| Thank you Brian for this statement, more clear than ever - I think you are getting to the root of the problem ‘signalled’ by the gillets jaunes protests.
I have one simple question: What kinds of new institutional forms are required? Or phrased differently, what types of new political design are required for a new political ecology along the lines you describe?
bests, Eric
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
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.
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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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