lecture 17 -- "the popular front"
john merriman
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France in the 1920s and 1930s has to be understood in the context of the international situation in Europe--and, in particular, the rise of fascism.
by 1939, only, in Central and Eastern Europe, only Czechoslovakia remained a parliamentary regime--when you think of fascism you think of Mussolini and Hitler, but it's important to remember that there were no parliamentary regimes left in the entire region. and even where democracy survived in W. Europe, there were indigenous Fascist movements (not to mention the case of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939).
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so, today, the rise of the Right in France; and its relation to the Popular Front.
the Popular Front era in France is remembered as one of the "magic" moments of French history.
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the political details of the Cartel de Gauche (Left-leaning) that came to power after World War I can be left to the reading. but, for all these countries, the right-wing temptation of the 1920s was evident. Mussolini was on the cover of Time magazine eight times in the US--known as the man who got the trains running on time (even if it was only to the ski resorts that American journalists frequented, quips prof).
Hitler doesn't come to power till 1933--and Hitler was of course only the most successful of a bunch of right-wing leaders in Germany agitating for the overthrow of the Weimar Republic.
one of the salient tactics is corporatism--the philosophy that you can get rid of social strife by organizing industries in a vertical way. Mussolini talked a good game in this regard.
so: Fasicsm was a European phenomenon, as well as a French one.i
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the spiritual leader of French fascism was [de la Rochelle?]. a novelist whose work was obsessed with suicide. in his autobiographical novel he thought Fascism could resurrect a medieval, Christian spirituality in France. Accion Frances was also, at this time, a pro-Monarchist group operating on similar principles. in France, the extreme right and Catholicism were interlnked.
and these groups begin to create paramilitaries (which is obviously what happened with the Nazis in Germany, and Mussolini in the early 1920s). the Accion France, then, takes the tactics of the early Boulanger movement and resurrects them. you have, also, the growth of right-wing groups through the trade union federation, the CGT.
they want to abolish parliamentary democracy. this activism develops to the extent that they are condemned by the Pope. and, indeed, many members leave the organization at this time, fearing ex-communication.
a number of other groups, who are even more radical, start up. Faisceau, which had begun in 1919, but increases its membership, and believes in violent struggle ("will to power"). another, the "Cross of Fire," attracted war veterans--founded in 1928 as a non-political organization, and its membership swells to 60,000 people.
of course, there has to be money behind these movements. interestingly, a bunch of producers of luxury products were funding these folk. and, because the newspapers,etc. are controlled by the right, much of these groups have ready means to disseminate their message.
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why were middle-class people attracted to these movements? (a phenomenon characteristic of Italy and Germany, as well)
has to be seen in the context of the hard times of the 1920s--Europe is basically in a long depression, with the exception of the period from 1924-1929. E. Europe is in a very severe agricultural depression the entire time.
with this rampant inflation (of course nothing comparable to Germany), the people who get burned are middle-class people on pensions. people who have saved their entire life, and their savings are wiped out.
in Germany this is quite clear--you had bourgeois families forced to sell silvers/antiques in order to make ends meet.
these grievances are expressed, then, through various components of fascist ideology, which are virulently anti-communist, anti-Bolshevik, anti-communists, and virulently anti-semitic (Hitler begins as a socialist-hater, before he despises the Jews).
in the 1930s, of course, you have huge numbers of Spanish refugees into France. a further grievance.
furthermore, these groups despise parliamentary regimes. the Europe of the 20s and 30s was dictatorships. characterized by an aggressive nationalism.
this ties into xenophobia in France quite obviously--the population in France was basically stagnant, remember. France has relatively few numbers of people under the age of 20 (only about 30%), and relatively more people who were elderly. and beginning in 1935, more people died in France than are born there. who makes up the difference? Italians, Poles, Spaniards, Belgians, Jews--all are significant minorities (half of the 325,000 Jews had come after 1918).
7.5% of the French population consists of immigrants--highest of any country.
why, with the exception of Oswald Mosley, does the UK remain relatively immune? immigration in that country was relatively small compared to these other places (despite the fact that it was only in London that you would run into people of color, as early as the 18th century, because of the British empire, prof is noting).
you only need to look at the success of the National Front, prof is noting, today, to see the continuities.
the idea of "True France" is being threatened. immigrants are not included, of course. (Hitler's own pernicious view, prof is arguing, took this to its extreme--the power of deciding who remained part of the German people lay with the Fuhrer).
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this culminates in February 6th, 1934. a political scandal gives the extreme right an opportunity for action (this is a country that had political scandals before, of course). and so now the Republic is accused not only of being soft (not virile--a weak system without a strong executive), but also of being corrupt. the France of "camping out" will conquer the France of the Apertif(!).
the police look the other way as the right mobilize their forces on the street.
a Ukranian Jew, con-man, who made an illict fortune. gradually it all collapses on his head--in December 1933 he flees to the Alps, rents a villa. revelations pile up, one after the other. Stavisky was protected by government minister, who happened to be the brother of the Prime Minister. the Right takes full advantage, and urges a full protest against the Chamber of Deputies.
the Police move in to arrest him, and Stavisky blows his brains out. he leaves a suicide note to his son, though, which didn't seem quite right--the right-wing suspected the Republic was covering itself. on top of that he was a Jew, of course.
these demonstrations turn into riots, toppling the gov't (which is replaced by a coalition government).
on February 4th, 1934, every right-wing group plans to march in front of the Chamber of Deputies, plans to perhaps even overthrow the Republic. the police batter them back--prof's uncle claims to have been in a counter-demonstration.
14 demonstrators were killed, and several thousand were injured. several hundred policemen hurt.
on February 8th, the prime minister resigns, again.
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on February 12th, the largest demonstrations in French history occurs (until May 1968), in defense of the republic. organized by the Popular Front, which was organized in the wake of these right-wing demos. millions of people march, 24-hr strike following. the Republic seemed to have a new lease of life--but it could also be called, of course, a new "lease of death."
"something had changed," prof says, "these three parties--communists, socialists, radicals--were frightened."
in 1920, the Communist Party split from the Socialist Party. it retained some elements of the Guedist party; it was fairly top-down, along lines of democratic centralism. in 1922-1923, intellectuals were tossed from the party, as it obeyed quite faithfully orders from Moscow. provided very good social services, however, and so it had a prestige that quite predated their resistance during WWII. (330,000 members by 1936--particularly strong in the red belt around Paris, and with railroad workers/engineers)
they considered the socialists (and Leon Blum) to be a reformist party, so this was a painful alliance for them.
Blum himself was "bourgeois." Blum was an intellectual, literary critic, socially radical ("on Marriage"), etc. when Jaures was killed on 31st of July 1914, Leon Blum was the logical successor. he becomes the dominant figure in the socialist party.
Leon Blum was also Jewish. and one thing that you heard in 1934/1935/1936, right-wing students would chant "better Hilter, than Blum." at one time he was almost beaten to death by right-wing thugs.
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in the meantime, government after government falls.
in June 1934, the Communist party repudiates class vs. class strategy--allowing their alliance with the "bourgeois" socialists. and the three parties meet and decide on a compromise program--tax reform, shorter work week, unemployment benefits, international disarmament,, support for league of nations, dissolution of fascist league.
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on the 7th of March, 1936, German armies move into the Rhineland. Hitler wins the big bluff against the League of Nations and the Allied Powers (his advisors warn him against the move, but Hitler gets away with it)
this leads to May 1936, when the Popular Front wins the election (57% of the vote--386 of 608 seats in the Chamber of Deputies). the communists refuse to participate in the cabinet, but their adding to the mix of three has made this victory possible.
on 3rd June, 1936, Leon Blum becomes prime minister.
what happens now, however, is that the largest wave of strikes (until May 1968) break out in France. in June 1936, there are 12,000 strikes, involving 2 million workers (for the first time ever, workers occupy factories; this happens in Flint, Michigan too, at the same time). there are pre-existing grievances, fanned by Popular Front rhetoric before the election (Taylorism, as well; "killing one's soul 8 hrs of day," factory as prison).
what is interesting is that the strikes take the labor federation and the communists by surprise. this isn't the last time this happens--happens in May 1968 as well, prof notes.
Leon Blum calls the government and employers together, and sign the Matignon Agreements, which promise 15-20% raises, 40-hr work week, paid vacation for a month, and free admission to the Louvre. (working-class resorts at beach develop in this period, prof is noting--"the working-class vacation"). an important conquest.
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but why does the Popular Front fail in the long run?
one of the reasons is because the employers have no intention of obeying their imperatives.
but really, it's the fact of the economic crisis--can't really bear the burden of these reforms, prof is arguing. wealthy people, also, run with their gold/silver to Switzerland. (Leon Blum does not put controls on currency).
and so at this point the Popular Front begins to unravel. in March 1937, police fire on demonstrating workers in Paris--the Communist Party denounces the gov't. the stock market goes into a tumble, the gov't has to devalue the Franc several times because of the outflow of gold.
but there's yet another reason that the Popular Front fails, says Prof, and that is Spain. people who lived in the late 1930s saw the war on Spain as a "war of Civilization." at the time people realized that it was a dry run for a war that was to come, later. the counter-revolution really starts in 1936 in Morocco--by 1939, an atrocity-filled war (but atrocities overwhelmingly on the side of the Fascists, no question, says prof) is ending.
the question was what was going to happen in Spain? but, of course, nobody gave arms to the Republicans. German planes strafe Guernica, though, and Italians try out their tanks.
there's a moment in France, when Blum is facing a crowd chanting "arms for spain, arms for spain"--and with tears streaming down his cheeks, Leon Blum says "I can't, I can't" (because the British and the Americans didn't want him to).
and, of course, Franco's regime lasts until 1975.
the Spanish Civil War is one of those moments, perhaps--maybe history would have been different if Hitler had been stopped at the Rhineland. or if Franco had been defeated.
as it pertains to the Popular Front in France, it survives, but in name only, until 1939. all this takes its toll. the government is defeated. Leon Blum ends up in jail, survives the war, and is active in politics during the Fourth Republic.
we live in a time of historical nostalgia, of course. prof's generation grew up listening to these tales of "arms for spain, etc." lots of the things that are good about France, prof is arguing, came out of this period of the Popular Front.
Showing posts with label 1968. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1968. Show all posts
Thursday, May 24, 2007
from "hatred of democracy", by jacques ranciere, 2006:
The equation democracy = limitlessness = society, on which the denunciation of the 'crimes' of democracy is based, presupposes, then, a threefold operation: it is imperative, first, to reduce democracy to a form of society; second, to make this form of society identical to the reign of the egalitarian individual by grouping under the latter all sorts of disparate properties, everything from mass consumption to the claims of special minority rights, not to forget union battles; and finally, to charge 'mass individualist society', henceforth identical to democracy, with pursuing the limitless growth that is inherent to the logic of the capitalist economy. (20)
(...) The so-called republican thesis took exactly the opposite tack: bringing School closer to society meant making it more homogeneous to social inequality. So that School could work to achieve equality only to the extent that, within the sheltering walls that separate it from the rest of society, it could devote itself to its proper task: to supply everyone equally, irrespective of origins or social destination, with the universality of knowledge, using for its egalitarian aims the necessarily inegalitarian form of relation obtaaining between the one who knows and the one who learns. (24-25)
(...) The enemy that the republican School confronted, then, was no longer the unequal society from which it sought to rescue pupils, it was the pupil him- or herself, who had become the representative par excellence of democratic humanity - the immature being, the young consumer drunk with equality, and whose charter is the Rights of Man. School, it would soon be said, was badly afflicted by one, and only one, evil, which was embodied in the very beings that had to be taught: equality. And what was undermined along with the authority of the professor was not the universality of knowledges but inequality itself, understood as the manifestation of a 'transcendence'. (26)
(...) The republican schoolmaster, conveyor of the universal knowledge that renders virgin souls equal, simply becomes, then, the representative of an adult humanity in the process of disappearing at the hands of a generalized reign of immaturity; the schoolmaster becomes the last witness of civilization, vainly opposing the 'subtleties' and 'complexities' of his thought to the 'impenetrable wall' of a world doomed to the monstrous reign of adolescence. He becomes the disillusioned spectator of the great catastrophe of civilization, the synonyms of which are consumerism, equality, democracy, and immaturity. Before him stands 'the adolescent-punk who, against Kant and Plato, demands the right to his or her own opinion', that is, the representative of the inexorable spiral of democracy drunk with consumption, attesting to the end of culture, if not the becoming culture of everything, to the 'hypermarket of lifestyles' and 'turning the world into a "club-Med"', and to the 'plunging of all of existence into the sphere of consumption'. (26-27)
(...) The fatal 'democratic' equivalence of everything is indeed first and foremost the product of a method that has only one explanation for every phenomenon, whether it be a social movement, a religious or ethnic conflict, changing trends, or advertising or other campaigns. This is how the young girl who, in the name of her father's religion, refuses to remove her headscarf at school, the schoolchild who opposes the rationality of the Koran to that of science, and the schoolchild who physically attacks teachers or Jewish students, will all find their attitudes attributed to the reign of the democratic individual, unaffiliated and altogether cut off from transcendence. And the figure of the dmocratic consumer drunk on equality will,according to the mood and the needs of the cause, be identified with the wage earner, with the unemployed occupying the Unemployment Office, or with the illegal immigrant detained in airport detention centres. There is no need to be surprised if the representatives of this consuming passion that excite the greates fury in our ideologues are generally those whose capacity to consume is the most limited. Indeed, the denunciation of 'democratic individualism' works, at little cost, to make coincide two theses: the classic thesis of property-owners (the poor always want more), and the thesis of refined elites - there are too many individuals, too many people claiming the privileges of individuality. This is how the dominant intellectual discourse meets up with those 'censitaire' and knowing elites of the nineteenth century: individuality is a good thing for the elites; it becomes a disaster for civilization if everybody has access to it. (27-28)
(...) Under the name democracy, what is being implicated and denounced is politics itself. Now, politics was not born with modern unbelief. Before the Moderns cut off the heads of kings so they could fill up their shopping trolleys at leisure, there were the Ancients, and first of all those Greeks, who severed links with the divine shepherd and set down, under the double name of philosophy and politics, the public record of this farewell. The 'murder of the shepherd', Benny Levy informs us, is there for all of us to see in Plato's texts. It is in the 'Statesman', for example, where he evokes the age when the divine shepherd himself directly governed the huma n flock. And it is in the fourth book of the 'Laws', where he evokes the golden reign of the god Cronus, who knew that no man could govern others without becoming bloated on injustices and excesses, and who resolved the problem by giving the human tribes leaders chosen from the superior race of daimones. But Plato, that reluctant contemporary of the men who claimed that power belonged to the people, not being able to oppose to these men anything except a 'care of the self' incapable of bridging the distance between the many and the whole, effectively countersigned the farewell, relegating the reign of Cronus and the divine shepherd to the era of fables. But he did this at the cost of compensating fo the absence of this fable by means of another fable, that of a 'republic' founded on the 'beautiful lie' according to which God, in order to assure a good order in the community, had put gold in the sould of the governors, silver in those of the warriors, and iron in those of the artisans. (34)
(...) Let's grant it to the representative of God: it is quite true that politics is defined in contradistinction to the model of the shepherd feeding his flock. One can object to this separation, by staking a claim, on behalf of the divine shepherd or the human shepherds who interpret his voice, to the government of his people. The price to pay for this is that democracy is effectively only ever the 'empire of nothing', the latest figure of political separation calling for us to turn back, from the pit of despair, toward the forgotten shepherd. (34) [so despondent aristocrats frame democratic passions around this looking-backwards precisely in order to confirm their own pretensions and longings]
(...) Plato is the first one to invent that mode of sociological reading we declare to be proper to the modern age, the interpretation that locates underneath the appearances of political democracy an inverse reality: the reality of a state of society where it is the private, egotistical man who governs. For him, democratic law, then, is nothing but people's pleasure for its own sake, the expression of the liberty of individuals whose sole law is that of varying mood and pleasure, without any regard for collective order. The term democracy, then, does not simply mean a bad form of government and political life. It strictly means a style of life that is opposed to any well-ordered government of the community. (36)
(...) In history, we've known two great entitlements to govern: one that is attached to human or divine kinship, that is, the superiority of birth; and another that is attached to the organization of productive and reproductive activities, that is, the power of wealth. Societies are usually governed by a combination of these two powers to which, in varying degrees, force and science lend their support. But if the elders must govern not only the young but the learned and the ignorant as well, if the learned must govern not only the ignorant but also the rich and the poor, if they must compel the obedience of the custodians of power and be understood by the ignorant, something extra is needed, a supplementary title, one common to those who possesss all these titles but also to those who do not possess them. Now, the only remaining title is the anarchice title, the title specific to those who have no more title for governing than they have for being governed. (46)
(...) This is the paradox that Plato encounters in the government of chance and that, in his furious and amusing repudiation of democracy, he must nevertheless take into account when portraying governors as men without properties that only a happy coincidence has called upon to occupy this place. It is this paradox that Hobbes, Rousseau and all the modern thinkers of the contract and sovereignty in their turn encounter through the questions of consent and legitimacy. Equality is not a fiction. All superiors experience this as the most commonplace of realities. There is no master who does not sit back and risk letting his slave run away, no man who is not capable of killing another, no force that is imposed without having to justify itself, and hence without having to recognize the irreducibility of equality needed for inequality to function. ... it is a reality that is constatntly and everywhere attested to. There is no service that is carried out, no knowledge that is imparted, no authoirty that is established without the master having, however little, to speak 'equal to equal' with the one he commands or instructs. Inegalitarian society can only function thanks to a multitude of egalitarian relations. (47-48)
(...) The term democracy, then, does not strictly designate either a form of society or a form of government. ...Societies, today as yesterday, are organized by the play of oligarchies. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as democratic government. Government is always exercised by the minority over the majority. The 'power of the people' is therefore necessarily also heterotopic to inegalitarian soceity and to oligarchic government. It is what divides government from itself by dividing society from itself. It is therefore also what separates the exercise of government from the representation of society. (52)
(...) Nor is the vote in itself a democratic form by which the people makes its voice heard. It is originally the expression of a consent that a superior power requires and which is not really such unless it is unanimous. The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so in the name of the people that representation is obliged to recognize but that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government. ... 'Representative democracy' might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron. (53)
(...) This duality [of man and citizen] has been denouced by critics from Burke to Agamben, via Marx and Hannah Arendt, in the name of a single logic: if two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles must be illusory, if not both. For both Burke and Arendt, the rights of man are either empty or tautological. They are the rights of bare man; but bare man, the man who belongs to no constituted national community, has no rights. The rights of man, then, are the empty rights of those who have no rights. Or they are the rights of man who belong to a national community. They are, then simply the rights of the citizens of that nation, the rights of those who have rights, and hence a pure tautology. Marx, conversely, saw the rights of citizens as constituting an ideal sphere whose reality consisted in the rights of man, not bare man, but the male property-owner who enforces the law of his interest, the law of wealth, under the mask of the equal rights of all. (58)
(...) The democractic process is the process of a perpetual bringing into play, of invention of forms of subjectivation, and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life. Democracy really means, in this sense, the impurity of politics, the challenging of governments' claims to embody the sole principle of public life and in so doing be able to circumscribe the understanding and extension of public life. If there is a 'limitlessness' specific to democracy, the that's exactly where it lies: not in the exponential multiplicatoin of needs or of desires emanating from individuals, but in the movement that ceaselessly displaces the limits of the public and the private, of the political and the social. (62)
(...) Republicanism and sociolgy are, in this sense, two names for the same project: to restore beyond the democratic rupture a political order that is homogenoeous to the mode of life of a society. This is really what Plato proposes: a community whose laws are not dead formulae, but the very respiration of society - the advice of the wise and the movement that the bodies of citizens internalize from birth, expressed through the dancing choruses of the city. This is what sociological science suggested be undertaken in the aftermath of the French Revolution: remedy the "Protestant', individualist tearing of the ancient social fabric, which was organized on the basis of the privilege of birth; oppose to democratic dispersion the reconstitution of a social body that is evenly distributed in its functions and natural hierarchies, and united by common beliefs. (64)
(...) That individualism is so out of favour with people who otherwise declare their proufound disgust for collectivism and totalitarianism is an easily solved enigma. It is not the collectivity in general that is being defended by the denouncer of 'democratic individualism'. It is a certain collectiviy, the well-ordered collectivity of bodies, milieus and 'atmospheres' that adapts knowledges to rank under the wise direction of an elite. And it is not individualism as such that is being rejected but the idea that anyone at all can share in its prerogatives. The denunciation of 'democratic individualism' is simply that hatred of equality by which a dominant intelligentsia lets it be known that it is the elite entitled to rule over the blind herd. (68)
(...) Usually the mere existence of a representative system is regarded as the crucial criterion for defining democracy. But this system itself is an unstable compromise, the result of opposing forces. It tends toward democracy only to the extent that it moves nearer to the power of anyone and everyone. (72)
(...) Eliminating national limits for the limitless expansion of capital; bringing the limitless expansion of capital within the limits of the nation: at the intersection of these two tasks the finally discovered figure of the royal science takes shape. It will always be impossible to find the just measure of equality and inequality; impossible, on this basis, to avoid democratic supplementation, namely, the dividing of the people. Governments and experts, on the other hand, consider it possible to find the right balance between the limited and the limitless. This goes by the name of modernization. Modernization is not the simple task of gearing governments to the harsh realities of the world. It also implies marrying the principle of wealth and the principle of socience in order to give oligarchy a renewed legitimacy. (78)
(...) No doubt it imports very little to consensual logic if the popular decision designates an oligarch from the right or if it designates one from the left. But there is a risk in leaving the solutions that depend upon the exclusive science of experts up to this decision. Our governments' authority thus gets caught in two opposed systems of legitimation: on the one hand, it is legitimated by its ability to choose the best solutions for societal problems. And yet, the best solutions can be identified by the fact that they do not have to be chosen because they result from objective knowledge of things, which is a matter for expert knowledge and not for popular choice. (78)
(...) We also know that the oligarchs, their experts and ideologues managed to find the explanation for this fortune [the 'no' vote to the EC], in fact the same one they find for every disruption to the consensus: if science did not impress its legitimacy upon the people, it is because the people is ignorant. If progress does not progress, it is because of the backward. (80)
(...) And it is hoped that a single principle will come to be ascribed to this thus-constituted ensemble: the ignorance of the backward, the attachment to the past, be it the past of social advantages, of revolutionary ideals, or of the religion of ancestors. Populism is the convenient name under which is dissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy, that is, the difficulty the government of science has in adapting itself to manifestations of democracy and even to the mixed form of representative system. This name at once masks and reveals the intense wish of the oligarch: to govern without people, in other words, without any dividng of the people; to govern without politics. (80)
(...) That capital growth and investor interests have laws involving complicated mathematical equations is freely granted. That these laws enter into contradiction with the limits posed by national systems of social legislation is just as obvious. But that these laws are ineluctable historical laws that it is vain to oppose, and that they promise a prosperity for future generations that justifies sacrificing these systems of protection, is no longer a matter of science but a matter of faith. ... The 'ignorance' that people are being reproached for is simply its lack of faith. (81)
(...) Today's faith seems to be the prerogative of governors and their experts. This is because it lends a hand to their deeper compulsion: the compulsion to get rid of the people and of politics. Proclaiming themsleves to be simply administrating the local consequences of global historical necessity, our governments take great care to banish the democratic suppplement. Through the invention of supra-State institutions which are not States, which are not accountable to any people, they realize the immanent ends of their very practice: depoliticize political matters, reserve them for places that are non-places, places that do not leave any space for the democratic invention of polemic. (81-82)
(...) The result of this is the reinforcement of a State that becomes directly responsible for the health and life of individuals. The same State that enters into battle against the institutions of the Welfare State is mobilized to have the feeding tube of a woman in a permanent state of vegetation reconnected. The elimination of the so-called Welfare State is not the withdrawal of the State. It is a redistribution, between a capitalist logic of insurance and direct state-management, of the institutions and funcitons that intervened between the two. (83)
(...) We can easily see here th emajor argument through which May '68 was reinterpreted, the argument constantly repeated by historians and sociologists, and lengthily illustrated by bestselling novelists: the movement of '68 was only a movement of youth eager for sexual liberation and new ways of living. And as neither youth nor the desire for liberty know what they want or what they are doing, these youth ended up bringing about the contrary of what they were proclaiming but the truth of what they sought: both a rejuvenation of capitalism and the destruction of all the familial, educational and other structures that stood in the way of the unlimited reign of the market that was penetrating every deeper into the hearts and minds of individuals. (88-89)
(...) Everything and its contrary become the inevitable manifestation of the democratic individual that is dragging humanity to its ruin, a ruin that hte imprecators deplore but that they would deplore even more were it not there to deplore. Of this evil individual one says both that he drags the civilization of the Englightenment to its grave and that he pursues its deadly works, that he is communitarian and without community, that he has lost the sense of family values and that the sense of their transgression, the sense of the sacred and that of sacrilege. Thereby one repaints old edifying themes in the sulphurous colours of hell and blasphemy - man cannot do without God, liberty is not licence, peace enfeebles the character, the desire for justice leads to terror. (89-90)
(...) Those who dream of restoring a government of elites in the shadows of a rediscovered transcendence are perfectly happy with the current state of things in 'democracices'. And as they take the 'petty people', who contest this state of things, as their principal target, their imprecations ultimately unite with the admonitions of the progressives to come in support of the managerial oligarchs grappling with the rebellious moods of these petty people who, just like the assses and horses obstructing the streets in Plato's democratic city, obstruct the path of progress. (91-92)
(...) In a sense, then, the new hatred of democracy is only one of the forms of confusion affecting this term. It doubles the consensual confusion in making the word 'democracy' an ideological operator that depoliticizes the questions of public life by turning them into 'societal phenomena', all the while denying the forms of domination that structures society. It masks the domination of State oligarchies by identifying democracy with a form of society, and it masks that of the economic oligarchies by assimilating their empire to the mere appetities of 'democratic individuals'. Hence, it can, in all seriousness, attribute all the phenomena connected with heightening inequality to the fateful and irreversible triumph of the 'equality of conditions', and so provide the oligarchic enterprise with its ideological point of honour: it is imperative to struggle against democracy, because democracy is tantamount to totalitariansim. (93)
(...) Democracy is first this paradoxical condition of politics, the point where every legitimization is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy, confronted with the egalitarian contingency that underpins the inegalitarian contingency itself. (94)
(...) The 'government of anybody and everybody' is bound to attract the hatred of all those who are entitled to govern men by their birth, wealth, or science. Today it is bound to attract this hatred more radically than ever, since the social power of wealth no longer tolerates any restriction on its limitless growth, and each day its mechanisms become more closely articulated to those of State action. (95)
(...) Democracy ... is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy. (97)
The equation democracy = limitlessness = society, on which the denunciation of the 'crimes' of democracy is based, presupposes, then, a threefold operation: it is imperative, first, to reduce democracy to a form of society; second, to make this form of society identical to the reign of the egalitarian individual by grouping under the latter all sorts of disparate properties, everything from mass consumption to the claims of special minority rights, not to forget union battles; and finally, to charge 'mass individualist society', henceforth identical to democracy, with pursuing the limitless growth that is inherent to the logic of the capitalist economy. (20)
(...) The so-called republican thesis took exactly the opposite tack: bringing School closer to society meant making it more homogeneous to social inequality. So that School could work to achieve equality only to the extent that, within the sheltering walls that separate it from the rest of society, it could devote itself to its proper task: to supply everyone equally, irrespective of origins or social destination, with the universality of knowledge, using for its egalitarian aims the necessarily inegalitarian form of relation obtaaining between the one who knows and the one who learns. (24-25)
(...) The enemy that the republican School confronted, then, was no longer the unequal society from which it sought to rescue pupils, it was the pupil him- or herself, who had become the representative par excellence of democratic humanity - the immature being, the young consumer drunk with equality, and whose charter is the Rights of Man. School, it would soon be said, was badly afflicted by one, and only one, evil, which was embodied in the very beings that had to be taught: equality. And what was undermined along with the authority of the professor was not the universality of knowledges but inequality itself, understood as the manifestation of a 'transcendence'. (26)
(...) The republican schoolmaster, conveyor of the universal knowledge that renders virgin souls equal, simply becomes, then, the representative of an adult humanity in the process of disappearing at the hands of a generalized reign of immaturity; the schoolmaster becomes the last witness of civilization, vainly opposing the 'subtleties' and 'complexities' of his thought to the 'impenetrable wall' of a world doomed to the monstrous reign of adolescence. He becomes the disillusioned spectator of the great catastrophe of civilization, the synonyms of which are consumerism, equality, democracy, and immaturity. Before him stands 'the adolescent-punk who, against Kant and Plato, demands the right to his or her own opinion', that is, the representative of the inexorable spiral of democracy drunk with consumption, attesting to the end of culture, if not the becoming culture of everything, to the 'hypermarket of lifestyles' and 'turning the world into a "club-Med"', and to the 'plunging of all of existence into the sphere of consumption'. (26-27)
(...) The fatal 'democratic' equivalence of everything is indeed first and foremost the product of a method that has only one explanation for every phenomenon, whether it be a social movement, a religious or ethnic conflict, changing trends, or advertising or other campaigns. This is how the young girl who, in the name of her father's religion, refuses to remove her headscarf at school, the schoolchild who opposes the rationality of the Koran to that of science, and the schoolchild who physically attacks teachers or Jewish students, will all find their attitudes attributed to the reign of the democratic individual, unaffiliated and altogether cut off from transcendence. And the figure of the dmocratic consumer drunk on equality will,according to the mood and the needs of the cause, be identified with the wage earner, with the unemployed occupying the Unemployment Office, or with the illegal immigrant detained in airport detention centres. There is no need to be surprised if the representatives of this consuming passion that excite the greates fury in our ideologues are generally those whose capacity to consume is the most limited. Indeed, the denunciation of 'democratic individualism' works, at little cost, to make coincide two theses: the classic thesis of property-owners (the poor always want more), and the thesis of refined elites - there are too many individuals, too many people claiming the privileges of individuality. This is how the dominant intellectual discourse meets up with those 'censitaire' and knowing elites of the nineteenth century: individuality is a good thing for the elites; it becomes a disaster for civilization if everybody has access to it. (27-28)
(...) Under the name democracy, what is being implicated and denounced is politics itself. Now, politics was not born with modern unbelief. Before the Moderns cut off the heads of kings so they could fill up their shopping trolleys at leisure, there were the Ancients, and first of all those Greeks, who severed links with the divine shepherd and set down, under the double name of philosophy and politics, the public record of this farewell. The 'murder of the shepherd', Benny Levy informs us, is there for all of us to see in Plato's texts. It is in the 'Statesman', for example, where he evokes the age when the divine shepherd himself directly governed the huma n flock. And it is in the fourth book of the 'Laws', where he evokes the golden reign of the god Cronus, who knew that no man could govern others without becoming bloated on injustices and excesses, and who resolved the problem by giving the human tribes leaders chosen from the superior race of daimones. But Plato, that reluctant contemporary of the men who claimed that power belonged to the people, not being able to oppose to these men anything except a 'care of the self' incapable of bridging the distance between the many and the whole, effectively countersigned the farewell, relegating the reign of Cronus and the divine shepherd to the era of fables. But he did this at the cost of compensating fo the absence of this fable by means of another fable, that of a 'republic' founded on the 'beautiful lie' according to which God, in order to assure a good order in the community, had put gold in the sould of the governors, silver in those of the warriors, and iron in those of the artisans. (34)
(...) Let's grant it to the representative of God: it is quite true that politics is defined in contradistinction to the model of the shepherd feeding his flock. One can object to this separation, by staking a claim, on behalf of the divine shepherd or the human shepherds who interpret his voice, to the government of his people. The price to pay for this is that democracy is effectively only ever the 'empire of nothing', the latest figure of political separation calling for us to turn back, from the pit of despair, toward the forgotten shepherd. (34) [so despondent aristocrats frame democratic passions around this looking-backwards precisely in order to confirm their own pretensions and longings]
(...) Plato is the first one to invent that mode of sociological reading we declare to be proper to the modern age, the interpretation that locates underneath the appearances of political democracy an inverse reality: the reality of a state of society where it is the private, egotistical man who governs. For him, democratic law, then, is nothing but people's pleasure for its own sake, the expression of the liberty of individuals whose sole law is that of varying mood and pleasure, without any regard for collective order. The term democracy, then, does not simply mean a bad form of government and political life. It strictly means a style of life that is opposed to any well-ordered government of the community. (36)
(...) In history, we've known two great entitlements to govern: one that is attached to human or divine kinship, that is, the superiority of birth; and another that is attached to the organization of productive and reproductive activities, that is, the power of wealth. Societies are usually governed by a combination of these two powers to which, in varying degrees, force and science lend their support. But if the elders must govern not only the young but the learned and the ignorant as well, if the learned must govern not only the ignorant but also the rich and the poor, if they must compel the obedience of the custodians of power and be understood by the ignorant, something extra is needed, a supplementary title, one common to those who possesss all these titles but also to those who do not possess them. Now, the only remaining title is the anarchice title, the title specific to those who have no more title for governing than they have for being governed. (46)
(...) This is the paradox that Plato encounters in the government of chance and that, in his furious and amusing repudiation of democracy, he must nevertheless take into account when portraying governors as men without properties that only a happy coincidence has called upon to occupy this place. It is this paradox that Hobbes, Rousseau and all the modern thinkers of the contract and sovereignty in their turn encounter through the questions of consent and legitimacy. Equality is not a fiction. All superiors experience this as the most commonplace of realities. There is no master who does not sit back and risk letting his slave run away, no man who is not capable of killing another, no force that is imposed without having to justify itself, and hence without having to recognize the irreducibility of equality needed for inequality to function. ... it is a reality that is constatntly and everywhere attested to. There is no service that is carried out, no knowledge that is imparted, no authoirty that is established without the master having, however little, to speak 'equal to equal' with the one he commands or instructs. Inegalitarian society can only function thanks to a multitude of egalitarian relations. (47-48)
(...) The term democracy, then, does not strictly designate either a form of society or a form of government. ...Societies, today as yesterday, are organized by the play of oligarchies. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as democratic government. Government is always exercised by the minority over the majority. The 'power of the people' is therefore necessarily also heterotopic to inegalitarian soceity and to oligarchic government. It is what divides government from itself by dividing society from itself. It is therefore also what separates the exercise of government from the representation of society. (52)
(...) Nor is the vote in itself a democratic form by which the people makes its voice heard. It is originally the expression of a consent that a superior power requires and which is not really such unless it is unanimous. The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so in the name of the people that representation is obliged to recognize but that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government. ... 'Representative democracy' might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron. (53)
(...) This duality [of man and citizen] has been denouced by critics from Burke to Agamben, via Marx and Hannah Arendt, in the name of a single logic: if two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles must be illusory, if not both. For both Burke and Arendt, the rights of man are either empty or tautological. They are the rights of bare man; but bare man, the man who belongs to no constituted national community, has no rights. The rights of man, then, are the empty rights of those who have no rights. Or they are the rights of man who belong to a national community. They are, then simply the rights of the citizens of that nation, the rights of those who have rights, and hence a pure tautology. Marx, conversely, saw the rights of citizens as constituting an ideal sphere whose reality consisted in the rights of man, not bare man, but the male property-owner who enforces the law of his interest, the law of wealth, under the mask of the equal rights of all. (58)
(...) The democractic process is the process of a perpetual bringing into play, of invention of forms of subjectivation, and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life. Democracy really means, in this sense, the impurity of politics, the challenging of governments' claims to embody the sole principle of public life and in so doing be able to circumscribe the understanding and extension of public life. If there is a 'limitlessness' specific to democracy, the that's exactly where it lies: not in the exponential multiplicatoin of needs or of desires emanating from individuals, but in the movement that ceaselessly displaces the limits of the public and the private, of the political and the social. (62)
(...) Republicanism and sociolgy are, in this sense, two names for the same project: to restore beyond the democratic rupture a political order that is homogenoeous to the mode of life of a society. This is really what Plato proposes: a community whose laws are not dead formulae, but the very respiration of society - the advice of the wise and the movement that the bodies of citizens internalize from birth, expressed through the dancing choruses of the city. This is what sociological science suggested be undertaken in the aftermath of the French Revolution: remedy the "Protestant', individualist tearing of the ancient social fabric, which was organized on the basis of the privilege of birth; oppose to democratic dispersion the reconstitution of a social body that is evenly distributed in its functions and natural hierarchies, and united by common beliefs. (64)
(...) That individualism is so out of favour with people who otherwise declare their proufound disgust for collectivism and totalitarianism is an easily solved enigma. It is not the collectivity in general that is being defended by the denouncer of 'democratic individualism'. It is a certain collectiviy, the well-ordered collectivity of bodies, milieus and 'atmospheres' that adapts knowledges to rank under the wise direction of an elite. And it is not individualism as such that is being rejected but the idea that anyone at all can share in its prerogatives. The denunciation of 'democratic individualism' is simply that hatred of equality by which a dominant intelligentsia lets it be known that it is the elite entitled to rule over the blind herd. (68)
(...) Usually the mere existence of a representative system is regarded as the crucial criterion for defining democracy. But this system itself is an unstable compromise, the result of opposing forces. It tends toward democracy only to the extent that it moves nearer to the power of anyone and everyone. (72)
(...) Eliminating national limits for the limitless expansion of capital; bringing the limitless expansion of capital within the limits of the nation: at the intersection of these two tasks the finally discovered figure of the royal science takes shape. It will always be impossible to find the just measure of equality and inequality; impossible, on this basis, to avoid democratic supplementation, namely, the dividing of the people. Governments and experts, on the other hand, consider it possible to find the right balance between the limited and the limitless. This goes by the name of modernization. Modernization is not the simple task of gearing governments to the harsh realities of the world. It also implies marrying the principle of wealth and the principle of socience in order to give oligarchy a renewed legitimacy. (78)
(...) No doubt it imports very little to consensual logic if the popular decision designates an oligarch from the right or if it designates one from the left. But there is a risk in leaving the solutions that depend upon the exclusive science of experts up to this decision. Our governments' authority thus gets caught in two opposed systems of legitimation: on the one hand, it is legitimated by its ability to choose the best solutions for societal problems. And yet, the best solutions can be identified by the fact that they do not have to be chosen because they result from objective knowledge of things, which is a matter for expert knowledge and not for popular choice. (78)
(...) We also know that the oligarchs, their experts and ideologues managed to find the explanation for this fortune [the 'no' vote to the EC], in fact the same one they find for every disruption to the consensus: if science did not impress its legitimacy upon the people, it is because the people is ignorant. If progress does not progress, it is because of the backward. (80)
(...) And it is hoped that a single principle will come to be ascribed to this thus-constituted ensemble: the ignorance of the backward, the attachment to the past, be it the past of social advantages, of revolutionary ideals, or of the religion of ancestors. Populism is the convenient name under which is dissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy, that is, the difficulty the government of science has in adapting itself to manifestations of democracy and even to the mixed form of representative system. This name at once masks and reveals the intense wish of the oligarch: to govern without people, in other words, without any dividng of the people; to govern without politics. (80)
(...) That capital growth and investor interests have laws involving complicated mathematical equations is freely granted. That these laws enter into contradiction with the limits posed by national systems of social legislation is just as obvious. But that these laws are ineluctable historical laws that it is vain to oppose, and that they promise a prosperity for future generations that justifies sacrificing these systems of protection, is no longer a matter of science but a matter of faith. ... The 'ignorance' that people are being reproached for is simply its lack of faith. (81)
(...) Today's faith seems to be the prerogative of governors and their experts. This is because it lends a hand to their deeper compulsion: the compulsion to get rid of the people and of politics. Proclaiming themsleves to be simply administrating the local consequences of global historical necessity, our governments take great care to banish the democratic suppplement. Through the invention of supra-State institutions which are not States, which are not accountable to any people, they realize the immanent ends of their very practice: depoliticize political matters, reserve them for places that are non-places, places that do not leave any space for the democratic invention of polemic. (81-82)
(...) The result of this is the reinforcement of a State that becomes directly responsible for the health and life of individuals. The same State that enters into battle against the institutions of the Welfare State is mobilized to have the feeding tube of a woman in a permanent state of vegetation reconnected. The elimination of the so-called Welfare State is not the withdrawal of the State. It is a redistribution, between a capitalist logic of insurance and direct state-management, of the institutions and funcitons that intervened between the two. (83)
(...) We can easily see here th emajor argument through which May '68 was reinterpreted, the argument constantly repeated by historians and sociologists, and lengthily illustrated by bestselling novelists: the movement of '68 was only a movement of youth eager for sexual liberation and new ways of living. And as neither youth nor the desire for liberty know what they want or what they are doing, these youth ended up bringing about the contrary of what they were proclaiming but the truth of what they sought: both a rejuvenation of capitalism and the destruction of all the familial, educational and other structures that stood in the way of the unlimited reign of the market that was penetrating every deeper into the hearts and minds of individuals. (88-89)
(...) Everything and its contrary become the inevitable manifestation of the democratic individual that is dragging humanity to its ruin, a ruin that hte imprecators deplore but that they would deplore even more were it not there to deplore. Of this evil individual one says both that he drags the civilization of the Englightenment to its grave and that he pursues its deadly works, that he is communitarian and without community, that he has lost the sense of family values and that the sense of their transgression, the sense of the sacred and that of sacrilege. Thereby one repaints old edifying themes in the sulphurous colours of hell and blasphemy - man cannot do without God, liberty is not licence, peace enfeebles the character, the desire for justice leads to terror. (89-90)
(...) Those who dream of restoring a government of elites in the shadows of a rediscovered transcendence are perfectly happy with the current state of things in 'democracices'. And as they take the 'petty people', who contest this state of things, as their principal target, their imprecations ultimately unite with the admonitions of the progressives to come in support of the managerial oligarchs grappling with the rebellious moods of these petty people who, just like the assses and horses obstructing the streets in Plato's democratic city, obstruct the path of progress. (91-92)
(...) In a sense, then, the new hatred of democracy is only one of the forms of confusion affecting this term. It doubles the consensual confusion in making the word 'democracy' an ideological operator that depoliticizes the questions of public life by turning them into 'societal phenomena', all the while denying the forms of domination that structures society. It masks the domination of State oligarchies by identifying democracy with a form of society, and it masks that of the economic oligarchies by assimilating their empire to the mere appetities of 'democratic individuals'. Hence, it can, in all seriousness, attribute all the phenomena connected with heightening inequality to the fateful and irreversible triumph of the 'equality of conditions', and so provide the oligarchic enterprise with its ideological point of honour: it is imperative to struggle against democracy, because democracy is tantamount to totalitariansim. (93)
(...) Democracy is first this paradoxical condition of politics, the point where every legitimization is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy, confronted with the egalitarian contingency that underpins the inegalitarian contingency itself. (94)
(...) The 'government of anybody and everybody' is bound to attract the hatred of all those who are entitled to govern men by their birth, wealth, or science. Today it is bound to attract this hatred more radically than ever, since the social power of wealth no longer tolerates any restriction on its limitless growth, and each day its mechanisms become more closely articulated to those of State action. (95)
(...) Democracy ... is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy. (97)
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
sarkozy taking france back to 1789:
In his victory speech, he vowed to “rehabilitate work, authority, morality, respect, merit”. Whether it was used deliberately or subconsciously, “rehabilitate” is an interesting choice of word, because it carries the implication of bringing back into vogue something that existed in the past. You will seldom find its proponents acknowledging that the neoliberal “reform” process falls squarely in that category, for it is based on the assumption that rapid “growth” and “wealth creation” are contingent on further empowering the owners and controllers of capital while wresting from workers many of the rights that were gained after long and arduous struggles.
(...) Trade unions tend to sell out, or become so bloated and bureaucratized that they lose the respect and allegiance of their members. But those that continue to serve their historic purpose of agitating and bargaining for better conditions face the wrath of the entrepreneurial classes: they are dismissed as relics of the distant past and as hurdles to “progress”. From the capitalist point of view, the ideal solution to the nuisance posed by organized labour is legislation that strips it of its powers.
(...) So much, then, for the legacy of May ‘68. It was, in fact, liquidated long ago. Sarkozy isn’t inheriting a socialist state any more than Royal would have sought to create one, had she won last Sunday’s election. France does, however, retain elements of the welfare state. As Tony Judt commented in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago: “The dysfunctional French social model, we are frequently assured, has failed. In that case there is much to be said for failure. French infants have a better chance of survival than American ones. The French live longer than Americans and they live healthier (at far lower cost). They are better educated and have first-rate public transportation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in the US or Britain, and there are fewer poor people.”
(...) European social democracy has been in decline for decades: most of the parties associated with that label have convinced themselves that there is no alternative to neoliberal economics and, furthermore, that deviations from the capitalist path are indefensible on the electoral battlefield. No one exemplifies this trend better than Sarkozy’s friend and admirer Tony Blair. The centre has shifted, making it simpler for conservatism to slide towards extremist variants of the creed. Sarkozy, with his appeals to nationalist pride, is one of the consequences. If the drift continues, it is not inconceivable that the far right in Europe will before long acquire “respectability” of the sort it hasn’t enjoyed since the 1930s.
(...) There is a small possibility, of course, that the reality of power will moderate Sarkozy’s crypto-fascist tendencies. However, given that their new president appears to have little time for notions such as liberté, egalité and fraternité, it’s more likely that the plurality of French citizens will sooner or later find themselves rallying to defend not the legacy of 1968 but the spirit of 1789.
In his victory speech, he vowed to “rehabilitate work, authority, morality, respect, merit”. Whether it was used deliberately or subconsciously, “rehabilitate” is an interesting choice of word, because it carries the implication of bringing back into vogue something that existed in the past. You will seldom find its proponents acknowledging that the neoliberal “reform” process falls squarely in that category, for it is based on the assumption that rapid “growth” and “wealth creation” are contingent on further empowering the owners and controllers of capital while wresting from workers many of the rights that were gained after long and arduous struggles.
(...) Trade unions tend to sell out, or become so bloated and bureaucratized that they lose the respect and allegiance of their members. But those that continue to serve their historic purpose of agitating and bargaining for better conditions face the wrath of the entrepreneurial classes: they are dismissed as relics of the distant past and as hurdles to “progress”. From the capitalist point of view, the ideal solution to the nuisance posed by organized labour is legislation that strips it of its powers.
(...) So much, then, for the legacy of May ‘68. It was, in fact, liquidated long ago. Sarkozy isn’t inheriting a socialist state any more than Royal would have sought to create one, had she won last Sunday’s election. France does, however, retain elements of the welfare state. As Tony Judt commented in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago: “The dysfunctional French social model, we are frequently assured, has failed. In that case there is much to be said for failure. French infants have a better chance of survival than American ones. The French live longer than Americans and they live healthier (at far lower cost). They are better educated and have first-rate public transportation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in the US or Britain, and there are fewer poor people.”
(...) European social democracy has been in decline for decades: most of the parties associated with that label have convinced themselves that there is no alternative to neoliberal economics and, furthermore, that deviations from the capitalist path are indefensible on the electoral battlefield. No one exemplifies this trend better than Sarkozy’s friend and admirer Tony Blair. The centre has shifted, making it simpler for conservatism to slide towards extremist variants of the creed. Sarkozy, with his appeals to nationalist pride, is one of the consequences. If the drift continues, it is not inconceivable that the far right in Europe will before long acquire “respectability” of the sort it hasn’t enjoyed since the 1930s.
(...) There is a small possibility, of course, that the reality of power will moderate Sarkozy’s crypto-fascist tendencies. However, given that their new president appears to have little time for notions such as liberté, egalité and fraternité, it’s more likely that the plurality of French citizens will sooner or later find themselves rallying to defend not the legacy of 1968 but the spirit of 1789.
Monday, May 7, 2007
what sarkozy brings:
A whopping record 86% of French voters went to the polls today to give an unambiguous victory to the autocratic, demagogic, hard-right nationalist Sarkozy, who campaigned on promises of a "rupture" with France's mixed economy and its welfare state, one of the most extensive in Europe.
(...) The crowd in the hall where Sarkozy declared victory after the polls closed repeatedly sang the national anthem, La Marseillaise -- with its famous xenophobic refrain, "Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!" (Translation: Let us march, let us march, May impure blood soak the furrows of our fields.) And Sarkozy's campaign was marked by incessant appeals to racism and the fear of immigrants, symbolized by his adoption of a slogan used by the neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, "France, love it or leave it," and by his proposal for a new "Ministry of Immigration and National Identity," which was widely criticized by the left and by anti-racist groups for amalgamating the two concepts and suggesting a fundamental opposition between the two.
(...) That lurch to the right five years ago by a significant portion of formerly left voters was confirmed by today's vote, in which more than two-thirds of former Le Pen voters -- many of them from the one-time Communist-dominated working class suburbs -- went for Sarkozy, according to the exit polls.
(...) But in reality, what Sarkozy's victory means for France is something closer to the so-called "Reagan Revolution" in the U.S. that began in 1981 the process of dismantling and destroying the institutional New Deal legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Chirac was a Gaullist, and the political heritage of General Charles De Gaulle, who led France from 1958 to 1969, included a vigorously statist approach to the economy and defense of a wide series of social protection and social safety-net measures that had been instituted by the left's Popular Front government in the mid-1930s, and which were renewed and extended by post-war governments dominated by the political activists of the Resistance movement to Nazi occupation, who had a conception of government as a guarantor of economic security for all. Sarkozy is of a new generation than Chirac and, ideologically, not a Gaullist -- but rather in phase with the "Chicago school" of economics led by Milton Friedman, which believes in minimal government, a slimmed-down state that interferes as little as possible in the economy, an aggressively laissez-faire approach that is dear to the economic barons of the MEDEF, the French business leaders' association, whose tycoons were solidly behind Sarkozy's candidacy. Sarkozy has already promised to, in effect, abolish the ISF (the tax on large fortunes), accord more tax breaks to big business and the upper-middle-classes, and make more cuts in the state-run national health system (declared by a U.N. survey to be the finest in the world in terms of delivery of health services and quality of care.) Sarkozy's economic program is designed to help the already-privileged classes retain and extend their socio-economic position, to the detriment of the have-nots (the massive pro-Sarkozy vote in the upper-income neighborhoods today confirms that they understood Sarko's message to them.) And he has promised a major down-sizing of the civil service employed by state agencies.
(...) Life for the have-nots will become even more difficult under Sarkozy's hard-right, anti-immigrant, law-and-order society. He has announced "zero tolerance" for illegal immigration, has deported tens of thousands of immigrants during his two terms as Interior Minister and split up immigrant families while making it tougher for them to become French citizens. He has proposed strict minimum sentences for all sorts of crimes, thus removing all discretion from French judges, and France's already-crowded prisons will soon be overflowing with expanded, and younger, populations. French prisons, like ours, are training institutes for criminals, and by sending ever-larger numbers of young people to them for petty offenses Sarkozy will, in fact, be manufacturing new generations of hardened voyous (thugs in French.)
(...) And, in a major campaign speech just days before the election, Sarkozy surprisingly devoted 20 minutes of his discourse to a violent denunciation of the May 1968 student-worker revolt (Sarko was only 14 at the time of that rebellion.). The heritage of May ';68, Sarko thundered, must be "liquidated." He blamed it for a generalized attitude of "laxisme," for France's having become a country "in which work has no value, in which people think they can do anything they feel like doing, in which people are lazy," and on and on. May '68 was, of course, the fountain of social ferment that led to the sexual revolution, to women's liberation and the legalization of abortion, the gay liberation movement and the eventual repeal of laws criminalizing homosexuality, and a whole series of cultural changes that opened up a stuffy, arteriosclerotic French society. But May '68 was also a general strike by 11 million French workers that gained union recognition in many factories, higher wages, and that won a reinforcement of the social safety net in an agreement (negotiated on behalf of then-President Georges Pompidou by a young Jacques Chirac) that became known as "les accords de la rue de Grenelle" (the agreement of Grenelle Street). What was unstated in Sarko's anti-May '68 speech was that all that sort of thing, too, must be "liquidated."
A whopping record 86% of French voters went to the polls today to give an unambiguous victory to the autocratic, demagogic, hard-right nationalist Sarkozy, who campaigned on promises of a "rupture" with France's mixed economy and its welfare state, one of the most extensive in Europe.
(...) The crowd in the hall where Sarkozy declared victory after the polls closed repeatedly sang the national anthem, La Marseillaise -- with its famous xenophobic refrain, "Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!" (Translation: Let us march, let us march, May impure blood soak the furrows of our fields.) And Sarkozy's campaign was marked by incessant appeals to racism and the fear of immigrants, symbolized by his adoption of a slogan used by the neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, "France, love it or leave it," and by his proposal for a new "Ministry of Immigration and National Identity," which was widely criticized by the left and by anti-racist groups for amalgamating the two concepts and suggesting a fundamental opposition between the two.
(...) That lurch to the right five years ago by a significant portion of formerly left voters was confirmed by today's vote, in which more than two-thirds of former Le Pen voters -- many of them from the one-time Communist-dominated working class suburbs -- went for Sarkozy, according to the exit polls.
(...) But in reality, what Sarkozy's victory means for France is something closer to the so-called "Reagan Revolution" in the U.S. that began in 1981 the process of dismantling and destroying the institutional New Deal legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Chirac was a Gaullist, and the political heritage of General Charles De Gaulle, who led France from 1958 to 1969, included a vigorously statist approach to the economy and defense of a wide series of social protection and social safety-net measures that had been instituted by the left's Popular Front government in the mid-1930s, and which were renewed and extended by post-war governments dominated by the political activists of the Resistance movement to Nazi occupation, who had a conception of government as a guarantor of economic security for all. Sarkozy is of a new generation than Chirac and, ideologically, not a Gaullist -- but rather in phase with the "Chicago school" of economics led by Milton Friedman, which believes in minimal government, a slimmed-down state that interferes as little as possible in the economy, an aggressively laissez-faire approach that is dear to the economic barons of the MEDEF, the French business leaders' association, whose tycoons were solidly behind Sarkozy's candidacy. Sarkozy has already promised to, in effect, abolish the ISF (the tax on large fortunes), accord more tax breaks to big business and the upper-middle-classes, and make more cuts in the state-run national health system (declared by a U.N. survey to be the finest in the world in terms of delivery of health services and quality of care.) Sarkozy's economic program is designed to help the already-privileged classes retain and extend their socio-economic position, to the detriment of the have-nots (the massive pro-Sarkozy vote in the upper-income neighborhoods today confirms that they understood Sarko's message to them.) And he has promised a major down-sizing of the civil service employed by state agencies.
(...) Life for the have-nots will become even more difficult under Sarkozy's hard-right, anti-immigrant, law-and-order society. He has announced "zero tolerance" for illegal immigration, has deported tens of thousands of immigrants during his two terms as Interior Minister and split up immigrant families while making it tougher for them to become French citizens. He has proposed strict minimum sentences for all sorts of crimes, thus removing all discretion from French judges, and France's already-crowded prisons will soon be overflowing with expanded, and younger, populations. French prisons, like ours, are training institutes for criminals, and by sending ever-larger numbers of young people to them for petty offenses Sarkozy will, in fact, be manufacturing new generations of hardened voyous (thugs in French.)
(...) And, in a major campaign speech just days before the election, Sarkozy surprisingly devoted 20 minutes of his discourse to a violent denunciation of the May 1968 student-worker revolt (Sarko was only 14 at the time of that rebellion.). The heritage of May ';68, Sarko thundered, must be "liquidated." He blamed it for a generalized attitude of "laxisme," for France's having become a country "in which work has no value, in which people think they can do anything they feel like doing, in which people are lazy," and on and on. May '68 was, of course, the fountain of social ferment that led to the sexual revolution, to women's liberation and the legalization of abortion, the gay liberation movement and the eventual repeal of laws criminalizing homosexuality, and a whole series of cultural changes that opened up a stuffy, arteriosclerotic French society. But May '68 was also a general strike by 11 million French workers that gained union recognition in many factories, higher wages, and that won a reinforcement of the social safety net in an agreement (negotiated on behalf of then-President Georges Pompidou by a young Jacques Chirac) that became known as "les accords de la rue de Grenelle" (the agreement of Grenelle Street). What was unstated in Sarko's anti-May '68 speech was that all that sort of thing, too, must be "liquidated."
Thursday, April 26, 2007
1968:
Meanwhile in France, a revolutionary insurrection was erupting. What began as a demonstration against curfew rules in university dormitories in Nanterres spread across France, igniting universities and the streets of Paris. By the middle of May the workers of France had joined in and President DeGaulle was considering launching a military attack against the French people-something which had not occurred in France since the days of the Commune in 1870. Students spent their days holding open organizing meetings in the commons areas of their schools and spent the nights fighting the police. Workers throughout France took over their factories and ran them with workers' councils. Workers in one Renault plant in the hinterlands locked their managers in their office and ran the plant themselves. Their goal was to show how needless management really is. Then, just as they did at Columbia, the powers regrouped. The workers' political parties-the Communists and the Socialists-reneged on their support of the strike in favor of immediate pay raises and some changes in working conditions. In addition, the Socialists ended up with a substantial share of political power. Although the more conservative Gaullists and their allies did lose some ground and although it could be argued that the balance of power shifted in France after May 1968, one would be hard put to prove that now.
(...) When everything is branded it becomes considerably more difficult to separate one's existence from that reality. Heck, at the January 27th protest against the war in Iraq there were people holding signs opposed to the war that were distributed by Working Assets communications company and included their corporate logo.
Meanwhile in France, a revolutionary insurrection was erupting. What began as a demonstration against curfew rules in university dormitories in Nanterres spread across France, igniting universities and the streets of Paris. By the middle of May the workers of France had joined in and President DeGaulle was considering launching a military attack against the French people-something which had not occurred in France since the days of the Commune in 1870. Students spent their days holding open organizing meetings in the commons areas of their schools and spent the nights fighting the police. Workers throughout France took over their factories and ran them with workers' councils. Workers in one Renault plant in the hinterlands locked their managers in their office and ran the plant themselves. Their goal was to show how needless management really is. Then, just as they did at Columbia, the powers regrouped. The workers' political parties-the Communists and the Socialists-reneged on their support of the strike in favor of immediate pay raises and some changes in working conditions. In addition, the Socialists ended up with a substantial share of political power. Although the more conservative Gaullists and their allies did lose some ground and although it could be argued that the balance of power shifted in France after May 1968, one would be hard put to prove that now.
(...) When everything is branded it becomes considerably more difficult to separate one's existence from that reality. Heck, at the January 27th protest against the war in Iraq there were people holding signs opposed to the war that were distributed by Working Assets communications company and included their corporate logo.
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