FRENCH CRYPTOFASCISM

VANESSA BEELEY—Since the 24th November 2018 the violence witnessed on the streets of cities across France has escalated dramatically. One French independent journalist, David Dufresnes, has been recording all infractions committed by police and security forces and tweeting them to the Interior Ministry while giving interviews to a huge number of French media channels to raise awareness of the police brutality during peaceful protests. In the tweet below, infraction number 362 dated 26/1/2019, an off duty soldier is reported to be hit in the head by a police LBD40 rubber bullet as he is leaving a restaurant in Montpelier on his way to the nightclub with two of his colleagues.

Jean-Baptiste Redde said he was shocked when he learned that TV channel France 3 had sanitized an AFP photograph showing him holding a sign that read “Macron out.” The channel, which dropped the “out” part of Redde’s message, blamed the curious Photoshop-job on a “human error.”

ALEX LANTIER—Saturday’s massive crackdown was a searing lesson in the character of bourgeois democracy: as soon as there is any expression of genuine popular opposition, the guns come out. After riot police backed with military armored vehicles and water cannon kettled and assaulted peaceful protesters starting early in the day, violent clashes erupted in all France’s largest cities. A record 1,385 people were arrested.

ALEX LANTIER—It is clear that the main task Mélenchon sets himself in this crisis is to rescue and defend the Macron government amid a deep, potentially fatal crisis. He warns the reader of the potential “refusal of the security forces to obey orders” to crack down on the protests, adding: “Of course such fragility does not come from nowhere. That is the case now. Thousands of hours of unpaid overtime, over 100 suicides in the police, just as many in the other security agencies, tense trade union elections in a few days, everywhere the situation is explosive.”

ALEX LANTIER—The unanimous turn against Mélenchon in the French media, many parts of which once styled themselves as socialists, is a warning. The layers of the affluent middle class drawn from the post-1968 student movement that dominated what passed for “left” politics have shifted far to the right and cast their lot in with the police state. The struggle to defend democratic rights requires above all the struggle for the political independence of the working class from other class forces.