Re: France
Posted: Thu Apr 13, 2023 2:23 pm
Class Struggle in France: How to Escape the Counterrevolution
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 12, 2023
Maurizio Lazzarato
What links exist between the strikes in France and the war? An overview from the perspective of class struggle and an urgent call to reconstitute strategic thinking.
Let’s get straight to the point: after the huge demonstrations against pension “reform”, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, decided to “pass it by force” (passer en force), depriving Parliament of its power and imposing the sovereign decision to pass the law raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. At the demonstrations, the immediate response was “we also pass by force”. Between opposing wills, the sovereign will of the State-capital machine and the will of the class, force decides. The capital-labor compromise has been broken since the seventies, but the financial crisis and the war further radicalized the conditions of confrontation.
Let us analyze the two poles of this power relation founded on force in the political conditions opened between 2008 and 2022.
The French March
The movement seems to have grasped the change of political phase provoked first by the financial crisis of 2008 and then by the war. It has used many of the forms of struggle that the French proletariat developed in recent years, keeping it united, articulating and legitimizing its differences. The trade union struggles, with their peaceful marches which progressively changed and integrated non-wage components (on March 23 the presence of youth, university and high school students was massive), were joined by the “wildcat” demonstrations which for days took place at nightfall in the streets of the capital and other big cities (where they were even more intense).
This strategy of action, developed by groups constantly moving from one part of the city to another, confronting the police, is a clear inheritance of the forms of struggle of the “yellow vests” which began to “terrorize” the bourgeoisie, when instead of parading calmly between Republique and Nation, they “set fire” to the rich neighborhoods of western Paris. On the night of the 23rd, 923 fire outbreaks (“departs de feu”) were counted in Paris alone. The police declared that the “wild” nights involved a higher level of “raids” in relation to those carried out against the yellow vests.
No trade union, not even the most pro-presidential (CFDT) condemned the “wild” demonstrations. Without exception, the media, all owned by oligarchs, who were eagerly awaiting, after the first “violent acts”, a turnaround of public opinion, were disappointed: two thirds of the French people still supported the revolt. The “sovereign” had refused to receive the unions, showing his desire for direct confrontation, without mediation. Everyone had deduced that there was only one possible strategy to adopt: the articulation of different forms of struggle, without being ashamed of the distinction between “violence” and “pacifism”.
The massification and differentiation of the components present in the protests are also to be found in the picket lines, which are as important, if not more so, than the demonstrations. Macron’s decision was probably motivated, above all, by the blockade, not entirely successful, of the general strike of March 7 (on the 8th the situation had become almost normal!). But what Macron did not foresee was the acceleration produced in the movement by the decision to apply Article 49.3. of the French Constitution, which forced the approval of the pension reform bill, without going through the vote of the deputies.
The only movement which was not integrated into the struggle is that of the revolt of the banlieues. The conjunction between “petits blancs” (the poorest parties of the white proletariat) and “les barabares” (the French children of immigrants, the “natives of the republic”) did not take place this time either. This is not insignificant, as we shall see later, because here the possible world revolution, the North/South conjunction, is at stake.
There was a de facto and universally accepted articulation between the mass struggles and the struggles of a minority part which has dedicated itself to prolonging the conflict at night by using the poubelles (garbage) – accumulated on the sides of the streets due to the street sweepers’ strike – to block the police and provoke zbeuls (disorder). For the moment, let’s call it ‘vanguard’ because I don’t know what else to call it, hoping that the usual cretins won’t cry Leninism. It is not a question of bringing consciousness to the proletariat, which would lack it, nor of political leadership functions, but of articulating the struggle in the face of the iron arm imposed by the established power. The relation masses/active minorities is present in all revolutionary movements. It is a question of rethinking it in the new conditions, not of eliminating it.
“Everyone had deduced that there was only one possible strategy to adopt: the articulation of different forms of struggle, without being ashamed of the distinction between “violence” and “pacifism”.”
Before the great mobilizations of recent days, there were differences and divisions running through the French proletariat, weakening its shock force. Here we can only summarize them: the unions and the institutional parties of the left (with the exception of France Insoumise) never understood the movement of the yellow vests, neither its nature, nor the demands of those workers who do not fit the classic standards of the wage-earner. They have shown indifference, if not hostility, towards their struggles. On the other hand, they have expressed open enmity towards the “barbarians” of the banlieues (with the exception of France Insoumise), joined by a part of the feminist movement, when they were all victims of the racist campaigns launched by the power and the media against the “Islamic veil”. For their part, neither the former nor the latter have been able to develop autonomous and independent forms of organization capable of contributing their point of view, which neither the trade unions nor the parties, closed on a constantly shrinking basis, even want to consider. Within the “barbarians” a decolonial theory has developed, many of whose positions can be shared, but which has never managed to take root in the barrios and endow itself with a mass organization. The feminist movement, for its part, is well organized and has developed lucid and profound analyses, expressing radical positions, but it brings no political ruptures of magnitude. It does not engage in a political battle within the struggles underway, although women are undoubtedly the most affected by the “reforms”.
Thus, the French proletariat was fragmented by racism, sexism and new forms of precarious work
The current movement made “bouger les lignes”, as the French say, as it shifted the dividing lines, partially recomposing the distinctions. The ecological actions also found strength and resources within the struggles. The Sainte-Soline clashes against the construction of large reservoirs to collect water for the agri-food industry, in which the police used military weapons, aroused indignation and mobilization in the days that followed, with the resumption of “wild” demonstrations, albeit on a smaller scale.
A leap in the recomposition? Perhaps it is too early to say. In any case, the various movements that have traversed France in recent years inserted themselves into the union mobilization, endowing it with a different image and substance: that of defiance of power and capital. In two months they burned Macron and brought his presidency to a dead end.
When the political system of Western countries becomes oligarchic and when consensus can no longer be secured through wages, rents and consumption, which are continually blocked or cut, the police become the fundamental axis of “governance”. Macron has managed the social struggles of his presidency centrally through the police.
“The brutality of interventions is today at the heart of the French ‘law and order’ strategy. France not only has a great revolutionary tradition, but it also has a tradition of exercising counter-revolutionary violence, unheard of in the colonies and proportional to the danger that power faces in the metropolis (where it does not hesitate to have the colonial army intervene, as in 1848, to repress the revolution). What is at stake now in the movement is not reducible to labor and its rejection, but rather the future of capitalism itself and its State, as is always the case when wars break out between imperialisms.
The lesson we can draw from two months of struggle is the urgency of rethinking and reconfiguring the question of force, of its organization, of its use. Tactics and strategy are once again political necessities of which the movements have been little concerned, focusing almost exclusively on the specificity of their power relations (sexist, racist, ecological, wage). And yet they raised the level of confrontation by moving objectively together, in the absence of subjective coordination, destructuring the constituted power.
Either the problem of the rupture with capitalism, with all that it implies, is reinstated, or we will continue to act only on the defensive. What arises when the war between imperialisms is imposed is always, historically, the possibility of its “collapse” (from which can also emerge a new division of power in the world market and a new cycle of accumulation). The United States, China and Russia are fully aware of what is at stake. Whether the class struggle can reach this level of confrontation is still an unknown.
Western autocracy
The French Constitution has always foreseen the possibility for the “sovereign” to decide within the so-called democratic institutions, thus the invention of article 49.3, which allows legislating without going through parliament. It is the inscription in the Constitution of the continuity of the processes of political centralization that began long before the birth of capitalism. The centralization of military force (the legitimate monopoly of its exercise), also prior to capitalism, constitutes the other indispensable condition for the emergence of the State-capital machine, which in turn will immediately proceed to centralize economic force, forming monopolies and oligopolies that have only increased in size and economic and political weight throughout the history of capitalism.
Much of political thought has ignored actually” existing capitalism, eliminating its processes of “sovereign” centralization; thus paving the way for the concepts of “governance”, “governmentality” (Foucault) or “government” (Agamben, much agitated during the pandemic, but disappeared with the -very little biopolitical- war between imperialisms).
Foucault’s statements in this regard are significant of the theoretical climate of the counter-revolution: “The economy is a discipline without totality, the economy is a discipline that begins to manifest not only the uselessness, but the impossibility of a sovereign point of view”. The monopolies are the “sovereigns” of the economy which will only increase their will of totalization, combining with the “sovereign” power of the political system and the “sovereign” power of the army and the police.
Capitalism is not identical to liberalism or neo-liberalism. Both are radically different and it makes no sense to describe the development of the state-capital machine as the passage from sovereign societies to disciplinary societies and the society of control. The three centralizations complement and command each other always and in any case as forms of governmentality (liberal or neoliberal), using them and then abandoning them, when the class confrontation becomes radicalized.The enormous imbalances and polarizations between States and between classes provoked by centralization lead directly to war, which expresses once again the truth of capitalism (the confrontation between imperialisms), the political repercussions of which are immediate, especially in the small European States. While the French president is asserting his sovereignty before his “population”, he has lost, like a good vassal, a piece of it to the United States, which has replaced – thanks to the war against Russia – the Franco-German axis by that of the United States-Great Britain-Eastern countries; in the center of which, the Americans have installed the most reactionary, sexist, clerical, homophobic, anti-worker and warmongering of the European countries: Poland. At this point, not only the federal hypothesis is a utopia, but also the Europe of nations. The future will be one of nationalism and new fascism. If anyone ever wanted to resurrect the European project, after a new slavish consent to the logic of dollar imperialism, he would first have to undertake a struggle for liberation from Yankee colonialism.
On the international chessboard, even less than before the war, but like all marginal lords, Macron pours all his lividity and impotence on his “subjects”, upon whom he bestows police action.
According to the Financial Times of March 25, 2023, “France has a regime that, among developed countries, most closely resembles an autocratic dictatorship.” It is amusing to read the international press of capital being alarmed (Wall Street Journal) that “Macron’s forced march to transform the French economy into a business-friendly environment comes at the expense of social cohesion.” Their real concern is not the living conditions of millions of proletarians, but the “populist” danger that would threaten the Atlantic Alliance, global NATO and thus the ruling United States: the “parliamentary rebellion” and “the chaos unfolding across the country raise troubling questions for the nation’s future for all those who expect France to remain firmly in the liberal, pro-European Union, pro-NATO camp.” The Financial Times fears that France “will follow the Americans, British and Italians and opt for the populist vote.” It is not clear whether they are hypocritical or irresponsible. They would like to have both at the same time: financial income/monopoly rent and social cohesion, democracy and dictatorship of capital, tax-exempt companies, lavishly financed by a Welfare completely twisted in their favor and social peace. Der Spiegel speaks of “democratic deficit”, of “democracy itself in danger”, when it is the economic policies that daily defend the causes of the Western autocracy that has nothing, but to envy to the Eastern one.
The cycle of the global struggle after 2011
What is just beginning to be glimpsed in the struggles in France, the challenge to power and capital, is what the struggles in the global South achieved since 2011. Back in the 20th century, the global South played a decisive strategic role, even more so than the struggles in the West. The international dimension of power relations is a decisive knot for regaining the initiative. The crisis of 2008 not only opened up the possibility of war (which came with punctuality), but also the possibility of revolutionary ruptures (the reality of struggles moves, it is obliged to move in this direction if it does not want to be swept away by the joint action of war and the new fascisms).
The last globalization not only deepened the differences between North and South, but also created Northerners in the South and implanted Southerners in the North. This in no way implies a homogeneity of political behavior and processes of subjectivation between the two hemispheres. The center-periphery polarization is immanent to capitalism and must imperatively and continuously reproduce itself. Without the depredation of the “South”, without the imposition of “lumpen” development and “unequal exchange” (Samir Amin), the rate of profit is bound to fall inexorably, despite all the innovations, technologies and inventions that the North can produce under the control of the biggest techno-scientific entrepreneur: the Pentagon. This is the underlying reason for the current war. The great South wants to get out of this relationship of subordination – it has even already partially gotten out of it – and it is this political will that threatens U.S. financial and monetary hegemony and its productive and political supremacy.
There are at least two major political differences that remain between the West and the rest of the world. The non-integration of the “barbarians” of the French suburbs in the current struggles, despite the fact that they constitute one of the poorest and most exploited layers of the French proletariat is already a symptom, within the Western countries, of the difficulties in overcoming the “colonial divide” from which the whites have long benefited.
Within the cycle of struggles initiated in 2011 there was a differentiation similar to that produced in the 20th century. Then we had socialist or national liberation revolutions (with socialist overtones) throughout the great South and mass struggles, some very hard fought, but unable to lead to successful revolutionary processes in the West. Today we have big strikes in Europe (in France, Great Britain, Spain and even in Germany) and, on the other hand, real uprisings, insurrections and opening of revolutionary processes in the great South. Let us consider just a few examples – Egypt/Tunisia inaugurating the cycle in 2011, Chile and Iran more recently – to highlight the differences and possible convergences.
It is difficult to compare the Arab Spring uprising with “Occupy Wall Street”, even if there was a circulation of forms of struggle: removal of the constituted power, millions of people mobilized, political systems shaken to their foundations, repression with hundreds of deaths, possibility of opening a true revolutionary process, which was immediately aborted because, as a poster in Cairo read during the uprising, “Half revolution, no revolution”. Occupy Wall Street never put into play power relations of this magnitude, nor did it generate, even if only for brief periods, “vacuums”, de-structuring, delegitimization of the devices of power such as those that periodically determine the uprisings in the South. And it is still the South that opens and promotes new cycles of struggle (see also South American feminism) that are reproduced with less intensity and force in the North. That of Chile, where “neoliberalism” was born after the action of the State-capital machine physically destroyed the revolutionary processes underway and called Hayek and Friedman to build, on the massacre, the market, competition and human capital (never confuse neoliberalism with imperialism or capitalism, one must always distinguish them, carefully!), is another type of insurrection, from which other lessons can be drawn, even if, as in North Africa, they are political defeats.
In Chile, unlike Egypt, a multiplicity of movements (the importance of the feminist and indigenous movement is significant) expressed themselves in revolt. But at a certain moment in the class struggle, one is confronted with a power that is no longer only patriarchal or heterosexual power, no longer only racist power, no longer only the power of the master, but the general power of the State-capital machine that encompasses them, reorganizes them and, at the same time, overflows them. Nor is the enemy only the national power, the sovereignty of a State like that of Chile. In these situations we are directly confronted with imperialist policies because any rupture – as in Egypt (more than in Tunisia) or in Chile or Iran – runs the risk of calling into question the relations of force in the world market, the global organization of power: both the Chilean and the Egyptian insurrection were closely followed by the United States, which did not hesitate to intervene with its “strategic interference”. In France a similar situation exists: the development of the struggles encounters, starting from a “trade union” struggle, the totality of the State-capital machine.
In these moments of struggle a point of no return is reached for both contenders, because it is not possible to consolidate stable forms of counter-power, of “liberated” spaces or territories, only for short periods of time. The Zapatista solution is neither generalizable nor reproducible (as the Zapatistas themselves have always affirmed). It is not understood how a lasting “dual power” can be implemented under the current conditions of capitalism. At the same time, since 1968, the seizure of power does not seem a priority. The current situation is configured like a puzzle! Despite the political differences between the North and the South, transversal problems arise: what political subject to build that is capable, at the same time, of organizing the multiplicity of forms of struggle and points of view and of posing the question of the dualism of power and the organization of force.
The revolts, the insurrections (but also, albeit in a different way, the struggles in France), produce a series of enigmas or impossibilities: impossibility of totalizing and synthesizing the struggles and impossibility of remaining in dispersion and difference; impossibility of not rebelling by de-structuring power and impossibility of taking power; impossibility of organizing the passage from multiplicity to the dualism of power imposed by the enemy and impossibility of remaining solely in multiplicity and difference; impossibility of centralization and impossibility of confronting the enemy without centralization. To fight against these impossibilities is the condition to create the possible revolution. Only under these conditions, solving these enigmas, overcoming these impossibilities, the impossibility of revolution becomes possible.
The second great difference between the North and the South concerns the ongoing war and imperialism. Imperialism names the leap in the quality of capital that operates from the integration of three processes of centralization (economic, political and military) that the First World War consecrates and that reached its climax during “neo-liberalism”. Far from free competition and free enterprise, alien to any struggle against the concentration of power that distorts competition, dissatisfied with the predation operated on a world scale and with the imposition of a reorganization in its favor of Welfare, imperialist centralization allows imposing – as it is doing – the inflation of its profits (“pricing power”: the power to fix the price in defiance of the self-styled neo-liberalism).
The French movement has not expressed itself on the war between imperialisms. The struggle against pension reform falls within this framework, even if the question has never been raised, even if the fact that Europe is at war and the West is recalibrating from Welfare to Warfare changes the political situation considerably. Perhaps it is better this way, even if it is an obvious political constraint. Had it done so, different, even opposing, political positions would probably have emerged. In the global South, on the other hand, the verdict on the war is clear and unanimous: it is a war between imperialisms whose origin is US imperialism, to which the suicidal European political classes adhere. The South is divided between states that declare themselves neutral and others that side with Russia, but all reject sanctions and arms supplies.
In the South, the category of imperialism has never been questioned as in the West. The blunder committed by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire – a supranational formation that has never been formed – shows a notorious difference in analysis and political sensitivity, to the point that they went so far as to affirm, in the last volume of their trilogy, that after having tried war, the impossible Empire would have opted for finance. That is exactly the opposite of what happened: American finance, after having produced and continuing to produce repeated crises – which constantly bring capitalism to the brink of collapse – is saved, exclusively, by the intervention of the sovereignty of the States and, in the first place, by that of the United States, which ends up being forced into war. Contemporary imperialism, the concept of which could be summed up – by greatly simplifying it – in the triangle monopoly/currency/war, also sheds light on the limits of the theories that have ignored it and obliges us to adopt the point of view of the South, which has never abandoned it because it still has it on its shoulders. As we have it too, but we prefer to pretend we don’t!
How to escape from the counterrevolution?
The struggles of the French proletariat are admirable. They are exciting because in them we recognize traits of the revolutions of the 19th century (and even of the great revolution), which confront counterrevolution with a continuity and an intensity not seen in any other Western country. However, it is necessary to remain vigilant. If the French proletarians rise up with an impressive regularity against the “reforms”, so far they have only succeeded in delaying their application or in modifying them marginally, producing and sedimenting, on the other hand, unprecedented processes of subjectivation which accumulate as in the current struggles (from the struggles against the labor law of the yellow vests to the Zones of Defense, the ZADs). All the struggles have been, at least up to now, defensive, whose reactive sense can certainly be overcome, but there remains a considerable starting handicap.
To explain what we call “defeat” – in spite of the great resistance expressed – perhaps we must go back to how wage, social and political conquests were imposed. If in the 19th century the first victories were the result of the struggles of the European working classes, in the 20th century the South played an increasingly important strategic role. It was the revolutions – as a latent threat in the North and as victorious in the South – that jammed the State-capital machine, forcing it to make concessions. What was frightening was the autonomy and independence of the proletarian point of view expressed there. The union of the peasant revolutions in the South with the workers’ struggles in the North led to an objective front of struggles across the “color line” that forced wage increases, welfare policies in the North and the breaking of the colonial division that had reigned for four centuries in the great South. This is the most important fruit of the Soviet revolution (Lenin never went to London, nor to Detroit, but was seen in Peking, Hanoi, Algiers, etc.), which was prolonged by the “oppressed peoples”.
Just as socialism is impossible in a single country, it is also impossible to impose conditions on the State-capital machine from a single nation.The Western working classes were defeated with the advent of World War I, when the overwhelming majority of the labor movement agreed to send the working classes to the slaughter for the glory of their respective national bourgeoisies. By the time the labor and class movement had redeemed itself through anti-fascism, the initiative was in the hands of the “peasant” revolutions, whose force pushed the centers of capitalism eastward. By then, the Western working classes had been integrated into the development and even when they revolted they were never able to really threaten the capital-state machine. In the same period, the revolutions of the great South were transformed into production machines or nation-states.
With the disappearance of the threat of revolution in the North and its real presence in the South, the relationship of forces was radically inverted: we began to lose and continue to lose, piece by piece, all that we had conquered (the passage from 60 to 67 years -that is, seven years of life captured at a stroke by capital- is perhaps the clearest sign of defeat). Until the counterrevolution initiated in the seventies, even when it had been politically defeated, progress was made in the social and economic fields. Today it is losing on both fronts. Now, after the crisis of 2008, significant struggles are breaking out everywhere (the French March is one of them), but unless the network of insurrections and struggles on a global scale is retracted, subjectively, this time I doubt that the cage of counterrevolution can be broken.
Men of good will propose to civilize the class war which is at the origin of the wars between States. We wish them good luck. In a single century (1914 – 2022), the different imperialisms brought humanity to the brink of the abyss four times: the First and Second World Wars, with Nazism as the climax; the Cold War, in which the possibility of the nuclear end of humanity was actualized for the first time. The current war – of which Ukraine will be but an episode – could revive the latter eventuality.
With regard to this tragic and recurrent repetition of wars between imperialisms (not even counting the others), it is a matter of reconstructing the relations of international force and of elaborating a concept of war (of strategy) adequate to this new situation. The Communist Manifesto gave a definition that is still very current, even if it has been eliminated or fallen into the oblivion of pacification: “uninterrupted war, sometimes dissimulated, sometimes open”. Disguised or open, it requires always and in any case a knowledge of the relations of force; a strategy and an art of rupture adapted to these relations. Historically, war – although it seems that also today – can give rise to a “revolutionary transformation” or to a new accumulation of capital on a world scale. Another possibility that Marx and Engels’ Manifesto considered is on the order of the day, exacerbated by the ecological disaster underway: “the destruction” not only “of the two classes in struggle” but also of all humanity.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/ ... evolution/
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 12, 2023
Maurizio Lazzarato
What links exist between the strikes in France and the war? An overview from the perspective of class struggle and an urgent call to reconstitute strategic thinking.
Let’s get straight to the point: after the huge demonstrations against pension “reform”, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, decided to “pass it by force” (passer en force), depriving Parliament of its power and imposing the sovereign decision to pass the law raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. At the demonstrations, the immediate response was “we also pass by force”. Between opposing wills, the sovereign will of the State-capital machine and the will of the class, force decides. The capital-labor compromise has been broken since the seventies, but the financial crisis and the war further radicalized the conditions of confrontation.
Let us analyze the two poles of this power relation founded on force in the political conditions opened between 2008 and 2022.
The French March
The movement seems to have grasped the change of political phase provoked first by the financial crisis of 2008 and then by the war. It has used many of the forms of struggle that the French proletariat developed in recent years, keeping it united, articulating and legitimizing its differences. The trade union struggles, with their peaceful marches which progressively changed and integrated non-wage components (on March 23 the presence of youth, university and high school students was massive), were joined by the “wildcat” demonstrations which for days took place at nightfall in the streets of the capital and other big cities (where they were even more intense).
This strategy of action, developed by groups constantly moving from one part of the city to another, confronting the police, is a clear inheritance of the forms of struggle of the “yellow vests” which began to “terrorize” the bourgeoisie, when instead of parading calmly between Republique and Nation, they “set fire” to the rich neighborhoods of western Paris. On the night of the 23rd, 923 fire outbreaks (“departs de feu”) were counted in Paris alone. The police declared that the “wild” nights involved a higher level of “raids” in relation to those carried out against the yellow vests.
No trade union, not even the most pro-presidential (CFDT) condemned the “wild” demonstrations. Without exception, the media, all owned by oligarchs, who were eagerly awaiting, after the first “violent acts”, a turnaround of public opinion, were disappointed: two thirds of the French people still supported the revolt. The “sovereign” had refused to receive the unions, showing his desire for direct confrontation, without mediation. Everyone had deduced that there was only one possible strategy to adopt: the articulation of different forms of struggle, without being ashamed of the distinction between “violence” and “pacifism”.
The massification and differentiation of the components present in the protests are also to be found in the picket lines, which are as important, if not more so, than the demonstrations. Macron’s decision was probably motivated, above all, by the blockade, not entirely successful, of the general strike of March 7 (on the 8th the situation had become almost normal!). But what Macron did not foresee was the acceleration produced in the movement by the decision to apply Article 49.3. of the French Constitution, which forced the approval of the pension reform bill, without going through the vote of the deputies.
The only movement which was not integrated into the struggle is that of the revolt of the banlieues. The conjunction between “petits blancs” (the poorest parties of the white proletariat) and “les barabares” (the French children of immigrants, the “natives of the republic”) did not take place this time either. This is not insignificant, as we shall see later, because here the possible world revolution, the North/South conjunction, is at stake.
There was a de facto and universally accepted articulation between the mass struggles and the struggles of a minority part which has dedicated itself to prolonging the conflict at night by using the poubelles (garbage) – accumulated on the sides of the streets due to the street sweepers’ strike – to block the police and provoke zbeuls (disorder). For the moment, let’s call it ‘vanguard’ because I don’t know what else to call it, hoping that the usual cretins won’t cry Leninism. It is not a question of bringing consciousness to the proletariat, which would lack it, nor of political leadership functions, but of articulating the struggle in the face of the iron arm imposed by the established power. The relation masses/active minorities is present in all revolutionary movements. It is a question of rethinking it in the new conditions, not of eliminating it.
“Everyone had deduced that there was only one possible strategy to adopt: the articulation of different forms of struggle, without being ashamed of the distinction between “violence” and “pacifism”.”
Before the great mobilizations of recent days, there were differences and divisions running through the French proletariat, weakening its shock force. Here we can only summarize them: the unions and the institutional parties of the left (with the exception of France Insoumise) never understood the movement of the yellow vests, neither its nature, nor the demands of those workers who do not fit the classic standards of the wage-earner. They have shown indifference, if not hostility, towards their struggles. On the other hand, they have expressed open enmity towards the “barbarians” of the banlieues (with the exception of France Insoumise), joined by a part of the feminist movement, when they were all victims of the racist campaigns launched by the power and the media against the “Islamic veil”. For their part, neither the former nor the latter have been able to develop autonomous and independent forms of organization capable of contributing their point of view, which neither the trade unions nor the parties, closed on a constantly shrinking basis, even want to consider. Within the “barbarians” a decolonial theory has developed, many of whose positions can be shared, but which has never managed to take root in the barrios and endow itself with a mass organization. The feminist movement, for its part, is well organized and has developed lucid and profound analyses, expressing radical positions, but it brings no political ruptures of magnitude. It does not engage in a political battle within the struggles underway, although women are undoubtedly the most affected by the “reforms”.
Thus, the French proletariat was fragmented by racism, sexism and new forms of precarious work
The current movement made “bouger les lignes”, as the French say, as it shifted the dividing lines, partially recomposing the distinctions. The ecological actions also found strength and resources within the struggles. The Sainte-Soline clashes against the construction of large reservoirs to collect water for the agri-food industry, in which the police used military weapons, aroused indignation and mobilization in the days that followed, with the resumption of “wild” demonstrations, albeit on a smaller scale.
A leap in the recomposition? Perhaps it is too early to say. In any case, the various movements that have traversed France in recent years inserted themselves into the union mobilization, endowing it with a different image and substance: that of defiance of power and capital. In two months they burned Macron and brought his presidency to a dead end.
When the political system of Western countries becomes oligarchic and when consensus can no longer be secured through wages, rents and consumption, which are continually blocked or cut, the police become the fundamental axis of “governance”. Macron has managed the social struggles of his presidency centrally through the police.
“The brutality of interventions is today at the heart of the French ‘law and order’ strategy. France not only has a great revolutionary tradition, but it also has a tradition of exercising counter-revolutionary violence, unheard of in the colonies and proportional to the danger that power faces in the metropolis (where it does not hesitate to have the colonial army intervene, as in 1848, to repress the revolution). What is at stake now in the movement is not reducible to labor and its rejection, but rather the future of capitalism itself and its State, as is always the case when wars break out between imperialisms.
The lesson we can draw from two months of struggle is the urgency of rethinking and reconfiguring the question of force, of its organization, of its use. Tactics and strategy are once again political necessities of which the movements have been little concerned, focusing almost exclusively on the specificity of their power relations (sexist, racist, ecological, wage). And yet they raised the level of confrontation by moving objectively together, in the absence of subjective coordination, destructuring the constituted power.
Either the problem of the rupture with capitalism, with all that it implies, is reinstated, or we will continue to act only on the defensive. What arises when the war between imperialisms is imposed is always, historically, the possibility of its “collapse” (from which can also emerge a new division of power in the world market and a new cycle of accumulation). The United States, China and Russia are fully aware of what is at stake. Whether the class struggle can reach this level of confrontation is still an unknown.
Western autocracy
The French Constitution has always foreseen the possibility for the “sovereign” to decide within the so-called democratic institutions, thus the invention of article 49.3, which allows legislating without going through parliament. It is the inscription in the Constitution of the continuity of the processes of political centralization that began long before the birth of capitalism. The centralization of military force (the legitimate monopoly of its exercise), also prior to capitalism, constitutes the other indispensable condition for the emergence of the State-capital machine, which in turn will immediately proceed to centralize economic force, forming monopolies and oligopolies that have only increased in size and economic and political weight throughout the history of capitalism.
Much of political thought has ignored actually” existing capitalism, eliminating its processes of “sovereign” centralization; thus paving the way for the concepts of “governance”, “governmentality” (Foucault) or “government” (Agamben, much agitated during the pandemic, but disappeared with the -very little biopolitical- war between imperialisms).
Foucault’s statements in this regard are significant of the theoretical climate of the counter-revolution: “The economy is a discipline without totality, the economy is a discipline that begins to manifest not only the uselessness, but the impossibility of a sovereign point of view”. The monopolies are the “sovereigns” of the economy which will only increase their will of totalization, combining with the “sovereign” power of the political system and the “sovereign” power of the army and the police.
Capitalism is not identical to liberalism or neo-liberalism. Both are radically different and it makes no sense to describe the development of the state-capital machine as the passage from sovereign societies to disciplinary societies and the society of control. The three centralizations complement and command each other always and in any case as forms of governmentality (liberal or neoliberal), using them and then abandoning them, when the class confrontation becomes radicalized.The enormous imbalances and polarizations between States and between classes provoked by centralization lead directly to war, which expresses once again the truth of capitalism (the confrontation between imperialisms), the political repercussions of which are immediate, especially in the small European States. While the French president is asserting his sovereignty before his “population”, he has lost, like a good vassal, a piece of it to the United States, which has replaced – thanks to the war against Russia – the Franco-German axis by that of the United States-Great Britain-Eastern countries; in the center of which, the Americans have installed the most reactionary, sexist, clerical, homophobic, anti-worker and warmongering of the European countries: Poland. At this point, not only the federal hypothesis is a utopia, but also the Europe of nations. The future will be one of nationalism and new fascism. If anyone ever wanted to resurrect the European project, after a new slavish consent to the logic of dollar imperialism, he would first have to undertake a struggle for liberation from Yankee colonialism.
On the international chessboard, even less than before the war, but like all marginal lords, Macron pours all his lividity and impotence on his “subjects”, upon whom he bestows police action.
According to the Financial Times of March 25, 2023, “France has a regime that, among developed countries, most closely resembles an autocratic dictatorship.” It is amusing to read the international press of capital being alarmed (Wall Street Journal) that “Macron’s forced march to transform the French economy into a business-friendly environment comes at the expense of social cohesion.” Their real concern is not the living conditions of millions of proletarians, but the “populist” danger that would threaten the Atlantic Alliance, global NATO and thus the ruling United States: the “parliamentary rebellion” and “the chaos unfolding across the country raise troubling questions for the nation’s future for all those who expect France to remain firmly in the liberal, pro-European Union, pro-NATO camp.” The Financial Times fears that France “will follow the Americans, British and Italians and opt for the populist vote.” It is not clear whether they are hypocritical or irresponsible. They would like to have both at the same time: financial income/monopoly rent and social cohesion, democracy and dictatorship of capital, tax-exempt companies, lavishly financed by a Welfare completely twisted in their favor and social peace. Der Spiegel speaks of “democratic deficit”, of “democracy itself in danger”, when it is the economic policies that daily defend the causes of the Western autocracy that has nothing, but to envy to the Eastern one.
The cycle of the global struggle after 2011
What is just beginning to be glimpsed in the struggles in France, the challenge to power and capital, is what the struggles in the global South achieved since 2011. Back in the 20th century, the global South played a decisive strategic role, even more so than the struggles in the West. The international dimension of power relations is a decisive knot for regaining the initiative. The crisis of 2008 not only opened up the possibility of war (which came with punctuality), but also the possibility of revolutionary ruptures (the reality of struggles moves, it is obliged to move in this direction if it does not want to be swept away by the joint action of war and the new fascisms).
The last globalization not only deepened the differences between North and South, but also created Northerners in the South and implanted Southerners in the North. This in no way implies a homogeneity of political behavior and processes of subjectivation between the two hemispheres. The center-periphery polarization is immanent to capitalism and must imperatively and continuously reproduce itself. Without the depredation of the “South”, without the imposition of “lumpen” development and “unequal exchange” (Samir Amin), the rate of profit is bound to fall inexorably, despite all the innovations, technologies and inventions that the North can produce under the control of the biggest techno-scientific entrepreneur: the Pentagon. This is the underlying reason for the current war. The great South wants to get out of this relationship of subordination – it has even already partially gotten out of it – and it is this political will that threatens U.S. financial and monetary hegemony and its productive and political supremacy.
There are at least two major political differences that remain between the West and the rest of the world. The non-integration of the “barbarians” of the French suburbs in the current struggles, despite the fact that they constitute one of the poorest and most exploited layers of the French proletariat is already a symptom, within the Western countries, of the difficulties in overcoming the “colonial divide” from which the whites have long benefited.
Within the cycle of struggles initiated in 2011 there was a differentiation similar to that produced in the 20th century. Then we had socialist or national liberation revolutions (with socialist overtones) throughout the great South and mass struggles, some very hard fought, but unable to lead to successful revolutionary processes in the West. Today we have big strikes in Europe (in France, Great Britain, Spain and even in Germany) and, on the other hand, real uprisings, insurrections and opening of revolutionary processes in the great South. Let us consider just a few examples – Egypt/Tunisia inaugurating the cycle in 2011, Chile and Iran more recently – to highlight the differences and possible convergences.
It is difficult to compare the Arab Spring uprising with “Occupy Wall Street”, even if there was a circulation of forms of struggle: removal of the constituted power, millions of people mobilized, political systems shaken to their foundations, repression with hundreds of deaths, possibility of opening a true revolutionary process, which was immediately aborted because, as a poster in Cairo read during the uprising, “Half revolution, no revolution”. Occupy Wall Street never put into play power relations of this magnitude, nor did it generate, even if only for brief periods, “vacuums”, de-structuring, delegitimization of the devices of power such as those that periodically determine the uprisings in the South. And it is still the South that opens and promotes new cycles of struggle (see also South American feminism) that are reproduced with less intensity and force in the North. That of Chile, where “neoliberalism” was born after the action of the State-capital machine physically destroyed the revolutionary processes underway and called Hayek and Friedman to build, on the massacre, the market, competition and human capital (never confuse neoliberalism with imperialism or capitalism, one must always distinguish them, carefully!), is another type of insurrection, from which other lessons can be drawn, even if, as in North Africa, they are political defeats.
In Chile, unlike Egypt, a multiplicity of movements (the importance of the feminist and indigenous movement is significant) expressed themselves in revolt. But at a certain moment in the class struggle, one is confronted with a power that is no longer only patriarchal or heterosexual power, no longer only racist power, no longer only the power of the master, but the general power of the State-capital machine that encompasses them, reorganizes them and, at the same time, overflows them. Nor is the enemy only the national power, the sovereignty of a State like that of Chile. In these situations we are directly confronted with imperialist policies because any rupture – as in Egypt (more than in Tunisia) or in Chile or Iran – runs the risk of calling into question the relations of force in the world market, the global organization of power: both the Chilean and the Egyptian insurrection were closely followed by the United States, which did not hesitate to intervene with its “strategic interference”. In France a similar situation exists: the development of the struggles encounters, starting from a “trade union” struggle, the totality of the State-capital machine.
In these moments of struggle a point of no return is reached for both contenders, because it is not possible to consolidate stable forms of counter-power, of “liberated” spaces or territories, only for short periods of time. The Zapatista solution is neither generalizable nor reproducible (as the Zapatistas themselves have always affirmed). It is not understood how a lasting “dual power” can be implemented under the current conditions of capitalism. At the same time, since 1968, the seizure of power does not seem a priority. The current situation is configured like a puzzle! Despite the political differences between the North and the South, transversal problems arise: what political subject to build that is capable, at the same time, of organizing the multiplicity of forms of struggle and points of view and of posing the question of the dualism of power and the organization of force.
The revolts, the insurrections (but also, albeit in a different way, the struggles in France), produce a series of enigmas or impossibilities: impossibility of totalizing and synthesizing the struggles and impossibility of remaining in dispersion and difference; impossibility of not rebelling by de-structuring power and impossibility of taking power; impossibility of organizing the passage from multiplicity to the dualism of power imposed by the enemy and impossibility of remaining solely in multiplicity and difference; impossibility of centralization and impossibility of confronting the enemy without centralization. To fight against these impossibilities is the condition to create the possible revolution. Only under these conditions, solving these enigmas, overcoming these impossibilities, the impossibility of revolution becomes possible.
The second great difference between the North and the South concerns the ongoing war and imperialism. Imperialism names the leap in the quality of capital that operates from the integration of three processes of centralization (economic, political and military) that the First World War consecrates and that reached its climax during “neo-liberalism”. Far from free competition and free enterprise, alien to any struggle against the concentration of power that distorts competition, dissatisfied with the predation operated on a world scale and with the imposition of a reorganization in its favor of Welfare, imperialist centralization allows imposing – as it is doing – the inflation of its profits (“pricing power”: the power to fix the price in defiance of the self-styled neo-liberalism).
The French movement has not expressed itself on the war between imperialisms. The struggle against pension reform falls within this framework, even if the question has never been raised, even if the fact that Europe is at war and the West is recalibrating from Welfare to Warfare changes the political situation considerably. Perhaps it is better this way, even if it is an obvious political constraint. Had it done so, different, even opposing, political positions would probably have emerged. In the global South, on the other hand, the verdict on the war is clear and unanimous: it is a war between imperialisms whose origin is US imperialism, to which the suicidal European political classes adhere. The South is divided between states that declare themselves neutral and others that side with Russia, but all reject sanctions and arms supplies.
In the South, the category of imperialism has never been questioned as in the West. The blunder committed by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire – a supranational formation that has never been formed – shows a notorious difference in analysis and political sensitivity, to the point that they went so far as to affirm, in the last volume of their trilogy, that after having tried war, the impossible Empire would have opted for finance. That is exactly the opposite of what happened: American finance, after having produced and continuing to produce repeated crises – which constantly bring capitalism to the brink of collapse – is saved, exclusively, by the intervention of the sovereignty of the States and, in the first place, by that of the United States, which ends up being forced into war. Contemporary imperialism, the concept of which could be summed up – by greatly simplifying it – in the triangle monopoly/currency/war, also sheds light on the limits of the theories that have ignored it and obliges us to adopt the point of view of the South, which has never abandoned it because it still has it on its shoulders. As we have it too, but we prefer to pretend we don’t!
How to escape from the counterrevolution?
The struggles of the French proletariat are admirable. They are exciting because in them we recognize traits of the revolutions of the 19th century (and even of the great revolution), which confront counterrevolution with a continuity and an intensity not seen in any other Western country. However, it is necessary to remain vigilant. If the French proletarians rise up with an impressive regularity against the “reforms”, so far they have only succeeded in delaying their application or in modifying them marginally, producing and sedimenting, on the other hand, unprecedented processes of subjectivation which accumulate as in the current struggles (from the struggles against the labor law of the yellow vests to the Zones of Defense, the ZADs). All the struggles have been, at least up to now, defensive, whose reactive sense can certainly be overcome, but there remains a considerable starting handicap.
To explain what we call “defeat” – in spite of the great resistance expressed – perhaps we must go back to how wage, social and political conquests were imposed. If in the 19th century the first victories were the result of the struggles of the European working classes, in the 20th century the South played an increasingly important strategic role. It was the revolutions – as a latent threat in the North and as victorious in the South – that jammed the State-capital machine, forcing it to make concessions. What was frightening was the autonomy and independence of the proletarian point of view expressed there. The union of the peasant revolutions in the South with the workers’ struggles in the North led to an objective front of struggles across the “color line” that forced wage increases, welfare policies in the North and the breaking of the colonial division that had reigned for four centuries in the great South. This is the most important fruit of the Soviet revolution (Lenin never went to London, nor to Detroit, but was seen in Peking, Hanoi, Algiers, etc.), which was prolonged by the “oppressed peoples”.
Just as socialism is impossible in a single country, it is also impossible to impose conditions on the State-capital machine from a single nation.The Western working classes were defeated with the advent of World War I, when the overwhelming majority of the labor movement agreed to send the working classes to the slaughter for the glory of their respective national bourgeoisies. By the time the labor and class movement had redeemed itself through anti-fascism, the initiative was in the hands of the “peasant” revolutions, whose force pushed the centers of capitalism eastward. By then, the Western working classes had been integrated into the development and even when they revolted they were never able to really threaten the capital-state machine. In the same period, the revolutions of the great South were transformed into production machines or nation-states.
With the disappearance of the threat of revolution in the North and its real presence in the South, the relationship of forces was radically inverted: we began to lose and continue to lose, piece by piece, all that we had conquered (the passage from 60 to 67 years -that is, seven years of life captured at a stroke by capital- is perhaps the clearest sign of defeat). Until the counterrevolution initiated in the seventies, even when it had been politically defeated, progress was made in the social and economic fields. Today it is losing on both fronts. Now, after the crisis of 2008, significant struggles are breaking out everywhere (the French March is one of them), but unless the network of insurrections and struggles on a global scale is retracted, subjectively, this time I doubt that the cage of counterrevolution can be broken.
Men of good will propose to civilize the class war which is at the origin of the wars between States. We wish them good luck. In a single century (1914 – 2022), the different imperialisms brought humanity to the brink of the abyss four times: the First and Second World Wars, with Nazism as the climax; the Cold War, in which the possibility of the nuclear end of humanity was actualized for the first time. The current war – of which Ukraine will be but an episode – could revive the latter eventuality.
With regard to this tragic and recurrent repetition of wars between imperialisms (not even counting the others), it is a matter of reconstructing the relations of international force and of elaborating a concept of war (of strategy) adequate to this new situation. The Communist Manifesto gave a definition that is still very current, even if it has been eliminated or fallen into the oblivion of pacification: “uninterrupted war, sometimes dissimulated, sometimes open”. Disguised or open, it requires always and in any case a knowledge of the relations of force; a strategy and an art of rupture adapted to these relations. Historically, war – although it seems that also today – can give rise to a “revolutionary transformation” or to a new accumulation of capital on a world scale. Another possibility that Marx and Engels’ Manifesto considered is on the order of the day, exacerbated by the ecological disaster underway: “the destruction” not only “of the two classes in struggle” but also of all humanity.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/ ... evolution/