This social right is under attack not only in France, but throughout Europe. All governments, whether they be Labour (Britain), Socialist Party (Spain), conservative (France, Italy) or a coalition of right and “left” (Germany), are seeking to destroy legal protections achieved by the working class and dismantle the system of social benefits established in the post-World War Two period.

The universal character of this attack makes clear that it is the product not of a single politician (French Prime Minister de Villepin), a single party (the Gaullists), or even a single government. It is the response of the ruling elites and all of the bourgeois parties, left as well as right, to a global crisis of the capitalist system—an economic system that they all defend.

The aim of the CPE is not fundamentally different from that of the Hartz IV laws, introduced by the previous Social Democratic and Green coalition government in Germany. It is in line with the social “reforms” insisted upon by the European Union commission, the European Central Bank, and big business internationally.

Simply put: the continued subordination of human needs to private profit and the accumulation of personal wealth—whether in France, Britain, Japan or the USA—means the destruction of the living standards and basic rights of the working class.

This is why the struggle of students, youth and workers in France raises the need to build a new, revolutionary leadership—one that will fight for the unification of the working class across Europe and internationally on the basis of socialist policies and the struggle for the working class to take political power.

The precondition for a successful defence of the workers’ and students’ interests is the understanding that the old organisations—the trade unions, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party—cannot and will not conduct the necessary struggle against the capitalist system. None of these organisations have even raised the demand for the bringing down of the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and President Jacques Chirac. Instead, they are pleading with the government to make some kind of cosmetic concession to the mass opposition to the CPE, while they work to exhaust and demoralise the anti-government mobilisation.

The students’ determination to defeat the CPE remains undisminished, as was made clear by the statement issued Sunday by the National Student Coordination meeting in Aix-en-Provence, which demanded the government’s resignation and vowed to block roads and train tracks on Thursday if Villepin did not give in.

More
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/fran-m28.shtml