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 On the 10th, Prime Minister Juppé announced that all the government's proposals were being withdrawn and convened a "social summit", as called for by the unions, for the 21st.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]