The ‘yellow
vests’ movement
Rashed Rahman
France has been
roiled by protests for the last four weeks. The protestors chose for themselves
a ‘uniform’, the high visibility yellow jackets all motorists in France are
required to carry in their vehicles. The protest movement therefore soon came
to be dubbed the ‘yellow vests’ or ‘gilets
jaunes’ in French. The protests began on November 17, 2018 over tax
increases on diesel and petrol, but particularly the former that has
traditionally been taxed lightly. Initially centred in Paris, the protests have
spread to a number of cities and often turned violent, fuelled by incidents of
smashing and looting private property and the ferocious response of the
notoriously brutal French riot police.
French President
Emmanuel Macron’s response to the protests is a study in how not to deal with
popular unrest. Arguing the tax increases of 6.5 cents on diesel and 2.9
percent on petrol from January 1, 2019 were related to international fuel
prices and also intended to generate funds for incrementally switching to green
technology, he initially dismissed the protests on November 27 as ‘thugs’ to
whom he would not surrender under the pressure of mass protests. That stance
and characterisation of the protestors acted as fuel on the fire. As a result,
from demands for reversing the increase in fuel taxes, the protest movement
added demands for an increase in the minimum wage, reversal of the abolition of
wealth tax, addressing rising living costs and, finally, the resignation of President
Macron.
The persistence
of the protests over four weekends and the havoc caused by burning cars and
smashed shop fronts led to the closure and boarding up of department stores and
the closure of museums and the iconic Eiffel Tower. Tourism to Paris suffered
as a consequence. Countrywide the protests saw 136,000 people on the streets at
a time, with clashes with the 8,000 police officers deployed leading to four
deaths, more than 2,000 arrested (more than 1,000 in Paris alone) and marches
of 10,000 and more on Paris’s central Champs Elysees.
Having been
forced to eat humble pie in the face of the determined protest movement, Macron
changed tactics, made concessions such as the withdrawal of the fuel price
increases, but this proved too little too late. As these lines are being
written, a crisis meeting is in progress in Paris between the President and
trade union and business groups, with a Presidential address to the nation on
the evening of December 10, but it is uncertain whether this will be sufficient
to cool things down.
France, let us
not forget, has a vibrant revolutionary tradition dating back to the historic
French Revolution of 1789. I had the privilege as a young student in the UK to
visit Paris in the middle of the May 1968 students and workers uprising against
President Charles De Gaulle’s government, a movement that led to his
resignation. I slept one night in the Odeon Theatre and one in the Sorbonne
University, both of which had been taken over by the insurgent students and
workers and where I made speeches of solidarity with the movement at both
venues. De Gaulle’s riot police was extremely brutal against the protestors. In
desperation, they began to uproot the cobblestones Paris streets were lined
with then and used them as projectiles against the well-protected riot police
squads. Just as the main boulevards and streets of Paris were ‘straightened’ to
allow artillery to be used against insurgents after the Paris Commune was
drowned in blood in 1870-71, the cobblestone largely disappeared from Paris
streets after 1968.
Macron has been
accused by the protestors of caring only for the rich while the poor and even
middle classes have struggled to keep their head above water. The former
investment banker was elected on a platform of economic reform to tackle the
aftermath of the 2007-08 global financial crisis but the fate of a youthful
president hailed internationally as a defender of liberal values is now being
closely watched abroad for lessons to be drawn from the French fray. The
protests have not only spread countrywide from Paris but also taken Belgium
(Brussels) and the Netherlands within their fold on similar issues.
When the Soviet
Union imploded in 1991, capitalist triumphant spokespersons such as British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared: There is no alternative (to the
neo-liberal economic paradigm and liberal democracy). However, the end of
history thesis was soon seen to be misguided and entirely premature. In 1999,
the first protests against the dominant G-7 countries meeting in Seattle proved
the first shot across the bows for a resurgent resistance to unfettered globalising
capitalism’s unequal and socially and economically unjust outcomes. In one form
or another, such manifestations of resistance to the trend of privileging the
one percent over and above the 99 percent rest of humanity relegated to hewers
of wood and drawers of water have dotted the globe since. Although their centre
has largely been the developed world, such manifestations have left their mark
on what was once known as the Third World too.
In Pakistan the
collapse of the Left around 1980-81, a decade before the collapse of socialism
in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, was owed more to the reliance of this
political tendency on seeking and working under the umbrella of larger
mainstream political parties since the extreme repression let loose upon the
Left from 1951 onwards. When the split in the international communist movement
between Moscow and Beijing emerged in the early 1960s, it had a belated effect
on our Left. When the Left in Pakistan also split as a consequence of Moscow
and Beijing adopting different paths, the pro-Moscow factions/s sought the
umbrella of the National Awami Party (NAP) Wali Khan while the pro-Beijing
elements chose the NAP-Bhashani. In the late 1960s, a considerable element of
the Maoist Left migrated to the umbrella of the PPP. When East Pakistan broke
away to emerge as Bangladesh in 1971, the West Pakistani Left in NAP-Bhashani
was orphaned and withered on the vine. Both the Left inside the NAP-Wali and
the PPP suffered collapse after both these parties either deviated from their progressive
agendas or were weakened by political developments after the 1977 military
coup. Since no faction had thought about an independent existence outside these
umbrella parties even as a contingency, perhaps it is not surprising the Left
as a whole met its tragic denouement around 1980-81.
Whatever the
fate of Macron in the face of the determined struggle of the French people
against the present iniquitous capitalist order, there are lessons to be drawn
from this and similar resistance movements of the recent past. It has become a commonplace
to say the future is digital. From the enormous American women’s mobilisation against
the ascent to power of US President Donald Trump to the French gilets jaunes movement, the internet and
social media have emerged as organising tools. The weak and ineffective remains
of the Pakistani Left need to study this phenomenon and learn from it.
rashed-rahman.blogspot.com
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