France: A great popular mobilization, a conduction tied to the system
Pablo Vasco
On Sunday 16 In October, the march “against expensive living and climate inaction” organized by NUPES took place in Paris., the reformist political coalition led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La Francia Insumisa. Neither the 140.000 people who exaggerated the organizers nor the 29.000 that the police minimized: In reality, from the Place de la Nation to the Place de la Bastille, some 50.000, many of them organized and also many independently, with their own banners and claims.
Among the several thousand who were in front of the head were the self-employed and numerous yellow vests: “We remain organized in each place and the right-wingers did not come to this march but many of us could not miss, because inflation affects us all.”, one of them explained to me. Union collectives were interspersed among the NUPES columns from the different regions., environmentalists, LGBT, pacifists and antiracists. Among others, The combative column of La Alternativa stood out, a federation made up of twenty student groups from all over the country: “We are anti-capitalist -a university student told me, and we know that the parliamentary dispute is not enough to change the relationship of forces.”.
The march of 16 It was an expression of the popular anger that is growing throughout France against inflation, the low salaries and the anti-retirement reform that Macron intends to impose at all costs. The greatest exponent of this working-class and popular cauldron is the wage strike of the refinery workers.: in the warehouses of the multinational TotalEnergies remain on strike despite official threats of sanctions. And tomorrow Tuesday 18 there is a national strike and mobilization of railway workers and bus drivers, for salary increase and against sanctions, to which other unions and student groups call to join, all of which fuels a climate of general strike.
Furthermore, Macron's government, without own majority in parliament, to approve your budget 2023 threatens to use the annual decree that the authoritarian constitutional article allows 49.3. This increases discontent. Both the extreme right of Marine Le Pen (RN) as the NUPES announced parliamentary motions of censure if he uses it. Faced with the political-institutional crisis, Some analysts do not rule out that Macron dissolves parliament and calls new elections. It's more: days ago, against his position, 20 Deputies of the ruling bloc voted in favor of an amendment to the finance law to impose a partial and temporary tax on certain business dividends.
At the head of the march, having to account for the social cauldron, the NUPES deputies carried a flag: “Support for striking workers”. Mélenchon and other deputies and leaders of LFI were there., the PC, the PS, the Left Party and the Greens, all members of the NUPES. Philippe Poutou was also there, NPA spokesperson, the anti-capitalist party whose majority leadership unfortunately follows reformism. In a symmetrical error, of sectarianism, Lutte Ouvrière was not even going to take any alternative position.
But the key was not only the important march, but Mélenchon's speech from the central bus, since it marks its objective as a direction. He intends to channel social mobilization in the wrong political direction, class collaboration, that is, functional to the capitalist system: “With what we are doing today we outline the construction of a new Popular Front, who will exercise power in this country when the time comes... Another life is possible, detached from the plunder of profit. Another world is possible, freed from the plunder of capitalist productivism. The Popular Union can transform into a Popular Front. And we all want it.".
As well, in 1936-1938 The French Popular Front meant the co-government of an alliance between the two main labor parties (PC and PS) with a bourgeois party (Radical), whose president was the social democrat Léon Blum. Faced with the wave of strikes and factory occupations, The PC that led the CGT betrayed them in exchange for some conquests. But he rejected the expropriation demanded by the working class bases in struggle, what terrified the French imperialist bourgeoisie. The Blum government ended up applying repression, lost mass support and then exploded, which facilitated the subsequent triumph of the right and the arrival of fascism.
From the LIS and its militants in France we believe that the course that Mélenchon proposes today is a deceitful political strategy that should be rejected outright., without denying the possibility of tactics of unity of action and demands towards the NUPES for this or that claim or against the right and the extreme right. The populist front trap must be opposed by the regrouping of the revolutionary socialists in a strong pole of the combative extreme left., based on class independence, to fight for the defeat of capitalism and for a government of the workers.
