A-Infos (en) France, Mouette Enragée #40 - A Vigilant Employer - What Are the Bosses of Capécure Afraid of? (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

"We don't want to relive episodes like the demonstrations against 
pension reform."* ---- When the bosses of Capécure consider their 
hegemony challenged, incomprehension and indignation are replaced by 
recrimination and repression. In this regard, they know how to count on 
the local media outlets of the bourgeois press and the iron fist of the 
police. ---- The Sacrosanct Right to Property... ---- During the latest 
attack by Élisabeth Borne's government against the retirement age, the 
industrial district of Capécure was the scene of direct clashes with the 
bosses' power exercised there and the police forces deployed to 
guarantee, in good bourgeois terms, "freedom of work and movement."

We remember the police roadblocks set up at the very first 
demonstration, preventing the procession from accessing the port area. 
Thus, the local authorities legitimized the Boulogne employers' right to 
extend their property rights and authority beyond the confines of their 
factories, by seizing public space. Experienced as an affront by the 
thousands of demonstrators gathered that day, this insurmountable 
barrier revealed the truth of the rule of law. In this case, the law is 
erased at the threshold of the higher interests of capital.

A Contested Hegemony

The humiliation would not go unpunished. For several nights, dozens of 
workers disputed with the bosses and the police access to and use of the 
port area, appropriating the necessary equipment on the spot to block 
the movement of the goods they had just produced a few hours earlier. 
Spontaneously, they regained control, prohibited its use, and denied 
ownership. This was all it took for employers, the sub-prefect, the city 
council, and the local press, in a seemingly unanimity that spoke 
volumes, to deliberately overshadow the reality of exploited labor, 
preferring to condemn in turn "the rioters," "violent individuals," 
"black blocs," who came from who knows where... The ensuing repression 
would lead several of them before the courts. None of them came from 
elsewhere; all were workers...

A Predatory and Weakened Employer Class

Each time its hegemony was challenged, the employers reacted, sometimes 
fiercely. Labor records tell us of shootings, assassinations, beatings, 
trials, dismissals... which never fueled any other desire than to 
reaffirm a power that was never established and always contradicted. It 
is precisely because they are clear-sighted about their organic 
fragility that employers seek to protect themselves from it.
Aware of their class interests, Boulogne's employers do not, however, 
form a homogeneous whole. Torn apart by the competition between them, 
divided by the size of the companies themselves and the nature of the 
capital that dominates them, they form an aggregate dominated by a few 
transnational groups amidst a slew of SMEs...

At the head of a sector greatly weakened by the collapse of the resource 
for which they bear full responsibility, they persist in their headlong 
rush toward productivism. Although they pride themselves on being at the 
helm of France's leading fishing port, each decade in the past has seen 
a drastic drop in recorded volumes, and the 300,000 tons of imported 
materials cannot mask this worrying reality.

The employers intend to ward off this curse in the future by building 
aquaculture plants and producing raw materials off-site. For every 
calamity it creates, capital substitutes an even worse one. The 
destruction of fish resources is followed by battery-farming factories, 
Henry Ford, Elon Musk...

Contradictions are sharpening
The supposedly glorious years of the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer are now a 
memory that the violence of exploitation and the exhaustion of workers 
in exchange for "good wages" will never make us miss. Grappling with 
exacerbated contradictions, today's employers are now buying labor under 
the degraded conditions of the period: temporary workers, minimum wage 
for life, and high turnover. The Fordist boom is well and truly behind 
us, and with it, the social compromise on which it was based. How can we 
be surprised, then, that the terms and intensity of the struggle also 
harden when the bourgeoisie imposes longer sentences on the exploited...

The return of the employers' militias?

Anticipating inevitable antagonisms, a "club of entrepreneurs has been 
formed to better secure the city's economic lifeblood"(1). In order to 
combat, they say, all kinds of "attacks, vandalism, and theft," a 
"vigilance charter" has been established and "security officers have 
been appointed to take turns throughout the day"(2)... It's always lurid 
to hear employers complain about theft, when theft, through the 
extortion of surplus value they practice on living labor, is their sole 
reason for existing in the world...

Are we witnessing the return of employer militias? The serious events 
that occurred in 2023 during the order pickers' strike at Vertbaudet 
warn us against any amnesia on the subject(3). While weighing much less 
heavily and relating to a completely different story than that of the 
textile magnates of Northern France, the small world of local SMEs 
nevertheless knows it is at a turning point. For now, it claims to 
prioritize "its contacts with law enforcement." Numerous struggles have 
taught us that one practice in no way excludes the other; often, the two 
are combined if necessary...
-----
*Alain Ducamp, Director of Océan Délices. La VdN. 06/23/2023.
(1), (2)Ibid.
(3)Vertbaudet: an operation worthy of an "employer militia" against a 
CGT union member. Read at: 
https://rapportsdeforce.fr/classes-en-lutte/vertbaudet-une-operation-digne-dune-milice-patronale-contre-un-syndicaliste-cgt-051718114

https://lamouetteenragee.noblogs.org/
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