PARIS, April 22 -- The massive, self-organised social movement known as the Yellow Vests held its second nationwide “Assembly of Assemblies” earlier this month. Hundreds of activist groups from all over France each chose two delegates – one woman, one man – to gather in the port city of St. Nazaire. Local Yellow Vests hosted 700 delegates at the St. Nazaire “House of the People.” The three-day series of meetings and working groups went off without a hitch in an atmosphere of good-fellowship. A sign on the wall proclaimed, “No one has the solution, but everybody has a piece of it.” Their project – mobilise their “collective intelligence” to reorganise, strategise, and prolong their struggle. Their aim – achieve the immediate goals of liveable wages and retirements, restoration of social benefits and public services. Tax the rich and end fiscal fraud to pay for preserving the environment. And, most ambitious of all, reinvent democracy in the process. Their Declaration ends with the phrase, “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” I often wonder if they know who coined it. Yellow and Green Unite and Fight Particular attention was paid to the issue of the environment, reaffirming the popular slogan, “End of the week. End of the world. Same logic, same struggle.” It rhymes in French. The Assembly called on people to “take up a conflictual stance against the present system in order to create, together, a new ecological, popular social movement”. This shows growth from the original Yellow Vest uprising, which began as a protest against a hike in taxes on diesel fuel imposed in the name of “saving the environment.” Less well known is that only 17 percent of that tax was earmarked for the environment. In any case, French president Emmanuel Macron rescinded it in an early attempt to pacify the movement. Since then, the Yellow Vests have tentatively converged with environmental groups. Many poor and working class Yellow Vests can’t help seeing them as bourgeois on bicycles unwilling to struggle directly against the establishment. So their call for unity is also a challenge to the environmental movement – “Join us in the struggle for social equality and be ready to fight the whole system.” Brilliant! Who said an unstructured autonomous movement of ordinary, not well-educated people, could not come up with strategies and tactics? “No one has the solution, but everybody has a piece of it.” This was the basis of direct democracy in Athens, from which the Yellow Vests have also borrowed the idea of choosing representatives by lot. Autonomy The Assembly of Assemblies reaffirmed the Yellow Vest founding principle of keeping clear of political parties. Also of leaders. To my mind this is genius. Every popular mass movement I have participated in over the past 60 years has been co-opted by the establishment or crushed. Leaders set up an office, try to raise money and gain access to power, end up compromising. They treat rank and file activists like a mailing list and the power and dynamic of the mass movement melts away. Instinctively, the Yellow Vests seem to have assimilated the profound criticism of representative democracy that goes back to the 18th century and was applied during the 1871 Paris Commune. There delegates were given limited mandates, subject to instant recall, regularly rotated, and paid at workers’ wages. The Communards also called on other cities to rise and link up as a federation. This is the Yellow Vests’ modus operandi. Europe This critique of representation explains the Assembly’s attitude toward upcoming elections for the European Parliament. Fear of being manipulated for political purposes is strong. Last month Yellow Vests at a Paris demonstration recognised a Yellow Vest who had just declared her candidacy, apparently in the name of the Yellow Vests. They were furious and yelled at her until she withdrew, shaken. Ugly, but a necessary example to anyone else who would rather be a politician than a Yellow Vest. The Assembly, far from calling for a Frexit, reached out to social movements in the other countries of the European Union in a call to come together and struggle against its neoliberal policies. The Assembly saw no point in voting in this sham election. As everyone knows, the European Parliament has no power or even visibility. Moreover, it limits the deficit spending of its member countries, thus making it illegal for France to finance the social services and environmental reconstruction people are demanding.
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