NOT BORED! writes:
"From a Dinner of Ashes to the Embers of Satin"
(On the Riots of November 2005 in France)
Les Amis de Nemesis
No more tomorrows,
Embers of satin,
Your intense heat
Is the [only] duty.[1]
— Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
Many of the remarks made by the inhabitants of the banlieus, rioters or not, and related by the press, hit the bull's eye with respect to the crisis that comes to manifest itself in their cities and forces one to perceive that in these remarks there is an unusually well-developed degree of lucidity.
The "dump-city" phenomenon is so clear and massive that no one can be deceived on the subject -- without wanting to be so, for more or less shameful reasons. But here one touches upon a class of things that capitalist society, if it can prevent one from understanding them, can in no way modify them. Any "amelioration" implies fundamental transformations that are incompatible with the very nature of this society; this is why it is absurd to speak of the "creation of new job markets" at the moment when the old ones are disappearing very rapidly in all of the industrialized countries; or of "raising the level of individual development," while more developed individuals have more needs and desires, which will be even more difficult to satisfy, and such people would be capable of expressing their anger in a more diversified and contagious fashion; or of "raising professional education higher," while education does not provide employment and thus one would simply have unemployed workers who are more specialized than before; etc. etc.
One cannot "improve the lot" of a population condemned by the movement of value (that is to say, by the rarefaction of economically necessary human labor and by the necessity of only exploiting faraway and cheaper laborers) and [condemned] by the "political ideas" that see to the perpetuation of these necessities (the "ideas" that are no longer ideas and the "political men" who no longer have the right to have ideas, since real ideas would necessarily set aside the business plan [2] of "society," that is to say, of capital). If these durable and intangible impasses demonstrate anything, it is the fact that the question is no longer changing society but changing societies.
