Prologue: The Strike Wave of 1995 in France(EdN) [Alan: code pls]
[Note on the background, added by EdN in January 2001:]On 15 November 1995, the right-wing French
government presented the National Assembly with a plan
to reform the social security system which put in
question supposedly irreversible "acquisitions" of
government employees with respect to pensions and
which sought to strip unions of the right to manage
social security funds. Simultaneously, the
state-railway workers of the SNCF were being
confronted in contract negotiations by the requirement
that the network become profitable (that deficits be
eliminated) by virtue of increased productivity. Two
big unions (Force Ouvrière and the Confédération
Générale du Travail) refused to sign any contract
based on this principle. On 23 November the railway
workers went out on strike; the 23 and 28 November saw
the first demonstrations. On the 28th the stoppage
spread to the Paris underground and buses, and on the
30th the electricity and gas workers joined the
action. The government hoped that the strikes by
public employees would be unpopular with
private-sector wage-earners, considered less
"privileged". The unions for their part called for a
general strike. As it turned out, the private-sector
workers, though they did not strike (except in the
sense that they left work to demonstrate), were
sympathetic to the strikers. The press dubbed this
phenomenon a "strike by proxy." On 5 December, there
were demonstrations across the country; on the 7th
they were even larger (more than a million people).
On the 10th, Prime Minister Juppé announced that all
the government's proposals were being withdrawn and
convened a "social summit", as called for by the
unions, for the 21st. The demonstrations continued
notwithstanding: on the 12th a million were in the
street once again, in a total of 270 towns across
France. The unions then called a halt to the strike,
which was effectively over by the 18th, except in the
South, where it continued for another week.
Translation begins.... [Alan: put adition all in italics ???????]
"The only thing the million marchers demonstrated,
with all their retro paraphernalia, was their flight
from the modern world, their fear of a liberal society
that is migrating to every corner of the world but has
not yet, it seems, established its culture of the free
and adult individual in France...." Thus the
[right-wing weekly] Le Point for 16 December
1995. In the same vein, the article evokes a "first
revolt against globalization" and even an "antimodern
revolution". Clearly the partisans of the
globalization of the commodity, in airing their own
fears (for no doubt they are nonplussed now and again
at the very ease with which their agenda is accepted),
said much more about the latent content of this
movement than it was itself able to make manifest.
Beyond a vague awareness of all that has been allowed
to be lost and corrupted - a general feeling that
floated like an aura over the strike of December 1995
- nothing concrete was ever asserted, and certainly no
critique of modern life. Anything that might have
served as a fulcrum for true opposition to the "logic
of the economy" has been insidiously destroyed. (A
people has to be conservative to revolt, as the saying
goes - or at least conservative enough to have
conserved its reasons for revolting.) So what is
there left to fight for? According to Professor
Bourdieu, the answer is "the civilization of public
service". He tells us that "Europe invented the
welfare state. As nowhere else in the world, the
citizens of the Fifteen enjoy old-age pensions, health
insurance, family support, unemployment benefit, and
the basic right to employment. This battery of
socio-economic guarantees, won by the workers'
movement, constitute the heart of modern European
civilization" (Le Monde diplomatique, January
1996). You really have to be a left-wing motorist to
be dreaming of a twenty-first century barely
distinguishable from the old world of never-ending
progress, a new millennium where social-democracy
crossed with ecologism and televiewerdom wrests the
said civilization of public service from the claws of
total production, and where, complete with its social
acquisitions adapted now to the era of tele-labour,
Fortress Europe continues as the ever-flaming beacon
of the rights of man and of a decent salary in the
dark night enveloping the rest of the world, etc.,
etc.
Only a Marxist of the Collège de France variety
could be unaware of the fact that the essence of the
commodity, qua social relationship, is the destruction
of all qualitative distinctions, all local
specificities, to the benefit of the abstract
universality of the market. If one accepts the
commodity, one is obliged to accept the commodity's
becoming-the-world, of which process every particular
commodity is an agent even if it is not made in
Taiwan. For the dynamic values of global commerce to
come fully into play, what is of course needed is a
world that is "open" - open to the infinity of endless
economic effort; open also to the co-optation, at
every level of the social hierarchy, of anyone who
displays marked affinities with the ruling elite:
nihilism, lack of imagination, passionate conformism,
or the coldness of the sadistic character. By
contrast, recalcitrants must be sent to join the mass
of rejected supernumeraries and retards in the
dungeons of sub-consumption and more or less
subsidized nomadism. "In Los Angeles turbo-capitalism
has totally destroyed the family structure. Your own
brother won't help you out. But the economy is
dynamic and employment opportunities are legion"
(Edward Luttwak, Croissance, April 1995). The
vast majority of people must learn to view themselves
as the economy views them - as human raw material.
What the survivors of restructuring learn the hard way
is that their reprieve is in any case strictly
provisional. Everyone is replaceable, and there is
nowhere to hide; even a value-added job can be taken
over by a piece of software from one day to the next.
No amount of redeployment and retraining can mitigate
this fundamental tendency of an unfettered economy.
Each individual fears that grumbling, having bad
thoughts or nurturing doubts about the consumerist
life style may call down the fury of theWeltgeist. Which is why we surround ourselves
with techno-fetishes and pay obeisance to them as a
way of demonstrating our true faith in this invisible
(yet eminently visible) force. It is a way of
partaking of the grandeur and power of the
collectivity. We fancy we can protect ourselves
through absorption, through a mimetic blending in with
the anonymity of an administered society whose
continued sway must surely guarantee the survival of
that human mass on which it depends for its existence.
Servitude itself thus takes the form of a magical
shield. Yet the security it affords can be no more
than a deeper adjustment to the insecurity of an
artificial life.
*****
The initial convergence of defensive interests
between the trade-union bureaucrats and the strikers
at the grass roots could have been brought into
question only through the emergence of a new content
for the protest movement. This opportunity presented
to latent dissatisfactions failed, however, to
crystallize a collective consciousness of the real
state of the world; instead, apprehension as to what
the world might become, once safeguards inherited from
an earlier time were cast aside, blinded people to
what it has indeed already become, to what it has been
allowed to become. "Modernization" thus appeared as
what it also is, as regression to earlier forms
of enslavement, but not as what it isessentially - not as the logical end point of a
dispossession that we have chosen to mistake for
comfort. The general impoverishment of life by the
economy has been perceived solely as literal
pauperization within the terms of an economy not
itself subjected to critical scrutiny. Already,
during similar defensive struggles of earlier years,
only the most benighted of leftists were persuaded by
seemingly innovative forms of extra-union organization
to ignore the desperate silence that reigned over the
absurdity and inhumanity of the very activities that
were thus being defended, sometimes violently. Were
striking nurses ever known to attack scientific
medicine? Did the lorry drivers ever protest the
insane growth of commerce, or the fishermen denounce
the wild plunder of which they are at once agents and
victims? Did airline employees ever criticize the
impulses of a globalized economy that clutters the
skies with its harried managers and mass tourism.
Likewise, during the December strike, we heard
precious little about the very peculiar emotion you
feel when careering at 300kph on a high-speed train
past a nuclear-power plant.
*****
Under the rule of the economy we must learn to
live without knowing what tomorrow will bring, and
give up all hope that tomorrow might be better than
today. Nothing will ever be achieved definitively,
for the very operation of the market machine is an
interminable process of destruction that cannot ever
produce a stable form, an actual result. The
instability of everything, the absence of the
slightest certitude about the future, the collapse of
the illusion of a guaranteed life - all of this is now
the backdrop of ordinary existence. All that remains
after the disintegration of the movement without which
civilization would quite simply never have come about
- a movement that sought at once to guarantee the
security of its constituency and to move forward - all
that remains is the enduring need for protection and
the regressive strategy whereby the leaders institute
a permanent "state of emergency" while herding the led
into the cavern of the cathode-ray tube. That the
insipid guarantees of the "welfare state" should now
be evoked as the marks of a golden age, and that
survival should now call for a more protective State
is eloquent testimony to the nature of modern poverty,
but it says nothing about what will actually come to
pass.
What surfaced during December 1995 was a sense,
censored in normal times, that the past is no longer
any guide to the future and that simply no one knows
what is going to happen; everyone feels, in fact, that
anything at all is liable to come out of capitalism's
witch's cauldron - and, more than likely, the worst.
The princes charming of advertising have been changed
into toads; toads, meanwhile, are mutating into
something else, something never seen under the sun.
The hiatus of euphoric consumerism, ensured happiness
and universal integration is now drawing to a close.
The notion is fast spreading that capitalism, having
destroyed everything that hitherto gave meaning to
human life, is bringing us to the brink of the abyss,
even as it continues to urge us to take a "great leap
forward".
*****
It is absurd, useless, indeed dangerously stupid
to persist in trying to reason against an
unbridled economy by arguing that it destroys not
merely nature but human society. After all, what that
economy sets out to do is, precisely, to become for
the human herd a totality from whose clutches humanity
cannot even dream of escaping. Likewise it is obtuse
to suppose that the electronic networking of the
planet could give rise to a countervailing power
capable of challenging the malignant, computer-aided
rule of rationalism. Utopian visions of a market
economy "with a human face" at the service of
responsible consumer-citizens are so utterly dismal,
so stultifying, that it is barely possible to prefer
them to a sensational cataclysm; but of course the
question is moot, for the very good reason that the
cataclysm of climatic change is already upon us. The
curtain is already ringing up on a new world with
quite unprecedented features before which the
machinery of instrumental reason is reduced to
silence:
Lester R. Brown, president of the Worldwatch
Institute in Washington, the leading international
research centre on environmental issues, is troubled.
After more than twenty years as an observer of the
impact of human activity on natural equilibria, he
feels that the ecological crisis is about to reach the
threshold of no possible return: the natural resources
on offer world-wide, the basis of the planet's
economic activity and social stability, can no longer
meet the demand of the world's peoples, notably their
demand for food. As Mr Brown put it to Le Monde,
"From now on it is war between man and Earth." (Le
Monde, 27 February 1996.)
The whole question is whether our common survival
is to be ensured in the disciplinary mode of a
continually renewed total mobilization that
guarantees the ruling class a sort of perpetuity, as
each fresh disaster or deprivation convinces the
populace of the need for an organizing authority
capable of waging a human war of secession from
nature; or whether, on the other hand, survival will
depend on humanity's emancipation from the economicfatum and its irresponsible hierarchies - on a
humanity fighting its own battle to preserve the
biological bases of life on earth.
This alternative can only seem naive or demented
to those who imagine that they are protected from the
disintegration of the real world by the simulations of
virtual reality and their claim that all is well. For
the others, it exacerbates their isolation and
powerlessness in face of the crushing objectivity of
what exists, the sheer speed of the race to
catastrophe, the social anomie into which they see
people plunged; and it encourages them to withdraw
from this hapless society and attend to themselves
alone, to the small circle of their private
pleasures.
We know, however, that escaping alone from a world
so disastrously unified is a vain hope. Not just
because there is no place to flee, no shelter to be
had, but also because such solutions would in any case
be useless: our happiness requires the company of
humankind. We have no choice but to strive to save
society. But where to begin? Let us say that we must
begin to save ourselves on our own; that we owe it to
ourselves to slough off all the credulities of modern
life - the fake pleasures, products, needs and images
that distress and misguide us. This is not some
austere duty, however: there is much joy in
recognizing the antipathy between one's mind and the
vacuity of a life of mimetism, always shameful, often
risible, poisoned at the source, and in truth simply
not lived. It would be odd indeed if down this
path we did not soon meet other musicians of Bremen
with the same secret belief as us: the belief thatthere is always something better than death.
From Remarques sur la paralysie de Décembre 1995, (Paris: Editions de l'EdN, 1996), pp. 16-19,20-21, 40-41, 43-45. [Alan: check code and style pls]
