After a one-day pause on Wednesday, the mass mobilisation of students and workers across France resumed yesterday with nearly 400 schools and universities closed down due to strikes by teachers and barricades by students.
Student leaders rejected a promise made by the French prime minster Sebastien Lecornu on Wednesday night that he would present a plan to ‘fix’ the country’s education system by the end of the month.
Lecornu didn’t provide any details of this plan to address the crisis that on Tuesday saw tens of thousands of students, parents, teachers and trade unionists take to the streets in over 30 cities across the country.
The French state had attempted to deal with this uprising in the traditional manner by unleashing the police to brutally attack the demonstrators – attacks that injured 215 teenagers while a 15-year-old had his hand blown off by a police sting-ball grenade.
Having failed to hold back the uprising of youth and workers, the French government is now attempting to defuse the explosive situation with the French education minister Edouard Geffray offering talks with high school students associations.
This unprecedented uprising of youth and workers has laid bare the economic debt crisis engulfing French capitalism along with the rest of Europe, the UK and US.
France, the second largest economy in the EU, is being strangled by a national debt fast approaching $4 trillion and over 150% of the country’s GDP (the size of the French economy).
The cost of financing this huge debt has spiralled by billions of dollars.
Bond yields, interest charged by the financial vultures who buy up government debt, have driven the cost of government borrowing to the highest levels in decades as investors demand more and more from a government that is increasingly being seen as unable to impose the discipline on the working class they demand to bring down the debt.
At a time when students and workers are rising up over crumbling schools and a lack of teachers, the hedge funds and speculators are demanding massive austerity cuts.
Already, prime minister Lecornu has proposed spending cuts of 43 billion euros while Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right-wing National Rally, is pledging that if she wins the presidency in the forthcoming elections she would cut 140 billion euros from the French budget and halve the national debt.
All these pledges for brutal austerity cuts have collided head-on with a working class, led by the youth, that is rising up against a capitalist system drowning in debt and preparing to take workers down with it.
This has accelerated the panic amongst the bankers and speculators who are now openly saying that if France collapses into bankruptcy it will take down not just the eurozone, but the UK and US economies with it.
Desmond Lachman, of the American Enterprise Institute, was quoted in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph saying: ‘If France falls, the whole of Europe falls’ and warning that the contagion could ‘wash up’ in Britain and America.
Lachman said that with the US ‘on its own path towards a day of reckoning, the ‘last thing the world needs now is a French debt crisis’.
The ‘day of reckoning’ is in fact upon the world capitalist system already.
France, along with the UK, US and the rest of Europe is crashing under the weight of a mammoth debt pile massively accelerated by the billions being spent on military preparations for war with Russia and war against Iran.
The working class has the power and has shown the resolve to end the capitalist crisis by forcing its trade union leaders to act by calling mass general strikes to bring down their capitalist governments and going forward to workers governments and socialism.
Build up the WRP and Young Socialists – build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required for the victory of the world socialist revolution.
There is no time to lose.
