France's Yellow Vests-- Left? Right? Both? Neither?

Russian cyber-saboteurs are certainly pouring gasoline on France's Yellow-Vest protests, but could there be more to it than just social media shenanigans? Macron's government is taking the possibility seriously. Yesterday, Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told radio station RTL that according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, about 600 Twitter accounts known to promote Kremlin views have begun focusing on France, boosting their use of the hashtag #giletsjaunes, the French name for the Yellow Vest movement. "An investigation," "is now underway."

[An] assertion of police dissatisfaction-- which doesn’t appear to be supported by facts-- resembles other Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns that have tried to engender mistrust in Western governments and show that liberal democracies are in decline, Schafer says.

Much of the tweeted material comes from Russian state media outlets including the Sputnik news website, the RT television network, and Ruptly, a German-based video news agency that belongs to RT. These outlets are covering the French crisis closely; RT has said that 12 of its journalists have been injured in the protests, far more than any other news organization.

Sputnik and RT have reported in recent days that most French police no longer support Macron and are siding with the protesters. Their sources: representatives of two small police unions that together won less than 4 percent of votes in nationwide union elections this month. Sputnik and RT also have shown a video– widely shared on French social media-- of police in the southwestern town of Pau removing their helmets in what was described as a sign of solidarity with protesters. Local police and journalists on the scene said the description was untrue. They said some officers had briefly removed their helmets to talk with protesters before putting them back on.

In response to questions from Bloomberg News, Sputnik later corrected its article about police in Pau showing solidarity with protesters, to say the report "hasn’t been backed by evidence so far." RT said its article about police siding with protesters, based on comments by the head of a minor police union, was justified because he had been quoted by other news outlets.

Macron complained repeatedly during his 2017 campaign that Kremlin-controlled media outlets were spreading fake news about him, because he took a tougher stance on Russia than his chief rivals, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front and François Fillon of the conservative Republicans. But negative stories, such as a Sputnik report claiming Macron lived a “double life” and was backed by a “wealthy gay lobby,” never gained traction.

In one instance, a bogus website resembling the site of a Belgian newspaper reported that Macron’s campaign was being bankrolled by Saudi Arabia. The source of the hoax was never determined, but the European Union’s East Stratcom Task Force, which tracks Russian disinformation efforts, said it bore striking similarities to an earlier incident traced to a Russian “troll factory.”

eparately, the Macron campaign was hit with repeated email phishing attacks resembling those used by Russia against Democratic Party organizations in the U.S. The Kremlin said it had no involvement in any fake news or cyberattacks on Macron, describing such accusations as “slander.”

Trump isn't the center of the universe. We can like Macron razzing Trump and still recognize he and Trump have more in common than not

And Putin's government isn't the only authoritarian, anti-democracy government interfering in French domestic politics. So is Trump's-- and Le Drian told Trump to stop meddling in France's internal affairs. Bloomberg reported that "In the past few months, Trump has published a series of tweets criticizing Macron's climate and defence policies, as well as Macron's low approval rating."

Last week Trump claimed, falsely, that French protesters were chanting "We want Trump." The video Trumpism stooges are sharing with each other is actually film from a pro-Trump neo-Nazi counter-demonstration when he was visiting London. Trumpanzee also tweeted: "Very sad day & night in Paris. Maybe it's time to end the ridiculous and extremely expensive Paris Agreement and return money back to the people in the form of lower taxes? The US was way ahead of the curve on that and the only major country where emissions went down last year!"

On French TV Le Drian pointed out that "most Americans disagreed with Trump over his decision to walk away from the 2015 Paris climate agreement."

Over the weekend right-wing Yellow Vest protests spread to Belgium and Holland. The Associated Press reported that "Belgian police fired tear gas and water cannons at yellow-vested protesters calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Charles Michel after they tried to breach a riot barricade, as the movement that started in France made its mark Saturday in Belgium and the Netherlands. Protesters in Brussels threw paving stones, road signs, fireworks, flares and other objects at police blocking their entry to an area where Michel’s offices, other government buildings and the parliament are located... The reasons for the protests are not entirely clear. Neither Belgium nor the Netherlands has proposed a hike in fuel tax-- the catalyst for the massive and destructive demonstrations in France in recent weeks. Instead, protesters appeared to hail at least in part from a populist movement that is angry at government policy in general and what it sees as the widening gulf between mainstream politicians and the voters who put them in power. Some in Belgium appeared intent only on confronting police."

So what's causing this? Russia? A right-wing conspiracy? Hooliganism? Legitimate economic anxiety born out of systemic inequality? Jacobin has an important essay by novelist Édouard Louis, a critic of Macron whose work "emphasizes the daily humiliations and petty brutality of life in small-town France." Louis has been a vocal supporter of the gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) protests. "In particular, the writer has combatted media attempts to smear the participants as 'country bumpkins' or stupid opponents of progress. In this text, originally published on Les Inrockuptibles, Louis proclaims that 'those who insult the gilets jaunes are insulting people like my father.'" He is horrified by "the extreme violence and class contempt that is battering down on this movement," a movement he says that is made up of "suffering bodies ravaged by work, by fatigue, by hunger, by the permanent humiliation of the dominated by the dominant, by social and geographical exclusion. I saw tired bodies and tired hands, broken backs and exhausted faces... people whose health is devastated by poverty and misery."

Right from the start of this movement we have seen “experts” and “politicians” in the media belittling, condemning, and mocking the gilets jaunes and the revolt that they embody. I saw the words “barbarians,” “idiots,” “yokels,” “irresponsible” spread across social networks. The media spoke of the gilets jaunes’ “grunting”: for them, the popular classes do not revolt, but instead grunt like farm animals. I heard of the “violence of this movement” when a car was torched or a window was smashed or a statue was tarnished.

A common example, this, of the differential perception of violence: a large part of the media-political world wanted us to believe that violence is not the thousands of lives destroyed and reduced to misery by politics, but a few burnt-out cars. You must really never have experienced poverty, if you think that graffiti on a historic monument is worse than the impossibility of being able to take care of yourself, of living, of feeding yourself or your family.

The gilets jaunes speak of hunger, of precarity, of life and death. The “politicians” and part of the journalists reply: “the symbols of our Republic have been tarnished.” But what are these people talking about? How dare they? What planet are they from? The media also talk about racism and homophobia among the gilets jaunes. Who are they kidding? I do not want to talk about my books, here. But it is interesting to note that whenever I have published a novel I have been accused of stigmatizing poor and rural France precisely because I mentioned the homophobia and racism that existed in the village where I lived as a child. Journalists who had never done anything for the popular classes were enraged, and suddenly set themselves up to play the defenders of these same classes.

For the dominant, the popular classes are the perfect representation of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a class-object; an object that can be manipulated by discourse, one day represented as the salt of the earth-- the authentic poor-- and the next day as racists and homophobes. In both cases, the underlying intention is the same: to prevent the popular classes’ speech, about themselves, from ever coming to the surface. Too bad if you have to contradict yourself from one day to the next, so long as they keep quiet... When the ruling classes and certain media talk about homophobia and racism in the gilets jaunes movement, they are not really talking about homophobia and racism. They are saying “Poor people, shut up!” In any case, the gilets jaunes movement is still a work in progress, and its language is not yet fixed in place: if there does exist homophobia or racism among the gilets jaunes, our responsibility is to transform this language.

There are different ways of saying “I am suffering.” And a social movement is precisely the moment where the possibility opens up that the suffering will no longer say “I am suffering because of immigration and my neighbor who’s on benefits,” but will instead say “I am suffering because of those who rule. I am suffering because of the class system, because of Emmanuel Macron and [prime minister] Édouard Philippe.” The social movement is a moment in which language is subverted, a moment in which the old languages can be destabilized. That is what is happening today. Indeed, over recent days we have seen a reformulation of the gilets jaunes’ vocabulary. At the outset, we only heard talk of petrol and sometimes unpleasant references to “benefits recipients.” Now we hear words like inequality, wage rises, injustice.

This movement must continue, for it embodies something right, urgent, and profoundly radical, because faces and voices that are usually reduced to invisibility are finally visible and audible. The fight will not be easy: as we can see, the gilets jaunes represent a sort of Rorschach test for a large part of the bourgeoisie. The gilets jaunes force them to express their class contempt and the violence that they usually only express in an indirect way. That is, the same contempt that has destroyed so many lives around me, and which continues do so, and ever more so; this contempt that reduces me to silence and paralyzes me, even to the point that I can’t write the text I wanted, to express what I wanted to express.

But we must win. For there are many of us now telling ourselves that we can’t tolerate another defeat for the Left, which is thus also a defeat for those who suffer.

But not all the voices on the left are singing from the same hymnal that Édouard Louis is. The World Socialist Web Site of the 4th International ran an essay by Peter Schwarz denouncing the reaction by Germany's Left Party which has condemned the Yellow Vest movement. "Abhorrence of any revolt from below," he wrote, "is written into the DNA of the Left Party, which emerged from a fusion of the Stalinist state party of former East Germany with a group of Social Democrats and trade union bureaucrats from the West. To paraphrase Friedrich Engels, it is 'more frightened of the least popular movement than of all the reactionary plots of all the Governments put together.' The Left Party instinctively regards any social movement that is not controlled and held in check by the trade unions as a right-wing conspiracy.

Left Party chair Bernd Riexinger has denounced the Yellow Vests.: "The potential of ultra-rightists in the ranks of the movement is worrying... such fraternization of left and right-wing sentiments is unthinkable."

French trade union leaders are also opposed to the Yellow Vest movement. Michel Poittevin, an official of the Solidaires-SUD union, said he "refuses to take part because the Yellow Vests are strongly supported from the right." Schwarz writes that "Above all, Poittevin is outraged that the unions, which have a long record of isolating, breaking, and selling out every social movement, have no influence over the Yellow Vests. It was 'a movement that we as left trade unionists cannot fathom. People have organized themselves, who are not or only tangentially in a union, or who even do not want to join one,' he laments."

Poittevin compares the protests against Macron with the Italian Five-Star Movement and the French Poujadists, a far-right party that achieved temporary electoral successes in the 1950s and in which the National Front’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was active.

This is nothing less than a vicious slander. The Yellow Vests movement is directed against the decades-long redistribution of income and wealth from the poor to the rich, which has made life impossible for many working-class families. It is part of an international working-class offensive that manifests itself in a growing number of strikes and protests. The increase in the gasoline tax by the former investment banker Macron, who had previously lowered taxes for the rich, was simply the last straw.

Even many bourgeois media outlets opposed to the movement must admit to this fact. The December 4 editorial in the daily Le Monde states that the inability of successive governments to respond to the global financial crisis of 2008 has "fuelled anger on the most powerful of breeding grounds, the sense of inequality."

The striving for social equality has revolutionary implications. It can only be realised through the overthrow of capitalism and requires an international, socialist movement of the working class. This is diametrically opposed to the goals of the extreme right, which fuel nationalism, divide the working class, and are preparing to defend capitalism with brutal force.

If extreme right-wingers seek to influence the movement and are partly able to do so, then it is only because they can exploit the anger and frustration of broad layers with those alleged “leftists” who have been and remain at the forefront of the attacks on the working class. This applies not only to the French Socialists and the German SPD, but also to the Left Party, which is pressing ahead with austerity policies in Berlin and other federal states where the party is part of or heads the administration.

Riexinger’s denunciation of the Yellow Vests plays into the hands of the extreme right. What worries him is not "the potential of ultra-rightists in the ranks of the movement," but rather its revolutionary potential and the fact that it is developing outside of the straitjacket of the unions and established parties. Before taking up the leadership of the Left Party, Riexinger was a full-time Verdi (public service union) secretary in Stuttgart and is familiar with these issues.

The Left Party can accommodate and even ally itself with the far-right-- as its idol Alexis Tsipras did in Greece, where he implemented a reckless austerity program in a coalition with the far-right Independent Greeks. But the Left Party cannot accommodate and ally itself with a movement that threatens the capitalist order.

In contrast to Riexinger, the head of the Left Party faction in the Bundestag, Sahra Wagenknecht, expressed support for the Yellow Vests. "I think it's right for people to defend themselves and protest when politics makes their lives worse," she said. She hoped for "stronger protests in Germany against a government that cares more about the interests of business lobbyists than the interests of ordinary people."