FRANCE 2. Profile of the Yellow Vest Protestors

Seemingly, the best way to deal with it has been to ignore them. (They happen every Saturday, again this week August 3rd 2024). And the EU is the paragon of Democracy. Let's see?

Who are they really? Ask a reporter who’s been on the front line every Saturday, all of these years, and seen a million Yellow Vest faces.  Ramin Mazaheri. (5,200 words)

If I am permitted only one word to describe the Yellow Vests it is this: civic-minded.

They are always referring to the common good and not the individual - in Western Liberal Democracy, with its emphasis on individual rights, competition and elitism, theirs becomes a revolutionary idea.

What are the Yellow Vests? It’s not easy to define because they are a social revolt instead of a social movement, which is focused on only a single area. Given all the Western propaganda against them it’s best to start by refuting what they are wrongly accused of being.

They are “rural-based”:

The near-total urbanization of France is a completed fact: According to Aurelien Delpirou in “La teint de gilets” (The Complexion of Vests) 92% of France lives - "according to modes and styles" - an urban, and not rural, life. This is a complete inversion from the 1822 revolution.

And while we can argue about the details of “modes and styles” the un-deniable point is that mass “Jacqueries” (the French peasant rebellions) simply cannot be rural-based in the 21st century. Rural life isn’t what it used to be, and while that doesn’t make rural life “urbanized” it does means we need new and more accurate conceptions.

The rarely understood reality is that the Yellow Vests are a result of sub-urbanite turmoil even more than rural dissatisfaction. The cause of this misunderstanding is poor translation and poor understanding of modern French urban development. The best translation for “suburban” in the French context is actually “periurbaine”. Periurbaine is best translated as “exurbs” or “outer suburbs”. The far more common usage of “banlieue” as being the less-populated barrier between city and country misleads because that refers to something quite different in France - namely, the settlements just outside the city limits but often as dense as the city itself. In the US, for example, the slums are inside the city limits - not so in France anymore.

Modern France has developed thusly: a historical city center, followed by a ring of ugly suburbs for workers, and then recently a larger, well-built and thriving periurbaine/exurbs area.

The periurbaine area developed far later in France than the “suburban” areas of the United States, where they first sprouted on its un(war)scarred landscape immediately after World War II. In France the urbanization of this exurb area didn’t happen until the 1980s and 1990s.

To many of France’s isolated city elites, these outer suburbs are still thought of as being essentially rural even though they are not cow towns any longer - this is the most common home of a Yellow Vest.

These historically new periurbaine areas have infinitely more political and social representation than the impoverished banlieues, and they even have higher average incomes (€20,975) than the average city center inhabitant (€19,887). The periurbaine is neither urban hellhole nor rural wasteland - they are vibrant places, but what the Yellow Vests have proven is just how little political influence they have in policymaking compared to the city center. The economic quality of life of those who live there {petty-bourgeois shop keepers, minor professionals, intermediary positions, government workers, working-class employees} have been absolutely gutted by the Age of Austerity’s successful imposition of Liberalist rollbacks to Social Democracy.

It’s not for nothing that the Yellow Vests began over a petrol price tax increase - 85% of French households own a car. A car is indispensable for living in the periurbaine exurbs but not for living in the city center, which benefits from well-funded public transportation. It’s also not for nothing that the most repeated violent assaults on property were the smashing of the toll booths on the outrageously priced tollways on France’s de-nationalized highways. (Current price of tolls to drive from Paris to Marseille, on the Mediterranean: €61.90 - wow.) Speed-ticket cameras also bore a major brunt of the Yellow Vest’s wrath.

This geographic/demographic re-calibration should instantly make the Yellow Vest movement clearer: a primarily exurb population, and then secondarily rural and banlieue dwellers, who are dis-empowered by the rich elite and disrespected by the snobbish city center hipster.

They are “populist”:

In an elite-forced pan-European project which has exacerbated and manipulated the Great Recession worse than any other area of the world, we can see why the call for “populist” solutions is such a personal affront to the elite - they think things are going great with how they are running the situation.

The term “populist” is mainly used to describe lower- and middle-class people who disagree with the prevailing Liberalist orthodoxy.

However, “populist” also asserts that it has found the material to bridge the unbridgeable chasm between leftism and Fascism, when no such material exists. A “red-brown” (Leftist-Fascist) alliance is fundamentally impossible - the irony is that it is usually talked of without an open denigration of Liberalism, which is the only thing they agree on.

A far more interesting concept is that the Yellow Vests are “counter-populist”, a term defined in Le sens du face-à-face (The Meaning of Confrontation) by Etienne Balibar as being equidistant from both the political oligarchy (i.e. Liberalism) and the ideological populisms of the left (the struggle of the working class) or of the right (the struggle of the ethnic nation). The adding of a key adjective makes it “transnational counter-populist”, which acknowledges that the ideological problem is international capital, and that the practical solution for a multi-national Europe now run by Brussels cannot be limited to one nation.

“It was (and remains) just a name to indicate that we need a concentration of forces and an assemblage of ideas to recreate a politics made by the people and for the people. With populism, ‘counter-populism’ shares a formal characteristic: criticizing the dispossession or disempowerment of the masses in the oligarch regime. Against populism, it doesn’t confer the task of ending dispossession to the dispossessors themselves, but seeks and requires the empowerment of the citizenry, therefore pushing its capacity beyond the limits and across the borders that in the past defined the political.” (emphasisis)

Balibar isn’t going to openly write that Liberalism and “the oligarchic regime” are synonymous, nor does he openly write that the fundamental motivation of Socialist Democracy is the “empowerment of the citizenry”. But terming the Yellow Vests as a “counter-populist” movement has more than just newness going for it: it takes the best of “populism” - resistance to the Liberalist oligarchy - and leavens the right-wing connotations it carries. Certainly, conflating Brexiteers, Trumpers and Yellow Vests as all “populists” - as all the same - is a way to avoid and prevent any serious political analyses.

A major criticism I make of the Yellow Vests is that they don’t understand how they need to be more “transnational” - a point I’ll clarify later.

They are “anti-migrant” and “anti-immigrant”:

What the Yellow Vests oppose is travail détaché, which can be translated as “temporary workers” or “posted workers”. This is a problem which is specific to the pan-European project.

Travail détaché was created in 1996 to allow European Union members to work across national lines, and on an industrial scale. Travail détaché has been a way to gut the power of the local artisan/craftsman/small businessman by flooding the market with cheaper labor, greatly damaging the economic prospects of both the French artisan/craftsman and the French petty bourgeoisie, who cannot organize the influx of such workers as easily as corporations. Travail détaché is an obviously neo-imperialist device which allows a rich international class to reap enormous profits while eliminating competition and reducing costs.

Being against this, in pro-capitalist Western media, is falsely conflated as being equivalent to wanting to deny asylum to refugees from war!  The Yellow Vests are completely right, nd they insist that every foreign person who works on French territory must have the same rights and same salary as a Frenchman, and that their employer must pay the same taxes as a French employer would.

Travail détaché is a subject which strikes at the core of the neo-imperial and neoliberal pan-European project, but many leftists are so woefully misinformed that they do not see how it proves the vital need for an alliance between the proletariat and the petit-bourgeois shopkeeper, which the Yellow Vests exhibit. Such persons falsely see these two groups as having opposite interests, when they are in fact united against big capital.

They are “a tool of Russian disinformation”:

In the book “Dans la tête des gilets jaunes” (In the Head of the Yellow Vests) the authors provided a quantitative study of supposed Russian influence, which the French government and mainstream media repeated endlessly.

In 2018 from November 10th through December 4th there were 200 Twitter accounts presumed to be linked to Russia, which provided 1,600 tweets and retweets on the Yellow Vests. Wow, hundreds of accounts - seems like a problem, right? Well, over that same timeframe in English and French Twitter there were 360,000 accounts, which emitted 1.6 million tweets and retweets about the Yellow Vests.

Obviously, Twitter was abuzz about the Yellow Vests because an unpopular government was sponsoring unprecedented attacks on protesters, and not because malign Russian influence had duped 75% of France into supporting the Yellow Vest anti-government movement.

The authors of the book concluded with what should be obvious to all:

“Well, even before getting into quantitative analysis, it seems at least surprising to us that the activity of 200 Twitter accounts could spark an important impact and, worse, to lead certain observers to see in them the mark of foreign interference. Making this one of the causes of mobilization of the movement seems a tenuous argument, to say the least. ... This approach doesn’t say anything about the profound causes of the movement, and closes the door to all sociological and political analyses.”

They are “outside agitators”:

Well, they could never expect the rich areas of Paris to march against Emmanuel Macron and the failed leadership of the “bourgeois bloc”, so they had to bring the march to them every weekend.

This accusation was constantly levelled by mayors of France’s major cities but it held little currency in the small cities and towns, where some locus of activity was necessary.

If there’s one thing the Yellow Vests have reminded everyone here, it’s that France is the world’s number one user of roundabouts, a fact repeated ad nauseam in coverage of them. They were a smarter modern choice than the small-town center: far more people pass through the roundabouts than small-town city center. What has been de-localized is not the protests, but French economic success and vitality.

They are “half-revolutionary”:

An idea among the French left is they have proletarian incomes but hopes for bourgeois lifestyles. Such an idea can only stem from total non-contact with the Yellow Vests, and it obviously contradicts the primary description of them: as civic-minded. The Yellow Vests are concerned with the lack of economic equality in France - they are not grasping capitalists.

Nor is it “bourgeois” for the working-poor Yellow Vests to want a stable middle-class lifestyle in modern France - to believe that, is to completely neuter “bourgeois” of its indispensable historical context.

So, who are the Yellow Vests, really?

At the beginning the Yellow Vests included every class and type of Frenchman, with one exception: the “bourgeois bloc”, a bloc which has historically been against democracy and in favor of oligarchical elitism. This was clear from the very beginning.

In December 2018 researchers in Bordeaux published the pioneer analysis of the Yellow Vests in Le Monde, which immediately revealed the unique composition of the group.

Nearly half (45%) of all active Yellow Vests were office workers/clerks, and that’s even though such workers only make up a quarter (27%) of the overall workforce. Also overrepresented by double (14%) were craftsmen, shopkeepers and lower-level bosses, who make up only 7% of the workforce. At almost the same rate of Yellow Vest involvement as in the national workforce were laborers/workers (20%), farmers (2%) and the inactive (retirees, housewives, unemployed, students). Drastically underrepresented were management, intermediary- and upper-level professions and intellectuals.

The median income of a declared Yellow Vests household is €1,700 per month, which is 30% less than the national average. The poorest 10% of Yellow Vest households earn less than €800 per month, compared with just €519 for the poorest 10% of French households not in the marches. Thus, Yellow Vests are the working poor: not enough to get stability, too much to get social assistance.

This allows us to make a point which is rarely touched upon: the Yellow Vests are certainly not anti-youth, but this is clearly a “grown person’s” movement. It’s a movement of the people who pay the bills.

In the West the political leadership is so often handed to their totally in-experienced youth class, something I have always found bewildering. Over and over again the youth are told to inspire new political movements even though they have the least experience, usually the least emotional fortitude and the fewest resources with which to sustain their combat - it’s a recipe for failure. However, that seems to be precisely why Western Liberal Democratic societies pick them to lead movements which demand political change.

The average age of Yellow Vests was found to be 45, which is to say several years older than Macron. Here is another rarely touched upon point: This is a middle-aged person’s revolt, and a revolt against a youth made heartless by four decades of the restoration of Liberalism. However, a less dramatic - and more far-reaching - reality is that Yellow Vests are people who have grown up with, but become disenchanted by Western Liberal Democracy.

The political spectrum analysis has revealed that the biggest difference was 33% of Yellow Vests declared themselves to be “neither right nor left”, compared with just 22% of the overall population. For those who did pick a side you had three times as many far-left (15%) as far-right (5%) with 43% being on the center-left. Of course, the mainstream media constantly accused the Yellow Vests of being far-right, in a lie which was disproven almost at the very start. We see that the far-right is the least represented spectrum among the Yellow Vests and that the Yellow Vests are movement in which the majority is leftist and center-left. There are a lot of independents, but that’s merely due to modern Liberalism’s scrambling of what left and right means, mainly due to the alliance between Liberalism and Fascism. As we’ll soon see below, their list of demands left no doubt as to the leftist nature of the group.

A whopping 47% of Yellow Vests said this was their first-time demonstrating, which does buttress the importance of political independents in the movement. Nearly 9 out of 10 said they rejected violence to property as a way to make their political message or demands known - a civic-minded group is not trying to tear down the community, even though this was precisely the primary claim of the mainstream media and government. Educationally the level of the Yellow Vests is mostly close to the national averages, with an overrepresentation of vocational degrees, as reflected by the abundance of craftsmen, and a bit fewer college degrees.

Their reasons for protesting were dominated by calls for increasing purchasing power, reducing taxes and a better distribution of wealth. Down at the very bottom of the list were ecology and immigration, two subjects obsessed over by the bourgeois bloc.

There were also major numbers of working-class women, a group historically not known for political activism. It’s certainly in keeping with French history: it was a women’s march which first apprehended Louis XVI and his family in Versailles, on October 6, 1789.

The reasons why working-class women would be spurred to action is obvious: Austerity’s biggest victim has been women - this has been justly reported countless times. In general, women are paid less, they are more often underemployed via part-time work, that leads to reduced pensions thus they are poorer in old age - so add in Austerity’s cuts to much-needed social services and it’s clear why this is a feminist movement as well. In a Catholic France less and less inclined to accept the sacrament of marriage, single parenthood is widespread, too.

Thus, it’s no surprise that Martiniquaise Priscillia Ludosky provided the first major petrol price petition, which garnered over 1 million signatures, and that she was also a co-organizer of the premiere protest on November 17, 2018. It’s notable not only that yet another leading French activist is a female, but also one with roots in France’s overseas neo-colonies - they have consistently been the political canary in the coal mine, or rather are at the crest of political consciousness, for main-land France.

So, what do the Yellow Vests want, really?

As Trotsky witnessed, during a pre-revolutionary time economic demands for social legislation does not cease but “on the contrary, expands to an unheard-of extent.” This was proven during the Paris Commune as well.

Here is the list of the Yellow Vests’ demands, based on online surveys of over 30,000 people and first delivered to the government in December 2018:

1. Zero homeless people - urgent

2. A more progressive tax system

3. Minimum wage of 1,300€/month, net

4. Measures to protect small businesses in villages and city centers (stop building malls, no more “big box” stores), more parking spaces in downtowns

5. Government program for insulating homes & other buildings

6. Big businesses (McDonald’s, Google, Amazon, Carrefour,...) should pay big taxes & small businesses pay small taxes

7. Same health insurance system for all (including self- employed). End of RSI (social security scheme for free-lance and independent workers).

8. Keep retirement system the way it is now, based on solidarity and thus socialized (no new system based on points)

9. No more increases on fuel taxes

10. No old age pensions below 1,200€/month

11. All elected officials should earn French median income + reimbursement of travel costs if justified + meal tickets

12. All salaries & all government benefits must be indexed on inflation

13. Protect French industry, outlaw de-localizations (moving overseas). Protecting our industry is protecting our know-how and our jobs

14. End the European system whereby workers from other European countries are paid the lower salaries and benefits of their respective countries, rather than French wages and benefits

15. Job security. Larger businesses should be obliged to give more employees permanent contracts (CDI)

16. Create a French industry of hydrogen powered automobiles

17. End the politics of austerity. An end to the interest payments on debt which is declared illegitimate, and start to repay the debt without taking that money from the poor and the lesser-poor and instead going after the €80 billion lost to tax fraud

18. Treat the causes that are forcing people to migrate

19. Those requesting asylum must be well-treated. We must give them lodging, security, food, and educate any minors. Work with the UN for camps to be opened around the world, while asylum-seekers wait for France’s decision.

20. Accompany those who are not granted asylum back to the countries they came from.

21. Create a program for integrating immigrants. Living in France entails becoming French (certificate program in French language, history, civics).

22. Maximum salary for anyone fixed at 15,000€/month

23. Jobs for the unemployed

24. Increased assistance for those with disabilities

25. Rent control. More social housing and in particular housing for college students, contractors, gig economy workers, people without steady jobs

26. Outlaw the sale of French public property (dams, airports...)

27. Allocate much more money to the justice system, the police and the armed forces. Pay police officers over-time or allow them to take the corresponding hours off

28. The totality of sums collected at toll booths should go only to maintaining the country’s highways & roads and road security, (not to private profit)

29. As the prices of natural gas & electricity have risen, since these sectors were privatized, we demand the re-nationalization of these industries and the lowering of prices

30. An immediate end to the closing of smaller train lines, post offices, schools and maternity wards

31. Well-being for our elderly. Outlaw for-profit elderly care. The time of “grey gold” has come to an end, and the time of “grey well-being”

32. A maximum of 25 students per class from nursery school through high school

33. More public financing for psychiatry

34. Write a popular referendum system into the Constitution. Create an on-line referendum site where citizens can propose new laws, overseen by an independent body. If a proposition receives over 700,000 votes it should be introduced into Congress, accordingly completed, amended and discussed before all citizens are allowed to vote on it (within exactly one year of obtaining the 700,000 signatures)

35. Return to a presidential mandate of 7 years. The election of parliamentarians to be held 2 years after the presidential election, which permits to send a positive or negative signal to the president regarding his or her policies. This will allow the voice of the people to be heard

36. Retirement for all at 60 years old and at 55 for people in professions that are hard on the body (construction work...)

37. A child cannot be alone at 6 years old: Extension of public aid to parents paying for day care for children up until 10 years of age

38. Incentivize transportation of merchandise by rail

39. No withholding of income tax

40. Presidents should no longer receive a salary for life

41. Outlaw the tax paid by shopkeepers each time a client pays by credit or debit card

42. Tax kerosene, air and maritime fuels

What the list reveals is a primarily economic movement - half the demands are related to economics. This obvious rejection of “Liberal economics” has often been summarized in France as “moral economics”, which is an obvious euphemism - based on either fear or ignorance of using the term, “Socialist economics”.

The relative dearth of political demands reveals that the Yellow Vests do not realize the incapacity of Western Liberal Democracy to care about how economic policies affect the average person - not caring is entirely the point of “Liberal economics”.

Their demands and group composition was summarized in Dans la tête des gilets jaunes (In the Head of the Yellow Vests) thusly:

“Among the versions of their demands which have circulated they singularly resemble those of France Insoumise (a left-wing party headed by Jean-Luc Melenchon), who came 3rd in the 2022 election and 4th in the 2017 election): anti-capitalism, super-Keynesian in economics, welfare state, 6th Republic. ... Nothing at all like the February 1934*, complacently evoked by members of the government.”

*[In February 1934 a royalist and Fascist demonstration led to the deaths of 15 people in Paris. It spurred strikes, sit-ins, the formation of the Popular Front leftist coalition and was a political movement unrivalled in modern French history - until the Yellow Vests.]

After clarifying the aims and composition of the Yellow Vests we see that the slandering of them as royalists and Fascists is particularly odious, but that is precisely what Liberalists and the bourgeois bloc did.

What a great list! What a disappointing list!

The list makes it clear the ambiguous nature of the Yellow Vests as regards to revolution.

The list shows there is no overt call for an overturning of property relations in the form of mass nationalizations, but there is a call for nationalizing the industries of natural gas and electricity, a call to end future privatizations, and a call to refuse to pay illegitimate debt. It’s instructive to return to a quote from the chapter on Trotsky in order to delineate the basic definition of a progressive revolutionary country:

“Meanwhile the hypothetical government (Trotsky is referring to a Western Liberal Democratic government which actually stood up to fascism) would give nothing either to the workers or to the petty-bourgeois masses because it would be unable to attack the foundations of private property; and without expropriation of the banks, the great commercial enterprises, the key branches of industry and transport, without a foreign trade monopoly, and without a series of other profound measures, there is no possible way of coming of the aid of the peasant, the artisan, the petty merchant.”

Jean-Luc Melenchon and his movement also have an ambiguous relationship with revolution: their call to found a 6th Republic is revolutionary, but many of its guiding principles are half-measures rooted in Social Democracy and Liberal Democracy. So, it’s not surprising that on an ideological level the Yellow Vests - so fundamentally patriotic in their civic-mindedness and so inculcated to believe There Is No Alternative (to Liberalism) - also fail to realize that seemingly all of their 42 demands can only be realized in a situation where a Socialist-inspired revolution has taken place to progress onwards from Liberal Democracy.

It’s a great list, sure - but because it’s so - surely impossible - to implement in the pan-European project there will not even be serious discussion about them. There is one lone demand which has been seriously discussed: #35. The alignment of the presidential and legislative elections in 2002 is widely regarded as a disaster in France: it has caused abstention levels in the latter to soar to levels which threaten France’s democratic credibility.

Extremely, extremely revealing is that the words “Europe” and “European” do not figure in any of these demands. It shows that there is a widespread lack of understanding of the rules governing post-Lisbon Treaty France.

The total lack of transparency regarding the activities of the Eurogroup and the lack of discussion permitted on the undemocratic passage of the Lisbon Treaty means that many in France assume that the French president has far more power to control French policies than he or she really does. It’s a fatal political misunderstanding - some people are playing chess while other people are playing checkers.

This would be evidenced during the 2022 presidential debate between Macron and Le Pen: Macron easily portrayed Le Pen as being anti-Europe because he pointed out that many changes she is naively espousing - no matter how sensible - are violations of pan-European treaties, and thus impossible without leaving the pan-European project. She had no retort for that because there simply is none. Thus, Macron called Le Pen a “vote against Europe” over and over, which she was, even though she didn’t seem to know it, just like so many Yellow Vests.

There is simply a dearth of honest reporting since 2009 which has engendered a lack of comprehension that France does not control ✓its own currency, ✓its public services, ✓budget, ✓trade treaties, ✓laws, ✓the skies, ✓rails, ✓prices, the ✓ability to end austerity and ✓much, much more. Western Liberal Democracy decides these things in an autocratic fashion, but Macron is actually not an all-powerful autocrat who can implement these 42 demands even if he ever wanted to.

The above paragraph represents a huge problem because it shows how far away from contemporary political reality are truly the most enlightened and popular political groups in recent French history. Western Liberal Democracy clearly has two different political realities which exist simultaneously: there is that of the bourgeois bloc (formerly limited only to the royal aristocracy) and then that of masses - only the former rules the laws and policies, as they always have.

The Yellow Vests do not realize that not only are their demands impossible in Western Liberal Democracy in general, but that their demands are specifically impossible in this version of the pan-European project. This obvious impossibility means that the bourgeois bloc views such demands to change - from Le Pen to the Yellow Vests - as nonsensical, un-informed and exasperatingly infantile. That is precisely the affectation Macron repeatedly took towards Le Pen during the 2022 debate: a repeatedly disrespectful posture of a professor dealing with a student who has wild ideas engendered by having only a partial understanding of fundamental precepts.

Any “counter-populist” movement should be “transnational”, but especially any such movement within Europe. The Yellow Vest movement spread to 30 countries and yet within France it was, paradoxically, insufficiently transnational in its outlook and demands.

Trotsky pointed out that communists contradict themselves when they say that society is based purely around economics: “The truth is just the opposite: the masses make hardly any response to appeals for strikes on a purely economic plan. In politics, how can anyone avoid facing the facts.” It takes more than just economic demands.

The list revealed the lack of an ideological demand - which is to say a demand for a new political system, not merely just a new economic system - which is the only sustaining spark that can keep combusting from a pre-revolutionary situation into a revolutionary situation, and this ideological demand was missing precisely because so many do not understand the reality of the post-2009 political system in Europe.

It is a new Europe.

Now that the British have (sensibly) left, Hungary is proving over and over who has sovereignty and who does not in the pan-European project: they kept their own currency (the forint) thus they do have the ability to push against the dictates of the autocratic oligarchy running the European Union. Countries who accepted both the euro and the European Union - like France - have handed away their national sovereignty completely, but even the Yellow Vests haven’t fully grasped that yet.

The French masses did respond for six months on primarily economic demands, but it wasn’t enough. The conclusion is clear: it was a revolutionary situation, but the fault was in thinking that a revolution against the French president was needed instead of a revolution against the pan- European project.

The group with truly revolutionary potential is pursuing reforms which are impossible without a “Frexit” or without major reforms to this version of the pan-European project. It may take some years but a revolution is certain because the failure of the pan-European project - for the average person - is baked into the Liberalist project itself, and certainly into the “neoliberal” and neo-imperial pan-European project.

Even if the next step - promoting the inadequacy of Liberalism - is not taken for years, the Yellow Vests still represent a major step in understanding of what revolution means within the contemporary Western context. It may not be expressly written in their demands as of yet, but it certainly is already engraved in their spirit.<—>

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