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    Re: Political Economy of the Gilets Jaunes Stathis Kouvelakis Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on July 8, 2019, 12:30 pm, in reply to "Political Economy of the Gilets Jaunes Stathis Kouvelakis"

    Ctd....

    That anger easily acquires a racializing colouration. If the centrality of social demands and unifying effects of collective action can help to counteract that process, it remains the case that the racial fractures within the popular classes can’t be named in these conditions—except through racist stigmatization. The necessity of keeping that at a distance, indispensable for the cohesion of a movement that aims both to rally all and to suppress all dissension, leads to keeping this question carefully out of sight. This position is inherent in the call for francité that marks the identity of the Gilets Jaunes: it acts both as a vector of inclusion, in the republican mode—all united behind the national flag, ‘without distinction of race or religion’—but also, and for the same reason, of exclusion. It occludes the invisibilization of non-nationals and the fact that, against the yardstick of ‘Frenchness’, some nationals (whites, non-Muslims) turn out to be more ‘French’ than others. Yet if the present political system debars the representation of ‘the little people’, those ‘from below’, as the Gilets Jaunes argue, it excludes in a much more radical fashion those who contest francité, who are placed in a category of permanent sub-citizenship—and who belong to an overwhelming extent to the same social world of ‘below’. The questioning of their ‘Frenchness’ by the symbolic markers of the Gilets Jaunes is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the movement initially had relatively little resonance in the banlieue—even if this is now beginning to grow.footnote17

    To return to the Commercy Appeal: in delimiting the identity of the Yellow Vests from racism—and also from sexism and homophobia—and including the ‘grey zones’ of francité (poor neighbourhoods, overseas territories), the text touches a sensitive point; more precisely, a repressed experience of the Gilets Jaunes movement, which touches its very identity. In doing so the Appeal takes a risk, certainly, but it also stakes a bet whose success is essential for the constitution of an ‘us’ that genuinely unites the working and popular classes—moving to the same rhythm, as Gramsci would have said.
    Exclusion and representation

    Starting from a protest against fuel taxes, expanding to tackle questions of fiscal justice and ‘cost of living’, the Yellow Vest movement found its emblematic demand in the citizens’ initiative referendum, ric. What social worldview subtends these claims? In the summary of Le Monde diplomatique: ‘The bosses should earn less, their employees should live decently: a “moral economy” of a certain sort.’footnote18 In the work of Edward Thompson, the ‘moral economy’ designated a set of shared norms, generally arising from common law, intended to regulate the economy of a still pre-industrial and pre-capitalist world around notions of a fair price or the guarantee of bread for all. When those norms were violated, the people had the right to revolt and to demand that the sovereign restore the implicit pact of which they were the basis.footnote19 By analogy, it’s been suggested that the Gilets Jaunes’ social demands articulate the principles of a contemporary ‘moral economy’—one that has come under incessant attack from the ruling power. The movement, in this light, aims at a restoration, rather than a revolution—at re-establishing a national compact, rather than the overthrow of the existing order.

    Stimulating and broadly pertinent, the analogy nevertheless founders on the radical difference between the epochs in question: the power addressed by the popular masses of the ancien régime owed its legitimacy to Divine Right. The King was supposed to care for the well-being of his subjects because they were ‘his’—not because he was accountable to the sovereign body of the citizens. It is precisely the regression towards a monarchical presidency and the sequestration of decision-making by a political elite indifferent to their conditions of life that the Yellow Vests categorically reject. The social compact they demand has at its core the democratic dimension that the present regime tramples underfoot. The figure of Macron is the highest incarnation of this denial of democracy, through his fusion of the monarchical apparatus of the Fifth Republic’s presidentialism with the arrogance of the contemporary bourgeois class.

    Rather than the ‘moral economy’ of pre-industrial societies, we would propose another historical analogy which reformulates that ‘moral’ dimension within the framework of a largely industrialized society and a political regime founded on the principle of representation. The Chartist movement in England announced itself with the publication of the ‘Charter of the People’ in May 1838. It had six points: universal male suffrage, secret ballots, eligibility of all citizens to stand as candidates, remuneration for elected representatives, equal constituencies and—unconscionably radical today—annual parliaments. The focus of the Chartists’ struggle was the institutionalized political exclusion of the popular classes: barely 15 per cent of the male population was enfranchised, despite the expansion grudgingly granted by the 1832 Reform Act. But winning the suffrage was equally seen as a lever for wide-scale social reforms targeting the 1834 Poor Law, with its notorious regime of workhouses for the indigent; the regressive tax system, the corruption of the political elite and, more generally, the privileges of the rich and idle, the landowning class that still largely dominated the summit of the state.

    In the Chartist worldview, an extension of the English tradition of democratic radicalism of the late-18th and early-19th centuries, the cause of workers’ socio-economic woes lay in the political monopoly of the rich. As Gareth Stedman Jones has argued: ‘In radical discourse, the dividing line between the classes was not that between employer and employed, but that between the represented and the unrepresented.’footnote20 The strategy was not the construction of a workers’ movement, even if Chartism largely drew its support from the working class, but an alliance of ‘the people’ and ‘the producers’ against the idle rentiers and landed proprietors who monopolized power. Its language conveyed a moral vision of the economy, centred on notions of justice, dignity and fairness, leaving aside the ownership of the means of production.

    There are some clear commonalities with the Gilets Jaunes. In both cases, the motive force of the movement is neither purely political nor purely economic, but a dynamic combination of the two. Both react against the political exclusion of the popular classes and conceive public action—reinvigorated by a series of institutional reforms aiming to expand citizens’ participation—as the most effective means to obtain social reforms favouring those layers. Facing a parliamentary regime founded on censitary, propertied suffrage and upheavals of early industrial capitalism, the Chartists demanded the reform of representative institutions to make them more responsive to the citizens. The Gilets Jaunes confront the mechanisms of the ‘hidden census’,footnote21 which serves to marginalize the weight of the subordinated classes within representative institutions, combined with the decrepitude of parliamentary democracy after decades of neoliberal policies. Abandoned by the political parties that once fought for their participation in public life, the popular classes took refuge in abstention—or supported the far right.
    Exploitable demands

    Their secession is at the heart of the organic crisis manifested in falling turnouts and desertion of the mainstream parties. The collapse of the Keynesian–Fordist social compromise also involved the deliquescence of political-institutional forms which, despite their bureaucratization and inherent limitations, permitted a form of popular participation. The Gilets Jaunes movement has served both to reveal and to express the severity of the crisis of representation. Like the Charter, although in a very different historical context, their programme suggests that state action can remedy their situation, without touching the mechanisms of capital accumulation, or even those of secondary redistribution. With the exception of the wealth tax, a largely symbolic measure, the programme’s emphasis falls on the state’s boosting ‘purchasing power’ by cutting direct taxes. It fails to concretize the Gilets Jaunes’ demand for redistribution in favour of the popular classes, their anger at social inequality and the arrogance of ‘the rich’.

    Though the local groups also target the multinationals and the phenomena of globalization—from environmental damage to the power of global corporations, offshoring of jobs and supranational institutions—so far, the political economy of the movement barely scratches the surface of neoliberal policies. Indeed, it risks legitimating indiscriminate tax cuts and the destruction of public services, as measures that would boost ‘purchasing power’. It’s not surprising that Macron has tried to snooker the Gilets Jaunes by taking them at their word. In his ‘Letter to the French people’ of 13 January 2019, he declared that it would be impossible to lower taxes without also cutting overall public spending, and invited the public to debate where the axe should fall.footnote22

    The ric, the idea of the citizens’ referendum that has become the beacon of the movement, is supposed to return power to the people by bypassing the party and institutional system. Yet it rests on an understanding of politics—as a list of discrete questions, posed as if in a quiz—that risks simply replicating the depoliticization of neoliberal ‘governance’: eliminating any notion of politics as a confrontation between currents of ideas, of projects endowed with overall coherence. Instead of resolving the crisis of representation, these proposals merely reflect and deepen it. Cultivating the anti-political illusion of a tabula rasa, free of mediations, instead of addressing the task of their reinvention, they would rather encourage the authoritarian flight forward inherent in the neoliberal state, to which the institutions of the Fifth Republic seem to have been predestined from the start. There too Macron, wilier than he’s often given credit for, aims to recoup the demand for direct democracy by repeating the Bonapartist performance that characterized his 2017 campaign—that of the President rolling up his sleeves, going among the people as part of a ‘great national debate’, naturally directed from above, allowing the ‘unmediated’ self-expression of the citizens.

    How to explain this striking gap between a movement borne up by popular anger against social injustices and democratic disintegration, and its expression in demands—more coherent than many like to admit—that can so easily be reversed into their opposite? The analogy with the Chartists may again be useful here. In addition to the implacable state repression unleashed against it, the movement rapidly came up against the internal contradictions of its political economy. The idea of political reform as the lever for universal social reform lost its credibility under the reforming governments of liberal Tories like Robert Peel, capable of making concessions on matters like taxation without giving an inch on the extension of the suffrage—or foregoing the option of merciless repression. The political economy of Chartism proved incapable of confronting the disjunction between the economic and political spheres, institutionalized by the maturing liberal state. Socialism and trade-union action would eventually pick up the baton of a political movement whose final burst of glory came in 1848. Without a change in orientation, which seems unlikely at the moment, the Gilets Jaunes movement may struggle to avoid a similar condition of powerlessness—to create a dynamic capable of blocking the ferocious repression aimed against it; to advance demands that would not be so easily recuperable by a vigilant state.
    At Troyes

    That said, the social and political experience that the upsurge represents is not exhausted by its official programme. Discussions with Gilets Jaunes at Troyes in late March, following a showing of François Ruffin’s film, J’veux du soleil, made clear that the movement’s capacity to withstand the test of time, and maintain its mobilizations over five months, depended on a genuinely collective mode of organizing. The active Gilets Jaunes had a clear preference for direct personal interaction; Facebook was seen as a site of manipulation ‘from below’—fertile terrain for rumours and personal rivalries—as well as state surveillance ‘from above’, even if it was still the only tool available for coordination and communication of a larger scale. The Troyes group also offered an interesting insight into the modus operandi of the far right.

    Serge, a former trade unionist at a Citroën car dealership, on early retirement after sickness, and a member of Mélenchon’s party, La France insoumise, explained how he had originally put his organizing skills—fliers, publicity, demonstrations—at the disposal of one of the precursor groups in the region, France en Colère, which encompassed ‘all sorts—a real red-white-and-blue’, certainly including the far right, and organized first against fuel taxes, then hospital closures. In Troyes, 4,000 people came out in response to the Gilets Jaunes’ call for action against the fuel tax on 17 November 2018—a huge crowd for an old market town of 60,000. At the beginning, four roundabouts were occupied round the clock. At one of them, Serge reported, two local far-right militants from Debout la France tried to take over the movement—‘pulling strings from behind their computer’—by announcing themselves on Facebook as regional representatives for the Aube Gilets Jaunes: ‘That caused a chill!’ According to Serge, the two of them hardly spent any time on the roundabouts: ‘They’d be sitting in a café while the rest were getting tear-gassed on a demonstration—people soon saw what was going on.’ Most of the Gilets Jaunes had no political background, he went on. ‘But they’re so fed up with this rubbish life that they’re ready to go anywhere, to follow anybody’:

    You hear some of them say, ‘There’s no money for us, and the immigrants get free lodging, they get free care when there’s no one to care for our old people, no one to care for my mother.’ The other day Giacomoni [one of the far-right duo] showed up with a pile of leaflets saying welfare assistance should be cut, because it was costing us too much. I refused to distribute the fliers, and so did the others at the Brico roundabout. We’ve always hammered it home: ‘Don’t mistake the target!’—and also, we try informing people . . . That’s beginning to bear fruit, but it’s been hard, and it’s not over yet.footnote23

    Asked why, of the four roundabouts originally taken in November, only the Brico occupation was still going strong, Serge replied that the atmosphere varied at each. The one held by the types from Debout la France was run in military style, with leaders and rigid rules. Another run by local Colère activists was more sympathetic, but one Yellow Vest there had tried to set herself up as a leader, which led to arguments. At the Brico, they’d had a good collective atmosphere from the start, and plenty of local people had brought them food and drink as gestures of solidarity. Fifty or sixty of them met to debate what points to raise at the Saint-Nazaire ‘assembly of assemblies’ and to choose two delegates to represent them. What were the effects of the current round of juridical repression? ‘People are getting it right in the face, with the fines and the law cases against them—they’ve been shocked by the repression. Whether that changes their politics, I don’t know. But it makes them angrier, that’s for sure.’

    In face of this determination, the response of a Gilet Jaune to a journalist’s question comes to mind. Asked what she thought of Macron’s concessions on the fuel tax, she replied: ‘Whatever they concede, it will never be enough.’ This suggests that the movement bears on something that escapes all quantification, an aspiration that can’t yet be put into words. It would be hard to find a more succinct expression of the gap between the perception of an intolerable situation and the radical impossibility of imagining a different one. This is where the challenge for today’s struggles lies: inventing an alternative, not as a utopia but as a project that would also include the means of its realization, in a new combination of radicalism and strategic thinking.

    This text draws on three articles originally published in French in Contretemps: Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘Gilets Jaunes, l’urgence de l’acte’, 21 January 2019; ‘Après Commercy. Dynamique de group et économie politique des Gilets Jaunes’, 18 February 2019; and, with Pascale Arnaud, ‘Paroles de rond-pont. Entretiens avec les Gilets Jaunes de Troyes’, 15 April 2019. The author wishes to thank Mediapart for the initial invitation to Commercy; l’EclairCit for the invitation to attend the screening of J’veux du soleil at Troyes; the Gilets Jaunes who shared their hopes and fears for these articles; and Pascale Arnaud for her essential contribution.
    1In late March 2019, a survey in Le Figaro found 53 per cent of respondents still expressing support or sympathy for the Yellow Vests, although this was down from earlier levels: ‘Gilets Jaunes: le soutien des Français en chute (sondage)’, Figaro, 20 March 2019.
    2Bruno Amable, ‘Vers un bloc antibourgeois?’, Libération, 26 November 2018; Vincent Présumey, ‘Du prolétariat et des populistes’, Mediapart, 13 January 2019; Gérard Noiriel, ‘Les gj replacent la question sociale au centre du jeu politique’, Le Monde, 27 November 2018; Sophie Wahnich, ‘La structure des mobilisations actuelles correspond à celle des sans-culottes’, Mediapart, 4 December 2018; Vincent Bilem, ‘Pourquoi la place des femmes dans le movement des gilets jaunes fait-elle tant polémique?’, Les Inrockuptibles, 17 December 2018 [Amable and Wahnich in English on Verso blog].
    3See the investigation by Yann Le Lann and his colleagues at Quantité Critique, discussed with Sylvia Zappi in ‘Le mouvement des “gilets jaunes” est avant tout une demande de revalorisation du travail’, Le Monde, 25 December 2018 [in English on Verso blog].
    4See in particular Antonio Gramsci, ‘Observations on Certain Aspects of the Structure of Political Parties in Periods of Organic Crisis’, in Geoffrey Nowell Smith and Quintin Hoare, eds, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London 1971, pp. 210–8. Gramscian conceptions also underlie the stimulating essay by Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini, L’illusion du ‘bloc bourgeois’, Paris 2017.
    5Sophie Wahnich, ‘La structure des mobilisations actuelles’.
    6 Rencontre réussie: the nuances of chance and happiness are missing from the literal English translation, ‘successful encounter’. [Trans]
    7Là qu’on vive: ‘[Act] where you live’. According to its Facebook page, the organization’s objective is ‘to open a space in our town where everyone is free to come without feeling judged by their social class, their origins or their gender; a space where we can meet up, talk, get to know each other and, above all, re-learn how to co-operate by sharing knowledge and skills, without having any leaders.’ Its political goals are perhaps best expressed in a text written by militants from the communication and cultural workers section of the anarcho-syndicalist cnt union, posted on Là qu’on vive’s page: ‘To constitute local committees that organize themselves on principles of direct democracy: sovereign general assembly, permanently recallable representatives with imperative mandates, rotation of responsibilities. These autonomous communes will raise popular, egalitarian, social and ecological demands. If their claims aren’t met, they will go ahead and implement them, without concerning themselves with legal forms of representation—they will be ready to confront the Mayor and the Prefect, to send the Member of Parliament back to his jar [bocal].’ ‘As much as necessary, the free communes will federate to share their experiences, their reflections, to lend a hand in managing common goods . . . Thus the state will be progressively marginalized, its powers diminished to the point where it is rendered ineffective, until the day when one last push will suffice to topple the pyramid of authoritarian order.’ See Pierre Bance, ‘A propos de l’appel des gilets jaunes de Commercy’, Autrefutur.net, 3 December 2018.
    8See ‘Masses, spontanéité, parti. Discussion entre Sartre et la direction d’Il Manifesto’, 27 August 1969, in Il Manifesto: Analyses et thèses de la nouvelle extrême-gauche italienne, Paris 1971, p. 300.
    9A transcription of the debates of the ‘assembly of assemblies’ is available on the website Vive la Révolution.
    10 See also Sophie Wahnich’s usage of Sartre’s concepts in this regard: ‘De la fusion, de l’incertitude et du pari’, Libération, 2 January 2019.
    11 See the remarks of Alexis Cukier and Davide Gallo Lassere, ‘Contre la loi travail et son monde’, Les Temps modernes, no. 691, 2016, esp. pp. 130–4.
    12 Videos of the Saint-Nazaire ‘assembly of assemblies’, 5–7 April 2019, can be found online. Its Appeal denounced the ‘anti-democratic and ultra-liberal’ character of the eu institutions but, respecting ‘the autonomy of Gilets Jaunes groups and of individuals in general’, made no call for a particular vote or abstention in the May 2019 Euro elections.
    13 Tristan Guerra, Frédéric Gonthier, Chloé Alexandre, Florent Gougou et Simon Persico, ‘Qui sont vraiment les gj? Les résultats d’une étude sociologique’, Le Monde, 26 January 2019. The survey found that inequalities (26%), purchasing power (25%) and poverty (14%) topped the list of issues, followed by taxes (11%).
    14 According to the Sciences Po Grenoble researchers, nearly 6 out of 10 thought ‘there is too much immigration in France’, roughly the same as the national level. Those most opposed to immigration were also least interested in politics and most concerned with ‘purchasing power’: Guerra et al., ‘Qui sont vraiment les gj?’.
    15 Nicolas Duvoux, ‘Gilets Jaunes: La perspective d’une réunification d’un bloc populaire inquiète les politiques’, Le Monde, 7 February 2019.
    16 Olivier Schwartz, ‘Vivons-nous encore dans une société de classes? Trois remarques sur la société française contemporaine’, La Vies des Idées, 22 September 2009.
    17 Emmanuel Riondé, ‘Pourquoi Toulouse est l’un des bastions des gj’, Mediapart, 9 February 2019; Lucie Delaporte and Mathilde Goanec, ‘Gilets Jaunes d’Ile-de-France: “Les quartiers populaires sont là”’, Mediapart, 16 February 2019.
    18 Pierre Souchon, ‘Avant, j’avais l’impression d’être seule’, Le Monde diplomatique, no. 778, January 2019.
    19 See Samuel Hayat, ‘Les Gilets Jaunes, l’économie morale et le pouvoir’, samuelhayat.wordpress.com, 5 December 2018.
    20 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History 1832–1982, Cambridge 1983, pp. 106–7.
    21 See Daniel Gaxie, ‘Le cens cachée’, Réseaux, vol. 5, no. 22, 1987, pp. 29–51.
    22 Wrapping up his ‘great debate’ on 7 May 2019, Macron confirmed that lower income tax would be compensated by further spending cuts, longer working hours and closure of some business tax loopholes.
    23 For all the differences with the Weimar period, when mass parties of left and right fought to capture the popular anger and aspirations for radical change, it may be worth recalling the words of a young German noted by Daniel Guérin in the summer of 1932: ‘You see, we’re pitted against each other. Passions are at boiling point, we are killing each other, but fundamentally we want the same thing . . . ’[Guérin: ‘Really?’] ‘Yes, the same thing, a new world, radically different from today’s . . . a new system’: Daniel Guérin, La peste brune, Paris 1971, p. 31.

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