France

Yes the present hour is very severe at least

May Day 2013 leaflet by Groupe Express-Roularta, Paris.

This is a response to a leaflet produced by the striking workers of the Aulnay PSA (Peugeot-Citroen) plant which is due for imminent closure. Translated by Chronos Publications.

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Cover of A Tale of Two Cities

Novel about the plight of the French peasantry in the years leading up to the French revolution, and the parallels with life in London. Arguably Dickens most sophisticated work politically speaking. Two Cities graphically describes the corruption and brutality of the French Monarchy and the plight of the peasantry.

Eyes to the South: French anarchists & Algeria

Submitted by wojtek on Apr 18 2013 10:29

'Eyes to the South' studies the currents of the Algerian revolution alongside the development of French anarchist thought from the 1950s to the present. The book presents a fluid mosaic of actions, writings, and theoretical positions as it follows the shifting contexts of Algerian politics and society and the evolving consciousness and organising of French anarchists in all their diversity. The result is an engaging and fresh approach to both transnational politics and anarchist ideas.

Available for purchase at AK Press here.

Good morning, midnight - Jean Rhys

A lonely widow drinks to forget in a foreign city, in this modernist feminist classic based on Rhys' own experiences. Trigger warning, features a rape passage.

Quite like old times,' the room says.
'Yes? No?'
There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse.

The meditations of young immigrant workers - Mogniss H. Abdallah

The following text was written by Mogniss H. Abdallah, a second generation immigrant and activist living in Paris. It was published in Patchwork,Paris: Cinel, 1980. Mogniss' involvement in developing immigration media, including "Rock Against Police" concerts, led to a (failed) attempt by the French government to deport him in 1979. Three years after this article was published he would found, with his brother, the IM'media Agency that produces a variety of reports and films on immigrant struggles.

Women in the cleaning sector and hotel-restaurant industry: syndicalist conversations

The purpose of these interviews is to provide an insight into the situation and the struggles of female workers in the cleaning sector and the hotel-restaurant industry. To this end, we have met cleaning and catering trade union members of the CNT-Solidarité Ouvrière in the Paris region.

More generally, we hope to encourage readers to think about the relationships between women's struggles and labour unions, from the perspective of emancipatory social transformation. Of course, this article does not claim to exhaust the subject, but rather elicit contributions.

Down and out in Paris and London - George Orwell

Tramping memoirs from Orwell, where he worked in Paris as a dishwasher and then travelled around London, going from one bedsit to another.

O scathful harm, condition of poverte! - Chauser

I

The Rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.

The French strikes of May-June 1968 - Bruno Astarian

A demystifying review essay and analysis summarizing the events of May-June 1968 in France with an almost exclusive focus on the strikes of the workers, based on reports and testimonies garnered from a voluminous bibliography, providing a sobering reassessment of the largest nationwide strike in French history, which the author defines as a “generalized non-insurrectional work stoppage”.

Translation into English completed January 2013

"Fighting For Ourselves " - lots to learn, a few things to criticize

Submitted by rooieravotr on Jan 2 2013 14:40

"Fighting For Ourselves", a new book by which SolFed explains it s view on anarchosyndicalism, deserves to be widely read. In what follows, I try to review the book, both highlighting its strengths and pointing to a few problems I encountered on the way.

"Fighting For Ourselves" , a new book in which Solidarity Federation (SolFed) explains its views on how to struggle against the bosses and the state, why anarchosyndicalism makes sense in that respect, and what anarchosyndicalist strategy could look like in the twenty first century, is a challenge to read and to think about.

Squatters storm Vatican Embassy in Paris

Submitted by working class s... on Jan 1 2013 16:54

Yesterday around 70 immigrant squatters and protesters have stormed the Vatican Embassy in Paris in protest against the church and its decision to evict squatters from an empty church in Lille to “preserve the sacred space”. Many of the squatters are now on hunger strike.

The protest started mid-morning as the squatters pushed their way through police and security staff into the Embassy. They unfurled a banner through an upstairs window that read, “Jesus defended the stranger. What have you Christians done for your undocumented brothers?” The protesters decided that they had ‘made their point’, and finally left the building two hours later.