From La Riposte, French Marxist paper and website.
[Note: On May Day this year, a new left formation was created, named the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES, in French). This organisation is led by La France Insoumise, the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and also includes the Socialist Party, the French Communist Party (PCF), European Ecology (The Greens), Ensemble! and Génération.s (G.s) as well as smaller parties. It was formed with the specific aim of denying a majority for the party of Emmanuel Macron in the legislative elections, the first round taking place this coming Sunday.]
It is obvious that only a victory for NUPES will be able to obstruct Emmanuel Macron’s reactionary policies in the assembly. Macron won the presidential election, not because there was massive support for his program, but because he was perceived to be a bulwark against Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. The division of the left forces also worked in Macron’s favour.
For the legislative elections, things do not look the same and every voice must be raised to inflict a defeat on Macron and all the reactionary parties and to ensure a parliamentary majority for NUPES.
Macron and his party, La République en Marche, want to impose more injustices and inequalities, and if NUPES does not get an assembly majority, they will have a free hand to do so. Capitalists are only interested in profit and will seek, by all possible means, to increase profitability. The economic, social and environmental consequences of a Macron majority do not matter to them. Indeed, Macron’s mission is to create a situation that is as favorable to them as possible.
Growing mass of people in economic distress
By reducing job security, attacking unemployment benefits, the RSA [in-work welfare benefit] and raising the retirement age, Macron wants to flood the labour market with a growing mass of people in economic distress, out of work or threatened with being out of work, and therefore ready to accept any working conditions and rates of pay.
The implementation of Macron’s national education policy would have disastrous consequences. It provides for the reorganization of the school system in such a way that increases inequalities. With a policy based on an experimental “school of the future” in Marseille, Macron aims to give school directors the powers to recruit school teams and modify teaching programmes. These new “autonomous”, schools will be in competition with each other, and the courses taught will no longer be the same so the baccalaureate will have a different ‘value’ depending on the school where it was obtained.
As Jean-Luc Mélenchon told France Info, “From the moment a head of school chooses the teachers, we will immediately have a bonus for cronyism, a bonus for a vision of the head of establishment” . This would be the beginning of the end of national education as we know it.
Food prices are rising higher than the average inflation
Already, unemployment, job insecurity and poverty affect about a quarter of the French population. Food prices are rising at over 3.4% a year. Energy prices are soaring, too. Let us not forget that inflation statistics are average values that mask an even more alarming reality, that the prices of staple foods have skyrocketed. This is particularly the case for all durum wheat products, such as pasta and couscous, as well as for fruit and vegetables, meat and fish, which have experienced increases between 6% and 20%! Tomatoes, for example, have seen prices increased by 24% year-on-year, and 9% since the beginning of the year. Thus, week after week, inflation increases the number of households in great economic difficulty.
In addition to the cuts on the economic and social level, Macron poses a threat to democratic freedoms as gradually moves in the direction of an authoritarian regime. His government has prioritized strengthening of surveillance and control. For every demonstration held in Paris, thousands of heavily armed police are mobilized and ready to intervene at any time. The use of tear gas against a peaceful crowd – in which there were many children – during the Champions League final on 28 May is not unrelated to this slide towards authoritarianism.
The strengthening of the means of repression is a sign of a social order that feels itself in danger. Macron is an intelligent representative of French capitalism, aware of the risks associated with its reactionary policies. It is also for the same reason that he has consciously sought to present a part of the population as an “internal threat”, in particular through “anti-separatist” laws.
This is the old “divide and rule” method, inspired by the racist and nationalist propaganda of the extreme right and is being introduced under the pretext of a fight against ‘terrorism’, Macron and his party want to divert popular anger towards an imaginary threat, exonerating in passing those really responsible for economic and social cuts, namely the capitalist class. By playing the xenophobia card, Macron will exploit and reinforce the nationalist tendencies – of which the massive vote for Le Pen is only one expression among others – that are asserting themselves in society.
French ‘CBI’ threatens a strike of capital
On June 1, on France Info, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux declared that a victory of NUPES in the legislative elections would lead the France “into chaos“. That the president of MEDEF [French bosses’ organisation, equivalent to the CBI] displays his hostility to the left is quite in the order of things. But his warnings about the reaction of the capitalists to the possibility of a NUPES victory are extremely relevant:
“The day there is a Mélenchon government, they will stop hiring, they will stop investing…just as in 1981 with the common program“ between the PS and the PCF. “In a few months, it’s just going to shut down the economy for good and plunge the France into chaos.”
This warning could not be clearer. It must be taken seriously. To scuttle the implementation of social reforms by a left-wing majority, the capitalists will use their economic power to cripple the economy. It is a threat that confirms the political program that has always been defended by La Riposte. Any program of progressive social reform must necessarily include revolutionary measures to break the economic power of the capitalists. Otherwise, they will sow “chaos” and blame it on the “unrealistic” policy of social reform, just as they did with the socialist-communist government. of 1981. But unfortunately, the programmes of the France Insoumise and the PCF do not take this reality into account.
The main features of Macron’s first term – social regression, neglect of environmental problems, police repression, nationalism and racism – will be renewed under a second, and with the same consequences: impoverishment, increased precariousness, worsening inequalities and social injustice.
As for the parties, militant associations and trade union organizations engaged in the struggle against capitalism, with or without a majority in the National Assembly, they cannot, especially in current conditions, fight seriously against the capitalist system and even less to deal it decisive blows, unless the hitherto passive popular mass is set in motion.
The passivity of the mass will have its limits
The social equilibrium on which the entire edifice of the capitalist system rests, is essentially based on the passive submission of the mass of the population. Ordinarily, the vast majority of the population remains politically inert, accepting its situation as inevitable. But this passivity necessarily has its limits. The movement of the yellow vests and the strikes of the pre-Covid period were an indication of this. A social order, whatever it may be, cannot hold on indefinitely by imposing a constant deterioration in the living conditions of the mass of the population. Yet this is exactly what characterizes the capitalist system of our time.
Under the basic pressure of the deterioration of its living conditions, the prospect of a popular revolt is becoming more and more plausible, and it would radically change the balance of power between social classes in France. It would probably not be a single wave, but a more or less long period of resistance and tumult.
To achieve the objective of true social emancipation for the population, freedom from exploitation and the reign of profit, a mass mobilization would have to lead to the expropriation of the capitalist class and the takeover of all of the country’s economic resources. The fight against capitalism today is above all the defence of and the fight for such a revolutionary program.
Based on the article in La Riposte, the original can be found here.
