Added on Jan 21: English readers can read an interesting background-piece written in English entitled « French Popular Uprising: Revolution Or Frozen Conflict? » by Tyler Durden , Tue, 01/21/2020 – Authored by Diana Johnstone via The Unz Review, in https://www.zerohedge.com/political/french-popular-uprising-revolution-or-frozen-conflict
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“We are asked to escape the measures personally, to see them applied only to subsequent generations. But we are only a small link in a 350-year chain. This chain must extend into the future: we cannot be the generation that sacrificed those who follow», https://lemediapourtous.fr/sacrifier-les-generations-futures-de-danseurs-lopera-de-paris-dit-non-a-macron/
January 24, 2020 will be a highly symbolic date: There have been years of protest by the Gilets jaunes and numerous other groups of citizens and students. Recently the protesters have been joined by the workers who went on strike since December 5, 2019 with the support of the majority of the population. Despite these widespread and growing protests, the French Presidency and government have decided to impose their unprecedented social regression by abusing their poorly elected majority in Parliament.
Here is the timetable for this parliamentary coup: on January 24, 2020, despite a rising and almost unanimous opposition, the government will present its legislative project to the Council of Ministers in favor of a contributory pension scheme. It will be open to private capitalization, and, in effect, it will reduce most pensions paid out. On February 17Th the National Assembly will vote according to a fast-track parliamentary process retraining it to a single reading.
Meanwhile, a Conference is being launched to study the financial equilibrium of the regime. However it will have to be maintained below a permanent threshold set at 14% of GDP. Its report is expected to be released in April. With a predictable growth in the cohorts of retirees, the only real thing to negotiate, or more rightly, to endure, will be the increased of the age of retirement necessary to preserve the pre-defined financial balance of the regime, with marginal – let’s say, Italian-style – measures for more stressful and tiring work.
It is a farce, but a farce with a very specific purpose, that is to override any opposition while ignoring the protests. The hope is to discourage the heroic resistance of strikers whose livelihood has already taken a tremendous hit due to the long strike, as well as the protesters literally brutalized by unprecedented police violence. Before the end of the Conference or immediately after, the Senate will have to pronounce itself. The outcome is already discounted for a Parliament and a Presidency that “won” the elections only with the support of those who wanted to block the ultra-right Marine Le Pen. It amounts to a real parliamentary coup, moreover one imposed with a National Assembly illegally called to vote on a text that does not spell out the financial coverage of the proposed reform. If this reform is pushed through it will be the end of the form of social democracy embodied by tripartite negotiations; the decision-process will increasingly rely on unilateral governmental decrees.
It is very probable that the first blow to this arrogant strategy will come from the March 15-22 March interlude provided by the municipal elections. (1)
The Presidency and its typical advisors seem confident that, after the vote by the National Assembly on February 17, 2020, they will have won the parliamentary game … and discouraged the citizens’ opposition to their intolerable regressions. The Italian experience of the so-called Years of Lead conceived by Gladio / P2 and by the Italian puppets – still transversely dominant in the contemporary Italian parliament – allow us to guess what is likely to happen next.
We can advance the following certainty: Neither the unions, nor the students, nor the French citizens will be demobilized, simply because this is an unprecedented attack against the founding principles of the République. In addition, they have understood that the best defense against State violence and terrorism and its social apartheid remains the strictly peaceful determination to resist everywhere, on the job, on the ronds-points and even on the front-square of the Opéra. A total general strike cannot be ruled out before February 17 to block the anti-democratic process in Parliament with the paralyzing of production and distribution, that is to say with recourse to the sacred right to strike.
The reform of the public pension scheme is only the last act of the neoliberal and monetarist war waged against sovereign peoples. It was preceded by many other regressions, in particular the destruction of the Workers’ Statute with the Loi travail – a French-style Jobs Act – and of social safety nets. As elsewhere, but still with a little delay in France, the dismantling of the Welfare or Social State, born out of the Resistance, does not spare any aspect of civil and republican life. The public education system, health-care, public transportation, production and distribution networks and other public infrastructures, the media, the arts and R&D and everything else is passing into the hands of a speculative finance; this is disastrously happening worldwide at the end of its self-destructive exuberance cycle. The bloody end of the Chicago Boys’ policies in Chile bears a striking testimony. Public services and infrastructures are the property of all those who have no other private property.
All forecasts point to the millions of full-time jobs that will be destroyed by the introduction of new robots and algorithms. Macroeconomic competitiveness and microeconomic productivity have never been so high and their gains so badly redistributed. (3) Italy illustrates the pathological nonsense that consists in making the majority of the population work longer but with increasingly reduced public services and with heavier indirect and regressive taxes. What is now needed is a general reduction of the working week for the same initial wage but with rehabilitated and strengthened safety nets. Full-time employment must return to be the norm.
The average population is getting older. Instead of being able to take advantage of life before becoming permanently ill or in some way incapacitated, this demographic trend is used to deny dignified full-time employment to young people who cannot even marry anymore. This leads to an almost irreversible national demographic suicide given the average age of our fellow women citizens. Essential public services and national education are sacrificed to deregulation, privatization and even multiconfessionality. The national territory, the bridges, the tunnels, and even the wastewater treatment plants are already collapsed or dysfunctional. It is nothing more than a collective madness nurtured against the general interest and the social utility enshrined in our Constitutions. « Once again », the most arrogant singularity claims to usurp universality.
Everywhere in Europe and in the whole World they pretend to pay the declining individual net wage with the drastic reduction of the other components of the gross paycheck, namely with lower social contributions and increasingly regressive and indirect taxation, that is to say with the essential parts of the « global net revenue » of the household.
Work is both a republican right and duty for all those eligible to work. It is the basis of citizenship and of the social contract; it is the basis of the production of wealth and of its socially-aware redistribution, enshrined in the key articles of our Constitutions. Fundamental Social Rights guaranteed by public regimes and public credit are definitively not a gift from capital to the workers and citizens. They are merely a small part of the wealth that only they produce with their own work, be it physical or intellectual.
Starting on January 24th, 2020, for the defense of our own fundamental social rights within a Social Europe freed from neoliberal and monetarist austerity, manipulated xenophobia and fear, 10, 100, 1000 Solidarity Committees supporting the French citizens on strike must flourish. It will be the right propaedeutical work for our own social awakening.
We are neither « fasci » neatly tied-up, nor canned “educated” sardines. We are Citizens endowed with Fundamental Rights, we are the sovereign people!
Economy and science must contribute the material conditions necessary for the general Human emancipation, the “market” must stop transforming human life into a mere commodity and return to being a civil location or platform where egalitarian exchanges take place.
« Austerity kills! » (4)
Paolo De Marco
Site: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org
1) « Retraites: the calendrier de la réforme se précise » Par Grégoire Normand, 16/01/2020, https://www.latribune.fr/economie/france/retraites-le-calendrier-de-la-reforme-se-precise-837236.html
2) Without surprise, the stigmatization policy against Islam is already in the cards … See «Voici le calendrier très serré des réformes à venir », Par AFP, 16/01/2020, https://www.latribune.fr/economie/france/voici-le-calendrier-tres-serre-des-reformes-a-venir-837289.html
Contrary to media reports there never was any integration problem with the culturally Muslim population in France and in Europe. See for instance the relevant passages on the Islamic veil in my Livre-Book III in French and in English freely accessible in Download Now, Livres-Books section of my old Jurassic site www.la-commune-paraclet.com . Just use the term “voile” or “bauer” in the English text with the Search function to quickly reach the pertinent paragraphs. See also the texts in the Category «Textes en français » of http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org in particular « La « palestinisation » de la France » in http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/la-palestinisation-de-la-france/
3) For a brief summary of the difference between science and economic narrative, see http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/the-pseudo-economic-science-of-the-bourgeoisie-here-is-why-we-should-quickly-change-economic-paradigm/
4 ) See « THE BODY ECONOMIC: why austerity kills, by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, HarperCollins Publishers LTD, 2013. A critical review. » in the section Critique de Livres-Book reviews of my old Jurassic site www.la-commune-paraclet.com