Assimilate or Die

TN: Look, I think that we’re dealing with very different characters, but Mitterand and Chirac, a Republican and a Monarchist, had both understood perfectly what was going to happen. Like them, the French elites, especially if we consider the great contribution given by sociology to French administration, were perfectly aware of the explosive dynamics developing in the banlieues: but what could they do? They too were overwhelmed by this neo-liberal wave, which exacerbates conflicts and revolts, and has hindered any possibility for them to control the transformation.

JI: Sorry, but this means that politicians are excused in advance, if it’s always the fault of neo-liberal dynamics.

TN: Of course not. I’m only saying that the revolts are the expression of the incapacity for neo-liberalism to turn itself into state policy. I’m not speaking only of leadership, but of the capacity of the state to exercise governance, that is, to put itself in permanent contact with the movements. This was a capacity that Fordism, with all its evils, had.

Several people have already commented on the disembodied nature of some of Negri's comments concerning the uprisings.  But clearly he is on the right path when he talks about neo-liberlism's weakening of the nation state's ability to respond to economic displacements.  Even the ineffectual French President Jacques Chirac has described the "reign of soft terror" that exists for the residents in the banlieues. Clearly one factor that has contributed to the intensity of the revolt is France's slow, painful incorporation into the new globalized economy.

After reading the interview with Negri I came across an interesting piece by Mark Levine, a middle east scholar at UC Irvine.  He also points to the eroding impact on governance: "What gives contemporary globalization its special disintegrative force, however, is the way it weakens the protective power of the nation-state which, until recently, acted as a buffer (however problematic) against the "assimilation" of whole societies into the global economic and cultural order." He presents this situation in rather stark terms:

Translated into the French situation, this means that a government continually accused of presiding over a "bloated welfare state" actually has increasingly less funds at its disposal to spend on the kinds of reconstruction and amelioration programs once again being promised to the inhabitants of the banlieues in hopes of quelling the current violence. Indeed, in France as in most countries, the state is constantly forced to choose between spending shrinking resources on addressing urgent inequalities or continuing to provide an acceptable level of services to, in France's case, millions of petite-bourgeois citizens and retired functionaires (state employees) who are only a few euros away from moving to the extreme right and into the embrace of Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National.

As the French historian Emmanuel Todd pointed out recently in Le Monde, the immigrants and petite bourgeoisie, who otherwise have "profoundly divergent interests," together produced the stunning "no" vote on the European Union Constitutional referendum, precisely because both saw the Constitution as forcing France along a neoliberal path not faintly in their interests. But as Interior Minister Sarkozy's comments at the start of the violence--he advocated, in language reminiscent of Saddam or Milosevic, "karcherising," or sandblasting the "racaille," or sub-human scum, from the banlieue--laid bare, neoliberal globalization has a nasty habit of intensifying the prejudices and suspicions alternatively nurtured and suppressed by France's republican-nationalist ideology.

While this seems to sum up the current situation, it is rather discouraging that there is no positive alternative on the horizon.  But Jodi has started the beginning of a discussion that may offer something more. 

Comments

[Matt]

Alain, thanks. The title notwithstanding, this is a more nuanced analysis, if one that would seem to further support Badiou's position, such as it is. On the grand scale, obviously Europe still needs some kind of constitution, a collective counter-balancing power to the US particularly. But who is going to take the lead in drafting one that doesn't simply condemn everyone to the neoliberal rush to the bottom? Shouldn't this be a priority on the part of the left, and in addition to weening the petit bourgeois from their status quo comfort, somehow convincing them that France will only be a richer fraternité for having a genuine commitment and openness to its population of several-generation immigrants? This concept of fraternité especially, in France, seems rather overripe for some expansion, and to release itself from the bonds of a patronizing 'tolerance' or unequal charity. No?

Are there not also some things that are *good* about this "disintegrative" force? Shouldn't one be careful in not simply blaming everything on "globalization" after all (having one neutral language (such as English)–just for instance–allows a lot of new communication to take place, and at times even to escape the various trappings of nationalism, not least of all those which are embedded in a native langauge itself).

Anyway, I appreciated the post.

[Alain]

Matt thanks for the feedback. I agree with you that there are positive results to the disintegrative force of globalization. But I also believe the human costs are too high and that our politics have become trapped by free market myopia. It would be great if Europe could offer some kind of alternative to the American model but I am afraid that they are more likely to move in a more xenophobic and neo-liberal direction.

[Matt]

Ah, ye of little faith! I suppose it does offer an alternative in many respects still, though perhaps fading. And nobody ever hears about the grassroots good stuff of course.

[s0metim3s]

In some ways, and while I find Negri's remarks increasingly unsatisfying, his comments here might usefully be read up alongside those in which he talks about the end of mediation, the end of civil society. And, he's no fan of Fordism.

Anyway, surely the contest here isn't between Fordist capitalism and post-Fordist (neo-liberal) capitalism. Or, indeed, nation-state versus global capital, as if the former is integrative while the latter is disintegrative.

The nation-state came into being as part of the world market. Global capital integrates the world as a world market, while it disintegrates previous forms of association. The nation-state arose through the disintegration of past forms of association, and erected the citizen-individual, individuated in a juridical and political sense - just as much as it formed the republic, demos, ets. Besides which, Fordism as a labour-process was precisely about the separation of tasks into discrete jobs on an assembly-line: disintegration and integration in a new form.

I don't see how it's possible to disentangle these connections to say that Fordism is integration and post-fordism is disintegration. Braverman's study of Fordism's labour process is maybe a good way to rethink the apparently seperable motifs of integration-disintegration.

[alphonsevanworden]

" in addition to weening the petit bourgeois from their status quo comfort, somehow convincing them that France will only be a richer fraternité for having a genuine commitment and openness to its population of several-generation immigrants?"

"Weening"? You've been converted by Milton Friedman this week? Someone said no look, Matt, the wealth really DOES trickle down, just the the water trickles through this sugar cube into this absinthe?

And when the 'pampered' and 'nationalist' French and German worker are 'weened' of their pathetic dependence on limiting the rate of exploitation in their territory and guarding their private and communal wealth from virtuously rapacious packs of capitalists, they'll be able to stand on their own two feet, Naked And Manly, just like MCI Worldcom?

[Matt]

Erm, not at all. It was an off the cuff comment and perhaps a bad word choice (Negri's too?) But thank you for jumping all over it. I fail to see how challenging the concept of fraternité and redistributing wealth is a support for Reaganomics. Obviously the wealthiest should be taxed up to their ears, loopholes closed, a vacation or two concelled, even. I suppose it all depends on what one means these days by "petit bourgeois."

[alphonsevanworden]

Er, jumping all over a word like "ween" - which is no mere word, but a whole condensed bit of repulsive liberal ideology, which portrays those to be 'weened' as infantile and dependant on some beneficient magically wealth-producing body, that is, proposes a fictitious image of the status quo, with all kinds of liberal implications - used to describe the plan to expropriate the communal equity of the productive citizenry of a democracy...is this not among the the purposes of a forum like Long Sunday?

"I fail to see how challenging the concept of fraternité and redistributing wealth is a support for Reaganomics."

Well the Braverman is a good recommendation to help you turn that failure into success. What could "weening" the 'petit bourgeoisie' for the benefit of "immigrants" involve, if undertaken outside 'the welfare state'? Only neoliberal programmes - what else? Tax breaks for the rich, incentives for business to hire lots of minimum wage workers. What else could possibly be implied if 'weening' the entire population of social services is requisite to accomplish it?

Am I missing something? What is your plan involving this "weening" for the benefit of "immigrants"? You cut health spending and unemployment spending and pensions and libraries and education, lay off people in these sectors many of whom are people of colour, reduce their benefits, you 'liberalize' labour laws - they are weened and set out into the world as grown ups - what then do you do with these funds you've saved? What are these mysterious programmes outside the model of the welfare state which will ameliorate the situation for the so-called "immigrants"? (French unemployed youth, that is, a portion of whom are young people of colour.)

Mn?

[Jodi]

Alain, interesting post (although too generous to me); you let me get past disgust with Negri and Zizek's recent remarks to think more analytically about them. Yet, I still can't get over the sense that Zizek's in particular are really quite irresponsible.

[Alain]

Alphonse, your response to Matt brings out a great insight (though I do not think it is something that Matt intended): today we find ourselves in a situation where there is no outside to the welfare state that is not appropriated by neo-liberalism. And you are right to focus on "weening": In the US the libertarians and free market fundamentalists use these sorts of terms to suggest people are suckling at the breast of the big bad "bureaurocratic mother" and we must force them to break their dependency.

[Alain]

Jodi, thanks. I did not read all of the Zizek essays that are linked together but they generally seem to be a "cop out" in terms of the significance of any of the recent events (New Orleans, France). I think this might make your project more challenging but also more interesting: Zizek obviously provides a great many resources for looking at the contemporary situation, and yet he seems to employ them in a rather banal, and irresponsible way.

[Eric]

s0metime3s, yes. The integrative-disintegrative break here is too neat. Capitalism has always operated with by balancing the two. Or to put it in other language, "capitalism axiomatizes with one hand what it decodes with the other."

Negri's assertion that state policy is impotent in the face of neoliberalism obscures not just the structural-productive features of capitalism you name, which attempt to defuse the antagonism "outside" of the state, but also that the state still has agents of cooptation: Keynesianism had its socialist parties and unions, neoliberalism has its unions, nonprofits, and NGOs.

The key, its seems to me, is to recognize both the state's capacities and incapacities.

[Matt]

Avw, I apologize. I meant to say "upper class" instead of petty bourgeois. A momentary lapse (either that or I meant to start a fracus). To speak of "weening" the very wealthy, or the relatively nouveau riche (including the largely delusional "liberals"), would take on quite different and ironic meaning then. So you were entirely right to get up in my face, if you believed I really meant the lower middle class should be weaned. On the contrary, I think they more than deserve to be suckled, with good educations, reasonable health care, living wages and excellent public libraries just to start. How odd, that a majority of people polled consistently agree (we're a world of populists at heart!) All very vague and general, I know; sorry.

To the degree that "disintegration" can be used to accurately describe aspects of "globalization" I think it is still appropriate.

[s0metim3s]

Aspects, sure. But it has other aspects which are integrative (and just to be clear, I don't mean that as a mark of virtue).

Alphonse - Braverman's analysis is useful not for girding narratives of progress, but for refusing them - even if those narratives are situated between 1920 and 1960.

Laments over the passing of Fordism are blind to what Fordism is and was, particularly as it rested on the devastation of much of the world, or so-called 'full employment' on the unpaid labour of women, the surpluses derived from colonisation. The decline of Fordism cannot, in all honesty, be entirely sheeted home to capital. Workers, and above all women and the colonised, struggled against its conditions, not least those of the bantustans. And, as an example of those demarcations: the Welfare state was never universal.

[alphonsevanworden]

"Alphonse - Braverman's analysis is useful not for girding narratives of progress, but for refusing them - even if those narratives are situated between 1920 and 1960."

s0metim3s: Sorry, I don't understand what you are replying to here. "narratives of progress" is a compound abstraction - all possible narratives of progress of nothing in particular; its ahistorical; it has no referent; its not compatible with the traditional historical materialism practised by Braverman. His most famous work was a narrative of the progress of the dehumanization of labour and the concentration of capital in the US. But I'm perplexed as to what position you've assigned me on this question.

"Avw, I apologize. I meant to say "upper class" instead of petty bourgeois"

Weening the upper class off their dependence on the expropriation of surplus value you mean? The state is really not about to ween capitalists of rents and profits. We can just forget that right now. Are we going to ween the rich off the comfort guaranteed by the welfare state? How? Why? Why do they take out? There are very few rich people. If they are expelled from the health service, and private medicine is introduced, that'll be the end of the national health service, as in Britain. What's the weening plan?

[Matt]

They could be weened off of corporate welfare, perhaps.

[doubtful dictionary]

Is it not spelled "wean"? I've never seen "ween" before, except in "overweening."

[Matt]

Remind me never to comment again; don't you ween?

AvW, surely you believe the just plain old rich could stand to be weaned from their recent tax cuts, at least. Or pay a bit more for their coffee and underwear, even if it means giving up a ski trip or an opera now and then.

[alphonsevanworden]

Mattski:

www.attac.fr

let's wean them. WE CAN. WE WILL. Another World Is Possible.