Mélenchon - French Elections 2017

Continuation of conversation concerning the extreme left candidate Mélenchon in the French presidential elections 2017 on Politico.eu

JJ>>I am a student in law and history. I am using my free time in between exam prep. This place is good as any for this debate. The longer, the more detailed, the better. Let’s get rid of nonsense dogmatic catchphrases. Let’s be rational and ground our arguments.
GS>> I do hope you are more neutral and objective in your studies, otherwise my opinion for French universities is really going down.
JJ>>Of course, Mélenchon has links and support with the PCF, the French party communist, he is a socialist and he has affinity with their goals: fighting for the working class. For a long time, up until HOLLAND, the PCF was allied with the French PS, one of the two “moderate” parties you seem to love. In 1972, MITTERRAND, from the French “socialist party”, and the PCF even created “le programme commun”, it was an alliance for the presidential election. It was all about Keynesian economic policies that were later ended by MITTERRAND when he went for a more liberal (economically) position. French communism is not the red devil you always try to make of it. It dissociated itself from all other communism in the 1970’s with the discovery of the communist regimes atrocities.
GS>> What would you say if someone openly supporting Nazism is freely defending it, and coming up in an election? Remember that even FN does not openly support Nazism. Why then would it be considered ‘normal’ for communism, where communism caused many more victims than Nazism? Yes, the French Communist party was luckily never in power and thus was never able to commit the same crimes (although their supporters are often violent in marches and strikes), and had to distance themselves from documented communist crimes, but as long as they go by the same ideology, that is as unbelievable as fascists distancing themselves from Hitler. As for Keynesian economic policies, please also do answer my comment about the ‘other half’ of this theory.
JJ>>You did not answer my questions about the EU and its legislation hurting the working class. Should I presume that your silence means you agree with the way the EU works? You don’t think Barroso committed what would be called in other democratic institution a conflict of interest? Do you think normal that the former PM of a fiscal paradise is lead the European Commission?
GS>> First of all, again, you seem to believe in ‘classes’, which have to fight each other, as if you’re stuck in the 19th or early 20th century. I only believe in cooperation between people. So I don’t believe in ‘the 99% versus the 1%’. Maybe I did not answer all of your points, as it was not exactly very well structured (also on this point, I do hope you’re doing better in your studies, but this is already much better). I don’t believe the EU legislation is hurting the ‘working classes’; in fact it is even helping more people to get a job, but it does always have to balance carefully between the rights for all people. Luckily they are not as one sided. Of course I don’t agree with everything in the EU, and there are a lot of possible improvements. I did already state the EU should do a better job in avoiding conflicts of interest. As for Juncker, he was democratically elected as PM of a free country, and then in fact also as head of the EC.

GS_EU_USA said:

Continuation of conversation concerning the extreme left candidate Mélenchon in the French presidential elections 2017 on Politico.eu

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JJ>>About the program: 1) European countries are suffering from the monetary, fiscal and social policies of Europe. France represent 18% of EU’s GDP, it can be a leader for a new kind of Europe that will stop the economical slaughter of the working class.
GS>> Maybe it would show good academic habit to indicate the source for your data. Furthermore, it doesn’t say anything to give the total % of the EU’s GDP for a country, as it does of course also reflect the size of a country, and thus a very poor comparison. It would be much better to indicate the GDP per capita. And for that measure, according to EuroStat, France is not even in the top 10 for the EU (of only 28 countries) for the year 2015. Not a very good statistic, in my opinion.
JJ>>Mélenchon has soften his previous stance regarding Europe. He wants to negotiate first: the EU should not only benefit the economic interest of Germany. There is a lot of European countries (Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal etc.) that will follow France if the EU does not want to protect the interest of the people. I don’t know why we should continue to remain in a system that is hurting most of the people. I am conscious that as a student there are incredible opportunities offered by the EU, however the cost for the working class is too much.
GS>> That means, he did temporarily had to take back some of his rhetoric because he noticed people did not follow his unrealistic program, but given a chance, he will of course go back to his own view. If France did not have the EU, its economy and currency would have completely collapsed, and most people would have lost almost everything.
JJ>> French workers work, per year, 1482 hours; German workers 1 371 hours (OECD, 2015). So French workers do not work less. French workers do not work 35H hours per week, 35h is the maximum legal working hour per week paid according to the smic (9,76€/hour, before social “taxes”), you CAN work 35h per week but you will be paid with a 25% bonus.
GS>> Please also be so fair to say that this is still one of the lowest numbers in their figures, and also study what is included in those numbers. That is the least we can expect from students at university. For instance, people working half-time are also included in this study. Please do read the warning with those stats: ‘The concept used is the total number of hours worked over the year divided by the average number of people in employment. The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources. Part-time workers are covered as well as full-time workers.’
JJ>>Employers are, by the cost of the 35h policy, incentivized to hire instead of making people work longer (for a “premium”). It worked fine up until employers saw the “marvelous” opportunity offered in delocalizing production to Asia or within Europe.
GS>>As for the ‘incentive’ to hire more people, as you clearly see companies will just stop growing or even stop completely or leave for other countries. And how can you justify people in other countries not having the opportunity to get a job as well for more than they would have if that company did not move to that other country. It is always a trend that those jobs start low wage, but gradually the wages and by that the welfare in a country goes up. But globalism is indeed very much like a system of communicating vessels; it tends to even out differences between countries.
JJ>>Then we don’t need to work as much as before. As time advance, with technological advancement, we produce more wealth with less effective human labor. So why the need to make people work more as if we were in the 1950s?
GS>> Very simple, because people also demand more now than in the 1950’s. How many people did have one or more television sets, cars, etc. in the 1950’s compared to now. Do you want to go back to the standard of living of the 1950’s?