unaware of how closely and powerfully the norms laws rules and regulations of our society control laws we not we might not be happy about it but most of the time most of us abide by our least trying to conform to the authorities structures institutions we find ourselves in one should pay the rent to the landlord don't go over the speed limit study and work hard to achieve success go to war when told this one's patriotic duty pay your bills during come taxes except for except for and most of us take for granted and don't challenge the authority figures and structures that impose those rules and laws the landlord the police the teacher the judge one's parents or elders ones boss the church the government except for it's only rarely that people take their individual grievances and begin to speak out collectively through unrest and protests these are brief and profound moments in history when ordinary people courageously challenge and defy authority and try to change the institutional status quo that govern their lives rare worse still is when protests in unrest become sustaining movements that then become a powerful force in politics it sees moments when ordinary people become more fully empowered to the democratic potential within them allows for the possibility of this up significant change to occur majority of americans in survey after survey are deeply disc ontented with the status quo and politics as usual but it's not at all clear what form the unrest and discontent might take what form this change might take is the concern of our show today we'll start by looking at what we can learn about what's been going on in france over the last year in the yellow vest movement a grassroots political movement for economic justice that began in france in two thousand and eighteen after an online petition calling for a drop in gas prices posted in may had attracted nearly a million signatures mass demonstrations began on november first and put paris and the country on edge those who participated were predominantly men and women who rely on their cars to get to work and take care of their families in the mix where small business owners independent contractors farmers homemade nurses and truck drivers they live in work primarily in rural towns and in the suburbs or ex urbs of france's big cities many earning just enough to get by to get to the bottom of all this and explore what it might mean to movements in this country if any were excited and thrilled to invite back to the radical magination a brilliant translator and historian widely known and as he puts it in small circles he needs the principal french translator for the marxists internet archives and is responsible for over a thousand translations from french spanish italian portuguese and that's pronto as well as a smattering of transcriptions from english articles his book may made me an oral history of the one nine hundred sixty eight uprising in france led to major articles in the new york times new york review of books this past year his other translations include anarchists never surrender voices of the paris commune and death to booze while society his circles have continued to expand wider and wider since his last appearance on the show and he continues to remain an even prouder third generation brooklynite welcome it to the radical imagination it's great to have you here again great to be back jim thank you thank you thank you so we're very you're very nice it's wonderful i'm so glad you're here to enlighten us on what's going on in france what you've been doing the past year what you're planning on doing and how it possibly relate to what's going on here so give full background about the the yellow vest move we were just beginning to take you know you have the trains you have mass transit but if you're living as so many of the french do in the smaller towns or in the countryside or in so burbs ex urbs well you need to get to work by a car ok and the price of gas in france is prog is about five and have dollars a gallon and half of the supposedly tax taxes and the government exactly and so it's it takes these people don't drive the small cars that they used to you know us would have been doing for the last year or so after i was i was with you i did a tour from a made me in england and i was struck by they're already taxed while you're really really harshly and so then when when michael added this gasoline tax this was for many people like just the last straw d he did we cut taxes for the rich in and then all the stuff he's done since trying to crush unions and then with this with this tax is he's acting as if he had this massive mandate and he did that in the in the in france they have two rounds of elections in the first round though he did not beat le pen by very much i think was three percentage points but because they were the top two they were in the second round a mandate to make all these enormous changes to it is eyes modernize friends but in fact if he got all those votes it wasn't so much for back home it was against pen and so he made it so he made this assumption to me this leap that he has the the power in the force behind him to do this now in the legislative elections that followed his party did really well this is what i saw when i did my interviews from a sixty eight is france has strive to become more and more like america my corner is really you know it believe in it entrepreneurs and cutting taxes for the rich because it will help everybody else strike last year and he did managed to force through a whole bunch of really terrible and the working class and the populist stuff ok but you know we just increased like said and he's told me that if i really wanted to understand where the yellow vests come from i should read a book called of house in france by journalist name france openness and yellow vests come from and so i read the book and there was a passage in it that was just so precious little america middle america middle america france has been exactly that so what she wrote in this was two thousand and four n will france explode people perhaps not take to the streets will remain calm but in the end it will be a kind of revolution that will overthrow those at the top who we don't know anymore what to call so that she saw in two thousand and fourteen two thousand and fourteen and what she traveled around france people already in this was when i was president distrust of government hatred of politics hatred of politics here absolutely and all along and everything you get was still being nothing's being done for the working class the common folk for people outside paris and the big cities so they had reason to hate the when this thing with the taxes hit it especially hits the people in left form the peace friends and so there's demonstrations and occupations and everything all over the exactly the aim of this was it was it had to do with a carbon emissions some thriving that were lower it exactly good for the environment good for the environment and it was so it showed like the limits you friends has been very big on this very supportive of it but it shows that there is a point beyond which right the people you know it's hitting them in the pocket is bad is this because not only would they have to pay t company this manufactures stuff to deliver it right now the price of everything is going to go up right and they're making you know on average eighteen hundred twenty four thousand a year twenty four thousand dollars a barrel and  the government is now it's open the great national debate and the great national debate so he held it was my home court together i think it was three hundred mayors in a small town in  ten weeks of that sort of pressure right for anything the really happened right take it somewhat seriously well he had already canceled the tax ok but when we went to that happened after how many weeks for i think i remember which week there was  a little bit later than that but he canceled the tax but still there was a no opening the willingness to talk to the yellow vests and so the is this weekend last weekend they begin to great national debate ok except there was a huge security force there to make sure that no yellow vests engaged in the debate with mark home the great national debate was  michael and just mayors sitting in a room with their sashes as they do right it's ok so the great national debate was between a politician a leading politician and other politicians the very thing that everybody hates and very pointedly excluding the yellow vests so they had huge security forces in this small town to make sure that no yellow vests got involved in the great national and could limit the couldn't even part of the audience like even you know apparently though michael put on a great performance i mean the man is extremely intelligent and it started at three o'clock in the afternoon and he spoke for seven hours yancey questions he mainly spoke was you know he was kind of he's kind of like a hillary clinton type politician you know because all the reports were that he has a total mastery of every statistic and all the data and he has like an answer like glib quick answer to everything but the people don't care you know the yellow vests absolutely hate politicians so which doesn't mean they don't have any there and weekends out weekends they might be in the hudson because if people unemployed but the actual demonstrations are only on saturdays ok because they they can't afford to go on strike and what  wow yeah and so that those you know before you get to the clips and let's not forget the back to him what i think is funny because you started with the revolution will not be televised or did how and then but this is precisely you know that we showed these clips is one of the reasons that the yellow vests hate the press because you know they have twenty four hour news channel just like exactly it becomes the image of all of us and right is becomes you know now that the guy in the mob the guy who punched the cop was the former light heavyweight champion of france really  a second so you could add in the second clip there was a guy who was taking the cup on the grounds that why they sort of didn't i mean they were pretty easy i mean i don't know what happened after that but they allowed him for a long time ago and in the second clip when you see the cop being kicked in the face that same guy really it's the same guy and he was what happened with him was and this is where you know this becomes like a romanticism you know on the left about the relationship of the french left to violence and the yellow vests has been really interesting for me because on the one hand i have friends writing to me from friends that whatever violence there is you know what is with the smashing windows or whatever it's all cops the cops are just you know dressing up as yellow vests and so he was arrested so he knows he's going to go to jail and so there was a crowd sourcing thing funding thing done that collected one hundred thirty thousand euros to give to him and his family for demonstrations and what you kind of saw in both of these you saw the way the cops with the helmets and they'll just like spacemen the violence on the police side has been absolutely horrific absolutely horrific you know there was one person killed early on but i do the cops it was a driver who panicked but they've been eighty two people been really seriously injured and the cops are shooting at people's heads  know you know they ever think of flash balls which i think i'm supposed to know what it is but i don't but it's officially and they're not shooting to warn in that shooting the but the shooting directly at people and they're smashing people's jaws and stuff so it's really been ugly and you see the gas that's being shot it level and water cannons so the left generally saying the violence is coming mainly from the police right and the right are saying ban demonstrations they the most the best known of the yellow vests is a truck driver and they arrested him when he was on his way to paris because he wasn't allowed to go there was allowed to be them and straighten they started  that's in the nature of my home you know he he did rescind the tax and everybody was supposed to raise the minimum wage and this he asked bosses to give a bonus at the end of the year that was tax free but that was really it now we started a great national debate but it's the on the yellow vests side the question is what is it that they want yes and so early on they have a vision they have a plan you know i was reading about how they wanted you know everybody had to make a certain amount of money and nobody could make more than a certain amount of money or to equalize things that where they have no organization right right have no organization and that is part of the romance of it for a certain element to the level of put it also means going back to paris commune come back to the paris commune but what it also means is this not only not only no central thing of people in different parts of france and it really is as if they're all living a totally different experience because if you're in a town that's a right wing town wealthy a lot of it's a right wing and if you're in a communist town and they still are a few going to be communist but none of the parodies have anything to do with the organization of this right because there's no organization but there are still in the si sounds extraordinarily polarized and getting more so i know listen jumping across the pond here but do you see some of this occurring what can we take from what's going there here you i've been skeptical about the yellow vests from the beginning because any movement that springs up from the people who call themselves the ignored caring and who come from the provinces who hate the city to a these but these people are if they were americans they would be trump supporters and what would mark say the idiocy of rural life act so and  things right now their main demands they have a couple and one of them is so they they wanted to major modifications in the tax code be fine but they also want to have popular referendum ok and california goes all the time all right and they want the country to be run that way ok the comment that i read in  not you know they're ok it sounds great and democratic elected people have their say with no interference from the politicians but you know as a left wing new york jewish snob you know i don't f and it's the people of organized themselves and they have and it's been really admirable to that x that they've done so that they forget and this is the difference between this white i don't think it applies to america and it will never apply to america because what it struck me was everything in france and they have big demonstrations for like you know pretty frequently you know there was the money for the ballot a demonstration against gay students and then the workers went on strike it with it let's close to toppling the government we came close to but never never really did and never kind of really aimed to do it but it changed france forever absolutely changed france forever  experience right so local memory ten million people were out so well so so every time there's something major it's another may sixty eight in america we call it everything becomes another watergate if americans ar other people will get paid thirty five thousand dollars for that crap but it is so you so americans are much more passive we don't go out onto the streets we wait for there to be some scandal everything is everything gets a gate attached to it so we're not you know where is the french everything is made sixty eight for us everything is something gate there's got to be some scandal somewhere so so now you know everything with  head and you know it's the inevitable it's almost inevitable that something like that would happen because if it if it's on the left it's going to going to be s about may sixty eight i talked about how some of the people who were like really central to the events you know had this real clear sighted not negative but they saw they had made it it was kind of like there's a lot of play acting involved they view things with a jaundiced eye ok and somebody in one of my talks said you know what you really can't ignore the impact of fifty years of defeats and how you look back at something you know fifty years ago and if the counter movements have been very powerful right but self destruction is also been been a huge part of it and you know i don't know that i would have predicted it would be any semitism that would you know do this to you know for the for the women's march but it was going to be something it was going to be something i can you know sadly i can't say that it was like a huge surprise you know that you know kind of this kind of casual anti semitism was always which is really always present or is none of us of people our age even if we mean i i was in high school at the time during the teacher's strike but who could forget the poem the tension there or  crushes me how unnecessary this is and how hurtful it can be i know it on both sides and we got to get over this we've got to stop doing this sort of crap and but clearly it's not so easy to just will atlanta and that's what you know it just feeds you know my cynicism about you know about the left when you know when the movement really coherent move progress one of the things that's interesting is that people on the left now the yellow vests included at the very beginning and i don't know if they've say they're the real far right and i mean  a journalist to hang out in a right wing bar in lille in the north of france and it was known as a hangout for the for the real far right racist and the immigrant violen and people from the national front also it turned out hung out in this bar and i mean important figures in the national front which would say we have nothing to do with the far right if you the far right we have to do with it but it showed how you know for president thirty some odd percent of the vote right so it's hard to rivera's out right you know there is you don't want to be much further right enough because they really you know there are elements of the party which don't just hate immigrants they want everybody few minutes more so we what do you see as the possible form of movement in this country in the next year or two you know to give you  that journalists are going to expose everything that's wrong right and the courts are going to block measures for as long as the cat and now it's congress you know a little bit you know get a little bit of spine with with the with the new people the new role the young women and all those long women yeah but even on the young women if you if you like today or yesterday there was a nasty report in the new york times about  not having set up a local office here and she said it had to do with the shutdown so we can't do anything but they did some investigating every other new congressperson in the area and set up an office but she has it so all you know we're g could be just a reflection of my own you know unwillingness to do that at this at this point because i just think it's absolutely futile but i don't everybody's angry now as they are now they hate him every bit as much if not more yet he's warn people down yeah and what we're as you were saying a few minutes ago we're sort of become dependent on the scandals now right streets and to make their voices heard because it's not just a matter of letting the cortez's of the world speak for us yeah we need to and this is a lesson for the yell from the yellow vests ok need to learn to speak for ourselves apple to make our voices heard and make our discontent heard instead of grumbling and whining amongst ourselves as we're doing right now that we need to reach out because when i was