tragicoptimist

The French struggles against the proposed reform of retirement laws are an analytical element of primary importance. There is something new happening here, independently from any immediate or technical result of a parliamentary reform. What we are seeing is a polyphonic movement that breaks away from traditional “bloc vs. bloc” logic. Likewise, well beyond any traditional conception of solidarity, there is a diffused recognition throughout different social strata of a common struggle that is articulated on multiple levels and in numerous forms.
A first characteristic of these new struggles can be seen in their temporality, which is to say the way that they have been articulated over the last few months. Mobilizations started even before the long summer holiday season of 2010. Despite the summer lull – a laps of time that usually results in a loss of intensity in social struggles – a rapid and constant escalation was seen immediately in the months of September and October. This massive intensification reached a critical point during the nationwide demonstrations that brought over 3 million people into the streets.
This form of protest saw continuous articulations with hundreds of demonstrations in French cities, now reaching its 8th occurrence with the national day of mobilization planned for this Saturday, November 6th. What we are witnessing is a classic multitudinary movement, a class struggle expressed transversally through the multitudes. Class and multitude are one in the same, leaving behind the models of working class leadership in favor of the hegemony of exploited people. These are nothing less than multitudinary struggles expressing both generalized massification and singular articulations.
The precarious character of the entire population predominates and is imposing this distinctive element as class. Although the antiglobalization movements of the last 20 years expressed this trait in a more centralized way, the massification of social struggles generally wasn’t singularized in organizational terms. The dualism of mass and attack that is always found in generalized struggles didn’t find an adequate expression, they were still manifested as avant-garde movements. Instead, today in France we are seeing mass and singularity, movement and action inside the multitude.
This multitudinary mass/action articulation, through its initial development in the CPE struggles 5 years ago, is now in full bloom. The masses occupy the metropolis while singular actions strike, unpredictably, a wide range of services, the flow of circulation, transportation, energy production, etc. and sustained by a wide popular consensus. Instead of on-going, intransitive strikes, workers in key sectors are essentially taking turns going on strike, giving more workers the possibility to protest without losing significant amounts of their already precarious paychecks.
Another fundamental aspect of this contemporary struggle is the objectives of the movement. What is interesting to note is that the fight against a retirement reform immediately posed the problem of biopolitical exploitation. In other words, it brought to light the deep contradictions of an entire society put to work, it profoundly questions the current organization of forms of life and their exploitation through the exercise of biopower. Thus, it is no wonder why the entire government was instantly identified as the adversary and that this government must be totally replaced.
In addition, the forms of organization behind this multitudinary movement are new and innovative. Beyond union calls for strikes and demonstrations, is it above all the complex networks created among workers, students and marginalized social groups that are creating, on a day to day basis, this new relationship between mass struggles and singular actions. So much that, in a certain sense, the unions themselves are constrained to work along the lines of the social movement and not the other way around.
The movement against the reform is becoming a semi-permanent, long-term low intensity insurrection, something similar to what happened in Italy in 1969. But the biggest difference is that what was an industrial struggle in 1969 is now diffused throughout the entire metropolis, highlighting today’s incredible collective intelligence.
In the end, these are all concrete, tangible signals of a shift in the strategies and modalities of social struggle, better calibrated for the contemporary structure of labor. A real change in the very nature of social movements is taking place and, quite possibly, we are only seeing the beginning of a long process of the becoming multitude of class struggle.