Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 91: Des Têtes Vont Tomber (w/ special guest Joshua Clover)

Episode Date: April 4, 2019

Professor Joshua Clover (@joshuaclov3r) stops by to talk Gilets Jaunes, rioting, class struggle in the 21st century, and the challenges of the next 50 years. Check out the professor's book here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2084-riot-strike-riot And subscribe to our Patreon here: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

This Saturday night. What's going on this Saturday night? This Saturday night. That's my macho man Randy Savage voice. Pretty good. That's pretty good. Do you think that Osama bin Laden didn't plan on 9-11 being as successful as it was? Yeah, I'd say they're probably pretty surprised

how well it worked out. Yeah, do you think he was watching the TV? He's like, fuck. Well, this is a thing now. Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, never mind. I was going to say something deeply personal. Yeah, you know what I think that

the response to all that was so wow 9-11? yeah what why this you know

975 trillion dollar a year military was just bested by box cutters. A couple guys with box cutters. Yeah, man. Totally. It says a lot about innovation

and scrappy upstarts. It's classic Dave and Goliath tale. Right. You think Osama Bin Laden will be sort of rehabilitated in several decades? In about, after the American Empire falls,

we might be putting like inspirational quotes about David besting Goliath. You mean we'll be putting, like teenage girls will be putting into their Facebook bios things like. Well, Facebook will be long gone. Oh yeah, you're right. Whatever the thing of the day is. Instagram or whatever.

Whatever the new thing is, Instagram or whatever. They'll be like... Sometimes you fight them and then they hate you. And then you fight them some more and then you win or something like that. Attributed to a sum of inline. Yeah. Yeah.

And it'll be... It'll be like the new, the future version of shoot for the moon and if you fall, you'll still land amongst the stars. Shoot for the White House and if you fall,

you'll still land amongst the Twin Towers. If I was Osama Bin Laden, that would be my biggest regret. That would be my biggest, like, fuck. The Twin Towers were kind of whatever. I really wanted the Pentagon and the White House. Well, you know, I've brought it up many times, but nobody ever talks about getting the Pentagon. Yeah, yeah.

That was the Pentagon just made out of fucking nine yards of fucking steel and concrete. Yeah, yeah. That was the Pentagon just made out of fucking... Yeah. Nine yards of fucking steel and concrete. Yeah, man. That shows you how big that motherfucker is, that a massive plane wrecked into it, and it... And we don't even talk about it. I'm sounding a lot like one of these truther guys. Well, I think the reason why is because there's nothing like symbolically arresting, like seeing two massive towers.

The two largest objects of American capitalism fall on live television. Yeah, well, you know what it did? It sort of allowed this country an opportunity to show um to show like you know sort of uh unfettered capital and just these bloodsuckers as like these little little lost lambs but we couldn't like show any weakness with the pentagon you know what i'm saying so we just buried that you know what i mean right? True. So we just buried that.

You know what I mean? Right, right. But now we have to go defend the honor of our bankers. Dude, that is very true. That is very true. It was an embarrassment. The Twin Towers was what gave us the impetus that launched that war. If they had just hit the Pentagon,

it would have been an embarrassment, I feel like. You think we would have gone to war if they had just hit the Pentagon, they would have been an embarrassment I feel like. You think we would have gone to war if they had just hit the Pentagon or do you think that they would have tried to? Oh we would have went to war but we would have just, it would have been under different auspices I feel like. Yeah you're right, you're right. Well you know it's really not a one to one

because Bin Laden was a rich kid too so. Yeah. So fuck him. That's true he was. So fuck him. That's true, he was. So yeah, he can go to hell too. You're right. But that's the. But a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.

That's the thing, I think he just got lucky. I don't think he really planned on it being as successful as it was. I think he woke up on 9-11. It's kinda like when you bluff to the point when it actually happens, you're like, oh shit, I meant over my head. Fuck.

Well, it didn't turn out well for him. He spent the next, what, nine years living in caves and houses. Only to get shot in the back of the head by some fucking... I think it's really, really hilarious. By some of those fucking, what do you call those? By some fucking Identity Europa guys. Yeah.

Right, some Identity Europa guys from like Iowa, from a cornfield in Iowa. Just corn-fed motherfuckers, bloodthirsty motherfuckers. One of the craziest stories of the last decade is the fact that the Pakistani government just hit Osama bin Laden. Yeah. They just hit him out.

Yeah. Fucking crazy. Who was it? Pervez Musharraf. See the guy? I guess so. The president that kind of tucked him away. I don't know much about...

I don't want to say that authoritatively. I have no idea. Same here. Well, the thing is one of the things that is so weird and disorienting about the current moment is when I was in college I was much more tuned into global events,

global developments, global shifts in power. You read Monocle and new things. I read Slates and the Washington Post. And foreign policy. Did you ever read that? Did you ever read foreign policy? I remember buying the magazines

and then just kind of sitting on the side. They were more like just when girls come over, I could look. Like I was well-versed in global affairs. I think Max Boot wrote for Foreign Policy. But if any of you didn't, it was guys like that. Did you ever have that? Like by some of these high-toned

or heady, stylish politics or culture magazines? 100%. Kind of laid them around, you know. Well, you know, growing up, I was under the assumption that I was a backwater dumbass, you know, just some dumbass yokel. And so going to college, I was like, I'm smart now, baby. I got to step it up now, baby.

And so, you know, you start reading more stuff like foreign policy, like, I got to know what's going on in the world. Yeah. so you're like, I gotta know what's going on in the world. I remember trying to explain to a hometown friend in like 2010 or 11, like the Greece, the Greek financial crisis. Just making it up. Just, but, you know, being like, my friend, Kevin probably thinks I'm smart.

Yeah, yeah. Well, here's what, Yaris, what's his's what Yaris What's his name? Yaris Yeah they wrote the book Which book? You know the book About the Eurozone

Oh Vanis Yarafakis Vanis Yarafakis Yeah that's right Yeah Apologies to our Greek listeners For my butchering of your No it's

Naming customs What was the point You were gonna make there? butchering of your naming customs. What was the point you were going to make there? No, I was just making fun of you telling your friend about that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess you could say I'm still doing that. Well, honestly, that's the gist of this week's episode. It's an attempt to understand a foreign event

from Appalachian perspective. Or not. Or not, yeah, yeah, just from American perspective. I didn't really have my hillbilly hat on for this one. I mean, we drew some parallels, but you know. Yeah, you're right, you're right. But our guest is Joshua Clover, who if you have not read, you can catch his writing at Popular,

among other outlets. He's a professor at UC Davis. I gotta say, this is one of my favorite episodes. And I can't quite articulate why. I think it's, I just have never heard it put so clearly the sort of stakes of the moment, I guess. And also, the professor is also one of the good ones too.

That, you know. Yeah. Sort of, you know, you've had a good professor. I had like. Yeah. Two in college. I had like one. And Josh was sort of

like. He's a good one. Those guys. No. Throwback to those guys that really engaged you and cared about your. Yeah.

Your own intellectual development and how you arrive at conclusions. And. Not just about your trying to earn a credential. Right. You know. And he's not trying to browbeat you or sort of indoctrinate you in his beliefs.

He is trying to help you come to your own conclusion. I mean, he's very clear about the beliefs that he has, but he's not trying to make you see the world the way he sees it. He is trying to instill critical thinking, like all good teachers. So, yeah, there's several things. He helped me sort of see things a little bit better in our sort of immediate situation but also um some global events like the reason we had them on in the first place was because we wanted to talk about gilet jaune gilet jaune movement um in france but soon our our conversation really started to um go somewhere else and it gets a little tangential,

but that's the point. You can talk about a lot of different things going on with the global economy right now by looking at the Yellow Vest movement. I'm going to have to start calling it that from now on because I can't keep doing Gilets Jaunes. This makes me sound pretentious.

I think it's really fun to say. You like it? Gilets Jaunes. You like it? Je les j'en. The best is the Cahiers de Doléance. The records that they have people submit about why they're riding, why they're angry.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of French words that are fun to say. Doléance. Doléance. So we hope you enjoy this episode. It's kind of a, it's not that long. It's kind of a longer one, but we, you know,

we really get into the weeds. One of the things that I think is most fascinating about it is what he refers to as liberals using the discourse of ecology and environmental justice or whatever within the context of neoliberal capitalism and the reaction that that then incurs in the population. So, for example, we'll get into it in the episode, but the main impetus for the Gilets Jaunes movement was a tax hike or, you know, a rise in gas prices that began this riot.

And the base, where that originated was this ostensibly environmental cause, right? You've got to get French drivers off of diesel. And what resulted? It's kind of like an Adam Curtis movie. But then a funny thing happened. The liberals weren't able to manage. It's a classic example of liberal managerial types not being able to manage the population,

not being able to manage dissent and social order. And what happened is you got this sort of outrage that spills over every single Saturday in a series of acts. Yeah. Man, they want Macron. Macron. Macron Macron Macron Macron Macron

Yeah Macron on a spit Don't they Yeah it's like One lady said Like I wanna see His head roll French don't fuck around

I wanna tell you Another thing While we're on the subject Of US military power And ways they've Led us astray Perhaps the biggest Trick they ever pulled

Was making us think The French were cowards Motherfuckers don't play No No Never have perhaps the biggest trick they ever pulled was making us think the French were cowards. Motherfuckers don't play. No, no. They never have. It's like I was telling you that one day. The reason they shocked the world in the 1790s is because prior to that point,

warfare was this aristocratic, very proper procedural thing. Tete-a-tete. Yeah, tete-a-tete. And then all of a sudden in 1794 and 95, you have these people. You have these people who are just charging the front lines with arms missing and stuff.

And the Brits, my God, that's not how this is done. I'm on go, dude. They're like, liberty! They're like charging., we got a death. They're like charging. Long live the republic. And it blew people away at the time. It's like, I know, we count to three and then we turn around.

Like we've always done. Exactly. No, I mean, that has its own problems. That was the birth of modern patriotism in the nation state. Even when you get it right, eventually, sometimes you can get it wrong. Wise words from Tom Sexton. Well, anyways, we hope you enjoyed this episode. Like I said, it's one of my favorites. I got a lot out of it, and it helped me sort of see the world in my own immediate situation in a slightly different light and in a more illuminating way.

And so we hope you get the same out of it. Before we launch into it, I just want to remind everybody to please go to the Patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash Trailbilly Workers Party. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com slash Trailbilly Workers Party. If you like what you hear, give us $5 a month. Yeah, earlier. You can hear more, or more if you want. Right, right.

Earlier this week, we released one of the Patreon episodes from last month. And so, if you like that, go to the Patreon. There's other episodes like that. A little sample of what you'll be getting. Yeah, we just gave you a little sample of what you'll be getting. First time's free, baby. Right. That's horrible.

I'm sorry. I'll walk that back. Okay, p-a-t-r-e-o-n.com slash Trillbilly Workers Party. Please go subscribe. $5 a month. We put out an episode every Sunday. But now, let's get to our episode interview with Joshua Clover, professor at UC Davis. you having a good saturday joshua uh i have the craziest thing i just discovered i have experienced identity theft and it's like the most weird trivial like someone used my credit card and i just have like one debit card that's i have no credit whatsoever so i have a debit card and uh someone

used it to spend 25 american dollars for german lessons in austria which seems cool i don't know i want to learn german so i feel like they're you know they're just doing the right thing but i i had to go cancel my card and all that shit they're living your life they're living living my life they're gonna fucking read marks in the original and i'm still gonna be sitting around being like good translation i don't know oh shit um well joshua thanks so much for having us uh or thank you for coming on our show today. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. So I'll just do some quick introductions. Today's guest is Joshua Clover, a professor at UC Davis, author of the book Riot Strike Riot. It's out on Verso Books if you want to check it out.

Today we're going to be discussing the Yellow Vest Movement, or as it's known, the Gilets Jeunes. Gilets Jeunes. Nice. Yes. So I've been wanting to do this episode for a few months. I just didn't know how to pronounce Gilets Jeunes. You're on it.

You're on it. I'll tell both of you, I've been doing the French Duolingo. Now this is the big payoff. Your moment has come. Right here. Yeah. lingo now this is the big payoff your moment has come right yeah well my only knowledge of french language comes from the revolution itself and so uh the only words i can really say are you know stuff like kaye yeah well that's a good that's gonna that's gonna turn out to be relevant good one it will it will um well josh, thanks so much for coming on the show today. As I mentioned in the email I sent you, before we really get into the weeds,

I kind of just wanted to maybe do some sort of preliminary, maybe like a timeline. Basically, you know, when and where did the protests begin? When and where did the protests begin? So I always think this is a difficult question. I've been trained to think historically in certain ways. So one answer is they began on October 5th, 1789, with the Women's March from Paris to Versailles with pitchforks to try and address the king and queen. And I actually think there's a way that really is the beginning, and maybe I'll come back

to that. But of course, more plausibly, the usual date that's assigned is there was a lot of unrest around the topics that animated the call for protests on November 17th of last year. And that was the first of the so-called acts. They've come to name, they have a sort of a weekly Saturday demonstration across the nation. And each one has come to be known as an act. So each Saturday, last Saturday, I think, was Act 19, if I've kept track properly. So November 17th is the first official gathering.

And the truth is somewhere in between, right? Because we understand that these kinds of social struggles arise out of a lot of different complicated forces, social forces and traditions and kinds of upset and unrest. and kinds of upset and unrest. And so, you know, over the course of the last 10, 15 years, these sort of stagnating or lowering standards of living and people's struggles to make it through the week and through the month are in many ways the wellspring of this dramatic social movement.

Yeah. is the wellspring of this dramatic social movement. Yeah. Well, so yeah, I guess the form that it's taken is like, you know, they've done roadblocks. Well, that was at the beginning, the form that it was taken was roadblocks and go-slows through important avenues of commerce and transportation. And then over, I feel like over time, it started to slowly morph into, I don't know, in America we get these images of violent destruction and things like that. Basically, the best way to understand it is as a bread riot, the sort of maybe modern-day equivalent of what you would have seen in the late medieval and early modern periods. Explain, I guess, what you mean by that and what's the bread they're rioting over in this scenario?

Sure, absolutely. I hope, you know, this is my, as we say in the industry, my field of scholarship. So I hope I won't get too long or boring. I'll try to be brief. So the riots of the period you mentioned from maybe the 15th century through the end of the 18th century, the most common kind was the so-called bread riot. The main image we have of that is people who are hungry, obviously, going down to the baker's and taking the bread to eat. And that happened, but that was actually not the most common form of what we call a bread riot. It sort of took two shapes. One was very much like that, but the first demand they always made was simply to sell the bread at prices people

could afford it wasn't just like showing up and alluding it ended that way sometimes but first they would they would say to the baker you know uh lower your prices to you know that we understand weed is scarce or whatever and you're taking this opportunity but we can't survive lower your prices so our family can eat and if the Baker wouldn't do that that then things get hyphy uh but but that's actually the second most common form that a bread riot takes slightly more common in that period is a merchant not a baker will decide they can make a bigger profit by shipping grain to the next province or, you know, some other place, even though people are starving. And so they'll ship it and the people will get out in the road and block the wagon and say, like, this doesn't work for us. Starving is not an

option for us. So this shipment has to stay here and sell it to us at a reasonable price, or again, we're just going to take it. So that history is very much what we're seeing repeated here in almost every possible way, right? The blocking of shipment of goods. But mostly it's the demand that this basic staple people need to survive. They can't afford and they say the prices have to come down. And in this case, the staple is gasoline itself. The structure of the economy, this is true in many places, but it's certainly true in France, is more and more people can't afford to live near where they work, which is maybe a city with high rents. And so they tend to live in the countryside and

exurbs and commute to work by car. It's the only way they can afford. And then suddenly you jack up the fuel prices a lot. And that's, you know, that's not an optional Sunday driving expense. That's how they make a living is driving to get to work. And if they can't afford to pay for that fuel, they can't get to work. And then, you know, the possibility of that family surviving sort of falls apart. So the demand, you know, that they began with was lower the fuel prices. And that's, you know, exactly like a bread wrap. But instead of lower the bread prices,

it's lower the fuel prices. And they've used the same strategies of blocking roads and making it clear to both merchants and the state that they need to set prices where people can survive. Why was Macron raising the fuel prices? What's the basis of these new tax hikes? Or I don't know, I guess you'd call them that. Well, it depends whose story you listen to, of course. According to Macron, I don't know how to pronounce that guy's name i don't like the way he looked either so i don't feel obligated to get it right but i think you called him a

a stack of 50 euros with a suit and a tie or something like that he really just is money personified and it's it's uh unpleasant to look at right um So according to him, this was part of a common and already scheduled ongoing increase in fuel prices designed to achieve two ends. One, to get people to use less fuel, and two, to use the taxes that were gained from this new fuel premium to fund ecological measures. So in both senses, positive and negative, there was supposed to be a sort of a green tax to help the ecology. And in the abstract, we might be sympathetic to that. The problem is that at the same time that Macron was instituting this tax, he was dramatically lowering the taxes on super rich people, businesses and so on.

So it's a little hard to believe that he was truly committed to these ecological expenditures. He could have gotten that money quite easily from a corporate tax, even just from keeping the corporate tax the way that it was instead of lowering it. So it looked to people, and I think correctly, much more like a standard austerity measure of passing the expenses of a certain government state project on to the proletariat and saying, y'all have to pay for this while the rich get to live their rich lives. And people, as you can imagine, were not enthusiastic about that. Was it the case that, doesn't he promise to levy like a 3% gross receipts tax on like the big four corporations like Apple, Google, then he kind of reneged on that?

Yeah, that's right, and it's unclear. That's a sort of whole other weird global economic struggle, which is these there are these corporations, the big four, as you say, that are obviously international in their character, but are based in a country as they're required by law to be. You know, someday they won't. We'll live long enough to see the moment when these countries are just completely these companies are just completely stateless and don't need the nation to sort of support them. But for now, they're required to be in a country in some way. So the question of how they get legislated and taxed is always up for grabs. And it's actually very easy for anyone to say, you know, in any country, we're going to tax the big four. And it can be sort of popular because it seems like you're sticking it to America in some way. It's easier said than done, and that promise by Macron, I'm not sure how much real substance it has in the end. Yeah. So Macron basically introduces these higher tax prices under the sort of pretense that it is ecologically sound.

I guess they're trying to transition France away from a sort of diesel-centric automotive economy. And that was one of the first things that stood out to me about this and why I thought it was so fascinating. this and why I thought it was so fascinating is because you've got the introduction of this policy that is ostensibly good in some ways, right? Like we're trying to save the environment, we're trying to phase out more environmentally destructive products or whatever. But by doing so, it takes place in this really sort of neoliberal hellscape where, yeah, you pass on the brunt of that onto, as you said, the proletariat. So then what happened was then you have people basically rising up and saying, we're not going to do that. We think that's wrong.

So can you draw any generalizations, I guess, about the makeup of the resulting revolts? I mean, it's like, again, in America, it's like we get so many different things. Some people say it's reactionary. Some people say there are leftist elements. Some people say that, you know, I guess it seems to me that a lot of people say most of these people are from maybe sort of more peripheral areas and more rural areas. So I don't know. Can you draw any sort of generalizations, I guess, about that? Well, you know, I've learned by now that any generalization you make is always going to be wrong.

So I want to be slow to do that. And, you know, there's two ways that's difficult to do. One, it's not entirely clear any generalization could have been made at the beginning back last fall. Two, as it's evolved and it's still ongoing, we're still seeing these Saturday acts, sometimes they remain quite dramatic. It certainly has changed a lot over that time. So I want to be slow to make generalizations. At the same time, I don't want to be a sort of left optimist. It is, like, I'm always interested in movements that are anti-state because I identify myself as sort of not a fan of authoritarian state organization for society. At the same time, I think we've all been aware that these sort of populist uprisings against the state often have extremely reactionary

elements in them, and that's been true this time as well. Sometimes these reactionary elements are affiliated with parties, with Le Pen's Rassemblement National, but often just sort of like freelance neo-fascists, you know, who don't identify with organized politics, but are quite reactionary and quite xenophobic. and have existed all the way through. At the same time, there's been extremely progressive and left elements to it. This is not only true in the cities. Sometimes it's easier to identify like, oh, yeah, the cities are more the sort of strongholds of leftists or socialists or what have you. And I'm not sure that's true. I think that, you know, of the various groupings

that have been involved, some of them have been city based, like the committee of Adama, which is named after someone who got killed by the cops in a sort of classic fashion, right? An immigrant grouping that's very anti-racist, anti-police. But there have been quite progressive figures coming from, as you say, these rural areas, the countryside, the exurbs who have been part of it. So it's a very, very gated movement. And the main thing to pay attention to, I think, is the struggles within it, because the anti-fascist, anti-racist, the leftists have really had to fight to sort of push out the fascist elements and in many ways have succeeded. Yeah. Well, as you described, I think, in the popular piece,

you basically said it is a low-key civil war in the sense that they're fighting for a specific vision of France. And yeah, you know, there was an article that just came out in the London Review of Books that I made Tom read to prepare for this. And one of the things that, like, they focused on in that, it was written by Jeremy Harding. One of the things they focused on in that was that it's interesting to distinguish, I guess, that there's sort of, like, immigrant and African, maybe, color communities in the Bonne Louis. And they haven't participated so much in these protests. sort of like immigrant and African, maybe colored communities in the Bonne Louis, and they haven't participated so much in these protests.

And so, I don't know, I just thought that was an interesting distinction that it seems that a lot of the protests began, or the riots, as you would call them, began more in the sort of provinces. And that's of interest to us because, you know, if you look at the makeup of America and who is made to pay for neoliberal policies and whatnot, it's easy to sort of read into what's happening there as something that could potentially happen here. I don't know if that's a scientifically sound assessment or what. a scientifically sound assessment or what but i think i mean i think there's real insight to that actually the um you know the ways that the sort of state capital nexus has of managing different populations is different in a way that the extremely immiserated people of the banlieue in france that's mostly immigrants north african arabic um often those people don't have formal jobs i mean

people have to do have some kind of hustle to survive so it's not like people are just sitting around all day collecting the dole that's not really what's happening but often it's an informal hustle it's off the books and in that case it's actually a bit harder for the state to extract money from them and to discipline them through the wage. And so you get a lot more direct violence. The cops, the CNS, that's the riot police going in there and, you know, doing the same things we see in the inner cities in the U.S. doing the same things we see in the inner cities in the U.S. On the other hand, out in the provinces, or France profonde, as they say, sort of the grand expanse away from Paris and away from the big cities, the people who seem to have been at the wellspring of this movement are people who have traditional wages.

They're not very good wages but in that sense you can get this austerity extraction of of money from them and so those are two very different economies and the question of how they could come together like we see in this movement the political split between those two different economies you know the economy of the excluded and the exploited, as I always say. And the question of how they can come together, that's obviously the huge political question of our times. That was the question of the Occupy movement in the U.S., right, which involves some people

who were already completely unemployed, completely immiserated and living in the encampments. And then some people who had houses, had jobs, but were down, down, really mobile and pissed off and struggling. And those trying to figure out if those two populations couldions since it began. What are some of those concessions? And, you know, I guess my sort of sub-question to that is one of the concessions he made was sort of this great national debate, as he said, which is supposed to sort of mirror, you know, getting back to the French Revolution, It's supposed to sort of mirror the testimonies that the three states drew up in 1789. And I've got it, man. Like what has been the sort of result of that, you know, so far? And, you know, what is its, I don't know, what is its trajectory?

Yeah, well, I'm not sure I know the answer to that question. You know, the main initial concessions that he made were he put a halt to the fuel tax. That didn't stop the bleeding much at all. He increased the national minimum wage, not a huge amount, but a little. That didn't stop the bleeding. People kept on saying the movement was going to die out, peter out. It certainly is continuing. I'm sort of a pessimist at heart, so I don't know how much longer it will continue, but it's already lasted a lot longer than I expected and been a lot more dynamic. Everyone thought that Christmas break would kill it, and it didn't.

So Macron's latest strategy to be announced, I guess, in February was the great national debate. And having been through a lot of political organizing in my life, my main position is fuck a debate, which is to say, like, I've always experienced that you know in kinds of organizing where eventually you show up and you occupy you know i've been involved in a lot of university struggles you show up with a bunch of students and workers and you occupy the chancellor's uh building and the first thing they do is send down some apparatchik

down the stairway to say like well let's let's have a debate very familiar with that and of course that's been a very common strategy of the alt-right in the u.s over the course of the last couple years like i just want to have i just want to debate you yeah no no you don't you're you're desperately playing for time because you see that people are angry enough to actually try and change their lives and and that terrifies you and you're doing anything you can to stall. So I'm suspicious of debates. But as you say, you know, maybe there's a hope for optimism leading up, you know, in the years before the French Revolution, the government understood people were really unhappy

and they sent out a bunch of emissaries to gather information about people's unhappiness. The famed Cahiers de Doliance, the notebooks of unhappiness. Right. Yeah. And I think they similarly thought like if they just really seem to be listening and take account and then maybe made some concessions toward what they found, they could stem the revolutionary tide. And that did not happen. And, you know, so we can hope for the same this time. Yeah. Well, so I guess this kind of gets, you know, I kind of want to get back to a little bit what we were talking at the beginning.

This kind of gets into the meat of what I really wanted to discuss with you, is that, wanted to discuss with you, is that, you know, in the Popular article, you mentioned that it's notable that these took the forms of riots instead of strikes, especially in a country, you know, in the sort of Western capitalist imperial core that has managed to hold on to union power much more so than America and other countries. union power, much more so than America and other countries. You know, what does that say about, what does that say about our modern era, that we're seeing more of these sort of riots instead of the traditional strike that we saw in the sort of 19th and 20th centuries? And what does it say, I guess, about the future of political struggle in a post-industrial world? it say, I guess, about the future of political struggle in a post-industrial world?

Well, that's certainly my big question. So it's generous of you to ask. And like, as with all big questions, I don't think I can give a small answer to it without really leaving out a lot of important details and important aspects. But yeah, we live in a time of the waning of the organized labor movement that really oriented political struggle for people in the West since at least 1830 is the first sort of big strike wave. And since then into the 70s and maybe the 80s. And since then, organized labor across the West has declined in various ways. It's incredibly dramatic in the United States, this decline. I can give you the numbers if you want, but I can hold off to, it's sort of me spouting data and it can be a little dry. But it's waned less in France. That's true. The sort of the large union or union of unions, the CGT has preserved a lot of power.

It's been able to magnetize a lot of political action, orient a lot of political action, sometimes in ways people didn't like. A lot of people felt like the CGT sold out the movement in 1968 when they really had sort of organizational power over a larger political struggle. And we've seen a weakening of them in France over the last few years.

So they used to be really hostile to other kinds of political engagement that we would probably identify with a riot, with sort of more wild action in the streets. So they seemed more open to being in the streets with people who were not unionists and who were interested in things other than just demanding a slightly higher wage. And in the case of the Gilets Jaunes movement, the CGT has actually played a very minimal role. They showed up late. up late they haven't shown any power to get people to do what they want them to do or to comport themselves in a that's sort of traditional like let's go for just a really big march and then and then go home they seem to have no power of it and so the question we should legitimately ask that i think you've asked is like what's what's changed is it just like unions got tired or people got tired of unions? I don't think that's the case. We've seen this wave of de-industrialization that there's still many

people who work in various sectors, but there's sectors that are much harder to organize. It's really hard to organize service sectors. It's really hard to organize people who have flexible work. They don't work with the same people every day. They don't have the same confidence and trust and communities built up. There's, for various reasons, it's hard to organize the labor landscape as it is today. Moreover, you have more and more people who are permanently displaced from work who are the proletariat, but not the working class. When you look at the banlieue in France or what we used to call the ghettos in the US, these are sort of examples of this, right? People who are just excluded from the traditional labor market. And so when they struggle, of course, they're not going to struggle at work because they have no work. They're not going to struggle over a wage because they have

no wage. They're getting money, but it's because they got some work. They're not going to struggle over a wage because they have no wage. They're getting money, but it's because they're they got some hustle. They're dealing drugs or selling cigarettes or cutting hair in their front room or doing sex work or whatever it is. Right. But that's not going to be the basis of a labor struggle. They still have to survive by buying shit in the market. Right. They're still market dependent, as we say, in technical language. So that's where they're going to fight. They're going to fight over the marketplace, how much things cost, whether they can get what they need to survive. And so more and more we see fights returning to that kind of shape. And Le Gilejon is a literally textbook example.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I guess is interesting about a sort of bread riot is that it is a sort of expression of, I guess, regulation on a market. It just comes from the sort of opposite direction of the state. So I guess like in a world where, you know, there is more and more of a surplus population, I guess you would expect to see those kinds of struggles more openly, maybe. I'm not sure. I mean, this isn't my area of expertise, but it seems to me that that seems more correct. I don't know. Yeah, I think it seems that way to me as well, and I think that's what we have been seeing.

The thing is, in general, they don't look exactly the way they looked in the 18th century, which is to say, at that time, they were really explicitly economic, right? Lower your prices or we'll burn down your shop. Now, the riots that we mostly see, I mean, we know what they look like. Over and over again, they happen because the cops kill a kid, usually a kid of color, sometimes an adult. And that's the first stage. And the second stage is the cops then walk away with complete impunity. They don't get charged or they don't get convicted or whatever. And it's that sense that it's just OK for the state to kill the people it doesn't need, that sets these things off.

So that looks really different from a bread ride. It's not like people are saying you have to lower your prices. They're saying let us live. And so trying to understand the relationship between those two things, that's sort of been my kind of work I've been doing. of been my the kind of work i've i've i've been doing uh and i think that you know the gilet jaune movement is is peculiar peculiar and interesting in part because it is explicitly like those those earlier riots it didn't have that moment where um you know freddie gray gets killed or said bruno in france in in 2005 gets gets killed to set it off. But at the same time, it does share a characteristic with those early riots of them being led by people who don't have the wage and the workplace orienting their political lives.

And so have to figure out how to proceed. There's so many more cops now than there were in 1750. You know, it's a dramatic change. There were certainly state forces then, and armies could be shifted here and there, and national guards, and there were bailiffs and various other categories. But the idea that there's a police garrison within 12 blocks of you or wherever you are, that's a very modern new idea. And that's why we see over and over again sort of direct struggle with the cops as always the form that these things are going to take. And that has to be overcome. Yeah. What is just and I'm kind of coming in this sort of ignorantly, but are French police militarized in the same way that American police would be at like a similar type demonstration?

Well, no one's as militarized as the American police, except maybe for the Israeli police. But the French police are pretty militarized. They're broken down into various categories that are slightly opaque to americans but not that different in the in the end but the riot police there are pretty militarized i've as of course purely in the context of research i've been in a french riot or two and so i've seen some of the the riot police uh there and they they're they're militarized similarly they've got a lot of tear gas a lot of pepper spray a lot of concussion grenades um

they're less willing to use live ammunition to this point, I think, but that's always temporary. That circumspection on the part of the police is always temporary. Right. But they're pretty militarized. Yeah. I guess one thing I wanted to explore a little bit, I'm not quite sure how to articulate it, is that you point out in the popular piece popular piece that, you know, you have this great sort of bullet point list. You say immigration and ecology are one-fifth.

You're essentially talking about, and this is a huge point of interest to me and Tom, the sort of rise of what you could call maybe a sort of green nationalism. like as politics in Europe and United States are more increasingly centered around this nexus of you know states I guess you could call it state sovereignty but more along the lines of like nationalism and who gets to define the nation and and immigrant quotas and all this I guess I'm just interested about like the introduction of environmentalism and green politics into that situation. So I don't know. Could you just sort of, I guess, flesh that out a little bit, that specific point and how it has to do with this protest movement? Yeah, I think you and Tom were interested in the crucial thing here.

I really think this is going to be the story of the next 50 years. You know, so I think there's two huge phenomena that we're living through right now. One is something that's classically internal to capitalism, which is the question of whether labor markets are absorptive or not, right? Which is to say the dream of capitalism is it can endlessly expand.

It has to, in fact. And it does that by endlessly taking in new labor inputs. That is, as I always like to point out, that's the national slogan of the United States of America. It's written in big letters on the Statue of Liberty. It takes the shape of a poem, but that poem basically says, we will take your labor, right? That's all it says. And it says it in party ways, but basically says, we will take your labor. That's all it says. And it says it in party ways. But it says, we will absorb labor from anywhere. Come on in, y'all. And as long as that's true, capital is pretty happy and pretty healthy.

But one of the things that we've noticed that's a fundamental phenomenon of deindustrialization, increasing efficiency and productivity so that you just don't need as much labor to make a car or make whatever else people make. We always use cars as an example. Increasingly, we've seen the end of what I refer to as an absorptive capitalism that can absorb labor inputs. And that's not just true in the U.S. That's true in the deindustrializing nations, the United Kingdom, Western Europe. And as that happens, we've seen a greater desire

to control labor markets by controlling borders in various ways. And that, of course, mobilizes xenophobia that may have other roots. I don't want to explain everything according to capitalism. But even if xenophobia and racism are older than capitalism, and capitalism certainly mobilizes them as a justification or excuse or kind of force to help close these borders and restructure an economy that no longer wants to take labor inputs into it. So that's one huge phenomenon we're living through is this rise of hard borders because there's no need for labor inputs. The other great phenomenon we're living through, of course, is climate collapse. It's hard for me to say that without thinking about the end of the world with themes in the offing.

And which, because I'm still a tiny bit of an optimist, I think of as a bad thing. And one of the things that climate collapse is doing is guaranteeing that people are going to flee nations that are essentially an economic collapse for climate reasons, drought and so on. People can't survive there. They're going to go look for someplace they can survive. So those are two forces. And obviously, they run together a massive wave of climate refugees coming up against a massive hardening of borders at a national level. And that's going to be the story of our lives. I think, you know, in the U.S., we already know the sort of horrific examples of these thousand yahoos in the Rio Grande Valley and wherever down along the southern border who, you know, are not employed by the state, but are happy to do that work driving around their four by fours with their shotguns shooting at immigrants.

Right. And the bad news is that thousand dudes, I assume it's mostly dudes. Maybe that, you know, maybe that's sexist to me, but I just assume it is. You know, maybe that's sexist of me, but I just assume it is. Probably is. That thousand dudes is going to be 10,000 dudes real soon, you know, which is to say as the sort of xenophobic hysteria around borders rises and as refugees flow more and more, this is going to really intensify, which is to say states are going to stay. But one of the ways they're going to try and manage resources and manage populations is going to be through this ecological discourse. So like not just like, oh, we don't want immigrants because we don't want them, you know, putting pressure on our school system. We hear

that a lot in California, like, oh, the terrible thing about immigrants is they're going to come to our schools and take our classes and learn things, but that's going to somehow stop other people from learning things. And it doesn't make much sense, but racism generally doesn't. And, you know, that's a model of the kind of resource protection logic that we're going to see more and more. It's not going to be about school systems. It's going to be about fresh water. And increasingly, we're going to just hear this rhetoric across the United States that says, well, you know, immigrants, they're probably lovely people. We respect all humans. The problem is we have a limited supply of water, American water for Americans. Of course, it'll all be Canadian water, but we'll conveniently ignore that fact.

And we'll say American water for Americans. And the border is going to be loaded with with people cheerful, excited, enthusiastic to defend it, to make sure that our ecological resources are husbanded while the rest of the world drowns and starves. And, you know, that's just going to be the political story, not the only one, but an increasingly intense one over our lifetimes. You have a lot more lifetime ahead of y'all than I do. But I think that there's no way around the fact that the left insofar as there is a left and we can believe in it needs to seize control of that rather than letting uh the rhetoric of ecology the discourse of ecological control be something the government takes power over that can't be allowed for a second i don't think yeah um i know this is this isn't a question that we're going to be

able to answer here but i am in but this is a question that has bothered me for a little bit of time now given these realities and um you know everything that we've just sort of laid out the sort of traditional understanding of like marxism and and of communism is basically that in order to exert some kind of political leverage on the system and seize state power, you have to organize basically along the lines of the workers. The workers,

they create profit, they need to control the means of production, therefore you can articulate that into a program that could then seize state power. If the case is that there are less and less workers in that traditional sense, how are we going to encounter this problem of articulation? Is it going to be, you know, is the best we can hope for is like a Bernie type figure or, you know what I mean? Like that to me seems very inadequate personally.

But in a world in which that we've just described, I'm just not sure what really the left is supposed to do. Well, I hope this isn't unfair, but I want to turn this question back on you and Tom. I mean, you have this formulation of the Trillbilly worker parties. I really appreciate the work you're doing. I'm interested in it. You know, my grandparents identified as hillbillies. Their parents were Orkies, and they moved out to California. They lived in a tiny little town. I think of what deindustrialization looks like, what the end of work and the decline of the working class looks like is posed really dramatically in the inner cities.

But I think it's also posed really dramatically in spaces like Appalachia, where you are. So, I mean, how does it look like to you from there? You tell me. Well, it's hard. I mean, I guess that... You just wrote about this. Well, that's true. I did just write about it.

I think that, like, you know, from where we are sitting, we don't, you know, our lives are a sort of perpetual cycle of being, you know, reinforced through various ideological indoctrination programs of, you know, your sort of role and function within the larger sort of social structure. rural areas, your role is to shut the fuck up and not challenge the extraction of resources, which, you know, as time continues, become less and less, you know, we're sort of like, we're running out of a lot of the things that we used to mine and drill and timber and things like that. And so, and, you know, just me and Tom sitting here, like, we can't really do anything about that. We can sort of try to organize people in our community, maybe like in a concerned citizens way, or maybe we can try to organize the workers. But, you know, nationally, what you have to do nationally is you have to have some sort of like, you have to have a workers party really you have to have a a national movement centered

in the sort of interest of you know the service industry workers the care workers the teachers and the tenants i think and you have to find a way to sort of honestly you know it kind of feels like reinventing the wheel but honestly i would like to see some form of like a Soviet or, you know what I mean? Something that like combines maybe, you know, workers, the tenants and, you know, socialists who would ostensibly be holding power but don't have any way to express it. So I don't know. I guess it would have to be some sort of like Soviet or workers committee, but you have to have something that can unite those into a larger national force that can exert power on the national stage. That's a tall order, and I'm just one guy.

podcast now yeah i'll go for it let me ask you a follow-up question so what's the relationship of that workers party to the all the people who are part of the proletariat but don't work or don't have a formal wage that's a great question that is that is the 64 000 question yeah yeah that's the thing you have to find a way to make it in their interest as well. And that's exactly the situation here. Yeah, and that's exactly the situation, exactly. I was thinking about that this week with all this sort of talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez coming here as part of this, like, Sunrise Movement, you know, championing the Green New Deal in Appalachia and all this stuff.

And the congressman from down the road in Lexington, where University of Kentucky is, was like, you know, go to a coal mine. You need to go to visit a coal mine and all this stuff. And we were talking yesterday. It's like, if she does, she's going to be in for a rude awakening. Nothing like that is going on here anymore. Right, exactly. Yeah, so people aren't wage earners really here anymore.

Right. In that way. Right. Yeah, I don't know. You have to find a way to ostensibly make it in their interest, but I don't know. You know, they did it in the French Revolution before industrial capital really sort of existed there. But this is a massive country, and that presents a huge obstacle. It's a massive country, but also, I mean, that was a bourgeois revolution in the technical sense.

I would say it was a revolution on behalf of the bourgeois class to try and set their productive powers loose from the history of monarchy, feudalism and so on. so on uh and you know i that's not such the the you know we live in a period of the victory of the bourgeoisie and it will be a self-consuming victory in the end we know whether it consumes the rest of us with it uh is unclear it has to this point you know it seems to me like there's just two things i would say like i i would not disagree with your account, mostly because, you know, I just like to agree with people. I'm a friendly guy. I guess, too. But, you know, and, you know, the main thing I've come to believe in my life is that people fight where they are. So people are in a job and that orients their life a lot.

They're going to fight there. They're going to organize in the workplace and try and figure out how to be, how to politicize their work and their work life and organize around it. And I totally get that. But if people aren't, you know, if where people are is not in the workplace, not in the formal workplace, you know, they're going to fight somewhere else. And I think it's very hard to say, no, come fight with my workers fight, even though you're not there. The thing that's been really important for me is, you know, I was, um, trained. I never know if that's the right word as, as a Marxist. Uh, I've, I've read a lot of Marx in English, unfortunately.

But I was also raised in the world, in the U.S. in the 80s and 90s, very much in that sort of the socialist tradition, the working class tradition, in a way that had trouble recognizing anything else as class politics. And what's been really important for me is to think about the fact that people who are not members of the traditional working class are still engaged in class politics if their social position has been generated by the structural relations of capitalism, even if what's been generated for them is absolute unemployment, absolute exclusion from the labor market, that's still an outcome of class relations,

and their struggle is still a class struggle. And so it's really important for me when I see the self-activity of people who are largely excluded from the labor market, and here I'm referring to what other people call riots, my first step is, okay, well, that's class struggle. And it may not be the same kind of class struggle as the union-led labor organizing that really oriented us in 1935, But it's not 1935. And I want to be really open to different kinds of class struggle, and I'm not certain that a class struggle that presumes a formal wage earner

has a lot of future. So the big question I'll leave you with is whether the logic of seizing control of the state is fundamentally related to the logic of having a workers' party and whether other kinds of class struggle might not have as the horizon something distinct from seizing control of the state, maybe doing away with it. Like, I'm just not a Leninist. I don't want to seize the state. I don't think it's a good idea. Right. I'm just not a Leninist. I don't want to seize the state.

I don't think it's a good idea. Right. Well, that's really, in a way, it's very comforting for me to hear. I'm not necessarily a Leninist either. You're wearing a red shirt, though. Hey, good point. But I think that'll be great for our listeners to hear. And, you know, people got to be more, they got to be more sort of adept.

They got to be more dynamic. And so we really appreciate that. The big question I'll leave you with that I hear all the time. The big question I'll leave you with that I hear all the time, what is it about French society that makes them so much better at, as you would say, writing than we do? They got fucking forklifts. They're breaking down ministry. The only reason I'm asking this is because so many people ask it as well. Online and other places, they're like, they really know how to ride over in France. Maybe this is tied back to what we were saying at the beginning. It started in 1789 at the Women's March.

I'll come right back to that. Thank you for giving me a big opening. Yeah, so they've had a lot of style. I've watched a lot of videos. I've been sorry to not be there in person. of style there's i've been i've watched a lot of videos i've been sorry to not be there in person uh some of my favorite videos like some person laid a hold of a forklift and lifted up a burning car they love to set cars on fire in france it's a great national tradition the voiture brulee so they got lifted up a burning car onto a forklift and slammed it into a toll booth.

This is all part of the logic of like the real hostility towards circulation in general. Like all the signs, like the car, the toll booth, like destroy it all. Right. And I think that's that's quite amazing. There was also this moment where in Paris, someone tried to ram a forklift into one of the minister's offices because they keep on storming Macron, the what's it called, the Elysee Palace where Macron lives. We keep on trying to storm it because that's a great French tradition, too, right? Storming the castle. We don't do that so much in the U.S. But so that moment of like, you know, it used to be pitchforks and now it's But so that moment of like, you know, it used to be pitchforks and now it's forklifts. Those women marched on Versailles carrying pitchforks to the palace saying, like, you've got to go.

And they hold to that tradition in France across, you know, more than 200 years. And you have to admire that. But in truth, less comically, you know, France as a nation has this really interesting structure. It's not a small country. I think we have about 80 million citizens right now, maybe a little bit more. But at the same time, it really is oriented by a single city, Paris, right? In fact, the Gilets Gènes riots have been, as we know, in the provinces and they moved to the cities, but lots of cities, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, and so on. But everyone's just like Paris, Paris, Paris. And in a way, that's kind of true, right? Who controls Paris controls France. And when you have a nation where if you can control the capital city, you control the country, it's much easier to topple the government.

Look at Iceland, man, they will drop the government there in 24 hours because three quarters of the population lives in Reykjavik. Right. And so it's possible. Now, in the U.S., we actually have a far more multipolar distributed, you know, Houston is huge. Phoenix is huge. Los Angeles is huge. And Chicago is huge. And on and on and on.

Los Angeles is huge and Chicago is huge and on and on and on. And that's not even counting the vast, you know, open spaces of the Great Plains, of Appalachia, the Pacific Northwest. So it's not the case you can just seize Paris and it's over. Right. Right. And so when we get down to not just the abstract, well, class, mass, party sequence or whatever, but the practicalities of where do you go to do your thing. This is complicated terrain. Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, Americans, we see stuff like that, and it kind of annoys me when I see people on the Internet, like,

we need to get our shit together, like the French, we need to be doing this. It's like, you know, we're doing our best. There's a long ways to go. But, you know, and honestly, when I think when the rev happens, I think the rev happens. I believe in it. But I think it probably doesn't happen first in the u.s it maybe spreads here but i think there's other places that are more likely yes i think i think there's like some place where there's a real single urban uh sort of concentration but that it's got

arable fields around because the first thing that happens with the rev right is if the international community cuts you off if there's a communist revolution no one's going to ship you any grain and so you need arable fields immediately like you need uh extremely high yield land to grow your food and support the rev for a couple years while while you sort of try to expand it and so you know someplace in South America, maybe. Brazil. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be fine with that. The sooner, the better. Portuguese, man.

It's all happening. Yeah. Well, your doppelganger alter ego, who is learning German, maybe. Learning German and Austrian. Yeah, I got to get you to know them. Yeah. Well, Joshua, I really appreciate it it this has been one of my favorite episodes yeah honestly it's been one of my favorites i knew it was going to be um because i've just

wanted to pick your brain for a while um i will appreciate both y'all talking to me it's a it's nice to have a chance to work this through with people and uh you know one of the reasons i've been following i don't do podcasts a lot i just don't quite have can't figure out where in my life i listen to them but i've been keeping up with don't do podcasts a lot. I just can't figure out where in my life I listen to them. I've been keeping up with Trill Billy because I'm actually super interested in what's happening in Appalachia. I think it's important. Keep going, y'all. We appreciate it, Joshua. Do you

want to plug anything? Any of your writing or books or anything? My plug is communism is not the same as socialism. Figure it out. That's the Trilly's plug as well yeah uh well we appreciate joshua and um i'll let you know when this goes up thank you again so much for being with us all right we'll see you later Thank you. Sous-titrage ST' 501 Thank you.