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General Strikes and Massive Demonstrations Challenge Neoliberal Reforms in France
| by Richard Greeman | Summer 2011 |
Since the Crash of 2008, European governments and the banks that control them have been trying to make the working people pay the bill for the massive bailouts that saved the financial markets from near-total collapse. As in the United States, a previously undetected "debt crisis" has been declared while traders continue to pay themselves fabulous salaries and bonuses. Suddenly there is "no money" when it comes to paying for the health, education, retirement, and social services that benefit the general public.
Sartre and the Idea of Freedom in the Anti-Colonial Struggle
| by Dan La Botz | Summer 2011 |
In the late 1960s it seemed to many almost certain that Jean-Paul Sartre would be remembered as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century and the most important public intellectual on the left of that era. Certainly it seemed so to me at the time. Sartre had in the 1930s taken Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and its reactionary and religious version of phenomenology and transformed them in Being and Nothingness into his new humanist philosophy of existentialism, a leftwing philosophy of freedom.
Welfare in France: A Review
| Betty Reid Mandell | March 3, 2011 |
The Bureaucrat and the Poor: Encounters in French Welfare Offices
By Vincent Dubois
Ashgate, 2010
Originally published in French as La vie au guichet: Relation administrative et traitement de la misère By Economica, Paris 2010 (1st edition 1999) Translated by Jean Yves-Bart
The Popular Front, A Social and Political Tragedy: The Case of France
| by Dan La Botz | Winter 2011 |
Decades since the spring of 1934 when the Communists first proposed the Popular Front as their strategy for fighting fascism and even longer since the summer of 1939 when it was suddenly terminated by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Popular Front—the alliance of the Communists with Socialists, liberals, and even sometimes conservative political parties—remains an issue for the left.
Contextualizing the Threat of Radical Islam
| Richard Greeman | October 27, 2010 |
Note: This article begins a series by Richard Greeman. Longtime socialist and international activist Richard Greeman is best know for his studies and translations of Victor Serge, the Franco-Russian novelist and revolutionary. His recent book Beware of Vegetarian Sharks: Radical Rants and Internationalists Essays (Illustrated) is available online at Amazon.com and may be downloaded for free at www.lulu.com/content/923573
Intellectuals and Anti-Fascism: For a Critical Historization
| by Enzo Traverso | Winter 2004 |
We are witnessing today a paradoxical and unsettling phenomenon: the rise of fascist-inspired political movements in the European arena (from France to Italy, from Belgium to Austria), accompanied, in the heart of intellectual circles, by a massive campaign to denigrate the entire anti-fascist tradition.
France: Crescendo of the Class Struggle
| by Vincent Presumey | Winter 2004 |
In France we have just experienced a great wave of strikes that directly addressed matters of political power. French history is defined by explosions of militancy which, for our governing class and for most of our journalists, are a "French sickness" that would be good to get rid of: before 2003 there was 1995; before 1995, 1968; before 1968, 1953 and so forth, all the way back to the Revolution. But this time there is something new: the latest wave of militant action is not an end to itself and is only an introduction.
Cultural relativism
| Lois Weiner | November 5, 2009 |
Are all cultures are equally valid and commendable? asks Peter Tatchell.
French Workers Face the Crisis
| by Léon Crémieux | Summer 2009 |
TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL SEITZ
GUADELOUPE HAS MADE AN IMPRESSION . . . but not yet on the French union movement.
The capitalist crisis affects France as it does all industrialized countries.The ingredients are the same: