19 ‘We have shown that it is possible to be strong
without striking,’ interview with François
Chérèque in Libération 12 April 2006.
20 Moreover, and even if it largely succeeded in
imposing its line in the inter-union body,
thanks to the unfailing support of the CGT
leadership, the CFDT nonetheless had to
accept engaging in a prolonged confrontation
with the government with an uncertain outcome.
This tends to prove that, despite the disclaimers,
the experience of spring 2003, and
more generally of the systematic signing of disastrous
agreements, was neither conclusive nor
repeatable, unless the CFDT leadership was
willing to pay an ever higher price after each
substantial social movement.
21 The student coordination was able to measure
this inversely when it attempted to pursue actions
directed towards wage-earners (even issuing
strike calls) after the announcement of
the withdrawal of the CPE, thus by-passing
the support (impossible to obtain) of the interunion
body. It was a catastrophic failure.
22 The unions backing this call included certain
CGT federations and département unions, as
well as those favourable from the outset: SUD,
certain FO and FSU unions, etc. Editorial
Note: Solidaires unitaires démocratiques
(SUD) is the name of a number of unions affiliated
to the militant federation Solidaires.
Together with the Fédération syndicale unitaire
(Unitary Trade Union Federation, FSU),
the main teachers’ union, Solidaires is a major
stronghold of the radical left in the French
workers’ movement.
23 Inversely, and whatever may be his intentions
(quite transparent, to tell the truth), the opposition
stance taken up by Laurent Fabius on
this question is an interesting indication of the
resumption of the process of internal differentiation
in the Socialist Party. The same is true
of the recent developments of the PRS tendency,
led by Jean-Luc Mélanchon, which enables
us to glimpse the possibility of a break in
the framework of participation in a common
candidacy of the anti-liberal left. Editorial
Note: Fabius and Mélanchon were leading figures
in the rebellion against the official Socialist
Party line of supporting the European
Constitution and in the left campaign for a No
vote.
24 See the analyses which have now become classic
by the team at Birmingham University led
by Stuart Hall on the rise of the ‘law and
order’ theme as a point of displacement/condensation
of the generalised social and political
crisis in the last years of the Labour
government in the 1970s: S. Hall et al, Policing
the Crisis. Mugging, the State and Law and
Order (Basingstoke, 1978).
25 Editorial Note: Ségolène Royal is the current
front runner as Socialist Party candidate in the
2007 presidential elections. In confirmation of
the analysis in the text, she has recently been
staking out strongly right-wing positions, calling
for rebellious youths to be made to do military
service and attacking the 35-hour week
that was the main social achievement of the
Jospin government.