This article (make sure you read the comments as well) at Richard Seymour's blog, Lenin's Tomb, is a bit of inside baseball, leftist politics version, but worth the read. The author reads a Le Monde article on a recent meeting of French trade union leaders which signal their desire (their resignation, in the eyes of the blog post author) to working within the parliamentary system, their desire to avoid a widening of the struggle beyond their control. The author's key points:
[From a union leader]: “Our responsibility as trade unionists is to construct compromises that make sense, and not to threaten the legitimacy of parliament or politics.” The intersyndicale communiqué reminds that the mobilisations will continue “respecting property and people” and makes no mention of other actions and strikes concurrently underway, making links with other confrontations and thus generalising the movement.
What's interesting is the push-back in the comments, where readers criticize the piece:
The article is one-sided as it does not present the opposition to the trade union leadership within the unions themselves....It seems strange to rely on the supine media which sings Sarkozy's praise and has tried to downplay the strength of public opposition to pension reforms (70% opppose) and then try to extrapolate from those reports what will happen to the movement which has continued to grow, now drawing in students who are currently occupying school and universities and while the numbers of blockades increases.
I'd read the discussion here along the lines of Deleuze and Guattari's distinction of macro and micropolitics, or molar and molecular politics. The macro / molar concerns the centralized apparatuses (State and union), while the micro / molecular concerns the local and free-lance (the internal opposition in the unions, the wildcat student strikers, etc). To some extent this distinction maps onto representative vs direct democracy, but in any case, DG's phrase at A Thousand Plateaus 222 rings true: "Good or bad, politics and its judgments are always molar, but it is the molecular and its assessment that makes it or breaks it."
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