France: Crisis of the Capitalist State

For my Left Libertarian friends and Liberaltarians who insist that there is some ideal capitalism that has existed without the state, some anarcho-capitalist ideal, the current crisis of capitalism and it's state in France proves once again what I have said here, ad nauseaum, that there is no modern State without Capitalism.

They go together like a horse and carriage as the song says.

Or as Herr Doctor Marx once said; the State is the "executive committee of the ruling class."

Business leaders tell Villepin to stand firm

Another executive who attended the meeting and declined to be identified was less optimistic.

"There was a feeling among many of the participants that if the law is withdrawn you can kiss goodbye to reform for the next 10 years," he said, according to his spokesman. "It would send a terrible signal.".

The businessmen's comments come against a backdrop of escalating social unrest over the First Employment Contract, an initiative known by its French initials as the CPE and closely associated with the prime minister, who drafted the new law in an effort to ease double-digit youth unemployment.

Six weeks after student organizations and labor unions embarked on their campaign to have the new contract scrapped, the latest battle on France's streets goes well beyond the fate of one unpopular law.

It has become a critical test of another French government to carry out economic change and has emboldened an opposition that has rallied around job security ahead of next year's presidential election.

"We are now at a point that is well- known in France: the point at which a reform measure has become a symbol of reform itself," said Elie Cohen, a member of the Council of Economic Analysis, a panel of independent economists advising the prime minister. "This is no longer just about the CPE, it is about the ability to reform France."

As the IWW preamble says; The Employing class and the working class have nothing in common.It's class war in France. France under threat of general strike Less than six months after violent riots erupted across its cities, France is in turmoil again as opposition to a controversial new employment law threatens to shut down the country.


And as we syndicalists say Political Power, parliamentarism, will change nothing. And France as much as America is the home of the revolutionary syndicalism.



It will take the whole of the proletariat, employed and unemployed workers, students, housewives, immigrants, sans papiers, etc. to mobilize direct action, to overthrow the neo-liberal State whether the new bosses are the Left or Right of Capital.

If the executive class of Capitalism in France fails to get what it wants with a Right Wing government well there is always the Left Wing it can appeal to. Which shows that to mobilize itself as class for itself, even the traditional Left must be superceded by the revolutionary proletariat.

Beigbeder, another prominent entrepreneur, said that any future French government - even if it was a Socialist government - would have to attempt labor reform to jump-start economic growth.

"In the end there will be a flexible labor contract in France, even if we are the last in Europe to adopt this kind of reform," said Beigbeder, who also leads the research and innovation arm of the French employers' union, Medef.

Indeed, he said it might take a leftist government to win the fight on labor market reform in France.

"If the left wins," he added, referring to the 2007 elections, "they will present a similar contract, maybe even a better one, because sometimes it's easier for the left to get the support of the unions and others from the left."

So far, business has been slow to take a public stance on the contract, fearing that this could create an even-greater backlash against a law regarded by many as a charter for exploiting young employees.

As I have said this is a revolutionary situation in France, not unlike May 68, and like the mass strike wave of a decade ago. It comes as a rejection of Blairs Thatcherism for Europe, and the EU constitution which would transform the member nations into modern neo-liberal captialist states. Like Britain.

And for a different view from the student/workers side of the Barricades see: Parisian riots, take two



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