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Title: The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet Author: David Graeber Date: December 11th, 2018 Language: en Topics: Yellow Vests, France Source: Retrieved on August 18, 2022 from https://braveneweurope.com/david-graeber-the-yellow-vests-show-how-much-the-ground-moves-under-our-feet
It strikes me that the profound confusion, even incredulity, displayed
by the French commentariat—and even more, the world commentariat—in the
face of each successive “Acte” of the Gilets Jaunes drama, now rapidly
approaching its insurrectionary climax, is a result of a near total
inability to take account of the ways that power, labour, and the
movements ranged against power, have changed over the last 50 years, and
particularly, since 2008. Intellectuals have for the most part done an
extremely poor job understanding these changes.
Let me begin by offering two suggestions as to the source of some of the
confusion:
1. in a financialised economy, only those closest to the means of
money-creation (essentially, investors and the professional-managerial
classes) are in a position to employ the language of universalism. As a
result, any political claims as based in particular needs and interests,
tended to be treated as manifestation of identity politics, and in the
case of the social base of the GJ, therefore, cannot be imagined it as
anything but proto-fascist.
2. since 2011, there has been a worldwide transformation of common sense
assumptions about what participating in a mass democratic movement
should mean—at least among those most likely to do so. Older “vertical”
or vanguardist models of organization have rapidly given way to an ethos
of horizontality one where (democratic, egalitarian) practice and
ideology are ultimately two aspects of the same thing. Inability to
understand this gives the false impression movements like GJ are
anti-ideological, even nihilistic.
Let me provide some background for these assertions.
Since the US jettisoning of the gold standard in 1971, we have seen a
profound shift in the nature of capitalism. Most corporate profits are
now no longer derived from producing or even marketing anything, but in
the manipulation of credit, debt, and “regulated rents.” As government
and financial bureaucracies become so intimately intertwined it’s
increasingly difficult to tell one from the other, wealth and
power—particularly, the power to create money (that is, credit)—also
become effectively the same thing. (This was what we were drawing
attention to in Occupy Wall Street when we talked about the “1%’—those
with the ability to turn their wealth into political influence, and
political influence back into wealth.) Despite this, politicians and
media commentators systematically refuse to recognize the new realities,
for instance, in public discourse one must still speak of tax policy as
if it is primarily a way of government raising revenue to fund its
operations, whereas in fact it is increasingly simply a way of (1)
ensuring the means of credit-creation can never be democratized (as only
officially approved credit is acceptable in payment of taxes), and (2)
redistributing economic power from one social sector to another.
Since 2008 governments have been pumping new money into the system,
which, owing to the notorious Cantillon effect, has tended to accrue
overwhelmingly to those who already hold financial assets, and their
technocratic allies in the professional managerial classes. In France of
course these are precisely the Macronists. Members of these classes feel
that they are the embodiments of any possible universalism, their
conceptions of the universal being firmly rooted in the market, or
increasingly, that atrocious fusion of bureaucracy and market which is
the reigning ideology of what’s called the “political center.” Working
people in this new centrist reality are increasingly denied any
possibility of universalism, since they literally cannot afford it. The
ability to act out of concern for the planet, for instance, rather than
the exigencies of sheer survival, is now a direct side-effect of forms
of money creation and managerial distribution of rents; anyone who is
forced to think only of their own or their family’s immediate material
needs is seen as asserting a particular identity; and while certain
identities might be (condescendingly) indulged, that of “the white
working class” can only be a form of racism. One saw the same thing in
the US, where liberal commentators managed to argue that if Appalachian
coal miners voted for Bernie Sanders, a Jewish socialist, it must
nonetheless somehow be an expression of racism, as with the strange
insistence that the Giles Jaunes must be fascists, even if they haven’t
realized it.
These are profoundly anti-democratic instincts.
To understand the appeal of the movement—that is, of the sudden
emergence and wildfire spread of real democratic, even insurrectionary
politics—I think there are two largely unnoticed factors to be taken
into consideration.
The first is that financialized capitalism involves a new alignment of
class forces, above all ranging the techno-managerials (more and more
them employed in pure make-work “bullshit jobs,” as part of the
neoliberal redistribution system) against a working class that is now
better seen as the “caring classes”—as those who nurture, tend,
maintain, sustain, more than old-fashioned “producers.” One paradoxical
effect of digitization is that while it has made industrial production
infinitely more efficient, it has rendered health, education, and other
caring sector work less so, this combined with diversion of resources to
the administrative classes under neoliberalism (and attendant cuts to
the welfare state) has meant that, practically everywhere, it has been
teachers, nurses, nursing-home workers, paramedics, and other members of
the caring classes that have been at the forefront of labor militancy.
Clashes between ambulance workers and police in Paris last week might be
taken as a vivid symbol of the new array of forces. Again, public
discourse has not caught up with the new realities, but over time, we
will start having to ask ourselves entirely new questions: not what
forms of work can be automated, for instance, but which we would
actually want to be, and which we would not; how long we are willing to
maintain a system where the more one’s work immediately helps or
benefits other human beings, the less you are likely to be paid for it.
Second, the events of 2011, starting with the Arab Spring and passing
through the Squares movements to Occupy, appear to have marked a
fundamental break in political common sense. One way you know that a
moment of global revolution has indeed taken place is that ideas
considered madness a very short time before have suddenly become the
ground assumptions of political life. The leaderless, horizontal,
directly democratic structure of Occupy, for instance, was almost
universally caricatured as idiotic, starry-eyed and impractical, and as
soon as the movement was suppressed, pronounced the reason for its
“failure.” Certainly it seemed exotic, drawing heavily not only on the
anarchist tradition, but on radical feminism, and even, certain forms of
indigenous spirituality. But it has now become clear that it has become
the default mode for democratic organizing everywhere, from Bosnia to
Chile to Hong Kong to Kurdistan. If a mass democratic movement does
emerge, this is the form it can now be expected to take. In France, Nuit
Debout might have been the first to embrace such horizontalist politics
on a mass scale, but the fact that a movement originally of rural and
small-town workers and the self-employed has spontaneously adopted a
variation on this model shows just how much we are dealing with a new
common sense about the very nature of democracy.
About the only class of people who seem unable to grasp this new reality
are intellectuals. Just as during Nuit Debout, many of the movement’s
self-appointed “leadership” seemed unable or unwilling to accept the
idea that horizontal forms of organization were in fact a form of
organization (they simply couldn’t comprehend the difference between a
rejection of top-down structures and total chaos), so now intellectuals
of left and right insist that the Gilets Jaunes are “anti-ideological”,
unable to understand that for horizontal social movements, the unity of
theory and practice (which for past radical social movements tended to
exist much more in theory than in practice) actually does exist in
practice. These new movements do not need an intellectual vanguard to
provide them with an ideology because they already have one: the
rejection of intellectual vanguards and embrace of multiplicity and
horizontal democracy itself.
There is a role for intellectuals in these new movements, certainly, but
it will have to involve a little less talking and a lot more listening.
None of these new realities, whether of the relations of money and
power, or the new understandings of democracy, likely to go away anytime
soon, whatever happens in the next Act of the drama. The ground has
shifted under our feet, and we might do well to think about where our
allegiances actually lie: with the pallid universalism of financial
power, or those whose daily acts of care make society possible.