One in a series of old texts that I am retrieving and collecting together, and sometimes reworking. Often this renewed effort exposes deeper, unworkable, internal contradictions. Sobeit!
First, let’s take a moment to remember Haussman. The French
state planned the layout of its capital city assuming the
inevitability of street fighting. The landscape is tilted in the
state’s favor and so the street is not denied to revolutionaries.
On the contrary, the "people" are almost invited to stage their
"manifestations". Whereas in the UK rioting is seen as an
unforeseen event and policed as an aberration, the French tend
to view 'the street' as an irreducible cost borne by its national
process.
Here are a number of preliminary comments on the nature and
function of French street politics so as to better investigate what
we might call popular insurgent forms.
All that is included:
1. The dominant culture in France likes to portray itself as a
domain of ideas. The advantage of this is that all positions tend
towards expressing themselves as ideas because there is a vast
and grandiose arena for them to do so. Radical ideas are much
more prevalent on French national TV and radio than on their
equivalents in the UK and the US. The anarchist federation for
example takes advantage of the state guarantee for the
distribution of ideas; Le Monde Libetaire is found in every
newsagents across the country because of this guarantee. It is
also officially sanctioned for the AF to participate in debates on
political ideas before students in schools and universities.
2. There is still a predominant 'popular front' mentality within
radical positions, and all left positions tend towards agreement
on issues and are prepared to mobilize together... this gradation
extends into the state and official bodies.
3. Demonstrating, occupations, even rioting, is generally viewed
as an element of political and cultural reproduction. There is an
established model, it is “68", and because the French state easily
survived those evenements it is now able to strategically gauge
all subsequent occurrences, the national media also compares
and then dismisses events as being 'not 68'. The state apparatus
therefore, and unlike in the UK, has a very wide margin of
comfort and with studied savoir-faire is able to merely raise its
eyebrows at even extreme conflagrations.
4. This modeling on 68 has become a curse; the not-68 element of
protests is reproduced at every bar and dining table across the
land. Every other year there are major street events: it has
become a culture. 68 has replaced 'I was in the resistance' as a
measure of le coq gaulois. And if nothing lives up to the big one
at least everyone is able to casually drop into their conversation
over aperitifs how they participated in 78, 88, 98. They too, all of
them, because they were there, are authentically of the French
left. Now, it is 2006, and in the photographs here is the girl on
her boyfriend's shoulders, she is punching the air. Here is the
girl with non scrawled on her face. Here are the serious young
men in the lecture room passing resolutions in Palestinian
scarves. In short, here is the manifestation.
5. If idea driven events have their place, the Haussmanised
streets, then they also have their temporality. The state knows
exactly how long demonstrations and rioting last... it has its
stopclock running on your marks, get set, go: first there is the
cause, then there is the outbreak, followed by the wildfire, then
there is the street fighting, then there is the consolidation and the
mass mobilization, then there is the defiance and movement for
continuation, then there is the full-stop mass demonstration, then
the melting away to other matters. In all, the fever takes about
two weeks to pass.
6. Certain sections of the state, ie the unions, will be weakened
by employment deregulation... on the other hand if these
measures are passed there will be advantages for workers (which
is the reason so many Europeans come to the UK to work).
Casualisation cuts both ways, it undoes the state power of
unions, and removes the 'left' interest from social management
but it also increases unpredictability in the economy. When there
are no brakes a social crisis can rapidly escalate.
Escalation and what exceeds the boundary:
1. There is something unreal about issue based protest, an
element that refuses escalation. However, it is hardly the
students' fault that their impeccable behavior, their honed
gestures, have been anticipated and contained, perhaps even
condoned, by the old foxes of the establishment. In truth, there
are few other options open to them as a social sector, they have
no special leverage on the economic mechanism. Accessible
radical forms and their effects are set by conditions and that's it;
there is nothing to be done to overcome these limitations of form,
and after all it is not for participants to decide the impact of the
measures they have taken. Students, even whilst rioting and
occupying, do not cause major upset to the running of the state.
Perhaps their impact would be much greater in the UK than in
France (see my co-authored leaflet “Some Notes Concerning the
Future Proletarian Insurgency" about the UK fuel blockades);
on the other hand, the UK state does not facilitate popular
manifestations so spontaneous mass eruptions are inevitably less
frequent anyway.
2. Nevertheless, it is important to explore the question of what
might prove excessive, and what measures might cause
escalation. Evidently, the spread of protest to industrial
production is the most certain means of causing genuine crisis
within the relation of production. It is interesting to note why
this spread into other sectors does not often occur... perhaps
precisely because protest is manifested in those sections of
society whose protesting has the least impact on society and
contrariwise, protest rarely occurs within those sectors that
would have most impact. The Swedish communist group Riff-
Raff talk of the 'cynical subject', that is of the capital-
ised/anthropologised human beings who already have
consciousness of their situation but see no way past it. The
cynical subject in fact, is in advance of the consciousness that the
left wants to bestow upon it, unlike the left it can see the process,
and that there is nothing to be won. The cynical subject will not
participate because its participation is decisive, it will not
participate until forced by its own circumstances. That is how it
should be.
3. Related to this, Riff-Raff also use the apocalypse fanatic
Oswald Spengler's divergent concept of spiritual communities
and cosmic entities. For riff-raff, a spiritual community is a
protest movement which aims to participate in the present as
fully as possible, they spread and grow within existing conditions
by drawing as many people to themselves as they can but never
grow out of the conditions which created them. The cosmic
entities by contrast mark genuine events and shifts in the
productive relation, they have that aura which speaks of new
possibility, they are caused when humanity is presented with the
opportunity for a new relation to the world (cosmos). If 68 was a
cosmic entity (and who knows now whether it was or wasn't)
then the facsimiles of 68 are decidedly mere spiritual
communities.
4. Thus a radical transformation of the protest dynamic would
depend upon (i) the participation of other sectors of society
(most importantly industrial workers); (ii) the distribution of
protest from out of its Haussmanised geography; (iii) the
extension of protest's temporality beyond the two week/month
fever. Most importantly however the uprising must cross the
cultural boundary and leave behind it the terrain of political
campaign issues and enter instead the intimate and troubling
matter of being able to directly articulate alienation and thus
formulate demands to address this. In short, protest will be
escalated when it engages the participation of capitalist society's
No comments:
Post a Comment