Originally published by Autonomies.
We begin with a critical appraisal of the movement from the Temps Critiques collective, followed by a more apologetic note, and in turn a response from the collective.
Without wishing, or being able to close the issue, it can be said
that what separates the two sides of this debate is an interpretation or
analysis of capitalism. For the Temps Critiquescollective, to
the extent that the movement fails to contest the conditions of
contemporary commodity production, while failing to see the dismantling
of the State, the privatisation of daily life in all of its many
domains, it is a failed movement. What our apologist, Dietrich Hoss,
defends is that the movement has shattered processes of capitalist
subjectivisation, which opens up possibilities and potentialities
unforseen before its eruption.
It is our conviction that the two views in fact complement each other, but the theoretical work for this union still awaits.
What can remain from the yellow vests’ movement
(Temps Critiques/Lundimatin#196)
We said in March that the movement had reached a crest. What about
today that the number of demonstrators, and those present at the General
Assemblies, declines, that the roundabouts are not recovered? How can
one continue to say: “We will not give up anything”, without being in
denial of the weakening of the movement? It is for all of these reasons
that it seems appropriate to us to evoke a simple question: what can
remain of a movement like this? This is a question that requires leaving
aside the short term on what can still be done here and now, without
projecting oneself into an illusory “it will resume in September, with
the preparation of Macron’s new measures that will only worsen the
situation” .
We have “Straightened our backs … [1]
The exercise is not a simple one, because we lived a long and intense
struggle (6 months of mobilisation and struggles). We do not reduce
this movement to its practical forms: roundabout occupations, actions at
tolls or commercial areas, determined demonstrations, popular
assemblies, etc. No, behind that, what seems essential is to have
“straightened our backs”. We have indeed refused to negotiate for our
freedom to demonstrate and circulate, we have taken them, because the
legitimacy of our revolt can not be contained by a legality that reduces
to nothing our capacities to express ourselves and act.
Through our actions, we have encountered all kinds of life paths and
we have widened a horizon beyond all political differences, of
generation, of sex, of habitation; differences that suddenly appeared
only as divisions. Only social urgency, the realization that it is no
longer possible and the determination to act, to make it stop, have
brought us together. That’s why the yellow vests carry their heads high,
despite all the contempt they have suffered from the media,
politicians, from all of those who have an interest in the continuation
of the status quo of the society of capital. And again, despite this,
the disdain shown to them by many more, Macronians without knowing it,
of the Left, who for the most part, are chained to and buried in their
small identities, their small differences, their small ideological
niches.
… and revealed the imperious nature that is hidden behind the management of the reproduction of social relations”
The movement against the labor law had unveiled the new tendencies of
repressive policies against social movements, but they had expressed
themselves only in marginal ways, as in the treatment of the “heads of
demonstration marhes [cortèges de tête]” or in the “excesses” of [the
police interventions] Nantes and Sivens.
But with the multiple attempts to dislodge/destroy the cabins and the
entire area of Notre-Dame-des-Landes by the police, then with the more
extensive and comprehensive crackdown on the yellow vests, since
November 2018, we find ourselves before a systematic, if not systemic,
logic. The voluntary attacks on the bodies of the protesters are no
longer mere excesses; the criminalisation/penalisation of the least act
of resistance becomes the norm, prevention measures no longer correspond
to a targeting of elements deemed dangerous, but are intended to
prevent demonstrations.
Nevertheless, from this last struggle, we begin anew armed with a
rare solidarity, reinforced by all the moments lived together in
adversity.
The state has shown its face of violence, that of everyday life,
which before we only conceived of in solitude, each in her/his own
corner, and that which raged in the street, many did not know, except
indirectly.
This brutal repression against anonymous people, people with nothing,
does not have the same meaning as the repression against the students
of May 68, certainly violent also, but which led to the mass uprising of
almost a whole generation supported by the benevolence, sometimes
active, of the greater part of the population, at least until the end of
May. Here, today, it is not a question of repressing, but of
terrorising the demonstrators and by capillarity the sympathisers who
could eventually join them. This has been partly successful, the yellow
vests’ movement is gradually reducing to its hard core and very few
people have joined after its December high.
When politics descends onto the street in the face of a power that
does not do politics, it is no longer formal democracy that presents
itself before us, the one that is enshrined in the rule of law, but an
imperious state ready to silence anyone who takes seriously unvarnished
freedom, concrete freedom in its various forms of expression.
The demand for concrete freedom is the only positivity which a
movement wholly directed towards negation (of representation, of
negotiation) expresses, with so many “claims” (almost fifty) that they
cancel each other out and which prove to be nonnegotiable, even if by
chance they had found a faction of power willing to start negotiating
them. Faced with a government that did not want to let go of anything,
it is the latter which finally took the initiative. First of all, by
targeting some basic points of social and fiscal justice (reduction of
the CSG [Contribution Sociale Généralisée:
a general progressive tax that serves to finance france’s social
security and unemployment insurance, in addition to that which is taxed
on employees salaries] and the indexation of modest pensions,
exceptional bonuses). Seemingly few things, but more than the unions had
obtained in the last ten years. Next, in skirting the demand for
citizen participation (via the RIC – Référendum d’initiative citoyenne)
by proposing a “Great Debate” against which the “True Debate” of the
yellow vests, finally modeled on the original, could only appear as a
pale copy.
A fundamental negativity of a movement on which there is nothing to “capitalise” …
Yet from the very heart of the movement, we already hear this
horrible expression from those who, in one way or another, do not want
to lose … to start from scratch and therefore for whom, “you have to
capitalise on the movement “. A very natural reaction when one has the
impression of having only been fighting for six months, but a reaction
that we can only reject from the political point of view. It takes many
forms. There are those who give it a communalist form with the
Assemblies of assemblies which seek to survive without any notion of a
relation of power, of the situation of the movement;[2] or a
municipalist and civic form with the local RIC and future participation
in municipal councils.[3] There are those who want to form themselves as
a “people” through calls for direct and citizen democracy with the RIC
present in all matters and their will to become constituents, whereas
the movement included, from the beginning, a strong destituent desire
(the permanent “dégagisme”) and expressed a negative politics. For
others, finally, the movement will have been only a point of departure
(insufficient) to try to stop the decline of the labour unions, by
playing the base against the leadership through the call for a
“convergence of struggles”, which has more often than not, remained a
one way proposition [to sustain the unions]. This is because the time of
the struggle, which is of the order of event, is not the same as course
of daily struggles.
For all these trends to capitalise on the “gains”, the [european]
election result had the double paradoxical effect of on the one hand a
cold shower (Macron did not come in at less than 10%, something that
many had hoped more or less secretly), and on the other hand, the
confirmation that it was necessary to save what could be saved.
At the beginning of the movement, at the end of November 2018, Temps Critiques asked
itself if a co-extension of the struggles was possible.[4] Our eyes
have had time to focus on this subject and, for example, it is without
any illusions regarding the fantasies of convergence, the lip-service
support of certain unions as well as the modest attempts in this
direction by the ecological Left. All these attempts were marked by
failure and rendered the very idea obsolete. That today some see support
for future struggles marks a return to settled forms unable to think
the possible and even probable death of the movement. In reality the
mass vanguard dimension of the yellow vests frightened, and frightened
above all those in power, including those who aspire to take over … So
we see how this fact could change without the loss of the singularity,
the new potentiality that came with the yellow vests.
Just as some, at the time, saw in May-68 only a general rehearsal
before the revolution, others today already announce the resumption of
struggles at the beginning of the Fall season, given the Macronian
measures underway or planned; the same causes are supposed to have the
same effects. In both cases, there is a misunderstanding of what a
historical movement is and therefore of a movement that is an event and
then adopts its own temporality far from that which exists, for example,
in the everyday conflicts in companies, in the attempts by groups of
employees to gain some autonomy with respect to the logic labour union
activity, etc. In this the yellow vests’ uprising is not a social
movement in the sense that we have heard speak of since the 1980s; the
years after which it becomes difficult to speak in terms of class
struggle. In effect, the yellow vests’ uprising is not the result of an
opposition between the interests of social agents or categories and the
state, mediated by social partners; a conflict in which the unions were
both the advocates for these interests and the co-managers of the
political compromise between classes within the welfare state. With the
yellow vests’ movement, we are dealing with a direct confrontation
between a fraction of the population and the State, because the first no
longer tolerates further mediation and because the second has done
everything to weaken them. Hence the violence of the confrontation and a
sudden movement that will very quickly reach a very high speed.
But as is said in the current language, the train that passes will
not pass again and thus, after six months, it is clear that not many
people have gotten on, even if some have fumbled with the step. The
decisive moment was December. The moment when the movement knew its
greatest strength (between the 1st and the 8th of December) and also its
biggest street repression, completed with the destruction of cabins and
tents at roundabouts, in the beginning of January, along with the
crushing of the secondary school movement, whose pallid sequel was the
Youth for climate movement; a sign of the recovery in hand by the
coalition of powers, that even it if they did not promote the latter, at
least supported it.[5]
… and for which to endure for the sake of enduring can only mean the loss of meaning
Of course, since then, the movement has continued, but as if outside
of the event it produced; outside of its revolutionary and
insurrectional dimension. It is now only a question then of lasting to
last and thus of organising “events” (in the weak or spectacular meaning
of the term) or to attach oneself to other’s events, as can be seen in
this month of June, with calls from yellow vests’ groups to join the
“Pride March”, as a new act of the yellow vests.
Either this, or let itself be cut off the forces that made the event,
in the strong and historical sense of the term, because every Saturday
was like the announcement of a possible changeover into something else.
A sign of this tendency to persist – and thus to take other forms –
is reflected in the fact that positions are now asserted which
surreptitiously pass from the “We Are All Yellow Vests” of 2018 to the
“All Together” of 1995.
For these, it would be a way of responding to the isolation of the
movement and the obvious failure of “convergence”. A double-handed
failure, that of struggles too embryonic to not be included in a yellow
vests’ movement (see the example of the “stylos rouges/red
pens” of education); that of activists and strikers who have no desire
to be assimilated to the yellow vests (the example of Blouses blanches/White
coats). It must be clearly seen that whatever their level of
radicality, these struggles remain those of professional categories,
defined by their threatened statuses or deteriorating working
conditions, whereas what is specific to the yellow vests was to have
left all of this at the door of the movement by referring to the general
conditions of life, conditions which violently reveal one’s state as
dominated and not any particular conditions of exploitation in a
workplace. This different position in relation to power and domination
has led to an intrinsic difficulty in bringing struggles closer
together. An almost objective difficulty to which is added a subjective
difficulty, that of the often unfavorable evaluation of the nature of
the yellow vests’ movement by other social forces. A movement that would
not be politically correct, a movement that would be uncontrollable
because it refuses any direction or leadership, a movement that
ultimately scares everyone (the powers in place as well as protected
segments of wage labor), although many would like to instrumentalise it
for their benefit.
Some “lessons” to retain?
Without saying that the movement is over, it seems urgent to us to
put forward what it reveals, from the point of view of the movement,
although this is sometimes in its defending body:
- The “people” do not exist. The yellow vests could only run up
against a wall from the moment it became clear that their will to set
themselves up as a people, ran up against the harsh reality that they
were only its partial representation. The people in action, in a way,
because in action it soon became apparent that they were, at best, only
their de facto vanguard. A whole reflection would have to be made on
this point and on the impasses that a criticism limited to the 1% of the
richest, the elites, and attacks against the patrimonial oligarchy of
the Pinault-Arnault and other banks, represent, while at the same time,
globalisation and financialisation attack oligarchical positions in
order to make them more fluid and flexible, in order to find new
equilibria between old and new modes of domination. - Avant-garde
in fact, we say, and not by right, because it is this legitimacy that
will be denied them by all the powers in place, political, media and
trade union, up to and including among the extreme Left and libertarian
circles. - A movement that has experienced confrontation with the
State as the basis for mass action, and not just as small groups of
activists. But a movement that still seeks its relationship to what is
the State in general, as indicated by the proposals for upcoming
demonstrations against any measures for the increase prices for major
energy and transport services and for the defense of the public sector.
This proposal does not take into account the failure of the the unions
to maintain the “system” of 1945 (the CNR –
Conseil national de la Résistance program), but seeks to replace them
in the same kind of great counterproductive masses, without advancing
what could have been demands-actions of the movement, such as the
constitution of local committees against the payment of the increase in
the price of electricity, that could join those already in place
against Linky electricity meters, etc. - In
short, while it advocates popular or citizens re-appropriation and is
truly a grassroots movement and of the grassroots, the difficulty it has
in actually taking root in daily struggles, at this level, and joining
with what already exists (associative struggles, struggles against
police violence in the suburbs and elsewhere) push it to launch global
calls that not only are unlikely to be heard, but do not correspond to
its original and unique characteristics . But of course, in the face of
such criticism, which occasionally arises in general assemblies, the
eternal social-statist reason arises and most often imposes its reality
principle by this simple sentence: “Are you then against public
services? “. One finds oneself then in a dead end. - What made the
originality and strength of the movement in its ascending phase, namely
its break with many theoretical a priori and ritualised practices to
the point of being strained, turns into weakness in the downward phase,
when all that transpires is its instability, its lack of organisation
and its difficulty to take the initiative, to surprise again. To the
point that to continue, it is ready to abandon its historical
singularity so as to mould itself into forms of mediation that are
themselves in crisis. When official “social movements” are no longer
able to do 1995, some yellow vests think that they can succeed at it and
in addition see this as a panacea, when this whole system was still
based on the centrality of work in the process of the valorisation of
the capital, on the one hand, and when the definition of social
relations, on the other hand, was still based on this same centrality
(employees/non-employees, contributions/benefits). - The result of
the European elections must question the movement, to the extent that
the surprise came from the interest shown in the elections (moreover
European) from protagonists of the yellow vests’ movement denying
precisely the legitimacy of representatives, including theirs! We then
arrived at the absurd positions of some calling to vote for anyone
except Macron and “yellow” lists [yellow vest candidates]! All this
confusion comes, in addition to the electoral illusion, from the fact
that the movement thinks itself as the “people” and therefore inevitably
the majority. Yet the historical examples are instructive: if elections
can lead to an insurrectional surge (Spain 1936 and to a lesser degree
France with the victory of the Popular Front, Chile 1973), a strong and
even insurrectional movement followed by an election brings only sores
and bumps (June 68, spring 2019). - A movement which, since the
beginning, played non-institutional cards in the elaboration of its
relation of power and which sometimes seeks to concretise them in
medium-term views, such as those of the “wild RIC”. A prospect which
suddenly collapsed under the blows of a Macron not sanctioned by the
ballot box. We understand that some yellow vests want to make voting
mandatory, when 50% of registered voters abstain; not to mention the
non-registered. But what will it take to get people to vote “well”? This
is a question that has often led politicians and even activists to want
to “exchange the people” … when it does not match their expectations.
But it came from groups or parties that had or wanted power. The yellow
vests are not in this category: they are before themselves and can not
despair of the people while now brushing with despair. - This
difficulty, peculiar to our period after the class struggle, is that
everywhere today we are witness to a resurrection of the notion of the
people. In the history of modernity, the people want to be a whole,
which is the negation of class contradictions, as they are only a sum of
particular interests. This is the basis of the opposition between the
bourgeois and the “bras-nus” during the French Revolution, to use the
Daniel Guerin’s terminology … and at the same time, their unity in the
idea of “the fatherland in danger” of 1792, which must weld the people
become the social body of the Nation. In this vision, it is the people
who suffer all the wrongs. It is the general interest made a people
against the enemies from the outside (emigrant aristocrats, imperial and
royal powers from abroad). Fascism will take up this image of the
people-totality against “internal” enemies, but foreign to the nation
and to the race (Jews, Freemasons, gypsies, homosexuals). It is the
basis of Carl Schmitt’s theories about the state of exception that
delimits the “boundaries” between friends and foes. But to return to the
revolutionary theses born of the French Revolution, Marx breaks with
this idea of a people-totality in a critical thesis on Hegel (in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right),
where he reverses the Hegelian dialectic to make of a class, the
proletariat, the class-totality, because it would not suffer any
particular harm to the extent that it suffers them all. It is then this
potential totality that transforms this immediately particular class
into the revolutionary class par excellence, or more exactly, the class
of the revolution. - Without knowing it expressly, it is this
thesis that the yellow vests assert by proclaiming the state of social
urgency on the part of a new popular totality suffering a general wrong
beyond the particular wrongs suffered by each of its fractions or
segments. A new “all” therefore, without historical determination or any
messianic essence, but based on the idea more or less commonly shared
that everything is going from bad to worse, that the situation is
becoming unbearable and that the dominant ones, whoever they are
(political representatives, capitalists and the rich), do not care. - It
is precisely because this wrong is felt as general that it does not
need to rely on facts and statistics and that what is “felt” is what
counts in the revolt and the spirit of resistance. The urgency exceeds
its social character to become vital in an utopia of equality … this in
the country, however, that is the least unequal among the rich countries
and where the welfare state still produces its relative effects, by
contrast to the situation in the neighbouring countries. However,
redistribution no longer follows the same process and does not have the
same effects when it is no longer centered on work and social partners,
but on a vague universalism assumed by the State through taxes (cf. the
CMU) and taxes imposed upon everyone, regardless of their position in
relation to production relations and work. - The yellow vests’
movement was not necessarily made up of employees and, in any case,
“guaranteed” or “stable” employees have little to do with the figures
that show that wages have increased on average, when spending
constraints have suffered an even bigger increase still, something that
they feel directly when it comes to filling the fridge or freezer. The
movement is therefore by nature voluntarist and subjectivist, since it
is a question of “forcing” the numbers, to go from resentment to revolt.
This necessary coup de force constrains it and contains it in a
minority position, even though it fantasises its majority dimension (“We
Are All Yellow Vests”), which can only come back on it as a boomerang
in the moments of the movement’s deceleration. - It is also this
feeling that collapses before the result of the elections. Either the
people do not vote (50% abstention + about 10% non-registered + all the
“foreigners” who do not have the right to vote) and it is then the
failure of the “citizen’s vote”; either s/he votes badly when s/he does
vote … and no RIC can do much about that. The illusion of the RIC is to
rely on the fact that the “people” would not be divided by capitalist
social relations, which nevertheless traverse the whole of the division
of labor and the hierarchies which it produces; all of the divisions of
status that allow, for example, yellow vests to participate in joint
demonstrations with the White Coats in the defense of public health care
services, as if “White Coats” defined that fraction of the people that
would constitute the “hospital people”. Therefore, involuntarily or not,
an outrageous hospital hierarchy is masked, a hierarchy that is also
responsible for the dysfunction of the public hospital and furthermore
denounced in the cries for help by emergency ward doctors.
So many “results” or non-quantitative gains, but qualitative gains
that make the yellow vests’ uprising a historic moment of inversion of
the too ordinary course of exploitation and domination. A moment that
refutes all political accountants in the service of the capitalism of
the summit, without yet opening for us a way out.
Temps Critiques, June 10-13, 2019
…
References
[1] – Cf. “Si t’as envie de vivre, tu décourbes ton dos” in
L’évènement Gilets jaunes, …/temps critiques, éd. À plus d’un titre,
2019.
[2] – A strong trend in big cities, even though it originated in Commercy. A third is planned at Montceau-les-Mines at the end of June.
[3] – A strong tendency on the roundabouts and within the “periphery”
groups. Under what label they will present themselves, this remains a
mystery since the yellow vests’ lists are globally disavowed.
[4] – Revue Temps critiques nº 19 : “Les luttes : de la coexistence à la coextension ?”: http://tempscritiques.free.fr/spip.php?article377
[5] – High school students wounded by the rubber bullets, those humiliated Mantes-la-Jolie, were suddenly praised as conscious and responsible young people, showing the example to their elders! While the many severely wounded yellow vests in the demonstrations of the first weeks have received only “they were looking for it” or “it will teach them” from the intellectuals and the dominant castes.
taken from here
Der Beitrag Looking back-forward at the #GiletsJaunes: A taking stock erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.