One important lesson that November the 30th, 1999 taught us

Courtesy of Infinite Thought, from an article in Socialist Worker:

The movement in the universities crossed a symbolic threshold with the occupation of the Sorbonne university, at the very centre of Paris. This hadn’t happened since May 1968.

Even the mainstream media sees that the government is in a difficult position. Opinion polls show that the government’s popularity has fallen to abysmal depths and that the CPE is overwhelmingly rejected.

The brutal evacuation of the Sorbonne, the standard lies about the supposed actions of a “radical fringe” and the rising internal dissent in the ranks of the Tories show that it has started to lose control of the situation.

The evolution of the struggle will depend on two factors – the capacity of the student movement to react on the streets to the brutal attitude of the government, and the strength of the demonstrations called for Thursday and Saturday of this week by the youth organisations and trade unions.

The call of the national student coordination for a day of nationwide strikes and demonstrations has not yet been followed by the main unions.

It decided instead to prioritise the Saturday demonstration and only to support the student actions from the outside on Thursday.

But the key to victory lies in the level of unity and coordination between the youth and the workers’ mobilisation. This is what is at stake in the streets, universities and workplaces of France.

You don't say.  Consider this an open thread to post links on current happenings in France.

Comments

[s0metim3s]

Oh, please, not more nostalgia.

[Charles]

My apologies, A.

[Charles]

Only the Bush is making speches again, you see.

[s0metim3s]

I thiiink I get what you mean, Charles. Or, maybe not.

Anyway, my remark was an expression of frustration, is all. The debates on precariousness have been occuring for some time, and my frustration with implicit celebrations of Fordism grow accordingly.

There's Chainworkers, Precarias la Deriva (which Nate could elaborate on better than I), the Frassanito Network, the edition of Fibreculture on precarious labour, and my "Precari-us?" from what seems ages ago, in among lots of other essays from the Mute reader on precariousness.

[infinite thought]

socialist worker on long sunday! bat will be pleased.

[bat020]

Just been chatting to some friends of mine who were in Paris yesterday. Key points are that the marches were thoroughly mixed – lycée students, university students and kids from the banlieues – which torpedos Villepin's attempts to counterpose "privileged" university students to the banlieue youth that are meant to "benefit" from shit working conditions.

Good solidarity from lecturers and teachers on the marches too, lots of them remarking that this could be a chance to have another go at the pensions struggles they lost in 2003. There were also delegations of striking railway workers from the south of France that had made there way up for the day.

Re the violence at the end, apparently the march led straight into what can only be described as a police trap – the marchers suddenly found themselves blocked by ranks and ranks of CRS. So this was a deliberate set up by the French state.

[s0metim3s]

I didn't see anyone here get squeamish about the rioting, such that it's necessary to deploy some 'understanding' of the course of events which deprives protesters of agency.

Given that the protests are 'mixed', and not just demographically, it's pretty clear that there are also differences as to how protests might proceed. Trashings, for one, have been a constant throughout. I doubt there is some unitary 'mass' that is ready to denounce those actions and which one is thereby immediately obliged to mollify.

[Matt]

I liked your article, s0metim3s, however old it is, and hope you don't mind if I quote this bit, from ages ago (it seemed to stand out):

Yet, capitalism is perpetually in crisis. Capital is precarious, and normally so. Stability here has always entailed formalising relative advantages between workers, either displacing crises onto the less privileged, or deferring the effects of those crises through debt. Moreover, what becomes apparent in discussions on precariousness is that warranties are often sought, even by quite different approaches, in the juridical realm. The law becomes the secularised language of prayer against contingency. This assumes a distinction between law and economy that is certainly no longer, if it ever was, all that plausible. It is not clear, therefore, whether the motif of precariousness works to simply entice a desire for its opposite, security, regardless if this is presented as a return to a time in which security apparently reigned or as a future newly immunised against precariousness.

And speaking of old writings, I wonder if one doesn't risk normalizing 'precariousness' somewhere along the way there, too? Anyway thanks for the links; most interesting.

[s0metim3s]

That's an interesting question about normalising precariousness. Though, I guess the question might be recast not so much as an ontological one (which perhaps Judith Butler does in Precarious Life) than about the extent to which capitalism is normalised.

So, in that sense the aspiration for security without the abolition of capitalism is, I think, a big mistake. For instance, there is only means by which there can be (has ever been), say, full employment without 'structural unemployment' or the 'reserve army' which fulfil the function of instilling precariousness in the labour market. And that's through the introduction of forced labour systems.

There are also the more regular ways to ensure protection for sections of workers, and this is generally accomplished by resorting to, say, migration controls or excluding women from certain occupations. But, the proliferation of racism and sexism aside, it is rarely a guarantee of protection even for those workers who seek some relative advantage, since employers can then resort to employing women or undocumented migrants as a ready-made pool of 'cheaper labour'.

This is all schematic, but you get the drift. (The article, btw, was written in 2004, published at the beginning of 2005.)

Btw, on France and the diversity of actions and politics: high school students have been shoplifting en masse after rallies, hundreds of undocumented migrants have just occupied a social service building demanding the repeal of certain laws, and there are parts of the anti-CPE protests whose slogan is 'No CPE - No CDI' (ie., beyond the focus on the problems with this new work contract.

In other words, if the insistence on 'unity and co-ordination' were to be put into effect, these kinds of actions and approaches would be subsumed under the usual machinations of representational politics. Viva la differance, I reckon.

[s0metim3s]

In danger of rambling for too long as well as over-commenting ...

I think you're right about Beck, Matt.

There's an essay by Melinda Cooper you might find interesting (pdf here). It might be interesting to think the play between what you talk about in terms of the diffusion of auto-immunisation and the pre-emption of emergence.

[CR]

Could you explain this:

For instance, there is only means by which there can be (has ever been), say, full employment without 'structural unemployment' or the 'reserve army' which fulfil the function of instilling precariousness in the labour market. And that's through the introduction of forced labour systems.

What would forced labor have to do with any of this? "Structural unemployment" = involuntary unemployment. Forced labor is a solution to voluntary unemployment (say, in the Belgian Congo or proto-apartheid South Africa).

The problem with full employment is that it leads to hyper-inflation, infinitely rising labor costs.

Thus this absolutely brilliant little moment from Woodward's book on Greenspan... Where Clinton learns the "rules of the game":

All the economic models built on years of history showed there was a limit to how high growth could go without triggering inflation. To complicate matters, the economists believed – and recent American economic history showed – that there was a level of so-called full employment. There was a limit on how low the unemployment rate could go without triggering inflation, and it was thought that the range was 6 to 7 percent. This lower limit was called the NAIRU – the non-accelerating inflation rate of full employment. The unemployment rate had started the year above 6 percent and was heading down.

Even [Robert] Rubin insisted that there was an optimum full employment rate of growth.

The president [Clinton] was skeptical and even outraged. So the problems were too much economic growth and too many people working! It was ridiculous, he seethed.

[s0metim3s]

I was being schematic. So, yes, you're right. If you retain a market in labour, you get hyper-inflation, which is, as you note, infinitely rising wage demands, and a crisis for capital. But, if you want to have full employment without inducing an inflationary crisis, you introduce constraints upon this market on the labour side.

We could talk about the Congo or South Africa, but there are more numerous examples, of the German National Socialist recourse to labour camps ...

Work-for-the-dole - which I think is maybe comparable to workfare in the US (?) - is a way of both forcing people to work but, because it fixes the nominal wage, isn't inflationary.

In any case, I'm not sure what 'involuntary unemployment' really means. Surely it gets more complicated if you think about the role of unpaid domestic labour in the apparent organisation of post-WWII 'full employment' in the US or AU.

Not to mention that I doubt very much that waged work is as voluntary as the contract theory implicit in such a formulation would suggest.

[Matt]

Thanks for the Cooper article, A.

The phrase, "venture capital model of war" seems very apt.

...even if this means willing it [unpredictable risk] to happen indeed

[CR]

The discovery of "involuntary unemployment" was essential in the turn away from neo-classical economics toward the end of the nineteenth century. NCE had trouble with any sort of unemployment which wasn't voluntary - i.e. people just don't want to work, as the labor market would automatically rejigger to set wages at a level that would allow for full employment.

In other words, in a neo-classical system, there's nothing but full employment. Anyone who's not working is de facto voluntarily excluding themselves from the labor market - lazy, deranged, unreasonably demanding etc.

The discovery of involuntary unemployment - I want to work but there's no job for me - is, in effect, the discovery of structural unemployment, the reserve army of labor.

We could talk about the Congo or South Africa, but there are more numerous examples, of the German National Socialist recourse to labour camps ...

Oh, but Africa's a pretty damn important topic, when it comes to unemployment. Seriously - apartheid began not as a walling out of blacks, but walling them in to work in the mines. The horror of the Congo - which saw the invention of such charming present-day holdovers as the cutting off of hands - began as a head tax imposed by Leopold II, first in ivory, then when the elephants were all dead in rubber (until the trees were all dead...) The problem, it seems, was that the natives weren't all that interested in wage labor, were comfortably self-sufficient...

In a certain way, much of what Africa deals with today had its origins in European grappling with volunary unemployment on the part of Africans.

Surely it gets more complicated if you think about the role of unpaid domestic labour in the apparent organisation of post-WWII 'full employment' in the US or AU.

The point is this - that even domestic labor aside - "full employment" in the US has never actually meant "full employment." That's what Clinton's discovering in the passage I quote above.

This lower limit was called the NAIRU – the non-accelerating inflation rate of full employment.

One wonders what would happen if every citizen of the US were made aware of the fact that one of the primary duties of government is not just the reduction of unemployment but it's increase, its maintenance at a certain level of discomfort. The fact that interest rates rise when things get too good for the average worker.

[CR]

From Frederic Jameson, "The Poltics of Utopia," NLR 25:

Marx’s anti-humanism, then (to use another term for this position), or his structuralism, or even his constructivism, spells a great advance over More. But once we grasp utopianism in this way, we see that there are a variety of different ways to reinvent utopia—at least in this first sense of the elimination of this or that ‘root of all evil’, taken now as a struc- tural rather than a psychological matter. These various possibilities can also be measured in practical-political ways. For example, if I ask myself what would today be the most radical demand to make on our own system—that demand which could not be fulfilled or satisfied without transforming the system beyond recognition, and which would at once usher in a society structurally distinct from this one in every conceiv- able way, from the psychological to the sociological, from the cultural to the political—it would be the demand for full employment, universal full employment around the globe. As the economic apologists for the system today have tirelessly instructed us, capitalism cannot flourish under full employment; it requires a reserve army of the unemployed in order to function and to avoid inflation. That first monkey-wrench of full employment would then be compounded by the universality of the requirement, inasmuch as capitalism also requires a frontier, and perpetual expansion, in order to sustain its inner dynamic. But at this point the utopianism of the demand becomes circular, for it is also clear, not only that the establishment of full employment would transform the system, but also that the system would have to be already transformed, in advance, in order for full employment to be established. I would not call this a vicious circle, exactly; but it certainly reveals the space of the utopian leap, the gap between our empirical present and the utopian arrangements of this imaginary future.

[s0metim3s]

No doubt we can take up the issue of work in the coming week.

But I've always found utopianism rather scary. For the simple reason that it takes current paradigms and projects them into some idealised future where, hey presto, their scandalous conditions seem to have vanished. The demand for and promise by governments to put an end to unemployment may well be undercut by the reality that they must also sustain it at certain, shall we say, productive levels.

But, contra Jameson, the demand for full employment has merely seen the proliferation of forced labour (workfare, work-for-the-dole), as well as the resort to things like the CPE which will indeed increase employment levels but only by making the distinction between employment and unemployment vanish in that confluence called precarious labour.

Time for dinner in this time-zone.

[CR]

For sure. I think our differences might be largely issues of terminology.

That's exactly what Jameson is saying in the piece - that's why "full employment" (in the sense that I'm describing, that Clinton believes in before his enlightenment, rather than your sense of it) is "utopian."

One other thing. I'm pretty sure that workfare in the US has very little to do with what you're talking about. It certainly didn't come in response to a demand for full employment, but rather moralistic posturing vs. what are called over here "welfare queens." A response not to anxiety about unemployment, but rather the classic American anxiety about unearned income. It is not designed to be a permanent form of forced labor, but rather provides incentive to rejoin the private sector labor market. (I.e. it sucks so bad sweeping cigarette butts in a blue jumper that you'll jump off welfare and into a Walmart job....)

But, yes, let's talk about all this next week.