My family could stand as a representative case of the ordinary racism found in working class milieus in the 1960s and of the way it increased in harshness throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Members of my family were always employing a pejorative and insulting vocabulary (which my mother continues to use today) when speaking of the workers who came on their own from North Africa, and then of the families that either joined them or that were formed in France, and then of their children—children who are French because they were born in France, but are nonetheless perceived as being “immigrants,” or in any case “foreigners.” These insults could pop up at any moment, and at each occurrence they would be accentuated in such a way as to increase ten fold the acrimonious hostility they meant to express. Crouillats was one of the insults used, or crouilles, or bougnoules … Because my complexion was quite dark, my mother would say to me regularly during my teenage years, “You look like a crouille.” Or she would say, “From far off, you looked like a bougnoule.” It is painfully obvious to me that the horror I felt in those years for my surroundings was linked to the consternation, or even the disgust that I felt faced with this kind of speech, something I encountered every day, and even many times each day. Just recently I invited my mother to spend a weekend in Paris. Her conversation was filled with this same vocabulary, something I rarely encounter, precisely because I have arranged my life so as not to have to deal with it: bougnoules, négros, chinetoques, and so on. When we were talking about the Barbès neighborhood where her mother had lived, a neighborhood that has for a long time been nearly exclusively one of people of African or Maghrebi origin, she asserted that she wouldn’t want to live there, because “It’s like another country where they live, it’s not like home.” I made a feeble attempt to argue with her, trying to hide my annoyance: “But Mom, Barbès is a neighborhood in Paris, it’s part of our country.” Her reply was simple: “You say whatever you like. I know what I mean.” All I could do was mumble, “Well, I don’t,” meanwhile thinking to myself that this “return to Reims” that I had already begun writing about was proving to be no easy road, and that as a mental and social voyage, it might in the end be impossible to complete. Still, when I think back on it, I find myself asking whether my mother’s racism, and the virulent scorn that she (the daughter of an immigrant!) always showed for immigrant workers in general and “Arabs” in particular, wasn’t in some way a means for her—someone who had lived her life as part of a category that was always being reminded of its inferiority—to feel superior to people even more inferior than her. Was it a way of constructing a somewhat valorized image of herself, something she accomplished through the devalorization of others; was it, in other words, simply a way of existing in her own eyes?
During the 1960s and 70s, the discourse of my parents, and especially that of my mother, mixed up two different ways of distinguishing between “us” and “them”: there was a class distinction (between rich and poor) and an ethnic distinction (the “French” and “foreigners”). Different political circumstances could cause the accent to shift from one to the other of these distinctions. The great strikes of May 1968 brought together many different kinds of “workers,” wherever they came from, united against their “bosses.” One striking and successful slogan declared: “French workers, immigrant workers, same boss, same struggle.” During more local, smaller scale strikes that followed, the same point of view prevailed. (The frontier was placed, in situations like these, between the strikers and “those on the side of the bosses,” the “scabs.”) Sartre was right to insist that before a strike the French worker is spontaneously racist and suspicious of immigrants, but once the strike is underway these bad feelings disappear and solidarity becomes predominant (even if it is partial or temporary). So it would seem that to a large extent it is the absence of political organization, or the absence of the perception that one belongs to an organized social group, that makes it possible for a racist form of division to replace a division based on class; it happens because of the absence of a sense of solidarity that comes from feeling the potential to participate in a political organization, a feeling that would mean that one is, in one’s mind, continually politically engaged. At the point when the left has dissolved all such sense of political organization, one that had formed a horizon for people’s self-perception, the group is then in a position to reconstitute itself around the other principle, a national one this time: the affirmation of oneself as the “legitimate” occupant of a territory of which one is feeling dispossessed or from which one feels one is being driven out. So the neighborhood you live in replaces the workplace and your position in a class hierarchy as part of your way of defining yourself and your way of relating to others. And more generally, your self affirmation depends on perceiving yourself as the natural master and owner of a country, as the sole legitimate beneficiary of the rights accorded by that country to its citizens. The very idea that “others” could profit from those rights—few though they may be—becomes unbearable, to the extent that it may seem that such a situation requires some kind of sharing that will result in a smaller portion being available for each of the interested parties. It is a form of self-affirmation that is activated in opposition to those to whom any legitimate form of belonging to the “Nation” is being denied, and to whom you would prefer to see refused all those rights you are attempting to hold onto for yourself at the very moment that the powers that be and the people who speak for those powers are calling them into question.
Yet we need to take this analysis even a step further if we wish to explain why at this or that moment the popular classes vote on the right. We need to ask if we are correct to assume, without questioning our assumption, that it is somehow more natural that those classes should vote on the left, especially given that it is not always the case that they do. And indeed it has never completely been the case that they do. After all, even when the Communist Party was doing well in electoral politics as the “party of the working class,” only 30% of workers voted for it, and at least as many, if not more, voted for right-wing candidates than for all of the left-wing candidates together. And it is not simply elections that we are talking about here. Even popular or working class communal actions, marches or protests, can at different historical moments be anchored on the right side of the political spectrum, or can, at least, turn their back on leftist values. Examples include the “Yellow” union movement in the early twentieth century, for example, or the racist riots that took place in the south of France in the same period, or strikes opposing the hiring of foreign workers, and so on.12 There have been many theorists of the left who over many years have tried to understand these kind of phenomena: think of Gramsci in prison wondering in his Prison Notebooks why, when all the conditions seemed to be in place at the end of World War I for a socialist and proletarian revolution to break out in Italy, it came to nothing. Or, more exactly, it took place, but the result was that the Fascists came to power. Or think of Wilhelm Reich, who, in 1933 in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, sought to analyze the psychic processes that led the popular classes to show support for fascism. Consequently, the relation that seems obvious between the “working class” and the left may well not be as natural as some would like to believe. It might rather be based on a representation that has been historically constructed by various theories (such as Marxism) that have won out over other competing theories and so have shaped both our perception of the social world and our political categories.13
My parents, like other members of my family from the same generation, claimed to be leftists. (“People like us are the left,” I would often hear said within our family circle, as if it couldn’t be any other way.) This was before they began voting for both the extreme right and the right (if in a discontinuous fashion). My brothers, like a certain number of other family members from their generation, openly assert their affiliation with the right—after having voted for the extreme right for many years; indeed, they are astonished that this could surprise anyone. As soon as
they were able to vote, they began voting against the left. Working class regions, once bastions of the left and especially of the Communist Party, have guaranteed—and continue to guarantee—a significant electoral presence for the extreme right. I’m afraid it’s the case that there are some cruel disappointments—along with some rather scathing refutations of their ideas—in store for those intellectuals who, demonstrating their own class ethnocentrism as they project their own manner of thinking into the skulls of those in whose place they speak while claiming to be attentive to their words, go on and on about the “spontaneous forms of knowledge” of the popular classes. Perhaps their enthusiasm is enabled by the fact that they have never in their life encountered anyone who belongs to those classes, except perhaps while reading writings from the nineteenth century. It is precisely these kinds of mythologies and mystifications, perpetuated by a certain set of people (seeking to be applauded as the promoters of a new form of radicalism), that the left needs to shake off—along with the neoconservative currents I described earlier—if it wishes to understand the phenomena that are leading it to its downfall, and then to reverse the process. There is no such thing as the “spontaneous knowledge” of the dominated classes; or, more exactly, we could say that any such “spontaneous knowledge” has no fixed meaning that would tie it to this or that form of politics. The position that any individual occupies within the social world and within the field of labor is not sufficient to determine that person’s “class interest” or their perception of that interest in the absence of any mediation offered by the theories provided by movements and parties, theories that furnish a way of seeing the world. It is these theories that give form and meaning to someone’s lived experience at any given moment, and the same experiences can take on quite different, and even opposing meanings as a result of the theories or discourses to which people have recourse and on which they choose to rely.14
This is why a philosophy of “democracy” that is content simply to celebrate the primary “equality” of each and every person, and to rehearse the notion that each individual is endowed with the same “competence” as every one else, is in no way an emancipatory way of thinking (and it makes no difference if the authors themselves profess a certain astonishment at the fact that they find themselves putting forth such a “scandalous” idea). This is because such a philosophy never asks itself about the ways in which opinions are formed. It never inquires as to how the results of this “competence” can entirely change directions—for better or for worse—on a personal level, or on the level of a social group, according to place and circumstance, and according to the discursive configurations within which, for example, the exact same prejudices might either become an absolute priority, or else be excluded from the political register.15 I would not want my mother or my brothers to have their lot drawn—and indeed, it’s not something they would ask for either—in order to take part in ruling the City in the name of their “competence,” equal to that of anyone else. The choices they would make would be no different from those they express in the way they vote, except that perhaps in this case they would be in the majority. If my reservations offend the sensibilities of those who dream of a return to the Athenian sources of democracy, so be it. However sympathetic their stance might appear, I find it highly disturbing to imagine what the results of it might be.16
On a related point, we might ask how one is to take into account the practical existence of “social classes” and of the conflictual nature of society, even of the objective “war” I spoke of in an earlier chapter, without falling into the magical or mythical invocation of the “Class Struggle” extolled these days by those who call for a “return to Marxism,” as if political positions just followed on in a univocal and necessary way from social positions, as if they led inevitably to a conscious and organized confrontation between, on the one hand, a “working class” that is no longer “alienated” and is driven by a desire for socialism, and, on the other, a “bourgeois class”? Such invocations rely blindly on these reified notions and fantasmatic representations, ignoring the dangers they represent.
What we must make an effort to understand is why and how it is possible for the popular classes to think of the conditions under which they live sometimes as tying them necessarily to the left, sometimes as self-evidently placing them on the right. A number of factors need to be taken into account: the economic situation, both global and local, of course; transformations in the nature of work and the relations between individuals that these transformations create or undo; but also, and, I would be tempted to say, above all, the way in which political discourses, discursive categories, play a role in shaping the process of political subjectivation. Political parties play an important role here, even perhaps a fundamental one, because, as we have seen, it is by way of them that people who otherwise have no voice can speak—by way of spokespersons who speak on their behalf, but also in their place.17 The role of parties is fundamental also because organized discourses are what produce categories of perception, ways of thinking of oneself as a political subject, and also define one’s way of conceiving of one’s own “interests” and of the ways of voting that correspond to them.18 We would thus do well always to be thinking about the antinomy that exists, for people from the popular classes, between the ineluctable character (outside of rare moments of struggle) of having to delegate their voice, and the refusal to be dispossessed by those spokespersons in whom it finally becomes impossible for them to recognize themselves—to such an extent that they go looking for, and find, new ones. Indeed, this is why it is always of the utmost importance to be wary of parties and of their natural tendency to wish to assure their hegemony over political life, and the natural tendency of their leaders to wish to assure their hegemony over the boundaries of the legitimate political field.19
So we find ourselves back at the question of who has the right to speak, who takes part—and how—in decision-making processes, which is to say not just in the elaboration of solutions, but also in the collective definition of the questions that it is legitimate and important to take up. When the left shows itself to be incapable of serving as a space in which new forms of questioning can be elaborated and tested, when it ceases to serve as a locus in which people can invest their dreams and their energy, they will be drawn to and welcomed by the right and the extreme right.
Here, then, is the task that social movements and critical intellectuals must take up: the elaboration of theoretical frameworks and of political modes of perceiving reality that enable not an erasure—that would be an impossible task—, but as great a neutralization as possible of the negative passions that are at work within the social body, especially within the popular classes. Other perspectives must be offered and a different future sketched out on behalf of what might then deservedly once again be called the left.
IV
* * *
1
How difficult they were, my first years in high school! I was an excellent student, but always on the verge of giving up on school altogether. If most of the students at the school I attended had come from the same background as I did, and had not, as was actually the case, been children of the bourgeoisie and petite-bourgeoisie, I have little doubt that I would have done what the system expected of me and dropped out. Whenever there were students making trouble, I was part of it, arrogant and impertinent, constantly speaking back to my teachers, never hiding my scorn for them. My ways of speaking and of carrying myself, my behavior and the expressions I would use, must have made me seem like part of some lunatic fringe—a bad seed more than a model student. I don’t remember quite what the verbal sally was that I had directed at one of my classmates, the son of a judge, and that earned me the outraged reply: “Curb your tongue!” He was dumbfounded by the verbal crudeness of working-class people, something he was not accustomed to, but his reaction, and the tone of voice in which he expressed it, both of them drawing on the linguistic repertory of his bourgeois family, seemed to me ridiculous, a
nd only encouraged my irony and vulgarity. There was an implacable social logic that was turning me into this particular character, one I naively took pride in. Everything seemed to be encouraging me to choose this role, one that had been held in reserve for me, linked to a fate that had always been lying in wait: a prompt exit from the educational system. When I was in sixth grade, a teacher said to me, “You’ll never make it past the second year of high school.” I lived in fear of that judgment until I actually made it into that year, and then through it. But, when you get right down to it, the idiot who said that to me had demonstrated a certain kind of clear-sightedness: it wasn’t intended that I make it any further than that, or even that I make it that far.
Returning to Reims Page 12
