Re: <nettime> Christophe Guilluy: France is deeply fractured. Gilets jau

On Sun, Dec 9, 2018 at 3:35 PM Carsten Agger <[email protected]> wrote:

I think it's too simplistic to describe the Gilets Jaunes in France as
the right wing's "future electors out swinging clubs".

Carsten, I agree with the points you are making, although you don't see that in what I wrote. The main line of my argument is that Macron is a European neoliberal, as the leaders and affiliates of the majority parties in France, the EU and around the Western world were until Trump and Brexit. Although I can see it's equivocal when taken out of context, my suggestion in the line you quote is that until the left recognizes the predicament of large categories of people who have been squeezed to the point of desperation by the winner-take-all oligopoly, the squeezed are going to vote for some version of the far right. I actually think they have no choice but to do that, and it's good to bring it out on the table - but the urgent job is coming up with a different choice, before the far right instrumentalizes popular anger in a devastating way.

You report that protestors have driven away far right groups trying to join. I would love to hear more about that and what it's like on the street more generally. Popular rebellion is always the sign of an injustice, and in this case the injustice is clear, only the mainstream left continues to make a mystery about it. Guilluy described the geography of this situation years ago and although his analysis can be improved, still it has been borne out in much of the world, so it can hardly be ignored. The point is to be attentive to reality, and one can't do that all alone, it takes multiple eyes and ears and extended conversations. So please excuse the misunderstandings and just go further, I'm always interested in what you say.

Eric Kluitenberg wrote:

"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?"

Eric, your question is not simple, it's the thing that intellectuals should be working on across disciplines. In the US we have seen that single-point ecological measures like phasing out coal, or attempting to regulate watershed health through the Waters of America act, or trying to set aside new natural reserves like the Bear's Ears Monument, have resulted in tremendous political blowback leading to Trump, which is a scenario at least superficially comparable to some possible outcomes of the Gilets Jaunes movement. I know that in recent years you have been exploring a design-oriented ecological strategy which focuses on the creation of specific technological forms, and their coupling with specific sets of behaviors - but as far as I have understood such an approach, I'd say it's positive but quite inadequate. We are in a period of political stagnation so great that people are turning in desperation to the extreme right. The situation is now truly comparable to the 1930s, through of course it is hardly the same. Capitalist society did not come out of the Great Depression because of a few ad hoc inventions. It came out of it due to the total mobilization of science, labor and industry during WWII. The institutional changes required for that were considerable, ranging from the launching of Social Security and other welfare initiatives, to the foundation of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) headed by Vannevar Bush. In short, society faced and surmounted a potentially mortal crisis. Nobody wants to imagine doing this again, but as we continue to reject the prospect, the situation just gets worse.

In this regard, the first institutional form we need is a discursive one capable of admitting, thematizing and discussing the intertwined nature of the economic and the ecological dead-end we are now in. I'm sure you agree with me on this, but it remains to be done. There is no way to just come up with a few good design tricks and spring them on the unsuspecting public (although that is presumably NOT what you mean by political design, so please clarify). What's needed is to publicly discuss a broad approach that has all the scope of a philosophy, all the passion of a myth, and all the reliability of scientific facts. There is no institution for that. It's not happening in the university, it's not happening in art, it's definitely not happening in business or government, and it's not even happening very much in social movements. I think we have to create this institution by enacting it informally, and then pushing it towards extensive formalization. That is already being done to some degree, fortunately, which is why I mention the Green New Deal proposal and the recent, and startlingly different, IPCC report containing sociological and economic conclusions alongside scientific ones. I'm particularly interested in the scientists, because in the face of a life-threatening challenge they realized that their institution was not good enough. They would have to seek out economists, sociologists, development theorists and politicians if they wanted their truth to matter. How many more disciplines would have to be sought out, if a revised and expanded eco-technical truth were to actually be brought into production?

I actually don't think like Patrice, that climate change will suddenly sweep us all away in a dark storm. I think it's already knocking the hell out of society and the long, bumpy, violent ride to come, which will surely outlast my lifetime, has only just begun. The fascinating thing is that right now we are clearly on the cusp of a new systemic round of invention/innovation, led and symbolized by AI. However, we remain on the cusp, because market forces (ie corporate planning departments) cannot overcome the sprawling social and ecological problems that have built up under their refusal of any higher-order system steering. Big corporate bets are never placed in situations of radial uncertainty that only governments can resolve, so there is as yet no massive collective investment in new productive capacity. One new design product, the electric car, is being developed in a concerted, system-wide way, basically because the Chinese Communist Party took the initiative of steering national automobile production in that direction, and everyone else felt compelled to follow in order to retain market share. But this one product is far from enough to make a difference, because there is no widely communicable and implementable vision of a global Energiewende, or systematic retooling of the world energy system that will power those cars and everything else that seven billion people demand. In the US, every environmentalist who learns a little bit about the New Deal, the OSRD etc, says, Oh shit, that's scary as hell, but we will have to do something like that. I agree, but knowing a lot more about the Imperial order that emerged from the Great Depression/WWII, I think that far more critical input is necessary to construct the next world order.

In the 1930s, much of the progressive social innovation in the United States was driven by intellectuals within or close to the Communist Party. I don't think we will ever get the Ministry of Climate Change Economy without some version of the Anthropocene Socialist party. That's my vote for the most urgent institutional invention: a fundamentally discursive formation, able to integrate members from across society, and oriented entirely toward political action.

Eric, what do you think?

best, Brian

On Sun, Dec 9, 2018 at 3:35 PM Carsten Agger <[email protected]> wrote:

On 12/9/18 8:57 PM, Brian Holmes wrote:
> 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.
I think it's too simplistic to describe thet Gilets Jaunes in France as
the right wing's "future electors out swinging clubs".

It is, as Frédéric Lourdon has put it[1], an "uprising not a movement",
and as such it hold many different currents and thus also dangers, but
GJ protestors have driven away far-right "sympathizers" many time. If
you really think the GJ is all about right-wing thuggery and protesting
against climate change policies, you're believing the smears.

A longer piece in NYT put the uprising into context recently[2] by
describing its source: A small-town France haunted by deprivation where
people are abandoning their cars at railway stations for hooligans to
burn because they can't afford to maintain them. And the anger is
directed against Macron's iron-clad neoliberal "reforms" which have so
far consisted of breaking the unions and giving tax cuts to the rich.

And after this spree of spending on the rich, when we want to reduce CO2
levels, what do we do? Of course, we pass the bill to those who can't
afford it, to blue-collar workers in a small-town France already ridden
by deprivation. That's the meaning, or one of them, of the article
Patrice shared.

In some sense, then, the GJ rebellions inspires hope - as Richard
Seymour points out[3], the anger of a lot of groups has gone into it,
and the hope I see is that maybe the people on the floor, blue-collar
workers and lower middle class, are not going to allow themselves to be
screwed over forever. Maybe there are limits, even in the UK and US.
Maybe we'll even see American blue-collar rage directed *against* Trump
in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, the situation in France
deserves our attention, and not our derision.

Cohn-Bendit is just a sellout, a former revolutionary inventing reasons
not to sympathize with the kind of rebellion which could now threaten
the privileges he fought so hard for ever since he settled down and
joined the bourgeoisie.

In the end, though, I share Patrice's diagnosis: This uprising will
peter out as Occupy and the Indignados did, and in the end we'll all be
swept away by the winds of climate change.

Best

Carsten

[1] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4153-end-of-the-world

[2]
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/02/world/europe/france-yellow-vest-protests.html

[3] https://www.patreon.com/posts/23184702