mardi 17 juin 2008

Low turnout. . .

The media report strikes and manifestations 'best' when there's a perceived failure in the worker action. Today 'only' 500 000 people demonstrated across France against the government imposed increase in the rate of exploitation and the news gleefully reported it as a defeat. It was nothing of the sort of course. These demos - like the ones in the UK against the Iraq fiasco - work on many more levels than those that the cameras can see. Links are forged, ideas exchanged and tactics planned and compared and most importantly - one's anger is confirmed and socialised. Your political anger on a demo is suddenly not just confined to your four walls or your workplace where it feels incongruous and hemmed in, but out with others who feel the same and who can add substance to your grievance and confirm and strengthen the conviction it emanates from. True, they can be frustrating, police littered rainfests but to stop going on them is to be absorbed into the silent mass of happy willing slaves. This is why the governance's propaganda machine must continually battle against the expression of such political resistance either by the (by now laughable) ruse of lying about the numbers or just ignoring or misrepresenting them. . . .

Isolated, demoralised and depressed - don't let them (and their union lackeys) do it to you