I've written this too often to write it freshly, but here it is: Macron came into office as a sort of idol of the French media and establishment - he was the perfect neoliberal. Neoliberalism is not simply an economic phenomenon - it is a cultural one. It is a synthesis between the gains of the civil rights era and the dissolution of the institutions of the social democratic era. That synthesis operates to repress class struggle and promote civil rights theater - which is how some billionaire woman can become an exemplar of "feminism", while her janitor can become an exemplar of "reaction".
In France, Macron did the most cute neoliberal thing by lowering the tax paid by the wealthy while at the same time denouncing "colonialism". The former was an actual cost, while the later was theater all the way. And so we were off!
The Left, I thought, two years ago, was actually going to get off its ass. Unfortunately, no. The Left has its own theatrical aspect, and a memory of Mitterand that has led to the politics of the big chief - which is, alas, Melanchon. A man who, unfortunately, failed to make the grade and has since acted as a great impasse to the left actually doing something. Marching in the street and getting beat by cops is supposed to... lead to something. But it didn't. This is not the thirties or the fifties, but NUPES has very much acted as a sort of responder to Macron, and not a very effective one. Although the Left has tried to represent low income communities and the rights of immigrants, it has failed in its major task - to lead the return of the repressed, i.e. class, and to operationalize class struggle. The struggle over immigration is imminently class struggle - for how much outcry is there when the immigrant is rich? It is pretty simple to see that the game is what it has always been - squeeze the worker. Workers can see that with their own eyes. The Left has never convinced the people that they can see what the workers can see - and they have not succeeded in making the rotten system in which worker and immigrant are posed against each other the real issue.
They are not going to do that in the next month. Miracles don't happen.
So it looks like France is going to have a coalition gov, with Bardella as our prime minister, Macron as president.
You drift, you hit the rocks, you sink.
4 comments:
Macron & Bardella. Not a done deal. Yet.
- Sophie
I've a couple of questions about this post. Feel free to yell at me for them, I might deserve it.
1) I'd like to understand the distinction you're making between class struggle and theater? The "lower classes" might not be season ticket holders at the Paris Opera but surely have a sense of theater, watch tv, etc. Can one cleanly dissociate class struggle - and politics - from theater?
2)Which leads to the second question: "the return of the repressed, i.e. class and operationalizing class struggle". If that means "convincing" workers that one sees what they see with their own eyes?
- Sophie
Sophie, no yelling here - it is bad for my dreams! The answer to one, or my answer, is that you have to pick your level of analysis. On one level, theater does represent class struggle openly - for instance, a demonstration in the street. On another level, theater is given as an answer to the neoliberal world embodied in Macron's strategy of ni l'un ni l'autre - a strategy of the double bind, as per Edwy Plenel's column about Macron's toxicity: https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/070624/emmanuel-macron-une-presidence-toxique?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1LaUiyDgvc0JV-32DwcxIIPnzlocuV_0v88Ul9GZ7zcxpo7V2SMYvH2Fc_aem_AY3s2q4Q6DNw-uBkvy2unfDFsZ7naNsMjez_8UfnSpe1WFlF-9WZsTJHGRyI1tbqhZbvYYDVWv6ukv3Ek8uvcOw4 An excellent example of theatrilization is Macron's education policy, a substance chemically produced in that lair of cokeheads, the Montaigne Institut - the very name is theater of the absurd - and dealt out in great gobs by the utterly brainless Attal. As even Le Monde, that fanmag of all things EM has noticed, Attal deals in tinsel lightning, commanding great changes without actually doing anything to make them come true - a performative of a performative.; Thw "lower classes", or the wage classes, can see this well enough, but their media is an adjunt of blindness - holding up an untrue image of the world and presenting it as their reality. The return of the repressed derives from the theater - it is the rage of the ticketholder to the magic show when the magician shows up cocky and drunk and performs no tricks at all. Sort of like the scene of burleque put on by the Duke and the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn. The rage mounts as nothing is done. And now the rage is everywhere. That's what I would say.
Now and then one does need to yell in the theater. I'm surely not the only one who has had quite enough of Macron's performances and am in no rush to see what magic tricks Le Pen and Bardella have planned. As or the Left, less speeches and slogans please, get your act together, and make sure people needn't worry about health, education, employment, unemployment, food, shelter, take care of that - it's not asking for the moon - and shut up and let us live, realize ourselves, share our hopes and dreams. (P.S. - The latter doesn't involve owning stuff, rather the mystery of being alive.)
- Sophie
La scène est le foyer évident des plaisirs pris en commun, aussi et tout bien réfléchi, la majestueuse ouverture sur le mystère dont on est au monde pour envisager la grandeur, cela même que le citoyen, qui en aura idée, fonde le droit de réclamer à un État, comme compensation de l’amoindrissement social.
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