Who gives a flying fuck about clarification?

 

The establishment press and commentators on France, both in the country and out, have a common judgement, best put by PhilippeMarlière on the ucleuropeblog:

“All in all, this snap election has provided anything but clarification. France is still in a severe political conundrum with months, possibly years of political instability and crisis.”

“Political instability and crisis” is centrist code for democracy. Instead of neoliberal “stability”, the politics of no alternative in which the plutocracy just, alas, is so necessary and de-regulation is just the ticket, you have a politics where this is questioned by the people who, well, somehow have the right to vote.

Clarification, which Macron tossed into the discourse, has been seized on by all commentators center-right and center-left – as if it were the real question in the election. The real question for real people is how to afford meat, how to go out occasionally for a meal, how to educate the kids, how to retire, and so trivially on – you know how the proles are.

Having been whammed by war in the Ukraine (where Russia is at fault) and Gaza (where we are pretending the government of Israel is not effecting a mass murder that will “destabilize” the Middle East for years), having had Covid managed by nudgery and the era of cheap ended by Covid plus the aforementioned wars, having de-industrialized and financialized until the trust fund babies beamed and the rest of us sweated and sank, “clarification” was a dodge, a way of saying nothing, but very seriously.

Thus, of course, all the serious people in the sea are swimming after it and giving us “analyses” that are all about continuing more of the same, since it has buttered their bread.

Myself, I could give a flying fuck about clarification. Let’s have good schools, controls on prices, and taxes on plutocrats instead.

Strike!

 

According to the Littre, the word grève – strike – comes from the Grève – the strip along the Seine behind the Hotel de Ville where, in the 18^th century, people hung out looking for work. There are places like that in all cities – in Austin, Texas, for instance, I remember working for someone who picked up day laborers down near I-35 in the center of the City. I believe that has moved since I left that town. But they will be somewhere – the day-by-days, the desperate, the Barbaric Yawp you can hire for minimum, pick em up at 8, drive em down there at 5.

That, according to Littre, the grève became a linguistic extension of that desperation – the worker becoming, voluntarily, the non-worker – is an etymology to be pondered.

Michelle Perrot, a historian known for her feminism, wrote a book in the wake of 1968: Workers on Strike in France, 1871-1890. Her purpose, besides the strictly historical one, was to understand the strike not as an empty form, but as a social complex. At one point she writes:  “It took May 1968 to remind us for a brief moment that a strike can be something other than a well-run economic scenario, that it can in fact be an expression of latent desires and repressed dreams, a freeing of both word and action, a festival [fete – party] of the assembled populace.”

That the great strikes are great parties is a shock to the Anglophone world. Parties are assigned to the upper class, the style section, the peeps with yachts. A strike – stopping work, by God! – has to be accomplished with solemn faces, with “ideals”, with a certain sense of sacrifice. The strike enters into the sacred realm.

But that realm just is, as well, the realm of the party. The party-sacrifice. Everybody’s pay is docked. Everybody blows trumpets and marches to a reggae beat, or to rap, or to the smokey arty songs of the 50s. To the great disgust of the bourgeoisie. It is by this disgust that you can diagnose them – it is alright to ask the boss for more wages, humbly, and it is all right if the boss, being a self-made man in a dog eat dog world, refuses the request and even institutes a healthful mass layoff – but to bring out the balloons and the saucisse sandwiches! It shows that you are really enjoying the idleness – and centuries and centuries have gone into the message that enjoying the idleness is reserved for the top ranks, only.

Perrot has a nice sense of the counter-seasonal reality of industrial labor, which is always being pushed back by the worker. Thus, the importance of May, of Spring, when working in a dusty building seems to go against human nature. She mentions a strike of the largely female work force at a glove factory:

“The women loved dancing. Their strikes took on the outward appearance of dances. At Ceton (Orne) where the Neyret glove factory employed a large female labor force (100 in the workshop, 600 in their own homes), “the day following the strike declaration, the whole population went to a meadow… and they danced there until dusk. At Ablain-Saint-Nazaire the stikes, female flint gatherers, went through the village streets led by a band, singing and dancing. They waved pocket handkerchiefs and aprons attached to long poles as banners… The day ended in an open-air dance.”

In The Age of Betrayal, Jack Beatty outlines the way labor was crushed in post-bellum America by the combination of media, the courts, Congress and the Executive. The joke of it all was that the highminded motivation here was “freedom” – free markets – and to uphold this freedom, workers were deprived of the freedom of association, speech, and in general of any activity that the establishment did not approve of. The New York Times, in the 1870s, was suspicious that labor strikers were actually not laborers at all, but “tramps” – how the NYT loves the unverified, country club rumor! Beatty digs out the particulars of the Railroad Strike of 1877 in Pittsburg, where the casualties amounted to around 40, the state guard gave the strikers the “rifle diet”, as the president of the railroad called it. Beatty does a good job of connecting the crushing of the strike and the ethnic cleansing going on in the borderlands. In both cases, what was being attacked was an older version of rights and properties.

It was the Homestead strike of 1892 that Beatty singles out as the turning point – a sort of Wounded Knee for the working class: “Homestead was an axial event. It portended the end of the skilled workers’ control over the pace of production, the eclipse of the nineteenth century entrepreneurial economy, and the triumph of corporate capitalism.” Homestead was a steel mill built on the plan of a prison or concentration camp, a place surrounded by barbed wire. Inside, conditions of work were such as to diminish the lifespan of the workers. “Fifteen to twenty men died a year at Homestead.”  But the workers, given the sweat and blood they literally spilled there, considered the plant their territory in some essential sense. As contemporaries wrote, and as Beatty asserts, the spirit of the skilled laborer took the skill as a property, with all its rights, against management. When the workers struck and occupied the plant, Carnegie Steel sent a private militia of Pinkertons against them. The ensuing battle was, really, a battle: the Pinkertons brought a cannon with them and bombarded the factory. The workers, armed, shot back. Since the Pinkertons were on barges on the river where the factory was located, the workers devised the strategy – probably taught to them by fathers who fought in the civil war – of sending rafts on fire against the barges. When the Pinkertons surrendered, the workers revenged the rifleshot and cannons that had cost them seven dead and sixty wounded by making the Pinkertons run the gauntlet in town. Women lined the streets and beat the Pinkertons, something that absolutely shocked the establishment.

The defeat of the Pinkertons was an excuse seized by Capital to get the Governor to call in the troops. And for Frick, who was running the steel company, to recruit strikebreakers. He preferred black strikebreakers – a clever strategy in the race war of the Jim Crow era. They were paid less, but as that pay was more than black workers could get in the South, they accepted it. Northern unions, who refused to accept black workers, paid for their racism with the use of the strikebreakers. Which of course led to the combination of racist and worker discourse, much to the satisfaction of the utterly white upper class. That strategy has been in place for a long, long time. It was in this way that the party of Lincoln reconciled the radical Republican demand for racial equality (in the South) with its middle and upper class demographic.

The strike has become old fashioned – such is the wisdom in the U.S. among the centrists. Indeed, the strike has become overloaded by government supervision, especially guided by a Supreme Court that, besides guarding white supremacy and female subordination, takes it role as crushers of worker associations for capitalist very, very seriously. We have still not seen the combination of strike and civil disobedience that is coming someday. In France, today, the cops are out in full. The reactionary Interior minister has, of course, seen to that. It is a grand tradition: when the right demonstrates, the cops leave them  a respectful space, when the left demonstrates, they are up in your face.

Liberation had an account of the utterly vapid thinking process in Macronie yesterday, which I’d recommend to anybody who can read French.  The Great Man has lept ahead of the “reform” – consider it done! What are people going to do, vote in people to undo the “reform”? Impossible! So now the Macronists are “brainstorming” for other hills to climb. Of course, ultimately they want to rely on the Le Pen card – go down the neolib road and lose your life in futile gestures nudged by thinktankers and business consultants, or you face – the Le Penists! Like Frick with his use of black strikebreakers, it is a strategy based on cynicism, hypocrisy, and the bottom line. Lets hope it blows up in their face before it is too late.

 

 

 

 

 

The reactionary rictus: Macron's deformation of social insurance

 Paul Quinio's editorial in Liberation about the collapse of the debate on the "deform" of the social insurance system in France revolves around a reference to an apocryphal phrase of Churchill's: that democracy is the worst system of government, except any other. That quip has always been a conditional surrender of an essentially reactionary stance, according Capital and the established power the lion's share of the discursive wealth of the nation - as well as the real wealth - and calling it democracy. France has never submitted to this kind of thing. The strike, the demonstration, all are not dead in France.

Macron viewed his larger task one of "normalizing" France - a nice little Thatcherization with some euphemism liberalism thrown in, like "apologizing" for colonialsm (while of course keeping French troops in Africa whenever the cause arises). The "reform"/deform of the social insurance system was key to Macron's larger cause. Quinio is entirely right about Macron's ultimate responsibility for the further decline of "democracy":

"But we must observe that the Chief of State has forgotten that the French, in barring the route to the extreme right, have in the second round of the presidential shown proof of their political maturity. Since, Emmanuel Macron has made a show of having been elected "normally" on his program (the reform of the retirement system) or his person. To this political maturity he has only responded with contempt for a non-neglible part of his electorate. To turn his back on the spirit of his election (and the promises of his second round campaign) is all the more an error in that he doesn't have, politically, the means, sitting as he does on a relative majority. That he enfeebles his majority, that he enfeebles he himself isn't really the important thing. But that, by his choice, he has raised up the French against each other, at the risk of further fragilizing the machinery of democracy that permitted him to fill his place, is much more serious."

I don't think Macron gives a shit for democracy, and so I am not totally in accord with this editorial, that credits Macron and the majority with good faith. This rhetorical assumption of good faith, which journalists, washed in the neoliberal waters, bring to the powerful seems to fight the forces arrayed against democracy on the worst terrain possible. However, it is true that Macron has exacerbated a division, a fracture, in France that is symbolized by the very deformation of the system he is trying to put through - a deformation that will make the lives of the upper class that much more cossetted and the lives of the rest that more ugly. Financially, the reform is judged not by a market standard - by that standard, the interest on French bonds shows that there is no crisis - but on a fictional-symbolic standard - it is the crisis of tomorrow that requires this action now. Interestingly, other crises of tomorrow - for instance, a climate change that might well wipe out French agriculture, decimate the rivers, and destroy the lifestyles of the majority - are to be approached petit a petit, until, alas, we all have to adopt to the Sahara-fication of the world.

The crisis of the tomorrow is here today: an out of control oligarchy, a muffled health crisis due to despair, a disenfranchised (politically and economically) youth, and an establishment that considers rules are for others. Myself, I see no way that Macron's "reforms", which will most likely be voted in by the Senate, will last past Macron's tenure. The deformed system will be so swollen with exceptions it will be a joke. Although: it was always meant to be a joke. On the principle that he who laughs last laughs best. That is what reactionary culture and politics amounts to.

Little France syndrome

 The Little France syndrome

Well, at last the NYT emerges from its Macron daze to notice the sheer cretinism of the Macron cultural politics, driven by its far right allies, all swimming happily in their own shit and screaming about Islamo-gauchisme.

Meanwhile, the old retired fossils in academe, who made their bones in the 80s and 90s – those decades Francois Cusset labels the great nightmare, due to the proliferation of Nouvelle Philosophes and their wannabe companions, all using leftwing rhetoric to promote right wing economic and foreign policy – are also on the attack against the “Americanization” of the cultural agenda. This movement is in synch with Trump’s 1776 commission and Boris Johnson’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities which last month reported that, hooray, Britain has none, and never did anyway, except during a brief window in May of 1679 when somebody financed somebody else’s slaveboat which we think musta been Dutch – a total anomaly!

All of these can be called “Little” positions – Little America, Little Britain, and now Little France. The attacks on American “wokeness” are congealed in a rhetoric that is difficult to cope with. It seems so ridiculous that French academics, any of them, in this day and age would claim that France represents “universal values”, but of course – in spite of the past five hundred years of history, in spite of the evident and outrageous income and wealth inequalities between people of color and white French people, in spite of what you see the cops doing every day – there we are. It is a country in which, on the one hand, feminist groups graffiti walls with condemnations of femicide, and in which, on the other hand, tve-genic academics who have built careers on subpar academic work bemoan intersectionality – we have come to this, debates with the midgets all descending from Action Francaise.

The laughter that wells up in me is the contrast between this small French attitude – in favor the “universal” – and the subrosa massive support for the Americanization of the French economy – a process that has been going on since the “lefties” of the 80s quietly abandoned the defining left tradition while clinging fiercely to the title. It was so eighties – the leveraged buyout era. The entire vocabular of the regime of the president of the rich consists of banalities from American business schools, from “entrepreneurship” – restored to the French vocabulary! – to competitiveness, to the “burden” of the state on the dynamic private sector. It is a made in America circus. But nobody is talking about the droite-onclesamists. Nor, frankly, is anyone in the Little France corner really attacking Islamicists. The largest and most totalitarian Islamicist state – Saudi Arabia – is France’s friend, and more importantly, France’s weapons industry’s friend. So nobody is going so far as to say that we should boycott the Saudis, or block their gas pipelines, like with evil Putin. This is because Saudi Arabia is reformin’, plus they’ve been waging un mignon génocide in Yemen, and nobody wants to interrupt the cash flow there. Rather, the focus is on how Daech’s leadership is no doubt absorbing Judy Butler’s tomes, one after the other.

Georges Bernanos in Les Grands Cimetieres sous le lune wrote: La colère des imbéciles m'a toujours rempli de tristesse, mais aujourd'hui elle m'épouvanterait plutôt. You and me, Georges my brother.