Home > IV Online magazine > 2019 > IV531 - April 2019 > Strike, demonstration, blockades ... for a Social Spring

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Strike, demonstration, blockades ... for a Social Spring

Saturday 13 April 2019

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According to the daily Le Parisien Macron is "washed out", "not far from being burnt out" ... A large part of the Macronian young guard has already left, and against a backdrop of a persistent contestation, with Act 20 of the Yellow Vests and mobilizations in the education sector, the government still does not know how to get out of his Great Debate ...

We take the same ones and we continue ...

The ministerial mini-reshuffle announced on Sunday is a demonstration of the situation. Politically isolated, Macron is reduced to appealing to people very close to him to replace those who have left ... Thus, Sibeth Ndiaye, Macron’s former public relations adviser, becomes the new spokeswoman of the government: the one who asserts that it is "perfectly OK to lie to protect the president" was also at the origin of the expression "crazy amounts of cash” used by the president to stigmatize the social aid given to the poorest. Totally in the image of Macronist contempt for the poor.

The government is experiencing a lot of difficulty in regaining control of the situation: the great pow-wow has been officially over for two or three weeks, and no announcement is really in the pipeline. The government’s road map has not changed: no more retreating in front of the Yellow Vests, make the poor and the entire working class pay.

Flight forward as the only response

Caught between its support from above and the mobilization from below, the government intends to accelerate its policy of social attacks. The privatization of Airports of Paris is a good example, as well as the trial runs concerning the retirement age, contrary to all the campaign promises of the candidate Macron ...
And the repression continues, in order to dissuade all resistance: the "forces of order", backed up by the anti-demonstration law adopted recently, are there to make sure of it. But the case of Geneviève Legay, this 73-year-old Attac activist who was seriously injured by the police during a violent charge during Act 19, has become a new political problem. After many lies, the responsibility of the police has indeed been established, but the policeman directly implicated acted while “strictly respecting the orders given by his superiors" ... Down with Castaner! [1]

The bans on demonstrating (with their train of unjustified fines), thousands of preventive identity checks, hundreds of prison sentences, people who have lost an eye or a hand because of the methods of the riot police, will not end the mobilization.

It’s time!

Since the beginning of the Yellow Vests movement in mid-November, Jupiter-Macron has been cut down a peg and was forced to make a first retreat in early December – which was largely deceitful. We must therefore continue to strike together.

After demonstrations last Saturday against the projected Blanquer Law [2], very wrongly baptized "school of trust", employees of the national education system will massively strike on Thursday, April 4th. This project, which will destroy the public service and introduce barrack-room discipline in schools, perfectly synthesizes all that this government promises us for the coming months ...

As Act 21 looms, the working class must seize its chance. Build the strike, prolong it where possible (especially in education), converge with the Yellow Vests, who will also meet in Saint-Nazaire next weekend. The possibilities of giving birth to a Social Spring exist: we must seize them!

Montreuil, 1 April 2019

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Footnotes

[1Christophe Castaner is Macron’s Minister of the Interior.

[2Jean-Michel Blanquer is the Minister of Education