The working class in France is on the move, with a bold and militant transit strike that has lasted more than six weeks and enlisted strong support from workers throughout the country (Odaxa poll, 1/8). At its peak, the action involved more than a million workers, from electrical workers to ballet dancers. In a period of intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry and harsher repression by the capitalist bosses, spontaneous fightback and class struggle is also on the rise.
Behind its investment banker president, Emmanuel Macron, the declining French ruling class has aggressively attacked workers in France and its former colonies in Africa. As Progressive Labor Party has pointed out, inter-imperialist competition—chiefly among the U.S., China, Russia, and the European Union—will inevitably lead to world war, as the bloodthirsty bosses scramble to protect their profits. France, in particular, is a dying empire desperate to keep its iron grip on the workers it exploits. Only by building an international communist movement, led by PLP, can workers move forward in this period—to resist the capitalists, and then to conquer them with communist revolution.
Nationwide strike
Last December 5, transit workers in France walked out of work and triggered the longest labor strike in French history. Workers shut down buses, trains, and high-speed rail lines, costing the bosses millions in profits. The strike was sparked by Macron’s proposal to savage the country’s pension system, cutting the average pension by 30 percent while raising the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64. These vicious reforms would most punish workers who’d taken time off due to injury or to raise children. The French pension system, established in the 1940s, is relied upon by France’s elderly, who have the lowest rates of elder poverty in Europe.
The  working class in France has a long history of fightback against the bosses, going back to the Paris Commune of 1871. But this revolutionary history and spirit has been undermined by divisions in the working class and racism toward African and Arab immigrants, who are segregated in impoverished and neglected suburbs of major cities.
The immigrants’ struggles for survival have been ignored by sell-out trade unions and fake-left political leaders (Atlantic, 2/26/19), despite a three-week uprising in 2005 and repeated fightbacks since. Without multiracial unity against racism and the bosses’ state, the current upheaval will be sorely limited, both for immediate impact and for longer-term, revolutionary change.
France’s imperialist conundrum
The French bosses’ profits are driven both by their exploitation of workers at home and their continued economic control over 14 former colonies in Central and West Africa, which provide a steady flow of cheap raw materials back to France. The former colonies are required to hold 50 percent of their foreign reserves in the French treasury, while French multinational firms retain rights to extract natural resources from the region.
To guarantee the continued flow of resources and profits, France has threatened to withdraw troops from Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mauritania as they face increasing violence from Islamic nationalist fighters (New York Times, 1/12). At the same time, France is using its permanent military bases in Africa to train anti-Islamist militias that have carried out genocidal massacres (International Crisis Group, 3/25/19).
Meanwhile, China has increased its investments throughout the region to $38.4 billion in 2016, as compared to France’s $7.7 billion. And where China is investing heavily in infrastructure and economic development in Africa, France’s imports remain heavily concentrated in commodities.
Revolution v. reform
The current upheaval in France recalls the lessons learned from the even more massive rebellion in May 1968, which toppled a government (see PL Magazine,1968, www.plp.org/pl-magazine/selections). Months of strikes and student protests against U.S. and French slaughters in Vietnam and Algeria led to the bosses’ state terror against students, and then to a general strike. Despite mass militancy and revolutionary fervor, workers and students were sold out by the fake-left Communist Party of France, which misled them back to the bosses’ elections. The capitalists remained in power, and workers’ reform gains were ultimately reversed. Like Bernie Sanders and other social democratic reformers in the U.S., the French “Socialist” Party—which later elected two presidents and groomed Macron—helped lead the way to betray our class.
Workers can’t rely on liberal politicians or boss-controlled union leaders to protect them from the capitalists’ attacks. While Macron has been pushed into a partial retreat, both in France and in Africa, history shows that the working class can’t be fooled into believing that any imperialist rulers have their best interests at heart. Far from it!
The only way to smash worker exploitation is to build Progressive Labor Party and fight for communism against the global capitalist class. Join us! We have a world to win!