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Blogs
Prologue: The Strike Wave of 1995 in France(EdN) [Alan: code pls]
[Note on the background, added by EdN in January 2001:]
On 15 November 1995, the right-wing French
government presented the National Assembly with a plan
to reform the social security system which put in
question supposedly irreversible "acquisitions" of
government employees with respect to pensions and
which sought to strip unions of the right to manage
social security funds. Simultaneously, the
state-railway workers of the SNCF were being
confronted in contract negotiations by the requirement
that the network become profitable (that deficits be
eliminated) by virtue of increased productivity. Two
big unions (Force Ouvrière and the Confédération
Générale du Travail) refused to sign any contract
based on this principle. On 23 November the railway
workers went out on strike; the 23 and 28 November saw
the first demonstrations. On the 28th the stoppage
spread to the Paris underground and buses, and on the
30th the electricity and gas workers joined the
action. The government hoped that the strikes by
public employees would be unpopular with
private-sector wage-earners, considered less
"privileged". The unions for their part called for a
general strike. As it turned out, the private-sector
workers, though they did not strike (except in the
sense that they left work to demonstrate), were
sympathetic to the strikers. The press dubbed this
phenomenon a "strike by proxy." On 5 December, there
were demonstrations across the country; on the 7th
they were even larger (more than a million people).
On the 10th, Prime Minister Juppé announced that all
the government's proposals were being withdrawn and
convened a "social summit", as called for by the
unions, for the 21st. The demonstrations continued
notwithstanding: on the 12th a million were in the
street once again, in a total of 270 towns across
France. The unions then called a halt to the strike,
which was effectively over by the 18th, except in the
South, where it continued for another week.
Translation begins.... [Alan: put adition all in italics ???????]
"The only thing the million marchers demonstrated,
with all their retro paraphernalia, was their flight
from the modern world, their fear of a liberal society
that is migrating to every corner of the world but has
not yet, it seems, established its culture of the free
and adult individual in France...." Thus the
[right-wing weekly] Le Point for 16 December
1995. In the same vein, the article evokes a "first
revolt against globalization" and even an "antimodern
revolution". Clearly the partisans of the
globalization of the commodity, in airing their own
fears (for no doubt they are nonplussed now and again
at the very ease with which their agenda is accepted),
said much more about the latent content of this
movement than it was itself able to make manifest.
Beyond a vague awareness of all that has been allowed
to be lost and corrupted - a general feeling that
floated like an aura over the strike of December 1995
- nothing concrete was ever asserted, and certainly no
critique of modern life. Anything that might have
served as a fulcrum for true opposition to the "logic
of the economy" has been insidiously destroyed. (A
people has to be conservative to revolt, as the saying
goes - or at least conservative enough to have
conserved its reasons for revolting.) So what is
there left to fight for? According to Professor
Bourdieu, the answer is "the civilization of public
service". He tells us that "Europe invented the
welfare state. As nowhere else in the world, the
citizens of the Fifteen enjoy old-age pensions, health
insurance, family support, unemployment benefit, and
the basic right to employment. This battery of
socio-economic guarantees, won by the workers'
movement, constitute the heart of modern European
civilization" (Le Monde diplomatique, January
1996). You really have to be a left-wing motorist to
be dreaming of a twenty-first century barely
distinguishable from the old world of never-ending
progress, a new millennium where social-democracy
crossed with ecologism and televiewerdom wrests the
said civilization of public service from the claws of
total production, and where, complete with its social
acquisitions adapted now to the era of tele-labour,
Fortress Europe continues as the ever-flaming beacon
of the rights of man and of a decent salary in the
dark night enveloping the rest of the world, etc.,
etc.
Only a Marxist of the Collège de France variety
could be unaware of the fact that the essence of the
commodity, qua social relationship, is the destruction
of all qualitative distinctions, all local
specificities, to the benefit of the abstract
universality of the market. If one accepts the
commodity, one is obliged to accept the commodity's
becoming-the-world, of which process every particular
commodity is an agent even if it is not made in
Taiwan. For the dynamic values of global commerce to
come fully into play, what is of course needed is a
world that is "open" - open to the infinity of endless
economic effort; open also to the co-optation, at
every level of the social hierarchy, of anyone who
displays marked affinities with the ruling elite:
nihilism, lack of imagination, passionate conformism,
or the coldness of the sadistic character. By
contrast, recalcitrants must be sent to join the mass
of rejected supernumeraries and retards in the
dungeons of sub-consumption and more or less
subsidized nomadism. "In Los Angeles turbo-capitalism
has totally destroyed the family structure. Your own
brother won't help you out. But the economy is
dynamic and employment opportunities are legion"
(Edward Luttwak, Croissance, April 1995). The
vast majority of people must learn to view themselves
as the economy views them - as human raw material.
What the survivors of restructuring learn the hard way
is that their reprieve is in any case strictly
provisional. Everyone is replaceable, and there is
nowhere to hide; even a value-added job can be taken
over by a piece of software from one day to the next.
No amount of redeployment and retraining can mitigate
this fundamental tendency of an unfettered economy.
Each individual fears that grumbling, having bad
thoughts or nurturing doubts about the consumerist
life style may call down the fury of the
Weltgeist. Which is why we surround ourselves
with techno-fetishes and pay obeisance to them as a
way of demonstrating our true faith in this invisible
(yet eminently visible) force. It is a way of
partaking of the grandeur and power of the
collectivity. We fancy we can protect ourselves
through absorption, through a mimetic blending in with
the anonymity of an administered society whose
continued sway must surely guarantee the survival of
that human mass on which it depends for its existence.
Servitude itself thus takes the form of a magical
shield. Yet the security it affords can be no more
than a deeper adjustment to the insecurity of an
artificial life.
*****
The initial convergence of defensive interests
between the trade-union bureaucrats and the strikers
at the grass roots could have been brought into
question only through the emergence of a new content
for the protest movement. This opportunity presented
to latent dissatisfactions failed, however, to
crystallize a collective consciousness of the real
state of the world; instead, apprehension as to what
the world might become, once safeguards inherited from
an earlier time were cast aside, blinded people to
what it has indeed already become, to what it has been
allowed to become. "Modernization" thus appeared as
what it also is, as regression to earlier forms
of enslavement, but not as what it is
essentially - not as the logical end point of a
dispossession that we have chosen to mistake for
comfort. The general impoverishment of life by the
economy has been perceived solely as literal
pauperization within the terms of an economy not
itself subjected to critical scrutiny. Already,
during similar defensive struggles of earlier years,
only the most benighted of leftists were persuaded by
seemingly innovative forms of extra-union organization
to ignore the desperate silence that reigned over the
absurdity and inhumanity of the very activities that
were thus being defended, sometimes violently. Were
striking nurses ever known to attack scientific
medicine? Did the lorry drivers ever protest the
insane growth of commerce, or the fishermen denounce
the wild plunder of which they are at once agents and
victims? Did airline employees ever criticize the
impulses of a globalized economy that clutters the
skies with its harried managers and mass tourism.
Likewise, during the December strike, we heard
precious little about the very peculiar emotion you
feel when careering at 300kph on a high-speed train
past a nuclear-power plant.
*****
Under the rule of the economy we must learn to
live without knowing what tomorrow will bring, and
give up all hope that tomorrow might be better than
today. Nothing will ever be achieved definitively,
for the very operation of the market machine is an
interminable process of destruction that cannot ever
produce a stable form, an actual result. The
instability of everything, the absence of the
slightest certitude about the future, the collapse of
the illusion of a guaranteed life - all of this is now
the backdrop of ordinary existence. All that remains
after the disintegration of the movement without which
civilization would quite simply never have come about
- a movement that sought at once to guarantee the
security of its constituency and to move forward - all
that remains is the enduring need for protection and
the regressive strategy whereby the leaders institute
a permanent "state of emergency" while herding the led
into the cavern of the cathode-ray tube. That the
insipid guarantees of the "welfare state" should now
be evoked as the marks of a golden age, and that
survival should now call for a more protective State
is eloquent testimony to the nature of modern poverty,
but it says nothing about what will actually come to
pass.
What surfaced during December 1995 was a sense,
censored in normal times, that the past is no longer
any guide to the future and that simply no one knows
what is going to happen; everyone feels, in fact, that
anything at all is liable to come out of capitalism's
witch's cauldron - and, more than likely, the worst.
The princes charming of advertising have been changed
into toads; toads, meanwhile, are mutating into
something else, something never seen under the sun.
The hiatus of euphoric consumerism, ensured happiness
and universal integration is now drawing to a close.
The notion is fast spreading that capitalism, having
destroyed everything that hitherto gave meaning to
human life, is bringing us to the brink of the abyss,
even as it continues to urge us to take a "great leap
forward".
*****
It is absurd, useless, indeed dangerously stupid
to persist in trying to reason against an
unbridled economy by arguing that it destroys not
merely nature but human society. After all, what that
economy sets out to do is, precisely, to become for
the human herd a totality from whose clutches humanity
cannot even dream of escaping. Likewise it is obtuse
to suppose that the electronic networking of the
planet could give rise to a countervailing power
capable of challenging the malignant, computer-aided
rule of rationalism. Utopian visions of a market
economy "with a human face" at the service of
responsible consumer-citizens are so utterly dismal,
so stultifying, that it is barely possible to prefer
them to a sensational cataclysm; but of course the
question is moot, for the very good reason that the
cataclysm of climatic change is already upon us. The
curtain is already ringing up on a new world with
quite unprecedented features before which the
machinery of instrumental reason is reduced to
silence:
Lester R. Brown, president of the Worldwatch
Institute in Washington, the leading international
research centre on environmental issues, is troubled.
After more than twenty years as an observer of the
impact of human activity on natural equilibria, he
feels that the ecological crisis is about to reach the
threshold of no possible return: the natural resources
on offer world-wide, the basis of the planet's
economic activity and social stability, can no longer
meet the demand of the world's peoples, notably their
demand for food. As Mr Brown put it to Le Monde,
"From now on it is war between man and Earth." (Le
Monde, 27 February 1996.)
The whole question is whether our common survival
is to be ensured in the disciplinary mode of a
continually renewed total mobilization that
guarantees the ruling class a sort of perpetuity, as
each fresh disaster or deprivation convinces the
populace of the need for an organizing authority
capable of waging a human war of secession from
nature; or whether, on the other hand, survival will
depend on humanity's emancipation from the economic
fatum and its irresponsible hierarchies - on a
humanity fighting its own battle to preserve the
biological bases of life on earth.
This alternative can only seem naive or demented
to those who imagine that they are protected from the
disintegration of the real world by the simulations of
virtual reality and their claim that all is well. For
the others, it exacerbates their isolation and
powerlessness in face of the crushing objectivity of
what exists, the sheer speed of the race to
catastrophe, the social anomie into which they see
people plunged; and it encourages them to withdraw
from this hapless society and attend to themselves
alone, to the small circle of their private
pleasures.
We know, however, that escaping alone from a world
so disastrously unified is a vain hope. Not just
because there is no place to flee, no shelter to be
had, but also because such solutions would in any case
be useless: our happiness requires the company of
humankind. We have no choice but to strive to save
society. But where to begin? Let us say that we must
begin to save ourselves on our own; that we owe it to
ourselves to slough off all the credulities of modern
life - the fake pleasures, products, needs and images
that distress and misguide us. This is not some
austere duty, however: there is much joy in
recognizing the antipathy between one's mind and the
vacuity of a life of mimetism, always shameful, often
risible, poisoned at the source, and in truth simply
not lived. It would be odd indeed if down this
path we did not soon meet other musicians of Bremen
with the same secret belief as us: the belief that
there is always something better than death.
From Remarques sur la paralysie de Décembre 1995, (Paris: Editions de l'EdN, 1996), pp. 16-19,20-21, 40-41, 43-45. [Alan: check code and style pls]
I've seen things you people wouldn't belive.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate.
All those moments will be lost... in time... like tears... in the rain.
Time to die.
"There followed on the birth of mechanisation and modern industry.....a violent
encroachment like that of an avalanche in its intensity and its extent.
All bounds of morals
and nature, of age and sex, of day and night, were broken down. Capital
celebrated its
orgies."
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One.
No dream. I have been broadening Quandary's horizons. I have started listening to
New Wave -- not to be confused with New Age, which is merely elevator music for the
upwardly mobile. I frequent Charlotte Russe's only record store, rubbing leather shoulders
easily with punks and New Romantics, Gothics and casuals. Dressed in fashions that
disappeared five years ago, we pick through albums by bands who broke up before their
music ever appeared in Charlotte Russe. It was the names of the bands that first intrigued
me. Dead Kennedy's. Primal Scream. The Vaselines. Ten Thousand Maniacs. Wet Wet
Wet. The Slits. Butthole Surfers. (Who, in truth, have little apart from their name to
distinguish them.) Names have come a long way since Quandary's youth, when Gerry and
the Pacemakers or Herman and the Hermits were the dernier cri. Despite the attractive
iconoclasm implicit in the names of today's louder bands, I must admit that it is the more
lyrical and reflective music that attracts me -- The Blue Nile, Everything But The Girl --
songs of irrevocable harsh words and obsessions with past lovers. The more pain the better.
I can suck melancholy from a song as a weasel sucks eggs. At first this lyrical tendency
worried me, but it would be a mistake to expect everything in my life to be dark and
forceful. Nevertheless, I make it a point to play only the Sex Pistols and the Dead
Kennedy's when I am in my office. And loudly.
... the language of entitlement to information that I describe in this book is both apologetic and critical. It is far from being a monoloithic aid to the powerful, an immutable system of oppression, a functionally determined expression of the interests of a particular class, or the dynamics of a particular stage in economic development. In fact, one of the more interesting things revealed by this study (and by the study of history in general) is the polysemic and open quality of languages of entitlement. This indeterminate and multivocal quality of our moral traditions seeems to me to be a good, rather than a abd, thing. in fact, it may have a positive but theoretically neglected role to play in cultural criticism. if there is indeed a sybiotic relationship between social praactices and the systems of thought that describe for them and prescribe for them, now can we ever criticize? Why doesn't norm simply follow the contours of fact, like a chair cover following the outline of a chair? Part of the answer I think, is that there is not just one set of cultural practices, one set of norms, and one set of interpretations. To put it another way, the indeterminacy within justificatory systems and the simultaneous existence of conflicting justificatory systems are two important reasons thatb we can make normative criticisms in the first place. Freedom is often to be found in the tension between traditions. this could be called the postmodern qualification.
SSS p.190
Analaysis of science under capitalism in a historical perspective. Like many Italian accounts at the moment it adopts terminology taken from the discussion of fordism v postfordism.
.... and some easing of the intense_feelings_of_physical_discomfort which caharcterised the initial fourty eight hours. For example, the involntary trembling of the thumb of my left hand has now abated, and my jaw no longer feels as if I'm coming down off three Es and in bad need of a spliff to *cane*.
Yesterday (yes, this is from a mail to n)
What was a gentle redimensioning of my nicotine habit has now reached its logical conclusion: total abstinence. Somebody appears to have tied ropes around my shoulder and collar-bones, and subjects them to persistent strain. Further, I notice that I now have a tic between the ridge of my nose and my right eye and my left-hand thumb trembles.
In addition strange noises emanate from my stomach where there also appear to be a gang of miniature interior designers/bio-engineers reorganizing something important. Itching and sweating too. all this feverish denial of temptation leaves me feeling smugly Nietzchean and more than a little catholic!
"....; it seems to me that until the beginning of the nineteenth century and even during the French rvolution, popular uprisings were led at one and the same time by peasants, small craftsmen, by the first labourers and then by that category of restless elements poorly integrated into society that might be highway robbers, smugglers and so on- at any rate all who had been rejected by the reigning system of legality , the law of the state. And in the nineteenth century, in the course of political struggles which permitted the proletariat to have itself recognised as a power with compelling demands...
.....the proletariat was obliged in some way to establish a speration between it and that other ‘agitated’ population. When labour unionisation was founded , in order to have itself recognised, it needed to dissociate itself from all the seditpous groups and from all those who refused the legal system: we are not the murderes, we are not attacking eoither people or goods; if we stop production , it is not in an outburst of absolute destruction, but inconjunction with very precise demands. Family morality which had absolutely no currency in popular circles at the end of the eighteenth century had become by the beginning of the nineteenth century one of the means by which the proletariat was able in some way to establish its respectability. Popular ‘virtue, the ‘good worker’, good father, good husband, respectful of the legal system, that is the image which since the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie proposed and imposed on the proletariat in order to turn it away from any form of vilent agitation, insurrection and any attempt to usurp power and its rules.”
Foucault, 1972
You could not make this shit up.
In a press release today, where they gloat at the fact that they have three prosecutions in course against children for warez activity, they also impart some real pearls of business ideology. And some cautionary words for parents:
Young people are often enthusiastic users, particularly of interactive services like email, chat and instant messaging. These are great tools that have been developed by the software industry so we do not want to limit children’s learning and enjoyment of the Internet. In short, the danger of ‘hanging-out’ in cyberspace is the same as loitering in the wrong part of town. Teenagers can just as easily fall in with the wrong crowd and unintentionally become involved in other serious crimes.
The software industry has been determined to refashion social norms around copyright for quite a while now, and they even managed to have it endorsed as State Doctrine (fear!) during the assembly of the National Information Infrastructure Report between 1993 and 1995. Somewhere out there exist hilarious websites dedicated to teaching children that sharing is wrong. Theft. Criminal.
Then they produce a stooge, one 'Alun Lloyd Jones, a Cabinet Member for Ceredigion County Council in Wales with responsibility for Trading Standards'[wow!] who dropped this piece of passive agressive crap:
"It is never pleasant to have to take action against young people but ...... Research indicates that some parents think such activities can be harmless and therefore they turn a blind eye. In fact, the consequences are broad; these young people end up with criminal records and their parents incur significant fines. Organisations like BSA are making an effort to educate young people about the risks but this will only succeed with the co-operation of parents."
In other words, parents tie down your kids or we'll fuck up their lives and take money out of your pockets - really subtle, eh?
You can find the whole of the press release here.
The tips for parents stuff though is to priceless to omit here.....
BSA’s cyber tips for parents:
1.In addition to the general Internet safety advice already widely available, parents should also:
2. Check that your children understand that downloading pirate software from the Internet is theft and is against the law
3. Check that they understand that selling pirated copies of software is illegal
4. Consider screening terms such as Warez in your Internet filter
5. Get to know the services and websites that your children use to ensure they avoid visiting sites offering illegal software (which often contain additional unsuitable content)
6. Double-check any online purchases that your children make, a web site may appear sophisticated but consumers can be duped into buying illegal software
7. Include the tips above in your own set of family rules about Internet usage and after discussing them, stick them at the side of the computer
The Terrorists
by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
Always on the hunt for gems of noir I strumbled upon The Locked Room by these two swedes a couple of months ago, ever since I've eagerly foraged for the other books in this series. The writers employed the detective fiction form and the contradictory character of their protagonist Martin Beck to document and critique both swedish society and capitalism in an incisive and humorous way. Wahloo died after they had completed The Terrorists, tenth and final episode of the saga, in the 1970s.
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