It strikes me that the profound confusion, even incredulity, displayed
by the French commentariat—and even more, the world commentariat—in the
face of each successive “Acte” of the Gilets Jaunes drama, now rapidly
approaching its insurrectionary climax, is a result of a near total
inability to take account of the ways that power, labour, and the
movements ranged against power, have changed over the last 50 years, and
particularly, since 2008. Intellectuals have for the most part done an
extremely poor job understanding these changes.
Let me begin by offering two suggestions as to the source of some of the confusion:
1. in a financialised economy, only those closest to the means of
money-creation (essentially, investors and the professional-managerial
classes) are in a position to employ the language of universalism. As a
result, any political claims as based in particular needs and
interests, tended to be treated as manifestation of identity politics,
and in the case of the social base of the GJ, therefore, cannot be
imagined it as anything but proto-fascist.
2. since 2011, there
has been a worldwide transformation of common sense assumptions about
what participating in a mass democratic movement should mean—at least
among those most likely to do so. Older “vertical” or vanguardist models
of organization have rapidly given way to an ethos of horizontality one
where (democratic, egalitarian) practice and ideology are ultimately
two aspects of the same thing. Inability to understand this gives the
false impression movements like GJ are anti-ideological, even
nihilistic.
Let me provide some background for these assertions.
Since the US jettisoning of the gold standard in 1971, we have seen a
profound shift in the nature of capitalism. Most corporate profits are
now no longer derived from producing or even marketing anything, but in
the manipulation of credit, debt, and “regulated rents.” As government
and financial bureaucracies become so intimately intertwined it’s
increasingly difficult to tell one from the other, wealth and
power—particularly, the power to create money (that is, credit)—also
become effectively the same thing. (This was what we were drawing
attention to in Occupy Wall Street when we talked about the “1%’—those
with the ability to turn their wealth into political influence, and
political influence back into wealth.) Despite this, politicians and
media commentators systematically refuse to recognize the new realities,
for instance, in public discourse one must still speak of tax policy as
if it is primarily a way of government raising revenue to fund its
operations, whereas in fact it is increasingly simply a way of (1)
ensuring the means of credit-creation can never be democratized (as only
officially approved credit is acceptable in payment of taxes), and (2)
redistributing economic power from one social sector to another.
Since 2008 governments have been pumping new money into the system,
which, owing to the notorious Cantillon effect, has tended to accrue
overwhelmingly to those who already hold financial assets, and their
technocratic allies in the professional managerial classes. In France of
course these are precisely the Macronists. Members of these classes
feel that they are the embodiments of any possible universalism, their
conceptions of the universal being firmly rooted in the market, or
increasingly, that atrocious fusion of bureaucracy and market which is
the reigning ideology of what’s called the “political center.” Working
people in this new centrist reality are increasingly denied any
possibility of universalism, since they literally cannot afford it. The
ability to act out of concern for the planet, for instance, rather than
the exigencies of sheer survival, is now a direct side-effect of forms
of money creation and managerial distribution of rents; anyone who is
forced to think only of their own or their family’s immediate material
needs is seen as asserting a particular identity; and while certain
identities might be (condescendingly) indulged, that of “the white
working class” can only be a form of racism. One saw the same thing in
the US, where liberal commentators managed to argue that if Appalachian
coal miners voted for Bernie Sanders, a Jewish socialist, it must
nonetheless somehow be an expression of racism, as with the strange
insistence that the Giles Jaunes must be fascists, even if they haven’t
realized it.
These are profoundly anti-democratic instincts.
To understand the appeal of the movement—that is, of the sudden
emergence and wildfire spread of real democratic, even insurrectionary
politics—I think there are two largely unnoticed factors to be taken
into consideration.
The first is that financialized capitalism
involves a new alignment of class forces, above all ranging the
techno-managerials (more and more them employed in pure make-work
“bullshit jobs,” as part of the neoliberal redistribution system)
against a working class that is now better seen as the “caring
classes”—as those who nurture, tend, maintain, sustain, more than
old-fashioned “producers.” One paradoxical effect of digitization is
that while it has made industrial production infinitely more efficient,
it has rendered health, education, and other caring sector work less so,
this combined with diversion of resources to the administrative classes
under neoliberalism (and attendant cuts to the welfare state) has meant
that, practically everywhere, it has been teachers, nurses,
nursing-home workers, paramedics, and other members of the caring
classes that have been at the forefront of labor militancy. Clashes
between ambulance workers and police in Paris last week might be taken
as a vivid symbol of the new array of forces. Again, public discourse
has not caught up with the new realities, but over time, we will start
having to ask ourselves entirely new questions: not what forms of work
can be automated, for instance, but which we would actually want to be,
and which we would not; how long we are willing to maintain a system
where the more one’s work immediately helps or benefits other human
beings, the less you are likely to be paid for it.
Second, the
events of 2011, starting with the Arab Spring and passing through the
Squares movements to Occupy, appear to have marked a fundamental break
in political common sense. One way you know that a moment of global
revolution has indeed taken place is that ideas considered madness a
very short time before have suddenly become the ground assumptions of
political life. The leaderless, horizontal, directly democratic
structure of Occupy, for instance, was almost universally caricatured as
idiotic, starry-eyed and impractical, and as soon as the movement was
suppressed, pronounced the reason for its “failure.” Certainly it seemed
exotic, drawing heavily not only on the anarchist tradition, but on
radical feminism, and even, certain forms of indigenous spirituality.
But it has now become clear that it has become the default mode for
democratic organizing everywhere, from Bosnia to Chile to Hong Kong to
Kurdistan. If a mass democratic movement does emerge, this is the form
it can now be expected to take. In France, Nuit Debout might have been
the first to embrace such horizontalist politics on a mass scale, but
the fact that a movement originally of rural and small-town workers and
the self-employed has spontaneously adopted a variation on this model
shows just how much we are dealing with a new common sense about the
very nature of democracy.
About the only class of people who
seem unable to grasp this new reality are intellectuals. Just as during
Nuit Debout, many of the movement’s self-appointed “leadership” seemed
unable or unwilling to accept the idea that horizontal forms of
organization were in fact a form of organization (they simply couldn’t
comprehend the difference between a rejection of top-down structures and
total chaos), so now intellectuals of left and right insist that the
Gilets Jaunes are “anti-ideological”, unable to understand that for
horizontal social movements, the unity of theory and practice (which for
past radical social movements tended to exist much more in theory than
in practice) actually does exist in practice. These new movements do not
need an intellectual vanguard to provide them with an ideology because
they already have one: the rejection of intellectual vanguards and
embrace of multiplicity and horizontal democracy itself.
There is
a role for intellectuals in these new movements, certainly, but it will
have to involve a little less talking and a lot more listening.
None of these new realities, whether of the relations of money and power, or the new understandings of democracy, likely to go away anytime soon, whatever happens in the next Act of the drama. The ground has shifted under our feet, and we might do well to think about where our allegiances actually lie: with the pallid universalism of financial power, or those whose daily acts of care make society possible.
Der Beitrag The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.