LONDON—Once again, French people are on the street. A group known as Yellow Vests emerged on the national scene in France on November 17, 2018. They are demanding a fair capitalism.
Their successful mobilization has shaken the government of Emmanuel Macron.
Before this group arrived on the scene, Macron was determined to stand steadfast to any social revendication movement to show that he is the man to break the militancy of the French Trade Unions and society.
African people do not need France to be great again; French colonialism is a nightmare for Africa.
The Yellow Vests are saying they want a benign capitalism, a just capitalism and it does not exist.
It is parasitic capitalism that steals oil and uranium to drive French cars and keep French homes warm at our Africa’s expenses.
Macron claims that he has the legitimate mandate to reform the French society, particularly the French economy.
After 18 months in power, he has not bowed to trade union and pressure groups.
So, the Yellow Vests have achieved something that leftists trade unions failed to do—force the governments of Emmanuel Macron to account.
It’s not business as usual. French people are talking of being gripped by insurrection mood, it’s citizen revolution.
It’s time for Macron to listen.
So what’s going on?
The Yellow Vests, the group made of the well-less off of the French society—some living with minimum wages—are expressing the impossibility to live with such a meager amount of money.
They are saying something must give way—something must change.
Macron was equally determined to show that he is the representative of the French ruling class by giving away a tax break to the ruling class and making the people of France brand him as the president of the rich. This label has stuck on him in the French society.
The decision by Macron to increase the fuel tax was the needle that broke the back of the camel.
This mass movement is not tied to any particular political organization. In fact many of the leading forces in this spontaneous mass movement refused to be glued to a particular movement.
They want to be seen as being in control of their own movements and they also recognize the diversity that makes up the movement.
They are well aware that they do have political differences, but they agree the government is out of touch.
The response from Macron’s government has been slow to come.
Drunken in their own arrogance, they hoped it would go away and not get the public support.
Macron was in Buenos Aires, Argentina in a meeting of the G20 when he, himself concluded something has to be done.
He instructed its Buenos Aires prime minister Eduard Philippe to host the meeting with the Yellow Vests.
One of the representatives of the Yellow Vests requested that the meeting with the government be broadcasted live. The prime minister declined that proposal, and the yellow vest representative quit the meeting.
These movements, at their peak, enjoy the support of over 80 percent of white people.
Weaknesses
The Yellow Vest movement is a movement that is not structured and it has many political centers, so there is no system of nominating or choosing united leaders.
You have those who wanted to negotiate and then you have those who demanded that Macron must go.
Macron’s standing on clay as his shaky legitimacy is questioned by white people
The majority of white people in France did not vote for Macron since he obtained nearly 24 percent of the electorate when he won the presidency in May 2017.
He is legitimate, because he won the presidential contest, but he is not representative of 75 percent of the vast majority of French people who overwhelmingly did not vote for him.
This is the crisis of imperialism, where elections are won against the backdrop of high abstention.
In May 2017, out of 47 million registered voters, 12 million absented and 4.07 million voted blank and nil.
This is a total of 16.1 million people who did not vote for Emmanuel Macron.
Macron won the presidency with 20.7 million votes.
To see how fragile Macron is, at the first round, there were 11 candidates vying to win the presidency.
Macron came first with 8.7 million votes followed by Marine Le Pen with 7.69 million votes, but in the second round, Macron won the presidency with 20.7 million votes or 43.7 percent. This is less than the majority of registered voters.
The increase in the votes came from the fact that some 43 percent of people went to the polls not to vote for Macron, but to stop Le Pen, the far right candidate, from becoming president.
Otherwise, the base of Macron is indicated by the score he achieved in the first round, less than 20 percent of French voters.
He is being reminded of this truth every day through these eventful protests.
Macron jumped ship too late, white imperialism cannot be saved
Macron did not understand that the failure of his socialist party to keep power was not an isolated phenomenon and that he would be saved if he jumped into another imperialist ship.
He created a new organization with the intention of capturing power at the expense of his old organization, whose candidate could not even pass the first round in the presidential elections in 2017.
Imperialism is dying, not of his own accord as Chairman Omali Yeshitela has often summed it up, but because, overall, despite the immense sacrifices and setbacks, the colonized people’s struggles for national liberation are being successful.
He is failing like his predecessors Francois Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques René Chirac.
The question as it is wrongly defined in certain bourgeois press, is does France need to be more liberal-imperialist like Great Britain, the U.S. and Canada—the “Anglo -Saxon way?”
The way forward: Embrace African Internationalism and build the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) and Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) in France
The first thing to do is to weaken French imperialism by uniting with the demands of the African working class and reparations to African people in the Caribbean and in Africa.
Secondly, we want the return of everything stolen by French imperialism back to Africa.
Third thing is the immediate removal of all French troops from the entire African Nation, that is from Africa itself, the Pacific islands and the Caribbean.
