The movement of yellow vests seems to confirm a break of the historical thread of class struggles.
If we stubbornly insist on sharing articles on the “gilets jaunes” of
france, it is because they embody a number of characteristics that may
mark out the future of possible anti-capitalist movements. The
following reflection, published with lundimatin 172 (31/12/2018) points in that direction.
We publish here an analysis from Temps Critiques
(27/12/2018) about the yellow vests movement and all that it puts into
question regarding the historical categories of a certain left.
The movement of the yellow vests seems to confirm a break in the
historical thread of class struggles. It had already been initiated
world-wide by the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and the movements of
the Squares, all of which had been at the head of mobilizations of
demands concerning liberties, equality, living conditions in general;
employment more than working conditions. It is also for this reason that
these movements were addressed much more to the State than to
employers, insofar as the process of globalization/totalisation of
capital leads States to manage the reproduction of social relations at
the territorial level, while remaining dependent on the requirements of
globalization.
In France, the resilience of the traditional workers’ movement still
maintained the idea of the class struggle against capital. In the spring
of 2016, the fight against the reform of the labor law and labour
statutes continued along the path of “the working class above all”,
without however obtaining tangible results. A few years earlier, the
renewed mobilisation generated by the “movement of the squares” did not
allow for an effective reaction or resistance, because it quickly
privileged the formalism of the assemblies, to the detriment of the
substance of struggle. This struggle seemed to have found a more
promising blend within the Spanish movement, with the overflow of the
squares towards neighborhood solidarities in connection with housing
problems.
In all of these struggles, including in the case of the struggle
against the labor law, the question of the general strike or the
blocking of factory production was not raised, nor has it been posed by
the yellow vests movement. In these conditions, to bring together the
pursuit of roundabout occupations with calls for a workers’ strike is a
fiction of “conflict convergence” or the outdated idea that blocking
flows of goods would be secondary to blocking the production of the
goods themselves.
A community of struggle that is no longer a community of labour
The roundabout rebels certainly include many salaried employees (or
similarly, employees who benefit from subsidized jobs or social
assistance to return to work), but there are also other non-salaried
occupants or former employees (including poor self-entrepreneurs and
especially retirees who are far from all going off on low cost flights
to exotic destinations). It is not from the working relationship that
they intervene, but from their living conditions and their social
non-existence. A struggle, of course, but a classless struggle rather
than a class struggle. It is therefore useless to look for what would be
its proletarian wing, to animate its expansion, something that it
clearly does not wish to develop.
Moreover, if the yellow vests are scorned by the power in place, it
is not because they are “proletarians” in the historical sense of the
term (Macron does not openly scorn the professional workers raised in
the rules of the the art of labour unionism and legal education), but
rather because they are, for him, nothing (“people who are nothing”, he
said), modern sub-proletarians, social cases, savages having forgotten
all the rules of civility, people who can neither speak nor produce
officials or leaders. “No teeth”, as François Holland said once. A
contempt itself despicable as it is charged with inhumanity; a blind
contempt since it casts an undifferentiated judgment on the movement,
while even we, as we mingle with them, know that there are very many
different people within the yellow vest collectives.
According to the testimonies of the collective life of the yellow
vests in the “cabins” which have flourished on the roundabouts, we can
affirm that it is first and foremost a community of struggle made of
sharing, in difficult living conditions; a union of energies against
globalist power (Macron, ministers, the elected, the corrupt, the
great-tax evaders, the confiscators of the word of the people, etc.);
collective aspirations to put an end to a bad life; all this with
sometimes utopian accents, as sung by a yellow vest amateur musician “I
do not want to live in a world where doves do not fly any more”.[1] A
lyricism and songs far removed from the eternal political couplets on
“emancipation” that accompany the demonstrations of workers or leftists.
It is this community of struggle that makes people take turns to
prepare food on the spot or share the food that is brought in support.
Solidarity is not an empty word.
What is the organisation?
If we agree that yellow vests have developed an autonomous movement,
we will not go so far as to say that they self-organise themselves in
the ideological sense of self-organisation, as conceived by historical
councilists or libertarians. It is an immediate self-organisation that
leads to nothing but his own immediate practice. It reaches its limits
when it wants to move to the stage of a true organisation of the
movement, if only in the decision-making to refuse or not the requests
of official authorisation for demonstrations or to accept or not
established routes, the election of spokespersons or delegates. There is
a refusal of organisation and not self-organisation, and it corresponds
not only to distrust of any political or trade union organisation, but
also to the fact that the present conditions have exhausted all the
known historical forms.[2] Indeed, the yellow vests can not create
“roundabout councils”, as there were formerly workers’ councils or
soldiers’ councils. But that does not mean that they can not argue or
act from these roundabouts. Simply, they are not places that can ensure
the durability of political forms, as we have seen recently with their
dismantling. Here again the movement innovates, because it at the same
time blocks and moves. Nodes of blockades can indeed be moved and
renewed in the same way that places and protest routes can be redefined
at any time.
The risk the is that of a repetition of previous actions. However,
this repetition is already made precarious 1) by the decreasing number
of those present at the points of mobilization; 2) by the intervention
of the gendarmes at the roundabouts and especially against the kinds of
small ZADs which have more or less spontaneously formed there; 3) by the
new apparatuses mobilised by the police during the Saturday
demonstrations, which tend to transfer the real violence of the
repression of State, which alienates a large part of public opinion,
onto a violence intrinsic to the movement, given the fact of its refusal
to comply with government calls to stop demonstrating. It is the
movement that then becomes the troublemaker and all those who call for
it are thus guilty of the same offense, by intention, a form of crime
increasingly manufactured in the name of urgency or exception (for
example, in relation to terrorist activity), but recyclable for the
occasion.[3]
From negation to institutionalisation?
Did we move to a second phase, more affirmative, that of the RIC [référendum d’initiative citoyenne/citizens’ initiative referendum:
a demand to promote proposals of law originating with the citizenry,
along the lines of what is found in Switzerland], while the first was
more negative (Macron, resign!, We will not give up on anything, etc.)?
Or can the movement continue by absorbing this new electoral proposal,
something that seems to offer a way out for those who, among the yellow
vests, see that Macron will not resign?
If the RIC destroys the immediate dynamics of the movement, it is
because on its current basis, that of the roundabout occupations and
demonstrations on Saturday, it does not carry a clear historical
dynamic, especially as the practice of assemblies, as well as the idea
of delegation, find little echo or create divisions within the movement.
It is precisely because it is incapable of making its dynamics
historical on an assembly basis, that it can take refuge in the RCI. A
referendum is for some an example of direct democracy, but for us it is
the risk of a beginning of the institutionalisation of the movement [4] –
or worse the birth of a typical Five Star movement, as in Italy.
Our criticism of the RIC can not therefore be taken primarily on the
basis of a perceived strategic error of the movement that would thereby
be “co-opted”[5], as claimed by a leaflet published on the net. Indeed,
this leaflet retains the traditional leftist discourse on “co-option”,
but finally rests on positions of “disengagement” limited to an
anti-macronism. It is tempting for some to appropriate them because they
may seem uncompromising and have expressed the unity of the movement
during the first weeks, but for those who, like us, think that capital
is a social relationship, we can be satisfied with neither. Of course
there are reasons to argue that the adoption of the RIC would ultimately
only concern “societal issues”; questions that are at the source of all
the media or populist manipulations, and which do not relate to the
material and social conditions which are at the source of the revolt.
Moreover, how could a referendum force employers to raise wages and
owners to lower rents?
But then it will be retorted, “what do you propose? “. This is the
same as what we were told in 68 and this time, in addition, without even
the escape, for some, of responding by proposing exotic models (Cuba or
China).
One can not neglect the fact that what makes the strength of the
movement is also what makes it weak. To take just one example, the
actual link between the yellow vests and trade unionists intervening on
the roundabouts remains very formal, insofar as these trade unionists
only intervene as individuals, as we do, but without establishing a
mediation that makes possible and concrete the fact that more and more
basic trade unionists are ready to enter the movement, but on another
basis that is not the convergence of struggles (this is the point of
view of the CGT), but with the feeling that it is the same struggle and
that in addition it took forms that make it possible to “win”.[6]
Yet it is a sentiment shared by many participants in the
inter-professional union event of December 14th, who also participated
in one or more Saturday demonstrations with yellow vests. Moreover, more
and more cégétistes, even if globally they are a very small
minority, put on yellow vests, while bearing signs and CGT stickers, or
better, wear red and yellow vests. But subjective expectations are
limited by objective conditions, because the union world is increasingly
cut off from what we can no longer even call the world of work, so much
have situations become particularized. A composite ensemble that, on
the one hand, understands that “working more to earn more” is an
illusion, but on the other, does not seem to oppose the tax exemption of
overtime proposed by the government. However, the latter has recognised
negative effects on the level of employment, which is a concern of the
yellow vests. This contradiction may explain the fact that the movement
does not seem to make any reference to the notion of guaranteed income,
even though it has the consciousness and the experience that, often,
working is no longer enough to live [7].
The movement expresses, by its diversity and heterogeneity, the
multidimensional nature of inequalities and a very different “sense” of
the statistical inequalities, taken one by one. This gap is also due to
the fact that France is more efficient in redistributing income upstream
(accessibility to university, health, minimum wage, quality of life in
general), that seems “normal” , than downstream, where the direct
progressive tax weighs little; the CSG is for all, along with the VAT
and various other taxes which weigh particularly on the propensity of
the poorest salaried employees to consume.[8]
Towards a general of all roundabouts?
A consumption that the movement upsets during this holiday season by
blocking the supply of large supermarkets at central platforms, such as
that of Auchan near Nimes, or directly blocking the entrance of
supermarkets. Some prophets of doom, always running ahead of triumphant
capital, may have spread rumours about the yellow vests, that they are
hurting the economy by blocking large supermarkets, thereby benefiting
Amazon and other online sales services. However, this assertion is
highly questionable since the first figures show a general decline in
consumption in traditional shopping places and a slight increase, but
normal, because expected on the basis of an average increase, of online
sales. Yet it is not unthinkable to consider the idea that “the spirit
of the time” (gassed) is not conducive to consumption and not just
because it would be more difficult to supply. In the same vein, we saw
statements such as, “Unplug the TV and put on your vest.” Many yellow
vests indicate that they no longer leave their homes except for what is
essential. The lack of social relations is palpable and the invisibility
we are discussing here is not that of exclusion, but that of a general
social invisibility due to the new geopolitics of space which also
concerns the inhabitants of suburbs [9]. This situation imposes itself
on a much broader ensemble of people than that which is covered by the
struggle between the two great classes, the bourgeois and the working
class, nor is it reducible to a simplistic opposition between the rich
and the poor defined quantitatively or monetarily.
It is the classless struggle of a “multitude” understood in the sense
that it is not that of the kind, exploited 99% against the 1% of
malicious exploiters and profiteers, at a time when the hierarchies of
social positions or at work are both multiplied and refined, and are
produced and reproduced without too much qualms by individuals, at each
level they occupy. A classless struggle in the sense of the absence of a
historical subject.
The movement of yellow vests is often criticised because, unlike
historical workers’ struggles, it would not present a project of
emancipation. It is a fact, but we have already said elsewhere why these
projects were carried, from 1788 and 1789 until the years 1967-1978, by
precisely historical subjects (first the bourgeois class and then the
proletariat). The defeat of this last revolutionary cycle ruined any
project of emancipation, except that which capital itself realized as
part of the completion of the process of individualization in a
capitalised society. But at the roundabouts and other places of
expression of the current movement, anyway, there is a tension towards
the community, not an abstract tension towards the human community, but a
tension at the same time concrete (it is at the level of affect) and
general because the movement embraces and questions all social
relations. It is no longer the “All together” of 1995 against a specific
project, but a sort of inseparable overturning and questioning of the
capitalist totality, from viewpoints or angles in themselves partial.
This partiality of the attacks is for the moment compensated by the
totality of the “act against”, the one that is translated in the
language of “We will not give anything up” of the yellow vests, which
answers to the “you are nothing” of Power. This “We will not let go”
implies determined collective actions that the excessive presence and
aggressiveness of the police can make violent; a confrontation of forces
that the power and the media call “extreme”, with all the interested
orchestration they give them.
Notes
[1] –
https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/economie-social/un-gilet-jaune-de-montbard-makes-a-carton-on-the-web-with-sa-new-chanson-
1545108297
[2] – On this point, cf. the blog of Temps critiques about the days of Eymoutiers): http://blog.tempscritiques.net/archives/2179
[3] – After Julien Coupat, it is now the figure of the yellow vest
movement that is paying the price. We are witnessing a criminalisation
of social movements with the proliferation of arrests, preventive
custody and heavy prison sentences for the slightest trifle. So many
anti-constitutional measures, because of their blatant disproportion
with the incriminated acts which demonstrates not the strength of the
state, but its weakness. A weakness made even more visible by the fact
that, on the other side of the barricade, the police, in a half day
strike, obtained a from 120 to 150 euros of monthly salary increase.
[4] – At the same time, we notice that for the first time, official
requests for authorised protest routes have been filed with certain
police prefectures, as was the case on 22 December 2018; the first
noticeable retreat of the movement, with the concomitant creation of
marshal services specific to the yellow vests.
[5] – Available here http://www.19h17.info/2018/12/12/non-a-la-ricuperation/
[6] – While the CGT signed with six other trade union centrals the condemnation of the methods of struggle of the yellow vests.
[7] – And paradoxically, it is Macron who makes the ghost resurface,
with the increase of a tax on work activity, which thereby loses its
original character, which was to push back to work people satisfied with
the social minimum. But this is something else that is the recognition
that wages no longer pay work “correctly” and that the complement must
be drawn from public money. The “work more to earn more” exhausted its
effects, even if the tax exemption of overtime seeks to give it a breath
of life … at the expense of unemployment figures!
[8] – See the investigation by Th. Piketty and the Laboratory on Global Inequalities.
[9] – Indeed, if the “problems” of the suburbs are highlighted by sensationalism on the side of the media or political interest by the parties, the daily life of the majority of its inhabitants, all associative or cultural actions that take place, are rendered invisible.h
taken from here
Der Beitrag A yellow costume that creates community erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.