Geography Archives: France

Friedrich Engels was born 200 years ago today. Modern reformists like to cite Engels as an authority. But until his very last day, Engels fought against reformist ideas and for revolutionary principles.

French health and social care workers stage mass protests for better staffing, pay and conditions as a second wave of COVID-19 engulfs the country, writes Susan Ram

Samir Amin is, incontestably, the greatest intellectual—luckily, a Marxist!

The second round of the French local elections, at the end of June, was bad news for president Emmanuel Macron, whose candidates did very poorly. In response, Macron switched prime ministers, replacing high-profile operator Edouard Philippe with an unknown right winger, Jean Castex, whose previous experience consisted mostly of being mayor of a town with 6,000 inhabitants.

The French courts recently found the telecommunications firm Orange/France Telecom and its top managers guilty of “moral harassment” connected to a wave of worker suicides a decade ago. The former management team, including the former CEO, face jail time and fines, while the company was ordered to pay 3 million euros in damages to the victims.

The present context in France and across the world is quite bad for the exploited and oppressed in general, as also for the organised workers’ movement. This long term weakening in the conditions of capitalist crises gave the green light to the ruling classes to take out their revenge at the end of the 1970s and wind back the limited but real social gains of the post-war period.

The media, quick to condemn violence against protesters elsewhere in the world, largely ignored the brutal crackdown on firefighters joining months-long nationwide protests in France.

From bus drivers to ballet dancers, workers from across France have taken to the streets in opposition to President Emmanual Macron’s attempts to reshape the country into a U.S.-style neoliberal state.

Since the middle of December, France has been gripped by a wave of large scale strikes. In this article the French collective Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes analyses the composition of the strikes, and the potential for its continued escalation.

France’s mass strikes have mobilized millions, persisting into a sixth day, in an attempt to forestall severe cuts to the social gains of the working class.

New Law Faced Critics Alleging it “Stigmatises and Silences ” Critics of Israel, and even those in Favour of 2 State Solution.

What if they succeed? We know what the ‘success’ of structured parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain led to. Maybe a horizontal federation of autonomous base-groups attempting to re-invent democracy could do better.

The film ‘Samir Amin: The organic intellectual’ depicts the audacious struggles of, as well as interviews with, addresses by and special moments involving this most outstanding intellectual of the South.

The campaign to ‘liberate’ Algerian women sheds light on the contemporary place of Muslim women in France—and the double aggression against them, both by the state and by a section of the feminist movement.

Reports say that the Disarm collective, a local group that campaigns against police violence, has counted 98 cases of serious injuries till now, including 15 cases of people losing an eye to rubber bullets.

The Empire’s European castle of vassals is crumbling. Right in front of our eyes. But Nobody seems to see it. The European Union (EU), the conglomerate of vassals–Trump calls them irrelevant, and he doesn’t care what they think about him, they deserve to be collapsing.

As the Yellow Vest movement in France continues its novel and inspiring revolt, president Emmanuel Macron could not help expressing his class disdain for ordinary people: at a gala speech on 11 January, he declared: “Too many French people don’t know the meaning of the word ‘effort’. That’s part of the explanation for the present troubles”.

In this essay, I will argue that the leadership of the climate justice movement and the movement for radical social change, which in my opinion is essential for tackling the eco-social world crisis, have fallen short to meet the opportunities and challenges that the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) protests in France (Greeman, December 3, 2018; December 28, 2018) and the Sunrise Movement in the United States have presented.

Act Five for the popular Yellow Vest revolt against poverty in France came on 15 December–but it was not the finale. The movement remains vibrant and determined, especially in big southern towns such as Toulouse and Bordeaux.

The first model is a radical critique of all forms of bourgeois right, including employment rights, which are considered to constitute an ideological reflection of the capitalist mode of production, and therefore an inseparable companion of exploitation.