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Contrary to all that we’re hearing, the real mystery is not that we revolted, but the fact that we didn’t do it sooner. What’s abnormal is not what we’re doing now, but all that we’ve put up with until now. Who can deny the bankruptcy of the system, from every angle? Who still wants to be shook down, robbed, and left precarious for nothing? Will anyone weep as the wealthy avenues of the 16th arrondissement are plundered by the poor, and the bourgeois watch their gleaming SUV’s go up in flames? As for Macron, he can stop complaining; it was he who asked us to come to him. A state can’t keep legitimating itself by reference to the corpse of a “glorious revolution” and then denounce the rioters as soon as a revolution gets going.
The situation is simple: the people want the fall of the system. But the system intends to keep going. It is this that defines the situation as insurrectional, as even the police openly admit. On their side, the people have the numbers, as well as their courage, joy, intelligence, and naivety. On the other side, the system has its army, its police, its media, and the deception and fear of the bourgeois. Since the 17th of November, the people have had recourse to two complementary levers: economic blockades, and the Saturday assaults on the government districts. These are each complementary, since the economy is the reality of the system, while the government provides its symbolic representation. To truly destitute them both, it is necessary to attack them both. This goes for Paris no less than the rest of the territory: to burn a prefecture and to storm the Elysée are a single and sole gesture. Every Saturday since the 17th of November, people in Paris have been magnetically focused on the same goal: storming the enclaves of government [marcher sur le reduit governmental]. From one week to the next, the only difference lies in (1) the increasing scale of the police apparatus set up in order to prevent it, and (2) the experience accumulated through the previous weekend’s failure. If there are a lot more people with swimming goggles and gas masks this Saturday, it’s not because “organized groups of rioters” have “infiltrated the demonstration.” Rather, it’s because people were gassed extensively the week before, and they drew the same conclusion any sensible person would: better come equipped the next time. And anyway, we’re not talking about demonstrations, but an uprising.
If tens of thousands of people invaded the Tuileries-Saint Lazare-Étoile-Trocadero zone, it was not because of a strategy of harassment that had been decided upon by a handful of small groups. It was a result of the diffuse tactical intelligence possessed by people who had been prevented from achieving their objective by the police apparatus. To criminalize the "ultra-leftists” for attempting to foment an uprising won’t fool anyone: if the ultra-leftists knew how to hijack construction machines and use them to charge the police or destroy a tollbooth, we would have heard about it; if they were so massive in scale, so disarming and brave, we would know that too. The fact is, with its essentially identitarian concerns, the so-called “ultra-left" has been deeply embarrassed by the impurity of the movement of Yellow Vests, plagued by a bourgeois fear of compromising itself by mingling with a crowd that doesn’t belong anywhere within its own categories. As for the “ultra-right”, it is sandwiched between its means and its supposed ends: they sew disorder under the pretext of an attachment to order, they attack the National Police all the while declaring their devotion to the Law and the Nation, they want to behead the republican monarch out of love of a non-existent King. On these points, we will leave the Ministry of the Interior to its absurd rambling. It is not the radicals who are making the movement, it is the movement that is radicalizing people. Does anyone really believe that our government would consider declaring a state of emergency over a handful of ultras?
Those who make an insurrection halfway only dig their own graves. At the point we are at now, and given the contemporary means of repression, we have two choices: either we overthrow the system, or we let it crush us. It would be a grave mistake to underestimate this government’s level of radicalization. Anyone who attempts to mediate between the people and the government over the coming days is destined to be torn apart: none of us want to be represented, we’re all old enough to express ourselves, and to discern who is trying to cajole or recuperate us. And if the government ends up taking a step backwards, this will only prove that we were right to do what we did, that our methods were sound.
This week will therefore be decisive: either we will manage, in ever-greater numbers, to halt the economic machine by blocking its ports, refineries, railway stations, logistics centers, etc., and by really taking-over the governmental enclaves and police stations next Saturday, or we’ve lost. The climate march next weekend has no reason not to join us in the street. After all, its purpose is make clear that those who have led us to the current brink of disaster cannot be counted on to get us out of it. We’re one step away from the breakdown of the governmental machine. Either we will succeed in diverting the course of things over the coming months, or else the foreseeable apocalypse will find itself accompanied by a securitarian backlash the depth and scale of which can already be glimpsed on social media.
The question is as follows: what does it concretely mean to destitute the system in practice? Obviously, it cannot mean electing new representatives, since the bankruptcy of the current regime issues precisely from the bankruptcy of its representative system. To destitute the system means to take over locally, canton by canton, the material and symbolic organization of life. It is precisely the current organization of life that is today in question, that is itself the catastrophe. We must not fear the unknown: we have never seen millions of people allow themselves to die of hunger. Just as we are perfectly capable of organizing ourselves horizontally to set up blockades, we have the capacity to organize ourselves to relaunch a more sensible organization of existence. As revolt is organized locally, so it is at the local level that our solutions will be found. The “national" level is only ever the echo that issues from local initiatives.
We can no longer put up with the endless accountancy of this world. If the reign of the economy is the reign of misery, this is first of all because it is the reign of calculation. The beauty of our blockades, in the streets, and in all that we have been doing for three weeks—already a form of victory in itself—lies in our having stopped counting, the moment we began counting on each other. When the question is that of our common salvation, that of the legal property of the infrastructures of life becomes a mere detail. The difference between the people and those who govern is that the people aren’t a bunch of losers.
This article first appeared inLundi matin #170, on December 19, 2018.
Translated by Ill Will Editions. [1]
The authors of the December 7 article, “Contribution to the rupture in progress,” continue their analysis of the Yellow Jackets movement. As they argue, the Saturday battles are now behind us, and it is the roundabouts and self-organization beginning at the local level that forms the line of increasing power within the current movement. -Lundi matin
***
"It’s a serious mistake to believe that people are made stupid by staying in a single place.” -William Cobbett
"AND THE STATE SANK…”
The week of December 3rd was marked by a massive deluge of state and media propaganda, in a drama that had several obvious aims: (i) to provoke fear, and to intimidate the population by alluding to the possibility of live ammo being used against demonstrators; (ii) to legitimate—that is, to encourage—a loss of control by police and state forces under the pretense of exhaustion; (iii) to avoid addressing the repeated transgressions of the line separating law enforcement from irregular warfare (flashballs shot directly at faces, high school students yoked and kneeling, a woman killed by a tear gas grenade); (iv) to announce, as now occurs with every supposedly important event (e.g. May 1, 2018) that ‘Paris will be under siege for twenty-four hours, and this time security forces will be deployed to their maximum potential’, which includes plainclothes cops in yellow jackets and tanks sporting new chemical weaponry; (v) to add an umpteenth layer to the long-sought division between ‘peaceful’ protesters and the various ‘rioters’ or ‘ultra-whatevers’; (vi) to accuse the people carrying-out blockades of spoiling the end-of-year holidays for honest folks, and of allying themselves with those fractions of the movement deemed ‘violent’ and ‘parasitic’ by the government. In sum, we watched the highest rungs of the French state adopt the methods of psychological war against sixty-seven million suspects.
But the besieged aren’t the ones we ought to believe. It is important to recognize that the state has been pushed to the edge, that it’s alone, clinging to the walls of its kingly enclaves. Having been lured into what can only be described as a war against its own population, it now indulges in the very same illegalisms it purports to oppose, becoming even more conspiratorial than those it denounces. All mediation has disappeared. The entire Keynesian apparatus built-up over the past century now spills out beyond the state and its social movements and dries up. All the ‘social partners’, political parties, and intermediate bodies the Presidency had sought to draw into its sheepfold so as to shore-up the illusion of Providence are now condemned to preach in the desert. We’ve sensed it coming for decades: the final completion of the passage from the flexible, dialectical mediation of the Keynesian state to its Nietzschean successor, a steamroller of caste-affirmation without any need of allies of convenience, a castle with raised drawbridge. It may be that when the West of Paris burned, our collective agreements and negotiating mechanisms went up in smoke with it. In this context, demands begin to mean something different. It’s no longer about delegating our collective power to a representative (the movement within the State, or the State within the movement). Demands now form the basis for horizontal forms of association that fight for themselves and—once the silence of the authorities becomes structural—may even go as far as to overthrow them altogether.
That is why none of the deterrent operations were enough to weaken the movement, in spite of being echoed by all the political parties and unions (with the exception of Solidaires). In spite of the State blocking access to Paris train stations, continuously deleting Facebook events with demo locations (on orders originating who-knows-where), in spite of a smugly-announced ‘record number of preventative detentions’, not to mention a considerable number of people arrested and charged (and an equally large number detained without charge), the quality of expression and the mobility of the movement on Dec. 8 exceeded the previous two Saturdays. Moreover, a palpable sort of agreement existed between social groups that are often separated in urban riots (radicalized crowds from the provinces, from Paris and its suburbs, the usual militants and onlookers, etc.)…
It might be said that urban clashes over the last few weeks began in a frontal mode (Nov. 24th), then became polycentric (Dec. 1st), before finally becoming kinetic. On Dec 8th, while its intensity and crystallization diminished, its extension and movement grew. Rich neighborhoods were repeatedly ravaged by crowds determined to tear them to shreds. For hours, multiple areas of Paris became truly ungovernable, as the movement became temporarily sovereign. Things were the same, if not more so, in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Grenoble and Saint-Étienne. Here, the movement began to pull away from the illusory bicentennial Parisian theater of the riot, enacting a critique en acte of the consummate artificiality and ancestral nuisance of the political centrality of the capital. It signals a new victory, one which ought to be remembered and taken to heart in the coming weeks and months. The decentralized, reticular character of the current movement has been, and remains today its greatest tactical asset, in the streets of Paris no less than across the whole national territory.
Taken as a whole, the political sequence that began in France is marked by a negative dialectic between two independent blocs, the state and its ex-citizens, with no resolution possible. The vague inclinations toward mediation are little more than ornamental flourishes. For weeks, the trials of the thousands of arrestees have made it painfully obvious that the so-called ‘professional violent rioters’ do not exist. In Paris as elsewhere, the people showing up to these court cases are the temp workers from the same building, or else they’re nurses, carpenters, forklift drivers, ex-soldiers and, not uncommonly, the kids of cops. For many, this was their first visit to the Champs-Élysées. They came to see the boulevards, to see Parisian life, the life of rich tourists they neither know nor envy. If they looted a store, it was usually in order to give their offspring a decent Christmas. Politics? The word disgusts them. Often, they’ve never done it before. Once in the streets, they were joined by rogues and other precarious types, and this without any friction or tension. It’s not a convergence, it’s a contagion.
NEW FRONTLINES
The balance sheet was announced on Monday, December 10, as Macron gave his first public address. If you want to cancel a minor tax, speed up the approval of a pre-arranged supplement (not even a raise) to the minimum wage, or slash the tax on pensions, it will henceforth be necessary to ransack Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux and other cities, accepting seven dead (and one more since then) and at least 1500 wounded—unprecedented damage in metropolitan France since the Algerian war. You’ll also have to wade through a morose national debate over non-sequiturs like French identity, immigration and so on.
Of course, the official political parties couldn’t resist joining the theatrics, and persisted in their clumsy efforts to seduce the "yellow jackets” by echoing the government’s call for a ‘political moment’ to supplant the ‘moment of revolt.’ Breaking with custom, only the French Communist Party remained dignified, (involuntarily, no doubt), ignoring the agitations of the moment and calling for a great mobilization (but in January!) for as long as the movement continues… At the more molecular level of leftism, there’s no need for us to delve deep into the official Trotskyist lines, since in each and every circumstance, week after week, they always call for the same thing: a ‘convergence of struggles’, university blockades and a general strike…
As for the unions still mourning their Keynesian state, summoned like children by their schoolmaster, once they had finished with their violent about-face toward the movement (supportive, then dissociative, then supportive again), they wound up aligning themselves magnificently-well with the government’s prerogatives. All these compromises, absences and calumnies won’t be quickly forgotten. We can only hope that they’ll intensify the fragmentation of the trade union world, its re-localization into forms of situated association, and their becoming-heterogeneous with respect to the world of business—all of which has been already been underway since the 2016 movement, at least. The death of the left is a fact, but not yet an occasion for celebration: as it stands, it has birthed almost nothing in its wake.
As for the movement of yellow jackets, the last two weeks have brought their share of defections, divisions, hesitations, captures. Among the three trends we identified in our previous article—electoralist or "citizenist”; negotiationist; and liberatory or insurrectionist—a section of the first group appears to have taken the lead with its the demand for a citizens’ initiative referendum, diluting into political ideality a revolt driven at least in part by financial hardship and marginalization. These self-proclaimed ‘democrats’ appointed representatives of the movement by ‘clicking’ on interposed candidates, rallying around those with the most charismatic authority. As concerns opportunist politicians of all stripes, they’ve long been licking their chops to join up with them. The 8th and the 15th of December already saw these two types of electoralists gather together before the cameras in Paris.
If “Act V” in Paris was in the end worthy of comparison with classical tragic drama, with its feeling of defeat and its too well-known end-of-movement atmosphere, the case is nonetheless not concluded between the State and the “yellow jackets”. This past Saturday, it was only a forceful policing of bodies that momentarily triumphed over peoples’ widely shared taste for weekly insurrection. The police set up an apparatus identical to that of the previous Saturday, on top of which was added the closure of several freeways leading to Paris and other major cities, blocking entry to its main throughputs, and sifting exits of the train stations across the city. Even with all of this in place, the streets of Paris were still filled by a little less than half the number of protesters from the previous two Saturdays. At the same time, at virtually every roundabout in France, the party continued in full swing. A useful reminder, for those who would otherwise have forgotten, that uprisings can henceforth only take place in the absence of either an event or a center [un soulèvement ne peut plus se faire désormais que sans événement ni centre].
The strategic direction has changed. The last two weeks have shown the limits of a politics polarized by the event, which is to say, by its overly theatrical and spectacular rhythm of struggle. Truth be told, activists and journalists have been the only ones hypnotized like this: the slower dynamism within the movement has lost no strength, and today is much more important than those moments of convergence beneath the watchful eyes of cameras and metropolitan cops. On the other hand, the weakness of rebels and revolutionaries is, as always, to have underestimated the repressive and governmental resources of the State. Unfortunately, power has retained a huge margin of intervention for the months and years to come, and the indignation against its machinations has been miniscule. Along with the social rights of the welfare state, all the freedoms won within liberal democracies over the past two centuries may in turn find themselves violated or confiscated, more than they already have been, in any case. The current political unrest has also served as an occasion for a struggle at the highest rungs of the state, which could well see a long-term victory for the Minister of Finance and his sought-after ‘reforms.’ Decrying ‘too many taxes,’ we may see an even greater paralysis of the ‘left hand’ of the State, leading to a further destruction of the last safety nets for the poor. From the 1970s to the last decade, crises have always served as an opportune pretext for administering ‘shock therapy’ to the social body, a privileged mode of introducing neoliberal modes of capitalist government. One final observation on the current configuration of the forces: we had described (on December 6) what we saw as the ‘weak links’ in power—media, police, mayors. Today, we must admit that these three links have been thoroughly reclaimed by the authorities over the past two weeks, and did not, in any case, serve as orienting fixtures for the base cells of the movement in that time.
Over the past two weeks, the strongest and most vital frontline in the conflict has left the city centers, the regional capitals and Paris, and shifted to the roundabouts and smaller townships [communes], closer to the ‘yellow jackets’ in their everyday life. In many places where occupations and blockades are occurring, deliberation and assembly today forms the most desirable horizon, in the absence of anything else. The government has, for its part, recognized this perfectly clearly, and has already launched a large national consultation at the level of town halls (some of which had opened grievances), thereby destituting, so to speak, the local understandings and practices produced through the mobilization, counterposing to them the eternal republican monolith.
“NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE EXCEPT PERHAPS A CONSTELLATION” [2]
It is only an apparent paradox that the spirit of a movement (of course, when it is still new) resides not in its demands, but in its practices. The meaning of a political sequence [une politique] does not hang on its ideas but on its acts. In this sense, when a movement is insatiable, when people couldn’t tell you what it would take to bring it to a close (the burning question all the banal reporters incessantly ask the participants of all movements), this indicates well enough that there is something more at issue in it than questions of speed or slowness, or the price of gasoline, or purchasing power, or even democratic renewal—something more than ‘forty-two points’ or any political program. What is this ‘something more’? It is place, the political power of locality, as we have seen at the ZAD, and in every site of the last decade’s leaderless revolts (perhaps without the artifice of those sites that lacked any pre-existing relations). This is where the frontline lies. Macron knows it. Believing he had seen the end of all the mediations of the ‘social,’ he now finds himself confronted with real solidarities, weak, eroded, and trembling, but not disappeared. [Its consistency is] local, in the various interstices of the country, between cities and countrysides. It will undoubtedly be these already-existing relations and linkages, integrated into a familiar, accessible, and imaginable milieu, that will one day, in this movement or in another, form the definitive bases of a redefined ecological politics, one that transcends the old and nagging socialist question, by transforming it.
With the adventure of the “yellow jackets”, locality [localité] [3] comes to the fore as the potential nucleus of a political subjectivation to come, antagonistic to the spheres of representation, whether existing or to come. On this subject, the call made by yellow jackets at Commercy was lucid: “This is not the time to hand over our voice to a handful of people, even if they seem honest. They must listen to all of us or to no one! From Commercy, we therefore call for the creation throughout France of popular committees, which function in regular general assemblies. Places where speech is liberated, where one dares to express oneself, to practice it together with each other, and to help one another.”"Who needs interlocutors? Journalists and politicians. Do we? Not necessarily,” adds Alice L., a 28-year-old car driver living in Brittany, in the comments of a Facebook page. "Our organization already exists online, between friends, between neighbors, on the roundabouts. Just because it doesn’t fit within their idea of a ‘classic strike’, doesn’t mean it has no value” (Le monde, 10/12/2018). Having themselves already known this for a long time, on Sunday Dec. 9th the Committees for the Defense of the Catalan Republic donned yellow jackets and opened toll-booths throughout their entire region. Over there, by contrast with the managerial municipalism of the mayor of Barcelona, a municipalist experience of villages coexists alongside “syndicats de barris”, neighborhood committees that emerged through practices of solidarity in low-income areas of the cities.
On the roundabouts here in France, collective cabins have already been constructed, serving as popular houses with their soups, crêpes, a whole tissue of resources, supplies, and assistance, gifts and counter-gifts that are mobilized beyond the movement to traders and producers, but which are also being directed toward the poorest folks who do not currently participate in the movement, in Issoire, Caen, Villefranche sur Saone and elsewhere. There are all sorts of exchanges of services, of time, barter of food, accompanied by an informal anti-commercial attitude and ethos typical of rural and semi-rural areas, in many cases never broken. There are these new temporary ‘families,’ with their operating bases in houses or at the houses of neighbors who take care of your children while the struggle continues. It has repeatedly been said that the "yellow jackets” think first and foremost about the end of the month. Nothing could be more oversimplistic. The next generation’s fear of downward mobility, of a social mobility that would be not only more constrained, but which would have contracted, and even more the fear not only of economic but of ecological and especially ethical degradation of living conditions, weighs heavily on almost everyone’s minds. The “need for mutual aid and support that had found a last refuge in the narrow circle of the family, or among the neighbors of the slums of the big cities, in the villages, or in the secret associations of workers, reappears in our modern society as well,” wrote Kropotkin in 1902.
The constructive ideal of the movement will thus depend on its actual ethics, not on democratic fantasies that would only signify a diversion onto the path of institutionalization, a blackmail by political ‘outlets’ and a bureaucratization of desires. What is a creative power [une puissance créatrice], if not the potential for association, for contamination, for a constellation of revolts capable of combining themselves? It is true that mutual aid and practices of reciprocity are still quite fragile, and a far cry from the relief societies, cooperative associations political clubs and other direct action unions of the nineteenth century. This is because the current movement calls for other collective forms, which would be better adapted to a return to locality as the cardinal element of emancipatory politics. Deliberation and assemblies are, in this context, only certain pieces among others within an assemblage of autonomies that it is necessary to invent, from one week to the next, from one struggle to the next.
-Some Destituted Agents of the Imaginary Party
NOTES
[1] We have taken the liberty of changing the title. In French, the original title of the article was “Rupture dans la contribution en cours”, or “Rupture Within the Contribution In Progress.” As the authors indicate, it refers to the article they published on Dec. 7, “Contribution to the Rupture in Progress”, which is available in English here. All footnotes below are our own as well. In a very small number of cases, we have omitted a sentence here or there, where the reference would mean nothing to anyone outside of France. We have indicated these omissions with ellipses. -Ill Will Editions
[2] “RIEN N’AURA EU LIEU QUE LE LIEU EXCEPTÉ PEUT-ÊTRE UNE CONSTELLATION.” A line from a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé.
[3] The standard meaning of the word localité is ‘town’or ‘village.’ However, given the inclusion of the ZAD within the imagination here, we’ve opted to use the term ‘locality’ instead of these more readily-circumscribed terms, in the hopes of widening the imagination of what such an ‘placement’ or localization of politics might look like
Since the beginning of the Yellow Jackets movement, these mysterious ‘Yellow Letters’ have been circulated at roundabouts and over social media. Accurate and poetic as ever, this 17th missive attacks both the standardization produced by globalization and the fictional identity promoted by those above. -Lundi matin
“Over the past few days the verbal escalation has reached its terminus. The contradiction between the reality from above and the reality from below has been set out clearly: there is Evil and there is Good! We are Evil, they are Good! Those above preach to us about the “free world”, inventing imaginary enemies to ensure the triumph of their logic. "We want freedom of expression”; “We want to defend the right to protest”; “We want to respect all opinions”, they say! They use these ideological tirades to adorn themselves with virtues, while concealing the real nature of their actions! They are talented magicians, but their tricks aren’t working anymore. We Yellow Jackets can see the iron fist beneath the velvet glove.
In spite of their enamored songs about Liberty, those from above are presently prepared to use any means necessary to eliminate those from below: banning demonstrations, preventive detentions, mass arrests, surveillance… Until recently, they had draped these techniques with beneficent speeches about ‘Freedom from oppression! Freedom from enslavement! Freedom from violence! Freedom from tyranny!’ But the reality of Freedom from above is a forced march of standardization. By producing a unique universe, a unique way of thinking, a unique way of acting, a unique way of producing goods, a unique way of living, they have slowly but surely created a new totalitarian logic in the name of their cherished Freedom. On the contrary, they are the fanatical enemies of Freedom. They are totalitarian because they want to impose commercial and legal uniformity as the incontrovertible rule for all: the same clothes! The same men! The same women! The same city centers! The same entertainment! The same jobs! The same suffering! The same nightmare!
This standardization produces remarkable identities that are ever more distant from life as it is lived from below. The European Union is merely the last Russian doll in this system. It swallows up the various States and subjects them to a methodical unification. These same States had already effaced all local peculiarities in order to merge them into large national entities. Statists and pro-Europeans both suffer the same syndrome, since they are equally bent on destroying the worlds from below. It’s always about producing a unity that is ever more distant from concrete life, from local life, from practical life!
It’s not up to Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris, Berlin, or Madrid to determine the size of a tomato, nor how we should live and produce! It is not up to Brussels to decide for Paris, but neither is it up to Paris to decide for Eymoutiers, for Mont-de-Marsan, for Colmar! On the contrary, it is from below that the common rises! No two apples on the tree are identical. But according to those from above, the French apple must be the same as the Romanian one! The apple from Landes must be identical to the apples of Normandy! This undifferentiation from above is the result of an imaginary idea detached from reality. Such top-down indifference does not take into account the abundance of difference. It generates a dead and standardized life.
So we, men and women from below, we Yellow Jackets, we embody particularities. We stand for character, nuance, chance. We stand for other ways of life! We stand for the rich diversity of life, and not its impoverishment! We are not here to not represent the abstraction of ‘Man as such’, detached from all familial, social, and cultural ties, this cosmopolitan, gray Man cast in a mould! We defend the rootedness of particular men and women, the fruits of that immense capacity of the living to produce variety, not insipid identity! The universe from above seeks to produce a groundless and monstrous Man. The world down below wishes to rediscover the warmth, color, and curiosity of alterity!”
Since the beginning of the Yellow Jackets movement, these mysterious Yellow Letters have been circulated at roundabouts and through social media. Accurate and poetic as ever, this 15th missive, which deals with the imminence of the end of this world and the responsibility that sits with us. -Lundi.am
***
Dear Yellow Jackets, dear men and women from below,
We are approaching a critical moment. We are approaching a historical moment, a tipping point in history. We are approaching the end. For several months now, we have been battling together to block the suicidal behavior of those above. Our lives, our children’s lives, our grandchildren’s lives, hang by a thread. We refuse to do the tightrope dance of weighing the pro’s and con’s of this or that constitutional measure that they promise will win us some tiny margin of room to maneuver. We must admit, we simply can’t stomach it.
It is no longer possible for us to define our forms of life in our own way. How do we work, how do we educate our children, how do we eat, how do we produce things, how do we dress, how do we celebrate, how do we look at one another, how do we struggle, how do we share things, how do we kiss, meet, and love one another? All of life is sucked up and devoured by the machinery from above which has never cared a lick about our grievances, our legal status, or our fine feelings. Those from above are already machines, and a machine, dear friends, does not think or feel, it calculates.
Dearest Yellow Jackets, dear men and women from below.
In 2019 our living ground, our real soil, all that surrounds us, the beauty and bounty of our countryside, the freshness of a fine morning, the scent of jasmine or lilacs filling the air in the streets, the anguish of dark nights, the shafts of sunlight caressing our morning faces and the laughter of our children in the gardens of their innocence – all of this is being destroyed and disappearing under a monstrous tide of useless pavement. We have to admit, my friends, that there are no peaceful pastures, no Greenpeace on the horizon. No carbon tax either! No responsible ecology! Still less, any high-level debates around the environment, nor Cop 21, 22 or 23! All of it would amount nothing but a brushstroke of green paint over the trash that awaits us!
So Macron and his friends from above can well afford to wish us a Happy New Year. They’re not the ones who suffer at the end of every month, nor is it them who despair over the end of the world. No, they despair at the lack of growth, their only worry is about what happens if France-from-below fails to adapt to commercial dictates from above. Today, our struggle from below is a total confrontation, and no doubt the last one. It is a struggle against the planned extinction of the human species. It is time that we create a real social organisation with a local base and global reach. The problems of those from below in Congo, in Thailand or in Brazil are also our problems.
While we are encouraged to soothe our frustrations by emptying the shelves of shopping centers during the winter sales, let’s try and imagine a 20-year-old in Vietnam, uprooted from the native soil where his family has lived for generations, heading out at 6am, alone, to a cotton field or to huge cold metallic blocks to produce a miserable item of clothing! Let’s imagine the same company congratulating itself on its great quarterly results! Now imagine us Europeans demanding consumer credit to buy this very same object! Can we imagine how wretched that is? Can we actually imagine the world that we live in? Our faces, a reflection of our daily miseries. This world, our world. The one that we are have rendered so intolerable, detestable, suffocating, and unlivable that we must seek refuge in the citadels of our screens, our illusions, our denials…
On the other hand, imagine if we could establish other ways of producing and consuming things in our apartment blocks, in our neighborhoods and villages. Can we imagine one washing machine per building? Can we imagine spending the morning fishing, the afternoon doing childcare, and the evening preparing the local festival, or tomorrow’s football match? Can we imagine conserving our food in old-fashioned jars and shared spaces? Can we imagine shattering the private property that pens us in, forces us out, isolates and evicts us? Can we imagine the 25-year-old pregnant woman whose needs are distinct from those of a sturdy 35-year-old man? Can we imagine a night watchman working 40 hours a week in the freezing cold, while a banker works the same hours in an air-conditioned office with a cup of coffee and fine cookies? Can we imagine these really-existing sadnesses? Can we imagine a real inequality, and not this abstract equality, that of an abstract labor in which work is no longer judged according to real, vital needs but according to fictive and imaginary ones? Can we imagine real work,meaningful work? Might we, finally, imagine a human face?
Dear Gilets jaunes, dear men and women from below.
This year, our fate is again in our own hands. Let’s seize the opportunity, raise the issues which trouble us and come up with radical and real solutions outside every institutional artifice. Our world is dying, our world is collapsing, human life is being extinguished. We have reignited a spark of hope! So let’s set our villages ablaze, set our towns ablaze, set France ablaze, set Europe ablaze, set the world ablaze!
May our yellow sparks of revolt be transformed into a creative furnace! May the destruction of the framework of everyday life be transformed into the vitality of tomorrow!
A Happy New Yellow Year to all of us!
P.S. A recipe for your end-of-year meal:
1 - For 40 years, wipe out 60% of the world’s wildlife.
2 - Stir in 10 tons of plastic produced every second in the world.
3 - Mix this with $237,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, the global debt of our world.
4 - Drizzle it with yogurt that has traveled 5000 miles to end up on our plates.
5 - And voilà, there you have it, the destruction of humanity! This recipe is unlimited, and will ensure one in six deaths worldwide occur due to industrial pollution, a death rate 15 times higher than all wars.
Translated by Ill Will Editions.Hat tip to Winter Oak, for their draft translation.
‘HISTORY IS NO LONGER ON OUR SIDE’ - An Interview with Jérôme Baschet (2019)
Interview conducted on September 12, 2019 by ACTA, on the occasion of Baschet’s new book on the Gilets Jaunes uprising, Une Juste colère. Interrompre la destruction du monde.
Translated by Ill Will Editions
***
1. I would like to begin by asking about the title of your book, or rather, its subtitle: “interrupting the destruction of the world.” Since the 19th century, and for quite some time, the tradition of the communist movement has thought of revolution as, in Marx’s words, a “locomotive of history.” In other words, that human emancipation was somehow inscribed in historical development itself. Walter Benjamin reversed this formula, suggesting that revolution would rather be "the act by which humanity aboard the train applies the emergency brake.” You seem to be more in line with this latter filiation. What are the issues at stake for you of such a paradigm shift? And how are they linked in particular to the current ecological disaster? [1]
Jérôme Baschet: I’m quite happy to accept your Benjaminian reading of the subtitle. Let me add something about the term “destruction,” which seems to me to be characteristic of a third age of the critique of capitalism. If the first age focused on exploitation, and the second on alienation, the third now focuses on destruction. Although it was certainly anticipated here and there, this shift in dimension is now clearly becoming dominant, as ecological devastation - in the broad sense of Guattari’s three ecologies - now comes to the fore. This does not mean that the other dimensions of critique - and the other aspects of capitalist domination they pointed to - are somehow invalidated; they must simply be reformulated in a new context where capitalist barbarism reaches such a degree that the very possibility of life on Earth is potentially called into question.
"Interrupting the destruction of the world,” then—although I might as well have said, even if the wording may seem strange, "interrupting the world of destruction.” For it is indeed a question of interrupting the course of this world of destruction, which crushes and annihilates so many manifold worlds. To interrupt the destruction of the world, in short, can only mean ending the world of destruction. And this world is the world of the Economy - a world dominated by economic tyranny and animated by a productivist compulsion that is the direct source of the present ecological and human devastation.
This insight implies a "paradigm shift” in our conception of the revolution and, more broadly, of historical time. It has recently been said that there is a major cleavage within the thought of emancipation. For some, it is necessary to preserve, or rediscover, the classical parameters of modernity, and in particular a conception of History understood as a triumphant advance of Progress. It certainly seems increasingly difficult to uphold such an image; yet some persist, in spite of every obstacle, in pushing this line, defending “accelerationist” theses according to which, to exit capitalism, it is necessary not only to continue “in the direction of history,” but even to move as fast as possible by intensifying the most advanced technological and organizational characteristics of capitalism. Full speed ahead, comrades! On the other side of the dividing line are all those who, following Benjamin, consider that we must completely abandon an untenable modern-progressive conception of history. To the arguments that Benjamin put forward in 1940, many others have since been added; and today it is ecological destruction that visibly and dramatically transforms the glorious march of Progress into a mad dash towards the abyss.
All this has important implications for the way in which a possible revolutionary process is conceived, but also, more broadly, for the relationship between present and future, or between past and future. We no longer have History on our side; we are no longer messengers on behalf of any sense of History that would inexorably lead us to salvation. There is a whole swath of representations wrapped up in this that need to be overcome, many of which have been highly effective at the level of organization, even if it is easy these days to recognize their fictitious and illusory nature. But it also means that another vision of history, of collective action, and of the intertwining in the present of the living memory of recollected pasts and the anticipation of possible futures, must be entirely invented.
2. Let’s turn now to the Yellow Vest movement, and your book about it. You insist that an essential trait that characterizes the movement lies in its refusal of representation, the refusal to be “recuperated by politicians” and normalized by the classical forms of politics. It is certainly striking to observe that, whereas many if not most of the mass movements of the previous cycle of struggle paved the way for parliamentary parties claiming to embody their "political outlet” (Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece) yet producing only renewed forms of social democracy, the Yellow Vests have so far deviated from the rule. How should we explain this? Whence this deeply rooted refusal of political representation and traditional parliamentary games?
The Yellow Vests uprising has blown apart the frameworks of classical politics, based as it is on the principle of representation, whose center of gravity turns around political parties locked into electoral competitions over control of the State apparatus. Of course, we have seen the inverse tendency too, here and there, with people attempting to play the role of spokespersons for the movement, acting as self-proclaimed negotiators with the government. There have been attempts by far-right or left-wing militants to infiltrate and steer the movement. But what has been most impressive is the collective intelligence deployed by the various groups of Yellow Vests, most often successfully, which has detected all of this and prevented the takeover of the movement by political sects or trade union activists. The more militant leftist characters that have been allowed to move among the Yellow Vests have generally only been able to integrate provided they abandon their usual speeches and attitudes and adapt to a collective dynamic that breaks with the parameters of classical politics.
No one can predict what will happen, but it is unlikely that parties such as Podemos will manage to assert themselves in France as a “political outlet” for the Yellow Vests uprising. On the other hand, the preparation of the 2020 municipal elections could be an opportunity to rebound on some of the concerns expressed by the Yellow Vests. If it were then a question of entering into the game of classic politics, for example by integrating candidates branded as “yellow vests” among the lists of parties or personalities already in place, this would not make any more sense than the anecdotal lists that emerged during the European elections. Conquering town halls and then claiming to develop forms of participatory democracy would also have obvious limitations and would only superficially modify the frameworks of classical politics. On the other hand, the municipal elections could offer a pretext to relaunch the formation of popular assemblies at the county or district-level, which could take charge of the organization of certain aspects of community life. In the event that they had the strength, the Yellow Vests could try to seize municipal offices as a means to extend their capacity for action, while transforming the elected officials therein into mere executors of the decisions of the assemblies. Such a process would not be easy and would come with many risks. But we cannot a priori exclude the possibility that the local anchoring of the Yellow Vest movement and the concrete solidarity networks it has created may be consolidated and extended by taking advantage of the space opened locally by the municipal timeline. While this may seem paradoxical, it would not necessarily signal a return to classical forms of politics, provided that the focus and attention do not center on municipal administrations but rather on the popular assemblies, which could then engender genuine counter-powers.
3. I have a follow-up question: the Yellow Vests did not simply criticize representative democracy, but also experimented with the implementation of new forms of collective organization “from below,” in particular by multiplying so-called “popular assemblies.” According to you, the latter prefigure instances of self-government and echo other experiments in political emancipation both past (the Paris Commune) and present (Chiapas and Rojava, in particular). What connects these different experiences, and how are the Yellow Vests inspired by these other revolutionary sequences?
I think it’s important to underline the positive dimensions of the Yellow Vest uprising. At the same time as they have radically rejected classical politics — that is, politics from above, centered on state power, parties, the political class and "experts” in public affairs — they have also sought to experiment with another form of politics, which emerges from below, in situated places of life [lieux de vie] through the ability of ordinary people to organize themselves and begin making their own decisions. It is this rejection of the politics from above and this choice of this politics from below that creates a deep affinity between the Yellow Vest uprising and the other experiments you mentioned, such as the Paris Commune, Rojava, Chiapas, or others. This overlap seems highly important.
However, I don’t think it’s quite precise to claim that the assemblies that have emerged as part of the Yellow Vests movement ‘prefigure instances of self-government’. This is only one possible future, particularly if one takes into account the Call by the Commercy Yellow Vests to form popular assemblies everywhere, by means of which “to reclaim power over our lives.” But it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the assemblies of the Yellow Vests necessarily tend towards forms of self-government, as if this formed their natural horizon. As for the Paris Commune, Rojava, and Chiapas, these references have appeared sporadically, and it is fortunate that they have never been invoked as models, which they cannot be.
That said, if we seek to give a politics from below its full strength and to push it to the point where it would be able to destitute politics from above, then it is indeed appropriate — perhaps as part of a generalized movement of blockades — to initiate instances of popular self-government. In other words, instances of self-organized communal life. In this regard, it must be recognized that the Paris Commune and Zapatista autonomy are particularly inspiring experiences. The call by certain currents of the Yellow Vests to increase the number of popular assemblies could be one way — necessarily singular — of sketching such practices of popular self-government.
4. Another important aspect of the Yellow Vest movement has been the centrality of the blockade as a form of action. Today, as capitalism extends its domination beyond the productive sphere and tends to encompass all aspects of life, the strike seems insufficient by itself to sustain a real balance of power. Hence the necessity, as you indicate, that an “articulation of multiple struggles” take place, a coordination of different social subjectivities in accordance with a logic of "generalized dispossession.” Among other examples, the blockade of the Rungis logistics center has seen the emergence of a practical alliance between yellow vests and the more combative nuclei within the unions. Similarly, some organizations in working-class neighborhoods, such as the Adama Committee [against racist police violence in the suburbs] were quick to join the Yellow Vests and affirm their solidarity with the movement. How do you view these attempts at crossover, and does the next step depend on a possible strengthening of these alliances?
Such crossovers do indeed seem important to me, and to be able to give them more strength would certainly be decisive. I devoted a whole chapter of my book to the question of blockades, as it has been one of the central forms of action adopted by the Yellow Vests. From this point of view, I suggest that we attempt to expand this notion of blockage to include all of its possible dimensions, in the hopes that they might be combined, rather than seeking to oppose one to another. This includes blocking flows and infrastructures, i.e. the sphere of circulation (of people, goods, and the flow of information). But also the blocking of consumption (in addition to the axes of communication, the Yellow Vests have often targeted the distribution centers on which supermarket chains depend); blockades that develop inhabited territories directly in the path of large-scale, harmful, and useless megaprojects; blockades in the sphere of social reproduction (e.g., climate strikes by the younger generation, which call into question social reproduction, of which schools are only one vector among others), as well as blockades in the sphere of production itself, through strikes.
On this last point, it is obvious that the strike has lost the centrality it enjoyed throughout the history of the labor movement. First, because the reorganizations of the work world in the neoliberal age have done everything possible to make it less and less possible, and less and less effective. But also because the work world can no longer be considered as the only sphere — or even the sphere par excellence — in which the relations of domination that constitute capitalism are exercised. This domination goes far beyond work, and when it comes to producing docile citizens and avid consumers, it quickly penetrates the “free” time of leisure and consumption, permeates all aspects of life and moulds subjectivities trained to competition in an increasingly direct fashion, resulting in a cult of success oriented around the quantitative evaluation of everything. In the classical age of capitalism, it might have seemed like the Capital/Labor opposition condensed its fundamental antagonism — and again, this would still be to risk overlooking both gender domination and colonial domination, both of which were and remain essential to capital’s affirmation. In the age of neoliberal capitalism, without the question of labor or strikes disappearing entirely from our radar, the fundamental antagonisms of the world of economics must be rethought more broadly, to encompass the multiple modalities of the dynamic of generalized dispossession: the dispossession of the meaning of one’s work, accentuated by the insatiable pressure toward maximization; the relegation to social nonexistence through unemployment, precarity, and exclusion; despoliation of territories through the multiplication of infrastructural megaprojects and the acceleration of commodification; the impossibility of safety for women continually exposed to gender violence; the dehumanization and discrimination experienced by racialized populations; the curtailed enjoyment of a consumerism transformed into subjugation by the weight of debt; the pervasive feeling of political dispossession in the face of collapsing representative democracies; the dispossession of our experience of time by the tyranny of unending ‘emergencies’; not to mention the most serious of all: the ongoing ecological devastation that deprives us all of the possibility of a dignified life. On the one hand, then, there is antagonism, everything that contributes to our generalized dispossession, itself associated with pure and simple destruction; and on the other hand, everything that seeks to oppose it, in an ethical leap to save the possibility of a dignified life for all human and non-human inhabitants of the Earth.
It is this broad understanding of the multiple forms of dispossession induced by the world of economics that lends credence to a strategy based on intensifying blockades, understood in all their various forms. “Let’s block everything” is a perfectly sensible way of opposing the dynamics of capitalist domination and its extension across every domain of life. Finally, it should be stressed that the blockade in all its forms is a perfectly concrete response to ecological urgency. Is it not the most direct way to stop the destruction of the world, by “turning off the tap” of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other pollution responsible for the collapse of living things?
5. As concerns the insurrectional “acts” of November/December 2018, you write that we were “on the brink of a situation over which the authorities might in fact lose control.” That for the first time in a long time in France, the destitution of power appeared to be a “credible” perspective… in the end, what was lacking, to make this overthrow effective? And what lessons can be learned for the future from this critical moment?
In the early days of December, the ruling class genuinely feared a popular uprising, which is something that had not happened for quite some time in France. The full deployment of law enforcement was nearly overtaken and those in power half-heartedly admitted that the Macronian five-year period was on the line. When they were first heard only a few days prior, the calls to destitute the Head of State had still appeared as a sort of pious wish. In short, power seriously faltered.
One may of course wonder what the departure from Macron could have produced in the way of change. The destitution of a president is still a far cry from the destitution of state power as such. And this limitation is surely linked to the tendency to present this or that politician in particular as the principal enemy. It is true that the hatred that Macron magnetized served as useful fuel for the uprising, but we can only agree with those Yellow Vests who insisted early on that another president would do no better and, even more so, with those who pointed out that, once Macron leaves, he must not be replaced.
What was missing? What prevented the situation from tipping over completely? Some have suggested that it was the refusal of the central trade union organs to throw themselves into the fray. But could we expect anything other than a posture of suspicious distance from a movement that has so often presided over the decline of the very forms of organization they embody? A massive strike wave by the more combative trade union bases could certainly have been important. A broader alliance with the struggles of marginalized people from the hood, which has only seen furtive attempts, could certainly have changed the situation as well. By and large, it was one fraction of the working classes that rose up — the one rooted in the near hinterland zones that ring the major cities, who for the most part have regular jobs, own homes, and are by and large white. Of those segments of the larger working class who live in racialized neighborhoods, and more often victim to exclusion and precarity, only small numbers joined in the insurrection. In general, everything is done to ensure that these different segments of the working classes remain divided and even hostile toward each other, a process intensified by the sort of racism that invigorates the extreme right. From this point of view, the fact that so many in the Yellow Vest movement succeeded in rebuffing and rejecting the grip of racism and of the extreme right and, quite pointedly, avoided scapegoating “immigrant” or “migrants” is very encouraging, at least from the perspective of a broader rapprochement that might be possible down the road. The involvement of certain organs of neighborhood struggle is likewise a cause for optimism. But we are still far from the conditions that would really draw together the two halves of the working classes, beyond all that tends normally to divide them. Finally, the movement suffered the absence of certain more “militant” formations, whose mistrust of any movement in which the extreme right is presence tends to arouse mistrust, and critiques of “impurity,” being too-far removed from the forms of organization that their militant affiliation had accustomed them to consider legitimate.
Whatever was found lacking, a powerful legacy is nonetheless being forged. It shows the kind of power that the sudden appearance of unforeseen popular mobilization can engender, even in the absence of any pre-existing logistical support networks common to the broader left or political groups. A new and widely shared perception of what can be done has emerged. The effect that this collective experience and shared perception of possibilities can have in subsequent uprisings should not be overlooked.
6. On a more strategic level, you take up some of the insights already offered in one of your previous books, Adieux au capitalisme (La Découverte, 2014). We agree that today the seizure of state power can no longer be a regulative aim of emancipatory politics, and that communism must be understood less as a horizon to be reached than as a process that unfolds in the present. The material foundations of such a process are what you call “liberated spaces,” that is, immediate forms of experimentation with a post-capitalist reality within the very heart of the contemporary world. There is a tendency, quite perilous from our point of view, to consider these liberated spaces as community refuges, harmless margins, in short to neglect their “antagonistic dimension,” thereby leaving the structures of domination intact. For this reason, we prefer to speak of instances of “counter-power” as a way of indicating a clearer connection between “building" and “fighting.“ How can we avoid this tendency to ghettoize liberated spaces (whatever their scale)? How can we preserve a link between prefigural positivity and the destructive function?
Exactly. What I call “liberated spaces” [espaces liberés] should not be construed as protected islands, where it we live out a charming life in the midst of the surrounding disaster, but as spaces for combat. “Free space” implies that we must free ourselves from something, from what oppresses us or causes us to slowly die; it implies that there is a struggle. In reality, these spaces are not entirely liberated, but only in the process of being so: they are not free of what oppresses and attacks them, nor consequently of the need to fight against them. At the same time as they are building from now on a different, clean reality, escaping as much as possible the norms of the economic world, they also have an intrinsically antagonistic dimension.
To affirm, as some do, that in order to exit capitalism it’s enough to simply stop reproducing it, without having to face off with it, is to ignore the antagonistic dimension of what could also be described as an interstitial strategy of openings. And I would add that the theories of collapse, at least in the version offered to us by “collapsology,” seem to me to induce a movement of flight, sometimes with panicked feeling, to shelters where it would be a question of learning, individually or in small groups, to survive the disaster. In this sense, it seems to me that there is a fairly strong opposition — perhaps even a polarization destined to appear with increasing clarity in the years to come — between the perspective of the liberated spaces, heard in their antagonistic dimension, and the reactions that collapsology elicits in the face of an allegedly inevitable and already ongoing implosion.
Of course, liberated spaces can take very different natures and scales. The most modest and discreet of them, by no means contemptible on this account, probably come into less direct conflict with their systemic environment than those who reach a certain dimension and who, in their process of creating their own reality, are led more openly to flout the norms of commodity society, or even to engage in a process of secession from state institutions, as in the case of Zapatista autonomy. As for the liberated spaces linked to the fight against large, harmful and useless projects, these cannot help but enter into direct conflict with the forces that sustain the world of the Economy and find themselves immediately threatened from them.
That said, it is often the enemy who succeeds in reminding liberated spaces of their antagonistic character, by attacking them variously and forcing them to defend themselves. But this reminder of a defensive antagonism is not enough. To build and multiply liberated spaces is certainly a positive way to contribute to the emergence of a world free of capitalist tyranny. But we cannot conceal the fact that these spaces encounter considerable difficulties, not only on account of the attacks they weather, but also because of the spirals of division and internal disintegration that often undermine them from within. Under these conditions, it is reasonable to think that they can only prosper if a broader struggle is able to attack the power of capitalist synthesis. This is why a concern for the survival of liberated spaces should lead us not to withdraw into the process of their construction alone, but to link it up with the broader fight against the world of the Economy. The liberated spaces can then be designed as bases for building bridges to other struggles and intensifying the offensive against the enemy.
For example, we might develop strategy that combines the multiplication of liberated spaces with generalizing blockades. To the extent that the liberated spaces are capable of deploying their own material resources and technical capacities, they can serve as decisive nodes on the basis of which it becomes possible to amplify the blockade dynamics at key moments, in various forms. The more liberated space we have, the more we should be able to extend our capacity for blockades. Conversely, the more widespread the blockades become, the more they promote the emergence of new liberated spaces.
Another dimension of such a strategy consists in deepening of links between existing liberated spaces. This is an important point, the urgency of which is no doubt widely felt, but on which too little progress has been made. Taking up an idea already launched earlier, the Zapatistas have proposed in a communiqué this past August to resume discussions surrounding the creation of a global network of resistance and rebellions. Numerous initiatives could and should exist that move in this same direction, and it would certainly be valuable if the various rebel territories could meet more closely, get to know each other better and exchange proposals, experiences, and concrete forms of mutual support for one another. In any case, for the Zapatistas, it is clear that the creation of autonomy in their territories in Chiapas, however important it may be for the concrete lives of tens of thousands of people, is not an end in itself; it only makes sense in combination with a global struggle against what they have called the capitalist hydra. And that is why they have never stopped organizing international, or even "intergalactic” meetings…
7. A complementary question: if the liberated spaces multiply and carry with them a genuinely antagonistic potential, it is obvious, as you say, that “the rulers of the world and those who serve them will not hand over their privileges voluntarily.” There is therefore also a problem of self-defense and the disaggregation of the enemy’s forces. How can we envisage this today, given the militarization of policing and the development of law enforcement technologies?
We always come back to this point: liberated spaces are places of collective construction; but they must also be defended. The scale and radicality of the liberated spaces that we are capable of building is directly proportional to the collective power at our disposal — and in particular to the capacity for self-defense that we are able to bring into play. In this regard, it should be recalled that the construction of Zapatista autonomy would certainly not have been possible without the armed uprising of January 1, 1994. And even if autonomy has taken on a civil character and has developed by dissociating itself from the Zapatista political-military organization, it has probably only been able to persist until now because it has enjoyed the protection of weapons (the Zapatistas have renounced the offensive use of weapons, but have kept them for defensive purposes). More broadly, it must be noted that today, the two liberated territories that were able to push the construction of autonomy the furthest, Zapatista Chiapas and Kurdish Rojava, are both linked to contexts where armed struggle plays or has played a certain role.
It is not a question of advocating armed struggle - which is something that the Zapatistas have been careful not to do ever since their public appearance in 1994. But it does highlight the rather direct link between the size of the liberated spaces and the necessity of a capacity for self-defense. There are of course many forms of self-defense that do not involve the use of weapons. Many struggles are experimenting with this, as was seen, for example, on the ZAD in Notre-dame-des-landes during Operation César in 2012. But this implies a successful conjunction combining a broad capacity for mobilization, collective physical commitment, unrelenting determination to defend that which is we hold dear, tactical intelligence and inventiveness, and of course the material, logistical and technical resources that go with this. To be sure, the more the enemy increases the level of repression and the means placed at the service of “policing” and the extension of the world of the Economy, the more difficult it becomes to defend liberated spaces. There is no simple formula for these matters, but it is clear that there is no other option than to increase our collective strength on all the points I have just mentioned (and probably others still).
In conclusion, I should reiterate that we have been plunged into a structural crisis such that the capitalist system can reproduce itself only at the cost of ever-increasing difficulties for both us and for it - and, first and foremost, at the cost of ever-increasing ecological and human destruction. We can already foresee that the antagonism between the world of Economics — which has proven itself ready to do anything in its power to perpetuate itself, to feed the quantitative hypertrophy of value, and to preserve the privileges of a few — and liberated spaces marked by multiple and conjoint ruptures with the ongoing devastation is bound to intensify. If this wager is even minimally correct, it would probably be a good idea to begin getting ready for it.
****
[1] Jérôme Baschet is a historian, currently teaching at the Autonomous University of Chiapas in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Author of several books on medieval history, he has also published Défaire la tyrannie du présent. Temporalités émergentes et futurs inédits (2018) et La Rébellion zapatiste (2019). This interview was conducted on September 12, 2019, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Une Juste colère. Interrompre la destruction du monde, on the Gilets Jaunes. The French original is available here: https://acta.zone/nous-navons-plus-lhistoire-avec-nous-entretien-avec-jerome-baschet/
Since the beginning of the Yellow Jackets movement, mysterious Yellow Letters have been circulated on roundabouts and social networks. With customary poetic and theoretical acumen, this 20th Letter lays the foundations for a strategy of combat: “if the cold reason from above is to give way to the common sense from below, we must gather ever more people.” -Lundi matin
***
This world has become logical. It imposes its implacable rhythm on our lives and on our bodies. Those on high ask that we break our backs with nothing to look forward to but disaster. Now they even ask that we join their ranks, that we make a deal with the devil! In fact, it’s only by staying away from their world that we can halt this infernal pace. It’s not too late to reverse the course of things, to sow new seeds on fertile soil. We must no longer be seduced by the refrains of reform, or by their lists of candidates for the European elections! We are the savior we’ve been waiting for!
It’s time to implement our radical project: a clear separation from the world on high. Local experiments must be set in motion to take back abandoned, polluted, endangered and cleared land! We must rebuild our world from below with our hands, our hearts, our vital force. Today, our fighting strategy must be to gather in ever-increasing numbers, in order that the cold reason from above gives way to the common sense from below.
Let’s get down to business! Let’s unravel the national and European territory! Let’s relentlessly fill it in with our experience and know-how: let’s finally secede! It’s no longer about revolt, it is a question of setting up new practical determinations, of creating new ways of being in common! Now that we have, at long last, succeeded in understanding and demystifying the language from on high, let’s come together and build the foundations for yellow houses, yellow communities, yellow lands! Our commons from below must become concrete, active, visible truths! We must engage in a permanent occupation, of the sort we’ve already begun at the roundabouts, but extended to infinity. We know, we have seen, we have experienced that we can count on the immense generosity of this united France.
Let’s make sure of it! The man from on high no longer believes in his reality! Having already given up, he now lingers on out of weariness and weakness! Deep down, he no longer even loves the monsters he has fathered, and prefers to hide out in his tower of denial! He doesn’t want to admit his mistake! If he still tries to see it through to the end, this is solely in order to prove himself right at all costs! It’s up to us, men and women from below, to bring him to acknowledge his misery! Let’s bring him down from his desert heights, bring him back to life, to us! It’s time we tore up the roots of all the fantastic illusions of this world from on high, which hustles its trash, its death and its sadness to us every day in glittering and shiny packaging!
We are governed today by invisible logics, by algorithms stored in air-tight secure rooms that administer the destruction machine day and night! If we are to live again, these must be destroyed! We must obliterate them! Macron is only the first stage of the rocket! We must certainly overthrow him, but we must also confront these mathematical locales: banks, logistics hubs, shopping centers, large global organizations, stock exchanges! The valorization machine must be blocked and shattered! The death train must be derailed! Let’s take back control of this autopilot world!
So, men and women from below, let’s leave their networks, our digital boxes, let’s leave this mortuary prison! Let’s smash the operating systems! No more hesitation! No more backing down! Let’s alter the course of the world! Let’s never again be programmed by the world from on high! Let’s create our short circuits from below! Spread the Yellow Virus worldwide!
Full book, translated into English by Robert Hurley.
“The communist question was badly formulated because, to start
with, it was framed as a social question, that is, as a strictly human question.
Despite that, it has never ceased to trouble the world. If it continues
to haunt it, that’s because it doesn’t stem from an ideological fixation
but from a basic, immemorial, lived experience: that of community—which nullifies all the axioms of economy and all the fine constructions
of civilization. There is never community as an entity, but always as
an experience of continuity between beings and with the world.”
A wild article on memes, revolutionary destitution, & looting as ‘anti-fascism’ by two North American comrades who traveled to France.
“The meme reopens the basic question of the Party, and offers what is perhaps the minimal basis for organizing a force of rupture in the twenty-first century. The fluidity of the meme makes it possible to join a march, a blockade or a roundabout occupation without having to buy into a “common interest” or the legitimizing “beliefs” of a movement. It does not solve, but simply defers the question of a common grammar of suffering to a later point…The meme authorizes everyone to act on their respective experience of how the ‘elites’ (a deliberately under-constructed enemy) have screwed them over, like a Tarot deck in which the audience fills in the personal content. Each of us is invited to intervene against the enemy without waiting or asking permission, and for our own reasons.”
Let’s make the most of a good thing! The Zeitgeist reveals itself in revolt, each time in new forms. With the movement against the Labor Law in spring 2016, there was the cortège de tête; in Spring 2018, it was the defense of the communized rural territory of the ZAD; most recently, in Autumn 2018, the Yellow Vests movement erupted into uncontrolled blockades and demonstrations, which are still ongoing.
An unknown but familiar territory has begun to take on a political existence. The yellow vests have situated themselves in a peripheral space made up of non-places: roundabouts, motorway tolls, shopping center parking lots – the same circulatory axes along which the atomized functions to which neo-urbanites are consigned are organized and distributed. This daily environment of millions of people stuck in early morning and late afternoon traffic jams seemed to have neutralized any possibility of an event. Statistics suggest that half of the French population lives in this periphery. All of these people had been desperately invisible…in order to exist, they had to put on a yellow vest, just as others had needed a balaclava or a black North Face jacket… The fact that the Adama Traoré committee was so quick to call for people to join the yellow vest rallies in Paris is a case in point: Beaumont-sur-Oise, the border point between the Parisian suburbs and what was once the Parisian countryside, embodies precisely this periphery of the metropolis that has taken on a political existence (in this case since the murder of Adama Traoré) and does not intend to give it up.
To use a term that is far from innocent, it could be said that this movement is an essentially provincial one, and in a way that is entirely unprecedented. Demonstrations and riots are erupting in small towns where nothing usually happens - the same places where the state has been busy shuttering train stations, post offices, schools, maternity wards—why spend public money on country bumpkins [parpagnàs] [*1]? Yellow Vests are cropping up everywhere. A riot in Nantes, St Nazaire, Caen, Rouen is plausible enough, but in Beauvais, Bar-le-Duc, Narbonne, Le Puy, Angers? Surprise! It’s a known fact that the vast majority of the rioters who looted the beautiful Parisian districts on December 1 and 8 came from these same provinces. Their wandering through Paris was more like hooligans on a stroll through enemy territory than a traditional trade union demonstration. Contempt for small provincial people, so typical of the Parisian national elites, finally receives a reply. A decade ago, it was already being said that Paris had become so thoroughly pacified and gentrified that nothing is left to do but loot and vandalize it. Never before has this claim been transformed into action in such exemplary fashion.
The province is a typical French construct. In the common parlance, which expresses the hierarchical organization of the nation, we go ‘up’ to Paris and ‘back down’ to the provinces. The capital, whose lights illuminate the entire hexagon, is enthroned at the top of the pyramid. More generally, in the current configuration of capitalism the relationship between the periphery and the center is arranged in a networked, rather than concentric fashion. However, in nation-states as centralized and centralist as France, traffic networks must be superimposed over this concentric organization of the territory, which still remains decisive. By heading ‘up’ to Paris to terrorize the bourgeois of the 8th Arrondissement, the Yellow Vests overturned the pyramid.
The ‘peripheral’ nature of the movement is not only geographical and political. The longstanding centrality of the factory as the axis around which movements revolve here finds itself called into question. It is no longer the company that serves as the initial point of aggregation. The people who are finding each other at blockades generally do not know each other beforehand, which means that their complicities come into being through voluntary acts that can only be described as political. Hence the dismay of the unions, most of whom had already signed a nonaggression pact with Macron’s party at the beginning of December (only Solidaires and a handful of local chapters of the CGT union [*2] refused this explicit gesture of collaboration). All of this indicates well-enough the exhaustion of the trade union movement, already clearly visible in spring 2016.
The Marxian analysis postulates that the genesis of exchange value is to be found in production, a value which the circulation of commodities merely serves to realize. In this dynamic, which literally is capitalism, all moments are dependent on one another and have their reality only in relation to the totality they constitute thereby. Not only does circulation add value to products and itself generate profits (indeed, an entire industry has developed to ensure this fact, including banking, insurance, marketing, transport, storage, mass distribution, as well as their related activities), but it is increasingly difficult to even separate these two moments from each other in the first place [1]. This is blatantly obvious when we consider commodities such as energy. The production of a nuclear power plant is inconceivable without the high-voltage lines that distribute the electricity, as is true of the supply lines and service stations linked to every oil refinery. By the same token, textiles made in China can only be produced there thanks to the giant container ships that will transport the precious T-shirts to Western ports—and no one can claim that maritime transport does not create value. At the furthest extreme, the Internet embodies the pure circulation of value, rendered almost totally independent of the exploitation of living labor – except, of course, for the electronic and computer components that make all of this possible, which must still be produced in factories… It has become difficult to single out a single segment of activity that could be called “production” from the totality of the other kinds of work and exchange that make up what we call society. In the 70’s, the Italian comrades were already talking about the ‘social factory’ – a deliberate oxymoron, given that a factory is not a society but a system. Today it is perhaps more correct to speak of a ‘global factory’, since we live in a moment in which the capitalist enterprise attempts to seize upon and reconfigure all that exists in accordance with the model of the factory or the plant. ‘Hubs’, – whether for land, sea or air traffic – shopping areas, and even highways are only so many cogs in the global factory. The distinction between the private and public spheres that defined the relationship between civil society and the state following the French Revolution has disappeared under the influence of apparatuses that today constitute the real force organizing the circulation of individuals. In the global factory, society has been hollowed out, and the State becomes little more than a service provider.
The great cycles of workers’ struggles ended with the crisis of the Fordist system. Since the second half of the 1970’s, most of the struggles in Western Europe have been focused on opposing the closure of companies and the atomization of the workers, and all of them ended in cruel defeats. Steel, mines, shipyards, then other major sectors of industry—all the strongholds of the working class went down the same way. We can date the precise historical moment when everything changed irreparably: it begins with the defeat of FIAT workers in Turin in the autumn of 1980, continues in France with the defeat of the unskilled immigrant Talbot workers in 1983, and ends with the defeat of the British miners in the spring of 1985. The same cycle that has been completed in Western Europe is now resurfacing in India and China…
This eclipse of the factory’s centrality in struggle leads us to hypothesize that the next wave of insurrections will be forced to seize upon businesses from the outside, and not the other way around (formulated in Marxian terms, they will depart from the sphere of circulation, in order to take over production). In other words, they will resemble the Yellow Vests movement, whose movement toward the center departs from the periphery. This will no longer take place within the purview of ‘self-management’, in which workers seize control of their factories, but rather in reverse: through an organized rupture with the logic of the global factory, forces arriving from outside would take over the factory and dismantle it according to their own needs. We are obviously not there yet. Still, the multiplication of revolts in the periphery, from the riots in the suburbs in 2005 to the current Yellow Vests movement, indicates that a new cycle is beginning, very different from those preceding it, and which continues to surprise us.
Among the Yellow Vests, everything is situated in the sphere of circulation, not only the initial demands, but also the non-places in which they have been expressed. The demand to rescind the fuel tax may well have been the first time that a movement of such magnitude has emerged from this sphere. Of course, the green “bike path” bourgeoisie made sure to ridicule their ‘retrograde’ demand. However, in a world based on forced mobility, fuel prices are anything but innocent, unless you live and work in the city center (and we know who now occupies the French city centers…). Suburban workers are literally trapped by this apparatus, which forces them to work to buy cars that they can’t do without…if they want to get to work! As a result, their action is centered on roundabouts, toll-booths, car park entrances, all the elements of this apparatus. Two centuries ago, the plebs revolted against increases in the price of bread; today, they are in revolt against the increase in the price of gasoline [2].
That the question of fuel is an eminently strategic one is something our governments have understood for a long time. At the height of the general strike of May 1968, they organized a fuel shortage (although large stocks were still available), so they could suddenly replenish the service stations just before the Pentecost long weekend…and millions of relieved French people, who were following the “events” as spectators, rushed out onto the roads. A machination of this kind probably did more against the movement than half a million pro-De Gaulle demonstrators on the Champs-Elysées [3].
Unlike the mass worker of the Fordist era, today’s atomized workers no longer have any room to maneuver on the wage, which consequently stagnates even as everything else gets more expensive. They therefore find themselves struggling against taxes on their incomes. On the left, some suggest that in doing so they are taking up a classic theme of liberal ideology, that of lowering taxes. This is true of some Yellow Vests, small bosses and traders. But the majority are well aware that in this case, if there has been a tax cut, it was applied exclusively to very high incomes, in particular through the abolition of the wealth tax [*3]. Moreover, while the question of wages begins with the company, that of taxes begins with the State, which ensures that it automatically picks up a political resonance (especially given the extent to which fuel taxes feed the State budget) [4]. From this point of view, the fact that toll booths are destroyed and radars sabotaged shows that this racket is increasingly perceived as a system of parasitism worthy of the Ancien Régime. Except that this time it is not the fermiers généraux [*4] who are feeding off people, but the State and companies like Vinci who manage the freeways… Moreover, it cannot escape anyone that, in recent weeks, many Yellow Vests have moved towards demands that are more social than fiscal (increasing the minimum wage in particular) even if the return of the wealth tax still figures at the top of their list.
Under the Ancien Régime, anti-fiscal revolts broke out incessantly, especially in the 17th century, which saw the consolidation of the absolute monarchy [5]. With the French Revolution, a complete reversal took place: paying taxes became a civic act, as did enlisting in the army (whereas previously people fled when the recruiting sergeant turned up). This is the bourgeoisie’s historical tour de force, and there is nothing to suggest that it has exhausted all its effects. Since then, refusing to pay tax has been treated as an Ancien Régime gesture. The left, whose only horizon is that of republican institutions, can no longer raise this issue. Within the political binary of right and left, it was customary for this anti-fiscal dimension to be the prerogative of the liberal right, while the Keynesian left advocated redistribution through state mechanisms financed by tax levies. Now that the political left and right hold the same positions, the old tradition of anti-fiscal revolt can reappear… What is paradoxical is that this is taking place explicitly in reference to the French Revolution - tricolor flags, “The Marseillaise”, demonstrators in Phrygian caps…
In a little over a month and a half, the Yellow Vests have achieved what the unions have been unable to do over the past two decades. Since they do not organize within a union framework, the Yellow Vests are not limited by its institutionalized modes of action nor deceived by its subsidized bureaucrats. This has made for some beautiful riots in Paris, to which provincial proletarians flocked (and even if some of the Yellow Vests do not accept this vandalism, their mere presence made it possible, and there were no union marshals around to crush the enthusiasm). The classical demonstration is replaced by a wandering. Whereas the cortège de tête [head of the march, *5] was still dependent on the trade union demonstration, and reached its limits on May 1st, 2018 (where there was a cortège de tête as large as the entire trade union procession, with a huge black bloc in the middle of it, and all this for an insignificant result); once it is freed from any notion of a cortège, the crowd begins to drift! Union parades are disciplined and disciplinary, and keep to the avenues of the city centers, places of representation par excellence. Meanwhile the stampedes of Yellow Vests in Paris in November and December 2018 were marked above all by their diffuse character and freedom of movement.
However, things appear to be taking a turn for the worse. Since mid-December, people in Paris have been declaring march routes to the police in advance, and on January 12 we saw the reappearance of trade union-style protest marshals, although it is unclear who appointed them [*6]. It is no coincidence that these forces reappear precisely at the moment representatives begin to retake control. In provincial cities, however, Yellow Vests have continued their joyfully uncontrolled wandering; as we said above, the heart of the movement is playing out in the provinces. In Marseille on January 12, the Yellow Vests’ wandering drove the people responsible for repressing them completely insane, and their unpredictable zig-zags through the streets (and even a highway tunnel) left the robocops gasping for breath.
The blockades have often taken the form of camps evoking the ZAD. This raises a question: could we not see in them the premises of an “insurrectionary urbanism” to come? What is one to do with all these sites whose only interest is tactical, namely, to be located on traffic routes? Not since the 2005 suburban revolt has the critique of urban planning been so present in practice. Warding off the event[conjurer l’événement]—this was always what this relentless extension of the global factory was about. The tightly-regulated flow of goods that organizes space must above all prevent anything from happening, whether it be an accident, an earthquake, a blockade, or a riot. For the time being, it is extremely vulnerable, just as a Fordist assembly line lay at the mercy of simple sabotage. It is not by chance that in several places the Yellow Vests have blocked access to Amazon warehouses, an emblematic company if ever there was one [6]….
The camps are the elementary form of communication, from Occupy Oakland to Taksim Square, from the saplings on the Oaxaca zocalo (central square) to the Lakota and Standing Rock anti-pipeline camps, from the ZAD to the No-TAV presidio in the Susa Valley. The construction of space comes primarily as a political affirmation. Whereas demonstrations remain indifferent to the space through which they pass, occupations lead to the production of something common that re-configures its place. In this respect, the blockades of the Yellow Vests are the opposite of the assemblies that defined Nuit debout: whereas the latter took place exclusively in central squares, in accordance with the hierarchical injunction that orders urban and suburban space, and gave primacy to speech therein, the Yellow Vest blockades almost always occur in peripheral areas or on major traffic routes. In this case, a primacy is given to the very action of the blockade itself and the relationships it establishes between the participants. This is the great innovation of this movement. Moreover, whereas the organizers of Nuit Debout negotiated with the prefecture to be allowed to remain in their place, the majority of the current blockades are imposed without anyone demanding anything.
There is one demand on which all the Yellow Vests unanimously agree: “Macron démission” [Macron resign!]. The country that guillotined its king is still, two centuries later, the most monarchical in Europe. This explains the typically sans-culotte furor that animates Yellow Vests [7]. But the monarch is no longer accorded the sacred characteristics that he possessed under the Ancien Régime: the French elect one, then hate him after a few months. The fact is that the monarch is a product, obsolete like everything that is produced nowadays. After the coke-head Sarkozy and the manic-depressive Holland, we have the arrogant golden boy who swoops in to bring the bipartisan regime of the Fifth Republic to its spectacular finale. The fact that he had never been elected before made him the perfect person for the job: whereas the political class, composed of mayors, presidents of general and regional councils, deputies and senators, was still mired in relationships of dependence, Macron [*7] freed the government from such a burden. Henceforth, the State coldly declares itself nothing more than a service provider for capital. There will be no more negotiated arrangements, only a pure injunction. In this respect, Macronian governance consecrates the replacement of civil society by the global factory. The presidential arrogance that today goes as far openly spewing insults (‘those ungrateful parasites!’) in fact only reproduces methods employed in the contemporary business world, which were themselves inspired by the training techniques developed by the army’s special forces.
In the Yellow Vests movement, ‘the people’ has thus come to occupy the place of civil society so dear to the citoyennistes [*7]. But this signifier only exists for lack of better term—prior to the French Revolution, one would have spoken of the ‘vile multitude’ or the ‘plebs’. The people only ever comes into being through a game of mirrors with the State, a supposedly-homogeneous entity that faces the monarch (the famous 99%…). This double reflection is today exacerbated by the monarchical character of Macron’s presidency. Yet the people refers to the Nation and therefore to the republican state, both products of the French Revolution. To postulate a truth inherent to this subject, and which a referendum is supposed to reveal—this where demagoguery begins, whether that of the Front National or La France Insoumise [*8]. “Left-wing populism should direct these affects towards democratic objectives,” says Chantal Mouffe, who adds that, “the people are always a collective subject, built in a discursive way.” That this construction necessarily implies the exclusion of immigrants, social welfare recipients, and others never seems to bother the supporters of this sub-gramscism. Furthermore, the politicians who try to claim the term ‘the people’ wind up promulgating the same themes as their symmetrical opponents: the demagogue Ruffin praises the confusionist Chouard, while Mélenchon declares his fascination with Eric Drouet… Populism consists in pandering to the affects produced by this world and maintaining them as something positive, whereas a revolutionary attitude places its trust in a future that gives birth to new forms of political sensitivity throughout the course of the struggle. Let’s never lose sight of the fact that the negative is the driving force behind any movement. In fact, in all these rebel camps that are multiplying throughout the world, the transcendent figure of the people gives way to the immanence of the common. [8]
The social classes, clearly identifiable until the end of Fordism, have since been liquefied, a fact which is reflected in the blanket term middle class, which is significant precisely in that it identifies nothing. In rich countries like France, the ‘middle class’ presumably consists of almost everyone apart from the bourgeoisie at the top, and immigrant workers and the unemployed at the bottom! One could say that a Marseilles dock worker, for example, is part of the old working class through his work, and part of the new middle class through his way of life and aspirations (building a house, taking out loans, ensuring that his children go to school and vacationing at dream destinations). The Yellow Vests identify themselves first of all as workers (even if they are retired, and plenty of them in this movement are), but what is paradoxical is the fact that they do so outside the sphere of the workplace, properly speaking. Their recurring complaint is, "we work and we don’t get by” (or for retirees, “we’ve worked all our lives and we barely have enough to eat”). All these people have been led to believe that a life of hard work will sooner or later be rewarded with a certain level of comfort; but they are forced to realize that this perspective is never more than an endless ladder that they will continue to climb all their lives [9].
One of the most interesting texts published on this movement refers to a “middle class tragedy” located in the relationship to money [10]. “The concern for money becomes permanent, particularly at the point where we finally gain access to it. We are middle class once we earn enough money that, whether we directly and consciously thematize it or not, it’s all we think about. (…) We might be in the best social position to know the value of money.” To this, we may add: if the most penniless people experience money only as a necessity, while for the rich it serves as the very expression of freedom, for the majority of workers the relationship to money is constantly torn between these two extremes. It is in this sense there can exist an effectively ‘middle’ class! It belongs to the very principle of the spectacle to constantly dangle such freedoms before us, such as that of being able to drive around in one’s own car, for example. That this spectacular freedom should have as its condition an everyday slavery is something we all intimately experience, without always being able to express it. It makes people sick, literally. And we must never overlook the fact that the therapeutic aspect of revolt is also what makes it so politically powerful.
As long as the state occupies the horizon of waiting for popular uprisings, they inevitably prepare the bed for all manner of nationalist demagogues. It is therefore by no means an innocent move for Macron to pull out his wild card now with the proposal for the ‘citizens referendum initiative’ (RIC). As the Yellow Vests move toward social demands (an increase in minimum wages and pensions in particular), an attempt to stifle these developments is being made by presenting the ‘RIC’ as a miracle solution that would constitute a way out of this incredibly unpopular regime. At the same time, however, the 'RIC’ also offers a way for the movement to turn down the heat. That this would lead us into a void by no means prevents the idea of the referendum from functioning as a meta-demand that draws together all the various elements of this extremely heterogeneous dynamic. The people who have drawn their strength only through the assemblies are enthusiastic about this proposal, even though this pseudo-consultation would effectively shove everyone back upon their initial isolation as voters, trapped by binary decisions about trick questions that the sovereign deems appropriate to present to the rabble. The referendum is the highest form of political spectacle [11].
Macron is ready to open up the field of representation so long as this means not having to give up anything concrete. He is therefore quite happy to throw a bone to all those under the sway of Chouard’s hare-brained ideas. As Rafik Chekat says: "The problem of the referendum (RIC) is that it maintains the tyranny of the majority. Why should the majority always be right? Even without being too sensitive, belonging to a minority makes you suspicious of the majority, because you know very well that sometimes the majority looks more like a lynch mob. Can you imagine a #RIC right after #CharlieHebdo? It’s no coincidence that the demand for the RIC comes from "whites”. But even beyond the question of racism, what does majority-building mean in a consumer society at the time of #BFMTV, #TF1, [both private TV stations] and #Hanouna [a sexist and homophobic TV clown]? Fundamentally, the problem of the 'RIC’ is that of voting, a mechanism that arranges our powerlessness into regular intervals. We could try to shorten the intervals and vote more often, but that wouldn’t lead to any change in the matter. If it is necessary to speak in terms of subjectivization, the voting apparatus creates a certain type of individual with a damaged relationship to existence, and particularly as concerns politics and public affairs.” Moreover, it is hard to imagine the government calling a referendum on property taxes (according to surveys, 2/3 of the French are in favor).
The regime has had so much trouble finding interlocutors that it had to go fishing on Facebook. The majority of the self-proclaimed leaders, almost instantly cast off by the Yellow Vests, are carefully staged on television shows, and the media systematically co-opts anyone with dubious affinities – providing ample incentives to self-righteous leftists to begin condemning the movement. Never before have the media been so obviously what they are, namely, the second pillar on which the regime stands (after the police). Their aim is to adjust everyone to the idea that beyond this regime there lies nothing but the extreme right—and in any case, we all know how popular the latter are among the police. Macron already won the presidential elections on this lie, and now the stronghold-against-the-Front-National-president has a new trick, the "Grand débat”, and you’ll never guess what the first issue will be…immigration!
The importance of so-called social networks in this case is far from anecdotal. In the periphery, the network socializes. But all these people who found themselves in a yellow vest after heeding a Facebook call had an experience that is not virtual. The question now is whether the Yellow Vests have rejected the political class in order to inaugurate a kind of internet democracy where likes would replace ballot papers, or whether, as the Yellow Vests of Commercy explicitly invite them to do, they will organize themselves into a new type of assembly. Because the network only socializes in a closed circuit that generates its own bubble [générant l’entre-soi] and where the charisma of certain “whistleblowers” has full latitude to capture intensities. A form of media manipulation more fragmented than the mainstream media could indeed function as a technique of governance. A Tunisian friend who participated in the 2011 insurrection mentioned the ability of the insurgents to mobilize quickly via social networks in the first few days, but also the fact that the police very quickly understood these benefits and did not hesitate to intervene by spreading fake news and misinformation. The quantity of false debates circulating on such networks in France is undoubtedly of the same order.
After two months of unrest, the question of the articulation between the roundabouts and the general assemblies now asserts itself. On the one hand, the links of proximity and complicity established on the ground [sur zone] which make it possible to take action without having to deliberate—and we know how demoralizing deliberations in assemblies can be when it comes to direct action!—but which can only be exercised at the local level; on the other hand, assemblies directly linked to each other which could act as a forum for strategic reflection and tactical coordination.
In contrast to this perspective, Yellow Vests could indeed give birth to a demagogic movement like the 5 Stars in Italy. A fraction of the movement will probably be tempted to follow this path, even if it means cutting itself off from the rest of the movement. It should be remembered, however, that the 5 Star movement was produced in an entirely artificial manner - even if it rode the brief wave of the Forconi movement [It: Pitchfork protests]. As things stand at present, the Yellow Vests lack the type of media buffoonery necessary to attract the attention of the crowds, provided in the 5 Stars case by the figure of Beppe Grillo, a public entertainer dressed up for the job by some businessmen who saw that the Berlusconian interlude had spun out and a new trinket urgently needed to be launched. Italy has gone from several decades of secret government (P2, Andreotti, the strategy of tension and alliances with the mafia) to TV show government (Mani Pulite, Berlusconi and Beppe Grillo). The problem with this mode of government is that one has to reshuffle the key characters just as frequently as show-biz does with its star system.
In a time when post-Fordist capitalism owes its survival to the rise of fictitious capital and now operates openly, the denunciation of the excesses of finance—which ignores what is essential, namely the criticism of value, money and commodification—encourages all manner of miraculous solutions and demagoguery. We remember the tired joke of the Tobin tax, for example, or the Dutch candidate who declared, “my enemy is finance” (it was a good joke!). When almost all workers work to pay off their debt (especially on their cars…), it is normal that banks become privileged targets, both in words and in vandalism (shout-out to the Yellow Vests in Toulouse who looted several banks last Saturday!). But there is reason to be wary when the references to Rothschild Bank are so insistent by contrast with those to BNP-Paribas or Société Générale (whose 2008 bailout by the State ended up costing taxpayers 30 billion Euros…). The fact that Macron began his career precisely at this bank obviously excites this anti-capitalism of fools who obsessively point the finger at “Jewish finance” on social networks.
It may be that this regime really is at its end. Protected by its soldiers, it can endlessly multiply its effronteries – the scandalous measures it announced against the unemployed at the end of December, for instance. The headlong rush into repressive escalation has only worsened since spring 2016. The attack on the occupations at the ZAD in Notre-dame-des-landes in April-May provided the occasion for major operations. Serious injuries and mutilations by the dozens, collective and individual humiliations, beatings, police intimidation going hand-in-hand with media exaggeration (the outraged reaction of the entire media caste to the solidarity that followed Christophe Dettinger’s beautiful act speaks volumes about the disgusting cynicism of these minions of power, especially when they conveniently fail to mention demonstrators methodically mutilated by the police). Orders are given from on high to inflict severe injuries, as even some police commissioners have admitted. People are learning, and we see more and more demonstrators coming equipped with gas masks, ski goggles, scarves, gloves, etc. to protect themselves. But nowhere does the movement have a sufficient degree of organization to defeat the police, and it is here that the demobilizing nature of pacifist speech can be seen. Which is related to the limited effectiveness of the blockades: the police have so far had no difficulty in restoring access to strategic sites such as oil refineries. At this level, little has changed since the spring of 2016. In addition, self-appointed demonstration marshals have been appearing in the Saturday marches for some time now, whether they be comprised of ex-soldiers or defecting CGT marshals. Even if their ability to control the crowds is limited, this practice cannot be allowed to establish itself….
Since it does not obey any vertical and centralized direction, the current movement has allowed local initiatives to multiply. But these can diverge completely from one place to another. After two months of unrest, the time for a decision is approaching. A party, in the historical sense of the term, proves itself to be the winning party by splitting itself into two parties: it thus shows that it contains within itself the principle it has previously opposed in an external way, and thereby sheds the one-sidedness from which it arose. The opposing elements that coexist within the movement have so far been held together by a common hostility to the current regime. Those in favour of an institutional outcome—which would obviously be authoritarian and xenophobic in nature—will find themselves opposed by those seeking to spread the movement to all the aspects of the global factory, within a revolutionary perspective. In fact, workplace struggles are multiplying, and yellow vests join chasubles rouges [red jackets of the unions during strikes] on picket lines. It is not impossible to imagine that the movement can provide enough momentum that workers decide to begin blocking their companies from within with concrete demands. National trade union leaders would watch themselves be tossed into the dustbin of history, and a new historical sequence could finally open to which everyone would have to become party, and take sides [prenne parti].
The latest news is that in Landes, the Yellow Vests are blocking a Monsanto factory, a keystone in the global factory…
-Alèssi Dell’Umbria, January 21st, 2019.
Author’s footnotes
[1] The circulation of goods is not only about the transport and distribution of products: for example, goods have already begun to circulate in commodity exchanges, even though they have not yet physically moved. Conversely, raw materials sold to an industrial company for processing are thus valued, because they have been purchased, and they will be included in the determination of the value of the finished product: here circulation is preliminary to production.
[2] Small business owners who refused to tax diesel fuel, which would increase their overhead costs, did not fail to disassociate themselves from the beggars who intended to sue. A yellow vest from Ales thus denounced the betrayal of certain people on December 20 of last year: “Shame on the ‘apolitical’ people pretending to lead the Yellow Vests of the Cévennes by raising the specter of the "anarchist” which the intelligence services have whispered into their ears… (…) Today, I no longer wish to choose my words wisely. But it is with great serenity that I accuse these so-called “coordinators” of being sell-outs and traitors of the worst kind. Because the naked truth is that a fraction of entrepreneurs promised everything to the poor seniors, the unemployed, those surviving off of minimum wage and the precarious in order to get them to join their ranks. Once the tax cancellations were achieved, these people purported to structure the movement so that it would take a new direction, all with the aim of stopping this historical movement in order to stuff themselves with money during the Christmas and New Year holidays.(…) As for you, neighbours and colleagues who have been mobilized for weeks; you who have not given up anything in the wind, cold or rain; you who have rediscovered solidarity and dignity on the roadblocks; you, the anonymous base with no other ambitions than to live properly, I greet you and send you the warm greetings of the Yellow Jackets in Alsace, Franche-Comté, on the A7 and in Bollène!”
[3] It was Michel Jobert, then Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, who organized this operation - he bragged about it publicly twenty years later.
[4] In Mexico, for example, the increase in gasoline prices in January 2016 caused a wave of massive demonstrations, often turning into riots and looting, which certainly did not owe anything to neoliberal ideology!
[5] Taxation and military conscription were the main reasons for sedition. For an illuminating analysis of this phenomena, see Boris Porchnev’s book, Les soulèvements populaires en France de 1623 à 1648, Paris 1963.
[6] Nevertheless, the impact of blockades must be put into perspective… while trade in city centres may have been affected by the riots, which affected their turnover, the effectiveness of blockades is far from obvious. Supplies continued to be made, gas stations were never short of fuel, supermarket shelves continued to be filled and Christmas squandering was left to run its course as in previous years.
[7] The Constitution of the Fifth Republic grants the President powers that he had never had under previous parliamentary regimes, in particular the power to legislate by presidential decree without the National Assembly. We know that De Gaulle, who was of monarchist sensitivity, thought about establishing a constitutional monarchy in 1958. Which he did, in a way: a monarch, but who would now be elected.
[8] In the great era of anti-monarchical revolts in Occitan countries, revolts identified themselves as “lo comun” [the common], much more than “lo pòble” [the people]. The common is precisely the political concept that corresponds to a revolutionary future for struggles.
[9] The notion of “moral economy” which some have used to refer to the Yellow Vests does not seem relevant to us in this case – not only because E. P. Thompson made this formulation in reference to the English working class that has since disappeared, not to mention the “common decency” so dear to George Orwell. Certainly a work ethic is still widespread in working class circles where, if not enriching oneself by working for the masses, one hopes at least to achieve a certain security, a relative ease and, at the very least, a vague feeling of personal dignity. In this respect, Sarkozy’s “Working more to earn more” could find an echo among these people. But now they see that none of this is actually guaranteed—not even a well-deserved retirement after a hard-working life. Macronism is a managerial mindset applied to the whole of society, without any political mediation. Capitalism in its innermost brutality.
[10] “Gilets jaunes : la classe moyenne peut-elle être révolutionnaire?” Lundi matin, December 7, 2018.
[11] We saw in the case of Notre-Dame-des-Landes what this little institutional trick of the referendum was for - and Macron was a minister in the government that had tried this slick trick… Now we see what the confusionnisme [*9] of demagogues like Etienne Chouard is for.
Translator’s Footnotes
[*1] Dell’Umbria uses the term parpagnàs, which suggests something like country hick, as well as those who are part of the surplus economy, undesirables.
[*2] The CGT is the largest labor union in France.
[*3] The solidarity tax on wealth was implemented by the Socialist Party in 1981 as a way to tax the rich. This tax was abolished in September 2017.
[*4] The fermiers généraux were the main tax collectors in a highly unpopular tax farming system in France during the ancien régime.
[*5] Demonstrations in France are traditionally led with labor unions at the front of the march. During the Loi Travail movement, the cortège de tête appeared as an antagonistic block that lead the demonstrations.
[*6] It turns out it was the fascists who organized this, and they were outed online.
[*7] Le citoyennisme refers to a neo-republican discourse centering on the citoyen [citizen] as political actor. It can be broadly characterised as a moderate and reformist tendency, often aiming to use participatory democracy as a means of ‘repairing’ or ‘correcting’ the immoral tendencies of capitalist society.
[*8] Mélenchon’s left-wing populist party, translated as ‘France Unbowed’.
![RESITUATING THE YELLOW JACKETS This article first appeared in Lundi matin #170, on December 19, 2018.
Translated by Ill Will Editions. [1]
The authors of the December 7 article, “Contribution to the rupture in progress,” continue their analysis of...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/0c2d3d2ceb1117f8c5f88cbbb3d7241e/tumblr_pk0esfe6Ay1tvr0q1o1_r2_1280.png)
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