Oiseau-tempête is animated by individuals brought together by their desire to overcome resignation and develop its critique. This journal does not aim to formulate a project of global subversion, or even to represent its diverse expressions. To the contrary, it aims, by the free play of passions, reflexions and exchanges, to favor the convergence of individuals who have no intention of bowing down. To this aim, it contributes to the critique of society through the fragmentary one of dominant cultural productions : books, films, exhibitions, advertisings, etc.

« FACING HISTORY »

The Georges Pompidou center presented, from december 1996 to april 1997, a thematic exhibit titled : « Face à l'histoire (1933-1996), l'artiste moderne face à l'évènement historique : engagement, témoignage, vision. » A few words on this exhibit.

History as conception of the world

It is in the XIXth century that history in France individualized itself as autonomus science, from the point where it began to be taught at university, to produce teachers, to have students. It formed itself around the methodic school, also called historizing history, which was the historical school of the third Republic, which is to say it dominated until the fourties. Its statement was to impose a scientific research rid of any philosophical and litterary preoccupation, leaning on «methods» and «tools», and to aspire to the objectivity of the scientific gaze on historical reality. But its social function was to impose, as soon as 1870, the values of a bourgeoisie whose hold on power was stil weak against the values of the monarchy, the church, but also the worker's movement (erase the impact of the Paris Commune), to instill, from the first school classes, the French Revolution as a historical event constitutive of the (bourgeois) republic, the respect of the institutions, secularism, patriotism, nationalism and, very quickly, colonialism. In short, all that makes up the charm of the bourgeoisie. The historizing history was, in the first place, a history of princes, generals, battles, wars, victories, and dates. An heroic and epic history, which emphasized greats men and great events. We need to wait until the end of the thirties, with the école des Annales (Braudel, Bloch, Febvre) for a more refined conception ofhistory to emerge, which happens to take a good portion of its methods from the marxist analysis, and which will become the historical school of the fourth and fifth Republics. «It has not been easy to vanquish the resistances, will write the historian Georges Dubi, to make people admit that the history of mentalities imposed itself, a little later that anthropologists could teach a lot to historians, and that the Marxian strain of thought was to be prolongated, not repudiated. We were whipped constantly by all these challenges that were coming from marxism and structuralism, neighbouring sciences. We had to question everything, shuffle the cards and start the game over..» 1 The historical gaze, with the école des Annales, concerns itself less with the sphere of political representation than with the economy and social organisation, less with that political event than with the long historical, economic and social duration : «We can do, and we do, the history of everything : of climate, material life, techniques, the economy, social classes, rites, festivities, art, institutions, political life, political parties, armament, wars, religions, feelings (love), emotions (fear), sensibility, perceptions (smells), seas, deserts, etc.» (Antoine Prost) 2 . With the école des Annales and its successions, the domain of history stretched to the entirety of human activity. To keep fulfilling its social function, it adapted to the complexity of modern capitalism, which during the same period expanded to the whole planet and all of human activity.

The «Face à l'histoire» exhibit doesn't concern itself with this «new» history. Its purpose, as it usually is for the great monumental and themed exhibits of the last twenty years of mixed economy art (subsidised by the State, banks, and industrials), is first and foremost to educate the public through art, by means of, here, a crude conception of history. The commissioners of this exhibit present, as Lionel Richard wrote, a conception of the world 3 , expressed by two main ideas. On one hand, in the face of fascist agression, the «citizens» must all be united in order to defend (liberal) democracy. On the other hand, the mediatization of the real world can only be the real representation of the world. The first part covers the period of capitalism in crisis from the thirties to the last war, the second the period of mixed economy capitalism, from the post-war period to this day.

The thirties and the war.

The historizing history revisited, presented here, is not an history of the crises and ideologies of exclusion and social reaction that marked the liberal democracy in the thirties. Here we won't find the famous « Better Hitler than bolshevism » of the french bourgeoisie at the time of the Popular Front 4 . It does not seek to explain what was the genesis of fascism's rise in Europe, nor to remind that the transformation of France from the liberal third Republic in the Vichy régime was made possible, for example, thanks to a simple vote in the national assembly of elected representatives giving full powers to Pétain. Here, the capitalism in crisis from the thirties doesn't explain fascism or the war. In one word, in this exhibit, the crisis simply isn't history. Liberal democracy is presented as an ideal and abstract democracy, fascism as a sudden and unexplained irruption of « barbary » in the polite world of « democracy ».

If the crisis is not a historical subject, the critique of capitalism in crisis by radical artists, situated inside liberal democracies like France, does not enter in the field of art facing history. Which is why artists and photographers from this period, who have tried to show through their work the social and material misery caused by this crisis, such as Walter Evans, whose photographs of american workers chased away by the crisis still managed to be well known, are excluded from all representations. If surrealism is largely represented in the part dedicated to the thirties, it is by its paintings, considered here as a symptom of the distress of artists in the face of fascism. It is of course absent as a vanguard radical artistic movement. Its greatest fault, for the commissaries, is to have committed itself to social revolution and against capitalism, be it in its liberal democratic, fascist crisis or russian state capitalist forms. For « Face à l'histoire », against the barbarism of both fascism and stalinism, there was no hope at the time except for unconditionnal defense of bourgeois democracy. Excluded as well of any representation in this exhibit, Frans Masereel, whose fault is to have preferred critique in images (engravings on wood) of liberal democracy in crisis. « His "Histoires sans paroles", wrote Michel Ragon in a preface of L'Idée, hard to find today, drawn political journalism of sorts, somehow had such success in Germany, before nazism, that some of its popular editions reached well over a hundred thousand copies. » 5

To avoid muddying such a well painted picture, whose figures are essentially composed of consensual artists, united around the ideal democracy, who reacted in their painting against fascist barbarism, the commissaries of the exhibit, in their infinite kindness, abstained from explaining to us the repressive and social politics of said democracy. Fearing, no doubt, that the public of « face à l'histoire » might skip school and discover astonishing parallels between the politics of social, juridical and cultural repression of yesterday and those of today.

This rewriting of history for the purpose of popular education today, in the context of capitalism in crisis again, we obviously find in the media discourse as well. A journalist of « Libération » for example, dealing with another exhibit dedicated to the thirties6 as well, at the museum of modern art of Paris, can write pedantly : « By grounding their research on dreams and the fantastic, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and their companions have developped a register which sometimes seems to turn its back both to the worries of the time and to the experimentations of their contemporaries. The recourse to onirism and to the virtues of the unconscious props them up on a fleeting line of which we see quite well now that it could not durably respond to the radicality of the stakes. » The message is clear : against fascist and stalinist barbarism, there was, at the time, no salvation except for the unconditional defense of bourgeois democracy. It is of course, a message from the cultural structures to the address of those they regulate today.

However, language is capricious. What we think we have to say is never exactly what we ended up expressing. It is so that sometimes, by ways completely unexpected, the real history of the thirties appears briefly in this exhibit. We can find, in the room of totalitarian fascist and stalinist art, a painting of nazi militant artist Franz Radziwill « The Demons » (1933-1934), as an example of nazi art. But looking closely, we also find a second painting by this artist, « Brême's complaint » (1946), this time in the room dedicated to post-war art in the federal republic of Germany. Without any particular mention. It is obviously a slip-up : given that the point of the exhibit is not to show the continuity of german capitalism, under the nazi régime and the federal republic after the war, nor to insist on the lack of haste by the german bourgeoisie to proceed to the denazification of the repressive and judicial supervisory personnel of the german state.

Paris-Match and Life as vision of the world

The second part of « Face à l'histoire » covers the years after the war to this day and deals in fact with this art subventionned by the state, banks and industrials that makes up our artistic landscape since more than thirty years, and its relations with « history ». If, in the first part, the commissaries have worked to instill in us that, in the face of fascist barbarism, we all need to stay united around the ideal democracy, they proceed in the second part to an explicit revalorisation of the media discourse of our time : if we were to listen to them, in an ideal democracy, even medias seem like red riding hood. The historical support used as documentation is, here, essentially composed of magazines of the time (« Paris-Match », « Life » ... ) and of television broadcasts. The choice of represented artists goes in the same direction of a positive redefinition of the social role of the media : they're mostly artists who focus on media documentation (articles, press photos) as sources of representation of reality, which they assimilate to a real representation of a world that they see as spectators and over which they claim to have no influence. And so, « the narrative figuration, explains a sign about the painter Erro, works towards taking in account contradictory informations, journalistic false noises which make up the event. It proceeds by galaxies of images, without moral or political judgement. » The painter Rancillac tries, unlike others, to « paint the world that flees terrifyingly fast, without him. Without us. » As for the painter Vostell, by using in media pictures in his works, says another sign, « He declares that he is searching to soak himself "in the authentic traces of history". »

The great monumental thematic exhibits thus are exercises in history rewriting, whose social function is firstly to educate the masses through art. If the media proceeds by communicating in real time the supposed signification of historical events, exhibits like « Face à l'histoire » do so retroactively. But as long as you replace what was put upside down, you can see clearly that mixed economy artists, exhibits commissaries and journalists work essentially towards producing a vision of the world (which the later usually express through means of a tele-vision of the world). A world view which assuredly, is not ours.

Barthélémy Schwartz

NOTICE TO ADEPTS OF WORK

In the glorification of work, I see the same afterthought as in the praises adressed to impersonal acts : that is, the fear of what is individual. Essentially, these days, we feel at the sight of work - we still target under that name the harsh labor from morning to evening - that such work constitutes the best police, that it holds everyone with a bridle and aims to hinder the development of reason, desires, the taste of independance. Because it consumes an extraordinary quantity of nervous strenght and diverts it from reflexion, reverie, worries, love and hatred, it constantly present petty aims to the view and ensures easy and regular satisfactions. Thus the societies in which we work hard will have more security. And these days we love security like a supreme divinity

Friedrich Nietzsche

THE NATION-STATE AND NATIONALISM

At the end of this century, it is difficult to ignore the surge in nationalist demands. Nationalism seems to have become the mass ideology the most widely shared in the world. Every state is now recognized as a nation even when they obviously do not conform to the model of nation-state they claim to embody. Nothing indicates that the multiplication of nationalisms and states will stop in the near future. It is not the least of the paradoxes of the times in which we live : more than ever capitalism tend to free itself from the limits that hinder it, in particular the limits formed by borders. But the crisis of the nation-state model which comes along with the affirmation of the supranational character of capitalism, far from eroding the foundations of nationalism rather seems to have consolidated them. At the same time, the nationalism of today, on many accounts, isn't a simple renewal of yesterday's nationalism. To defy the poisoned calls of the nationalists, whatever stage costume they might take on, we cannot satisfy ourselves with the banalities of a basic critique. It is necesasry to think for ourselves about the unprecedented situation in which we are. In that sense, Hobsbawm's study, « Nations et nationalismes depuis 1780 »7 is one of a few rare books which might give us indications. Even though it flirts sometimes too much with the conceptions of historical materialism's adepts - for him, centralised states like the URSS at least had the merit of containing the separatist tendencies - he is far from limiting himself to their sclerosed ramblings on this cursed question. Here, whe chose to bring out a few trails, essentials to our own reflexion.

The upside-down world of nationalist ideology

Hobsbawm's merit is to have overthrown the nationalist perspective. To nationalists, nations are entities, if not immutables, at least universals, which express the generic needs of human beings to be associated and identified to historicaly stable communities. It flows from there that it would be possible to give general definitions of the national phenomenon, common to any phase of human history. The nation could be defined by objective criteria (territoryn language, culture or even economy ... ) and even by subjective criteria (the consciousness of sharing some identitarian values, the will to realize them ... -). In short, for nationalists, the nation is definable a priori and the formation of the nation state simply sanctions a posteriori the popular aspiration ton constitute the nation. Hobsbawm shown that it is actually not the case. The term nation by itself is antediluvian but its meaning has evolved through history. There is nothing in common between, for example, the scholar's state of the Sorbonne during the Renaissance in the XVIth century, expression synonymous to corporation, and the nation that appeared, at the time of the XVIIIth century's revolutions. In reality, nations are recent historical phenomenons. The real world of nations has nothing to do with the upside-down world of the nationalists. The actual history shows that, as a general rule, nations are shaped by states and the nationalists, not the opposite. In history, the emergence of the state preceded that of the nation, but the notion of nation-state, more recent, shows the intimate liaison between the two. Dissociated from the state, the nation loses all consistancy no matter what the so-called revolutionary nationlists might try to prove the opposite. From the historical character if the national phenomenon it flows that the famous criterias are subjected to almost constant revisions. In reality, in every crisis that the history of nations goes through, it is the reason of the state that imposes its restrictions.

The nation-state and the jacobins

The nation, in the modern sense of the word, appeared for the first time during the oeriod of the french Revolution. Is is there that was thought up and implemented the jacobin bourgeois conception of the nation-state, in particular concerning the notions of territory and borders. For the jacobins, the definition of the nation was tied to that of the state, the territorial state, undivided and inidivisible. It hinged on the sovereignty of the people, which was supposed to have ripped the power from the hands of the sovereign individual, the monarch, to exercise it throught the means of deleguates at the Convention. The criteria for nationalité was then citizenship. Hobsbawm highlights with reason that the conception which some sections of the sans-culottes had of the nation went a little beyond the jacobin definition. Because the revolutionnaries of the sections where hostiles to the bourgeois as well as to the aristocrats, hoarders of feodal goods, speculators on the army supplies, etc. They considered themselves as the tip of the spear of the european revolution and aspirent to spread it beyond the borders. The jacobins, however, inherited the centralisation of the state, well underway under the monarchy that defined the state as the territorial entity, limited by borders which already didn't cover the domains of the aristocracy anymore. They finalized the centralizing work of the monarchy and made the nation-state the somewhat generic community, as opposed to the antique communities which were then seen as hindrances on the realization of citizenship. In their mind, the social pact rested on the adhesion by presumably emancipated individuals, the citizens, to the values of the republican state. Later on, for foreigners, obtaining the french nationality was possible, but only through the assimilation of those same values. The cultural, linguistic, economic, etc criterias which went on to become more important were already there at the time of the jacobins. The lack of homogeneity between citizens, in all domains of their non-political lives, could only undermine, on the long-term, the strength of the central state? But they were subordinated to the political critera : the citizenship.

The nation and liberal economy

Nevertheless, even in France, for the bourgeoisie of the late XVIII century, the stranglehold on the state power was merely a prelude to the consolidation of the strength that was theirs : the economy. From the dawn of industrialization, the apostles of political economy, in England, did not take national phenomenons into account. To the most dogmatic of them, the mere existence of territories limited by state borders was antagonistic to free competition, primordial condition of the free accumulation of capital. In their mind, the territory upon which capital operated was the global market in the process of forming itself, battlefield of particular capitals. Nevertheless, they were forced to recognize that the accumulation of capital, as a concrete phenomenon and not an abstract idea, was performed from determined poles, roughly from the nation-states taking form in Europe. In the end, none of them denied the advantages that states and their colonies could bring, advantages inherited from mercantil wars fought between the european monarchies for the control of the global market. The centralizing states constituted as many warm greenhouses under which capital could proliferate on the condition that it would stimulate accumulation through appropriate mesures. Even the most fanatical advocates of free exchange never intended to destroy the economical functions of states. Thus the brith of the national economy as a concept to take into account the existence of states. Hobsbawm is right to claim that, in developped areas of capitalism, the constitution of nations that hinged upon the combination of national state-economy was one of the essentials phenomenons of the XIXth century. But the nation was recognized as a viable entity on the condition that it stays compatible with progress, the progress of the accumulation and centralization of capital. At the time, the liberal principle of nationalities was not unconditional. It excluded many areas not yet touched by capitalism and, particularly in Europe, regions which were already an integral part of centralized states.

Nation and culture

It is not well known that the cultural, linguistic and racial criteria for nationality only appeared quite late and only became decisive in Europe during the second half of the XIXth century. Hobsbawm highlights that the identification of nationality to language originally only mattered for litterate people who, like in the split-up Germany of before the Reich, had only their literary language in common, main vector of diffusion of any culture that could pretend to be national, language which then helped them to invest the State apparatus. In a general manner, languages, which would later reach the status of national languages, could only play a very modest role in the formation of the national consciousness of the illiterate, barely out of the Middle-Age in the major part of Europe. The same goes for culture. It is certain that nationalists, to get the approval of the populations they were courting, tried harder and harder to speculate on traditions, customs, languages, religions, etc... with which they might identify sometimes. From there the nationalist myth of the community of culture, religious included, stable and even foreign to the intermixing of populations and cultures. Somewhat pre-established, it only had to wait for favorable conditions to appear in the open under the forme of the national State. Hobsbawm also reminds that, amongst the main invetors of cultural and linguistic nationalism, some came from the marxist school confronted to the problem of nationalities in the empire of Austria-Hungary in full decomposition by the end of the XIXth century. Bu there generally wasn't any continuity between the heterogeneous factors of popular protonationalism, as he calls it, and those, homogeneous, proper to the nation-state. In reality, national languages were half artifical creations, which sometimes only had distant relations with the vernacular languages they claimed to represent and standardise. Their diffusion was unthinkable without the generalisation of mass instruction, in short, without the intervention of the state. It is following that, when homogeneity of language and culture under the auspices of the state started to become effective, that they became central criteria to the definition of the nation.

Nationalism as a mass phenomenon

For Hobsbawm, there is no intention to deny that nationalism, along the period from the Commune to the Great War, might have, little by little, asserted itself as a mass phenomenon, in Europe first then elsewhere. The growth of the basis of nationalism, in particular the cultural, linguistic and racial variant, was evidently tied to the modification of the class structure of society. The industrialisation of the european states, national or multinational, was dislocating what was left of earlier society, accelerating the depopulation of the countryside and growth of the city, giving rise to migrations and population mixing without precedent, etc. In Europe, from the end of the XIXth century, nationalism appeared more and more as the reaction of the pauperized rural middle strata, threatened with extinction, as well as the urban middle strata destabilized by the Great Depression of the end of the last century. Such groups were terrorized by the rise of the dangerous classes and were looking for scapegoats for their misfortune : foreigners sometimes assimilated to dangerous revolutionaries. Nationalism found refuge in the arms of the monarchists, clericals and racists who all joined together in their hatred of revolution. But the dangerous classes, in particular the working class, weren't indifferent to the call of nationalism. Hobsbawm signals one of the main paradoxes of the time. The working class was, of course, hostile to the bourgeoisie. But it demanded to be recognized as an integral part of the state as well. Workers aspired to benefit from their status as citizens. However, the very idea of citizenship was tied to that of nationality, particularly in France. The democratization could thus help states resolving their problems in the acquisition of legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens, including when they were contesting them. In order to be republican, nationalism was no less nationalism. The contradiction exploded when, as soon as the war was declared, the same workers who had firmly fought the bourgeoisie on occasion were taken by a patriotic fervor to defend their respective homeland. During the beginning, at least.

Wilsonism and the principle of nationalities.

According to Hobsbawl, the First World War and the peace of Versailles constituted decisive steps in the history of nationalism. First off, the days after Versailles gave the occasion to apply the principle of nationalities defined by Wilson, principle incidentally shared by Lenin and the heirs of Marxism-Leninism. The wilsonian principle didn't differ from the liberal principle in essence. It demanded that state borders and national, cultural and linguistic borders matched as well. But he gave up the notion of threshold : whatever their size, communities, thus defined as potential nations, had to have the possibility to form the territorial state of their choice, with the help of which they would exercize their sovereignty. Hobsbwam remarked with finesse that wilsonian autodetermination only aggravated the situation. In Europe, it was only put in place with the agreement of the victorious states, generally as buffer states against revolutionary pushes from the East. But given the imbrication of communities and their dispersion on non-connected territories, the principle of territorial matching between state and nation could only be achieved through intercommunal violence, sometimes pushed to paroxysm, associated with that of the state. Realized, the nationalism of european national minorities appeared as reactionary than that of the multinational states of which they used to be part of. Then, the days after Versailles revealed the extension of the influence zone of nationalism to colonies. All those who claimed to act in the name of oppressed people in the colonial empires spoke as nationalists. Hobsbawm shows that they adopted the language of the oppressor states they claimed to fight. In reality, the future leaders aimed ton form states from the colonized areas. The territories they represented as potential national entities, according to wilsonians criteria, or even marxist-leninist, were recent creations of the colonial conquest, in particular the partitioning of the world between the colonizing states of Europe, to the notable exception of China as well as a few other antedeluvians asian states. The colonial areas could not be identified to the territorial model of the nation-state. The nationaliste elites, educated in the occidental way, were themselves half conscious of this since, as Hobsbawm reminds us, they deplored the indifference, hostility even, to the national idea by the populations that were the target of their propaganda. They attributed their failure to the politics of the colonizers which used the millenial tribalism of the colonized people. But the relative succes of « divide an conquer » proved that the attachment of diverse populations did not yet go to the national communities imagined by the elites but rather to the multiple forms of traditional communities. Nevertheless, with the penetration of capitalism in the colonies and the simultaneous decomposition of such communities, reactions, sometimes insurrectional, against foreign oppressors and the loca compradors began to appear. Nationalists now had the possibility to use the potential for revolt as long as they modified somewhat their programme and their language. It became necessary for them to hold into account the confused aspirations of the populations if they wished to make them play the role of canon fodder to the national ideal.

Marxism-Leninism and radical nationalism

For Hobsbawm, the apparent victory of the russian revolution was decisive to the course of nationalism. The participation of the URSS and the parties subservient to it during the Second World War, presented as a war of liberation against fascism, tje assimilation of fascism to a betrayal of the nation, particularly in France, etc. were accelerating the reunion of nationalism and marxism-leninism. Nationalists that aspired to create independant states could not fail to see as their favoured allies the so-called socialist states, which claimed to be the defenders of all nations oppressed by imperialist states. Even in Europe, separatists came to the point where they adopted marxist-leninist ideology which contrasted with their genealogy, marked by their association with clericalism, royalism and even fascism. It allowed them to give up their old costumes for those of nationalist revolutionnaries, more apt to captivate the attention of disoriented populations in the sense that it allowed them to combine national and social liberation. Even those who were not subordinated to Moscow appeared so on the stage of struggle against imperialism, in particular against americain hegemony, even though in reality they never really desired anything else than the adaptation of the nation-state model to the local conditions in which they operated. What followed evidently proved it. Decolonization, even when it wasn't realized with the blessing of colonial states but through a string of aborted revolts, such as in Algeria, showed what was the real meaning of their revolutionary phraseology : take the state power and attempt to build it on a local scale, on the basis of nationalization of key economic sectors, something quite close in principle to the european model of national economy. In most cases, such measures did not even allow to improve the situation of the concerned populations and to escape the tutoring of the global market. For the rest, such as states created through decolonization were sitting on mosaics of cultural, linguistic and ancestral religious communities, inheriting all of their contradictions, in particular their struggle between clan leaders to gain a monopoly on power, without mentioning the multiple frictions between states tied to the correction of colonial borders.

Nationalism today

At the dawn of the third millenium, marked by the implosion of the soviet state and its satellites, it seems strange that Hobsbawm would insist on the decline of nationalism. It is because, in the face of the multiplication of states with a national pretention and the exacerbation of national hatred, he wants to highlight the dead end that the nation-state model constitutes. The nation, which always seems like something very tangible, actually became quite abstract. Identification to the national representation is more and more imaginary and no one, wheter simple citizen or head of state, is able to explain what national belonging actually means, if not the exclusion of others. The nation-state and nationalism are in crisis, particularly in their wilsonian and marxist-leninist versions. Crises half-hearthedly admitted by the nationalist leaders abandoning, little by little, the previous references, the national state-economy couple in particular, to speculate on more or less successful identifications to ethnicity, culture, language, religion or even race. Because given the catastrophic and unprecedented mutations of global capitalism, the traditional components of nationalism which favored the identification of their population to their state, especially the economic component, were losing all their strengths even if they didn't disappear completely. Globalisation accelerated capital, with social structures desagregating and transforming rapidly in the background, allowing it to transgress the limits of national states. It even favored the multiplication of minuscule states, even city-states like Singapour, which were poles of accumulation and circulation of capital. Following that, there isn't much left from the nationalist programme except for very vague references to communities and traditions more or less made up and sometimes the illusion of being able to reconnect with the pre-wilsonian model. This is what distinguishes religious fundamentalists from secular nationalists. The fundamentalisms of today have the wind in their sails as ideologies of substitution to the bankruptcy of the myth of progress, including the marxist-leninist version of emancipatory progress. Fundamentalists claim to go back to the fixed values of mythical origins, in principle at least. They claim to give precise answers to the nerve-wracking questions of the time. But, as Hobsbawm indicates, today, the very absence of a precise programme from the diverse versions of nationalism play in their favor. To the point that, even in Europe, any local, regional or even sectorial revendication against that central state's bureaucracy is likely to take on the national costume, preferably in its cultural and linguistic version. In reality, nationalism is the catalyst of more profound phenomenons. It is continuously fueled by the disorientation of populations, traumatized and sometimes cornered into simple survival by the catastrophic evolution of capitalism on a global scale, atomized and uprooted, looking for cues to give a sense to their lives or at least make it more bearable. There, the ancient familial or tribal relations can play an identification role even though, in reality, they've been ravaged and absorbed by the economy for a long time, even serving as the basis to the constitution of mafias as seen in separatists groups in the soviet ex-empire. National indentification, national fundamentalism even, whatever delirious justifications it may conjure up, including religious ones, thus serves an essential function in designating scapegoats, the foreigners who, as foreginers, are dangerous ennemies and which, in our era heiress to the frenzied industrialization of the Glorious Thirties, camp even in the heart of the european states. Thus the common base of the various nationalism of today : xenophobia. Because of this, states have little trouble persecuting foreigners, chasing them, closing their borders, etc. even though, with the acceleration of globalisation, they are losing large parts of their traditional functions.

France and nationalism

We cannot conclude this brief approach without addressing the situation to which we are confronted ine France, situation which Hobsbwam barely touches on. Today in France, it is in good taste, in the face of rising fascist-like xenophobia, with its specific racist connotations, to equate nationalism and fascism. To fight against xenophobia, sanctioned and aggravated by the actions of the state, which accentuates antagonisms between the presumed nationals and presumed foreigners, we would need to affirm the intangibility of the democratic principles. Such is the creed of the spectacular opposition to the fascist menace, fascism which it reduces in an obtuse way to the party of Le Pen (TN : the « Front National », far right political party, led by members of the Le Pen family then and now as of 2018). But that would be forgetting, or pretending to forget, that those notorious universal values of citizenship, including on matters of assimilation, are rally singular, characteristic features of the nation-state as it formed in France during recent history. They are national values. It is also forgetting that their realisation as always been very flexible, subordinated in priority to th necessities of the national economy and the will of the state. They have thus always been very restrictives, to the exception of brief periods in history like the Glorious Thirties, where national capital need forgein workforce from the colonies. Brandishing the tattered flag of the so-called universla republic against this and that party, this and that leader, even a demagogue as Le Pen, who claims to represent the values of the republic as well, is at best to understand nothing of the nation-state and the origins of contemporary nationalism, at worst to share the same fundamental values. As proof, you only need to see the influence of this demagogue's ideas not only amongst peasants and merchants, usual basis of ultranationalism in France, but in what's left of workers as well. The working class community, which formed itself with the industrialization of the country, is in the process of disintegrating on the back of a crisis of work tied to the relative deindustrialization. However, in France, class values, despite the potential for revolt that they might still symbolize, have been tied for a long time to tha values of the nation-state, protector of national industry. There, the themes on national decadence find some echo, because they match the idea that workers have of their own decadence as an essential factor in the valorisation of national capital. There is no great wall of China between the defense of the national economy and that of the nation today, just as there was none yesterday between socialism that is national and national-socialism. The apostles of democracy, sometimes found in militancy with revolutionary pretentions, pretend to not understand the genealogy of fascism as a massphenomenon. They even denounce sometimes the ultranationalist party of Le Pen as that of betrayal of the republican traditions of France and seek to reheat the putrefied ideology of national resistance to fascism. They could not make a better confession that the democracy-nation couple is inseparable, unveiling the bases upon which they intend to direct and frame the spectacle of resistance on its knees against the rise of fascism. Moreover, in the face of the autoritarism of the state-power, those who are disappointed by centralization in the peripheral regions are somewhat sensible to the siren calls of the autonomists, or even the separatists. The desertification caused by the centralization of the economy, especially in the domain of culture, would be the exclusive responsibility of the central power. Given the standardization of survival, more and more atomized, desperate and devoid of meaning, the need to find marks and reconnect with sociability goes through the valorization of purported particular cultures which, usually, are presented as remains of popular traditions restrained by the state. And the people who take refuge in those traditions are ready to forget how exclusionary, limited and autoritary they were. The naive partisans of the separatist leaders swear that it's only a matter of culture to them, nothing more. But in this case, the culture is the pursuit of politics by other means. The apologia of cultural differences appears as one of the essential means to mobilize them behind such leaders who aspire to conquer power, including through violent means, in their respective areas of regional influence and, of course, to make business within the framework of Europe. State-power, loyal to the jacobin tradition, is irrited by such nationalist gesticulations. At the same time, it is willing to relieve some pressureon , or even give free rein to nationalist mafia as can be seen in Corse for example. Nowadays, cultural relativism stretches even to the immigrant communities from the thirld world. Without denying the factors of solidarity that they may still posess, we cannot turn a blind eye to their stubborn aspects, particularly their patriarcal type of hierarchy, upon which lean the nationalists, from the last marxist-leninists to the muslim fundamentalists. In France, they appear as shelter values because the state-power, in virtue of the jacobin principle of individual assimilation, persectues them as such. But to make them poles of radical resistance to the state is quite the stretch !

In France just as elsewhere, nationalism is less than ever capable to bring solutions to the fundamental questions that the catastrophic evolution of contemporary society rises. As a general rule, it diverts individuals, even those who are a bit revolted by the condition which is made theirs, from the essential : the struggle against capitalism. It gives them illusions on the possibility of bettering their survival on the condition that they accept to be identified to the various national communities offered on the market of ideology, presented in a mystified and nostalgic way as just as many palpable traces of precapitalist sociability. In reality, such communities, under the leadership of nationalists leaders, dominate them, use them and, in the end, robs them of their liberty. We are in support of individuals taking the path of community, which as previously existed in the history of humanity, including in recent history in Europe, through the fights against capital and the state. In that sense, today just as yesterday, revolted individuals start from nothing to realize their objectives and dreams. But the conquest of liberty, both individual and collective liberty, remains the primordial condition of regained sociaiblity. Where liberty is missing, community loses all meaning. It is synonymous with domination.

André Dréan

FACE TO FACE

Facing history : art cultivates this face to face, contemplates its own alienation, mirrors general alienation, tramples... Does it act ? Does it seize history just like the real, to unsettle the conventional image and multiply alternative approaches, beyond sensible perspectives, until it lifts the veil of the events and illuminates, at the heart of the chosen moment, the presence of utopia ? The cause of modern at, wheter it was or not the cause of human emancipation, what is left of it now that contemporary art only shows grotesque renunciations of the promethean projects of those of whom it claims to be the heir ? Of course, the exxhibit being held since last winter at the Georges Pompidou center, dedicated to the ties between art and history from 1933 to 1996, is not made to allow such questions to be raised. To the contrary, through a selection of pieces and various documents along a chronological path, we are told repeatedl that art aims to nothing more that to hold hold an honorable place in the just fight of bourgeois democracy against all forms of totalitarism. We are in the best of all worlds. Even if barbarians shake dangerously its foundations. Because, among those who aspired to bring down society, there were the fascists, the nazis and the stalinists, the dominant ideology trumpets everywhere that any attempt to end the bourgeois order, any other project of society ends up inevitably in totalitarism. Chorus repeated a thousand time which, for example, throws to the oubliettes the libertarian communism realized during the spanish revolution. Chorus repeated today by all these journalists commenting on the albanian situation, which probably preludes to larger movements of revolt. This one, like the chatter of the mind in the concert of states, could only bring disorder, chaos and anarchy.

Three scarecrows for the bourgeois order, formidably animated on the scene of modern mythology by the avant-garde, dada and surrealism. We do not get tired of exhibiting, with calculated nostalgia, the scandalous lucidity. Neither forgetting its lessons in the deadening echoes of the cultural and economic supremacy of the United States peddled since 1945 of action-painting in pop-art, minimal art in post-modernism, until the revolt and desire which found the creating art are entirely deprived of sens, and as senseless as the narcissism and pushiness with which contemporary artists can be recognized. Art, like the experience of freemdom in a world where freedom is liberalism, now there is an improper idea ! There have been dreamers : we lend them willingly the nightmare of having know more than the newspaper of the time. But there is also a place for the newspapers, which become the only consciousness of the events. As soon as the artists, disappointed to be unable to understand the world beyond the stalinist lie, boast themselves to be no more or less alienated than the « common man », they measure themselves to no other horizon than the mystificating one of the daily newspaper. Its haunting presence becomes the only gage of reality, the only model. In the labyrinth of this exhibit, it is the minotaur, belching the fateful dates. The visitor is thus invited to an inititation to the misery of the world, to the cynically esthetised acceptation - as the artists seem to be mumbling more than they are protesting, with the distinct voice of the mediatic logorrhoea - of the spectacle of it to which can be resumed the so-called contemporary art of today.

From 1933, rise of Hitler to power, to 1996 - what the heel happened in 1996 ?of a purely event-driven story,
or its morose palinodes, goes along slowly. Modern, modernist, modernized when its artists think they're compensating their lack of imagination by imitating not their competitors, but the world of work. We lose ourselves on representations of the real, not open to its possibilites anymore but enclosing itself in identification to some fetish of submission. The ambition that was to capture the visions of desire and becoming sees itself, the day after the liberation, oriented towards the production of a propaganda for the state and the capitalist economy, towards the acceleration of its imaginary models that are the engineer and the pioneer. Equal to those, we take the mythical posture to brush great paintings, to produce en masse images in which is reflected the scrappy consciousness of those for whom art doesn't have for object to reveal more consciousness anymore. This sweats boredom and brainwashing, and in this pursued indifferenciation between art and sordid life, no piece of art can set itself apart from that image representing I don't know which american politician, signed Andy Warhol, which reconciles in the same servility the wordly portrait and the election poster. To the chronology of a purely factual history, arranged along a succession of bloidy seasons without showing the least bit of the irrational contradictions of capitalism, a chronological lecture of art since 1933 responds, aiming to coincide every social or political event with this or that blooming of an artistic movement. Outstanding operation in order to bring back the old debates on engaged art. That way we don't have to talk about the rest, especially poetry which won't « rythm the action » anymore but rather « be at the forefront ». We prefer to concern ourselves with the guarnish, to embellish history, or the fatalist idea to which it is reduced by those who do not want people to be master of their own fate. Sometimes, the decoration tears and what is shown is not so much the history which « falls outside like snow » than our reasons to not lose hope to the end of days.

But this exhibit is there to convince us that art, if it wishes to work over time, has retrospective as the only safe perspective. At then end of it, the manichean choice between the barbaric adventure and trust in the era. He who does not have revolt as his compass comes out of the last room as bewildered as if someone had just announced the end of history to him. No logic can be discerned under the events of which contemporary artists manage the illustration. Such art, from 1933 to 1996, was able to store in the attic its utopian challenes, its promethean project, to desire to see no further than the retinas of a journalist. Always late on the current events it enunciates, he would be satisfied to be their privileged commentator and to make us experience first-hand how the mass media becomes the ultimate ready-made.

Guy Girard

The dissuasion strategy of the blocks era, which the media called cold war, created a sinister nuclear heritage. However, given the consensus, today's dominant discourse tries to reassure us with nuclear disarmament even though it is almost impossible to realize, especially for the states which are nearing the economic precipice. In parallel, the establishment of the private nuclear as one of the most viable and profitable energy source intensified. If it is urgent to apprehend in a concrete way the threat that is the nucleocrat lobby, how, amongst other things, do we measure the fallout that unfolds in the heart of living organisms. The work of Jay Gould, "the enemy within", presented in the recent article from « The Nation », late 1996, of which we give some excerpts, allows us to see for ourselves this irreversible degradation. It is clear that the obscurantism shown by science and medicine allied to triumphant capital cannot hide forever the risks taken by the population living near the nuclear centrals and test sites. « The enemy within » shows very well the link between low intensity radiation and immuno-deficiency, or how science and medicine in general have a world view which oscillates between decay and desperate tinkering. This dichotomy of the absurd strikes with its deadly power because the essence of its operating is to put lives at stake. Such works give us the data which contributes to denounce and maybe jam the general atomization, both in the literal and figurative sense. Although we have to express some reservations about the remedies suggested by scientists, even those who are not subordinated, who measure today the damage caused by technical and scientific activies, sustained and sometimes detected for a long time.

Karl

FALLOUT FROM THE COLD WAR

Fought in the context of experimentations, premeditated explosions and unplanned nuclear accidents, many unreported and still kept secret, the cold war did not need to become warm in order to leave behind it traces of ruin, devastation and tears. The most lasting legacy of these years of ruinous military insanity could very well be global waves of immunodeficiency epidemics. (…)

Although environmentalists around the world recognize the importance of our interdependent global relationships and the tragic costs of the nuclear age, in fact, almost every word Gould writes is challenged. The official media even neglected to consider the long-term consequences of the legacy left by our idealized weaponry while the veil of secrecy and distortion of basic data remained draped around nuclear energy and low-intensity radiation. Remember ! When Ten Dixy Lee Ray was appointed by officials to chair the Atomic Energy Commission, she reassured the anxious mothers: « It's good for you, clean and cheap. Trust me on this! » ( ... )

In some settings, there is great resistance to Gould's analyses that relate examples of cancer, AIDS and low infant weights to various industrial poisons and pesticides, especially when combined with nuclear pollution. His most controversial idea is that men and women born during the nuclear age, especially during years of atmospheric testing and accidental emissions or explosions, are the most at risk because their hormonal and immune system were the more attacked.(...)

In 1945, the nuclear weapons complex at Hanford, Washington, which produced plutonium for the first generation of atomic bombs, released radioactive iodine into the atmosphere, which rivalled the magnitude of what was rejected at Chernobyl in 1986, the nuclear accident recognized as the worst in human history. Between Hanford and Chernobyl, the planet has suffered decades of fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests, equivalent to forty thousand bombs of the type Hiroshima. Impact on hormonal systems and immune system of more than eighty million « baby boomers » was, according to Gould, immediate and long-lasting. ( ... )

Gould and his associates in the Radiation and Public Health Project, non-profit association based in in New York, are monitoring health effects that result not only from nuclear tests and accidents, but also light drizzle, stealth leaks and fumes and almost imperceptible emanations from low intensity radiation. Using data from the National Cancer Institute, Centres for the Control of State Departments for Health and tumour registration, among other sources, Gould provides documents relating to the impact of radiation on residents of the « nuclear counties »), the one thousand three hundred nineteen counties close to either one of the sixty civil and military reactors installed in the United States. The result is alarming: the cases of cancer, AIDS, birth defects. chronic fatigue syndromes appear. more frequently in irradiated areas than anywhere else. Compared to all the others counties in the country, fifty-five of the sixty nuclear sites he was studying had rates of breast cancer significantly elevated, rates that couldn't be explained by chance or genetic factors.(...)

Gould's previous book « The Mortal deception: low-intensity radiation, high intensity concealment », written in collaboration with Benjamin Goldman, translated into Japanese and Russian, has been very well used by the anti-nuclear activists. He contributed to the closure of the dangerous Trojan and Yankee Rowe reactors in Oregon and Massachusetts. « The Enemy Within » is a new call to action. He explains the causes of the disaster that many of us, living in Long lsland's East End, have become aware of: here, almost every family has known tragedies.(...)

Gould amply demonstrates the reasons for this. Twelve miles north of the shores of Long Island Sound, there are three Millstone reactors, currently closed. They are waiting for their review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a result of countless security breaches that have long been undeclared. In the heart of Suffolk, two small reactors in Brookhaven's national laboratory have been discharging radioactive iodine, strontium and tritium into the air and into the river, the Peconic, for 40 to 50 years. In Suffolk, women have experienced a 40% increase in breast cancer since 1950. We never needed to suffer nuclear war to be bombed by nuclear fallout...)

By demonstrating the connection between radioactivity and immunodeficiencies, « The Enemy Within » can help us plant stakes in the heart of the nuclear industry. To the extent that the consequence of nuclear power is the extinction of life, we must change the course of history. Gould and his associates in the Radiation and Public Health Project provide us with the evidence we need to decide: the time has come to choose life.

Blanche Wiesen Cook

• 1Georges Duby, « Entretiens », « Le Monde », 26 janvier 1993.
• 2Antoine Prost, « Douze leçons sur l'histoire », Seul, 1996.
• 3Lionel Richard, « Les peintres contemporains face à l'histoire », « Le Monde diplomatique », décembre 1996.
• 4See Grégoire Madjarian, « Conflits, pouvoirs et société à la Libération », 10/18 1980, Notably the first chapter where the author mentions « the undisguised admiration of the french bourgeoisie towards a régime that – after the régime of Italy – had given the example of a barrage against bolshevism » and « The interessed indulgence of the bourgeois classes towards the initiatives of a nazi Germany that appeared as a champion of the capitalist social order in Europe. » (p,19)
• 5 Preface by Michel Ragon, « L'Idée », Frans Masereel, Nautilus éd., Paris, 1984.
• 6« Années trente en Europe (1929-1939) : le temps menaçant », Modern art museum of Paris, until april 15 1997.
• 7Editions Gallimard, Bibliothèque des histoires, 1992.

THE IMMIGRANT AND THE « LAW OF POPULATION » IN MODERN CAPITALISM

Is there a contradiction between the globalization of the economy and the strengthening of restrictions imposed by States on migratory movements? Asked about this, a Socialist Interior Minister protested against the liberal approach to migration control, adding: "It is not only immigration that should be controlled (...) it is capital movements and unfair competition that should be controlled first". 1 In reality, however, and by the force of historical circumstances, the order of priorities is reversed: the democratic state concentrates most of its efforts on immigration control. So what are the capitalist needs that justify increasingly repressive immigration policies? Should this be seen as a barrier to population movements or rather as an attempt to create a new framework for worker mobility?

Several recent publications challenge the classic explanation of migration trends. In "The Mobility of Labor and Capital" 2 , North American academic Saskia Sassen offers an original analysis of new forms of immigration, linking the movement of labour and capital. Her conclusions shake up some preconceived ideas.

Sassen begins by recalling that capital mobility has always created the conditions for labour force mobility and that the current immigration problem is only "the new version of an old question". By the way, Sassen is surprised that most current studies on migration avoid addressing the relationship between the mobility of capital and that of labour - this at a time when the circulation of capital and the internationalization of production and the labour market are essential features of modern capitalism. Today, there exists "a transnational space within which the movement of workers can be considered as one of the flows, in the same way as capital, goods, services and information" (p. 3). Sassen insists on this aspect: immigration can no longer be treated as a strictly national affair but, on the contrary, as the result of the globalisation of trade. Only in this way will it be possible to understand why population (density and growth) and poverty issues are no longer sufficient to explain the new migration trends. Hence a first conclusion: in the current phase of capitalism, a society's place in the internationalization of production determines its place in the global labour market. Migration has always been explained by the lack of development. If it could have been true, it is no longer true. The current phase of capitalism sees a direct link between the internationalization of production and international migration.

In the 1970s, the strong flow of investment to poor countries accelerated this internationalization. Sassen shows that the countries to which US industry exported production were precisely those that became the main exporters of labour to the US: Mexico, Philippines, South Korea and China. This leads to the second conclusion: foreign capital investment creates both jobs and the conditions for new emigration. In search of ever lower production costs, multinationals have shifted intensive agriculture and labour-intensive export industries to poor countries. These investments have destroyed traditional societies and their economies, causing massive rural migration and, above all, the proletarianization of young women. This proletarianization is at the root of the destabilization of poor and patriarchal societies, provoking unemployment among men and creating a reserve of labour likely to emigrate 3 . The internationalization of production has also resulted in the industrial decline of the old capitalist centres 4 . Only, Sassen emphasizes, decentralization and international dispersion of production goes hand in hand with a concentration of capital and centralization of production control. While the scale of foreign direct investment in economies reflects the growing internationalisation of production, it also reflects the growing concentration of capital. This development, apparently contradictory, characterizes what is now called the "global" economy. It is accompanied by the emergence of a modern service sector, with a high technical level, concentrated in a few megacities of the old capitalist countries, which have become the specialized places of finance, management, information and control of a dispersed production. This sector requires a new, cheap, submissive and flexible workforce. As a result, the urban structure and human composition of these megacities are changing. In this regard, Sassen asserts that the development of the low-wage sectors and the underground economy is not the sign of a decline but, quite the contrary, the manifestation of the new capitalist dynamism. Now, she concludes: "Deskilled jobs can be part of the most modern sectors of the (new) economy and backward sectors of the same economy can be carriers of its growth." (p. 129)

Until the 1980s, North American capitalism was the world's largest exporter of capital. Since then, the situation has completely reversed and, in 1981, the United States even became the largest importer of capital. According to Sassen, this is explained by the fact that "several regions of highly industrialized countries have once again become competitive with industrial areas in the Third World in terms of direct investment, both foreign and domestic." (p. 171) As we have seen, the ongoing globalization has led to a centralization of capital control and management. After having initially been decentralized, part of manufacturing production returns to developed countries, to the detriment of poor countries 5 . The latter, after having been destructured by the creation of export-oriented production zones, run the risk of being abandoned again by productive capital 6 . This is to say how wrong it is to identify globalization and standardization of capitalist development. It's just the opposite. Globalization is the modern form of unequal development. Current developments also demonstrate that the multinationals that dominate the world economy remain attached to their nation states and home markets 7 . Sassen gives several explanations for this return of manufacturing production in capitalist countries: technical advantages, protectionist policies, proximity to large markets8 and, finally, the cost of political and social instability in the new developing countries 9 . Added to this is the presence, in the old capitalist centres, of a new cheap and malleable immigrant labour force, perfectly adapted to the new forms of exploitation and manufacturing production. The current period of capitalism, known as "globalization", sees the tendency to impoverish the proletarianized populations confirmed, both in the societies of the periphery and in the old centers.

It is the emergence of a global labour market that has created the conditions for the rise of transnational migration. At the same time, the consolidation of States has made it possible to control such migration within a national framework, producing a labour force with a separate status. Since the 19th century, Sassen insists, "any immigration policy of a nation-state is linked to its place in the world economy" (p. 34). In any case, the institutional and legal differences that define the status of the immigrant worker are essentially aimed at lowering the cost of labour force reproduction - saving on training and social costs, exporting unemployment and the price of social discontent where appropriate. The import of labour has always gone hand in hand with capitalist expansion. This is how post-war reconstruction in Europe made massive use of immigration. Today, developed countries are using this labour force, drawing on an ever-expanding international labour market. New immigration is now concentrated in megacities where control of the global economy is centralized. Everywhere in developed countries, immigration policies are being revised in order to accentuate this separation, making the immigrant's legal status more fragile, even denying it 10 . Permanent immigration no longer meets current capital valorisation needs. States are therefore trying to institutionalise rotating immigration, of which insecurity is the normal condition. This allows Sassen to conclude: "If we compare the current situation of international migration with that of migration at the beginning of the century, we see a growing tendency to treat migrants as commodities." 11 (p. 50)

The shift from internal and colonial migration to transnational migration has always corresponded to a greater complexity of the capitalist system. The specific case of France is exemplary. After having resorted to internal migrations of peasant origin and migrations of colonial origin, French capitalism consumed, during its post-war expansion, the labor power of poor peasants and proletarians from the countries of southern Europe. In this case, labour movements preceded capital movements. But they announced the integration of European economies, the creation of a unified economic area. This development saw the weak peripheral economies gradually fall under the control of the large capitalist groups of the European "hard core". Their productive infrastructure has been destroyed and small local markets integrated into the unified European market. While the relationship between capital movements and labour force movements is clear in Europe, it may seem less clear when it comes to immigrants from Asia or Africa. Yet the persistence of a migratory current from North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa towards France cannot be understood outside the history of French colonialism and neo-colonialism, of the maintenance of the interests of French capitalism in these regions. Moreover, the economic repercussions of this immigration were essential for the survival of the local regimes set up by Paris. Hence the importance of state-to-state relations in French immigration policy.

What these immigrant workers expect from French society derives, for many, from the historical ties and cultural reference points created by colonialism. Thus, the desire for integration into French society is a powerful mobilizing factor, as we saw with the struggle of "undocumented migrants" (1996-1997), where the demand for social rights for the children of illegal immigrants gave cohesion and determination to the movement. But this aspiration is also used by power for divisive purposes. The movements are diverted from the field of exploitation and reduced to the humanitarian and defence of formal rights, dividing the struggling community according to integration criteria, based essentially on the rights of families and children. This also explains why the French political class constantly hesitates between repression through integration and repression without integration. This is why the issue of family and children is at the centre of all immigration regulation projects and of any new State measures aimed at making immigrants' stay more precarious. That is why, finally, in the French case, any attempt to treat the immigrant exclusively as a labour force is a source of major conflict and a factor of political destabilization of society as a whole. Dynamic sectors of capitalism are now demanding a new type of immigration, precarious, malleable and with a minimum of formal rights. The French State must therefore establish a new immigration policy corresponding to current exploitation needs. To do so, he must deal with the weight of the past and procrastinate. On the one hand, it must continue to take account of the strong demand for integration brought about by immigration from its former colonial area. On the other hand, the loss of influence of French capitalism in Africa may finally allow the state to revise its immigration policies, freeing them from state-to-state constraints established at decolonization.

In capitalism, the movement of workers is done according to the conditions of sale and purchase of labour power as commodity. Like capital, this movement is "free" only within the framework of market laws. Today, the precarisation of the immigrant condition is the freest form that the movement of men as commodities takes. That said, it is important to see that in developed countries the overhaul of immigration policies is carried out in parallel with the reform of the welfare state. We know that, in the large modern states, social spending constitutes a minimal share of public spending 12 . The destruction of social security systems and the exclusion of large sectors of the poor population is primarily aimed at reducing overall labour costs and thus improving the profitability of capital. Tackling social wages makes sense only to the extent that it leads to a reduction in direct wages. The "flattening" of the old labour legislation, the breakdown of the guarantees of the former working class and the precariousness of the status of the immigrant are all measures that make it possible to create a new pool of cheap labour. The same applies to the reduction of social benefits. This is the meaning of the reform of American welfare, which today returns to the labour market a proletariat paid at rates defying all competition - whether it is workers from poor countries or illegal immigrants working in the United States 13 . Everywhere in developed countries, savings are being made on the cost of working class reproduction. The expansion of the labour market to the whole planet and the creation of a new malleable immigration go in this direction. The cuts in public health policies show that the capitalist system no longer considers these expenditures to be socially necessary and part of the cost of maintaining and reproducing the labour force. They are superfluous insofar as any precarious immigrant worker can be replaced, displaced, expelled at will, according to production need 14 .

In studying the movement of capital, Marx had concluded that to each period of capitalist development corresponds a "law of population". Today, it is capitalist labour force needs that drive immigration policies and explain the fate reserved for young people of immigrant origin in Western countries. Side by side with the proletarians definitively ejected from production, and in the same way as the population of the American ghettos and the slums of the Third World, these young people are part of the population in excess in the current phase of capital development 15 . Parked, marginalized and criminalized, this youth can no longer claim to join the ranks of the former proletariat, decimated by the decline of industrial production. The working conditions of their parents' generation (permanent immigrants with legal status) no longer exist or are unacceptable to them, as are those of the new precarious immigration. However, as Sassen points out, the new immigrant must increasingly be reduced to his status as a commodity, and the few formal rights attached to the former condition of immigrant must be abolished. The human condition of imperfect citizens, which was recognized to them, is now contested. Capitalist states regard the costs of reproduction, maintenance and control of young migrants with formal rights as a burden. In France, the successive reforms of the law of nationality and the constant use of practices such as the "double penalty" 16 target precisely the youth who are part of the proletarian overpopulation.

One of the functions of the modern state is to regulate the relationship between its nationals and foreigners, thus creating a category of labour force with separate status. In this context, the recurrent practice of regularisation has become the way to manage new immigration that is rotating, malleable and of precarious status. More than a measure intended to act on the labour market, regularisation seeks social pacification, it serves as a safety valve: "The need to 'let bygones be bygones' on a regular basis, under penalty of seeing the development of a category of people without rights and therefore potentially explosive situations". 17 This means that the terms of regularization policies depend above all on the balance of power created by the struggle of immigrant workers, and not on an alleged "generosity" of the capitalist state. Regularising means recognising that illegal immigration has become a fact, irreversible and permanent under current capitalism. "Regularisation" is the legitimisation of the illegal situation.

The growing authoritarianism of the democratic system is not unrelated to the modern form of the "law of the people". The expenditure necessary for repression is that which the system considers essential to the stability of social relations. Formal democracy hides the social and economic inequality on which capitalism is based. Today we are entering a time when political power is trying to reduce this formal framework to its simplest expression. And where reverse reformism is defined by the defence of the lesser evil and the "least evil solution" 18 . But labour power is a very particular commodity in the sense that the worker who sells it never abdicates his rights as a human being, he never sees himself reduced to the commodity that makes him exist. The immigrant worker, even more so, invests all his energy in the realization of the project of survival and integration in society where he can sell his labour force at the highest price. If he sells his work force in a place, it is precisely to be able to live there. The tendency of modern capitalism to treat migrants as commodities creates new class resistances. This is how the struggles of immigrant workers who refuse to see the framework of their existence reduced to variations in trade must be understood and supported.

Charles Reeve

WHAT'S UP WITH THE GREEKS ?

Important struggles were waged last winter in Greece. First, there was the mobilization of farmers, particularly cotton producers, who were severely affected by last year's heavy rains and, more generally, by the end of the protectionist measures resulting from the GATT agreements. The agrarian problem is quite complex, but it is mainly due to the disappearance of small farmers due to the restructuring of agriculture. The percentage of peasants in Greece is, at 21 %, the highest in Europe, which the government considers as excessive. He therefore stated that it should be reduced to 7 %. The 1980s had already seen the gradual questioning of customs barriers, subsidies and fixed price policies. Subsequently, these measures were replaced by others imposed by the EEC's agricultural policy and then by the GATT agreements. European subsidies mainly favour large agro-business complexes. On the other hand, quotas for certain agricultural products have become stricter. This means that a farmer who exceeds the set production quantity must pay a fine: a measure that hits small farmers first. Given the high cost of production and debts to banks, small farmers are unable to compete with agro-business, either in Greece or globally. According to the Agricultural Register, which came into effect in September 1997, farmers whose main income is not derived from agriculture, for at least 50 per cent, are not considered farmers and, as such, are not eligible for subsidies and compensation. These conditions effectively exclude the majority of the peasant petty bourgeoisie.

The peasants have blocked the highways twice. The first time, from late November to mid-December 1996, was the most effective, but the Communist Party, which completely controls the peasant committee, was called upon to stop the mobilization during the Christmas holidays. However, the movement resumed at the end of January but no blockade could be undertaken this time because the government sent thousands of cops and anti-riot sections to the Thessaly plain. From the beginning of the movement, media propaganda against them has been harsh. As the Minister of Justice called them "donkeys", "criminals" and "vulgar", the peasants circulated donkeys in the villages mounted on carts flanked by panels bearing the name of the minister in question. There were also some attacks by police vehicles: during one of them, peasants literally lifted a police bus off the ground with their arms when it was full of cops, before leaving with the ignition keys. A game of hide and seek then began across the fields: farmers directing their tractors towards the highways while riot police armed to the teeth pursued them on foot. Unfortunately, after a few days of pursuit, the cops took revenge by damaging the tractors which, on the advice of the Communist Party, had been left unattended on the Paleofarsalos motorway. Many farmers promised them that they would find each other on the football fields.

As to the fishermen, they live under the constant threat of unemployment. Boat owners have not only reduced the composition of crews but also the proportion of Greeks in favour of foreign fishermen. Three years ago, the government passed a law allowing fishing bosses to hire more foreign workers at wages equivalent to a third of those of Greek fishermen. Thus, in January 1997, the sailors stopped the machines for ten days and blocked the ports, which caused much more problems in the movement of goods than the peasant movement did. That is why they have been thwarted more quickly than the latter by the special police forces and their union... Yet they have reached a "compromise" on social measures and tax burdens.

Furthermore, there was another struggle: a thirteen-day strike by primary school teachers, which I consider very important, and not only because I personally took part in it. The movement began when the strike by secondary school teachers was in its second week. This has always been the case in the past: secondary school teachers being more militant were starting a strike and everything they could win automatically benefited primary school teachers, whether they were mobilized or not. However things were a little different this time. Although secondary school teachers had been on strike for two months, the teachers' movement had been more dynamic because most of them were very young. In addition, union leaders, mostly members of the government party, appeared so openly sold and deplorable that they were attacked and driven out of the hotel where they had called for the withdrawal of the strike in mid-February. The hotel, which was rather chic, looked like a battlefield after the rally. We then walked to the union headquarters where we were greeted by the cops. The building was occupied for two days but the strike was over. This collective explosion has been dynamic which is quite unusual among teachers who are quite conservative people. The strike itself put forward relatively few demands. Given the enthusiasm of the strikers, I believe that the vast majority of them participated in the movement not only to obtain an increase in wages but also to protest against working conditions and the role of union leaders. The strike by secondary school teachers had been more disciplined. Most of its activists are between 40 and 50 years old and are part of this generation that became involved in political action after the fall of the dictatorship. Their ideology is the pure expression of social democracy. Slogans such as "Free and public education for all" dominated during the movement. It is difficult to say whether the two strikes won or not. Most of the demands were not fully met, mainly those concerning wage increases, but the strikes at least temporarily hampered, no doubt, future liberal reforms in education and the public sector as a whole (increase in part-time jobs, lengthening of the contribution period to claim a full pension, wages indexed to productivity).

K.

JUNE 36 : BEHIND THE SCENES

While May 1968 remained in the social memory as a social movement repressed in a combined manner by employers, the State, left-wing parties and trade unions, it only retained the "social achievements" of the Popular Front from the strikes of May-June 36. Yet these were only the necessary concessions of Blum's government to the repression of the largest social movement in the interwar period. Daniel Guérin's reissue of "Front populaire, révolution manquée" 19 is an opportunity to revisit this period, which in many ways is close to ours. If the role played by the PC will not surprise much (the historical word of Thorez, "It is necessary to know how to end a strike", has remained in the annals of social police), that of the socialists is less known. Beyond the action of left-wing parties and trade unions, the events of May-June 1936 remind us that when it comes to social repression, we are never better served than by those who represent us and speak on our behalf, at least until the rule of the game has been changed.

The occupation movement emerged spontaneously, taking the employers, the government, the unions and the left-wing parties by surprise: "The movement started without knowing exactly how and where." (Jouhaux, Secretary General of the CGT). What was the attitude of the employers, the State and the trade unions to put an end to the occupations in June 36? 20

Minimize the extent of strikes, misinformation, withholding of information

If the employers very quickly denounced the revolutionary character of the occupations, on the other hand, socialists, communists and trade unions deny any subversive character to the strikes movement. On June 6th, Jouhaux declared: "The strikes currently taking place in Paris and throughout France are neither political nor insurrectional, they are strictly corporate". The kidnapping of bosses in the occupied factories is frequent from the beginning of the movement, but at the request of the government the unions put pressure on the strikers to stop this practice. The CGT states that employers "must be free to enter and leave establishments" and that "any exaggeration, demagogic bidding, dangerous disorder must be avoided". While, generally speaking, the bosses expect in May-June to be dispossessed and expropriated 21 , they are surprised to realize that they are only dealing, thanks to the moderation of the unions, with demands 22 . At Renault, "Lehideux[a member of the factory management] is very surprised at the modesty of the workers' demands" 23 . In the working class press, the tone is one of moderation. "Humanity" makes a comparison between the first strikes only on May 24 (they began on May 11). When strikes resume, in the second phase of the movement (2-7 June), it is only on the sixth page that "L'Humanité" announces the resumption of strikes. The same thing will happen again after the Matignon accords and the renewal of occupations. Disinformation against occupations is practised equally by employers, who denounce kidnappings where they do not exist, and by left-wing parties and trade unions: it is a question of making strikers bend by all means. Salengro, the Socialist Minister of the Interior, published a communiqué on 6 June stating that the unrest was ebbing as it was increasing. When the movement really ebbs, the workers press won't say a word on the last resistance of the strikers. The media coverage of labour unrest by trade unions is a crude but effective means of distorting the reality of social struggles: each defeat of strikers is misrepresented as a victory. In striking companies, the union withholds information to isolate strikers from the context in which it negotiates with management, officially on their behalf. "[At Renault], as the days pass, notes Simone Weil 24 , the information given to the workers by the delegates becomes scarcer and less precise."

Blackmail in the national interest, the foreigner as a scapegoat

The CP, patriotic since the Staline-Laval Pact of 1935, which associated the tricolour flag with the red flag and "La Marseillaise" with "L'Internationale" at each of its demonstrations, used national defence blackmail to put an end to the workers' excesses: "We consider impossible a strategy which, faced with the threat of Hitler, would risk jeopardizing France's security". 25 ("L'Humanité" of June 3rd). It poses itself as a guarantor of the unity of the nation: "The broken negotiations must be resumed. It is up to the government authority to intervene forcefully with the employers' unions so that they agree to give satisfaction to the workers. The present situation, due to selfishness and employer obstinacy, cannot be prolonged without endangering the security of the people of France." (idem, June 6). After Thorez's appeal of 11 June calling for the resumption of work ("We must know when to end a strike"), strikers who continue occupations despite opposition from trade unions and communists are openly slandered: anarchists and Trotskyists are accused, along with fascists, of trying to drag the masses into an adventure. At Renault, the communists encouraged demonstrations of intimidation: simulated funerals of yellows (TN : see « yellow unions ») but also of Fire Crosses (far-right) or Trotskyists; leaflets nominally designate the supposed Trotskyists. It is a matter for the PC to oppose the union of the French nation to the workers unrest, implicitly accused of encouraging, by persisting, the Hitlerian and fascist threat. Antifascism in its bureaucratic-bourgeois version becomes the ideological justification for the repression of the occupation movement by the workers' organizations themselves (PC, SFIO, trade unions). An amalgam is made between elements foreign to trade unions and foreigners who work in France. The outsider becomes the scapegoat. It is the supposed intrusion by elements outside the trade unions that is the pretext for the government to take its first measures of order: "It is true, says the socialist Blum, that there is a feeling of suspicious groups from outside the trade union organisation." On July 4th, the government published a circular to the prefects: "France intends to remain faithful to its tradition as a land of asylum. It would not, however, be acceptable for foreigners on our territory to take an active part in domestic policy discussions[hear factory occupations] and cause unrest and disorder." At the end of June, the movement was almost over in the cities, but it continued in the countryside where strikes by agricultural workers broke out in mid-June in Ile-de-France: the repression drew attention to the role of foreign labour in this unrest. Strikers and demonstrators are accused of attacking the nation, of being the hand of the foreigner. This accusation does not only come from the far right, but now also from the Popular Front government and the organisations of the workers movement. 26

Negotiate strikers' demands within the social consensus

As early as 1935, in the face of the crisis and the fascist threat, the CGT advocated a rapprochement with the middle classes: "We know that it is impossible in the present circumstances to achieve immediately[the total transformation of the economy] because, by pursuing it, we would set up against us a coalition of people, some of whom, on the contrary, must be with us". Thorez, in his speech of June 11th, does not express himself differently: "Our goal, he says in substance, remains the power of the Soviets, but it is not for this evening nor for tomorrow morning, because all the conditions are not met and in particular we do not yet have behind us, decided as we have until the end, all the population of the countryside. We would even risk, in certain cases, to alienate ourselves some sympathies of the layers of the small bourgeoisie and the peasants of France." The trade unions are therefore striving to reduce workers' demands within the bourgeois legalistic framework. In October, after the strikes movement, the CGT declared that "it is to practice a true democracy that [to] put on the same level the right to work and the right to property, and to want both to find, through solutions of social justice, their safeguard". In times of social unrest, for the ruling classes the union of the classes is the absolute priority: Blum limits his governmental action within the limits of the ultramoderate program of the Popular Front, he recalls that the voters did not vote socialist but Popular Front. Echoing this, Thorez explains that "we cannot be saying that "now the issues of demands take second place and that it is a matter of taking possession of the factories and placing production under the direct control of the workers": the government's work must not be compromised. Frachon, a communist leader of the CGT, wants to put an end to the factory occupations in order not to endanger the alliance with the radicals (in this dupe deal, within the Popular Front, the centrist party of the radicals, supported by the powerful insurance trust, will oppose any measure of constraint with regard to the employers). From the first strikes of May 36, the Popular Front (government, parties and trade unions) and the occupation movement were made to collide.

For a rational management of capitalism

Trade unions and workers' parties denounce the "irresponsibility" of employers. As early as 1935, the CGT Plan explicitly called for a directed economy based on nationalisations covering all activities, private or not. Although the ideas of the Plan are not retained in the proposals of the Popular Front, the idea of a more rational management of the economy is a strong idea in trade unionism and in the so-called workers parties. On May 29th, "L'Humanité" explains that, if the employers understood better what was happening in the factories, the occupations would not have taken place: "The metalworking movement in the Paris region can very quickly calm down if, on the employers' side, they are prepared to accept legitimate and reasonable workers' demands". 27 More rational plant management would therefore be sufficient to avoid this type of "inconvenience". This idea of a rational and directed management of the economy is also found, in this period of crisis, within a part of the big employers, which is expressed in particular around the "Nouveaux Cahiers". This magazine, which brings together bankers, industrialists, senior civil servants and trade unionists, proposes a collaboration between employers and trade unions: "While some French industrialists have not yet understood the importance of the changes that have taken place in recent months in the social order and have some chimerical dream of returning to the mistakes of the past, others know that such an evolution is irrevocable. They are ready to adapt and to adapt their factories." June 36 is the beginning of the mixed economy company in France.

State intervention: the Matignon agreements

The intervention is requested by the employers 28 , which does not succeed, in spite of the support of the trade unions, in absorbing the movement of the occupations. If the State intervenes, it is because, for the first time since 1919, the social balance in France is no longer in favour of employers. In agreement with them, Blum made it appear that he was at the origin of the Matignon agreements. This lie by the government of the Popular Front has the advantage for the employers to reinforce the prestige of the State at a time when the employers cruelly need its help, but also to hide from the strikers the real weakness of employers who does not want to show them that they are ready to negotiate 29 . The government hopes, through the Matignon agreements, in exchange for social benefits (collective contract, paid holidays, 40-hour working week, wage increases, etc.), to end the occupations in a few days. If the employers are ready to accept everything to recover their production units (as long as the essential, private capitalist exploitation is not called into question), the trade unions, on the other hand, are moderate because the object of the negotiations is less to pay a high price for social benefits than to stop the movement of occupations at any price. It is at the initiative of employers, and not trade unions, that the principle of workers' delegates in companies is retained in negotiations. The Matignon agreements thus enshrine trade unionism in its social function of managing social relations with employers and the State. But this consecration only validates the repressive, useful and effective role that trade unions had to play to put an end to occupations. In this sense, if June 36 is a great victory, it is that of unionism and a defeat for the strikers movement. To survive, French capitalism had to change. The recognition of the union as a legitimate partner by employers opens "a new era" (Jouhaux), but even more so the appearance of the State as a third partner. Jouhaux will also say: "This shows peremptorily that it is not necessary to realize the totalitarian and authoritarian State for the elevation of the working class to its role of collaborator in the national economy, but the regular functioning and the elevation of democracy allow it".

Employers discover the usefulness of the union in times of social crisis

The counterpart of the gains ceded by the government and the employers to the strikers during the Matignon agreement of June 7, is the evacuation of the companies. The unions are committed to promoting recovery, but insist on the responsibility of employers in the social crisis: "It is really now that you may regret having systematically taken advantage of years of deflation and unemployment to exclude all trade union activists from your factories. They are no longer there to exercise the authority over their comrades that would be necessary to carry out our orders." And Richemond, representative of the employers, to recognize: "It's true, we were wrong." The employers approve the CGT when it explains that if trade union activists had not been repressed for fifteen years in companies, there would not have been a movement of occupations in France. For the union, it is in the perspective of a rational management of capitalism that union activists are useful in factories, to prevent crisis situations and also, when they break out, to help resolve them. At the end of the collective agreement on metallurgy, the employers' representative, Baron Pétiet, "strongly hopes that contact will be maintained between the two delegations (employers and CGT) through periodic meetings". The employers intend to keep in touch with a union that has proven its ability to help it resist the demands of strikers. Some company managers put pressure on non-union employees to join the CGT, the best guarantee for them not to have an uncontrolled outburst in their company. But this sudden lucidity on the part of employers towards trade unions was only imposed in June 36 by the urgency of the social crisis; it will be forgotten very soon as the crisis is over. In September 1936, the textile employers wrote a letter to Blum explaining the new rule of the game: "The textile manufacturers of Lille no longer want their factories occupied. They no longer want sequestrations, passes granted to bosses by factory delegates, threats addressed to staff who do not share the CGT's vision. They no longer want to see bosses stuck at home or assaulted in their factories, they no longer want to see their offices and shops occupied, they no longer want to be "allowed" to enter their establishments to pay their workers, they no longer want picket lines installed day and night at their managers' homes, they no longer want their staff to be tried by a factory council." The boss doesn't want to be humiliated anymore. In November 1938, a classic and revengeful repression was decided by the right-wing government that succeeded Blum: according to the testimony of one of the CGT leaders of the time, 9% of the working population of the industrial and commercial sector was fired on December 1st 1938 following these last strikes.

Nationalizations versus occupations

Among strikers, there is the idea that the nationalization of companies by the state is a guarantee for them. The threat of calling for nationalisation is often brandished by them in occupied enterprises. After the failure of the Matignon agreements of June 7th, the strike movement resumed in metallurgy because the strikers denounced the agreements they felt were below what they had expressed in their notebooks of demands (the CGT, on the contrary, called for the resumption of work on June 9th and spoke of victory). On June 10th, the strikers issued an ultimatum to the employers: in 48 hours, the latter must have satisfied their demands, failing which they will demand the nationalisation of the war factories and those working for the State, their operation being ensured by the technical and working staff, under the control of the ministries concerned. In Rouen, the oil workers declared that they wanted to continue the strike until nationalisation. Since nationalisation is first a dispossession of the private boss, there is both the belief among strikers that the revolution can be done from above (by the state) and a first phase of self-management (the next phase would be not to wait for nationalization by the state but to self-manage the enterprise directly). But the requisitions by the State are already envisaged by the CGT as means of breaking the social protest movement. On June 16th, Jouhaux reminded the Confederal Committee of the CGT that the government had, at its request, considered requisition procedures: "We had the principle of requisition accepted in the branches indispensable to consumption, on the sole condition that the workers organisations would put themselves at the service of the requisitioned companies. The government didn't have to use this weapon, but it says it exists." Belin, a member of the CGT bureau, commenting on these words, explains what the requisition means: "Let us suppose that, as a result of the conflicts, the supply of petrol, milk and flour to the capital is compromised. The role of government would be to ensure by all means the distribution of these products. To this end, it should requisition establishments where striking workers and employees would return to work under government orders. What if the conflict goes on? The State would remain, throughout its duration, the manager of the industries and businesses requisitioned. In this case, the strike would no longer be characterized by the cessation of work, but by its resumption under the management of the State, thus by a temporary dispossession of employers. They would return to their companies as soon as the conflict was over. Note that the plants have not been considered for operation, this is only an exceptional measure to prevent serious inconvenience to the population." (Lefranc, p. 141). Another form of neutralisation was inaugurated by the Blum government : arbitration. It consists of a social conflict freeze in the company, effectively protecting it from strikers, who have everything to lose from neutralizing their offensive, while it serves the interests of employers by validating, by its application, capitalist legality. "This is how, explains Blum, the strikes in the North and the Sambre were settled amicably. Neutralization was a kind of sealing in which all rights on both sides were respected. We then had the Houses vote on a text that prohibited strikes and lockouts as long as the attempts at conciliation provided for by law continued." 30

ABC of Socialist Repression

The employers are opposed to the use of force by the government, although the wild occupations of its production units take it by the throat: "We risk a bloody conflict [an employers' delegate argues], it is blood that will spill over on us and it will perhaps forbid us to take back the direction of our factories". 31 Occupations are an offensive as well as a defensive means: they forbid employers to recruit, in this period of crisis and unemployment, yellows. The priority objective is to free occupied factories. The Blum government will do its best not to use police force against strikers. On July 7th, the Interior Minister summarized his policy before the senators: "Salengro told the Senate that he would end the occupation of factories by all appropriate means. In his idea, this means an intervention by trade union activists, then by the public authorities. If this were not enough, we would have this intervention confirmed by activists and public authorities. If the result was still not achieved, joint action would be taken, and only if all these attempts at persuasion failed would the government use other measures. That means we'd send cops." 32 For the Popular Front government, the repression of occupations thus goes through several phases: first of all, the use of trade unions as a dissuasive and policing force within companies, then the intervention of the State as arbiter, then, as the last means, the use of the armed forces. If the use of trade union force is a palliative supposed to prevent the government from resorting to armed force, from June 11th and from Thorez's call for the resumption of work, the process of repression is launched: the government mobilises the armed forces, troops of mobile guards are concentrated by the government around the workers' centres, in the Paris region, in the agricultural centres and in the north of France. The Popular Front is lowering its mask.

In "Front populaire, révolution manquée", Guérin, a former member of Pivert's revolutionnary left within the SFIO, gives an autobiographical account of the rise of fascism in France in the 1930s, of antifascist resistance (the Front populaire) but also workers resistance (the June 36 occupations). If the reading of this book makes it possible to enlighten usefully, by comparing them, the rise of fascism and antifascism yesterday and today, it is less so, on the other hand, to understand what was the social repression of the occupations movement of June 36, by the Front populaire antifasciste precisely. Very talkative on the creation of the Popular Front from 1934 to 1936, the political quarrels and the criticism of the party drums, Guérin devotes only thirty small pages on the occupations of June 36. If this work is useful, however, in the study of the movement of occupations, it is in what it tells us, involuntarily, of the means of repression that were implemented to break the strikes of May-June 36. And the GR of the SFIO, by participating in the transformation of a Popular Front guarantor of capitalist legality into a pseudo-government with a revolutionary tendency that that only need to be pushed to the left to make it take a revolutionary leadership, made its contribution to this repression.

Guérin rejoined the GR in 1935, when Trotskyists were excluded from the SFIO. Far-left of the SFIO, the RG was in turn excluded in 1938, and individualized outside the party by becoming the PSOP (Socialist Workers and Peasants Party, 1938-1940). Until their exclusion, the Pivertists believed they could push the Popular Front to the left but, while criticizing Blum, they participated in the government of the Popular Front (Pivert was in charge of propaganda). 33 By actively participating in the heroicization and mythology of the Blum government, not only do they support the initially moderate and then openly repressive policies of the Popular Front, but also and above all they are in the vanguard of this dupe deal where the Popular Front coalition poses as the ally of striking workers, whereas its mandate is precisely to repress labour unrest. As the Blum government prepares to sign the Matignon agreements on the evening of June 7th, 1936, the purpose of which is above all, in exchange for a few concessions, to put an end to strikes, the picketers are busy making the socialist leader a hero : "When, the day after [the presentation of his government], in front of the chambers, on June 7th, [Blum] comes to the Vélodrome d'hiver, to swear to the people of France never to be dislodged from power without a fight, an extraordinary staging greets his entrance. The spotlight is on him. An orchestra plays "The International". The activists metamorphose into choir members. The Young Guards in blue shirts form a vibrant double hedge. The faithful chant indefinitely until they lose their breath: "Long live Blum" or "Blum! Blum!" Who is the director of this cult? None other than Marceau Pivert. A little later, too late, he will invite the militants to free themselves from a "certain religiosity" that prevents them from judging the policy of the "most prestigious militants" in a healthy way. But in the meantime, he's the high priest." Guérin concluded: "We were thus helping, to a certain extent, to spread a deception." (p. 163) Guérin clearly shows the influence of the new mass propaganda techniques inaugurated in Nazi Germany on socialist ideologues. Pivert "believes in totalitarian propaganda techniques", for him "socialism must respond to these "poisonous" weapons (fascist and Nazi propaganda techniques) with equivalent weapons and use against fascism the same methods of provoked obsession." 34 ; none of the forces of great capitalism, fascism, the general staff, the Church, reaction could have resisted him. If he had wanted to, 35 he had only one word to say and armed workers and peasants militias would have emerged from the ground even in the smallest villages; they would have protected the social conquests, supported the great nationalizations, reduced the trusts to powerlessness. (quoted by Guérin, p. 186). That the socialist Blum did indeed do everything he could to put an end to the factory occupations is a historical fact which still escaped Pivert twenty years later. It is easier to understand how the pivertists, including Guérin, by supporting a Popular Front they criticized, helped to "propagandize a deception". Despite the limitations indicated, "Popular Front, Missed Revolution" is an extraordinary critical testimony on the rise of fascism, antifascism, the Popular Front and the strikes of June 36, and an excellent introduction to this period and its stakes.

Barthélémy Schwartz

SERGE BRICIANER, SHADES OF BLACK AND BRIGHT RED.

I am told that, with the passing years, it will be like war. Craters everywhere, a void that gradually envelops us. The only way to salvation, others add, is to fill the void with life, to continue to live with death, in short. How to describe the unacceptable that we are forced to accept. The death of friends that becomes part of our lives. According to the usual formula, you have to get used to the idea. Another one of those "common metaphorical places that our laziness usually regales itself with without fear of surprise," wrote René Crevel. And suddenly, a big surprise. I circle around the question, I dare not write the words that hurt me. Serge Bricianer, my friend, is dead.

First there was this medical error, as he said with irony. One less lung, it was still bearable. Medicine, he used it like everyone else. Without believing it more than the doctors themselves. "Doctor or no doctor, it's shit," he said, a few days before the end. The second mistake was irreparable: death. Serge was part of my life, one of my critical points of reference about the world. How do you try to talk about him in the past? Serge was not, strictly speaking, an example of sociability. He was solitary and secret, someone very shy and reserved, with a difficult approach, sometimes to the point of rejection. A rich trajectory summarized in a few lines, one of the rare times when he wrote about himself: "After accompanying the Communist Youths of the year 40, as long as they spoke of "proletarian fraternization" (at least that is what I thought I heard), I crossed some of the shades of black and bright red." 36 . Shades ranging from surrealism to "Socialism or Barbary", "ICO" or more confidential magazines like "Mise au point" or "Spartacus". In the bubbling after 68, some of us crossed his path, and the encounter turned into friendship. In friendship, he was unfailingly faithful, as in enmities, for that matter. Through him, often in spite of himself, I and others, were introduced into the tribe of the subversives of the century who were part of the panorama of his life. There were: Breton, Pannekoek, Brauner, Rubel, Debord, Souvarine, Tanguy, Luca, Mattick, Herold, Natalia Trotsky, Korsch, Péret, Castoriadis, Nadeau, Malaquais, Franz Jung and many other illustrious unknown. Make no mistake about it. Serge hated anything that could be anything like a veterans' fraternity in any way. He spoke of them when he felt like it, when the occasion encouraged him to - with the ironic hindsight with which he was so good and not always with tenderness. "The past interests us only to the extent that it helps us understand the present," he said. In his own way, Serge lived totally in the present. With the distance that was proper to his personality, he was interested in everything, followed the disastrous state of the world. But cynicism, which he handled very appropriately, never replaced a strong social ethic. Straight and upright, he made no concessions. His sense of humour was fierce but you had to know his codes to play the game of irony. In times of confusion, when the ambiguity of situations confused my mind, I called upon him to open a window for me. "What do you want me to think?" he started by saying. Then, in a sentence, a lapidary formula, he swept the fog. But of course... Of a rare intellectual exigency and an exceptional rigour, he always weighed against those who allow themselves to say anything about everything. He never stopped writing and always considered that what he was doing was unfinished. That exasperated us. "And you think that's how it's done, that you can deal with a question like that in a few sentences?" For him, intellectual work consisted in "clarifying a context, further supporting or extending an analysis or, if necessary, discussing or updating it by proceeding in successive touches. 37 . Its purpose is to " persuade the reader to do the same ".

He left us two books 38 that refer to those interested in the revolutionary Marxist currents: "Pannekoek and the workers councils" (EDI, Paris, 1969) and "Karl Korsch, Marxism and counter-revolution" (Seuil, Paris, 1975), as well as numerous translations of Paul Mattick and other authors of the current of council communism. From an inexhaustible culture, with a wisdom that never resembled an accumulation of knowledge, he was sometimes sharp, dry, even elitist. How could we ignore what he considered essential? He had always refused to "succeed", and he was little stingy with sarcastic remarks about academics and other professional intellectuals, whom he gladly called "state researchers". There was not the slightest jealousy there. What he was questioning was the social function. His great friend Paul Mattick's formula was his: "Say what you must say, do what you must do, speak where you are given the opportunity, but, above all, never compromise yourself with fools. The foolishness, mediocrity and weaknesses of thought, he was very good at detecting them. The internationalism of the current of ideas to which he was attached always seduced me. An internationalism that was in its way of being, not a political position of doctrinaire sectarianism. The surrealist disgust of everything that has a patriotic or identitarian smell, he had kept intact. Many of his life's friends were those who had experienced exile, immigration and uprooting.

I will stop here, because he would not have liked these lines to look like praise. "Brrr! What's the point? It's life that counts." A great emptiness is there, since Serge is no longer with us. It's more than a lack. It's unspeakable. It seems almost pretentious to say that we must continue without him, by keeping alive what we were able to take at home. Courage, coherence, self-respect, ethics, sensitivity to social injustice and a deep desire for a fraternal and egalitarian world. Like his friend, the surrealist poet Jean-Pierre Duprey, Serge Bricianer was "allergic to the planet". Let's make sure that feeling is shared.

Charles Reeve

THE MYTHS OF EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE

In the history of societies and states, there are founding myths. Undeniable truths, at least for the most part, their function is always to justify the mode of domination in place and to stifle in the egg attempts to call it into question when it begins to appear for what it is. The same is true of the founding myths of science. Faced with the accumulation of catastrophes and scandals in which it is involved, the body of scientists still has the impudence to affirm that it is only a question of blunders, nothing but blunders, attributable to some irresponsible researchers, corrupt politicians and mad mad military... But science as such would have nothing to do with such horrors. From now on, the fauna of the reformists and moralists, researchers still in activity or already in retreat, rises to the occasion. They use all the advertising and media means made available to them by the State in order to make it more presentable in the eyes of the disillusioned. To believe them, it would be enough that it reunites with the spirit which was, it seems, hers at the origin so that it returns in the good way. It therefore seems useful to us to revisit this imaginary genesis somewhat.

For the official history, the decisive advance of science, towards the end of the Renaissance, was the work of extraordinary personalities, solitary, honest and disinterested, persecuted by the Church and ready to the supreme sacrifice to make their cause triumph: to dispel the darkness of obscurantism, to illuminate with the lights of the knowledge of nature the way of humanity so that it progresses in the conquest of happiness. But far from being intrepid revolutionaries, the founding fathers of science were generally fearful reformists, dyed-in-the-wool clergymen, landowners and bourgeois, even beasts of power, like Francis Bacon, Chancellor of England and principal ideologue of experimental science. They were even hostile to the radical questioning of religion: Bacon had Giordano Bruno expelled from the University of London for heresy. On the other hand, all criticized the Church for taking a position on matters that did not concern it. Theologians should no longer be the censors of natural scientists: "We must give back to faith what is faith, to science what is science. " 39 The separation of the divine and the profane was on the agenda. The emancipation of science from theology went hand in hand with the emancipation of the bourgeoisie from the aristocracy and the Roman church, especially in England, the cradle of capital accumulation. Despite the wrath of the Church, the recognition of science by the State was very quickly acquired. The absolutist states, prototypes of the national states of today, were engaged in wars for the control of the world market in the process of constitution and for the sharing of the colonies. They were anxious to consolidate their own civilian and military manufacturing base. Hence the foundation, during the Great Century, of royal academies of sciences, placed under the tutelage of the monarchs, but also of parallel academies, financed by the banking and commercial companies which had the monopoly of exchanges with the colonies. Academicians were retired by the state and sometimes salaried by manufacturers, bankers and traders. The academic luminaries were thus able to acquire notoriety and lucrative incomes to carry out, in the shadow of despotism, their expensive research. Isaac Newton, the symbol of science at the time, president of the Royal Academy of England, was also one of the main shareholders and managers of the East India Company and the future Bank of England. The credit of science accompanied the growth of credit itself.

Autonomy of thought towards the Roman Church had been the great demand of the founding fathers. In their minds, the enlightened despotism of the State was to protect them from the persecutions of the Church. But the monarchs and knights of industry, banking and commerce did not limit themselves to financing the academies. They intervened in their discussions and their choices. State intervention became even more systematic, particularly in France from the reign of the Sun King. The ministers of the King of France, in the decades preceding the Revolution, even forbade academies to continue studying physics in the spirit of Aristotle, sanctified by Rome as the master of mechanics. Newton's physics was already well established and recognized as the model of experimental science. The State stimulated the development of the sciences which were indispensable for the accumulation of capital and the increase of royal power. Thus, botany gained importance in connection with the extension of the plantations placed under the control of the various companies of India. The botanical gardens they financed in metropolitan France were laboratories where naturalists studied the possibilities of increasing the yield of exotic crops in the colonies.

In the minds of the ideologues of science, the concept of nature had very specific functions: religion had ruled in the name of God, science was going to do so in the name of Nature. Strange nature by the way that they were supposed to represent. Reified, it no longer had anything to do with nature as understood by the best critics of Christianity, such as Giordano Bruno, in spite of their pantheistic shortcomings: creative nature, source of life, which existed only through the multitude of things and transient beings that made it up. Driven by dynamic and contradictory forces, the evolution of nature was not limited to the perpetual repetition of the same phenomena even when they presented, during their movement in space and time, remarkable regularities. For Bruno, the notion of creativity, in the profane and non-divine sense, implied that there had been and would continue to be unexpected spontaneous creations, disappearances and transformations in nature, that all evolutions, mutations and regressions are not given in advance and predictable. There were some things that were elusive, indescribable and unthinkable in nature unless one imagined that humanity, in the image of God, was the true demiurge of the universe. Moreover, he did not simply recognize the importance of the connections and correlations between humanity and nature, understood as the indispensable environment for human life. Humans themselves were one of the manifestations of nature's creative power. They were part of it even if they distinguished themselves by their particular faculties, in the foreground of which they placed sensitivity and thought.

The idea that nature could be creating was not to the taste of science. Nature must have been silent and when it was not, scientists did not hesitate to silence it: "The only hope of progress lies in the restoration of science and the beginning of this restoration must take into account the totality of natural history but it is of a new kind. For what understanding requires is the preparation of the appropriate thing and that is why we look very little at the history of free and unbound nature in its own spontaneous work and course. We are concerned with the history of forced and tormented nature as it is when mortal effort and art tear it from its proper state, sense it and shape it. We care not for the pride and prestige of the thing and nature appears to us more through the torments and irons of art than in our own freedom." 40

"Knowledge is power " 41 : Bacon, with the cynicism of the statesman, had at least the merit of clearing showing his colours. The lapidary formula contrasted at its root with the claim to the innocence of science, distinct from the needs of capital, motivated by the search for knowledge for the pleasure of knowledge of nature. The foundation on which science was based was the historical process of separation between nature and society based on exploitation and domination, the process of appropriation of nature through labour, which was taking on dimensions hitherto unknown with the emergence of wage labour and the instruments necessary for the development of capital. From the perspective of the ideologists of science, nature had always been the seat of foreign forces hostile to humanity. The progress of humanity consisted in taming them ever more in order to transform nature into an environment adapted to the needs of property and the State. And the role they assigned to science was to work to aggravate the process of domestication to "finally make us masters and possessors of the totality of nature " 42 - As the elite of knowledge, they naturally placed their research activities well above those of ordinary mortals. But, in spite of the sophisticated means they used, they nonetheless remained work intended to develop capital. This is why, from the dawn of industrialization, they did not only concern themselves with pure research but undertook to merge science and technology. Their laboratory instruments were already both models and prototypes of those beginning to be used by capitalism, especially in the decisive field of engine power.

As a result, it is hardly surprising that they equated natural history with the history of class societies, particularly capitalist society. When Bacon affirmed that "we, ministers and interpreters of nature, can govern it only if we obey it " 43 , he revealed that, in the upside-down world of science, it was capitalism itself that appeared as nature, as the supreme authority to which all owed allegiance. The so-called laws of nature were like the laws that idealized the way capital worked, guided by the need to constantly generate, invest and reinvest profits to survive, even if it meant ravaging and sterilizing nature. In other words, they expressed only submission to the necessities of accumulation. The book of the wonders of nature interpreted by science was very similar to the prosaic books of accounts of the bourgeoisie and the state.

Following the fathers of faith, those of science also intended to tame human beings. They knew, moreover, that the achievement of their objectives ultimately depended on the damned of the Earth. They didn't think they could change the world on their own. On the other hand, they wanted to manage it.

That is why, at the end of the Renaissance, they began to draw up plans for reorganizing society and the State. In the utopian and totalitarian society he imagines, "New Atlantis", Bacon anticipates in many ways the scientist to come. Even if Christian religion and morality continue to have their place in Atlantis, the empire of Reason has succeeded the kingdom of God on Earth. No authority without power, no power without knowledge, no knowledge without science that validates it, such is the central theme of Bacon's utopia. Rich in their experience in mastering things and beings, scientists form the core of the hierarchy. They run it and regulate everyday life, from the workshop to the domestic kitchen. The ideal city functions, like automata, on a regular basis under the control of the masters of knowledge. Guided by the knowledge of the world held by the cenacle, it is free from the contradictions that until then had disturbed the harmony of society. When they appear, they can only be the result of maladjusted people who refuse to place the laws of the community, based on science, above their own individual passions. If the troublemakers of harmony refuse to understand, they must be neutralized. In the image of the reason of State, Reason hated contradiction.

We see it, from the beginning, scientists had the incredible pretension of teaching the rest of humanity to live and die. The "obedient commanding" revealed their excessive thirst for power. Nothing is more relentless than the ideologues who finally imagine they hold the key to understanding the world. Mirrors of the world, they are therefore the only authentic interpreters and the rest of the universe owes them obedience. As Bakunin showed, "their government can only be cruel, exploitative and oppressive " 44

The hatred of the senses, dreams and human passions was one of the main characteristics of theologians. Worship of the divine world was the only passion they recognized as worth living. Scientists, hostile to sensualism, did the same in the name of knowledge of the secular world. They affirmed, like Bacon, that "our mind does not need wings but lead soles") and fought like the plague "the senses and passions that deceive us, the imagination and the fantastic and superfluous representations that clutter our mind" 45 ). Far from freeing these essential faculties of the human species, which are sensitivity, reflection and imagination, they therefore had the objective of subduing them even more to adapt them to the needs of their idol.

In their minds, scientific rigour stemmed from the implementation of the inductive and deductive method of thought. Considered as a prerequisite to the process of forming the concepts themselves, it was to bar the way to vain speculation and facilitate the realistic investigation of nature through the care taken in studying the details hitherto neglected. But in use, the "discourse of the method" sanctioned the triumph of instrumentalist ideology, the reign of the functionalization of thought, of heavy formalist, analogical, repetitive cogitation and incapable of showing critical spirit. The spontaneous processes of the formation of ideas, both individual and collective, which implemented all human faculties, were no longer of any importance. The ideal was the mathematization of nature.

Indeed, there could only be science that could be quantified and it could not govern the world without calculation. The clerics had Latin as coded language, the vehicle of the revelation of the mysteries of faith. Scientists had their own, mathematical language, as a means of keeping their accounts with nature up to date. They did not make mystery of the reductive character of mathematics, where reiteration took the place of argumentation "but science is the art of measurement and measurement is at this price. Outside the convenience of calculation, everything seems far too confusing and subtle." 46 Thanks to them, they were finally able to realize their obsession: to transform the world into equivalent, weighted, measurable, calculable, quantifiable entities that could be formulated into mathematical symbols. The famous laws were themselves only convenient means to equate the phenomena of life. They explained nothing but proved useful for observing and calculating the state and evolution of systems and functions.

As a power aspiring to domination, science needed martyrs. Galileo's fame among the enlightened public of the time came much more from the trial than from the questionable evidence that he was supposed to provide as the basis for the principle of inertia, the keystone of experimental physics. But martyrology nevertheless proved insufficient. From religious, truth had to become scientific, not revealed but proven. Thus was born the myth of experimental proof.

Humanity had not waited for science to conduct experiments. All human beings realize it from birth to death. They have always been an integral part of human life, and even non-human, as soon as it possessed faculties such as sensitivity, memory and reflection, even if they were embryonic. In the spirit of the best thinkers of the time, like Giordano Bruno, experience, the sensible associated with thought, was one of the main sources of knowledge of the world but also of oneself.

The ideologists of science, full of themselves, despised the experience of common sense. They were obliged to take this into account, however, since their own experiments seemed very hermetic in the eyes of the people they wanted to captivate, aristocrats and enlightened bourgeois. Also, in their mouths, the call to common sense had the function of striking the imagination of the dazzled naive. Newton would have so formulated the principle of gravitation thanks to the fall of apples in the Garden of Oxford. Undeniable proof of genius because, since the time that apple trees bloom in the English gardens, nobody had had the idea to draw from it such universal principle. But the cheaters forgot to say that without Galileo's acceptance of the axiom on inertia, Newton's hypothesis had no value.

In reality, for scientists, human experience was something inferior and unessential ! "The domain of vulgar things, which cannot teach us anything about the intimacy of nature" 47 Detached from life and considered superior to it, experience became their reserved domain: it was to reveal to them the hidden mysteries of nature, the invisible and somewhat immutable substance, hidden within visible phenomena and which was to determine their evolution. But, prisoners of their instrumentalist prejudices, they never managed to understand in depth the world they were supposed to observe impartially. They were said to study life, but properties as essential to life as sensitivity, they did not encounter under their measuring instruments except as obstacles to overcome. Generally speaking, all the phenomena that did not fit into the mould fixed by the cankers of the experiment were considered as annexes. Bacon confessed himself without blush: "Is worthy of the name, the one designed and presented with the skill and rigor of art to obtain what is sought. Induction proceeds by separation in experimentation and the necessary conclusion depends on the forced exclusion. And the necessary is the measurable." 48 The a posteriori checked the a priori on condition that one did not hesitate to manipulate the manipulation. It was sufficient to define and isolate the area of validity of the tests and to define in advance what should be fragmented and discarded. In the final analysis, the validity criterion depended on the choice of standards and measuring instruments that confirmed, corrected and even invalidated the basic axioms when the tests did not lead to the desired consequences. It was even possible to demonstrate almost anything. But in reality, choices were never made without ulterior motives. Experimenters could not leave ideology at the door of their laboratories. And, attached to their status as privileged bodies, it was very rare that they did not orient their experiments in the direction determined by the needs of capitalism and the State.

Experimentation has never proved anything other than the deadly nature of science. In action, researchers should not give in to "any kind of sensibility" 49 - They should not hesitate to destroy to know. This was not without its difficulties, for some, even among academics not inclined to sentimentalism, were reluctant to participate in the planned massacre and shivered with disgust at the ignominious acts perpetrated in the experimentation rooms. The experimental approach was not an analysis but a dissection of life, literally and figuratively, cut, carved, dismembered, quartered and mutilated. Things and beings subjected to instruments were themselves only instruments, flesh for experimentation. Primed for and by experimentation, they were already only members of themselves. And after the disassembly, came the reassembly form, the creation of models supposed to represent in their generality the phenomena of life subjected to tests. Science thus seemed to bring to life the things and fugitive and transient beings it had annihilated. But such abusive generalizations were never but frozen extrapolations, the ghosts of the individualists detached from their environment, thus deprived forever of their own life, even when they were still palpitating under the instruments.

In accordance with humanist ideology, science had placed the human individual at the top of the hierarchy of species, next to God, then in God's place. This seemed at least to offer the guarantee that it would not do to the human species what it did to species considered subordinate. But, under the pretext of promoting the progress of humanity, she did not hesitate to sacrifice human individuals on the altar of experimentation. The cold passion of the experimenter sometimes even pushed him to the worst extremes. Bacon, the first, proposed the use of prisoners subjected to torture for experimental purposes and, following him, the Newtons, Lavoisiers and other academic luminaries of the period of the Great Century and later of the Enlightenment. The honorable members of the royal academies left their laboratories to carry out in the crowd, in the middle of London for example, experiments of electricity and chemistry which crippled onlookers. The Enlightenment saw the appearance of the practice of soliciting the poor, later generalized by the laboratories, beginning with that of the good Doctor Pasteur. For a few pennies, the teams of reelers took them to the cellars of the royal academies or the experimenters made them ingest preparations which, sometimes, poisoned them. With the notable exception of Diderot, who denounced its inhumanity, the matter did not prevent many people from sleeping, even on the side of encyclopedists. When one sees what the humanists of the academies were capable of, it was not surprising that they manufactured without complex instruments of war and torture.

it is not my intention to transform all the men of science of the time, any more than their successors, into bloodthirsty monsters. However, the ease with which they became indifferent and even ruthless in their activity speaks volumes about the inhuman nature of science. It is pragmatic. Only the results count, and the end justifies the means. Faced with Reason, the principle of individuality displayed by science has never weighed very heavily. An abstract humanist principle, it has always masked the little attention it paid to concrete individuals, both human and non-human. For scientists, they have never been anything more than sketches, not always very well finished, of the protoype they wanted to refine to achieve the perfection of the model.

As we can see, the idea that science is capable of self-correction as long as it reconnects with humanism is ridiculous. The fold was already taken at the end of the Renaissance and, since then, it has shown what it is capable of in terms of inhumanity.

It is in the nature of humans to create their own world, to transform the non-human environment that surrounds and penetrates them, according to their goals, ideas, desires and needs, an activity that also includes their own transformation, especially through the formation of conceptual thinking and articulated language. To our knowledge, such creative faculties are unique on the planet, at least at such degrees of complexity. The transformative power that humanity possesses is both promising and disturbing. To paraphrase the popular saying, while it can generate the best, it is also capable, when historical circumstances permit, of generating the worst. And the worst always happens when human beings see the world as nothing more than their property, which they can and must possess through their work.

More than ever, they are confronted with the problem of profoundly transforming activities and relationships in the world of exploitation and domination. One of the essential conditions for progress in this direction is that they finally understand that nature is much more than just their playground. They will never be content to observe without touching it, to interpret it without modifying it. What is essential here is that the modifications and transformations they will carry out take the spontaneous evolution of natural phenomena into account as much as possible. Their own freedom is at stake because, as human history attests, the domination of man by man is the corollary of the domination of nature by man. "The human creature will only be free when all earthly creatures are free," 50 Munzer prophesied with some reason. But even if such conditions are met, the human adventure will not be over unless we believe that, like gods, humans are not capable of mastering their destiny in its entirety. There is no guarantee that, even when they are freed from capital, they will not sometimes fall back into all-too-familiar failings and even into others, unknown, that we cannot even imagine today. Human life is also made up of criticism, trial and error, implementation and questioning, individual and collective experiences, through exchanges within our species and with the rest of nature.

Reconciliation with nature is one of humankind's antediluvian dreams, no doubt since the appearance of property and the State. But it is not cheap. It is to be conquered unceasingly. Moreover, unless they want to force human life back to the idealized stage of vegetative survival, the mere presence of human beings on the planet implies that they modify it to live. Even in the absence of exploitation and domination, this sometimes has unpleasant, even deadly consequences for some of them and for other natural beings. The essential thing is not to repress contradictions in the name of universal harmony, but to recognize them as such when they appear and to seek to create favourable conditions so that they do not turn into destructive and self-destructive antagonism. There will no doubt always be contradictions in natural and human history, especially between individuals. For individualization is one of the properties of life that also appears in non-human nature, though sometimes not very noticeably for us. But we cannot ignore it unless we reduce ourselves to undifferentiated and interchangeable objects. The recognition of the individual dimensions of existence is one of the conditions for rediscovering and developing a sense of sociability, symbiosis and reciprocity in nature and with nature.

André Dréan

THE LOVES OF ART AND MONEY

Art and money have appeared in various types of society other than capitalist societies, which have given them their present form. Or, rather, we encounter phenomena presenting the characteristics of the activities called today art and money in different forms of social life. But they did not yet possess the essential characteristics related to the roles they play in the society in which we live. The classical authors had already stigmatized the degeneration caused by the love of money, especially the deleterious effects it had on poetry. However, until recent centuries, money was not the true general equivalent of trade between goods (since labour power barely existed as a commodity) and it played only a rudimentary role as capital. For the most part, the term "art" was still synonymous with trade or know-how. And it was only towards the end of the 18th century that the modern system of the arts was to see the light of day.

The intensification of trade during the Renaissance and the development of a production method centered on the expansion of value encouraged the emergence of a great love story between art and money. Poets, musicians and plastic artists began to produce for merchants and bankers as well as for popes and princes. In the 18th century, however, the seeds of conflict first appeared in this emotional relationship. So much so that in 1771, Mrs. d'Épinay could write of Fragonard: "He wastes his time and talent: he earns money." 51 Diderot's salon criticism, for example, represented the opposition between the emerging social principle of capital and earlier aristocratic ideals. And this is in the form of a fear that the arts will degenerate because of the very increase in wealth, which should have fostered the flourishing of culture. However, at the turn of the century, art generally came to appear as a redeemer of wealth, not only by embellishing bourgeois homes but also by providing some spiritual refuge to hard-working capital. (Note the difficulty of assigning a gender to art: while the artist was clearly defined as male, the art object tended to be female.

The role of the State was decisive here, as for any legitimate link, recognized by society. From the end of the 18th century, the first museums were created from princely and royal collections, as symbols of national power and dignity and also as institutions intended to elevate the taste of the common man whose existence, with the development of modernity, had to be recognized. In the United States, as soon as the unified capitalist power became aware of its strength in the aftermath of the Civil War, businessmen from New York gathered in Paris to call for the foundation of an art museum, to show that they could now speak as equals with the ruling classes of Europe. To varying degrees and in different ways, States have encouraged the establishment of private collections, set up institutions for the training of artists and subsidized theatres and concert halls.

Like other marriages, this one combined true affection, dependence, resentment and mutual distrust. After all, it was in this society, dedicated to commerce like no other in history, that the spiritual virtues of art were associated with the idealized overcoming of the search for profit. From the artists' point of view, artistic activity was an expression of their superiority over labour, which had become the common lot of humanity in bourgeois society. Art was thus defined - Kant's aesthetics is the classic example - as "free", that is, exclusively governed by the internal impulses of its creators. Like other modern forms of freedom, the artist's freedom was one of the particular applications of the laissez-faire ideal, marking the replacement of commissioned works by patrons, characteristic of pre-modern arts, by work for the anonymous market. Given the actual mechanism of markets, it is not surprising that the inseparable myth of freedom of expression has been bohemian life. By virtue of necessity, involvement in a profession that provided wealth, or even sufficient income, only to small minorities, aroused aristocratic disdain for trade and, therefore, the appearance of a way of life that was intended to be superior to that of the businessman.

The other side of the coin was the tendency of the art lover businessman to distance himself from the pursuit of mere gain. The veneration for art came to express the aspiration of the upper classes of capitalist society to rise above the down-to-earth concerns of commerce, as worthy heirs of aristocratic culture. As manufacturers and financiers in Europe and America bought estates and started hunting, they filled their homes with antique furniture, paintings by old masters, or works of art of the moment.

The golden age of these loves can be illustrated by Joseph Choate's words at the opening of the new building of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park in 1890. He urged New York millionaires "to convert pork into porcelain, grain and fresh food into precious pottery, the coarse ores of the carved marble trade and the parts of the railway and the actions of the mines - all things which perish without being used and which in the next financial panic will shrivel up as surely as burned scrolls - into famous paintings of the great masters of the world... It is our highest ambition to convert your useless gold into objects of living beauty which will make the joy of a whole people during thousands of years. " 52 In reality, the dependence of this living beauty on nothing less than useless gold governed the constitution of collections as well as philanthropic donations of works of art. It explains the mixture of admiration and contempt with which the rich regarded artists.

In 1939, Clement Greenberg drew our attention to the evolution of these conflicting loves in the 20th century. Thus, he described the relationship between the vanguard and "elites within the ruling class of this society, from which it considers itself cut, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord made of gold" 53 . Given the opposition of fascism and Stalinism to modernism, which had its favor, Greenberg believed that only socialism - the abolition of a society devoted to the enlarged reproduction of money - could keep culture alive. He could not see that the upper classes would soon embrace the vanguard with enthusiasm, and that modernism would become the official art of progressive capitalism. 54

With the victory of American modernism after the Second World War and the shift of contemporary art to the centre of the aesthetic scene, we could see that art had become a kind of concentrate of the characteristics that make the success of an individual, a society or a nation: audacity, innovation, sensitivity to new needs still unknown to those who will recognize them at the time of their satisfaction 55 . The most coherent attempts to challenge the ownership of the avant-garde by capital, for example works such as Hans Haacke's "Documentation of Peter Ludwig's Industrial and Artistic Holdings", are easily absorbed by the artistic system even if, within it, an institution or another protests (as when the Guggenheim refused to exhibit Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings of Shacke in 1971). The fact that modern art, including post-modern art, functions as a class symbol is verified by the way it can be mobilized in an almost populist way by American conservatives in their struggle for power.

Phenomena of this order reveal the existence of elements disturbing the embrace of culture and commerce, as partners age. Art has not only been, from the beginning, one of the areas conducive to the representation of conflicting relations within bourgeois society, but it has also been affected by its development. With its world historical success, capitalism has lost much of its "bad conscience" and its initial sense of inferiority to earlier social orders. Thus, art can function more freely not only as signifier of wealth but also as a means of its expansion.

In the 19th century, as we have seen, art was defined as the embodiment of values superior to those of the market, as a model of meaning and as an object transcending everyday commercial life. Today, this conception of art, although still in force, is apparently in decline. One of the striking manifestations of this phenomenon is the tendency of artists, critics, historians and collectors to accept in their work, however ironic they may be, the coexistence of trade and the aspiration to transcendence, even the pre-eminence of the former over the latter.

Andy Warhol is, of course, the very example of the artist who placed the commercial character of art at the heart of his own activity. Interesting variations on this theme could be the work of JSG Boggs and H Steinbach, who specialized, respectively, on the monetary and commercial poles of value circulation. The recent increase in interest in the art market among sociologists, art historians and economists is part of the same phenomenon, as is the influence of Pierre Bourdieu's studies on cultural production, highlighting the link between aesthetics and market value and making fundamental use of the notion of cultural capital.

The take over of artistic production and consumption and, in particular, the avant-garde domain, by State and university institutions, combined with the gigantic and rapid expansion of the art market, have eroded the ancient conception of art based on overcoming the social division of labour, carried out by the creative, heroic individual. Art today is, at least in practice, more clearly subordinated to the private and state institutions that govern all other areas of social life. This is not necessarily bad for artists, or for anyone else who seeks to find in the debris of capitalist civilization materials for the creation of new meanings. It is always useful to know where you are.

With the collapse of pseudo-socialism, now retrospectively transformed into a preparatory stage for the further globalisation of capital, the realm of money seems larger and more solid than ever. At the same time, the crisis in the state-party system was one of the elements of the much larger crisis in the state-capital system. It is certainly too optimistic to speak of the "ageing" of money, thereby implying the programmed death of bourgeois society. But, beyond the certainty that this society, no more than those that preceded it, will not last indefinitely, the current period, combining economic decline and many ecological disasters, shows that we are entering an era of disasters. It could perhaps make the search for forms of association beyond today's conceivable once again.

It is this situation that has produced the ruin of the ideology called post-modernism, the loss of confidence in progress, in all areas of social life. While art, like politics, science and self, continues to function as one of the fundamental representations of social activity, it is itself part of the general decline. In the United States at least, the eclipse of art, as an object of worship, by religion, may reveal it to us. Even though it promised to be its substitute. In their old age, art and money have not found peace and security which, only forty years ago, seemed to be their due, but anguish, disappointment and doubt, which all the bullshit and self-persuasion can only alleviate momentarily 56 .

Paul Mattick Jr. 57

« DECHERVELAGE »

In this month of October, at the top of the bill, everywhere: Che Guevara. "Remember this small condottiere of the 20th century", wrote this stakhanovist of the guerrilla before going one last time to hunt down the paper tiger of imperialism at the bottom of a jungle. And thirty years after his death, we still remember him, in a world where the memory of the past helps us to forget that the present has no future, and where the history of the past struggles, their commemoration, so invigorating for the veterans, have for role to make incomprehensible the current struggles. What is celebrated in Che's face? The revolutionary agitation of the 1960s, if it still holds a utopian surplus in the subversive imagination, could not be reduced either to the pavé-étalon of May 68, nor to the image of Christ-guérillero that we see flourishing again in the shops of radical ready-to-wear. But it is perhaps also the very idea of revolution that one wants to tie with this so expressive goatee, in the archaic ideology that it conveyed in the shade of the morose mangroves. A revolution which is only a military adventure, which aims only at the take-over of power, which the masters of this world have all the means to guarantee themselves...

However, I dare to believe that this idea is conveyed differently, in relationships more complex than the adoration of an icon to the cult served by journalists, leftists repented or not and the last Stalinist bureaucrats in exercise. This complexity is commensurate with the current confusion, which will not, far from it, be lifted by the mystification of a "real left" watering, under the gaze of a few tutelary figures, the old tree of the "next-day-singer" whose best fruits after successively falling in the gardens of the "socialism-in-one-country", would fall today in cadence in the Chiapan eden. Two months ago, during the last papal performance in Paris, a friend told me that he had seen an interview on the news with a teenager participating in it. To the journalists astonishment to see him on such an occasion wearing a T-shirt bearing the effigy of the most famous Cuban Minister of the Economy, the young man replied more or less this: "Che is for the mind, the pope is for the heart." News of idolatry. If it is still reassuring that this boy knows he has a mind and a heart, the symbolic forms he communicates to them, when will they stop carrying these deadly deliriums to open more avenues to desire? To hell with the Vatican carrion and the fatigue relics, but will the circulation of the Guévarist legend be able to exceed its commercial objective and untie in this senseless world the need for the renewal of the Promethean myth? Not of course in order to feed with devoted militants some Marxist organization claiming to be this arboricultural strategist ! But since this whole media operation is addressed not only to the guevarists of yesteryear but especially to a younger generation so obviously devoid of culture that the minister of its education proposes to give themlessons in morality, it is important to know if, against all expectations, once the whirlwinds of incense have dissipated, the image of the bearer of the star beret is likely to grant itself an unforeseen metaphor, that of an irreconcilable rebellion against the order of this world. The images that run through the streets of contemporary mythology have a latent power that is not controlled by those who, speculating on the misery of sensiblelife, gradually deprived of effective achievements to the benefit of virtual substitutes, multiply their appearance. Because playing with the portrait of such a cigar smoker is also playing with the desire for fire and the burning of an entire horizon.

But this image of Che, what is it an ad for ? It sells thirty-six cultural products, books, films, symposiums, exhibitions, festivals and various ceremonies including on a tropical island, a funeral with great fanfare. The mechanism of the show is well oiled and certainly, it has made his teeth on tougher prey than the sparkling operative. And yet, it is October. For thrill seekers, it is the 80th anniversary of the Russian revolution. We don't speak of it much, was it only this "vague ministerial crisis" as claimed Aragon, whose 100th anniversary we celebrate ? Let us bet that in spite of all the indisputable utility that the communist parties resulting from the consequences of the October 1917 coup d'état showed for the survival of the old world, the revolutionary events from which they benefited are not yet reducible to sports commentaries.

World upside down before being renewed world, the time of the revolution could be confused with the time of the carnival. In the world of entertainment, the carnival is a permanent promise, a promise of what lies beyond the commodity that is nostalgia for its mad expenditure . In other words, exoticism. And what could be more exotic than the Rio carnival ? The idea of revolution, to make it inoffensive, let it thus be confused with that of an historical exoticism ! In such an unfestive perspective, the figure of Che works best. The sparrow scarecrow under the palm trees over there, so far away.

Guy Girard

• 1Chevènement, interview, "Le Monde", 26 juin 1997.
• 2 Saskia Sassen, "The Mobility of Labor and Capital", Cambridge University Press, 1994. See also Nigel Harris, "The New Untouchables Immigration and the New World Order", Tauris, London, 1995.
• 3Without work, man is no longer able to start a family. Emigration occurs as the one and only opportunity to find work and regain traditional male identity. See "Tomorrow's second sex", "The Economist", London, 28 September 1996.
• 4Between 1969 and 1972, 22 million industrial jobs were lost in the United States.
• 5Sassen studied the ready-to-wear industry in New York and electronics in Los Angeles.
• 6See "Nike commence à trouver trop élevés les salaires asiatiques", "Le Monde", 24 June 1997.
• 7 Large multinationals control 90% of capital movements. American multinationals sell 70% of their goods in the United States.
• 8The United States and Canada form the first world market.
• 9Strikes and violent demonstrations (Vietnam, China, Indonesia) worry multinationals based in Asia, see "Le Monde", 24 June 1997, op. cit. The 1997 general strike in South Korea shows that the fall in production costs in these countries has reached limits. In Mexico, multinationals are concentrating their investments in areas close to the border with the United States.
• 10In the early 1980s, the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the United States was 3 to 12 million... for a population of 230 million.
• 11The export of labor power has become essential for countries like the Philippines or Mexico (more than 600 000 people per year).
• 12In the United States, where 14% of the population lives below the official poverty line, welfare and food stamps represent 3% of the federal state budget.
• 13Under the new workfare system, unemployed workers who have reached the end of their state benefits (at the RMI rate) are placed in private companies or public services, where they continue to receive the same amount: $1.5 per hour, the federal minimum wage being $5.5.
• 14 In the United States, the new immigration law (passed by the Democratic administration) deprives legal immigrants of social benefits (health, education, food stamps) from the federal state.
• 15The "discovery" of the consequences of this state of affairs in Viviane Forester's book, "L'horreur économique", constitutes a real cry of anguish from the humanist left. Its extraordinary success cannot be explained by the banality of the text, it rather reflects a fatalistic concern towards the economy seen as the fetish category of bourgeois society.
• 16Expulsion from the territory for young people of immigrant origin who have served a prison sentence.
• 17Editorial, Le Monde, 11 juin 1997.
• 18 The regularization modalities as well as the amendments to immigration laws are elaborated by "experts", academics and others, whose work invariably leads to conclusions of reformist xenophobia: the definition of the "acceptable level" of immigration !
• 19Editions Babel/Actes Sud, 1997.
• 20 Main sources: "Juin 36", by Danos and Gibelin (La Découverte 1986); "Juin 36", by Lefranc (Julliard, 1966); "La France en mouvement", edited by Jean Bouvier collection of articles by various authors, devoted to June 36, published in "Le mouvement social", (Champ Vallon, 1986).
• 21"Remember, on June 4 and 5, 36, there were one million strikers. Remember that the movement was gaining from hour to hour and from person to person throughout France. Eyewitnesses told you so. Mr. Sarrault said it, Mr. Frossard said it. Panic and terror were widespread. I was not unrelated myself to the representatives of the big employers and I remember what I was told, or made to say by common friends: "So, what, it's the revolution? What are they gonna take from us? What are they gonna leave us?" Blum au procès de Riom, 1942, Pottecher, "Le procès de la défaite", (Fayard, 1989, p. 129).
• 22See the testimony reported by Lefranc (op. cit., pp. 204-205).
• 23"Les grèves du Front populaire aux usines Renault", Badie, "La France en mouvement".
• 24Note on Simone Weil.
• 25Unless otherwise indicated, italicized passages in quotations are underlined by me.
• 26It was not until the end of the occupation movement at the end of June that the government issued a decree on the dissolution of the far-right leagues.
• 27Reasonable, for whom?
• 28Blum was contacted by the employers three days after his arrival in power, which the Stock Exchange welcomed, "because it is generally thought that the new government will quickly end the strike movement" ("Le Temps", 4 June 36). During the Riom trial, Blum declared: "At that moment [when the first strikes broke out in 1936], in the bourgeoisie, and particularly in the employers world, I was considered, awaited and hoped for as a savior. The circumstances were so distressing, we were so close to something that resembled the civil war that we hoped only in a sort of providential intervention: I mean the arrival in power of a man who was given sufficient deterrent power over the working class to make it listen to reason and decide not to use, not to abuse its strength. (Guérin, p. 192).
• 29Richemond thus deplored "the notorious lack of resistance on the part of many employers."
• 30Blum at Riom's trial, "The Trial of Defeat", (p. 143)
• 31Sarrault before the Senate, July 7, 1936.
• 32Ministry of the Interior press release, July 36
• 33Guérin will, however, be the only pivertists to vote against participation in the Blum government (p. 188).
• 34Tchakhotine, author of the "Viol des foules par la propagande politique" (1939), is introduced into the GR by Pivert.<:fn> In both cases, the individual exists only through the masses.

  While criticizing Pivert, Guérin followed him until the war, from the SFIO to the PSOP. Just as he saw no possible action except within the socialist or communist parties (he chose the SFIO), so the GR (in vain) proposed the unification of the SFIO and the PC, because "it was from within the unified workers movement that we wanted to seek the possibilities of revolutionary recovery". (p. 165). This explains why Guérin's view in this book focuses essentially on the activity of the parties and their leaders. After the war, Pivert returned to the SFIO and wrote retrospectively about the Popular Front: "Yes, anything was possible. Relying on these fervent masses, Blum could do anything Emphasis mine.

• 35Idem.
• 36Introduction, "Karl Korsch, Marxisme et contre-révolution" (choice of texts translated and presented by Serge Bricianer), Seuil, Paris, 1975.
2] - Ibid.
• 37Ibid
• 38Since the publication of this text, Ab irato has edited by Serge Bricianer: étincelle dans la nuit : Islam et révolution en Iran 1978-1979 (2002).
• 39"Advancement of learning", ( 1605) F. Bacon.
• 40 "La Valeur et le progrès des sciences", ( 1623) F. Bacon.
• 41"New Atlantis", ( 1625) F. Bacon.
• 42"Le discours de la méthode", ( 1637) R. Descartes.
• 43"La Valeur et le progrès des sciences", ( 1623) F. Bacon.
• 44"God and the State", ( 1872) M. Bakunin.
• 45"On Principles and Origins", ( 1620) F. Bacon.
• 46"La Valeur et le progrès des sciences>>, ( 1623) F. Bacon.
• 47"Advancement of learning", ( 1605) F. Bacon.
• 48"Novum Organum", ( 1620) F. Bacon.
• 49"La Valeur et le progrès des sciences", ( 1623) F. Bacon.
• 50"Mulhausen articles", ( 1524) Th. Munzer.
• 51Quoted by Étienne Jollet in L. B. Dorléac et al, "Le commerce de l'art", Ed. La Manufacture, Besançon, 1992, p. 129. In addition to this very interesting article, see also, P. Mattick Jr, in P. Mattick et al, "Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art", Cambridge Univeversity Press, New York, 1993, pp. 152-177, and Annie Bec, in Jean-Claude Bonnet, et al, "La Carmagnole des Muses", Armand Colin, 1988, pp. 81-95.
• 52Quoted in C. Tomkins, Ditton, New York, 1973, pp. 23-24.
• 53C. Greenberg, in Art and Culture, Dutton ed. in Boston, 1961, p. 8.
• 54Two descriptions of the early stages of this development can be found in Nicholas Fox Weber, Patron Saints, Knopf, New York, 1992, "Étude du mécénat moderne aux États-Unis dans les années 30", and James Sloan Allen, "The Romance of Commerce and Culture", University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983, on the alliance between modern art and the American business elite.
• 55To quote just one of many expressions of this thought, Hamish Maxwell speaking in place of the sponsor of Picasso and Braque's 1989 major exhibition on Cubism at the Museum of Modern Art, said that "Philip Morris [was] pleased to contribute to the presentation of this tribute to the enduring value of creativity, experimentation and innovation, qualities we believe are as important to business as they are to the arts. For whether we are in 1908 or 1989, in a rapidly changing world, not taking risks is the greatest risk of all" (William Rubin, Picasso and Braque : Pioneering Cubism [New York : Museum of Modern Art, 1989], p. 5.).
• 56An earlier version of this essay will appear in Sheely Horstein and Jody Berlands (et al.), State Institutions and Value(s), McGill- Queen's University Press, Toronto, forthcoming.
• 57Additional note: On this theme, P. Mattick Junior co-published with Katy Spiegel Argent in 2004.

Summary of the issue :

-Dangerous shortcuts and vegetarian sharks - Zapatism
and neoliberalism
-Upcoming head-on collisions
-Unemployed/media: a house of mirrors
-NEITHER LAND NOR FREEDOM
-ON SUICIDE AND OCCUPATIONS
-FREIGHT-LIFT
-The entirety of the press is toxic
-Movement of the unemployed: A struggle under
influence
-The ugly mug of work
-EXILE/ANAGRAM
-MAIL
-A NEW CULTURAL ORDER
-GUARANTEED INCOME FORCED LABOR AND
VIGIPIRATE
-NATIONAL HORROR AGAINST ECONOMIC HORROR
-The SEL are lacking in salt
-SCRAPPED WORDS
-

The beginning of 2001 saw an editorial infatuation arise for the writings of Noam Chomsky, noticeable since 1998. Several collections have been published (notably by the publisher Agone), as well as interviews; a part of the anarchist press makes moderate use of a fair deal of Chomsky texts and interviews available on the Internet. Le Monde libertaire, then, gave him the front page of their re-entry issue, with prelude to a longer series on him(1). The political texts of the famous American linguist were before that hard to find for some twenty years.

This rediscovery happens almost always in a eulogistic way. “Noam Chomsky is the most famous of the contemporary anarchists; he is also one of the most famous living intellectuals”, writes N. Baillargeon (L’ordre moins le pouvoir, Agone, 2001). In the preface of De la guerre comme politique étrangère des États-Unis (Agone, 2001) J. Bricmont with glory characterizes Chomsky as “underappreciated political giant”. The “authors” of an interview curiously titled Two hours of lucidity (Les Arènes, 2001), don’t go easy either, welcoming “one of the last living authors and thinkers truly rebel in this young millennium”, for which one must “wait six months in advance in the beaches of free time to meet”. No doubt that these formulas, characteristics of of a foreign personality cult in the libertarian tradition, make laugh the interested, whom I don’t accuse of any crime. They aim, and it is there that they are interesting, to persuade the reader that there is an opportunity to discover a thinking so absolutely original and yet hitherto unappreciated or ignored. From the part of libertarian journals and commentators (Baillargeon, etc.), it is a matter of using the reputation of the famous international linguist to spread political positions quantifiable as anarchist that he defends, which are then through authority legitimized by his academic and scientific prose. One must therefore present Chomsky as celebrity linguist doubling as great anarchist thinker. It is on legitimacy and the consequences of him as such an object of propaganda that I wish to write this critique.

One must first note that while the anarchist is presented to the militant public, the analyst of foreign politics (notably military) from the United States sees himself largely and frequently respected in the biggest (French) national presses, without necessarily getting presented as libertarian. Le Monde, which offers him a full page in one of their supplements on the war (22nd of november, 2001), qualifies him as “incarnation of radical thinking”. Le Monde diplomatique, which publishes “Terrorism, weapon of the powerful” (December 2001), does not speak of their engagements. It is also Chomsky himself who abstains from alluding to it. We may then notice – reserving ourselves to a future examination – the separation which he reveals between academic linguistics and militant activity (justified by the fact that the latter mustn’t appear reserved to the specialists), yet we are conflicted on why the “anarchist” Chomsky ignores similar large tribunes, and waits for us to ask him questions on his anarchistic tendencies, as if it were a matter of “personal affairs”, to hit on this side of things. Thus, he contributes to his own instrumentalization by ideological fabricators, still ignored (in the US, even his book 9-11, for September 11, sold itself, without big press coverage, at over a hundred thousand pieces), similarly celebrated (in France) with a perfume of anti-Americanism.

In his pamphlet of vulgarization The order minus power, unanimously saluted by the anarchist press, Baillargeon estimates that Chomsky has “prolonged and renovated” the anarchist tradition. He abstains at the same time – and for reasons! – from describing in what way this “renovation” would constitute itself. Chomsky himself seems closer to the truth when he precises (in 1976): “I do not really fancy myself an anarchist. Let us say that I am but a fellow traveler.” Outside of his identification with revolutionary anarchist trade unionism, obtained in numerous interviews with militant journals, it is not easy – in spite of the plethora of recent publications – to give oneself a clear idea of what Chomsky’s anarchistic companionship signifies. I have limited my quest to the essential question of the destruction of the State and doing away with the capitalist system.

I indicate here, for the convenience of my intent, that I consider “revolutionary” precisely he or she who takes part in such a rupture, judged by a prior necessity to construct an egalitarian and libertarian society. Symmetrically, he who is “counter-revolutionary” is he who would proclaim such a rupture impossible, undesirable or ultimately works to in reality go against this prospect.

Strengthening the State

In one of the recently published texts(2), Chomsky recommends a politics which – from the anarchist point of view – merits at least the characterization of being original: the strengthening of the State.

“The anarchist ideal, in whatever form, has always contended, by definition, towards a dismantling of State power. I share this ideal. However, it often comes directly into conflict with my immediate objectives, which are to defend or even reinforce certain aspects of State authority […]. Today, in the frame of our societies, I contend that the strategy of the sincere anarchists must be to defend certain State institutions against the assaults they undergo, while simultaneously opening themselves up to a bigger and more effective popular participation. This view is not inherently contradictory either strategically or ideally; it proceeds naturally of a practical hierarchization of ideals and of a just as practical evaluation of means of action.”

Chomsky returns to the subject in another text not translated into French, so I will provide us with the essence of its contents before critiquing a thing or two.

Interviewed on the odds of realizing an anarchist society Chomsky, using a slogan used by agricultural workers from Brazil, answers: “They say they have to enlarge their cage until they can break the bars.” Chomsky asserts that, in the current US state of things, one must defend the cage against external predators; defend power – however certainly illegitimate – of the State against private tyranny. It is, he says, “an evidence for all people troubled by injustice and unfreedom, for example someone who thinks children must be nourished, but this seems difficult to make understand many who fancy themselves libertarian or anarchist.” “In my view”, he adds, “it is one of the irrational and self-destructive instincts of good people who consider themselves left who, in fact, distance themselves from the legitimate lives and aspirations of suffering people.”

Except for the reference, more precise than in the prior text, to only the US, it is here again the same classic defense and illustration of the so-called realistic reformist. This time, in spite of the oratory precautions, the actual opponents of the State are supposed to be more foolish than anyone else preoccupied with justice and, incidentally, are incapable of understanding their contributions to letting children die of hunger! The “sincere anarchists” are thus invited to recognize honestly finding themselves in a reformist impasse.

Let us immediately observe that this Statist fatalism, doubled of a crusty and reformist moralism, is not without echo here in France. The French libertarian La Griffe published in its summer issue of 2001 a “State dossier” in which the first article ended with the same formula, signed Chomsky: “the State [sic] is today the last bulwark against the private dictatorship which, in particular, will not give us any gifts.”

Since such similar enormities can be published today in libertarian reviews without its authors seeing in it anything but a legitimate view as any other, it is indispensable to counter the effects of the Chomskyan “pedagogy” by putting the record straight.

“Ideal” and “realism”

Recent history provides us with examples of struggles led partially in the name of defending “public services” (transportation, social security, etc.) which certainly did not deserve to be condemned with an abstract anti-State principle. I have, for example, analyzed the dismantling of the traditional railway system and its replacement with the “TGV system”, predestined first and foremost to a clientele of roaming cadres between the large European metropolises. It was quite apparently part of the larger historical push to privatize the valuable “services” (transportation, health, mail and telecommunications, water, gas, electricity) and the nefarious consequences which stem from them. It did not occur to me to – because there exists no logical connection between the two suggestions – to deduce from this a “practical hierarchization of the ideals”, which should inevitably lead to theorize a support to the State institution which would apparently be desired as destroyed.

That there can exist, in a historical given moment, different enemies, dangerous on unequal levels, and that a revolutionary may find the painful (and aleatory) necessity to play one adversary against the other, one would need a foolish dogmatism to not agree. It is then not inconceivable to press on this attachment to “public service” (on the condition that one desecrates it) to hit the brakes on, for as much as it is possible, the appetites of the large firms. It is wrong that this should be seen as equivalent to a necessary denouncing, of which the quasi-Leninist “withering of the State” – which Chomsky precisely reincarnates – would give us the calculated formula. In other words: strengthening the State to better erase it afterwards, we have already been pranked by this before! Consequently, if oppositional movements within the current tendencies of capitalism lead to restore, temporarily, certain State prerogatives, I do not see a reason to lose any sleep.

We will notice that Chomsky also inverts the process. For him it is the ideal (of the dismantling of the State) which enters in conflict with the immediate objective. Or, the immediate objective is not reinforcing the State (or is it?), but for example to delay the privatization of public transportation in opposition to the restriction of circulation they necessarily bring. The partial “reinforcing” of the State is thus a consequence and not an objective. Elsewhere, we well see that the fact of baptizing as “ideal” the destruction of the State it comes back to reject this objective outside of the real. Qualification is worth disqualification.

The veritable realism, it appears to me, consists in remembering that a State disposes of but two eventual and complimenting strategies to answer to social movements and even more a revolutionary agitation: repression and/or reform/recuperation. A revolutionary movement, beholden by a desire (conscious or not) to rupture with the system in place cannot – by definition – obtain the approval of a State. On the flip side, it can constrain it to play reform, retreat and demagoguery.

The inconvenience of reformism as strategy (increasing “popular participation” of the democratic State, as per Chomsky) is that it never reforms anything at all. This is for the excellent reason that the auto-adaptive State arranges for itself reforms at least as well as certain popular assemblies. The State defuses them, the phagocyte, reduces them to nothing. The State as such does not exist, outside of struggle, knowing that the guarantee of “progressive” reform will not be emptied of its content, but we must realize this evidence, paradoxical only in appearance, that it is indeed revolutionary action that is the way of reforming society. Many institutions and social apparatuses are truly the result of insurrectionary workers’ struggles. The fact that they have been effectuated by either politician or capitalist can but lead to see the welcoming of a strengthened “State”, conceived as abstract entity or as a type of inert matter, a dyke for example, which we would have to consolidate to protect ourselves from floods. The State institutionalizes in a historical moment the matters of existing classes in a society. Let us remind ourselves of the definition (in constitutional rights) of the modern State which yields the monopoly on violence. An anti-Leninist like Chomsky knows otherwise very well that there can exist no “workers’ State”; speaking very well that the State is by nature a bourgeois arm.

Critiqued in the USA

The positions defended by Chomsky and his Canadian admirers do not reflect, without fault, the general viewpoint of militant libertarians or anarchist trade unionists in the USA. They are very notably critiqued in the trimonthly Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, to which he had accorded an interview. The metaphor of the aggrandizing of the cage, which Chomsky judges as particularly enlightening(3), sets off the ire of James Herrod: “The predators are not outside of the cage; the cage, it’s them and their practices. The cage itself is mortal. And when we realize that the cage is of world-systemic proportions, and that there is no “exterior” to which we may escape, then we can see that the only way to not get culled, brutalized or oppressed is to destroy the cage itself.”

If the ensemble of the contributors attribute to Chomsky the merit of having analyzed the foreign policy of the USA(4), giving visibility to the American anarchist trade unionist movement, furnishing a critique of the media which seems novel outside of the Atlantic, three of which (out of four[5]) absolutely notice and scorn his reformism. “It is possible that Chomsky does this, as purported trade unionist [he is wearer of the badge of supporter of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), revolutionary trade unionist organization], and to defend the benefits of liberal democracy, but that is neither anarchist trade unionist or anarchist”, writes Graham Purchase. “It would be an error for us”, adds James Herrod, “to turn ourselves towards Chomsky to ask him about his opinion on subjects that he has not truly studied, because his priorities were elsewhere, expressly not in that which touches upon anarchist theory, the revolutionary strategy, conceptions of a free life, etc.”

In France: at the service of what strategy?

Why forget today the texts of Chomsky on anarchism? Let us widen the simplistic hypothesis of a French-Quebec co-editorial, financially supported – including in France – by Quebec cultural institutions(6), even if the originality of the editorial mode merits to be signaled. Is it more a matter of publishing without proper judgment a theoretical body – by its volume –, produced by a reputed scientific, and bringing a real caution to an “anarchism” of which the precise content would bring little? This second hypothesis is informed by the simultaneous publication of N. Baillargeon’s texts, which takes in detail the Chomskyan distinction between objectives (at very long terms) and immediate goals, the latter being “determined while taking into account possibilities enabled by circumstances”(7), which would serve to justify a compromise of – and the word is of Baillargeon – “certain cyclical, provisional and measuring matters with the State”. Baillargeon also takes over from Chomsky his tear jerking arguments (little starving children) and his calls for “intellectual honesty”: “This means then, if we don’t play word games, to bring ourselves to defend certain aspects [sic] of the State.” He advances even, achieving this way the Chomskyan inversion of the historical perspective, that the obtaining of reforms “is without a doubt the necessary condition” for the maintaining of an anarchist ideal. Reformism is then thus not a lesser evil, but the immediate way of laying the foundations upon which will be built an apparatus allowing the obtaining of revolutionary aims. We doubt this: neither the nature of this apparatus nor its mode of propulsion are specified or even indicated.

This “libertarian” rehabilitation of reformism finds its echo in the French or French-speaking anarchist milieus, as it does in other walks like those of Attac, already critiqued in these columns, which does certainly refer to the “libertarian ideal” but resorts to the phraseological and the imaginary utopia of the proletarian world (cf. Oiseau-tempête no. 8). The reformist-libertarian fashion expresses itself equally in the echoes coming from the theses of the “municipalists”, taken from Bookchin, in the attempt to create an academic-libetarian caucus, within which participate the wise seminars of the ACL (Lyon) editions and in certain measures the editorial Réfractions. That this or that initiative be accompanied by excellent comrades is here not taken into account. At a time where libertarian ideals arouse a certain renewed interest in the editorial or even the militant, this fact is given testament through the creation of anarchist libraries (in Rouen, Besançon, etc.) and numerous publications animate themselves to present as compatible an anarchist tradition with an original reformism, given as only possible ersatz the toppling of the world.

As an American critic of Chomsky reminds us, each one has well the privilege to take a position which is as such – to speak strictly – of counter-revolutionary character. It must be deconstructed and critiqued – with disciplined language –, and this must be done with as little complacency as is found draped in the folds of the black flag which is given plume and pedigree to a flattering anarchism of opinion, which has become academic discipline, actor of democratic plurality and museological curiosity.

Within the rupture with the capitalist system, necessary path towards the construction of a communistic and libertarian society, dwells a point of fracture that is essential between those who accept this world – liberal-libertarian cynics or supplementary citizens – and those who want to invent another world. On the most immediate level, we would like that all honest libertarians who solicit Chomsky, publish Chomsky and sell Chomsky in piles take from that the consequences and tell us if, after considering it, they are rallying themselves behind the strategy of compromise, the anarchism of the State.

Claude Guillon [l]

1 – “Le capitalisme en ordre de guerre” (20th to 26th of September; text taken from the Internet; found in the fourth cover of the review Les temps maudits (theoretical review of the CNT), October 2001); “À propos de la globalisation” (27th of September to the 3rd of October); interview taken from the Internet (15th to the 21st of November 2001).

2 – Reponsabilité des intellectuels, Agone, 1998, p. 137.

3 – Outside of the cited text, Chomsky uses this metaphor in his interviews with D. Barsamian, The Common Good, Odonian Press, 1998.

4 – In the analusys of geopolitics, the domain where his competences are least subject of caution, Chomsky adopts the same democratic and reformist twist. The new military humanism. Lessons from Kosovo (Page deux editions, Laussane, 2000) makes a call to meditate on the merits of international human rights from which the principal advance would be, according to the author Chomsky appreciatively cites, “the outlawing of war and the prohibition of resorting to violence”. What the prefacing author qualifies as “a reasoning of quasi-mathematical rigor” outlines here a legalistic silliness.

5 – Only Mike Long delivers himself to a lengthy advocacy for pragmatism which leads him to, for example, a sympathetic evaluation of the Castro regime.

6 – It is the case for Instinct de liberté and De l’espoir en l’avenier (Chomsky) and for Les Chiens ont soif (Baillargeon; cf. note suivante)

7 – Les chiens ont soif. Critiques et propositions libertaires, Agone, Comeau and Nadeau, 2001. Released in Quebec. Published within the competition of the Conseil des Arts du Canada, of the program of income tax for the edition of the Quebec government and with the SODEC.