Yellow Vests

= the Gilets Jaunes movement

Discussion

Jean-Claude Michéa:

"[T]he first merit of this plebian movement (in which women, as in all genuinely popular movements, played an absolutely decisive triggering role) is that it has obliterated the foundational myth of the new liberal left, which holds that the “people” has, once and for all, lost any political significance—except when the term applies to immigrant populations living near major globalized metropolises.

Yet it is precisely this people that is not only returning to the historical stage with a vengeance, but that has already started to achieve—thanks to its refreshing spontaneity and its obstinate practice of direct democracy (“we don’t want to elect, we want to vote!” is one of the [Gilets Jaunes]’ most popular slogans)—more concrete results in a matter of weeks than all the trade-union and far-left bureaucracies managed in thirty years.

This is the “peripheral” France—rural, consisting of small- and medium-sized towns and overseas territories—upon which Bernard-Henri Levy each day vomits his class hatred, despite the fact that, for over thirty years, it has been hit hard by the practical consequences of his liberal gospel, to the point that, in the poorest rural regions, living conditions are even more dramatic than in the “problem” suburbs. It comes as no surprise that this France, which comprises more than 60 percent of the population, has been completely wiped off the left intelligentsia’s radar. It is simply the logical consequence of the process that has led the modern left, since its conversion to the principles of economic and cultural liberalism, to gradually abandon its original social base in favor of the new, overeducated and hyper-mobile upper-middle classes living in globalized metropolises, who represent only 10 to 20 percent of the population and are structurally protected from liberal globalization’s problems (when they do not benefit directly from it) […]

More than anything, it is this “sociological counter-revolution” that explains why the most radical working-class movements (or, at the very least, those with the most revolutionary potential) almost always take root, in our times, outside the framework of left-wing trade unions and parties. Once the new left’s brilliant intellectual elites definitively renounced anything like a socialist critique and became hopelessly incapable of seeing those who produce the vast majority of wealth with their own hands (including Hillary Clinton’s evening gowns and Emmanuel Macron’s suits) as anything more than a sinister and repulsive “basket of deplorables” who are naturally racist, sexist, alcoholic, homophobic, and anti-Semitic, all the conditions were in place to favor, in working-class milieus, consciousness of the fact that, as capitalism enters its terminal stage (to borrow a concept from Immanuel Wallerstein), the left-right divide has lost most of its erstwhile historical significance. Consequently, it corresponds, at present, to nothing more than what Guy Debord, in 1967, called the “spectacular sham struggles of rival forms of separate power.” […]

Whatever the short-term political fate of this [Gilets Jaunes] movement may be (for one must not forget that Emmanuel Macron—good left-wing Thatcherite that he is—will not hesitate for one instant to use every means possible, including the very bloodiest, to break their revolt and defend his class privileges)—it is already clear that it has raised in a spectacular fashion—in a matter of weeks—the political consciousness of those from “below” (notably on the question of the structural limits of this allegedly “representative” system that, at present, is taking on water from every direction)."

(https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/an-interview-with-jean-claude-michea)