Workers' Liberty

The 2006 Movement Against Precarity – A First Assessment
[The following was written in 2006 by Xavier, a JCR militant. NB – "AG" here refers to Assemblée Générale, the sovereign mass meetings in universities, lycées (roughly equivalent to FE Colleges) and sometimes workplaces, where all students or workers had a vote and a voice; "banlieue" is a word with a specific cultural connotation meaning a working-class suburb of a major city, especially Paris, where the population suffers from poverty and urban decay that often reach acute levels, and is in large part non-white]
The movement of 2006 was the biggest youth movement in France since May 1968, but it was more than that: it sparked off one of the three important political crises that the present government has known since 2005.

AN EXCEPTIONAL MOVEMENT
A stage in the reconstruction of consciousness
This movement was an opportunity for thousands of young people to acquire an exceptional experience of struggle. Organising a strike with pickets, participating in mass AGs, acting in co-operation with workers, carrying out radical actions, etc... This militant experience, and the political discussions which took place on a mass scale within this context, represent a fundamental advance. These youths will not forget this experience. They have seen that it is possible to drive back a government like Villepin's. Above all, this movement was a thunderous demonstration of the fact that struggle pays off. Following more than three months of movement and a serious trial of strength, the government was forced to withdraw the CPE, this emblem of its liberal politics. And even if unemployment and precarity are still with us more than ever, this evolution within the consciousness of millions of people could be decisive in the future, because it has begun to give people back confidence in collective action and it has clearly discredited the government's liberal arguments.

Evolution of the Student Milieu
Between 1995 and 2006, wage labour has increased massively among university and lycée students. Almost two thirds of students are obliged to sell their labour to finance their studies. 70% of young people began their professional life in a precarious job. The generation which today is between 16 and 26 years old know that they will not live as well as their parents' generation did. Among the youth of the working class neighbourhoods and particularly among those whose families originate from the former colonies, a sense of a lack of perspectives has sunk deep roots.

The level of organisation of young people in youth groups is relatively low even if it isn't non-existent. Youth organisations, notably UNEF (the only truly national youth organisation) played a decisive role in kicking of the movement. Massive youth struggles have taken place almost every year since 2002...

And the 2006 movement seems to have synthesised the strong points of the movements of precarious workers, of the university and lycée student movements, and of the suburban (banlieue) uprisings: it has profited from the student movement's capacity to organise, it took elements of radicality from the lycée and banlieue movements, all the while taking pretty much for granted from the beginning that the link with the world of work would be decisive.

Politicising the Movement
Students, and to a lesser extent other mobilised young people, were not content with just discussing what actions to take the next day in the AGs – very quickly, in order to grow to a mass level and win a legitimacy with public opinion, the movement elaborated solid arguments against precarity and unemployment... The debates around precarity, exploitation, racism and liberal reforms multiplied in the AGs. The question of constructing anther society, founded on something other than maximising profits, was posed and discussed by thousands of students. Furthermore, a sentiment of defiance towards the institutions was put in place over the course of the movement, which did not diminish after the government voted on the law. The idea, commonly held in the workers' movement, that once a law was voted through you couldn't do anything against it, was rejected soundly and loudly. Chirac's manoeuvres, notably around his TV appearance, in no way slowed the movement. Confrontations with the police were not always reserved to a minority and "radical" actions often involved hundreds or thousands of young people.

THE MOVEMENT: THE TERRAIN FOR THE BATTLE BETWEEN THE INSTITUTIONAL LEFT AND THE REVOLUTIONARY LEFT
During the movement, the major divide was around this question: should we push the crisis all the way to its natural conclusion, or limit ourselves to a movement whose sole objective would be the withdrawal of the CPE, and which wouldn't shake the established order? From the outset revolutionaries argued for an orientation founded in blockades, self-organisation and links with workers.

Strike with Blockade
The blockading of universities, and to a lesser extent, of lycées, was the means of building the movement to a mass level. From the start, only minority groups were involved with the work of informing people. After the numbers in the AGs had passed a certain threshold, blockades became the means of organising massive AGs, with several thousand-strong AGs in numerous universities. Effectively, with the deterioration of students' social situation, the tightening-up of monitoring absences (missing three Supervised Tutorials [TD, or Travail Dirigé] is often treated as the equivalent of missing a whole term's studies), the obstacles to a real right to strike are much more imposing than in the past. Preventing lectures from taking place was the only way of assembling all students.

The pickets were thus a way of completely shutting down the universities. It was an attempt to set an example of radical struggle before the population, like an invitation to do likewise and refuse to surrender to the government. This readiness to confront authority can be seen in the proliferation of blockades of rail stations, occupations of local offices of MEDEG [French bosses' union, equivalent of CBI], etc.

Self Organisation
AGs took place in a very large number of universities and HE education institutions, such as IUTs [vocational training institutions] (there were up to 144 delegations from striking universities and HE institutions at the national co-ordination). AGs in lycées were much rarer, self-organisation was less developed there, in large part due to the fact that, unlike the preceding year, organised student bodies did not help lycée students. These AGs were massive: at Rennes 2 or Poitiers, they reached 5,000 or 6,00 students. In all universities, there were the biggest AGs since the movement of 1986, or indeed ever (at Orsay, the AGs were bigger than in 1968...). Effectively deciding what action to take, unions and political groups finding themselves obliged to follow their decisions, they elected delegates who for more than two months met weekly in a national co-ordination. This national structure of the movement allowed young people in struggle to decide for themselves a national strategy to build the movement. Not only did this give the youth the opportunity to experience radical democracy for itself but equally it allowed the movement to avoid falling foul of the union leaderships' strategy of exhaustion: a demonstration now and then while hoping to negotiate the withdrawal of the CPE with the government. This national co-ordination voted every week to adopt declarations which addressed themselves to students, youth and young workers. In these declarations we can see a strategy combining two elements: on the one hand, a clear call to a general strike, on the other, concrete proposals for the construction of the general strike, by formulating step by step tactics for the extension of the strike through calls linked more and more to common demonstrations and strikes with wage workers', to calls for strikes timed and planned to allow the most combative groups of workers to go on strike for extended periods... It was the co-ordination which provided the impulse for the calls for the two great strike days of the 28th of March and the 4th of April, with three million demonstrators each time.

The co-ordination also elected spokespersons for the movement, notably to express themselves before the media and the unions, which indicates an awareness among the mobilised youth that it was necessary to control the representation of the movement; and a will to combat all recuperation and the semi-monopoly of the media enjoyed by Bruno Julliard, president of UNEF.

Links with workers
From the beginning, there existed among the mobilised youth a diffuse awareness that we could not win alone: a lesson drawn from social movements since 2003. Under the influence of revolutionary-left militants (LO, LO Fraction, LCR and JCR), this sentiment turned into an organised and active strategy. These activists who had political links with militants active in workplaces organised leafleting in front of workplaces, joint AGs, and even blockades of workplaces carried out jointly with workers. The students' objective was to draw the workers into a general strike, i.e. into a frontal assault n the government. Extended strikes were sporadic, but it is interesting to note that they took place where there was very close contact between youths and workers; and where agitation around the CPE had been combined with agitation around sectoral issues (the postal workers in Saint Denis, for example). Clearly, it was in the context of the threat of the extension of the movement into the working class, and of a general strike, that the government gave way. These three elements gave the movement its character. The only organised tendencies to argue for the before, during and after the movement were the revolutionaries.

The role of revolutionaries
Revolutionaries and other combative currents played an important role in the proliferation of blockades. Their necessity was consistently stressed, in light of the lessons drawn from the movements of November-December 2003 and the lycée student movement of 2005.

This role played by revolutionaries proved to be decisive in the construction of the national co-ordination. This type of co-ordination had already existed in previous movements of youths in education, but it had developed late, the co-ordinations were ill-structured and reformists were always hesitant to really engage in these bodies, where their domination was hotly contested. In this movement, the JCR took the initiative, through the intermediary of their members in Toulouse who were unionised in the student union SUD-Etudiants, to fight for the rapid convocation of a national co-ordination as soon as the first universities went on strike. The leadership of UNEF, which had a significant base in Rennes 2, the cradle of the movement, was obliged to respect the convocation of a first national co-ordination at Rennes on the 18th of February, 10 days after Rennes went on strike. At this co-ordination, a fight arose over whether or not the next co-ordination should meet the following week at Toulouse, to accelerate the construction of the movement and give it a political dimension. The UNEF leadership boycotted the Toulouse co-ordination which was nevertheless larger than the one before. Not only did the national co-ordination gain a weekly rhythm, but the UNEF leadership accepted from that point on to construct the movement in unity with and within the framework of self-organisation constructed by ordinary students.

Another important battle was led jointly by the JCR and the LO Fraction: the battle to construct a real leadership for the movement. Concretely, it was a matter of electing a national strike committee and not simply spokespeople on an imperative mandate, which restrained the possibilities for a rapid response in the face of the government and union leaderships. They were not mandated to work in between two co-ordinations to structure the movement, to reinforce the links between different places and sectors in struggle, which is one reason why the president of UNEF appeared to be the natural spokesperson for the movement. This fight to put in place a national strike committee was lost.

The role of revolutionaries was surely vital to constructing what could be called a "unity policy". From the start of the movement, a right wing existed (organised around the UNEF leadership) whose policies would not permit us to win. Quite quickly, an "ultra-left" wing also developed, with fluid contours but linked to the most radicalised milieus, which expressed a desire to do away with authority, but without bothering to win the great mass of workers and students to their politics. The revolutionaries, particularly the JCR and LO Fraction, consistently pushed an orientation which tried – often successfully – to take into account the different levels of mobilisation and consciousness and bring the whole of the youth and the world of work into a confrontation with the government and the ruling class.

AND THE ROLE OF THE REFORMISTS
At the start of the movement, the reformists constituted united bodies which launched the mobilisation (the Inter-Union committee of the different Union Confederations and the national united collective of youth organisations). They built the mobilisation and the united bodies played a fundamental role in launching a mass campaign of information and mobilisation around the CPE (but also around the Equal Opportunities Law), without which the first AGs would not have taken place. But the reformist currents did all they could to ensure that the mobilisation would not overflow their organisations, and showed themselves to be very timid on fundamental questions (blockades, national co-ordination). With regards to demands, everything was done to restrict the movement to the question of the CPE so as not to risk the extension and radicalisation of the movement. The dates fixed for mobilisations by the confederations at the start of the movement were incredibly late: the first took place on the 7th of February, several days after the beginning of parliamentary discussions in the LEC, and the following one month later, on the 7th of March, when Rennes 2 and several other universities had already been on strike for a month!

At the heart of the movement, reformist currents within the youth (UNEF leadership, Jeunesses Communistes, SOS Racisme...) didn't really have a policy of their own. They appeared to "tail" the movement (they didn't oppose links with workers, but did absolutely nothing to foster them). These currents, together with the "ultra left", led a battle against the election of a national strike committee. Today they are merely concerned with building for the 2007 elections, rather than leaning on the movement's gains in order to prepare the next major confrontation.

Of course, this movement was not simply a dialogue between reformists and revolutionaries. "Ultra-leftism" had significant weight, losing sight of the necessity of the most united, mass movement possible But the battle hinged on the fundamental question: as regards the CPE, did we need a movement based simply on a particular demand, which occasionally called upon the workers to pressurise the government to withdraw this measure? Or was it necessary to build a movement that drew in the great masses of youths and workers into a general strike that swept out the government and deepened the social and political crisis?

It should be noted that in recent years, in mobilisations of the youth, the balance of forces between reformists and revolutionaries has shifted in favour of the latter: during the 1998 lycée movement, for example, FIDL (lycée student "union" under the control of social-democrats) could allow itself to call its own national co-ordination alongside and against the united co-ordination called and built by radicals, and eventually to negotiate with the Minister of Education to call for a return to work, but in the lycée movements of 2005 and 2006, this was totally impossible for them... And it is the revolutionaries' orientation which had the greater influence and the better reception, even if it would be a great exaggeration to say that they controlled the mobilisation.

PREPARING THE NEXT BATTLES
The return to normality
The mobilisation won on the CPE and greatly destabilised the government. It went much further than the reformist currents wanted. Nevertheless, there was no general strike, precarity and the government are both still there, and the latter still has the strength to act... Villepin came out "alive", even if greatly weakened, from a movement which aspired to unseat him. How did this happen?

We must first recall that the movement explicitly posed the question of a general strike and the removal of the government, from the outset: these two key ideas for revolutionaries in the current context were discussed on a mass scale for weeks. This is no small matter, and will be significant in the future. But the profound implications of these ideas were not fully taken on board by youths and workers, and this is not only due to the union leaderships. Once the withdrawal of the CPE was won, the majority of young people, not to mention workers, turned back again to day-to-day concerns, with exams at the forefront of many minds. The necessity of a confrontation with the government did not appear sufficiently vital to the youth (even if many agreed with this perspective) for them to carry on and go all the way. For wage-workers, the mobilisation mainly remained a movement in solidarity with the youth rather than a common fight against a common enemy. That was the principal political obstacle to a massive explosion of sustained strikes amongst workers.

The other limits of the movement
The movement didn't manage to give itself a leadership that was sufficiently visible to really make an impact among the public and the trade unions. And it was only with great difficulty and very late that representatives of the national co-ordination were received by the national inter-union committee.

Another limit to the mobilisation was the inadequacy of links with youths from deprived working class areas. A real rift opened up between the youth from the banlieues, whose families were often from former French colonies, and the rest of the population. During the movement, this often manifested itself in fights or confrontations during demonstrations. Involving banlieue youth. "Young thugs [casseurs, or "wreckers"] from the banlieue" were deplored loudly and often. But it must be remembered that if some youths from the suburbs effectively came to look for a fight with demonstrators, these latter were not the majority, and the hostile reactions from certain groups, indeed, the full-on witch-hunt for young people from the banlieues carried out by some union stewards [services d'ordre, security for the demonstration; not workplace union officials], served only to deepen the divisions between one section of the demonstrators and youths who had come to demonstrate but who did not necessarily identify with the mobilisation as it was organised. I was possible to "win" some of these young people to the demonstration and into organised cortèges, and to isolate the real troublemakers, as we understand that they are part of our social camp, and we must make an effort to address ourselves to them. At the same time, we must not give into angelic day-dreaming – "as we all have the same interests at heart, let's not organise stewards or security, that's just divisive". The best course of action is to have contact at the grassroots level between students, lycée students and youths from different neighbourhoods in the same region, with a view to holding AGs, common actions, and going to demonstrations together. That is what was done in Saint-Denis or Nanterre for example, without forgetting students at working-class lycées (of which a significant number incorporate vocational training colleges) who went to the demonstrations all together, themselves organised into cortèges. Even if the racist dimension of the Equal Opportunities Law wasn't always clearly perceived and emphasised, there existed a real aspiration on the part of the mobilised youth, to articulate the specific situation of banlieue youth. The idea of a shared interest was largely shared (the demand for an amnesty for incarcerated banlieue youths was widely adopted in AGs). Nevertheless, the rift has only begun to be filled in, and there remains much to do to overcome the "colonial fracture", so that, regardless of their origins, young people consider themselves to have fundamentally the same interests. Long-term work of this kind in the lycées should be a priority for young revolutionaries.

The three central demands were: withdrawal of the CPE, of the CNE and of the Equal Opportunities Law. There was a deeper logic behind that: fighting against the CNE meant not limiting oneself to defending young workers or future workers, and leads one to look for solidarity with all workers; demanding the withdrawal of the Equal Opportunities Law meant taking aim at the government's whole political strategy. But the movement blundered around before consciously fixing its demands and the temptation to adopt extensive lists of demands which were superfluous and tangential to the general direction of the mobilisation (that of a confrontation against the government and against precarity) was almost constant.

The movement saw an unprecedented level of repression. More than 4,000 arrests,3,500 overnight spells in jail, 1,270 people taken to court, 67custodial prison sentences.. These young people weren't persecuted and prosecuted because they were delinquents, but because they were part of a movement that threatened the ruling class... The legitimacy of the police state is such that such repression appears "normal" to the majority of the population. There is still an enormous amount of solidarity work and political persuasion to do there. Furthermore, not very many mobilised to demand that the conditions of exams and teaching at the end of the year did not constitute a form of punishment for mobilised students.

The tools for future victories
After this movement, one of the fundamental tasks consists in fighting to ensure that all the youths who mobilised remain organised over the long term, regardless of differences of opinion, exactly like in the AGs, to act on broader political issues just as much as on concrete conditions of life. This means principally fighting for a reunified and offensive student unionism, which draws lessons from this year's mobilisation. Naturally this will take time but it is vital.

Building an autonomous revolutionary youth movement must allow revolutionaries to intervene in a co-ordinated manner at a national level in this type of movement, to the fullest extent of their potential and of their new responsibilities. This movement also shows that dynamics of awareness-raising and of mobilisation exist which are peculiar to young people. It also shows that the major questions which are at stake in the construction of a mobilisation (blockade, self-organisation, links with workers, demands, etc.) hinge around the question of reform or revolution. For revolutionaries, the logical consequence is to construct an autonomous youth organisation, capable of constructing these mobilisations, and to intervene by pushing to tie links with workers, and to go all the way in a confrontation with the ruling class. The important spaces which the revolutionaries were able to use in this mobilisation as well as the limits of their intervention bear witness to the possibility and to the necessity of a mass autonomous revolutionary organisation.

The international impact of the struggles of the youth in France can only inspire confidence: not only is the cycle which opened in 1995 not yet finished, but we can begin to hope for the arrival of some first real victories for youths and workers. The movement currently underway in Greece is offensive, and winning back our rights has become feasible again. We can win!