The World or Nothing was written at the request of some South American comrades keen for more in-depth information leaning as it does towards "explaining a lot of things 'foreigners' sometimes don't know." (Jack de Montreuil) However, the same can be said regarding Remy's insights in Pour Dave regarding an 'English' situation. Both texts were prominent on the Revolt Against Plenty web after 2016 right up to its mysterious disappearance six years later.

Some of what follows is also referenced / even repeated elsewhere on these four webs (PART 1, 2, 3, 4) related to the life and times of Jack de Montreuil who died on 25 May 2025.

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The following text is by: Alèssi DELL'UMBRIA, Marseille, June/July 2016

...............was written for Latin American comrades who, from Mexico to Argentina, asked me for information and analysis on the agitation in France. This explains why many details are made in it, which are obviously not relevant for French comrades.

"The World or Nothing"

Remarks on social unrest in France in the spring of 2016.

"Comfort is the worst thing that can happen to a social movement, and that's what overwhelmed the Gezi insurrection. For a movement to remain in motion, something unbearable must continue to itch it, day and night. If nothing bothers you, if on the contrary you start to get comfortable, you will stop, and that's normal; The need for landmarks, for stability, is natural. To revolt is to be ready to fight against one's own natural needs. To revolt, you have to feel strong but helpless, helpless but strong. Discomfort is the only force that will keep us moving forward."

Kenan Görgün, Rebellion Park.

The agitation began in March against a draft labour law, known as the El Khomri law after the Minister of Labour. "The controversy over the labor law is drifting toward an ideological crisis and a rejection of the system as a whole," according to an internal memo from the Central Territorial Intelligence Service dated April 28, the day on which some of the harshest protests took place. "Against the labor law and its people" said some banners... This law also comes after a long series of government measures that are a flagrant break with the electoral campaign promises of François Hollande, the Socialist Party candidate elected President of the Republic in the spring of 2012... It was finally adopted on 21 July, after Prime Minister Manuel Valls resorted, for the third time in this case, to Article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows adoption without a parliamentary vote. It was published in the Official Journal on 9 August. It remains to be seen whether the implementing decrees will see the light of day...

*

The El Khomri law is one of these landmark legislative measures. In France, we are experiencing the end of the entire cycle opened by the Stalinist-Gaullist pact of the Liberation1 . The notion of a contract between capital and labour, which was the basis of this pact, and ensured that the workforce benefited from certain social protections in the context of its exploitation, is now obsolete. The institutionalisation of the trade unions, after the definitive abandonment of any reference to a qualitative leap (the famous "insurrectionary general strike" advocated by the revolutionary syndicalism of the past), installed them in the role of co-managers of labour power within capitalism, which was to work throughout the Fordist period, when the unions had an unprecedented capacity for negotiation. This was not always enough to prevent wildcat strikes in the Fordist industry of the 1970s, which could sometimes express a real refusal of work. But for the most part, in France, the workers' struggles remained contained by this union framework, which was so often overwhelmed in certain neighbouring countries...

In this regulation of conflicts, protagonists with opposing interests found themselves indissolubly linked. The opposition of labour and capital must never turn into a contradiction, otherwise social conflicts would lead to a political conflict as happened in 1968... Opposition could take acute forms, but they always had to be resolved in a contractual way, by branch agreements (the model remaining the Grenelle agreements which, at the end of May 1968, were to short-circuit the wildcat general strike that was paralysing the country). This conflict-negotiation dynamic between capital and labour, which operated within the framework of an internal market and a national currency, entered into a double crisis: first with the decline of the Fordist system that began in France at the end of the 1970s, and then with the constitution of the European single market. The establishment of the euro zone marked the irreversible exit of capitalism from the state-national framework, with the subordination of the internal market to the rules of a common market and the imperatives of a supranational currency.

There is no such thing as a political economy. The economy is not a category of the world, as are money, commodities, wage-earners and capital: the economy is only bourgeois and bureaucratic thinking about the world. But in order to be exercised, this thinking requires a field of application – or rather, it is the appearance of such a field that requires a certain type of expertise that then functions as the dominant discourse. Political economy was born historically with the constitution of the nation-state, which established a field of governance crossed by a tension between the inside and the outside of the market that had to be regulated. But now governance has been transferred to international institutions that constitute the real political power, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and of course the European Union. The tension between power and wealth, which determined all the activity of the state, has therefore shifted and is now exercised according to parameters other than those of classical political economy - that which extended from the mercantilist school to Keynes. Governments have no other way than to cling to the dictates of global governance: will they end up signing the transatlantic free trade agreements, which will further strip them of their prerogatives? Probably, since "growth" and "employment" are at stake...

The discourse of the leaders then rings as false as the ideology of the Party in Stalinist regimes at the end of their course. Anyone perceives the false and unreal character of the political discourse, which must be content to relay a neoliberal semantics structured around a few signifiers hammered out ad infinitum - "growth", "employment", "sustainable development" etc. Never before has the spectacle of politics reached such a level of antinomy between what is promised and what is accomplished, between what is affirmed and what is verified. This explains the importance of the lexicon of war and security in the language of power, since it relates to the only field in which state policy still has an effectivity: national governance can no longer be exercised as a political economy but as a pure disciplinary management of populations – we no longer even dare to speak of "protection"... Hence the role that security and xenophobic issues have come to take in public opinion.

*

The official aim of the El Khomri law is to "protect employees, promote hiring, and give more leeway to negotiation in companies". Supported by the MEDEF, the French employers' union, it aims in reality to increase the flexibility of the workforce, to accentuate wage insecurity and to reduce the cost of labour, following the recommendations of the European Commission - whose president, Jean-Claude Juncker, deplored during his last visit to Paris that there had been little change in labour law in France for decades: "That we eliminate certain rigidities seems to be an appropriate legislative gesture." Other European countries, such as Germany, Spain and Italy with Matteo Renzi's Jobs Acts, have already taken steps in this direction, and in Belgium, a similar bill, the Peeters Law, provoked demonstrations and strikes in the spring of 2016.

Most European legislation provides that, in each branch of activity, contractual agreements define working and wage conditions: according to the provisions introduced by the El Khomri law, company-specific agreements would now take precedence over industry-wide agreements. The latter, because they establish a general rule, applicable to all companies in the same branch of activity, metallurgy, chemicals, transport, construction, etc. are denounced by both the MEDEF and the Eurocrats as preventing the flexible use of labour. It is clear that in companies where the balance of power is not favourable to employees, they would be more easily forced to give in to the bosses' blackmail.

While the El Khomri law is an adjustment to the European directives, which are moving in the direction of deregulation of work, it also reflects the relative powerlessness of national governments in the face of that of the E.U. For example, each state that entered the eurozone lost the ability to play with its currency (which was an essential prerogative of state power). It is therefore impossible to stimulate industrial production, which has stagnated since 2008, by reviving exports by devaluating the currency. To compensate for this, each government must therefore engage in an escalation of wage disinflation, by all conceivable means, in order to guarantee the companies established on its territory an acceptable rate of profit. This is the purpose of a number of measures taken in recent years in France, which relieve companies of part of their tax burdens and social security contributions: and, with the El Khomri law, lower the cost of labour by reducing the payment of overtime and night work and reducing the cost of redundancies. Again, this law only follows the general trend in the countries of the euro zone. There is therefore no doubt that the application of the El Khomri law will accentuate the development of the working poor in France, as we saw in Great Britain following the dictatorship of Margaret Thatcher. There are already two million of these working poor throughout the country, corresponding to 7.6% of salaried jobs (according to figures from 2013): workers who earn too much to die of hunger but not enough to live.

The El Khomri law also intends to sweep away the provisions which, by regulating working time, slow down the logic of just-in-time flows. This requires ever more flexible working hours, a workforce confined to a precarious status, on temporary or short-term contracts, as well as on-site subcontracting. It is no coincidence that many of the blockade actions in May-June targeted logistics companies: since transport must obey the same imperatives of speed and flexibility as manufacturing, the delivery driver or the docker find themselves increasingly oppressed by the need to save time and condemned to be ever more available. And this unbridled flexibility impacts workers' lives outside of work itself, affecting the mere possibility of having a semblance of a social or family life...

*

The weakness of the union mobilization during the first two months contrasted with the strength of the mobilization among students and even more so among high school students. The agitation has never presented the character of a massive movement as in 1994 (against the CIP), or in 2006 (against the CPE) or even as in the autumn of 2010 (against the pension reform)2 . This is even among high school students: out of 188 high schools in Paris, only 33 have been blocked. On the other hand, a very strong determination of the participants, all the more impressive if we take into account the level of police and judicial violence implemented against them. The Independent Inter-High School Movement, which brings together high school students, students, precarious workers, apprentices and the unemployed in Paris, is emblematic of this determination. In the other cities, cohesion was made from collective links formed in local struggles (against the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport in the case of Nantes and Rennes) or improvised (the collective "13 en lutte", in Marseille)3 . The confederal leadership of the CGT had to end up mobilizing at the national level, under pressure from the company sections and even the local unions, some of which were beginning to stir (particularly in the transport sector), at the same time as it could not risk appearing too out of step with the agitation of the youth. However, it has never launched a slogan for a renewable general strike – it is not at all certain that such a slogan had any chance of leading to anything other than a demobilizing failure.

Continental, PSA-Aulnay, Goodyear, Air France, Bosch, the recent workers' struggles in France are part of the straight line traced since the end of the 1970s: in reaction to job cuts, or factory closures, often relocated to another continent or, for the past twenty years, to an Eastern European country. The only thing that remains negotiable is the amount of the severance pay: a scenario that has been repeated for more than thirty years in the steel industry, shipbuilding, petrochemicals, automotive... In the public sector, the strikes occurred in reaction to measures worsening working conditions, particularly for railway and hospital workers. In any case, these are struggles which, although sometimes very hard, are no less defensive. In this context, the union can only manage its own survival, and must function as a technocratic auxiliary of capital (CFDT) or fight to maintain its status as a privileged opponent-interlocutor (CGT for the workers' sector, FO for civil servants, both accused of archaism by the CFDT, the alternative union SUD being treated as adventurist).

The composition of blue-collar workers in France has been polarized for several decades between, on the one hand, skilled and guaranteed workers, on permanent contracts, and low-skilled precarious workers, on temporary or fixed-term contracts, on the other. The mode of union organization has always prevented communication between the two, which has not been without consequences, since the unions accept, as an inevitable counterpart to the rights acquired by skilled workers, the generalization of precariousness outside this protected wage zone. It is a fortiori opposed to any communication between these adult and integrated workers and the young people who are still free (the hatred of the members of the trade union S.O. towards these young people "who fuck up" testifies to this).

To the extent that the trade union horizon is delimited by the company, or by the branch of activity, the atomized crowd of temporary workers, precarious workers, the unemployed and RSA recipients is de facto excluded from the struggles for demands: the movements of the unemployed that appeared in France during the winter of 1998 died out after a few years. Being unemployed is then equivalent to a social nothingness, from the union point of view. The unions of struggle, the CGT, FO and SUD have therefore held on to the defense of the gains of the guaranteed workers, whom they intend to prevent from falling into this void. But these famous gains are only a crystallization of power relations that are now outdated: hence the difficulty of mobilizing at the moment even in traditionally combative sectors such as railway workers or hospital staff.

The primary objective of the unions, and particularly of the CGT (which remains the main union in the country but could well be overtaken by the CFDT in the next delegate elections), is to maintain a significant institutional role in a period where major decisions are now taken without them, who are granted a simple advisory role in the best of cases. And if, in this case, the CGT was still the privileged interlocutor under Sarkozy, with Hollande it was replaced by the CFDT, which directly inspired the content of the El Khomri law. Since the collapse of the PCF, the CGT has ceased to be the monolithic union it had been for fifty years, to assume a certain heterogeneity – conversely, it is the CFDT, which played the role of self-management after 1968, which has become monolithic and pyramidal! The CGT has certainly retained its bureaucracy, at all levels of its organisation, its congresses are still as closed and characterised by the absence of substantive debate, its security service still as police-like, but, within this Stalinist system, fault lines are opening, the basic structures are floating, in relative autonomy from the confederal leadership, the Local Unions of the CGT risking to take initiatives that were unthinkable in the past.

*

In this context, it is imperative for the unions to control the most spectacular moment of the ongoing agitation, the demonstration. Their problem is that the energy comes from young people, and from high school students even more than from students – this is certainly not a new thing. What is new, however, is that these young people are organizing themselves to lead their own demonstrations, and that in the "unitary" demonstrations they have succeeded, despite the S.O. of the CGT, in imposing themselves at the head of the parade. The simple fact that within these uncontrolled processions several hundred young people, often masked and dressed in black K-ways, were able to stand up to the cops, as we saw during the demonstrations of March 17 and 31 in Paris, is in itself remarkable. In these situations, the cleavages that had been revealed, sometimes violently, during the anti-CPE movement in the spring of 2006 no longer seem to be as strong: the processions of high school students were obviously colourful, young blacks and Arabs participated. And the slogan, shouted or written on banners, "Zyed, Bouna, Rémy, we don't forget!" said it all.4

The appearance of these processions took the unions by surprise, generating a struggle for the symbolic space in the demonstrations. The uncontrolled processions continued to grow, attracting union members from the end of April, to the point of being designated as "the head procession", sometimes to go back on a wild demonstration after the official dispersal. Hence the violent interventions of the S.O. of the CGT and F.O. These security services, which have never protected any demonstrator against police violence, are only there to maintain the control of the union bureaucracies over the conduct of the demonstrations5 . This became evident during the May 17 demonstration in Paris where they literally charged the demonstrators who were slow to disperse. In Nantes, the S.O. CGT prevented the tractors of the peasants of the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes from entering the demonstration under the imbecile argument that "the ZAD has nothing to do with the object of this demonstration"; In Marseilles, on May 12, the S.O., out of pure paranoia, attacked with sticks and gas all kinds of demonstrators who were dispersing. Similar abuses have been reported in several other cities. This violence went so far as to provoke protests by many union members against the provocative behaviour of the S.O. For its part, the police left the trade union processions alone, and systematically attacked the uncontrolled processions, sometimes acting in relation to the trade union S.O.

If the turbulent head processions have made a different tone resonate in all this agitation, the trade union bureaucracies have no intention of giving up the very conventional "day of action" with its disciplined crowds marching behind the sound trucks. These days offer the spectacle of a mobilization which, precisely, is summoned only to demobilize. It is therefore not surprising that this disciplinary technique is accompanied by a discourse of submission to the legality joyfully claimed: thus the call of SUD Rennes to come and demonstrate wearing helmets - nothing more -, launched in May after a series of serious injuries inflicted on demonstrators in Rennes by the police, provoked a unanimous protest from the other unions. When the simple fact of protecting oneself is perceived as an attack on the polite order of the demonstration, one can say that the discourse of the union leaderships has reached the level of the "We have nothing to hide if we have nothing to reproach ourselves for" of the average collaborator-informer. On the other hand, there is the beautiful gesture of solidarity of the high school students of the 11th arrondissement in Paris, rightly revolted by the beating of one of their own the day before: attack the police stations of the 10th and 19th arrondissements. On March 25 - improvised, admittedly, there was little material damage - and then looting of a supermarket and distribution of part of the loot to the Syrian refugees who were camped not far from there, Place Stalingrad.

For its part, the police indicated that they would not tolerate the slightest deviation from the pattern of the union-demonstration-all-in-line-behind-the-sound-truck-and-the-union-balloons. From the beginning of the protests against the law, there was only a series of police interventions at the doors of high schools to prevent blockades, both in the city and in the suburbs, each time with a cleverly calculated brutality. General assemblies in universities were dispersed just as brutally. The arrested and handcuffed protesters were methodically beaten after their arrest, among them 15-year-old boys. The trap technique involved systematically cutting the processions in half to isolate and lock up part of the crowd, in the middle of which the cops then threw grenades. To which was added the use of drones to monitor the demonstrations in Paris. The use of the RAID, an elite anti-terrorist unit, to evacuate the Maison du Peuple in Rennes, occupied following a demonstration, indicates an even more worrying trend.

Not only did the unions deliberately turn a blind eye to this police violence, but they competed with the government, each blaming the other for the damage. The fact that the figure of the "thug" is a key element of spectacular Newspeak is certainly not new. It is important to point out that the damage was very generally targeted: the windows of bank branches, real estate or temporary work agencies, and the premises of the Socialist Party of course... There were exceptions to this intelligence of vandalism, the most notable being the famous incident at the Necker Hospital on June 14. But for the first time, the divide between the rioters and the demonstrators has been called into question – or at least has begun to be. Thus the spokesperson of the Student Coordination, Aissatou Dabo, publicly declared: "We have decided not to dissociate ourselves from what you call the thugs". The intervention of Samir Elyes, a former member of the Mouvement de l'Immigration et des Banlieues, on Nuit Debout on May 17, articulated the current clashes with those of the revolt of the poor suburbs in 2005: "Convergence must be with those who throw stones (...) A riot is political." Meanwhile, the chief bureaucrat of the CGT tirelessly continues his denunciations against the "thugs" supposedly manipulated by the government...

Already, the agitation against the El Khomri law has had the merit of flouting the state of emergency, renewed for three months at the end of February and then again until the end of July. The streets of the country, which had been occupied in 2015 by the demonstrators – Charlie embracing the CRS, were occupied for several months by those who shouted "Everyone hates the police". A slogan in which young people from poor suburbs as well as high school students from the city can recognize themselves without a shadow of hesitation. If we had to use the language of old politics, we would say that it is a unifying slogan – which has continued to grow in size as the agitation has progressed.

*

The third protagonist of the unrest, after the youth of the high schools and the unionized workers' bastions, is the middle class, which is more or less in the process of being downgraded. And more precisely the professions in charge of the cultural reproduction of the system (teachers, cultural or social animators, artists and technicians of the show, etc.) who were the first animators of Nuit Debout. This sector of cultural animation is at the forefront of capitalist modernization, since in the name of the creative resource new paradigms of exploitation are being experimented with which tend to be generalized to other sectors (we can see here a back-and-forth movement with the practices of Toyotism and its circles of quality...). Many are in fact precarious workers, confronted with new forms of wage slavery. But on the other hand, these people are hardly inclined to question their own role in this world: there were few critical interventions on education and culture in the debates of Nuit Debout. To what extent this class extends its social role to the current agitation, instead of starting from it to question its function, the question remains unanswered...

The first Nuit Debout took place in Paris on March 31, with the idea of following up on that day's demonstration by calling on the demonstrators to meet at the Place de la République (where the Bourse du Travail is also located). The team of journalist François Ruffin played a significant role in this initiative. By occupying a square that bears this name, Nuit Debout sent a strong message against the state of emergency: after the attacks of November 2015, the statue of the Republic, in the center of the square, had served as a place of collection for the memory of the victims and the first public demonstration against the state of emergency in December was repressed there. A symbolic charge that had not escaped the instigators, some of whom were toying with the project of drafting a new Constitution. As one participant recounts: "It must be said that we have the strange feeling of swimming in the enemy sea, Place de la République. In this Haussmannian model of dismissal where the foam of heads of state marching after the attacks still smokes. We look at those who come to pay their respects for the victims, for example this lady in a chic coat sweeping around the commemorative candles. Above her, the statue stratified with history, between alcoholic flights of fancy and cries of revolt. Next to the inscriptions in homage to Charlie or the dead of the Bataclan, one can read: "Let's eat the rich", "Down with the State, the cops and the UNEF", "Solidarity with refugees". These layers announce it better than a long speech: the sequence has changed."6 The fact that the occupation of Republic Square had to be negotiated and regularly renegotiated with the authorities also shows its ambiguity in relation to other occupations of the square - those of Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011, Taksim Square in Istanbul in 2012, and, even further away, the Zocalo in Oaxaca in 2006. It is more related to 15-M, whose shortcomings it has taken up - in fact a team arrived from Madrid to bring its expertise in communication to the occupants of the Place de la République and, indeed, some of the presenters of Nuit Debout have mainly devoted themselves to the handling of so-called alternative media, from Radio Debout to overactive social networks.

Nuit Debout was therefore a place of con-fusion. In the interventions at the microphone, platitudes and flashes of brilliance followed one after another; In the crowd of occupiers, people rubbed shoulders and sometimes confronted each other who were usually unaware of each other. Zonards who drink 8.6 and teachers, techno DJ's and libertarian activists, punks and rank-and-file union members... Committees discussed during the day, and each evening a general assembly was responsible for taking stock, anyone being free to register to ensure the circulation of the microphone and guarantee the rotation of the turns, a wise anti-bureaucratic precaution. Little by little, energies seem to have been concentrated in the committees, with more tangible objectives, the evening General Assembly ending up emptied of content. A commission entitled "Democracy and General Assembly" was also responsible for raising the question of the functioning of the evening General Assembly... In the long run, many participants ended up having the unpleasant impression of going around in circles in procedural debates - hence often small riots of spite at the end of the evening around the square....

Nuit Debout tried to revive advertising, as the public and executive debate was called at the time of the Popular Sections of the French Revolution, in 1792/93. But advertising cannot be based on immediacy. If this attempt at publicity consisted in taking over a public space and opening it up to all, it found its limits in the fact that this space was above ground and out of frame. As Almamy Kanouté, from Val-de-Marne (southern suburbs) aptly pointed out during his intervention on Nuit Debout, "Not everyone has the patience to sit on the ground and listen to people talk for four or five hours. In the suburbs, there is an emergency. Families are being evicted. The inhabitants of working-class neighbourhoods are waiting for action. Why not make a schedule of evictions and all go to each address to prevent this? ". Why didn't the audience of Nuit Debout take up such a suggestion on the side? It should be remembered that 15-M's most interesting outlet in Spain has been the multiplication of collectives that oppose the evictions of families who can no longer pay their rent or their credit (while others preferred to work on building a new political racket...). Off-screen, therefore, because the very space of this symbolic place is an illusion. The field of possibilities opens up elsewhere, at the entrances to high schools and universities and, even further geographically but also socially, at the entrances to industrial areas and in suburban housing estates. In fact, many people from Nuit Debout went to reinforce the blockades, in the city or in the industrial areas, during the month of May. But it is just as notable that few high school students came to participate in the Nuits Debout, while the Place de la République is located in the east of Paris, where the high schools most involved in the unrest are also located. Similarly, there were few people from the poor suburbs, although several people intervened, such as Amal Bentounsi to denounce the countless racist murders committed by the police, or the rapper Fik's Navio, from the southern suburbs.

The intellectual Frédéric Lordon was supposed to bring to Nuit Debout the theoretical density that neither François Ruffin's film, "Merci patron", nor the editorials of his newspaper Fakir could bring. Lordon's remarks in a speech at the Bourse du Travail on April 4 are indicative of a large part of the idealism that presided over Nuit Debout: "To demand is already to be submissive, it is to address amiable tutelary powers." Such a statement underlines the incoherence of its author who, in his latest book, "Imperium", endeavours to argue, against the thinkers of the libertarian tradition, that verticality is necessary and unavoidable... And if we think that every society inevitably obeys a vertical organization, as is its case, then we cannot deplore the fact that people turn to the tutelary powers that occupy the top of the pyramid - which, by the way, are rarely friendly. But let's move on... The existing society is in any case constructed in a vertical, hierarchical way, and people like Lordon occupy a place that is not devoid of privileges in this hierarchy. Each of these left-wing intellectuals cherished his hobby, one advocated the abolition of the stock market, the other the establishment of a guaranteed income; another proposes the drawing of lots for political representatives while some bring it back with the Tobin tax... Above all, it must be admitted that none of these magic potion recipes has the slightest chance of ever becoming a collective demand. We will never see the workers stop work to demand the abolition of the Stock Exchange, a hobby dear to Lordon; even less to demand the application of the Tobin tax.

And if it is absolutely necessary to rely on a slogan, it might as well be the one formulated a hundred and fifty years ago and which is still relevant: "Expropriation of capital and abolition of the wage system"7 . The question is therefore not to substitute for immediate demands ("food" as the radicals of service would say with contempt) apparently more ambitious objectives: the question is rather to know how the capillary diffusion of agitation around immediate demands creates a situation in which unprecedented acts become possible, the combination of struggles being more than their simple sum. It is a question of political alchemy, but this cannot depend on a learned manipulation: it depends on the struggle establishing an unexpected field where institutional mediations are no longer effective. A modest local demand such as that of defending a park can lead to an insurrectionary situation, as we saw in Taksim Square in Istanbul.

The fact that the audience of the Nuits Debout on the Place de la République remained mostly monochromatic is also significant. There were many Nuit Debout events in the inner suburbs, where the majority of immigrants and the children of immigrants live - in St Denis on 13 and 14 April, in Ivry, St Ouen, Noisy-le-Grand, Romainville, St Ouen, Montreuil, Fontenay-sous-Bois, and further afield in Créteil, Blanc-Mesnil, and even further afield in Cergy, Evry, Mantes-la-Jolie. Initiatives full of good will but which did not survive the night and do not seem to have had many follow-ups... In most French cities there were also Nuit Debout - and sometimes even in small towns. In Marseille, the Nuit Debout, which met in the city on the Cours Julien, moved for an evening on April 23 to the Flamands housing estate, in the northern districts. After gargling consensual speeches for a month, evacuating any dissonant voice as an aggression, the good citizens wanted to risk themselves among the savages... and had to endure a certain verbal brutality. Indeed, a resident of the estate, a long-time activist on issues of housing, racism and police brutality, welcomed them by saying:

"Here, we have been standing for thirty years. We didn't wait to fight precariousness, police violence, social injustice... Are you coming to free our speech? But our speech is free. No one hears her because she is censored and stigmatized. Another resident with an identical profile added: "There is such social relegation in our housing projects that people don't care about the reform of the labour code, the El Khomri law, they have other priorities. It would be easy to object that this law will hit the most precarious first, namely the young people of the suburbs, but the question of territory is decisive here and cannot be resolved in a symbolic way. It therefore remains unresolved"...

The slogan "We are better than that", which follows the injunction "Be indignant" a few years ago, was above all the cry from the heart of the intellectual class frustrated in its ambitions for social recognition. On April 21, Ruffin and his team called for the unions to join the unions in the May Day procession, but the day before his proposals for an alliance at the Bourse du Travail meeting were not taken up by either the CGT or Nuit Debout. On the one hand, the desire of the union leaders to keep control of events, and on the other hand, the distrust of many people in Nuit Debout towards bureaucratic apparatuses made the manoeuvre short-lived. Ruffin consoled himself by multiplying his interventions throughout the country, his film serving as a letter of introduction: which certainly did not raise the level of the debate, given Ruffin's sovereignist and productivist credo, which harks back to the worst hours of the blue-white-red French Communist Party -(the PCF). With the dreams of a new Constitution that these people have never ceased to agitate within Nuit Debout, they perfectly illustrated this remark of Marx against the liberal bourgeoisie of his time: "The more powerful the state, the more political a country is, and the less it is willing to look into the principle of the state, and therefore into the present organization of society of which it is itself the active expression. conscious and official, the reason for social ills and to understand their general principle. Political intelligence is precisely political intelligence because it thinks within the limits of politics. The more acute it is, the more alive it is and the more incapable it is of understanding social ills." 8

Nuit Debout was in a way an improbable mixture of oil and water. The most bleating pacifism, which led some to offer flowers to the CRS who, an hour later, were going to bludgeon them without mercy, the legalism bordering on collaboration, could not prevent beautiful excesses from giving free rein from the occupied Place de la République. The peak having been reached with the wild demonstration on the evening of April 9: someone having launched on Nuit Debout the idea of going to visit Manuel Valls' partner who lives not far from the Place de la République, two thousand people left in a spontaneous procession, coming up against the CRS roadblocks set up at the last minute, escaping an attempt to trap the police and, on returning to the square, destroyed banks and temporary employment agencies, many of which were on Boulevard Voltaire. It was that night that one of the self-proclaimed leaders of Nuit Debout went to ask for the help of the cops to restore order in the square - while, on the contrary, the commission in charge of the question of violence had decided not to condemn acts of vandalism during the demonstrations. In the finale, the confusion had this positive thing that it prevented ambitious people of all stripes from using Nuit Debout as a springboard.

*

Following the clashes with the trade union S.O.S, various groups and non-institutional collectives involved in the agitation called for the fraternisation of the red vests and the black k-ways9 . This testifies to a good, horizontal vision: solidarity at the elementary level, that of the street. For their part, the trade union bureaucracies had to take note of the fact that union delegates were also among the convicts of the demonstrations, from the CGT as well as from SUD... The attitude of the union members was therefore very variable, from the guys who unbadged themselves before joining the autonomous procession to the unionists who were hateful to see this procession overflow theirs...

The climax of the demonstrations was reached on June 14. In Paris, this demonstration brought together at least half a million people (80,000 according to the police, one million two hundred thousand according to the organizers). The entire route was fenced-off by gates several meters high, which made it impossible to escape - and also to enter, as thousands of demonstrators who wanted to join the procession along the way were in fact blocked by this device. The police kept charging the lead procession to the sides, meeting fierce resistance. At the end of the demonstration, a large group of CGT dockers clashed with the CRS after one of their own was seriously wounded by a grenade shot. That evening, the Paris police prefect declared himself scandalized that many CGT flags were flying in the head procession: "There was a form of solidarity, passive to say the least, with the rioters," denouncing the fact that some trade unionists were trying to hinder the interventions of the police, especially arrests. Valls, for his part, accused the CGT of having had an "ambiguous attitude towards the rioters" and President Hollande threatened to ban all demonstrations as long as security conditions were not guaranteed, blackmailing the CGT leadership so that it would take over the parades and that its headquarters would once again play the auxiliary of the police against the "unorganized". The absolute priority for the government was to break the solidarity that was being built in this procession.

What was at stake here was much more than broken glass, but an unprecedented communication - a friend had a nice formula on this subject, speaking of a pollination of energies in these processions where the media-police opposition between "thugs" and "demonstrators" no longer really worked and this was obvious on June 14 for those who were in the lead procession. Black K-ways (Black Block) smashed the windows of banks, real estate agencies, even a damn Starbuck's Coffee that received the punishment it deserved, many applauding them, some lamenting, but finally all these beautiful people advanced at the same pace, each attentive to his neighbours and the incursions of the cops in the procession and the throwing of grenades did not get the better of this fraternity. A specific demand then leads to forms of life that take shape in the course of the struggle.

The state therefore played the suffocation game against this communization of energies and sensitivities, while putting pressure on CGT leaders who were unable to isolate the good seed of the docile demonstrators from the chaff of the uncontrolled... The next step in the police system was to lock-in the demonstrations, on the model of the fan-zones tested at the same time in the capital on the occasion of the Euro football tournament, in a kind of giant trap. And, indeed, a few days later, Valls refused the route planned by the unions for the June 23 parade, offering them in exchange a static rally on the Place de la Nation – which would have been fenced off on all sides by a hermetic police force... This proposal was rejected by the unions, which presented proposals for alternative routes to the one they had initially planned. In response, Valls announced on Tuesday 21st an outright ban on the demonstration, the unions replying that they were ready to defy such a ban - even the League of Human Rights which issued a statement to this effect! Obviously, no one could have taken such boasting seriously: the obstinate legalism of the union leaderships would have condemned them to settle for a platonic protest in the event of a ban... but the simulated tension between the two protagonists of this show was finally to be resolved by a new proposal: to go around in circles inside a police trap from the Place de la Bastille along the Canal de l'Arsenal (a 600-metre one-way trip). The leadership of the CGT and FO were delighted with the government's counter-proposal, which allowed them to save face while joining the government on a common demand: to put an end to this procession of leaders and the acts of political vandalism that it authorized. This closed parade, without any stakes, which would spectacularly highlight the submission of the unionized crowds to the imperatives of maintaining order, was finally going to bring the trade unions and the government to an agreement on a fundamental point: that both speak the same language, the general secretary of the CGT Philippe Martinez has given proof of this more than once, going so far as to justify the bans on demonstrations sent on the eve of June 14 to 130 people (including some college students...): "It's normal, they are thugs" (judging on the basis of police files). In contrast to this collaborator-informer, the dockers of Le Havre who had warned at the beginning of April that they would block the entire city if students or high school students from Le Havre were to be imprisoned following the demonstrations...

Until recently, the main parameter in terms of "maintaining order" in France was the dispersal of demonstrators / rioters, which meant leaving at least one way clear for them to get out. It is clear that for some years now, another parameter has dominated: shrinking the space conceded to the demonstration to the point of suffocating it. With this trap technique, imported from Great Britain, the objective is no longer to clear the streets but to inflict punishment on those who have dared to occupy it, once they are immobilized between rows of CRS and gendarmes - the technological arsenal at their disposal allowing them to injure and maim at will. An exemplary demonstration was the May 1st demonstration, even if on that day the police ambitions (Nasser several tens of thousands of people) failed in the face of the determination of the demonstrators. But according to all the people who participated in the May Day in Paris, the police vice of June 14 was even worse.

June 23 appears to be a more than symbolic act of enclosure - dispossessing the demonstrators of their dignity by making them go around in circles like animals in a zoo, not without having searched them beforehand and taken away all those who had protective equipment - thus a postal worker from Sud-92 found himself in police custody for having had swimming goggles on him and will have to account for this crime in court! The humiliation was not complete, however, because there were still a few wild processions outside the system: on June 23, a large group managed to force the police trap in front of the Gare de Lyon, escaping towards Dausmenil, another group rushed to the Place des Victoires and in the evening 500 people demonstrated in Belleville, destroying various symbols of capitalism. Nevertheless, the system was repeated on June 28 and then on July 5: and although each time the attendance decreased, a significant part of the opponents of the El Khomri law agreed, in fact, to fit into this box that was assigned to them, the others suddenly finding themselves deprived of the space offered to them despite everything by these large demonstrations. And improvising wild demonstrations in other places is always possible, provided that you are well trained in running, but the disadvantage is then to send these more determined demonstrators back to a self-isolation that the lead processions had precisely allowed to overcome. "We have reached the limits of the riot," as an article on the June 14 demonstration lucidly titled.10

If the deal between the Ministry of the Interior and the S.O. of the CGT, during the demonstrations, never stopped working, on the ground it was partially called into question in the second phase of agitation, that of the blockades: while the union instructions on the spot were not to assume a confrontation with the police, the latter did not hesitate to free the blockades with a debauchery of violence, as was the case at the Esso refinery in Fos-sur-mer. Indeed, after two months of procrastination, rotating strikes had begun to multiply, in sectors linked to the movement of goods (SNCF, RATP, Gennevilliers river port, road transport) in oil refineries, in waste treatment centres (Vitry, Port St Louis). In May, the blockades had increased in intensity (refineries, but also logistics platforms and railways and as far as Roissy airport, the most important in Paris). In Le Havre, the CIM, which unloads 40% of the oil imported into France and distributed to several refineries in the region, remained blocked by the strike for several weeks, to the point of compromising the supply for Paris and its airports... More anecdotal but well targeted were the blockade in Marseille of the Les Terrasses du Port shopping centre, built on port sites, on 26 May by the Intersyndicale, or the blocking of the Eurofoot 2016 advertising train at Paris Montparnasse station by the railway workers of SUD-Rail in struggle on 8 June... These blockades lasted only a few hours, given the rapid intervention of the police, but they indicated a more fruitful path than the repetitive demonstrations.

As Jean-Pierre Levaray explains, "Strikes have become almost ineffective, to stop the country it has become more complicated than that. Power plants, refineries, production plants have become increasingly difficult to stop and restart, which puts off many people. There are fewer large industries than there were thirty years ago and, when they still exist, work is separated between employees with company status and subcontracting SMEs, temporary workers, or even self-employed people who cannot strike. Similarly, in transport, energy and health, powerful safeguards have been put in place to ensure that the "service" is provided at all costs. So we end up blocking the sinews of economic warfare: gasoline, travel, logistics. Essential elements of production and consumption. Blocking roads, industrial areas, bridges, rails has become the practice of social struggle in recent years. "Once again, the strategy of blocking is the most immediate, the most obvious and the most effective practice in a political conflict" according to the Invisible Committee"11

The strategy of blockade, however, did not succeed in stopping the wheels of the global fabric during the spring turmoil. While it has opened a new front line, we are forced to admit that it has not achieved its objectives: at most it has caused the beginning of a scarcity of petrol at petrol stations in the middle of May, and led to a slowdown in production in some industries. For the rest, shopping centres continued to be stocked, and the average French innocently left for the weekend. It is clear that, for the trade unions, it was not a question of effectively blocking the country, but only of using the blockades as a means of pressure to force the government to open negotiations - which the government was in no way willing to open, and which it did not open! The next deadline was the Euro 2016, organized in various cities in France from mid-June to the beginning of July. The big boss of the CGT had clearly announced that he did not intend to disrupt this event. In Paris the circulation of the metros was a little disturbed by the rotating strikes of the RATP workers, in the other cities there was not even that. It is clear that blocking the Euro football tournament would have involved concerted actions of blockade and sabotage, aimed at preventing public transport from serving stadiums and fan zones, short-circuiting their electricity supplies, disrupting television broadcasts, etc. which would have taken the agitation to a higher level. Such a strategy would certainly have put the government in jeopardy, as the mass entertainment industry is also a leading governance technique. The fact that it was not even possible to envisage this deadline shows the limits of the agitation against the El Khomri law.

*

However, it was a beautiful moment. This agitation was all the more exemplary if we measure the leaden blanket that covers this country where, for years, only the supporters of order have been heard in the streets, from the Manif pour Tous to the Je-suis-Charlie marches. France is abandoning itself to the tension of security and identity, in a growing paranoia that is looking for enemies: Muslims, Roma, illegal immigrants, the unemployed, and young people from the suburbs. It must be inside and out. Salafist fanaticism, the enemy that the Western world has patiently manufactured for itself for thirty years, has made it possible to close ranks under the spectacle of terrorism. France has never been so much at war as under the presidency of Hollande; These wars waged by professionals, in various Muslim countries, far from France, not only do not provoke protests, but on the contrary serve to close ranks at home. Terrorism and the state of emergency thus bounce off each other, with the French state sending its air force to bomb some city in Syria for each Salafist attack, leaving dozens or even hundreds of civilians killed or maimed who invariably call for other attacks in an endless spiral. Dragging us willingly or by force into this spiral is the last means of government available to the state. As for the state of emergency, proclaimed after the November 13 attacks in Paris and supposedly intended to combat other attempted Salafist attacks, which expands the powers of the police in terms of identity checks, searches, seizure of computer data, police custody, and prohibition of demonstrations, it was mainly used to ban counter-demonstrations during COP 21 in December 2015, and then to justify a certain number of measures applied against social unrest in the spring of 2016. It completes the trend to establish a state of exception in the country for the past fifteen years.

In this context, the fact that Manuel Valls, who had made a specialty in the PS of dealing with "security" issues, before logically becoming Minister of the Interior, finds himself at the head of the current government is highly significant. It is therefore not the police that are beyond the control of the government, but rather the government that has become completely police. The Ministry of the Interior has become the key to any government in France, and the more martial postures the minister displays, the more chances he will have of becoming prime minister, or even president of the Republic. Executive performance is in any case the supreme value of such people, who model their behaviour on that of raiders. Nicolas Sarkozy had already embodied such calculated cynicism, according to a trajectory that Valls in turn followed12 .

Valls leads a government that is in reality nothing more than a simple institutional organizational chart, the symbolic dimension, that of the pseudo-parliamentary debate, can therefore be evacuated - the use of 49.3, an expeditious procedure that allows a law to be passed without examination in the National Assembly, is in this sense indicative of a monarchical authoritarianism of which the French Republic holds the heritage, but here the state is no more than an apparatus subordinated to Eurocratic governance. And as the President of the European Commission said during the Greek referendum on austerity in 2015, "There can be no democratic choices against the European treaties". At the European level, this translates into the domination of a technocracy that only recognises the leading executives of capital as interlocutors; at the national level, the transfer of political decision-making, which abandons the legislative to the benefit of the executive, leads to a concentration of functions at the highest level (thus the El Khomri law was in fact thought out and prepared in Manuel Valls' cabinet). In this regard, we have been able to speak of a putschist government, of which Valls has been the instigator since 2012.

Like police repression, the judicial treatment of those arrested during the unrest is part of a state of emergency that is becoming commonplace. We announced it in 2010 at the time of the trial of the rioters in Villiers-le-Bel: the call for paid and non-public testimonies would set a precedent. In fact, the very notion of tangible evidence, which until then had been the basis for the possibility of an accusation and therefore of a conviction, seems to have dissipated in the face of simple presumption. It is enough to be considered capable of the act to be guilty of it. At the beginning of July 2016, since the beginning of the unrest, there had been exactly 896 people placed in police custody, 32 sentenced to prison terms and 59 people sentenced to suspended prison sentences, 23 of which were on probation. The profile of the convicts is like the procession at the top, extremely varied - there are even union delegates! As with the convicts of the autumn of 2005, most of them were convicted on vague reports - it was enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time! A novelty in the repressive arsenal, the bans on entering the perimeter of demonstrations, given by the police to people who have already been arrested or simply identified during previous demonstrations, have concerned several hundred people, mainly in Paris and the cities of the West (Nantes, Rennes, Rouen). The trap technique is therefore not only intended to punish, but also to file dozens and hundreds of demonstrators, who may subsequently be subject to preventive arrests, house arrest, etc., or even end up on anti-terrorist files13 .

The outburst of police violence in recent months has been such that some commentators have wondered whether the police have escaped the government's control... which is very naïve. In any case, the police have a special power, the number of police homicides committed on young Arabs and blacks, invariably covered up by the judicial authorities, is enough to testify to this. But it does not only have free rein when it comes to punishing certain categories of the population. The police union Alliance, which has spoken publicly and repeatedly about the law enforcement operations throughout the unrest, awarding good and bad points to the Ministry of the Interior, went so far as to organize a union rally on May 18 at the Place de la République "against anti-cop hatred." As for the question of whether the police are still under control, the answer is quite obvious: a body of which two-thirds votes for the National Front is perfectly suited to apply the policy of the extreme that a regime in desperation needs. So there is a perfect coincidence between this PS government and its fascistic cops, just as there was a perfect coincidence between the Social Democrats in power in Germany in 1918 and the White Guards who assassinated Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Exemplary in this respect was the unprecedented intervention of the cops against the traditional May Day demonstration: CRS and mobile gendarmes did not act like this without orders. The mobilization against the labour law and its world will have called into question Labour Day...

In addition, for fifteen years successive governments have methodically equipped the various police forces with increasingly sophisticated equipment, allowing increasingly vicious techniques of maintaining order and encouraging an unleashing of gratuitous violence on the part of the cops. The use of flash-balls and other so-called non-lethal weapons is intended to intimidate, even terrorize by causing serious but non-fatal injuries - the haunting of a new Malik Oussekine... The suffocation of demonstrators with tear gas and then the firing of offensive grenades into the middle of the crowd is a clear indication of this intention, which has resulted in an impressive number of serious injuries and mutilations. People were blinded, some found themselves in a coma, and many will keep in their flesh the traces of these so-called de-encirclement grenades. The police bestiality did not spare the independent journalists, nor the teams of Street Medics who with admirable dedication treated the wounded on the spot: several of these volunteer healers were themselves arrested and brutalized.

The escalation of military equipment does not stop, encouraged by the conflation of Salafist terrorism with uncontrollable forms of social unrest. A new assault rifle, a ballistic helmet and a soft bulletproof shield are added to an already well-stocked arsenal. In the media, this gives rise to this kind of discourse: "Since 2013, the CRS have been thinking about how to respond if rioters or demonstrators target them with firearms. With the terrorist threat in particular, the risk of mass killings, the training plan has accelerated. Before Euro 2016, 1500 CRS will be operational (...) During the urban riots in Villiers-le-Bel in 2007, they were shot at with hunting rifles, without being able to defend themselves on equal terms"... What the police and the media consider to be the weapon "equal" to a simple shotgun firing buckshot, is in this case a weapon of war, the HK G36 assault rifle, which will equip the CRS but also the BAC... equipped with a 30-round magazine, but capable of receiving a hundred cartridges to fire in machine gun mode (it is used in Mexico and Brazil by the federal police).

*

The turmoil of spring 2016 therefore started from almost nothing – the growing dissatisfaction in several sectors of French society. The summer period (July/August), which is the period of paid holidays, inevitably leads to a suspension of the struggles, but it is quite possible that the agitation will start again at the beginning of September. A rank-and-file student summed up the decisive point well when he spoke of "guerrilla warfare in the long term": repeated harassment, which allows breathing space in the time of struggle, can prove to be much more fruitful than a frontal clash. And we would be inclined to risk the following hypothesis: the general strike, which some saw as the first and unavoidable horizon of the struggle, and which very often only led to an exhaustion of resources until the unions called for a return to work – claiming that "the struggle continues in other forms" while the strikers are at the end of their rope, This general strike would perhaps, unlike in 1968, come as a consequence of the political moment and not as its cause.

Moreover, it is interesting to note that in the current agitation, the workers in struggle have not formulated any list of demands, they have contented themselves with demanding the withdrawal of the El Khomri law. Some, who already had reasons to go on strike before (notably the railway workers) simply took the opportunity to add this demand to their initial demands. In addition, there are local strikes such as the one at the Bosch factory in Vénissieux, which is on strike from April 26 to May 11 against the announced closure of the site. Others have relied on the ongoing agitation, such as the workers at Ascométal, in Fos-sur-mer, who went on strike at the beginning of July against the dismissal of one of their own, supposedly caught by his foreman rolling a joint, and who benefited from support to block the entrance to the factory that they would probably not have had in normal times - if only in view of the geographical isolation of the factory, between the blast furnaces of Sollac on one side and the plain of La Crau on the other, 50 km from Marseille.

The problem of syndicalism, from the point of view of a revolutionary critique, is not so much its lack of combativeness. We have also seen extremely combative unions when it comes to "defending jobs" – in the Port of Marseille, this was seen with the CGT of dockers, SNCM sailors and naval metallurgy, capable of taking on a confrontation of great intensity but who remained carefully locked up in this space, without any communication with the rest of the city. It is the status of the worker that governs the trade union struggle, not the social and urban space to which this same worker belongs. And one cannot overturn a social relationship by remaining locked in a statute.

Positing living labour as an autonomous power in the face of capital has been the horizon of the workers' movement for a century. But work as it has existed since the great industrial domestication (which economists dare to call "revolution") is only the condition for the existence of capital. The subordination of labour to capital is not a misfortune inflicted on labour by capital – even if it is a misfortune for people condemned to work, condemned to wage slavery. Labour exists only subordinate to capital – otherwise, it is activity, not labour. This opposition of labour and capital, fixed and theorised by the various revolutionary currents of the nineteenth century, has de facto relegated the subjective element, that of the refusal of work, to clandestinity. In this perspective, no future was conceivable: workers' struggles could be victorious in the short term, in the long term capital largely regained its positions by reconfiguring the terms of opposition so that the worker was ever more dependent and more subject to the devices put in place by capitalist engineering.

What we know as labour is not an ancestral reality, which capital has alienated: it is something that has been imposed on us with the advent of capitalism. This can only be reproduced to the extent that it succeeds in imposing wage labour as the general horizon of life. This is what many of the young people in the lead procession reject, banners and even more tags say it clearly and poetically: "Work is broken, let's throw it away!", "General burn-out", "Work is the worst police", "Let's not organize work, let's generalize laziness!", "Neither law, nor work" said banners in the head processions, not to mention the magnificent "We are among those who make love in the afternoon"! These slogans openly formulate something unspeakable by those who have to go to sorrow – even if a certain number of these young people in the lead procession are themselves workers, precarious for the most part. But where and how does the articulation between the strikers, unionized or not, and these young people (high school students, students who will soon be unemployed, precarious workers), between demands and aspirations, where and how does it take place? The unions and the multitude of the head procession correspond to different, if not antagonistic, modes of socialization. On the one hand, socialization through work, through a guaranteed worker status, which still covers many people despite the galloping precariousness, while at the front of the procession a zone of uncertainty opens up that subjectively envisages an overcoming. The moment when these two distinct components converge towards the same point of fixation would be truly political. It is reasonable to think that this horizon of expectation is not absent from the union processions – otherwise, why would so many union members go up in a procession of leaders who display such slogans?

While it is obvious that the stakes of this agitation go beyond the El Khomri law, it allowed the question of work to be brought back to the table. After all, such a law only sanctions the loss of social meaning of work. For a long time, within a global regime of exploitation, work was still the major form of socialization and individual legitimation. At such a degree of precariousness, flexibility and mobility, work no longer even offers that. Not to mention the very purpose of this increasingly absurd job - making hamburgers at McDonald's, working as a security guard in a security agency or stacking clothes in an H&M store... Unlike the assembly line workers of the Fordist era, whose revolt was socialized in the space of the factory, the revolt of the precarious and unemployed for life young people is in a way suspended in a social vacuum. And if the relationship to the necessity of money constitutes the common element of all those who find themselves forced into wage labour in its various forms – or else into poverty – what is going to bring about a communisation in the struggle? In other words: how will this constraint be communized? It is not just a question, as a group of comrades from Toulouse jokingly puts it, of demanding "money while waiting for communism" (after all, this is what the Argentine piqueteros did and the Kirchners were able to neutralize them by redistributing money) but of giving substance to the refusal of work by experimenting with forms of activity that are not subject to the imperative of valorization.

The most significant thing is that at Nuit Debout, despite the fact that it came out of the demonstrations against the labor law, there was almost no debate on the question of work! Endless interventions on countless "social questions" but practically nothing on a question as fundamental as that of work, or more precisely of the critique of work. This is also critical of the separation and hierarchy between manual and intellectual work. This would involve, among other things, giving up on making intellectuals speak as such, based on the specialized and privileged position they occupy in society; and to cultivate doubt on any discourse that is constructed and deployed from this position. Nuit Debout, far from calling into question the status of the intellectual, gave him a dominant position in the midst of the current agitation - two minutes the average intervention time of an unknown, endless interventions for recognized intellectual personalities. The critique of labour would be first and foremost a critique of the dominant division of labour.

*

If the constraint that weighs on the worker is expressed abstractly, as the result of impersonal social relations – the necessity of money, which silently forces him into wage slavery – it is nevertheless exercised in his work according to very concrete modalities. It is therefore vain to say that the real struggle would begin beyond any particular demand. The question is: how can a common demand open up a field of conflict, and how, brought to a certain point of incandescence, can it lead to a crisis of power and thus become a political moment? Marx had shown in his time, with unequalled talent, how the latent class struggle in France led to insurrection by taking advantage of the phases of political crisis - the spring of 1848, the winter of 1870. The first condition is therefore that the current turmoil is already sustainable.

Capital imparts to labour a double character: the concrete labour of the executor is confronted by the omnipotence of abstract labour, which determines the content and form of concrete labour. "In fact, the work that is thus measured by time does not appear as the work of different individuals, but the different individuals who work appear rather as simple organs of work"14 . Trade unionism is deployed in the field of concrete work, but this work – which is certainly not the free and more or less creative work of the craftsman of the past but the repetitive and exhausting work of the exploited worker – has itself no consistency in the face of abstract work. This is well expressed by the content of the El Khomri law. What becomes of die beruf when living labor is so mortified? Who can still believe in fulfillment through work after the sixty suicides at France Telecom between 2006 and 2009?! 15

This labour crisis makes it more and more difficult for the unions to assume the function that has historically been theirs, that of negotiating the price of labour power, reduced to doing so from a rearguard position, namely "the defence of employment" – in addition to the fact that the field thus delimited also comes into violent contradiction with elementary ethical and ecological requirements: for a CGT Vinci that agrees to condemn the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport project, how many CGT sections that defend jobs in factories manufacturing and exporting military equipment, not to mention the pro-nuclear position of the CGT Energy... 16

The CFDT is taking responsibility for the labour crisis, in a perspective that is certainly not revolutionary: a good part of the El Khomri law responds to the orientations of this co-managing union. But whether it is the CFDT or conversely the CGT, FO and SUD, the unions reason, each in their own way, in a perspective that would maintain the centrality of work. And this while the share of living labour in the production of value is constantly diminishing in inverse proportion to the share of dead labour (thought materialised in the technological apparatus, all capitalist engineering in fact). That 6.5 million unemployed are counted in the sixth richest country in the world leaves no doubt about this. But while living labour sees its effective role relativized within the global fabric, it continues to be posited as an absolute in the dominant morality, i.e. in the economy and in the political discourse that it dictates. These axioms of "employment" and "growth" work in tandem, each summoning the other to form a circular discourse closing the field of questioning, and which is translated into the mode of moralistic injunction: for example, the slogan of Sarkozy's presidential campaign in 2007, "work more to earn more", or more recently the insolence of his counterpart Emmanuel Macron who, draped in his luxury suits, goes to lecture the workers who are so badly dressed... 17 The first political function of the economy, which is certainly not new, is to train people in the morality of work.

The unions, for their part, find themselves increasingly out of step with the evolution of the wage system: not only do they bring together only a part of the guaranteed employees, but they only correspond to this figure of the employee - which could be described as the fixed part of the variable capital. About 85% of the employment contracts currently signed in France are fixed-term contracts, most of which are short-term: the major union mobilizations are in fact ignoring all this floating salaried employment. To which is added the weight of undeclared work in sectors as important as construction, agriculture and catering... The movement of the Intermittents du spectacle had begun to question this extension of the salaried workforce: "It has been some time now that what was once the prerogative of artists and technicians of the performing arts, practitioners of discontinuous employment (being inventive, available, flexible) is what is increasingly demanded of all employees. And it is indeed to bring them to this enthusiastic docility to precarious, underpaid and undignified employment that the Unedic agreements (on unemployment insurance) were designed," declared the Coordination of Intermittent and Precarious Workers of Île-de-France a few years ago. "The government of a 'floating population' requires social control mechanisms, hence the constitution of new 'bosses' such as Unedic, Pôle Emploi, the State through the management of the RSA. Unemployment insurance is not simply an institution of compensation and assistance enabling the unemployed to find a job: it is also a mechanism for constituting, regulating and governing a poor labour market and a "floating population". The same can be said of the management of the RSA by the State and local authorities."18 This blind spot of the wage system is de facto abandoned by the unions to the mechanisms of state management, disciplinary apparatuses responsible for exerting permanent blackmail on the beneficiaries in order to force some of them to accept arduous and poorly paid work. And workfare, imported from the USA, heralds an even more difficult future for many: workfare programs assume that recipients of social assistance must work voluntarily to receive a monthly allowance. Several General Councils have already decided to make the payment of the RSA conditional on the fact of carrying out free working hours for the benefit of local authorities or associations... the return of the workhouses of yesteryear, but in an open environment19 . In addition, the use of free work by beneficiaries will contribute to worsening the working conditions of many employees by competing with them at unbeatable costs!

The inhabitants of the poor suburbs are obviously even more abandoned to these devices, and suspicious social assistance goes hand in hand with police surveillance. Exposed to precariousness, temporary and underpaid jobs or prison, it is clear that all these people who would have excellent reasons to come forward have little opportunity to do so within the union framework. It is not the mantra of a "convergence of struggles" that will encourage the relegated of the suburbs to enter the dance. All the more so since a clearly counter-revolutionary factor works against it in many suburbs, namely clientelism, especially associative ones20 . But it could also enter into crisis, at a time when the resources to be distributed are becoming scarce - today, elected officials are granting precarious part-time jobs paid a few hundred euros per month as a favour... In the poor suburbs of the country, the social question is immediately posed on a completely different level than that posed by the unions or by Nuit Debout - or by certain monomaniacal anarchists and autonomists...

If work remains the reference in the discourse of politicians and economists, it is also for the unions since it is the basis of their existence. But the one and only thing that identifies the proletarians as such at present is the relationship to the necessity of money: in other words, something that is first experienced in the mode of lack of. It is this necessity that is common to all, whereas capitalists know money only in the exact opposite of lack of, as capital. Some have thought to respond to this contradiction between the necessity of money and the status of worker by proposing the establishment of a social wage, an income guaranteed by a new welfare state (cf. the fantasies of the recycled Stalinist Bernard Friot, among others). We will not even enter into idle discussions about how such an income would be collected and then distributed, since we believe that it is quite the contrary a question of defining a field that escapes the grip of economic discourse and where we would stop thinking in terms of employment and income to think in terms of the direct pooling of resources. This will not come out of the head of an economist, even if he is appalled, but from the multiplication of direct actions. We might as well say it clearly, this will be done illegally, to the detriment of companies and the State. To take an example from the recent unrest, actions such as those of EDF employees who, in several departments, have switched the meters to off-peak hours, are moving in this direction.

Such a field can certainly not be conceived through a position of overhang. Only one academic who has never been in sorrow would say that to demand is already to submit... "If the working class were to give up in its daily conflict with capital, it would certainly deprive itself of the possibility of undertaking this or that movement on a larger scale."21 The conflictuality inherent in the opposition between labour and capital is only the normal state of society, which has led the bourgeoisie and its rulers to recognise the need to have a trade union interlocutor in order to make the conflict negotiable. But it is clear that this regulation has entered into crisis. The managers of Air France with their torn shirts and the sequestered Goodyear executives have had the bitter experience of this: union delegates have participated in these violent actions, and have been convicted for it22 ...

Struggles in the workplace are necessarily demanding, since it is in a well-defined field of tension between labour and capital that they arise; But there are inequities that go beyond it – if only the pleasure of shutting one's mouth to the little chef, for example. When they become widespread and leave the company, they lead to a shift in the conflict towards what we call a political moment: they then tip over into a dynamic that is no longer one of demand but of self-organization – not self-management, which remains locked in the logic of the company and the market, but the communization of resources. This has been seen recently in several Latin American countries, from Argentina to Mexico to Bolivia. This is where we need to be inspired.

We have seen the beginnings of the constitution of such a field in Italy in the 1970s, where the separation between the space of the factory and that of the metropolis fell under the influence of autonomous struggles. More recently in Argentina in the 2000s, where the movement of the unemployed had reached a truly political power: when it came to defending the occupied factories against eviction, it was the organized unemployed who provided the bulk of the troops, reversing the relationship between workers and the unemployed that usually makes the latter the poor relations of the struggle. When in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood the unemployed constitute the main force capable of supporting the workers, the field of socialization is such that it goes beyond the walls of the company. We also think of new forms of solidarity experimented in Andalusia, and not only in Marinaleda but also in these neighbourhoods of Cadiz where those who have a job share their salary with unemployed neighbours in turn. The perspective would be to build a field of relations that goes beyond the framework of the company (for workers) and police social assistance (for the unemployed). As a prerequisite for a social diversion of technical resources that the political moment (i.e. the power vacuum) would authorize. It is not only a question of practical experiences but also of a field of reflection. In short, of an experimental communization.

The fact that there are important struggles outside the trade union field points in the direction of such an opening: no one is unaware of the role of the ZAD of Notre-Dame-de-Landes, in the West, on the dynamics of Nantes and Rennes in recent months. Similarly, the question of refugees, especially from Syria: the violent expulsion of the camps in Calais, where fascist groups were seen helping the CRS, some time before the beginning of the agitation, contributed to increasing resentment against this government. In Paris during the spring turmoil, we saw several solidarity actions, from active support to the encampment on Place Stalingrad to the opening of an abandoned college to receive migrants. And it is notable that the MILI was formed during the mobilization against the expulsion of a Roma high school student a few years ago.

*

"It's not the demo that is overflowing, it's the overflow that is manifesting" could be read on the walls in this spring of 2016... The comrades of the MILI define well the beginning of a political moment: "Just the desire to create the conditions for something that overflows us, not to control something". We do not do politics, what we do is, at times, political: that moment when an increase in collective power is likely to cause state power to break down.

State power is based on two poles that must always remain in tension, that of the legal order and that of the disciplinary order. The first presents itself as the positive pole, which provides protection, the second as the negative pole, which inflicts punishment. When these two poles cease to be in tension, under the effect of uncontrollable unrest, the power dynamic enters into crisis. The premises of this are currently perceptible. On the one hand, we see that the legal pole of power, which is also the one that legitimizes it, is increasingly weakened (for example, labour law is now relegated to the background) and according to expeditious procedures (national representation short-circuited by the use of 49.3). Our purpose here is not to defend the labour code, which only regulates exploitation, nor to defend the pseudo-parliamentary debate, which only stages the spectacle of politics; we only observe that governance is beginning to overlook all this system of legitimation and regulation which constitutes the sphere of civil and political law - even criminal law which is shaken up by anti-terrorist provisions! On the other hand, we see the disciplinary pole, which is also the one that represses, getting carried away with the explosion of unprecedented police violence and the inexorable establishment of a state of exception throughout the country. Governance is now acting in an emergency that smells of the end of a reign.

The political deadline not to be missed will be to organize electoral demotivation in the run-up to the presidential and legislative elections of 2017: there can be no question of passively enduring two quarters of presidential campaigning. On the contrary, it is to be inspired by the Otra Campaña that the Zapatista comrades organized in Mexico in 2006: that people all over the country who are organizing themselves can debate their respective experiences, leaving the indignation to the powerless.

Because indignation always finds an electoral echo chamber, so Ruffin now declares to anyone who will listen that "Nuit Debout is over": "Now what matters is to win the presidential elections of 2017", in other words to campaign for the apparatchik Mélenchon. This will have the advantage of clearly placing such people, with their sovereignist and productivist rhetoric, in the enemy's camp. As for the Socialist Party, it is reduced to cancelling its "summer university" announced in Nantes at the end of August, for fear of suffering proletarian vindictiveness in a city that has been singularly agitated throughout the spring...

On the right, the government is denounced for its inability to stop the unrest and restore order – although the right can hardly outbid each other, Hollande having proved even worse than Sarkozy in terms of repression. As for the far right, which has woven laurels for Hollande for its bellicose policy since the attacks, it is not destined to exercise power: it has, in fact, already amply fulfilled its function in the spectacle of politics. For its part, the PS will find it difficult to recover votes by playing, as it has done for thirty years, on the fear of the National Front: in a country where a clone of Pierre Laval is Prime Minister, it is clear that this false opposition will no longer mobilize. Once again, to take up what we wrote ten years ago, if France has avoided fascism it is not because it is the country of freedom but because it is the country of authority23 . The reproduction of the state and disciplinary apparatus is the essential, the colour of the government livery is secondary.

While the state of emergency is set to last, and the various exceptional measures restricting the scope of legal freedoms are clearly set to be the norm for a long time, it is clear that the 2017 presidential campaign will aim to obtain the explicit consent of voters-spectators on this issue. For twenty years, "security" has been the theme on which the candidates have been confronting each other, each posing as the most likely to guarantee it to the French. Under these conditions, the country could fall into a military-police emergency regime without even needing a pseudo-coup d'état like Erdogan in Turkey... the electoral campaign would in itself constitute such a coup d'état, which it would be sufficient for the winner to ratify constitutionally. It is therefore important to dismiss him in advance.

"Let's continue the beginning..."

Alèssi DELL'UMBRIA,

Marseille, June/July 2016.

***********

For Dave

Dear Dave,

So here are some informative elements about the situation in France. There are surely many things you already know. I have not gone into the details specific to the situation in Marseille: shooting and gassing in the demonstrations, quarrels with the CGT on the one hand and with radicals on the other, for whom nothing is ever radical enough in their eyes... (You know what I mean!) It should be noted that since the beginning of the movement, a kind of chaotic assembly has been formed in Marseille next to the "Nuits Debouts" bringing together several dozen people, whether or not they came from militant circles. Despite the conflicts and controversies mainly provoked by a few contemptuous autonomists, this assembly (its name: "13 in struggle") decided very early on to intervene in the companies to inform the employees about the movement in progress. And this outside of any union ties. For the time being, the port and roads are regularly blocked by dockers, sailors, shipbuilding workers, people from Nuit Debout, students. But of all this, I must tell you one thing: I was relatively little present. You are surely not unaware of my new situation of fatherhood. My two little girls also spend a lot of time wanting to be Upright... It's promising.

I hope you're doing well.

Friendships

Rémy

*****************

First, the general context.

If it were not for the common course of the measures of modernized capitalism – deindustrialization, uberization, precariousness, social Darwinism, the state reduced to a single role of repression, etc. - and those imposed by the European Community – the abolition of social gains, the ideology of the free market, debt pressures, reductions in wage costs, etc. – France has experienced some significant events in recent years from which the dominant powers have tried to derive new important benefits in terms of social peace.

The attacks of January 2015 (Charlie Hebdo, etc.) provoked an emotion that brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets, some of whom, heavily covered by the media, cheered on the cops in an atmosphere of national unity that made all the police and economic authorities dream. This apparent unanimity has come to complete the phenomenal amount of news, flashes, discussions, editorials constantly dealing with the National Front, a selling and sulphurous subject. Thus, in recent years, these two subjects have been fuelled essentially by these two subjects: the National Front and terrorism, accompanied by the implementation of the state of emergency

The labour law was a detonator. Why this infamous law in particular, when so many other decisions had been despicable without arousing rallies and mutualisation's of anger? Surely, this alchemy so particular to the genesis and explosion of social movements? That said, the rejection of politicians, the mistrust of the authorities, the brutal anger were already transpiring quite a bit in France. The rise of the National Front is a terrifying, horrible and miserable expression of this among many isolated, frightened and disgusted people (including the poorest)

The movement against the labour law - which began after the signing of an online petition bringing together more than a million people - was broadly played out in three stages.

The first is that of young people, especially high school students and also students. They blockade high schools, go to official demonstrations, march dancing, fight with the police, take as their slogan remarks borrowed from RAP groups ("The World or Nothing", "The sky knows that our blood flows under our hoods", etc. This is a radical change from traditional incantations such as "This is just the beginning..." They meet in demonstrations, put themselves at the head of the processions where people more seasoned in the fight against the cops meet. Gestures are communicated. Together, they make reinforced banners to resist blows and grenade and flashball shots. They attack, along with others, the windows of banks, temporary employment agencies, state annexes, advertising billboards, street furniture. Some of them, from a still working-class district of Paris, attacked two police stations on March 25 in revenge for the violence of the cops, looted two supermarkets and distributed food to migrants who had taken refuge under a metro bridge. From the first demonstrations, the cops systematically supervised the demonstrations on all four sides in the English or German way. The cops attack the processions, gas, mutilate, fire grenades, block people using the kettling technique. Plainclothes cops enter the demonstrations to catch people with great brutality. Some are sometimes postponed. Young people and others from more politicized movements, go, sheltered by their reinforced banners, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat with the lines of cops, which makes it more complicated to fire grenades and flashballs. Without knowing who is behind the slogans, we hear: "Law! Work! Withdrawal of both! The slogan "Everyone hates the police! " is widely repeated. (He first appeared during the demonstrations about the death of Rémi Fraisse, killed by a gendarme during a rally against a project to destroy a forest to install a dam in the South-West). A very beautiful banner carried by young people (in the provinces) says ironically: "And you thought we were going to stay on Twitter?" Throughout this period, which will change around March 31, young people are on the whole quite alone. The cops, already, are behaving very violently. "Adults" rarely come forward, observe and intervene little when they witness situations of totally disproportionate police brutality.

Second step. Following the demonstrations of March 31, a new movement appeared with the occupation of public spaces: in Paris with the occupation of the Place de la République, but gradually also in hundreds of cities, large or small, throughout the country. They are then the place of all the debates – and above all – of all the encounters, as if everyone had raised their heads from their computer to go and see their fellow human beings in vivo. And in this era of lack of project, isolation, monologue, poorly compensated by suffocating self-isolation, it was inevitable (and necessary) that we would witness a kind of flood of heterogeneous discourse: the drafting of a new constitution, the defence of animals, chemtrails, conspiracies, gender issues, citizenism, etc. Everything that modern emptiness offers. But there are also attempts to elaborate a perspective, debates on violence, criticisms of politics, of the state, of the commodity, etc., etc., etc. And always with the most total refusal to have a political label or leader. A vast agora where ideas, constructions and curiosities are mixed. A publisher friend who distributed her books on the Place de la République told me about the masses of questions concerning the Paris Commune, democracy, organization, anarchism and communism, violence in history, etc. Each time, I was told of a remarkable benevolence between the participants, in an atmosphere of openness, but also sometimes and obviously of ingenuity... This situation, which still lasts in many places, corresponds to the shortcomings and "needs" of that time. Even if it is without a clear and decisive future, there is there, as elsewhere, by default, a real intelligence in action... This "Nuit Debout" movement has a truly unprecedented character. It does not rely on any reference related to institutional politics, does not take up (perhaps because it does not know them) the traditional slogans and manners of social movements. It seems to be indirectly influenced by a number of underground initiatives that have been developing in France and also in Europe for several years – on the way of life (food, housing, territory), the creation of links of exchange and mutual aid, the refusal of work, the hatred of the authorities, horizontality, the absence of leaders, criticism of the economy, self-organization, the functioning of general assemblies. What is happening in Notre-Dame-des-Landes is the tip of a broader and deeper movement that seeks to preserve its invisibility. Many of its general orientations can be found in the "Nuits Debouts".

It is also (to make a long story short) in these agoras that the question of the general strike will begin to be named more and more often, considered as the indispensable condition – and rightly so – to strengthen the movement and reverse the balance of forces. To the point that the head of the CGT will come to speak at the Place de la République.

The CGT leadership is in a rather special position. There is its "essence" which is to appropriate the movements, to slow them down and to hope to benefit from them with the authorities and with the least combative of its adherents. But also, a significant part of the base is made up of very angry and angry people who have no intention of obeying the management. The Marseille congress, which took place in mid-May, showed a great determination on the part of part of the rank-and-file. The CGT apparatus will try to juggle between all its components.

In this demand on the part of the "Nuits Debouts" is reproduced the great deal of illusion that elections carry, where the imagination is led to think that a new political figure could change everything. By calling for a general strike, it meant giving the CGT a free hand and therefore allowing it to take control of the situation. It is with this idea that some of its security services will collaborate, in places, with the cops to chase away the "thugs". The head of the union took a firm stance with the government while not seeking to negotiate on a few articles of the labour law.

It was also during this period that the idea of holding "wild demonstrations" outside the official processions was often taken up. Races in the streets, creation of ephemeral barricades to slow down the cops, attacks on Socialist Party offices, etc. Rank-and-file trade unionists who are also often repulsed by the behaviour of their union and that of the police are also involved. In Marseille, on April 28, during one of these wild demonstrations, it is the truck of the Sud union that will be in the lead. He was the target of grenades and flashballs, breaking the windshield and injuring a union representative in the region.

Third time. Beyond the trade union apparatus, the slogan that spread at the time was "Block everything". The union leadership did not take it up, but, on the ground, employees mixed with people from Nuits Debout, militants, students and others began to block the refineries, then the ports, the roads, while at the same time a large number of small strikes took place (and this in great silence). For many, the issue of the labour law is only an argument in the context of a more general anger. The state and its supporters will put themselves in battle order against a movement that some until then regarded as a kind of entertainment, caught between the affirmation of a living democracy and the commercial potential that violence represents for the media. The police, bathed in the praise they thought they had received during the January attacks, will let loose (and this from the beginning). The number of wounded among the opponents is considerable. Until now, the overflow of police violence was only applied in the outlying districts: it now overflows in full view of everyone in the city centres. Savagery, impunity, extreme violence, and with a weaponry – called sub-lethal – quite similar to those available to the military. It seems like an eye-opener to many. (The forces of law and order have revived this practice that disappeared in the twentieth century: that of aiming at a crowd with a firearm) The ranks of those who go to the fight are growing. The 1ster In Paris, almost the entire demonstration (tens of thousands of people) shouted "Everyone hates the police". In Bordeaux, on May 26, dockers who came en-masse freed a young "thug" who had been arrested from the hands of the cops. The media decided to set up a blackout that would grow. While blockades, roadblocks and police assaults continue in many places, official information is becoming more and more silent. A police car on fire or an injured cop makes headlines while news about a guy seriously injured by a grenade on May 26 goes unreported for a week.

Unsurprisingly, but by provoking anger and hatred, the media are doing their propaganda work. Roland Garros, the floods and especially this football crap come at the right time. Except that their discredit is further reinforced by the existence of networks on the Internet through which information circulates for those most committed to the struggle.

The question of deadlock is also the expression of real strategic intelligence. Which big factory to occupy? A few stocks seized even though everything is now on a just-in-time basis? What mass of employees can be brought together when they have different statuses: subcontractors, temporary workers, displaced workers, micro-entrepreneurs, the unemployed, the precarious, not to mention the pressures they are subjected to directly or indirectly?

On June 8, blockades and strikes continue with different intensities depending on the place: refineries, roadblocks, boats, nuclear power plants, airlines, trains, garbage collection, Amazon, etc. (EDF employees have reduced the price of electricity for more than a million people in the Paris region) while Hollande paraphrases Maurice Thorez by saying that "you have to know how to stop a strike". This kind of remarks, combined with the almost total media blackout, gives the measure of the concern, even the panic, in which the authorities are.

What next?

If the movement stagnates, it will obviously die out. Politicians and the media are relentless in their pursuit of a propagandistic zeal worthy of the great moments of war.

If the movement persists in the form it has today (and there is a lot of energy in action) it will at least create this scandal of hindering the smooth running of this damn European football cup. Let's hope that this will also be an opportunity for a debate on this subject at this time when the function of football is clearly apparent.

If the movement redevelops, clashes will be inevitable. And this kind of situation will then change all the parameters of reflection.

But what is certain is that it will be a milestone. The fight against the First Job Contract (CPE) in 2006 raised a whole generation of refractories who continued to think, resist and fight against the living conditions in this society. The movements around the ZADs are the most notable continuity, among a large number of other attempts, experiences, ruptures that continue in a certain social clandestinity. We can say with certainty that what is happening in France today will have the same consequences. All of this will remain in people's minds: for the participants, as well as for the hundreds, if not thousands, of those who were arrested, injured, etc. The feeling of being irreconcilable with the state of society will spread.

Marseille, 8 June 2016

Last news: a subscription intended to collect money for the strikers has raised more than 200,000 euros in less than two weeks. At the initiative of this collection, a branch of the CGT union which has already distinguished itself by the manufacture and distribution of posters against the behaviour of the police...

A final (?) comment from Dave Wise. Summer 2025..........

Below are examples of some of the books written by Alessi dell Umbria. They really are far-ranging from across the globe but always very well informed though not in the style and presentation of some wooden left wing academic treatise. On the contrary they are very hands-on like as if the guy is living with the subjects he is talking about breathing the same air, suffering the same indignities, organically identifying with all their creative, communal liberatory impulses. In that sense no different from all the other Os Cangaceiros individuals I've had the joy of connecting with throughout the last 40 years or so. Not just Remy and Jack de Montreuil but Guillaume and Morgane, etc (I won't use their second names because like other genuine subversives the system after all these years is still hunting them down). They are still The Unforgiven. Hence as Jackot /Jackot did these individuals tended to pass from country to country always cagey about what the multifarious French law and order brigade could do to them. So why not take a good look at Alessi dell Umbria's video in French on Os Cangaceiros available on Youtube...........

Alessi describes his central exposition in his recent Antimatrix as something "like a noir novel" which basically is a treatise on his experiences of what he calls the globe's "blind spots", those nowhere places filled with nowhere people from the Tarentello of southern Italy, even - it seems - parts of Liverpool. (I guess he means Toxteth and a poor suburb which was the great spur to the 1981 riots in the UK). And as Alessi also said he's "been drifting in cities from the age of 15" onwards. However, these nowhere places have been slowly but surely systematically re-colonised and domesticated by a new regime; a kind of techno-feudalism together with a heavily authoritarian police deploying all kinds of techno-scientific devices separated from everyday life (e.g. especially the smart phone) reining over everything and slowly but surely creating an information /disinformation regime destroying all genuine communality, knowledge and debate. This nightmare is what we are now witnessing. However this calamity has slowly been undermined especially in France beginning with the urban riots of 2005 in the suburbs through to Nuit Debout in 2016 on to the magnificent Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) uprising of 2017-20. Alessi reckons that the wall graffiti of Nuit Debout in 2016 was richer than that of May/June 1968 in France because it was in and around "stories with different voices" wilder and yet more personal and a separation reaching out to genuine convergence. (One need only read Jack de Montreuil's account plus his myriad photographs formerly on the Revolt Against Plenty web and now on Libcom.org to realize how true this is). As Jack also said Alessi's accounts and hands-on experiences are one step on and forward from Guy Debord's analysis in The Society of The Spectacle encompassing the new "information regime of the spectacle" with a now all encompassing disconnecting 'show' utterly destroying all genuine hands-on touchy/feely human communication.

What we are all experiencing today is like the myth of The End that inspired the film of The Matrix closely followed by all its popular cinematic add-ons. One gets the sense too that Allessi dell Umbria has also read a lot of Robert Kurz along with his relevant reinterpretation of Marx, concerning that of fictive capital, credit/debt and the growing insubstantial character na of capitalism today. In consequence, Alessi dell Umbria reckons that capitalism has become ungovernable through debt. Thus, in order to control the many uprisings that have taken place over the last few years from Hong Kong to Belarus - and which seem to disappear without trace - a terrorist-like ruthlessness by the state has been deployed against the crowds in revolt. (In parenthesis here just take a look at the now terminated but still extant Dialectical Delinquents web which gave out some excellent - almost day-to-day information - on these uprisings).

Interestingly, Alessi discusses the big question of money and its potential abolition /supersession in Antimatrix beginning with ways of diverting money from an omniscient banking system. He goes back to the past and /or present day poor communities that still use the Muslim Hawala or the West African tontine where money is based on a relationship OF TRUST. Alessi's emphasis here is on people in poor countries but one that escapes "racketeering, banking, Mafias and the State". He then goes on to say that we (in the West?) have had no historical experience of the suppression of money apart from the brief experiment in Catalunya and close by in the Spanish Revolution of 1936/7 where the anarchist CNT/FAI invented a voucher system that was used internally for all transactions. However, Alessi realises we can't use this today as with the advent of globalisation we are in a new realm. In the recent past in communes like Rojava in the Middle East or Chiapas in Mexico he wonders how a new exchange could take place one that could potentially spread world-wide.

Interestingly, too Antimatrix ends with a quote from a municipal official in charge of video surveillance and thus has something like total control. He praises "the ability of surveillance software to learn "through experience" when its intelligence itself that ends up being exiled in the supersensitive world of control and surveillance systems" This comment really struck home with Jack de Montreuil as he was always questioning me about surveillance in the UK where there are more cameras focussed on the population than anywhere else in the world. Three cameras to every living human being!

Below: Various books in their original French or Spanish by Alèssi Dell'Umbria

As for the UK, a far number of Alèssi Dell'Umbria's books have been translated into English and are immediately freely available on the Good Reads web although the essential Antimatrix is missing. However, what is seriously lacking is any intelligent discussion in and around Alèssi Dell'Umbria himself.

• 1Between 1944 and 1946, a series of measures by the National Council of the Resistance, which intended to rebuild the country on the basis of co-management between the unions, employers and the state, led to the creation of Social Security and the total nationalisation of services considered to be public (railways, coalmines, electricity and gas, etc.). airlines and shipping companies, some banks and insurance companies, the car manufacturer Renault), as well as the official recognition of trade unions. Coming after the measures of the Popular Front in 1936 in favour of the workers (right to paid holidays, limitation of the working week to 40 hours), they were intended to defuse the revolutionary tendencies of the workers' movement at a time when many workers, strengthened by their role in the Resistance against the German occupation, were still armed. In fact, most of them had to lay down their arms on the orders of the French Communist Party in the name of national reconstruction... By 1946, the alliance between De Gaulle and the PCF had ended, the Cold War had begun, but the social measures taken during these two years remained...
• 2CIP, Contrat d'Insertion Professionnelle, which provided that fixed-term contracts for young people under 26 years of age would be paid at 80% of the Minimum Wage (SMIG). It was withdrawn in the face of the magnitude of the street protests. CPE, Contrat Première Embauche, a bill on youth employment adopted in March 2006 but which, in the face of the scale of the demonstrations, never had its implementing decree. In both cases, it was young people, high school and university students, who launched the movement, followed by the workers' unions.
• 3The MILI has changed its name, now called the Independent Inter-Struggle Movement. Here is their website: https://miliparis.wordpress.com/.
• 4Zyed and Bouna, two 15-year-old boys who were electrocuted while hiding in an electrical transformer to flee a police check: their deaths provoked the great revolt of the poor suburbs in the autumn of 2005. Rémy, a 21-year-old kid murdered by the Mobile Gendarmerie in October 2014 while defending the ZAD of Sivens. An Arab, a Black, a White.
• 5During the June 14 demonstration, three plainclothes cops were at the head of the union procession, who signalled to the leaders of the S.O. when to stop, to let the lead procession move forward and isolate it from the rest of the demonstration. It is therefore clear that there is direct collaboration, on the ground, between the leaders of the S.O. CGT and the police.
• 6Ferdinand CAZALIS, Nuit Debout, le mois le plus long, CQFD nº 144, May 2016. The UNEF is the student union, an empty shell that serves above all to train the future cadres of the left-wing parties.
• 7You have to read it to believe it! "How can we get out of the antinomy between un-productivity and the return to the parliamentary stable? The only answer in my eyes is: by structuring ourselves not to return to the institutions but to rebuild the institutions. Remaking the institutions means rewriting a Constitution. And here is the second reason why the exit by the Constitution makes sense: the fight against capital. To put an end to wage labour as a blackmail relationship, we must put an end to the lucrative ownership of the means of production, and this property is enshrined in the constitutional texts. To put an end to the empire of capital, which is a constitutionalized empire, we must rewrite a Constitution. A Constitution that abolishes private ownership of the means of production and institutes ownership of use: the means of production belong to those who use them and who will use them for something other than the valorization of capital." Lordon believes that it is enough to abolish private ownership of the means of production to put an end to capital, so he has learned nothing from the experience of state capitalism, in the USSR or elsewhere... But his naïve idealism reaches new heights: the constitutionally decreed expropriation of capital! It was enough to rewrite the Constitution to achieve the abolition of salaried employment, and in addition it can be done via internet forums, without having to take to the streets like the revolutionaries of yesteryear - in fact, a "digital and participatory citizens' assembly" has been operating since the end of June to consider this recasting of the Constitution among former members of Nuit Debout! At least there is no longer any risk of ending up glued to the wall of the Fédérés: at worst, the State will only have to cut off the internet connection to dissolve such a dangerous assembly!
• 8K. MARX, Critical marginal glosses to the article "The King of Prussia and Social Reform", Vorwärts!, 1844.
• 9The red vest is the one worn by CGT members during demonstrations.
• 10http://www.lundi.am/
• 11"Quand tout s'arrête, tout commence", article by J-P LEVARAY published in CQFD of June 2016, nº144. Levaray worked all his life as a worker in a chemical factory in Rouen, and he recounted this experience in several books that you absolutely must read, starting with "Putain d'usine!".
• 12These two politicians also have in common that they are viscerally pro-Zionist, which is not innocent in a country where a large part of the dangerous classes are Muslim. This means an unconditional alignment with US imperialism, with its military choices with the consequences they imply, and with the theory of the "clash of civilizations" which claims to justify such choices - a clash in which Israel is obviously posed as a privileged ally. This active pro-Zionism has helped fuel Salafist terrorism in France, justifying in turn a state of emergency and legislation worse than the Patriot Act. It therefore obeys not only a foreign policy imperative, but also an internal one: these two sides of the state tend in fact to merge in the same logic.
• 13Several people are imprisoned on terrorism charges for setting fire to a police vehicle in Paris on the side-lines of the police rally organized by Alliance on May 18. In Rennes, about twenty people who had tried to sabotage metro ticket machines during a demonstration were arrested and charged on the same grounds. It should also be remembered that in the Tarnac case, which dates back to November 2008, the investigating judge in charge of the case had ended up renouncing this grotesque qualification of terrorism given the nature of the alleged facts: but in the midst of social unrest, in May 2016, the Court of Cassation, which is the highest legal body in the country and is therefore a direct emanation of the government, appealed against this decision. A few days earlier, Manuel Valls, denouncing the violence punctuating the processions, publicly attributed the responsibility to "Julien Coupat's friends, all those people who don't like democracy" (Julien Coupat is one of the defendants in Tarnac, to whom the police had blamed the writing of the book "The Coming Insurrection").
• 14K. Marx, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.
• 15France Telecom, a state-owned company that had a telecommunications monopoly in France, was privatized between 1998 and 2001. New management techniques, particularly aggressive, introduced a few years later, led to some sixty employees committing suicide, some of them throwing themselves out of the window or setting themselves on fire in front of their work colleagues.
• 16As for the French Communist party, which controlled the CGT for so long, it called for a yes vote in the referendum on this airport project in the name of employment... This new airport, with shopping centres and hotels, should be built north of Nantes by the French multinational Vinci, on the territory of Notre-Dame-des-Landes - in a region that already has three airports at a distance of 100 km each! The farmers of the region and the inhabitants of the neighbouring municipalities are opposed to this project, and have called for occupying the area concerned after the police eviction attempt in the autumn of 2012. The Zone A Défense in Notre-Dame-des-Landes has become a rallying point for many initiatives. Several demonstrations in support of the ZAD have brought together up to 60,000 people in Nantes. Contacts exist between the ZAD and the comrades of San Salvador Atenco who have been fighting since 2001 against the project to build the new Mexico City airport on their communal land.
• 17Emmanuel Macron is the Minister of the Economy (!), Industry and Digital Affairs. After graduating from the ENA, this former banker recently declared in Las Vegas (everything fits together...) "We need young French people who want to become billionaires." During a public event, shouted at by a striking worker in overalls who reproached him for his luxurious suit, he replied that "to pay for a suit, you have to work"... The Macron laws have rolled out the red carpet for entrepreneurs, in particular multiplying tax gifts and authorising Sunday work.
• 18M.LAZZARATO, Misère de la sociologie, pp.78/79, 2014.
• 19The General Council is the body responsible for the management of the department. The latter is an intermediate administrative and geographical level between the municipality and the Region (each department includes dozens of municipalities, and each Region several departments). The RSA is financed by the State, but it is the departments that ensure its distribution.
• 20Thus, it is said that the failure of Nuit Debout in the Flamants social housing estate in Marseille was also linked to a disinformation campaign led by some people from the city linked to elected officials, who had every interest in discrediting such an initiative by soaping up those Flamants who had decided to welcome it.
• 21K. Marx, Wages, Prices and Profit.
• 22In February 2015, the management of the airline Air France publicly announced a plan providing for 2000 redundancies. At the exit of the conference, two leaders and their bodyguards were insulted and beaten by furious workers, and had to flee shirtless, with shirts and ties torn. The trial of the Air France comrades has been postponed to the autumn of 2016. In January 2014, two executives of the multinational Goodyear were kidnapped for 36 hours: the workers were protesting against the closure of the Amiens plant, which left 1143 employees unemployed. Several workers who took part in this action were sentenced to twenty-four months in prison, including nine months in prison for this. The trial took place in January 2016, three weeks before the announcement of the El Khomri law...
• 23Cf. "Is it scum? well I'm in!", ed. L'Échappée 2006, reed expanded under the title "La rage et la révolte", Agone 2009. Given that the term fascism is used at every turn and in all kinds of ways by the left and the far left, let us remember that fascist regimes were characterized by clearly anti-liberal, protectionist and corporatist orientations, which does not correspond to the program of any party today, even if Marine Le Pen's National Front and Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Left Party advocate a return to the commercial borders of yesteryear and a return to the to the franc. Fascism had the cult of authority, but not everything authoritarian is fascism – Stalinism for example, or democracy made in the USA.