One year of Yellow Vests

(Article written by an OCML-VP supporter one week before the December 5 strike)

Saturday, November 16, we celebrated the first anniversary of the yellow vest movement. In one year, many things have happened. Tens of thousands of people have started to move. There have been some great meetings. The roundabouts, spaces for life and political debate, have allowed many people to break out of their isolation and discover the strength of the collective. Many illusions about the neutrality of the police have fallen, and some reactionary, racist and sexist blinders have been ripped out. There were 12 dead [1], hundreds wounded, many of them mutilated forever. In the face of ever more brutal repression, the question of revolutionary violence was raised again, after forty years of unquestionable domination of reformism and legalism. There have also been many failures and disappointments, self‐proclaimed providential figures who have led the movement towards dead ends (such as Chouard and his RIC [2]), attempts at structuring that have failed, reformist politicians who have tried to get the anger of the masses into their small electoral agenda.

A lot has happened, but a year later nothing is settled. In the absence of clear revolutionary orientations, the bourgeoisie had time to manoeuvre. In November 2018, Macron claimed to solve the crisis with magic money : renunciation of the increase in the carbon tax, a 450‐euro bonus for two million employees, an increase in the activity bonus, set-back in the CSG [3] increase for pensioners under 2000 euros, no more school and hospital closures without the mayor’s approval until the end of the mandate (the latter measure was announced in April, after the "big debate"). Since then, the government has tried to take back with one hand what it had released with the other. The "five‐year act 2", which was announced as more "social", was marked by a radicalization of attacks on the rights of proletarians (just think of the recent attacks on immigrants around the CMU [4], or the attacks of early November on the unemployed, which should be further aggravated in April).

Macron wanted to wrap his attacks in racist and islamophobic propaganda (whether by presenting immigrants as profiteers or veiled women as threats). However, this strategy of "divide and conquer" has failed thanks to the racialized people in the working class neighborhoods who did not let themselves be paralyzed by the images of racist violence at the beginning of the movement. They understood that they had everything to gain from the convergence of struggles, and their courageous presence moved the small fascist groups away from a movement they had first sought to control. As a yellow vest from Seine‐Saint‐Denis recently said to a yellow vest from Oise "You say you’ve been waiting for us for a year, but we’ve been waiting for forty years".

In the countryside, the first demands for carbon taxes and speed limits united proletarians, artisans and small bosses, because everyone depended on their cars to access their workplaces, businesses and services. At the time, many trade union and "radical left" activists blocked their noses and shouted at populism, perhaps because they themselves were often state employees, and saw tax cuts as a threat to their own existence. As the demands deepened, the defense of social minima, schools and hospitals in rural areas became more and more important. The small bosses lost control of the movement in January and new layers tried to take over, especially employees in education and social work, often linked to the France Insoumise [5]. They have brought their own prejudices, including their illusions about the nature of the state, by transforming what was initially a struggle for survival, for the right to health and education into a struggle for the "public service", presented as an antidote to capitalism when it is fully integrated.

As repression increased and the government denied any legitimacy to the word of the yellow vests, the question of democracy became increasingly important. How could politicians elected by universal suffrage also openly despise the people and so brutally seek to silence them ? All kinds of reactionary utopias have circulated, claiming to reinject democracy into bourgeois institutions. The most famous of these utopias was the Citizen Initiative Referendum, as harmless to the bourgeoisie as it would have been demobilizing to the masses. It seems that, since the summer, this claim has gradually disappeared, as it has become apparent that the government would not concede either on the RIC or on anything (unless forced to do so by a revolutionary situation, but then it would be like trying to appease a lion with an appetizer).

First anniversary demonstrations in Paris

In Paris, the demonstrations, although authorized, planned on the first anniversary of the movement were the occasion for a new debauchery of repression by the police : at 10 a.m., the unfortunate men and women who tried to venture onto the Champs‐Elysées were fined 150 euros, when they were not preventively arrested. The demonstration at the Porte de Champerret was dispersed before it could even leave. However, the scattered groups have managed to regroup. They left an hour late for Bastille, where some of the demonstrators were trapped. If the demonstration could be reconstituted at the Porte de Champerret it is thanks to the presence within it of pairs and small affinity groups formed in recent months, and able to act independently.

Every week, in a rotating way, the movement sets itself an epicenter towards which to converge, and that weekend it was Paris. The "provincials" had therefore come in large numbers. They have often been cared for and guided from street to street by comrades from Paris and the suburbs, met during the various assemblies that have sought, since Commercy [6], to structure the movement. More high school students and students had also come, a sign of the turmoil that is currently stirring young people around educational reforms.

Those who had managed not to be trapped by the police in Bastille were able to reorganize a procession to the Place d’Italie, to join the 2pm demonstration, which in turn was trapped. The police imposed a real collective punishment on the unfortunate ones they managed to trap, suffocating them with tear gas (we have seen in recent weeks a tear gas in the form of marbles that burst when they arrived on the ground and released a very powerful gas). A journalist was disfigured ; a worker with four children received a grenade in his face and lost an eye in particularly horrible conditions. As usual, in the following four days, the media only reported on the depredations attributed to the "black blocks".

Other actions were organized throughout the weekend (blocking of the ring road on Saturday morning, opening of a "people’s house" in the former concert hall of the Flèche d’Or, occupation of a department store), we will be there on the 5th for the general strike. Whatever the coming year brings, the experience and solidarity accumulated in the face of state repression will continue for a long time to come in the practice and memory of the masses.