Two Lessons from France’s Yellow Vest Protests

Did your read the last Matt Taibbi column? The Neoliberals and Neocons will join forces during the next American election:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bulwark-weekly-standard-778709/

“So, longtime Democratic Party advisers are once again triangulating against their party’s own progressive wing, which was the core strategy of the original “Third Way” Democrats in the early Nineties. Party leaders now want to kick out populist, antiwar liberals in the same way Frum once wanted to excommunicate antiwar conservatives.”

“Just don’t be surprised if “liberal interventionists” are sitting in the White House once Trump leaves the scene. These are determined revolutionaries who’ve been scheming for years to throw a saddle on the Democratic Party after decades in bed with Republicans. Sadly, they have willing partners over there.”

Fascists joining forces with Neoliberals has already happened in Brazil, everything approved by our Zionist overlords and their Evangelicals useful idiots.

If only there was a reliable Economic Justice For Angry Mobs handbook, with a chapter on making sure things end well in spite of “no centralized control”.

I always saw neocon/neolib as two sides of the same coin anyways. The money trail always leads to “them”, regardless of how patriotic or common wisdom sounding their propaganda.

The World Socialist Web Site is reporting the jailing of a yellow vest who is prominent on Facebook. His crime: calling for the blockade of an oil refinery.
French worker sentenced to six months’ jail over Facebook call for demonstrations – World Socialist Web Site
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/01/16/fran-j16.html

“Zionists” Chiron?

Really?

Why does an otherwise sensible comment have to end off on that pernicious crap?!

Or was that the point entirely? Dangle the truth out there, knowing people are so utterly exasperated with not being able to state the baldly obvious that they aren’t going to feel inclined to call that last bit out. Then–bam–the entire commentariat can now be tarred as antisemetic, or as enabling antisemitism.

In that case, it didn’t work.

“Neoconservative” and “neoliberal” were synonymous up until 2000. The former term was more commonly used in North America, and somewhat less erudite. There was never any suggestion that the former somehow related specifically to geopolitics. Ontario’s Macron, Mike Harris, was invariably described at the time as a neoconservative, not a neoliberal. Canadian provinces don’t have foreign policy stances (well, unless they’re Quebec…)

The idea that neoconservatism was some sort of middle-east policy stance and always had been was Iraq-war era propaganda messaging. If you repeat it here, you’re carrying Bush and Cheney’s torch here.

(And for the record, most of my maternal grandmother’s side of the family died in Hitler’s camps.)

Gorilla insurgency campaigns are not won with large groups. Just sayin.

Ian, one of the things you did not mention regarding union impotence is the lopsided talent problem. Who gets elected to run the union? Often it is the loudest hothead on the shop floor. This person is not likely to be Harvard law graduate or a DBA, but some guy who came up from the loading docks.
Labor leaders nearly always lack strategic planning competencies needed to appreciate the unintended consequences for their members of a policy or deal they agree in writing to support.

Mid-career, I worked 7 years in a large federal agency with the most pugnacious labor union in the US government. My job was to advise (via research) policy changes that would improve workforce morale and enhance efficiency and effectiveness too. Because we were a union shop, I always engaged top labor leaders from project start to finish. I briefed labor on the results – sometimes after I briefed top executives and sometimes when both were in the room. This often led to very productive dialogues which, ironically-but-not-surprisingly annoyed the hell out of the agency’s labor lawyers. After all, a happy workforce was not good for their job security.

How can you think America could crash-land left?
I mean what was the response to Trump? A renewed commitment to economic and social justice?
Haw!
It was to embark on red scare!
Tells you all you need to know.

The Nazis were not Socialists, despite their name.

I wish more people would read the Wikipedia article describing Oswald Spengler’s Prussian Socialism. Words to not have inherent meanings. A word may mean something quite different from similar sounding words. The word “master” is used as a title for a boy child, who certainly is not master of anything. The word “Socialist” in “National Socialist Workers’ Party” originally did refer to Marxian Socialism, but after 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch, it came to refer to Spengler’s version. Hitler hated socialists with the heat of a thousand suns, and made that clear throughout the 1930s It doesn’t matter, of course. The people who claim the Nazis were socialists are not arguing in good faith. They know better.

Agree* Ian;

[Macron]…he’s scared…a coward. Most protests get nowhere because they threaten no one and nothing. [Neoliberalism] has been tried since 1979* and not worked anywhere.

*Carter 1978, but I quibble

And while we are on the subject French elites, this article illuminates a rather dark corner of the French elites present & past….

“France’s is severely addicted to looting and exploitation of Africa…this complete lack of creativity and imagination of French elite to think beyond [a colonial empire]…France has 2 institutions which are completely frozen into the past, inhabited by paranoid and psychopath “haut fonctionnaires”…they are the Minister of Finance and Budget of France and the Minister of Foreign affairs of France.”

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jecmaus/blog/300114/franceafrique-14-african-countries-forced-france-pay-colonial-tax-benefits-slavery-and-colonization

It is an edifying read of the horrific treatment meted out by France’s elite upon African colonies, [present tense intended]. Neocolonialism is the handmaiden of neoliberalism.

Actually, Orthodoxy tends to be inversely proportional to Zionism. Zionism was founded as a secular movement. The Orthodox are the least likely to recognize the State of Israel and most likely to believe that such a state can only be founded by the Messiah.

“Right now I think that the US and Britain have a good chance to land on the populist left. ”

Between Corbyn & Sanders, it’s going to be mighty disappointing if neither manages to capitalize on being so well poised to take power. I’d say Corbyn is closer to it, but Sanders is very plausible right now, if not the actual leader (assuming Biden’s support is inch-deep based on being Obama’s VP and dries up once he starts campaigning in his own right).

Waitwhat, in the US, there has been a war on unions that goes back to the Red Scares under Wilson where unions were split off from their underlying social movements. The modern phase of this war dates back to the late 1970s with the deregulation of airlines and trucking and anti-union legislation which Reagan used in 1981 to break the air traffic controllers union in the PATCO strike. So-called right to work laws, offshoring and free trade treaties also undercut private sector unions. Union corruption as with the Teamsters and straight on anti-union propaganda which portrayed union workers as arrogant and greedy and whose wage gains were somehow at the expense of non-union workers instead of actually raising overall wage rates, and so benefiting all workers. The co-optation of union leadership by the Democrats, the failure of the Democrats to support unions or push through basic legislation to facilitate unionization, like card check (under Obama). All these things decimated private sector unions.

On the public sector side, teachers unions are not especially strong. About the only unions which still have teeth are police unions and these often use their power to defend bad cops and dubious policing practices.

“Actually, Orthodoxy tends to be inversely proportional to Zionism. Zionism was founded as a secular movement. The Orthodox are the least likely to recognize the State of Israel and most likely to believe that such a state can only be founded by the Messiah.”

that´s why the “state” of israel is full of orthodox religious freaks mumbling at a wall like low functioning autists.

forget what they say ,see what they do.

“Dennis Prager is a Jew. And he knows everything.”
he is a right winger conservative, that means he knows nothing.

“Far saner is discussing”
why? do you think it´s insane being against zionists and orthodox jews?

“But maybe he’s made those plutocrats his bitch the way Israel’s made the USA it’s own bitch.”
more likely he is plutocracts bitch spreading disgusting ideology.
not diferent than lobbyst,fox news or alex jones.

There’s plenty of Orthodox living in Israel who do not really recognize the state as such. Its most of the reason the haredim don’t want to serve in the army. Whether, and to what degree this makes them hypocrites is another matter. The deliberate conflation of Jewishness with Zionism only serves the reactionary forces on both sides but it certainly seems to be the popular trope these days. Its the flip side of “Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism”, which certain parties have pushing since approximately 1948.

“Why is it so hard to explain to regular Joe voters that when establishment Dems screwed progressive Dems, we wound up with…Russian connections.”?

Why? Maybe…because it’s a lie. Hillary had more connections to Russia than Trump…not that I’m saying Hillary is a Putin puppet, anymore than Trump is, that type of nonsense is for children and for the children-of-the-corn who inhabit DC.

Cui bono? The Russia story has been great for Hillary, she has escaped blame for being too lazy to campaign properly, her war crimes as SoS, her campaign crimes and besides, Hillary will rise to power through her puppet, Kamala Harris. So while Hillary has never been one to say thank you to the proles, she owes a big debt of gratitude to all the chumps that go out and sell the “Russia Story”.

The spirit of this article seems correct. If a non-rich majority movement-load of people could credibly threaten upper-class-persons’ personal wealth, health, safety and survival without the upper-class-in-general being able to neutralize that threat; then the upper-class-in-general would give in on certain things.

Here in America, if unorganized bunchloads of protesters tried using Yellow Vest methods on the agents of the upper class, or on upper-class people specifically; they would be suppressed beginning with modern versions of methods we have seen used here in the past. And if those methods didn’t work, the forces of upper class government would use al-Assad methods in this country. Would they win? Is it worth finding out?

So if bunchloads of the non-upper-class majority wish to apply genuine force against the upper class, without leadership and without vulnerability to immediate suppression attacks; they may have to find other methods than the Yellow Vests use against other points of weakness in America which are not present in France in the same way.

Perhaps an exploration of what those other weak-points and those other methods of attack are might be worth discussing. John Robb at Global Guerillas used to discuss this sort of thing back when he thought the anarchy-rebellion he stealth-hoped to stealth-foment would lead to the Total Runamok License of the Upper Class which he is pleased to call Libertarianism. Now that he sees open-source rebellion NOT leading to his Libertarian Paradise, he is concerned and fretful; though he still continues writing his general-principals cookbook posts on how to leaderlessly erode, attrit, and degrade a social target.

S Brennan:

So, we should all vote Republican to really teach the plutocrats a lesson?

The US has a history of monster demonstrations and protests that are either violently suppressed by the authorities and militias or which peter out relatively quickly from boredom and/or the problem of “getting nowhere.”

Sometimes it seems like the more enormous the demonstration, the more it is ignored. On the other hand, tiny demonstrations by selected groups of malcontents are sometimes hailed as the Next Big Thing. These selected groups are almost always of the rightist persuasion. Funny how that works.

Ah, it boils down to marketing, you see? Cui bono? What will sell, and who will it be sold to? In other words, protest a la gilets jaunes is certainly possible, and it could be effective in the US, but without a marketing hook, it would ultimately fail. It’s remarkably easy to ensure such failure, too.

OWS started with a marketing hook, and that’s part of why it still resonates all these years later, both with those who favored and those opposed to it. It couldn’t be sustained in the public squares, not here and not in Europe, but it was only partially due to official violent suppression. Internal fractures had already weakened the movement. Of course some of those fractures were the work of provocateurs. Of which there were many.

What happened to OWS was an example for the rest of the Rabble if they thought to get above themselves. And it wasn’t just in the US. Far from it. There were coordinated suppression efforts wherever the Occupy movement arose.

But it is wrong to say that the Movement was utterly destroyed and is now gone. I still receive regular communications from OWS participants and a reorganized Movement. Many seeds were planted, and alternatives to the dominant social/political paradigm are everywhere. While the authorities made an example of the encampments, and they have not re-emerged as they were — and probably won’t — the ideas generated by and through OWS are now widespread and nearly mainstream.

One of the lessons of both the OWS movement and the gilets jaunes is that you won’t get what you want/need through the political system as it is intended for other purposes, such as further enriching the already rich. No, for the kind of change that’s needed, one must work outside that system and most importantly, make it impossible for that system to function. Spanners in the works, bodies on the machines and all that. They’re not just metaphors.

That can force the system to change, but fussing over the parties and voting per se won’t and can’t.

Simultaneously, it’s necessary to create and maintain viable alternatives to the status quo at every scale possible. One reason otherwise marginal religious outfits tend to be successful is because they do that — they create and maintain alternatives as nearly independent as they can. On the other hand, they can fail, too. Oh, spectacularly!

Clearly the political class and their owners have noticed there is discontent among the Rabble, and they’re pondering how best to address it. Macron is doing his part. Trump too. But from appearances, the Old Order is shuddering and perhaps on the verge of collapse.

I don’t know what’s supposed to take its place.

I notice from articles at NaCap that the French Establishment has begun to speak of untying the police’s hands to carry out as much repression as needed, including instructional killings I suppose, to get the Yellow Vesters firmly rounded up and put back in their cages.

One wonders how many Yellow Vesters the French Establishment can sport-murder before the rest of the Yellow Vesters begin to practice the kind of Area Denial Warfare referrenced by Ian Welsh in a long ago post . . . . to deny Metropole France from access to Hinterland France.