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Sorry Lee for replying to the whole digest. Email clients are easy enough to operate, but one get's confused with the innumerable options. Anyway, responding to email exercises my mind in otherwise dull suroundings. Today, French General Strike which resulted in blocking the A11 freeway where I live [6 milllion euros a day according to a comrade who works for the French tax office, mainly Renault, Auchan, Decathlon, etc... ]. The problem being that the A11 freeway is mainly connected to production zones (Renault), which can simply slow down production when the freeway is blocked for a day or two. IT's the big supermarkets on the A11 from Le Mans to Rennes or Nantes that really cause the riot police to come out. BLocking all possibilities for supermarket consumption represents a loss of revenue of over ... 5 million euros a day when one takes into account the loss of consumption revenue associated with Rennes (3 million euros) and Nantes (2 million euros). Weird thing is blocking production zones only draws apathy, blocking the big super-markets around major cities creates incredible anger. Weird ? No, just the logic of things. But it is easier to block the production zones than the consumption zones, because of the existence of city ring-roads which enable consumers to reach the super-market car-parks. Where they are greated by hostile strikers. But the super-markets still function. Was on strike all day, blocked the ring-road and was rewarded by the trade-unions "calling upon Sarkozy to listen to the people" (instead of "telling the people to make Sarkozy listen"). I'm sure Sarkozy was listening. It's all nonsensne, most French trade unions being led by the French Socialist Party and Parti de Gauche/Communist Party, which are only out to get votes for the March elections but who would have enacted EXACTLY the same budget-cuts had they been in power. Actually, I KNOW they would... because the last Socialist Party in Government in France (2001) resulted in the de-indexation of wages on inflation, the legalization of the right to fire over 500 employees at once, complete pay freeezes for all public sector employees, and enormous tax-cuts for the rich. The NPA are also getting on my nerves, but enough said about them. They control many of the trade-union positions, many town-councillors positions, their ambition is to replace the old historic French CP(Now, Parti de Gauche) and Socialist Party. The NPA is too interested in taking control of other organizations to really build it's own organization. Anyway, it's all depressing, any way you look at it. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
