The meaning of the Yellow Vests
This radical websit asked a group of people to write 400 words each on the Yellow Vest Movement. This is what I wrote:
"The Yellow Vests are an inspiration. Rooted in the small-town working class, traditionally little-mobilised, the movement has transformed many thousands in the struggle. In my working-class French family in the South West, I found that people who before ‘never talked politics’ were enthusiastically involved, and arguing, with all the facts at their fingertips, about tax policy or police violence.
Every weekend for six months has seen between 20,000 and 160,000 protesting. Macron has been humiliated every Saturday by joyful Yellow Vests and imaginative action, whether blocking motorway toll booths, picketing tax-avoiding multinationals, or forcing their way into a ministerial HQ with a handy fork-lift truck. The movement has had consistently more than 50% public support, about double Macron’s support. They have succeeded in keeping worker poverty and pensioner poverty on the front pages, and government concessions are insufficient but real: more money for minimum-wage workers, less tax for pensioners, re-indexation of lower retirement pensions on inflation, a moratorium on hospital and school closures. Macron’s Grand Debate, in response, was a flop.
The endless queues of naysayers, whether neoliberal elitists, bought and paid-for journalists or tired old leftists, have been comprehensively proved wrong. No, the movement was not close to the fascists, it was not anti-ecology, it was not anti-Semitic. One popular spokeswoman is a Black woman; joint demonstrations have been held with ecological protesters, women’s rights marchers, campaigns against homelessness and with striking teachers; Black groups campaigning against police violence have joined with the Yellow vests. Of course, there were people who had voted for the fascists: but ten million people voted fascist in 2017. Building mass revolt without talking to these people is a ludicrous fantasy. The police, meanwhile, have been more vicious than seen here for decades. At least 14 people have lost an eye, several lost limbs, and I have lost count of the number who say they are too scared to go on demos.
The joint involvement of workers and small businessmen under pressure has led to a tendency to prioritise consensual demands like higher taxes for millionaires and more control of politicians, rather than simpler working class demands like a higher minimum wage. But the movement has transformed French politics, and, if union leaderships have been scandalously cowardly, the radical Left is now drawing strength from the movement through respectful and enthusiastic dialogue. As the popular Yellow Vest song says ‘For the honour of the workers and to build a better world’, la lutte continue!"
And here is what everyone else wrote :
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