At the manif

 

Nobody knows what to do with Bardella’s name.

We all hate Macron. Last year’s protests against Macron stealing the living time of future generations – otherwise known as the “reform” of the pension system – were joyous, a sort of political charivari. For one thing, everyone knew that the vast majority was against the “reform.”

So Macron just thrust it down our throats. And the left responded by – fighting over who would be the fearless leader. Or something. All that time, all that marching, all those strikes – an utter failure.

But Bardella is a new villain, and not even one that we care deeply about. Le Pen, yes. Macron, double yes. But though there were many tries to make fun of Bardella’s name, none came up with anything interesting. Adam, when I came back, said easy: Bardello. My son, the slogan genius.

What to do with the contempt Macron instills in the average French heart? Well, the extreme right knew what to do. As Macron’s card is neither one nor the other – a reactionary economic policy with all the right rhetoric to celebrate women’s rights for the “other” side – they just smacked him around. And because Macron, while insensitive to the point of blindness to the left, is as sensitive as an easily tickled goof to the Valeurs actuelles crowd, they got the immigration “reform” they wanted, melting away all of the supposed difference between our paper mache Jupiter and the right. The rage against Macron, the failure of the left, and the National Front’s refusal to quit combined to create a brown France. As brown as Mussolini’s mIlice uniform.

So I went out to the manif for the new united popular front. It was, as always this year, gray and drizzly. I have a sort of dream vision of the thirties as an overcast decade that became even rainier at the end of “Casablanca” and then went into full storm mode until a mushroom cloud stood over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This was not the joyous flex of last spring’s demos. Because it is all so sudden, the majority of the signs were scrawled on industrial cardboard torn from boxes. But there was a lot of people – the press and police will say 75,000, the organizers 150, as is usual for left wing demos. We all looked very Vitamin D deficient out there. We’d all filed down these streets before. But after a while, the spirit of the demo picked up. It is one of the great advantages of having gay and trans advocates in the march that the spirit of masquerade and music visits their parts of the crowd – and that infects other parts.

Hard, though, to dance in the streets this time.

All reactions:

3Anna Kornbluh, Nataša Bašić and 1 other

Elections in France

 I might be breathing the fumes. But for once, I think the Left is actually on the right track. Glucksmann joining the LFI and the other factions of the left for a united front is very good news. And making this about repairing the damage Macron has made to France's social democracy, starting with taxing the wealthy and restoring the pension that was arbitrarily stolen from the people last year is an excellent platform. 

One suggestion, though. Everybody sees with their own eyes what investment in public services does. But they also see with their own eyes what they are taxed. I think it is time to send around, yearly, public audits telling the individual family what they have gotten from public services - and to make this very plan, per income group. It will turn out, always, that the state has given the most to the wealthiest. But the state, given the right administration, should give the most to the low and middle income groups. This should of course be sent out with tax information. It helps people decide where the holes in the system are. 

So, here we are. What are we gonna do about it. 

fascism is easy with an opposition like this

 The fascist tactic, classically, is the pounce. The fascist strategy is to see the fragility of the political establishment, which by its nature has nourished the most shortsighted and the most cowardly in its ranks.

Le Pen is not a particularly shrewd politician, but after Macron did her the favor of dissolving the national assembly, she is reeping the benefit of the strategy of normalization: the political establishment is dissolving before her eyes. She probably can't believe her luck. One goes back to the thirties, and the way the Social Democrats went from the establishment to the concentration camp in Germany. All the while its leaders making some vain and stupid stand or another, and refusing to turn to the working class, cause they are grody.
France, as Tucholsky remarked in 1928, was characterized, much more than Germany or the UK at the time, by the fact that the past was never passed - history was in the very cries in the street.
This was a shrewd insight. And what we are seeing in France - the cluelessness of the left, the vanity of the center, the cluelessness of the right, and the desire of the extreme-right - is like many periods in the past. Marx's 18th Brumaire is still pertinent to France.
That a man as shallow and vain as Macron is trying to make this all about him just adds to the comedy. His asskissers are floating a new idea from the Great Disrupter: what if he resigned? Then he could run again for a glorious third term.
Louis Napoleon he is not. This harebrained scheme, however, might be the best way for Le Pen to take the presidency in the next year. I can see Macron trying it, although I don't think even the ever pliable constitutional council would accept it.
Watching this happen here is sad sad sad - and instructive. It happened in the UK with the Tories. The political establishments in most countries are fat, complacent, and brain-dead. We will measure just how braindead as the Socialists, under Raphael Glucksman - who, for my sins, I voted for - pull away from the only thing that can save the left from disaster - a united front.
The only happy gleam I can see, at the moment, is that the fascists in Italy, though they triumphed in the Europeans, were closely followed by a re-invigorated leftwing party. But that is thin gruel.
Welcome to the Jungle, baby.

And here 's the song link.null

A Karen Chamisso Poem

 Thoughts at the Denfort-Rochereau Metro Stop

The lion prowls in marble

with no lion tamer props

no stool no whip

to lend a civilizing touch

We like our marble lion rampant

but we much prefer

a cage to mediate

our flesh and jaw encounters

of the first kind.

Here the whip is seen

- so why do we so breathlessly wish for

The tumbled stool, the sawdust bloodied?

The meatmarkets I have seen

Birdsong pulled a labyrinth from my ear.

The birds have their nests, the foxes their holes

who will live with me

in the maze?

Wind and unwind, turn and turn back.

The heroes were netted and dispatched.

I stepped on a crack and a dynasty died.

Their ghosts follow me to this address.

A centerfold is at the center of it all.

O land of cockayne, free drinks and pussy!

To every sailor and peasant, tonight:

Tenderloin, tenderloin, the sirens sing.

‘The gates and yssues of this town are kept with watch and wards.”

Ariadne’s blues echo in the common pissoir.

My tears, my tears flow riverwards.

Jack comes to my bed to bone ce soir.

-Karen Chamisso

The News from France

 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.

All reaction

the indefinitely postponed real

In the history of the professionalization of philosophy in the Anglo-sphere since the beginning of the Cold War, one notices that there are periodic crises of realism, in which its enemies are warded off in one way or another. In the division of intellectual labor that organizes the universities, the philosophers have taken up the vocation of defending the real. Still, there is the problem of what the real is and how it can be attacked in the first place. On the one hand, there is the inclination to make the real synonymous with what there is – the universe, say. And yet, few realists would say, I think, that the real began with the big bang. If the real is the universe, why not dispense with the term real as a superfluous and confusing lable? Yet one feels that the realists are uncomfortable thinking of the real as having a beginning or end, or having dark matter in it, or black holes. These things are real, but they aren’t in the real. Then there is the tendency to make the real the objective, as opposed to the subjective – thus a black hole is real and a thought is not. But again, this seems an oddly bent way to talk – how could a thought not be real? Is there a domain of irreality? And can I have a ticket to it, please? One way – cause I’m not coming back.

No doubt, the real – reality – is an odd term.

There is an excellent riff on the philosophical use of the real in Engel’s small book on Feuerbach. Engel’s suffers from the self-inflicted wound of never quite being real himself – his commentators will forever compare him to Marx, and take Engel’s writings to be either a translation or a distortion of Marx. This is, however, what Engels wanted. Inevitably, if one member of a dyad is to play the role of the sage, the other must be the fool. If one is the knight, the other is Sancho Panza. If one is Bruno, the other must be Bruno’s ass. And, indeed, Engels is the sensual man compared to the ever harassed Marx. Marx, at one point in his desperate attempt to change the world and not simply understand it, applied for and was refused a humble job as a railroad station accountant; Engels, on the other hand, was apparently a successful manager of a branch of his family’s business in Manchester. It was Engels who turned Marx on to the political economy, not vice versa. It is as if Sancho Panza loaned the romances of chivalry to Don Quixote. Otherwise, Engels seemed to see himself in this dyad.

Engels, who attended lectures at the University of Berlin as a soldier but never took a degree as a student, never imbibed that obsessive stylistic tic of Marx’s that Benjamin (in a different context) calls la culte de la blague. Often, in Marx’s writing, when the reader feels the roof being lifted off the house, we are in the presence of that tremendous, even prophetic sarcasm that makes Marx so pre-eminently a writer, a man of textual strategies. Engels likes a little Hegelian word play as much as the other guy, but when he tells a joke he is sure to label it a joke – not for him Marx’s habit of throwing all his genius into a joke, so that it becomes Satanically, sublimely not funny.

Engels begins his book on Feuerbach by discussing a well known maxim of Hegel’s: all that is real, is rational, and all that is rational, is real. He notes that his has been seen as Hegel’s blessing of Prussian despotism. But Engel’s disagrees. Those who quickly rush to make Hegel a bootlicker of the Prussian court forget that for Hegel, the real is the necessary. It is not an “… arbitrary regime measure – Hegel himself adduces a certain ‘tax adjustment’ that counts, without anything further, as real. But what is real shows itself in the last instance also as rational.

As well, what is necessary, shows itself as rational in the last instance; which, applied to the Prussian state at that time, means, according to the Hegelian proposition, only: this state is rational, that is, corresponds to reason, only in so far as it is necessary; and if it appears terrible to us, and yet, in spite of its badness, continues to exist, the badness of the government finds its justification and explanation in the badness of its subjects [Untertanen]. The Prussian of that time had the government they deserved.

Now, reality – according to Hegel – is not an attribute that a given social or political arrangement retains under all circumstances and times. On the contrary. The Roman republic was real, but so was the Roman empire that crushed it. The French monarchy of 1789 had become so unreal, that is, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed through the great Revolution, that Hegel always spoke of with the highest enthusiasm. Here, the Monarchy was the unreal, the revolution the real. And so it goes that in the course of development, all that was earlier real loses its necessity, its right to existence, its rationality; a new, lively reality steps into the place of the dying real – peacefully, when the old state of affairs is rational enough, without striving to be carried off by death, and violently, when it holds out against this necessity. And so the Hegelian proposition is inverted through Hegelian dialectic into its opposite: everything which is real in the domain of human history will become unreasonable with time, and thus is already according to its pre-determination irrational, is qualified by the irrational from then on; and everything, which is rational in the heads of men, is predetermined, to be real, may it contradict existing reality in ever so many ways. The proposition of the rationality of all the real is dissolved according to the rules of Hegel’s conceptual method into its other; the value of everything that exists is the fact that it dies. [Alles was besteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht]"

I interpret this wonderfully uplifting, almost surrealist credo in terms of the sense of reality. And any newspaper reader of this century in the U.S. must have noticed the loss of this sense of reality in the Americanized part of the world. This loss comes through in two ways: a deep failure of the mechanisms of social cause and effect, and a profusion of symbols that become issues.

Pick any recent events, from immigration to Middle Eastern policy to the persistence of Trump to the age of Biden – one one feels the deep mechanism, the machine, has jumped the track. The real is a climate change that we are simply watching and participating in. The real is plutocracy, with all its trimmings: an utterly corrupt judiciary, a militarized police force, jails for the poor piker who is found with some crack and fines for the evil millionaire who has just invested in some offshore fund that coshares money with fentanyl mafiosos. As politics takes out of our reach the happiness of all, it supplants it with symbols that make for more and more interior rage and despair. Symbols define the politically possible, which nobody even pretends is a response to or solution for the politically impossible, that is, real social problems. These are the lineaments of dysfunction. They go deep. They sap the real. The earthquake is coming. How long will it tarry?