Other Democracies: The Yellow Vest Movement in France.

The protests against austerity policies in France that blossomed into the Yellow Vest movement in November, 2018 present challenges to those who still carry faith in electoral democracy.  While initially centering on fuel taxes, participants also are demanding raises to the minimum wage and the rollback of recent tax cuts for the wealthy and other pro-business policies.

Like other protests by the poor against pro-business policies that have bloomed across the world for decades, these protests against fuel price rises push back against neoliberal economic policies.  Although the Macron government argues the fuel price tax increase was to move the French economy towards a greener economy, French truck drivers, secretaries, care workers, and others with no room in their budgets are forced to pay costs they cannot bear. This is the cost of living in an electoral state where the leadership is not interested in popular opinion, but in its own narrow interests.

The history of policies generous to the rich and attacking the poor in France and many other economies worldwide often produces protest from the poor. But when do electoral democracies listen to the poor?

The difference of the Yellow Vest movement in France from many other protest movements is its lack of a center. This is a structure for democratic demand that does not replicate the centralized hierarchies of electoral governments, an organizing tactic that produces other politics. The turn away from centralization and towards openness to many constituents and viewpoints characterizes many political practices, what we term “Other Democracies.”

Commentators who are only familiar with centalized organizations assume that the Yellow Vest movement will be overtaken by already established political parties. This shows that commentators are not familiar with non-party movements, and can only conceive of politics in the narrow terms offered by electoral party policits. Yet the Yellow Vest movement has refused to align itself with established political parties, since they recognize the danger of participation in a centralized system tilted towards social elites.

The success of French democracy hangs in the balance of this struggle over public discussion.

Other struggles in Europe against neoliberalism, such as the Greek anti-austerity movement of 2010-2015 and the 2011 indignado movement in Spain, have shown the costs of allowing a popular movement to morph into political party activism. Austerity policies have continued apace after both of these movements were captured by political parties, and the pressures on low-wage workers, the unemployed, the disabled, and even the middle-class have not been reduced significantly.

One strategy of the privatization and wealth redistribution upwards policies known as neoliberalism or austerity is to attack public spaces. Presenting private spaces, such as shopping streets, mini-malls, and megastores, as gathering places for the public makes it more difficult for the public to do the important business of discussing urgent concerns. These privatized spaces displace citizenry roles to make roles as consumers more central in the life of the public.

The yellow vest movement members claims on traffic circles as meeting places revived the important activity in any democracy of a discussing those topics of concern for citizens.  When austerity policies remove safety nets ensuring all can meet basic needs and place intense pressures on the public, citizens would respond in any full democracy with discussion of how to meet basic needs and reduce the stresses of a lack of resources. So discussions in open, public spaces become important on a time frame driven not by parliamentary elections but by increasing pressure on the poor.

Macron’s attempts to reclaim public discussion and manage it to serve his own interests is an attempt to disrupt competing claims to represent the public’s interest by the Yellow Vest movement.  The smear tactics of sending in thugs and vandals to reduce public support for the Yellow Vest movement is an old tactic found since the nineteenth century in France (275-80), when the wealthy began using thugs to divide the poor and prevent mass movements.

Outside Europe similar struggles have led to different outcomes, as when multiple presidents were thrown out by popular meetings in public places in Argentina of 2001 and when the South Korean president was removed from office in 2017. Certainly Macron is aware of the high stakes, and will do whatever he can to remain in office.

Perhaps the greatest fear of those in command of electoral political systems is that they will lose their monopoly on the claim to represent the public. As Michel Foucault argued (271-88), unexpected associations of groups in horizontal solidarity is a major threat to the modern regime that enforces individuation in an effort to interrupt horizontal solidarities. Such horizontal solidarities were very successful in Europe between around 1780 and 1848, demanding accountability of political leaders to widespread concerns and changes in unequal distribution of wealth and political power.  These horizontal solidarities also attempted to disrupt actions of the wealthy that were harmful to common people, such as labor exploitation and the theft of family wealth through financial markets.

Democracy can thrive only when the urgent concerns of large social sectors are addressed by political leaders.  Yet electoral democracies in Europe and beyond have shown for decades that they are more responsive to the interests of the few than to the interests of the many. That is why structures for democratic practice other than the electoral state have long received wide support, even if these movements are overlooked by news commentators and policy experts.