Social conflict in the Antilles

Taken from a thesis in political science defended in 2017, P. Odin’s work aims to shed new light on the social movement “against the profit » which shook the Antilles at the beginning of 2009. The author’s bias is not so much to analyze the springs of popular mobilization as to restore the political genesis of the movement carried by the LKP (Lyannaj Kont Pwofitasion) in Guadeloupe and K5F (Kolectif 5 Févrié) in Martinique through the prism of a history of trade unionism and anticolonialism in the Antilles. The material used – some sixty biographical interviews conducted with trade unionists and political activists involved in the 2009 movement, activist archives and articles from the national and local press – clearly reflects this bias and the delimitation of its subject. In this sense, this work provides a key piece in understanding a conflict that had been analyzed, until now, rather “in the heat of the moment” and according to a multitude of approaches intended to grasp its foundations both in form (through the role played by the LKP and the K5F in particular) than in substance (high cost of living, poverty, unemployment, socio-racial inequalities carried over into a postcolonial framework, identity claims, etc.). The sociohistorical perspective allows us to go beyond the event-based approach of the 2009 general strike to provide information, more broadly, on the articulation between trade unionism and social movements in the contemporary French Antilles. This political sociology of trade unionism in Guadeloupe and Martinique (Barker C., Modonesi M.) shows that the political work of militant organizations aims to “reaffirm the class struggle and anticolonialism for the reappropriation of the material conditions of existence by the populations” (p. 18).

Trade unionism nourished by revolutionary anti-colonialism

The first part of the book, “Genesis of contemporary unionism in the Antilles”, immerses the reader in a founding decade of political and union struggle with the Manifesto of the Organization of Anticolonialist Youth of Martinique (OJAM) of December 1962, the creation of the National Organization Group of Guadeloupe (GONG) in 1963 and the riots of May 1967 in Pointe-à-Pitre. Led by an anti-colonialist youth whose line of action differs from that of the local Communist Party, these three political moments will outline the repertoire of action of contemporary trade unionism in the Antilles. Seen in the light of the wars in Indochina and Algeria as well as the repression of trade union struggles in the Antilles as observed in the early 1960s, the departmentalization of the “old colonies” is quickly perceived as a transfiguration of the colonial relationship. The Manifesto of theOJAMposted on the walls of Martinique on December 23 and 24, 1962, is unequivocal: “Martinique is a colony, under the hypocritical mask of a French department, like Algeria was, because dominated by France, on the economic, social, cultural and political levels.”

Like the GONG and its objective of national liberation, the line of action of the young West Indian activists flirts with revolutionary ideas. The neighboring island of Cuba has just shown the way with the arrival of Fidel Castro to power in 1959. The GONG considered taking action when, in May 1967, a general strike of construction workers in Pointe-à-Pitre broke out. The anti-colonialist and revolutionary organization called on the workers to revolt. Two days of riots and repression followed, with a human toll that would remain in the memory: at least 40 dead among the insurgents and many pro-independence activists imprisoned. A year later, the events of May 68 in France would add to the anti-colonialist program of the young West Indian activists aims and an organization deeply rooted in the extreme left, notably Trotskyist, Guevarist and Maoist. The 1970s were then marked by a reconversion of the political struggle into a trade union struggle:

As the hypothesis of a national revolution that would open the way to independence recedes, the situation that had brought many activists to revolutionary organizations seems to be running out. Many Guadeloupean and Martinican activists will then perpetuate their commitment to union structures that constitute, for many of them, structures of remnant. (p. 70)

This is the case, in particular, of the General Union of Workers of Guadeloupe (UGTG) created in 1973 and which defines itself as a “mass, class and resolutely anti-colonialist” unionism.

Highly politicized unions

Starting from the observation that trade unionism and politics are closely linked in the Antilles, P. Odin devotes the second part of his work to the analysis of the political work carried out within the main Antillean trade unions:UGTG for whom trade unionism is a path to independence, and the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) which associates the union struggle more with the class struggle. The chapter devoted to theUGTG is essential to understanding the social movement of 2009. Not only because its general secretary, Élie Domota, is the spokesperson for the LKPbut more broadly because the union’s guiding principle reflects the ambivalence of Guadeloupean society which, on the one hand, hears the anti-colonialist discourse of theUGTGbut on the other hand, remains firmly opposed to any institutional transformation of the island. Highly critical of French political, economic and cultural domination over the Caribbean territory and the only trade union organization to point out the racism that underlies some of the social relations of production, theUGTG occupies a paradoxical position in that it benefits from a very large audience (it is the island’s leading union in terms of membership) while projecting an independence horizon that seems insurmountable for the majority of the population. Its strength thus lies more in its reading of the social world, the promotion of a Guadeloupean culture and pragmatic patriotism, the capacity to mobilize and defend employees and even citizens as a whole (the “Guadeloupean people”), rather than in its explicitly political project. For its part, the CGT many of whose leaders come from the Trotskyist organization Combat Ouvrière, inscribes its political project in a revolutionary communist aim. The denunciation of class relations is made first and foremost among the agricultural workers of the plantations, symbols par excellence of the transfiguration of the relations of domination of the colonial regime towards the capitalist regime. A lineage of the logics of domination which will be very rightly at the heart of the grievances expressed by the LKP and the K5F during the movement “against the profit “.

” Against the profit “, the construction of a united movement

Following Michel Dobry’s sociology of political crises, the third part of the book dissects the structural and conjunctural dimensions of the 2009 social movement and the way in which these are articulated in the course of the event, that is to say how groups and unions with heterogeneous positions (the LKP includes 48 organizations, the K5F account 12) manage to say and build a unitary movement. In this perspective, the very term profit has proven to be an extremely powerful and unifying signifier. Referring to the problems of high cost of living, unemployment, poverty and inequality, the profit will then be further defined by the actors of the mobilization. As such, the platform of demands of the LKP and K5F will be the place of an accumulation of critical material and of diffusion of the analyses thus produced: “a form of synthesis between objectification of the pwofitasyon – notably from the statistical point of view – and different militant projections, which are the fruit of the coalition work initiated by the Guadeloupean and Martinican unions” (p. 176-177). In an opposition between “them” and “us”, between “the pwofitans » and « the dominated », the trade union organisations have managed to overcome their own divisions and to re-inscribe the social movement in their respective repertoires of action: the social and economic situation observed in the Antilles is sometimes thought of in terms of a relationship of dependence on the metropolis, sometimes in terms of class relations between local economic and political elites and impoverished populations. The success of the 2009 conflict is thus due to a « structure of opportunities » marked by the encounter between the anti-colonialist and revolutionary militant trajectories of the trade union actors and the lived worlds of large sections of the Antilles population, who found in the political narrative of the profit a framework for reading their social condition and, in fact, an important reason for mobilization.

What does social conflict say about the postcolonial question?

The conclusion of the book outlines a rereading of the research object through the prism of the postcolonial question. On the fringes of the controversies that have animated French political science on this issue, and refuting any mechanical and “culturalist” connection between the original violence of colonial regimes and the contemporary recurrence of local forms of protest, P. Odin prefers to rely on the notion of “opportunity structure” to decline it in the singular case of the Antilles. This notion, which “refers to a social and political configuration that is rooted in a territory and is part of a given period” (p. 274), leads him to emphasize once again the singularity of West Indian trade unionism and its role in the 2009 conflict. The analysis of the biographical and political trajectories of trade union activists allows us to follow the path by which anticolonialism, independence and Trotskyism were maintained by “a relational game where the balance of power between organizations within the trade union field is linked to the balance of power between the trade union field and the broader political field” (p. 277-278). Faithful to his research subject, the author insists more on the ways in which anticolonialist criticism is actualized, and leaves unresolved “the question of what remains ‘after the colony'” (p. 279). The entry through the political work of the unions and in particular their efforts to objectivate the forms of dependence and domination sedimented in the economic and social structures of the Caribbean islands could allow, in our opinion, to feed the postcolonial question overseas in a more frontal way. To what extent do these actors contribute or at least exercise themselves in constructing the proof of continuities/discontinuities with the colonial fact?

Finally, it should be noted that in these territories the social question invariably refers to the egalitarian and republican promise of departmentalization. A promise, for the time being, imperfectly kept which very rightly founded the adoption of a law on real equality overseas eight years after the 2009 movement and in response to it. At the same time, social conflicts in the overseas departments have multiplied over the last ten years. If the watchwords are plural (cost of living, unemployment, poverty, insecurity, etc.), each time, it is indeed the renewal of a total and asymmetrical political relationship between the former colonial metropolis and its “confetti” that touches on the debates. Social and/or postcolonial question, the explanatory springs of this social conflict do not therefore seem to be exhausted…