FRENCH IMPERIALIST COLLABORATION

WILL MORROW—Macron’s equation of anti-Semitism with all “extremes” is aimed at declaring that the left, and all social opposition in the working class, is inherently anti-Semitic and so essentially criminal. Referring to anti-Semitism, he said that “in the times we are in, other forms [of hatred] are rising with it,” including hatred “against elected officials, against authority, against parliamentarism.”

ALEX LANTIER—In the meantime, European papers are downplaying or furiously denying the obvious: that they are trampling Venezuelan sovereignty underfoot, backing a right-wing coup launched by Trump. “The capitals that are the most implicated, including Paris, appear to be acting in line with Washington,” France’s Le Monde wrote, while Spain’s El Pais proclaimed: “The announcement made by Spain and other European countries is not a break with legality, but precisely an attempt to task the interim president with restoring it…”

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—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.