Yellow vests: a national coordination, school of autonomy or shortcut back to the apparatus?

According to Le Monde, the national coordination of the "gilets jaunes" (yellow vests) is using the October mobilisations to give the protest some structure. The paper notes that the role taken by certain spokespeople, who are rooted on the left, raises questions for the movement's historic figures, in a movement born without a leader or political orientation. That is what we know. The rest, we do not have: the dispatch says nothing about how many people are involved, how these spokespeople were chosen, or who controls them. That silence is already information, because this is precisely where everything is decided.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The charge against the "seasoned" militants is an old one: they know how to get things done, so they take the floor. But experience is not a vice. A movement that rose up on roundabouts, without a party card, always ends up facing the same question: how do you turn scattered anger into a force that decides? Refusing all structure means leaving decisions to whoever shouts loudest, or to television studios that pick their own interlocutors. Horizontality without rules does not abolish power; it simply makes it invisible.

On this, Luxemburg (Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist theorist) held a stubborn idea: leadership cannot be decreed from above, it emerges from the action of the masses. In The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, she observes that a movement born from the sole discipline of a general staff remains at best an episode, the symptom of a combative mood. Initiative, for her, belongs to those who fight. Let us apply the test: is the coordination the tool of local assemblies, mandated, revocable, accountable for its actions? Or is it a committee of militants speaking on behalf of a movement that never asked to be represented?

The label of the left, for its part, settles nothing. A sincere spokesperson without a mandate remains a spokesperson without a mandate. And the reverse holds too: political orientation does not taint a movement that claimed to be apolitical, especially when its demands concern wages, taxation, purchasing power, and therefore the balance of power between labour and capital. Claiming to have no politics at all is often the most comfortable politics of all.

The real danger lies elsewhere. Les Gazette concept notes remind us that every measure, every alliance, is judged by what it does with the trust and power of people at the bottom. If the coordination serves to negotiate, to win a seat at the table, to turn revolt into a reasonable interlocutor, it demobilises. If it multiplies assemblies, debates, and decisions taken by those who act, it educates.

You do not learn democracy from a textbook; you learn it by arguing on a roundabout after nightfall. The question is whether the coordination extends that argument or politely brings it to an end. A movement that is learning to direct itself needs spokespeople; it does not need guardians.