English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Translating Clouscard; history knocks at the philosopher's door 0:00 Good evening, dear friends. We're resuming our awareness campaign with the aim of achieving an English translation, a translation for the English-speaking world, of the main works of Michel Clouscard, to sum up the essentials. First, a big thank you to those who have started contributing to the fund. I thank you every time, but there are new contributions and we're glad about it.
0:30 Well, I don't really need to insist too much anymore. I wouldn't say it reassures me, because unfortunately it's not very good news, but you know, it's been almost ten years now, if you look closely, that I've been struggling in my broadcasts on the web to point out that as long as we're philosophizing, we're caught between crisis and war. It's because of the crisis that we started philosophizing, but power would love, capitalist power here, wouldn't it?
1:01 The dominant power, power would love to bring about a terrifying geopolitical solution before we've been able to properly close our parenthesis, our epoché, as we'd say in Husserlian terms, our theoretical detour. But you know very well that it's not the same temporality, history doesn't wait.
1:32 It knocks at the door. Remember that Hegel puts the final period, according to what seems to be a legend, well a legend that persists in this way, with a strong element of truth. In any case, what's certain is that it's the same year, the same moment, and it's during the Battle of Jena, which will bring about the collapse, will see the collapse of Prussia as a power at that time, a rising power. It's the moment when Napoleon enters Jena that Hegel puts a final period, you see, to the Phenomenology of Spirit.
2:08 And so history comes, so to speak, with cannon fire, knocking at the philosopher's door. Now, I'm not Hegel, but on the other hand, the danger our era must face, even Hegel didn't anticipate it. Who can anticipate such horror? I'll start there, and someone might say, we're straying from Clouscard—don't be fooled. I remember Clouscard, you know I often say that it's in jokes, sometimes, that he delivers perhaps the most dizzyingly profound aspect of his thought, and yet it feels more like an ellipsis, a shorthand, a joke, because it's no joking matter at all, judge for yourself.
Clouscard's quip about fascism and leftists 2:49 What he told me was in Paris, and it was coming out of a class by Guilhermitte, an excellent reader of Kant. Our discussion turned somewhat on the ease with which leftists cried fascism simply because a professor's desk was 20 centimeters higher than the rest of the classroom—so that was fascism. You see, when you analyze fascism like that, it plays right into the hands of fascism, the real thing, as you know.
3:20 Go ahead and extend my sentence, you can guess—I'll say, quoting Freud, the death drives progress in silence. So there we were, denouncing all this chatter, which had, alas, the sad, sinister drawback of trivializing the ocean of fascism, so that in the end we stop paying attention to it. From talking about it so much, oh it's fine, we'll see it coming. Which brings us to today's paradoxical situation, at a moment when fascism has never been more topical.
3:53 I'm not just talking about the Ukro-Nazis—the far right is in power in Sweden following the last elections, states that were painted to us as democratic models. It's been in power for a long time in Austria, in Germany, in the days when I—I'll say I was your age, the average age of my interlocutors, I prefer to say followers, you know, interlocutors is more what I had when I was a student—average, though there are all age groups otherwise, and I'm glad of it.
4:27 But when I was a student, the far right in Germany scored 1.7%, 1.2%, there was a national—a Soldatenzeitung, a newspaper—that made everyone laugh. Now it's approaching 20%, and it wasn't nothing in certain Länder. I'm not even talking about France. Italy—Italy is in power, the true face of fascism, which is not an anti-liberal populism, it's quite the opposite, isn't it.
5:08 The woman who runs Italy—quite well, women in power, but that's not enough. Personally I'm for more women in power, but not at that price all the same. Formal parity is stupid, we can see that clearly here. Anyway, whoever runs Italy holds populist-sounding positions on the side of those who govern us, doesn't she. But on the other hand, she's fully behind the European Union's and NATO's policy on Ukraine.
5:44 The real mask falls, just as Clouscard had predicted. The far right, especially in France, pretends, you know, to flirt with the left, sometimes even, I don't know, with a social left. This isn't new. National socialism is as old as the 1930s. But when there are serious stakes at play, all the liberals join together to shoot our comrades against the Wall of the Fédérés.
6:16 I'm speaking metonymically, it'll be quicker. So, back to Clouscard and his quip. We were joking about this very dangerous way of trivializing fascism by calling the most derisory behaviors fascist, and suddenly Clouscard looked at current events. I'm talking to you now—this was in '60... let me not say anything wrong—it was in '76. There. And he suddenly said to me, in fact, the only time they were really scared.
6:50 All of that—the liberals, the leftists. Careful, Clouscard is not a man of the right. For a man of the right, when he says "leftists," it means everyone to the left of him, not just the communists. Whereas the communists were the worst enemies of those proclaimed as leftists in '68. No, he's talking about the leftists of '68. So let me repeat, so that newcomers can catch up, that this is neither an insult, nor an exaggeration, nor an assimilation, nor an amalgam. It's a union, in the mathematical sense, of three positions.
7:22 So, to list them in chronological order, so as not to upset anyone: the anarchists, who are historically the oldest, among whom there are people who were true comrades and faithful companions of the working class's struggles. But there is also a right-wing, even far-right, anarchism—I'm thinking of Céline. The anarchists, the Trotskyists, and a bit later historically, the Maoists, closer to our contemporary history. That's it—that's exactly who the leftists were.
7:54 In the sense that Lenin gives to this term—that's the one I'm invoking, of course, in his famous title, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. So, if Lenin speaks of it this way, you see, it's still meant to discredit it. So those who conflate communists with leftists—that's a bit funny. Or sad, depending. However you like. Still, when he says "the liberals, the leftists," he didn't yet have his concept of the liberal-libertarian, but you see, he already saw that it was the same conglomerate.
8:31 all those who were hammering away in '68 at the CGT, at the workers' demands, which they dismissed with the phrase "basely categorial"—you know, pensions, so topical, pensions, wages, all that, the role of unions in the workplace. What's that compared to going to visit the girls in their dormitories? Now those are real societal freedoms. I'm barely caricaturing—you know very well that what were then called the "new struggles," a certain very bourgeois feminism, environmentalism, etc., were at that point substituting themselves for social demands proper.
"The only time they were scared was the Red Army" 9:13 So I come back to it—I'm building suspense on purpose, but I'll give you the quote now. "The only time they were really scared—he's speaking of the liberals, the leftists—was when there was the Red Army, then they weren't laughing." There, he's invoking a historical depth, a fellowship, what the Soviet Union represented at that moment, and the rout of Nazism, and the failure of world capital's grand strategy, which would have so loved for Stalingrad to turn in favor of the Browns, so that the world could be divided between fascism above the Atlantic and fascism below the Atlantic.
10:06 The two together are in the fleet—that's the North Atlantic. Ah yes, that's NATO. There you go, you see. No, no, these aren't amalgams, this is serious. Someone tells me, well what about Britain, how could you say that, that's scandalous. Even so—Britain's resistance, yes, thankfully, Churchill—I'm not making the case, he's no Marxist, no communist, he's a fierce anti-communist—but at least he had the merit of doing a complete about-face in Britain's policy during the early years of the conflict, and especially the fatal interwar period, that of Chamberlain, who, coming back from Munich, well before the German-Soviet pact, and even, if you think about it, justifying it in advance, allowed himself to return to London to a delirious crowd.
10:54 There, we've saved peace, since we won't be going to war with Hitler. Of course—better Hitler than the Popular Front. But no, Chamberlain's declaration was: "Mr. Hitler is a gentleman." Of course, he's not the one to make war against, it's the Soviet Union. I continue my digression before getting into Clouscard's text, but still commenting on his sentence, "The only time they were really scared, our adversaries, was the Red Army." This is also a tribute I pay to those thousands of young people.
11:25 Not just that they made the greatest sacrifice—not a people, because it's not the Russian people, it's the peoples of the Soviet Union. There were Kazakhs, Chuvash, Kazakhs, Ukrainians of course, and whatever else you like. And how many fell so that we would not now be under the Nazi boot. Don't forget, you'll say I'm making an amalgam with the Nazis of the West, on the other side of the Atlantic, and don't forget that Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford in his office.
11:58 Don't forget that Joseph Kennedy, the father, known to be a great mobster—that's not the case I'm making now, but anyway, he later moved into real estate, unlike the Texans who did in his son over oil, but that's another story. Don't forget that Kennedy the father, who was ambassador—who held the most important post in the State Department, the American foreign ministry if you prefer—in London, which is not a marginal post.
12:31 In the years when Hitler was taking a new step every day—Austria, Czechoslovakia—he was so pro-Nazi in his statements and in his pro-Hitler, pro-National-Socialist reports, that Roosevelt was forced to recall him. This isn't on Churchill's warnings alone. Well, there you go, that's to tell you that when we talk about the German-Soviet pact, by which Stalin managed to ensure that if war broke out, it wouldn't be against him first—he would have loved even more Russian deaths if there hadn't been this pact.
13:08 So, where do I want to go with this, how do I want to conclude this reminder—the danger of war that exists. And I'll take the most recent example, I'd like to read you a comment I owe, a post I owe to our comrade Sébastien Deville, which comes, after all, from—I'll ask Pierre-Alain to please display the statement from the sinister Little, but you'll judge for yourselves—Jonathan Little, in L'Express if you want the source: "The Third World War is already here and it must be won."
13:52 You see, and our comrade Sébastien Deville, above, you can read it, comments by saying, it's wonderful, the trivialization—you see, the same word I use—of this kind of thing. Yes, we started with Clouscard, and me, almost a generation ago, warning against the trivialization of the term fascist for what wasn't fascist, and now we're starting to get used to it, finally, you see, to war. I don't know what weapons will be used in a Third World War, but I can tell you what will be used in the Fourth, said Einstein: stones.
14:31 It's not war that threatens—I'm changing the article, I'm no longer using the definite article when we say "the war, the war," we have references, don't we, and it's starting again like in '40—no, no, no, it's a war like we've never seen, and like there won't be another modern war for a long time after, because we'll have gone back to prehistory, as Einstein said, once all civilization has been razed by nuclear warheads, and it won't matter whether it's this side or that, and it won't matter if some had more than others and supposedly "won"—what would "won" even mean at that point?
15:10 when there will be nothing left but human rats crawling out of the tunnels. There, I make this long preamble not at all to make people cry into their handkerchiefs, nor to be alarmist—alarmist meaning we sound the alarm wrongly, or at the wrong moment. No, no, on the contrary I'm astonished that there's still so little alarm among public opinion, among the masses, even though there's more and more of it. I've seen with...
Clouscard has nothing against desire: critique of puritanisms 15:41 It started to reassure me a bit that in the demonstrations, the number of signs saying money for pensions, yes, and not for war. But some are starting to understand it's the same fight. There. So now, to dive into the text, I'll start from certain comments—I always read you very attentively, I read your comments very attentively—where people told me, when I warned against a possible misreading of the excellent video made by the tutor on Michel Clouscard's denunciation of the ideology of desire, to quote Clouscard, and I had told you, watch out, he has nothing against desire, I remind you, that's what I was developing, Michel, he has nothing against your desire, especially now that it's passé.
16:35 He's not one of the many puritans who are now proliferating, whether it's ecologist puritanism or feminist puritanism or bourgeois puritanism—because the working-class woman would love to enjoy herself more, I tell you, if she had a bit less work. And I could go on—the puritanism of political correctness in general, that's the current form of puritanism, it's not LGBT, it's political correctness—and you say that because I'm Black, you say that because I'm a woman, you say that because I'm Corsican, well, you see, you no longer have the right to speak—that's serious.
17:19 And what's even more serious than this puritanism is the fact that the only ones who oppose it, and who delight in opposing it, are on the right. And it's precisely so we don't confuse Clouscard with that right-wing rabble—I don't know—who talk about LGBT people much the way the German far right in the 1930s talked about the disabled, I say "disabled" to be a bit more correct.
17:57 And I'm not talking about Jews here, I'm talking about societal minorities, you know, homosexuals—that's why, well, so that Clouscard isn't lumped in with this right-wing view of what they themselves call the "woke," if you will—let me stress that this puritanism mainly functions, like all puritanism, to limit the consumption of the working classes.
18:29 Look, every time they show supermarkets with people supposedly wallowing in consumption, when in fact these are people whose production has largely legitimized the little they consume. So, I had warned against misreadings—Clouscard critiques discourses, ideo-logy, logos, soliloquy, monologue, dialogue, we're in the realm of language and discourse, Socrates—Clouscard warns against the hypocrisy of the anti-consumption discourse, which in fact revives the old religious discourse.
19:13 I won't go through the whole demonstration, it's simple—I'll say, not simplistic, because people are careful not to bring it up. I'll say, the flood that God sent us because we were already wallowing in sin—that's the punishment by water—then there's the punishment by fire, Sodom and Gomorrah, you know about that. There, and then in every era, the Church has railed against every form of debauchery or excess, of pleasure, whether of the table—gluttony is one of the sins—but above all of the flesh, of course, of eros, and of ostentatious consumption, provided it was among the working classes, because the ruling classes could do whatever they wanted, including divorce—at the time, divorce was forbidden, it hasn't been allowed for very long.
20:02 There, I don't want to go over all that again, but your comments, going back to my thread, say, but where did you find all this from Clouscard? Listen, I told you, mostly in passing, in Le Frivole et le Sérieux, a publication of which there's a nice reissue by Delga, and by Éditions Delga, and then also and especially perhaps in Néofascisme et idéologie du désir, and it's there that we'll go through a few lines that will be unambiguous for everyone, needing no interpretation nor stretching the text one way or another—it's clear enough.
20:41 So I'll ask Pierre-Alain to start scrolling through the texts that Clouscard devotes in Néofascisme. Now, I'll be using an edition that, unfortunately, will be rather hard for you to get hold of—that is, the original edition, which you can still find online of course, or through somewhat marginal channels—but otherwise you're lucky enough to have a first reissue done by Delga, which I'm showing here—but which, given its success, this one was done in 2007, right, and since then there's been a new reissue—unfortunately I lent out the only copy I had left, and I have to give credit to my son who always scolds me, saying, "Dad, put your name on the books you lend out."
21:38 There, thanks, but it's a bit late because of course I neglected to do that, and unfortunately I no longer have the book, which has a very nice color cover and an afterword by yours truly titled "Should the Soldier Lordon Be Saved?" There you go, so you know which edition I'm referring to. So here I'll be using the original edition with minor modifications.
Marcuse, figure of revolt, and the difference between revolt and revolution 22:10 It's obvious that when Éditions Delga does a reissue, they ask the author—who was still alive at the time—for his approval before final proofs, and of course, like any conscientious author worth his salt, Michel always had some small detail he wanted to change, but it's minor. So, let's go. This is a passage—I tell you, the last one—it's no longer a preamble, it's really an introduction to the text, no longer a general preamble. In this passage, Clouscard rails against what he calls, at the time, the first incarnation of desire, the first ideology that embodies desire, what he calls Freudo-Marxism.
22:50 I'll come back to this phrase, this expression if you prefer. And finally, it's now embodied, in the literal sense, in an individual, an author who is read much less now, but who was a leading author for rebels. Revolt is not revolution. Power will always prefer revolts that can be crushed in blood, or dissolved, or distracted with some trinket or gadget, rather than revolution.
23:23 or else it has to step aside. I'm alluding, you know, to Louis XVI, learning from his window that there was trouble in Paris, and saying, "A riot, Sire?" and being told, "No, Sire, a revolution." There's a long way from revolt to revolution. I'll close this little digression, which I'll develop another time, on the three moments—reform, revolt, and revolution. An interesting subject.
23:53 I'll close it with this quote, which I never miss a chance to slip in, from someone who is neither Marxist nor communist, but an honest philosopher, Merleau-Ponty, from the school known as phenomenology, who says in his magnificent In Praise of Philosophy—he's not praising any particular philosopher, he praises Bergson at one point, against those who used Bergson in Vichy France—and he says: "If the philosopher were a rebel, he would cause less offense, for after all everyone knows deep down that the world isn't as it should be."
24:36 With Socrates, it's another matter, it's more serious—Socrates was put to death because he was more than a rebel. There, that's a revolution. Let's not stray—Hegel indeed said, regarding Plato having Socrates speak, that it was the world revolution that had thereby taken place, speaking of Plato's system. I return to this direct introduction to Clouscard's text. The one who embodied this revolt was Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher trained in—the leftism, in the sense I defined earlier, was the thinking that circulated equally among the Maoists, the leftists, the anarchists, and whose essence consisted in saying—we'll get to the text.
25:22 From Clouscard, you'll see regarding consumption that we are in a consumer society because the working class turned the page, it sold itself for a mess of pottage, I'm quoting the aforementioned Herbert Marcuse, and that it is now completely integrated into bourgeois society and that the revolution can no longer come from it. You can guess what comes next, what comes next is your generation, the revolution will come from oppressed minorities, from those who are too fat, too thin, who are gay, who are dominant or dominated in gender terms, I mean, well, I have respect for all of that as long as none of them wages war on all the others.
26:10 More than respect, I mean, I'm in favor of leaving them alone, both at the legislative level and at the societal level, and so that this doesn't distract us from the main struggle, which is social — because when the Vietnamese were being crushed under a deluge of bombs, they couldn't have cared less whether the pilot was gay or Black or a woman. There weren't many women. But even if there had been one, it wouldn't have changed much. It's time to look at what's happening on the victims' side.
26:43 That changes quite a few societal viewpoints. So there you have it, facing this discourse which presupposes a contempt for the popular classes, you see, that there are no more real oppositions, that it doesn't come from there. It's very current, it's even a bit more current, isn't it? We read this in "Neo-fascism and the Ideology of Desire." So, in this edition, it's page… I'd have to find my place, wait.
27:14 There. I have page 41 in the reissue I showed you earlier. So maybe Pirella can tell me… No? I'm not on the right pages. Well, never mind. But anyway, since this edition I'm presenting to you is scanned, all it takes is one key sentence to find the page. So in any case, it's near the beginning of the book, you see, since for me it's on page 41 of a work that has 184 pages in all.
Equipment goods and consumption goods: Marcuse's confusion 27:51 There. So, you see, right away he plunges in medias res into this business of the so-called consumer society. So, as for the argument he develops — one I haven't developed in a general way — this is where we're going to dig into it thanks to this reading. To show that it doesn't hold up regarding the consumer society, that there are indeed circles that consume, classes that consume — I've already said that, so I'll go quickly — but certainly not a society that consumes as a whole; distinctions needed to be made against this scandalous amalgam, namely that we're all wallowing in consumption.
28:34 And for that, he's going to introduce distinctions that he alone makes. No one had made them before with this precision and this political lucidity, and no one has since. So: the series production of capital goods and consumer goods, and the negation of the class struggle. That's a section heading that follows. Series production, which coincides with the years after the Marshall Plan, particularly from the 1960s onward — the series production of capital goods and consumer goods, and the negation of the class struggle.
29:10 There's no more need for class struggle since the workers are supposedly bourgeoisified according to Mr. Marcuse, according to leftism. The negation of the class struggle is made possible by the double characteristic of the new society, namely the series production of two new kinds of goods. This is where there's a crucial distinction: capital goods and consumer goods. Crucial parenthesis: need it be pointed out that capital goods and consumer goods have always existed, and that they only take on a specific character through a qualitative leap — the quantity-quality relation — and through a dialectical relation with other needs?
29:49 Don't worry, this will become clearer. I could tell you right away that when he says this has always existed — in the Roman Empire, the roads, you know how the Romans were champions at building roads across the Empire — the roads were capital goods. That's not a consumption item you'd find in the shops of Rome, of Subura, or of Naples — I mean Pompeii, at that time. Need it be pointed out, the error of Herbert Marcuse — behold the man — the confusion between capital goods and consumer goods? So this distinction that Clouscard makes is obscured by leftist discourse.
30:23 He doesn't say it yet — you see how Clouscard's argument is taking shape. At the time, he hadn't yet coined the phrase "liberal-libertarian," but Marcuse is a trivial embodiment of it, so to speak, an exemplary one. What characterizes it? The confusion between capital goods and consumer goods. At this stage of growth, the Marcusian interpretation is a double scientific error — an analytical error — and a double political fault.
30:58 On the one hand, because it makes it seem that the workers are wrong to make claims — look at the millions of people who have been in the streets lately, why, why, you have everything you want, you consume, don't you? On the one hand, Marcuse confuses — is it the revolutionary role of the intellectual to produce such analyses with such a crude confusion — capital goods and consumer goods. And moreover, he attributes consumer goods to the proletariat. That's the thesis Clouscard is going to discuss. That the proletariat reaches — and I'm telling you in advance, because we'll see the list — the goods, the proletariat reaches subsistence goods, that's the first level, without which it couldn't even renew its labor power.
31:36 It also gains access, starting from the Marshall Plan and the concessions imposed on employers by one of the best governments France has had since the Popular Front, namely that of the Resistance. Before all of this was sold off, wasn't it? Namely, precisely, the workers' gains, especially in 1946-1947 — look at Bernard Friot, who knows this better than anyone.
32:17 The immense advances brought about essentially, if not exclusively, by the Communist Party, including — this is hardly out of date — pay-as-you-go retirement pensions. And which came on top of the gains of the Popular Front, paid vacations, the 40-hour week, etc. So the sum of all these advances allowed the proletariat not to wallow in consumption, but to gain access to capital goods.
32:58 The car, the refrigerator, the car for someone living in the suburbs who needs to come to work, right? And women's work, wives' work — none of that would have been possible without access to a minimum of capital goods. If it had still been the traditional woman spending her time — when she wasn't tending goats, going back even further, before industrial society — taking care of young children, cooking and housework, then to free her up and let her have a job, there needed to be a minimum of household appliances.
33:38 Those are equipment goods. That's not consumption. This will become clearer in what follows. So, on the one hand, Marcuse confuses capital goods and consumer goods, and moreover, he attributes consumer goods to the proletariat. And here he adds a parenthesis showing his political and philosophical finesse — which is, moreover, a rather disconcerting paradox. If the proletariat has sold out, according to Marcuse, if it fully has access to the goods it produces, then the revolution has been carried out by the new society.
34:12 So how is it that it lets itself be steered toward false needs by a repressive ideology? What an unwitting admission on Marcuse's part! What a revealing ideological slip about what must be hidden — the deep allegiance of Marcusian leftism to the so-advantageous new society! Let's continue, because the further we go, the clearer it gets. These two ideological misreadings make it possible to integrate the proletariat into bourgeois society as a consumer.
Emancipatory consumption; Freudo-Marxist or Marxo-Freudian 34:43 Exclamation point. To show how much Clouscard disagrees. Ideological benefit of Marcuse's theoretical confusion. Let's start there: the promotion of Freudo-Marxist contestation through the ideology of emancipatory desire. You see, this already announces Deleuze. But on the other hand, this ideological operation is a whole. From these analyses, the new modes of consumption authorized by neo-capitalism can be justified, namely so-called emancipatory consumption.
35:16 Smoking a joint, for example. He's not moralizing, he's not saying it's wrong to smoke a joint, he's saying that it is certainly not the act by which I prove I'm a revolutionary. As Clouscard often said, he repeated it all the time, he'd say, do whatever you want, I'm not here to moralize. But on the other hand, you have to state clearly what it is you're doing: it's a submission to the established order, to the new economy, and not a contestation of it.
35:46 Look at how media or music stars — I wasn't thinking of, Jimi Hendrix — became extraordinary societal idols through the fact that they took drugs. It's rather extraordinary, because as far as guitar goes, well, he touched a guitar, let's say. You'd really have to not know a Joe Pass, a Jim Hall, a Kenny Burrell — look them up. Even the most middling jazz guitarist would be dazzling compared to that kind of guitar-playing.
36:19 There, I have nothing against the man. I'm glad, for the milieu he came from, that he was able to score points. But on the other hand, this operation, yes — so-called emancipatory consumption, let me give an example. The corollary of the sophistic integration of the proletariat into the new society will be to totally exclude from this society, which even becomes repressive, those who — no longer having, as their problem, this is the petty bourgeoisie, no longer having subsistence and equipment as a problem, thanks to the new modes of exploitation we're going to define, no longer even having the problem of acquiring consumer goods, since they can simply buy them — can then devote themselves exclusively to sexual, parasitic, marginal — because selective — consumption.
37:12 This is one of the rare moments where Clouscard specifies what he means by "marginal," a term repeated left and right in his name without good reason. What's essential in what he calls marginal is that it's selective, according to the cultural models of Freudo-Marxist contestation. So, that's the third time I've come across "Freudo-Marxist," and I'm not going to put it off any longer. Here's a point of disagreement between Clouscard and me. It still needs to be addressed.
37:42 I say, and I repeat, that I am neither a Marxist, period, a Hegelian, period, nor a Clouscardian, period, but I think that these three schools of thought I've just named go much further than all the others, and that the same cannot be said of what I think they contain — because they contain the others, without the reverse being true. However, that doesn't mean I align myself with everything the three of them say. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's me who's mistaken, but anyway, here's the point of disagreement I raised.
38:13 I had asked Michel not to talk about "Freudo-Marxists" — we talked about them every day — but to talk instead about "Marxo-Freudians." There, I was making a somewhat academic, university-style demonstration, which consisted in saying that the first word is grammatically the modifier. Isn't it? And so it's the following word, the noun, which characterizes the group being talked about. And by saying "Freudo-Marxists," he does his opponents a great service — and this was quite intentional, which is why I warned him — by treating them as Marxists who simply have a Freudian variant.
38:55 So, it's better to call them Marxo-Freudians, that is, people who are actually Freudians — who never had, as a capital concern... we'll see how much Clouscard uses Freud's advances and psychoanalysis extensively, but by making an enormous shift from the libidinal unconscious to the class unconscious. There's more, combining the two, but that's another story, we'd need to talk about the Treatise on Love another time — but simply, if this can be simple at all, what I wanted to insist on is that it should be "Marxo-Freudian": they are Freudians who give themselves a Marxist coloring from time to time, like Deleuze for example — yes, typical.
39:38 Deleuze, who is not at all Freudian since he first and foremost wrote Anti-Oedipus, but you see, he too keeps shifting all the time from societal denunciation to social denunciation. So, there's the little dispute, to tell you what he calls Freudo-Marxism, which he'll later call "liberal-libertarian": that is, "Freudo" here sums up everything societal — relations between man and woman, adult and child, children among themselves, there you go.
Subsistence goods, historical norms and not natural ones 40:13 Reconstitution of the meaning of production and consumption according to standard of living. And here begins a list that I recommend to each and every one of you. Long before getting to consumption, which Marcuse says the working class wallows in — and this was at the time, you see, long before — there are first subsistence goods, we must start there, but that's always been the case: the trade-union conquest of the guaranteed minimum wage, the SMIC.
40:43 It was first called the SMIG, it was even called — how odious — the "minimum vital," as if the minimum for survival hadn't already been surpassed by cavemen when they painted on the walls of their caves, when it wasn't biologically necessary for their survival, after all. Nor either — we only have their visual art, they must have had music too, I don't know, funeral chants, I have no idea — in any case, they made magnificent burials, none of that was necessary.
41:13 Biological survival — he was already looking beyond the merely biological, the caveman — what a regression [in comparison, today]. So: trade-union conquest of the guaranteed minimum, the SMIC — that concerns subsistence goods, and it is defined very precisely by Michel Clouscard: subsistence goods are necessary for the reproduction of labor power. If capital doesn't even grant that, it even loses, doesn't it, the very opportunity to extract surplus value, since it kills its goose that lays the golden eggs, so to speak.
41:48 So, these subsistence goods, sorry, they allow for the recreation of the worker's body, quite simply, of labor power. These subsistence goods already represent a conquest by the proletariat, because there have been famines in times past, when they can be measured by the SMIC. A threshold is thus defined below which one cannot fall. The worst working conditions are no longer possible.
42:19 The worst working conditions — there's no bottom, you might say, but if you want to see them as they actually existed, not just imagine them, read the admirable work done by Marx in the chapter, chapters, titled under the generic heading "Primitive Accumulation" in Capital, Volume 1. And look especially at the notes Marx adds on the subject in that chapter on primitive accumulation — notes containing many quotations, you see, not interpretation, quotations from what the labor inspectors of the time (legislation wasn't very developed then, protecting workers) themselves observed where they went — it's barely bearable.
43:07 Don't forget that the factory of the 17th century — I mean the century before last, since I'm a bit old — the factory of the 19th century is the greatest gulag in contemporary history. Children, yes, your six-year-old child was already sent to the forge, to the steelworks, where people died very young. We can consider, then, the needs that seem elementary to us, natural — look at Clouscard's greatness here, all of a sudden — needs that seem elementary, natural, sorry, could only become the minimum standard through the conquests of socialism, of trade unionism; they are historical, these standards, not natural, and more precisely a result of the context of the Popular Front and the Resistance.
44:00 A fine historical reminder. This historical awareness is something the current masters of the world — and have been for quite some time, since the end of the war, the United States and America, you know, I never bash Americans, I bash Atlanticism, but we shift to Atlanticism — their ideology, their propaganda discourse, dwells little on history because it's a nation whose history doesn't go back very far. So it has little interest in recalling historical depth, because there are plenty of things that would go against the propaganda of the American way of life, right?
44:40 If nothing else, the legend of the settlement of the American continent, which we must never forget was marked not by a final solution as with the Third Reich, but by an initial solution — the annihilation of the people who were already there — replacing, so as to mask this crime, that history with a legend: that of a virgin land offered to settlers, with a rifle in the right hand and the Bible in the left. No — Clouscard has a historical mind.
45:10 Let's restore history in place of legend. There were struggles, wounded, deaths, to arrive at what now claims to be elementary natural rights. No — these are historical conquests, not natural ones. I repeat: they could only become the minimum standard through the conquests of socialism, of trade unionism, and more precisely through the context of the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Resistance in the immediate postwar period. The war and the immediate postwar period.
45:41 This concerns, of course, the few years before the Communists were driven from power. Even elementary needs are social. Even elementary needs are social. Look at sentences like that — that could be dissertation topics for the agrégation in economics, couldn't it? And one can dream: nothing is natural, and especially not subsistence goods. Famine, malnutrition — we can consider the guarantee of subsistence goods, wrested from employers who then finally grant it, as a partial, minimal recovery, on the part of the productive forces, that is, the workers, of a share of surplus value.
46:26 A recovery of part of the surplus value. At the level of state monopoly capitalism — that is, the contemporary capitalism at the time Clouscard was writing, which is no longer the old prewar capitalism, our fathers' capitalism, which he calls CCL, competitive liberal capitalism — and I'm giving reminders for those who aren't familiar — which had values like effort, work, thrift, and we know this crashed against the crisis of the 1930s, because if you save, if you don't consume much and are too puritanical, in the sense of the time, that is, regarding material consumption, well then you get the famous crises of overproduction — overproduction not absorbed by consumption, which is held back, isn't it, by this effort of saving and moderation.
47:17 So, of course, after the war, you can imagine that capitalism had thought long and hard — as one American economist said about the crisis of 1929, or the 1930s — about the absurd spectacle of crowds starving in front of overflowing granaries. So, to avoid starting overproduction again, all restraints must be removed, isn't it, and you can sense the liberal-libertarian coming, no more restraints, societal ones anyway.
47:48 We can consider the guarantee of subsistence goods, which employers finally granted only grudgingly, as a partial, minimal recovery of the productive forces on surplus value — that was a prewar achievement. At the level of state monopoly capitalism, we're now in the postwar period, a minimal standard of living must become immanent to the development of the productive forces — that is, the productive forces won't get to work unless they benefit from this acquired minimum, obtained through struggles, because workers' struggles managed to wrest it from employers and have it institutionally guaranteed.
48:26 Isn't it? For example, paid vacations in 1936, and of course the new rights granted to unions within companies, and of course pay-as-you-go retirement pensions — you see that I'm hardly speaking of current events. So these needs are so — oh, sorry, let me interrupt myself — while the Marcuses and the leftists of the time said these demands were old-fashioned, that the truly avant-garde struggles were ecology, feminism, in the style of…
48:59 Isn't it? In the style of… I'm thinking of demonstrations by Maoist women, the PCML, who marched saying "we are not castrated," you see, since this concerns women of all countries and all social backgrounds. So, they were able to wrest it from employers and have it institutionally guaranteed. So these needs are so legitimate, once they've been institutionalized, that we finally consider them natural. Here Clouscard rediscovers the wisdom of nations, if such a thing exists.
49:31 I'm thinking of a well-known saying, which some of you may know, perhaps repeated a bit less than before: custom is a second nature. So these needs are so legitimate that we consider them natural. Nature is history that we've grown accustomed to. That's how I would define it personally. We can talk about it again, if you like. That could be the subject of a new series. It's much the same, for similar reasons, that we confuse nature and landscape. We think we're admiring nature, and we're actually looking at the result of millennia of human effort upon nature, whether on marshes, or forests, or whatever you like, on the climate.
50:14 The same holds for capital goods. So, sorry, this finishes the passage on subsistence goods. So, these needs are so legitimate that they're finally considered natural. You see, throughout this whole development on subsistence goods, he avoided reducing subsistence goods to a single vital necessity. It's vital for the employer. Collective equipment, we're no longer with subsistence goods, we're with collective equipment.
Collective facilities, a new vital minimum 50:52 It's not household equipment, it's not the washing machine, the mixer, the dishwasher, no, collective equipment, not what each person individually has at home. It's about everything that's invisible, and like nature, we never think about it, right? It's what's under our feet when we walk in the street, right? In the form of pipes, gas, water, the metro, the RER. Can you imagine going straight from Orly to Roissy without a single red light? It seems like nothing.
51:22 Collective equipment, can you imagine? Everything that's carried around as public transport without there being any more accidents than that—it's mind-blowing. And that was even before computers made it secure. Can you imagine what the SNCF represents in terms of effort, of logic, of equipment in the plural, and of prior brainpower? So, collective equipment, the new minimum guaranteed by the new productive forces.
51:55 Sewage systems, the road network, then the highway network, after the roads—they're part of, they're authorized because new productive forces authorize them as possibilities. Remember in the 1859 preface, Marx's Critique, in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that key sentence where he says humanity has never posed problems for itself except from the moment when it had the means, or history—its present—gave it the means to solve them.
52:31 The same holds for capital goods. They must be considered as the result of the enormous development of the productive forces, especially at the time of what's called the Thirty Glorious Years, right? A reappropriation, however partial but minimal, of surplus value. This equipment is a reappropriation—not when you consume it, you don't consume the gas pipes under your feet, but you benefit from it in part. So it's a reappropriation, however partial?
53:03 Clouscard is precise—but minimal—of surplus value. We're not in the methodology of economics here, we're in applied economics, mind you. The progress of productive forces, of the sciences, of technology, of services, even despite the super-profits of the trusts and state monopolism, first creates an infrastructural fabric of collective equipment, an infrastructure necessary for the functioning of the economy and from which the public also benefits.
53:36 And you see, the examples keep coming back—road networks, telephones, electricity, etc.—by force of circumstance. This first infrastructure of collective equipment will be doubly completed. Watch, we're progressing. For these new trades and services, neo-capitalism has to develop other collective equipment. Thus universities. You need an agronomy faculty to keep up with new inputs, fertilizers, advances in biology serving agronomy.
54:10 Moreover, working-class struggles, the Popular Front, and the Resistance were able to wrest—because when we say “acquired benefits,” it sounds as if they fell from the sky and God sent them. Still, working-class struggle, the Popular Front, and the Resistance—that cost a lot of lives—were able to wrest from capital the elementary rights to health care. It does us good to remember that, at a time when we see the state of disrepair the hospital was in, when at the time Clouscard was writing this, the French health system was the envy of the whole world.
54:43 Likewise, at the time—curious coincidence—EDF, another example of collective equipment, was envied by the whole world, a structure like EDF that has now been driven into bankruptcy by our authorities. Indeed, a fine example of the state apparatus destroying the state. The state apparatus—the opposite of the general will and the collective interest—destroying what is our common and collective interest, destroying the state. Two meanings of the word 'state.'
55:13 Moreover, working-class struggles, the Popular Front—third time I've said it—and the Resistance were able to wrest from capital the elementary rights to health care, social security, the new development of subsistence goods matching the development of collective equipment. University hospitals, clinics, etc. These three components of collective equipment—we're still not at consumption, we're still at capital goods, still collective, we're not yet inside households. These three components of collective equipment constitute the new vital minimum guaranteed by the new productive forces.
55:46 This isn't luxury, it isn't ostentatious, it's made possible by things that are there, already there, real, technological, industrial, and that result from the muscular and intellectual effort of millions of workers. Because still, we're not going to congratulate ourselves every day that we're no longer, right, in the famines of the Middle Ages. It's really incredible. You measure a standard of living relative to what the productive forces allow at the very moment you're speaking.
56:16 Otherwise, we're in utopia, of course. The social practice of these capital goods becomes natural too. From getting used to it, we find it natural that we come home, press a button, and there, we have light. And there was light—I'm thinking of my grandmother, Corsican, right, it moves me to think of it, she spent her time turning the button on and off. Because throughout her life, before becoming a grandmother, right, she'd had to deal with kerosene, the oil lamp, and everything that gets cut short when there isn't enough light—life ended pretty early in winter.
56:53 There you go. I know some people talk about the good old days, that's their business. You can tell they weren't the ones doing those chores—hauling wood down to the cellar, the heating-oil tank. Let's find out. So there, the social practice of these capital goods, implying, from getting used to it, habit becomes second nature, becomes natural too, as a new level of the socialization of needs, as an infrastructural place of environment that has become a place of subsistence.
57:26 You see that when he talks about environment, he's not talking about nature. According to the collective capital goods, these are the constitutive elements of a whole that renews everyday practice. Well yes, the enormous changes there were in those years in the public and even the private sphere—they became necessary to subsistence since new achievements, an expression of traditional existence. These capital goods are the infrastructure not only of the functional but of the relational: paid holidays allow people to see new peoples, to establish new bonds, new regions.
58:02 There was a time when a person from the Nord region could really only mix with other people from the Nord region. And for me, who thinks that culture, contrary to the anthropological definition since Lévi-Strauss—since the misuse of Lévi-Strauss, who was actually someone more mature than that—what we call culture isn't what we reduce it to when we say 'it's not part of my culture,' 'it's not part of his culture,' in short, one's culture of origin. What I mean is that someone who is cultured is someone who steps outside their culture of origin to take an interest in other cultures.
58:35 That's when you start being cultured. Either they go out into space by dialoguing with people from another culture, or—especially, and this they can do at home with the internet, so much more easily than before—they enter into relation with cultures across time, from the past. That's when you start being cultured, when you step outside your culture in the anthropological sense. Now there's something even worse than 'it's not part of my culture,' there's worse: 'it's in my genes,' the way it's become biologized and all that.
59:10 We see things through Clouscard, you know, through his distrust of any reduction to naturalism of what are in fact conquests, magnificent heroic conquests. This capital equipment is the infrastructure not only of the functional but of the relational, a new social fabric. I would even say that in this parenthesis, 'new social fabric,' which comes right after the word 'relational,' there's already the germ of the whole treatise on mad love he'll write a few years after this text. Love itself is not the same in a society where there are paid holidays, where subsistence goods are secured, and where collective equipment allows a distinction between working time and leisure time.
59:56 Dearly won. Well yes, it changes relationships, in what Aragon marvelously calls, in one of his most beautiful texts—I'm thinking of the preface to La Diane française—'the laughing women at the fountains,' as there used to be in the old days. And finally, in the third sub-paragraph, household equipment and then collective equipment. There, now we cross the threshold of apartments, of the new housing developments. And there are those who miss the chicken-coop tenements and the shantytowns, right, by attacking the housing projects.
Household equipment: does one consume the fridge? 1:00:30 It's extraordinary, isn't it, really. You can tell they never lived before, back when water fell inside the apartment. Household equipment, which completes the three modalities of collective equipment, completes the conditions of the vital minimum authorized by the new productive forces and authorizes the new reproduction of the labor force necessary for the new working conditions. At a first level, this capital equipment can be considered mixed. The passage from collective capital goods to household capital goods.
1:01:01 These are new modes of realizing subsistence: electricity, running water, sewers, gas. At a second level—so here we're straddling capital goods and consumer goods—and then, at a second level, we reach household equipment proper: the electric stove, the washing machine, the refrigerator, and we get access to the first degree of mass production, to the universe of manufactured objects. But look at this magnificent construction Clouscard has built, and this time in order, not just logical order but chronological and historical order.
1:01:34 Everything that's always hidden in TV-panel debates and in debates about arbitrary and subjective societal values—need I point out that we're still very far from the universe of consumption? And here there's this crucial sentence for those who've asked me, where are your sources when you say, as you put it, that it's not consumption that Clouscard criticizes, it's the discourse that denounces the consumer society. Do we consume sewers, the fridge, the washing machine?
1:02:04 These are techniques, mediations that make subsistence life, everyday life, easier, and which can thus be considered as immanent to subsistence, as means of family praxis. I spoke earlier about the car, which simply allowed you to get somewhere, right, when you have to go work far from home. At a third level, we move—or the car, or forms of equipment like the RATP back when it worked better than now. At a third level, we move to manufactured objects that are not consumed, even though they are tendentiously treated as such by the Freudo-Marxists.
1:02:40 Today we'd say the libertarians, the liberal-libertarians. Thus the car, in its function, must be thought dialectically. It is essentially the instrument that allows movement from home to workplace. Essentially—this isn't a value judgment. He's not saying, for me, Clouscard—the essential thing is—it's not the whole of work. It's measured in number of hours. If you look closely at a sociometric study, the number of times the worker took his car, it was rarely to take the little scenic detours that let us visit that marvel that is the Suisse Normande, right, à la Poitvin, with his partner.
1:03:25 It is essentially the instrument that allows movement from home to workplace, the means of productive concentration—rural proletariat, for example—of the mediation between town and country: bringing my goods with the van to market, for the farmer. And I'll open a small parenthesis: before frozen food, before the invention of trucks, of heavy goods vehicles that transported frozen goods, fish was something rarer.
1:03:57 It was on Fridays that a van would pass through villages that were a bit far from the sea. When I say a bit, I stress 'a bit' because even in Corsica, there was no fish inland unless vans brought it on Fridays, keeping it a little on ice, right, for people to say, today there's fish, get it while you can. Not anymore—now you only have frozen fish, you have it whenever you want. Refrigeration, and above all deep-freezing. You see that the progress of the productive forces also allows an extension of consumption.
1:04:27 But there are those who would like to forbid, right, those who live far from the sea from consuming fish—after all, why not. Because incidentally, a piece of equipment can serve a leisure function—the car, of course, can also serve that purpose, which we don't consider as consumption but still as an extension, admittedly a limited one—look how methodically he proceeds—of these subsistence goods that allow the recreation of the labor force and participation in a family life scattered because of the social mobility demanded by production, and that will take the children to school, and take my wife to work, and myself as well.
1:05:09 The limit of the proletariat's access to capital goods. Struggle and social conquest. So here it's not the limit of the proletariat's access to consumer goods, but even to capital goods, short of consumption. The limit of household equipment is access to manufactured objects that essentially allow a leisure function. Television, for example. It's when we get there that we've reached the top, so to speak, of access to the new goods produced by the new productive force.
1:05:43 Let me reread the paragraph so it's clear for everyone. The limit of household equipment, so the upper limit, of course—here, how far households can obtain what you recalled earlier with great rigor, and the only ones assisting is a very partial recovery of the surplus value that was extorted from them. The limit of household equipment is access to manufactured objects—so we've gone beyond subsistence, gone beyond collective equipment, we reach household equipment, the equipment of households.
1:06:18 manufactured objects that essentially allow the leisure function, because it's obvious that the electric stove isn't purely for leisure—it's still tied to the subsistence of cooking—whereas television, for example, how many people gained knowledge of other landscapes, other parts of the world, other fauna, other flora, other cultures—in the anthropological sense this time—brought precisely by television into people's homes, right?
Television, the limit of equipment, and the Corsican language 1:06:54 I'll open a parenthesis here—I think of my Corsican compatriots—it's always an impoverishment when a language disappears, and it's true that many regional languages have disappeared, not because of repression, contrary to what people think, or if there was repression it didn't come from the French state—I know I'll sound scandalous saying this—but it came from the regional people themselves who, out of concern that their offspring not be confined, right?
1:07:26 Confined within a culture—I really experienced this in Africa, where to say someone is literate, they say 'he knows paper,' 'he's going to make money,' speaking of a young person, right, who goes to school. So there you are, again, it was teachers who severely penalized, well, who wanted to put a student in detention for having used a Corsican expression, wow, in his speech—which I'm not justifying, I'm saying it's a bit simplistic to claim that in Paris there was a directive telling the teacher, 'you will tell him that'—no, it was out of a concern for social emancipation.
1:08:03 But let's leave that—I repeat, it's always a reduction, an impoverishment when a language disappears. I'm very glad that my grandchildren—sorry for the anecdote, it's rare for me to talk about my own family—who currently live in Corsica, and go through the Corsican school system, where learning Corsican is now compulsory. The same, I'd say, goes for Basque or Breton or Gaelic, whichever you like. But what mattered most to see was, again, the openness this represents toward other cultures.
1:08:48 It's not simply provided it's in relation with the cultural diversity of the world. But anyway, let me return to Clouscard's own summary of what he's just developed: the limit of household equipment at its upper bound. When we sum up this whole trajectory we began with, access to manufactured objects that essentially allow a leisure function, television, for example. That's where I'd got to, and I'll now close my parenthesis on Corsica.
1:09:18 right? What made the Corsican language disappear was television in homes more than any particular ban. I remember, walking through the little streets of villages in the old days, you'd hear nothing but Corsican coming out through the windows of the old houses in the villages, right? And then, all of a sudden, the fucone—that's what's called the hearth, the fire, the fireplace, right?—around which people gathered, the core of social life at that time.
1:09:51 Outside of work, at home, life gathered around the fire—it was replaced by the television screen, which isn't in Corsican. And young people knew less and less how to speak Corsican. There you go, these are mechanisms like that—I'll close my parenthesis now—where we see just how much an evolution of the productive forces can affect cultural edifices. That manufactured objects made possible at the level of capital goods, to pick Clouscard back up.
The bourgeois scandal of the motorized worker, breeding ground of fascism 1:10:23 The proletariat rising out of misery is already a great source of anger for the bourgeois. There are those for whom it's already too much that the proletariat has risen out of misery. Right? 'Would you believe, my dear, my cleaning lady comes to work by car!' What a scandal! As if the car had become a luxury item, given the rate at which they're produced now, right? Anyone can see that in the worst slums, favelas in Brazil, in the most destitute spots of the great urban concentrations of the world, on any continent, there are always TV antennas on cardboard shacks and pseudo-dwellings where the slightest rain doesn't keep out the drops of water, right?
1:11:08 Because the ultimate outrage, the scandal of scandals, says Clouscard, is that workers own cars and even televisions. They complain, but they live better than we do. You see, you see? You see? The petty bourgeoisie, the one that... All right, let me get back to my preamble on war and the danger of neo-Nazism. I'm being paranoid. Nazism no longer exists, everyone knows that. There's Godwin's law—the moment you mention it, you're being ridiculous, see Godwin's law.
1:11:38 Well of course, I made the list earlier—Nazism has come back in Austria, in Sweden, in Italy. But no, no, you have to see the photos of Ukrainian fighters, right, when you see swastikas going from the wrist up to the shoulder, or even all over the body when they're in their underwear, right? But we should say, like Magritte saying 'This is not a pipe' after painting a pipe—I believe it's Magritte—we should say 'This is not a Nazi.'
1:12:08 if you like, I'd say. But it starts like that—this petty bourgeoisie that gets overtaken, right, by what's just below it, by a proletariat that keeps progressing, keeps progressing. That's terrifying for the future. It's exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930s. Listen carefully, what I'm about to say is serious. What made it so that the same economic crisis produced National Socialism in Germany and the Popular Front in France? It's that in France, the lower middle classes rallied to the workers' demands at the time of the Popular Front.
1:12:46 Whereas in Germany, the lower middle classes rallied to National Socialism, to big business. You only have to look at the revenues of the Ruhr firms from the moment the Nazis came to power, well before the outbreak of the war, right? The prodigious, logarithmic rise in profits of the great German companies of the time. Some of which are doing very well now. I'm thinking of Porsche, of Hugo Boss, and others.
1:13:19 So the list would go: "Isn't it fine, and quite in keeping with a socialist perspective, that the worker also drives around in the car that takes him to work, that he produced and even paid for, that he watches a football match on TV, and even variety shows?" Aren't these still the necessary conditions for the recreation of productive forces in a universe unanimously considered polluted, hectic, and so on? It takes a Clouscard, it takes intellectual effort, to bring out what should, after all, go in the direction that's good for everyone, men and women alike.
1:13:55 All the same, that's really the bare minimum given the prodigious development of the productive forces from which the working class can benefit. Of course, through TV, the worker is particularly subjected to advertising and ideological pressures, but the proletariat is neither the "good folk" who swallow everything, nor the "public opinion" that produces polls from which Freudo-Marxist interpretations are drawn. The proof — and now it's me speaking in voice-over, me, Pagani — is that all the polls today show that those who are out in the streets, and more generally the French people, even those who don't go out into the streets, are now at around 75%, between 72 and 75, against the pension reform.
1:14:38 You mustn't take people for idiots. Neither the intellectual who always believes the crowd is behind him or beneath him, nor the public opinion that produces the polls from which Freudo-Marxist interpretations emerge, nor the idiot — the proletarian is not the congenital idiot who needs to have things spelled out for him with a picture — nor the ascetic that some would like him to be. You see, just as he doesn't want to be, just as Clouscard does not put consumption on trial — the misreading that Lordon makes when he says Clouscard praises the worker's sobriety.
1:15:12 No, he deplores this sobriety which is forced upon him, neither the congenital idiot who needs things spelled out for him with a picture, nor the ascetic that people would like him to be in order to fulfill a mission from which, moreover, the authentic libidinal ideologues have stripped him. The progress of the productive forces has made this standard of living possible, and already in France, a country subject to state monopoly capitalism, the proletariat has reconquered a portion of what it produces. Context: the Popular Front, the Resistance — something every revolutionary should be glad of.
1:15:45 There, I'm going to leave this duty here, which it seemed to me was my duty to discharge with respect to those comments that told me: "but in which text of Clouscard can you justify that?" It goes so far against the image that a right-wing use of Clouscard would like to convey — that is, of someone who opposes debauchery, opposes desire.
1:16:16 If it were a matter of debauchery for everyone, he would be the first on board, agreed — we're far from that, as we've just seen. There you go, listen, I wish you a very, very good evening, and we're far from having finished our Clouscardian serial, that's the right word for it. Have a great evening.
