The revolt of the 'gilets jaunes', the protesters in yellow hi-vis jackets, is a natural occurrence: unprecedented, inventive and uncontrollable. Like all spontaneous outpourings of the people it has swept past existing organisations, shaken up professional commentators and thrown those in government into panic. Like all collective social struggles it invents itself from day to day, in a political creation with no pre-established agenda and where self-organisation is the only determining factor. Like all popular mobilisations, it takes France as it is, with all its diversity and plurality, its miseries and its grandeur, its sense of solidarity and its prejudices, its hopes and its acrimonies.
Faced with the unknown, the first responsibility of journalism is to hear and seek to understand before judging. That is what Mediapart has tried hard to do since the start by taking the time to go out and see the movement up close, on the ground. In doing so Mediapart has come across a range of motivations, of generations and of people from different backgrounds, demonstrating the unprecedented involvement of pensioners and the strong presence of women (see reports, in French, by Mathilde Goanec and François Bonnet). By not limiting themselves to the chronicling of news items about racist, anti-migrant and anti-journalist incidents, which have sometimes tarnished and discredited the movement, our reports have thus highlighted the genuine political awareness which runs through this spontaneous revolt. On the one hand there is a keen perception of social injustice, on the other there is a strong demand for radical democracy.
It was the issue of tax that led to this social revelation. The whole country has understood that the government that emerged from the ballot box in 2017 has shamelessly adopted policies that benefit economic interests who are in a minority in society. Emmanuel Macron knowingly impoverished the state to benefit the ultra-wealthy while bringing to bear on the incomes of the great majority the consequences of a class politics which undermines social solidarity in three ways: by weakening everyone's public services, by reducing the taxes of a minority and by increasing those for everyone else. The cold statistical facts, which have been documented by Mediapart (see in particular the articles by Romaric Godin), have suddenly transformed into fiery indignation.
On August 2nd this year, before the 'gilets jaunes' protests against the carbon taxes on fuels, the Ministry of Public Accounts published the current status of the state budget as of the end of June 2018, in other words halfway through the year. As the economics group Alternatives Économiques, immediately pointed out, what already stood out then was that in like for like terms tax receipts had fallen by 2.4% in relation to the first quarter in 2017, a fall which is in reality 4.5% if one takes inflation into account. In other words, an enormous 14-billion-euro hole in the budget for the year. Yet this drop is due, and due solely, to the unfair tax policies of the government's policies: while the taxes that continue to affect the great majority have continued to rise, the fall in the overall tax take results from the tax gifts that have been handed to companies and to the wealthy. In like for like terms, between the first half of 2017 and the first half of 2018, the drop in tax revenue amounts to 10.5% on corporation tax and to as much as 39% on wealth tax, which was replaced in its old form by a new tax on property wealth, inheritance and capital!
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The gilets jaunes are not revolting against taxation but against its unfair distribution. The best proof of this is that they are calling for funded and accessible public services and are themselves defending the things that bring a society together: schools, hospitals, police stations, transport and so on. Like everyone else they know that these public services are financed by taxes, what article 13 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen called an “indispensable ... common contribution” which “must be equally distributed to all the citizens, according to their ability to pay”. What is no longer tolerable now is that this taxation should be distributed unequally. What is not acceptable is that the people pay more and more taxes while at the same time the state reduces the services that it provides for them, because of the significant scale of the tax gifts granted to companies and the very wealthy.
The other political clarity shown by this revolt concerns the denial of democracy. The egalitarian use of social networks, the refusal to let their cause be hijacked by partisan causes, the desire to film their meetings with the authorities, the collective production of books of grievances, the spontaneous invention of new forms of actions....all these are symbols of a new democratic demand, whatever the tensions or contradictions which it contains. Suddenly the people are gripped by the issue of institutions which have now taken on a life beyond that of political manifestos and learned symposiums. By referring to referendums, the demand for consultation, the demand for debate, the 'gilets jaunes' are saying that democracy cannot just be reduced to the right to vote. And that a democracy where the sovereign people lose all power once they have cast their vote, are dismissed from the political debate and asked to remain silent, is no longer a democracy at all.
This radical democratic demand collides head on with the blind monarchism of the Macron presidency. Having taken place amid the promise of a “profound democratic revolution” (sic), the unlikely election of someone from outside professional politics has resulted in an accentuation of the worst traits exhibited by professional politicians under France's Fifth Republic, which began in 1958. These traits include: government by an individual who behaves as if they have assumed ownership of everyone's wishes; an authoritarian personalisation of political decisions made by the person of the president; a Parliamentary majority that is subject to the desires, errors and misguided ways of the elected monarch, to the point where it had to tolerate the Benalla affair, involving the president's own security aide; a clientèle of private interests who have been amply recompensed by an absolutist presidency which has made that the basis of its government, to the detriment of the common interest.
Emmanuel Macron is clearly not the first president to illustrate this democratic decline. But two characteristics of his presidency aggravate it, to the point where they fuel a passionate and virulent rejection of him of the kind that reminds one of the end of the Valéry Giscard d’Estaing presidency (1974-1981), even though Macron is at the start of his term of office. First of all there were the circumstances of his election win in the second round in 2017 against the far right's Marine Le Pen; rather than taking on board the meaning of such a vote (which Mediapart reminded him of personally even before the election), which was not a massive show of support for him but an enforced obligation, and rather than taking account of the diversity and contrasting nature of his vote through a participative and deliberative exercise of power, he has instead behaved as if the base support of 18% of registered voters he attracted in the first round of the election gave him a blank cheque to take action, even if that was to the detriment of the remaining 82% (as we also reminded him a year later).
To this irresponsible lack of awareness – irresponsible as much as anything because of the way it once more plays into the hands of the far right – one can add the exercise of personal power formed out of disdain and scorn. While he happily goes and meets the public, this president cannot stop himself from handing down lessons. He claims to know in advance and better than those primarily concerned what is good for the people. And he often evokes 'the people' as if he were separate from them, or even as if they were foreigners to him, for example in his comments about those “Gauls” who are “resistant to change”. Combining mistrust stemming from class – in his case the wealthiest class – and also caste – in his case the highest qualified – in the way he exercises power he represents a politics of inequality where there are superiors and inferiors, strong minds and faint hearts, the included and the excluded, the lucky and the unfortunate. The ideology of personal success, which is to the detriment of collective solidarity, is wedded to the hubris of a personal adventure, that excessiveness for which the only authority comes from within itself.
From the realm of tax – the social issue – to political debate – the democratic issue – the 'gilets jaunes' movement renews the demand for equality which has always been the motivation behind emancipatory struggles. On December 10th this year we will celebrate the adoption 70 years ago in Paris of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose assertion that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” is fleshed out with democratic and social demands throughout the document's 30 articles. This right to have rights, to defend them, to claim them and to invent them, opens up a wide range of political possibilities, of being able to sweep away the mountains of conservatism, remove centuries of prejudices, overturn those with power who believed they were unmovable. For this is a statement that is without boundaries, which rises up against all those supporters of natural inequalities; a statement that is without distinction as to origins, circumstances, appearance, beliefs, sex or gender, for we are all equal in terms of rights and dignity.
Depending on how it plays out politically, this democratic notion that “anyone” can be involved is at the heart of the future of the gilets jaunes' movement. The active sympathy that the various right-wing and far-right forces are showing towards it are intended to drag it towards a form of betrayed equality, where rights are handed only to those who resemble us, in the closed world of identity politics where people retreat into themselves and exclude others out of a range of prejudices – xenophobic, racist, sexist, homophobic and so on.
Conversely, the message of coming together that has been demanded by the wide-ranging social movements speaks more in favour of a emergence of common causes that are based on equality: workers taking action, as nurses and refinery workers are currently doing; students and secondary school pupils who are against an increase in enrolment fees for non-EU students; women from the #NousToutes movement fighting against sexist and sexual violence; sections of society discriminated against because of their origin, their appearance or their beliefs, like the #RosaParks movement; gays and lesbians seeking to get fertility treatment available for all; solidarity and welcome for migrants.
What happens next is unclear as events are in charge and there is no clear vanguard leading the movement, no dominant faction. But rather than keep one's distance from this unprecedented event which has swept past them, all supporters of a democratic and social Republic should take part in this battle for equality close to and alongside the 'gilets jaunes' and those who are with them. To stay away, to remain a spectator or be doubtful, to withdraw or hang back, that would be to open the way ever more to the forces from the shadows who, in France and in Europe, and on the world stage as a whole, want to replace equality with identity, the rights of all with the privileges of some.
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The French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter