On May 1 2018 some people decided to petrol bomb a McDonald’s in eastern Paris.
It was the 50th anniversary of the famous student May Day riots of 1968, which was a turning point for French cultural, political and economic thinking. The May Day events of 1968 were begun by students. Workers, unions and their supporters joined. President Charles De Gaulle fled the country, and when he returned he dissolved parliament and called for new elections.
It’s hard to say who burnt the McDonald’s. They wore masks and are called the “black bloc” by authorities. It’s doubftul students were involved, because most of them really like McDonald’s. Same with workers and union types. They eat at McDonald’s often.
The Paris riots were a level up in violence from May Day demonstrations past and those that took place in other parts of the world.
Why is the “black bloc” so angry at McDonald’s?
There is the symbolism of attacking a global capitalist enterprise that pays low wages and has no regard for the health, safety, culture or well being of the countries in which it chooses to open stores.
There is the resistance to the seemingly inevitable corporatization of the globe, where sameness and lowest common denominator goods, products and services come with a heavy dose of crassness and shallow profiteering.
There is the highlighting of the wage gap and working conditions of poor workers who increasingly feel like lifelong serfs.
However, the so-called “black bloc” seems to be less concerned with messaging and more interested in provocation. That’s what you do when you are an anarchist. You don’t actually want to promote anything, you just feel a deep passion for tearing things down.
Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe the poor of the world need events like May Day to remind us all that poverty, disaffection and dissilussionment are very real. Curiously, a watershed work on global poverty by Bourguignon and Morrison proposes that fewer people on earth live in “extreme poverty” than ever before in human history.
(Our World in Data: Global Extreme Povery by Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty)
Perhaps the May Days of out time are not about highlighting, resistance or symbolism. Perhaps they are about visibility. Perhaps they are about the deep human need to be acknowledged as existing. Perhaps the target of the petrol bombers on May 1 2018 was the singular, greedy eye of the a corporate cyclops, who obsessively counts its sheep and guards its cave with covetousness. Perhaps the petrol bombing was a kind of heated stake driven into the eye of this global cyclops. An act of literally “sticking it to The Man.”
As Norman Mailer wrote in his 1974 Esquire article on the graffitti phenomenon: “Perhaps that is the unheard echo of graffitti, the vibration of that profound discomfort it arouses, as if the unheard music of its proclamation and/or its mess, the rapt seething of its foliage, is the herald of some oncoming apolcalypse less and less far away.”
(Test Pressing; Esquire magazine, March 1974 http://testpressing.org/2012/06/esquire-the-faith-of-graffiti-norman-mailer/ )
Did you know that the French name for the Big Mac is “Le Royal”? Did you know that the first two names McDonald’s tested for the Big Mac were “The Aristocrat” and “The Blue Ribbon Burger”?
Vive la revolution and one Happy Meal, please.
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