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

>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.

Macron’s decision to make the poor pay for climate change control is scarcely distinguishable from the responses of the oligarchs, sheikhs and billionaires to COP24 and the IPCC report. 20^th century politics was characterised by successive waves dedicated to opposing, overwhelming and ultimately sabotaging the gains of the revolutions of 1917 and 1949, backed by the strategy of corrupting the successful liberation movements of the Global South in 1950s and 1960s. Now at last the losers of 1917-18, who lost again at the end of World war II with the establishment of welfare states, are poised to restore plutocracy on a scale unseen since the end of the Ottoman and Holy Roman empires. The new Kaisers and Czars are admittedly closer to Hearst than the fantastically bearded patriarchs of the European empires, but no less wedded to the model of obscene power and wealth as family business, epitomised by the fact that the only staffers who haven’t been churned out of the Trump White House are the dynastic offspring.

The engagement of oligarchs and plutocrats in destroying anything that might slow the full restoration of imperial-scale gulfs between rulers and ruled rests on shattering even relatively toothless bureaucracies who have tried to hamper the wholescale looting of the planet. Russian and US billionaires spending their tax-free dollars on European fascists desperately want to destroy the EU. The only novelty is the triumph of right-wing anarchism: destroy the state, unhinge any form of organised opposition, in fact any form of organisation, and unleash chaos so the market can triumph.

One of two configurations informs this strategy. Either we have intensely self-interested individuals and clans who are happy to see the world go to hell, so long as they can amass privilege, power and wealth. Or the logic that drives this machinery is not human at all. Because the obscene class have already passed the point where ’more money’ makes any sense – you can only live in so many palaces, after all – there is every likelihood that the plutocrats are not driving this process after all, but that they are components in a larger, no longer human operation. We thought cyborgs would look like Arnie Schwarzenegger: humans with digital implants. The actually existing cyborg is the inverse: a vast network of computers with human implants. The cyborg corporation has taken over.

The logic of the cyborg is to make money now. Extending credit is a way to ensure that next year’s income gets spent this year. In order to create this year’s profit, spend next year’s earnings. To create this year’s profit, burn whatever can be set fire to, and throw the rest into the trash. This system can only survive on massive waste. Waste is not an accidental by-product: there is no present profit without waste, without dumping our excess into the future, in the same way we dump it in the oceans. Cyborg capital runs on waste and debts, financial and environmental, which the cyborg has no intention of ever repaying. That this means it will consume itself does not figure, because only humans consider the future effects of their actions. Forget Transformers and The Matrix. We have already been taken over by cyborgs.

Three tasks:

dismantle the cyborg corporations, carefully, chip by chip

defend even the indefensible bureaucracies, those remnants of welfare’s handbrake on the worst excesses of unbridled profit

and set to building peer-to-peer alternatives now so we have the organisations we need when the shit hits the fan

Free the human seven billion!

Sean Cubitt

Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Goldsmiths, University of London

New Cross, London SE14 6NW

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2018 10:22:40 +0100
From: Carsten Agger <[email protected]>
To: nettime <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Christophe Guilluy: France is deeply fractured.
Gilets jaunes are just a symptom (Guardian)
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

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 Fr?d?ric 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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