On Monday, farmers were once more on the move. They have one great merit: they don’t let themselves be pushed around. When things are bad, they take action. This fighting spirit should inspire all workers.
If many small and middling farmers are badly treated, what about the tens of thousands of workers in the automotive, chemical, steel and retail industries, who could soon find themselves without a livelihood? What about the millions of blue-collar, white-collar and precarious workers forced to go without because basic food supplies are too expensive and wages haven’t followed inflation.
Worse still, the government wants to impose further sacrifices on workers to pay off the public deficit. It's a world turned upside down: the livelihoods of those who are the most useful and indispensable to society are under threat, while the major parasites, financiers, shareholders and billionaires wallow in extravagant luxury.
While workers at Michelin or Auchan, threatened with redundancy, live in anguish about what will become of them, members of the Michelin and Mulliez families live like kings.
While some farmers toil from morning to night, not knowing if they'll ever be able to earn a living, money is pouring into the coffers of the agri-food, chemical and fertilizer trusts, of the seed companies, farm machinery manufacturers, supermarkets and banks that are strangling them.
We should not let anyone trample upon us: collective struggle is the only way to gain respect! But we still need to know what we're fighting for, and against whom.
The farmers' mobilization, organized by the FNSEA (the largest farmers’ organization in France), is directed against the trade treaty that the European Union is in the process of concluding with Latin America, the Mercosur. But Mercosur is not yet in place, so it is not responsible for their current difficulties.
Mercosur is being used to deter attention away from the crux of the matter: the domination of larger capitalists over smaller producers. The latter are still caught between their suppliers and their buyers, i.e. the agri-food industry and supermarkets.
For example, the Besnier family, the owners of Lactalis and of a 40 billion-euro fortune, have decided to collect less milk to guarantee its margins. 500 dairy farmers find themselves without a buyer. How many of them will go out of business?
Small farmers, like wage earners, live under the diktat of big business, and their labor enriches a whole lot of parasites. The most powerful farmers, on the other hand, play in the big league. Just like Arnaud Rousseau, the leader of the most influential agricultural union (FNSEA) and boss of the company Avril famous for its Lesieur and Puget vegetable oils, they profit from international trade by increasing their exports.
Not all farmers have the same interests. Will the small farmers be able to impose their own interests, or will the larger ones be able to take the lion's share? Time will tell.
Like the small farmers, the workers under attack must target those truly responsible. Michelin, Stellantis and Valeo all hide behind international competition, which they call “unfair” when they lose out. This rhetoric is taken up by all politicians and sometimes by major trade union leaders. But to denounce the Chinese or the Brazilians is to exonerate French bosses right here from any responsibility, and to leave workers helpless.
The capitalist trusts that whine about foreign competition are defending the laws of the market and competition on a national and international scale. And they're the main players, because for them, competition is the only way to “eat out of your neighbor's bowl”, as Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares so elegantly put it.
The only concern of these vultures is to devour each other in order to gain market share and be more profitable than their rivals. All, of course, with the lives of the workers.
So, factory workers, employees, railroad workers, public sector workers and small farmers, if we want to be respected, we have no choice but to fight for our class interests against the big bosses who exploit us, against their rapacity and the madness of their system. And we have to fight for a completely different society, one that is collectively organized, planned and free of blind competition.
Nathalie Arthaud