views from montparnasse

Rule of what law?

2011-05-03T15:37:00.006-04:00

Does it matter that US special forces shot Bin Laden dead rather than arresting him and bringing him back to stand trial? I see very little evidence that this issue is on anyone's mind--but my own. And why should it matter? He was guilty, wasn't he? He got what he deserved ...

But I persist in thinking that what was needed was not Bin Laden's dead body, thrown into the sea, but a restoration of lawful process. That for me was what was so very disturbing about the World Trade Center attack, not the affront to our national pride, not even the horrific deaths themselves, but the sense that violence had invaded the civic space, encroached on the everyday lives of civilians on their way to work, marked the most ordinary of times with the threat of sudden death. And that in turn was the consequence we inflicted first on the Afghanis, then the Iraqis, and now once again the Afghanis: death from the air, drone attacks, bombs in marketplaces, sudden sectarian assault, weddings turned into holocausts, houses blown to pieces. Toppling governments and setting up clumsy occupations, we turned these countries into lawless, randomly violent zones where the 9/11 experience has lasted intermittently for nearly a decade.

Wouldn't the appropriate therapy be a restoration of due process, a return to the norms of civil procedure? Bin Laden, this notorious criminal, this fomenter of violence, would it not have been a salutary exercise to do what civilized societies do? To "bring him to justice," not in the derisory sense in which that phrase is being tossed around by President Obama and the news media to describe an act of vigilantism, of extrajudicial murder, but to bring him to what we used to mean by "justice," the careful procedural kind prescribed by our Bill of Rights and honed over centuries of careful jurisprudence. To present the evidence of his crimes in open court, to hear his defense, and judge him on the facts. To carry out a lawful sentence. Wouldn't this have established some clearer sense of what those values are for which we are so prone to fight? Wouldn't this have been a way to begin healing the raw sores of violence and war we--not Bin Laden, not the Taliban, but WE, the United States of America--have brought to this devastated region?

I listened just now to a press conference in which John Brennan of our Homeland Security department described the events of Sunday's raid. In response to a reporter's question he was quick to say that we were ready to bring Bin Laden back alive. But we knew it was unlikely he would let that happen, Brennan went on, and sure enough, he engaged our troops in a firefight, and was shot dead. But the reporters persisted. Firefight? Did Bin Laden fire on our troops? Brennan was not so sure. Did he actually have a weapon in his hand? Here the punctilious Brennan seemed to lose the thread of his story altogether, and wandered into a long digression about what sort of individual Bin Laden was, hiding in a million dollar mansion, using women as human shields (?!), sending others to risk their lives ... Now the US government has recanted its story: no women used as human shields, no firefight, Bin Laden was unarmed. Our readiness to capture him alive was just a big lie. What happened was an execution, extrajudicial murder, a crime. But still our leaders and spokespersons repeat endlessly how "justice" was done, as if that word, liberally applied in place of the actual procedures of justice, can return us to the standards of lawfulness and order that we have cast aside.

I found it reprehensible ten years ago, when Muslims chanted their support of the September 11 attacks. The crowds cheering Bin Laden's death outside the White House, at Ground Zero, here in Kenmore Square, struck me the same way. We are a brutal, bullying nation, an empire subject to no one's rules, careless of the damage we inflict. The brutal facts of Bin Laden's demise are not the most important part of this dispiriting story, but they are another step in our long descent from principle, along with the public's indifference to such questions, and the visible bloodlust that stands in its stead. U--S--A, the flag-wavers were chanting, but what does that proud name stand for any more?

Future tensions

2011-04-16T15:37:00.004-04:00

Listening to Valérie Pécresse, France's Minister of Higher Education and Research, speak at Harvard the other day, I had the feeling that, like Lincoln Steffens visiting the USSR in 1921, I had seen the future. (Whether it works is a longer question.) Mme. Pécresse is at any rate a powerful spokesperson for this particular vision of post-modernity, articulate and witty (in English) and utterly sure of herself. French higher education in her view is barely distinguishable from research; in 90 minutes of remarks, both prepared and extemporaneous, she mentioned the humanities and social sciences only when directly questioned about them. Otherwise the intention behind her ambitious plan to consolidate universities and grandes écoles into larger research institutions on the Anglo-American model is entirely to promote France's global position in the sciences. And not just the sciences, but the applied version, what she called innovative science, the patent-generating, job-producing, technologies-of-the-future sort of science practiced most famously at MIT--her next port of call after Harvard. Behind her determination to transform the idiosyncratic, tradition-encrusted French system of research is the hope that global private industry will find France's institutions compatible as partners (as Intel and several others have recently done). To this end her ministry is pushing doctoral candidates into research roles with private companies. When her 'reforms' are complete, France's public, nationally peculiar institutions will be adjuncts to the global corporate system for which she and her boss, M. le Président, are such insistent shills.

In a sense there is nothing very surprising about all this. Johns Hopkins University was beginning to outsource its physics department to the profit sector when I was there 30 years ago. The 8-acre hole in the ground I look at from my back window, which was to be (and may still become) Harvard's new science complex, was understood to be a venture in applied inter-disciplinary science. Its guiding light, Larry Summers, sees the public/private distinction as blurry at best, and the economics of patent development and corporate partnerships inspired his pharaonic investments. With the collapse of Summers' financing scheme the project is likely to bring the university into still deeper partnership with private capital. So in a real sense Pécresse is simply, as she says, trying to bring France's university research complex up to the existing global standard.

What that means, alas, is the death knell of humanistic education as we have known it for the past half-millenium. Tomorrow's educated elite will be homines economici, trained more than educated, prepared to execute technical functions rather than to reflect on less immediate questions. It is a sober vision, whose only rationale is quantified cost benefit. This vision is not Pécresse's invention, but it is the legacy she intends to leave as minister.

As I have just read Jean-Luc Mélenchon's manifesto, Qu'ils s'en aillent tous, I find myself contrasting Pécresse's futurism with the rather quainter one offered by JLM, in every way its polar opposite. For Mélenchon's France is one that would retain its particularities. The globalizing, American influence is at the top of the list of entities he wants to "just go away." Crude economism can go too. Local cooperatives, not global conglomerates, are the productive institutions of choice, and French is the language of France's future (unlike Pécresse, who interestingly suggested that English, in her educational system, is not a foreign language but a basic tool all French children must acquire). To be clear: Mélenchon's is not the nostalgic France of Marine Le Pen (despite cynical attempts to amalgamate the two). His bedrock citizenry is a diverse population, enriched by immigration, but united in the secular fraternity of citizen power. His economy reduces growing inequalities by limiting the profits allotted to shareholders, capping the salaries of executives, and protecting the social acquisitions of working people. In many ways it is a France frozen in the modest prosperity of the trente glorieuses. And it would preserve the cultural values of the existing educational system, keeping a place for the inefficiencies of humanistic study.

Mélenchon's is the future France in which I personally would choose to live. But Pécresse's is the one that is taking shape even now, and in which the next generation will have to find its way. A bigger world, with greater material rewards for those who excel, but a restricted view of what makes a life--that is the orientation she is bringing to higher education.

When you call Europe on the phone ... a busy signal?

2011-03-23T09:23:00.005-04:00

Scene: President Obama, en route from Chile to San Salvador on his first imperial tour of Latin America, uses the time on Air Force One to bring order to the squabbling NATO allies. Prime Minister Erdogan must first be cajoled: he can claim all he wants to his party faithful that Turkey will not be shooting at Muslims in Libya, but he mustn't block NATO's command-and-control role there. Then Cameron and Sarkozy must be placated: NATO will take a lead role (Cameron), but so will an independent authority (Sarkozy). Now if Italy doesn't get cold feet, if Norway can be reassured and Chancellor Merkel (looking at her party's declining poll numbers) doesn't make a fuss, and a couple of Arab states can be brought on board, the US can make good on its claim to play a secondary role. But meanwhile, no in-flight basketball games for the President, as he carries out his functions as Leader of the Free World.

One of my main interests in pursuing this blog is to see whether Europe, particularly the 'Old Europe' with its traditions of social democracy and post-colonial contrition, can play a significant and countervailing role on the world-stage of the 21st century. As the world system evolves from a single superpower to a multilateral system embodied in the G-7 or -8 or -20--or is it really a G-2, as China steps firmly into every power vacuum?--I, like many others, have held out hope that the European civilization, somewhat world-weary and battle-scarred, could gather its forces and bring into world affairs a degree of circumspection and civility that seemed so wanting in the America of George W. Bush and our yahoo Congress. I still think the EU has that potential.

But right now, in the face of an urgent situation in Libya and throughout the Arab world that demands clarity of purpose and deft diplomatic and military discipline, Europe seems more than ever to be looking over its shoulder for its American big brother to take charge. Who else could make those calls to order? Lady Ashton? 'President' van Rompuy? The EU's exclusion of Turkey is of course an initial difficulty, but it hardly stops there. The particularist--and nakedly political--interests of politician-statesmen like Sarkozy and Merkel, both looking at unfavorable polls, present another. And then the divergent traditions each works within: Cameron must bring his policies back to Parliament where he is primus inter pares, while Sarkozy is half-expected to act like General de Gaulle, if not Napoleon. Germany isn't sure whether it is still a pacifist nation, in rehabilitation, or one of the new world-system's Great Powers. Belgium, the Netherlands, and others to varying degrees are held hostage to nationalist, xenophobic parties whose world-view has nothing in common with the global perspective I would hope for in this virtual Europe of my dreams. And let's not talk about Italy's leadership ...

I salute for the moment the efforts of Obama and Clinton to implement the Pax Americana, with all its bellicose trappings, along lines of UN sponsorship, multi-lateral responsibility, and diplomatic consensus. In some ways an outlier like Gadhafi makes an easier test case for such an initiative than more complex test-cases like Afghanistan or Iraq. But despite the eager volunteerism of Sarkozy and Cameron, 'Europe' is in no way ready to be a co-equal partner in this venture, and I have to ask: if not now, when?

France's Brave New Political World

2011-03-22T10:08:00.007-04:00

The political scene in France this morning is a shambles. Polls that suggested the emergence of the National Front as a major player have been strongly confirmed by Sunday's local elections, and the ambivalence of Sarko's UMP is there for everyone to see: wanting the FN's voters, the UMP managed to promote the its ideas to the point where significant numbers of voters are leaving the UMP for the FN, in effect asking, Why not go for the real thing? This becomes easier to consider as Marine Le Pen proves so much more canny than her father in banishing the more offensive parts of his message while sending a clear signal that hers is still a France for 'the French' (defined along the narrowest lines of race, religion, origin) and her movement a vindication of the white, Christian, and chauvinist identities of another age.

In response the UMP and the French Right in general still can't decide where the lines of respectability ('republican' is the term of choice) are to be drawn. This leaves considerable confusion as to whether the Right intends to team up with the Socialists against the FN, or leave open by default (i.e., abstention in the second round) an ambiguous space in which an unstated alliance with the FN can continue to form.

This dilemma is oddly mirrored on the Left by the success of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Front de Gauche. Though given little attention in the MSM, consumed as it is with the marquee drama of Le Pen and her vague bleu Marine, JLM's success on Sunday is no less impressive. The FdG, barely 2 years old, stands at something more than 10%, with candidates in play for more than 200 local seats; it is, as its leaders proclaim, the clear second force on the Left, the fourth largest force nationally--and though they aren't saying so right now, a bloc without which the Left may never claim the national presidency it so desperately covets.

In yesterday's press conference the FdG's leadership strongly urged an alliance with other Left forces--the Socialists, but also Europe Ecology/the Greens--in order to exclude the FN as widely as possible from winning seats in next Sunday's second round. In the longer run, though, will the FdG be able to support a PS whose candidate is none other than the director of the IMF, one of the most visible leaders of the global capitalist system the FdG so deeply deplores? Conversely, can the PS hope to capitalize on its situation--Sarko's unpopularity, the enduring economic crisis, the threat of the FN--without running a centrist like M. Strauss-Kahn? While the Right's dilemma is all over the front pages today, the quiet triangulation between Left, Far Left, and Center (and also between socialists, communists, and ecologists) is at least as thorny.

Trying to untangle this knot I find myself turning to an unlikely source, Valérie Pécresse, a hack politician on the Right and a junior minister. With reference to the UMP/PS/FN dilemma, Mme. Pécresse makes a distinction between "differences of ideas" (that divide UMP and PS, républicains all) and "differences of values" that make an unbridgeable gulf between the UMP and the FN. Wherever this leaves the Right, its logic applies similarly to the Left. For some JLM and the FdG are symmetrical with the FN--suspiciously descended from totalitarian Communism, republican by convenience but with values fundamentally incompatible with the PS. Decades of PCF participation in the 'republican' rituals of governance may have tempered this criticism, but they haven't put it to rest.

What I hear JLM and the FdG saying today, though, and in the campaign to come, is that they represent a challenge to Center-left Socialists at the level of ideas but not of 'values.' Far from contesting the basic values of republicanism, they intend to revitalize the PS and the Republic by addressing, within its institutional framework, the dissatisfactions and the despair that are driving voters outside that republican framework and into the waiting arms of Mme. Le Pen. While it is erroneous (as polling data shows) to claim that the FN's new strength is coming from apostate voters on the Left, it is probably true that those voters in play are demographically close to the PCF's traditional base. Can JLM reach them and bring them into an enlarged alliance within a Left that really challenges current assumptions (and cannot be dismissed with Le Pen's sardonic term 'UMPS')? Are his 'values' not compatible with those of the PS to which he belonged for nearly all of his long career? The Left has a year to negotiate these difficult waters, but after Sunday it will no longer be useful or possible to ignore the existence of a well-formed bloc to the left of the PS's center of gravity.

President Rising

2011-03-08T22:26:00.005-05:00

Leading economic theorists converged on the IMF headquarters in Washington today for a summit conference on macroeconomic policy. I gave myself the treat of watching the IMF's director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, open the proceedings with a 20 minute address, in charmingly accented and idiomatic English, in which he welcomed his academic colleagues, reviewed the themes of the day's work, and promised to attend the sessions. It was a remarkable performance from this remarkable person, in whom the strands of politician, economist, and banker come together with such force. Only a few years ago DSK, between ministerial posts, was teaching economics at Sciences Po. In another year he may be Président de la République ... or not. As he exhorted his guests to help set the new, post-crisis course for global capitalism, in which his IMF will take a leading part, I had to wonder (as I suppose he himself does) whether that other job, if he wins it, would be a vertical promotion, a lateral one, or no promotion at all.

Clearly on display in this room full of brainpower, in the roster of topics and supporting papers, and in the host institution at large, is the confidence of a world system that believes it knows where it is going. Conference convener Olivier Blanchard, describing the task at hand, makes it seem so clear: certain assumptions need to be examined, certain adjustments made to monetary and fiscal regulation, and then the global system can resume its work, spreading growth, consolidating markets, enlarging the precincts and advancing the interests of capital. It is a powerful, possibly all-powerful system, and DSK sits at its nexus.

Of course like so many others my interest in DSK is more specific: I want to know if he is going to launch a presidential campaign, and if so when, and with what success. What was merely a handicapper's curiosity until last Saturday has turned into something much more urgent: the fate of the Republic, no less. For with Sarkozy's dismal performance and the meteoric ascent of Marine Le Pen in the polls, all eyes are turning to DSK as the one sure trump card that will keep the National Front out of the Elysée Palace.

But I must say, watching DSK preside over the IMF, he seems oddly juxtaposed, with all due respect, to Marine Le Pen. Not that I mean to underestimate her, and anyone who does would be a fool. She is a fierce debater, a quick study, and her strategic instincts thus far display a discipline quite unlike her father's. And yet what she stands for, compared to DSK and the IMF, seems so small, so petty , so local. Her current mission to Lampedusa, presumably to tell the Tunisian and Libyan refugees to get back on their boats and go home, is a case in point: in the face of a wrenching political and humanitarian crisis that has galvanized the world's attention, her response is to pull up the gangplank and let history take its course somewhere else. Hers is a folkloric France, homogeneous and pure, old-fashioned in its values and without global ambitions. One can understand the appeal of such a world to a populace battered by unemployment, bewildered by demographic and cultural change, chronically anxious about the destination of a world too large to be comprehended. If she can succeed in painting her more familiar vision in vivid colors for the French voters, is it so difficult to imagine them preferring it to the more abstract, cosmopolitan, polyglot realities so perfectly embodied in DSK?

Well sure, the smart money still favors DSK, or even Sarko, to this upstart frontrunner-of-the-moment. My own admittedly remote hope is for a third alternative that has hardly shown its outlines as yet. It would question the viability of that capitalist world system, for all its power, and recall how close it brought us to the brink of collapse just two years ago. It would question whether the barely visible but no less imposing environmental catastrophe can be addressed by a system whose only rationale and modus operandi is perpetual growth. It would understand that ours is, like it or not, a world system, but would postulate a world system grounded in solidarity, not competition, exploitation, profit. It would take on the challenge of rising inequality, within the developed economies and between the less developed ones, and redistribute the vast accumulations of wealth that are the source of such instability. Such a nascent vision will be represented, however imperfectly, in the French presidential election, whether by Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Olivier Besancenot or both. It will be ridiculed and marginalized in the mainstream press, as indeed it already has been. It may never be forced to specify its ideas programmatically, which is too bad because they need the refinement that comes from public debate. That debate will most likely follow the worn path of DSK's (or Sarko's) old ideas, vs. MLP's utterly anachronistic ones. But a new synthesis of global reach with local management, in a framework no longer determined by capital's demands for growth and profit, will try to articulate itself in this coming campaign. It would be everyone's loss if the more flamboyant thematics of today's medio-political stars render it invisible.

The EU's Libyan failure

2011-02-27T11:37:00.003-05:00

Through all the storm and stress that has marked the recent history of the European Union--voters in France and the Netherlands opposed to its voluminous constitution, then outright rejection by the Irish, now the endless controversies over how to manage a common currency--the Union has remained for many an article of faith. There must be an EU, they intone, because the world cannot dispense with the universal values embodied in the war-weary, post-colonial, globally aware, democratically committed, in short, the enlightened vision of Old Europe.

If such indeed is the ideological ballast required to keep the EU and its EMU afloat through the perilous seas of ongoing financial crisis and economic contraction, it would make all the more serious, as Le Monde's editors suggest in yesterday's edition, Europe's failure to flourish its values in the face of Libya's humanitarian disaster. But alas, the divisive, sauve qui peut side of the European mentality is what heaves into view at moments like this. Will the EU call for Gadhafi's resignation and removal? No, because two member-states, Italy and Malta, are afraid of precipitating a refugee crisis. And in a sense they are right: apparently, as I learn, the Treaty of Dublin is the vehicle by which other EU countries decline to share the refugee burden with fellow member-states unlucky enough to be the point of landfall. If those Libyans make it to Lampedusa, they're yours forever, Signor Berlusconi, and every article of the Declaration of Human Rights is yours to share with them. Don't bother to call Brussels--where Lady Ashton is busy anyhow making idle pronouncements in the absence of any clear diplomatic agenda.

Part of what is so tawdry in this scenario is the clear fact that Libya, for all the difficulties posed by its 42 years of tribal rule, is Europe's neighbor and Europe's problem. It was only yesterday that all the heads of government, from Tony Blair to Sarko to Merkel, were lining up for photo ops--and oil contracts-- with the Guide of the Revolution. And wasn't Libya supposed to be a mainstay of the Mediterranean Union?

Other voices, sometimes dismissed as demagogic or anachronistic, have questioned whether the EU idea is anything more than window dressing for an international business cartel whose mission is continued exploitation of less developed economies. I personally would like to believe in a better EU, whose espoused values are close to my own. But honestly, if the sight of a dictator shooting down his own people in the streets of the capital isn't enough to excite the EU's humane reflexes, one has to wonder what the use is of all that high-minded rhetoric.

A Star (and Crescent) Is Born?

2011-02-20T13:52:00.007-05:00

Has la diversité opened a new chapter in French politics?

Ilham Moussaïd became a cause célèbre a year ago when she appeared as an NPA candidate in the French regional elections wearing a head scarf. As I noted a few months ago ("Au Revoir, Ilham," 12/2/10), she and some colleagues eventually left the NPA when it appeared the party was in no hurry to resolve its position regarding women, head scarves, cultural identity, and their relationship to republican politics.

Now the social service organization she helped found to address issues in the immigrant quartiers of Avignon has declared its intention to form a political party, with Moussaïd as its candidate, in this spring's local or cantonale elections.
Does she have a chance? As self-acknowledged novices she and her co-workers are modest in their immediate goals. But she proved herself a formidable presence at the microphone, under fire, during all the controversy surrounding her previous candidacy. She has a clear understanding of her own values--solidarity, equality, opportunity, cultural diversity--and the insurmountable obstacle that is the capitalist system. Within the limitations of a new, modestly funded party she will be a credible candidate.

But the stakes could grow much higher. France's 2nd-generation immigrants, citizens all, are a numerous bunch, and unlike previous smaller cohorts, they may be a lot less eager to shed their particularist identities in order to amalgamate with the larger citizenry, as republican tradition would require. Ever since the 2005 riots across the immigrant districts (if not sooner) it has seemed possible, if not inevitable, that French political establishment would have to reconsider its relationship to the ethnic identity politics we take for granted in the US. No, not in France, many say from all sides of the political spectrum, or perhaps not yet. But Ilham Moussaïd is a determined young woman, not willing to be told "no," or "not yet." Others may follow her example. The winds of change that are blowing through Tunis and Cairo, and even Tripoli and Rabat, may reach Bobigny or Clichy-sous-bois or the quartiers of Avignon. If they do, Ilham Moussaïd and other young leaders like her will be there, ready .

Islamic democracy: inexorable fact or oxymoron?

2011-02-11T23:58:00.003-05:00

Amid today's cataclysmic events in Cairo, I felt the thrill of the new medias as the NY Times and other papers brought me minute-by-minute updates in the form of blog posts and tweets, video feeds and live streaming, along with regularly updated commentaries by a team of seasoned correspondents. When the dust had cleared I was left with a sense of drama, lots of subjective accounts of individual heroics, and a shared feeling for the collective wave of emotion that stretched from hope to outrage to jubilation as the day unfolded. Only in turning to Le Monde, though, did I find analysis that measured up to the seriousness of the events, in the form of a pair of articles: one by neo-conservative Islamophobe Hirsi Ali, the other by Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan. Together their remarks placed the events in an intellectual framework that made clearer the world-historical stakes of today's revolutionary events.

Hirsi Ali, a Somalian refugee whose extraordinary life's journey has brought her to the American Enterprise Institute by way of a term in the Dutch parliament, is by her own account a recovering Muslim. She won sanctuary in the Netherlands after suffering genital mutilation and forced marriage (she later lost her resident permit when certain details of her story proved false), and during her brief, controversial public career in Holland she proved equally tenacious in support of Muslim immigrant women and in opposition to the patriarchal strictures of Islam. She has suffered much at the hands of the Islamic authority, and her piece in Le Monde draws on her tribulations. "When I see images of the masses in Cairo," she writes, she is inescapably reminded of the "collective prayer" of her early years. The "mosque" is for her the "key to understanding" the Egyptian uprising; in the Islamic world all political roads lead to Islamism. "Conspiracy, manipulation, intrigue, and corruption": these are the stock in trade of any Muslim politics--and have been for 1400 years! Only by building intermediate structures of civil society can the Egyptians, or any other Muslim people, hope to escape the endless cycle by which today's liberators become tomorrow's despots.

It is perhaps clear from this grim assessment why Hirsi Ali is conservative Washington's favorite ex-Muslim. She articulates with some authenticity the old thesis that Arab societies are incapable of democracy by virtue of their cultural traditions. It is only a short step--though she doesn't take it--from her analysis to the view widely expressed in Israel and Washington that it would have been prudent for the Obamists to hold onto Mubarak for as long as they could. These Arab masses need guidance--"leadership," she calls it--from cooler heads not mesmerized by the call to prayer. Her logic leads back to de facto restoration of the old colonial protectorates, while a modern civil society takes the time to grow out of its old habits of Muslim subordination.

While Hirsi Ali has thus internalized the subaltern position of cultural inferiority, Tariq Ramadan reverses the argument, and lays Egypt's problems squarely at the feet of the old imperial powers. Ramadan, of Egyptian origin, was born in Geneva, also to refugees: his grandfather was in fact a founder of the much reviled Muslim Brotherhood. Long a proponent

of a modernized Islam compatible--but not identical--with Western values, Ramadan teaches at Oxford, after the Bush administration refused to allow him to enter the US to take up a professorship at Notre Dame. Seen as an apologist for certain objectionable traits of Islam--in a debate with candidate Sarkozy Ramadan argued that Sharia law might best be discussed, not summarily rejected--Ramadan is cast, in the US at least, as the bad Muslim opposite Hirsi Ali's good one. No accident, then, that his opinion piece appeared in Le Monde rather than the NY Times.

From his position as insider/outsider to the Western intellectual tradition, Ramadan is able to speak refreshingly past the ideological truisms that mystify so much commentary about the Egyptian situation. In the face of pious claims of support for 'democracy' emanating from North America and Europe Ramadan cites their long, sad history of sustaining the most obdurate forms of authoritarianism throughout the Muslim world. Even the most extreme forms of Islamism, he notes, placed in the proper geo-strategic light have won the endorsement of these self-proclaimed advocates for 'democracy.' Be wary, he counsels us citizens of the Western democracies, and avoid the naiveté that would accept our governments' professions of concern for those democratic values we have sold down the river in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, in Mubarak's Egypt and countless other situations of expediency and national interest.

So while Hirsi Ali offers a sober reminder of how much needs to be done--for she is surely right that civil society must be shored up if not invented in Egypt and throughout the Islamic world--Ramadan offers some useful caveats to the received and somewhat paternalistic truisms circulating in Western punditry just now. Democracy, if it comes to Egypt, will be won by the Egyptian people despite our national interests and diplomatic initiatives, and we would be foolishly naive to think otherwise. Obama may to his credit play a less heavy-handed, more supportive role than some of his predecessors--or then again he may not. But already the Egyptians in the street have disproved the most damning of Hirsi Ali's parroted disclaimers, and the visionary optimism of Ramadan, inconceivable only months ago, has shed its wishful character. On to the new era!

Tunisia, viewed from the left

2011-02-05T13:32:00.004-05:00

Olivier Besancenot is just back from Tunisia, and he's excited about what he saw there. It was his first trip: unlike foreign minister Alliot-Marie, he doesn't spend his vacations jetting around there with rich friends. He doesn't even own a vacation condo, like Socialist Party honcho Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Instead, as he reports to the NPA membership in this video, he spent his time hanging around on street corners, where as he notes, political discussions sprang up spontaneously at all hours. "One or two people start talking, then more, soon 40 or 50 people are there discussing politics--a general assembly on every corner." In a rare personal moment, OB notes that, although a revolutionary since the age of 14 or 15, this was his first chance to participate in an actual revolution, and the atmosphere obviously suits him.

What insight has he brought back? Unlike most commentators, he is not so interested in the sectarian questions. Rather, this uprising, along with the one in Egypt and the possibility of others, points to a new stage of the globalized economy, the moment when people start to fight back against the precariousness and inequality globalization has brought them. He sees a revolutionary wave forming in the wake of the global crisis, a wave that has by no means crested. Is this an accurate assessment? I'd say it's too soon to tell, but an interesting counterweight nonetheless to the mainstream commentary, which chooses to localize these events as a phenomenon of the 'Arab street.'

Less consciously, though, OB's simple joy to be part of the popular discourse on the streets of Tunis may say something more substantial about the sort of revolution he isn't shy about calling for in France. In that revolutionized world, we will all be outside on street corners, talking about politics with our neighbors. We will all be as absorbed in public questions as the handful of party activists are today. We will care about process and policy and all the arcana that disappear, in our sub-revolutionary worlds, into the black box of public administration. This is the utopian vision of the NPA, the new, wholly participatory democratic socialism that would have almost nothing in common with the closed process of yesterday's politbüros. Could such a truly engaged populace be sustainable in a new social order? Perhaps not, but it speaks to the fundamentally democratic impulse in Besancenot--so often maligned as a party centralist, an authoritarian, a would-be commissar--that what he likes, what moves him, is the fact of masses of people taking their destiny into their hands. Some find that threatening, but I join him in feeling the exhilaration.

Tiger President?

2011-01-30T15:14:00.003-05:00

It may be mere coincidence but the central tenet of President Obama's State of the Union address last week--we must compete in the global marketplace!--found an uncanny echo in the viral controversy surrounding Amy Chua's bestselling Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Not that Mr. No-Drama resembled in tone the psychopathic Ms. Chua, or that his eminently sensible prescriptions verged as hers do into the abusive or deranged. And yet, as Elizabeth Kolbert cannily observes in her New Yorker review of Chua's screed, all the to-do about Tiger Mothering may well stem from displaced anxiety about America's declining global fortunes. And if the success of Chua's draconian methods rests on the slender shoulders of her two young daughters, America's future, our President tells us, depends on the competitive abilities of our national offspring.

But does it?

Surrounded by his honor guard of corporate advisors, Obama clearly pitched his message

to a business-minded audience for whom merit-based reward is a pleasing message. Likewise Chua's bizarre ideas escaped into the internet via her op-ed abstract in the Wall Street Journal. Both play on the idea that good things come to those who work hardest--we earned that million-dollar bonus, that acceptance to Harvard. We paid the price. While Chua's social model is a steep-sided pyramid, with herself and her daughters at the apex, so is Obama's a thinly disguised brief for widening social inequality.

But what if the good society rests on other values? What if the well-being or quality of life indexes that a few economists are trying to craft would show that the engine that drives us toward the highest levels of satisfaction, personal and collective, has more to do with solidarity, belief in the collective enterprise, concern for the least advantaged, and less to do with the cultivation of exceptionally talented, 'creative' (and highly paid) individuals? While it is easy to measure the productive effects of creative entrepreneurs like Gates or Jobs, who can measure the demoralizing effects of gigantic Wall Street bonuses? Highly visible, unmerited earnings by the 'winners' in our Tiger economy are profoundly corrosive of public ethics, and the widespread demoralization that results is massively unproductive--just visit any standard workplace, where the talk turns more often than not to ways to game the retirement system in one's favor.

All of which is not an argument against teaching math more effectively in our schools, but it might question the use of competitive exams as a measure of our educational successes. Rather than worrying that those children in Shanghai-or Estonia!--will eat our children's lunches, we should encourage them to think collaboratively about how nutritious lunches might be afforded to children everywhere. I don't expect that sentiment would earn the respect of the crazed Ms. Chua, but I had hoped to hear something more like it from Mr. Hope.

Toward a durable, peaceful people's struggle ...

2011-01-02T22:51:00.006-05:00

Back in the heady days of October, when the French high school students were joining older students and workers in the streets and a wave of protest was spreading across most of western Europe, a tract appeared, calling for "une guérilla sociale durable et pacifique." Now that wave of protest has evaporated like the bubbles in last night's champagne--just as the tract's author, a sociologist and activist named Philippe Corcuff, had predicted. In fact the whole premise of his manifesto was that the movement, rather than grow into the general strike that some were calling for, would dissipate as the Toussaint vacation intervened and the pension reform inevitably became law.

But although the issue of France's retirement age is settled for the moment, and the students are back in school, the larger questions that engaged protestors not just in France but in London and Athens, Barcelona, Dublin, Lisbon, and everywhere else where austerity policies are in the works, those questions are still very much with us. Here in the US as well, as a retrograde Congress takes office tomorrow, the politics of social regression are occupying center stage. In that context it was interesting to see that Corcuff renewed his call in an interview published just last week, long after all the chants and marches had faded away.

What is this "peaceful guerilla" that Corcuff proposes in lieu of a general strike? It is not one movement but many, protean, serial but persistent. It implies a climate of resistance that would maintain the momentum of the mass marches without imagining that such large-scale mobilizations can be sustained indefinitely, or that they are ready to grow into something more confrontational, e.g. the general strike. Local strikes, political theater, even civil disobedience--a checkerwork of such actions is what Corcuff imagines that will maintain the spirit of resistance to Sarkozy's politics of retrenchment and the gradual wearing away of the social security systems.

And why just in France? As the problem of increasing inequality and diminished resources for ordinary citizens manifests itself variously in all the advanced economies, might not the varied forms of resistance reinforce one another to produce a global "guérilla durable et pacifique"? After all, the financial class at the root of the problem has long since globalized itself. So even here in the reactionary hub of the Empire, resistance of any sort might add to the greater momentum sustained by countries such as France, Greece, even the UK. Such a perspective could be heartening to an American left that feels increasingly constrained by its rear-guard action against Mr. Yes-We-Can, the bankers' friend. Gestures of solidarity with the foreclosed, the unemployed, with immigrants and retirees without pensions--these ongoing, small, hardly visible but persistent efforts may be our national contribution to that larger struggle.

Politics of Color

2010-12-23T11:34:00.003-05:00

Several years ago I saw up close the troubled state of 'diversity' questions on the French far-left. I was at a local meeting of the NPA where proposed bylaws for the new party were under discussion. One of the comrades, a young woman of visibly African origins, though impeccably French, was suggesting that just as 'parity' would guarantee equal representation to women in the party's governing bodies, so some form of ethnic 'parity' might be useful as well. She had just attended a regional gathering of party activists and taken note of the absence of people there who "looked like me," as she put it. Her suggestion was roundly rejected by the others, who pronounced it 'anti-Republican,' an affront to the full and equal citizenship enjoyed by people of color, and an invitation to consider such people as second-class party members. The suggestion was never voiced again.

I recall that story while reading in today's Monde an op-ed piece by François Durpaire in which he decries the failure of the French left to embrace what he calls France's "visible minorities." Professor Durpaire, who is something of a pioneer in 'identity studies' in France, recalls the moment in 1956 when Aimé Césaire felt compelled to leave the French Communist Party because of its indifference to ethnic concerns, and the incomprehensibility of that gesture for the Left, then and now. He notes the solidarity many on the left felt for the social demands of protesters in Martinique and Guadeloupe last year, but the absence of support for inclusion of créole in the bac. Wedded to its marxist heuristic traditions, the Left cannot see the double causation at work in the collapse of the quartiers: it understands the economic problem, but fails to see the overlay of ethnic discrimination. The PS's call for "Real Equality" may seek to address some of the barriers to upward mobility--access to schooling, hiring discrimination--but fails to take in the magnitude of the problem for those who are visibly 'different.' What good does it do to repair the elevator, asks Durpaire, if the doors are blocked?

I was interested to notice that M. Durpaire's academic competence extends to the US: his research includes North American studies as well as post-colonial francophone topics. He was prescient enough to write a biography of Barack Obama in 2007--the first non-English biography. All this suggests to me that the French Left could learn a lot, as he has, from the example of that woebegone American institution, the Democratic Party. For all its shortcomings, the party of donkeys has forged and maintained a durable relation with America's 'visible minorities,' without whom it would win very few elections. The future of its social program rests with the growth of those communities (particularly the Latino ones), much as for Durpaire the progressive future in France rests with the young, and especially those whose ancestors, as he says, were not Gauls. To that honor roll so dear to the Left, that starts with 1789 and passes through 1848 and 1871 en route to 1936 and la Libération, he would add France's post-war "multicultural revolution." It's a challenge in historical revision the French Left can hardly afford to overlook.

In Memoriam

2010-12-21T18:50:00.003-05:00

I never met Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa. In fact I had never heard of him until last month when I went to hear him talk about Notre Europe, the think tank he directed. From the vitality of his remarks and the respect he elicited I gathered he was a distinguished personnage. Looking him up when I got home I discovered that many regard him as the intellectual force behind the creation of the Eurozone--a large claim. Looking back, I realize that his determined and elegant defense of the European mission--in the face of persistent criticism from questioners responding to the steadily expanding debt crisis within the EMU--was a genial exercise in statesmanship. I hoped to hear more from this eminent man on some other occasion.

Now Padoa-Schioppa is dead, quite suddenly at age 70, of a heart attack, and with him a little piece of the European vision. The death itself was dramatic: having assembled 100 or so guests and led them through a private visit to the Sistine Chapel, he was just welcoming them to dinner at the nearby Palazzo Sachetti when he collapsed and died. The tributes that followed in the European press were effusive. As Romano Prodi's finance minister in the last center-left Italian government Padoa-Schioppa made the notable remark that "taxes are very beautiful and civic-minded, a collective contribution to those indispensable goods that are health, security, education, and the environment." Berlusconi's harsh criticism of his tax policies was another form of tribute, as was Italy's success in weathering the crisis in 2008.

Padoa-Schioppa was above all a banker, an economist, a regulatory official--and only accidentally a politician, as he remarked. A leading player in the Basel Accords that designed banking rules for the EMU, one could argue that (like a lot of other regulators) he placed too much confidence in the existing financial institutions. As a consultant for a global management firm, a recently appointed director of a Fiat subsidiary, a director of the ECB, Padoa-Schioppa was unquestionably an icon of the financial establishment. And yet he was if not a left-wing banker, certainly a social-minded one--an anomaly and perhaps an anachronism in a world of nihilist financiers and bottomless greed.

In my one encounter with him, though, Padoa-Schioppa was wearing not his banker's hat but his Europeanist one. He spoke in a visionary way of collective global problem-sharing, of post-sovereign cooperation, of the ethical imperative to go forward with the European experiment despite all the cross-winds. As the debt crisis proliferated through the Eurozone in the past half-year I can only imagine that this architect of the Euro was heart-sickened by economists who decried the impracticality of "a currency without a nation," his cherished construction. The man I saw exuded confidence, forbearance, a belief in the long-term--but at what cost? Was the effort to maintain that tenacious optimism finally too great a strain for his heart?

It's new! ... It's hot!! ...

2010-12-20T09:23:00.006-05:00

It's the trailer for the European General Strike, coming soon (?) to a boulevard near you! Music by The Clash. Don't miss the cameo by General de Gaulle.

To form a more perfect Union

2010-12-18T14:52:00.007-05:00

It can be a lonely business following European news in the American press. For instance, last Wednesday's alleged donnybrook in the German parliament, with opposition members calling the Chancellor an enemy of Europe and worse, got no mention at all in the Times or anywhere else that I could find. It has therefore been mildly heartening to find a number of op-ed pieces recently in that journal that address the problems of the Euro and the Union as if these somehow mattered, even at this distance.

Yesterday the Times reprinted a piece from Le Monde by Jacques Attali and Haris Pamboukis, calling for European treasury notes (a version of the Euro-bond idea Mme. Merkel has summarily dismissed?) that might absorb member states' sovereign debt up to 60% of their GDP--a bold expansion of the EU's financial regime. Today a rebuttal appeared, authored by the conservative Dutch professor of finance Harald Benink, calling for a version of the North/South division of the Eurozone (in this case, winners stay, losers like Greece, Portugal, and Ireland take a 10-year time-out, returning to their own currencies until they get their houses in order). Clearly the Eurozone and the EU itself are at some sort of crossroads, and will either adopt measures to effect more centralized control, or dissipate altogether. How to design those measures is a problem of compelling interest.

The Times might have shared with its readers (but didn't) another scenario (of the many), also drawn from the forum in yesterday's Monde. This piece, by Pierre Khalfa of ATTAC, the progressive activist organization, takes a different view, one Khalfa notes is likely to be ignored by the financial barons who run the EU. Khalfa observes that most solutions to the various debt crises involve private financial institutions making large profits as they lend money to Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and such, while insisting on destructive austerity measures to insure their investments. Why not, he argues, simply empower the ECB itself to lend directly to member states, 'monetizing,' as he says, their deficits, and requiring holders of speculative sovereign debt to take their well-deserved losses? (Perhaps someone better schooled in economics will tell me exactly which taboos Khalfa would have us violate here.) Under this regime, freed from the control of the commercial banks, the EU could reinvent itself as a guarantor of the social values European workers are in imminent danger of losing. Thus socialized, the EU and the EMU could fulfill a different historic mission, building a continental system based on social welfare, environmental justice, and economic cooperation, not competition. This was surely not what Delors and the 'founding fathers' at Maastricht had in mind--but given the ongoing financial crisis and the threatened shredding of the social fabric in so many EU countries, might it be worthwhile to imagine a radical change in direction?

With all the trimmings

2010-12-11T10:41:00.005-05:00

Prognoses for the destiny of Europe, the Union, and the Eurozone paint an ever bleaker picture. Yesterday's metaphor was the "tsunami"; tomorrow's ... Armageddon?

It was refreshing therefore to read on the same op-ed page an upbeat assessment finally of Europe's fortunes. The authors are the foreign ministers of four significant and quite various countries--Sweden, Italy, Finland, and the UK--and they write in anticipation of Monday's meeting of the EU's General Affairs Council. They believe that the royal road to European prosperity is the expansion of the Union, and they insist that that road runs through ... Istanbul to Ankara and beyond. It is Turkey that represents "the free flow of capital, goods, services, and labor" in an easterly direction--and back again. Its current rate of economic expansion is five times that of the EU's, and before long it would be one of its larger constituent economies--if it was one. What the ministers don't quite say, but almost, is that Turkey and the global markets it has developed could be the engine that pulls Europe into its next cycle of prosperity.

The ironies abound. Only yesterday Turkey was the land of ten million migrant workers waiting to storm the European frontier. For many it stillsounds the tocsin of Christian civilization and its bellicose values. Remember Vienna and the battle of Lepanto! In my one brief visit to Turkey (I was only in Istanbul and some western regions) I was struck by the signs of modernity and prosperity everywhere I turned. I was awed by the cultural legacy that includes much of what we call 'Ancient Greece,' and thrilled by the call to prayer broadcast across the courtyard of the Blue Mosque--much as I am by plainsong chant echoing through the galleries of St. Eustache in Paris or in the Florentine Duomo. Turkey struck me as confident, young, energetic, and--yes--open to the world. It would be the EU's good fortune if Turkey still wishes to embrace it.

And yet the same economic conditions that make Turkish inclusion suddenly a more palatable topic for discussion in Brussels have sharply raised the political stakes throughout Europe. Unemployment and recession have a way of intensifying people's most parochial feelings. Marine LePen polls over 15% these days, and the wave of Islamophobic politics is far from cresting (See my post, "Bigotry on the March," 9/19/10). Is either France or Germany in the mood for an expansive gesture? Can either afford retrenchment? In its quiet way Monday's meeting--and all the maneuverings that surround it--represents one of those crossroads where civilizations check their roadmaps. Does the EU know where it's going?

Life Lesson

2010-12-07T13:47:00.006-05:00

At 91 Helmut Schmidt has seen 'em come and seen 'em go. This makes for a number of quotable moments in his interview with David Marsh, published in today's Market Watch. But as wisdom for the ages, the following is in a class by itself:

"You can divide mankind into three categories. In the first category are normal people like you and me. We may have once stolen an apple from a neighbor’s trees when we were boys, or we may have taken a bar of chocolate from a supermarket without paying for it. But otherwise we are dependable, normal human beings. Then secondly you have a small category of people with a criminal character. And thirdly you have investment bankers."

Reading Jean-Luc Mélenchon (part 1)

2010-12-05T19:27:00.006-05:00

I've been reading Jean-Luc Mélenchon for several years now. It's a big job. Not just the steady flow of political essays in book form (which I haven't read), but the weekly blog posts (which I do try to keep up with), stretching to thousands of words each week, a deluge of words. "I think in writing," he remarked in a recent post--and this is a man who thinks a lot. Where else is there a politician of similar stature who is this committed to the practice of writing? And it's not just the quantity but the remarkably personal quality. This is not PR stuff put together under his signature but the real thing, an inexhaustible series of thinking-out-loud essays, stocked with philosophical quotation and pungent anecdote. One might instructively compare this practice to the growing tendency of American politicians to tweet their followers in 140-character bursts of sub-literate soundbite. Mélenchon by comparison is a Montaigne.

So what does he write about? I'll pass over the most recent polemic, a studied evisceration of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's legitimacy as a 'socialist.' Yes, partisan in-fighting is part of the genre, as is the routine nurture of a fledgling political party and the obligatory comments on recent events. But JLM (to the horror of his handlers, if he had any) doesn't scruple to go deeper. Over the last month, for example, he has been interrogating the concept of 'populism,' a word far more pejorative in French (where it seems to be a near-synonym for 'demagoguery') than in English. JLM has been tarred with this label as he questions France's membership in the EU and its role in the financial crisis (and as his growing visibility makes him a potential threat to his former PS comrades): one compared him to the xenophobic nationalist Le Pen (a particularly low blow), while another questioned his commitment to democracy.

Rather than repudiate the populist label in the face of these attacks, JLM has--rather shockingly-- chosen to embrace it, starting with its progressive appearance in late 19th-century North America, and continuing with the 'populist' experiments underway in Venezuela and Bolivia (he has been a visible supporter of both Chávez and Morales). The root of the term, he points out, is 'the people,' and the notion that power ultimately resides there. He traces this idea all the way back to the Aventine revolt of the Roman plebes, and makes the link to the sans-culottes of 1789. Le peuple is the proper subject of history, the agent of what JLM likes to call the "citizen revolution." This is particularly true when the people are identified with the 'précariat.' This term, fusing as he says the notion of precariousness with that of the proletariat, best defines the contemporary, historically significant identity of le peuple. Because of its precarious status (in English would we say 'at risk' ?), this subset of le peuple is the dynamic embodiment of popular sovreignty, and JLM's social program is derived from its needs. As a 'populist,' JLM charges himself to speak through and for the précariat. To do so is to align himself, from 1789 to Jaurès by way of the Commune, with the progressive path in French history.

Reading Mélenchon, in other words, is a bit like taking a short course in Marxist historiography (and so is interviewing him, as the TV host Jean-Jaques Bourdin discovered the other day). You can take it or leave it, but personally I find it a refreshing, and even amazing exception to the flattened and constrained norms of political discourse that deaden our own political life.

Au revoir, Ilham (et bonjour, tristesse)

2010-12-02T14:44:00.009-05:00

It's official: Ilham Moussaïd and 11 of her colleagues have resigned from the NPA's Vaucluse chapter, after eight months of fruitless negotiation with the central party. Moussaïd gave the party its most widespread--though least welcome--burst of publicity last February when she appeared on the list of local candidates in the regional election wearing the Islamic headscarf she favors. Squeezed between the strident criticisms of feminists and secularists, she held her ground--and insisted on her qualifications as a long-time social and party activist--with grace and poise that belied her 21 years. (See my previous post, "Veiled Threat," 2/15/10) After a storm of polemics, mostly hostile, both inside the party and in highly visible venues such as the Idées pages of Le Monde, Ilham and her local supporters had hoped the delicate issues of tolerance and diversity she raised could be fully aired in a party congress. But as that public debate receded in time--originally scheduled for November, then December, now February--she apparently lost confidence in the party's openness to her situation, and now her chapter is closed.

But the larger question is anything but resolved. If no one anywhere on the French political scene was willing to rise to her defense, the fact remains that France's Muslim presence, like the rest of Europe's (and North America's) is growing, and the willingness of such immigrants and their children to forswear all allegiance to their culture of origin is in decline. Moussaïd, let's be clear, was no fundamentalist. Her belief system is shaped by Marxism and social justice more than the Koran, but like many young people in her working class suburb of Avignon, and in many other such communities, she declined to abandon this simple gesture of adherence to a norm of appearance. Dutiful? Perhaps, but certainly not subservient, as so many feminists were wont to charge, safe in their make-up and figure-flattering outfits.

While Ilham is at best a footnote, her story I feel is devastating for the NPA (which is hemorrhaging members for a variety of reasons), and for the immediate future of the far-left. My assumption had been that the disaffected young people of the quartiers (many of them French citizens) would represent not just a ripe harvest for the NPA, whose program speaks directly to their needs, but would define a historic mission for the party: to bring the alienated sectors of immigrant populations into the political process where their increasing numbers could lead to real social power and thus broader integration. Ilham's headscarf was not an impediment to this project. But the "petrified" attitudes of the traditional militants were. (The term belongs to Moussaïd's supporter Omar Slaouti, who ran a dignified if futile regional campaign as head of the NPA's list in the Île-de-France.) This situation will not improve as the phobic secularist Jean-Luc Mélenchon assumes the mantle of the far-left. Moussaïd and other promising young people like her will continue their social activism, while the political sphere maintains the purity of its laicité. But in the changed circumstances of the present, that laicité wears no clothes.

Trotskyist Outburst in Financial Times

2010-12-01T09:50:00.006-05:00

As the Eurozone debt crisis deepens (Italy? Belgium? France?), and the full measure of the Irish 'resolution' begins to take hold in our imaginations (state pensions used to securitize continental bank loans?!), Martin Wolf is not alone when, writing in yesterday's Financial Times, he raises doubts about the whole arrangement. But one particular sentence caught my eye:

Bank debt simply cannot be public debt. If bank debt is to be such debt, bankers should be viewed as civil servants and banks as government departments.

An interesting proposal, but it sounds oddly familiar. Where ...? Oh yes, two years ago, as the Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste was forming, wasn't it Olivier Besancenot who called for a public financial service to replace the discredited private-sector one? And yet when Besancenot offered his proposal, it was widely viewed as proof of how absurdly out-of-phase the Trotskyist position was with reality.

Now in fairness, Martin Wolf isn't exactly advocating for such a thing--he just says it would be logical, much more logical than offering public securitization to private, hugely exploitative banks for any and all of their high-risk, socially useless investments. So no, Martin Wolf hasn't turned Trotskyist on behalf of the financial establishment--he only wishes he could.

Debt crisis: the long view

2010-11-26T15:22:00.006-05:00

Confidence in Europe's ability to manage its debt crises is eroding by the hour, with bleak prognoses appearing on all sides. Credit for the most incendiary remark of the day--despite tough competition from the Bundesbank's Axel Weber, whose speculations on the size of the eventual bailout drove bond rates skyward--must go to Michael Pettis, financier and economist at the University of Beijing, for his vatic remark, below:

"This has been said before, but in a way this crisis is the European equivalence of the American Civil War. Once the dust finally settles Europe will either be a unified country with fiscal sovereignty firmly established in Berlin or Brussels, or it will be fragmented with little chance of reunion."

One can only guess which new financial instruments will replace the gatling gun and the ironclad warship in this post-modern replay.

Is Europe Burning?

2010-11-25T16:23:00.007-05:00

We know that flags are the most rudimentary of symbols, but what does this one symbolize? Perplexing question. For many years I have tried to share the idealistic interpretation which would hold that it represents the end of the internecine wars that have plagued Europe, and stands for a new era of peaceful cooperation. Some would add: the prototype for a post-sovereign world order, and not a decade too soon, as our species confronts a variety of earth-threatening problems. Au contraire, argue my friends on the far left: it is the flag of Capital, a more rational system of domination in which the particularities of local culture and participatory power are swallowed up in the interest of the global financial system.

Recently a couple of events have focused my attention on some particular aspects of this thorny question. First of course, the ongoing debt crisis that first threatened the Euro-status of Greece, now Ireland and Portugal, soon perhaps Spain, Italy, Belgium ... even France, says Mr. Roubini. And as Mr. Van Rompuy says, as the euro goes, so goes the union ...

On a more positive note Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF has chosen this critical hour to propose a consolidation of labor markets and fiscal process across the eurozone, a bold proposal that would transfer major projects of national government--wages and regulation of labor, the entire social security network, and that central document of governmental authority, the national budget--to some trans-national european decision making-apparatus. Was he serious? Is this actually an oblique move by his purported presidential campaign to outflank some of his critics on the left? Or alternatively, as some have suggested, a bold if unorthodox play to claim the directorship of the European Central Bank? In any case, if taken seriously the proposal represents a large step, whether for better or worse, toward fulfillment of the vision of Europe-wide governance.

Finally, I was amused by the tone of questions at a recent forum at Harvard's Center for European Studies. The presenter was Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, president of the think tank Notre Europe, and he was there to advocate for the most benign understanding of the EU as post-sovereign problem-solving friend of the human species. His high-minded approach made all the more striking the tone of realpolitik that greeted his proposal (for a shared US/EU global policy framework). Questioners all but demanded how many divisions the EU commanded, and the suggestion of the Union as immature in its delegation of security to its big brother in NATO was a discouraging moment for a Europeanist. Is the EU irrelevant in a dangerous, increasingly (once again) bi-polar world? Does that thought lend weight to the objections of a far-left France-firster like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose antipathy for the union is almost unseemly in a Euro-deputy? Or is the EU still slouching against all odds toward the progressive vision of its early advocates?

A Republic in the Streets?

2010-10-15T17:07:00.006-04:00

PROUVONS QUE C'EST LA RUE QUI GOUVERNE! TOUS ET TOUTES DANS LA RUE LE 16 OCTOBRE!

Are the French people governing from the streets yet? Well, not quite. Sarkozy's government is holding firm on its intention to push back the age of retirement, and despite the millions massed in street protests, he will no doubt get his way. Indeed, Rational People (RPs) throughout the capitalist world accept as fact the necessity to lengthen the duration of the working life, if only to maintain some golden proportion to the natural lifespan--as if this were some sort of natural law. "Ah, the French," say the RPs, and roll their eyes at the latest antics of this most wayward of Capital's adolescents. "If the French are not careful, they'll turn into ... Greeks."

And certainly by the numbers they win the argument, these RPs. Budgets must be balanced, debts repaid, we mustn't live beyond our means (those Greeks again). If these last two years of burst bubbles, soaring unemployment, and the specter of financial collapse have taught us anything, it is that we must tighten our belts--all of us, that is, but the financial upper class, the ones who preside over the reduction of everything but their personal incomes.

And yet, if you examine the photo (above), it may strike you that it has a certain verisimilitude. Workers really are shutting down transport systems and refineries; students, most recently a throng of high schoolers as well as university students, have taken en masse to the streets. And while they are not likely to govern France any time soon, they may well render France ungovernable. If that should happen, it may be a clarifying moment, and a rejoinder to all those in the 'anglo-saxon' discursive circuitry who enjoy ridiculing the radical tendencies of le Peuple français.

For even in this romanticized and helter-skelter fashion, the insurgent unions and students and partisans of the far left who have seized the momentum in France's ongoing political struggle have made themselves significant. Like the Greeks, perhaps, but with far more conviction, the French protesters are making clear that their progressive vision of human history will not go gentle into that good night. In the tradition of '89 and '48, 0f the Commune and the Popular Front and May '68, the French left will contest the exhausted retreat of Capital. And when the workers and students and partisans succeed in making clear that there is no 'reform' solution, no acceptable accommodation within Capital's diminishing precincts, then le Peuple français may be ready to consider a solution more radical still.

Bigotry on the March

2010-09-19T16:00:00.006-04:00

Early returns from Sweden are showing that the islamophobic, far-right Sweden Democrat party will enter parliament for the first time, and possibly hold the pivotal seats for any new government that tries to form in that country. Something similar happened in the Dutch elections last summer. Comparisons are also apt with the rise of the nationalist right in Flanders, in France, Italy, Switzerland, not to mention the more advanced movements in Hungary and other eastern European countries. Intolerance is on the march, taking Muslims as its primary target (as the rather beautiful photo suggests), but extending its adversions to Roma, Balkan immigrants, people who don't speak your language, or more appallingly, in northern Italy, in Austria, perhaps in Germany, people who are not of your 'race.' Witness inter alia the strange concatenation of genetics and anti-Turk diatribe in Thilo Sarrazin's screed, published a few weeks ago in Germany with great fanfare.

We live in dangerous times. Not long ago the economics blogs were full of comparisons to the 1930's. This pan-European populist uprising against the Other fits all too comfortably into that distressing context.

Nor are we exempt here in the USA. Palin and her Tea Party cohorts are romping to political victories by bashing immigrants and raising spectres of a Muslim Fifth Column that threatens to take power. Perhaps, they darkly hint, perhaps it already has. Here in 'liberal' Massachusetts a notoriously dirty cop has won the Republican nomination for, and may well take, the 10th Congressional seat, on a platform of withholding social benefits even from legal immigrants. In Arizona law officers can now stop 'questionable' people and demand proof of citizenship. (Guess which color the questionable people are?) The massive outpouring of hate-speech directed against a moderate imam and his project to build an islamic center with strong inter-faith values has tightened the screw. Next week Harvard will honor a supposed social scientist who insists, publicly and without shame, that "life is cheap among Muslims." (Not to stretch the comparison, but Harvard was notoriously slow to acknowledge the danger of the Third Reich in its day.)

I believe the rise of xenophobia in all corners of the West is a major cause for alarm. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" announced it. The Bush administration's exploitation of the September 11th attacks honed it, remarkably. Now the tottering condition of global capital is offering politicans the chance to demagogue this question. They are choosing scapegoats among the most vulnerable. That's why I am revisiting this blog, and hope to carry it forward more faithfully. Good luck to the Moderates (did I say that?) in Sweden, and vigilance to us all.

Teed Off in Boston

2010-04-14T13:04:00.003-04:00

Went to a tea party this morning on Boston Common, and there was Sarah Palin, big as life, surrounded by several thousand of her idolators. Sarah was her perky, folksy self. At one point she urged us to "clutch [our] Constitution, our guns, and our religion," a memorable phrase she may utter with some frequency. This crowd--mostly middle-class-looking, middle-aged, all white-- sure liked hearing her say it.

Most of Sarah's speech, though, was keyed much lower, an almost wonkish explication of the absurd proposal to lower taxes and balance the budget at the same time. She plodded through this lesson in fantasy economics as though she had come here to Boston to show how credible, how schooled she has become since those heady big-hair days at the 2008 Republican Convention.

Still, she and her "Tea Party Express" are a rather small, even sad affair this sunny spring day on Boston Common. Fresh off her widely-quoted comparison of nuclear arms policy to a schoolyard scuffle, she seemed bent on speaking in the truisms and simplicities that betray the mediocrity of her thinking. In that way she is a lot like the early Ronald Reagan, with less able speech writers and much less competence at the microphone. A small figure on the platform, her vision seems particularly slight and myopic when she recites the nativist, American-first segment of her stump speech.

Reagan didn't stay small and provincial, though, and there is no way to be sure that Palin will either. How angry could all these well-fed white people get, anyway? What sorts of inroads will they make between now and November?

Palin bears comparison with Marine LePen, who is preparing to succeed her father (maybe) as head of France's National Front. Small-minded, racist at the core but really just identified with social groups that happen to be white, a feisty guard dog for the bypassed, the bewildered, and the besieged--Sarah, like Marine, might take a serious bite out of the American body politic in the next elections, though in my estimation (to change metaphors) she won't get the whole apple.

Veiled Threat?

2010-02-14T19:06:00.007-05:00

I had stopped posting news about the French far-left, mainly out of despair at the failure of the various players to find grounds for a common slate in the March regional elections. But then into the arena marched an unlikely combatant, Ilham Moussaïd, a 21-year old NPA activist and candidate on the slate in the Vaucluse, and suddenly I find there is something important to say after all.

First of all, Ms. Moussaïd herself: born in Morocco, living most of her life in a largely immigrant suburb of Avignon, she was not apparently looking for the drama that has swept her up. By her account she became a local activist from the age of 13, forming a small group to render social services in a neighborhood where, as she has noted, the only visible presence of the state is its security forces. Drawn to the Revolutionary Communist League by its support for Palestine, she and her friends were welcomed as LCR members, and then encouraged to sign on when the LCR morphed into the NPA. While pursuing her post-secondary studies Ms. Moussaïd volunteered for the thankless job of local party treasurer, earned the gratitude of her comrades, and when it came time to choose an electoral slate, she won a spot pretty far down on the list.

In all this there is nothing very surprising, apart from the fact that her election was hotly contested, and nothing that would have made it a featured story in the right-wing paper Figaro ... except for the head scarf Ms. Moussäid habitually wears as a token of her Muslim beliefs. Suddenly she became the center of a firestorm of debate, both inside the party and all over the French national media. Never mind that the Abbé Pierre sat in the national assembly for years in his priest's cassock, or that several town councilors who are Muslim wear their scarves to meetings. Suddenly the secular principles of the Vth Republic are seen to totter (setting aside the fact that Ms. Moussaïd has no chance of winning a seat), and the NPA's lifelong Trotskyist leader Olivier Besancenot is being counseled--by a deputy from the Socialist party that embraces market principles!--to "re-read his Marx."

Where this episode is heading is not so clear--the NPA is trying desperately these last few days to change the subject in the media, and will have an internal debate, in the fall after the elections, where sparks will surely fly. It continues to fascinate me, though, both the issue and the incredibly lively and informed debate I monitor on NPA sites, and well as the sheer magnitude of the question (in this and other forms) that seems to hold France in thrall. How can the commonly held French idea of such things as secularity, diversity, assimilation, and the free exercise of religion be so very different from our own? Will there be no middle ground--in France, and in the rest of Western Europe--for immigrant and minority sub-cultures to coincide with adherence to national norms of residency and citizenship? That is, will young Muslims have to choose between increasingly integral Islam and a secular Frenchness that tolerates no ethnic hybridism? Will a left party such as the NPA (the Socialists have already disqualified themselves) be able to reach out to ethnic communities on terms congenial to their ethnic identities, or will it hold its members to a high standard of social integration? And for women in particular, will they have to renounce all religious adherence in order to be embraced as feminists by their secular French sisters? These are just a few of the many questions, with profound implications for the nature of democracy and civil liberty, that have been stirred up in Ms. Moussaïd's hornet's nest.

As for the primary subject herself, she professes to be as perplexed as I am by all the fuss. She declares herself a loyal anti-capitalist, and plaintively asks why eight years of steadfast activism on her part has been condensed by her erstwhile comrades into a simple headscarf. But she remains undaunted, pointing out to an interviewer that she was raised to believe in justice and equality, and insisting that those universal beliefs will see her through this crisis.

As the case evolves, I will be trying to use this blog to sort out my own impressions--and will welcome your comments.

Tower of Copenhagen

2009-12-19T23:29:00.012-05:00

They came from the whole world, according to the Genesis story. They spoke a common language, and had a common plan--a glorious one, a tower, reaching all the way to heaven. In that way their global city with its far-seeing tower would rival God's seat in the vista it would offer. But as we know, the plan went awry. God sowed confusion in their ranks, and they went away again, no longer speaking one another's languages, their tower unbuilt and their city abandoned.

Delegates from 193 nations arrived at Copenhagen with no less ambitious hopes. Princes, presidents, prime ministers, ordinary citizens and advocates, NGO's and scientists, all looked to build the structure that would steer our planet away from impending climate catastrophe and toward a more hopeful future. But the confusion of national and private interests weighed too heavily on the fragile foundations laid at previous climate summits. The negotiations collapsed and the legions of the hopeful went away in anger and disappointment. We are condemned to a babble of blame and recrimination, while the ice melts and the deserts spread.

The Copenhagen summit was an event of mythic proportions, in some ways larger and more universal than any previous conference in human history. The dramatic last-minute parleys of heads of state, the surge of dissident voices outside the Bella Center, even the address I happened to catch by the Prince of Wales on rain forest preservation, all coalesced to lend it an air of historic gravity--of kairos. And many years from now, when the climate crisis has wreaked its destructions and bent the nations and peoples of the world to its perverse will, some folk-narrator may tell the story of the failure of Copenhagen and the collapse of its proud tower--that is, if there is anyone left to tell.

Hiroshima Transfigured

2009-08-06T11:35:00.012-04:00

August 6, 2009

Hiroshima Day

To observe "Hiroshima Day" is to acknowledge a critical fact of our existence as human beings: we have invented the means to destroy ourselves. In the glow of Hiroshima the moment of total annihilation is fully imaginable as an 'anthropogenic' after-effect of our brilliance, our capacity for invention. To acknowledge this day, then, is to acknowledge the new form or dimension of Evil that is our unprecedented capacity to wreak destruction on our entire planet and species. In using this quaint and venerable term Evil I mean to identify the invention and deployment of nuclear weapons with the much deeper human capacity to inflict pain or harm, to overpower and destroy. On this Hiroshima Day I want to invoke the specific responsibility we bear as Americans for the destruction of Hiroshima, of Nagasaki, of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, for all the incinerated civilians (ONE MILLION of them between Jan. and Aug. 1945, says James Carroll in yesterday's Globe).

On Hiroshima Day we accept this Evil as our legacy. In this respect we are the spiritual descendants, let's say, of Ghengis Khan and the Mongol horde, of Huns and Visigoths, of Romans, crusaders, conquistadores. Heirs, just say it, to the Third Reich. (Not, of course in many essential ways, but in the specific way of industrially-scaled destructiveness, yes.) On Hiroshima Day we acknowledge our kinship with the Serbians, the Hutu, the Khmer Rouge. In the one million civilian deaths we answer for in 1945 and the millions more since, in Vietnam, in Iraq and elsewhere, we measure the depth of our Fall as human beings.

When I confront matters as weighty as this day raises, I often refer myself to the Christian gospels (as seen through a left-wing Anglican lens). In that tradition I observe that, as if by some dark prophecy, August 6 has long been observed as the Feast of the Transfiguration, a day that celebrates the bizarre anecdote recorded in all three synoptic gospels when Jesus ascends the mountain and is ... irradiated. Taken up, that is, by God-force and visibly seared with other-worldliness. You see him thus, in Raffaelo's rendition above, and in so many spectacular icons of the Transfiguration, a figure of luminous transcendence.

It is surely a scandalous fact that these observances of Hiroshima and the Transfiguration should coincide. It is perhaps true that the silhouettes of the incinerated residents of that city, radiographed onto the streets and sidewalks and preserved to us in that iconic form, bear a macabre resemblance to many of the Transfigured Jesuses you will find in Christian iconic tradition. But can the imagery of Evil and Good in their (dare I say) absolute forms be in any way conjoined? What are we to make of this outrageous coincidence?

I want to suggest that there are two ways to read Hiroshima Day as Transfiguration. One way, not mine, would understand the Bomb, and the human drive toward annihilation more generally, to represent our passage toward the biblical Apocalypse, the fulfillment of God's Plan. Hiroshima in this view prefigures the consuming fire--whether atomic, climatic, or some other catastrophe--with which we will all someday be aglow. I reject this interpretation from Rapturists and End-timers and such, in that it seems to align God absurdly with Evil. But another way is to understand Hiroshima Day as a challenge for us to transcend ourselves, to climb the mountain, to become a transfigured people. In this vision the memory of the atomic holocaust renews us in our determination to live peaceably and work together to avert or mitigate the worst effects of our destructive technologies. If we understand Hiroshima Day in this way, we can see ourselves in it, aglow with the demand for peace with justice.

What would Sarko do?

2009-08-03T23:06:00.004-04:00

On matters of social policy I have often found it useful to look at how European governments, especially the French, address the issue in question. As it happens, the issue of internet access vs. copyright infringement was being hotly debated while I was in France last fall, as the Sarkozy government introduced a law, known as Hadopi (acronym for a 'High Authority' who would administer it), which would impose sanctions on downloaders. Alas, I found the issue pretty inscrutable at that time, with a lot of technical vocabulary, and in short I pretty much ignored it. I did notice that both the governing right-center UMP and the Socialists were having trouble creating a consensus and keeping their members in line on this hyper-sensitive question with so many competing interests in play.

So now that the Tenenbaum case has piqued my interest, I have gone back and learned a few interesting things about Hadopi:

First, the law as proposed is pretty tame. An infringer would receive an email warning from his provider. A second infraction would draw a warning by registered letter, and if the infringement persisted, the provider would be authorized to cut off internet connections to the offending computer for up to a year (with the user banned from changing providers in that time). That's it: no million dollar judgements, no drama. And yet ...
The law met with militant opposition on a number of fronts: the surveillance of computer users was deemed invasive, the penalty of interrupted service disproportionate, the role of the provider as arbiter unconstitutional.
In view of these objections, particularly the latter one, the French Constitutional (Supreme) Court struck down the penalty part of the law, rendering it useless. A new version is now making its way through the parliament, but I'm not sure how the problems are addressed.

Several points could be drawn from this comparison. First, this rather modest legislative attempt at remedy makes the American approach through civil litigation look extremely heavy-handed, with a vast and disproportionate degree of power vested in private interests (e.g., the recording industry) with the means to conduct expensive lawsuits. France has a totally different balance of power between individuals and corporate interests. Secondly, from what I can tell the opposition to Hadopi is deeply rooted among left-leaning citizens who, being French, make their position known in the street with large noisy protests. And third, these opponents include high-profile artists, 'creators,' who in our country are pretty well locked down by the industry but in France feel free to side with the libertarians (perhaps against their own economic interests).

One reason for this last point may well be that the French recording industry is smaller, with less at stake. On the flip side, artists may well depend more on state subsidies and less on the largesse of the industry. I'm not really sure of the present state of artistic subsidy in France, but I notice Socialist legislators pointing to this as a potential solution to the vexing question: if the new medias allow for free use, how will the artists get paid?

Well and good, you say, but public subsidy just isn't an option over here in Frontierland USA. Maybe so, but what would be our red-blooded American alternative? How about foundation support? Some are starting to see this as the solution to the journalistic crisis, as the newspapers die not through infringement but fair use. A non-profit but rigorously non-governmental support network here in the land of low taxes and 8-figure salaries might make sense for musicians as well as journalists (though one might imagine a vast divide between the artist as modestly salaried, whether by state subsidy or private grant, vs. the artist as win-the-lottery American Idol, all-or-nothing star or loser--the plot line our culture seems to prefer. Does our sensationalized star system make for better art, or just a lot of hoopla and wasted motion? Would public subsidy produce boring official art, or a distinguished caste of socially integrated artists? Right now in America the labels are waging (and perhaps winning) a rear-guard action to defend their status quo. Tenenbaum's case is an awkward moment in that ungainly struggle. But history is ultimately on the side of progress, not stasis, and we should all be thinking of creative ways to support creativity under the changed circumstances of rapidly evolving technologies.

Corporate Punishment

2009-07-30T17:30:00.005-04:00

Though my previous post tries to address the Tenenbaum copyright infringement suit by way of a rough sort of social theory, in the end the case (like everything else in life, really) plays out as just another scene from the family drama. According to script, plaintiffs' attorney Reynolds spent a good hour excoriating defendant Tenenbaum for disrespect: of the truth, of his college handbook, of the lawyer who deposed him, and ultimately of the conglomerate corporations that sell recordings. Reynolds is the earnest-dad type, super-serious, with a crisp white shirt and a little bald spot on top. He has the habit of biting his lower lip just slightly while preparing to light into his next line of questioning. Watching as a rogues' gallery of exhibits, depositions, interrogatories, and screenshots flashed across the courtroom monitors, you knew Tenenbaum wouldn't be turned loose from the witness stand until he was very, very sorry. In fact I felt my stomach tighten--a traumatic flashback from those times long ago when my own father would lower the boom on us for some egregious infraction.

But wait. That's not Joel Tennenbaum in the picture, or rather, it is and it isn't. Tilt the image and refocus, and you may see that actually the bad boy here is defendant's attorney Nesson, and that's Judge Gertner chastising him on behalf of the law, the court, and the rules of procedure. No political speeches, she's telling him, no narratives, no unfocused questions, no fair use defense, no, you may not approach the bench. Whack!--whack!--whack!

No, I'm wrong. Look again and you'll see that the child in the picture is actually the consuming public, that is, you and me. We're all being disciplined by this case, by the RIAA, by their whole posse of lawyers and consultants, and by the law itself--starting with the 30,000 file-sharers who were shaken down for $3-5000 each in out-of-court settlements. It was 'expert witness' economist Liebowitz (of the Cato institute inter alia) who connected the dots most clearly when he opined that unfettering markets always produces more goods, more profit, more pie. So that's what this case is finally about: disciplining the marketplace. By driving out all the free competition and making a deal with the itunes folks, the RIAA is funneling us back in line as paying customers. The law proves to be an effective paddle, the pain is quick and sure, the lesson learned.

Justice Cubed

2009-07-28T16:29:00.006-04:00

In his opening statement in the Tenenbaum copyright infringement case (see "Justice, Equity, ...", 7/20), defense attorney Charles Nesson invited the jury to consider the Necker cube (pictured at left) as a "metaphor for the truth." His remarks followed the plaintiffs' opening, in which Tenenbaum was predictably described as dishonest and evasive, taking bread from the mouths of artists and technicians and their hungry children while shirking all responsibility for his misdeeds. Since the facts underpinning these assertions are fairly clearly on the record, Nesson's hope is not so much to refute them as to reframe them. Tenenbaum was and is a "nice kid," indistinguishable from the millions in his generation who "love music and technology," share files, and take for granted the free circulation of culture via the internet. Just as the eye sees the Necker cube in two equally 'true' orientations, the jury are enjoined to see Tenenbaum in these two contradictory but coexisting perspectives, rather than trying to decide which of them is 'the truth.'

Whether this parable of the Necker cube points the way to a successful defense remains to be seen. Certainly Judge Gertner's initial advice to the jury encouraged them to decide on what they thought was 'the truth' (singular), but in many ways the Necker/Nesson paradigm is truer to experience, at least for people who approach life reflectively. I am somewhat impressed by the jury's professional credentials, but whether they are a reflective bunch is harder to predict.

I believe, though, that the double orientation of the Necker cube suggests a dualism in our public culture, and in this case as well, that is much broader than the simple question of Tenenbaum's guilt or innocence. Viewed from the corporate perspective, Tenenbaum is simply in the wrong: the labels produced the music, it's theirs to sell, he didn't pay. Underlying that scenario are all the verities of the marketplace: if the labels make a pot of money, that's because they deserve it. If Tenenbaum wants to enjoy the music, he has to denominate his passion in dollars. There is no place for sharing--cash is the nexus of all legitimate transactions. The plaintiffs in this case argue for this market-driven ideology, and their case exudes the self-righteousness of the possessing class.

What then is the competing social vision, the other orientation sketched out in Nesson's statement? This world, Tenenbaum's world (from which he was abruptly yanked by the plaintiffs), is very much grounded in the cashless transaction of sharing. Prominent in this social system are "friendship groups." Its landscape is a benevolent one: in Nesson's acccount, a surge tide of technical invention "washed over" the recording industry in the late '90s and left its songs "scattered on the beach," where young people can stroll and discover objects of delight, free for the taking. Put another way, it is a world where use value trumps exchange value, where personal tastes overshadow the consumerist impulse, while the internet guarantees instant availability. It is this benign, even utopian world, composed of fluid electrons rather than hypostatized atoms, that Nesson designed as Tenenbaum's own. A similarly imagined world has been for some years the vision of many in the free software movement and other manifestations of an idealistic techno-culture, once labeled 'hacker', whose bête noire has always been the corporate desire to own the code, exploit the talent, and extract profit.

Just a few years ago it didn't seem like a very open question which of these visions was dominant in our social sphere. The utopian impulse--Tenenbaum's, Nesson's--looked like a throwback to an earlier decade, and corporate cops like the plaintiffs' legal team were ascendant everywhere. With the (temporary?) collapse of the financial markets, with the hope-driven election of Obama and the increasingly insistent ecological imperative, new life is being breathed into such visions as Tenenbaum's. It is now just possible to imagine the advent of a generation of young adults who will repudiate privatized market logic. I doubt that this tendency will affect the outcome of this trial (though you never know ...). But it confers on it a significance that extends far beyond whatever judgements are rendered in the terms of the law.

Art Revolution Utopia

2009-07-26T21:17:00.009-04:00

I spent several hours on Saturday inside the world of Sol LeWitt. We were visiting the gigantic installation of LeWitt's wall paintings that will fill an entire factory building at MassMOCA, three floors' worth, for the next 25 years. You enter a world of pure concept--spare lines void of color that fill whole walls with simple geometric forms massively elaborated through repetition--at the ground floor. Then you rise into rectilinear patterns of primary colors, then into swirls and splashes of all sorts of colors, always articulated in terms of formally governed patterns. Those patterns, LeWitt's part of the job, enabled this installation, his chef-d'oeuvre, to be executed by a small army of art students according to LeWitt's instructions after his death. He has in this fashion bequeathed to us, by way of MassMOCA, a vast utopian space.

The occasion was made more remarkable by the participation of composer Steve Reich, who described his close personal and theoretical ties to LeWitt. Each is seminal to the minimalist movement in his particular art. Reich spoke of LeWitt's formal design programs as 'scores,' while Reich's own pieces unfold like the endlessly permutating figures in LeWitt's wall paintings. Later, we listened to Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians," his hour-long summum of complexity and instrumental color, in the museum's auditorium just steps from the LeWitt installation. With Reich's huge work, as with LeWitt's, you don't just listen to the work, you enter into it. You become subject to its abstract dimensions, measured not as space in this case but as duration. You live the music, transfixed by its regularities and modifications, according to its transmuting postulates of rhythm and tone.

These carefully intertwined experiences of art and music were all the more poignant as I had been thinking on the way out to North Adams of how unlikely a thing it is that we will ever slip the bonds of the present capitalist world-system, except perhaps in the direction of catastrophe. The heroic revolutionary vision of a 'better world' beyond the horizon of the profit-system is all but extirpated from our collective consciousness by what the French call la pensée unique and we in America refer to as 'the end of history.' Observing the jockeying of the Congress as it diminishes the already reductive initiatives of the President, listening to the unsyntactical grunts of the Mayor as he announces his campaign for reelection, I think 'What a sad and cynical affair our politics have become!' And yet all the vitality and promise that are missing from this dreary public sphere show themselves here, at MassMOCA, in these huge and utopian artworks. Totalizing artists, Reich and LeWitt have found ways to revolutionize the ways we see and hear, to build from first principles a new world of sight and sound. This may be small consolation for the morass of greed and inertia that constitutes our public sphere ... but consolation nonetheless.

Justice, Equity, Public Interest, and the MP3

2009-07-20T14:28:00.015-04:00

Like the Moakley Federal Courthouse itself, Judge Nancy Gertner's courtroom is an orderly, even stately place, brightly lit and impeccably arranged. The judge likes things to run smoothly. This morning, for example, several courthouse staff spent a good half-hour lining up the technology so that when the time comes to play the 'evidence,' a series of allegedly pirated songs, they play on cue.

The case in question pits the music recording industry, a phalanx of blue-suited lawyers and expert witnesses, consultants, and corporate executives, against Joel Tenenbaum, a twenty-something grad student who did what most other folks his age do: he 'illegally' downloaded hundreds of his favorite songs and--gasp!--shared them. For this 'infringement' the industry hopes Gertner and the jury will order him to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in 'damages.' Aligned with Tenenbaum is Harvard law professor (and my good friend) Charlie Nesson, an affiliated local law firm, the Bill of Rights, and possibly, depending on how the case reaches the jury, a populist streak in the American consciousness that doesn't like to see big corporations use the courts to push ordinary folks around. But the road to that jury hearing passes through Judge Gertner.

The Judge, who described herself from the bench as a "creative judge," is known as something of a maverick, even a bit of a leftie, none of which was in evidence during this morning's pre-trial maneuvers. She displayed a primary allegiance to the institution of the law, which she referred to as "these four walls," and insisted that the case had to be trimmed to fit its dimensions. She declared her interest in keeping the various issues in "the right boxes," which could prove an impediment to Tenenbaum's defense. To be specific, the doctrine of "Fair Use"--what an ordinary person might think was appropriate use of song files given the available technologies and habits of file-sharing--rests at the center of Tenenbaum's defense. But Gertner suggested she might relegate this argument not to the trial itself but to the box marked "damages." If she does so, Tenenbaum loses the chance to prove that he is not a thief, a 'pirate,' but an ordinary non-commercial music listener. In effect, Gertner's rage to order may exclude Nesson's larger vision of what is equitable in this case.

I had a chance to hear a bit of that larger view this morning, as Nesson argued for a conception of the law as circumscribed, both theoretically and historically, by liberty. It is this elegant appeal to a higher principle--to a notion of popular sovereignty, in stark contrast to the plutocratic firepower assembled on behalf of the plaintiffs--which might well inspire a jury to see the larger interest in the case. We all have a stake in this vision of cyberspace as public space, of the internet not just as a field for online commerce, a profit center, but a public square where ideas--and yes, songs--can be freely exchanged. The recording industry and its gunslinger lawyers would like to mount Tenenbaum's head on a pole, as a warning to the rest of us. If Gertner insists on her narrow view of the case, overruling Nesson's visionary one, she just may let them do it.

Money Matters

2009-07-13T18:32:00.003-04:00

I'm no economist , but two recent stories in print have usefully clarified the present situation for me. One is the up-close and ugly account by Michael Lewis in the current Vanity Fair of the egregious fraud carried out at A.I.G., at a cost to US taxpayers of $182.5 billion. This is old news, but it acquires poignancy with the article in yesterday's New York Times celebrating Goldman Sachs's triumphant 2nd quarter, with profits exceeding $2 billion. I have trouble grasping sums in the billions, but a more personal number was quoted in the article: of Goldman's 26,000 employees, the ones at the median make $600,000 annually, plus benefits. That's 13,000 employees whose pay exceeds that princely sum. And why not, when a company makes such high profits, because it is so skilled in speculative trading, as the article admiringly suggests.

What's the connection between these two stories? Well, at the very end of the Times article you can read what Lewis elaborates in considerable detail, namely that the A.I.G. bail-out was also, and perhaps primarily, a bail-out of the investment banks and other Wall St. entities, Goldman Sachs among them. It was their losses that A.I.G. supposedly 'insured,' but not really--the losses were too great. It seems these brilliant and richly rewarded Goldman traders had lost $13 billion betting on subprime mortgages, but no matter: they and the other banks and A.I.G. were all 'too big to fail,' so the government covered their losses, at 100 cents to the dollar, with our money. Now that they are back to their winning ways, they get to keep all the profits--it's only the losses that show up on the public balance sheet.

This whole sorry story was public knowledge last fall, when the Paulson plan set the bail-outs in motion--Secretary Paulson, you recall, was Goldman's former CEO doing a tour of duty at Treasury. But in the shock of November, 2008, economic virgins like myself found the whole thing hard to fathom. But no more. Somehow with Goldman's announcement of huge profits and huge salaries (with multi-million dollar bonuses to follow), the picture has come wonderfully into focus. The plan we can now call Paulson-Geithner-Summers is, simply put, a massive transfer of vast sums of money from taxpayers to the very wealthy. We ordinary Americans put ourselves in hock to the future, to the tune of trillions, so that the folks who created this debacle, working at Goldman and other such establishments, can make ten, fifty, a thousand times more money than ordinary decent working people. That's the financial system our president and his team have worked so hard to preserve.

But we had no choice, they said--and still say. If we hadn't acted, the "whole sucker," as President Bush so eloquently put it, was "going down." And what a wonderful thing that could have been. Picture it: A.I.G. defaults, a dozen giant, over-leveraged, totally irresponsible banks go down too, with all their unbelievably greedy hands on board. Instead of covering their trillion-dollar losses and setting them back up to do it all over again, the government lets it collapse, then steps in and takes over. Instead of making good their speculative losses, the government takes its--our--trillions and infuses that capital directly where it's needed, into credit markets that are not just speculative but productive, that keep the real economy going. There was a moment, last fall, when such a thing might have happened. The system of capitalist finance had failed, utterly. That was the moment when we might have created a public financial sector, the one Olivier Besancenot has been talking about in France (and not a soul here in America, as far as I can tell). The time had come, the system really had crashed under the weight of its own irresponsibility and greed, we had every reason to replace it with a financial service in the public interest. Instead, Mr. Hope, Mr. Yes-We-Can and his team of Wall Street profiteers decided to refloat the whole thing with our money. And with today's Goldman story we're back in business, making the already rich even richer, selling out the rest of us. Our moment of historical possibility came--and went--and now we're left holding the bag. But not to worry--it will happen again, maybe soon. And next time, with the advantage of hindsight, next time we the people must be ready to take our destiny in hand.

The next Obama

2009-07-08T17:40:00.005-04:00

I've never given up the Dennis Kucinich campaign t-shirt I got when Dennis spoke in Cambridge back in '04. Actually I wear it for a night shirt because it's many sizes too large. And if you want to take that as a metaphor for Kucinich and the Presidency, go right ahead.

Whatever you say about Kucinich as a potential President--and many rude things have been said--as a candidate he has insisted on the need for transformative and collective--read: socialist--solutions to the intractable problems of capitalism, militarism, environmental degradation, income maldistribution, global exploitation, unavailable healthcare, and more. These are the urgent topics our politics should address, and Dennis is one of the few who does. No, Kucinich won't be the next Obama, but his brand of radical populism can help us think about some further directions our politics needs to take.

Imagine for a moment that Obama continues to reframe the national agenda as he has started to do--reinstating core values like scientific rationality and social justice and internationalism. Imagine that he manages to guide his party through modest successes in 2010, and gets reelected in 2012. Picture him working deliberately to build consensus for a variety of reforms: not just a greener energy policy and some form of national health insurance, but even a whiff of nuclear weapons reduction and financial regulatory reform, along with fairer tax distribution to pay for these expensive but necessary measures.

So according to this modestly optimistic scenario we will find ourselves, five or six years from now, just a few baby steps along the way to major structural changes. But we need to build new systems--and quick--before we destroy ourselves and our planet. At best we will have barely started back in a progressive direction after the abysmal detours of previous administrations. Who will Obama be preparing to pass the torch to? I won't pretend to name names--few come to mind--but I will offer this prescription: that successor will need the political skills of Obama, combined with the collectivist sensibilities of a Kucinich, a Paul Wellstone, a Bernie Sanders. Obama may use his great pedagogical skills to lay the foundation for this transformation, but he won't achieve it in eight years even if he wants to--and it's not clear he wants to. He will need to be the precursor to someone bolder, who can really realign the systems of power. Right now there are only a handful of national figures who even seem to understand this goal. One of them needs to grow--fast--into the next Obama.

What America Means to Me

2009-07-05T00:01:00.008-04:00

Midnight, July 4, 2009.

Bombs bursting in air ... Thousands of people, by foot or bike along the Charles River, peaceably assembled to celebrate the nation's independence ... English, Spanish, many languages ... No military parade (there was a fly-over, fighter jets, so fast you couldn't see them) ... No hysterical speeches, no call to battle, no celebration of empire, just the "Stars and Stripes Forever," the "1812 Overture" (Bonaparte thrown back!), and this spectacular but chastely republican fireworks display ...

What the 4th of July means to me: the small-town patriotism of my '50s childhood, a parade around the block with sparklers and flags, and a neighborhood cook-out (or crab feast if we were lucky). Americans--some were WW II vets--proud of their role as saviors of Europe, as pillar of the Free World. Our visionary Founding Fathers, the Liberty Bell, the Tea Party, the pursuit of happiness ...

But the long road from those times leads through Vietnam to Iraq by way of Nicaragua, Chile, Guatemala, Iran, many more. America's soldiers fan out across central Asia to the Pakistani border, drones dealing death from the sky, the projection of power. America's greed, the greed of its bankers with no upper bound, the greed of its credit-addicted consumers, brings the world to its knees while the dollar stays strong. America is Assyria, Carthage, Rome, sped up.

How to reconcile these contrasting flashes of the American identity this 4th of July, under a placid sky, in a throng of orderly, contented fellow citizens, gazing in wonder at this pyrotechnic sacrament?

now more than ever

2009-07-02T21:04:00.005-04:00

I return to this blog prompted by two specific events in the political world, not in France but here in the US. First, the publication by Elizabeth Kolbert, in the recent New Yorker, of a perfectly shocking profile of Jim Hansen, the NASA climatologist whose work on global warming has been path-breaking for three decades. Hansen himself is not the shocking part: he comes across as measured, factual, reasoned as usual. But what he has to say is appalling: far worse data than even a few years ago, strong evidence that we have passed the tipping point in the feedback loop of carbon retention in the atmosphere, and thus decades closer than we thought to eco-catastrophe. Even worse, though, are the remarks of people in government, congressional staffers and the like, who suggest that Hansen is being hopelessly intractable--he just doesn't 'get it.' And what he doesn't 'get' is that there is no way in hell the US political establishment can respond to this slow-motion train wreck in any appropriate way. Too much to lose, not enough political capital to spend, etc. So these people think Hansen should just lighten up, admit that politics is what it is, and ... what exactly? Just watch as a climatic cataclysm that could end human life on the planet, or at least disrupt every form of civil order, slowly takes shape? Is this really the 'common sense' view? Apparently, and despite the undeniable truth of what Hansen says, that the laws or geo-physics are immutable, whereas human behavior is in theory adjustable. But no--politics as usual as driven by American finance capital and practiced in Washington DC is equally immutable. If desertification, flooding, dislocation, vast mortality are the consequences, that's just how things are.

Event 2 is the Carbon Trading bill, passed by the Congress with much fanfare though facing some trouble in the Senate. This is Obama's big initiative, a historic change in American policy, etc. etc. Of course the bill as passed is totally inadequate to address in any meaningful way the disastrous data Hansen puts forth, but ... but what? Well, at least we're not in total denial any more, we're trying, it's a start. Bullshit! Sorry, but every word of praise heaped on this sham bill is a continuation of the American joy-ride to extinction. Folks just don't get it--THIS IS AN EMERGENCY, and the best we can offer is token half measures?

To my mind this legislation is all the proof we need that our systems of power and governance DON'T WORK. The current world-system, Capitalist or what have you, under the aegis of our United States, is on a death trip. Our present leaders may die rich and self-satisfied, their children may use their stockpiled fortunes to fend off the inevitable (while climate dislocation wreaks a holocaust of unimaginable proportions on the world's poor). But the generation of their/our grandchildren will no longer find the Earth habitable. Are you OK with that, dear reader? Shall we just chill while we can and think about something else? Isn't our system 'working' if it gets us through the next two or three decades without compromising our unprecedented and disproportionate habits of consumption? What do we care about posterity? That's what the smart folks in Washington seem to be saying to Jim Hansen, but he's not buying: at 68 he is embarking on non-violent resistance to the status quo. And in the same spirit I'm still pulling for an eco-socialist movement in Europe to show us Americans the way to an alternative. Only by socializing our governance can we hope to escape the trap of free-riderism, aka greed, that keeps real fundamental change in consumption off the table. Socialism may not be the solution, but it offers at least some chance of collective response. Some may find it quixotic or fanciful. But what should we call the complacency that simply accepts the suicide of our species as 'how things are'?

post-election blues

2009-06-09T15:28:00.004-04:00

Now that the dust is settling from the EU elections, and it is clear that the NPA has been disappointed in its first foray into electoral politics, I want to share a few of my own opinions as to what happened:

First, it is clear that neither in France nor in the rest of the EU is there a groundswell of resistance to the capitalist world-system, even in this time of deepening crisis. I don't know why this is so, but the results speak clearly on this point. There is arguably considerable feeling against the EU itself in its present form--the historically high rates of abstention in France correlate strongly, according to post-election polling, with repudiation of the EU model (though approval of the more general European Idea remains high). But it is not at all clear that the EU's 'liberal' or free-market tendencies are at the center of this critique. Neither the NPA nor its companion parties in other countries were able to gain any significant traction with their strong reading of the present crisis as a symptom of Capital's structural failure.

2) Polling data also confirm that the NPA and the Left generally lack the capacity to mobilize their natural constituencies: the young, the poor, the excluded. Voting in these demographic groups was markedly lower than in other sectors--it was hard to find a 'protest' vote anywhere, except perhaps against the bad behavior of M. Bayrou. As I said before, unless the NPA can win the trust of its potential foot-soldiers in the cités, among the unemployed, within immigrant enclaves, and so forth, it will remain marginal. That is even truer now that the PG has found its stride among more middle class leftists who would like to see it restore the older, more adversarial edition of the PS.

3) Watching this debacle unfold over the past month or so, my first thought was to condemn the NPA central committee for its intransigence in setting too high a bar for a unified ticket with the PG and PCF. After all, their combined total of 11 or 12 % would have placed the Far Left remarkably close to the Socialists and set the stage for a serious challenge next time--or so the argument goes. Upon reflection, though, I now think this logic is flawed for the very reason the NPA pointed to all along: the PCF, and thus the 'Front de Gauche,' is by no means ready to take that walk in the wilderness. The Communist remnant will be right back next year pursuing their strategic alliance with the PS, and dragging the PG with them. Neither formation really believes its own rhetoric about the break with capitalism. Both will happily look for ways to join a center-left consensus at whatever level beckons, and claim a share of the offices and authority that come with compromise. This is not a dishonorable approach to politics, which many define as the 'art of compromise,' but it is not the NPA's historic mission. That mission leads into the wilderness, or at least to some place outside the channels of official power, where it will continue to support the forces of real resistance to the capitalist system. If that system retains the adherence of the French people, so be it. Joining the tepid left wing of the Socialists in their failed bid at opposition would not serve any purpose I can think of, and that really is the sad destiny of the PG and PCF.

Enfin: there is a quality of instant gratification in elections, particularly if one's side 'wins' in any sense, which makes them so attractive to political junkies (myself included). Class struggle is a more ambiguous thing, as is historic change. The NPA's great challenge in the next few weeks and months is to convince its adherents--against all the temptations of the media and the culture of immediate consumption--to believe in the long-term dynamics of struggle and profound change. It will not be easy, and if it fails, the party could fall back into the sectarian micro-world of the LCR. I would like to think that the energy and momentum I saw up close will outlast the disappointment of this electoral set-back, but time will tell.

I'm back! He's out!

2009-05-28T15:55:00.009-04:00

28 May, 2009.

So with the European parliamentary elections just ten days away I have to admit that it looks a bit like my NPA horse has stumbled out of the gate in its first big race and is running way back in the pack. Of course--and here I frankly claim the last resort of ideologues--the polls could be wrong. But I am restarting this blog to see if it makes any sense to keep reporting on the NPA's fortunes at this distance--Nb. 'Montparnasse' is even more of a metaphor than it used to be--and I hope in due course to write about the strategic blunder that has brought about this sorry state. Meanwhile, though, I propose to use an old debater's trick and CHANGE THE SUBJECT. So here goes.

Julien Coupat (pictured above) walked out of the Santé prison today [actually he was driven out in the trunk of a car--ndlr], for the time being a free man. Anyone who might chance to be reading this blog might also know why this is front-page news in France (though unworthy so far of a mention in the Times): Coupat has been held without charges for more than six months on suspicion of 'terrorism' in conjunction with a minor act of sabotage or vandalism--opinions differ--against the SNCF, the French railroad company. As the damage was slight, was claimed by another group operating out of Germany, and seems to have had no direct link to Coupat and his tiny band of anarchists, many in France have wondered just what this tenacious imprisonment was all about. A best guess is that the authorities were 1) charged by their boss, Mme. Alliot-Marie, the Interior minister, and her boss, President Sarkkozy, with finding some plausible evidence of terrorism, preferably home-grown leftist stuff, on French territory, so as to justify the increasingly imposing security measures Mme. Alliot-Marie has been implementing, and 2) impressed by the implacable tone of the small revolutionary tract, titled L'insurrection qui vient, attributed to 'The Invisible Committee' and thought by many to be Mr. Coupat's handiwork.

It is worth asking why this rather diminutive event has been causing such a stir in France. Guantanamo it isn't, though perhaps French citizens more than their American confreres are particularly sensitive to infringements on accepted liberties. For example, the liberty to print one's ideas, however subversive: when The Invisible Committee's publisher, Eric Hazan, was hauled into a police station and grilled for four hours the other day, a committee of many dozens of French editors signed a protest letter to the newspapers in support of Hazan and the freedom of thought he represents. Others resent the deployment of squads of heavily armed anti-terrorist shock troops against a small group of unarmed 'autonomists,' as they are referred to, while others fear that the dangerous example of Bush/Cheney's prolonged terror-alert is being imported into France by Sarko the American.

One irony here is that the sabotage incident and subsequent raid on the group in its farmhouse in the tiny hamlet of Tarnac took place just days after Obama's election. Since then the high-powered paranoia of Cheney et al. has been broadly discredited, and a new respect for procedural justice and constitutional propriety has become message of the day from imperial headquarters in Washington. Once again Sarko the American's timing is just a little off. It was Sarko after all who campaigned in 2007 with a pledge to bring American-style finance, sub-prime mortgages, credit default swaps and all, to the backward precincts of his native land.

France's heavy-handed treatment of Coupat and the Tarnac 9 might come to be seen as an out-of-phase epiphenomenon of the Global War on Terror, just as the books close on that sorry chapter in US history.

On the other hand France, with its history of street protest and the recent uprisings in Guadeloupe and elsewhere, may be more vulnerable than the US to the sorts of challenge posed by radicals such as Coupat. One of the targets of my NPA activist comrades in Paris is the government initiative to mount surveillance cameras all over Paris, where controlling the streets has long been a tactical goal. As the economic crisis deepens, many fear a recurrence of the insurgencies in the suburban cités, especially in this climate of labor unrest. A recent government edict banning hooded participants from public events led numerous colleagues to wear hooded sweatshirts to this year's May 1st parades. In this ongoing skirmish between the forces of Liberty and Order Julien Coupat's small drama has taken on a larger significance. This anonymous author of a visionary anarchist tract has been airlifted from the obscurity of his rural commune and dropped onto page one, where his eventual impact is far from certain.

From the Anti-Capitalist Trenches: a summary of my NPA adventures, fall 2008

2009-02-03T13:58:00.007-05:00

January, 2009

[The following article is distilled from my posts in October and November, 2008. I edit and post it here for the convenience of anyone who wants to read highlights of that encounter in a more sequential format. As the NPA moves toward its founding congress on February 8-9, 2009, I can only hope the party and how it formed will inspire some interest.]

From the Anti-Capitalist Trenches

My first encounter with the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste (NPA) took place in a little Turkish restaurant called the Trojan Horse, not far from the Place de la Bastille. I had already visited the party’s city-wide headquarters at the bookstore La Brêche (the Breach) a few days earlier, which is how I found out about the meeting at the Cheval de Troie. After losing my way from Ledru-Rollin, I walk in a half-hour late to find a social gathering in progress. Twenty-five or 30 people fill all the tables in the front room, eating and drinking. It looks like a boho birthday party in TriBeCa, dark, with loud chatter over a drone of Turkish music. Except that just as I walk in and feel my way to a chair in back, a fellow stands up and brings the “business part of the meeting” to order.

Seated around the room is a visually remarkable little group of people evenly distributed in age from roughly 25 to 75, not dressed up but well dressed, attractive, and remarkably—I have to say it—petit bourgeois. It’s an informal meeting, with a presider but no agenda, and it soon turns into a series of testimonials, as one after another of the core group rises to speak. Patrick leads off: a bespectacled bureaucrat and radical labor organizer in his thirties, he could just as easily be an econ grad student as he breaks down the financial crisis for us (This is mid-October, and Paulson’s Plan I is under fire). But then he denounces the whole analysis as a media construct, and explains instead why the current situation points to a general—perhaps terminal—crisis of capitalism as a system.

Patrick is followed by the woman to my right, a Lebanese woman of a certain age who speaks French elegantly with thickly rolled rrr’s. She identifies herself as a union activist, a long-time militante, and rather stirringly invites all present to work to build a better world. After her a woman in her fifties named Marie-Claire—a writer, it turns out— urges the group to undertake not just activism but theoretical understanding, and offers some.

By now I am enjoying it all: the atmosphere of the place, the level of the discourse, my Turkish beer. At one point a clump of three or four younger comrades get up and stand in the vestibule, causing the président to interrupt the proceedings to condemn the problem of smoker-factionalism (he is kidding). Later, an older militant declares that he had had lots to say, but has been made to wait so long he has "lost his inspiration." He gives a rambling address, at the end of which he rather politely denounces the authoritarian tendencies of the presider, who insists in rebuttal that he was only correcting for the meeting’s lack of auto-regulation.

Through all the jockeying and good humor a few serious points surface again and again. Beyond trying to assess the crisis itself, people are concerned with the question of how to organize in these dark times. Many remark that not just the Socialists but the Communists too have sold out to free market capitalism, and some want to reclaim ‘communism’ as the term for a humane alternative to competition, crisis, and war (though most agree that the term is a hopeless impediment “among the young”). Perhaps the greatest consensus is around the double idea, that the crisis presents a whole new opportunity to talk to a larger public about capitalism’s failure, but the crisis is also a disaster in concrete terms for the very people the NPA wants to speak on behalf of.

By 10:30 or so the meeting adjourns with a reminder for people to pay the waitress—and some jokes about socializing the cost of the meal. But really the meeting only adjourns to the sidewalk, where 10 or 12 of the committee are still actively debating, and show no signs of going anywhere, as I make my way back to Ledru-Rollin.

Several days later I take the train to Évreux, an obscure little one-street town on the eastern edge of Normandy, where Olivier Besancenot is addressing a rally. Besancenot, a thirty-four-year-old mail carrier with a master’s degree in history, has twice run for President of the Republic as the candidate of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). Earnest and articulate, a media darling, Besancenot has defied the odds by becoming one of France’s most popular politicians, with voter approval ratings over 60%. On the strength of that popularity the 40-year-old Trotskyist LCR, with Besancenot as its public face, has decided to disband in favor of the more broadly-based NPA.

As I approach the Zenith theater I spot Besancenot in the crowd outside. He is a small man, fine-featured and impeccable in pullover and jeans—a potential heart-throb. Surrounded by mics and cameras, he is giving one of his unbelievably rapid-fire interviews, every word precise and logical, like a prof de lycée giving a lecture to his class—at double speed. As he finishes with the press I greet him and tell him I have come from America to hear him speak, an especially surprising declaration in this little rust-belt town. He responds with a quizzical upraised eyebrow as his handlers spirit him into the hall.

After a variety of movement activists have had a chance to speak to a packed hall, Besancenot is introduced by a hoarse auto worker who has come directly from the picket line at the local Renault factory, where several hundred workers are losing their jobs “so the shareholders can have their dividends,” as he puts it. Besancenot begins in that same embattled tone, but he soon warms to his audience and begins to enjoy himself. He ridicules President Sarkozy and Christine LaGarde, the finance minister, pulling scraps of paper from his blue jeans to read excerpts from their speeches. “Ne pa—ni—quez—pas,” (“Don’t-pa-nic”) he mockingly quotes. “Doesn’t that make you even more anxious?” And he makes one-liners out of the cabinet’s substitute phrases - e.g. “negative growth” or “prolonged period of soft economic performance” - in place of the banished word “recession.” I realize I am seeing close-up the Besancenot-effect I have heard so much about. He is performing the “mailman from Neuilly,” a folk opera about the local boy who outwits the profs and pols to tell the people’s real story to the emperor. He has drawn the audience into his performance, and he keeps them shouting and cheering as he denounces the “privatizing of profits and socializing of losses” and calls for an entirely public financial sector.

Later, as his handlers slowly move him out the door and toward the parking lot, I get another close look. No longer lit by klieg lights, no longer radiant, his face is sweaty, and he is a bit slumped, clearly drained from the performance he has just turned in. He seems as small as his actual size, an ordinary person shouldering an enormous load. He is the lifeblood of this new party and the movements it embraces. Without him there would be no party. So his handlers gently detach him from his admirers, ease him into the back of a sedan, and drive off with him. He has to get up early tomorrow to deliver the mail.

The 14^th arrondissement committee of the NPA meets biweekly in a public space at the Chateau Ouvrier (“Workers’ Castle”), an improbably-named public housing high-rise in one of Paris’s formerly working-class neighborhoods south of Montparnasse. One of the NPA’s challenges is to develop a grass-roots or ‘federal’ committee structure in place of the centralized party hierarchy that is its Leninist legacy. This local committee—and 400 like it all over France—are where that change must happen. As I listen to several dozen party activists discuss the formation of the new party, I realize that many of their concerns turn on this question: will the opinions of the base be listened to at the center? By what mechanisms? Who decides?

Such questions come naturally to people who live their lives in activist groups and associations. Dimitri, the presider by consensus, was a lifelong Communist Party militant, first in his native Greece and then, after the colonels’ coup, in France. Now he and many like him believe the CP is washed up, and hope this new party can carry on the struggle in a new, 21^st-century way. Tough-minded, sometimes abrasive but very funny, Dimitri keeps the agenda on track, shushing all side conversations—“pas de dialogue, s’il te plaît”—and restricting every speaker to three minutes, carefully measured on his battered travel clock. His counter-weight, Marc, an “early retiree” who arrives on a bicycle with a sack of apples picked from his own tree for the comrades, is patient and avuncular, and moves his arguments forward with gentle humor. Some of the livelier minds in the group belong to graduate students in economics and sociology, and more than a few are union activists where they work.

I get to know the regulars in this little group as I attend many meetings with them over the next few months. I am only partly joking later on when I write that they have become my "Village in the Vaucluse" (a famous longitudinal study of French peasant life), only vastly speeded-up. As in a village, the 25 or 30 attendees distribute through the available roles: the one who cites Jaurès or Marx, the one who tells a joke, the passive listeners, the objectors and the consensus-builders. Like a village square, NPA 14e meetings are the scene of flare-ups and reconciliations, dismissal (rare) and admiration (frequent). The 'old guard' of middle-aged men I saw running the meeting in October is mostly listening to a crew of 20-somethings in November, as our two young delegates to the national group report back, and a team of computer-savvy leaflet designers astonish us oldsters with their efficiency. See? I have a kind of a niche too, though they laugh when I introduce myself as "NPA un peu provisoire (a somewhat temporary member)."

One of the dramas of founding a far-left party is what to name it. Are words like ‘Communist’ and ‘Revolutionary’ too scary to go up in footlights? How about ‘Workers’? Will the new party be ‘Socialist’ or ‘Left,’ or are those words used up too?

A lively website and many meetings have belabored this question. All agree that ‘New’ and ‘Anti-capitalist’ won’t wear well. One of many interesting debates concerns whether or not the NPA intends to be a ‘party’ or a ‘movement.’ In next June’s European Parliamentary elections it will enter as a ‘party’ (if not an ‘alliance’), but for many of the comrades the party is just an extension of their movement work.

Supporting immigrants, the unemployed and under-housed, contesting Sarkozy’s ‘reforms’ and privatisations, for most NPA comrades these mobilizations are the real work of the party. I joined such a group, a support network for immigrants sans papiers, and kept vigil at the commissariat just off the rue des Écoles in the Latin Quarter as a woman from Ecuador was hauled in for questioning. A few weeks later the same group sponsored a lecture by Louis Joinet, an eminent jurist and UN human rights commissioner, who encouraged us to practice a carefully planned and monitored “civic resistance” to unfair immigration laws and their violent enforcement. Joinet was right about the efficacy of this work: even our low-key ‘civic resistance’ helped persuade the bureaucrats to back off and give our client her working papers.

One beautiful, breezy Sunday in late October I walk over to Port-Royal, just steps from my apartment, to help the NPA comrades work the manif, the big teachers’ protest march. First they unfurl a shiny new banderole about ten meters long with the NPA logo—a bullhorn—and some words of encouragement to the teachers. This we affix to poles and tie onto street signs just at the critical junction at the top of the boulevard where the marchers will slow down before turning onto the boulevard Saint-Michel. Eighty thousand teachers from all over France will be making that turn, and our job is to distribute 10,000 leaflets urging them to join forces with us to reform not just the education ministry but the state itself.

I am busily handing out flyers when I look up, and there is Olivier Besancenot, doing what I’m doing, handing out leaflets. He is also talking with party stalwarts, greeting well-wishers, planting bises on friendly cheeks, and looking after his good-natured but sleepy son, who looks to be 3 or 4. It all seems oddly down-to-earth, oddly real somehow. As though this nationally prominent figure really does like to spend Sunday afternoons going to demonstrations, taking care of his kid, talking politics with his pals. It's hard to think what other political leader of his standing would turn up unstaged in just this way.

I had one other chance to see Besancenot up close, addressing a rally of some 2,000 party militants in Paris in November. The meeting started with testimonials from activists, including two undocumented workers from Africa whose accounts of underpaid and precarious work amid a stream of racist insults made a large impact on the crowd. This was two days after Barack Obama's election, and Besancenot started with some gracious words appreciating the historic significance of the event in light of the long history of racial oppression. "But make no mistake," he quickly added, the Democratic Party, like the Republicans, are and will continue to be agents of a failed capitalist system, whose injustices Besancenot proceeded to lay out in rhetoric that was fiery and witty by turns. For a good hour he kept his audience shouting and cheering. When he was finished, the whole room stood with upraised fists and sang the "Internationale" in its original French, as though the days of the Paris Commune were a recent memory.

But seriously, does the NPA have any chance at all? Does it matter? Conventional punditry maintains that the whole question rests on Besancenot’s matinée looks and his mediagenic manner. Certainly his frequent appearances on French talk shows, culminating in his magisterial performance (sellout ? conquest?) on a popular Sunday afternoon TV magazine show, make this media stardom sound like an important fact. But cults of leadership have been out of fashion since Stalin in leftist movements, especially in this new one, and Besancenot has repeatedly denied any long-term personal ambitions. More significantly, he has kept a notably low profile for the last few months since the big Paris rally in early November (See my post, “Obamencenot,” Viewsfrommontparnasse, 11/6/08). In the run-up to the NPA’s founding Congress in early February Besancenot is keeping the party, not himself, at center stage.

No matter how much Besancenot charms the cameras, though, if the world economy pulls out of its nose-dive—and pulls France and Europe with it—the NPA and its porte-parole will remain outliers, eccentrics, curiosities. But if things get worse (France’s job losses are if anything more serious than the USA’s), more French people will be turning to their left. What they will see is an imploded Socialist Party lurching between center-right and center-left, and beyond it, the smoldering remains of the Communist and other far-left parties. Striding across this desolated landscape, Besancenot and the NPA are conspicuously on the rise. Besancenot got 4% as a Presidential candidate in 2007; recent polls show him with 2 or 3 times that. Every major politician and party in France is watching as he comes up fast in the rear-view mirror.

Personally I agree with OB when he pleads that he is not the flesh-and-blood future of the NPA. History, or as Bogart calls it, “fate” will “play a hand,” and the resilience of the capitalist system will largely determine Besancenot's political fortunes, and the NPA's. But it is also my old comrades in NPA Paris 14—they and many like them— who will determine the success or failure of this party. These militants will have the task of organizing and mobilizing their neighbors in the face of a prolonged crisis. They will have to bring their associations and support groups into the party, or else it will not grow. They will have to organize in the suburban slums, the banlieues that fester and spread around France’s major cities, full of alienated and disenfranchised immigrant families. Either the NPA will recruit large numbers of new historical actors in such places, or it will remain marginal. Many have recently described these impoverished districts as “powder kegs” after the Greek example, ready to explode. No political party or movement has been able to contain or direct that energy for long. But the convergence of the NPA’s organizing efforts with the epochal failure of the capitalist system could launch the party next month with surprising force.

envoi

2008-11-28T06:58:00.026-05:00

28/29 November

"Car c'est vraiment, Seigneur, le meilleur témoignage

Que nous puissions donner de notre dignité

Que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'âge en âge

Et vient mourir au bord de votre éternité!"

--lines from Baudelaire's "Les Phares" inscribed on his statue in the Luxembourg gardens

It was really thanks to my friend Steve that I got back to Baudelaire. I had brought along a cheap copy of "Les fleurs du mal," but hadn't spent much time with it. But the text Steve sent me of Roy Campbell's lurid and convincing translation of "Au Lecteur" got me going, and I've been pulling out my little paperback late at night, on the métro, waiting in ticket lines, even lying in bed first thing in the morning. It becomes atmospheric, that world peopled by demons and saturated with a powerful nostalgia for what never existed except in the imagination.

I also gradually began to take special notice of this statue of Baudelaire as I ran around the Luxembourg gardens. I hadn't noticed him at all the first few times--I was getting my second wind at that point, not sight-seeing--but now I make a point of greeting him, and he me. I take photos of the statue when I walk past it--I have an extensive, all-weather set. I also drop by his grave now and then, here in Montparnasse, and that single faded red rose on his tombstone is the one I put there.

I had never paid much attention to his poem "Les Phares"--"The Beacons"--but I went back to it after I found its final quatrain inscribed on the base of his statue. In it the poet makes a strange and uncanny visit to his art museum of the mind, starting with the "amnesiac river" that is "Rubens" ("Rubens, fleuve d'oubli"), and continuing on through singular descriptions of Rembrandt, Leonardo, Goya. Eventually he arrives at "Delacroix, bloody lake haunted by evil angels" ("lac de sang hanté des mauvais anges"). I have to admit that I don't for the most part recognize these Old Masters in his phrases. Perhaps scholarship could help me, but I doubt it. These are paintings as seen by the poet and no one else--a visionary gallery. Not even paintings, they are signals, pointing outward, sounding the alarm, or drawing us back, if like the "hunters" he goes on to mention, we should lose our way.

I don't exactly identify with these iconic figures from art history, either in Baudelaire's poet's vision of them, or my own. But at the end of the poem they become generalized into the outcry of "a thousand sentinels," or better yet, "a thousand loud-speakers" ("porte-voix," if you'll pardon the anachronism). Here I begin to see myself: could I be one of these loud-speakers, these "signal-fires lit in a thousand citadels"? Not that I could claim the singularity of vision the poet ascribes to his artist-beacons, or by implication to himself. But I do hope that these scattered observations of a place, Montparnasse, of Paris, and of a movement to build a better, more equitable society, might like Baudelaire's phares "bear a higher witness," as the poet says, "to our human dignity."

But for now it's au revoir to all that, or better, à la prochaine.

"it's a party": last thoughts for now

2008-11-27T18:23:00.008-05:00

28 November

In an interview published yesterday in l'Express, Olivier Besancenot was asked (not for the first time) what the positive goals of his anti-sounding party were. His answer: "Socialism updated for the 21st century, ecosocialism, workers' self-management ["autogestion libertaire"], and democratic communism." Later on he added a 5th principle: internationalism. On Wednesday night I listened to three hours of debate by NPA 14e members on what should be the party's platform, and though it will take more meetings before anything like consensus is achieved, what I heard gives specific content to Besancenot's stated principles. So let me explore them briefly in the light of the debate I heard:

1) An updated socialism in a sense embraces all the rest: it must be democratic and thus freed from the control of a small central committee--that's why the localized structure of the NPA will be so important, and why groups like NPA 14e are so intent on seeing how their suggestions are received at the national level. And that new socialism must be creative in the economic tools it uses: I heard detailed arguments for and against lowering or abolishing the VAT (as opposed to taxing income in a directly redistributive fashion), for and against the LCR demand to prohibit lay-offs. Many question whether the LCR demand to increase income by E300/month across the board has any meaning without price controls, and whether the latter should be general or quite selective. And so on. The NPA's economic and social platform is still in the early stages of development, but that is precisely the '21st century' mode: not bureaucratic, centralized diktat but flexibility and debate.

2) What 'ecosocialism' will mean in this context is also largely uncodified. On issues such as nuclear power and genetically-altered crops the NPA will certainly follow its activist base. Will it also take a more general stand against 'productivism' (and thus for a 'small-is-good' sort of economy), in favor of local and organic agriculture (and thus for some form of protectionism)? Renewable energy is a given, but will it call for radical reduction in carbon-based non-renewables, and can this be done without jeopardizing France's economic standing by classic measurements? NPA's capitalist critics taunt it as the party of a "European Cuba," but for ecosocialists the transformation of Cuba's economy since the early 90s is one of the few successful models of sustainability anywhere in the world (and we in the US, whose government considered climate change a fraudulent theory until 2006 (!), have absolutely nothing to be proud of in this regard).

3) As I understand "autogestion libertaire"--a term I associate with Italian anarchist theory dating from the '70s but correct me if I'm wrong--it is the corrective for the state bureaucratic planning that worked so dismally in previous socialist experiments. Besancenot has been clear that his "service public bancaire" would not be a 'nationalized,' i.e. state-run, banking system, but a financial sector run by 'users,' 'employees,' 'the people.' Likewise industrial management is understood in theory to be the domain not of a national ministry but of workers' councils. As I understand it 'democratic communism' is closely related: a communalism governed from below. What would this look like? The most that can be said is that it would not resemble in any way the socialisms of the 20th century, of the Soviet system or China. 'For the 21st century' means incorporating the openness of a modern society, using decentralized technologies like the internet, in ways that are unprecedented. This is not a question for next week or next year. But as I discovered on Wednesday, the activists at the base typify the highly-informed and passionately-engaged citizenry such a system would hope to will into existence. My NPA 14e camarades would be really good at autogestion (though they'd spend a lot of time doing it).

4) Finally, no one imagines that France will head off in this direction by itself. I heard some useless talk on Wednesday about how companies could be kept from relocating elsewhere if they didn't like France's revolutionized economy, but in reality the smallest scale on which the NPA imagines its revolutionary transformation could take place is Europe. That is why the 'Other Europe' question is so important, and why the European Parliamentary elections next June will be a major focus: NPA needs to help form an anti-capitalist bloc within the EU, whose long-term goal will be to build a Union that will accommodate the France envisioned by the NPA.

That is one prong of NPA's internationalism. The other is North-South solidarity. Though less immediately in view, the party imagines a whole new relationship between the fully industrialized European nations and those less developed in this way, among them its former colonies: fair trade, regulated immigration and work visas, and cultural exchange are parts of this redefined relationship. The emergence of Chavez and Morales and a somewhat 'anti-capitalist' bloc in Latin America is also of great interest: asked who he most respects among global political leaders, Besancenot named sub-commandant Marcos of the Zapatista Army in Chiapas.

A third side of the internationalist question--relations with the world's most powerful country, an insular nation in decline and therefore particularly dangerous--are very little mentioned. It has been hard to imagine a 'democratic communist' France or Europe in dialogue with the US of Bush and Cheney. It is still hard to imagine in the 'Obama era.' In some pathetically small way I have hoped that these posts would help to clear a space for that eventual conversation, many years from now. Perhaps they will. It is a long road the NPA is just about to embark on. Only those who believe in history and have some hope for the future of our species would set foot on it. En avant!

not in Kansas

2008-11-25T18:34:00.013-05:00

25 November

So I'm walking down the rue de Seine in the gallery district when I run smack into a demonstration: sound truck and chants, flags and banderoles, a regular labor action. But I missed the front of the cortège where the leafleters and signs were, so I couldn't tell what it was about. So I asked a guy on the corner, who told me matter-of-factly, "It's the archaeologists." And that's just who it was: several hundred archaeologists marching down the street, shouting and chanting, demanding that the government withdraw plans to disperse the headquarters of its national archaeological service from Paris.

"Toto," I said to myself, "we're not in Kansas any more."

débat public

2008-11-24T13:57:00.004-05:00

23 November

NPA 14e continues to impress me with, among other things, its dogged determination to make this party happen. In that spirit mes camarades spent long hours last Saturday and Sunday a week ago leafletting every market and métro in the 14e to invite people to a public discussion (débat) last Thursday on the current financial crisis. About 40 people showed up, half militant(e)s, half new people from the neighborhood, and the discussion-after a rapid-fire intro from an academic economist--was lively. France's economy is heading south (though maybe not as fast as the US's) with new lay-offs every day, and people here are looking for solutions beyond 'Obama will save us.'

In that light I want to use this post not to summarize the (rather fluid) débat but to lay out what it helped me see are some of the most pressing issues and concerns of a French anti-capitalist movement at this time:

1) "Le NPA n'est pas Olivier Besancenot." It was remarkable to hear how some of the new people completely attached their remarks--about the crisis, social change, the anti-capitalist movement--to the hasty metonym 'Olivier Besancenot.' Remarkable but not surprising: the mass media themselves have created this usage not knowing any longer how to present any issue of substance except in the personalized, psycho-dramatic terms of 'Who will lead us?' Thus the importance of our presider's succinct response: "Besancenot is not the NPA." The NPA has to be a 'parti de base,' a grass-roots operation, not only to grow but to avoid all the risks of identifying with a single personality, no matter how attractive that leader is--and the skill and mediagenic attraction of Besancenot make this problem all the more urgent.

2) The European Union: I am only gradually becoming aware of the wealth of issues that led a large majority of the French Left to oppose the European Constitutional Treaty three years ago, effectively questioning the status of the EU as presently constituted. While some on the margins, Left and Right, simply want the Union to go away, that is certainly not the position of the NPA (or any other reasonable party to the conversation). On the other hand, the claim of the Left that the EU is an agent for dismantling the Social-Democratic legacies of many European countries in favor of a 'neo-liberal' or free-market economy has considerable merit. The call for an 'Other Europe' is a broad rallying cry, from eco-activists who want the Union to promote a local and organic agriculture to Marxists who want to socialize the entire financial sector. And France's bitter experience of pursuing 'socialism in one country' in '81-'83 makes a European-wide transformation look like an essential idea.

3) The European Parliamentary elections next June are thus crucial, partly because to define this 'Other Europe' is to resolve a lot of policy issues, and partly because the election will bring about a whole series of political alliances, Left and Right. In that regard the looming question for the NPA--a question that came up again and again on Thursday--is how to approach the new Parti de Gauche founded two weeks ago by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other left socialists leaving the PS in anticipation of its continuing rightward drift. I personally find Mélenchon compelling--his blog strikes me as a frank testimonial of personal engagement quite unlike the discourse of any elected official I know. And I feel that the NPA had best be very flexible in this first round of campaigning, that is, open to all who see capitalism as the central problem, quite apart from any details of interpretation. I believe mine is a consensus position, at least in our local group, but Mélenchon has inspired a lively debate that is far from over.

4)'Revolutionary' vs. 'Republican': Mélenchon himself suggested that this pair of terms defines his difference from the NPA. This means in part that his new Parti de Gauche, like Die Linke in Germany, would take part in a reformist, left-center government, even though his stated goal is not the reform of capitalism but its 'dépassement.' (Do we have a word for this in English?) NPA would not take part in such a government--its strategic plan is to build a majoritarian movement, and abstain from governing until it has the power to create a post-capitalist order. A revolutionary strategy--but also a 'republican' one? (The intention is not to overthrow the Republic but to seize it through mass movements including elections.) Conversely, isn't Mélenchon, though clearly a 'republican,' also 'revolutionary'? Can the two terms coincide? I raised this question, thinking it was lexicographic--how are these terms used in French?--but I discover that there is no clear answer, that in fact the question contains the crux of a large theoretical and strategic debate that hasn't apparently reached a conclusion.

5) "What sort of society are you aiming for?" "How will you get from here to there?" "Ordinary people just want to go on living their lives--will they be able to do that under your program?" These naive questions, which arose from newcomers in pretty much these exact terms on Thursday, are questions that any serious movement that aspires to be majoritarian had best be prepared to answer. Lots of theoreticians think they know the answer to the first one, drawing on a now classic body of Marxist theory. Some think they can answer the second, though the contingencies of the current situation will always modify any strategic blueprint--just ask the ghost of Lenin. But the third question, the most commonsensical one of all, is less evident in the classic literature, because revolutions haven't generally been designed for affluent, in many ways comfortable societies like France's (or Europe's). The revolutionary impetus to put it all on the line makes sense if you are starving or being sent into the trenches. It makes less sense if the system 'merely' threatens mass starvation somewhere else, or ecological catastrophe several decades from now, or slow economic regression. Somehow this revolutionary--NOT reformist-doctrine needs to develop an evolutionary theory of transformation, a way to imagine the revolution in slow motion, with stability in many of the modes of daily life, even during major institutional changes. Is an evolutionary theory of revolutionary transformation imaginable? I don't know the answer, but I do think the question will have to be answered before the NPA can lead a mass movement in the direction of a social revolution.

Falstaff (2): forever waiting at the station

2008-11-24T07:33:00.009-05:00

24 November

"Les joyeuses commères de Windsor" (aka "The Merry Wives of Windsor") is not one of Shakespeare's more original works, though the guy did have a knack for putting a show together. Seen primarily as a vehicle for resurrecting Falstaff (allegedly at the insistence of the Queen, to whom one did not say 'no') it is a bit disappointing: unlike in "Henry IV," where the pathos of Falstaff's downward trajectory, juxtaposed to the upsurgence of the prince, is the stuff of universal drama (see my post of 22/11), the outsized Falstaff is here fitted into a standard comic plot of fickle wives and jealous husbands, where his enormities are just another occasion for low humor. So I wondered what a company as original as the Théâtre du Voyageur would make of this material, and said as much to Chantal Melior before the show. "You'll have to see," she said, sphinx-like, and see I did.

One simple fact is that Chantal's two 'episodes' directly connect in a way that Shakespeare's do not: two hundred years of social history and a change of genre separate Shakespeare's feudal Falstaff from his early modern one. In the Voyageur's episode 2, though, the rather touching conclusion of episode 1 is replayed, verbatim, except that Falstaff, rebuked and abandoned, trudges to the far side of the stage ... and into a boxing ring! There he KO's one, two, three of his erstwhile critics and emerges a winner once more. Later the ring will become a stage where Falstaff's desperate housewife (now known as Mme. de Gaie?), will croon a love-song (in English), Motown style, while the rest of the cast sings back-ups. More choral numbers similarly yank the scene into the present day--but of course that's exactly what Shakespeare did by creating a contemporary bourgeois bedroom farce.

Other interpolations worked less well for me. The English wars of succession break out all over again, just long enough for Falstaff as recruiter to engage in a lot of wordplay (I no doubt missed a lot here), but then the armies seem to get laid off and everyone goes home. On the other hand the fact that the play actually erupts in the bar/waiting area before it officially starts, with Falstaff bellowing and cursing from the stairwell and the cast warming up at the piano, is a wonderful way to launch a sequel. This was particularly effective as half the audience was a group of middle-schoolers (who had seen the first half as I did the night before): not quite knowing what to expect, they were both amazed and a little worried as this enormous and rather unstable-looking fellow was suddenly amongst them, using language they knew one didn't use in polite settings ... but was this a polite setting? Had their teachers brought them by mistake to a bordello? In some ways the uncertainty of that moment set a perfect tone for what followed.

After the instabilities of these preliminary gestures the main plot of "Merry Wives," in which Falstaff's adulterous designs are deceptively encouraged, then foiled in a crescendo of humiliations, goes ahead like a mechanical toy, delightful in its details but finally all too predictable. Falstaff is left on all fours, wearing a ridiculous set of horns (antlers, actually), while the honest burghers of Windsor--that boringly upright bunch--make sport of him. That's as far as Shakespeare takes it: Falstaff realizes his folly, and the romantic subplot (altogether missing from this version) is left to work its charms.

But in the Voyageur version a wonderful thing happens at just this moment, a gesture with which Chantal Melior has won my heart forever. Falstaff picks himself up, antlers and all, and returns to the studied nonchalance he tried to assume in the face of Hal's devastating rebuke at the end of episode 1. Turning to his faithless friends he asks--in exactly the words he used last night-- "Who wants to have dinner?" and strolls off as if nothing has happened: no moral lesson, no triumph of bourgeois propriety, no change of heart. For all his faults and follies he is still Falstaff, heavyweight champion of the world, now, tomorrow, forever. Now that's an ending.

resonance

2008-11-23T14:45:00.015-05:00

23 November

Each Sunday that I've been here I have jumped on the RER and gone down to Saint-Eustache for a 5:30 organ recital. These are brief experiences--they function as a prelude to the 6:00 Mass (which I do not attend)--but powerful. All but one (a Bach recital) have featured the music of Olivier Messiaen, whose hundredth anniversary is being celebrated all over Paris this fall. And from the effect of Messiaen's singularly modernist music blasted into this flawlessly high Gothic interior space, I have learned to hear the organ in a new way.

If you don't know the music of Messiaen, you should. I discovered him through his "Quartet for the End of Time," a work composed (incredibly) in a prison camp in 1940. It is the most luminous piece of music I have ever heard. After that I listened to some of his piano works that evoke birdsong: Messiaen traveled all over the world, from Morocco to Utah to Japan, notebook in hand, transcribing the music of birds. Though he composed for many instruments, Messiaen was foremost an organist, a professor at the Conservatoire de Paris and the regular Sunday organist at l'Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris. I had heard his organ music here and there, but never listened to it systematically, as this fall's festival has allowed me to do.

A fervent Christian, Messiaen's organ works are often directed toward mystical experience: his nine "Méditations sur le mystère de la sainte Trinité" (1969) were a substantial part of the programming at Saint-Eustache. As a teacher of composition--and a wildly inventive musical genius--he also looked constantly for ways to expand the vocabulary of musical composition and the technical possibilities of both the organ and the piano (he wrote for his wife, a virtuoso pianist). At another anniversary concert, this one at Saint-Sulpice, I was lucky to hear excerpts from his Livre d'Orgue, a notebook of bold, often powerfully dissonant inventions not often performed--and I was lucky to hear it there, in the same church where the teen-aged Messiaen came on Sundays to hear the improvisations of his teacher Marcel Dupré, France's other great modernist composer for organ. Small world, Paris.

What I suddenly realized one evening at Saint-Eustache is that for Messiaen the organ itself is only half of the composer's equipment. The other half is the resonant chamber of the church, and in the case of Saint-Eustache, it is a magnificent instrument. All those lofty spaces, those stone indentations and galleries, transepts and ambulatory, they all hold and return the vibrations from the pipes at variable intervals that build and overlay the sound. Knowing this, Messiaen inserts spacing into his scores. A fortissimo blast of one of his impossibly dense chords will sound, then be followed by silence while the sound finishes its circuitous journey through this echo chamber. (I did not detect this effect in Bach, glorious as it was in other ways.) The space likewise separates out the layers of sound characteristic of Messiaen's work: in the 9th meditation, the one I heard this evening, he builds up from a sort of bass ostinato in the pedals, with one melody in the middle range and another reedy bird-like melody played in the highest register. Each layer resonates differently, so that while they are simultaneous, they persist in quite different temporalities, hanging there in nether space. In this way Messiaen, the organ, and the Gothic space are able to simulate something like what the Scholastics described as the convergence of time in eternity.

with Falstaff on the railway platform (1)

2008-11-22T01:47:00.011-05:00

22 November

Crowned and regal, Bolingbroke surveys his destiny, his wanton prince, and us from a high chair, which is rolled majestically across the vast stage when History beckons. Hotspur and his rebellious colleagues, on the other hand, wander through the same space like nomads in their mobile HQ tent. When the battle occurs, it happens as an athletic ballet, part West Side Story, part soccer match. These spacious effects come naturally to the Théâtre du Voyageur at Asnières, just north of Paris, a big stage housed right on the platform in a former railway station.

But what do we care about kings and battles? The production is "Le Ventre de Shakespeare," the Belly of Shakespeare, or "the Lives and Deaths of Falstaff in Two Episodes," and we spend most of the evening carousing with Sir John and Mistress Quickley and their patchy friends in a seedy piano bar that takes up most of center stage. Oh, and Prince Hal is there too, in it but not of it, his acerbic wit setting him apart, starting with his first lines, though it takes him the length of episode 1 to realize it.

At the Théâtre du Voyageur, as its website informs us, each production is "un apprentissage et un voyage," an exploration and a journey, which departs from the "psychological theater" to create "an experience lived simultaneously by actors and spectators." The local genius who inhabits these precincts is a dynamic woman named Chantal Melior, and it is she who has assembled the script, produced, and directed it. Chantal (everyone seeems to call her by her prénom) has nurtured her little repertory company over nearly two decades. It was she who saw the possibilities of the abandoned station and somehow persuaded the local and regional governments to renovate it. Though she disclaims much knowledge of English, she knows her Shakespeare, and she has stitched together these scenes from four of his plays with the cunning of a master, adding songs and choreography as needed. Her Falstaff, a hogshead of a man whose belly deserves its top billing, not only lives and breathes--as he does in Shakespeare's vignettes--but takes on the full amplitude of a major character, not tragic but sad in a modern way, a perpetual adolescent whose tricks and fancies never cease to amuse, but who gets left behind when Hal's express train leaves the station.

Before that happens, though, we get the full enjoyment of this outsized character: hear his quick lies as he tries to repossess his squandered bravery, hear him load his beloved prince with calumnies he smoothly disavows when overheard, hear him declaim on the hypocrisies of "honor." A floozie named "Do-Do" sings a dancehall number in his honor, in which he seems to be compared to an orangutan (my French isn't always up to this sort of scene, but folks around me found it hilariously naughty). And best of all, with Quickley on his arm, Sir John himself sings her a little chanson d'amour as they two-step across the stage, a scene the Bard would have stolen in a minute.

Theater is meant to be transport, and Chantal's brilliant insight in claiming this space is only a small part of how that effect is put to work. Apart from its luxury of stage space the company's style is low-budget: the cozy coffee bar/waiting area is furnished with mismatched chairs and makeshift tables and lit by a large dripping candelabra, a cross between an Allston group apartment and a set for La Bohème. But I feel immediately drawn in as the volunteer hostess absolutely refuses to take my euro the coffee is supposed to cost, and insists that I meet Chantal. "Is this your first time here? Welcome to the Théâtre du Voyageur" is said to me at least three times. This is clearly a voyage we're taking en groupe.

At the final moment of episode 1, though, that voyage becomes vast and solitary. Sir John and his friends witness the triumph of their pal, now crowned as Henry V, from behind a crowd-control barrier of chicken wire. Falstaff is his bragadoccio self, assuring one and all that his personal connection to the new king will have them all rolling in titles and repaid debts. But the new king has moved on to another life. As he rebukes his old companion from the far side of the stage, telling him how unsuited his capers are to his white hair, we can all but hear the air leaking out. Abandoned by his prince and his disappointed followers, Falstaff, slumped and vacant, makes an achingly slow walk across that spacious but empty stage, a voyager to nowhere.

What I saw last night was just episode 1, "la dolce vita." Falstaff's death is recounted in a rapid-fire epilogue just as the lights go out, but Chantal's notes to episode 2 promise that he will be back on other terms, not a person but a "character" (personnage de théâtre) living a "farce tragique." Will that be so very different? I'll find out tonight and let you know.

legality and legitimacy

2008-11-20T01:18:00.004-05:00

November 20

Last night I had the good fortune to hear Louis Joinet, legal scholar and former magistrate of the Cour de Cassation (French Appeals Court?), currently attached to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. M. Joinet was invited to speak on the rights of foreigners by the 12th arrondissement collective that supports undocumented workers, with whom I demonstrated a few weeks ago on behalf of an improperly challenged resident immigrant. (My 15 seconds of fame, a video interview on that occasion posted on Liberation.fr, would appear here if I knew how to make the link.) M. Joinet gave a theoretical overview of the question but spent most of his time fielding questions from the 50 or 60 interested citizens who filled a conference room in the Mairie of the 12th. Here are a few highlights of his talk:

Though like many here he refers to France as the "pays des Droits de l'Homme," M. Joinet derives the theory of Civil Disobedience, his principal topic, from Thoreau and M. L. King, both of whom he cited;
While undocumented workers are by definition in a situation of "délit" (infraction?), Joinet made the point that theirs is an administrative rather than a criminal offense, a distinction the current French government has deliberately blurred, as in the case of the immigrant I was involved in supporting;
Joinet's fundamental distinction was between legality and legitimacy: his point being that disagreement with the law is legitimate in a democracy, and thus the acts of resistance to the law which characterize the efforts of groups such as the sponsoring collective have a legitimacy as well. For Joinet such resistance in the name of what he called an "interêt supérieur"--the human right to immigrate, to live decently in the host country--is not only 'legitimate' but essential to the democratic process;
Several members of the audience challenged the limits to that resistance, which Joinet insisted must be non-violent: one cited the violence of 1789 and 1871, both of which the questioner insisted were legitimate instances of violent resistance, while another pointed out that resistance to the Vichy government was only legitimized après-coup, and only then because Germany lost the war. Numerous audience members cited the extraordinary violence the government employs when enforcing its immigration policies. Joinet cautiously acknowledged the place of violent resistance under carefully specified conditions, e.g. that no other means of resistance is available, but he clearly believes in the efficacy of carefully monitored and calibrated non-violent resistance;
He also cited an extraordinary precedent in French law, which he called "légalité future": several decades ago, after the right to abortion had become widely recognized but before that right was codified in the law, a French judge ordered that prosecutions cease on the grounds of future legality, i.e. the inevitability of a change in the law. I wonder what American legal specialists would say about that principle;
Joinet placed repeated emphasis on the importance of transparency for the argument he was making, and the dangers of clandestinity. Being legitimate, civic resistance must make its actions and its rationales perfectly clear, so as to distinguish itself from criminality, which he noted is by its nature clandestine. He cited a personal instance: while trying to negotiate an agreement in El Salvador between the military government and the FMLN, he noted that the quite understandable clandestinity of the latter made it hard to reach a verifiable agreement on the basis of the UN-guaranteed principles Joinet was there to represent.

Finally, Joinet thanked his audience, saying "You know more than I do about civic resistance because while I deal with it in theory, you practice it on the ground ("au terrain")." Coming from this eminent jurist whose long record of support for humane legal principles would be hard to dispute, this was high praise indeed.

sortilège du coin

2008-11-19T17:48:00.028-05:00

20 November

Ever since I arrived in Montparnasse, I have felt peculiarly drawn to the rue de la Gaîté. I don't know why. Perhaps its name: a street that promises gayety is not to be bypassed. Or its history: in the pleasure days of the 19th century this was a spot where Parisians came for, well, gayety, for dance, drink, and amour. In the last century these pleasures evolved into music halls and burlesque theaters, most famously Bobino, where Piaf sang and Chevalier got his start. Now interspersed with peep shows, the street remains nonetheless a theater district, a miniature Times Square full of show crowds, neon, and the buzz of cafés.

The other night I saw "Les Sortilèges de l'Amour" at the Comédie Italienne, surely the smallest theater on the rue de la Gaîté, where for the price of a ticket I bought a potent dose of magic. Just buying the tickets was an experience. Pushing open the little swinging door that separates theater from street I entered a darkened lobby hung with masques and costumes, where a voice from nowhere greeted me. Eventually I located a spotlit desk at the far end, where I met Attilio Maggiulli, co-founder of the Comédie, adapter/translator/director of "Les Sortilèges," ... and ticket-seller on this slow afternoon. Signor Maggiulli, Italian by birth, has dedicated much of his long career to bringing Commedia dell'Arte to France, studying with the eminent Giorgio Strehler in Milan, collaborating with Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theâtre du Soleil as well as the Comédie Française, and launching his Teatrino Italiano in Montparnasse in 1974. He moved to his present location, the former site of a police commisariat, in 1980, and expanded next door in 1991, replacing a sex shop (more on hybridization in a moment). Famous for his revivals of the Italian Baroque, he has also created an adaptation of Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks," and more recently, as a sequel to his "George W. Bush ou le triste Cow-Boy de Dieu" (2003), he performed his piece called "Guantanamo Palace" in San Francisco. Told I came from Boston, his eyes lit up: "Ah, le North-End ...."

"Les Sortilèges de l'Amour" is steeped in metamorphosis from the moment the narrator steps on-stage, wearing a parrot-mask, and delivers his prologue with little bird-coos separating the phrases. Each character in turn has such a hybrid identity: the King, a bull-dog, punctuates his speech with little barks; the ingenue Clarice not only wears a mosquito-nose and brandishes a rapier but buzzes around the stage en pointe while her exasperated father chases her with an old-fashioned bug-sprayer. The lovely Angela, played by Maggiulli's co-founder and companion Hélène Lestrade, alternates between a feminine voice of exquisite softness, and little lamb-noises that become a second lexicon of devotion.

In fact every element in this play of marvels is apt to transform into something else. The actors all play three or four parts, changing masks and costumes with a sort of mad glee. The court of faraway China becomes an enchanted forest when a set of enormous but delicate Chinese fans are folded out to make it one. Of course there is a magic spell that turns the King into a Beggar, the evil Minister into the King, the Beggar into a Cerf (deer), and even the Cerf almost becomes a Cerf-volant (kite). The play itself is a strange cross-fertilization of works by Goldoni and Gozzi, contemporaries and bitter rivals whose involuntary collaboration in "Sortilèges" is a theatrical inside-joke.

But the greatest metamorphosis is the one the viewer experiences stepping into Maggiulli's miniature world. The theater itself, with no more than fifty seats, is like a jewelry case lined with deep red plush. When the narrator pushes open the curtain, he reveals a small stage whose every surface is adorned with little decorative emblems--pictures, bits of glitter, hanging things-- suggestive of someplace faraway. Maggiulli's characters speak in an antique French that retains the inflations of court-Italian, though they lapse as well into speech rhythms--"Permesso?" " Avanti!"--more suited to a present-day trattoria. Likewise the magic curtain--what Maggiulli calls his féerie--parts to admit sly references to François Fillon (France's evil Prime Minister) and Carla Bruni (its balladeer First Lady). But for the most part we are swept along in the currents of the fabulous, so that when the actors remove their masks at the second curtain call, their reinsertion into the everyday is a more outrageous travesty than the play itself.

À quoi sert la Tour Eiffel?

2008-11-19T05:38:00.008-05:00

À encadrer la Tour Montparnasse, évidement.

mesure pour mesure in bobigny

2008-11-16T06:00:00.022-05:00

16 November

"Measure for Measure" is an intellectually fascinating text but a hard play to bring to life on the stage. In fact, it's a hard play to justify in lots of ways, as I found out one time when I attempted to teach it to sophomores at Commonwealth School... but that's another post. I went to see the play in French at MC 93 Bobigny last night, and the experience taught me some new things about the play--and a few about France as well.

One of the most successful aspects of this production was the set. Director Jean-Yves Ruf has the action begin (after a sort of prologue delivered by the duke from the audience) behind a gauzy transparent screen, through which we see what Vienna has become under the lax Duke's reign: prostitutes flaunt their wares under a garish light, as one of them squats to rinse her crotch and several clients exchange ribaldries while peeing (toward the audience) into a large rectangular pool/urinal that literally sets the stage for this drama of infraction and purgation. It is a world, as the duke admits, whose moral authority has gone flaccid in response to his negligence in enforcing the law. It is every Angelo's nightmare, every law-and-order conservative's case-in-point, every French droitiste's view of ... places like Bobigny.

Allow me to digress a moment. In this morning's Monde I read an interesting op-ed piece, "Appeler un Noir un Noir," in which the writer examines le Monde's use of racial and other sensitive terminology, and notes how the Obama campaign among other forces has put pressure on that usage manual. One of the terms the author still considers defamatory is the chic adjective neuf-trois, 9-3, which identifies the départment Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris, but is understood to "stigmatise" the residents with undertones of criminality and foreignness. (American speakers, think of the adjective "ghetto") Bobigny is part of that world: MC 93 is Seine-Saint-Denis (93)'s public theater.

Of course, one could hardly compare the French government's policies to the duke's. Under Interior Minister, now President, Sarkozy enforcement in places like Bobigny has been much more like ... Angelo's 'reforms.' Candidate Sarkozy famously suggested directing a watercannon at such places, and under his vigilance the racaille of Seine-Saint-Denis, as in Vienna, are rounded up, incarcerated, deported. Once you understand that Angelo's real principles are hypocrisy, abuse, and personal gain, voilà!--Ruf's lurid scenography takes on a hard edge. In yet another turn of the screw Sarkozy's cultural ministry has been trying to execute what local commentators call a "hostile takeover" of MC 93 by the ministry-managed Comédie Française (against the wishes of artistic director Patrick Sommier and Bobigny's Communist mayor), though that initiative seems to have been deferred. But the context is particularly pertinent for this play that is all about official power in conflict with human desires, as mirrored in the contrast of aristocratic and plebian standards of behavior. In its lavish and engaging presentation of the more populaire elements--not just the staging but virtuoso readings of a number of comic parts--this production comes down heavily on the side of le peuple and its humane republican values, and against the republic of les flics--of cops like Angelo and Sarkozy.

What is less successful is the effort to make coherent the angelic worldview, the absolutist standard of right behavior, whose burden in the play it is Isabelle's to impose on this bordel of a town. It is not the fault of the actress that she is constrained to play her entire role in a white nightgown more suggestive of Bon Marché than of Heaven. But she wouldn't have to intone her moral lessons so operatically, though really the fault is in how untrue these lines ring to moderns. Even her beloved, soon-to-be executed brother Claudio can't believe his ears when she patiently explains why her chastity is worth more than his young life. I'm in no position to judge André Markowicz's verse translation except to say it was 'difficult' for me in a Racinian sort of way, but I'm not sure Shakespeare's original makes Isabelle's case any more successfully.

This production's version of the Duke, on the other hand, is an improbable success, as well as the part of the play when I was most aware that it was in French. Let me say that my 10th graders were particularly unwilling to take this guy seriously, despite their teacher's increasingly plaintive insistence that they had to, that he was the obvious center of authority and truth in the play. But what a wacko he is, with his plots and disguises and non-stop machinations. And that's just how Jérôme Derre played him, waving his hands and rubbing them with glee, shouting at Isabelle and pulling her by the ear, just before he suddenly turns and gives her a 10-second smooch right on her virgin mouth. Is this sounding French? At last it all makes sense: it's all about the desire of the Other of the other, which displaces the phallocratic law of the father into a chain of signifiers ... Just wait till I explain it to the sophomores.

réflexions/reflections

2008-11-14T07:45:00.016-05:00

14 November

In just a few weeks I leave Paris, and already I am looking back. Among other marvels I am startled to realize that my most recent NPA post ("En avant le NPA!") was my ninth substantive report. Together they make up a narrative of --I'm guessing--5000 words, some of them directed at the mediated persona of Olivier Besancenot, others written from the trenches with my wonderful comrades from the comité du 14ème arrondissement de Paris du Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste, i.e. NPA 14e.

The very existence of these dispatches amuses me, as I had no intention whatsoever to write this blog, or any formal account of my NPA experience. I wasn't even sure it would be an NPA experience--I looked into the Greens and others before settling on the NPA. But the conjuncture of numerous events--the general crisis of capitalism (the so-called financial crisis), the rightward drift of European Socialism, the relative success of Besancenot in the 2007 presidentials, and then in the mainstream press, and above all the portentous decision to create a new party--has made the founding events of the NPA worth recording. The opportunity to post "Olivier Besancenot and the Besancenot-effect" on Art Goldhammer's blog showed me what fun the blogosphere could be, and here I am. It's not quite "Ten Days that Shook the World," this NPA story, at least not yet ... but close? (You tell me--that's what the 'comments' link is for.)

But here's the dirty secret (the one John Reed never told you): it's really all personal, this batch of political reports. To hell with dialectical materialism, my decision to become part of the historic forward march of the NPA was in response to the question, who will I have to talk to in Paris? Since I don't know a soul there anymore, who can I meet, and how? There. My secret is out. And since I've said plenty already about what I think are some of the grand historical themes of the NPA narrative, I want to address the question, also thorny and dialectical in its way: did it work, my ploy?

Not entirely, not in the six short weeks I've had. The local committee is a professional sort of connection: its meetings are formally organized, and I've spoken little, while listening for hours to, and just barely keeping up with, the lively back-and-forth. I've spoken more personally to a few of the comrades at other meetings, emailed with others; at the Besancenot rally Debra and I were warmly greeted at the door by Dimitri and his Greek Communist pal Mikele (?), and sat surrounded by them, Dimitri's son, another comrade named Bruno, and Bruno's wife--practically a little clan in that sea of faces. I was actually asked to give a talk at the last meeting, an indigène report on Obama's election, but we ran out of time. I plan to reconvene at a café with at least a few of the comrades to hold that session before I leave. So yes, I do feel a some real personal connection--and a great deal of warmth--for these NPA comrades, but no, it would be unrealistic to think I could build real social ties in a few months.

On the other hand, as an observer I've had a fascinating immersion into a small social world that was forming long before I got there and will go on for who knows how long, but even in six weeks has shown real growth. I feel that NPA 14e is like my own little "Village in the Vaucluse" (a famous longitudinal study of French peasant life), only vastly speeded-up for the 21st century. As in a village, the 25 or 30 attendees distribute through the available roles: the one who keeps order, the one who tells a joke, the passive listeners, the objectors and the consensus-builders. Like a village square, NPA 14e meetings are the scene of flare-ups and reconciliations, dismissal (rare) and admiration (frequent). The 'old guard' of middle-aged men I saw running the meeting in October was mostly listening to a crew of 20-somethings last time, including our two pre-congress delegates and a team of computer-savvy leaflet designers who astonish us oldsters. See? I have a kind of a niche too, though they laughed when I introduced myself as "NPA un peu provisoire."

So History will continue and so will I, but the NPA et moi will live our histories in different places. More will happen in the next two weeks--this isn't my last post from Paris about the NPA. But it's probably the last time I'll take a photo in the mirror, so I hope you liked the picture.

En avant, le NPA!

2008-11-14T02:10:00.010-05:00

14 November

[Warning: the following post contains hard-core communist political analysis. Readers wishing to avoid such content are advised to proceed to the next post, which will offer a more personal account of the same experience.]

"After all, it's not every day that one founds a political party."

--One of the NPA 14e militants, on the question of why we need weekly meetings from now till January

With the apparently quite successful work of the November 8/9 pre-Congress, and deepening crises in both the world economy and the French Socialist Party, the NPA is taking on greater solidity in the minds of its adherents even though it's still more than two months before it will officially exist. The sense that the historical moment draws near has sharpened the focus of NPA 14e's work, including its meeting last Wednesday night, and makes these preliminary manoeuvers all the more significant.

The pre-Congress itself: all accounts agree that it was a serious, even tedious working session. Delegates from 400+ committees from all over France were divided into four work-groups, and proceeded to analyze the founding documents--programme, statuts, and orientation--line-by-line in 3-hour sessions that went through Saturday and into Sunday without quite finishing. The Sunday session on finding a new name for the party was (as I predicted) adjourned indefinitely without any resolution. The party will head toward the European elections next spring as the 'New Anti-Capitalist Party,' and after that, who knows. Some other decisions of consequence:

(programme) The party will operate for now with a 'small' program, that is, a statement of general principles--democratic, revolutionary, eco-socialist--without trying to define for now the 'large program,' i.e. exactly what sort of socialist organization, what distribution of goods, what systems of management, in short, all the details of that new society that will go about replacing the capitalist system. One has a general idea, but .... Likewise the strategic steps for getting from here to there will not be mapped out by the time of the January Congress, but will presumably evolve over time in response to a variety of conditions.
While relations between the party and its allies in the left of the labor movement were recognized as extremely important, there too no specific mechanisms were created to connect the two. For now the party will continue to support syndicalist movements on an ad hoc basis, but the pre-Congress agreed that a more formal institutional relationship will need to be defined.
(statuts) After some debate the proponents of a more centralized party were out-voted by federalists, that is, there is agreement that primary authority resides in the local committees, from which the authority of the central committee (CPN) devolves. This was understood as part of a larger effort to dissociate the structure of the new party from that of the more Leninist LCR, whose dissolution on January 30 will directly precede the foundation of NPA on the 31st.
(Orientation) This document, which intends to supplement the theoretical and formal structures with more concrete plans, engagements, and strategic initiatives, was the least finished, and a draft of its status quo will not be available until next week. But concrete prises de position are more interesting to many than ideological declarations, and NPA 14e agreed to focus its immediate efforts on staking out a position on this part, which it will sent to the central committee. It was agreed at the pre-Congress to divide this question in two:

1) All the specific movements the NPA supports, such as anti-privatization of the Post Office and other public services; support for immigrant rights and regularized work status; enlarged unemployment benefits and a moratorium on lay-offs; and so forth need to be catalogued into an active program; and

2) the party needs to position itself for the June, 2009 European elections. This thorny and ultimately quite revealing question involves defining "What sort of Europe," a question one hears all over the left, especially since the French voters rejected the Treaty of Lisbon (in a non-binding referendum). NPA insists on the need for pan-European and international solutions on many fronts, but opposes the EU in its present form as an agency of the Capitalist system. It will hope to elect deputies to the European Parliament who will convey this message, but the big question is: with whom will it construct lists of candidates within the regional districts? Greens? Left Greens? Left Socialists including the new Parti de Gauche that has split from the PS? In my view this question, and the lists of candidates that result, will define the identity of the NPA far more effectively than all the official documents put together end-to-end. Let the debate begin.

Meanwhile, the debate already did begin in a most interesting fashion on Wednesday night. Background: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the senator who just left the PS to start the Parti de Gauche, left open the question of a potential alliance with the NPA. Besancenot, in a press conference related to the NPA's pre-Congress, seemed to shut that door with a remark one of the comrades described as 'sèche' (harsh?). This gesture was first gently, then roundly criticized by a clear majority of the 30 or so members of NPA 14e for two reasons: 1) they want a much more flexible and open system of alliances within the far-left, rather than the old sectarianism of the LCR, and 2) (most interestingly) they don't know on what authority Besancenot can make NPA policy on this sensitive issue: no one has elected him to any NPA office, there are no mechanisms to do so, and in short he seems to have spoken out of turn. A motion to this effect was deferred, for lack of time, to the next meeting, but in a week's time the NPA 14e will almost surely send what amounts to a motion of censure to the CAN (temporary central committee), enjoining Besancenot from making unilateral pronouncements.

I draw three conclusions from this:

1) the media perception that NPA is a vehicle for Besancenot and/or a continuation of the LCR's highly centralized structure is completely at variance with NPA 14e's view of its role;

2) the local or 'federal' basis of power in the NPA is already a fact for this local group; and

3) both of the preceding ideas will be put to the test if and when CAN responds to NPA 14e's motion.

So the gears are meshing, and the machinery of the Revolution lurches forward. My own quite personal reflections on this process will follow in a next post.

tour de Montparnasse

2008-11-13T03:07:00.010-05:00

13 November

One of the great Parisian traditions is the ritual of the visite guidée. Half a dozen perfect strangers, consulting their Officiel des spectacles, show up at a designated exit from some métro station, perhaps greeting each other shyly, perhaps not even. Then a scholar arrives to lead them on a walking seminar around the quartier, discoursing on its history, its anecdotes and notable inhabitants, its architecture and public art. Instant liberal arts education, bonus points for exercise, and a lesson in spoken French, all for 10 euros.

When I lived in Paris 26 years ago the visites were a favorite of mine for all these reasons, and I went on enough to know which guides--there were then about a dozen regulars--were more substantive and which were fluff. First place in the former category was an intense little man named Pierre-Yves Jaslet, who looked and talked like a perpetual graduate student, and I saw pas mal de choses in his company.

The other day I picked up my Officiel, and found a triple surprise: Jaslet was still giving tours all these years later, I remembered his name beyond a doubt, and he has added Montparnasse to his repertoire. This was all too good to ignore, so last Monday at precisely 10:30 Debra and I found ourselves in front of métro Vavin, sortie blvd. Montparnasse, côté impair, looking about expectantly. Sure enough I recognized him as he came huffing up a little late, Jaslet himself, a little heavier, same intense black-framed glasses, maybe even the same red silk ascot, still in need of a wash and badly tied.

We began--a little group of eight--by crossing the street and walking straight into the Coupole, the art deco cafe-restaurant whose grand opening at the end of 1927 signaled both the high water mark and the final movement of Montparnasse's golden age. Jaslet warmly greeted the maître-d' before walking us around the palatial dining room, pointing out the columns individually painted by a roster of well-known artists of the era--but not, he tells us, the artists you associate with the 20's, not the cubists and surrealists. This is a more representative collection.

From the Coupole we begin working the rue Delambre. Jaslet pulls rumpled papers from his pocket with scraps of information and the codes for street doors so we can enter the courtyards. In this one a series of artists, including the famous model Kiki of Montparnasse, had their studios starting in 1909. This other one has a tall doorway so that farm-wagons loaded with hay could enter: it was a breton dairy, where cows were kept and fresh milk sold, even at the start of the 20th century. But don't raise your voices in the courtyard--the woman who lives upstairs suffers from Tourette's syndrome and has been known to throw buckets of water down on the visitors. We maintain an awed silence, but the half-timbered construction and exterior wooden staircase speak for themselves--nothing on the street shows this sort of age.

And so we go. At the end of Delambre we stop for a little talk about the progressive walling of Paris. The boulevard Edgar-Quinet, where we stand, marked a fortification less military than fiscal: under the ancien régime tariffs were collected on goods entering the city, and much smuggling took place over the wall, now the site of market stalls. Outside the wall was a free zone, a lieu de plaisance for students from the Latin Quarter since at least the 17th century. It was they who named it 'Parnassus,' the mountain of the Muses, in honor of their own creative leisures. In passing Jaslet notes the balcony of the apartment where Sartre passed his final years, just a few blocks from the studio of de Beauvoir. Another doorway leads to the room where André Breton wrote one of the Surrealist Manifestos--Jaslet can't remember which one, but gives us a short lecture on Breton's exposure to psychotic formations during the Great War, when he was in psychiatric training, and the relation between the Freudian unconscious and the fantaisiste realism of the surrealists.

Gradually this little grid of streets, familiar to me for its shops, turns into a hive of interconnections over time and space. We enter more courtyards, some older than the quartier as such. We hear about the urbanist impulses of the incipient Vth Republic, which left the Tour Montparnasse to hover like Modernity itself over the once-bucolic environs of the Gaîté. And about the cultural politics of Jack Lang and the Socialists, which would explain the placement in the little public garden of that lovely proletarian sculpture by a Franco-Lithuanian sculptor whose name I've forgotten. (I should have taken notes.) We hear about more artists, more groups of artists, and --yes--the expatriate American writers, whose real café, we learn, the apex of literary snobisme, was the Select, across the street from where our visit ends.

If the name Jaslet stayed in my memory for all those years, even now when I have trouble remembering my own, it must be because his profession has always fascinated me. A really good visite requires a rare intensity of knowledge, ranging across many disciplines but homing in on an area just a few blocks square. With that clarity of context and intention the sometimes dilettantish pursuits of cultural history become as precise and applied as engineering. After two hours with Jaslet the back streets of Montparnasse have changed for me forever; they echo as I walk them, and their closed doors open onto a dozen secluded vistas. If education, as its roots suggest, is a leading out, then an educator might have much to learn from a guide de visite.

partie de campagne

2008-11-12T18:33:00.007-05:00

12 November

"Nos Enfants Nous Accuseront" is not a particularly well-made film. Directed and partly written by Jean-Paul Jaud, a television producer making his first documentary film, it relies too heavily on gorgeous stills shot across the rich fields and mountains around Barjac, the village at the center of the film. These, and the swelling music, give the film the feeling of a series of epiphanies, when actually it records an ongoing social struggle whose outcome is far from certain. That struggle, though, is worth the careful scrutiny it gets in Jaud's film, quite apart from the director's artistic pretensions.

Barjac's drama is the drama of the earth itself, threatened with industrial methods of agricultural production that poison the soil and contaminate our food supply. The film cuts from farmers spraying clouds of chemicals on their crops to a UNESCO conference in which epidemic levels of cancer and birth defects are linked to the concentrations of poisons in our food. Led by its forward-looking mayor and a cadre of dedicated school personnel, Barjac fights back: the school canteen announces an all-organic food policy, children learn to appreciate organic food by growing it in little plots, and experts engage a skeptical group of local farmers in lengthy discussions of subsidy-driven market distortion and the logic underlying sustainable production. In this film cafeteria cooks are heroes, and by the end the whole village sings a protest song--"aux armes citoyens!"--while sampling one another's pot-luck delicacies.

What interested me most was not the issue, important though it is, or the sentiment deployed to advance its message. No, the really remarkable thing is how this small-town mayor, these ordinary country folk, are able to act decisively and communally in the face of a vast threat that leaves many of us shaking our heads and changing the subject. The mayor takes a brave stand because he knows he needs to. Teachers tell their students what is right and what is wrong--their descriptions of processed turkey patties have the kids making sick faces--with no apparent fear of being labelled ideologues or fanatics. A rough consensus forms around the urgency of the problem, and the children, their parents, and the local farming establishment are brought to reason. The mayor asks a number of people how it's going, but he doesn't ask if they think he's right. Close-ups of the faces of adults at meetings--cooks and parents and farmers, straining to understand the scientific explanations of medical and agronomic experts--are some of the film's best moments. Close-ups of children delighting in the lush produce they pull from the earth are a close second. But although the film's vocabulary is an antiquated repertoire of sentiment combined with the false sublime of the wide-angle lens, its unstated message is of solidarity, people's power, and resistance. In this domain the people of Barjac have much to teach Paris, and us all.

Obamencenot

2008-11-07T03:42:00.010-05:00

November 7

He is young but battle-tested, an eloquent and inspirational orator, a visionary ready to open a new chapter in his nation's political history. He is ... Olivier Besancenot in 2012? Well, maybe not, but from where I sit it is interesting to compare the careers and messages of these two meteoric and somewhat improbable political leaders.

Let me first note that the Obama phenomenon continues to resonate through French political life. At 80%, after all, French voters were prepared to give him a margin somewhat higher than Hawaii's. Media coverage has been intense and uniformly effusive. This is all the more poignant as the Socialist party faithful have just voted provisionally for Ségolène Royal over several even less inspiring figures to carry on as party leader. Meanwhile the citizenry and the editorialists on all sides are asking bluntly and rather plaintively, where is our Obama?

Obamania was somewhat less in evidence at last night's first big NPA Paris rally, though Besancenot's remarks on that question are worth quoting: "It would be foolish and sectarian," he said, "to overlook the historic importance of this opening of the American political process to a black man whose race would have excluded him in an earlier time. But is would be equally foolish and sectarian to imagine that Obama or any leader of the Democratic Party can bring about the sweeping changes needed to rescue Capitalism from its crisis." And that about sums it up: the interest and frank admiration for Obama's success are genuine and profound, but as every comrade I spoke with was well aware, Obama was the chosen candidate of the financial class, and his job is to get the system running again, not to change it in any fundamental way.

Besancenot and the NPA, on the other hand, are riding the crest of a powerful wave, and the impending shipwreck of the Socialist Party will only add force to the new party. Besancenot delivered a fiery exegesis of the crisis, which he resolutely sees as the "inevitable" conclusion of a long series of crises which as he said are "systemic" to Capitalism. He spoke for more than an hour to an auditorium full of shouting, cheering, laughing supporters, several thousand of them. Preceding him on the program were a series of quite moving speakers from labor movements, a pair of undocumented workers whose descriptions of the sans-papiers struggle drew the loudest applause, and a teenaged student shouting in kidspeak--"v'là!" Besancenot came on with a fervid, almost angry denunciation of the capitalist system, but as he relaxed into his speech, he found more connection to his audience, with his distinctive mix of ironic humor and pedagogy. "It doesn't matter whether you call it revolutionary socialism, ecosocialism, communism, or a democratic workers' state," he said. "But it needs to be a completely new system."After he finished, and the audience was on its feet, clapping rhythmically, OB and the emcee led the audience in a "song," and I have to confess that the sound and sight of a thousand militants et militantes, their fists upraised, singing the Internationale in its original tongue, left me more than a little moved.

Does that mean that OB and Marxism are 'right,' and Obama and the Democrats are 'wrong'? Three days after his election and seventy-four before his inauguration, is Obama already headed for the dustbin of history? Well, let's not be hasty. Economist that I'm not, I have a sense that a well-managed operation like Obama's may have a good chance of pulling the system together and restoring confidence, and for purely selfish reasons I sure hope they can. More broadly, I can imagine a few more good cycles in the American economy (even if it can only be done by borrowing even more against our childrens' future, and their children's ...). America's size and dominance of many sorts give it more room to maneuver through a crisis whose magnitude is still unknown.

But--to go deeper into treacherous waters--I wonder if France's economy isn't more vulnerable, for reasons of size, to such a debt-driven recovery strategy. As OB and many others have noted, France and much of Europe were heading into recession before the financial crisis, and have already experienced a lot of social tension because of the shrinking government safety net. If Sarkozy isn't able to fend off a prolonged and deep recession, the anti-capitalist logic expounded so clearly by OB and the NPA will sound more--to use OB's word--inévitable to French ears than to American.

Would it not then, indulgent reader, be a scenario of World-Historic grandeur if in 2012, they were both running for president: Obama reaffirmed and reelected by a resilient and grateful America; and Besancenot, in a France devastated by relentless recession, unemployment, and despair, leading the French left to a historic and revolutionary victory ...?

Naming the baby, and other dialectical questions

2008-10-29T20:57:00.009-04:00

30 October

In this week before the NPA's pre-congress, with no NPA-related trials in process, and just the usual run of Besancenot-sightings in various media, one could say that the NPA story is in pause mode. A vast number of small events are taking place, though, on a variety of levels (most of all in the extremely busy online forums). So let me signal two quite different activities I have been observing up close:

1) Of the various topics under discussion on-line, two draw the greatest activity: the party's program, and its name. But after a few hours of reading the many strings of posts for each, I realize that really the two are one: every proposal to name the party is finally a claim for some programmatic emphasis or other, and conversely, every program suggests a slightly different name. Whether this ferment will lead to some consensus on a program, and/or a viable name, is hard to say at this point. Some support is building to defer the name question and live with "NPA" for a while at least, even though the 'negative' cast of the phrase was intended as a place-holder for something more positive--but the place-holder has taken on a certain life.

Meanwhile the temporary central committee CAN (Collectif d'Animation Nationale) issued a statement last week essentially suggesting that the name-the-party forum was hopelessly unwieldy as a mechanism to actually resolve the question. On the other hand the extended argument in that statement, and the mass of posts it responds to, shed valuable light on what it means to undertake this politics at this time. CAN's communiqué examines a series of key terms that show up in proposed names, as follows:

parti: or a movement?
gauche: is the relativism of the term useful? or is there an absolute of the term, which might be 'revolutionary' or some such? Even Ségo claims the term 'gauche' for herself ...
de classe: is the class analysis so central to Marxism appropriate for the present struggle? Is the party oriented toward a classless alternative? If it intends to gather (as it says) all the exploited, are these the same as 'workers' (travailleurs, but also ouvriers or even salariés)?
révolutionnaire: here there is substantial agreement: the party intends a break with capitalist forms of organization, not a reform or modification. But is the term too scary to put in footlights as the party's name?
socialisme: here again, substantial agreement that socialism is the pour, the counterpart of the anti- in the present name. But there is already a Socialist party, which no one wants to be confused with, and also a legacy from the discredited 'actually existing socialist regimes.' So how to convey the idea of a reinvented socialism?
démocratie: again, solid agreement on the goal of real participatory democracy, of which the forums give some anticipatory vision. But how to differentiate from the co-opted forms of democracy in evidence in France and elsewhere?
Other key elements: ecologism, feminism, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, and--perhaps most significant--internationalism all claim some visibility, but it's hard to privilege one without demoting the others.

So this name business raises lots of questions--good ones--but the simple marketing question--a catchy name-- gets quickly overwhelmed. My guess is that CAN will preempt the question, and the party will remain the NPA, even though (as many note) it isn't just against but for, it won't always be new, and it may already be more of a movement than a party. As Shakespeare noticed, the answer to "What's in a name?" can be "trouble."

2) Meanwhile back at the Chateau Ouvrier, NPA 14e met last Tuesday, and a little microcosm of the party's concerns unfolded. Apart from a lot of busyness as the core group tries to participate in various committees local, city-wide, and national, there is a constant drawing-in of new people. We were only 15 (the Toussaint vacation drew many away), of whom about half were attending their first or second meeting. And when the group tried to agree on a statement of party principles to send along to the national committee, a tempest blew up as one of the newer comrades roundly condemned the draft as involving all the old Marxist/Communist jargon and clichés that--in the speaker's view--have no use in the 21st century. Passion emanates from some precise source, and in this case that source was clear: the speaker evoked his grandparents, Chinese people who had participated in the revolutionary struggles of the mid-century. And his ingrained, almost phobic resistance to the terminology of those times was uncontainable: the meeting came close to collapsing into a shouting match more than once.

Others supported his thesis in more nuanced terms: yes, there are large sociological changes to account for (eg: the fact that through their retirement accounts many union workers are shareholders if not precisely capitalists, the declining fraction of workers who are 'ouvriers' --factory workers?--and so on). But what impressed me was that the bulk of the committee held its ground: Marx was eloquently defended, his tenets knowledgeably applied to the present conjuncture, the goal of 'revolution' in no way relativized (though all agree that the tactics will have to be newly invented, and will not involve armed struggle per se). And through all the shouting and blunt contradiction, a certain sense of common purpose (if not quite civility) persisted. There is a lot of tolerance both in the on-line forums and in this group for controversy, with feelings only temporarily bruised. I come away with a new appreciation for not being 'nice' à l'américaine in these situations.

So the party heads into its pre-congress, starting with the first Paris NPA rally--starring Olivier Besancenot-- on Thursday night. What direction all this fervor will take, whether so many intense expectations can be satisfied, whether the tension between democratic openness and expediency can be sustained ... these are questions that hang in the air, or rather criss-cross the virtual space of the internet.

vive Jaurès

2008-10-27T18:00:00.009-04:00

Today I read about the death of Jean Jaurès. It was not a big job of research--actually I just read the article in Wikipedia. Probably I once knew who he was, and what he did, and how he died, but all that was a blank slate when I started this morning. So here's what I learned:

Jean Jaurès was a leader of the French Socialist Party at the turn of the last century, a leading figure in the Second International, a deputy to the Assembly, a hero to many. In those terrible months in 1914 when the most horrific war imaginable at that time was drawing ineluctably toward its opening bombardment, Jaurès had the idea that the working people of Europe could still prevent it by acting in concert. This idea was wildly unpopular in France, where the fires of chauvinistic pride were already burning high. Even in his own party Jaurès, though respected, was in the minority. Still he spent the last two weeks of July shuttling frantically between meetings of workers' organizations, trying to build the foundations for a general strike, which could only work if every combatant country was paralyzed simultaneously--an unlikely outcome. To achieve partial success in one's own country was to risk the charge of treason, but for Jaurès, who seemed to understand better than most the weight of devastation that pulled on the other side of the balance, the cost of failure was too heavy to bear. So he labored on, returning to Paris on the afternoon of the 31st of July. He went to his office at the newspaper L'Humanité, where he wrote another appeal against the war. Then he went as usual to take his dinner at the Café du Croissant, rue de Montmartre where, sitting with his back to the sidewalk, he was shot in the head by a deranged nationalist student named Villain. He died instantly. The French army, like those all across Europe, was already mobilizing toward the front. His socialist brethren, along with many of his nationalist adversaries, paid Jaurès the honor of a massive funeral, but there was no further opposition in France to the war, which broke out in force two weeks later.

Villain was imprisoned for the duration of the war and tried only afterwards, in 1919. Despite the certainty of the facts, he was acquitted by a French jury, who judged that "he had done a service for the fatherland" by murdering Jaurès. Under French law Jaurès's widow was obliged to pay court costs.

Why do I bother to excavate this little footnote? Well, I happened to be reading an article on the NPA website this morning, in which the author offered the opinion--which I happen to share--that the capitalist system will not be able to respond to the urgencies of the impending environmental catastrophe in time, if ever, and he therefore called for an anti-capitalist party that would be "100% écosocialiste." The author, Raoul Marc Jennar, notes in passing that he was not a member of the Trotskyist LCR, did not share"the political culture born in 1917," but rather belonged to the tradition of 1793 (the radical phase of the French Revolution), 1871 (the Paris Commune), and "the man who was murdered in the Café du Croissant in Paris in August, 1914." That was the remark that sent me to Wikipedia, where I retrieved the rather moving story of Jaurès's murder.

But still the reader--if any has penetrated this far--may well ask, so what? Why that, why now? Or better still, why this quixotic fascination for the improbable Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste, when you could be simply enjoying Paris (and perhaps entertaining a reader or two with your folkloric evocations, so much more fun to read than these tracts chiants)? But I find it remarkably interesting that M. Jennar, in the year 2008, continues to keep faith with Jaurès, let alone Robespierre and the communards. Like Jaurès we are staring into the abyss, though it may not cost us our lives to say so--just a little sleep, unless we change the subject. With whom are we keeping faith, dear reader, you and I?

So there, faithful reader, I'm done for now. Maybe tomorrow I'll have something lighter to talk about. But for now, vive Jaurès, vive le NPA, vive l'écosocialisme!

street-singer

2008-10-25T06:36:00.015-04:00

25 October

The outdoor market near my quartier, the Edgar- Quinet, happens twice a week. On Wednesdays I go there because I'm hungry, but on Saturdays I try to work up a hunger just so I can go and hear the street-singer. He is quite a performer, with his traditional costume and his high, almost operatic baritone, and he positively preens for the many like me who take his picture. His repertoire, cranked out on a wonderful old hurdy-gurdy machine, includes all the old bal musette standards. Grandmothers often pause so their young charges can breathe in this air of an older Paris as it blows past. I don't recognize the tune he is playing when I enter the market this morning, but as I make my way down the stalls I hear 6, 8, a dozen mostly older folks still singing the tune long after the sound of the hurdy-gurdy has faded away.

book-seller

2008-10-25T03:53:00.022-04:00

25 October

There are several bookstores just around the corner on the boulevard Montparnasse, including one that sets out a charming rack of antiquities, but the moment I saw Tschann Libraire I knew I had found the real thing: notices for meet-the-author events and other book news taped all over the door, a steady flow of serious-looking customers in and out, and BOOKS, lots of them, ranked ceiling to floor on every square meter of wall space with more piled on tables and desks. When I mentioned to Mme. la libraire that I wanted to read about the literary and cultural legacy of the quartier she gave me a sharp look, as if to determine how serious I was, marched over to one of the dense shelves, pulled down a small armload of books, and handed them to me. Then she directed me to her own swivel chair and suggested I take a look at them "in tranquility." Now that's a bookstore!

Among the volumes was a vast, 600-plus-page edition of the memoirs of André Salmon, a writer I had never heard of. Salmon was a poet, novelist, and art critic who lived just around the corner from where I am now through the golden Montparnassian decades of the '10's, 20's, and '30's, before decamping for the south of France, where he lived and wrote for another 30 years. As a young man he had been part of the Montmartre crowd, but in 1909 he joined the migration of artists from the one butte to its crosstown rival. In explanation he cites the adage, "Open a school, you close a prison," and elaborates: "Open a night club, you close an artist's workshop, and ten poets disappear." A succinct history of the decline of Montmartre.

Luckily for me, Salmon also published a shorter volume just about Montparnasse, and that's the book I walked out with and am deeply immersed in at this moment. Salmon is a challenging stylist, a bit like Proust in his attachment to a rarefied vocabulary and long, twisting sentences, but he is also (like Proust) a genial and pungent observer.

To give you a little sense of Salmon, and to give myself a little translating work-out, I am appending a short passage from his boyhood recollections (editorial suggestions and corrections welcomed):

[...] ça descendait, au clair de lune et en bande, bras-dessus, bras-dessous, la rue de la Gaîté pleine des attraits d'une rue chinoise, parfumée de friture, arrosée de lumières violentes charriées par les ruisseaux. Nos drôles bramaient, feulaient selon les temperaments variables d'une unique nature, leur hymne provocateur, cynique et fier, orgeuilleux et patibulaire:

Faut qu' ça pète ou qu' ça casse,

V'là les gars de Montparnasse;

Ils sont tous rigolos;

Viv'nt les gars de Montparno!

("Montparnasse," p. 9)

[... this rowdy bunch] strolled arm-in-arm under a full moon down the rue de la Gaîté, as full of attractions as any street in China, perfumed with the smell of deep-frying and washed with violent flashes of light that shone in the streaming gutters. Some of our jokers bellowed out, while others growled, according to their particular variations on a single personality, their provocative anthem, proud and cynical, felonious and bold:

Look out for that fart, it'll bust your ass,

'Cuz we're the guys from Montparnasse;

With this bunch of clowns you never know;

So here's to the guys from Montparno!

Fun, hunh? I'll look for more bits to pass along as I go.

In the Ring with OB

2008-10-23T10:14:00.004-04:00

23 October

As the economic crisis deepens, and the NPA moves closer to its actual founding congress, the swirl of media attention that his lifted Olivier Besancenot into a prominence unheard of for many years on the far-left shows no sign of abating. Indeed le Monde seems to regard him as a ‘hook’ for its series of online interviews en directe and has been prominently displaying the notice of his participation in the series next Monday, complete with photo, in its online edition for the past few days.

But what is the real communicative value of these encounters between a serious revolutionary party leader and the mainstream (read: bourgeois, infotainment, commercial, sensationalized) media? Let’s take as an exemplary case Tuesday’s 15-minutes-of-fame for OB at the microphones of BFMtv, a relatively new and small (I think— anyone who knows more about the vagaries of French TV here, please weigh in) cable network. French speakers can find the footage on the new (and quite user-friendly, unlike the old LCR site) NPA site at NPA2009.org, but for the rest I have prepared the following little recap of the proceedings.

The ‘host’ of the show, Jean-Jacques Bourdin, launches the exchange by asking OB what he thinks of Sister Emmanuelle, famously known to the media as the 'French Mother Teresa,' who has just died. OB makes a respectful acknowledgement of her work. “But you, you’re not a believer,” says JJB, as OB explains that no, he isn’t, but he finds some common cause with her work to relieve the poor, and plunges into an analysis of the shortage of public housing, and the decline in social security. JJB looks uneasy for a bit, but then interrupts him to ask if he doesn’t think Sarkozy is handling things pretty well. This sets off a long critique of the French government's bail-out plan, and a call for a new “service public bancaire,” a publically owned and managed financial sector, which is the core of NPA’s counter-proposal.

JJB breaks in on OB here to ask, smiling, “Are you still being spied on?” (Background: OB has been in court this week pursuing his complaint against the French CEO of the Taser-gun manufacturing firm, who has admitted gathering personal data on OB. He and six co-defendants may have violated privacy laws by supplying privileged financial data, taking personal photos, even recording the daily schedules of OB's small children.} OB tries to establish his objection to deploying the Taser without a full study of alleged incidents—150 deaths in the US, according to Amnesty International—but JJB interrupts him with questions like, “Who do you think did the spying? Did you see them?” and “’Under investigation’ doesn’t mean he’s guilty, does it?”

As OB recites the cautionary practices of other EU countries on the Taser question, JJB abruptly breaks in: “Is Jean-Marc Rouillon a member of the NPA?” (Background: Rouillon 20-some years ago, in an act of radical-left adventurism, murdered a French CEO, and had served 22 years, 10 in solitary, before being released on parole. He was just reincarcerated two weeks ago when he gave a magazine interview, a parole violation, and refused to express remorse, a political land-mine. During his brief liberty he did indeed join the Marseilles NPA, though only after the committee required him to renounce violence as a tactic. OB—against the advice of many in the NPA—has stoutly defended his right as a former prisoner to exercise his “rights as a citizen to engage in activist politics.”} OB notes wearily that he has been asked about this in the media every day for the past ten days, but JJB is tenacious: “But you understand that he didn’t show any remorse?” “Do you think armed struggle is justified?”

OB finally takes a high-speed exit from Rouillon into an elaboration of democratic socialist principles; JJB is non-plussed for a moment, but manages to break in with “You like soccer—what do you say to those soccer fans who booed the ‘Marseillaise?’” (Background: This happened at a recent match between the national teams of France and Tunisia, played in France. President Sarkozy has threatened to personally suspend any future match where such a thing should happen, though no one is quite sure how he will do it.) OB managed to suggest that the entire world of professional soccer was “suffering from racism and nationalism,” but not before JJB asked him if he sang the “Marseillaise” at games. “No, but I don’t boo.” “Do you know the words?” OB, with a master’s degree in history, allowed himself to smile, and remarked, “I know a few things about history—and it’s a beautiful revolutionary song.”

On a final note, after asking OB if he owned any stock, and if he gave coins to street-beggars, JJB read from Steven Erlanger’s NY Times profile of OB published last month, the part where Erlanger suggests that OB resembles Tin-Tin. OB replied that he and Erlanger had had an interesting conversation about the financial crisis, and was preparing to elaborate, but—alas—time was up.

There is something undeniably comical about such an exercise as this interview—JJB could play himself on Saturday Night Live without rehearsing. And the recurrent image of OB, lifting up the conversation and setting it back on the tracks again and again, is consistent with the overtones of David-and-Goliath that are part of his allure. But he and the French public will be forced to wade through a vast morass of such sludge in order to explain and learn, respectively, what this new party is actually about. There may be no other way to reach a public, and the times are too perilous not to try. Maybe OB even enjoys playing Muhammed Ali to JJB’s Sonny Liston, though one senses he would rather spar with someone of comparable skill.

from the ground up

2008-10-22T12:51:00.003-04:00

22 October

I happened to be walking this afternoon along the quais, looking up at Notre-Dame de Paris and thinking (once again) what a magnificent thing it is, despite all the efforts of the touristo-consumer culture to reduce it to a cliché of itself. What suddenly struck me, though, was a thought of a different order. What an unimaginable quantity of human labor is embedded in all those stones! Think of it: with nothing but hand tools and the most rudimentary machines, how slowly they must have cut and placed and mortared the stones, one after another, day after day. And in the first generation, how they must have known how little they would ever see of the built structure, how little of it their stone-cutter sons would see, or even their stone-cutter grandsons. Yet still they cut, placed, and mortared stone after stone, accumulating value through the decades and centuries. And finally, what value!

Perhaps it wasn't the first time I had thought these thoughts, but recent events have allowed me to appreciate them in a new way. Gazing up at Notre-Dame, I began to think about the tower of world finance, that bizarrely cantilevered structure whose trillions in hypothetical 'value' rest on so relatively small a base of real economic fact. (Is it $60 of speculative capital for every $1 of productive capital? Does anyone even know?) And the sheer speed of it, which generates such huge profits by means of unbelievably rapid turnovers in finance capital through transactions that fly with electric speed around the globe. And still this monstrous and denatured construct continues to be buttressed on every side by the confident assurances of leaders and prudent commentators of every stripe, as if by some prodigy of faith we can will this engineering fantasy to stand ... for how much longer?

So I'm looking at the cathedral, thinking about all those stonemasons, and more and more I'm tempted to cry out like Ezra Pound against USURIA and on behalf of artisanry and the value of craft. But no, the Middle Ages are over, and I'm not so moved by nostalgia. No, we need to master the artisanry of our own age, in order to build a Notre-Dame that will address our modern needs for the centuries to come. The task will be slow, and the ones who started it have already died without seeing even a transept--indeed, their first structure collapsed not long ago, as did more than a few Gothic experiments in their own day. But that mustn't discourage us from continuing to cut the stones and lay the foundation for the new society, for a new social order built from the ground up, built by ordinary workers to serve everyday human needs, built with love, not greed, built--like Notre-Dame in its day--to shelter us all in its compassionate embrace.

vavin

2008-10-21T09:13:00.006-04:00

21 October

Where is Vavin? Before I even got to Montparnasse I saw the name on the plan du quartier: Vavin. It seemed to be the nearest métro station, but I couldn’t find it for the longest time. Found the street, but not the station. Then for a while I would lose the street, because where it crosses my street it forms a Y, and I’d get it mixed up with the rue Bréa, the left fork. The rue Vavin is actually very small, and the métro station isn’t on it at all: it’s on the Boulevard Montparnasse. That’s why I couldn’t find the station: I thought it was the Montparnasse station, until I realized that that station is further on, and much, much bigger. So from the start Vavin posed a lot of questions.

Even after I mastered the topology of Vavin, it has taken me some time to figure out its sociology. As you walk down the rue Notre-Dame des Champs, you pass almost nothing but schools and apartment buildings in close formation with few breaks in the façades until you reach the rue Vavin, where it opens up into a little square. The café Vavin, whose double rows of tables wrap around the corner as if it were on a boulevard and not just two small streets, is always noisy and full of young people no matter what time of day or night. Eventually I realized that for all the many students in the quartier, the Vavin is the logical hang-out, along with the bakery that turns into a sandwich shop at lunchtime, and the sidewalk itself, which can be impassable in the mid-afternoon. So that is one Vavin, a magnet for the young, but there are others.

A different crowd, a more sophisticated twenty-something crowd, permanently occupies the sidewalk in front of the Lucernaire, the avant-garde cinema and theatre complex at the bottom of the square. They stand around or sit at a handful of tables, and fill the whole street with clouds of smoke. Threading these sidewalk societies is a near-continuous line of mothers with carriages and small children in tow, on their way to or from the nursery and elementary schools up the street. They too leave their mark on Vavin: for the children a large toy-store fills the top of the square, while their mothers lend to the scene the poignancy of their faded beauty.

Across the square is another café with just a few tables and an older clientele, but even it lights up on Saturdays, when the little specialty butcher draws a long line of mères and grand-mères de famille, and middle-aged couples window-shop the boutiques that line the square and overflow down the rue Vavin. In the stone-paved center of the square a newsstand spreads its wares around a belle-époque fountain whose basin is supported by a foursome of gracefully draped naiads. These seem impervious to the constant circulation of motos around and sometimes (illegally) through the middle of the square, drowning out the din of conversation as they roar past.

It took me many trips through Vavin before I noticed all these features, like little compartments that opened for me one by one. I’m sure there are others that are still shut.

I have seen numerous references to a ‘carrefour Vavin,’ though no street sign bears that name. It is rather a virtual carrefour, a word which literally refers to the bifurcations (fourches) of four (quatre) paths, but anyone conversant with modern French can be forgiven for seeing in its name the image of a big square oven. I have seen other such squares tucked away in Paris’s residential neighborhoods, each one a small dream of urban design. All sorts of things get cooked up in these places. But Vavin is special because of the way the plane trees overhanging the fountain give it the air of an oasis, because of the way its two Vs seem to mirror the Y-shape of its defining streets, the way its very name seems to rhyme with an even more intimate emblem of hospitality and enclosure. Vavin is special because if only for a short while it has become my little carrefour.

just seen on the boulevard

2008-10-19T15:16:00.003-04:00

19 October

So this afternoon was the big teachers' demonstration. Tens of thousands of teachers from all over France marched around, then through, the Latin Quarter, passing less than 100 yards from my front door, chanting, singing, waving signs and banners. Teachers are facing massive lay-offs, budget cuts, and worse, and their high degree of union organization can pull off a good old-fashioned labor protest--color-coordinated delegations, graphically brilliant banners, songs that everyone can sing, and does--of a sort one seldom sees anywhere these days.

Two or three guys from the NPA staked out a corner at the top of the Boulevard Port-Royal, where the march would slow to make the turn onto Saint-Michel, and hung their brand-new banner with the party logo: a bull-horn. Stacks of leaflets appeared, supporting the teachers and inviting them to join the NPA, and I joined a squadron of 10, then 25 or 30 militant(e)s, handing them out to marchers and passers-by. Hard, but high-energy work. It took about an hour for the whole cortège to pass. At some point in the middle I looked up, and there was Olivier Besancenot, doing what I was doing, handing out leaflets. Except that he was also talking with some of the party stalwarts, greeting well-wishers, planting bises on friendly cheeks, and looking after his good-natured but sleepy son, who looked to be 3 or 4. It all seemed oddly down-to-earth, oddly real somehow. As though he really does like to spend Sunday afternoons going to demos, taking care of his kids, talking politics with his pals. It's hard to think what other national-level political leader would turn up unstaged in just this way.

Cynical reader, stop: I know what you're going to say. Plenty of other political types on the soi-disant French left are saying so, and I've even heard whispers from NPAers. People like me who feel this about OB are dupes and suckers and victims of the most blatant media-savvy manipulation. Perhaps, but I don't think so, not in this case. I think OB is actually trying, as the German Greens did years ago, to rethink the role of the politician, trying to undermine certain myths of the leader. He may fail. His skillful and unambivalent use of mass media already looks like a slippery slope to some of his friends. If the party grows according to plan, and he remains its public face, he will surely find it hard to maintain this low-key posture. But for now, OK, I think Besancenot is for real, and refreshingly so, and I don't care who knows it.

clouds giving way to sun

2008-10-18T17:17:00.001-04:00

18 October

Even for someone accustomed to New England's fickle climate, the changeability of Parisian weather can be unsettling. You think you see the dawn mist dispersing into a clear sky, but then you go out without your umbrella, and sure enough it clouds over and starts to shower. If you wait it out, though, you may still get some sun in the afternoon.

My rather full day of politics was just like that. I spent four hours in a grueling session of the Paris NPA Coordinating committee, gleaning some exciting information, growing hungry and tired and a bit testy,then struggling to stay tuned as the meeting threatened to collapse into anomie. But after it thankfully adjourned on a note of agreement, I hopped on the métro, and just a few stations away, my ennui gave way to exhilaration as I joined this wonderful marche festive under the banner Bridges not Walls (Des ponts pas des murs), powered by an explosive drum corps you can barely begin to imagine from this little photo. (More on that in a minute.)

First, though, the meeting.

We sat around a long table in the basement of La Brêche, Paris headquarters of the LCR, about 35 of us representing the 17 or 18 local NPA committees currently active in nearly all of the city's 20 arrondissements. For the first hour or more we went around the table and heard each local describe its various 'public outreach' initiatives. These spanned a broad range, from leafletting markets about the current crisis to forging alliances with other activist groups and movements to supporting individual undocumented workers threatened with expulsion. One group, the XXème, spent the last few weeks planning a big neighborhood party, starting with speeches from some party luminaries and then eating and dancing "into the morning." (I'd be there right now if I wasn't so tired.)

Some issues are widely shared: almost every group is working with a coalition of left parties and unions--and mail carriers in their neighborhoods--to oppose current plans to privatize the French postal service. Many are creating public educational forums to discuss the financial crisis. Several work closely with immigrant support groups, but only the XIIIème had the honor to report that of the 29 undocumented workers it assisted through a cumbersome sort of amnesty program, all 29 received permanent working papers. This news was met with little nods and noises expressing admiration.

The actual status of these local committees is variable. Several just had their first meeting in the last week or two. Others have been meeting for six months, and have 50 or 60 active names on their distribution lists. In the aggregate, though, these party activists, with overlapping memberships in many activist groups, and cautious partnerships with other left parties and the Greens around select issues, are carrying the NPA message into all those little corners of the city where it is most likely to resonate. The enjeu, as they say, is whether they can bring some sizeable fraction of these partners into the party.

The second half of the meeting turned to some pressing organizational matters: the November 8/9 national NPA meeting (not a congress) of which the Paris groups are in the role of host; the status of the draft documents for that meeting and the sticky question of how open they are to amendment; and the procedures by which the Paris groups will meet on the issues they have

agreed to research (public services, undocumented workers, urban housing). These are meaty topics, all important, but none especially suited to disposition by a committee of 35. A notice I saw for a different meeting promised adjournment by 1 pm "for those comrades who need their aperos"; drinks all around would have helped this meeting a lot.

Of the two-plus hours of discussion that ensued, I will just point to several inter-related and quite interesting tensions surrounding the November 8/9 meeting. Recall that this is a party that doesn't exist yet, and will achieve critical mass only by making a clear break from its leninist antecedents in the LCR. Every organizational gesture is for this reason freighted with subtext, and the November 8/9 event is a big gesture. Is it more important to encourage the diversity of opinion by leaving major questions open in advance, or to show coherence and resolve to external observers? (Considerable attention will be paid to this non-congress by a political establishment that sees Besancenot and the NPA coming up fast in its rear-view mirror.) Will the key texts--the statuts, the principles, the 'orientations' (a draft I haven't seen yet)--be circulated at the meeting as drafts, or as finished documents? If drafts, how will they be amended? Can local committees have a say in those drafts before the meeting? For all the urgency of these questions, no definitive answers were readily available. At this stage of its fetal development the NPA is still an act of faith.

But let's get out of that meeting before we fall asleep, lose interest, or decide we hate each other.

Des ponts pas des murs was the most visible face of a 'Citizen Summit' organized by Association Emmaüs and a coalition of some 300 groups who support immigrants and their civil liberties. Its specific target was the European Union and its 'shameful directive' ("directive de la honte") authorizing member states to detain undocumented immigrants, deport their children, and so forth. Le Président Sarkozy, past the midpoint of his rotating term as European president and well-remembered for his shameful assaults on immigrant rights while Minister of the Interior, was clearly in the sights of the protesters as well. The whole event would be classed, I think, as part of that lively and multi-faceted movement here called Altermondialisme--not just an 'anti-globalization' movement as we know it but a host of initiatives in support of global equity. Thus an array of placards called for fair North-South trade as well as freer terms of immigration.

But the action was less in the signs than the body language. The corps of 30 or 40 drummers, nearly all women, dancing not marching to the polyrhythms they detonated, raising and lowering their arms in a synchronized ballet more African than European, seemed to be there to demonstrate the richness of world culture more than the short-sightedness of European policy. And the several thousands who were thus driven along from Bastille to République were a carnival crowd, despite their protest signs. For me, taking to the street just a few meters from where the French people seized the Bastille and launched a new epoch in human history, was no small thing. Mutatis mutandis, some such ferment was in evidence on the Boulevard Beaumarchais at that moment.

The marche festive, technically unrelated to the NPA, was nonetheless mentioned numerous times in the flurry of NPA communiqués that flood my in-box, and there are clearly many altermondialistes participating in the NPA committees. Even before the financial crisis erupted, the gradual deterioration of France's social contract has given new life to a variety of activist movements. From the anti-libéraux (that is, anti-free-market capitalism) to the 'Non' campaign against the European constitution to the active daily support for undocumented workers and their families, there is vitality, purpose, and--yes, as I saw--joy in these movements. The great challenge for the NPA is to harness a sufficient measure of that energy. We'll see.

close encounters

2008-10-17T05:07:00.000-04:00

17 October

My street, Notre-Dame des Champs, is long, narrow, crooked, and very old. As its name suggests, it dates to a time in the Middle Ages when it bordered the fields; likewise, more recently, the nearby Boulevard Montparnasse once marked the edge where country and city met. According to old guidebooks Parisians as late as the Second Empire would repair there of a Sunday for recreation and country air. The name of my café, the Bal Bullier, recalls one of the open-air dances that regularly took place here. At another of these lieux de plaisance, the Grande-Chaumière, just across the street from where I write these lines, in 1845 the Can-Can was invented. There ought to be a plaque.

I can't recall if it was Georg Simmel or Walter Benjamin who remarked that the essence of the urban experience is the incongruity of chance encounters, and the effet de choc that these routinely cause the city-dweller. One of the most incongruous juxtapositions I have encountered anywhere in Paris lies just at the bottom of my street, where it meets the boulevards. There at the corner sits the Closerie des Lilas, a famous old restaurant dating to Montparnasse's quasi-rural past. And there in the little square just in front stands the statue of le Maréchal Ney, Napoléon's most celebrated commander. The Closerie, as its name suggests, is completely enclosed by a tall green floral hedge, a singular fact that gives it an air of bucolic tranquillity despite the busy boulevard. Marshall Ney, on the other hand, stands in an agonized posture, his neck twisted sideways and his sword poised over his head as if to decapitate some aggressor approaching from behind. One struggles to imagine what these two landmarks can possibly have to do with one another--did M. le Maréchal fail to make a reservation? Was the Suprême de canette "vigneronne" avec galette de pommes de terre aux cèpes not prepared to his taste?--yet there they are, sharing en permanence the same little piece of Parisian sidewalk.

the comrades roll up their sleeves

2008-10-16T16:11:00.001-04:00

16 October

While my first NPA meeting at the Trojan Horse was quite festive, last night’s meeting of the 14^th arrondissement committee of the NPA was a no-nonsense affair. Twenty-three of us crowded into a common room at the Chateau Ouvrier, a public housing complex locally famous for having defeated the efforts of urban renewal to tear it down. Dimitri, the presider by consensus, kept the agenda on track, shushed all side conversations—“pas de dialogue, s’il te plaît”—and restricted every speaker to three minutes, carefully measured on his battered travel clock.

Time is short, he reminded us several times, and we have a lot to do. The party’s next organizational congress is November 8/9, and many of the outstanding points of contention will need to be resolved there, in advance of the founding congress in January. All over France local committees are meeting to hash out disputes and send position papers to the central committee, but I wonder how many are doing so with the focus and determination of NPA 14e?

I will have to sift through my pages of notes to highlight a few of the many issues we covered in three hours of intense debate, but first a word about the participants. Half a dozen, like me, were newcomers, mostly listeners. At the center of things was a core group, mostly men, mostly middle aged, though several younger women are also clearly mainstays. As we introduced ourselves, people stated first names and their engagements : labor organizers, movement activists, former Communists and Socialists, to be sure, and some long-time Communist Leaguers (LCR) who try hard not to come across as insiders. Dimitri is a former CP activist, tough-minded, sometimes abrasive, and very funny at the same time. His counter-weight, Marc, an “early retiree” who arrived on a bicycle with a sack of apples picked from his own tree for the comrades, is patient and avuncular, though no less intent. Several are graduate students, and nearly everyone speaks with intellectual clarity.

Elsa, a doctoral candidate in philosophy, presented the first topic: “programme,” or what the party stands for. Her summary of the subcommittee that is meeting on this question was laced with the terminology of academic Marxism, but her point was just that: the committee felt that all this terminology—“ bourgeois,” “class struggle,” “socialized means of production,” even “state” and “democracy”—needs to be carefully scrutinized both for actual meaning and for its usefulness in a wider public forum. Our group generated a much longer list of such terms, and pledged to explore what we think they mean in an electronic forum over the next week, with resolution of differences (by vote of enrolled party members) at next week’s meeting.

This question of membership and cards is a serious business. You pay to belong, on a sliding scale by income: temporary memberships (till January) cost between E10 and E100. Cards are being distributed, and after next week no one without a card will be allowed to participate in decisions.

Overarching all questions of program is the big one, as Dimitri framed it: will this party call for the abolition of capitalism, or will it make a place for those who want to reform it? Dimitri supports the former, period; others think more flexibility, at least for a while, will encourage party growth. Next meeting NPA 14e will debate the question, take a vote, and send its resolution to the national committee. The technical term for this is démocratie de base, but what the central committee will do with these communications from the base is anyone’s guess right now. That crucial question loomed large over the second major topic of the evening, the statuts (the party’s charter or operational rules).

Drafts of possible structures are already circulating from the national committee, and our local group’s version, with annotations, comes to seven dense pages. In brief, the drafts envision a party whose semi-annual congresses would be “sovereign”; the congresses would elect a central committee, with some version of ‘term limits.’ That central committee, along with some administration, would effectively run the party between congresses.

At the same time the party’s primary structure will be the local committees such as NPA 14e; all membership is to a local committee, and these will have some latitude in managing their affairs. How to run an efficient party without endowing the center with too much power is, of course, the big question, especially as many of these folks have bitter experience, direct or indirect, with the Stalinist residues of the PCF. So my colleagues asked a lot of shrewd and specific questions about exactly what mechanisms will ensure that the opinions in the field will matter at the central office. Marianne, one of the younger people most involved in the committee discussions, insisted that the overall design is not a pyramid, but a “système de retour par la base,” a sort of feedback loop whose mechanisms are far from clear. But the prominence of this topic, and the intensity of the questioning, suggest that this new party will feel quite different from the centralized and secretive LCR it springs from.

One interesting point of contention at first seemed small to me: should NPA sponsor, as most other French parties do, a youth organization? Laetitia, one of the younger comrades, sounded like the laissez-faire young people I know when she said in effect, why not? Why not reach people where they are, have a campus-based group (“un NPA de fac”), a way for the young to do their thing. Opposition from the older members was vehement, grounded in the principle of ‘why make distinctions? Everyone should be a member of equal standing.’ Ultimately the whole category of ‘youth’ was rejected as a social construct, an unhealthy one, and that was that.

A second quite fascinating exchange concerned the question of ‘parity,’ the rule that male and female members will be represented equally at every level of party structure. This is old news to most, from whatever left group they work with, and there was no objection—though I believe I detected some ironic looks from several older male comrades. One of the grad students, Yoann, then proposed that the same principle should apply to guarantee right of access to the economically or socially marginal: immigrants, unemployed persons, he wasn’t sure of the definitions but wanted some principle that would assure some level of participation, even at the central committee level. This was a more challenging idea, though clearly well-received. But then Laetitia, who happened to be the only black person in the room, made a powerful declaration to the effect that she found it unbelievable (“hallucinant”) that this party, so keen on representing the banlieues, the marginal, the sans-papiers, would not design some form of parity based on race. “C’est un parti blanc,” she shouted, and looking around the room this seemed hard to dispute. But dispute it they did, nearly all the others, insisting that there could be no special memberships, that all were equal, and so forth. But what about male/female parity, asked one free-spirit? No, that’s different, that’s grounded in the historical specificity of the blah blah blah …. In short, Laetitia got nowhere, but I think she put her finger on one of the most essential questions for this party, if it wants to be a representative workers’ party, and I am drafting a little memo of my own in support of her position. We’ll see. To my American eyes the majority position looks like a huge blind spot, but given the venerable logic of French republicanism, it may be the only possible conclusion.

There was much more, but this post is already too long, so I’ll stop. The Paris-wide coordinating committee meets on Saturday, and I’ll be interested to see if the other local reps are as keen-witted and dedicated and I want to say professional in their approach to political organizing. NPA 14e is a formidable little group; writ large, they could move mountains.

crusoeinparis.com

2008-10-16T12:50:00.000-04:00

Four days now since I landed on this blog, and still no sign of another sentient being ... But wait! Can those be human footprints?

Choses vues

2008-10-15T18:13:00.001-04:00

15 October

Outre-mer

At the market this morning I was buying fruit to replenish my fruit basket. The provenance of every item in the stalls tends to be written in chalk, along with the price, on a little blackboard overhead, so I could see that the clementines were from Spain, the figs and pears from France. But I wanted to strike up a conversation, so I asked the vendor, where in France? Normandy? No, from the southwest. Then I asked for bananas, and he said, these are from Martinique. Yes, I nodded, I suppose bananas don’t grow in France. No, no, he answered, surprised. Martinique, c’est la France.

In the Gardens

It was a gorgeously sunny day yesterday, but I was hurrying through the Luxembourg Gardens, head down, thinking about some project or other. I must have been pretty absorbed; at least, that’s the only way I can explain what happened next. I was passing a group of girls, young teens, gathered around a bench near the pétanque pitches. Suddenly a couple of them jumped out into the path, one carrying a little cardboard sign hand-lettered in English: Free Hugs. Monsieur, she addressed me in rapid French, they were offering free hugs and would I like one? Deeply suspicious, I stopped, said “Oui, d’accord,” and let myself be hugged by this charming dark-haired beauty, not a day over fourteen. And then I kept going. For the first and no doubt the only time in my entire life I had the chance to engage a whole band of pretty French girls on the subject of hugs, for goodness sake … and I kept on walking. I’ve gotten over it, but I don’t think I will ever quite forgive myself.

Excavation

Chez Fernand is up on the boulevard Montparnasse, but it’s still a neighborhood place. Several gentlemen, like me, are eating by themselves, and people passing on the sidewalk stop to chat with the maitre d’. It’s a cozy, old-fashioned-looking place with big oak sideboards for waiter stations and cut-glass semi-partitions that reduce its size. The large framed sepia-tinted photographs add to this feeling—but as I look closer at the one nearest me, I realize I am looking at a famous portrait of Jean Cocteau by Man Ray. It looks perfectly normal until you notice that Cocteau is holding a pane of clear glass in front of himself. I ask the waiter about the photos, and he tells me that back in the Parnassian glory days of the 1920s this place was the Jockey, one of the famous haunts of the avant-garde. Fernand has only been here 8 or 9 years. I have just read something about the Jockey, and I suddenly feel one of those Proustian tremors as I realize I have stumbled into the sort of urban palimpsest that makes Paris or Rome so endlessly surprising.

When I get the chance I decide to learn more about the Jockey, and I discover that what the waiter told me was true—sort of. The famous Jockey relocated to the other side of the Boulevard Montparnasse around 1920, where it may indeed have been a scene for a few years, but it lost its lease and closed. But then an arriviste bought the place where Fernand’s is now and set up a new Jockey, which never had the authenticity of the old one. It was, my source tells me, “un bar americano-nègre égaré au plein far-West” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), where “the bourgeois came to play at being artists” until the Crash closed it for good.

So my waiter gave me a good tip after all: Chez Fernand is the model of an urban palimpsest, illustrating how successive layers of fact, not least the photographs on the wall, give rise to legend.

Olivier Besancenot and the Besancenot-Effect

2008-10-13T17:38:00.000-04:00

11 October

Last night I met the phénomène Olivier Besancenot face to face. I greeted M. Besancenot, shook his hand, and then watched him fire up a packed hall of 500 shouting, cheering supporters. It was the full Besancenot-effect, and I came away thinking that history may have some chapters left after all, and this man may write an important one.

The meeting took place in Évreux, an obscure little one-street town on the eastern edge of Normandy, at the Zenith, a large movie theater rented out for the event. When I arrived OB was standing in front of the theater chatting with a few supporters, while several camera crews circled around him and four burly handlers eyed him protectively. He is a small man, fine-featured and impeccable in pullover and jeans; he could be a real heart-throb if he wasn’t so serious.

Politely excusing himself from his supporters, he turned to the micros and proceeded to give one of his unbelievably rapid-fire interviews, every word precise and logical, like a prof de lycée giving a lecture to his class—double speed. Having seen a number of such interviews on video, I expected the speed, but not the emphasis—even in this dispassionate and expository mode he makes every word felt. But he also maintained a cool and business-like demeanor.

When the interview ended, I made my move. I went up to him, told him I wished to greet him, shook his hand, and remarked that I had come from the United States to hear him speak . This remark must have sounded particularly absurd here in Évreux, and the only response I got was a quizzically upraised eyebrow as his handlers spirited him into the hall.

I went in, grabbed a spot and watched as every seat filled with people of all ages and conditions, a huge event for this little town. The program was carefully choreographed to reflect the NPA’s desire to form a broad coalition of people from many movements outside the traditional labor base of the Trotskyists. OB came out and sat with 5 or 6 others in armchairs at the front of the hall. Each of the others spoke briefly about her or his personal activism: an anti-nuclear environmentalist, a nurse/labor organizer, a former Socialist Party organizer, a member of a support team for undocumented workers, and—most movingly—a hoarse auto worker who had come directly from the picket line at the Renault factory, where several hundred workers are losing their jobs “so the shareholders can have their dividends,” as he put it.

When OB finally stood up to speak, he seemed quite literally to arise from this collectivity of bruised and embattled citizens. As he warmed to his speech, a quite different side of him began to emerge: animated, even radiant, a man who loved being here, speaking to his people. He was funny and charming, this OB, ridiculing Sarkozy and Christine LaGarde, the finance minister, pulling scraps of paper from his blue jeans to read excerpts from their speeches. “Ne pa—ni—quez—pas,” (“Don’t panic”) he mockingly quoted from the overreactive president. “Doesn’t that always make you even more anxious?” And he made one-liners out of the cabinet’s substitute phrases - e.g. “negative growth” or “prolonged period of soft economic performance - in place of the banished word “recession.” This was OB’s bravura performance as the “mailman from Neuilly,” a folk opera about the local boy who scores first on the exams and outwits the profs, and uses his gifts to tell the people’s true story to the emperor. The hall loved it, and loved him, and you could see in his shining eyes that he loved us back.

At a certain moment, though, this witty and sarcastic OB turned into a quite different speaker, this one angry, insistent, prophetic. He denounced the greed of the few, and the magnitude of the profits they “suck like blood from the economy,” leaving “pas un radis” (not a red cent) for healthcare and education and social solidarity. Again and again he pointed to lay-offs and unemployment, and demanded decent-paying jobs for everyone able to work. Finally he called for nationalizing the entire finance sector, not just the “rotten fruit” but the whole orchard, a “service publique financier.”

I could try to itemize the many changes OB rang on these themes—he spoke for nearly an hour without a moment’s lapse or lull—but I’ll just say that it was galvanizing. All over the hall teenagers, distinguished-looking older people, people of all sorts were laughing and cheering and shouting out, and quite a few rose to their feet in tribute as he finished.

We were warned that the meeting would end promptly, as OB was tired and had to go to work the next day—he really does deliver the mail in Neuilly. As his handlers slowly moved him out the door and toward the parking lot, I got another close look at him and saw yet another side of this remarkable man, no longer lit by klieg lights, no longer radiant. His face was sweaty, and he was a bit slumped, clearly drained from the performance he had just turned in. He seemed as small as his actual size, an ordinary person like the rest of us, shouldering an enormous load. It no longer looked easy being Olivier Besancenot, not glorious, just a very big job. He is the lifeblood of this new party and the movements it embraces. Without him there would be no party, and everyone knows it. So his handlers gently detached him from his admirers, eased him into the back of a sedan, and drove off with him, to rest, to prepare to do battle another day.

Street Music

2008-10-13T17:17:00.001-04:00

12 October

For the second day in a row our little street has exploded with street music. The genial but slightly daft lady in the basement apartment is beside herself, banging shutters and muttering imprecations. But what can one do? It's a trio who look like North Africans: the leader, a very brassy trumpet player, supported by a fast-fingered clarinetist, and a melodicon that sounds remarkably like an accordion.

The music, above all the trumpet, is unspeakably, unbelievably loud as it echoes between solid rows of 7-storey buildings. But they play with passion, unembarrassed, and they play very well. The melodicon player waves a cup at me with one hand as I pass.

Today they begin with some Latin tunes--yesterday it sounded more Middle Eastern--but right now they're belting out a very Bourbon-Street cover of "I Love Paris in the Springtime." If only Marlene were here. Yesterday I dropped in a euro, but today it's down to 50 centimes. I'm actually hoping that tomorrow they'll choose another street. I can't take all the excitement.