Fighting Fascism in France, 1936 v. 2017

Fighting Fascism in France, Summer 1936:

Léon Blum’s Popular Front government establishes extensive labor law protections, including the right to collective bargaining, two weeks’ paid holidays, and 40-hour work week.

Fighting Fascism in France, Summer 2017:

Macron’s government uses summer holidays to ram through extensive labor law retrenchments, including provisions that ensure collective bargaining agreements protect workers who aren’t in unions and that prevent workers from having to answer work-related email and phone calls after hours.

Also, this:

… he’ll [Macron] ask Parliament for legislation that would let the government enact labor reforms by decree, avoiding momentum-sapping debate…

That’s how we fight fascism today: by an enabling act that allows the government to bypass political debate and rule by decree.

5 Comments

  1. jonnybutter June 30, 2017 at 4:33 pm | #

    an enabling act that allows the government to bypass political debate and rule by decree.

    Sounds like a reasonable definition of the whole zombie Euro Project.

  2. Dr. Andrew Joseph Pegoda June 30, 2017 at 4:33 pm | #

    It’s really appalling what is happening in many places in Europe, in Canada, and in the United States right now. Governments at all levels are growing more powerful and more abusive.

  3. If anybody tells me that he or she did not see THAT coming, I am going to smack that person with a wet kwa-SAW!

    • Oh, and if history is any guide… the French rank-and-file will resist, and the Macron-ista neo-libs will likely be forced into their first embarrassing back-down.

      • fosforos17 June 30, 2017 at 9:00 pm | #

        You think Blum was “fighting fascism?” Stupid. Blum could have fought fascism when Hitler and Mussolini set their Francoite thugs upon the Spanish Republic. Instead he (with those “antifascists” Stalin and Baldwin) lead the “Nonintervention Committee” to prevent aid to the Spanish Revolution. Even worse, he kept Abd-el-Krim in jail to assure Franco’s continued domination of colonized (northern) Morocco. Sp when you say “… he’ll [Macron] ask Parliament for legislation that would let the government enact labor reforms by decree, avoiding momentum-sapping debate…That’s how we fight fascism today: by an enabling act that allows the government to bypass political debate and rule by decree” you i9gnore that Macron, continuing Hollande, has no more intention of “fighting Facism” than Blum had in his time. Less indeed, Because his Napoleonic political conceptions are exactly what 21st-century fascism (aka neoliberalism) is all about.

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