What is the public face of violence in France? For someone who regularly travels all over Europe, the first image of violence one sees on arriving at a station or an airport is the police. I have never seen so many police in France as there are at present, especially in Paris. Not even in Turkey during the military dictatorship were there such numbers. Anyone would think that a coup d’état was taking place or that the country was under occupation. There is nothing to compare with it in either present-day Italy or Germany. A right bunch these police are too! A wholly unparalleled air of brutality and arrogance hangs about them. From the moment the least objection is made—to having your papers checked, for example, or to the quite-unprecedented bag searches before boarding a train—you feel that you run the risk of being arrested, manhandled and eventually charged with “resisting arrest”. It is difficult to imagine what it must be like if you happen to have darker skin or cannot produce the right papers.
One is left seething with indignation at reports of policemen entering schools under the pretext of looking for drugs, and, once there, using dogs to terrorise children while taking teachers to task for shielding their students; or at reports of the sudden arrest of journalists for merely expressing “unorthodox views”; not to mention the conditions in which immigrants who seek leave or otherwise to remain are expelled, and the fact that a ministry has predetermined the number of calamities to bring about or lives to tear apart in the manner of the figures for industrial output and arrests established by decree in the Soviet Union back in the good old days (for the police).1 What emerges here above all is the intention to humiliate, carried out with an almost scientific precision. Journalists have on occasion shown just how ineffective airport security is by the ease with which they have smuggled knives or bomb components onto a plane. But in the airports we continue to be frisked and parents made to drink the contents of feeding bottles, alongside the routine injunctions to remove all belts. Every time this happens I cannot help thinking of the trial of the Prussian generals who attempted to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944. To humiliate these former aristocrats as much as possible in court, the Nazis gave them outsized clothes without belts in order to enjoy watching them hold their trousers up throughout the proceedings…
No need to read scathing revolutionary diatribes to learn about the misdeeds of police and the justice system, Le Monde will do. Unease is rife, even among the liberal bourgeoisie. Why though is so little being done to defend “civil liberties”? Whereas the erosion of purchasing power or cuts in school staffing levels prompt large-scale demonstrations, no such mobilisations ever occur against CCTV, and even less against biometric passports or the card-cum-human tracking device called a “Navigo” used in the Paris metro.
It is a universal tendency to give absolute power to the police and to a justice system that is subservient to the government. Proof enough of this is furnished by the fact that Great Britain, the birthplace of bourgeois democracy, has practically abolished Habeas corpus which prescribes that a person has to be brought before a judge within three days of their arrest. Its introduction, in 1679, is widely considered to mark the beginning of the rule of law and of the freedom of the individual faced with the arbitrary workings of the state. Its abolition heralds the symbolic closure of a long historical phase. The drift towards a police state, however, seems even more developed in France than in any other “long-established democracy”. A quite unprecedented blurring of the boundaries between terrorism, collective violence, sabotage and illegality has been achieved. This criminalisation of all forms of dissent that are not strictly “legal” is a major feature of this day and age. Recent times have seen spray-can art and attempts to disrupt rail travel classed as “terrorism”. Teachers have appeared in court for voicing their objections to a “forcible repatriation” that they happened to witness on a plane. The facts are too well-known for me to repeat them here. “Democracy” is more than ever purely formal and limited to periodically choosing between representatives of the different inflections of the same management (and even this vestige of choice is rigged). All opposition to the politics of elected authority that goes beyond a petition or a letter to a local representative is by definition “antidemocratic”. In other words, anything that might be the least bit effective, and which was even permitted not so long ago, is now banned. Thus, in Italy, Berlusconi’s government has just placed drastic curbs on the right to strike in the public services and introduced huge fines for sit-ins on transport routes. Students who continue to protest have been described by one government minister as “guerrillas”.
In this conception of public life every single initiative lies with the state, institutions and authorities. What is more, this state monopoly on all forms of conflict is also encountered in everyday life. People now seek legal redress for the slightest insult or dispute. The struggle against “harassment” has done much to rob people of the ability to react directly against harm caused by others and fosters an increasing reliance on institutions for everything. Insult is no longer met with insult, or, at the most, with a punch, but by filling out a form at the police station. It is claimed, particularly on the left, that such measures address the protection of the most vulnerable, especially women, when in reality the effect is to make them weaker and more dependent than ever. In the process the most elementary forms of personal response are being wrenched from us.2
At the same time, it is no secret that in Iraq the Americans leave the dirty work for the most part to private companies—contractors—made up of mercenaries from all over the world. The number of private “security officers” is on the rise everywhere. In Italy, Berlusconi’s government, which bases its consensus largely on racism against immigrants who are wholly equated with criminality, has decreed the setting up of “citizen patrols” in order to provide a police presence everywhere. He has even permitted them to be privately funded, a move that could eventually lead to the formation of “death squads” as in Latin America, paid by local businessmen to have someone “clean up” their neighbourhood.
There is nothing contradictory, however, about the reinforcement of the state’s monopoly on violence and its privatisation. Violence is the core of the state and always has been. In times of crisis the state transforms itself back into what it first was historically: an armed gang. In many regions of the world militias are becoming “regular” police and police are becoming militias and armed gangs. Behind all of the rhetoric on the state and its civilising role there is in the last analysis always someone smashing in the skull of another human being or who at least could do so. The functions and functioning of the state have varied greatly throughout history but the exercise of violence is its common denominator. The state may or may not see to the wellbeing of its citizens; it may or may not provide education; it may or may not create and maintain infrastructure; it may or may not regulate economic life; it may overtly serve a small group, or a single individual, or, on the contrary, claim to serve the public good. None of this is essential to it. But a state without armed forces to defend it from external threats and to maintain “order” internally would not be a state. Hobbes and Carl Schmitt have been proved right on this point: the ability to administer death remains the linchpin of any state structure.
In the course of the last few centuries the state has claimed to be much more. It does not only want to be feared; it wants to be loved. On an ever-growing historical scale, it has gradually taken charge of a host of things that were previously the domain of other agents. But as soon as the crisis of the valorisation of capital began to cut off the state’s means of subsistence, it reversed course and ceased to intervene in an ever-increasing number of sectors. When there are not many nurses or teachers left in the public services, there will always be more policemen.3 In times of crisis, the state has nothing to offer its citizens other than “protection”, and it therefore has every reason to foster the insecurity that creates the demand for this protection. It can do without all its functions but not the maintenance of law and order. This was already the opinion of that prophet of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman: the state must leave everything to private initiative, except for security (it is true that his son David wished to go much further and privatise the justice system, although this proved to be a step too far even for hard-core liberals).
So the state is shedding the flashy rags in which it has been clad for more than a century. But this is no retrogression. The historical situation is new, for the state is establishing itself as the only master of the game. Over the last thirty years it has forged an arsenal of discipline and repression that is wholly without precedent, even in the time of so-called “totalitarian” states. Has anyone ever sat back and thought what would have happened if the Nazis and their allies had been able to use the same instruments of surveillance and repression as today’s democracies? Between CCTV and electronic tags, DNA samples and spying on all written and verbal communication, no Jew or Gypsy would have escaped, no resistance could have emerged, and everyone who managed to escape from a concentration camp would have been captured immediately. Today’s democratic state is far better equipped than the totalitarian states of yesteryear to harm, track down and eliminate anything that could oppose it. For the moment it would appear to have no wish to put these means to the same use as its predecessors, but the possibility of such future use has not been ruled out. An inescapable logic drives states on to do everything that can be done, even more so given that they are the managers of a technological system which obeys the same logic. This can be seen moreover every day in the use of repressive means: DNA sampling, originally used only for the most serious crimes, such as child murder, is now used widely for scooter theft or anti-GM activists and, in the last analysis, for any crime except the financial kind (do-gooders on the left will confine their protest to a demand for the criminalisation of this too in order to combat “privilege”). For the first time in history governments can reign supreme by wiping out any possibility of a different future from the one foreseen by its leaders. And what if their foresight is not as masterly as all that?
The very existence of an historical dialectic presupposes that the current state cannot be all-powerful, but that other forces must be able to emerge. Today, everything is done to prevent any possibility of a change in direction. And yet, a study of the street names in every French city will reveal those of Auguste Blanqui and François-Vincent Raspail, Armand Barbès and Louise Michel, Édouard Vaillant and Jules Vallès… all persecuted in their time, thrown in prison, deported, sentenced to death, and today all acknowledged even by the state itself (albeit reluctantly) as having right on their side against the state of their own time. By its own self-definition the French state is based on two or three revolutions and on the wartime Resistance movement; but if its predecessors had had the same weapons as today’s state, today’s state would not exist. If the state held to its own logic, it would have to give its adversaries a chance… Of course, the state will hardly be asked to abide by its own rhetoric. But were it to seek to strip its real or imagined enemies of the least capacity to act and react, fancy itself to be more perfect than all its predecessors, and appoint itself as the “end of history”, the consequences could prove to be disastrous. It has done everything to make open barbarity the only “alternative” to its reign. It truly prefers to be judged by its enemies rather than on its non-existent successes, just as Guy Debord pointed out in his Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988. Every “anti-terrorist” policy follows this principle and Algerian leaders have applied it more effectively than perhaps any other government.
So, the state declares that change is no longer possible, take it or leave it. It does this at an historical juncture—at the beginning of the real economic, environmental and energy crises into which we are currently sinking—when it will be harder and harder for its citizens to continue to go along with the way things are, however great the tendency toward submissiveness. Thus there is no point in justifying or condemning the spread of practices identified as “illegal” and the recourse to what the state defines as “violence”. One thing is easy enough to predict: it will be quite hard for the increasing number of future protest activities to remain within the parameters of “legality” designed precisely to neutralise them.4 In its ascendant phase the workers’ movement essentially placed itself—and was placed by its adversaries—outside the laws of bourgeois society. It knew very well that laws were not neutral but promulgated by its enemies. The rise of the “legalists” within the workers’ movement, especially in the late-nineteenth century, was considered to be treason by many of its members. It was only after the Second World War that the state managed to get accepted nearly everywhere as a regulatory body above the fray. At the same time as social struggles stopped aiming for the advent of a completely different society and limited themselves to talks over the distribution of value, “respect for the rules” had become customary on the left and marked the divide with “extremist” minorities.
But these illusions seem to be in the process of disappearing for good. There is no more margin for manoeuvre. At the same time as the state no longer has anything to redistribute, the incentive to stay within the law loses its effectiveness. Missing is the payoff, the cake in return for our forbearance. Thus a marked rise in the number of “illegal” acts, such as occupations, the abduction of company directors, disassembling, acts of destruction and the blocking of transport routes, can be foreseen if not yet actually witnessed.5
In short, acts of sabotage. It seems to be what the authorities fear above all. Sabotage is effective: if there is now a partial moratorium on the growing of genetically modified crops (GMO) in France, and if a large part of public opinion is against them, this is down to GM crop wreckers rather than to petitions. It is significant that over the last few years the French Minister of the Interior has marked out these wreckers for police persecution. Mass disobedience, continuous sabotage, uninterrupted resistance—even without physical violence—would be the worst-case scenario for defenders of law and order. They prefer overt violence and terrorism: that is their terrain. In issue 25 of the journal Lignes (spring 2008) I wrote that sabotage is a possible form of political action, citing the destruction of GM crops by night and the disabling of biometric devices. I would never have dreamed that I myself was running the very real risk of finding myself some months later in prison accused of inciting terrorism.
I am of course referring here to the “Tarnac affair” involving the arrest of eleven young people in November 2008, accused of sabotaging railway lines. Despite the obvious lack of evidence, Julien Coupat, who the police regarded as their “leader”, remained in prison for about six months. Moreover, the police presented them as the authors of the pamphlet The Coming Insurrection, published in 2007 by an “Invisible Committee” (which, beyond the whole police angle, has not even been denied by their supporters). Indignation towards the state, which left them to rot in prison to “set an example”, should not prevent us from being surprised at the naiveté of the authors of The Coming Insurrection. Paradoxically, they must have had a lot of trust in democracy to believe that they could, at an historical juncture like our own, use their writing to invoke sabotage of the railway network without eventually suffering the consequences. Where do they think they are living? In nineteenth-century England? Their tragedy is to have happened upon policemen and judges cynical enough to take their fantasies of violence literally, to act as though the authors are as dangerous as they fancy themselves to be, and to punish them for what they hoped to do… somewhat along the lines of what befell Antonio Negri in Italy in 1979. Moreover, the hype doled out by their supporters can sometimes grate. Is it any wonder that the police tried to cast Julien Coupat as a kind of Charles Manson given the following to be found in Tiqqun, the journal he edited: “In Germany it was the June 2nd movement, the Red Army Faction (RAF) or the Rote Zellen, and in the United States, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Diggers and the Manson Family, emblem of a ‘massive inner desertion’”.6 Or will he say that he was only clowning around and not to hold it against him? It is unlikely that Coupat is some kind of Charles Manson, but it is clear that his capacity for historical analysis is no better than that displayed in the course of a TV debate.
Apparently the state has failed to pull off its coup and everything suggests that the defendants will be cleared of all suspicion.7 Moreover, they have achieved some degree of fame and received a great deal of support, from their farmer neighbours as well as from members of parliament and leading articles in Le Monde. But the state may be said to have won out if the intention was to nip in the bud any attempt at a mass resort to sabotage, and if the aim was to trumpet “zero tolerance” for forms of resistance of the low-level warfare kind that could emerge in budding social movements. A real “terrorist” is not frightened by a few months in prison; the average frustrated citizen, tempted at one time or another to carry out a threat, thinking “It’s not a big deal, it’s not like I’m going to kill anyone”, might think twice about the prospect of months in prison. And if humiliation and anger drive someone to resume armed struggle, the state will again relish the company of its dearest enemy.
On the other hand, it is averse to leaderless and wayward social movements. In late 2008 the Minister of Education apparently abandoned his project to reform high-school education because of the growing and, above all, uncontrollable (by student organisations and leaders) violence of school demonstrations and also because of the example provided by the youth revolt in Greece which seems to have made a strong impression on the French government.8
It is nevertheless to be hoped that “violence” will not take the form described by the authors of The Coming Insurrection. They propagate, as did their predecessors in the radical-chic journal Tiqqun, the narrow concept that it is possible to redirect increasing barbarity into an emancipatory force. They are fascinated by the emerging chaos and seek to accentuate this barbarity,9 instead of placing their reliance on human qualities which might represent the only way out. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing “anarcho-communist” or Marxist about The Coming Insurrection. Rather, its pages smack far more of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt: the “decision”,10 the will without content that is equally at the heart of state politics. They simply want to set their will against that of the state, to be the strongest, to hit the table louder with their fist. Their legal debacle may well transform them into a myth among protestors. But even on a literary level their apology for gratuitous crime seems a bit clichéd, sixty years on from André Breton’s reconsideration of his ideas on the “simplest Surrealist act”.11
Faced with sabotage and other forms of “violence”, the question is always: who exercises it and to what end? The radical left has often confused violence, even when it is used for goals that are absolutely immanent to commodity logic such as demands for wage increases, with “radicality”. Sabotage can also be conflated with the violent assertion of particular interests and provoke equally violent reactions from the other side. Thus, farmers whose genetically modified crops have been targeted by wreckers, and who feel let down by the state, could turn to private security firms. Even though it may start out on a sound basis, the emancipatory character of an opposition movement is never guaranteed in the long run; it can always fall into a populism that “goes beyond the left-right divide”. The transformation of certain resistance movements against the state into mafias only fending for themselves (such as the FARC in Columbia) is highly significant. Moreover, once the “communes” referred to in The Coming Insurrection (and whose concept is somewhat reminiscent of the North American survivalists who are currently preparing for the apocalypse) realise that the rest of the population is not going down the same road, they will fight solely on their own account. It would not be the first case in recent history.
Rather than engaging in a critique of how capitalism functions—and therefore of value, money, labour, capital and competition—the present time is instead witnessing a “manager witch-hunt”, involving attacks on their residences, abduction12 and the storming of luxury restaurants. It is not necessarily “proletarians” who are most inclined towards violence but usually lower-middle and middle bourgeois: swindled investors, owners whose homes have been repossessed. Once their demands are satisfied they will again be pledging their allegiance to the dominant order, and will keep their properties under armed patrol to defend them against other “predators”. A popular revolt against a “development project” that will fell an entire forest is much less likely than one against a trader who has stolen perhaps one euro from every citizen. What if it was envy that prompted this hatred, the desire simply to be like them? We could have massacres of leaders and their lackeys as The Coming Insurrection wishes, thereby kick-starting the same system all over again after a bloodbath. A different hunt for a fraudster and his political accomplices, the Stavisky Affair in 1934, led to the storming of the French Parliament by the far right.
The Coming Insurrection informs us that “little more than hatred for the present society, and not considerations of class, race or locality, unites the range of characters to be found among those charged [with affray in the suburban hotspots]”.13 All well and good. However, the fact of hating society as it currently exists remains neither here nor there, it has to be seen whether the reasons for this hatred are good or bad. The Islamist is also driven by hatred of this society and fascist football supporters shout “All cops are bastards” in stadiums. Followers of Antonio Negri fancy that they see wholly imaginary alliances too between all the enemies of this world, from Palestinian suicide bombers to striking teachers, from the Paris ghetto kids to Bolivian miners; just so long as whatever it happens to be is kicking off… The feelings of rejection engendered by today’s world are often much closer to “abstract hatred” [haine désincarnée] (Baudrillard) and aimlessness than to traditional violence, and are hardly the stuff of which “political” strategy of whatever kind is made. And were civil war to break out for real, it is not difficult to imagine who would be the first to find themselves awakened in the middle of the night and unceremoniously shoved up against the wall, while women are raped and children shot.
It is quite possible to hate what exists in the name of something even worse. One can hate Sarkozy and prefer Mao or Pol Pot. The feeling of humiliation, the impression of having to submit with no power to react, is just as likely to lead to intelligent subversion as it is to school shootings or massacres in town councils. What filters through in the majority of present-day protests is above all the fear of being excluded from society and therefore the desire to remain a part of it. Generally speaking, what people are now seeking to escape from is no longer “adaptation” to a situation judged to be untenable, as in 1968 and thereafter, but marginalisation in a society that is shrinking away.
Admiring violence and hatred for their own sake will help the capitalist system direct the fury of its victims onto scapegoats. Many things have deteriorated, violence and illegality among them. It is very likely that the armour of “legality” will soon fall apart and there is no point in bemoaning its passing. But not all reasons for violence are good reasons. Perhaps violence should only be wielded by people without hatred and resentment. But is this possible?
1.In 2009 Amnesty International published a report entitled “France: Police above the law”, confirming all these impressions.
2.Of course, the demonisation of violence in everyday relationships only moves it elsewhere. The German sociologist Götz Eisenberg, who analysed school shootings in Germany, insists on the fact that their perpetrators do not come from “tough neighbourhoods” or working-class or underclass backgrounds, where a certain amount of violence is part of life, but from middle-class, “run-of-the-mill” families where any violent expression of tension is stigmatised. A taste for violent video games is thus widespread and can eventually lead to a desire to transpose them into real life. The public instinctively feels that these killings, called “amok”, reveal a hidden truth and that these killers—who generally commit suicide at the end of their “mission”—are expressing the death drive that in one way or another pervades all commodity subjects. See Götz Eisenberg, Amok—Kinder der Kälte: Über die Wurzeln von Wut und Hass [Amok—Children of the Cold: The Roots of Rage and Hatred] (Reinbek: Rowoht, 2000), and …damit mich kein Mensch mehr vergisst! warum Amok und Gewalt kein Zufall sind [That way, no one will forget me anymore! Why amok and violence are not random] (München: Pattloch, 2010).
3.Or better equipped policemen because the replacement of man by technology affects even law enforcement. Some representatives of the “left” will, however, always be on hand to request that the state invest in “community police” rather than in the high-tech variety, or who salute those police voicing their scepticism towards the government’s “war on crime”, and complain that they are not given the funds to do their job properly.
4.Issues of legitimacy, more than legality, will take on another dimension. The public may again see defendants who, instead of continuing to plead innocent before the law, will use court proceedings to mount a proud defence of their actions and accept the consequences. René Riesel gave us such an example in the trial which followed his participation in the destruction of genetically modified crops, and during his subsequent imprisonment. See René Riesel, Aveux complets des véritables mobiles du crime commis au CIRAD le 5 juin 1999 suivis de divers documents relatifs au procès de Montpellier [Full disclosure of the real motives for the crime committed at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development on 5 June 1999, followed by various documents relating to the Montpellier trial] (Paris, Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances, 2001). Throughout history, time spent in and out of prison has been viewed with equanimity by most revolutionaries.
5.Politicians like Olivier Besancenot, who, after the arrests of the “Tarnac 11” for the alleged sabotage of a TGV line, claimed straightaway that no activist in his party would ever do anything like that, may well find themselves swiftly outflanked by their “rank and file”. Such is the historical fate of second-rate Leninists.
6.“Parti imaginaire et mouvement ouvrier” [Imaginary Party and Workers’ Movement], Tiqqun, no. 2 (2001), p. 241.
7.It is particularly worth noting the historical and political acumen of the current Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, who observed, forty years after 1968, that the French Communist Party is no longer attracting dissenters, thereby confirming the role that the party had in the Grenelle agreements in containing social unrest.
8.“The ‘Greek syndrome’ is no doubt largely responsible for Xavier Darcos’ recent about-turn on high-school reform. After consultation and agreement with the President, the Minister for Education decided to defer the reforms for a year, thereby completing a U-turn that was as spectacular as it was unexpected. […] Hence all the talk of a ‘Greek syndrome’. In other circumstances, i.e. leaving the economic crisis which again threatens the employability of young people, the tense situation in the suburban trouble spots which are ready to erupt at the merest hint of police intervention, and the threat of imminent youth revolt represented by Greece out of the equation, it is likely that the Minister for Education would not have given in so easily. A heated debate on the subject between the government and the Élysée Palace resulted in victory for the most cautious elements who sensed such a degree of tension that steps needed to be taken to cool things down. It was not so much the scale of the fortnight-old high school student movement that worried the government as the fact that it was largely spontaneous, unruly and sometimes violent.” Françoise Fressoz, “Réforme du lycée: un récul symbolique” [High-School Reform: A Symbolic Retreat], Le Monde, 16 December 2008.
9.“The normal functioning of the world usually serves to hide our state of truly catastrophic dispossession. What is called ‘catastrophe’ is no more than the forced suspension of this state, one of those rare moments when we regain some sort of presence in the world. Let the petroleum reserves run out earlier than expected; let the international flows that make the country tick be disrupted, roll on massive social breakdown, a ‘return to primitive savagery,’ ‘planetary threat,’ and the ‘end of civilisation!’ Either way, any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis management scenarios they envision.” This translation is an amended version of the original translation; see The Coming Insurrection: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/.
10.“It’s a fact, and it must be translated into a decision. Facts can be conjured away, but decision is political. To decide on the death of civilisation, then to work out how it will happen: only decision will rid us of the corpse.” Ibid.
11.In an interview in 1948, reproduced in Entretiens in 1952 (Gallimard). [Translator’s note: André Breton once famously stated: “The simplest Surrealist act is to go down into the street, revolver in hand, and shoot randomly as much as possible into the crowd.”]
12.Which seem not to be that infrequent but which go largely unreported in the copycat-averse media and which have not yet reached South Korean levels, where bosses are thrown from the tenth storey of a building or doused in petrol.
13.The Coming Insurrection, op. cit.