Such comment as there has been in the mainstream UK press has uniformly cast the current French anti-CPE struggles as wrong headed and conservative. As the editorial in the Independent puts it:
“This is not the expansive internationalism of 1968. Rather this modern leftism is inward-looking; it wants state intervention to preserve a jobs-for life system.”
Lets ignore the revisionism in how such a paper would really have covered 1968, what’s important here is the ever-familiar voice of TINA. Neo-liberal capitalism is the only future that is even thinkable let alone possible. All struggles against it are merely anachronistic, last man spasms.
The trouble is history refuses to end. “History isn’t a straight line. It moves in a series of uncontrolled breaks, jolts and ruptures.” And it’s precisely events like this French movement, such ‘Moments of Excess’ that can snap history in half and force it to re-organise. The starkness of the Independent’s editorial shows that a little glimpse of this has crept into the journalist’s peripheral vision. During such moments all subtlety and ambiguity is dropped, all pretence at objectivity vanishes and they openly state that they are neo-liberals and that there is no alternative. Like Simon Bates smashing a Sex Pistol’s record, such starkness is partly born of the unsteady wooziness brought on by history moving.
I’m getting that feeling full in the face, a vertiginous exhilaration that’s being held in check because I can’t find a way to concretise it in my habitual life. But I can still feel it re-casting recent history. It’s hard to look at last November’s riots in the banlieue as a clash of civilisations any more because there is an obvious potential for commonality between them and the present anti-CPE struggles. And even more directly the whole cycle of Counter-globalisation struggles really comes into focus. Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, sort of thing. To paraphrase an abstract I wrote last week for an unwritten paper:
“In recent years the counter-globalisation movement has been able to constitute itself by finding, in international summits, a figure that could stand in for the abstraction of neo-liberal global capital. While this provided the moment of focus through which the common of the movement could emerge, it also imposed a particular form on the movement, namely that of existing through a series of events. The problematic then becomes: how do such events relate to the experience of daily life? How can the common of the movement be concretised outside of those events to find resonances in wider society? How can the movement overcome the limits of its form?”
A series of social movements in Europe proposed precarity as a concept to solve this problematic and now the anti-CPE struggles have pushed that on to a whole other level. We can now see that the Anti-war movement couldn’t find a way out of the counter-globalisation movement’s problematic because it also moved from event to event. Struggles have to resonate into habitual life if foundational rupture is to occur. Increased precariousness in habitual life is how the global north experiences neo-liberalism and what provides the potential of a commonality with struggles in the global south.
Let's be clear on this, precarity isn’t a sociological category. It’s a political concept; it deals with the potential for resonance of struggles. It isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about an already existing common condition in the world around which a unified struggle can be created. Rather it’s a sense that different struggles, starting from the particular circumstances people find themselves in, might have the chance of entering a relationship of resonant amplification.
And this brings me to the main point about Moments of Excess and the reason they can re-cast history – They are moments of intense creativity and generation. It’s only the cauldrons of social movements that can give birth to the new social forms that can provide an exit from the binary of Neo-liberalism or post-war Fordism.
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