France’s Pension Protests Are the Culmination of a Long Rebellion Against Neoliberalism
Emmanuel Macron’s government has angered millions with its attack on the French pension system. But the strength of the protest movement owes to struggles that came before — and the organizations allowing a sustained challenge to the neoliberal agenda.
Protesters take part in a demonstration after the government pushed a pensions reform through parliament without a vote in Clermont-Ferrand, France, on March 28, 2023. (Jeff Pachoud / AFP via Getty Images)
The movement that has been developing in France since January 19 is exciting for many reasons. In not much over two months, it has profoundly changed the political atmosphere in France, pushed back the ambient defeatism, and destabilized (even frightened) the zealous defenders of the established social order and neoliberal policies. It has broadened the expectations of the millions of people who have joined the struggle and thus begun to give them a sense of their own strength.
Above all, this mobilization has intensified the crisis of hegemony that has been deepening in France for years; it has shown how socially isolated Emmanuel Macron’s government really is. It had crystallized social discontent that had not always found ways to express itself politically. It has transformed into righteous anger the generalized distrust of a large part of the population — in particular the working class and youth — toward Macron and his government.
An ”Economic Issue”?
This also means the issue is no longer just about Macron’s pension “reform” (or better, counterreform). It is no longer simply “social,” in a limited, trade union sense. It is eminently and fully political: as it becomes national, takes on a broad social scope, and sinks firm roots, the movement becomes a confrontation not with this or that capitalist (as in a fight against layoffs or job cuts at the firm level), not with this or that sectoral measure (of whatever importance), but with the whole bourgeois class as represented and defended by the political authorities. Such a movement can open up a fault line in the political order, by changing the relations of force between the classes in the long run.
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