NEITHER the Gendarmerie, nor troops or even the fatwas of the ‘holy men’ can stop the French youth rebellion, which is the product of years of pauperisation, victimisation and repression of millions of oppressed youth by the arrogant French ruling class and its massive, armed to the teeth, state apparatus.
What makes this revolt of the youth so potent is that it coincides with a general movement of the French working class against the privatisation and deregulation of the French economy, including the destruction of the 35 hour week and the cutting of many benefits and the elimination of a lot more that the working class and the poor depend upon to survive.
This movement of the working class first saw the political light of day with its rejection of the EU constitution in the French referendum. The constitution was rejected as a threat to the wages, jobs and basic rights of French workers.
The current developing revolutionary situation in France is more potent than the uprising of May and June 1968.
Then, French students took to the streets to reply to the attacks launched by the administration of President de Gaulle on education.
The students were assaulted for over 14 days by the massed ranks of the gendarmerie, before the French working class took to the streets in a general strike that saw de Gaulle leave the country out of fear of revolution.
The union leaders at that stage were able to rescue the ruing class from the revolutionary masses by obtaining a number of concessions.
Today the mass movement of the youth is an anticipation of the entrance of the millions of the working class onto the scene.
It is the working class that is already at the centre of the revolutionary situation with its massive opposition to privatisation and deregulation.
The French ruling class is on the brink of using troops to police curfews with shoot-to-kill policies for those that breach them.
Any such use of troops must be the signal for the working class to take general strike action to bring down the Gaullist regime and the Fifth Republic and go forward to a workers’ government that will end the privatisation drive, defend the basic rights of the working class and give the millions of youth jobs and a future.
This is the logic of the struggle that is rapidly emerging.
There is no doubt that the impact of the French youth uprising on Britain and Europe will be no less than the powerful impact of the events of May June 1968, which virtually set European capitals ablaze with struggle.
There are millions of discontented, oppressed and angry youth in Britain, who are sick and tired of being used as cheap labour by greedy bosses and their government and then of being repressed, curfewed, and Asbo’d by the police and the capitalist state.
There is no doubt that the French youth revolution will spread into Britain, where there are also millions of angry workers who will be inspired by their action.
In fact, the uprising of the French youth is not just the beginning of revolution in France it is the beginning of revolution throughout Europe.
It was after all Marx who predicted that the French would begin it, the British carry it on and the Germans complete the socialist revolution throughout Europe.
All the more reason then for us to build the WRP in Britain and sections of the Fourth International throughout Europe to lead the European socialist revolution to its victory.
