Repeatedly in recent French history, an effort has been made
to take away from the French working class
gains and benefits that they have won
over the years through strikes, through elections
in countless ways.
One of these gains, one is a national pension
system in France.
When you reach the age of 62,
you can go on retreat.
The French language what that you can retire in English.
At age 62,
successive conservative business
oriented governments have tried in France
to take away that benefit.
Here's how they've proposed to do it.
Those who work this way
never honestly say what they are doing.
They come up with clever wording in the hopes that they can fool
elements of the working class not to see
the deprivation being imposed on them.
So of course, they call what they're doing
pension reform.
What the reform boils down to, details aside, is simple.
To raise the age of retirement
from 62 to 64.
That's the issue.
They've tried it before and they have repeatedly been defeated,
mostly by workers going out on strike and saying,
if you push this, the country will come to a stop.
You are not going to take away whatever government
you are, whatever president is sitting there.
You are not going to take away from the vast majority of the French
people a benefit to the quality
of their lives that they fought hard for.
It's not going to happen.
And if you push, it will push right back.
And so the effort to do that failed
more than once in recent history.
However,
the conditions of modern French capitalism
are such that the business community,
the conservatives, the wealthy keep pushing
whoever is in power to try to get this done.
And the reasoning for that is simple.
They don't want to pay the taxes
that are part of how this gets funded.
And so they save themselves having to pay taxes.
This is a small minority of the French.
They want to deprive the majority
of the French of the pension.
They've won the right to retire at age 62.
So you're going to people who are already exhausted
at the end of a life of working like that.
And you're going to take away two of the few years they have in retirement.
No, you're not.
Here's the second argument.
France has prided itself in recent decades
on raising worker productivity.
What a nice phrase. You know what it means.
It means you get more out of a worker per hour than you used to.
You've raised labor productivity.
Now, you've done that in a number of ways.
You have added machine reuse, improved the machinery.
You now have a high, you have robotics, you have computers, all kinds of things.
But you've also made workers work harder, work faster, etc.,
and that is wear and tear on the bodies
and minds of people.
You have made them work harder,
but you haven't kept up in terms of
what it means for the mental and physical capabilities.
Therefore, you owe the working class
some sort of adjustment
to what you have pressured them to do.
But you're not giving them more retirement as an offset.
You're not giving them earlier retirement as an offset,
which would make sense if you cared about the mass of your people.
You want to take away two years
of the retirement that they can look forward to enjoying.
Don't call it a reform.
You're depriving your working class
of two years of retirement.
That's what you're asking for.
Take away two years
of whatever you can enjoy in the way of a retired life.
But I stress these are arguments.
In France, the unions long ago learned a lesson not all that well learned
in many other countries that the arguments
are never what win the case.
They're important. They're worth developing.
They're worth publicizing.
And the French are doing all of that.
But you've got to get the bodies out on the street.
And that's why the unions declare all seven or eight of the different
federations of unions in France agreed together,
cooperating to have a general strike.
A general strike.
They've been planning it for weeks,
scheduled for the 7th of March.
That strike is underway already
because different unions started different points.
And so it's sort of a stretched out event because you're talking about
millions of people.
It will be at not at all
surprising if there is more than a million on any given day.
Not working.
Staying at home and or in the streets.
But the unions in France know
that to win this fight, they need to be allied.
They have to have allies.
And the allies are two things in France
that are worth our looking at and understanding.
First, they ally with social movements.
Movements against racism.
Movements against the persecution of immigrants.
Movements. You fill in the blank.
The unions work with them.
They go out and support them
in exchange for them supporting the unions.
And since everyone has an interest, everyone in the working class,
the vast majority of France has an interest in holding on
to the pensions they fought for and won.
This is an alliance that can be built
a bit
more interesting in the French context.
Is the fact is a third player in this alliance,
the unions, the social movements and the left
wing political parties.
That's right.
The unified left wing political parties who contested in the race
and whose candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon,
came a couple of percentage points behind Mr.
Macron.
That's all not a big difference.
They have also mobilized to support
and participate in this general strike.
It's a little bit like the next phase of what was called
the Yellow Vest movement a couple of years ago,
a movement of enormous power and strength which overturned initiatives by Mr.
Macron and only came to an end because of COVID and all that
it implied for people getting together and marching down the street.
So all of these forces are getting together.
And unlike Annalena Baerbock in Germany,
the Greens in France are participating in all of this.
Unlike Annalena Baerbock in Germany,
these people know that capitalism
is a big part of their problem.
It all agree it's not that.
But those who are explicitly anti-capitalist
are a recognized, welcomed part of the larger community
that's focused on saying, You don't take away our pensions.
And it's not lost on anyone
that having that and
anti-capitalist component
is a powerful support
for the chances they have to win this fight with Mr.
Macron.
They could not do it without the anti-capitalist political parties,
without the anti-capitalist militants that are part of all of this.
This is a challenge to capitalism.
You want to take away working class rights,
an effort of capitalists everywhere all the time.
It's part of what maximizing profit is all about.
It's a clever phrase we maximize.
Sounds like you're not hurting anyone.
But it is always partly at the expense of workers.
Whether that means replacing workers with machines,
whether that means exporting jobs to places
where you can get away with paying workers less.
You get the picture.
The French are fighting back.
They are challenging capitalism.
Not the least lesson of the French challenge
to capitalism embodied in this struggle over
pensions is the importance
of unifying the labor movement.
Unions left wing political parties,
including those explicitly anti-capitalist and the social movements,
many of which have their anti-capitalist components.
More and more, it's becoming clear to people
that capitalism is part of the problem and that overcoming
and moving beyond capital ism is part of the solution.
That is a strengthening glue
to bring all these things together.
And the French are absolutely pioneers.
In the past, as far back as the French Revolution,
in the recent past in the Yellow Vests and now in this struggle over pensions.