Contrat social
English-language materials on the struggles against the Contrat Nouvelle Embauche.
Mohammed, quoted in the libcom blog, seems more adept in his analysis than most of what I’ve read so far. He’s angered by not “only the CPE but all the law of ’social cohesion’, because the government wants to throw young people into the arms of employers after what has happened in the estates. It is all a gift for the employers.” Contracts, indeed. So, it would be really nice if the libcom site, and other stuff I’ve been reading, wasn’t confining itself to coverage of the fight against the CPE as if this occurs in some kind of vacuum-sealed pack transported from 1968. You know, going beyond the schools, universities and factories … (Addendum:) With some sense of the unemployed and intermittent marches that occured in the early 1990s, the ensuing debates over precarite, the relation between social and wage contract policies and policing, the relation of biowar and border technologies (like the lockdowns) to such processes. I would like a step back from the inclination to reminisce about May68 (and its particular figure of the student-worker) and think the difference, the movement.
hi mate,
i think i agree with you tbh, problem is i am only able to work with the material i am finding out tthere, so that is inevitably the direction our reporting leans, i am trying to get as much english language material out asap, thats the priority so far.
please make such comments on our blog too, stir up some debate, it can only be a good thing.
cheers,
alibi
alibi [March 15, 2006 @ 1:13 am]
See also on this http://dearkitty.modblog.com/core.mod?show=blogview&blog_id=814083
dearkitty [March 15, 2006 @ 8:00 am]
Alibi, I was expressing some frustration - not just with the libcom blog on this, but generally. For instance, when you talk about covering student-worker revolts, does this literally mean not covering the riots of the banlieues? What are the implications of construing a figure in a particular way, for how one understands what is going on in France (and elsewhere)? Did all young workers in France have more or less security of employment prior to the CPE? What of informalised sectors of work, migrant workers, etc? I’m reluctant to repeat the assumptions of the socialists and social democrats, even while there’s some difficulty with translating from the French.
And on this, I guess Thiago is more familiar with what I was looking for, because he sent this:
I’ll leave the rest of his remarks for him to post if he wants.
In a broader sense, I’m frustrated with the ways in which the Left continues to think the struggles over work contracts (such as the recent ‘Workchoices’ policy in AU, or that of the CPE) at some distance from the struggles of the suburbs, of racism, borders and lockdowns.
s0metim3s [March 15, 2006 @ 12:53 pm]
This is a real powderkeg. The government is apparently quite worried to the extent that Le Monde reported that the Sarkozy and pals were telling everyone to bunker down for a hard confrontation. The main reason, and I think everyone seems to know this, is that they’ve got an issue that pisses workers and students immensely and then toss it at the banlieurs as if it was some kind of nice present, and people seem to have seen straight through it.
That’s my sense anyway.
RMIstes are people who receive the Revenu Minimum d’Insertion, a minimum income scam with a fabulous name.
TCO [March 15, 2006 @ 2:05 pm]
There’s also some backgrounding here.
s0metim3s [March 15, 2006 @ 4:10 pm]
France
Are the strikes, blockades, and protests that seem to occur more frequently and with more vigor in France than in the rest of Europe possible because it has the lowest unionization rate on the continent? If the fight against the contract laws were bei…
Recording Surface [March 17, 2006 @ 8:27 am]
Last night I had a half-hour chat to a friend currently occupying one of the smaller universities in Paris: they had occupied the night before and it was eleven in the morning (Paris time) when she called me, but it had taken them that long to break in to a phone usable for international calls (half an hour Paris landline to Melbourne mobile is probably not inexpensive). She had been around these ‘events’ for few days by this time, including the always-already doomed attempt to ‘retake’ the Sorbonne on the same night that maybe four hundred people occupied the social science building of the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie.
I trust the perceptions and underlying political positions of this friend, even though her French is limited and thus she relies on (pressuring other people to do) translations for the more difficult/’politicised’ debates, documents and discussions. Her impressions (she would acknowledge the somewhat tentative nature of these descriptions/conclusions, however they are expressed) may be interesting to people and can be crudely summarised as follows:
(i) There are solid divisions and separations between different people involved in these events, from the old favorite of entrenched trade unions limiting and policing their members (and sometimes everyone they can get away with policing) - a role the trade unions adopted with some commitment at the large demonstrations on Saturday, in Paris until the end of the quasi-official gathering when a bunch of people, notably a few hundred from the housing estates, decided to make use of more direct tactics. In terms of people taking action beyond anything that trade unions in France are going to endorse, defend, help with, etcetera, the divisions between the impoverished from the estates and the students are real and appear to have reached an at least temporary limit-point.
(ii) In short, sections from of the estates and the more fun-loving sections of the students act together in particular iinstances, spontaneously, but the former are not willing to pursue connections beyond that. Sections of ‘the students’ involved still implicitly or explicitly confugure this as a lack of politicisation on the part of the impoverished, which is pretty awful but predictable, no doubt. According to my informant, there is little or no communication, let alone coordination, between the youth of different estates, or even between buildings in the same estates, so that at any given event a few hundred people from a particular building will turn up, unexpectedly, prepared to take action - indeed, for the purposes of doing so - but the choice to attend seems to be somewhat spontaneous in any given instance.
(iii) My friend spoke of one young man from an estate - who had been with my friend at the attempt to retake the Sorbonne and thus had shared the experience of being tear-gassed by undercover cops who snuck into the protest and let off gas canisters to disperse a crowd which was not necessarily doing anything very notable at the time (the crowds relative passivity amounting to circumstances which for much of the population would make any ‘accident’ - such as someone being seriously injured or even dying from being hit by a conventionally launched gas grenade - somewhat more obviously outrageous; hence I suspect the sneaking-teargas-into-the-crowd-with-undercovers tactic). This person talked of the unwillingness of the estate kids to be involved with ‘politics’, with organising in the way of or with ‘the students’, combined with a willingness and desire to be involved in the most ‘militant’ forms of resistance. In his account, in any case, the position is that (a) as people already subject to massive state surveilance and repression on a daily basis for just being kids living in the estates, they felt that to identify as or overtly organise in any ‘political’ way would be a suicidal gesture sure to attract the violence of the state in one way or another and unlikely, in their eyes, to offer much more than pretexts for such violence, combined with (b) though ‘the students’, or at least many of them, are glad to have the ‘estate people’ at the demonstrations, there is an assumption of political superiority on the part of the former, as if the estate people should come to the students and/or the Left because the students and/or the Left are supposedly manifestly better, more sophisticated, more politicised, etcetera, which also relates to (c) should he estate people be subject to even greater repression, whether because of ‘becoming political’ or just comntinuing to resist, kids from the estates expected auhorities to treat them worse than they would treat the students, and didn’t feel that the students or the Left would be able to offer any effective forms of solidarity (cf. unimpressive responses to the repression during and after the estate-based rioting a few months ago). This even apart from debates about what the actual political content of the current resistance is. Suffice it to say that no section of the Left very broadly defined or of ‘the student movement’ has managed to develop any real ongoing connections with the people from the estates, despite the latter usually constituting the most impressive rioters (when they show up).
(iv) The obsession with May 68 is having a defining and destructive effect on the movement(s), with the students in Paris obsessed with (re-)taking the Sorbonne merely to enhance the symbolic relationship with 38 year old events. The police, realising this, have moved to guarantee that this doesn’t happen. At least the Canadian students who occupied so many universities and high schools last year had the strategic thought of moving on the blocking ports, highways and occupying non-educational institutions (corporation, political parties, confederations of industry, etcetera). The current French or at least Parisian movements seem unable to move beyond May and thus unable to ask either what desires could be actualised in these processes of struggle or what sources of collective power and freedom could be explored. There have been a couple of smallish wildcat strikes, not in Paris, but accoring to my friend no-one believes that these will spread: the unions have been much much more effective at containing, representing, mediating-into-conformity the anti-CPE workers, and are so institutionalised that this massive and key different from the wildcat strikes of 68 has to be ignored by ‘the students’ who are effectively reproducing the cliche of 68 as a ’student movement’. The differences in social relations between 68 and now are thus seen as obstacles to re-enactment, requiring ideological distortion of what made 68 remarkable, and not as potential opportunities to be open to the event, or to create and invent and seek new practices of power and freedom, within new forms of life entailing new lines of alliance.
My friend said many more things, but I was tired and on the streets at the time and didn’t take notes. If I remember anything particularly interesting I will maybe send a note here, though my friend said that she will try to write up her thoughts soon for Indymedia or libcom. As a general assessment she stated that while she had fun, what with the burning cars and struggles against cops: (1) it probably looks a lot more impressive from overseas than it does there; (2) apart from the participation of the estate people, these movements appear more like a larger and more militant version of student movements in Australia (or anti-IR or anti-war ‘campaigns’) we have seen in recent times, than any insurrection/revolt that is qualitatively different or genuinely reminiscent of what was interesting and exciting about 68; (3) she doesn’t believe that wildcat strikes are going to spread, that the estate kids are going to start participating on a larger or more organised basis, or that the student movements are going to move beyond their limitations in the near future, thus leavin a lot of space for recuperation by unions and the dullest of political parties and of student leaders/unions.
My friend is planning to leave France on Thursday or Friday unless massively surprised by events.
benjamin rosenzweig [March 22, 2006 @ 9:36 am]
Thanks Ben.
You’ve already come across this, no doubt. But here it is anyway, for those who might not have:
An Update by the Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile
Communique # 4
Monday, March 20, 2006
The Sorbonne University with its airs of eternity. Full of suspended history. Marble hallways like a frozen swamp. “When there is no sun, learn to ripen under the ice.” Then ten days ago, the ice started melting, one evening in centuries. A fire of tables and final papers: a flame higher than any man, in the middle of the quad, the quad of ceremonies. No more murmurs in the lecture halls, and in the hallways, no more discourses, just jostling together, searching for a structure. It begins. Projectiles, screams, fire extinguishers, chairs, ladders, against the cops. A monster awakens.
The authorities are stupid. They run around. They think that by evicting us they have destroyed the blast that emerged here. Fools. Fools as dull and the heavy thud of a computer on the helmet of a riot cop. By sending us in exile they only broadened our field of action. They will get their just desserts for taking from us our Sorbonne, for having dispossessed us. By installing their police here, they offered the Sorbonne to all the dispossessed. At this hour when we are writing this the Sorbonne does not belong to the students anymore, it belongs to all those who, by the word or the cocktail, mean to defend it.
Since our exile, we’ve had some thoughts on the state of the movement.
Revision #1: We are fighting against a law passed with a majority vote by a legitimate parliament. Our simple existence proves that the democratic principle of majority vote is questionable, it proves that the myth of the sovereignty of the general assembly can be usurped. It is part of our struggle to limit, as much as possible, the tyranny of the majority vote. All that space given to the general assemblies paralyses us and only serves to confer legitimacy on paper to a bunch
of wannabe bureaucrats. The assemblies are neutralizing all initiative by establishing a theatrical separation between the word and the act. Once the vote has been cast for a strike until the withdrawal of the law for equal opportunity, the general assemblies should become a space of endless debate, a space for sharing experiences, ideas, and desires, a place where we constitute our strength, not a scene of petty power struggles and intrigues for swaying the decision.
Revision #2: The union bureaucracies, even though they continue with their habitual manipulations, are not as serious an obstacle to the real movement as the reflexes of pacifism that spread amongst us. The night of the eviction of the Sorbonne, part of the students had no idea why they were there or what they could do, let alone what they should do. They were wandering in anguish of the freedom offered but impossible to grasp, because it was not desired. A week later, after
numerous occupations and confrontations with the police, their asserted impotence is finally giving place to an innocent taste for direct action. Pacifism finally becomes what it has never stopped being: a benign existential pathology.
Revision #3: The struggle belongs to those who fight, not to those who
want to control it.
Revision #4: The constant movement, the circulation of everything is a paradoxical condition for the functioning of the capitalist machine. In the same paradox, interrupting its functioning is a condition for its disruption. By the blockades, we are fighting against the total freeze of the situation they want to impose.
Revision #5: We are referring to 68, it is true, but we a referring not to what actually happened in 68, to the folklore, the occupied Sorbonne back then, the barricades in the Latin Quarter, we are referring to what did not happen in 68, the revolutionary turmoil that did not take place. By casting us in the past, some would like to extract us from the present situation and to make lose the strategic understanding of it. By treating 68 as a simple student movement, they would like to dismiss the still present menace of what 68 could have been, a savage general strike, a burst of a human strike.
Revision #6: The idea of democratically debating every day those who are against the strike on the renewal of the strike is absurd. The strike has never been a democratic practice, but a political accomplished fact, an immediate expropriation, a relationship of power. No one has ever voted the establishment of capitalism. Those who oppose the strike are de facto standing on the other side of the barricade, and the only exchange we could have with them is of insults, punches and rotten eggs. In the face of referendums set up to break the strike, the only thing to do is to abolish them by all means necessary.
Revision #7: A strange idea haunts this movement, the idea of occupying university buildings only during work hours. This is an occupation that does not liberate space. An occupation where firefighters, administrators, and pretexts of authority and safety continue to make us childish, and where the university will remain simply a university. It’s true that once we’ve taken over this space, we would need to populate it, populate it with things other than the desire to return to normal. We have to embrace with serenity the fact that there will be no return to normal, and then inhabit this irreversibility.
Revision #8: National coordination reflects the sterility of a certain classic notion of politics. The unionists, the million leftist groups and groupings offer to lifeless general assemblies platforms written in advance by their leadership. In atmosphere approaching that of yet another party congress, the national coordination displays nothing but a soviet-style power play between the “orgs”. We propose instead the idea of a parallel coordination following the example of the high-school students’ movement of last year, an open coordination (consulta) that is nothing but a temporary space to refine a national strategy.
Revision #9: We are the heirs of the failure of all the “social movements” and not just those of the last three years (teachers, retirees, seasonal workers, high-school students), but many more dating back to at least 1986. We have learned some lessons from these failures. The first is about the media. By becoming the echo of the movement, the media effectively becomes a part of it, a part which, when it pulls out (usually at the same time as the union bureaucracies) provokes the movement’s collapse. The strength of a movement is in its effective power, not in what is being said about it, and the malicious gossip about it. The movement must protect itself by all means, even by force if necessary, from the grasp of the
media. It must develop its own voice.
Revision #10: None of the “social movements” of recent years has achieved in months of “struggle” what the insurgents of November discretely obtained in three weeks of riots – cuts to public assistance in the affected areas were suspended, funding for local programs was reinstated. All of this without making any demands.
Demanding means defining your existence in the mutilating terms of those in power, it means conceding an advantage to the enemy. Even from the point of view of those who want to gain certain things it is stupid.
Revision #11: This is the end of the marches and the days of action declared by central committee. Only wild demonstrations and occupations from now on. The assembly of strikers in Rennes already prefers demonstrations with “intuitive routes”, and refuses to submit to the routes ordained by the police and its henchmen. Even their marshals have a new role, and a new name: they are now the “action division” and are preparing to confront the police if they have to.
Revision #12: No one has the right to tell us that what we are doing is “illegitimate”. We don’t have to see ourselves as spectators of the struggle, even less should we see ourselves from the point of view of the enemy. Legitimacy belongs to those who believe in their actions, to those who know what they are doing, and why they are doing it. This idea of legitimacy is obviously opposed to that of the State, majority, and representation. It does not submit to the same rationales, it imposes its own rationales. If the politicizing consists in a struggle of different legitimacies, of different ideas of happiness, our task from now on is to give means to this struggle with no other limit but what appears to us to be just and joyful.
s0metim3s [March 22, 2006 @ 12:15 pm]
Ben and S0metim3s,
I’ve also been working on libcom.org/blog with alibi, although my French is very, very limited so it’s been mainly technical and photo collation. Appreciate the comments here, although I think the criticisms a you raise are more down to a lack of resources/time on our part rather than a lack of will - and the fact we’re concentrating on reporting events rather than our own analysis for now.
I’d like to emphasise that we’re certainly not excluding (or de-emphasising) the riots in the banlieues, although these are naturally more difficult to pick up on since the French press doesn’t report them very much, and they’re unlikely to be posted up to the various Indymedias. When we come across them, they do get covered:
http://libcom.org/blog/the-changing-face-of-the-anti-cpe-movement/03/23/2006
What’s been interesting for me as well is how many high-schools have been occupied (around 20%, several in the banlieues) and that the high school students have in several cases been involved in shutdowns of transport networks (motorways, train stations etc.) There’s also been increasing frequency of government and employment agency offices. Again, it’s harder to find this information and what we have is a tiny fraction of it.
We’d be very, very interested to hear more from your friend in Paris, and appreciate that summary of her thoughts above. If she has more information on the wildcats, no matter how small, that’d be great as well
catch [March 24, 2006 @ 12:16 am]
catch, my criticisms were, as I said, frustrations. The libcom blog has been an excellent source over the last weeks, and we’re been making good use of some of the rest of the libcom site elsewhere these last few days.
Also, you might be interested: Alain Touraine is being an idiot, again. I can’t recall the link, but a google of his name and CPE should bring it up. Maybe it’s on that ‘Sight & [something] site which gives English-language summaries of European stuff. You might already have come across it.
Hopefully Ben will get and pass on the message.
s0metim3s [March 24, 2006 @ 12:38 am]
No luck with Alain, but I’ve plenty to look at the moment - if you find it again a link’d be good though.
Hope I didn’t seem tetchy about the blog - I agree with your frustrations just wanted to make it clear we’re not ignoring anything on purpose!
Have looked at the tronti discussion - wish I had the time and background reading to join in…
catch [March 24, 2006 @ 8:50 am]
actually, would ben mind if we put his summary up? it’s interesting enough.
catch [March 25, 2006 @ 9:24 am]
Catch, do with it as you will.
Follow-up conversation with ‘my friend’ tonight, who has just arrived back in London, and again I couldn’t take notes so this is from memory:
(i) barring a few details, the summary I put together was apparently an accurate enough reflection of what she said and mostly still thinks: she is planning to be part of a group project of writing something that will go into more detail and attempt a little more rigorous an assessment of impressions;
(ii) the obsession with retaking-the-Sorbonne -to-relive-68 notably hegemonic amongst many students has been less evident, which she thinks is positive, though she also cautions that this may have been because of the subsequent occupation in which she participated, which was explicitly designed to create an alternative organising space. Since this occupation was forcefully ended by the CRS and related RSAs in the last day, some version of this strategic monomania may reassert itself. Nonetheless, she was cautiously optimistic that people were thinking a little bit beyond sheer repetition;
(iii) that Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile document that has circulated very widely was apparently put togther by the people she was spending the most time with, who had been in the Sorbonne occupation but who were certainly not running the occupation committee. In fact, she says that this sort-of-tendency spent a day putting the text together as a sort of provocation or prank as well as a political intervention, precisely because they thought that their politics were being administratively excluded from expression in the ‘official’ occupation committee. This tendency or network, which sometimes denies that they are a ‘group’ though they put out a substantial political journal and other materials and have a building in Paris, seem, from the conversation I just had and the previous one, to be extremely interesting, though I am not sure how appropriate it would be to talk about them in detail here and now (I will talk to ‘my friend’ again on this point). In any case, in addition to the name the authors of the statement also used some kind of logo that had been used by the ‘actual’ occupation committee, so they have succeeded in pissing off some of the students while also managing to have their statement circulated widely;
(iv) yesterday was a nightmare; she saw groups of suburban youths (who she describes as ‘quite territorial’) attack each other quite viciously at a demonstration, in a twenty-people-putting-the-boot-in sort of way, and when other people attempted to intervene to prevent, well, near or actual death, these people were also attacked, like, with iron bars. In her words, ‘there were an awful lot of bleeding people and not because of the police’, though the police also seriously fucked people up and the police and media opportunistically blamed all of those injuries on ‘hooligans’ (now characterised as ‘not real demonstrators’ by various people and institutions possibly hoping to further entrench divisions between people in these struggles) as well. She spoke at some length about underlying divisions and distinctions that may have played a role in bringing things to this point, most of which did not actually reflect ‘badly’ on the suburban youths at all in fact, and I hope that the planned collective text goes into this in more detail - I don’t feel able to adequately reproduce her analysis here, or the analyses she reported others as having;
(v) an awful lot of people are now being arrested, Paris is saturated with CRS/riot cop types, some people are heading to other parts of France where they feel there may be more room to act;
(vi) some of what she said I am not sure I should put in writing, and I will consult with her again when we speak tomorrow morning.
Ange, give me a call if you get a chance, it would be good to see you.
Benjamin
benjamin rosenzweig [March 25, 2006 @ 10:54 pm]
Also, when I referred to “the subsequent occupation…explicitly designed to create an alternative organising space’, that was referring to the EHSS, which in my first comment I referred to as ‘the social science building of the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie’ (the EHSS is that social sciences building, apparently).
Benjamin
benjamin rosenzweig [March 25, 2006 @ 11:05 pm]