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Olivia C. Harrison: Who’s Afraid of Palestine Solidarity?


Image 1: The logo of Mouvement des travailleurs arabes, from the Saïd Bouziri collection at Archives de La Contemporaine.

One question has been haunting me since the current wave of repression of pro-Palestinian speech began in the wake of the October 7 attacks and the genocidal campaign-disguised-as-reprisal that followed: who’s afraid of Palestine solidarity? This is an urgent question on US, French, and German campuses today, but its purview is not limited to the Global North. In fact, this question puts pressure on the distinction between Global North and South, as if the newly minted leaders of formerly colonized nations had created the “new man” that Frantz Fanon so passionately called for (Fanon 1963: 316). As dissidents, intellectuals, and artists from former European colonies have taught us, the simple transfer of power cannot be mistaken for what Fanon called decolonization, a process that begins with sovereignty but does not end there. The mass transfer of populations set in motion by colonial settlement and postcolonial migration is one of the vectors that disrupts the neat temporal and epistemic divisions between the imperial era and the purportedly postcolonial era. So too is Palestine, the object of a century-long process of settler colonization that flares up every few years in a new war of elimination. The migrant question and the Palestinian question are not separate questions. The ways in which they overlap go a long way to explaining the threat Palestine and Palestine solidarity represent across our still decolonizing world.

At first sight, Palestine appears to be an outlier on the sanitized map that has made permanent the borders drawn by European colonial powers – as if Palestine were a belated hangover from the era of full-throttle imperialism and settler colonialism. But the impermanence of Palestine’s ever-dwindling borders gives the lie to the fantasy of decolonization as a fait accompli. Palestine is a thorn in the side of postcolonial regimes too quick to forget the revolutions that carried them to power – perhaps especially those regimes that pay lip service to the Palestinian cause while quashing dissent, including Algeria, a self-declared ally of the Palestinian resistance that has long suppressed any speech deemed critical of the state. As dissidents in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have repeatedly warned, Palestine has long served as an alibi for repressive Arab regimes.

And yet Palestine solidarity is alive and well, as the mass protests of the past two years have shown us, even though the conditions on the ground have deteriorated to the point that the goals of Palestine solidarity in the era of Third Worldism – total decolonization in the form of a single, democratic state for all inhabitants of historic Palestine – seem completely unattainable today. The facts on the ground have all but foreclosed the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty. So why does Palestine continue to pose a threat, not only to the settler colonial regime that has been steadily replacing the Palestinians for over a century, but for nation-states that have apparently no stake in the outcome of settler replacement or indigenous resistance? This is not a rhetorical question, although the answer may seem obvious in the nation-state in which I write, the US, a settler colonial regime likewise premised on the replacement of its indigenous populations. Settler colonial solidarity goes a long way to explain the threat that Palestine and Palestine solidarity represent to Israel and the US. This is also true of other settler and post-settler regimes like Australia and France (more on the latter below). But this does not explain the threat that Palestine solidarity poses to the postcolonial regimes of former European colonies – including former settler colonies like Algeria. This is the flip side of Arpan Roy’s caution against taking Palestine solidarity as a given. If we need to rethink what it means to commit to Palestine, anti-Palestinian backlash, too, should be denaturalized. In what follows I discuss several case studies that shed light on dangers that commitment to Palestine represents in France, Algeria, and the US, focusing on the links that tie the migrant question to the Palestinian question.

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I begin with a document that stages our relationship to decolonization as an unfinished process, one in which Palestine figures among other more or less successful anticolonial revolutions. French-Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili’s twenty-two minute digital video Foreign Office is part of an installation which includes fifteen photographs of the now-deserted embassies of Third World revolutionary movements in Algiers and a silkscreen print that assembles these sites in an “Archipelago” of now disconnected points. The video begins with a medium shot of Ines and Fadi, two young Algerians, sitting side by side at a black desk that turns into an editing table as they handle the maps, photographs, audio and video recordings that together compose the archive of Algiers as a “Mecca for revolutionaries,” in Amílcar Cabral’s poetic phrase: the soundtrack of the 1969 Pan-African Festival; black and white photographs of Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver at the Black Panthers’ international headquarters in Algiers; and portraits of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Agostinho Neto, Mário Pinto de Andrade, and other Third World revolutionaries who gathered in Algiers to discuss their plans for decolonization (Khalili 2015). In the wake of the Algerian revolution, anticolonial and antiracist movements from around the world found refuge in Algiers, sometimes headquartered in the same colonial-era building, vacated to make room for transcolonial solidarity. But this legendary past is long gone. “We have inherited only disenchantment and history in pieces,” Ines observes. What has happened to Algeria, she wonders, to make everyday Algerians yearn to leave for France? Ines speaks in Darija (Algerian Arabic), Fadi speaks in Taqbaylit, an indigenous language that predates the Muslim conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, and they understand each other perfectly. Together, they edit the archives of an era they never knew to understand the present they share, summoning the voice of Algerian writer Kateb Yacine, who left behind the French language – his “butin de guerre” (war booty) – to forge new cultural forms and idioms in a newly sovereign nation that was already betraying its revolutionary ideals.

Shot in Algiers a few years before the pro-democracy movement (al-hirak) took to the streets in February 2019 to protest Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s attempt to secure a fifth term as president, Foreign Office sketches the coordinates of transcolonial solidarity and its undoing in the aftermath of decolonization. What lessons can we draw from Ines and Fadi’s “revolutionary heartbreak” (to cite a term coined by my colleague Neetu Khanna) as we witness the destruction of Gaza in the twenty-first century? And what can Palestine teach us about our relation to the anticolonial past and neocolonial present? The lines that Foreign Office draws between past and present, here and elsewhere are an invitation to rethink what commitment to Palestine means at a time when the intensity of Palestine solidarity stands in inverse proportion to the possibility of Palestinian futurity.

To begin answering the question “who’s afraid of Palestine solidarity,” I take Ines and Fadi’s invitation to return to the work of Kateb Yacine, an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights who deployed Palestine in a twinned critique of the roles Algeria and France played in transforming the figure of the indigène (the colonized) into the figure of the immigrant, divorced from the settler colonial histories that produced it. In response to Ines’s question as to why Algerians continue to leave the “Mecca of revolutionaries,” Kateb’s play proposes that they do not have a choice. Settler colonialism set in motion the mass transfer of populations from the metropole to the colony, from the colony to the metropole, and, if the anti-immigrant right has its way, from the post-settler colony back to the former colony. It’s not coincidental that settler colonialism set this train in motion, or that Palestine, the object of another project of settler replacement, elucidates this dynamic in Kateb’s writings and in the forms of migrant activism that followed. As I will show in my concluding discussion of Palestine solidarity in 1970s France and the US today, Palestine has become a litmus test for national belonging in the settler postcolony.

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In 1970, the beloved anticolonial writer Kateb Yacine returned to Algeria with the aim of working in the languages of the people, Darija and Taqbaylit, better suited, according to him, to achieving cultural decolonization than the colonial tongue he mastered so brilliantly. On his friend Ali Zamoum’s recommendation, he joined Masrah al-bahr (Theater of the sea), a popular theater troupe that had already performed several plays, including one on Vietnam, a topic dear to Kateb’s heart. Based on collaboration, improvisation, and audience participation, the troupe began adapting parts of Kateb’s thousand-page French-language manuscript play, Boucherie de l’espérance (Butchery of hope, 1968-69) in their headquarters in the working-class neighborhood of Kouba, in Algiers. Their first play, Mohamed arfad valiztek (Mohamed pack your bags), premiered on October 17, 1971, marking the tenth anniversary of the murder of hundreds of Algerians peacefully protesting against a racist curfew targeting Français musulmans d’Algérie (colonized Muslim French nationals of Algeria) by Paris police forces five months before the signing of the Evian Accords that would put an end to the Algerian war of independence from France. The irony of the title, Mohamed pack your bags, was initially lost on the Algerian immigrants who saw the poster for the play during the troupe’s French tour in 1972 – they reportedly panicked, assuming it was a call for the expulsion of immigrants. (The far-right National Front party was founded on this very campaign promise in October 1972. It remains the number one agenda of its de-demonized successor, the National Rally, and the plethora of anti-immigrant parties and organizations that have cropped up since.) While one of the self-declared aims of the play was, in fact, to convince Algerians to return to their homeland to continue the work of decolonization, the play is also a fiercely funny denunciation of the collaboration of postcolonial Algerian authorities and French government and industrial forces in recruiting, deporting, and exploiting Algerian workers in France. Mohamed arfad valiztek remained the troupe’s most popular play, reaching an estimated 75,000 spectators during the French tour, from February to June 1972, and another 350,000 in Algeria in the next four years, where the troupe (renamed Al-nishat al-thaqafa lil-‘umal/Action culturelle des travailleurs or Worker’s cultural action, hereafter ACT) continued to perform Mohamed arfad valiztek alongside plays on Palestine (Filastin al-maghdura, Palestine betrayed, 1974) and the neglected role of Imazighen (“Berbers”) and women in Algeria’s millennial history (Malik al-gharb, The king of the west, 1977). Initially funded by the Ministry of Work and based in the popular Bab El Oued neighborhood of Algiers, the troupe’s irreverent and openly critical performances soon caught the attention of government censors. In 1977 the troupe was forced to relocate to the Western province of Sidi Bel Abbès, where they continued to perform until Kateb’s premature death in 1989.

An often bitingly funny satire of the backroom deals between the Algerian and French governments that resulted in the emigration of an estimated 750,000 Algerians by the time the first decade of independence was over, Mohamed arfad valiztek depicts the trials and tribulations of the titular character, a down-on-his luck migrant who faces a series of setbacks that ultimately lead to his triumphant return to Algeria where he resumes possession of his expropriated home thanks to the proverbial nail in the wall (this scene is based on a popular “Juha” tale known throughout North Africa) and vows to join the struggle against injustice “until the end of colonialism!” (Kateb 1999: 336). Although no opponents are named – Mohamed battles in turn the slavedriver, the police officer, the qadi (judge), the mufti (religious leader), and Boudinar (“father of money”) – the satire of the national elites and their French counterparts is impossible to miss. More subtle is the play’s critique of the transformation of indigènes (natives), as the Algerians were dubbed in French colonial law, into immigrants, construed as a disposable labor force that greases the wheels of the French and Algerian economy alike. The satirical name Pompez-tout (“Pump-it-all”), a near homonym of Pompidou, the French president’s name, neatly captures the labor-for-oil deals of the postcolonial migrant economy. But a less expected figure joins the chorus of characters on stage to expose the colonial genealogies of the migrant economy in France: a Palestinian laborer. What does Palestine have to do with Algerian immigration to France?

Mohamed arfad valiztek begins with a scene split between French Algeria and Mandate Palestine. On one side of al-halqa (a circle drawn by the spectators) stand Mohamed I, an indigenous laborer, and Ernest, a French settler; on the other, Mohamed II and Moses, a Zionist settler. The two Mohameds till the land under the supervision of the settlers, until the pairs depart, seemingly taking the same path home. After a good night’s rest, the two Mohameds and settlers wake up and begin chasing a single rooster with the generous aim of offering it to their “guest” for breakfast. The hilarious battle for hospitality that ensues satirizes the contest for indigeneity in a now chiasmic settler colony (“If only this rooster could speak… – He’d say France! . . . – Israel! – Algeria! – Palestine!) but also, as the rest of the play implies, in the settler postcolony, where yesterday’s indigène has been transformed into an immigrant, and the settler of old has become a native (Kateb 1999: 214). Rooting French anti-immigrant discourse in the longue durée history of French Algeria, Mohamed arfad valiztek exposes the settler colonial genealogies of the forms of nativism that were taking hold in France at the time. That it delivers this critique through a comparison with Palestine should not surprise us. If settler colonialism is based on land expropriation rather than labor exploitation, it remains the case that both French Algeria and Israel relied on native labor – notwithstanding the Zionist myth of Jewish labor – and that the indigènes (natives) have been transformed into foreigners in both France and Israel. But the play goes further than this. If the migrant economy is a product of settler colonialism, settler replacement also provides the rhetorical framework for calls for “remigration” satirized in the title Mohamed pack your bags. The fantasy of the “great replacement” – the purported replacement of Français de souche, white French people, by immigrants – was born at the colonial frontier.

When the ACT toured Mohamed arfad valiztek in France, North African migrant workers were already organizing around Palestine. In the wake of Black September, the 1970 massacre of thousands of Palestinian fedayeen by King Hussein’s troops in and around Amman, a group of Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian activists got together at the Maison du Maroc (Morocco House) of the Cité Universitaire in Paris to form the Comités de soutien à la révolution palestinienne (Committees in support of the Palestinian revolution, hereafter CSRP). The first autonomous organization dedicated to the rights of migrant workers and students in France, the CSRP allied support for Palestine to advocacy for migrants, raising money and donating blood for the fedayeen even as they organized mass protests to denounce racist crimes and anti-immigrant legislation. The French authorities, aided by their counterparts in North Africa who were busy tracking their nationals’ political activities abroad (including activism against the authoritarian regimes of Morocco and Tunisia), arrested scores of pro-Palestinian activists and deported several to their home countries, where they were duly collected by domestic police forces. These punitive measures did not deter CSRP activists, who went on to found the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (Arab workers’ movement) and a theater troupe, Al Assifa (The Tempest), named after the armed wing of Fatah (the Palestinian National Liberation Movement). Popular theater was, for Al Assifa as it was for the ACT, a weapon in the struggle for migrant rights in France. Whether or not the members of Al Assifa attended any of the ACT’s performances in France – there is no evidence of this in the archives – the North African genealogy of Palestine solidarity in France is clear. North African migrant workers and students identified with the Palestinians on the grounds of a shared experience of colonization and settler replacement. But they also looked to Palestine for inspiration, explicitly positioning themselves as successors to the Algerian revolutionaries and allies of the fedayeen. Migrant rights were, for these activists, part of a process of decolonization that did not stop with formal independence or at the borders of France-Algeria. The French government was right to suspect that Palestine solidarity meant activism on many fronts, including in defense of migrant rights, just as its North African counterparts were right to see Palestine solidarity as a first step in the struggle for decolonization in the purportedly postcolonial era. For the past half century, Palestine has been a “rallying cry” for decolonization in former colonies and metropoles alike (Said 1979: 125).

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The repression of pro-Palestinian speech in 1970s Algeria and France prefigures the repression of pro-Palestinian speech today, even though there are important differences between these two moments, not least the impossibility of calling for cohabitation in a single democratic state – let alone the right to resist colonialism, once enshrined in international law – without being branded a terrorist. Today the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech remains intimately tied to the suppression of migrant rights, as illustrated most recently by the Abu Daqqa case in France and the Mahmoud Khalil case in the US. In conclusion, I briefly turn to these two cases, which are exemplary of the intimate links between Palestinian and migrant rights, and the continued instrumentalization of pro-Palestinian speech by anti-immigrant policy.

On October 16, 2023, undercover French police arrested Palestinian feminist activist Mariam Abu Daqqa in Marseille, following an Interior Ministry expulsion order that claimed that her presence on French territory after the Hamas attacks of October 7 was a threat to “public order” (Abu Daqqa is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is blacklisted as “terrorist organization” in France and the US). A pioneer of the Palestinian feminist movement, Abu Daqqa was invited by French feminist organizations in September 2023 to speak about the rights of Palestinian women and the plight of female political prisoners in Israeli jails. The timing of her presence on French territory proved ideal for the nativist right. Her arrest came one week after the October 7 attacks and one day after an Islamist Russian national murdered a French schoolteacher, Dominique Bernard, in Arras. Despite legal attempts to stay the deportation order, she was deported to Cairo on November 10 (the state did not deport her to her native Gaza, on humanitarian grounds). In the following weeks, the Abu Daqqa and Bernard cases were instrumentalized to support a proposed law that would make it possible to deport immigrants displaying “behavior not compatible with French values.” Abu Daqqa is a feminist activist, and an unveiled one at that – in this sense, her behavior is presumably compatible with the values of the French Republic. But this does not make her less threatening in the context of France’s ongoing war on terror. To be Palestinian or pro-Palestinian is to be a potential terrorist.

The long history of the French state’s suppression of pro-Palestinian speech offers lessons for activists and scholars who continue to commit to Palestine in a range of diverse contexts, even though we must attend to the specific forms these commitments take, and the particular contours of the backlash against them. Writing as a French-American teacher and scholar based in the US, I am struck by the parallels between the foreignization of Palestine solidarity in France over the past fifty years and the decades-long reduction of Palestine solidarity to terrorism in the US. Remember that one of Donald Trump’s first reelection campaign promises was to deport foreign pro-Palestinian protestors. True to his word, he has spent the first few months of his second term targeting pro-Palestinian activists, starting with students carrying visas and green cards. Although I’m not aware of any inkling within his team that France has a proven record of doing the same, it’s clear that the deportation of pro-Palestinian migrant workers in 1970s France and, more recently, the deportation of Mariam Abu Daqqa offer a playbook for the foreignization of Palestine solidarity in the US, one that fits perfectly in the narrative of the war on terror that governs both French and American domestic and foreign policy. The current arrest of pro-Palestinian protestors by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the most recent example of anti-Palestinian policing in the settler postcolony, where migrant rights are the first (but not the last) to be sacrificed in the name of security. That the government is threatening to deport a permanent resident, Mahmoud Khalil, apparently marks a departure from the French state’s practice of deporting immigrants, whether on French territory legally or not. And yet twenty-first century debates about denaturalization in France, and more recently in the US, make it clear that Palestine has become a litmus test for national belonging: if you’re pro-Palestinian, you’re not really French, or American.

That the criminalization of pro-Palestinian speech has been reenergized in the wake of October 7 and the unfolding genocide in Gaza should not delude us. If the killing subsides, as one must hope it will, Palestine solidarity will not die down, nor will attempts to suppress it. Commitment to Palestine has only become more urgent as a result, particularly for those of us who have the privilege of carrying a French or US passport – at least the kind that cannot be revoked. We know who’s afraid of Palestine solidarity, and we’re not afraid of them.

Olivia Harrison is Professor of French, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California, and author of Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France (2023) and Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (2016).

References

Fanon, Frantz (1963). The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

Kateb, Yacine (1999). Boucherie de l’espérance: œuvre théâtrale. Paris: Seuil.

Khalili, Bouchra (2015). Foreign Office. Digital video.

Said, Edward W. (1979). The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Press.

Cite as: Harrison, Olivia C. 2025. “Who’s Afraid of Palestine Solidarity?” Focaalblog September 26. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/09/26/olivia-harrison-whos-afraid-of-palestine-solidarity/

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Ida Susser: Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc

On June 19, 2022, the united left party, NUPES (New Ecological and Social Popular Union), cobbled together by Jean-Luc Melenchon in less than two months, won enough seats to become the official opposition in the French National Assembly. How should we understand the growth of this left alliance in France which seems to have taken political pundits by surprise?

Since 2015, I have been conducting ethnographic research on progressive social transformation in Paris and, in fact, documenting the emergence of the counter-hegemonic bloc represented in this alliance. I have focused on what has been called “commoning” (Nonini 2007; Stavrides 2015; Susser 2016, 2017, 2018; Dardot and Laval 2019), the process of creating commons, to consider the ways in which this form of popular contestation is transforming political subjects, generating collective ethics, and reconfiguring democracy.

Image 1: Jean-Luc Melenchon delivering a speech at the NUPES convention on 7 May 2022, photo by Hugo Rota

Two aspects of commoning help to illuminate the current elections. The first is the creation of a new political subject and a political vision through a process of sharing and community activities. The second is the process of thresholding or crossing of transitional space that led to alliances among groups who had not previously recognized common interests. I argue that both aspects contributed to the creation of a public oriented in the direction of social justice, inclusivity and a collaborative left leaning political bloc.

To illustrate these processes, I focus on the Gilets Jaunes, a movement which emerged in November 2018.  From the start there was much debate in France and internationally about whether to characterize the Gilets Jaunes as right or left in the context of Brexit, Trump, and most significantly, Marine Le Pen, head of the extreme right party in France (Rogozinski 2019, Balibar 2019 and many others). It is this dilemma that made these protests particularly important from an analytic and practical political perspective.

Historical Conjuncture and Crisis

In 2016, the Socialist government of Francois Hollande, with Emmanuel Macron as economy minister, initiated legislation to change the labor laws. Although policies to reduce public spending and increase the flexibility of employment had been gradually implemented for some time, this major effort by a Socialist government to change the labor laws set off a political crisis.

Because of this crisis, a new era of street protest emerged in Paris. The first of the protests was Nuit Debout, which began on March 31, 2016. This movement echoed the historic squares occupations of Southern Europe in 2011, although it took place five years later.  As previously, in Spain, the call to action was initially to join the unions in support of the traditional labor laws that a socialist government proposed to relax.

The attempt to change the labor laws, and the protests in response, dramatically undermined the legitimacy of the Socialist Party. The political conjuncture of this event with allegations of fraud on the traditional right opened the way for a new political configuration in France. In this vacuum, the newly created party led by Macron, the left party created by Jean-Luc Melenchon in 2012, and the marginal far right, reincarnated by Marine Le Pen, re-oriented the national arena.

Taking advantage of the wide-open field, in May 2017, Macron, without a traditional party but strongly supported by corporate funding, was elected President for the first time. He rapidly began to implement far-reaching changes. In the interests of workforce flexibility, he weakened employment security and later tried to alter the calculation of union pensions as well as increase the age for pension entitlements. Student admissions to public universities were re-organized and health workers and teachers faced layoffs. The threat of worker disciplining in the interests of capital became widely feared. Each change was accompanied by massive social movements and street uprisings.

Over the years of the first Macron presidency, many different groups under different kinds of pressures opposed the new changes. Resistance took the form of both organized strikes and wildcat worker strikes, the occupation of squares, student sit ins and street rebellions. In November 2018, the Gilets Jaunes uprising began. Finally in 2019, a mass movement was organized by unions to oppose the dismantling of the national pension plans. I analyze the Gilets Jaunes within this broader historical arena as well as in contrast or comparison with the protest movements I have been observing in the United States.

The Gilets Jaunes and Commoning

The Gilets Jaunes began as a one issue protest, against the gas tax. The message was spread through Facebook, and other platforms. Still organizing around one issue, the protesters began to meet in real time, at roundabouts, crossroads and along highways in many parts of France. Next, Gilets Jaunes took to the streets of Paris in enormous and unprecedented marches on successive Saturdays for over eighteen months.

As people who lived near one another but had not necessarily met before began to meet regularly, they began to build a shared sense of community. Starting out as a mixture of pensioners, and many poor and disabled people from the provinces, including disengaged socialists and Le Pen supporters, the Gilets Jaunes can be seen as negotiating positions over time. Negotiations took place within the space of the commoning experience during the occupations, the general assemblies, the assemblies of assemblies and the massive Saturday demonstrations.

Image 2: Gilets Jaunes – Acte IX at Place de l’Etoile in Paris on 12 January 2019, photo by Olivier Ortelpa

The community was built in multiple ways: by barbecues and picnics, by bringing children to play in the environment, by building cabins, sometimes making them comfortable for wintry stays. Saturday afternoons were spent grouping close together in the cold to keep warm in wind, rain and snow, and some Saturday evenings around fires and in cabins. Gilets Jaunes wrote personal statements and commentaries on the backs of their vests. They spray painted slogans and arrayed tags, posters, and banners as well as other forms of graffiti (Le Comité de soutien 31 2019) along the routes of the demonstrations. The yellow vests and the songs such as the ever-present “On est la” generated a sense of belonging and became a signal that Gilets Jaunes were present in whatever guise they happened to be. Over time, singing the song simply indicated that people emulated and echoed the Gilets Jaunes in other demonstrations.  Experiences such as this can be seen as the commoning process of the Gilet Jaunes.

Through meeting several times, a week, sharing narratives, singing Gilets Jaunes songs and, dressing in the familiar yellow vests, group members built a, possibly fragile, sense of solidarity in ways that crisscrossed over divisions of family, income, color, and age, and maintained a strong belief that the disabled were part of the community. Negotiations involved a recognition that poverty and distress need not be shameful but were a product of changing circumstances and uncaring or destructive government policies. As a result, in difficult, often physically uncomfortable, conditions, principles of cooperation were established along with a belief in horizontalism and an aversion to political leaders.

Où sont les neiges d’antan? (Where are the snows of yesteryear?)

Analysts have discussed the solidarity of factory floors or assembly lines and even nostalgia with respect to that solidarity (Muehlenbach 2017). Following Lefebvre there has also been a recognition of the solidarity of the streets and public spaces (Lefebvre 1971, Harvey 2012, Susser and Tonnelat 2013). The experience of the Gilets Jaunes points to the creation of a critical public at the roundabouts which generated or echoed the affect of the lost village community.

Such nostalgia has historically generated conservatism as well as revolutionary ideas (Susser 2008, Williams 1983). The question became, in what ways would this community be invested with emotions? It could generate an exclusive nationalism (as today in Hungary, Romania, or Poland) or a wider sharing sense of the needs of the poor and disabled.

In an ever-evolving process, people came to the roundabouts and talked among one another of their economic challenges and domestic hardship. They managed to escape the individual humiliations of poverty and household desperation, of their unrelenting work for not enough pay, their exhaustion and lack of belief in their own or their children’s future. Instead, they talked collectively about the degradation of everyday life – the loss of a village center, a post office, a bakery, and a public square; the loss of local schools; the need to drive long distances for employment and childcare; and the endless drudgery of work which did not allow sufficient time or provide the means to help their children, their elderly or disabled neighbors and relatives or meet their friends (Susser 2020). Their nostalgia recalled the loss of a social existence centered around local services and a secure welfare state and became the basis of their rage against Macron’s neoliberal policies.

Thresholding

The second aspect of commoning which contributed to a progressive or left positioning on the spectrum was what has been called thresholding (Stavrides 2015). Analysts (Stavrides 2015) have talked of “thresholds” to distinguish commoning from more right wing or nationalist movements claiming territory. The idea was that open doors or thresholds connected different groups which allowed for inclusivity while at the same time recognizing ethnic and other identities upon which the different groups were based. If commoning creates groups which are built on experiences of sharing in new ways, thresholds are a basis for sharing across groups. Thresholding be understood in much the same way as rites of passage which Arnold Van Gennep (1960) saw as taking place in three stages, separation, transition, and incorporation (see also Turner 1958).

We might consider moments of liminality, such as occupations, freezing afternoons at roundabouts or possibly the common experience of violence in the streets as the moments of separation and transition. These represent challenging and bonding processes taking place in liminal or temporarily undefined space. In sharing such trying circumstances, people cross thresholds of trust and build bridges across unusual groups, in processes of incorporation.  Thus, what might be understood as prefigurative politics which emerged in the practice of street protests included both commoning and the recognition of many autonomous groups working together: In other words, inclusivity, and thresholds to new populations.

Environment, convergence, and thresholding

Thresholding among the Gilets Jaunes occurred with respect to the environmental movement. Emmanuel Macron had announced the gas tax as an effort to curb the use of this gas for environmental reasons. Consequently, the Gilets Jaunes protest against the gas tax was interpreted by the government and the media as a protest against ecology. Over the next two years, much time and effort were put into convergence. Environmentalists who were also Gilets Jaunes and others who organized joint marches, teach ins and conferences worked to counteract stereotypes and to build thresholds between the two movements.

In February 2019, the environmental movement staged a demonstration on a Saturday afternoon in Paris which the Gilets Jaunes joined. They started together. However, after the first few blocks the Gilets Jaunes parted ways from the permitted route of the ecological demonstration and made their way on a “wild” protest (undeclared) towards the Champs Élysées. Later all the groups met again listening to passionate speeches at La Place de la République. Some youthful Gilets Jaunes were sitting in the square wearing flowers in their hair reminiscent of green protests over many decades. After about 6pm, as dusk settled, violence suddenly erupted, traffic was stopped, and the square was closed off by police. From the point of view of the Gilets Jaunes, the violence was in response to police arrests in the square.

In spite, or possibly because, of the evening clashes, this demonstration clearly opened portals between the Gilets Jaunes and the environmentalists. From early 2019, “The end of the month and the end of the world” became a characteristic slogan of the Gilets Jaunes. Climate activists continued their efforts towards convergence. The Gilets Jaunes never became a climate movement, but the polarization claimed by the government was not supported by later events. Rites of passage in shared marches and other experiences had opened thresholds for collaboration.

Police brutality and thresholds of race

As I described in a previous post in FocaalBlog (Susser 2020), the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the US were followed by massive demonstrations against police brutality in France. Although police brutality was a long-time theme of the Gilets Jaunes, this time the Paris protests, while including the Gilets Jaunes, focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. This recognition of common problems represented newly possible thresholding between the Gilets Jaunes and people of color from the banlieues.

Here, thresholds were opened between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship, and other forms of historical subordinations.

Joint marches between Gilets Jaunes and people of color most subject to police brutality were not an ongoing phenomenon but again this demonstrated the opening of a portal for common understandings.

Image 3: “Who protects us from the police?” Gilets Jaunes protest in Tours on 12 January 2019, photo by Guillame70

Unions and strikes: thresholding on the left

Many Gilets Jaunes were suspicious of unions and many unions refused to officially march with Gilets Jaunes. However, despite this contentious relationship, there were collaborative efforts on May Day marches and elsewhere. Gilets Jaunes picketed many early mornings with bus drivers when they were out on strike. After the strike, the bus drivers organized a barbecue in front of a bus headquarters for Gilets Jaunes who had come out on those cold winter mornings: one of many thresholding events among strikers and Gilets Jaunes.

The silence of others: a more controversial example of thresholding

While there was openness among the Gilets Jaunes about not having enough to live on and many domestic challenges, Gilets Jaunes avoided talking about the politics of left and right. Their reticence over political persuasions was not surprising in the polarized political situation of France. In 2017, Macron had successfully used the fear of fascism and the history of the Vichy government to mobilize voters in opposition to Marine Le Pen in the second-round elections.

In 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Gilets Jaunes poured into Paris from the provinces, both Le Pen, on the extreme right, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, on the left, pledged support. Reporters and participants claimed that in ACTE 3, Le Pen nationalists led the assault on the Arc de Triomphe. The international leftist Black Bloc may have led the attack on the elite restaurant Le Fouquet a few months later. The participation of many on the left in the protests, and the roundabouts over time led to a movement that called for a diverse democratic voice and the extreme right became marginalized.

While the Gilets Jaunes expressed their rage in breaking windows and other property and participated in attacks on the Arc de Triomphe and Le Fouquet, they did not accept political leadership from either the far right or the left. Silence with respect to political affiliation and the rejection of an official leadership remained a determined response.

Although disagreeing in fundamental ways, Gilets Jaunes were more or less uniform in their hatred of Macron. They believed that he was “stealing the state” with his privatization policies and cutbacks in funding for services and public employment.  They blamed the government for the destruction of a middle-class lifestyle either for themselves or for their children.

Collaboration for a political bloc was not based on a romantic image of common identity. Rather it was built on a restrained acceptance of political difference in a common rage about the loss of accustomed living conditions. This contrasts sharply with the US where polarization between left and right has become more extreme.

Trump, class, and thresholds in the United States

Although the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders certainly raised the possibility (Susser 2018), no political bloc has yet emerged to work across the vicious polarization in the United States. Trump demonstrators also come from the shrinking middle class and displaced affluent working class partially represented in the Gilets Jaunes. However, they have moved to the right and responded to the Trumpian rhetoric of anti-immigrants, whispered racism, antisemitism and now even the adoption of theories of the Great Replacement. What can explain these different reactions to some similar circumstances?

Analysts have been concerned that Gilets Jaunes, like Trump supporters, were opening an avenue for the antisemitism, racism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric expressed by the growing far right. Indeed, in recognition of the popularity of Le Pen, Macron adopted some rightwing exclusive rhetoric. A popular surge to the right was a frightening possibility. However, the Gilets Jaunes did not evolve into a movement fundamentally based on hatred of the other. Instead, as a movement they focused their desperation and rage against Macron’s shredding of the welfare state and reduction in investment in areas outside gentrified Paris (Hazard 2020). They demanded a more receptive democracy and not an authoritarian state.

Conclusions

As political pundits have finally noticed, a new political bloc or a working class with consciousness or agency is emerging. Commoning and the generation of shared values as well as thresholding across autonomous groups were particularly significant in the long-term building of this oppositional left bloc. An important part of this thresholding was the ability to by-pass the polarization of the extreme right and the extreme left. This unusual collaboration, rarely the product of any explicit negotiations, allowed the extraordinary and inspirational mass movement of the Gilets Jaunes to avoid the exclusive and racist nationalism evident in the US.

In the presidential elections of 2022, Le Pen, as in 2017, made it through to the second round. However, Melenchon came in a close third. Macron, lacking the broad support evident in 2017, relied on the anti-fascism of the left to pull him through the second round. The power of the left to support Macron against Le Pen was finally negotiated into NUPES, a united left front for the deputy elections for the National Assembly in June 2022. 

In the June elections, NUPES won enough seats to become an official opposition and deny Macron his majority in the National Assembly. Some of Macron’s nominated ministers did not even make it into the Assembly. Macron was no longer able to pass the much-hated changes in pensions or his other policies. Marine Le Pen also won more seats than previously.   Nevertheless, the success of NUPES clearly represents an unheard-of situation in the fifth French Republic where the President is generally rubber stamped by a weak National Assembly. This new powerful counter-hegemonic political bloc should come as no surprise. It has been formed over five years of extraordinary protest including the collaborative politics of commoning, thresholding and silence in the Gilets Jaunes collective efforts. The forthcoming regime will have to take these progressive voices into account.

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.

References

Balibar, Etienne. 2019. Le sens du face-à-face. In Joseph Confavreux (ed.). Le Fond de l’Air Est Jaune. Editions Seuil

Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. 2019. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hazard, Benoit. 2020. Lorsque les ‘sans-parts’ se rallient au ‘pouvoir vivre’. Ethnographie des associations des gilets jaunes sur les ronds-points de l’Oise. Condition Humaine/ Condition Politique 1 https://revues.mshparisnord.fr/chcp/index.php?id=237#text

Lefebvre, Henri 2003. The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2017. The Body of Solidarity. Heritage, Memory, and Materiality in Post-Industrial Italy. Comparative Studies of Society and History 59(1), 96-126.

Comité de soutien 31. 2019. La rue etait noire de jaunes – 500 slogans, tags, affiches, pancartes, dessins, photos, banderoles….  Éditions du croquant.

Nonini, Donald M. (ed.) 2007. The Global Idea of ‘The Commons’. Berghahn

Books.

Rogozinski, Jacob. 2019. Démocratie Sauvage. Lignes 59, 23-36.

Stavrides, Stavros. 2015. Common Space as Threshold Space: Urban Commoning in Struggles to Re-Appropriate Public Space. Footprint 9(1), 9–19.

Susser, Ida. 2016. Considering the urban commons: Anthropological approaches to social movements. Dialectical Anthropology 40(3), 183–198.

Susser, Ida. 2017. Commoning in New York City, Barcelona, and Paris: Notes and Observations from the Field. Focaal 79, 6-22.

Susser, Ida. 2018 Re-envisioning Social Movements in the Global City: from Fordism to the neoliberal era. In Don Kalb and Mao Mollona (eds.). Worldwide Urban Mobilizations. Class struggles and Urban Commoning. Berghahn Books.

Susser, Ida. 2020. Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries? FocaalBlog, December 3, https://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser-covid-police-brutality-and-race-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries/

Susser, Ida. 2021. “They are Stealing the State”. Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). Urban Ethics. Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities. Routledge.

Susser Ida, and Stéphane Tonnelat. 2013. Transformative cities: The three urbans

commons. Focaal 66,105-121.

Turner, Victor. 1958. Schism and Continuity. Manchester University Press.

Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage.University of Chicago Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. Columbia University

Press.

Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2022. “Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc.” Focaalblog, 21 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/21/ida-susser-melenchon-the-creation-of-a-left-political-bloc/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Ieva Snikersproge: Jobs or ecology? Why green growth is a pipe dream and how the pandemic could change this

My interest in the tensions between job preservation and ecological transition comes from my fieldwork among neorurals in Diois, a relatively isolated mountainous area in Southeastern France. The term neorurals (a literal translation from French néoruraux) refers to a diverse group of urban-to-rural migrants; one of its major components is back-to-the-landers who move to the countryside because they want to live in an environmentally friendly manner. The modern neorural movement is about fifty years old and has been at the forefront of inventing new, environmentally friendly ways of living. For example, neorurals have been pioneers in organic farming, they have experimented with environmentally friendly construction techniques, and have re-localized production chains, such as washing, brushing, colouring, and threading of wool, which disappeared from France because they were judged as economically unviable.

The economic dissolvability of environmental practice

It is curious that, despite neorural experiments using extant ecological alternatives for nearly fifty years, they struggle to become the mainstream. It is mainly because these ecological initiatives are more labour-intensive than conventional choices and, hence, are harder to access.  By and large, there are two ways to get to environmentally friendly goods, such as organic food, a passive house, and a locally produced woollen pullover. First, it is possible to buy them on the market, but they will inevitably be upmarket goods because the price needs to cover the longer working hours involved in producing them. This poses a serious limitation because these goods become out of reach for most people, particularly in rural areas, where there are very few jobs in competitive, well-paying industries.

A blonde, white person in a dirty jacket and work boots kneels on a gravel floor lined with boards, holding a power drill.
Image 1: A voluntary worker helping to build a self-constructed, ecological house in Diois, France, photo by Ieva Snikersproge

The second option for accessing these goods is self-producing them. In economically poor areas, such as where I did my fieldwork, this was a common, if complicated option. At first glance it might appear to be a “free” solution, but it requires access to space, land and/or other expensive inputs that cannot be self-produced and thus necessitate monetary resources. Moreover, in many cases, self-production imposes imperial time demands that are hardly compatible with a regular job. In the end, through self-production, essentially “productive” environmental practices, such as organic vegetable growing or construction of houses, become “reproductive” activities subordinated to money and time dispositions of everyone. There is a kind of economic insolvability innate to environmentally friendly practices because they require “uncompetitive” amounts of work.

Of course, neorurals represent a marginal fringe of French society, but the environmental crisis has become a mainstream policy concern. The neorurals show that, from a technical point of view, it is possible to dramatically reduce the footprint of our livelihoods by re-localizing production and reducing our needs. However, there are socio-economic impediments that limit the ability for this to become a mainstream solution. For now, environmentally friendly practices are either “free” but do not allow practitioners to make a living, or they allow for a living but are reserved for well-paid elites and well-funded institutions. In other words, ecological transition is not only a technical but also, and probably primarily, a socio-economic problem.

Economy and jobs: “No matter how much it costs”

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a major turnaround in France’s macro-economic policy. Emmanuel Macron, the current French president, is known as a follower of right-wing economic policy. Just to give a few examples, he has sought to reduce France’s sovereign debt by decreasing state expenditure and to increase the age of retirement to balance the budget of pensions. However, when Macron announced the first social confinement on March 12, 2020, he immediately added, “the government will mobilize all the necessary means (…) to save lives no matter how much it costs.” Macron’s speech echoed the European Central Bank’s (ECB) former president, Mario Draghi’s, famous phrase “whatever it takes,” which showed his willingness to open the tap of public money to assume all monetary costs of his political decisions.

Macron’s decision meant massive state expenditure, not only to buy medical equipment and boost hospitals but also to “avoid the collapse of the national economy and mass unemployment” (Coeuré and Inspection générale des finances 2021, 5). The logic was that it was less painful to keep the economy afloat artificially with state support than let the lockdown destroy enterprises and jobs that would need to be rebuilt afterwards. To achieve this, the economic plan included four key measures: First, state-guaranteed loans to enterprises (141 billion euros); second, a solidarity fund to small enterprises facing bankruptcy (35 billion euros); third, a partial activity/technical unemployment scheme for workers who cannot continue working full time because of the confinement (32 billion euros). And last but not least, it involved a scheme to cover the cost of small-to-medium enterprises whose activity was administratively suspended (8.4 billion euros). The plan confirmed French commitment to job preservation, as unemployment rates remain a major yardstick for assessing the performance of successive governments.

Unsurprisingly, these COVID measures caused French sovereign debt to skyrocket. A year later, a report commissioned by the prime minister estimated that COVID measures had created a loan worth 215 billion EUR and surged the sovereign debt from 98.1% of GDP to 120% of GDP (Arthuis and Commission pour l’avenir des finances publiques 2021). The report concluded that, under the current lending conditions (low interest rates due to the European Central Bank’s (ECB) PEPP program that bought loans worth 750 billion EUR), the loan is not putting the state in the difficulty of repayment. However, it argued that ECB would not be able to continue this policy endlessly. According to the reporters, the ECB was buying sovereign debts because its mission is to keep inflation under 2% and to avoid deflation. If inflation approached 2%, the ECB would immediately stop this policy (Ibid, p.23-24). Thus, again, according to the authors, it is important to create strategies that show France is taking its indebtedness seriously and is considering ways to reduce it. Until the onset of the COVID recession, France had not managed to stabilize its sovereign debt that it had contracted in previous decades. The report advised marking the COVID debt separately from the rest of the debt with the sole reason of “transparency.” Yet, the authors advised against all three publicly discussed solutions for handling the sovereign debt: first, effacement of the debt; second, making the debt perpetual; and third, confining the COVID debt to create a new mechanism/tax for paying this portion of the sovereign debt.

A week after the report, Bruno Le Maire, the French minister of economy and finance, said that he understands French worries about the repayment of the debt and that the subject requires “responsibility.” He said: “we could envisage dedicating a part of economic growth to the repayment of the debt. During the crises we have helped enterprises a lot (…). If in the near future they grow, if there is supplementary growth that increases income from the tax on enterprises, would it not be right just to use part of this tax to repay the COVID debt?” In other words, Bruno Le Maire envisages repayment of the debt from economic growth alone, as he specified, he has no intention of increasing tax on entrepreneurial activity. On the contrary, in 2022, it will decrease to 25%.

A green growth plan to mop up the sovereign debt and create jobs

As early as July 2020, the government announced that the state would mobilize extra funding to boost the French economy at the end of the lockdown. On September 3, 2020, the government unveiled a new program entitled “France relance” or “France restarts/relaunches” with a 100-billion euros envelope (of which 40 billion are covered by the Next Generation EU) to rebuild the economy. Macron presented the program by explaining that the most remarkable aspect was not its budget, but its project, i.e., France does not want to return to “pre-crisis normal.” Instead, it wants to turn the crisis into an opportunity by investing in sectors that “will make the economy and jobs of tomorrow”.

France relance consists of three pillars: ecological transition (30 billion EUR), competitiveness (34 billion EUR), and territorial cohesion (36 billion EUR). Ecological transition includes such measures as aid for energy renovation of (public and private) buildings, aid for buying more ecological cars, investment in trains as well as decarbonization of the industry. The competitiveness of the French economy is encouraged through support measures for export, investment aid for the development and modernization of the industry, aid to “digitalize” small and medium enterprises, and loans to help enterprises that want to invest but whose investment capacity has been affected because of COVID-19. Territorial cohesion includes many insertion measures, such as a special program for integrating young workers in the labour market, aid for reclassification schemes to avoid firing, investment in hospitals and allocations to local authorities for local infrastructure development projects.

While France relance includes a few investment schemes that tackle infrastructure and help households to consume better, the backbone of it is job creation through green growth. All documents and videos that present the program advertise it as a plan to “create employment that the French are waiting for.” The idea is that by greening energy and investing in innovative, cutting-edge enterprises, France will manage to create economic growth that will then create jobs. In fact, economic growth is sold as a panacea to three macro-economic problems: it helps to keep France’s sovereign debt sustainable; it permits (at least in theory) the creation of jobs; and it permits the state to raise funds for financing the “ecological transition.”

Jobs and ecology?

There are a few problems to this narrative. First, not all economic growth creates jobs (Kannan and Raveendran 2009). If it creates jobs, it first creates jobs in competitive economic sectors and only then, secondarily, in sectors that are centred on the reproduction of everyday life, such as public services, the care sector, agriculture, etc. (Davezies 2009). There is no guarantee that economic growth will trickle down to create and fund jobs that service local needs. Among neorurals, it was precisely the lack of income that limited their possibilities of remunerating local labour and generalizing environmentally friendly practices. Second, the competitive sectors might not be green sectors at all (like the automotive industry, nuclear energy, or aircraft building). To name this widespread phenomenon when job preservation takes priority over ecological concerns, sociologists have coined the term “jobs versus environment dilemma” (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011). Third, economic growth might not be strong enough to keep ahead of technological advancement and produce enough taxable income for both financing environmental transition and repaying the sovereign debt. Decades long sluggish economic growth (that Larry Summer analysed as “secular stagnation”) and desperate state attempts to boost it have largely contributed to the creation of sovereign debts in the first place. Finally, there is mounting evidence that green growth is impossible. Economic growth is not just (or not only) a manipulation of numbers, but also an increase in goods and services that use energy and other material inputs for their functioning (Hickel and Kallis 2020).

In short, France Relance is heading for green growth but it is most likely a misguided policy goal. The necessity to create jobs and service a humongous sovereign debt makes the French economy growth-addicted but imaging that economic growth can be simply “greened” appears to be a pipe dream. Of course, I would not like to suggest that, to live within the ecological limits of planet Earth, we should all become neorurals. The neorural experience, however, could invite us to find ways of remunerating environmentally friendly practices directly (Conditional cash transfers? Basic income schemes? Subsidies?) without engineering economic growth that will hopefully trickle down to all the layers of society in the form of jobs and produce enough taxable income. Where the pandemic could help – but only could because none of this has been acquired, far from it! – is to change the laws of monetary creation to fund the ecological transition without pushing for economic growth. The pandemic made many governments change their position on deficit spending; it also made the EU, for the first time in its history, take on a collective debt. Could the widespread explosion of sovereign debts finally change the rules of debt repayment and, with it, monetary creation? Or is it going to precipitate us first into unreasonable struggle for economic growth and then painful austerity measures that will curb government capacities to finance ecological transition?

Ieva Snikersproge is a post-doc research fellow at the Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. Her thesis, “Working Alternatives to Capitalist Factory Takeovers and the Return to the Land in Early Twenty-First Century France,” investigated two alternatives to capitalist ways of (re)production in Southern France. She is currently carrying out a large-scale quantitative study that seeks to understand the articulation of productive and reproductive economic practices for achieving ecologically sustainable livelihoods.

References

Arthuis, Jean, and Commission pour l’avenir des finances publiques. 2021. “Nos Finances Publiques Post-COVID-19: Pour de Nouvelles Règles Du Jeu.” https://www.viepublique.fr/sites/default/files/rapport/pdf/279092.pdf.

Coeuré, Benoît, and Inspection générale des finances. 2021. “Comité de Suivi et d’évaluation Des Mesures de Soutien Financier Aux Entreprises Confrontées à l’épidémie de Covid-19.” France Stratégie: Évaluer. Anticiper. Débattre. Proposer. https://www.viepublique.fr/sites/default/files/rapport/pdf/281253.pdf.

Davezies, Laurent. 2009. “The Residential Local Economy.” Géographie, Économie, Société 11 (1): 47–53.

Hickel, Jason, and Giorgos Kallis. 2020. “Is Green Growth Possible?” New Political Economy 25 (4): 469–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964.

Kannan, K.P., and G. Raveendran. 2009. “Growth Sans Employment: A Quarter Century of Jobless Growth in India’s Organised Manufacturing.” Economic and Political Weekly 44 (10): 80–91.

Räthzel, Nora, and David Uzzell. 2011. “Trade Unions and Climate Change: The Jobs versus Environment Dilemma.” Global Environmental Change 21 (4): 1215–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.07.010.

Cite as: Snikersproge, Ieva. 2022. “Jobs or ecology? Why green growth is a pipe dream and how the pandemic could change this.” FocaalBlog, 25 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/25/ieva-snikersproge-jobs-or-ecology-why-green-growth-is-a-pipe-dream-and-how-the-pandemic-could-change-this

Blog

Ida Susser: Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?

On May 31, 2020, the US exploded in protest to address the super-exploitation of racism, which has uniquely scarred its history. This was followed by international demonstrations, including massive demonstrations in Paris against police brutality, a common theme of the Gilets Jaunes, a protest starting in November 2018 that I was studying. However, this time the Paris protests included the Gilets Jaunes but focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. In these important new developments, we have seen an international mobilization which may now be breaking down, or breaking through, some of the fragmentations of the working class between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship and other forms of historical subordinations.

Here I consider long-term research among street protests in France in relation to the post-Covid outrage against police brutality. Austerity policies should be seen not simply as a consequence of the Great Recession in the wake of the financial crisis but rather as the latest most destructive stage of a neoliberal assault that began worldwide in the 1970s. My ongoing research in France suggests that the  mass demonstrations which began with the French Occupy movement Nuit Debout (see Susser  2016, 2017) in 2016 and continued through a variety of strikes among students, transportation workers and others until the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations of fall 2018, and finally the massive pension demonstrations of 2019/2020, represent an effort to rebalance the pendulum in the struggles against the ever more virulent neoliberal assault. These are, in the end, international processes. I suggest that the kinds of demonstrations which were emerging powerfully in France before Covid-19, are now beginning to take place in the US and elsewhere. The disastrous inequalities that were massively exposed in the unequal fatalities and economic distress caused by the pandemic (see Focaalblog: Kalb 2020, Nonini 2020) have precipitated protests that can be seen as part of an ongoing formative process.

Long-term neoliberal assault, international dimensions

Long-term neoliberal assault has precipitated the widespread destruction of a particular kind of state (Smith 2011) as well as the restructuring of global power and networks  (Nonini and Susser 2020). The industrial state underwrote the corporate world by subsidizing the education, health and stability of a large proportion of workers. Twentieth century workers’ struggles established the particular forms of social reproduction originally reified in the welfare state. The idea, for example, of ‘a fair day’s wage’ encompassed the costs of the patriarchal, heterosexual family for the reproduction of men with their wives and children. However, the stable working class emerged alongside and in interaction with lower and precarious standards of reproduction for minorities, migrants and other historically subordinate groups and women, as well as the uneven development of (post) colonialism. In other words, industrial capitalism included a super-exploited working class, marked by race and gender, citizenship rights and in many cases, indigeneity (Carrier and Kalb 2015; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Fraser and Jaeggi 2019, Steur 2015). These groups were the subjects of distinctive historically-defined processes of inequality and they were generally excluded, especially in the United States, from the benefits of the welfare state and the class compromise.

The massive assaults of neoliberalism of the past 50 years destroyed the lives of displaced industrial workers and further devastated minority, immigrant and native communities. Under Covid-19, both in France and more drastically the US, these losses, long manifested in differential mortality rates, among others, have become immediate life and death issues.

Image 1: French Riot Police at Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

A new working poor of displaced industrial workers compounding the super-exploitation of historically subordinated groups has been recognized in the United States and Europe since the 1990s (Susser 1996). In the shifting global power configurations, contemporary nation-states no longer protect the stability of the traditional working class. The emergence of different forms of social movements can be seen as an attempt to redress the assault on customary living conditions, life cycle security and aspirations. I would suggest that this is also an attempt to redefine workers to include the previously neglected minorities as well as new family and identity configurations. New forms of worker protection will have to consider new forms of relationships within families and new kinds of work/leisure routines to address issues that some categorize as identity politics (such as feminism and LBGT rights).  

From Nuit Debout to Gilets Jaunes

After Nuit Debout, 2016-17 in France, which was largely a big city, youth led, leftist Occupy movement, the next major mobilization was that of the Gilets Jaunes (2018-2019).  The Gilets Jaunes were recognized as a new phenomenon as they came from the urban peripheries of Paris and throughout the provinces. Not regarded as cosmopolitan they included many teachers, nurses, social workers as well as truck drivers, chefs, construction workers and service workers in general. Many Gilets Jaunes were middle aged and some were thought to be right wing.

Although perhaps not representative, it should be noted that the woman who sent out the first call to protest the new fuel tax implemented by President Emmanuel Macron was an educator of color from the urban periphery of Paris. In addition, contrary to stereotype and the government portrayal of the demonstrations, Gilets Jaunes insisted that they did not object to environmental concerns. They objected to a measure that targeted for extra tax the fuel that poor people in the urban peripheries were dependent on for their daily commutes. Protests were organized in collaboration with climate activists to demonstrate their common concerns and the support of the Gilets Jaunes for the environment. A frequent chant and sign stated; we care about “the end of the month and the end of the world”.

The first email call to protest the fuel tax was put out in September 2018 but by November, when the Gilets Jaunes began to block the highways and roundabouts and gather in thousands in the streets of Paris, they were objecting to much more than the fuel tax. They were concerned with the degradations of public services, the privatization of health care and their own daily challenges as well as what they saw as the decay of democracy. These protestersfrom the urban periphery frequently described the lack of investment in public transportation outside Paris and the declining support for provincial services as illustrating the “stealing of the state.” (Susser 2020). People regarded public services as a right and saw the services as belonging to the state as paid for by their tax money and therefore belonging to them. When the state privatized a service, it was seen as ‘stealing the public money.’ The destruction of the state is manifest not only in the privatization and dismantlement of public services, but also in the crisis of daily life, the family, education, health care, the aged, the handicapped (highly visible at protests on crutches and in wheelchairs) and the students, who feel they are “losing their futures,” as one protester said to me.

Continued Gilets Jaunes resistance

Until the pension strike, which began in September 2019, the Gilets Jaunes were the most powerful, and most supported of a variety of movements that had emerged in France since the austerity policies imposed in the wake of the financial crisis. They linked many of the uprisings and strikes from different sectors (such as railroads, teachers and health workers) and the smaller uprisings among hospital aides or the sans-papiers as well as the climate change activists and left-wing organizations. Not concentrated in the workplace although participating in many disparate strikes, the Gilets Jaunes invented new methods, such as the occupation of the ronds-points, the building of cabanas and the freeing of toll booths. In these ways, the Gilets Jaunes were attempting to forge a new set of resistances and generating the support of the public from the banlieues to the provinces. The movement was both enraged and resilient: Enraged at the loss of community and public and social services over time, and resilient in the commoning efforts to create a new community (Susser 2020). The Gilets Jaunes, made up of working-class people on the urban periphery, including many pensioners and families who could not make ends meet, were crafting an emerging oppositional bloc.

The pension protests began in September 2019, when strikers closed down the metro and the buses for a day. A few months later, different sectors from health care workers, legal professions, social services, educators and others, organized massive strikes and demonstrations in the streets that continued until they were shut down by the Covid 19 epidemic in March 2020.

Gilets Jaunes among the grassroots union members, in many ways, had forced the unions to take up more militant positions against the pension changes. As health workers, lawyers and transportation workers marched in massive protests through Paris, Gilets Jaunes could be seen populating the street protests of every profession in their distinctive yellow jackets, personal statements written in black marker on their backs. The signature song of all the pension protests was that of the Gilets Jaunes, as were many of the chants and banners. Until Paris was closed down for Covid-19 in March 2020, the Gilets Jaunes and the massive pension marches combined in different, often conflicted, ways across France, in some cities with more cooperation in time and place than others.

Image 2. Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

In France, Nuit Debout, the Gilets Jaunes, the pension strikers and many other movements represent transformative spaces where people in the current era of financialization and globalization are struggling to work out new strategies. Activists envision horizontalist movements as an effort to develop innovative forms of protest to counteract the increasing inequality, authoritarian tendencies and hardened boundaries of the new global regime. Such progressive representation strives for inclusivity and the breakdown and recognition of established hierarchies of gender, race, immigration and class, among others. Each of these groups has to be understood in the context of their own history and social movements. The participants in Nuit Debout were not the same as the Gilets Jaunes. However, in France and elsewhere, multiple subaltern groups may be beginning to recognize themselves as part of a larger political bloc in opposition to the destruction of the welfare state and degradation of democratic representation (Kalb and Mollona 2018). Such movements are contingent and contested, reflective of the same rage against the destruction of living standards and aspirations for a generation but offering hope for more inclusive solutions.

Image 3. Protests against police brutality in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

Before the Gilets Jaunes, in 2016/7 activists from Nuit Debout had protested the police violence often focused on young men of color in the streets. The Gilets Jaunes protested the violence of the police against their own street demonstrations for over a year. It is a crucial development that in June 2020 the Gilets Jaunes joined ranks with the protests against police brutality and racism that were rocking the world. At this conjuncture, after the shocking Covid-19 shutdown and the disproportionate deaths of people of color in France as elsewhere, the displaced workers of the urban periphery joined directly with the superexploited immigrants, refugees and previously colonized people of color from the banlieues in several unprecedented massive demonstrations.

Image 4. Gilets Jaunes protester with Black Lives Matter support message (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

As Polanyi knew, rage against the disastrous failures of (neo)liberalism could be expressed in brutal and fascist ways (see also Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2020, Kalb and Halmai 2011). However, the protests that we see today are a hopeful sign in their inclusive progressive moments bringing together many groups who are all at risk in different ways and at different levels or aspects of exploitation. They are demanding a rebalancing of the destructive neoliberal assault of the past 50 years. They are constructing an inclusive but uneven critical community which may serve as an antidote against the growing fury which is fueling nationalism and exclusivism (see also Kalb and Mollona 2018).

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.

References

Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi. 2018. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Medford, MA: Polity

Carrier, James and Don Kalb (eds.) 2015. Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kalb, Don and G Halmai (eds.) 2011. Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. Vol. 15. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Kalb, Don and Massimilliano Mollona (eds.) 2018. Worldwide Mobilizations. New York: Berghahn Books.

Kasmir, Sharryn and August Carbonella (eds.) 2014. Blood and Fire. New York: Berghahn Books

Kalb, Don 2020. Covid, Crisis and the Coming Contestations. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/

Maskovsky, Jeff and S. Bjork-James (eds.) 2020. Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press

Nonini, Don 2020 Black Enslavement and the Coming Agro-Industrial Capital. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/03/don-nonini-black-enslavement-and-agro-industrial-capital/

Nonini, D. and I. Susser (2020). The Tumultuous Politics of Scale. New York: Routledge.

Smith, Gavin (2011). Selective Hegemonies, Identities, 18(1): 2-38.

Steur, Luisa (2015). Class trajectories and indigenism among agricultural workers in Kerala. In: Carrier J and Kalb D (eds) Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: CUP, pp.118-130.

Poperl, Kevin and Ida Susser (1996). “The Construction of Poverty and Homelessness in US Cities.”Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1): 411–35.

Susser, Ida (2018) Inventing a Technological Commons: Confronting the Engine of Macron, http://www.focaalblog.com/2018/04/19/kevin-poperl-and-ida-susser-inventing-a-technological-commons-confronting-the-engine-of-macron/

Susser, Ida (2017). Introduction: For or Against the Commons?, Focaal 79:1-5.

Susser, Ida (2017). Commoning in New York City, Barcelona and Paris: Notes and observations from the field. Focaal 79: 6-22.

Susser, Ida (2020, forthcoming). “They are stealing the state”: Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In: Urban Ethics Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). New York: Routledge.

Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2020. “Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?” FocaalBlog, 3 December. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser:-covid,-police-brutality-and-race:-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries?/