A country that rises

13 min read FREDERIC LORDON

FREDERIC LORDON

Monday March 20, the front pages of the national press echo the excitement of a motion of no confidence, tell the deputies likely to vote, guess the possibilities, foresee future combinations, play the informed, what a delight political journalism, in really a passport to political inanity.

During this time, politics, in its emergency power, has taken over the country. A cloud of spontaneous initiatives has broken out everywhere, walkouts without warning, roadblocks, riots breaking out or just wild demonstrations, student assemblies on every corner, the energy of youth at Concorde, in the streets. Everyone is on edge and impatient in their legs, but not because of the nonsense that fascinates the Parisian thimble. The thimble is like the head of the pin, the journalists glued to Macron and Borne, as ignorant as each other of what is really happening: the boil.

It's beautiful what happens when order starts to go off the rails. Small but unheard of things that break the resigned confinement and atomization in which the powers exercise their power. Here farmers bring baskets of vegetables to striking railwaymen; there a Lebanese restaurant owner distributes falafels to beleaguered protesters; students join picket lines; soon we will see individuals open their doors to hide the protesters from the police. The real movement is beginning. We can already say that the situation is pre-revolutionary. What prospects are you facing? Can she get rid of the "pre" to become fully revolutionary?

rule by raid

This power, its legitimacy collapsed, is now just a block of coercion. Having himself destroyed all mediation, the autocrat is only separated from the people by a line of policemen. Of this individual, whom all reason has long abandoned, nothing can be excluded.

Macron has never registered otherness. His psyche does not know what it is to be another, another person. He only dialogues with himself and the exterior does not exist. For this reason, in particular, his speech, the very meaning of his words, does not feel subjected to any of the collective validations of the interlocution. On June 3, 2022, he can affirm without blinking that he is going to "change his method" and that "the French are tired of the reforms that come from above" and on September 29 that "the citizen is not someone who is imposed decisions”. Isn't it obvious that with such a guy, all possibility of dialogue is effectively abolished? That nothing he says can ever be taken seriously again? It is easy to understand that such an individual, who knows only himself, is rigorously incapable of any admission of error that is not fictitious, since it is necessary to have listened to the outside, to the non-ego, to perceive that he is wrong. . That is why all his promises of "reinvention" (which journalists love so much) cannot be anything other than pantomime produced within his closed circuit.

Faced with a potentate, entirely abandoned to his movements by potentially, and now actually, liberticidal political institutions, all levels of violence are possible, anything can happen. In fact, everything is happening. The images of the rue Montorgueil trap from last Sunday are perfectly clear in this regard. Macron's politics is on the way to dissolving entirely in police intimidation. From now on, this power rules by raiding. The police make raids. Anyone, in any way, bystanders unrelated to the demonstration, frightened women and men, stunned by what is happening to them. Just a message: don't go out on the street; Stay at home; watch the TV; obey.

Here the unconscious transaction that the police carry out with their recruits comes into play: the agreement is immediate between an institution dedicated to violence and some individuals who seek legal solutions to satisfy their own violent impulses. This agreement finds an unparalleled opportunity in a pre-revolutionary situation, when power, precisely, can only be maintained by force, and when maneuvers of force, as a last resort, are given inordinate importance - in addition to carte blanche. As we already saw on the occasion of the “yellow vests”, it is the time of sadists and uniformed thugs.

The thesis of "the police with us" is completely outdated, it no longer has any chance: the impulsive hold of violent authorization absolutely prevails over the objective social proximity on which the illusion of "union" was based - vulgar materialism if it only has it takes into account the social data of material existence and ignores everything else (which is not entirely reducible to them). These are the ways in which structures produce their effects, in which an order meets their needs: by being transmitted by the psyches of the right officials it has chosen for itself, and this from Macron at the top to the last police thug on the street. .

Counterforces

However, there are counterforces that protect us from descent into tyranny or, more simply, from being crushed by the police. Let's mention the first one for the sake of awareness, that is, without believing too much in it. Perhaps it is possible that some remnants of morality, some idea of limits and turning points, still linger in the state apparatus - certainly not in the Home Office, where smallpox has conquered everything, where, at an almost fascist minister is enthroned like his troops-, but not in the cabinets, in the "retinues" where, at some point, the awareness of a major political transgression could form, the anxiety of committing the irreparable. As we know, it is better not to count too much on the hypotheses of a virtuous beginning, of a secular form of miracle, especially in the state of corruption, both moral and financial, of the "exemplary republic" - and in the critical case of public order. bourgeois that must be preserved.

A more material counterforce is the possible overwhelm of the police. Not in the heat of some localized action - in these kinds of circumstances, and unless special tactics are developed, it's probably useless - but on a country-wide scale. Because if somewhere in the Home Office there's a big board in the style of Dr. Strangelove's, it must be blinking like a Christmas tree, but with red all over it. The police had held out during the "yellow vests," though not to near exhaustion, because it happened in a limited number of large cities and only once a week. Now it happens all over France and every day. The marvelous power of number - the fear of all powers, the north of all revolution. He must already be starting to stick his tongue out from behind his visors. But they are not done running and doing miles in vans. You have to blow them up with fireworks, so that the tree is nothing more than a huge garland and the big board blows up the light box. The exhaustion of the police: this is a nerve center for the movement.

Finally, there is a resource of another type: hatred of the police, as a driving force. When a power unleashes its thugs, two radically opposite effects can occur: intimidation or tenfold rage. All transformations occur when the first effect mutates into the second. There are many reasons to think that we are there. To say that the atmosphere is one of rage is an understatement. Hatred of the police promises to reach unprecedented depth and breadth. Now, with Macron attached to his police, hatred of the police ipso facto becomes hatred of Macron. This character we really don't know how he's going to end up – the best would be without a doubt: in a helicopter.

Go beyond the "pre"

It is clear to everyone that, by dint of wanting to sit alone in glory, Macron has stuck to everything: he has stuck to the pension law, he has stuck to the police, so that, by metonymy, he has become the living synthesis of all the particular detestations, and finally in its only object. By one more notch of metonymy, as much as a need for structure, he too is attached to the "capitalist order." So that is the question that is now on the agenda: end "Macron the capitalist order." In other words, a revolutionary question.

The question posed can be revolutionary without the situation itself being revolutionary. History has shown that there are two possible parts here: wait on the shore for it to form “by itself”, or actively help it do so. Perhaps at the risk of being outdated, but with the possible help of rhythms that, under certain circumstances, can quickly accelerate. In any case, one does not go from the current "pre-revolutionary" to the "revolutionary" with the mere negativity of a rejection. There must also be an affirmation, a huge “for”, that achieves the unification of everyone's forces. What can be? – The question is understood under the condition of living up to what the country is raising, even if it is still indefinitely – and, precisely, to make it pass into a definitive form.

For the insurrection to be a means and not an end, for it to become a true revolutionary process, it needs to articulate a way out. That is to say, to formulate a positive political wish, in which the numbers can always be recognized. But you don't have to look far to identify it, we actually know it well: minding our own business, starting with production. The positive political desire, the one that capitalism and bourgeois political institutions offend by principle and by definition, is that of sovereignty.

The sovereignty of producers over production is something that can speak far beyond just the working class, the first interested party. Because more and more people, the so-called professionals and managers, also suffer from the stupidity of management, the blind control of shareholders, the idiocy of their managers' production options, if not their harmfulness, and aspire, but with an aspiration gigantic, to have a voice and vote in everything of which they are dispossessed.

There is only legitimacy, and therefore title of sovereignty, for those who do the work. As for those who, ignorant of everything, nevertheless intend to organize it, advisers and planners, they are nothing more than parasites, and they must be expelled. The supreme and unstoppable argument in favor of the sovereignty of the producers was given by a trade unionist, Eric Lietchi, of the CGT Energie Paris. The balances speak for themselves, he observed in substance: under the leadership of the parasitic class, the country has been destroyed. The hospital is in ruins, justice is in ruins, education is in ruins, research and the university are in ruins, medicine is in ruins – pharmacists are begged to make amoxicillin in their back rooms. This fall, Borne gave "thank God" that it was not too cold in winter for the electrical system - in ruins like the rest - to hold. We recruit teachers in half an hour. Officials are mobilized to drive buses - trains soon? And people go hungry. We would never have thought it possible to write something like this, but the fact is that a quarter of the French population does not have enough to eat. The young are hungry. The queues for food aid are endless. Between that and the police, France 2 would do a "big" report, but blindly, without indicating which country it is about, and a solidarity marathon would immediately be organized, Binoche would cut a fuse and Glucksmann would prepare a platform... for these wretched at the end of the world.

In the space of a few decades, with a high point since 2017, they have brought an entire model to its knees. They have brought the economy to its knees. Not the CGT, not the Intersindical -hopefully-: them. The competent have ruined the country. The disorganization is total. As we know, the diploma and the competition have historically been promoted by the bourgeoisie as substitutes for blood and lineage to oust the aristocracy. Paradoxically (which it is not), in late capitalism, the incompetence of the bourgeoisie has become a force in itself - we can give it a name with a minimal Schumpeter correction: destructive destruction. Or the proper name of synthesis of it: McKinsey.

imagine the unheard of

Lietchi's argument acquires its full force here. Indeed, the idea of producer sovereignty, usually relegated to the realm of dreams, is the logical consequence of an irrefutable fact. His conclusion is just as sharp: these harmful idiots should be fired and all production taken away from them. Couldn't they? The workers will know, they already know. It could be considered that this is the true meaning to be given to the words “general strike”: not the general cessation of work, but the act of initiating the general reappropriation of the tool – the beginning of the sovereignty of the producers.

It is at this moment that the event shows its unprecedented power, if only in the imagination. Unheard of is, in fact, the face of the companies when they return to the hands of the employees. Unheard of is the reorganization of public services when they are under the direction of those who know how to care, teach, control the safety of the railways and drive trains, draw lines, distribute the mail while having time to talk to people, etc. Unheard of is the opening of universities to all audiences, the liberation of art from the artist bourgeoisie and its capitalist sponsors. Unheard of is the discomfort of the bourgeoisie, the historical condemnation of its characteristic mixture of arrogance and nullity - not knowing how to do anything, it has never done anything other than force people to do it.

It will be agreed that imaginations do not make a completely armed form – and so much the better. At least they provide direction to the mind. In this case, a common direction, derived from the political question, which applies to all issues: who decides? More specifically, it derives from a principle: all those affected have the right to decide.

The beginning is a dividing line. For the bourgeoisie, only the bourgeoisie has competence to decide. CNews, which tells the truth of the late bourgeoisie, its fascistized truth if necessary, is perfectly aware of the danger: "Is it necessary to fear the return of communism?" Unintentionally no doubt, the question is well posed. As soon as "communism" is understood as the opposite party, the party of the title of all, the party of general sovereignty, the party of equality.

The wonderful rise of the "yellow vests" had the defect of never having seized on the wage issue. As for the official bearers of this issue, an institutional gear installed in the institutional system, they have never stopped depoliticizing the issue they were in charge of, transformed into a matter of collective agreements. With this enlightened direction, we: subscribed to defeat.

In two months, everything changed. The forms of the struggle have diversified and complemented each other: it will no longer be possible to separate the massive but useless demonstrations on Thursdays from the savages who make the police run until the end of the night. Thus, the substance of the class struggle ends in the form of the “yellow vests”. An unprecedented combination, long awaited. And this time impressive.