French people: 1, Neoliberalism: 0
Ha ha they won! That’s one in the eye for all those moaning liberal types who kept going on about how the French students were being sooo selfish and depriving the poor immigrants of the banlieue of wonderful jobs in MacDonalds. Similar to the way that sweatshop workers in the Pearl River Delta are selfishly depriving their poor rural cousins of urban jobs and the shantytown dwellers of Nairobi should realise that they’ve never had it so good because other people aren’t so privileged as to have a piece of corrugated iron to call home.
Could this victory be the sort of antidote that is needed for the acute case of business ontology and necrotising TINA compromise that has been pervading the world of late?
Funnily enough the French movement did get some interest from elsewhere in East Asia aside from Korea:
I am a Chinese communist. We Chinese communists are paying much attention to the rallies in France about the CPE labour law.
We are encouraged by the French movement and we get information about it from the internet.
In China, we can get little information about the movement in Chinese.
We have to find information in English. I have translated the article, “France 1968: A Year To Remember” (Socialist Worker, 1 April) into Chinese and put in on the largest Chinese website.
Ma, China
[I must admit that I admire the bravery of the letter writer - openly calling yourself a communist in China could have serious consequences in this day and age…]
great post. analogies spot on, and I enjoyed the k-punk piece.
meanwhile the general strike here in Korea, such as it is, is universally ignored … this country needs more “selfish” workers out on the street
Comment by jay — April 12, 2006 @ 8:15 am
Thanks for stopping by Jay. I’ve been meaning to plug your blog for a while…
Comment by kotaji — April 12, 2006 @ 12:55 pm
Not so quick. The bourgeois regime in France still wants to define labor relations in the neoliberal way. They’ve simply been required to make a tactical retreat here. A real victory would be enjoying the spectacle of de Villepin’s head on a pike pole at the Elysée Palace. Sarkozy’s noggin alongside would be a bonus.
It is not time for students and workers to let their guard down.
[And fix that captcha thing. It doesn’t even work — besides being set up in the most annoying way possible.]
Comment by Comandante Gringo — April 15, 2006 @ 6:45 pm
Agreed, triumphalism is probably not warranted. But it’s fun sometimes anyway. And there’s no doubt that even a victory in a single battle like this can have many knock-on effects elsewhere and make a huge difference to general confidence.
[The comments thing is definitely a bit screwed up, should try to tinker. To be honest though I don’t really understand how wordpress works, so no promises.]
Comment by kotaji — April 17, 2006 @ 3:51 pm