I hate mawkish political sentimentality. You won’t find phrases like “echoes of ‘68” liberally sprinkled through this blog and you certainly won’t find any talk of “fiery continental temperaments.” You won’t find painterly descriptions of clouds of tear-gas hanging over our heads or lurid retellings of how I screamed profanities at French police while the tears streamed down my face and the gas choked me to the point of vomiting. I’m not a machismo-romantic and, aside from anything else, the current mobilisations in France don’t need that kind of talking up; the facts speak for themselves.

And the facts are these: in opposition to new labour laws (the First Employment Contract, or ‘CPE’ in French) that will essentially allow bosses to summarily fire workers under 26, French workers’ and students’ organisations have launched strikes, demonstrations and occupations of universities and colleges. The demonstration on Saturday March 18th brought more than 500,000 workers and students onto the streets of Paris. When those at the head of the demonstration reached the Place de la Nation, French riot police manoeuvred en masse, blocked off several key exits and greeted demonstrators with repeated baton charges and barrages of tear gas. The French riot police are one of the most notoriously brutal arms of the French state, and this movement has clearly got them panicked. That alone shows that it means something. It was incredible to be part of that demonstration, and just being on the march was enough to convince me of the intense energy of the mobilisation.

French trade unions have now called a general strike for March 28th (conveniently coinciding with British public-sector workers’ 1,000,000 strong strike in defence of pensions). It’s a depressing thought that while over 10,000,000 workers and students will be on strike in France (along with 1,000,000 on our own doorsteps), a tiny minority of NUS’s membership will congregate in a Blackpool conference centre to set policy that will undoubtedly be buried by next year’s leadership and mean nothing to the vast majority of our members. I don’t want to play down the importance of our annual conference, but comparing what we’ll be doing on March 28th to what our French comrades will be up to does show you how far we’ve got to go.

It’s not as simple as saying “we should copy them”; there are some objective factors that make it easier for such a movement to develop in France. The massively high unemployment rates amongst young workers (twice the European average) and the continuing trend towards precarious, casualised work – coupled with the existence of a labour movement still willing to put up a meaningful fight on key class issues – make for objective circumstances that give our French brothers and sisters a bit of a political head-start.

We cannot directly or immediately replicate what they’ve achieved, but we can learn from their experiences. We can learn from their example of making decisions in cross-campus General Assemblies open to all – far more democratic and accessible than bureaucratic union councils that struggle to quorum. We can learn from their emphasis on student-worker unity, the centrality of the organised working-class and their example of building local liaison committees to co-ordinate joint activity – up to and including joint strikes – between students and workers. We can learn from their spirit and willingness to take on the government in an uncompromising struggle to defend students’ rights and welfare. Most of all, we can learn from their understanding of what unions are for and what they can achieve. UNEF (the nearest French equivalent to NUS) has a lot wrong with it (it’s almost totally led by members of the French equivalent of the Labour Party, for a start), but even with all its problems its fundamental perspective is still heathier than NUS’s. It describes itself as ‘le syndicat pour les étudiants.’ ‘Syndicat’ means ‘trade union.’ It knows what it’s about and why it exists.

Disputes like Gate Gourmet and the Irish ferries dispute show that the tendencies in global capitalism towards increasing casualisation and insecurity – what the French call ‘precarité’ – are just that: global. Soon they could be effecting NUS members in the way they currently effect French students and young workers. When that happens, British students will need a union that has its head screwed on about properly representing and campaigning for them on campus and helping them get organised in the workplace. If we in NUS want to play that role, we could desperately do with some French lessons.

In the meantime, get your SU to send a message of support to students at a university or sixth-form in France. If you can, send a delegation. Publicise the French struggle on your union’s website. Tell your mates about it. When there’s such an inspiring example of what a militant, class-focused student movement can achieve going on just across the English Channel, it’d be political negligence of the worst kind for our unions to ignore it. Don’t let that happen. Force the bureaucrats, the managers-in-the-making and the Blairite MPs of the future who currently run NUS to look at the French struggle in great, great detail. Bring it to their attention whenever you can, and maybe they’ll see just how lacking their leadership, their politics and their entire perspective really are.

Salutations, dans la solidarité -

Daniel Randall

For more information on the struggle in France, check out:

www.free-education.org.uk

www.libcom.org/blog/

and, if you speak French:

www.lcr-rouge.org

www.lutte-ouvriere.org

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