The people are in revolt, and the entire social order is collapsing
Gen Z are leading the European protests. Here’s why they’re angry
“Let’s… make ourselves heard for schools that don’t collapse on our heads, for safe and dignified work, for public healthcare, for social justice.” Italian student union leader Sabrina Brizzola
It’s like a traffic accident: a fatal junction, a death. Macronism is dying at the crossroads for which it has always been destined: the intersection of capital and people. Here, capital appears in its purest form — the form of money that makes money, without mediation: finance capital. And opposite it, the fire. The FT ran an early headline: ‘France Caught Between the Bond Market and the Barricades.’ There we are: right to the bone.
Four decades of neoliberal rot are now coming to a head at this point of terminal crisis — the point where two incompatible principles of sovereignty collide: the financial markets’ claim to sovereignty, as they seek to control all public policies, shape them according to their wishes, and nip in the bud any they dislike; and the sovereignty of the people. Macronism is the party of the former against the latter: choose France, please the markets — as for the rest: riot police, eye-gouging, mutilations.
It took until 2017 for capital to get a man of capital elected. Previously, there had been lingering delays, awkward timidity, occasional backtracking. But with Macron, everything has become clear. It is no coincidence that the sovereign debt crisis erupted at the same time as the political crisis (let’s stop talking about a ‘social’ crisis): these are characteristic features of a global order headed for ruin, when all its internal processes synchronise, signalling that fundamental contradictions of the matrix have reached a critical moment. The matrix has created its own impasse — its total impasse.
Time of Crisis
How did we get here? 1) Sanctify the financial markets, applaud their complete control over the economy, and celebrate their role as watchdogs of the neoliberal order: distant, abstract, incomprehensible, beyond the reach of any protest movement — perfect. 2) Enact the Tax Law: exempting both the rich and capital from being taxed. 3) Watch as the deficit inevitably widens and the debt balloons. 4) Invoke ‘the debt’ (self-imposed) and ‘the markets’ (deliberately enshrined) to begin the rampage: cut, impoverish, privatise, commodify. 5) Turn the people protesting into enemies and subdue them with weapons of war. Until the day when — no. No more. Then, the bunker that the rich thought they had built turns against them: the final explosion of the matrix.
The last adjustment variable — the one on which the rich had staked everything, the variable of voluntary servitude — has just collapsed. The daily of the bourgeoisie, Le Monde, is ‘dismayed’ by the ‘accumulation of crises’. One can see why these people are despondent, situated at the intersection of blabocracy (the government of loudmouths) and morocracy (the government of idiots). They cannot understand a thing unless they are destroying things. Their impasse is total. Their equation has no solution; there is no way out. The people have broken free from the straitjacket and forced Prime Minister Lecornu into it. This unfortunate man is under orders to announce a fiscal recovery plan just as the entire country rises up to tell him: No, not this time.
A formidable nemesis: it’s no longer even about Parcoursup, or the de-indexing of pensions, or housing assistance; it’s about everything. No authority can reassert itself when everything is called into question; that is to say, when the primal sovereignty of the people — denied by the usurping sovereignty of capital and the markets — rises up. This gigantomachy was bound to happen eventually. Now its time has come.
La Totale
But poor Lecornu hasn’t seen anything yet. Like the media morocrats, he doesn’t realise that the real financial cyclone — the one involving private debt, AI, private credit and private equity, as well as household debt — hasn’t hit yet; it’s still gathering strength. It will ravage the US financial system and thus the entire neoliberalised world system. Banks and insurance companies will go under and will have to be bailed out. Yet again. With public money. The ensuing recession will be devastating. Deficits will skyrocket. Why? Because this is a crisis of everything: ‘La Totale’.
‘La Totale’ is also a historic opening. Under the guise of youth — astonishing in every respect — popular sovereignty is surging forward. We know the bourgeois order’s only response: to terrorise. But these ‘solutions’ are only temporary. Their scope is limited. The sum total of everything that is unbearable — high schools, colleges, diesel, food, wages, firefighters, healthcare, public services, pensions — has crashed up against the sum total of all those who can no longer bear the unbearable. Behind the high school students spearheading the movement, the larger battalions are beginning to grow restless. The fatal error of Macronism: because it corrupts everything, everything can work towards its overthrow…..
Source: Tribune
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