Why the French labor protests are important to US

In France, to the streets over capitalism
By William Pfaff | April 1, 2006
PARIS


THE MANIFESTATIONS by French students, workers (and would-be workers), with unions and the French left riding on their bandwagon, have amounted to a spontaneous revolt in France against something that I suspect few of the participants fully appreciate.
The protests contest a certain form of capitalist economy which a large part, if not the majority, of French society regards as a danger to national standards of justice -- and above all, to equality.

Consider classical economist David Ricardo's ''iron law of wages," which says that in conditions of wage competition and unlimited labor supply, wages will fall to just above subsistence. There never before has been unlimited labor. There is now, thanks to globalization -- and the process has only begun.

It seems that this European unrest signals a serious gap in political and corporate understanding of the human consequences of a capitalist model that considers labor a commodity and extends price competition for that commodity to the entire world. In the longer term, there may be more serious political implications in this than even France's politicized students suspect. What seems the reactionary or even Luddite position might prove prophetic.