The following text appeared December 6th on the French platform lundimatin

Decompositions

Even if it soon proves fragile, for now, one of the principle merits
of the current mobilization is to have sent the rhetoric and the
tactical repertoire of the left movements of the past century to the
Grévin Museum¹—all while demanding more justice
and equality and without reproducing the anti-tax rhetoric of the
post-war right and extreme-right. After the collapse of the Social
Democrats signified in France by Macron’s election, we see the collapse
of the communists, the (in)soumis,², the
leftists, anarchists, members of the “ultra-left,” and other class
struggle professionals or spokespeople of radical chic: and a majority
of them, after sneering or holding their noses, are running at full
speed after the movement with their factions, unions, parties, media
coverage, and blog posts. Welcome to the rearguard!

The delay is obvious, the protest is funereal. Everyone can foresee
the calls, editorials, motions, petitions, the route from Place de la
République to Bastille announced by the prefecture, their protest
marshals and their black bloc, the committees coordinating and
negotiating between representatives and rulers, the little theater of
representativeness between the leaders or delegates and the “base,”
taking the floor through the press or in general assemblies. In short,
the final ruins of the welfare state, or rather, of its forms of
protest, have gone up in smoke; they are not only useless, but above all
obsolete and pathetic, the terms of a completely dead language that may
still be spoken for a long time by the ghosts that come to haunt them.
One can always count on bureaucrats, professionals, or trainees, and on
the army of organic intellectuals of emptiness, to play the
ventriloquist, to play the grand game of the Party, to imagine
themselves once more in the avant-garde of a movement, for which they
are in reality just sad street sweepers bringing up the rear.

Here they are proposing watchwords, soon to be constitutions,
enacting rules of good collective conduct, exhorting the inversion of
the power struggle, rambling on learnedly about the pre-revolutionary
characteristics of the situation, infiltrating protests and meetings,
calling for the convergence of struggles… These practices, these
speeches were already hollow incantations last year during the movements
of the railway workers and the students—they are hollower than ever
today. For the novelty, the tenacity of the first successes of the
“yellow vests” cruelly illuminate the series of almost systematic
defeats that have taken place over the past several years in France and
the general decomposition into which all the currents of the left, so
proud of their heritage and singularity and always so stupidly heroic in
their posturing, have sunk little by little over half a century. Far
from being an obstacle, it’s precisely the much-disparaged ideological
impurity of the movement that has enabled it to spread and rendered
obsolete all the unifying voluntarisms of specialized organizations and
activists. To the professionals of the leftist order and the
insurrectionary dis-order, the movement of “yellow vests” only offers an
invitation to travel, to a participation that will finally be free of
the established collectivities, like so many ideological and material
weights of the past.

Turning Point

The mobilization underway has no need of being inflated—or rather,
competed with, if one knows how to read between the lines of the deposed
little chiefs’ revanchist declarations—by existing or parallel
movements. In the roundabouts and in the streets, by blockade or by
riot, it is already bringing together forces that are heterogeneous,
politically diverse, or even opposed (though often sociologically close)
to encounter and to clash. Instead of using preexisting ideas or shared
class consciousness or even videos and messages exchanged on social
networks, the movement clings to local sociability, old and commonplace,
to interactions outside of the workplace, in the cafés, groups, sports
clubs, buildings, neighborhoods. Because the religious character of
progressive ideology, with its hackneyed myths and empty rituals, is
completely foreign to them, the “yellow vests” don’t appear in the first
two weeks of the movement to carry assurances or pat interpretations of
their common misery. With suppleness and adaptation, at the risk of
division and dissolution, they take to the streets, advance on
crossroads and tollbooths without prejudice, without imposed certitude,
free of the pathological intellectualism and idealism of the left and of
leftists and their fantasy of the proletariat, the historical subject
and the universal class.

The movement is situated at the turning point between two periods of
capitalism and the modes of government associated with them. In its
content more than in its form, it bears the marks of the past, but
leaves glimpses of a possible future of struggles or uprisings. The
critique of the tax, the demand for redistribution, the correction of
inequalities—all these are addressed to a regulatory state that has
largely disappeared. At the same time, the movement wants less tax and
more state. It only attacks the state to the extent to which it has
withdrawn from the urban and semi-rural zones. And though until recently
the issue was a question of purchasing power, that was the case only as
a consequence of ignoring the salaries that for the most part determine
the general level of purchasing power even more than taxation does. A
remarkable trait of the current period is that no one in the government
has thought of blaming the bosses for their wage policies. This
tactically incomprehensible restriction of focus demonstrates better
than any discourse what interests the leading politicians of the current
regime serve, even at their own peril.

Since it defies the parties and expresses itself outside of
unions—and even, at the beginning, against them—the movement also
confronts the entire system of representation of interests that dates
from the Second World War and from the Fifth Republic: a set of
mechanisms of delegation attached to the Keynesian administration of
capitalism. In thus dismissing the left and leftists to ancient
tradition, or better, to formaldehyde, the “yellow vests” complete for
some the demands for autonomy that have been expressed since May 1968.
But for the same reason, they are also in harmony with the program of
destruction of union organizations and democratic institutions that has
been implemented under advanced capitalism since the 1970s. Or rather,
they are its irreducible remainder, the emergence of which some had
prophesied. Keynesian, libertarian, and neoliberal by turns, or all at
once, the movement brings with it, in its relationship to the state, the
economy, and history, the stigmata of these dying political ideas and
the ambivalences of our time.

Nevertheless, the movement proposes, albeit in a still paradoxical
form, the first mass politicization of the ecological question in
France. This is why one would be wrong to relate the mobilization only
to the conditions of class, status, and profession, and to create an
oversimplified opposition between the problems of the end of the month
and the question of the end of the world. This old reflex is also a
remnant of the old regime of regulation and protest. In the movement of
the “yellow vests,” labor is not the epicenter any more than purchasing
power really is. What the movement protests, beyond ecological
injustices (the rich destroy much more of the planet than the poor, even
while eating organic and sorting their trash, but the poor are the ones
who must bear the costs of the “ecological transition”), is above all
the enormous differences that exist in relation to circulation, which
have hardly been politicized until now. Rather than expressing itself in
the name of a social position, in this sense the movement makes
mobility (and its different regimes: constrained or chosen, diffuse or
concentrated) the principal focus of the mobilizations, and, in blocking
traffic, the cardinal instrument of the conflict.

The Three Vests

On the level of concrete mobilization, the chief quality of the
movement will have been to have invented a new tactic and a new
dramaturgy of the social struggle. Weak means, perfectly put into play,
will have sufficed to create a level of crisis that has rarely been
attained politically in France over the past several decades. The logic
of numbers and convergence, which was part and parcel of the
mobilizations of the Keynesian period, is no longer the decisive factor:
no more need to count on high school and college students, on the
unemployed and the retired, on their availability and on their time; nor
to seek a central, mediatized, Parisian resonance chamber to give the
movement its strength and legitimacy. The unique combination of a
proliferation of small groupings in the spaces without spontaneous
political life for half a century; of the practice of blockades; and of
the obvious, natural, ancestral recourse to the riot, reaching to the
very hearts of the local, regional, and national urban centers, has
supplanted, at least temporarily, the repertoire of the strike with its
imposing and well-established figure.

Beyond this common trait, three practical and tactical tendencies
currently appear to divide the movement and determine its future. The
first is electoralist in its heart, “citizenist” in its fringes. It
already calls for the formation of a brand new political movement, for
the constitution of candidacies for the next European elections, and it
no doubt dreams of a destiny comparable to that of the Five Star
Movement in Italy, or Podemos in Spain, or the Tea Party in the US. This
is a matter of weighing in on the existing political game via
representatives whose social characteristics are as similar as possible
to the characteristics of their constituents. The most radical ones in
this camp are not satisfied with the current political institutions and
demand that these be completely transformed immediately: they want their
referendum or their “Nuit debout”,³ but in the giant soccer stadiums where they imagine a new deliberative democracy will be invented and put into practice.

A second polarity within the movement is openly in favor of
negotiation. It expressed itself in the press last Sunday by calling for
discussions with the government and by accepting, before retracting,
its invitations. A more or less rebellious fraction of the parliamentary
representatives and politicians of the majority responded, with
representatives of the opposition, the unions, and the heads or
seconds-in-command of the party, by calling for a change in course:
complete transformations of the Estates General [legislative
assemblies], taxation, ecology, inequalities, and other burning
subjects. This pole dominated the debates in the third week, but it is
quite contested inside the movement, which doesn’t see how a new
Grenelle Accords,⁴ a fortiori without
unions or legitimate representatives and probably diluted with time,
could possibly address the rage. After a false start, the government’s
principal advantage is now the time of year; they hope to drown the
opposition in end-of-the-year parties and make the discussion last
several months. We know as well that, in other circumstances, the Estates General could not dress the wounds.

The third core of the movement is dégagiste (oppositional)
and, at its margins, insurrectionary or even revolutionary. It expressed
itself this weekend in Paris and in the prefectures, demanding the
immediate resignation of Macron without any other program. It obtained
results that are unprecedented for several decades in France by reaching
the rich neighborhoods west of the capital and responding to the forces
of order with an unheard-of enthusiasm despite the police repression,
the numerous victims of violence, hands ripped off, faces battered. A
few statistics offer an idea of the violence underway: on December 1,
the police shot as many grenades in Paris as they had in France
throughout the entirety of 2017 (Libération, December 3, 2018).
It is possible that the very acute character of these confrontations
has been, in part, the product of a governmental calculation aiming to
disqualify the riotous fractions of the movement. This strategy failed
last week. It has been the object of mass propaganda once again this
week. Whatever happens, the best prospects of this segment of the
movement are reminiscent of the Arab revolts of 2011, when a very
heterogeneous political mobilization brought down several authoritarian
regimes, but without succeeding in going further and affirming a
revolutionary positivity.

This portrait wouldn’t be complete without recalling that the
neo-fascist possibility spans the three camps of the movement. The
extreme right is present in all of them. The identitarian and
authoritarian tension is also a possible scenario for all of the
tendencies: in alliance with (like in Italy) or by absorption into the
electoralists; by disgust or its counterpart, if the negotiators win the
day; by backlash or counter-revolution, if the putschists of the left
or the insurgents triumph. The extreme right in ambush! All the good
spirits are demoralized. Will that be enough to tarnish the movement? In
reality, the neo-fascist possibility has been present in France since
Macron’s election: it is its necessary double and the most probable
consequence. The emergence of the extreme right is occurring everywhere
today as the logical consequence of maintaining the neoliberal economic
order and police state in conjunction with social crisis, witnessed by
the authoritarian turn in many countries since 2008. The existence of
this danger is not uplifting, but it is the obvious proof that we are at
a crossroads in France, in Europe, and beyond. In critical times,
history is always uncertain and molten; the purists and the hygienists
of the mind and of politics are at a loss. If they are not yet
illiberal, the “yellow vests” are already anti-liberal. But who can say
whether they wish for new liberties?

Weak Links

By this measure, the insurrectional riot amounts to nothing, even if
the ones that took place November 24 and December 1 in Paris and in some
cities in the provinces were of historical scope. We sometimes forget
that the French have violently risen up, most often against taxes and
the concentration of powers, for nearly four centuries. Over the last
hundred years, tolerance for destruction and street violence had
considerably weakened. However, since 2016 and the new, fragile
understanding between the “black bloc” and assemblies, the demonization
of riots has receded. This trend has been reinforced over the past few
days by ordinary citizens’ encounters with exacerbated police brutality.
A tactical course of action could take advantage of this, perhaps
provisionally, in order to win the heart of the movement and sharpen the
precision with which it aims at targets.

The storming of the Palace de la Republic will not take place. For
the moment, there are still many mechanisms in reserve with which to
defuse the situation: the dismissal of the government, the declaration
of a state of emergency, the army, et cetera. Let us finish mourning all
leftism: revolution itself, understood as event, is no longer a
necessity, nor even an absolute horizon. Henceforth, the battle can only
take place continuously: that is to say, by attacking, according to
priority, the weakest parts of the strategic systems of the presiding
power. The media and police, to begin with.

The media are effectively divided on this movement. Some media
support the anti-tax position of the “yellow vests” to increase the
class interests of their owners, all while fearing popular violence.
Other media, ideologically closer to the government, in social affinity
with the figure that Macron embodies, are nonetheless held to account by
their consumers, who support the “yellow vests” even if they aren’t
participating. In a fluid situation, representation is one of the
decisive arms of war. However, social networks and various protest sites
only partially correct the monopolistic tendency of traditional
audiovisual media when they themselves are not won over by shameless
counter-truths. We like to imagine a part of the “yellow vests”
interfering as soon as possible with one or several radio and television
stations, national ones if possible, associating with defecting
journalists, thus enabling the historical developments underway to
appear more clearly. At the very least, we must immediately expand the
instruments of counter-information that we already have.

The police presence is paradoxically the other weak link in the
presiding system. It’s a used up, overexploited machine, full of rusty
parts and weapons, and whose human cogs experience socio-economic
conditions very close to those of the “yellow vests.” This proximity
could succeed in dividing the ranks of the police, their unions, if they
are pushed where their pains have accumulated, softening the base. The
task seems rough, difficult, perhaps impossible, but no uprising occurs
without at least a partial reversal of the repressive apparatus.
Temporality is tight. We can’t be sure that this Saturday, the plan
decided by the Interior Minister will not be more insidious, avoiding
frontal conflicts in favor of targeted arrests—in the German manner, as
it were—in order to contain the tension to the point of breathlessness.
But will that work when a mass radicalization has taken place over the
last two weeks against the ordinary practices of the police? At Pau on
December 1, the CRS [riot police] took off their helmets in front of the
protestors. Didn’t a union (Vigi) already call for an unlimited strike
after Saturday? Other unions of civil servants (teachers, fire and
rescue departments, the entirety of public services) have formulated
similar calls for the next few days and next week. The state apparatus
is fissuring slowly.

Aim well, but also persist, above all. Paris is a riot, but Paris is
also a trap. A spectacular showcase. The scale of the movement is local.
We hope it will remain local and multiply its points of existence as
well as the meetings held there. The generalization of the perspective
of local “popular” assemblies, like at Saint-Nazare or at Commercy, that
are able to draw together other groups beyond the already mobilized
“yellow vests,” would head in this direction. This would take resources,
energy, force, mutual aid. Funds for blockades could be
organized—including material resources and even online fundraising.
Politically, the role of supportive associations and even of sympathetic
local elected officials is yet to be determined, like that of the
turning of the new year.

All of these considerations, already excessive, are nonetheless small
in the face of the questions the movement will face in the future, like
those about business and ecology, which have mostly remained on the
margins of the current commotion, whereas they are at the heart of all
the demands. We will have to return to them. December 8 is only the
fourth act of mobilization. All the best tragedies have five.

-Deposed agents of the Imaginary Party
December 6, 2018

1. A wax museum.
2. The Insoumis, the “untamed” or “not submissive,”
   is the populist democratic socialist party of Mélenchon. The parentheses
   in the original French text convey doubt as to whether it is more
   correct to describe Mélenchon’s devotees as tamed or untamed.
3. Nuit Debout, “up all night,” was a French knockoff of Occupy that took place in 2016.
4. The accord that effectively ended the insurrectionary events of May 1968.

taken from here

Der Beitrag Contribution to the Rupture in Progress erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.