Politics of the Many by Halligan Benjamin;Penzin Alexei;Pippa Stefano;Carson Rebecca;

Author:Halligan, Benjamin;Penzin, Alexei;Pippa, Stefano;Carson, Rebecca;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Chapter 8

THE GILETS JAUNES AS UNINTENTIONAL VANGUARD

Marc James Léger

Something is happening with the Gilets Jaunes protest movement that erupted in France in the fall of 2018, but no one is quite sure what it is.1 It has been said that because they are supported by both the left and the right, because they refuse leaders and representation, because they are not organized around ethnic and national identity, and because they seem indifferent to the history of French radicalism, the Gilets Jaunes do not act as a class and cannot be described by recourse to traditional categories of political analysis. Even a historian of social movements, Stéphane Sirot, described the Gilets Jaunes as a ‘non-identified social object’.2 An answer to this enigma is readily provided by Italian ‘workerism’, or autonomist Marxism – a strand of ‘post-political politics’ that developed in the 1960s and 1970s that challenged the ideology of communist parties by emphasizing the new conditions of post-Fordist production as well as the libertarian spirit of 1960s protest movements, from civil rights, student activism, the anti-war and ecology movements, to countercultural lifestyles and identity-based struggles.3 A key concept that emerged from autonomist theory – the multitude – is defined by Paolo Virno as a feature of the contradiction between labour and capital, with the difference that in contemporary societies the working class has changed along with the new communication technologies that allow for creative self-valorization. However, because the multitude can no longer directly confront capitalism through labour strikes or through armed revolutionary upheaval, according to this theory, its politics are focused on the kinds of networked cooperation that are immanent to the new mode of production. This politics is defined in Foucauldian terms as biopower.4

The concept of the multitude is commonly associated with the work of the post-workerist theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Four years after their successful 2000 book, Empire, Hardt and Negri published Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.5 The two books presciently adumbrated the struggles that encompassed the anti-globalization movement and the movement of the squares. Largely organized as grassroots movements against neoliberal globalization, the numerous G8, G20 and WTO summit protests mutated into town square occupations and encampments: Puerta de Sol in Spain, Syntagma Square in Athens, Taksim Square in Istanbul, the UK student strikes, the Arab Spring protests across North Africa and the Middle East, the Wisconsin protests, Occupy Wall Street and its many offshoots, the Quebec student strike, or Printemps Érable, the Brazilian Spring and Nuit Debout. Despite the postmodernists’ declarations of the end of meta-narratives, history and ideology, these protests gave people hope that leftist and popular resistance was still possible. In response to the rise of the anti-global left, the post-9/11 War on Terror and neoliberal austerity were pursued by liberal and conservative governments alike, giving way to an authoritarian rightist thrust unseen in Western countries since before the Second World War. If new social movements have taken a great deal of inspiration from anarchist modes of constituent organization

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