As mass celebrations erupt throughout France, euphoria seizes the nation and the world as the election is called for the Left, and Le Pen’s Nazi revivalists are once again denied capture of the state, for the tide of history has reversed and our odds of avoiding an Age of Tyranny and centuries of global war ending with our extinction are a little better today than they were yesterday.

    First the British choose Labour over the Tories, and this stunning reversal of fortunes in an election where all the polls said LePen was unbeatable; it gives me hope for our own election in November, and the forlorn hope of sending Trump back to his golf course.

     How this victory was won precisely merits special attention by America and any nation under threat of electoral capture of the state by the enemy, for tactical voting is a form of Fraternity which I often term as Solidarity and applies in all nations with a citizen electorate who are co-owners of the state.

     Nothing is beyond the possibilities of mass action and refusal to submit to force and control by authority and those who would enslave us.

     Today France has liberated herself and illuminated a path of resistance for us all.

     As I wrote in my post of April 25 2022, Victory For Democracy Versus Fascism in France; Celebrate with us the victory of democracy over fascism in the election of Macron over Le Pen in the elections of France.

    We share much history, ideology, values, and the institutions of government as partners and champions of a unifying civilization founded on democracy and the Rights of Man, America and France, and many of the same challenges as well.

    An imperial and monarchial Presidency may be counted among such challenges to democracy, for the unchecked power of the office and the extraordinary wealth necessary to win it makes of it a prize in the games of elites, and its capture by fascist subversive forces threatens our liberty in a way like no other.

     Capture the Presidency of France as the Fourth Reich did in America with  Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, in the Stolen Election of 2016, and all of the institutions of the state, its Justice and Legislative branches, and all of the values and ideals of the nation, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, verifiable and transparent Truth and impartial Justice, a secular state which stands between no one and his personal relationship with the Infinite, all of this becomes destabilized and questionable, and vulnerable to infiltration and subversion from the top.

     The Imperial and Monarchial Presidency must be restored to balance with the Legislative and Justice branches of government, for this is a precondition of fascist subversion and tyranny.

      For such systems already disastrously out of balance, wherein power becomes centralized to a single authority and the carceral state which functions as his exoskeleton and extends his will throughout a nation become a prison and instrument of tyranny, only the apex predator has agency. And no one, not even the tyrant, is truly human in tyrannies of unequal power. This is why democracy is important; at stake is liberty and equality versus dehumanization and slavery.

    France has averted this fate, for now. And for all of our tomorrows? Such is the power we hold in our hands, to choose who we will become from among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

    Let us dream and forge better Brave New Worlds.

    As written by Harrison Stetler in Jacobin, in his article entitled Marine Le Pen Would Destroy French Democracy; “ Emmanuel Macron has hacked away at civil liberties, with heightened police repression and ministers promising to root out “Islamo-leftism.” Marine Le Pen would be much worse — she’ll wage all-out war on France’s democratic institutions.

     Spirits were low last Tuesday at the Dorothy, a café and community space in Paris named after Catholic American labor activist Dorothy Day. Two days earlier, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing France Insoumise, had finished third in the first round of France’s presidential election, a little over 400,000 votes shy of qualifying for the runoff. The reality was sinking in that on April 24, voters will again have to choose between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. The incumbent Macron and the slew of conservative candidates divided up some 68 percent of the first-round electorate, an unmistakable sign of the country’s lurch to the right.

     With a keen eye for timing, the anti-capitalist, Christian-inflected magazine Limite chose this moment to host a public discussion with François Bégaudeau. A novelist, filmmaker, and essayist, Bégaudeau is one of the few great polymaths in contemporary French culture, a keen observer whose unpretentious novels channel a frank realism. His 2008 film The Class, on a teacher assigned to a difficult Paris school, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival and was nominated for Best Foreign Picture at the Academy Awards.

     But it’s as a social critic that Bégaudeau has most distinguished himself. His controversial 2019 essay, The Story of Your Stupidity, pillories the moral pretensions of what Bégaudeau now calls the “cool bourgeoisie”: the upper-middle-class Macronists who go to such ends to distinguish themselves from crass reactionaries like the Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour ilk. When their interests depend on it, Bégaudeau argues, the hip side of the ruling classes shed their easygoing mystique and become indistinguishable from their stiffer cousins. The pressure to do so would only become more intense as capital struggles to sustain itself through the twenty-first century’s wave of social, economic and climate shocks. This is a fine description of the lopsided politics of the Macron era, and has made Bégaudeau one of its most lucid observers.

     Except on one subject. Bégaudeau did not vote on April 10, and, needless be said, he won’t be voting on April 24. Reared on decades of political retreat, he has become one of the leading voices for abstention on the French left. In mid-March, he released How to Occupy Yourself on an Election Sunday, a lively essay on the inanity of electoral politics and the totem of voting. The book stated in clearer form what was already one of the central threads of The Story of Your Stupidity: Bégaudeau’s abstention from the last Le Pen–Macron face-off.

     The struggle, real or imagined, between the “cool” and the “hard” wings of the French elite — the Macronists and the far-right — was the official the subject of the April 12 talk at the Dorothy. But this was a natural pretext to discuss the subject on everyone’s mind: voting. “For someone with the luxuries that you have,” a woman in the audience commented, “I find that your position is irresponsible.”

     “Luxury . . . irresponsibility . . .” Bégaudeau retorted. “When I hear those words, the Nietzschean in me starts to get riled up.”

     In less intellectualized form, Bégaudeau’s dilemma is something that many French people will be facing today. Already on April 10, roughly 26 percent of the electorate abstained — the highest level since 2002, when the far-right then led by Jean-Marie Le Pen first qualified for the runoff. Macron seems to have a strong enough lead to win anyway: 15 percentage points, according to an Ipsos poll released on April 21. But this is still a historically small margin, with some polls showing him only 6 percentage points ahead. And he surely can’t count on votes from the Left. According to an internal consultation by Mélenchon’s France Insoumise released on April 17, 38 percent planned to cast a null ballot, expressing their discontent at the runoff, while 29 percent would abstain entirely.

     For left-wing voters specifically, relativism between Le Pen and Macron is fed by the experiences of the last five years, which have been lived as a series of attacks and humiliations that quickly earned Macron the nickname “president of the rich.” Le Pen, however, would not mark a rupture from the deeply antisocial democratic tenor of the Macron years, despite her attempt to position herself as an advocate of France’s lower and middle classes. Le Pen has, notably, abandoned her 2017 campaign plank of reversing recent changes to the labor code that undermined job security. Her propositions on purchasing power, mainly to achieved through tax rebates, are a reminder of the Reaganite origins of the 1980s National Front.

     Social and economic policy aside, it’s Macron’s attacks on public liberties and his cynical exploitation of right-wing cultural anxieties that have left-wing voters most dismayed by the choice faced. But there is fundamentally a difference of kind between Macron and Le Pen when it comes to preserving democratic norms. Macron’s administration has done little to stop a slippage that began well before his administration. The 2017 turning of the state of emergency into law, the 2018 “Collomb law” on immigration and asylum, the 2021 “global security law,” the 2021 law on “Islamic separatism,” the dissolution of associations, and Macron’s cajoling of police forces have only accelerated this trend. A Le Pen presidency would close the circle entirely.

     Rule by Referendum?

Le Pen plans to kick off her term with a series of attacks on France’s constitutional architecture. One of her main propositions is the establishment via referendum of what the far-right calls “national priority,” institutionalizing a hierarchy of rights between French citizens and foreigners in employment, housing, and social welfare. To clear the way for measures that would directly contradict European and international law on immigration, asylum, and human rights, she also plans also plans to impose the primacy of French law over European law, a reversal that Sorbonne law professor Bastien François said would amount to a “de facto exit from the European Union.”

     A French president bolstered by a parliamentary majority, and therefore with a pliant prime minister, leads an extremely powerful executive. Enjoying the initiative in much legislative activity, the president and prime minister can in some cases circumvent Parliament entirely via constitutional pathways such as Article 49.3, which allows the executive to force a law through unless the National Assembly approves a censure vote in under twenty-four hours.

     Without a parliamentary majority, however, the president’s agenda-setting capabilities are severely weakened. This is why, throughout the campaign, Le Pen has highlighted her intention to govern by referendum — a way to circumvent a likely hostile Parliament. In doing so, Le Pen hopes to position herself as a direct tribune of the French people, using the bully pulpit to force through opposition from mediating institutions such as the court system, the National Assembly, and the Senate — at the risk of provoking a constitutional crisis.

     The actual legal argument for this is flimsy. Constitutional reform in France is organized under Article 89 of the constitution, requiring supermajority approval from both chambers of Parliament. A hypothetical Le Pen majority in the National Assembly, the lower chamber, is already a stretch. The advantage enjoyed by entrenched parties in the Senate suggests that the upper house would almost certainly be under opposition control.

     In the April 20 presidential debate, however, Le Pen again insisted that she would use Article 11 of the constitution to bypass the official constitutional reform process. This article, which is meant to be used for the approval of traditional pieces of legislation or questions pertaining to “the organization of public powers,” was controversially used in 1962 by Charles de Gaulle to institute the direct election of French presidents by universal suffrage. The article stipulates, however, that a referendum must result in a consultation from the government in Parliament — a detail that De Gaulle ignored in 1962.

     Le Pen has also brushed over these technicalities. “Only the people are sovereign,” she stammered during the April 20 debate, implying that it’s a simple question of the balance of power — between institutions, but more importantly, between institutions and segments of French society of which a rogue president would claim to be the sole representative.

     “It’s at this point that we can start speaking of a coup d’état” François said.

     What exactly happens? We don’t know. The Parliament can decide to impeach the president. Do state functionaries call a general strike? We’d enter into very murky terrain. It’s like seeing what would have happened if the January 6 assault on the Capitol had worked: as soon as we step outside the rules, it becomes very difficult to say how things will go.

     “I have a hard time actually seeing her go down this path,” François tempered. “We don’t have the spoils system,” anticipating that, within state administrations at least, Le Pen would find little enthusiasm. An opposed Parliament could lead Le Pen to call for dissolution, of course, ushering in a snap election in the unlikely hope of demanding and winning a new parliamentary mandate.

     Regime Crisis

But even what the attorney and legal expert Jean-Pierre Mignard called a “shackled” Le Pen — boosted by a presidential mandate, hobbled institutionally — would bring the country to the limits of a “regime crisis.” This sort of situation would only further galvanize France’s confident far-right ecosystem. Friendly media organizations, retired generals, and extra-parliamentary political clubs already relish talk of civil war and seek to constantly outdo each other in racist saber-rattling. This flattered though minoritarian counter-society would become a dominant pole in possession of actual state power. They would eagerly follow Le Pen’s anti-institutional adventurism — just what France can’t afford right now.

     For all these reasons, left-wing voters need to be clearheaded about what today’s vote really means. In the society that they want to build, there is space for “neither Le Pen nor Macron,” as the slogan rejecting the election goes. But from today, France’s next president will be either Le Pen or Macron.

     That is the only thing being resolved. Bégaudeau is surely right to point out that elections are only one aspect of our political existence: a vote on Sunday is a momentary intervention to reduce the harm that can come from a figure with major sway over what people are able to do elsewhere in their social and political lives. The everyday injustices already endured by many French people have festered or been swollen by Macron — they would grow exponentially through a Le Pen administration. On the erosion of democratic institutions and rights, the response is no different. Without question, fighting back against, or eventually reversing, France’s rightward drift would be massively less difficult during a second Macron term.”

     Here is my previous essay on this year’s elections in France, April 11 2022 France Chooses a Future; France chooses a future in April’s elections, and as in America and much of the world it is one in which the forces of democracy and the founding Revolution of Liberty, Equality, and Solidarity is increasingly eclipsed by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and by a centrist neoliberal order whose rallying cry is the return to normal; a normality whose internal contradictions of systemic and structural unequal power long unraveling now threaten us with civilizational collapse and extinction.

    As I wrote of our own elections in my post of November 2 2021, which parallel those of France this April, entitiled This General Elections Day, Let Us Seize Our Power in the Reimagination and Transformation of America and Humankind; We face a great threat of fascist tyranny at a balance point of history throughout America and the world, and how we choose to give answer will decide both the course of our lives and those of future generations for centuries to come, perhaps for all time til the end of humankind if our choices bring extinction.

     Today we have an opportunity to choose one another and not the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites, equality, diversity, and inclusion and not the divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, liberty and not the centralization of power and authority to a carceral state owned by the wealthy, democracy and not tyranny, hope and not fear, love and not hate.

     Use the power of your voice and your vote while these rights are still yours, and refuse to submit to those who would enslave us. For at stake in our elections is our power to choose our own identity and our own destiny, and once lost to tyranny and state terror a free society of equals can only be reclaimed through seizures of power and revolutionary struggle.

     As written by Sigmund Freud in 1893; “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” Voting is better than fighting. Let us throw words and not stones.

     As I wrote in my post of November 22 2020, Normal Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; One of the things which concerns me about the use of the term normal in the current political moment is its inherent confusion and ambiguity, especially by the Collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party as an apologetics to reclaim their hegemony of power which was shattered and seized by the three successive waves of mass protests which have ruled the streets of America’s cities for a year or so now and handed the Presidency to the miscast champions of Revolution and Socialism Biden and Harris; the Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice and equality, a new Green Movement driven by Greta Thunberg’s mass global school strike and the guerilla theatre of Extinction Rebellion calling for economic and ecological justice and championing the Green New Deal as the last, best hope for humankind, and the #metoo movement which preceded them as a social transformation and reckoning of Patriarchy.

     If we squander our opportunity to enact real change with Executive control, if Biden and the fossil structures of a failed system which he represents return us to the conditions which led to the rise of fascism and state tyranny and terror, if we fail to seize our day and reforge the social contract of a free society of equals as the praxis or action of our values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, there may never be another chance for us to do so.

    Now is the time for change, and we must be its champions and bringers.

     We must be the Party which leads from the front of the three mass movements which have brought us to the White House, and let the Republicans be the Party that cowers from its people in bunkers and behind walls. History has handed us a hammer with which to smash the old and build the new; and to seize it we must abandon normality as the illusion that it is, behind which elite power enslaves us and swindles the public wealth. Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

     Normal doesn’t live here anymore.  

     David Walsh disambiguates kinds of normalcy writing in the Boston Review; Last year Joe Biden began his presidential campaign with a simple premise: “I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time.” The question of whether Donald Trump really has been an aberration in U.S. history has dominated political discourse for years, and in the face of both Trump’s incessant antics and the upheavals of the pandemic, Biden positioned himself as the “return to normalcy” candidate. (Before 2020, that political rhetoric was perhaps most closely associated with the presidential campaign of Warren G. Harding a century ago.) Even though Biden himself has walked back some of this language on the campaign trail, it has served as the bedrock of his message. And it worked: it unseated an incumbent president for the first time in nearly three decades, even if with razor-thin margins in some states.

     What do these claims of aberration and normalcy actually mean? The simplicity of messaging conceals a multiplicity of interpretations, each with their own implications for politics.”

     Nor is this shift toward fascism and the centralization of authority and power to a carceral state of force and control a sudden and unforeseen event; it has been gathering force as a counter-revolution and the subversion of democracy for some time.

      Historically I would link the origins of fascist revivalism in France to the mass immigration and infiltration of the former Nazis who had joined the Foreign Legion and ruled the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate until its fall, who now form the core of Le Pen’s party which threatens capture of the government of France, with the earlier importation of Nazi elites and scientists by America’s intelligence services during the Red Scare era of McCarthy’s blacklist, not only Werner von Braun and others recruited for the space race but also war criminals drafted into our intelligence and military services, in some cases including the Green Berets and Central Intelligence Service entire Nazi military units and espionage networks retaining their former rank in new uniforms.

     Fascism remains a beast with many heads and fifth columns within such security services throughout the world; and must be resisted globally whenever it crawls out of the darkness to ambush us.

     How best can it be resisted? Exposure and relentless pursuit unto destruction when identified; but we must also set counterfires and starve it of the fear it feeds on. For this is a consequence of overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power through division and shaped as fear of otherness by falsification, lies, propaganda, rewritten histories, and alternate realities.

     We must speak directly to the fear of those authority seeks to subjugate by claiming to act in their name; fear is a primary basis of human exchange as politics, and whomever best speaks to such fear wins, especially when fear is based in very real existential threats and unjust and unequal systems.

     As I wrote in my post of November 17 2021, The Revolution Goes Ever Onward: France’s Gilets Jaunes; This month marks the anniversary of three years of revolution and the Gilets Jaunes protests in France; one which has been met with repression and a shift in the government of France not toward liberation, but toward a brutal police state of force and control.

     The Yellow Vest movement emerged with a new precariat as a response to globalization, privatization, worsening economic conditions, and government complicity in the systemic mechanical failures of our civilization from its internal contradictions as we enter the terminal phase of capitalism. Historical forces sweep all before like an unstoppable tide, but like the fall of previous civilizations ours is dying because the final causes are often political decisions. 

     This means that there is yet hope; we can still change our future from an age of tyranny to one of liberty and a free society of equals.

     As with all tyrannies, dissent and resistance become pretexts for the militarization of the police through the counterinsurgency model of policing and the escalation of force and state terror, the universalization of surveillance, and the centralization of power to authority and a carceral state which serves the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites.

    Herein we see the globalization of tyranny which employs the strategy of Trump’s numerous coup attempts in 2020 to provide a causus belli for the federal occupation of Democratic cities by having police provocateurs and deniable forces of white supremacist terror disrupt the Black Lives Matter protests with violence and looting.  The parallels between America under Trump and France are alarming, but illuminating as well.

    Such historical progression from liberty to tyranny is not unique but universal; the nature of states is service to elites, law serves power, fear becomes reaction, and the centralization of power to authority creates tyranny. Here is the origin of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; not in personal sin, unfitness, or the innate depravity of man in the absence of restraining force and control but in systemic inequality.

    Tyranny is born of overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized by authority in service to power, using the lies and illusions of propaganda, false histories, and alternate realities to divide and conquer its citizens by making some of us complicit in the subjugation of the others through hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness, thus creating fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

    Other nations have proven less resilient to this subversion of democracy; among them France, which I would have thought impossible. Consider the cultural shift necessary to transform a nation in which protest is enshrined and valorized in the national identity as a patriotic duty to one wherein police brutalize protesters rather than embrace them as comrades in the cause of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and the universal Rights of Man are become contingent on their service to authority. I’d have said the same of us, once.

     France is fallen, but like America with our electoral repudiation of Trump and fascism, may yet rise again.

     As written by the philosopher Alain Badiou in his Verso Books blog; “That there are numerous reasons for this revolt, and that the movement may therefore be regarded as legitimate, is something I grant without hesitation. I am aware of the depopulation of rural areas, the sad silence of abandoned streets in small and even medium-sized towns; the continuous removal for masses of people of public services, which are gradually being privatized: health centres, hospitals, schools, post offices, train stations, telephones. I know that pauperization, initially creeping and then accelerated, is affecting sections of the population that forty years ago still enjoyed almost continually increasing spending power. I am well aware that material existence is becoming a headache for whole families, especially for many women, who are highly active in the yellow vests movement.

     In short, in France there is a very high level of discontent on the part of what we might call the labouring part of the middle class, provincial in the main and with a modest income. The yellow vests movement is a significant representation of this discontent in the form of active, vehement revolt.

     For those willing to attend to them, the historico-economic reasons for this uprising are perfectly clear. Moreover, they explain why the yellow vests date the onset of their woes to forty years ago: crudely, the 1980s, which marked the onset of a long capitalist-oligarchical counter-revolution, incorrectly dubbed ‘neo-liberal’ when it is liberal full stop. Which means: a return to the savagery of nineteenth-century capitalism. This counter-revolution occurred in response to the ten ‘red years’ – roughly 1965–75 – whose French epicentre was May 68 and whose global epicentre was the Cultural Revolution in China.  But it was considerably accelerated by the collapse of the global enterprise of communism in the USSR and then China: nothing on a world scale now opposed capitalism and its profiteers, in particular the trans-national oligarchy of billionaires, wielding unlimited power.

     Meanwhile, from the 1980s to the present France’s situation has gradually deteriorated. This country is no longer what it was during the trente glorieuses of post-war reconstruction. France is no longer a strong world power, a conquering imperialism. Today, it is frequently compared to Italy or even Greece. Competition is causing it to fall back everywhere; its colonial rent is on its last legs and requires innumerably military operations in Africa, which are costly and uncertain, to maintain it. In addition, as the cost of working-class labour power is much lower in Asia, for example, large factories are gradually being relocated abroad. This massive deindustrialization entails a sort of social degradation extending from whole regions, such as Lorraine and its steelmaking or the North of textile factories and coal mines, to the Parisian suburbs, abandoned to property speculation on the countless wastelands left behind by ruined industries.

     The consequence of all this is that the French bourgeoisie – its dominant oligarchy, the shareholders of the CAC 40 – can no longer maintain a politically servile middle class on the same footing as before, notably before the 2008 crisis. That middle class was an almost constant historical support of the electoral pre-eminence of the various right wings – a pre-eminence directed against the organized workers of the great industrial concentrations, tempted by communism between the 1920s and the 1980s and 90s. Hence the current uprising by a significant popular section of this middle class, which feels it has been abandoned, against Macron, who is the agent of local capitalist ‘modernization’ – meaning: tightening the screw everywhere, economizing, imposing austerity, privatizing without any of the consideration that still existed thirty years ago for middle-class comfort in exchange for their consent to the dominant system.

     The yellow vests, pleading their all too real pauperization, want to be paid a high price for this consent once again. But this is absurd precisely because Macronism results from the fact that the oligarchy, firstly, has had less need of middle-class support, which was expensive to finance, since the communist danger disappeared; and secondly, no longer has the resources to pay for an electoral domestic staff on the same scale.  And it therefore has to shift, under the cover of ‘indispensable reforms’, towards an authoritarian politics: a new form of state power will serve as a support for lucrative ‘austerity’, extended from the popular class of the unemployed and workers to the lower strata of the middle class. And this for the benefit for the real masters of this world – namely, the principal shareholders of the major groups in industry, commerce, raw materials, transport and communications.

     In the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Marx had already examined this kind of conjuncture and referred, in essence accurately, to what are today’s yellow vests. He wrote this: ‘The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative.  Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.’

     They strive all the more bitterly today because the French bourgeoisie is no longer in a position, given the turn taken by globalized capitalism, to maintain, let alone increase, their spending power. It is true that the yellow vests ‘fight against the bourgeoisie’, as Marx puts it. But they do so to restore an old, outdated order, not to invent a new social and political order, whose names have been ‘socialism’ or, above all, ‘communism’ since the nineteenth century. For close on two centuries anything that was not more or less defined in accordance with a revolutionary orientation was quite rightly regarded as pertaining to capitalist reaction. In politics, there are only two main roads. We must absolutely return to this conviction: two ways in politics, only two, and never a ‘democratic’ dusting of pseudo-tendencies under the leadership of a self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ oligarchy.

     These general considerations enable us to revert to the concrete characteristics of the yellow vest movement.  Its spontaneous characteristics so to speak – those not attributable to interventions external to the main current of the uprising – are indeed ‘reactionary’ as Marx puts it, but in a more modern sense: we might term the movement’s subjectivity a popular individualism mobilizing personal anger at the new forms of servitude imposed by the dictatorship of Capital today.

    As written by Andre Kapsas in Jacobin; “When the gilets jaunes revolt began on November 17, 2018, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to barricades and roundabouts across France, police had initially seemed overwhelmed. “I thought it was the revolution,” says Youri, sitting with a group of fellow leftist activists from Montreuil, eastern Paris. His comrade Julien remembers a Paris deserted by the police: “There was no more state, the street was ours, not a cop in sight; we could roam through the whole city, we thought we were hallucinating.”

     But if in the very first days of the movement the authorities vacillated, before long they turned to crude repression. Week after week over the next year and more, the gilets jaunes took to the streets — and the police met them with increasing brutality. “Only” one person was killed, but hundreds were left with serious, even permanent, injuries; over eleven thousand people were arrested; and at least several hundred are still in jail. Through their response, French authorities introduced new norms of judicial repression — both dramatically and permanently restricting the room for democratic protest.”

     The police forces’ violent reaction was completely disproportionate,” lawyer Arié Alimi tells me over the phone — emphasizing that the gilets jaunes mostly attacked objects, while the police attacked people. For seventeen years an ardent defender of victims of police brutality, he talks with indignation about the “thousands and thousands of people injured, with considerable physical and psychological traumas.” Advocacy officer on civil liberties at Amnesty International, Anne-Sophie Simpere agrees, describing the police reaction as “illegitimate, unnecessary, and completely disproportionate.” She calls the events in December 2018 a rapid “intensification of previously existing, worrying trends in the policing of demonstrations” — citing the use of weapons and a switch from crowd control to aggressive arrests that cause serious injuries.

     According to the “Désarmons-les” (“Let’s Disarm Them”) collective, French police maimed almost as many people in the first six months of the gilets jaunes movement as they had in the last twenty years. The main serious injuries were eyes being put out (twenty-four) and hands torn off (five), mostly because of the massive use of weapons classified as war weapons, such as flash-balls and sting-ball grenades. Zineb Redouane, an eighty-year-old woman, was also killed by the police, as a tear gas grenade exploded during a protest in Marseille; in her final hours, she claimed that she had been targeted on purpose. Another 284 head injuries were reported among protesters as well as journalists, who were also often attacked by police.

     Another major urban center of the movement was Toulouse, southwest France, where Pascal Gassiot took part in almost all demonstrations as a member of the independent “Observatory of Police Practices.” He tells me that “the level of violence was extremely high, with a striking asymmetry in the police response.” Despite wearing recognizable clothing and standing to one side, observers were attacked twenty-seven times by police in Toulouse; four of them ended up in the hospital, including Gassiot himself. “There is absolutely no doubt that they were doing it on purpose,” he tells me: “I was filming a protester being charged over nothing, and I didn’t see the [Brigade anti-criminalité] coming in, with one of them tackling me to the ground.” With his head cracked open and two broken ribs, Gassiot had to be taken to the emergency room. He nonetheless soon returned to his work.

     For Gassiot, the police violence obeyed the political strategy of a government full of “class contempt” for rural, lower-middle-class, and poor protesters. “They thought they’d strike a good blow on their mug, and these plebs would go back in their hole,” he sarcastically notes. A veteran radical left activist, the sixty-five-year-old has no doubt that “police violence is on a level unseen since the 1970s, worse than May ’68″ when France was on the brink of revolution. “It was like the war in Algeria, but without the dead,” he says — drawing parallels with the state violence of sixty years ago, when police killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Algerians and French communists on the streets of Paris during the colonial war in Algeria.

     Bringing the War Home

     The infamous Brigade anti-criminalité (BAC) best illustrates this gradual importation of methods of colonial policing into the French mainland, moving first into the banlieues — the working-class suburbs heavily populated by people with a migrant background — and finally extending them across the whole population. As Alimi stresses, it was a former senior civil servant in the colonies who set up these brigades in Paris and its suburbs in the early 1970s. “The BAC were brigades created specifically for Algerian migrant populations,” he explains.

     In addition to police brutality, the state moved in to curtail the movement with mass arrests of thousands, judicial harassment, and illegal tactics.

Alimi invokes the long history of police violence against the workers’ movement, saying that we should properly speak of “contemporary police violence, with new methods.” For him, “the working-class suburbs were a laboratory for new practices of police repression introduced by the BAC, with new arrest techniques, permanent control, racial profiling, and new weapons like the flash-balls and grenades. . . . The poor migrant populations were guinea pigs for those methods, that then spread to political activists, social movements, and now to protesters in city centers.” The main architect of this shift was Nicolas Sarkozy, interior minister when he replaced neighborhood police with intervention units like the BAC in 2003, before becoming president in 2007.

     In addition to police brutality, the state moved in to curtail the movement with mass arrests of thousands, judicial harassment, and illegal tactics. Simpere speaks of “very repressive laws that allow almost anyone, including peaceful demonstrators, to be arrested, often ‘preventatively.’” More specifically, she points out the use of two vaguely defined laws that she considers contrary to international law: one punishing the “preparation of group violence,” under which many people with protective gear like goggles have faced judicial persecution; and one forbidding “contempt toward police forces,” used more than twenty thousand times in 2019 alone. She cites the case of protesters in Narbonne prosecuted for this offense, simply because they had a banner denouncing the severe injuries caused by flash-balls.

     In early December 2018, the authorities started to widely disregard their own laws. Alimi calls it “state illegality,” a concept he plans to elaborate in an upcoming book: “The state itself becomes criminal,” he explains, “as its representatives decide to deliberately violate the law to prevent the expression of civil liberties.” In addition to mass preventive arrests and illegal searches, he names the case of a state prosecutor calling on his substitutes to keep people in custody for the maximum length in order to prevent them from demonstrating, despite having no evidence against them. “France shifted from a justice system that punishes actions to a justice system that punishes intentions,” he says.

     This judicial repression has led to unprecedented numbers of arrests, with more than eleven thousand detained and more than three thousand convicted. “The courts were working like a production line,” recalls Gassiot, “with speedy trials on Mondays for those arrested on Saturdays.” Alimi counts about seven hundred to eight hundred gilets jaunes currently in jail — and he has himself defended many of those arrested. “They have been victims of an incomparable judicial violence and discrimination; they’ve been treated like animals,” he says. Unusually for France, even people with no criminal records were sentenced to jail time. “They were lower-middle-class people endangered by poverty; they were simply trying to keep their head above water, but they were pushed down — and drowned.”

Police Impunity

     This swift and merciless justice against the gilets jaunes contrasted with the lack of judicial reaction to police brutality. Despite the thousands of acts of violence against protesters — many of them proven by solid video evidence — the available information reveals that only seven police officers have been convicted. All of them received suspended sentences, with no discharge. Simpere describes the cases as “largely symbolic,” expressing her “serious doubt that there will be sentences corresponding to the seriousness of injuries.” Alimi is less diplomatic, calling the few convictions “crumbs thrown to the people to calm popular anger.”

     Alimi goes further, stressing the whole systemic structure enabling police impunity in France. He says it starts with police officers and their hierarchy “who never acknowledge any act of violence and put into place a set of dissimulation measures every time there is any violence, including the systematic faking of official reports.” He then goes on to point out the lack of judicial independence in France, where “prosecutors are under the authority of the Justice Ministry, and see themselves as protecting public order, which leads them to protect the police.” This translates into prosecutors lying and blocking inquiries, among other things, by reacting more than thirty days after events, once footage from public cameras has already been erased.

     Despite facing this “judicial wall,” Alimi says that amateur videos are changing the game. His team has imported techniques from groups like Black Lives Matter, making online calls for videos and witnesses. “Those videos have shattered the administration’s lies and have revealed dissimulation techniques.” As for judges, Alimi also points out that some are starting to recognize the need for real investigations into police work, but he says that it is too early to make an honest appraisal of investigations into police violence against the gilets jaunes. “We will know in two to three years,” he says, “then we can make a final assessment of those investigations, and maybe even talk about a transformation of the approach to police violence.”

     Yet hope remains, and has a champion in Jean-Luc Mélenchon. As written by Marlon Ettinger in Jacobin in his article entitled Jean-Luc Mélenchon Is Fighting to Be France’s Last President; “Emmanuel Macron claimed that France was missing a “king figure” — then spent five years ruling it like a monarch. His record has fueled Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s pledge to get rid of the presidency entirely and rebuild French democracy from the bottom up.

     In Toulouse on April 3, in Jean Luc Mélenchon’s last open-air rally of the campaign, a man held an enormous colorful sign that read, “For the Sixth Republic.” The existing republican order, the fifth in France’s postrevolutionary history, had come to its natural end, schoolteacher Damien told me. It is “way too monarchical, way too autocratic,” he said. “We might as well proclaim a Third Empire!”

     Flore, who brought a sign made by her nine-year-old daughter, said that part of Mélenchon’s appeal was that he knew how to take good influences from wherever they came. The Référendum d’initiative citoyenne proposal — allowing citizens to propose legislation if they can collect enough signatures for a referendum — was inspired by the Revolución Ciudadano in Ecuador, she explained.

     Mélenchon had first formally elaborated what the Sixth Republic could mean in 2010, when he wrote a short book whose titled could be translated as Get them all out! Quick, the Citizens’ Revolution. “The Citizens’ Revolution,” Mélenchon wrote, “is the concept proposed in Ecuador by Rafael Correa during the 2006 presidential election, which he won. This revolution was first of all constitutional. It gave by referendum full powers to the National Constituent Assembly.” This meant, Mélenchon explains, a citizens’ revolution in “institutions, social relations, and the dominant culture.”

     The concept of citizenship is essential to this strategy — and is something that Mélenchon sees has been undermined in France. “I use the intellectual definition of citizenship,” he emphasizes. “Being capable of enunciating not what’s good for yourself but what’s good for all.”

     “What I’ve observed in revolutionary countries is that most people don’t enter into a movement for ideological motives, or to realize a particular [political] program,” he insists. Rather, movements emerge to sort out “concrete problems that the great and powerful have definitively proven incapable of settling.”

     “The revolutions of our time,” he concludes, “have a social fuel and a democratic motor.”

     A Wartime Constitution

     But in France’s Fifth Republic, the people are not the sovereign. In 1958, Charles de Gaulle came to power in the context of the Algerian Civil War. His supporters, among them a group of military officers in French-colonized Algeria, believed he was the only one who could keep Algeria French. He was swept to power under the threat of a coup d’état, spearheaded by a putsch involving officers in Algiers. At one point, plans were made to land paratroopers in Paris and overthrow the government. Instead, parliament stood aside and invested de Gaulle with the power to govern by decree for six months before he produced his new constitution. The text of the new constitution was written hurriedly, then presented to the public to vote on its ratification just one month later. Worried by what they believed to be the democratic instability and excesses of the Fourth Republic, the drafters of the 1958 constitution sought to limit the power of the legislature. To accomplish this, they made the president the supreme sovereign of the country, with the power not just to approve and enforce laws but also to draft them. The only crime he could be charged with under the constitution was high treason.

     I spoke with Raquel Garrido, a close advisor to Mélenchon and mainstay of the popular television show Balance ton post! A lawyer by profession, she’s also a regional councilor in the Île-de-France region that includes Paris.

     “In constitutional law we talk about ‘responsibility’ when the person who holds the executive power is responsible for the exercise of their power before another power, most often a legislative power,” Garrido told me.

     “In France, there’s criminal immunity for the president of the republic for the acts he executes while president. It’s this which explains, for example, why Nicolas Sarkozy can’t be tried or still less convicted for, for example, cheating in [his presidential election campaigns].” This is different from the “political immunity” that the president has. “In France,” says Garrido, “the president isn’t accountable before any authority, [nor] before the parliament, as in all other parliamentary models.”

     Does there exist an impeachment process in the constitution of the Fifth Republic?

     “The answer is no. But there exists one article, in theory. It’s called destitution, but it’s for very serious cases . . . and it’s never [been used], it’s impossible to implement.”

     This wasn’t the case during the Fourth Republic. “It was an invention of the Fifth [Republic],” Garrido explained. “France’s history, since the departure of the monarchy, has seen moments of democratic advancements, and then moments of retreat.”

     “Today there is a current of the extreme-right in France that is very hostile to the idea of popular sovereignty. . . . When you look at the supporters of Zemmour, for example, it’s all the royalist camp.”

     The End of the Presidential Monarchy

     The conflict between monarchy and democracy is a hallmark of Mélenchon’s rhetoric. The past five years of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency have only provided more fodder for this theme.

     In 2015, Macron, then economy minister in François Hollande’s government, gave an interview where he talked about an “absence” in French politics. This was, said Macron, “the figure of the king, which I fundamentally don’t think the French people wanted dead. . . . Since then, we’ve tried to refill this void by placing other figures: these were the Napoleonic and Gaullist moments. The rest of the time, French democracy doesn’t fill this space.”

     As president, Macron has pursued what Mélenchon calls an “authoritarian drift.” In 2020, when the French government ordered a lockdown for a second time in the face of rising COVID-19 infections, Mélenchon wrote a blog post denouncing “the addiction of our society to permanent states of exception,” highlighting the specter of terrorism and public health emergencies. This was particularly offensive given potential democratic alternatives like massive investments in rebuilding the capacity of French hospitals, as well as using the power of the state to organize methods of containing the pandemic like case tracking and financial support for sick people being isolated.

     The past three years under Macron, Mélenchon charged, had seen the fastest reduction of liberties in a long time. This was not just the product of Macron’s actions, Mélenchon concluded — though he was a particularly adept practitioner at it — but the “heart of economic liberalism,” a system that sees human beings like pig, cows, and chickens, nothing but “batteries, exclusively occupied with producing and consuming.”

     When Mélenchon spoke in the northern city of Lille on April 5, he called for an end to the “presidential monarchy.” The crowd roared in approval. “There is no democracy without democrats. There is no Republic without republicans,” Mélenchon declared.

     The Constituent Assembly

     The Union Populaire, the movement launched out of Mélenchon’s France Insoumise vehicle for the 2022 election, has a very similar program to his 2017 campaign. It even shares the same name — l’Avenir en Commun, or “our common future” — though it has been expanded. In the most recent edition, the first section explores the Sixth Republic and proposes sweeping changes to, and the replacement of, the country’s institutions.

     The solution, then, is a constituent assembly — a democratic process where the people write a new constitution. Mélenchon’s plan is to establish this assembly by calling a referendum under Article 11 of the current constitution.

     That referendum will decide how the process is set up, including the constituent assembly’s own deliberative process. After two years, the constitution it produces will be submitted to the people again for a referendum. If the people reject the constitution, the assembly will continue its work. The assembly would also bar any legislator from the two old legislative bodies (the National Assembly and the Senate) from any involvement. Then, after the new constitution is settled, members of the constituent assembly would also be barred from running as candidates in any subsequent election.

     “The Fifth Republic has had its time. Abstention has become the majority in most elections. A democracy without the people isn’t one at all,” proclaims the program.

     The fight for the Sixth Republic, and the new constitution that will come with it, is a fight for a re-democratization of France. Today polls predict record-high levels of abstention — almost a third of voters say they won’t cast a ballot.

     I talked with Mathis, originally from Rennes, who was selling programs in the lobby outside of the hall in Lille. He’d been in Chile in 2019, when a powerful social movement opposed the conservative president Sebastián Piñera in the streets. One of the outcomes of that campaign was the calling of a constituent assembly around the time of the 2021 presidential election. This was despite the hostility the constituent assembly faced from the president, who had only granted its existence under intense pressure, and the media, which questioned its legitimacy. For Mathis, the point of the Sixth Republic is that people become “democratic actors every day,” opposing today’s “sclerotic public life.”

     Garrido, who visited Chile during the development of that country’s constituent assembly, said that the difference with an assembly under a Mélenchon presidency would be that it would have the government’s full support. In Chile, “they had a president hostile to the constituent assembly,” she said. “The main difference is, we’d have an ally in the [presidency.]”

     One of the centerpieces of the new constitution that Mélenchon would champion is the right to recall elected officials if they fail to follow through on their mandate. On April 6, Mélenchon’s spokesman, MP Alexis Corbière, spoke to about two hundred people in a meeting hall in Bobigny, a suburb north of Paris. “The Fifth Republic fabricates a system where you can govern without the people,” he said. The reason abstention is so high, he said, was because the people have no right to recall their representatives when they betray them. “During the French Revolution, this right existed!”

     The National Assembly, he said, was not a place where the people really had a role in governing. Instead, deputies like him used the forum to be tribunes for another system. “If we don’t change these institutions . . . the worst is to come,” he said.

     François Hollande, the Socialist president from 2012 to 2017, came to power promising to be the “enemy of finance.” Instead, he pushed through the notorious “El Khomri law” supported by the employers’ association MEDEF, which rewrote France’s labor code to the detriment and anger of many workers. In 2015, he perfectly encapsulated the reality of the French Fifth Republic: “An unpopular president can operate with great capacity, with great liberty . . . it’s that which is the difference between our institutions and those of our neighboring countries.”

     That is the fruit of the institutions of the Fifth Republic. As Mélenchon faces the polls for likely the last time today, France has a chance to completely sweep those institutions away and replace them with new ones

     “Mélenchon,” Garrido, who has been by his side for over a decade, told me confidently, “wants to be the next and the final president of the Fifth Republic.”

     This day we celebrate the victory of the people of France over fascism; tomorrow we must begin to build a new humankind with France as Liberty leading the Revolution as she was always meant to be, for there are just a few things to be fixed before we truly realize a free society of equals wherein each of us acts in solidarity as a guarantor of the Rights of Man.  

     As I wrote in my post of July 1 2023, In Marseille and Throughout France, a Test of Competing Futures and Ideas of Human Being, Meaning, and Value; A Free Society of Equals Versus Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil and Liberty Versus a Carceral State of Force and Control;  Revolt against racist police terror is met with brutal repression of dissent and becomes a gateway to Revolution in France in an echo and reflection of America’s Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, in the wake of the French police murders of nonwhite boys so very like the murder of George Floyd and countless others in America.

     In the streets of Marseille and throughout France tonight, we fight for a nation which has forgotten its heart.

     And if France cannot reclaim her heart as a bastion of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights throughout the world and for all humankind, we are all truly lost.

     Here as in many theatres of liberation struggle and across vast chasms of time I have answered the question of who I am with the words; I am the Revolution. Among the things I mean by this is that I think of myself as a Jacobin in terms of political identity, and an inheritor and steward revolutionary struggle. Here in Marseille, the legacies of this history and the questions of who is human and who a citizen, of unequal power in a free society of equals divided against itself by race, gender, faith, and class as nationalist identity politics in serve to the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites bears special and unique meanings and existential threats to our future and our humanity.

     I cannot imagine this but in terms of the great film Casablanca and the iconic song La Marseillaise, the national anthem of France first proposed by Robespierre in 1790 as the battle hymn of the revolutionaries of Marseille had become that of the Revolution itself.

      I wonder now, what would those revolutionaries think of France today, as vilified and destitute underclasses protest for their universal human rights of liberty and equality under the law of the nation which established them as a new world order and centuries ago seized power from that of kings and priests?

     In Marseille, where the Marseillaise was born as a hope for the future of humankind, and where now that hope is reborn in streets of fire with the glorious resistance of the reviled others of a fallen empire whose ghettos rise to defy the carceral state and systems of dehumanization, and make claim to the promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

     I believe the revolutionaries of 1790 who created La Marseillaise would recognize themselves in those of Marseille today. The question which remains is, is France still the nation which they founded and dreamed?

     How would Humphrey Bogart’s antifascist character Rick Blaine in Casablanca regard the protests? How would Camus and the heroes of the Resistance of the Second World War judge their counterparts today?

     Who now are the Occupation, with guns and badges to enforce an imagined racial superiority and the caste privilege of hegemonic elites? And who now the Resistance, who place their lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased?

      We who identify ourselves as Antifa and the Resistance on the one hand and as the Revolution on the other and claim membership in this history will be judged by these two interdependent and parallel sets of motivating, informing, and shaping forces; the legacies of the American and French revolutions which birthed democracy and human rights, and of the civilizational struggle against the Nazis and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil which aspires to realize our ideals as a free society of equals.

      In this Defining Moment and Rashomon Gate Event, we each of us must choose; who do we want to become, we humans? What futures shall we win for our possibilities of becoming human? A world of masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?

     Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!

La Marseillaise, scene in Casablanca

France election: surprise win for leftwing alliance keeps Le Pen’s far right from power

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https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/france-presidential-election-macron-le-pen-melenchon

French

7 Juillet 2024 Victoire France !

      Alors que des célébrations de masse éclatent dans toute la France, l’euphorie s’empare de la nation et du monde alors que les élections sont déclenchées pour la gauche, et les revivalistes nazis de Le Pen se voient une fois de plus refuser la capture de l’État, car le cours de l’histoire s’est inversé et nos chances d’éviter une L’ère de la tyrannie et les siècles de guerre mondiale se terminant par notre extinction sont un peu meilleurs aujourd’hui qu’ils ne l’étaient hier.

      Premièrement, les Britanniques choisissent les travaillistes plutôt que les conservateurs, et ce renversement de fortune stupéfiant lors d’une élection où tous les sondages disaient que LePen était imbattable ; cela me donne de l’espoir pour notre propre élection en novembre et le vain espoir de renvoyer Trump sur son terrain de golf.

      La façon dont cette victoire a été remportée mérite précisément une attention particulière de la part de l’Amérique et de toute nation menacée de capture électorale de l’État par l’ennemi, car le vote tactique est une forme de fraternité que j’appelle souvent solidarité et qui s’applique dans toutes les nations avec un électorat citoyen qui sont copropriétaires de l’État.

      Rien n’est au-delà des possibilités d’action de masse et du refus de se soumettre à la force et au contrôle de l’autorité et de ceux qui voudraient nous asservir.

      Aujourd’hui, la France s’est libérée et a ouvert pour nous tous un chemin de résistance.

25 Avril 2022 Victoire de la Démocratie Contre le Fascisme en France

Célébrez avec nous la victoire de la démocratie sur le fascisme lors de l’élection de Macron sur Le Pen lors des élections en France.

    Nous partageons beaucoup d’histoire, d’idéologie, de valeurs et d’institutions gouvernementales en tant que partenaires et champions d’une civilisation unificatrice fondée sur la démocratie et les droits de l’homme, l’Amérique et la France, et bon nombre des mêmes défis également.

    Une présidence impériale et monarchique peut être comptée parmi ces défis à la démocratie, car le pouvoir incontrôlé du bureau et l’extraordinaire richesse nécessaire pour le gagner en font un prix dans les jeux des élites, et sa capture par des forces subversives fascistes menace notre liberté d’une manière pas comme les autres.

     Capturez la présidence de la France comme le Quatrième Reich l’a fait en Amérique avec Notre clown de la terreur, traître Trump, lors de l’élection volée de 2016, et toutes les institutions de l’État, ses branches judiciaire et législative, et toutes les valeurs et idéaux de la nation, la Liberté, l’Égalité, la Solidarité, la Vérité vérifiable et transparente et la Justice impartiale, un État laïc qui ne s’interpose entre personne et sa relation personnelle avec l’Infini, tout cela devient déstabilisé et discutable, et vulnérable à l’infiltration et à la subversion de la Haut.

     La présidence impériale et monarchique doit être rétablie pour équilibrer les branches législative et judiciaire du gouvernement, car c’est une condition préalable à la subversion fasciste et à la tyrannie.

      Pour de tels systèmes déjà déséquilibrés de manière désastreuse, dans lesquels le pouvoir devient centralisé à une autorité unique et l’État carcéral qui fonctionne comme son exosquelette et étend sa volonté à travers une nation devient une prison et un instrument de tyrannie, seul le prédateur suprême a le pouvoir. Et personne, pas même le tyran, n’est vraiment humain dans des tyrannies de pouvoir inégal. C’est pourquoi la démocratie est importante; l’enjeu est la liberté et l’égalité contre la déshumanisation et l’esclavage.

    La France a évité ce sort, pour l’instant. Et pour tous nos lendemains ? Tel est le pouvoir que nous détenons entre nos mains, de choisir qui nous deviendrons parmi les possibilités illimitées de devenir humain.

    Rêvons et forgeons de meilleurs Braves Nouveaux Mondes.

11 Avril 2022 La France choisit un avenir

     La France choisit un avenir lors des élections d’avril, et comme en Amérique et dans une grande partie du monde, c’est un avenir dans lequel les forces de la démocratie et la révolution fondatrice de la liberté, de l’égalité et de la solidarité sont de plus en plus éclipsées par les fascismes du sang, de la foi et du sol et par un ordre néolibéral centriste dont le cri de ralliement est le retour à la normale ; une normalité dont les contradictions internes du pouvoir inégal systémique et structurel se dénouant depuis longtemps nous menacent maintenant d’effondrement et d’extinction de la civilisation.

    Comme je l’ai écrit à propos de nos propres élections dans mon article du 2 novembre 2021, parallèle à celles de la France en avril, intitulé Ce jour des élections générales, saisissons notre pouvoir dans la réimagination et la transformation de l’Amérique et de l’humanité ; Nous sommes confrontés à une grande menace de tyrannie fasciste à un point d’équilibre de l’histoire à travers l’Amérique et le monde, et la façon dont nous choisissons de répondre décidera à la fois du cours de nos vies et de celles des générations futures pour les siècles à venir, peut-être pour toujours jusqu’à ce que la fin de l’humanité si nos choix entraînent l’extinction.

     Aujourd’hui, nous avons la possibilité de nous choisir les uns les autres et non la richesse, le pouvoir et les privilèges des élites hégémoniques, l’égalité, la diversité et l’inclusion et non les divisions et les hiérarchies de l’altérité d’exclusion, la liberté et non la centralisation du pouvoir et de l’autorité dans un système carcéral. État appartenant aux riches, démocratie et non tyrannie, espoir et non peur, amour et non haine.

     Utilisez le pouvoir de votre voix et de votre vote tant que ces droits vous appartiennent encore, et refusez de vous soumettre à ceux qui voudraient nous asservir. Car l’enjeu de nos élections est notre pouvoir de choisir notre propre identité et notre propre destin, et une fois perdue par la tyrannie et la terreur d’État, une société libre d’égaux ne peut être reconquise que par des prises de pouvoir et la lutte révolutionnaire.

     Comme écrit par Sigmund Freud en 1893; “Le premier être humain qui a lancé une insulte au lieu d’une pierre a été le fondateur de la civilisation.” Voter vaut mieux que se battre. Jetons des mots et non des pierres.

     Comme je l’écrivais dans mon article du 22 novembre 2020, Normal Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; L’une des choses qui me préoccupent dans l’utilisation du terme normal dans le moment politique actuel est sa confusion et son ambiguïté inhérentes, en particulier par l’aile collaborationniste du Parti démocrate en tant qu’apologie pour récupérer leur hégémonie du pouvoir qui a été brisée et saisie par les trois vagues successives de manifestations de masse qui ont régné dans les rues des villes américaines depuis environ un an maintenant et ont confié la présidence aux champions erronés de la révolution et du socialisme Biden et Harris ; les protestations de Black Lives Matter pour la justice raciale et l’égalité, un nouveau mouvement vert conduit par la grève scolaire mondiale de masse de Greta Thunberg et le théâtre de guérilla d’Extinction Rebellion appelant à la justice économique et écologique et défendant le Green New Deal comme le dernier et meilleur espoir pour l’humanité , et le mouvement #metoo qui les a précédés en tant que transformation sociale et prise en compte du patriarcat.

     Si nous gaspillons notre chance de mettre en œuvre un véritable changement avec le contrôle de l’exécutif, si Biden et les structures fossiles d’un système défaillant qu’il représente nous ramènent aux conditions qui ont conduit à la montée du fascisme, de la tyrannie et de la terreur d’État, si nous ne parvenons pas à saisir notre jour et reforger le contrat social d’une société libre d’égaux comme la pratique ou l’action de nos valeurs de liberté, d’égalité, de vérité et de justice, nous n’aurons peut-être plus jamais l’occasion de le faire.

    L’heure est au changement, et nous devons en être les champions et les porteurs.

     Nous devons être le Parti qui mène de front les trois mouvements de masse qui nous ont amenés à la Maison Blanche, et laisser les Républicains être le Parti qui se recroqueville sur son peuple dans des bunkers et derrière des murs. L’histoire nous a donné un marteau avec lequel briser l’ancien et construire le nouveau ; et pour la saisir, nous devons abandonner la normalité comme l’illusion qu’elle est, derrière laquelle le pouvoir des élites nous asservit et escroque la richesse publique. Faites toujours attention à l’homme derrière le rideau.

     Normal ne vit plus ici.

     David Walsh lève l’ambiguïté sur les types d’écriture de la normalité dans la Boston Review ; L’année dernière, Joe Biden a commencé sa campagne présidentielle avec une prémisse simple: “Je crois que l’histoire reviendra sur les quatre années de ce président et tout ce qu’il embrasse comme un moment aberrant dans le temps.” La question de savoir si Donald Trump a vraiment été une aberration dans l’histoire des États-Unis a dominé le discours politique pendant des années, et face à la fois aux bouffonneries incessantes de Trump et aux bouleversements de la pandémie, Biden s’est positionné comme le candidat du “retour à la normale”. (Avant 2020, cette rhétorique politique était peut-être le plus étroitement associée à la campagne présidentielle de Warren G. Harding il y a un siècle.) Même si Biden lui-même a reculé une partie de ce langage sur la campagne électorale, il a servi de fondement à son message. Et cela a fonctionné : cela a renversé un président sortant pour la première fois en près de trois décennies, même si avec des marges très minces dans certains États.

     Que signifient réellement ces affirmations d’aberration et de normalité ? La simplicité des messages cache une multiplicité d’interprétations, chacune avec ses propres implications pour la politique.

     » Ce glissement vers le fascisme et la centralisation de l’autorité et du pouvoir vers un état carcéral de force et de contrôle n’est pas non plus un événement soudain et imprévu ; il a pris de l’ampleur en tant que contre-révolution et subversion de la démocratie depuis un certain temps.

      Historiquement, je relierais les origines du revivalisme fasciste en France à l’immigration massive et à l’infiltration des anciens nazis qui avaient rejoint la Légion étrangère et dirigé la colonie d’Algérie en tant qu’ethno-État blanc jusqu’à sa chute, qui forment maintenant le noyau du parti de Le Pen. qui menace de capturer le gouvernement français, avec l’importation antérieure d’élites et de scientifiques nazis par les services de renseignement américains pendant l’ère Red Scare de la liste noire de McCarthy, non seulement Werner von Braun et d’autres recrutés pour la course à l’espace, mais aussi des criminels de guerre enrôlés dans notre les services de renseignement et militaires, y compris dans certains cas les bérets verts et le service central de renseignement, des unités militaires nazies entières et des réseaux d’espionnage conservant leur ancien rang dans de nouveaux uniformes.

     Le fascisme reste une bête avec de nombreuses têtes et cinquièmes colonnes au sein de ces services de sécurité à travers le monde ; et doit être combattu à l’échelle mondiale chaque fois qu’il sort de l’obscurité pour nous tendre une embuscade.

     Comment y résister au mieux ? Exposition et poursuite incessante jusqu’à la destruction lorsqu’elle est identifiée ; mais il faut aussi lancer des contre-feux et l’affamer de la peur dont il se nourrit. Car c’est une conséquence de la peur écrasante et généralisée militarisée au service du pouvoir par la division et façonnée comme la peur de l’altérité par la falsification, les mensonges, la propagande, les histoires réécrites et les réalités alternatives.

     Nous devons parler directement de la peur de ceux que l’autorité cherche à subjuguer en prétendant agir en leur nom ; la peur est une base essentielle de l’échange humain en tant que politique, et celui qui parle le mieux de cette peur gagne, en particulier lorsque la peur est basée sur des menaces existentielles très réelles et des systèmes injustes et inégaux.

     Comme je l’ai écrit dans mon article du 17 novembre 2021, The Revolution Goes Ever Onward: France’s Gilets Jaunes; Ce mois-ci marque l’anniversaire de trois ans de révolution et des manifestations des gilets jaunes en France ; une situation qui s’est heurtée à la répression et à un changement dans le gouvernement de la France non pas vers la libération, mais vers un état policier brutal de force et de contrôle.

     Le mouvement Yellow Vest a émergé avec un nouveau précariat en réponse à la mondialisation, à la privatisation, à la détérioration des conditions économiques et à la complicité du gouvernement dans les échecs mécaniques systémiques de notre civilisation à partir de ses contradictions internes alors que nous entrons dans la phase terminale du capitalisme. Les forces historiques balayent tout avant comme une marée inarrêtable, mais comme la chute des civilisations précédentes, la nôtre est en train de mourir parce que les causes finales sont souvent des décisions politiques.

     Cela signifie qu’il y a encore de l’espoir ; nous pouvons encore transformer notre avenir d’une ère de tyrannie en une ère de liberté et d’une société libre d’égaux.

     Comme pour toutes les tyrannies, la dissidence et la résistance deviennent des prétextes à la militarisation de la police à travers le modèle anti-insurrectionnel du maintien de l’ordre et l’escalade de la force et de la terreur d’État, l’universalisation de la surveillance et la centralisation du pouvoir vers l’autorité et un État carcéral au service de la la richesse, le pouvoir et les privilèges des élites hégémoniques.

    Nous voyons ici la mondialisation de la tyrannie qui utilise la stratégie des nombreuses tentatives de coup d’État de Trump en 2020 pour fournir un causus belli à l’occupation fédérale des villes démocrates en faisant en sorte que des provocateurs de la police et des forces déniables de la terreur suprémaciste blanche perturbent les manifestations de Black Lives Matter avec violence et pillage. Les parallèles entre l’Amérique sous Trump et la France sont alarmants, mais aussi éclairants.

    Une telle progression historique de la liberté à la tyrannie n’est pas unique mais universelle ; la nature des États est au service des élites, la loi sert le pouvoir, la peur devient réaction et la centralisation du pouvoir vers l’autorité crée la tyrannie. Voici l’origine du mal dans l’anneau wagnérien de la peur, du pouvoir et de la force ; pas dans le péché personnel, l’inaptitude ou la dépravation innée de l’homme en l’absence de force et de contrôle restrictifs, mais dans l’inégalité systémique.

    La tyrannie est née d’une peur écrasante et généralisée militarisée par l’autorité au service du pouvoir, utilisant les mensonges et les illusions de la propagande, les fausses histoires et les réalités alternatives pour diviser et conquérir ses citoyens en rendant certains d’entre nous complices de l’assujettissement des autres à travers des hiérarchies d’appartenance et d’altérité d’exclusion, créant ainsi des fascismes de sang, de foi et de terre.

    D’autres nations se sont montrées moins résistantes à cette subversion de la démocratie ; dont la France, ce que j’aurais cru impossible. Considérez le changement culturel nécessaire pour transformer une nation dans laquelle la protestation est inscrite et valorisée dans l’identité nationale comme un devoir patriotique envers une nation dans laquelle la police brutalise les manifestants plutôt que de les embrasser comme des camarades dans la cause de la liberté, de l’égalité et de la fraternité, et de l’universalité. Les droits de l’homme sont devenus subordonnés à leur service à l’autorité. J’aurais dit la même chose de nous, une fois.

     La France est tombée, mais comme l’Amérique avec notre répudiation électorale de Trump et du fascisme, peut encore se relever.

     Comme l’écrit le philosophe Alain Badiou dans son blog Verso Books ; « Qu’il y ait de nombreuses raisons à cette révolte, et que le mouvement puisse donc être considéré comme légitime, je l’accorde sans hésitation. Je suis conscient du dépeuplement des zones rurales, du triste silence des rues abandonnées dans les villes petites et même moyennes ; la suppression continue pour des masses de personnes des services publics, progressivement privatisés : centres de santé, hôpitaux, écoles, postes, gares, téléphones. Je sais que la paupérisation, d’abord rampante puis accélérée, touche des couches de la population qui, il y a quarante ans, jouissaient encore d’un pouvoir d’achat en augmentation quasi continue. Je suis bien consciente que l’existence matérielle devient un casse-tête pour des familles entières, notamment pour de nombreuses femmes, très actives dans le mouvement des gilets jaunes.

     Bref, il y a en France un très haut niveau de mécontentement de la part de ce qu’on pourrait appeler la partie ouvrière de la classe moyenne, majoritairement provinciale et aux revenus modestes. Le mouvement des gilets jaunes est une représentation significative de ce mécontentement sous forme de révolte active et véhémente.

     Pour ceux qui veulent y assister, les raisons historico-économiques de ce soulèvement sont parfaitement claires. Ils expliquent d’ailleurs pourquoi les gilets jaunes datent le début de leurs déboires d’il y a quarante ans : grosso modo, les années 1980, qui ont marqué le début d’une longue contre-révolution capitaliste-oligarchique, improprement qualifiée de « néolibérale » alors qu’elle est libérale pleine arrêt. Ce qui veut dire : un retour à la sauvagerie du capitalisme du XIXe siècle. Cette contre-révolution s’est produite en réponse aux dix « années rouges » – environ 1965-1975 – dont l’épi centre était Mai 68 et dont l’épicentre mondial était la Révolution culturelle en Chine. Mais elle a été considérablement accélérée par l’effondrement de l’entreprise mondiale du communisme en URSS puis en Chine : plus rien à l’échelle mondiale ne s’opposait désormais au capitalisme et à ses profiteurs, en particulier l’oligarchie transnationale des milliardaires, au pouvoir illimité.

     Entre-temps, des années 1980 à aujourd’hui, la situation de la France s’est progressivement détériorée. Ce pays n’est plus ce qu’il était pendant les trente glorieuses de la reconstruction d’après-guerre. La France n’est plus une puissance mondiale forte, un impérialisme conquérant. Aujourd’hui, elle est souvent comparée à l’Italie ou même à la Grèce. La concurrence le fait reculer partout ; sa rente coloniale est à bout de souffle et nécessite d’innombrables opérations militaires en Afrique, coûteuses et incertaines, pour la maintenir. De plus, comme le coût de la main-d’œuvre ouvrière est beaucoup plus faible en Asie, par exemple, les grandes usines sont progressivement délocalisées à l’étranger. Cette désindustrialisation massive entraîne une sorte de dégradation sociale qui s’étend de régions entières, comme la Lorraine et sa sidérurgie ou le Nord des usines textiles et des mines de charbon, à la banlieue parisienne, livrée à la spéculation immobilière sur les innombrables friches laissées par les industries ruinées.

     La conséquence de tout cela est que la bourgeoisie française – son oligarchie dominante, les actionnaires du CAC 40 – ne peut plus maintenir une classe moyenne politiquement servile sur le même pied qu’avant, notamment avant la crise de 2008. Cette classe moyenne a été un soutien historique presque constant de la prééminence électorale des différentes droites – une prééminence dirigée contre les travailleurs organisés des grandes concentrations industrielles, tentées par le communisme entre les années 1920 et les années 1980 et 1990. D’où l’insurrection actuelle d’une partie importante de cette classe moyenne, qui se sent abandonnée, contre Macron, qui est l’agent de la “modernisation” capitaliste locale – c’est-à-dire : serrer la vis partout, économiser, imposer l’austérité, privatiser sans aucune de la considération qui existait encore il y a trente ans pour le confort des classes moyennes en échange de leur consentement au système dominant.

     Les gilets jaunes, plaidant leur trop réelle paupérisation, veulent une fois de plus se faire payer au prix fort ce consentement. Mais c’est absurde précisément parce que le macronisme résulte du fait que l’oligarchie, d’une part, a eu moins besoin du soutien bourgeois, coûteux à financer, depuis que le danger communiste a disparu ; et d’autre part, n’a plus les moyens de se payer un personnel de maison électoral au même barème. Et elle doit donc basculer, sous couvert de « réformes indispensables », vers une politique autoritaire : une nouvelle forme de pouvoir d’État servira de support à une « austérité » lucrative, étendue de la classe populaire des chômeurs et des ouvriers aux couches inférieures de la classe moyenne. Et cela au profit des vrais maîtres de ce monde, à savoir les principaux actionnaires des grands groupes de l’industrie, du commerce, des matières premières, des transports et des communications.

     Dans le Manifeste communiste, écrit en 1848, Marx avait déjà examiné ce genre de conjoncture et fait référence, pour l’essentiel avec justesse, à ce que sont les gilets jaunes d’aujourd’hui. Il écrit ceci : « La petite bourgeoisie, le petit manufacturier, le boutiquier, l’artisan, le paysan, tous luttent contre la bourgeoisie, pour sauver de l’extinction leur existence de fractions de la bourgeoisie. Ils ne sont donc pas révolutionnaires, mais conservateurs. Bien plus, ils sont réactionnaires, car ils essaient de faire reculer la roue de l’histoire.

     Ils luttent d’autant plus âprement aujourd’hui que la bourgeoisie française n’est plus en mesure, compte tenu de la tournure prise par le capitalisme mondialisé, de maintenir, voire d’augmenter, son pouvoir d’achat. Il est vrai que les gilets jaunes « se battent contre la bourgeoisie », comme le dit Marx. Mais ils le font pour restaurer un ordre ancien, dépassé, non pour inventer un nouvel ordre social et politique, dont les noms sont « socialisme » ou, surtout, « communisme » depuis le XIXe siècle. Pendant près de deux siècles, tout ce qui n’était pas plus ou moins défini selon une orientation révolutionnaire a été à juste titre considéré comme relevant de la réaction capitaliste. En politique, il n’y a que deux routes principales. Il faut absolument revenir à cette conviction : deux voies en politique, seulement deux, et jamais un saupoudrage « démocratique » de pseudo-tendances sous la houlette d’une oligarchie « libérale » autoproclamée.

     Ces considérations générales permettent de revenir sur les caractéristiques concrètes du mouvement des gilets jaunes. Ses caractéristiques spontanées pour ainsi dire – celles qui ne sont pas imputables à des interventions extérieures au courant principal du soulèvement – sont bien « réactionnaires » comme le dit Marx, mais dans un sens plus moderne : on pourrait appeler la subjectivité du mouvement un individualisme populaire mobilisant colère personnelle face aux nouvelles formes de servitude imposées par la dictature du Capital aujourd’hui.”

1 Juillet 2023 A Marseille et dans toute la France, une épreuve de devenirs et d’idées concurrentes de l’être humain, du sens et de la valeur ; Une société libre d’égaux contre les fascismes du sang, de la foi et du sol et la liberté contre un état carcéral de force et de contrôle

     La révolte contre la terreur policière raciste se heurte à une répression brutale de la dissidence et devient une porte d’entrée vers la Révolution en France dans un écho et un reflet des manifestations américaines Black Lives Matter de 2020, à la suite des meurtres par la police française de garçons non blancs si similaires au meurtre de George Floyd et d’innombrables autres en Amérique.

      Dans les rues de Marseille et de toute la France ce soir, nous nous battons pour une nation qui a oublié son cœur.

      Et si la France ne peut pas reprendre son cœur de bastion de la Liberté, de l’Egalité et de la Fraternité et garante de la démocratie et de nos droits humains universels dans le monde et pour toute l’humanité, nous sommes tous vraiment perdus.

      Ici, comme dans de nombreux théâtres de lutte de libération et à travers de vastes abîmes de temps, j’ai répondu à la question de savoir qui je suis avec les mots ; Je suis la Révolution. Parmi les choses que je veux dire par là, c’est que je me considère comme un jacobin en termes d’identité politique, et un héritier et intendant de la lutte révolutionnaire. Ici à Marseille, les héritages de cette histoire et les questions de qui est humain et qui est citoyen, de pouvoir inégal dans une société libre d’égaux divisée contre elle-même par la race, le sexe, la foi et la classe comme politique identitaire nationaliste au service de la la richesse, le pouvoir et les privilèges des élites hégémoniques ont des significations spéciales et uniques et des menaces existentielles pour notre avenir et notre humanité.

      Je ne peux pas l’imaginer mais en termes du grand film Casablanca et de la chanson emblématique La Marseillaise, l’hymne national de la France proposé pour la première fois par Robespierre en 1790 alors que l’hymne de guerre des révolutionnaires de Marseille était devenu celui de la Révolution elle-même.

       Je me demande maintenant, que penseraient ces révolutionnaires de la France aujourd’hui, alors que des sous-classes vilipendées et démunies protestent pour leurs droits humains universels de liberté et d’égalité en vertu de la loi de la nation qui les a établis en tant que nouvel ordre mondial et qui, il y a des siècles, ont pris le pouvoir de celui de rois et prêtres?

      À Marseille, où la Marseillaise est née comme un espoir pour l’avenir de l’humanité, et où maintenant cet espoir renaît dans les rues de feu avec la glorieuse résistance des autres vilipendés d’un empire déchu dont les ghettos se dressent pour défier l’État et les systèmes carcéraux de déshumanisation et revendiquer la promesse de liberté, d’égalité et de fraternité.

      Je crois que les révolutionnaires de 1790 qui ont créé La Marseillaise se reconnaîtraient dans ceux de Marseille aujourd’hui. La question qui demeure est la suivante : la France est-elle toujours la nation qu’ils ont fondée et rêvée ?

      Comment le personnage antifasciste de Humphrey Bogart, Rick Blaine à Casablanca, considérerait-il les manifestations ? Comment Camus et les héros de la Résistance de la Seconde Guerre mondiale jugeraient-ils aujourd’hui leurs homologues ?

      Qui sont maintenant l’Occupation, avec des fusils et des badges pour imposer une supériorité raciale imaginaire et le privilège de caste des élites hégémoniques ? Et qui maintenant la Résistance, qui mettent leur vie en balance avec tous ceux que Frantz Fanon appelait Les Misérables de la Terre, les impuissants et les dépossédés, les réduits au silence et les effacés ?

       Nous qui nous identifions comme Antifa et la Résistance d’une part et comme la Révolution d’autre part et revendiquons notre appartenance à cette histoire serons jugés par ces deux ensembles interdépendants et parallèles de forces motivantes, informatrices et façonnantes ; l’héritage des révolutions américaine et française qui ont donné naissance à la démocratie et aux droits de l’homme, et de la lutte civilisationnelle contre les nazis et les fascismes du sang, de la foi et du sol qui aspirent à réaliser nos idéaux en tant que société libre d’égaux.

       Dans ce moment déterminant et l’événement Rashomon Gate, chacun de nous doit choisir; qui voulons-nous devenir, nous les humains ? Quels avenirs allons-nous gagner pour nos possibilités de devenir humains ? Un monde de maîtres et d’esclaves ou une société libre d’égaux ?

      Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité !