Is it possible to take the transposition I suggested earlier even a little further and to speak of an implacable war society prosecutes, in its most banal activities and its most ordinary operations, a war led by the bourgeoisie, by the dominant classes, by an invisible enemy—or all too visible—, against the working classes in general? It would be enough to take a look at the statistics concerning prison populations in France or in Europe to be convinced: the “numbers” would speak elegantly of the “dire probability” that young men from destitute suburbs—especially those who are labeled “children of immigrants”—will end up behind bars. And it doesn’t seem at all exaggerated to describe the suburban housing projects, the “cités,” that surround French cities as constituting today the theatre of a latent civil war: the situation in these urban ghettos provides clear evidence of the ways certain categories of the population are treated, how they are pushed to the margins of social and political life, reduced to poverty, to a precarious existence, deprived of a future. The huge revolts that flare up at regular intervals in these “neighborhoods” are simply the sudden condensation of a multitude of fragmentary battles whose rumbling never entirely goes away.
But I would also be tempted to add that there is really no other interpretation possible of other statistical realities such as the systematic elimination of the working class from the educational system and the situations of segregation and of social inferiority to which such mechanisms condemn them. I know people will accuse me of falling into the realm of conspiracy theories, ascribing hidden purposes to certain institutions and even inventing evil intentions. This is the same criticism Bourdieu offered of the Althusserian notion of “ideological state apparatuses.” Such a notion involves thinking in terms of a “pessimistic functionalism.” An apparatus, he writes, would be “an infernal machine, programmed to accomplish certain purposes,” adding that “this fantasy of the conspiracy, the idea that an evil will is responsible for everything that happens in the social world, haunts critical social thought.”15 Of course he is right! It is undeniable that Althusser’s concept returns us to an old fashioned Marxist dramaturgy—or better, an old fashioned Marxist logomachy—in which entities written with capital letters confront each other as if on a stage in some theatre (in a purely scholastic kind of way). Still, it is worth pointing out that certain formulations by Bourdieu are surprisingly close to what he seems so insistent here on dismissing, even if, in his case, it is less a matter of revealing a hidden will and more about pointing out “objective results.” An example is when he writes: “What is the real function of an educational system when it functions in such a way that across the entire educational spectrum children from the working classes and, to a lesser extent, from the middle classes, find themselves eliminated from the system?”16
The “real function”! Obvious and undeniable. So, like Wideman, who refuses to give up his immediate perception of the world in spite of the reasonable observations his mother makes, I cannot help but see an infernal machine in the school system, given the way it functions right in front of our eyes. If it is not set up to attain this goal, it at least produces this objective result: rejecting the children of the working class, perpetuating and legitimating class domination, differential access to careers and to social positions. A war is going on against the underdogs and schools are one of the battlefields. Teachers do the best they can! But in fact there is little or nothing they can do when faced with the irresistible forces of the social order, forces that operate both in secret and in the light of day, and that impose themselves everywhere and on everyone.
III
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1
I mentioned earlier that during my childhood my entire family was “communist,” in the sense that the Communist Party was the organizing principle and the uncontested horizon of our relation to politics. How could my family have turned into one in which it seemed possible, even natural sometimes, to vote either for the right or for the extreme right?
What had happened to create a situation in which so many people whose spontaneous reactions had been ones of visceral disgust when they came across figures they took to be enemies of the working class, people who had happily hurled abuse at the television when such figures appeared on the screen (a strange but effective way of taking comfort in one’s beliefs and one’s sense of self), would begin voting for the National Front? I am sure this is what transpired in my father’s case. And what had happened to produce a situation in which a good number of these people, having voted for the National Front in the first round of elections would, in the second round, cast their vote for the candidate of the traditional right wing, someone they would have treated with contempt in an earlier moment? (This finally led to a situation in which even in the first round of the election they voted for a caricatural representative of the bourgeois business classes, who, thanks to their votes, was elected President of the Republic.) What heavy measure of responsibility for this process must be borne by the official left wing? What is the responsibility of those people who, having set aside the political commitments they held in the 1960s and 1970s as the youthful follies of a bygone moment, having risen to positions of power and importance, would do all they could to encourage the spread of right wing thinking, would consign to the dustbin of history anything associated with what had once been one of the essential preoccupations of the left (even, since the middle of the nineteenth century, one of its fundamental characteristics), which is to say the attention paid to oppression, to social conflict, or simply to the effort to create a space within the political sphere for the oppressed? It was not just the “worker’s movement” with its traditions and its struggles that disappeared from political and intellectual discourse and from the public stage. Gone, as well, were the workers themselves, their culture, the conditions under which they lived, their aspirations …1
When I was a young leftist (Trotskyist) in high school, my father was constantly ranting about “students” who were “always trying to tell us what to do” and who “in ten years will be coming back and giving us orders.” His reaction, as intransigent as it was visceral, seemed to me then to be contrary to the “historical interests of the working class” and to be the result of the influence wielded over that class by an outdated Communist Party that had never fully left the Stalinist moment behind and was doing all it could to prevent the arrival of an inevitable revolution. But nowadays how is it possible to think that my father was wrong? Look at what has become of all those who back then had been advocating civil war, intoxicated by the mythology of the proletarian revolution! These days they are just as sure of themselves as ever, just as vehement, but, with only one or two exceptions, their vehemence is focused on opposing the slightest hint of protest arising from the working classes. They have returned to what had originally been promised to them—they have become what they were destined to be—and in doing so they have turned themselves into the enemies of all those people whose vanguard they used to claim to represent, people they accused of being too timid and too corrupted by middle-class aspirations. It is said that one day in May 1968, Marcel Jouhandeau, seeing a column of student protestors passing by, sneered at them: “Go back home! In twenty years, you’ll all be bankers.” We could say he was of more or less the same opinion as my father, even if his reasons for arriving at that opinion were the exact opposite. And, of course, he was right. Maybe not bankers, but “important” people without a doubt, people whose astonishing career paths established them, whether politically, intellectually, or personally, in comfortable positions in the social order, turning them into the defenders of things as they are, the defenders of a world perfectly suited to the people they had become.
In 1981, when François Mitterrand made it possible to hope for a victory for the left, he managed to win over a quarter of Communist Party voters. The Communist Party’s own candidate only received 15% of the votes in the first round, compared to 20 or 21% in the legislative elections of 1977. This erosion of suppo
rt, a prelude to the total collapse that would soon take place, can be explained to a great extent by the inability of the “Party of the Working Class” to evolve and to break from the Soviet regime (which provided, it is true, a good deal of its financial support). But it was also due to its inability to take seriously the new social movements that developed in the wake of May 1968. To put it mildly, the Party no longer seemed to have much of a relation to the forms of desire for social transformation and for political innovation that characterized the 1960s and 1970s, and that in some ways realized themselves in 1981. And yet the victory of the left, along with the government it put into place (which would include some communists) soon produced a strong sense of disillusionment in working class circles, and a loss of interest in the politicians whom they had previously trusted, and for whom they had voted. Soon they felt betrayed and neglected by them. I remember often hearing the observation (my mother repeated it to me every time we spoke): “Right or left, there’s no difference; they are all the same, and the same people always end up footing the bill.”
The socialist left set out on a major project of transformation, one that became more and more marked as the years went by. With a suspicious degree of enthusiasm, they started to turn to neoconservative intellectuals for guidance. Those intellectuals, pretending to offer a way to renovate leftist thought, in fact set out to eliminate all that was leftist from the left. What actually occurred was a general and quite thoroughgoing metamorphosis of the ethos of the party as well as of its intellectual references. Gone was any talk of exploitation and resistance, replaced by talk of “necessary modernization” and of “radical social reform”; gone the references to relations between the classes, replaced by talk of a “life in common”; gone any mention of unequal social opportunities, replaced by an emphasis on “individual responsibility.” The notion of domination, and the very idea of a structuring opposition between those in positions of dominance and those who were dominated disappeared from the official political landscape on the left, replaced by a more neutral idea of a “social contract” or a “social compact,” providing a framework within which individuals who were defined as “having equal rights” (“Equal?” What an obscene idea!) were encouraged to set aside their “particular interests” (that is, they should keep their mouths shut and let the government do its job). What were the ideological objectives of this so-called “political philosophy,” one that spread widely and was celebrated throughout the media as well as the political and intellectual fields on both the right and on the left? (Its promoters in fact did their best to eliminate any frontier between the right and the left, while encouraging the left—a willing partner—to move ever rightward.) The stakes were hardly hidden: the extolling of the virtues of the “autonomous subject,” and the accompanying effort to do away with any form of thought that took into account historical and social forms of determinism were mainly intended to dismiss the idea that specific social groups—“classes”—existed, and so to justify dismantling the welfare state and other forms of social protection. This was done in the name of a necessary individualization (or decollectivization, or desocialization) of the right to work and of systems of solidarity and of redistribution. Up until this moment such age-old discourses and projects had always been a hallmark of the right; it would obsessively trot them out, lauding individual responsibility as opposed to “collectivism.” Now they became the discourses and projects of a good part of the left. The situation could basically be summed up like this: The parties of the left, along with party intellectuals and state intellectuals, began from this moment forward to think and speak the language of those who govern, no longer the language of those who are governed. They spoke in the name of the government (and as part of it), no longer in the name of the governed (and as part of them). And so of course they adopted a governing point of view on the world, disdainfully dismissing (and doing so with great discursive violence, a violence that was experienced as such by those at whom it was directed) the point of view of those being governed. The most that any of them would deign to do (in the Christian and philanthropic versions of these neoconservative discourses) would be to replace the oppressed and dominated of yesterday—along with their struggles—with the “marginalized” of today—who were presumed to be of a passive nature. They could be considered as the silent potential recipients of the benefits of various technocratic measures that were intended to help the “poor” and the “victims” of “precarity” and of “disaffiliation.” All this was nothing other than a hypocritical and underhanded strategy meant to invalidate any approach to these problems that used terms such as oppression and struggle, or reproduction or transformation of social structures, or inertia and dynamism within class antagonisms.2
This shift in political discourse transformed the way the social world could be perceived, and therefore, in a performative manner, it transformed the social world itself, given that that world is produced by the very categories of thought by means of which it is perceived. But making political discourse about “classes” and class relations disappear, eliminating classes and class relations as cognitive and theoretical categories, does nothing to prevent those people who live under the objective conditions that the word “class” was used to designate from feeling abandoned by those people now preaching to them about the wonders of the “social compact,” and simultaneously about how urgent and “necessary” it was to deregulate the economy and to dismantle the welfare state.3 Whole sectors of the most severely disadvantaged would thus, in what almost seemed like an automatic reshuffling of the cards in the political deck, shift over to the only party that seemed to care about them, the only one, in any case, that offered them a discourse that seemed intended to provide meaning to the experiences that made up their daily lives. This happened despite the fact that the leadership of that party was not made up of people from the working class—far from it! Things had been different in the case of the Communist Party, which was always careful to choose activists from the working class itself, so that voters could identify with them. My mother did finally admit to me, after having denied it for a very long time, that she had voted for the National Front. (“But only once,” she insisted, even though I am not sure I believe her on this point. “It was in order to make a point, because things weren’t going right,” she offered as a justification once the unpleasantness of the confession was behind her. Then, strangely, she added, regarding the decision to vote for Le Pen in the first round of the elections, “The people who voted for him didn’t really want to see him elected. In the second round we all voted normally.”)4
Unlike voting communist, a way of voting that could be assumed forthrightly and asserted publicly, voting for the extreme right seems to have been something that needed to be kept secret, even denied in the face of some “outside” instance of judgment (which is what I appear to have represented, in my family’s eyes). Such a vote had nonetheless been carefully thought over and decided upon. The former way of voting was a proud affirmation of one’s class identity, a political gesture confirming that very identity by offering support to the “workers’ party.” The latter kind of vote was a silent act in defense of whatever was left of such an identity, to which the ruling powers of the institutionalized left paid no attention, or else treated dismissively. They had all graduated from the École Nationale d’Administration or other bourgeois institutions whose function was to produce technocrats. Such places produce and inculcate a “dominant ideology” that has become generalized across all political divisions. (One cannot insist too much on the extent to which elite circles of the “modernist”—and often Christian—left contributed to the development of this rightist dominant ideology. It is hardly surprising that a former socialist party leader—from the north of France, of course, and thus coming from a different class background and a different political culture—felt it to be his heartfelt duty to remind his friends during the presidential election campaign of 2002 that “worker” was not a dirty word.) Ho
wever paradoxical it might seem to some people, I am convinced that voting for the National Front must be interpreted, at least in part, as the final recourse of people of the working classes attempting to defend their collective identity, or to defend, in any case, a dignity that was being trampled on—now even by those who had once been their representatives and defenders. Dignity is a fragile feeling, unsure of itself; it requires recognition and reassurances. People first of all have a need not to feel like they are being treated as a negligible quantity, or merely as an entry in a statistical table or on a balance sheet, which is to say mute objects about which political decisions are made. If a time comes when those in whom you have placed your confidence seem no longer to deserve it, you place your confidence in others. Even if it happens bit by bit, you end up turning to new representatives.5
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