The Red Spring

https://i.redd.it/89fbwurtdvb51.png. Results of Red spring .The Red Spring refers to a period of violent unrest in France lasting from January to July 2020, in which the radicalized working class clashed with, and eventually overthrew, the economic and political establishment. As of 2020, it was the most notable flashpoint in what has been dubbed the “Post-American Revolutionary Wave”, a global trend of social unrest in the wake of America’s withdrawal from the world stage.

Although the immediate cause of the uprising was anger at a proposed funding plan for the ECANAC project which entailed significant cuts to the public healthcare budget, the overarching factors in its precipitation were the poverty and wealth inequality which had grown during the ongoing economic recession, the largest of its kind since the Great Depression, and general discontent with Marine Le Pen’s conservative government.

The tensions that had been building since the announcement of the funding plan came to a head on January 29th when the IWW, by that point the single largest labor union in France, initiated a general strike. The smattering of protests and localized strikes which had been happening since late 2019 were immediately tied together into a single mass movement, and the French economy drew to a halt as millions of workers abandoned their posts and flooded into the streets. As the weeks wore on, workers from other unions joined the fight, some with the backing of their unions, some in spontaneous wildcat strikes. By mid-February, the bottom had fallen out of the Euro, which fed the cycle of class warfare as banks closed and hundreds of thousands of workers were fired or furloughed. Violent clashes between strikers and police were a daily occurrence by this point in time, and every night was marked by riots.

A number of organizations spearheaded the Red Spring, chief among them the New Communards. Led by Adeline Brodeur during the Spring, the New Communards started in 2017 as a group of radical Parisian university students inspired by the relative success of the American Worker’s Army across the Atlantic. By the declaration of the general strike in January, it had grown into a national organization of dedicated socialist revolutionaries drawn from all walks of life, including students, blue-collar workers, the homeless, and immigrants, all in spite of the French government’s constant attempts to attack it from one angle or another, which had landed dozens of its prominent members in prison over the years.

A damper fell on the revolution in March and April as the authorities began strictly enforcing stay-at-home orders, partly to deal with the coronavirus crisis, but also in an attempt to force striking workers off the streets and kill the movement’s momentum. Thousands of demonstrators were arrested during this period. To keep the movement alive during the weeks of quarantine, the organizers of the movement called for rent strikes and rooftop demonstrations.

By early May, the movement was faltering, as the government had hoped it would. Some of its more moderate elements, the social democrats and disaffected liberals, were willing to accept the concessions Le Pen had offered under pressure from the rest of the EU, which was suffering the economic consequences of the discord in France — a 50% reduction in the planned budget cuts and the dismissal of the finance minister, as opposed to the outright rejection of the budget cuts, resignation of Le Pen and her finance minister, immediate recall elections, and withdrawal from ECANAC demanded by the radical strains of the movement. All this came crashing down on the tenth of May, when Parisian police stormed the Ninth Congress of the Fifth Worker’s International, arresting Alain Badiou and the delegation of New Communards, and expelling the foreign delegations from the country. The outrage of the masses returned with a vengeance, and millions retook the streets of France in defiance of orders to stay indoors.

In the following days, dozens of courthouses, jails, and other government buildings were stormed by rioters and burned down. It began with an angry mob gathered around the courthouse at which Alain Badiou was to be tried. With the throng of people refusing orders to disperse, and most police busy elsewhere with belligerent strikers, the police holding Badiou in their custody decided against transporting him to the courthouse and asked to have his trial rescheduled. When the crowd heard that there would be no police entourage to harass, they turned their attention towards the court, storming it, ransacking it, and burning it to the ground. Another crowd laid siege to the jail holding Badiou and freed him later that day. This was the point of no return for the revolution — the spree of arson, prison riots, and jail breakouts it ignited was an escalation in violence from which there was no stepping back.

On May 15th, Le Pen ordered the French army to restore order to the nation by any means necessary. The brutal martial law that was established — a domestic occupation of sorts — saw the unconstitutional imprisonment and execution of hundreds of French citizens, and the deaths of thousands more as the riots devolved into guerrilla warfare.

On the first day of June, the IWW urged the French workers to seize and syndicalize the country’s means of production, declaring that the “twin tyrannies of the state and capital” had declared war on the working people and needed to be destroyed. Violence erupted at factories, warehouses, railroad stations and other industrial sites as armed workers attempted to capture them and private security forces fought back with lethal force.

The final death blow was dealt to the French establishment on June 28th, when leaked documents revealed that additional ECANAC funding plans included drastic reductions in military pensions. Tens of thousands of French soldiers, already weary of being at war with their fellow Frenchmen, began deserting the army, often even joining up with the New Communards or handing over their weapons to them. Just eighteen days later, the captured General Thierry Brukhard shook hands with Adeline Broduer as a plain red banner was unfurled from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Le Pen and most of the surviving members of her government fled to French Guiana in the days before Paris fell, where they continue to operate as a government in exile. The infant Socialist Republic of France has appointed Hugo Bachelot to the office of acting President of the republic while a new constitution is prepared for ratification. The idea which has dominated the discussion thus far is Adeline Broduer’s idea of “dual power by design”, a stable dual power of intent rather than the unstable dual power of circumstance described by Lenin. The basic idea is that a revolutionary worker’s union (likely the IWW) will function independently of the vanguard party, maintaining a decentralized state of workplace democracy while the revolutionary political organ directs the state with centralized governing power. Mao’s “mass line” philosophy and the allied party system utilized in China are among the other ideas currently favored by the constitutional drafting committees.

In response to the IWW’s active role in the Red Spring, a number of western nations have declared it and the Fifth International to be illegal terrorist organizations. Where the global left will go from here remains to be seen.