The French have a different sensitivity when it comes to living. Addressing the huge masses that filled the streets of Paris in protest against Emmanuel Macron raising the age of retirement by two years, the Leftist leader Jean Luc Melenchon said that “retirement is when one retakes possession of one’s own living” and finds the time, among other things, to “read poetry or engage in learning”.
Imagine with how many raised eyebrows such an assertion would be met were it to be made during a mass meeting here in Malta!
In 2021, 80 per cent of the French had read at least one book during the previous year. The French national average stood at 15 books per year. Fifteen!
In 2017 (apologies, but that’s the latest data I could find), only 44.4 per cent of the Maltese had read at least one book in the previous year.
I guess the numbers speak for themselves. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the French have a different outlook on life than, say, us. After all, consciousness has to be nurtured.
The protests across France are not just about retirement age. And not just about how in that country, rating 22nd on the World’s Democracy Index, the president has a quasi-monarchical power to bypass a vote in parliament (that he was due to lose) to impose a pensions reform rejected by 80 per cent of the French people.
The protests are about the collapse of a whole system of government and its economics; about the widening divide between the haves and have nots; about the marginalisation of the working people; against the ideology of productivity, where the value of the individual rests solely on one’s ability to remain active within the cycle of the capitalist productive system.
This ideology of productivity, which has permeated the very fabric of our western culture, has taken away our humanity and, as Georg Lukacs would put it, turned us into objects of consumption, our value being merely that of producing in order to consume, in other words, keeping the capitalist engine moving and forever expanding.
Unless we go along with the system and subject ourselves to this dehumanisation, we have no value and therefore no utility, not just for the market but also for the capitalist state. That is what’s driving the French people to nationwide unrest.
I would imagine that many a Maltese reader at this point might be asking ‘what’s the fuss then?’ It all so smacks of old school socialism (even though, somehow, it seems that nowadays there is some nostalgia for old school socialism in Malta coming from quite odd places). This is where consciousness comes in.
It isn’t just the Left that’s in the streets in France. So are the different shades of Right. The French have a long tradition going back to the Enlightenment, that 18th-century intellectual movement that first propagated the individual’s worth as a human being. The value of the individual is intrinsic and anything that aims at usurping it, whether it be a governing authority or an economic system, stifles individual growth and freedom.
It was no coincidence that the first declaration of human rights was adopted by the Revolutionary Convention of 1793. As the protestors were chanting in the streets of Paris, it was necessary for a king to lose his head for the freedom of the individual to reign supreme. Not a subtle message at all to King Macron.
In France, but not just, the workers have taken to the streets with the intention to halt this downward trend of their rights as a class- Aleks Farrugia
According to Karl Marx, capitalism is more successful than other economic systems because it has instinct to change and adapt according to historical changes. There was a time when in the interest of capitalism to expand, at the late stage of industrialisation, many concessions were given to the working classes and the demands made by social-democratic parties were grudgingly met.
Of course, back then, there was the ominous threat of communism to keep the capitalists on their toes. But since then, and since capitalism shifted from industrialisation first to services and then to finance, with industrial production shifting to cheap labour in poor or developing countries, the rights acquired by the working classes have become jeopardised to the extent that workers began to resign themselves to new conditions that rather than a step forward resulted in a leap backwards.
Precarious conditions of work; deregulation of the markets; laws to diminish the right to strike; short-term contracts; imported labour; all these diluted the bargaining power of trade unions and the workers they represent.
The mainstream Left, eager to score electoral victories, preferred to shift its focus to mostly middle-class concerns, turning away from their traditional electorate. More committed towards civil rights then shopfloor rights, a good part of the working classes were left politically orphans.
In France, but not just, the workers have taken to the streets with the intention to halt this downward trend of their rights as a class. At one time, almost half of the working population took to the streets. But even though these protests have been taking place almost on a daily basis all across France for more than two months, mainstream media in Europe didn’t give them much coverage.
Of course, looking at who owns the media, it’s no big surprise. One wouldn’t want Europe to get infected with the idea that there is more to life than work, that there is individual value irrespective of productivity, that there are nobler purposes in life than being part of the capitalist machine.
In the end, what we don’t realise is that while we might have become materially richer (a number of us at least), this Europe of ours in becoming increasingly poor as it is no longer on the forefront of ideas, culture and discovery, having instead driven its human efforts solely towards what’s most commonly known as ‘the market’.
The protests in France shouldn’t be viewed simply as the rebellion of the French against the arrogance of Emmanuel Macron, they are a call to arms to find once more a soul for Europe.