Re: <nettime> Christophe Guilluy: France is deeply fractured. Gilets jaunes are just a symptom (Guardian)

[Carsten Agger <agger@modspil.dk>]

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


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