Thanks for these texts, Patrice. Cohn-Bendit's fears of authoritarianism
notwithstanding, it's clear that until the left proposes forms of
collective investment that can respond simultaneously to climate change and
to the predicament of the squeezed lower classes that Guilly describes, all
the front-page news will come from the extreme right -- whether it's their
would-be politicians or their future electors out swinging clubs. I read
the article in The Observer you suggested, but it has nothing to say, it
draws no fresh conclusions from what's happening, it just replumbs the
current nadir of public discourse. That's the international
head-in-the-sand standard when it comes to actually facing this new phase
of an ongoing, decade-long crisis.
That's also true in the US, where amid all the necessary protests against
fascism and racism, there have only been the earliest steps, carried out by
the youngest of protagonists, toward a Green New Deal. The situation in
France shows how urgent this is. No response to climate change is possible
without collective investment, by which I mean big money spent by the
government to employ people while transforming infrastructure. That
requires seriously changing the rules of the neoliberal political economy.
Trump has tried to make such a change with his tariffs, under the mistaken
belief that the private sector can come up with transformative investment.
Listen to that: Trump to his credit has tried, but it's a triple failure.
First because China can just reorient its production away from the US,
second because the MAGA rhetoric is geared ONLY to the declining industrial
classes and therefore causes damaging polarization, and third because it
does nothing to change the obscene accumulation of wealth among the urban
upper classes, which has caused so much of the resentment misdirected at
other urban populations. So Trump and all the neo-authoritarians lining up
behind him are ready to move on failed solutions whose most likely endgame
is a state of even more heightened and nationalisitically enflamed
desperation leading to war. Meanwhile in the face of that, what do the
Democrats offer as ideas for combating inequality and responding to climate
change? Strictly nothing, until the recent proposal of the Green New Deal
which is still just a dream of a few brilliant young representatives, plus
the oldest socialist of them all, Bernie Sanders. Let's take them seriously
and start living in the present.
Macron became popular as a bulwark against fascism, but he's very clearly
from the entrepreneurial right, he's a 90s neoliberal. One of the first
things he did on coming to power was to abolish the wealth tax ("impot de
solidarite sur la fortune" or ISF). This was levied every year on people
with assets of over 1,300,000 euros. Suppressing it was a flagrant gift to
the rich that took away 6 billion euros of revenue for the state. At the
same time he put a flat tax on capital gains. This and many other of his
policies are simply continuations of financially led globalization, which
used flexible management strategies to ratchet down popular incomes, while
repurposing government as a vehicle for wealth accumulation. There is no
way to wring more out of these income categories in order to finance vague
measures against climate change. The scam is too obvious, the arrogance is
too blatant. Thomas Piketty made some important comments about it in Le
Monde today, which you can read in French here:
https://tinyurl.com/yellowvests. I'm gonna translate the end of his article:
".. Since the 2008 crisis, and above all since Trump, Brexit and the
explosion of xenophobic parties throughout Europe, the dangers of rising
inequality and the feeling of abandonment among the lower classes have
become a lot more obvious, and many people understand the need for a new
social regulation of capitalism. Under such conditions, serving up another
slice for the richest in 2018 was not so clever. If Macron wants to be the
president of the 2020s and not of the 1990s, he'd better start evolving
quick.
"The worst of it is the terrible fiasco on the climate front. For a carbon
tax to succeed, you have to put all the revenue into social measures
alleviating the ecological transition. The government did exactly the
opposite: of the 4 billion-euro fuel-tax hike in 2018, with 4 billion more
coming up in 2019, he planned on spending barely 10% for alleviating
measures, while the rest amounted to a means of financing the elimination
of the wealth tax and the flat tax on capital gains. If he wants to save
his mandate, Macron must immediately reinstate the wealth tax and use the
proceeds to compensate those hit hardest by the rise in fuel taxes, which
should go back into effect. And if he doesn't do it, that will mean he has
made a choice in favor of an outdated ideology for the rich, at the expense
of the struggle against global warming."
Macron is Bill Clinton as Parisian chic. The French who voted for him
deserve him, just as we deserve Trump. Historic situations demand novel
thinking, plus the resolve to act on it. This new thinking has to embrace
all of society and address a majority of the people, because they are the
ones who have to make the biggest adaptation. There is no wonder why we do
not have politicians who are up to this. The reality is that there is no
coherent discourse on the role of collective investment in the struggle
against inequality and climate change, not in the papers, not in the
universities, and least of all from the left. Either you have the
neoliberal common sense of business-as-usual, or you have radical
anti-authoritarianism. But business-as-usual means more despair, more
resentment and more authoritarianism, so I am not convinced by the current
exclusive focus of the supposedly radical left on anti-authoritarianism.
Without a positive direction for political-economic change along the lines
of a new political ecology, a movement like the Yellow Vests will clearly
evolve toward some kind of fascism, yes that's true. But the problem is not
the fascist essence of the people in the street. The problem is that the
right has only failed solutions to the current crisis, while the left has
no solution whatsoever. This has to change.
The phrase "socialism or barbarism" has a meaning. It means that a
capitalist political economy, left to develop on its own inherent
principles, leads to multiple forms of collapse and conflict, social,
ecological, cultural, international etc. But it also means that we have to
deal with the requirements of socialism, which are first and foremost,
political steering of the state such that a majority of people can trust it
enough to participate in collective programs. Who are the people discussing
this most intensely right now? They are scientists who have turned to
economists and sociologists in order to identify and surmount the blockages
that keep us from dealing with climate change. Read the IPCC report. It
couples the most advanced discourses on equity between classes and regions
(that is, the best part of post-68 left discourse) with a call for the
sweeping, state-led transformation of infrastructure. A typical neoliberal
proposal like a carbon tax that might have worked forty years ago, or
worse, cap and trade that would never have worked, is rejected as too
little too late. This is echoed by 350.org and all the major climate
organizations. It's embraced by progressive young people who don't want to
grow up into social and ecological hell. They can imagine actually playing
roles in a collective effort to overcome a crisis that is now clearly on
the scale of World War II (which remains "the big one" in the minds of most
people). But the whole thing stops right there. No one outside the climate
movement can begin this discussion. And I am sorry to say there is a reason
for that.
The reason is the substantial continuity between the neoliberal right and
left when it comes to the role of the state. The reason is the stranglehold
of the anarcho-libertarian spectrum on any new political thinking. This has
to go. It doesn't mean abandoning the critique of the state. It means
putting that critique into effect, in order to achieve an organization of
society that can address the obvious threats of social polarization,
ecological collapse and war both civil and international. Trust in a new
organization of society can only be gained by building the best aspects of
previous critiques into new institutional forms. This can be done, it's the
task of this political generation and therefore of all of us. But it has to
be done soon or the outcomes are all too obvious. The sounds of smashing
glass and sirens in the streets of Macron's Paris are the sounds of an
inexorable clock that goes on ticking. Climate change is real. If we
continue to do nothing, war over the consequences is next. Socialism or
barbarism is the political urgency of the present.
-BH
On Sun, Dec 9, 2018 at 2:49 AM Patrice Riemens <patr...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> Aloha,
>
> Below Guilly's op-ed, links to two other Guardian features worth looking
> at, today's The Observer's analysis of the Gillets Jaunes movement, and
> a sum-up of the interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit ("we wanted to oust a
> general, they want a general in power") which nicely illustrates the
> disarray of ertswhile leftists who've seen 'the Revolution' switching
> sides ... in their eyes.
>
> Enyvej, (i) the gillets jaunes movement will, immo, petter out in the
> end, and the soon to come final showdown will not be that of the people,
> but that of nature.
>
> Cheers all the same, p+2D!
>
> ------------
>
> original to:
>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/02/france-is-deeply-fractured-gilets-jeunes-just-a-symptom
>
>
> France is deeply fractured. Gilets jaunes are just a symptom
> by Christophe Guilluy, The Guardian/The Observer, Sun 2 Dec 2018.
>
> The author of a seminal account of French society charts widening
> cultural divisions
>
>
> From the 1980s onwards, it was clear there was a price to be paid for
> western societies adapting to a new economic model and that price was
> sacrificing the European and American working class. No one thought the
> fallout would hit the bedrock of the lower-middle class, too. It’s
> obvious now, however, that the new model not only weakened the fringes
> of the proletariat but society as a whole.
>
> The paradox is this is not a result of the failure of the globalised
> economic model but of its success. In recent decades, the French
> economy, like the European and US economies, has continued to create
> wealth. We are thus, on average, richer. The problem is at the same time
> unemployment, insecurity and poverty have also increased. The central
> question, therefore, is not whether a globalised economy is efficient,
> but what to do with this model when it fails to create and nurture a
> coherent society?
>
> In France, as in all western countries, we have gone in a few decades
> from a system that economically, politically and culturally integrates
> the majority into an unequal society that, by creating ever more wealth,
> benefits only the already wealthy.
>
> The change is not down to a conspiracy, a wish to cast aside the poor,
> but to a model where employment is increasingly polarised. This comes
> with a new social geography: employment and wealth have become more and
> more concentrated in the big cities. The deindustrialised regions, rural
> areas, small and medium-size towns are less and less dynamic. But it is
> in these places – in “peripheral France” (one could also talk of
> peripheral America or peripheral Britain) – that many working-class
> people live. Thus, for the first time, “workers” no longer live in areas
> where employment is created, giving rise to a social and cultural shock.
>
> 'Workers' no longer live in areas where employment is created, giving
> rise to a social and cultural shock
>
> It is in this France périphérique that the gilets jaunes movement was
> born. It is also in these peripheral regions that the western populist
> wave has its source. Peripheral America brought Trump to the White
> House. Peripheral Italy – mezzogiorno, rural areas and small northern
> industrial towns – is the source of its populist wave. This protest is
> carried out by the classes who, in days gone by, were once the key
> reference point for a political and intellectual world that has
> forgotten them.
> Advertisement
>
> So if the hike in the price of fuel triggered the yellow vest movement,
> it was not the root cause. The anger runs deeper, the result of an
> economic and cultural relegation that began in the 80s. At the same
> time, economic and land logics have locked up the elite world. This
> confinement is not only geographical but also intellectual. The
> globalised metropolises are the new citadels of the 21st century – rich
> and unequal, where even the former lower-middle class no longer has a
> place. Instead, large global cities work on a dual dynamic:
> gentrification and immigration. This is the paradox: the open society
> results in a world increasingly closed to the majority of working
> people.
>
> The economic divide between peripheral France and the metropolises
> illustrates the separation of an elite and its popular hinterland.
> Western elites have gradually forgotten a people they no longer see. The
> impact of the gilets jaunes, and their support in public opinion (eight
> out of 10 French people approve of their actions), has amazed
> politicians, trade unions and academics, as if they have discovered a
> new tribe in the Amazon.
> France’s ‘gilets jaunes’ leave Macron feeling decidedly off-colour
> Read more
>
> The point, remember, of the gilet jaune is to ensure its wearer is
> visible on the road. And whatever the outcome of this conflict, the
> gilets jaunes have won in terms of what really counts: the war of
> cultural representation. Working-class and lower middle-class people are
> visible again and, alongside them, the places where they live.
>
> Their need in the first instance is to be respected, to no longer be
> thought of as “deplorable”. Michael Sandel is right when he points out
> the inability of the elites to take the aspirations of the poorest
> seriously. These aspirations are simple: the preservation of their
> social and cultural capital and work. For this to be successful we must
> end the elite “secession” and adapt the political offers of left and
> right to their demands. This cultural revolution is a democratic and
> societal imperative – no system can remain if it does not integrate the
> majority of its poorest citizens.
>
> Christophe Guilluy is the author of Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity,
> Periphery and the Future of France
>
>
> ---------
>
> The Observer's view:
>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/09/the-observer-view-on-the-french-protests-observer-editorial
>
> Cohn-Bendit interview:
>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/08/daniel-cohn-bendit-gilets-jaunes-macron-may-68-paris-student-protest
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