Last night I had the pleasure of attending the screening of a 90-minute documentary about the 2018-2019 Gilets Jaunes movement in France.
Shot in and around the city of Toulouse, La Vie de tempête (“life in the storm”) is a very moving account of this important popular uprising against the plutocracy.
It combines thoughtful interviews with a dozen GJ supporters with often-dramatic footage of events on the streets, as the state launched relentless military-style assaults against protesters, using tear gas, water cannon and grenades.
The courage of those who kept going, weekend after weekend, for more than a year – notably one determined woman in a wheelchair – is humbling to behold.
The film’s director, Marc Khanne, was present at the screening and I asked him afterwards whether he saw a certain continuity between the GJ movement and the current wave of protest against the Macron regime, which is also now being countered with draconian bans and ferocious police violence.
He said that he could certainly see the same élan behind the 2023 rebellion, but added that although some GJs were involved, many of the original rebels were not.
They had been drained of energy by their full-on revolt and the repression with which it was met.
Some were still in prison, or paying off massive fines, or in poor health because of injuries from police batons and grenades, or indeed weekly exposure to tear gas.
He mentioned one person who, as a result of the latter, was now intensely sensitive to any kind of chemical and could not even tolerate exposure to a whiff of car exhaust.
The original rebels have also long been identified and targeted by the state. I have spoken to GJs who have received automatic police fines just because their car registration number was recorded in the vicinity of a protest.
I think two fundamental insights shone through from the film.
The first is that the GJs were very ordinary French people, more often first-time protesters than long-term political activists, and their demands were simple ones for social justice and democracy.
It was perhaps this element that gave the movement such energy, such optimism and such outraged anger at the way it was treated by the state, in terms both of smears and police violence.
The second insight is that this violence was entirely disproportionate and very deliberately meted out in order to crush the people’s revolt.
Marc mentioned, when speaking after the film, a photo he had discovered of a massive protest in Toulouse in 2010, where a crowd of some 150,000 people was accompanied by one single police car, its occupants in caps and shirtsleeves.
What, he asked, had changed so dramatically in the intervening eight years?
The answer, for me, cannot be separated from the global coup we are currently undergoing under the heading of The Great Reset.
The transition from a society that pretends to be democratic to an overtly authoritarian model has been in the pipeline for a long time now.
In the same way that 9/11 brought to an end the huge anti-globalization protests that blossomed in the 1990s, so was Covid intended to crush the new wave of revolt that was swelling before 2020.
Emmanuel Macron, the former Rothschild banker elected French president in 2017, has always been part of that process.
And in WEF leader Klaus Schwab’s 2020 book Covid-19: The Great Reset he specifically named the Gilets Jaunes in his warning that “social unrest” and a “political and societal backlash against globalization” presented a “sombre scenario” for the interests he represents.
Watching Marc’s film of the GJs with a few years’ distance, and now witnessing the French state’s treatment of protest in 2023, it is very clear to me that we have passed into a new historical phase, albeit hopefully a very short-lived one.
The latest shocking revelation is that Macron’s police are now planning to use drones against protesters, not only to watch them and bark orders at them through loudspeakers, but also to spray them with chemicals that will allow them to later be identified under UV lighting.
This is not the behaviour of an old-fashioned pseudo-democratic government trying to maintain the “rule of law” without alienating the people.
This regime does not give a fig for the people or what it thinks of them.
It is prepared simply to use the full force of its power to crush all those who dare stand up to its rule.
What we are looking at is more akin to a government of foreign occupation, such as France experienced during the Second World War.
Having no affinity with ordinary French people and their wishes, the regime treats them in the way that the French state used to treat Algerians; that the British empire used to treat its subjects in India or Ireland; that the South African apartheid regime used to treat blacks or that the Israeli state continues to treat Palestinians.
It is not only France that is under occupation from the global empire of greed, of course.
But the level of resistance here has forced this truth into plain sight, has shattered the illusion of democracy for millions.
This does not, in itself, represent a victory. The brute force of the occupying force is not easy to overcome in a head-on struggle, as all those brave Gilets Jaunes who lost eyes or arms on the streets know full well.
However, forcing the system to reveal its brutality it is a necessary step in defeating it.
If we are to bring down this monstrous global criminal entity, we first have to demolish the lies, fronts and facades behind which it hides, so as to reveal the full nauseating horror of its existence and its agenda.
Like all vampires, it will shrivel and die in the cleansing sunlight of truth.
More info onMarc’s film can be found here, along with the chance to view some of his associated series of short documentaries showing the struggle in more detail.
A selection of articles in English about the Gilets Jaunes struggle, including my own reporting, can be found here.
I very rarely do book reviews, but in this case I felt that I simply *had* to share with you what I consider a true gem, one of those books which one simply has to read. I am referring to the book “France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values” by Ramin Mazaheri, a PressTV correspondent and a regular contributor to the Saker blog. Though we never met face to face, over the years Ramin and I have developed a real friendship, but that is not the reason for this review. The reason for this review is simple: I want to convince as many people as possible to read this book.
Why?
That’s what my review will be all about.
The title of the book “France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values” gives a first indication of the scope of the book. Yes, of course, it is about the Yellow Vests and how the state viciously repressed this truly popular, grassroots, movement. But the book also discusses the so-called “western liberal democratic values”. In fact, this book could be seen as two books in one.
The first part is an absolutely fascinating, and delightfully controversial, discussion of the evolution of what we now call western liberal democracy. The second half discusses the Yellow Vests specifically (Chapter 1 through Chapter 8 deals with French history from 1789 until World War II. Chapter 9 through Chapter 18 deals with the Yellow Vests.)
To make his case, Ramin looked as far back as “The Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which is indispensable to understand the roots and evolution of western liberal democratic thought. The book also includes a fascinating discussion of the French Revolution and of the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. Ramin also discusses the French Commune, Fascism and even Leon Trotsky!
What makes this book so fascinating is that the author is a Marxist, but a special kind of Marxist, one which does not hesitate to be extremely critical of other Marxists, which makes for a very refreshing, unpredictable and truly riveting read! Ramin’s analysis is informed by Marxism, but it is truly original and his conclusions often surprising and unpredictable.
Personally, there is a lot I completely disagree with, especially Ramin’s apology for Napoleon, but here is the wonderful thing about this book: even when I disagreed with Ramin’s conclusion, I was compelled to rethink my own views due to his many excellent arguments. Besides, Ramin does not want the reader to agree as much as he wants the reader to think and rethink his/her certitudes.
One of the most powerful aspect of the book is that it truly and indisputably shows the truly evil nature of western liberal democracy. Just for that reason alone this should be an absolutely mandatory reading for anybody considering himself/herself has a proponent of western liberal democracy. If that applies to you, then I challenge you to read this book. If, after reading it, you will not have changed your views, then you will at least have tested your beliefs against Ramin’s arguments. And if you do change your mind, you will be forever grateful to Ramin for his truly eye-opening book!
The second part of the book is a detailed analysis of the Yellow Vests phenomenon which Ramin personally saw from up close and which he truly understands. His main conclusion is that unlike the innumerable fake-popular, fake-leftist, movement out there, the Yellow Vests are the “real thing”: a truly popular movement against the brutal class oppression of the French ruling elites.
Here I have to say that I fully concur with Ramin. The Yellow Vests are definitely the real thing, and not a fully co-opted and controlled fake opposition (“caviar left” is the French expression) which we observe in almost all EU countries. What is most amazing about the Yellow Vests is that many powerful actors tried to either bring them under control or use them for petty political, partisan, interests. These attempts all failed and while COVID pandemic provided the perfect pretext to crack down even harder against the Yellow Vests, the movement has not been destroyed which, by itself, is quite amazing, especially considering the truly vicious and brutal violence unleashed by the French state against the Yellow Vests.
My purpose here is not to review the book chapter by chapter or thesis by thesis. My intention is, rather, to “bait you” just enough to make you get the book and read it for yourself. The reader can purchase it on Amazon in English and French, and in paperback or e-book form. They can also find it in participating bookstores in Europe via IngramSpark, but Amazon is the most certain and fastest way.
This is how the book is summarized on its Amazon page:
The most comprehensive book on the Yellow Vests, and from the journalist who knows them the best. No journalist in English or French reported at more Yellow Vest demonstrations than daily news reporter and author Ramin Mazaheri. Divided into two parts: The first gives new explanations for the European wars against French progressive politics from 1789-2017. The second is a complete analysis of the causes and victories of the truly progressive and totally misrepresented Yellow Vest movement. With over 100 quotations from actual, marching Yellow Vests no book gives their view such pride of place – decide for yourself. The Yellow Vests either end or begin a major era in French and European history, but their repression was certainly a once-in-a-century event for France. Finally find out why Western elites believed repressing them was – and still is – necessary.
It’s all true, but please do check it for yourself :-) I can promise you that you will not regret it. And, do I need to mention that this book also makes a great present, especially if you want to open somebody’s eyes about the true roots and nature of the society we live in?
This book is one powerful “red pill” – make sure to have it in your “toolkit”!
On December 1, 2018, the Yellow Vests announced themselves to France, the world and the history books with their revolutionary graffiti tagging of the Arc de Triomphe.
“The Yellow Vests will win” was a slogan gaped at worldwide as they would become the biggest, most organic, most devoted and most truly revolutionary threat any Western country had faced for 50 years. It was their third week of protest, and there was now no going back.
The colonised world never expected a genuine resistance movement to sprout in one of the modern West’s worst imperialists. The French were – many insisted – too self-righteous, too spoiled, too propagandised, etc., and yet for the next six months every single Saturday was a war zone across France. France was truly in a revolutionary situation back then, and it was because the French way of life isn’t as sumptuous as people may think.
The Yellow Vests didn’t bravely endure all this – at least 11,000 arrests, 1,000 political prisoners, 5,000 protesters seriously hurt, 1,000 critically injured, scores maimed for life and 11 deaths – because they have a luxurious lifestyle.
I’m not sure what was worse – the repression by the French regime, or the way Western media and NGOs slandered and ignored the weekly blood baths, tear gas and mass arrests. The Yellow Vests are an immediate, permanent rejoinder to any Westerner who claims their governments are more protective of democracy and less brutal than those of non-Western countries. That’s one of the three great legacies of the Yellow Vests.
The key to understanding the Yellow Vests is this, and it’s implicitly understood by the average European, totally not understood in places like the United States, and has been intellectually mastered by the vanguard Yellow Vests:
Ever since the pan-European project went fully on-line in 2009 it has done nothing but fail. Prosperity, stability and democracy – none have been implemented. France is not really France anymore – not unless Brussels says so – and it’s getting less like France with each passing day under a political system which is really still quite new.
So the Yellow Vests were truly 10 years in the making. They even arrived after a decade full of major social movements, because the first war of the European Union wasn’t a proxy war against Russia but the social war it waged against its own citizens.
The problem was not just the Great Recession of 2008 but the fact that the European Union/Eurozone was the only macro-economic bloc which implemented absolutely no major recovery plan. Even worse, its response was to undemocratically ram through far-right austerity policies instead. The Yellow Vests were this “working-poor class” cemented by the changes of Brussels’, and their opponent was the highly-unequal “bourgeois bloc” which only saw the pan-European project in a rainbow glow of total success.
The Yellow Vests disproved the insistence of the Anglosphere – whose cultures are all extremely conservative politically – that all populist groups in the West are necessarily on the far-right. As soon as December 2018 it was clear in France that the Yellow Vests were steeped in left-wing economics, anti-imperialism and a non-Islamophobic, modern conception of healthy patriotism. This explains their nearly 80% approval rate, a staggering popularity anywhere but especially in a France which had grown extremely cynical, due to the undemocratic failures of the pan-European project. .
If only given one word to describe the Yellow Vests I require a hyphen, please: civic-minded. Concern for their fellow citizens and the downward spiral of the non-elite masses is what has motivated any popular revolution, after all.
These simple, obvious and pro-community concepts are forbidden in the Western mainstream media. There is no “working-poor class” in France – there are only racist, backwards, lazy, always-complaining Frenchmen. There is no “bourgeois bloc” – there is only an elite group of enlightened and deserving technocrats who have all the answers to decide for us about what constitutes “reality”.
These are truly the two classes of the 21st century West – forget “middle class”, because the pan-European project has been (thus far) the final blow to what Reaganomics/Thatcherism began. Fully understanding and opposing the West’s current social class reality is the second great achievement of the Yellow Vests, but of course one cannot find class discussed in the English-speaking media.
However, there is another achievement which is even greater but even less discussed, and probably because it requires a complete overview of modern Western politics, which began in 1789 with the anti-monarchy/anti-aristocrat/anti-privilege French Revolution.
The arrival and the repression of the Yellow Vests reminds us all of the undeniable failure of “liberalism”. The Yellow Vests aren’t actually new, but are a true piece of French revolutionary history transported from 1848-71 – the struggle today is the same as it was back then.
It’s a struggle against always-elitist liberalism and its attendants: oligarchical and anti-democratic parliamentarianism, free-market chaos, the anti-government ideology encapsulated by austerity cuts to social services, and the encouragement of a rat race to “become bourgeois”. The Yellow Vests took France and Europe back to 1848, when the “2nd Republic” re-ended the French monarchy and claimed the mantle of the French Revolutionary “1st Republic”. Liberalism was installed for the first time and… immediately proved that it was plagued by all the problems described above.
Liberalism has failed since 1848, and the liberalist principles (“neoliberal” is more commonly used today, in order to differentiate itself from the discredited, original “liberalism”) which underpin the pan-European project have failed today. They always fail. The arrival, desperate passion and durability of the Yellow Vests is proof of this, and showing the hypocrisy, brutality and ineffectiveness of always-unequal liberalism is the third and greatest historical achievement of the Yellow Vests.
Liberalism, infamously, does not promise anyone the right to a decent existence. Back in 1848 Marx and other socialists demonstrated these facts about Western liberal democracies – the Yellow Vests have brought us back to these inescapable political and social truths.
Why did the Yellow Vests “fail”? Quite simply: Via guaranteed police violence, fines, arrests and imprisonments, the French government scared the average person away from protesting. That’s why their protests dwindled – fear of absolutely certain repression.
The fear has had dramatic, lasting consequences: the French have been reduced from the most politically-active nation in the West to being apathetic and uninvolved – typical of Western liberal democracies. The apathy surrounding this year’s re-election of Emmanuel Macron was completely atypical for France, but the nation saw quite clearly that there was no stopping the will of the 1% and their fanatical “bourgeois bloc” toadies.
The Yellow Vests marched to commemorate their 4th anniversary, but you likely didn’t hear about it. You likely haven’t heard that they’ve been marching every Saturday since “Season 2” began in October 2021, following a 1.5-year coronavirus pause – a pause which no world leader embraced with more joy and relief than the embattled Emmanuel Macron. However, the media blackout on them actually began way back in June 2020.
France is no longer in a revolutionary situation, but the Yellow Vests haven’t gone anywhere. The average person has put their reflective yellow vest back where it belongs by law – in the car – but the network, relationships and experiences created by the unprecedented Yellow Vest movement ensures that they’ll be back one day.
And they will be back – the history of Western liberalism has proven over and over that the average person’s right to live decently will never be guaranteed.
Our culture has a strange tendency to want to describe reality in terms of abstract ideas.
It is regarded as a sign of education and intelligence to be able to identify a social or political process in terms of a concept invented to describe just such a thing.
“Ah, this is classic neoliberalism in action!” we might declare. Some other situation might be described as “socialism” or “fascism” or whatever.
There is nothing wrong with such labels (we have used them frequently enough on this website!) as long as we understand that they are merely descriptions of a reality and not the reality itself.
It has become obvious in the conversations that have been taking place since 2020 that such labels mean different things to different people (particularly “capitalism”) and so their use can lead to confusion.
This confusion risks drawing attention away from the actual truth behind the terminology, which in the case of the Great Reset amounts to a vile clique of power-hungry psychopaths lying and intimidating their way towards their goal of total global domination.
We are not in fact dealing with an “-ism” of any variety, but with a real conspiracy involving real people and with real victims.
It is therefore unsurprising, as the urgency surrounding what is happening increases, that we are seeing more and more specific denunciations of individuals and organisations, rather than ideological statements on an abstract level.
Our recent article on the First World War, for instance, followed the example of researchers Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor in identifying those responsible for the bloodbath, who seem to be very much the same imperialist/globalist elements manipulating us today.
A team of researchers at the Thinking Slow website are among those who are busily tracking down the detail of exactly who is behind the current worldwide financial-totalitarian power grab.
They explain that they have invested thousands of hours into researching COVID itself and the staggering levels of dishonesty around the data, the policy response and media reporting.
“This is in many ways a frightening and fascinating time to be around and this website and the painstaking research behind it represents our contribution to the cause of liberty against tyranny in the UK and elsewhere”.
They invite people to join them in their efforts – they can be contacted at ThinkingSlow1@gmail.com or via Twitter.
They have produced, for instance, a video about the receipt by the UK’s ruling Conservative Party of more that £1 million from two Russian nationals via Luxembourg and some British Virgin Islands companies.
Coincidentally, the Moscow-based Edward Slavsquat blog revealed earlier this month that the Russian state is fully behind the creation of a global Pandemic Fund.
Led by the World Bank, in partnership with the WHO, this will be used to support the G20’s health agenda, which includes efforts to “improve genetic surveillance, encourage the mobilization of health resources for medical countermeasures, and expand research and manufacturing networks for vaccines, therapies, and diagnostics”.
Donors to the fund include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, as the G20 proudly stated in a November 12 press release.
Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, in backing the creation of the Pandemic Fund, also confirmed the existence of something which he approvingly described as the “global healthcare system”.
It is not merely rhetoric to describe this all-embracing worldwide network, whose interests seem to magically surpass supposedly all-important geopolitical disputes, as criminal.
Investigative journalist Whitney Webb recently published One Nation Under Blackmail, a two-volume analysis of the world of Jeffrey Epstein.
Her research has revealed the ties between his sex-trafficking/blackmail operation, US/Israeli intelligence forces and an “informal” pro-Israel philanthropist faction known as “the Mega Group”, itself linked to the organized crime network founded by notorious American mobster Meyer Lansky.
She has also explored the key role played by billionaire Ronald Lauder, a Mega Group member, former member of the Reagan administration, regular donor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and long-time friend of Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, on her 11th Hour blog, Jennifer Bilek has exposed in detail the dubious activities of the Pritzkers, one of the wealthiest families in America and “their plight to engineer the normalization of synthetic sex identities through funding of our medical, legal, cultural, military, educational, and other institutions”.
She adds: “Yale University has been privy to a windfall of Pritzker cash and, subsequently, the creation of a growing program in manufacturing synthetic sex.
“The psychiatric community has been bought off by huge cash dumps from billionaires invested in the techno-medical and biotech industries, driving a religious cult through the media and all our institutions.
“This is a profiteering enterprise but also acts as a grooming process meant to unmoor humanity from the biosphere and acclimate us to a more intimate connection with technology”.
With the seriousness of what we are facing, the fundamental “political” position we all need to adopt today is, as Webb said in a recent interview, that we don’t want to live in a world run by organized crime!
The Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France have just marked the fourth anniversary of their protest movement.
While a defiant march in Paris was, with utter predictability, blocked and then attacked by President Emmanuel Macron’s hired thugs (see this video), lower-key events were held around the country.
In many ways the Gilets Jaunes’ initial struggle provided a foretaste of the post-2020 political world, with a popular movement spanning previous political divisions coming under violent assault by a regime headed by a former Rothschild banker, to the applause of the corporate media and the well-heeled classes.
The remarkable thing is that they were never actually defeated. Yes, the various kinds of repression used against them eventually slowed their momentum and numbers were already reduced when the Covid lockdowns were imposed.
But the movement was never discredited in the eyes of the French public, despite the best efforts of power-friendly journalists and intellectuals.
The majority never swallowed the lies that the Yellow Vests were extreme right-wingers, or far left-wingers, or anti-semites, or violent louts.
Everyone had encountered the Gilets Jaunes in their own neck of the woods and most still sympathise with their aims of social justice, freedom and democracy.
This fact was very much in evidence in Nîmes, the main city of the Gard department in south-eastern France, on Saturday November 19 2022.
The Gilets Jaunes encampment by the side of the busy Delta roundabout was greeted with constant hoots of support, shouts of encouragment, broad smiles and fists raised in solidarity throughout the several hours we spent with them.
This bunch of stalwarts have been present here every Saturday since the end of lockdowns, each time decorating the roundabout with around 200 balloons in the colours of their revolt, which are duly removed by the authorities every Monday.
On this occasion they also enjoyed the passing presence of several hundred motorcyclists, including some Gilets Jaunes, heading off to Montpellier to protest against new state regulations set to make life still more diffucult and expensive for them.
Gilet Jaune Marielle stressed that there were a lot of people out there today who agreed with their stance against the Macron regime.
People had been put off attending protests because of two different types of repression.
Firstly, there was the unprovoked police violence, including the liberal use of teargas, which obviously frightened off a lot of supporters.
Secondly, there were the hefty fines handed out to anyone attending “unauthorised” protests.
“Our supporters are generally people without much money. They might manage to pay the 135 euro fine once, but for a second or third time?”.
Marielle said she had been disgusted by the way trade unions and left-wing organisations “didn’t lift a finger” to help the Gilets Jaunes in the face of all the repression.
“I am convinced that these people are just fine in the system,” she said. “They are part of the system. They are frightened of us because we refuse to have any leaders and because, above all, they don’t want an actual revolt”.
Fellow protester Michèle added: “We’re neither left nor right, we’re Gilets Jaunes!”
Both women are convinced that popular rebellion will flare up again, especially since conditions for ordinary people are a lot worse now than when their movement began in 2018.
Michèle said that just as the system had used the “narrow window of opportunity” of Covid to advance its agenda, so should its opponents take advantage of the next moment of social crisis.
“It would have to be something that affected everybody”, she mused.
“We’re the protectors of the glowing embers. The day that the opportunity comes we will pour on the fuel and… whoosh!”
We have become used to seeing our freedom in terms of political “rights” granted to us by the State – the right to free speech, free association, bodily integrity…
But even if we did enjoy all these little multiple rights – which is of course far from being the case today! – would we thereby also bask in a bigger singular Freedom?
In other words, can a community really call itself free if, even to feed itself, it has become totally dependent on the ruling system?
This is the fundamental question asked by French writer Bertrand Louart in his 2022 book Réappropriation: Jalons pour sortir de l’impasse industrielle (Reappropriation: Steps towards a way out from the industrial dead-end). [1]
He writes of the need for a broad conversation about the “central scandal” of our contemporary society.
“The simplest things necessary for our existence are disappearing, moving ever further from the grasp of each of us (and notably the poorest); the most basic activities are becoming impossible, being confiscated for the profit of the megamachine; the practical foundations of all freedom and autonomy – which had until now ensured the survival of humankind through countless trials and tribulations – are being obstructed or destroyed”. [2]
Louart notes the physical limits encountered by each wave of (French) popular revolt against the colonisation of yet more aspects of our existence.
This colonisation is part of a project of economic accumulation centred around capital investments that need to yield sustainably increasing dividends.
While we can see this happening, we no longer have the means to truly challenge this endless toxic expansion, this “development” of global capital.
“We are powerless to criticise industrial society; because we depend on it in a thousand ways,” [3] states Louart.
In a “situation unprecedented in history” [4] we find ourselves deprived of the possibility of serious resistance.
As the Encyclopédie des Nuisances warned back in 1996: “Power can let revolt run its course, as it were, so as to allow our exhaustion to play out in the face of the enormity of the effort needed to bring consistency to our refusal”. [5]
Worse still, the “Left”, which supposedly represents the interests of the people, has long since fallen into the trap set by the exploitative system.
It should be leading the battle against the ruthless advance of industrial capitalism and its “series of ever-deeper dispossessions and ever-wider disasters”. [6]
But no, it has stupidly swallowed all the “progressive illusions”. [7]
Louart talks a lot about England in his book, especially the way that the historical land enclosures forced ordinary people into cowed dependence on the burgeoning industrial racket.
And he explains how the Luddites, at the start of the 19th century, revolted against the loss of their independence, their freedom to organise for themselves their work and their lives.
“For these craftsmen, the new organisation of work meant succumbing to the orders of a boss, submitting to the rhythm of the new machines, working as wage labour in a factory.
“It pushed them into a state of dispossession, dependence and destitution in which they were obliged to sell themselves so that they could buy everything”. [8]
“The Luddite revolt was therefore conservative without this making it reactionary, for it was opposed to what was in reality a regression: the loss of meaning in work and the dislocation of social living”. [9]
Not only did the Marxist-Leninist “Left” fail to stand up against this primary dispossession, but it even adopted it as its own model!
In the USSR, the communists waged “a war against peasant subsistence… at the cost of millions of deaths and the destruction of the countryside”. [10]
“Everywhere that Marxist-Leninist parties helped the peasantry fight against feudal oppression, once in power they ferociously fought against their independence.
“They had understood better than anyone that this independence was the main obstacle to industrialisation: nobody would slave away in mines and factories under the iron rule of the bosses if they could embrace subsistence by living freely on the land”. [11]
So how can we reclaim our subsistence and thus our freedom?
Obviously, we have to stop listening to the “progressive” siren voices who have lured us into this dire dead-end of powerlessness.
Louart writes: “We aim to think and act for ourselves on the basis of our own circumstances and to encourage everyone else to do the same wherever they are. [12]
“We think we need to defend and revive subsistence practices as a point of departure“, [13] he says.
But at the same time this subsistence has to be lent “a political dimension” so as to launch “a practice of struggle and resistance against the commodification and industrial standardisation of life”. [14]
Louart concludes: “Preparing ourselves for the collapse of society through its own lack of consciousness is merely to resign ourselves to the idea that personal consciousness and collective thought and activity will forever remain powerless.
“It is more important, indeed crucial, to start building the basis of a free society before we suffocate in the chaos and the ruins of the old world”. [15]
[1] Bertrand Louart, Réappropriation: Jalons pour sortir de l’impasse industrielle (La Lenteur, 2022). All subsequent page references are to this work. [2] p. 137. [3] p. 11. [4] p. 18. [5] Remarques sur la paralysie de décembre 1995 (Paris: Editions de L’Encyclopédue des Nuisances, 1996), pp. 24-25, cit. p. 10. [6] p. 14. [7] p. 14. [8] p. 27. [9] p. 29. [10] p. 84. [11] p. 84. [12] p. 103. [13] p. 114. [14] p. 115. [15] p. 171.
4. Silvia Federici: an organic radical inspiration
The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.
“Marx remained wedded to a technologistic concept of revolution, where freedom comes through the machine”
Silvia Federici (1942-) is a feminist scholar, writer, teacher, and activist. She is a powerful critic of capitalism and the way in which it continues to enclose, or privatise, the commons to accumulate wealth in private hands.
According to her, colonial expropriation and the methodical subjugation of women, together with the appropriation of their labour, form part of this bigger picture.
She wrote in 2011: “The neo-liberal attempt to subordinate every form of life and knowledge to the logic of the market has heightened our awareness of the danger of living in a world in which we no longer have access to seas, trees, animals, and our fellow beings except through the cash-nexus”. (1)
She has also highlighted women’s role in resisting industrial capitalism and supporting the healthier alternative of subsistence farming.
In her book Caliban and the Witch, Federici rejects the conventional wisdom that a “transition to capitalism” occurred as some kind of natural social evolution.
Federici argues that capitalism was in fact the reaction of the ruling elite against their potential loss of control.
She writes: “Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle – possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. This much must be stressed, for the belief that capitalism ‘evolved’ from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life has not yet been dispelled”. (2)
Federici describes the Middle Ages as a period of “relentless class struggle” in which “the medieval village was the theater of daily warfare” (3)
“Everywhere masses of people resisted the destruction of their former ways of existence, fighting against land privatization, the abolition of customary rights, the imposition of new taxes, wage-dependence, and the continuous presence of armies in their neighbourhoods, which was so hated that people rushed to close the gates of their towns to prevent soldiers from settling among them”. (4)
In order to impose capitalism on the unwilling people, the power elite used what Federici terms “social enclosure”. (5) She writes: “In pursuit of social discipline, an attack was launched against all forms of collective sociality and sexuality including sports, games, dances, ale-wakes, festivals, and other group-rituals that had been a source of bonding and solidarity among workers”. (6)
“Taverns were closed, along with public baths. Nakedness was penalized, as were many other ‘unproductive’ forms of sexuality and sociality. It was forbidden to drink, swear, curse”. (7)
The rich elite tried to create “a new type of individual” (8) – a servile, malleable and thus profitable type. To this end it set out to separate us from our bodies and from our very sense of who we are, says Federici.
“According to Max Weber, the reform of the body is at the core of the bourgeois ethic because capitalism makes acquisition ‘the ultimate purpose of life,’ instead of treating it as a means for the satisfaction of our needs; thus it requires that we forfeit all spontaneous enjoyment of life. Capitalism also attempts to overcome our ‘natural state,’ by breaking the barriers of nature and by lengthening the working day beyond the limits set by the sun, the seasonal cycles, and the body itself, as constituted in pre-industrial society”. (9)
The communal cohesion traditionally woven by, and among, women was specifically targeted by the ruling class in their efforts to disempower and enslave the common people, she explains.
This took the form of the notorious fearmongering over “witches”, resulting in the murder of untold numbers of innocent women: “The witch-hunt destroyed a whole world of female practices, collective relations and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism”. (10)
She adds: “The witch-hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of pracices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline”. (11)
The witch hunts were thus part of the general philosophical war being waged by industrial capitalism. Writes Federici: “This is how we must read the attack against witchcraft and against that magical view of the world which, despite the efforts of the Church, had continued to prevail on a popular level through the Middle Ages. At the basis of magic was an animistic conception of nature that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit, and thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism, populated by occult forces, where every element was in ‘sympathetic’ relation with the rest”. (12)
She also describes in Caliban and the Witch (2004) how in the first phase of capitalist development, women were at the forefront of the struggle against land enclosures both in England and in the “New World” and they were the staunchest defenders of the communal cultures that European colonisation tried to destroy.
In Peru, when the Spanish conquistadores took control of their villages, women fled to the high mountains where they recreated forms of collective life that have survived to this day.
She notes in the essay ‘Feminism and the Politics of the Commons’: “Not surprisingly, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the most violent attack on women in the history of the world: the persecution of women as witches.
“Today, in the face of a new process of Primitive Accumulation, women are the main social force standing in the way of a complete commercialization of nature, supporting a noncapitalist use of land and a subsistence-oriented agriculture”. (13)
Federici adds that women are the subsistence farmers of the world. In Africa, they produce 80% of the food consumed, despite the attempts made by the World Bank and other agencies to convince them to divert their activities to cash-cropping, she says.
In the 1990s, in many African towns, in the face of rising food prices, they appropriated plots in public lands and planted corn and beans along roadsides, in parks and along rail-lines, changing the urban landscape of African cities and breaking down the separation between town and country in the process.
In India, the Philippines, and across Latin America, women replanted trees in degraded forests, joined hands to chase away loggers, made blockades against mining operations and the construction of dams, and led the revolt against the privatization of water.
Federici sees the roots of women’s position in contemporary society as a direct result of capitalism and its industrialisation of society.
In a 2014 interview she set out how capitalism constructed the figure of the housewife as part of its dehumanising productivism.
She said the process began in the 16th and 17th centuries with the bifurcation of work activities so that only some were recognized as work: “Only waged labor is valued, and waged reproductive activities begin to disappear. That’s the first fundamental, foundational step”. (14)
By the 17th century, women were being expelled in Europe from most of the occupations they had outside the home, she explained.
Soon they could only obtain forms of employment that were forms of housework, as nurses, wetnurses, maids, washerwomen, and so on. A new form of worker emerged who was increasingly invisibilised.
By the second half of the 19th century, we began to see a very determined construction of the full-time working class housewife.
That was demonstrated by a whole set of policies, the beginning of the ‘family wage’, the expulsion of women through different protection acts from the factories, the institution of the marriage act.
She added: “It’s a very long story, but it’s clear that housework is work that has been subsumed to the capitalist organization of work. In fact, it is part of the assembly line that produces the workforce”. (15)
This feminist critique has led Federici to criticise Karl Marx for accepting the capitalist criteria for what constitutes work and imagining that waged industrial work was the stage on which the battle for humanity’s emancipation would be played.
She writes that “Marx ignored women’s reproductive labor because he remained wedded to a technologistic concept of revolution, where freedom comes through the machine, where the increase in the productivity of labor is assumed to be the material foundation for communism, and where the capitalist organization of work is viewed as the highest model of historical rationality, held up for every other form of production, including the reproduction of the work-force”. (16)
Federici’s other books include Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018) and Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018).
1. Silvia Federici, ‘Feminism And the Politics of the Commons’, https://libcom.org/library/feminism-politics-commons 2. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004), pp. 21-22. 3. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 26. 4. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 82. 5. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 84. 6. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 83. 7. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 137. 8. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 135. 9. Ibid 10. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 103. 11. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 165. 12. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, pp. 141-42. 13. Federici, ‘Feminism And the Politics of the Commons’. 14. ‘The Making of Capitalist Patriarchy’: Interview with Silvia Federici, https://marxismocritico.com/2014/02/24/the-making-of-capitalist-patriarchy/ 15. Ibid. 16. Silvia Federici, ‘The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution’ https://endofcapitalism.com/2013/05/29/a-feminist-critique-of-marx-by-silvia-federici/
“We pledge to be responsible custodians of our children’s future”, declares the new Not Our Future website, which is inviting millions of signatures from across the world. “We reject this bleak future that is being forced upon us. It is dark, coarse, and devoid of any hope or humanity. Many of the policies that are now beginning to affect our lives are broadly those adopted by our governments under the United Nations Agendas 21 & 30 and the Sustainable Development Goals. All of this is occurring without any meaningful public debate or democratic oversight and being led by elites who pursue their own vested interests”.
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Protesters against so-called “vaccines” and the imposition of an authoritarian digital surveillance state took to the streets of London, England, in numbers on Saturday November 19 2022.
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In a packed hall in Govan, Glasgow, Scotland, on Sunday November 20, people heard about the dangers to their freedom posed by digital ID, smart cities and social impact investing. To see a video recording of the meeting on the planned “Digital Alcatraz”, contact Temora Yuille at temora@live.co.uk
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“No to your transhumanist hell!” declares the latest in an impressive selection of free memes available from our friends at The Stirrer.
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“World Cup 2022, which is being held in a tax jurisdiction created by the UK to guarantee its control over the oil resources of Qatar, is exemplary of the spectacles by which the Western masses are kept obedient and ignorant while feeling morally superior”, notes Simon Elmer, fresh from his London book launch, in a Twitter thread. “If you’re wondering why the English team is so intent on kneeling and wearing rainbow armbands as a protest ‘against discrimination’, an attempt to whitewash the UK’s complicity with the Qatar Investment Authority may have something to do with it”. The empire’s wokewashing at its nauseating worst.
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A second conversation between Tessa Lena in New York and our own Paul Cudenec, covering a broad range of subjects, can now be seen online. Paul’s writing now also appears on his new Substack site, with free email subscription.
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So-called conspiracy theorists have long since been warning that instead of “saving” the planet, the fake-green global empire wants to profit from every aspect of it. This has now been confirmed by former Bank of England senior advisor and G20 co-chairman Michael Sheren who reported that carbon was “moving very quickly into a system where it’s going to be very close to a currency”. He added: “And we start thinking about putting prices on water, on trees, on biodiversity, we find where does that sit?” When he says that “nature has real value”, he doesn’t mean it like the rest of us do.
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“When did blind obedience to authority become a prerequisite for making a living as a popular musician?” asks John Leake, referring to the rarity of dissident voices like Joseph Arthur in that supposedly free-living and rebellious world…
The first part is an absolutely fascinating, and delightfully controversial, discussion of the evolution of what we now call western liberal democracy. The second half discusses the Yellow Vests specifically (Chapter 1 through Chapter 8 deals with French history from 1789 until World War II. Chapter 9 through Chapter 18 deals with the Yellow Vests.)
In her book Caliban and the Witch, Federici rejects the conventional wisdom that a “transition to capitalism” occurred as some kind of natural social evolution.
“According to Max Weber, the reform of the body is at the core of the bourgeois ethic because capitalism makes acquisition ‘the ultimate purpose of life,’ instead of treating it as a means for the satisfaction of our needs; thus it requires that we forfeit all spontaneous enjoyment of life. Capitalism also attempts to overcome our ‘natural state,’ by breaking the barriers of nature and by lengthening the working day beyond the limits set by the sun, the seasonal cycles, and the body itself, as constituted in pre-industrial society”. (9)
The witch hunts were thus part of the general philosophical war being waged by industrial capitalism. Writes Federici: “This is how we must read the attack against witchcraft and against that magical view of the world which, despite the efforts of the Church, had continued to prevail on a popular level through the Middle Ages. At the basis of magic was an animistic conception of nature that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit, and thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism, populated by occult forces, where every element was in ‘sympathetic’ relation with the rest”. (12)
