The ‘Total Strike’ Has Come for France

Por Frédéric Lordon — Tribune

It’s like a traffic accident: a fatal junction, a death. Macronism is dying at the crossroads for which it has always been destined: the intersection of capital and people. Here, capital appears in its purest form — the form of money that makes money, without mediation: finance capital. And opposite it: the fire. The Financial Times ran an early headline: ‘France Caught Between the Bond Market and the Barricades.’ There we are: right to the bone.

Four decades of neoliberal rot are now coming to a head at this point of terminal crisis — the point where two incompatible principles of sovereignty collide: the financial markets’ claim to sovereignty, as they seek to control all public policies, shape them according to their wishes, and nip in the bud any they dislike; and the sovereignty of the people. Macronism is the party of the former sovereignty against the latter: choose France, please the markets — as for the rest: riot police, eye-gouging, mutilations. 

It took until 2017 for capital to get a man of capital elected. Previously, there had been lingering delays, awkward timidity, hesitation, sometimes even backtracking. But with Macron, everything has become clear. It is no coincidence that the sovereign debt crisis erupted at the same time as the political crisis (let’s stop talking about a ‘social’ crisis): these are characteristic features of a global order headed for ruin, when all their internal processes synchronise, signalling that fundamental contradictions of the matrix have reached a critical moment. The matrix has created its own impasse — its total impasse.

Time of Crisis

How did we get here? 1) Sanctify the financial markets, applaud their complete control over the economy, and celebrate their role as watchdogs of the neoliberal order: distant, abstract, incomprehensible, beyond the reach of any protest movement — perfect. 2) Enact the Tax Law: exempting both the rich and capital from being taxed. 3) Watch as the deficit inevitably widens and the debt balloons. 4) Invoke ‘the debt’ (self-imposed) and ‘the markets’ (deliberately enshrined) to begin the rampage: cut, impoverish, privatise, commodify. 5) Turn the people protesting into enemies and subdue them with weapons of war. Until the day when — no. No more. Then, the bunker that the rich thought they had built turns against them: the final explosion of the matrix. 

The final adjustment variable — the one on which the rich had staked everything, the variable of voluntary servitude — has just collapsed. The daily of the bourgeoisie, Le Monde , is ‘dismayed’ by the ‘accumulation of crises’. One can see why these people are despondent, situated at the intersection of blabocracy (the government of loudmouths) and morocracy (the government of idiots). They cannot understand a thing unless they are destroying things. Their impasse is total. Their equation has no solution; there is no way out. The people have broken free from the straitjacket and forced Prime Minister Lecornu into it. This unfortunate man is under orders to announce a fiscal recovery plan just as the entire country rises up to tell him: No, not this time.

A formidable nemesis: it’s no longer even about Parcoursup, or the de-indexing of pensions, or housing assistance; it’s about everything. No authority can reassert itself when everything is called into question. That is to say, when the primal sovereignty of the people — denied by the usurping sovereignty of capital and the markets — rises up. This gigantomachy was bound to happen eventually. Now its time has come.

La Totale

But poor Lecornu hasn’t seen anything yet. Like the media morocrats, he doesn’t realise that the real financial cyclone — the one involving private debt, AI, private credit and private equity, as well as household debt — hasn’t hit yet; it’s still gathering strength. It will ravage the US financial system and thus the entire neoliberalised world system. Banks and insurance companies will go under and will have to be bailed out. Yet again. With public money. The ensuing recession will be devastating. Deficits will skyrocket. Why? Because this is a crisis of everything: ‘La Totale’.

‘La Totale’ is also a historic opening. Under the guise of youth — astonishing in every respect — popular sovereignty is surging forward. We know the bourgeois order’s only response: to terrorise. But these ‘solutions’ are only temporary. Their scope is limited. The sum total of everything that is unbearable — high schools, colleges, diesel, food, wages, firefighters, healthcare, public services, pensions — has crashed up against the sum total of all those who can no longer bear the unbearable. Behind the high school students spearheading the movement, the larger battalions are beginning to grow restless. The fatal error of Macronism: because it corrupts everything, everything can work towards its overthrow.

When everything comes into play, the balance shifts. The Nahel revolt — from which the current movement draws much of its legacy — had seen the police teeter on the brink of collapse: too many red lights flashing on the ‘big board’ in the Interior Ministry’s crisis room, too many hotspots in too many places across the country, impossible to keep track of — so in came the police brigades, the RAID, the BRI, the madness of a regime already on the ropes. Now, we wait for nothing more than for the working class rise from its strongholds and take the stage: refinery workers, transit workers, sanitation workers. Picket lines everywhere, blockades everywhere: the Total Strike — but ours. From one Total Strike to another: the Total Strike of the uprising against the Total Strike of the bourgeois crisis. The police are overwhelmed, resorting to extremes that will fuel hatred against them to levels where fear is transformed into a desire for revenge.

Images for History

Whatever happens from here on out, this regime has lost. In ten years, Macronism has quite literally destroyed the country, before sinking into shame and disgust. We have long awaited the moment to present it with the bill. And here it is. Macronism is not only morally delegitimised but also symbolically defeated. No movement in France since May ’68 has produced such a wealth of imagery. TikTok has become the channel of vitality, invention and creativity: when we aren’t trembling with rage at videos of police violence, we’re crying with laughter — or simply crying because it’s so beautiful. Who would have thought: TikTok, the return of Simone Weil’s ‘pure joy’.

A tyrannical regime cannot beat it. Here, high school students sing Aznavour’s ‘Emmenez-moi’ beneath the sunlight; there, eruptions of energy right under the bullies’ noses. We don’t know where to look. A radio broadcast arrives from the blockade at none other than the École Alsacienne, the famously elite private school, where a ‘woman in fur’ is asked for her view of the students. The woman in fur says ‘I support them.’ In the background, we hear the protesters sing the final verses of The Internationale at the top of their lungs. Only times of extreme crisis produce scenes so absurd, so joyful. The symbolic disaster is total. There is no recovering from this convergence of images.

La Totale marks the culmination of a bourgeois state that has been looming on the horizon for quite some time: a state reduced to two ministries — the Ministry of the Budget and the Ministry of the Interior. Or, to put it another way: the Ministry of Friends (the markets) and the Ministry of Enemies (the people). As the first runs up against the economic impasse of neoliberalism, the second comes to hold all the power. It is nothing more than a gathering of sadistic thugs at every level; this is indeed the novelty of Macronism.

Even Pasqua, even Pandraud, even Sarkozy, even Hortefeux knew when to stop. The new rulers do not. They take pleasure in beating people, gouging out eyes, maiming, strangling young women or groping them. The levels of sexual violence in police custody are staggering. The police are nothing more than a degenerate force, made up of degenerates. We are living in an era where the police now inspect protest signs. What little bell is jingling inside an officer’s head when he decides which are allowed and which are not? Who gives such instructions? It’s true, as we are often told, that there are lawless zones in the country: they are called ‘the Ministry of the Interior’ and ‘the police stations’.

Such is the hideous spasm of powers on the wane. Macron, a sham ruler and a puppet of historical forces that overwhelm him on all sides, came to power to carry out neoliberalism — that is, to bring it to an end. He has now been overthrown, and by whom? By kids. An abject disgrace on top of a historic failure. A young girl protesting sums up the situation: ‘I don’t understand why they tell us not to revolt’, she says, ‘when our curriculum is literally full of people who revolt — Arthur Rimbaud, La Boétie, Olympe de Gouges’. Suddenly, the morocrats of the 24-hour news channels — old, white, bourgeois — find themselves ridiculed. The unfathomable hypocrisy of bourgeois culture, which cares nothing for what it reads, what it sees, what it claims to revere — which celebrates merely to embalm and neutralise — is exposed. Only young people, from the depths of their integrity, can rediscover it.

Among the avalanche of photos destined to go down in history, one will undoubtedly stand out. It shows a child, sitting on the ground against a police van, handcuffed, beneath the two thugs who arrested him. Everything in the frame is dark: the street, the police vehicle, especially the helmeted officers. But a patch of light radiates, leaping out of the image: the face of this child looking directly at the camera. It’s as beautiful as a Rembrandt.

The entire period has become melodramatic, full of stark polarities — from Rembrandt to Hugo, so to speak. But one subsumes all others. There is the struggle, which is life, and the bourgeoisie, which is death.

Fonte: Tribune