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 Monday March 20, 2006 15:44 by dara
 A Personal Account of French anti-CPE march and riot
The metro on the way to the demo was packed, with barely breathing space; it emptied entirely at St Jacques qnd we started marching to Place Renfort for the demo. Right away it was clear that this was as big a demo as I'd ever seen, maybe Make Poverty History would be bigger, but that doesn't count. Generally people were having a good time, each party/union had their own sound system, and while some groups tried to lead their members in chants, many were content just to blare out crap french punk. Everyone was having a laugh, and les jeunes were passing around tins of cheap lager, rose and joints. So kind of like a massive Reclaim the Streets for some people. After no end of milling around, the march got going, but it took several hours for all the groups to start moving. The CGT seemed to have an endless supply of vans filled with soundsystems and speakers leading the union branch in the slogan, "retrait! retrait! retrait cpe!". As the march passed the prison, the demonstrators cheered the prisoners who were at their cell windows. As the Anarchist groups moved past, the sound systems started playing as loudly as possible, and everyone raised their fists. This wasnt enough for some, and a symbolic attack was launched upon the prison walls, bottles and other debris bouncing off the brickwork. No prisoners were liberated. The march moved on eventually, and a few took the chance to graffiti a bank and others put their tag APH everywhere. Background and Resources: French Universities Occupied | Three Generations March Hand In Hand. | French Youth Up In Arms Over New Employment Law The Libcom site provides a blog with up to date archiving of events in France including exclusive translations, analysis, discussion and eye-witness accounts. Paris Indymedia also carries reports. Other IMC Coverage on France: The Suburbs Are Ticking... Why The Nihilism Of The Paris Riots Is Not A Political "Insurrection | La Haine Est Dans La Rue| Paris Housing Hell | Paris Housing Hell 2 | Paris Housing Hell 3 | Discussion On earlier Riots On Indymedia.ie As the march moved up Boulevard Aragon, towards le grand place, the crowd had broken up and was streaming back, people with faces streaming trying to get back. I moved forward and the air got thick with tear gas. There was a large crowd in Le Place, and the CRS had sealed off all the roads away, and eventually moved up to seal the road behind us. They were clearly looking for some kind of conflict, but the crowd was ill prepared to meet it. The main area ofconfrontation was at one of the rues leading off from the centre of le place. The CRS were several lines deep, and the crowd occupied the centre. The cops threw lots of tear gas, and made frequent baton charges. The crowd would retreat and surge back, throwing back tear gascanisters and whatever debris they could find; occasionally pushing les flics back. The only weapons that les jeunes had were bottles, litter, broken glass from bus shelters and other rubbish that was no use against the plexiglass shields and full body armour of the CRS. After several of these returns, the cops made a series of sustained charges, driving the crowd away from the centre and then back further, constantly trying to drive lines between them. The crowd kept coming back, becoming suddenly animated to attack, but with little to no weaponry and constant tear gas,it was a losing battle. Successive charges drove us back, dislodging us from the embankments circling the place, which had been a rallying point. The shout went up "a la Sorbonne!" and it echoed around, but at this stage, there was no clear escape and too much confusion to mont any cohesive movement. Further charges drove us into a police line, where we were peppersprayed and several hundreds pushed down boulevard aragon.By the time i was able to see again, I could only follow their trail, burning barricades and overturned cars showing successive retreats. I met with some jeunes, picking up stones from the side of the road, they planned to go to the sorbonne, but had little idea how to get there, it seemed to sum up the night for les jeunes. Personally, I think that the sealing of the place was a clear provovation by the CRS, they were looking for a confrontation. From the start, the crowd were separated, the unions and more moderate protestors intimidated by the violence. The people who remained were primarily les jeunes, largely male and no match for the CRS. The people Id spoken to before hadnt expected violence, they had thought that the cops would leave the demo alone on account of the size. Few had masks, and even less had any sort of weapon, so I think its very unlikely that there was any desire for violence from les jeunes. By creating a violent situation, the French government may intend to split the anti-CPE movement, portraying les jeunes as violent hooligans. By removing large-scale public expression from the movement, the cops might hope to be able to suppress the more militant tendencies in the universities and on the streets. |
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"No prisoners were liberated" - such bull shirt; maybe you are male, maybe you are female but imo no thanks to rapists. Nowhere do you suggest thattheir captivivity is political, so if thats your idea of "liberation", well no thanks!
For Brian Boru,
"Mao tried socialism, and it killed 100 million of his people on collective farms. The Communist bloc in Eastern Europe tried it, and you had bread-queues in Moscow and the implosion of the system. Capitalism may not be perfect, but it's the best model going."
If you really want to count the dead of History, let me tell you that Capitalism can claim for a much higher toll. (Like a few million Irish starving to death when Ireland was producing twice as many potatoes as were needed to feed its whole population... Free-traders today don't wear wigs, but they're still the same.)
But anyway, Communism is nothing but State-Capitalism, so you're not that wrong. The State is a boss. (In France, the State hasn't been paying any tax burden since WW 2, although it's the biggest employer!)
You're right when you're writing that France is heading towards bankruptcy, but the question is "why?" Where is the money? Who produces the riches?
"De l'argent, il y en a, dans les caisses du patronat."
It's always the same story, my dear man: Capitalism privatizes profit and collectivizes losses. (Think of Enron.)
"Competition provides choice and the ability to choose lower prices than another company, while moderate labour laws and low taxes encourage multinationals to come in and create jobs. There is no viable alternative to capitalism."
Now, that's a good one. Let's take a successful capitalist company as an example: Microsoft.
Oh, yeah, you're right, they love competition and we benefit that with low prices. Ha, ha, ha...
One last thing, and it will account for the pseudo I chose: people like you never understand, but there's a new guest in the story: Mother Nature. You're an islander, aren't you? Do you live by the sea-side? Are you ready for what's ahead?
Think about it, Brian Boru.
and don´t forget: la peur, angst, fear, is the motor of revolution. `cause fear can turn into hate. and hate into action. that´s it
I've been living in Paris for 4 years now, and I can tell you that this is not really about the CPE, it's about the extraordinary divide which the French have allowed to open up firstly between the 'real French' and the immigrants from Francophonie (basically the Magreb and Sub-Saharan Africa), secondly between the culturally arch-conservative over 40s and the smaller demographic, the under 30s.
The over 40s are the 'French' you find in your tourist brochures. They drink wine, read Le Monde, want to keep their pensions, squeeze the last bit of life out the increasingly financially untenable social model, are brazenly nationalist and Anti-AngloSaxon because it threatens their cultural role in Europe, etc. The under30s feel obliged to learn English to secure a good job, follow 'AngloSaxon' culture in movies and music, and are almost the same culturally as the British and Irish youth - but they are squeezed between toffs like De Villepin, who consider the young lefties as 'pas serieux' (riff-raff) who have hampered French power by voting No to the EU constitution, and on the other side by the growing marginalisation of what the Parisians call 'la zone', the ring of banlieue which surrround Paris like a Congostan in some futuristic slum world. Biometrics came in in 2006, by the way ... only for Malians seeking a carte de séjour in France!
Forget fashionable talk of 'la Haine', this is about fear for the future - 'la peur'. They know they ain't going to remain middle class much longer, as the crisis of Western civilisation deepens.
It's not about absolutes. It's not a choice between no social-welfare system and the status-quo. It's not a choice between no employment-rights and the status quo. The status-quo is unsustainable in the long term because France is having to borrow heavily to pay for it. They need to go down the route we have. We have a social-welfare system - just not one as ridiculous ( in terms of removing the incentive to look for work) as the French and German ones.
You Socialists attack capitalism, without telling us what you would replace it with. A barter system? You still have inequality because the former upper-classes have far more to barter with. Mao tried socialism, and it killed 100 million of his people on collective farms. The Communist bloc in Eastern Europe tried it, and you had bread-queues in Moscow and the implosion of the system. Capitalism may not be perfect, but it's the best model going. Competition provides choice and the ability to choose lower prices than another company, while moderate labour laws and low taxes encourage multinationals to come in and create jobs. There is no viable alternative to capitalism.
aahh... things could be so easy...
why do workers always have to complain about capitalism - why don´t they just work? when will they finally become part of the machine - instead of resisting?
you tell them: your social system created unemployment - so smash your social system!
and these idiots, instead of obeying, say: we want to keep our social system, we´d rather smash capitalism - than our social system.
crazy fools, aren´t they!
think about it Brian!
The reality that the protesters don't seem to grasp is that money doesn't grow on trees. Unemployment has eroded the French tax base and forced them to borrow to pay for the much-vaunted 'social-model'. Unemployment has to be cut to give the French government the revenue to avoid bankruptcy. Villepin stand firm. Tell the protesters to eat cake!
Hundreds clashed with riot police on Monday afternoon in the Parisian banlieue (suburb) of Drancy. Between 300 - 500 pupils of the Eugene Delacroix High School gathered for an anti-CPE demonstration. Three vehicles were set fire to and a bus shelter was damaged in the clashes. There was one arrest.
According to the police force, the incidents lasted 3 hours.
Drancy is located in Seine-Saint-Denis, a department in the north-western periphery of Paris where the wave of urban violence which struck the French suburbs, last November started.
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Unionists from SUD-PTT said police men did punch him with their feet and run over him (1), unionists from CNT describe how about 30 police men "lynched" him (2), photographers tell on yahoo news (germany), they have seen police men hunting him and then beating him when already lying on the street.
After the attack Cyril lied about 15 minutes on the street. Police did neither help him nor call an ambulance.
2 students then called fireworkers and an ambulance. The ambulance was 200 meters away - it took 20 minutes till they arrived at Cyril Ferez.(3)
(1) Un anti-CPE dans le coma, AP, 20. 3. 2006
(2) La grève, maintenant!, Confédération Nationale du Travail, 19. 3. 2006
(3) Justice nulle par, police partout, indymedia Paris
information about the mass protests in France on:
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/03/335653.shtml
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/03/336110.html
.
Cyril Ferez, 39, member of the union SUD-PTT, after the police attack
Cyril Ferez, 39 years old works at Torcy as an technician for the Orange telephone company and is a member of the SUD PTT union.
He has been hospitalised at Henri-Mondor de Créteil in the Val-de-Marne district, after suffering serious head injuries at the confrontation with CRS (French riot police) in the Nation district of Paris on Saturday. An inquiry has been opened.
http://libe.com/page.php?Article=368679
Yet we now seem them on a routine basis. Every two weeks there are scenes of police wardrobed in high-tech equipment which had not not even been invented or marketed by the corporations of chemistry and security, 20 years ago. We see these scenes of arrested kneeling youth, of burning cars and streets, of paramilitarised police on average now once a month from some city of the EU.
We see and are made read and watch the most mediocre commercial & state media analysis of what is happening. And these scenes are not just a result of "political" reasons, or even old trustworthy chestnuts like the dreary steeples of Donasti or Navarra, Thessalonika or Athens, we see this violence in the now routine oppression of youth culture in its non-commercial forms, we see it for the criminalisation and brutal repression and marginalisation of an abject heriditary poverty dismissed as "unpredictable nihilism".
What we see, that is to mean, what we ought to see emerging from the mist aprt from those steeples, what is solidifying in the acrid smoke of burning streets, is a new generation of very angry citizens & they are angry for good reasons. They are still angry . & if the EU constitution without its guarantees of employment, housing, pensions and social care, &c.., had been passed, we would still this, they would be European citizens the same.
We see this conflict, all over Europe not just for "political" reasons, or even old trustworthy chestnuts like the dreary steeples of Donasti or Navarra, we see it for youth culture, we see it for abject heriditary poverty dismissed as "unpredictable nihilism". What we see, that is to mean, what we ought to see emerging from the mist, solidifying in the acrid smoke of burning streets, is a new generation of very angry citizens. & they are angry for good reasons. They are still angry .
Allons!
solidarité! = liberté! = egalité! = fraternité!
.:.
It just shows how far the "Anglo-Saxon" model has penetrated our consciousness that this debate is conducted against a background of almost universal acceptance that the CPE will reduce youth unemployment. NO, NO, NO!! That is the big lie. (And even if it was true, how low would you go to "solve" youth unemployment? Work for buttons? Nothing? Why not go the whole hog and pay the employer for the privilege of being trained and gaining experience?) The truth is that lowering standards of employment (or pay - same thing effectively) simply redistributes wealth from workers to employers.
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as they move through an important phase of thier and our struggle against precarity.
De Villepin has rejected the olive branch of peace offered him by the organised left
and ignored years of silently increasing opposition to neo-liberal capitalism by the youth
of Europe.
FLY THAT FLAG!
allons a liberté.
not a one worth their salt will criticise you young of France now.
fly on.
Well Brian Boru before simply saying the French need to copy the Anglo-Saxon model we need to ask is that the right thing to do? And the answer depends on who you are asking and what they value.
Will the CPE decrease the level of youth unemployment, probably, in the short term, yes. But it will also result in an decrease in the standard of living for french workers. Because the benefits of being employed will decrease relative to being unemployed. And in the long run no the CPE will not reduce unemployment. It reduces the power of workers relative to employers, however after a peroid employers demand further sacrifices. Sacrifices that workers will be unable to resist giving due the their situation of decreased power.
Unemployment exists because full employment is impossible under capitalism. In the jobs market all though there are jobs to be done*, by not hiring workers Capital restricts the supply of jobs which leads to capitalists being able to demand more from those who are looking for a job. The response to this restriction should be that workers undermine the power of capital by forcing capital into crisis whereby it has to adapt to a changed power relationship by increasing employment. (This is what happened in the 30s, 40s, 50, (with the creation of the welfare state) and again after the 60s during the 70s and early 80s (with it's expansion)).
That's not to say that the current struggles will or should result in a re-creation of the welfare state. Indeed even if it was/is the declared intention of the French movment against the CPE that they want the recreation/re-empowerment of the welfare state. It simply won't happen: history doesn't repeat itself. However, by engaging with history and not accepting that the power of the market is greater than us, we create history and create our own futures. Remember the invisible hand of the market is no metaphysical entity. Rather it is the reification of material social relationship between real living people. Ultimately our actions are the market. The market cannot therefore ultimately decide how we act. Mr. Marx said something similar in "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon": "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language."
Considering this we can see what kind of solution the CPE offers to the French people. It offers the exact opposite of a desirable, democratic solution. It increasses the power of capital to demand higher profits, lower wages, longer hours, cheaper working conditions, greater power. This only furthers the disempowerment of workers and enables Capital to manipulate the labour/jobs market more freely.
Ultimately the only real solution to the problem of unemployment and the inability of workers to provide for themselves is for workers to expropriate the means of production from Capital and then run them to satisfy their own needs, wants and desires.
*Consider the absurdity of an unemployed builder unable to pay for his accomodation.
Brian, the french know that capitalism offers them only one "solution" - to give up their old social model and to adapt anglo-saxon turbo-capitalism. which means they should accept working more, earning less, give up their workers´rights and so on...
as they don´t want be exploited even more by capitalism than now - they decided to try to revolt.
I hope they will succeed.
It is not about CPE.
It is about overcoming capitalism. step by step
sorry the pic in my 1st comment was wrong.
blocked and occupied universities all over france
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They are trying to protect a system that has given 10% unemployment. They are like our unions for most of the 80's - frightening away multinationals with their hysterical protests at every hint of economic reform. Their intransigence reminds one of the Orange Order at Drumcree even if their ideologies are very different.
The so-called Irish/Anglo-Saxon economic model works. We have low unemployment. They have high unemployment. They need to copy Britain and Ireland or continue descending into the economic quicksands. France and Germany used to have low unemployment before the brought in the failed 'social-model' - a model which encourages laziness and drains the government of revenue to pay for the social-welfare that rewards the laziness. To be fair, the French and Germans have excellent health-services but that is a separate issue. The issue here is that companies gravitate to countries with lighter regulatory regimes and in the Western European context that means Ireland and Britain. These marches should be banned but its the governments decision.
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capitalism is not able to solve the big problems we are facing - capitalism even created them.
It is time to stand up. The french, once more, did the right thing.
"PEACE AMONG THE PEOPLES - WAR BETWEEN THE CLASSES", University of Bordeaux
Sorry I meant that their deficit is 4% of GNP. Their debt-GNP ratio is closer to 100%, compared to 38% in Ireland.
Socialism was tried in Ireland for most of the 80's, when unions demanded and got 25% pay rises, where the top and bottom rates of tax were 64% and 33% respectively, and where unemployment was 18% and emigration 88,000 per annum. So in some ways, the problems in France are very similar. The Irish unions eventually came to their senses and learned to accept a changed economic model, which has worked spectacularly in Ireland in reducing unemployment to 4.4%.
The French people need to a Haughey style TV speech to tell them they are "living beyond our means" and need to "tighten their belt" and accept economic reforms along the Irish model. If companies cannot fire, then they won't hire. Also, a social-welfare system that makes you almost as well off on the dole will not encourage people to look for jobs. The sad truth is that many French people prefer the dole to work. Of course, that brings up the question of where the money is going to come from long term to pay for the largesse. French already has a 4% debt-GNP ratio. If they want to go completely bankrupt then I suggest they continue with their beloved 'social model' and its 10% unemployment. They will only have themselves to blame when it all goes belly up.
courtesy of libcom
please publish more coverage not just of marches but what people are saying from all backgrounds and ages. :-)
It has been 10 months since De Villepin asked the French for 100 days grace before they judged him . The reference was so obvious, De Villepin a biographer of Napoleon and poet of the haut bourgeois has never really mastered nor even attempted to use the language of the ordinary. http://ireland.indymedia.org/article/70054 for good reasons- he is not ordinary This led to his first attempt at a social pact http://indymedia.ie/article/70140 That was long before Sarkozy called some of the French racaille which was a bit too vulgar and ordinary for most. But of course at the same time (high summer when everyone loses their jobs) as the houses of the poorest migrants were burning in Paris. Not for arson but simply for squalor. the 3 "paris housing hell reports" - http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=71693 http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=72013 http://www.indymedia.ie/article/72750
There has been over 10 months of smoke in France.
As we know there is never smoke without Fire.
Don't get too focussed on the Flames, Look for the kindling.