Going by social media reactions, I'm seeing these street-blocking protests getting praises from both people on the left and the right. I'm trying to decipher what I can by translating French articles on the matter but I'm still not entirely sure what the ideology behind this protest is.
I mean, going against a colonialist government is always based, but I'd feel a little icky supporting the movement if it's chuds throwing a tantrum that they're forced to pay their workers living wages, or can't dump pigshit into waterways or something.
It's over farm subsidies, economic protectionism, and diesel taxes for farmers that are being economically squeezed by the other two things. Those are all totally valid material concerns that I agree with. They're chuds because of the idiotification that comes from the separation of town and country that I'm opposed to as a Marxist agrarian, so I can't hold that against them like I would the Dutch farmers protesting immigration and methane reduction efforts.
I think the impulse to pull up the ladder is shit, but I still ultimately sympathize with people who see themselves being squeezed off their land with sharecroppers and one sided regulation.
In both cases, the struggle is finding a broad base of class consciousness. The "left and right agree" shit is illustrative of a common denominator at the working class. It's the ideology that divides people, but material condition pierces the contradiction.
Are they cutting agricultural subsidies? I actually have no idea about what they're doing, I assumed it was something stupid like the Dutch farmers.
They want to add subsidies to offset skyrocketing costs of production, climate change restrictions on land/input usage, and the ability of imported/industrial agriculture to undercut the prices that unionised smallholder farmers have to charge. It's an anti-globalisation/anti-free trade/pro-union protest more than anything. Like India they're one of those countries where there's an epidemic of farmer suicides because of how much debt they're forced to go into just to do a job they can't make a living off of.
Awesome thanks for the explanation
also cheap Ukranian agri imports too, right?
but also, France proper always does this when it loses part of its colonial empire, so I think its also about the Sahel in a way