The Damnable French

PARIS, March 18 — Students joined forces with teachers, workers, retirees, opposition politicians and labor union leaders in more than 150 cities and towns throughout France on Saturday in the largest nationwide protest against the government's new youth labor law.

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The demonstrations were the climax of a week of protests that have shut down dozens of universities and confronted Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin with one of the most serious crises in his 10 months in office.

The giant left-wing C.G.T. workers' union estimated that 1.5 million people protested nationwide; the Interior Ministry put the total at more than 500,000, with 80,000 in Paris. [1]

Excuse me for bringing to your attention that at this very moment the French are doing what they do best — rioting. The history of France is the history of a most evident class conflict, of the mounting tension between two opposing forces that inevitably results in a progression of one force and the regression of the other. This is not a unique phenomenon; the history of humanity is the passing of one progression to the next via a conflict of forces. Perhaps the specific tensions of France make the French so damn good at the progression-regression pattern. The development of the Jacobin capitalists leading to the overthrow of absolutism, the radical Jacobin democracy leading to Napoleonic absolutism, the Napoleonic failure of ‘kriegpolitik’ and the rise of the Paris Commune, the destruction of the Paris Commune by the reactionaries and the rise of the second bourgeois republic, the invasion of France by Nazi Germany and establishment of the technocratic Vichy France, the rise of DeGaulle’s third republic and the May 1968 French Maoist and Situationist upheaval, and so on.

The trend of this political development is marked by two dialectics, the dialectic of class conflict — peasants-absolutists, bourgeoisie-proletarian — and the dialectic of spontaneous conflict and organized conflict. If you didn’t notice the above was organized-feudal absolutism → spontaneous-bourgeoisie, spontaneous-bourgeoisie → organized-bourgeois absolutism, organized-bourgeois absolutism → spontaneous-proletarian, spontaneous-proletarian → organized-bourgeois democracy, etc.

The ‘riot’ is in actuality the manifestation of a conflict between classes of opposing interests. Moreover, it is the manifestation of this conflict in a spontaneous manner. The build-up of quantitative properties — 23% unemployment amongst youth, 10% unemployment overall — results in qualitative changes — university occupations, protests, unorganized violence, etc. The riot is the spontaneous side of the dialectic of spontaneity-organization. However, what is the organized aspect of this dialectic? The revolution. The revolution embodies not only the demand of political change but also the permanence of political change.

How does the riot become the revolution? Through the synthesis of the riot and the revolution, the organization of spontaneous rebels. Between the riot and the revolution lies the task of organization. The Bolshevik revolution became so when the riots and strikes of the industrial centers became urban insurrections. The task of organization lies within those who realize the need for organization. These avant-gardes of the proletarian movement recognize the need for armed insurrection, for the formation of workers’ councils and factory committees, and for the overthrow of the existing material relations.

Then what is the course of the ‘contrat première embauche’ riots? The course lies in progression-regression on the short-term — either the capitalists cave in and repeal the CPE, progression, or the capitalist do not repeal the law and suppress the riot, regression — but what of proletarian political power, of the radical change of society? For this to happen the there must be a change from spontaneity to organization. Yet where are the organizers? Does the Lutte Ouvrière become the dark horse of political change? Or does May 1968 happen all over again? The fate of the French proletariat depends on the consciousness of the French proletariat. The French revolutionary-proletarians must act towards a revolution.

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[1] Sciolino, E. (2006, March 18). French Protests Over Youth Labor Law Spread to 150 Cities and Towns. The New York Times. Retrieved March 24, 2006, from http://www.nytimes.com/