Fear of the People: a geneology of Macron's ultra-liberalism

 

In Marie Helene Baylac’s aptly named “The Fear of the People, a history of the First Republic, 1848-1852, there is an account of one of those highly charged and very theatrical events that distinguish the 1848 revolution – which in spite of being the revolution of writers (Marx, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Sand, Hugo, and last but not least, Marie D’Agoult, whose history of that moment should be retranslated and introduced by some muckety muck for NYRB books – who will inevitably refer to D’Agoult as Franz Lizst’s lover and the mother of one Cosima, who married another famous composer, Richard Wagner) is not a revolution much loved by historians. A flop, they say. Such hopes, ending in Little Napoleon!

The scene takes place at the Hotel de Ville, which is around 10 blocks from where I am typing this. To set the scene, Louis Phillipe, the last king of France, had fled, and a new republic had been proclaimed , at least in Paris. One of the notable figures in the provisional government was Alphonse Lamartine, a romantic poet and, it turns out, an ultra-liberal. He was in the company when, on February 25^th, a worker with a rifle, at the head of a delegation of workers, barged into the room at the Hotel de Ville where the provisional government was meeting and addressed them, demanding “the organisation of labor, the right to guaranteed employment, and a minimum assistance assured for the worker and his family in case of sickness, and to save him from misery once he could not work.” Lamartine rose to the occasion: “You would have to cut off my hand before I would sign that!” Three days later, Lamartine addressed the assembly with even more stirring words about the horrors of undermining the free market in labor, again offering himself as a martyr for the cause: “You can set me to face the mouth of a cannon but you will never get me to sign those two words associated together: Organisation of Labor!”

The phrase is associated with Louis Blanc, who wrote a best-selling book of the same name. Blanc is a socialist of the kind still recognizable on the French left. Baylac quotes a speech he gave which defines, to an extent, the nebulous concept of organisation of labor: “… does liberty exist there were the conditions of labor are such that they are hammered out between the master who stipulates the wage to profit by it and the worker who stipulates in order not to die… one of the thousand tragic incidents that are engendered each day by the immense anarchy of universal competition?” In Blanc’s vision, the state would insert itself in the manifestly bad deal for the workers by creating national workshops and moderating competition. The demand for organized labor was, to an extent, a demand for unions – but this was still a vague organizational notion.

Lamartine is, I think, the true begetter of that strain of social moderation and ultra-liberalism that has found its latest puppet in Macron. One can imagine Macron throwing himself into some hysterical pose to face down the unruly masses – organisation of labor indeed! The combination of police-heavy tactics, a throwback to the French governments of the seventies, if not the Greek colonels of the 60s, and the confidence that the people, like children, will just settle down “after the dust has settled” – the Macronites have a quasi-obsession with the “dust settling”, which is about their entire experience with such things as garbage collection and manual labor – is reminiscent of Lamartine, although not as poetic – the poetry in Macron’s circle is produced by McKinsey consultants, and they earn more for their odes to privatization than Lamartine could ever have dreamed.

I have a feeling, where I sit, that the weight of fatigue has shifted – that the unions, the young, and the seventy percent that oppose the “reforms” are on the retreat. I hope I am wrong – and I know that this retreat is not an extinction of anger, but a sense that the government is sealed against the will of the people. I don’t see the French going gentle into the next period, giving away the national treasure of a social security system for Macron’s beaux yeux. But I also don’t see the Left taking advantage of this moment. Which leaves Le Pen.

And yet, Le Pen has her problem too - someday, somewhere, she  is actually going to have to speak about the French social security system, which her hardcore supporters have fought furiously against for fifty years. This is a dilemma she is helped over by a complacent French media, but these are questions that can't be delayed forever. 

Inactual observations, or how relevance nailed my ass

 

In one of his notebooks from the 1880s, Nietzsche, who was re-reading his essay on the Use and disadvantage of history for life (the second of his Untimely Meditations – although I like inactual for unzeitgemassige), jotted down one of those lightning bolts “How little reason there is in being as old, and as reasonable, as Goethe!” It is one of those lines that deserves to be haloed with a laughter, something like Johnny Rotten’s guffaw in God Save the Queen. “Is there room in science for laughter?” Nietzsche had asked in The Gay Science – and tacitly, he put himself forward as the answer to that question.

When one grows old – I am putting myself forward as that “one” – and one is as inclined to reason as a cow is to chew its fodder, it is good to remember how unreasonable it is to reason in the first place. It is good to remember that history serves, ultimately, life – and that the nexus between the two has never been satisfactorily resolved by either the mighty – Goethe – or the low – myself. Another note that Nietzsche jotted down as he was making up howlers about Goethe concerned the purpose of the Inactual observations. It was a bait to capture the attention of similar minded readers.

“At that time I was young enough to go fishing with such impatient hopes. Today – after a hundred years, if I am allowed to measure time according to my own scales! – I am always not your old enough to have lost every hope, and every  patience. How strangely it sounds in my ears when a gray old man presses his experience into these words.”

Nietzsche’s inactual observations are the presiding spirit over Georges Didi-Huberman’s giant book, Imaginer Recommencer, which takes in, in typical Didi-Huberman style, an encyclopedic ensemble of history, art and philosophy to make its point: tracing our modernity, or our culture of the modern, back to the Weimar culture of the 1920s, which was Nietzschian for both the left and the right.

The subtitle of Did-Huberman’s book is: ce qui nous souleve, 2. Soulevement is in the air, here in Paris, given the strikes and demonstrations. It is a song in the manif, although the echoes of that song are more melancholic than positive, more 1848 than 1789.   We are rising up, is the atmosphere among the bien-pissant – the pissed off and the disenfranchised. I am one of the pissants, here, and from my perspective, these demonstrations, this crisis, is about time. Human time, which was drained into Capital and recuperated, partially and painfully, by the social democratic initiatives of the twentieth century. Time, which divides into youth and old age, which casts a varied pall over different sectors and employments – for instance, over the garbageman, who is expected to devote more than forty years of his life to his smelly, untouchable job – which as we know, under the new regime of retirement, means no retirement, since death, the end of the garbageman’s time, is the more likely outcome to the new rules.

Which is fine for the rulers, who live in a different time, who reward themselves copiously with the finest pensions the state can offer. Who “work” all the time – at lunch, over a fifty euro meal, in conferences in Switzerland with big name capitalists, and of course at night, with their lovers-assistants, all on the highend dole.

My own dallying with the inactual began, I suppose, in high school, under a different set of parameters: the cry in the seventies was for relevance. Instead of learning fusty poems by Longfellow, we were plunged into, say, Walden 2 – or at least that was the book we read in Humanities class. Or into Atlas Shrugged – that was a book I was assigned and failed to read, the unrelieved one-dimensionality  of Ayn Rand’s imagination repulsing me. I was consciously mostly of how many letters, sentences and black black print each paperback  page bore – which I suppose is the non-reader’s feeling about books in general. They assault the senses, giving nothing to the eyes and making the body feel straitjacketed. Which is why you want to eat when reading a massive paperback tome. To give the tongue some leaway, at least, as the book closes the lid on you.  

So I chose non-relevance, and was quite happy with my choice until the advent of Internet. I dropped out of the inactual with a bang in the 00s, when suddenly social media and the digitalisation of everything enforced relevancy like a motherfucker. Plus, of course, the era of Bush, the Vulcanite Bush, the realization that we were going to be really, really stupid in the 21^st century. I was a little witness to the fact that greatness – measured in global effect – can be combined with idiocy to produce catastrophes that will be with us the rest of my life. Everything has been under the shadow of that period, 2001-2009 All the squandered opportunity, the death of the Holocene, the wasting of millions of lives, the neolib glee.

Lately, I’m in an odd place – both angry and suspended in the overwhelmingly relevant and longing for the inactual, for larger projects and maybe even hope.  

Hope. What a word.

Therapeutic nihilism and us

 

In these days of evil on the telly – and on the computer screen and in the climate shift, etc. etc. – my mind has been drifting towards the topic of therapeutic nihilism. In a sense, when peeps say we can imagine the end of the world more than we can imagine the end of capitalism, they are positing some natural power in capitalist arrangements that is powerfully reminiscent of the state of medical science in 1844, when the Viennese doctor, Josef Dietl, published his manifesto in the Zeitschrift der K.K. Gesellschaft der Aerzte zu Wien that proclaimed the proper scientific limits of medicine.

“Why don’t we demand of our Astronomers to turn the days into nights, of our physicians that they turn winter cold into summer heat, our chemists that they turn water into wine? Because it is impossible, that is, because it is not grounded in the principles of their sciences, and because astronomers, physicians and chemists are upright enough to confess that they couldn’t do it. But then, why do we demand that our doctors heal lung diseases, dropsy, arthritis, heart disease, etc.? Are these demands somehow grounded in the principles of his science? Absolutely not!”

The list of diseases is impressive, and impressively, we don’t have a “cure” for arthritis, for instance, even today. But the twentieth century not only saw the invention of airconditioning, turning summer heat into winter cold, but an amazing structure of therapies that could address the body’s ills in a manner undreamt of by Dietl.

In 1844, this world of cures – or therapies that could alleviate illnesses, such as insulin for diabetes – seemed extremely distant. It was an unimaginable world.  Dietl’s nihilism was a reasonable belief that the cure was an area not of science, but of chance. However, this did not mean doctoring was substantless: “The doctor must be valued not as an artist of cures, but as a scientific researcher [Naturfoerscher].

I often take this stance towards Marx. The communism he strove for depended, of course, on the thoroughness of the capitalism that he diagnosed. In a strong sense, it arose out of it, like … well, like the response of the body to a disease. The analogy is inexact, however. This body is the disease, and its cure is a new body, arising from the old one. Resurrection.

We all know how the resurrection belief has worked out – it has become a master trope in our metaphoric imagination, but it has less of a grip on our sense of the real future. Although, of course, literally billions  of people believe that it will, more or less literally, happen.

In the case of our political economy, it is easy to see that most economists are even more mired in a nonsensical world of cures than that of Dietl’s colleagues. To believe that you cure inflation with unemployment and then you heat things up until unemployment sparks off inflation is to have the most primitive sense of the general economy. It loses sight, in fact, that the economy is not a master but a servant – a servant of the social whole. Its only reason, its only footing in humanity, is to make the quality of human life better. It it doesn’t serve that purpose, kick it to the curb, start over. To rephrase slightly the slogan of the Wat Tyler rebels: “First we’ll hang all the economists.”

In fact, as it proved, therapeutic nihilism was not so nihilistic as all of that. Diagnosis eventually lead to water being turned into wine, or at least to an Austrian physician discovering blood types in 1901 and blood transfusion becoming a real thing after the discovery of anticoagulants, research that was hurried up because of (natch) war, as in World War One. Turning water into wine was nothing compared to transfusing blood properly and easily to a patient, but the creep of blood blood blood in the twentieth century mapped the creep of cure cure cure. Diagnosis, the left hand, found cure, the right hand.

A hopeful story. We are not mired in a world of therapeutic nihilism forever. We don’t have to accept that.

Saving the heritage: France's system of retraite

 

Lucie Mazauric was a museologist of the rarest sort – a Radical Socialist (along with her husband, Andre Chamson), a resistor, and a key member of the “circus” – mi-clochard, mi-aristo, as she puts it – who hid France’s museum treasures, its Da Vincis and Delacroixes, from the Nazis. In Ma Vie en Chateaux, she gives an account of this adventure: the finding of places of safety, the gathering of equipment to guard the treasures, especially fire-fighting equipment, the getting trucks together to convey it, on short notice, from one place to the other.

“But this happy specialisation, even as it filled us with pride, didn’t prevent our trucks from becoming ever more dirty at every new displacement, and our personnel ever more tired. We trailed after us a miserable baggage that gave us the air of travelling, not too prosperous, jugglers. In the end, the cases were worn out, the nails were lost, the gas was hard to find, the wrapping had lost their initial freshness. However, we buckled the buckle, the paintings were returned to their hanging places nail by nail, the sculptures pedestal by pedestal, and we had to marvel at it all.”

I have this feeling about that other French treasure: the social security system. A work of eighty years. While the Macronists are destroying it now, out in the street, with the air of down at heels jugglers, our protestors, our strikers are determined to save it. And we will have it back, every nail and pedestal of it, so to speak. I don’t believe France will lose its heritage because a lot of jumped up suit, clustered around their suited and rolexed Ubu Roi, have decreed it so.

Vive La France!

the great American sarcastics

 

Although listings of the top 100 novels or authors or movies or albums or whatnot are often contrived and set at large in the world as the most shameless kind of clickbait, we rarely have listings of the one hundred greatest sentences, or lines. I think that one of the greatest and most influential sentences of the twentieth century is the one at the beginning of England Your England: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

Orwell’s sentence had, I think, a tremendous influence on the whole WWII generation of American writers. In a literal sense, this situation, turned around, is the whole songline of Catch 22. Yossarian very correctly thinks someone is trying to kill him – precisely because he is one of the highly civilized human beings trying to kill other human beings, from civilized to not yet toilet trained, in the cities he is dropping bombs on.

Kurt Vonnegut’s entire style was based on seeing in this alienated way – that is, alienated from the not-seeing required for patriotism, hierarchy and the whole cultural extent of the defence of liberal capitalism. It is a seeing that Carlo Ginzburg, in an essay on the proto-history of estrangement, brought back to a very old stoic discipline – the kind of disenchantment by the real in which Marcus Aurelius instructed himself.

Here's a marvellous bit by Kurt Vonnegut that seems to have dropped out of Orwell’s sentence and landed squarely on American culture in the last half of the twentieth century.

“Reading is such a difficult thing to do that most of our time in school is spent learning how to do that alone. If we had spent as much time at ice skating as we have with reading, we would all be stars with the Hollywood Ice Capades instead of bookworms now.

"As you know, it isn't enough for a reader to pick up the little symbols from a page with his eyes, or, as is the case with a blind person, with his fingertips. Once we get those symbols inside our heads and in the proper order, then we must clothe them in gloom or joy or apathy, in love or hate, in anger or peacefulness, or however the author intended them to be clothed. In order to be good readers, we must even recognize irony—which is when a writer says one thing and really means another, contradicting himself in what he believes to be a beguiling cause.

"We even have to get jokes! God help us if we miss a joke.

"So most people give up on reading.”

One of Orwell’s essays is called, self-flatteringly, In front of your nose, as in “seeing what is…” There Orwell speaks of the trouble, the absolute bother, it is to see what is in front of you. Orwell, like anybody raised as he was raised, could see what was in front of his nose as long as he was facing in a certain direction among a certain sort of people – mostly of the masculine flavor. But what he did, at best, was see that this is, exactly, how he saw. It is, in fact, exactly how I see – and must re-see and re-see in order to see at all. There was a rightwing trend, a few years ago, for “stoicism”, with stoicism confused with masculinity, as defined by the Skull and Bones club. That isn’t stoicism at all. Stoicism is for slaves, as Nietzsche saw, and in as much as Marcus Aurelius could become familiar with it, it was a technique that royally dethroned him.

So most people give up on reading, as Vonnegut writes, because it is more work than it looks like. The slave’s inner voice is tuned in to sarcasm – because, as its etymology of “tearing flesh” tells us, the slave sees that the whiphand doesn’t rule because it is right,but because it holds the whip. The stoic see that Jesus’s admonition that we love one another and forgive our enemies elevates us above any God that condemns to the whip – to the “gnashing of teeth”, sarkazein. That God, having forgotten to forgive, has forgotten the essence of divinity, the love without limit. And in the profane world of gnashing of teeth, highly civilized human beings will spend oodles of time and trillions of dollars trying to find ever new ways to kill you.

The great American sarcastics saw that, at least, clearly. In front of their nose.  

Illegitimacy in France: Macron's bossism

 

You can hear the cop cars at night. Distant booms. In the morning, there are ashes on the sidewalk and the street. Practically, the 49,3 regime has reposed its awesome littleness in the hands of the Minister of the Interior, a man named Gérald Darmanin. A man born out of time - he would certainly have flourished in the good old days, circa 1943, 1944. A rightwinger pur et dur, he has been stirring up his forces to do their utmost - illegitimately hassling demonstrators in all four corners of the Hexagon.

You can smell the illegitimacy. It smells like smoke and tear gas.
Macron always goes below the line that you have drawn in your head - surely he couldn't be that arrogant, that blind, that clueless? Yet this product of a thousand McKinsey position papers always comes out with the boss-ist position, like a vending machine always comes out with the chewing gum when you put in the dollar in change. Unless something jams. It is a bit of a mistake to look for comparisons in politics - Macron's choreography is pure business. He's a corporation type through and through. What he would like to do in France is enact a mass layoff. Alas! Certain U.N. decrees make this impossible.
Oddly, for such a business oriented guy, Macron apparently never took the class, "how to hide your evil". So he shows it again and again. However, he has cleverly figured out how to strategize the fascists. Thus, he is always looking for some future point where it is either Macron or the fascists. Hence, the many subtext in Macronie - by which I include Le Monde - where Macronist worry that the result of all the "fuss" over the very very very necessary reforms will benefit the Le Pen fascists. Very worried, worried to tears, these Macronists. And their solution to that worry is: get behind the great man!
While this goes down like a refreshing drink among the media elite who have benefitted from Macron's tax cuts for their class, out in the street people, the vulgar crowd, want to take a big dump on it. And on the chief.
One thing to note before I end this rant: the reforms are advertised as changing the age of retirement to 64. That is inaccurate, though, for millions of cases, where the protocol for full retirement will change to 67, 68. If you are one of the people who started work at 18 and stayed with the same work - well then, you might be a lucky 64! Otherwise, good luck.
France is experiencing that part of neoliberalism called shamelessness. But the shame is comin' at you from the street, all you think tankers and nudgers!

poem by K. Chamisso

Oh poet without portfolio!
In the raplines of this city
Cell phone to cell phone
You seek some operator’s voice.
 

Control without purpose, purpose without heart
Out of the stones themselves some grotesque starts
To urge us to turn turn turn again
And change our stone stare into
Something living and lost.
But the wire in our ear is inexorable
And we’ve forgotten what we meant to say.