Geography Archives: France

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.

Since November 17, France has been witnessing the massive Gilets jaunes or ‘Yellow Vests’ protests against the anti-working class policies of the Emmanuel Macron government. The protests against the rising economic burden on the people are also spreading to many other European countries.

It is sad to see how completely misrepresented Adam Smith (1723-1790) is when pundits call upon him to vindicate neoliberalism and the status quo. It seems many have not really bothered to read his works.

Nothing shows the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism more clearly than the popular uprising in France that is occurring under the banner of the “Yellow Vest” movement.

Susan Ram, who is writing a book on the French Left for LeftWord Books (New Delhi), has a crisp assessment of the yellow vest (gilets jaunes) movement and of its fifth week of demonstration–Act V Macron Démission (Macron Resign). It is anger and determination that defines the yellow vest protest.

In his brief Dec. 10 television address, French President Emmanuel Macron outlined the measures aimed at calming the popular anger of the “Yellow Vests”

Hello, Professor Drweski. My name is Maria Cernat. I am a feminist, an academic and a journalist writing for Baricada.org. I am a lecturer at the Communication Sciences and International Relations Department, Titu Maiorescu University. I was very curious, and I am sure our readers are too, about the situation in France. I have a few questions that I hope you could answer for our readers.

Television channels around the world had the pleasure of broadcasting street events that took place in Paris on Saturday, Nov. 24. Perhaps not all of them have taken care to provide their progressive viewers with the necessary elements to move beyond a sense of chaos and understand the current situation.

A scene of ordinary life in France, in these times of conflict: On Thursday, Dec. 6, late morning, in front of the gates of a secondary school in a very peaceful town in the Paris suburbs, about 100 students aged 15-17 are strolling from their high school to go to lunch, chatting, joking and relieved that the half-day classes are over.

For centuries, the “left” hoped popular movements would lead to changes for the better. Today, many leftists seem terrified of popular movements for change, convinced “populism” must lead to “fascism.” But it needn’t be so, says Diana Johnstone.

In fact, my book begins with the early Marx because he created the first version of what I call the philosophy of praxis. The key problem of this version of Marxism is what Marx called the “realisation” of philosophy.

“Increased awareness will not happen through successive adaptations to the requirements of capitalist accumulation, but through awareness of the necessity of breaking with those requirements.” —Samir Amin

Students are much too busy to think these days. So, when a junior comes to talk with me about the possibility of my directing their senior thesis, I ask them about their topic—and then their schedule. I explain to them that, if they really want to do a good project, they’re going to have to quit half the things they’re involved in.

Alain Badiou is former chair of philosophy at École normale supérleure and author of In Praise of Politics. Laurent Joffrin is editor of Libération newspaper—and a reformist who defends existing social democracy. Alain Badiou recently announced that he would stop running his seminar. He also announced that he would soon be publishing The Immanence of Truths, completing […]

Frantz Fanon attended the All-Africa Conference convened by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah in 1958. He met with anticolonial leaders, including Congolese Patrice Lumumba and Cameroonian Felix Moumié. During the Second Congress of Black Writers (Rome 1959), he expanded his network with activists from the Portuguese colonies, including Amical Cabral.

The fall of 2017 will witness the most brutal assault on working and middle class living standards since the end of World War II. Three presidents and their congressional allies will ‘revise’ labor legislation, progressive income tax laws and regulations and effectively end the mixed economy in France, the US and Brazil.

Our very modes of thinking about the social are fragmented, or intersectional…[which is] why intersectionality has become such an important paradigm for feminism. It conceives of different experiences of oppression and exploitation as coming from different and separate systems and tries to recombine the fragments of oppression without denying their singularity. Social Reproduction Feminism seeks to include and to go beyond intersectionality by saying both that we need to understand capitalism as the very specific socio-economic system in which those forms of oppression are generated and nourished, and that there are not ‘separate’ systems of oppression or exploitation under capitalism that can be understood in isolation one from the other.