French Left: From the fringe to vindication

PARIS – As printing presses churn out revolutionary leaflets, one of France’s most popular leftist politicians says plunging stocks, frozen credit markets and bank failures are signs the world economic system is rotten – and needs to be overthrown.

“A page is being turned,” declares Olivier Besancenot, leader of France’s Revolutionary Communist League. He is no longer just a voice from the fringe.With markets careening, his sentiments are being echoed in cafes and at dinner tables and government meetings around the world – but especially in capitalism-wary France.The mood here today is anxious, like many places, but there’s a note of grim satisfaction underneath.It’s a sense that the statist model, which Louis XIV championed in the 17th century and which made France look so stuck-in-the-mud in recent years while places like Britain bounded up the financial food chain, wasn’t obsolete after all.Sitting at the bar in Chez Cosette, a cafe in Paris’ rebellious Belleville district, 44-year-old management consultant Daniel Boudia says France could be heading toward another revolution.”I don’t believe in long reform or consensual change: Latin society doesn’t work like that,” said Boudia, a former trader who rode out the 1987 stock market crash.”We accumulate tensions and eventually there is an earthquake.We are near to an earthquake.”When he came to power last year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was meant to shake up the stagnant, interventionist French traditions, and bring back the French bankers who had jumped across the English Channel for lucrative jobs in London.He embraced the American entrepreneurial spirit and pledged to free up mortgage lending and hiring and firing.Now, teamed up with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he’s among the foremost cheerleaders for a new global economic order that will rein in the perceived excesses of the free market.Capitalism’s critics say the crisis is bigger than a financial or banking problem that can be fixed with more or better regulation – or with wads of taxpayer money.It’s the system itself that is broken.Just like a junkie, they say, the world has lost control and allowed its appetites to overwhelm it.France has long been a spiritual homeland for leftism, from the revolutionaries of 1789 to Jean-Paul Sartre and other 20th century intellectuals.According to a 2007 survey of 18 developed and developing countries by Globescan, an international pollster, France is one of only two countries along with Turkey where a majority disapprove of the capitalist system.The financial meltdown has confirmed their doubts, says Stephane Rozes, head of French polling firm CSA.”For 15 years French people have been hostile to economic liberalism,” he said.”In the past, it was a theoretical perception, a question of culture.Now they feel they are dealing with something real.”Besancenot’s solution is a planned global economy, with stabilised prices and – where possible – decentralised policies made by consensus rather than by an elite.His supporters say all nations should be treated more equally in global trade.Besancenot, who has long been calling for revolution, says he hopes the drama of recent weeks serves as a wake-up call “which allows us to open the eyes of millions of people so they understand that it is time, urgent and necessary to change society.”Speaking from the LCR offices in the Paris suburb of Montreuil, the two-time presidential candidate who continues to work as a postman holds forth on capitalism’s evils.”It’s a system where we produce first and make problems afterwards through the laws of supply and demand which create a lot of waste, which creates climate chaos, which makes social catastrophe.We are proposing to change the software.”At Liberation, the newspaper founded by Sartre in the wake of the 1968 protest movements, editor Laurent Joffrin talks of the “monster comparable to Frankenstein that no one can control” and the revenge of Keynes, the economist renowned for his advocacy of government intervention.Last week, the newspaper asked 17 artists and intellectuals to comment.Opinions ranged from a comparison to mad cow disease to a critique of a “formidable and intelligent financial system where no one understands anything.”In the Nouvel Observateur weekly, columnist Jacques Julliard rejoices at the end to the “diatribes against archaic statism of the French.””Where have the (economic) liberals gone?” he asked.”Since Bush nationalised the American banking system we don’t hear from them anymore.”In Les Deux Magots, a cafe once associated with Sartre and his existential friends and now a respite for high-end shoppers on the Boulevard Saint Germain, Thierry d’Olivera put down his copy of Le Monde.”We are victims of capitalism,” said the 50-year-old lighting engineer as he sipped his afternoon coffee.”It’s the hunt for profits, the need to get as much money as quickly as possible, the greed that has brought us here.”Unemployed Leila Comolli, 27, agrees.”We should get back to the real economy: artisans, farmers, people who make things,” she said from the terrace of Belleville’s Aux Balcons, a cafe in a more working class area of town.Economists say they’ve got it all wrong: that the image of wise politicians taming crazy uncontrolled markets should not be used as a pretext for allowing them to take over the running of the economy.Historian and economist Nicolas Baverez says “eulogies to the wisdom of politicians against the craziness of markets don’t hold true: public authorities have a direct responsibility in the birth and development of this crisis.”When he wrote a back-page editorial in Le Monde arguing the best way to recover from the crisis is to let the markets return to normal as soon as possible, he was deluged with sackloads of mail decrying his dangerous views.Nampa-APHe is no longer just a voice from the fringe.With markets careening, his sentiments are being echoed in cafes and at dinner tables and government meetings around the world – but especially in capitalism-wary France.The mood here today is anxious, like many places, but there’s a note of grim satisfaction underneath.It’s a sense that the statist model, which Louis XIV championed in the 17th century and which made France look so stuck-in-the-mud in recent years while places like Britain bounded up the financial food chain, wasn’t obsolete after all.Sitting at the bar in Chez Cosette, a cafe in Paris’ rebellious Belleville district, 44-year-old management consultant Daniel Boudia says France could be heading toward another revolution.”I don’t believe in long reform or consensual change: Latin society doesn’t work like that,” said Boudia, a former trader who rode out the 1987 stock market crash.”We accumulate tensions and eventually there is an earthquake.We are near to an earthquake.”When he came to power last year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was meant to shake up the stagnant, interventionist French traditions, and bring back the French bankers who had jumped across the English Channel for lucrative jobs in London.He embraced the American entrepreneurial spirit and pledged to free up mortgage lending and hiring and firing.Now, teamed up with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he’s among the foremost cheerleaders for a new global economic order that will rein in the perceived excesses of the free market.Capitalism’s critics say the crisis is bigger than a financial or banking problem that can be fixed with more or better regulation – or with wads of taxpayer money.It’s the system itself that is broken.Just like a junkie, they say, the world has lost control and allowed its appetites to overwhelm it.France has long been a spiritual homeland for leftism, from the revolutionaries of 1789 to Jean-Paul Sartre and other 20th century intellectuals.According to a 2007 survey of 18 developed and developing countries by Globescan, an international pollster, France is one of only two countries along with Turkey where a majority disapprove of the capitalist system.The financial meltdown has confirmed their doubts, says Stephane Rozes, head of French polling firm CSA.”For 15 years French people have been hostile to economic liberalism,” he said.”In the past, it was a theoretical perception, a question of culture.Now they feel they are dealing with something real.”Besancenot’s solution is a planned global economy, with stabilised prices and – where possible – decentralised policies made by consensus rather than by an elite.His supporters say all nations should be treated more equally in global trade.Besancenot, who has long been calling for revolution, says he hopes the drama of recent weeks serves as a wake-up call “which allows us to open the eyes of millions of people so they understand that it is time, urgent and necessary to change society.”Speaking from the LCR offices in the Paris suburb of Montreuil, the two-time presidential candidate who continues to work as a postman holds forth on capitalism’s evils.”It’s a system where we produce first and make problems afterwards through the laws of supply and demand which create a lot of waste, which creates climate chaos, which makes social catastrophe.We are proposing to change the software.”At Liberation, the newspaper founded by Sartre in the wake of the 1968 protest movements, editor Laurent Joffrin talks of the “monster comparable to Frankenstein that no one can control” and the revenge of Keynes, the economist renowned for his advocacy of government intervention.Last week, the newspaper asked 17 artists and intellectuals to comment.Opinions ranged from a comparison to mad cow disease to a critique of a “formidable and intelligent financial system where no one understands anything.”In the Nouvel Observateur weekly, columnist Jacques Julliard rejoices at the end to the “diatribes against archaic statism of the French.””Where have the (economic) liberals gone?” he asked.”Since Bush nationalised the American banking system we don’t hear from them anymore.”In Les Deux Magots, a cafe once associated with Sartre and his existential friends and now a respite for high-end shoppers on the Boulevard Saint Germain, Thierry d’Olivera put down his copy of Le Monde.”We are victims of capitalism,” said the 50-year-old lighting engineer as he sipped his afternoon coffee.”It’s the hunt for profits, the need to get as much money as quickly as possible, the greed that has brought us here.”Unemployed Leila Comolli, 27, agrees.”We should get back to the real economy: artisans, farmers, people who make things,” she said from the terrace of Belleville’s Aux Balcons, a cafe in a more working class area of town.Economists say they’ve got it all wrong: that the image of wise politicians taming crazy uncontrolled markets should not be used as a pretext for allowing them to take over the running of the economy.Historian and economist Nicolas Baverez says “eulogies to the wisdom of politicians against the craziness of markets don’t hold true: public authorities have a direct responsibility in the birth and development of this crisis.”When he wrote a back-page editorial in Le Monde arguing the best way to recover from the crisis is to let the markets return to normal as soon as possible, he was deluged with sackloads of mail decrying his dangerous views.Nampa-AP