Walk… the government doesn’t care!

Demonstration of this March 7 in Paris. Some 700,000 people according to the unions, 80,000 according to the police… a ratio of 1 to 10 that reminds us of the contradictory and radically unequal estimates expressed during the demonstrations of 2020–2022 in Belgium. Anyway, the Senate voted, and doesn’t care how many of them were protesting in the street… Policies « move forward », inexorably. 

At Kairos, having scoured every event since 2020, we wonder:

• on the relevance of still questioning the governments? Isn’t this a sign of a profound misunderstanding of their true function, a transmission belt for the interests of capital? Do we need to remind you of the political corruption, the passages from the public to the private sector and vice versa, the offshore accounts, the dubious proximities? What else can we expect from them? How can we believe that they work for the public good?

• In the same sense, isn’t it obvious that the government doesn’t give a damn about the protesters? What does he really have to fear? He plays on division and knows that he would be in danger without the support of his police force, which is a bulwark against the anger of the people. That is why this government gives the police a special status, which includes the risks and hardships of the job. Funny, or cynical, to know that the risks taken by the police in framing the demonstrators who protest against a pension reform that will make them work longer, will allow them to work less long.

• The media keeps the monopoly of the representation of reality, eager not to reveal that many citizens do not agree with the government. Their propaganda reveals their concern to maintain the system and avoid a massive popular revolt. Without democratic control of information, nothing seems possible. The people must be massively and freely informed, especially by showing the citizens that the arguments of the governments to raise the pension age are false, pure lies. Macron favors those he really cares about: the bankers, relegating the people to a mere adjustment variable.
• The uprising of the people against the pension reform in France is legitimate. But doesn’t generalized indecency require a generalized uprising, not only when individual interests are affected, and whose defense indirectly amounts to endorsing a system? Because doing a bull-shit job⁽¹⁾ until the age of 62, 64, 67… changes the situation by a few years, but in a minor way if you compare it to a life of killing yourself in a job that has no meaning.

Hasn’t protesting paradoxically become the sign of a popular impotence to change the course of history, where people who protest remain, paradoxically, sheep guided from point A to point B by authorities who endorse their trajectory, and thus circumscribe the acceptable and accepted protest?