English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Presentation; communism, revolutionary class, revolution 0:00 Good evening everyone. It falls to me to welcome you to this meeting between Dominique Pagani and Bernard Friot, on the theme of the already-there communist and its actualization in current struggles, the current mobilizations, organized by the association Avec Doumé. So first of all, this is our first format, we're a young association, whose aim is to spread philosophical thought and the debates that go with it, where we organize a real debate, or at least a real meeting.
0:37 So we're very happy that it's Bernard Friot who agreed to inaugurate this new format, since he's someone with whom we share a lot of points of view. So we also know that this meeting, given the current political and social context, was very certainly awaited well beyond the association. That's why this debate, this meeting, will be filmed tonight, even if the term "debate" shouldn't be misinterpreted.
1:07 There are many convergences of views, we think, between the theses that Dominique develops and those of Bernard. So we're more in an exchange in depth, but with very likely convergent ideas. There it is. The debate, the discussion, the presentation by the speaker will last about an hour, half an hour each. And we'll then move on to a question session that will last until about 10pm. The evening will be concluded with a friendly drink right next door.
1:40 There you go. Thank you. Thank you and good evening. The already-there communist obviously presupposes that I define in what sense I'm going to speak of communist. As for already-there, it presupposes that there is a revolutionary class. And that's a postulate that is not shared globally by social science today.
2:12 that there are two classes, that there isn't just a single class for itself, that the bourgeoisie is not the only class for itself, that there is a macro-social, macro-economic subject capable of driving an alternative, that there is a revolutionary class. There is a revolutionary class. And there, it's narrative against narrative.
2:42 Social science does not claim, despite its name, to produce a science of society, a narrative that postulates there is a revolutionary class instead of postulating there isn't one. Which is the dominant postulate of social science, which presents capitalism either as worked through by an internal contradiction, but without genuine class struggle—let's say the theses of Wertkritik, for example—or as an institution of domination that generates victims, or of secession, or well...
3:37 But in any case, no revolutionary class. Maybe tomorrow, but there is no already-there revolutionary today. It's this postulate, which is really widely dominant, that I'm challenging. Communism—I'm taking up Marx and Engels's definition in The German Ideology, that is, the real movement of exit from the state of things, the real movement by which we exit from communism—sorry, from capitalism—and which can therefore be observed empirically.
4:21 It's not what? It's not an aim, it's not an ideal, it's not a project, it's a finding. Provided, however, that we can validate the postulate of the existence of a revolutionary class. Revolution—well, revolution, I'm going to use it in the sense of a change of mode of production.
4:56 There will obviously be... a dimension in the strictly political sphere, but well, I'm not going to at all... Well, I'm going to challenge a widespread vision of revolution that presupposes a prerequisite in the seizure of state power, whereas when you look at the history of the revolutionary class that succeeded, that is, the bourgeoisie, there was no prerequisite at all to the seizure of state power.
5:36 There was a change of mode of production and then, as the icing on the cake, I would say, a few centuries later, once that change had been made, a change of political regime. So, the dynamic of the real movement of transition to communism which can be observed in all capitalist societies, of course, but I have essentially studied our own—this dynamic, I read it in a communist socialization of value.
The 1946 general scheme against social security 6:26 Value is permanently being socialized; in capitalist socialization, you have the constitution of profit centers, capital markets, portfolios of securities that socialize the value captured in profit in order to then allocate it to productions that valorize capital, and I observe—but from a precise object; I don't at all claim to present the totality of the real movement of transition to communism—I do it in the specific field of the economics of labor and the sociology of labor that I practiced at the university and that I continue to practice now.
7:26 The communist socialization of value will make it possible—will be the occasion to subvert—sufficiently for us to be able to speak of an already-there communist—the property regime, the resource regime of workers, which are absolutely major institutions of a mode of production.
8:00 As regards the property regime, the great novelty introduced by the communist socialization of value, as it essentially operates at the Liberation—but well, it's a movement that had already had... well, it's a movement that obviously doesn't happen brutally like that, even if we read it particularly in 1946, when, in the general social security scheme, which is built against social security—social security is an institution of capitalist socialization of value that was built in France from the end of the 19th century to 1945—
9:11 and in 1946 you're going to have a subversion of social security in the general social security scheme, which is a communist form of socialization of value, managed by the workers themselves. It's the workers who manage the equivalent of a third of the total wage bill from 1947, half the state budget—well, the equivalent of the state budget—by the early 1960s, the equivalent of the state budget, which is thus managed by the workers themselves.
9:52 Communist, then, in the sense that the withering away of the state operates on an absolutely decisive public institution through management by the workers themselves. Management by the workers with a scheme that will replace a multitude of schemes, branches, companies, territorial schemes that existed at the time.
10:35 Social security is absolutely overabundant in 1945. There are 1,300 funds, there are 70,000 employees, it's an extremely lively institution that was created on capitalist initiative, essentially, over the previous 50 years, and which is illegible precisely from a class point of view, which doesn't allow for the constitution—it's not an institution that can carry the constitution of a revolutionary class—whereas by replacing all these disparate funds, essentially managed by insurance companies, by employers directly as regards social insurance, insurance companies for ATMP (workplace accidents and occupational diseases), or joint management for social insurance, and by employers for family allowances, replacing all this illegible hodgepodge with a single scheme, and a single scheme whose contribution rate is cross-industry
11:45 and is imposed on employers, whereas the rates were on the contrary instruments of employers' power over workers. Let's take the core of social security in 1945, that is, family allowances: the rates ranged from 4 to 17% of gross wages from one company to another, because family allowances were a weapon of war against the general rise in wages, concentrating benefits on those with dependents alone, and the CGTU was firmly opposed to family allowances; the civil servants' mutual societies, since they weren't allowed to unionize at the end of the 19th century, were also very hostile, since it's in the civil service that this scheme was created to avoid a general rise in civil servants' wages—so it was concentrated on those with dependents alone—and depending on the level of conflict within companies, the rate was either the legal minimum of 4% under the 1932 Laval law, or 17% if the company had been, in 1936 in particular, the object of an occupation
12:55 of a factory with strong conflict, which meant there was a demand—say—for a 35% wage increase which translated into a 17% wage rise and 17 points of employer contribution, since generally the end-of-occupation agreements of 1936 resulted in a fifty-fifty split, a 50-50 between demand for wage increases and employer contributions to family allowances. This capitalist institution, then, this capitalist form of socialization of value that is social security, is thus totally subverted by a communist form of socialization of value that imposes on employers a cross-industry logic, which thus manages—which entrusts management of the schemes to the workers themselves—and which will allow a change
Subsidizing the hospital: use-property and the elimination of credit 14:07 of property regime for a very sensitive production, that of care production: one of the branches of the general scheme is health insurance, and starting from the end of the 1950s there was an enormous transformation of the care production apparatus, of the hospital apparatus in particular, which required considerable investment, which would be financed—not entirely but to a notable extent—by this communist socialization of value, by a rise in the health contribution rate. The rise in the health contribution rate would allow health insurance—this share of the wage socialized in a communist mode, unlike the socialized share operated by stock market capitalization and capitalist forms of centralization, or public markets too, where taxation operates a capitalist socialization of value—
15:17 through public procurement entrusted to capitalist groups—but instead of that, we thus have a communist socialization that will allow radical innovation as regards ownership of the tool. The tool is financed by subsidy and not by credit: health insurance, because it collects a notable share of the value managed by the workers themselves, will be able to subsidize hospital investment, which has two major effects: on the one hand, replacing patrimonial ownership—a tool, that's a hospital as a tool, but like any tool it is two things, both something that's used, a tool that will be used, and also an asset, it's worth something, it's both—there, in capitalism, ownership
16:27 as an asset is for-profit; here we will have a non-profit patrimonial ownership—a public body will be the owner of the tool thus mutualized—well, thus financed by subsidy, sorry. That also means we have a change in the status of the producer, that is, the care producer doesn't have to repay a debt, doesn't work to repay a debt weighing on his shoulders because the company got into debt to finance the investment, and in doing so forges his own chains, since he feeds the capital by repaying the credit granted by the
17:38 capitalist bourgeoisie, which appropriated a part of the value and concentrated it in profit centers and then lent it out—there we are in a completely different logic where the worker is responsible for producing value such that additional value is created corresponding to the advance made in the subsidy for investment. It's a completely different status for the producer, not someone alienated by the obligation to repay a debt, but someone who has the responsibility of producing value and who has that responsibility because he is the user-owner of the tool. In capitalism there can be no user-ownership at all for workers, since the tool, being the for-profit property of capital—well, of the capitalist bourgeoisie—this bourgeoisie ensures that it is used to valorize its capital, and so the workers have absolutely no say at all
18:49 over the use of the tool. In communism, in this already-there communist that is the creation of the CHUs, local hospitals, etc., the transformation of psychiatric hospitals, from social assistance to health insurance—well, everything that happens at that time—workers have a user-ownership that is not complete, we are in the early stages of communism. Of course, in capitalism these workers are so convinced by school in particular, and also so constrained in their capacity to decide, that when they do have user-ownership of the tool, they're not necessarily, not necessarily up to it
19:59 —this user-ownership—of course, living one's work as the responsibility of producing value presupposes that non-profit patrimonial ownership has been sufficiently long established for the user-ownership it makes possible for workers to be actually practiced. It's clear that healthcare workers in the 1960s did not entirely seize the tool in order to decide on clinical practice; nonetheless they did it, and today we have what's called neoliberalism—and that's a word that means nothing, which prevents us from thinking—with the capitalist counter-revolution that has been happening for about thirty years, which therefore presupposes that there was a communist revolution. Of course, the capitalist counter-revolution once again finances
21:10 the production of care on credit, and user-ownership of the tool by healthcare workers has completely disappeared. They now have—they no longer have any clinical freedom of any kind at all, obliged as they are to repay a debt, they obey the protocol put in place by managers in order to make this repayment, and so their capacity for user-ownership of the tool has considerably eroded. Communism is not built as some kind of quiet long river; as you can see, it presupposes—it presupposes of course an ethos and also practices consistent with the gains, representations consistent with the gains too, which are built after the gains. The transformation
22:21 of the property regime by the suppression of credit—not at all by the setting up of public credit, that's not communism, it's not public credit in place of capitalist credit, because public credit leaves us within the logic where one is in debt, at a perhaps microeconomic level—each company is in debt, workers within the company have to repay the debt, we remain within a microeconomic, company-by-company logic of financing investment, with workers who, from an anthropological point of view again, are posited as debtors: one can only work by first being in debt, the point is to repay a debt—that's the objective of labor, even if the credit is public. Public credit mimics
23:31 capitalist credit, simply, but it doesn't actually replace it. So the stakes of communism aren't to have public credit, they're to abolish credit, and that's what we observe through the socialization of value that we see in health insurance—but you see that there again, the abolition of credit, which allows the socialization of investment, which allows the dynamic branches carried by an already-built market, etc.,
24:14 or by an innovative technology or whatever, to support investment in struggling branches, or entirely new ones in which the market isn't yet built, etc., allows for a form of harmony in the productive fabric, which credit does not allow, since it always functions at the microeconomic scale. But you see that for all this to be possible, it presupposes a practice of responsibility in production that is only built slowly, since capitalism rests on our irresponsibility and the construction, from primary socialization on, from the family and from school, of this irresponsibility. The other communist dimension of the socialization of value that operates
Wage tied to personal qualification and pension as continued wage 25:24 starting from '46 is the change in the resources, in the resource regimes—sorry—of workers, and there's a point I insist on a great deal—so I've mainly focused just now on the question of property; you know what I have to say about the personal-qualification wage, so I won't dwell on it at length. The personal-qualification wage, such as the 1946 civil service statute and the 1946 general scheme and the 1946 statute for gas and electricity workers initiate it, that is, the worker is paid according to his qualification—more precisely, in the private sector's collective agreement, according to the qualification of the post—and this qualification is a subversion of the
26:34 capitalist resource regime, since the capitalist resource regime is the price of labor power. The price of labor power is the recognition of the needs of an economic minor who is not instituted within the order of value; he is a bearer of needs, he has a right to purchasing power. That's the capitalist remuneration of workers, self-employed as well as employed, in the 19th century. Then, in the 20th century, you have the invention of the wage tied to qualification, which institutes persons within the order of value and not within needs—in concrete labor, no, in abstract labor—which precisely links the wage to an abstraction, 1.10.575 or OHQ or whatever; remuneration is not tied to the task, to concrete labor, it is tied to a political measure in the collective agreement of abstract
27:45 labor—and if the political work is done—it is done in the 1950s-60s, there's no shortage of CGT leaflets telling us capitalists don't need us, we don't need capitalists, or else we are the sole producers of value; all this is repeated constantly—so if the political work is carried out to institute wage-earners within the order of value, that means positing them as legitimate to be sovereign over value; they're not economic minors who have a right to purchasing power, who have a right to an income corresponding to their needs, they are the producers of value recognized as such. Qualification of course still leaves room for surplus labor—I'm not saying that the wage level corresponds to the value produced, but it refers to the value produced through the qualification of the post—and the novelty introduced by '46 is that the qualification shifts from the post to the person, and it's not
28:55 the post that is qualified as in the collective agreement, which leaves the initiative to the owner of the post—it's the person themself. The civil servant is paid for their grade, not for their post, and the grade is an attribute of their person. Then the general scheme is going to dissociate wage from employment—that's the decisive stake of the general scheme—by attributing a wage to parents even though this wage is totally dissociated from being present in a job, by attributing a wage to retirees, whereas the capitalist mode of socialization of value regarding retirement is to attribute to retirees a deferred income. In capitalism, retirement, the retirement scheme, is intergenerational solidarity, as they say: workers accumulate in an account the sum of their contributions,
30:05 which demonstrates the solidarity they show by not spending their whole wage, by putting a part into the common pot, and when they're retired, that is, when they're no longer productive, well, they spend, and they're legitimately entitled to spend their contributions—obviously not through their own contributions, which have already been spent, but through the contributions of the active workers of that time. There we are in the capitalist practice of labor, which ties labor to employment, which ties labor to the valorization of capital, which denies that any activity that does not valorize capital is labor. There, on the contrary, we are in a communist practice of labor in the general scheme, since on the model of the civil service, the general scheme provides that retirees have a right to a percentage of their reference wage—it's thus the continuation of the wage, 75% of gross wage, that is, 100% of net. We are in the continuation of the wage
31:15 of the best wage, and not at all in a deferral of contributions; we are not at all in intergenerational solidarity, we are in taking labor out of its capitalist definition, which is the heart of revolution. Revolution is what changes value, what changes labor, and the communist socialization of value is what allows labor to be taken out of its capitalist definition, to posit that parents, retirees, healthcare workers who are going to have a personal-qualification wage, civil servants who have a personal-qualification wage, work—and so not only are workers going to be freed from debt, but they are also freed from the labor market. Debt and the labor market, which are two major institutions of exploitation and alienation—a liberation which of course presupposes
Human sciences and philosophy: a disciplinary rivalry 32:25 the construction of new representations, new practices, which only come about afterwards—it's always very slow—and if these representations and these practices do not come about, well, the capitalist counter-revolution will be able to roll back these gains, and that's the stake of current struggles. I too am going to start, as you did, from the elevation—well, from the representation of revolution to its concept. That requires a certain amount of work, I should say. As a preliminary, I should say that this meeting between Bernard Friot and myself is also, I would say, a somewhat disciplinary encounter between the human sciences
33:35 and philosophy. It might not seem like much—I'm not for the compartmentalizing of disciplines, the proof being right here—but I'm a little intimidated to speak on a strictly, on the level of social history, on the strictly economic level, in the way Bernard does, simply because I don't know anyone in the French language, to my knowledge—maybe that's a bit limited—who is as relevant as Bernard in this domain, a domain of an almost obscene restitution, so much is it hidden from us, isn't it—well, which has an obscene effect for those in power, doesn't it—of historical sequences that are completely concealed, and without the restitution of which—a restitution to which Bernard applies himself tirelessly for years—without the restitution of which, the loads of words we use are incomprehensible, blurred, you see. There you find the philosopher again—I say that because when we were studying, Bernard must remember, there was a small conflict
34:45 a muffled conflict between the human sciences and philosophy—there have always been disciplinary quarrels, and even within the human sciences there are always conflicts, I don't know, between historians, economists, isn't there, roughly speaking, to simplify—when the human sciences were formed towards the end of the 19th century, roughly, even if Auguste Comte wasn't one of the very first to use the term sociology—it really becomes effective only starting, correct me if I'm wrong, if you know this better than I do, starting from works like The Rules of Sociological Method—it's really a discipline that becomes relatively autonomous—they formed themselves in rupture with the already-there, the already-there in that domain, at the university, was philosophy. There's always a bit of a parricidal side, isn't there, in the birth of new disciplines, which is quite normal—look how astronomy could only appear, couldn't it, by slaying astrology, fortunately, isn't it, fortunately for science
35:55 as for the imaginary, you can always do whatever you want, and also to sell magazines—but when they were formed, it was against the backdrop of this rivalry. Roughly, the terms of the problem, I'm simplifying since the rest is secondary compared to the importance of the stake I'm going to develop now, is that from the point of view of the human sciences, philosophy is a bit something backward, which had whiffs of old metaphysics. Well, now that the positive, exact, hard sciences—I don't know how you'd put it, I think I tried to free my listeners from structuralist terror, call it whatever you like, as long as the predicate is the same and agreed upon, isn't it—there you go—ever since those sciences, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, were formed, and then the human sciences, in their image, tried to form themselves and bring a rigor which philosophy was supposedly lacking—it's Bachelard, I believe, who says somewhere in Le Rationalisme appliqué, that in meetings of philosophers
37:05 people hurl arguments at each other's faces, whereas at conferences of physicists, they exchange information—I don't know if that's still true, sometimes physicists argue too, especially in teams of Nobel-hopefuls, don't they—there you go, there you go, but broadly speaking we understand very well what he means. So there, when we were studying, philosophers were somewhat looked down upon as people who were a bit backward, still refusing scientificity, modernity, including on the Marxist side, of course—and conversely, the philosopher allowed himself to snub these tough guys who were the human sciences, who prided themselves on the rigor of the hard sciences, with which philosophy's relationship has never been very clear. You know Bergson spent his whole life criticizing a science that had already been outdated for 50 years in his time—well, he couldn't have known, poor old man. As a philosopher, that's—much respect for people who were subtle men, but well, it's a little unfortunate all the same when you step outside these specialties and these discourses. That's why I insist a little by starting there.
38:16 Well, anyway, before—or, I'll come back anyway to that time when we were students—people like Lévi-Strauss, who isn't known as a philosopher but as an anthropologist, indeed practically the founder of anthropology, who had to break, you see, with ethnology, which before Lévi-Strauss had Gurvitch—I'm thinking of Gurvitch, who wrote the Traité de sociologie, which was the reference for students at the time—these were people who had a philosopher's training. When we were students, you had to get a degree in philosophy and then specialize afterwards by doing a year or two of sociology; there wasn't yet a degree, nor even the agrégation, in that field. You see, I'm starting there because, thanks to the crisis—the crisis we're living through, that you're no doubt living through, the most serious one, it's not me who says so, I'm no specialist, but there's a consensus to say it looks like the most serious one since that of the 1930s, among those that can affect capital—thanks to the crisis
The century of revolutions and the question "what do you call...?" 39:27 and of the quest for meaning that it engenders — I'm speaking a little like journalists do — philosophy has come back into fashion for better or for worse, more often for worse, in mediatized philosophy, the philosophy of TV panel shows, one could put all the media on trial, there you go — and today's meeting is singular because, and here I pick up the concept of revolution, "we are approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions" — that's a quotation, of course you know it's from Rousseau, Rousseau in the 1770s says we are approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions — there may be philosophers who rave, but if anyone was ever nearly a prophet it's really Rousseau when he says that, because he doesn't say we are approaching a great revolution, even beyond that, we are approaching the state of crisis and the century — of what is he speaking?
40:34 he's speaking of the late 18th century, he's talking about the 19th century — you'll have noticed that every century has numbers and letters: 16th century, there you go for the numbers, for the letters it's called the Renaissance, it has a nickname; 17th century, well that's called the century of classicism, of the Sun King, the Grand Siècle, by way of positionings; 18th century, the Enlightenment; 19th century, and there — well, I propose, I've already done this, that we baptize this century, as Rousseau did, the century of revolutions, because it doesn't stop from 1789 onward, and this is where I pick up on what Bernard said, conjugating my remarks with his, articulating them onto his: we do not live in revolution, the gains of '45 have been more than nibbled away — after what you say about '46, nothing happens from the Liberation, of course — the gains of '46 have been more than attacked, these are effects of counter-revolution.
41:44 I believe — you used the term yourself — that since the storming of the Bastille we have lived neither in revolution nor in counter-revolution but in a permanent see-saw movement between revolution and counter-revolution. You see, hardly has the First Republic been set up than there's Thermidor — I'll go quickly through the sequence — then afterward there's my compatriot Bonaparte who is supposed to put an end to the revolution but who keeps a few of its gains, then, whoosh, there's the restoration of the monarchy, the return of those who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as was said of the émigrés — a new formula, that's it, and that's the end of the revolution — ah, well no, there's 1830, and then there's the monarchy again, and then there's 1848, that's serious, and then there's the Commune, and then there's 1910 — it doesn't stop — 1917, it doesn't stop, you see, each time there's a bit of a swing, so that's why we find it a little difficult sometimes — it's not... Now why did I mix the problem of revolution/counter-revolution with that of the disciplines? It seems to be independent.
42:55 Well no, it's because there's a link, it's because — knowingly or not — Bernard Friot is one of the best philosophers I know, whether unwittingly or not — here I come back to my discipline — if philosophizing is doing as Socrates did, starting by saying "what do you call...?" — not "what is the sun," that's an astronomer's question, but "what do you call the sun?" — to know whether it's a planet, a star, and so on, you tell me first what you call the sun — if that's it, I hardly know any intellectual worker of our time who submits the words of the tribe, to speak like a great poet — which proves that he is also a poet without knowing it, since the mission of poetry, for Mallarmé, is to give a purer sense to the words of the tribe. Well, listen, instead — when Bernard Friot distinguishes activity, wages, contribution, and things that we're used to taking rather for one another in confusion, he does revolutionary work, he does what got Socrates condemned by the city, because it's a fundamental subversion, because the way
44:05 of speaking about it is what connects us all the same — we do say "to take up language," don't we, that's very important — that's why I spoke of quasi-obscenity earlier, doing as he says, saying that the pension as decided in '46, as defined in '46, has nothing to do with an old-age minimum, with a charitable act — well, we have to give something to old people so they'll shut up — no, it's eminently subversive because everything is turned upside down, you see. Revolution is a word — you must always look at the field a word comes from — revolution, in the strict sense, originally comes from astronomy. There are words that come from agriculture, others from astronomy, that's it, others from economics. Revolution is originally the revolution of the stars — it goes up, it comes down. So I come back to fate: "we are approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions, the great becomes small, the monarch becomes a subject — are the blows of fate so rare that you could count on being exempt from them, what will become of one deprived of everything..."
45:15 He's speaking to the mother of Émile, of the pupil who must be educated — "this pompous imbecile whom you have raised only for gold and who knows how to put, who puts his whole being only into what is foreign to him" — which is one of the very first definitions of alienation that I find in our literature, isn't it, this pompous imbecile who puts his whole being into what is foreign to him. The text then continues with an apology for work — not for work as such, because the morality of work, the idea that idleness is the mother of all vices, that's religious, it's not political, it's not social — no, Rousseau goes so far as to say, in this same passage, that it's less a matter of learning a trade for the sake of the trade than of overcoming the prejudices that despise it. You can't get more social than that. Now I'm surprised to see that for years Bernard Friot has never ceased elaborating another subversion, which consists in saying: well, capitalism may be nasty and so on, but look how down-to-earth it is, how efficient, how pragmatic, the science of realities — no, he says, it's a religion.
46:25 which imposes on us a religious discourse when we have to pay off the debt, when the Italians — but what are they doing, are they crazy right now, they haven't reckoned with the markets, they're going to anger the markets — how do we appease the markets? He says: but that's exactly how one speaks of the god Moloch, to whom children must be thrown into his burning belly to appease the gods' wrath — here, to appease the markets' wrath, you have to appease... it's a religious discourse. Some of you who know a bit of German may know that it's the same word in German for debt and guilt, that is, the word Schuld, guilt. At the moment I'm speaking, you know, there are five-year-old children in India who don't go to school in order to pay off their parents' debt, making bricks all day long, whose life expectancy is quite short, in order to pay off their parents' debt — they are born guilty. So, I mean, there are two things that are eminently philosophical in Bernard's activity.
47:35 as far as I know — but you'll tell me if I'm adding to it, if I'm reading into your remarks — the first is the questioning of words. I'm thinking in part — I come back to the pension file — well before 1946 there were payments for old people, under Vichy there was — what's it called — the allowance for old salaried workers, I believe, which was a way of papering over misery. Bernard points out that the revolution, at the time of Croizat, on pensions, is to specify the replacement rate — well yes, that, like many things, the legal retirement age, are all statements that are revolutionary and that were not at all present in the old-age minimum. This way of putting us on guard about how to speak of these things is eminently philosophical, but not only that. When I alluded to Socrates and Plato, it's linked — even at the origin, not only the chronological origin, back there, in the past, 2,500 years ago — at the very principle of philosophy, every time it rebounds, every time it makes
Restoring the historical sequence: the salary for life and the ruse of reason 48:45 an advance in its history, it's by returning to this questioning of words, of the words of the tribe. But there's a second aspect, at the other end of this great table I once spoke of to my listeners — not that it would gather all the philosophers of history, but there would be Plato at one end, Hegel at the other, the one who initiates the corpus of works of philosophy and the one who is supposed to close it. I'm not saying we no longer have the right to philosophize after Hegel, I'm saying that after Hegel, what will count — Marx, Nietzsche, Freud — each for different reasons, situates itself outside philosophy, even if that makes philosophers spill a lot of ink. So when Bernard interrogates, he restores a historical sequence to us — that's Hegel, that means that the restoration of history in place of legend has demonstrative value in the human sciences, because, you see, I'm not sectarian, I often criticize Althusser, but here there's one point
49:55 where I agree with him, it's when he says that Euclid opens the field of the so-called exact, hard sciences etc. by opening the mathematical field; many centuries later, Galileo opens the field of physics — this leads to Bachelard's periodization, but anyway he expressed it very well, Althusser — Lavoisier opens the field of chemistry, you see the interval keeps shortening each time — Claude Bernard, the one who said "the living is the dead," makes biology a science, we start to stop raving a bit about the living — we haven't finished today, but anyway, I'm not talking about the bio, I'm talking about biology — I remind you, all the same, that the main cause of mortality in the world, malaria, is inoculated by a mosquito, antibio, and beyond that — that's it, the end of the so-called natural, hard sciences. Beyond that would begin the human sciences, and he says Marx inaugurates the science of history, which would be generic — I don't want to, I don't want to impose it, but which would be generic with respect to the human sciences in general, so which would be
51:06 so each of them would be a sub-discipline, wouldn't it, of history. I say this because I'm passionate about geography, but there's physical geography which doesn't belong to history — I don't know, Himalayan erosion — and then when you fly over the earth in a helicopter there are lots of things you see that don't depend on nature. I remind you that human geography, formerly, well, that's history, it's a discipline that contains everything — this human geography, everything that has been inscribed on the earth. Where I want to get to is a quip of Clouscard's — I think I've mentioned it once to some of you — a quip, I don't want to make it say more than it says, but not less either, when he says, with his Tarn accent, that the human sciences appeared at the end of the 19th century to lock up nascent Marxism — implying that the human sciences as we see them today, dispersed at the EHESS into disciplines, into anthropology, into history, into the history of mentalities, into social psychology, well, developed
52:17 in order to lock up the development of Marxism, that is, of the nascent science of history. By restoring a historical sequence, Bernard Friot does revolutionary work — you see that the two aspects of philosophy are linked, I wanted to show that. And I want to press your thinking further — you have the right to link — and more than that, it's not just any philosopher who illustrates it, sometimes in a striking way, it's Hegel's philosophy — I'm not talking about Marx's, which goes far beyond. No, no, but look — I learned, thanks to Bernard Friot, the origin — well, the first appearance — of the salary for life; well, normally that should be a pleonasm, it's not a salary, it's a salary for life. Some of you perhaps know this, but the first salary for life appears in 1830, at the moment when Louis-Philippe decided — by the Louis-Philippe regime, which needed to pay its debts, hence to conquer Algeria and build a colonial empire — created the salary for life for naval officers,
53:28 because the marine infantry was going to be the armed arm of the colonial conquest, and to stabilize them, to have them at his disposal, because there was great mobility, they decided on this revolutionary thing: that it's no longer the post that is paid, isn't it, but that the pay, if you will, is irreversible — the naval officer's pay is irreversible, he has a salary for life. So you see the connection with Hegel — but you know that Hegel is the author of one of the most effective concepts, in my view, which will allow me — I'll finish on this, my intervention — to answer, five years late, a question you perhaps have forgotten but that you asked me between two doors one day at the Tropiques bookshop: what is this story about dialectics, what does dialectic mean exactly? We won't forbid ourselves — I see that — we won't forbid ourselves, but all the same, here we are eminently dialectical in restoring at once the questioning of words and the historical sequence that corresponds to it. The concept of the cunning of reason — I'll go fast, we'll have time in the discussion to go deeper if you're interested — consists in saying
54:41 for Hegel, there is something in history that manifests itself — I'll sum it up as the spirit of history — which is reason, reason is the essence, which is the truth of what appears to us as capricious, as arbitrary, as contingent, and behind all that there's an essence. Now, I'm not discussing the thesis for now, but all logicians have known since Aristotle and since Plato that essence is magnificent, it's the truth of what appears — but it has one small drawback, which is that it lacks its opposite, which is existence. You see, man gives the Greek citizen his anthropology, his humanity, he makes him a man — yes, but woman gives him existence — I'm alluding here to Antigone and Creon, these are serious matters, still today. There you go, that's important: thanks to man, the human animal becomes, in the city, a man — that's right, that's his essence — yes, but for that essence to enter into existence, you need woman — well, that can serve in the same way. Hegel says the problem of essence is — here is where you see he's not really
55:51 an idealist — and Lenin's stroke of genius, a small parenthesis I'm opening here, is in his reading of the Logic, when he's in exile in Switzerland, when he tackles it like a self-taught man, it's prodigious, it's perhaps the work — the little file of the history of thought — and Lenin even writes in the margins of these passages, which should sometimes be called the best way to get a headache, but he hangs on, he's very critical at the start, he has his prejudices, that's normal, and then all of a sudden, as he reads, he says, all the same, this is something else than bourgeois philosophers on the whole — and at the end, when he arrives at the absolute idea — not a very Marxist, very materialist program stated like that — the absolute idea, when it grows, Lenin says this passage is archi-remarkable, it's the most materialist and the most idealist thing in Hegel — it's contradictory, but it's a fact, it's written down in black and white by Lenin in the Philosophical Notebooks, if that interests you, republished by Gallimard — and he adds, after that, in a boxed note: nobody has understood Marx, half a century after him, and especially not the first section of Capital, for lack of having read Hegel's Logic. You see, that's why I'm dwelling on this a little. Now what is dialectical about it, or about his notion of the cunning of reason, is what makes it materialist —
57:01 it's that something must exist materially for the essence to enter into existence. Let me be a bit less abstract: for the modern state to appear, you need a small ambitious and vain body called Napoleon — I say small because he was 1m60 — you see, reason makes use of this man's exceptional qualities, as a strategist, as a politician, whatever you like, as sans-croît — that's more important, it's not a matter of value judgments. In other words, reason doesn't care about the "ought to be" — people should be this, men should be good, etc. Rousseau is the first to have shown that if the social contract must be made, it's not because it's not good that there are poor people, that the rich are wicked, that's not it — it's that society could not have been constituted otherwise, it cannot appear on the basis of a relation of force — being is more important than the ought-to-be, than what it should be according to our values and our imaginings. No, Napoleon exists, with all his flaws, he will contribute to bringing about the modern state. He's clever — when he arrives in Germany, for example, he says: you're not going to keep your medieval institutions,
58:11 all that — go on, with one signature I'm putting an end to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation — he did that, bang, and a few centuries later it collapses, and there you go — you have, with us, rights, freedoms, you're behind the times with your old medieval stuff — and it worked, he was clever because he brought the populations over to his side, you shouldn't think that these guys at the bridge of Arcole — that's not what makes a great military man, he's a great politician, a real political operator here — and so, once he has fulfilled this function, reason takes him and puts him on St Helena, in the dustbin of history, it's over, he's fulfilled his function. Now what does Bernard Friot reveal to me? That it's exactly what reason did with Louis-Philippe, who starts from an imperialist idea, colonialist through and through, who even initiates our great colonial conquest, but who — and this wasn't planned, not by Louis-Philippe — creates the salary for life, and now — and this is revolutionary — extends it, doesn't confine it to the small society of naval officers. So we've just had a fine example of dialectics between what is, what ought to be, between existence
Questions on debt and low-skilled work; answers 59:21 and essence, simply by interrogating with rigor — both conceptual rigor — Bernard proves both, and the richness of the empirical documentation, there — sorry to make you blush, Bernard, but I mean I would like many philosophers to be at that level philosophically, there. — Yes, my first question, then, is for Bernard: you mentioned that capitalism only recognizes work if it fits into a labor market or a market for goods and services, if it valorizes capital, and recently in your latest talks you also mentioned that capitalism recognizes someone as working only if they repay a debt, only once they've repaid a debt — so I'd like you to come back a bit to this idea, to clarify what debt we're talking about, because we can't be talking about the debt one takes on for major purchases
1:00:32 like a house or a car, because that exceeds the current flow of our resources, so now, with a salary for life, you must in my view be talking about another debt — so maybe you're talking about the debt that's about to hit students, maybe you're talking about the debts that hit workers every time there's a decades-long austerity cure following a stock market crash — anyway, I wanted you to develop this point a bit — so my question is also addressed to Bernard Friot, because I was a bit surprised, the few times I was able to watch videos of previous talks and debates with other economists or philosophers — namely, to be more precise, during, I believe, an exchange with Frédéric Lordon at the Tropiques bookshop, I think — one of the criticisms or reservations regarding what Bernard develops frequently is that
1:01:42 the system he sketches out doesn't allow solving the problem of low-skilled work and, as Frédéric Lordon said in a comment, someone who's going to take out the trash or collect the garbage — these low-skilled jobs that nobody wants to do and that, if people aren't somehow forced to do them one way or another, won't get done. And, in all modesty, the answer that seems to me perhaps to at least partially solve the problem, and that I don't have the impression of having heard, though maybe I'm wrong, would be that ultimately, if it's the workers themselves — including those who, being low-skilled, are led to carry out these tasks — if it's the workers themselves who decide on investment, they will indeed direct investment toward developing tools that will allow them to avoid these arduous tasks, and that ultimately the idea that goes with it, which is the measure of value through qualification, becomes quantifiable,
1:02:53 and it allows showing how this constitutes progress, that is, that there's a need, or in any case there's less and less need, for low-skilled workers, because they have freed-up time precisely to become qualified, and there's less need for them in work collectives since these low-skilled jobs have been replaced by, I don't know, machines that do the job instead — so is this a line of reasoning that makes sense and that indeed answers this question, and that you, Bernard Friot, might have made along those lines — sorry, I was a bit long. — Yes, well, my question is the following: I wanted to make the connection between what the two of you said and the current mobilizations — so, well, the railway workers, so it's varied, the railway workers, the high schools, the hospital, the nursing homes, well, and to speak only of the most publicized conflicts, so there you go.
1:04:03 what link is there between the discourse the two of you are giving and the current mobilizations, how do we bring up to date what one could call Bernard Friot's program in the register of the struggles currently underway, and perhaps to translate it into more philosophical terms, how do we speak of revolution from the standpoint of the current mobilizations. — On the debt, it's obviously the debt contracted to finance investment, it's not the debts one contracts to buy heavy consumer goods that exceed the monthly flow of our resources. Now, the financing of investment is always carried out through the value that we produce, either that we've already produced and it has been collected through contributions or is currently centralized in profit centers, or
1:05:14 that we're going to create, if there is monetary creation, which can happen either through borrowing or through subsidy. If the funds that collect economic contributions — if we extend the already-existing communist element of hospital investment financing in the 1960s — if the contributions that would replace profit and that would finance investment funds are not sufficient to finance all the validated projects, well then there's monetary creation, but through subsidy — it's not necessary that monetary creation happen on credit. So it's this debt I'm talking about — indeed, in exploitation as well as in alienation, the fact of identifying work and indebtedness is really quite
1:06:24 very significant, and communism precisely frees work from indebtedness, but on the other hand it ties to work the responsibility for producing the value necessary to finance investment — that's something entirely different, again, from being indebted or being responsible, firstly. And it's something entirely different for the financing of investment to happen from a microeconomic standpoint, in which each firm must repay the loans granted to it, or from a macro level, in which firms contribute to investment funds — we socialize investment. Firms do have a responsibility to produce the value corresponding to the advance made to them, but at the macro scale, just as we have socialized wages, we must socialize investment — that's the condition for the territorial development of the tool, its inter-production development, well, to be harmonious. As for low-skilled work,
1:07:34 yes, of course, one can suppose, I quite agree, that workers who decide, because they are the user-owners of the tool as a collective, and then, as citizens, they are the patrimonial owners, since the public collectivities that are the patrimonial owners of the tool are also managed by the workers — yes, decide to replace, well, to mechanize or whatever, I'm not very competent in all that, low-skilled work — but low-skilled work isn't the only thing that poses a problem, there's night work, which can be extremely skilled and which can't simply be replaced by machines. On the other hand, there's the way capitalism practices productivity gains, that is, through the relative elimination of living labor —
1:08:44 is not the alpha and omega of productivity gains. Communism is precisely what will, on the contrary, put living labor back at the heart of the act of production, and so this might come through mixing tasks — well, that the division of labor is attenuated and that we mix tasks that today are low-skilled — well, jobs that are made up only of low-skilled tasks — but that we reduce the division of labor and that low-skilled tasks be mixed with skilled tasks, carried out by living labor. Some doctoral students from my lab, some 15 years ago, decided
1:09:54 to settle in a little village — I told them, what, you want to go back to the oil lamp? — because they wanted to master their daily life, to get out of the sort of loss of competence in which we permanently find ourselves — again, I was quite harsh with them, but I think they were anticipating something very correct. Reducing the social division, of course, but reducing the technical division of labor is, I believe, part of a communist dynamic. On the current mobilizations — on the current mobilizations, I'm going to approach it especially from a standpoint I presented little in my initial talk, but from the standpoint of wages tied to personal qualification — one can clearly see how central this is to the conflicts. I explain at length, in the second chapter
The counter-revolution of work: basic income, individual accounts, loans 1:11:04 of Defeating Macron, that the — the capitalist counter-revolution in the world of work as it has been operating since, let's say, the 1980s, consists in replacing wages tied to personal qualification with, on one hand, a flat rate paid through taxes, one that is progressively gaining universality up to Hamon's proposal for a basic income — but this has been building for about 40 years, the replacement of wages tied to qualification by a basic income. Young people know this, since it's from them that this happened — their access to wages tied to qualification was progressively replaced by a basic income, a flat rate financed by taxes, through the youth measures, the youth jobs, etc.
1:12:05 but not only that, that is, the wage tied to qualification is replaced, for its first 800 euros, let's say, by an income financed by taxes, but beyond that it's replaced by an "I contributed, I have a right" — by something extremely contributory that also denies any reference to personal qualification. If we take up again what Doumé was saying about 1946, regarding pensions, it's not simply the replacement of the AVTS — indeed the AVTS, the allowance for salaried workers, was a social minimum, but it's — yes, yes, of course — but it's the affirmation of a right to a wage for retirees, against
1:13:15 what the Agirc and the Arrco are going to put in place, that is, a right to a deferred income from one's contributions. It's the right to a wage tied to qualification against the "I contributed, I have a right" of the Agirc-Arrco, which is Macron's project for reforming pensions, to unify all the schemes around individual accounts. That's the capitalist practice of work: only those with a job or who valorize capital work, the others spend — so retirees spend, they have the right to spend what they've put into the common pot. The theme of intergenerational solidarity is the capitalist discourse on work, and precisely the novelty or the communist subversion is to institute the continuation of the wage
1:14:25 in the pension, that is, by referring to the civil servants' scheme which, in fact since the 19th century, continued the last salary into the pension, for the reason Dominique recalled: that civil servants are paid for their rank and not for their post, and that their rank is an attribute of the person which does not extinguish itself at the end of service — a captain remains a captain until his death, and he's paid as a captain until his death. This extension of the field of work, positing, taking work out of its capitalist definition — those who work are those who valorize capital, either as self-employed workers, which is the classic form of work in capitalism, self-employed work, since it's the most exploited, or as an employee holding a job — that's where we're at the heart of the battle over the railway workers, over retirees, over students.
1:15:35 All these battles, the whole capitalist counter-revolution in work, consist in denying that one has a right to a wage outside of employment. This has already started with the CSG financing family allowances, whereas Croizat made family allowances a wage disconnected from employment — Rocard reconnects the production of value to employment by financing, through the CSG, the cost of a child, denying that parents produce value. And regarding pensions, it's exactly the same process that would take place if the Agirc-Arrco became the core of pensions and if the deferral of contributions replaced the right to a wage for retirees — we would be reaffirming that retirees are not productive, that they are active,
1:16:46 that they are whatever one wants to imagine in terms of social usefulness, that their concrete work is useful, etc., but that they don't produce value. For students it's exactly the same thing — the stake of student loans is to posit them as future workers and not as workers — future workers who will have additional wages linked to their studies, and this surplus value that they will create will allow them to repay a debt they contract as students. Student loans, as they are increasingly clearly taking shape, are exactly symmetrical to the income deferral in pensions, it's an anticipation of
1:17:56 the additional value they will create thanks to their studies — so they are future workers, but they are not workers. The student loan, quite apart from the fact that, again, it positions us as indebted as a worker, has the same meaning as the pension as deferred income rather than as continuation of the wage, that is, only those who valorize capital work — students don't work, retirees don't work — and railway workers, we're in the same situation, that is, the fact that the wage is tied to the person and not to the job position
1:19:06 in the statutes of railway workers, as also in the statutes of civil servants of the post office, well, of what's left of it at France Télécom — we're in the same battle: qualification must be tied to the job position and not to the person. I think this is what unifies all the current conflicts, independently of the question of ownership — of course it's clear for the SNCF, which also has a stake in ownership, of course, but I wanted to insist on the other decisive dimension: the communist socialization of value not only changes the ownership regime, it also changes workers' resource regime by attributing qualification to the person, by taking them out of the labor market. Now the conflict over railway workers, the coming conflict over retirees, the
1:20:16 coherence between Parcoursup and the arrival of student loans — all of that, we're in the same logic, and let's not hope to win if we fight with themes of the kind: oh well, I don't know, railway workers aren't as privileged as people make out, or if they have a special status it's because they have special constraints, or, oh well, ultimately each euro contributed will give one euro of pension, or the same, oh well, you see, it's fair, or else, oh well, no, it's individualistic because it's individual accounts — these arguments are derisory as long as we don't pose the question in terms of who works, what does it mean to work, who produces value —
The empire of necessity and the vocabulary of "hostage-taking" 1:21:28 the communist revolution is precisely to change the very definition of value, its practice — but in saying this I am obviously working within a certain reading of Marx that isn't shared by everyone who identifies capitalism with value and thinks that communism is the suppression of value — which, of course, is not what I think. Well, I'll just add two little words — you want to ask your question, Dominique? Go ahead. — No, but I'll go afterward, two little words to finish answering both Romain and Samuel. To Romain, on the subject — in principle it should be the progress of productive forces, technical progress to put it quickly, that should reduce working time. In principle, the idiotic work you denounced earlier — there are tasks — Bernard and I have known this, you haven't seen this — in the metro, women who spent the whole day in the basements punching tickets, there was a carpet
1:22:38 of little punched circles from metro tickets on the ground — one more human being reduced to that — it's not that I want to make her the scapegoat, there's no such thing as a menial trade, but I mean it's terrible, that in the fifth largest industrial and economic power in the world, we should have reached that point. Well, anyway, so that's fine — now, I don't much like making quotations, but Marx says this in some additional notes to the third book of Capital — he's in the process of speaking, he says there will always be a natural constraint, the necessity of eating to live doesn't depend on the mode of production, one will always have to eat to live, even if the way we satisfy this need varies according to history. But he says this: this realm of natural necessity — you see the precision of the vocabulary, Engels and Marx were both like that — there is the realm of necessity which is opposed to the kingdom of freedom, the kingdom of freedom must make itself a place within the realm of necessity — the moon that revolves around the earth is within the realm of necessity.
1:23:49 In this domain, freedom can only consist in this — because it seems impossible, since we will always be dependent on a natural context — in this domain, freedom can only consist in this — now here you must listen closely, it's rare for Marx to be programmatic, usually he studies how things happen under capital and not what will happen — the associated producers, the cooperators, associated socialized man, rationally regulate their organic exchanges and bring them under their common control, instead of being dominated by the blind power of these exchanges — these blind powers, these exchanges that are called, by deifying them, the invisible hand of the market in classical capitalist economics — and they carry out these exchanges by expending as little energy as possible — this ties in exactly with your question — as little energy as possible, under conditions most worthy of and most conforming to their human nature. There were those who said that Marxism was not a humanism, in Althusser's day — you remember — but here it's Marx himself speaking.
1:24:59 But the realm of necessity nonetheless persists; it is beyond it that the flourishing of human power begins, human power which is its own end — the true realm of freedom, which however can only flourish by grounding itself upon this realm of necessity. The reduction of the working day is the fundamental condition of this liberation. And so here I'm answering Samuel's question at the same time — the connection with the current conflicts — you already asked me this question five years ago, Loïc I think, about the previous railway workers' conflict, and already people were saying that the railway workers were taking us hostage — us, as they say, the users — I'm thinking of vocabulary that isn't the same, small parenthesis here, but I'm fed up with hearing about "consumers" whenever there's a report done in a supermarket, as if the people we see there and interview weren't also all producers. All the same, they're taking us hostage — but that's an extremely serious vocabulary, firstly when you see what has happened, the terrorist attacks, hostage-taking is extremely serious — this criminalization, through vocabulary, of workers.
1:26:09 In particular the railway workers, that's something - but as if by chance, we're attacking people who are supposed to be privileged in the world of work. Now that's still an extraordinary operation, because you'll always find a way to say that a wage-earner is privileged, at whatever level of salary. So we start with the railway workers, but if we start granting that the railway workers are privileged, in the end we'll find that even the one receiving the minimum, the minimum wage, is still privileged simply by the fact that he's in a country where there is a minimum wage, right? And the retiree and the unemployed person is lucky to be a French unemployed person, because - listen to BFM Business and you'll see they'll always tell you the reimbursement rate, the unemployment benefit rate, etc. must above all be lowered. I mean, all that will always be too much until we get to - what was I saying earlier - the five-year-old child who makes bricks all day long in appalling conditions to pay off his parents' debts, well, he's a privileged one too, no? But that's the reasoning, because when they tell you the number one problem is unemployment
1:27:19 it's employment, because in that case the solution has long since been found - I don't understand how people could say we've tried everything. You know, socialist, well, slavery - slavery solves the problem of employment, no? But seriously, employment isn't the problem, it's dignity, as Marx says - it's who is employed, and their pay, and the duration of their pay. There, that's to link the two questions a bit, that's why the railway workers' struggle is exemplary, because it's a matter of high and low - there's the class enemy who each time wants to pull us downward, right, whereas the railway workers are still far from the high point that the current state of the productive forces would allow, to come back to Marx. So, I have two questions but which, in the sense that Dominique knows well, are more like requests - one of the requests in the Euclidean sense - one for Dominique, one for Bernard, and to bring us back to the question, normally to today's theme, that is, the already-there communism and in relation
Questions on essence, "what is to be done," the 1%, and acts 1:28:29 So, you had - it was good to hear your addition and your invocation of Marx's text, because precisely the question I wanted to ask you was related to the discussion we had exactly on the theme you just mentioned with Bourgeois some time ago, on the question of necessity, etc., of freedom. So the question I'm putting to you is rather a request for clarification, let's say, on the essence that you invoked in evoking the Hegelian character - not necessarily against his will - of Bernard when he does history, perhaps simply restoring to us the history, the historical development which is at the heart of Hegelian logic and of Marx's as well, in order to raise again the question of essence, asking you for the clarification you've already in fact partly provided by what you just mentioned, since it was directly related to essence, recalling that Bourgeois reproaches Marx, for example, in his critique of Hegel, for having stopped at essence
1:29:39 at the same time, as the other one would say - Marx, already young, still very Hegelian moreover, in a very famous text recalls that there is no human essence - which ends with the paragraph that ends with the opium of the people, that man is in search of a human essence but that there isn't one, and on the grounds that you just specified, we can see clearly that Bourgeois is wrong, in my opinion. So, the question of essence in relation to the already-there: what is this being-to-be-born or already-there communism, and this being is of course a social being, and that's the link with my question to Bernard - I'd like him to clarify, well, to specify what he means by socialization of value, insofar as the mediation is still Marx - we all know very well that for Marx value is nothing other than a social relation. There, those are my two requests. Hello, well, I'm Léo, first I wanted to say
1:30:50 that I was very glad to see scientists meeting philosophers, because I think dialogue between the two is crucial. I'm a doctoral student in astronomy, and the catastrophic level in philosophy of my colleagues has frightened me for decades - hard scientists no longer give a damn about philosophy, and here I find it good news that sociologists are meeting philosophers, so I think it's very promising. So precisely I was going to - I'd like to start by asking an epistemological question regarding social science, so I'll give you a bit of my view of the already-there communism and submit it to your validation. So for my part, I'd rather side with Bernard Bourgeois's view - I've seen the videos at Hubert Tropique - who says Marx is first of all negative, communism, as Bernard said in a seminar, isn't Marx's business - what obsesses Marx
1:32:00 is first of all capital - he spent his life studying capitalism, even if there were positive works like the Manifesto or a few passages in the Critique of the Gotha Program, it's above all the study of capital, that is, of his enemy. So what I would propose as an interpretation is that Hegel's dialectic was walking on its head, Marx put it back on its feet, but it was walking backwards, and now that we're starting to have communist beginnings, we can finally turn around and walk forward. Except, I have the impression, if that were true, it would mean communism was already fully realized, whereas I think we're still in a moment of actuality in Hegel's sense, that is, we're in the process of making being enter the concept through actuality, so through philosophical work, since apparently you're both philosophers, from what's been said. And so that brings me to my second question, since you're both philosophers, well, what is to be done?
1:33:10 since that's the question of philosophy - what can I know? Well, we have the empirical data of sociology; now that we have this empirical data, these communist beginnings that we analyze, what should be done with it as a philosopher - but as a philosopher who is an actor in political life? There, I'll stop there, thank you. Paul Eric, I wanted to perhaps ask a somewhat, how to say, delicate question, and then come back - well, I won't dwell on the question. I saw the interview of Bernard Friot on the Thinkerview channel, and also his debate with Aude Lancelin - I found both were quite clear and explained things well, laid things out well. I wanted to come back to another theme
1:34:20 which I know isn't - isn't part of Bernard's main ideas, but on the opposition, well, the opposition between the 1% and the 99%, and the opposition between the high, the accumulation of capital, on one hand, and poverty on the other. My question will be fairly quick, and maybe a bit naive in its approach, a bit naive, but imagine that, by some abstract idea, we gathered all the billionaires' capital at once and redistributed it - the famous redistribution of wealth that France Insoumise talks about - what would that give? Let's imagine, it's a hypothesis, what would that give - would there be enough, could all - well, could
1:35:30 could poverty be eliminated, for example - I wanted to bring up this hypothesis again, I know it's not one of Bernard's priorities but I wanted to talk about it again, thank you. Again, Rodolphe - I wanted, I wanted to come back to an idea - well, it's more wanting to come back to an idea than asking a precise question, that's actually why I'm speaking up, but it might resonate with the two questions asked at the start of this second round of questions, namely the idea - the idea that acts precede representations. I'd like us to develop this idea a bit, because it seems quite fundamental to me in understanding our situation, which explains our difficulties precisely in mobilizing to fight, to push back capitalism and be able to generalize the already-there communism, so it seems fundamental enough to me to perhaps be treated in more depth, and maybe it can also connect with dialectics, perhaps - well there, I don't know, I'm asking a question
Value remains: endless class struggle, against messianism 1:36:40 precisely, and there - could you tell us a bit more about that? My intervention is addressed to both speakers - on the socialization of value, it's not a matter of skimming off part of the value to do the same thing, because precisely value is a social relation, and so communism supposes, in the reading I make of Marx, which isn't necessarily the reading shared by everyone, that because there's a change in social relations, there's a change in value. That said, value remains, because I - in any case, on a foreseeable horizon
1:37:50 for a researcher - I don't at all believe in a classless society in which social relations would allow - well, would occur without the dimension of power that is essential to value, to the definition of what has worth in everything we do. So the stake of communism is not the abolition of classes - I don't believe that at all - it's a euphemization of the violence inherent in production. And when, in '46, the general social security scheme initiates a communist socialization of value, it's precisely to take value out of the capitalist social relation, by positing that parents work, that retirees work, in short, that
1:39:00 value escapes the field of capitalist exploitation. That doesn't mean, gradually - it's the end of class struggle. And I, I completely link class struggle to this irreducible conflict over what has worth, what has worth in what we produce.
1:39:44 Still, in order to be able to continue the capitalist production of value, capital centralizes in places of accumulation the value that will allow it to continue exploitation, and there is indeed a communist stake in also centralizing value in order to devote it to another practice of work.
1:40:28 So, socialization of value is not at all what the question about the 1% perhaps evokes. It's not a matter of better distributing value in order to, through work fighting against inequalities, reduce poverty. That is not the stake of communism. Just as the stake of capitalism was not to better distribute feudal value, it was to put an end to the feudal practice of work.
1:41:06 The stake of communism is not to hand over the money of the 1% to the 99%. It's to take work out of its capitalist definition. Now, precisely, the current stakes around the railway workers, the students, the retirees, to take these three conflicts, that is exactly the question being raised. What is it to work? With what tool? What ownership of the tool?
1:41:39 And with what status for the worker? What is to be done? For me, it's always the same thing. Communism is sovereignty. But again, it's the sovereignty of workers over work, it being understood that this is not the end of class struggle. So this sovereignty is going to be the stake of a class conflict that won't die out with communism.
1:42:13 I don't believe it, I don't wish for it either, I don't want history to stop. So I prefer that class struggle continue. I don't believe at all - I'm not a Jehovah's Witness - I don't believe in paradise on earth in which we would be in the transparency of use values without power relations and without value. All that, for me, is... it's a messianic conception of Marxism. Yes, it doesn't interest me, let's say.
1:42:43 I respect Jehovah's Witnesses, if there are any here, don't feel targeted, that's not the point. The point is that communism carries an illusion in its frequent representation, which is of the Jehovah's Witness type, that we're going to make paradise on earth in the transparency of use values. There will be no more value. There will be no more economic value, no more money, no more work, there will be people who are fishermen in the morning, poets in the evening, all that in the everyone-united, all-brothers, care-bears sort of thing.
1:43:15 For me, that's not an interesting project. It doesn't help us move forward at all. The question is how we are able to take work out of the labor market, out of credit, to assert use-ownership because patrimonial ownership becomes non-lucrative. These are quite concrete stakes that are not carried at all by the messianism of the end of value.
1:43:57 I'm a bit foreign to this kind of reflection. And what interests me instead is what I just said. How, by generalizing wages tied to personal qualification, by generalizing the financing of investment through subsidy, and therefore the possibility of a non-lucrative patrimonial ownership that makes possible a use-ownership by the workers themselves, how do we move forward on that front?
1:44:41 That's the central point for me. In the third chapter of Vaincre Macron, you'll find some elements on this, but I don't have a program either. I try to see what we can draw from the already-there communism. There's - I believe I'm finishing reading Capitalexit ou catastrophe by Lucien and Jean Sève, which has just been published by La Dispute, and which, I believe, says extremely interesting things about the possibility of revolution.
1:45:36 I strongly recommend this reading. So, Capitalexit - well, the title is what it is, but titles, we do what we can. Vaincre Macron was much criticized, but at least it helped sell the book, which isn't bad either. Capitalexit ou catastrophe. Acts precede representations, yes, yes, yes, yes, that, yes.
Acts precede representations: Croizat, Rocard, retirees 1:46:06 I say that to those who tell me, in the Contretemps dossier, for example, published in January, against Vaincre Macron, what are you making Croizat do that he doesn't say? Well, if he didn't say it, he didn't do it. We only know what is said. Since Croizat doesn't say, in the law, to accompany the 1946 law, 'parents work' - he says 'I'm fighting for the dignity of families,' I don't know what - well then he didn't change the practice of work by attributing wages to parents.
1:46:51 Yes, of course he doesn't say it. That doesn't mean he doesn't do it. I do think that indeed our acts precede our representations at the individual level, but at the collective level, I think class consciousness is expressed first in acts. Symmetrically, when Rocard abolishes the family contribution and replaces it - well, the wage to pay parents - and replaces it with the CSG, he doesn't say, 'I'm putting work back in the ranks of employment, in the ranks of capital.'
1:47:28 He doesn't say, 'I'm restoring the capitalist definition of work.' He does it. And that's enough. Well, it's enough for a certain time - that is, of course, once an act like the civil service statute or the general scheme, which I've shown is really created against social security - I insist, because so much nonsense is told about this that we really need to restore '46 in its radical opposition to what was being built - before, well, let's take '89, that is, 1989, when Rocard creates the CSG for the family, if facing him he has people who don't say 'parents work,' obviously, he's going to win.
1:48:31 Just as Macron will win if he doesn't face people who say 'retirees work.' Because retirement will be turned into a matter of intergenerational solidarity, and so it's only fair that we get back our contributions in our pension. And so, when a revolutionary act that takes work out of its capitalist definition by attributing wages to retirees - well, if that act doesn't generate, in the following decades, a change in representations and a change in practices too, of course that act will be vulnerable.
1:49:27 And we've clearly seen this since Rocard's white paper on pensions, since 1991 - the whole emphasis of the counter-revolutionaries is to say retirees have a right to get back their contributions. That's why we go from the best 10 to the best 25 years, and next year, if Macron wins, it will be the whole career - contributions across the whole career that will determine the pension.
1:50:03 The change in discourse about this new thing that was created, with a discourse that comes from the old world, seems entirely normal to me, is absolutely necessary. We need to create the words that correspond, or give words the meanings that correspond to the new things. And practices too. Practices, we observe.
1:50:33 I really realize more and more, in the debates I can have. We now observe a form of frustration among retirees who now are retired with a wage linked, almost, a pension close to their working salary, as they say, and who have 10, 15, 20 years of retirement. There's a frustration at not being inscribed in the order of value, at being praised for one's social usefulness - the retiree is very useful, he volunteers, etc., etc.
1:51:11 There's a frustration, there's - there's, at the start, especially since the significant increase both in the number and the resources of retirees was accompanied by the theme, to fight unemployment, well, the...
1:51:42 old people should give up their place to the young, well, things of that sort which were extremely omnipresent in the 70s-80s, when there were still major advances in pension matters before the setback organized by Rocard in the 90s. There resulted, in retirees' representations and practices, a kind of feeling, I think, of liberation from work, a reversal of the stigma, as sociologists say - I'm quite happy to no longer be inscribed in the order of value, I'm so happy - happy about what?
1:52:25 Happy to be relegated to use-value, to social usefulness, as women are in the 'second shift,' or as sixty-year-old men are, well, in terms of caregiving responsibility, they 'help' their wives, as they say. I notice a growing sensitivity, and that's what's important precisely in the question of the mutation of representations which must necessarily be accompanied by a mutation of acts, otherwise what's the point - a growing sensitivity among retirees to the concern, well, to the weariness at being confined to social usefulness, and the concern to maintain, on the contrary, their recognition and their practice in the production of economic value.
1:53:18 Instituting another practice of value is something extremely long. The fact that the institution as such exists, that is, the right to a wage for retirees, that's what was built in 1946 against the capitalist institution of pension which says right to the retiree, or to the deferral of their contributions - it's only progressively, and provided all the political work is done, provided the work on expression is done, that this translates into another practice of retirement, which is not the acceptance of being confined to social usefulness but the claim to be actors in the production of value while freed from the labor market, freed from the obligation to go through employment to be recognized as a worker.
Essence as vanished being and freedom as result 1:54:36 Thank you, Bernard. I'll start with Dominique's question. We're not going to settle the Hegel-Marx file this evening. That said, through the point about sovereignty, there is something that remains relevant to today's agenda. When Bourgeois says that Hegel stopped at essence - it's the same thing he says about Marx stopping at essence, that's exactly what you were recalling. Yes, that's it, instead of going all the way to the concept of freedom as...
1:55:06 I'll remind those listening to us, even if it seems abstract, that it's much simpler than one thinks - Hegel writes in German. In German, essence is said Wesen. My name is Heidegger - I'm not telling you that if you don't speak German you understand nothing in philosophy. That would be awful, I'm not saying that. It's just to go a bit faster so it's clear. It's perfectly translatable. Now, Wesen, every German schoolchild knows, is the past participle of the verb 'to be.'
1:55:36 Essence is what has been - in German. All right? So what's the connection? It's that essence is being disappeared, being evaporated. Come on, let's be concrete now, all right? There's the Greek world. The divine is what is. You approach a spring, there are nymphs. You don't see them, but watch out, it's not because you don't see them that you won't attract trouble if you neglect their presence. That's the whole problem of Greek tragedy. It's that you're always in the process of transgressing, of committing hubris without realizing it, encroaching on the domain of the gods.
1:56:09 Look at Icarus, as soon as he goes a bit too high. As he is punished afterward - tragedy. So, that's the world of being. The divine is there. With Christianity, the next stage, the divine has disappeared. It's not there, it's beyond. That's essence. It's being that has disappeared. My kingdom is not of this world. You're going to say, Pagani, you're going on and on, you make us believe you're a Marxist, you're a Hegelian, and you're telling us the Gospel.
1:56:41 Yes, wait, I take that literally. My kingdom is not of this world. This - this, demonstrative pronoun. That is, this world, which Rousseau defines by servitude and domination. My kingdom is not of the world where what reigns is servitude and domination. It can mean that. You see what I mean. It's a bit in this sense that the liberation theologians in Latin America got themselves killed, tortured, etc. Because they said, if you really want to be Christian, God must be the result of our action and not have us fed a God-as-origin who is a rival to the Big Bang.
1:57:19 the Big Bang, sorry - excuse me, it's the audience making me stumble. There. So, first answer: when he says that Marx stopped at essence, it has to be linked with - remember, he said Marx starts with the negative and thinks that from that we'll get to the positive, to being, right? I simply reminded him, and this is quite important, that what matters is not the origin, not what one starts with, but what one arrives at.
1:57:53 Earlier we started with Louis-Philippe wanting to conquer the colonial empire - that ends up at the wage for life. It's the result that counts, damn it. It's freedom that is the result of all that, and that's what unifies more or less all progress. That allows all points of view to be reconciled - totalizing and anti-totalitarian - on the famous problem of the meaning of history. When Hegel says the Orientals knew that only one is free, the emperor of China, pharaoh, the historical Orientals.
1:58:26 I remind you that in China there are people who are much more modern than me at the present time. There was in Iraq, there was before we intervened, there were nuclear engineers, I'm not talking about that Orient, I'm talking about the historical Orient, Hegel too. The Orientals knew that only one is free, the Greeks knew — past tense — that a few are free, those who are not slaves, and the moderns, the Christians, must know that all are free, in an equal vision. What does that mean? It means we can dismiss both the thesis that says history has no meaning, it's the absurd — that was fashionable at the time, you know, the Camus crowd...
1:59:01 the absurd. Right? It has no meaning. And as soon as you want to attribute a meaning to it, that's totalitarian. Totalitarian doesn't mean it's Nazi, it's communist, it means it's communist. Historically. No, no, listen, the proof is that now fascism is coming back everywhere, communism isn't, so the symmetry doesn't work anymore there. Right? So Hannah Arendt, the disciple of the most Nazi of philosophers, has to be thrown into the dustbin of the history of philosophy. Yes, that's not very reverent.
1:59:32 So, I'll go back to my point. There is a way to reconcile those who say history is absurd — my good sir, there will always be rich and poor. You know, that opinion isn't only held by great hypocrites, it's also common opinion. It's my concierge — I haven't had a concierge for a long time, it's just my way of speaking. Well, my dear lady, there will always be rich and poor, we go round in circles, it's cyclical, there's no progress. But that's very topical today. Man is filth, only the animal is worth anything.
2:00:04 You know all this, it's very topical. Nature superior to man — Nazism starts like that. Although Hitler never actually went so far as to advocate the suppression of all humanity. It was the Jews, the communists, the progressives, the collectivists. I read an ecological article this morning, a comment saying that it's humanity that is superfluous in being. So when we see that we were convinced that Marxism was not a humanism, not so long ago, in the 1970s, and when we see Lévi-Strauss telling us, I don't know, or rather Foucault, who said that man is a recent invention and, fortunately, destined to disappear soon.
2:00:50 There are convergences that worry me at times. I'm not talking about amalgamation, I'm talking about convergence. So, back to my point. From the moment that, like Hegel, we dismiss both the one who says history has no meaning and the one who says it does have a meaning by saying that meaning is freedom, there is nothing more anti-totalitarian than that meaning. That means that once it has become established, no matter how it became established — that's where the cunning of reason comes in, the contingency doesn't matter. I believe Bernard says somewhere that the communists, the CGT, admirably knew how to take advantage of a context at a given moment in 1946 to advance the coupling precisely when it was favorable.
2:01:31 And besides, if it hadn't been them, no one would have done it, because Beck and Hong, everyone was opposed to what has become, for us, an already-there communism, at the time when it hadn't yet appeared. So from the moment freedom appears, it puts everyone in agreement, there's no going back. There are people who want to forbid Chinese women from having washing machines, you know that. Who want to confine them to the washhouse because if they have washing machines, we'd need 50 planets — you hear that, you hear it every day.
2:02:02 We hear that more often than the Marxist discourse, that thing. So, I'll just point that out to Bourgeois — I don't know if I'm answering your question — that what matters isn't whether we started with the negative, the positive, the senses, existences, it's where we end up. And we come back to the previous question, it's the acts that are decisive. Often I've been heard saying: he did better than thinking, he said it, he expressed it, he brought it out of himself, he produced it in reality.
2:02:38 It's by our acts that we are judged. I think I had a second question. I'd like to ask it — if it's not the case, I'm happy to stop. My question was roughly, to get an epistemological interpretation of communism today based on the fact — from a dialectical point of view — Marx said that Hegel's dialectic is standing on its head, and that he put it back on its feet.
2:03:12 Yes, that's fine, thanks for reminding me because I wasn't sure I had understood correctly. I think I answered that question before it was asked, earlier. When I recalled that Lenin had concluded that where Hegel is most idealist is where he is most materialist. So, second point on which I agree with Althusser — we'll take advantage of that tonight — is that when you turn something upside down, you don't change it, stand in front of a mirror and you'll understand what I mean.
2:03:42 It's not really there that you transform the silhouette. By inverting Hegel, you haven't gotten out of Hegel. And I think Marx inverted Hegel but didn't get out of him. And I say, fortunately so, given what happened. When he says, then, the metaphor of the inversion has to be abandoned, that means that for him, in any case, Hegel must be uncoupled from Marx. And this necessity of uncoupling Hegel from Marx, I say in passing — and this is empirical, check it, don't take my word for it — every time Marx is uncoupled from Hegel, there's a setback in workers' gains.
2:04:19 Every time they're brought together, there are advances. I compare the post-May '68 period, that of Cohn-Bendit and the structuralists, etc., and the Maoists, I compare it with Lenin's work, which strongly couples Marx and Hegel, for example. There. I've tried to answer both questions. That's very short.
Questions: the firm, incarnations, intimate work, collective worker 2:04:49 One question for Bernard, one for Dominique. The question for Bernard is... I'm talking about all the work you do on value which really seems very interesting to me. My name is Jean-Michel, sorry. There's something that surprises me a lot too, but you can't do everything. Why are there so few conceptual proposals on the structure of value production, that is, on enterprises?
2:05:22 And there it is. No sociological study of any importance, as far as I know, exists on this, as if it were a sort of unthought. I'd like your opinion as a sociologist. Collective appropriation, that exists. But concretely, what does it translate into? Are there any studies on this? Do you think about it? What's your opinion on this?
2:05:52 And the question for Dominique is that I was delighted to learn today that Louis-Philippe was one of the incarnations of the cunning of reason. My Leninist training would make me... Yes. Right. The philosophical interpretation was more on your side. And so my Leninist training would push me rather to recognize these incarnations rather in people like, I don't know, Robespierre, Eugène Varlin, or others.
2:06:28 And what I'd like you to tell us here — we always take examples from the past, well, and that ties in with the title of the question, of tonight's talk, on the already-there communist and contemporary, concrete struggles today. Do you see, today, in the news — quite heavy and quite hopeless, though one should never despair, of course — possible incarnations that would be capable of actually transforming essence into existence?
2:07:13 Good evening, Gwenaëlle here. I'm delighted to be the first woman to speak in this assembly, which is still very male tonight. I know Bernard's work well because I've been in his seminar this year with great pleasure, and thank you, Doumé, because here's what your talk added to what I already knew of Bernard's work.
2:07:53 It's a proposal to move from "what is work" to "what do you call work." And precisely as a woman, and as Bernard underlined earlier — I second what he says — I'm very frustrated to have, from the point of view of what I call work, a double approach. That is, I have an approach to the home, to the intimate, to children, to education, which isn't designated as work but which I designate as work.
2:08:31 And fortunately, because I had access to education, because I'm in France and not in the depths of Bangladesh, I also had access to work valorized by value. Now, the break — indeed, the frustration of this break — is something very strong for me, and it would be a beautiful prospect that we could offer to my daughters, my granddaughters, my great-granddaughters: a continuity in thinking about what I consider to be work, with a continuation between a public-type work and an intimate-type work, a work that acts on the world and a work that carries the coming generation.
2:09:21 and also something very concrete: if retirement is indeed calculated on the whole working period, help for women, because let me tell you that all maternity periods count as zero, it's even less than a 10% reduction on the rates. So, gentlemen, thank you for supporting us, and let's not let it go that far. But there, I don't really have a question, I mainly have great pleasure in having been able to hear this element from Doumé, moving to "what is work."
2:10:02 Yes, what I'll restate, also as a woman raising a generation, particularly involved in thinking about the coming generation, thinking about children, thinking about education in relation to work, especially in the current context — that's how I experienced it. What is work? I'm forced to see what work is and to protect the rising generation from the flaws and violence of work.
2:10:38 Now, in a perspective precisely of connecting the work of intimacy with the work of raising the coming generation, and a continuity, and thus also an involvement in the work that engages with the world — I think that this difficulty of being ambivalent about projecting children, future adults, into work, I think it could be weaker, and so, there, it's a progress that I wish for my great-granddaughters.
2:11:18 Yes, I'd like to take the opportunity, since you're both together, to speak about a third person, that is, Michel Clouscard. So, to avoid perhaps generalities, there was an angle that seems to me connected with the already-there, with today's struggles, which is the concept of the collective worker and the parliament of the collective worker, which could perhaps be an idea that brings people together beyond communists, perhaps people interested in democracy, in parity between social classes, etc., which would seem like a sort of gentle step that would allow crystallizing people who may not be ready to directly take in the whole reflection that's particularly relevant, obviously, on value, on work, etc.
2:12:20 So, there, since Dominique is particularly qualified to speak about Michel Clouscard, and since I'm sure Bernard Friot has read him a great deal, I'd like to know if there's a connection there. So, my own question is a very simple one. Among the already-there communisms, there are those — and Bernard Friot is a specialist in this, if not the specialist — those that occurred in France.
2:12:50 There have been some in other countries too, notably in the USSR at various periods. And my question, quite simply, is: what is there to take from current struggles as a possible representation among what happened in other countries besides France, since we've already discussed the history of France? So, in the history of other countries, what is there to take up for today's struggles? There.
Answers from Bernard Friot: limits, collective worker, Italy 2:13:29 On the enterprise, yes, indeed, I don't have much to say because I'm not at all a specialist. So I refer you to the Bourse du Travail seminar which will take place in 2019-2020. So, see you in October 2019. But, in the meantime, you can look at the work, I think, of Benoît Borrits, "Au-delà de la propriété," which has just come out, because these are colleagues who reflect starting from the enterprise.
2:14:04 Thomas Coutrot's, his latest book too. Daniel Bachet as well. These are colleagues we're going to bring in for the seminar. But so, there, I have to admit that I have nothing to say on this question. I approached... I didn't approach things starting from the enterprise, that's one of the important limitations of my work, that's clear.
2:14:35 Because I took a macroeconomic point of view in my approach to wages, social security, etc. But so, Thomas Coutrot, Benoît Borrits, Daniel Bachet, at least — but you know, I suppose, all these colleagues already. If you wanted to make me say that these people should be read, it's said. Now, I couldn't say more. Thank you very much for the intervention on Intimacy and World.
2:15:12 It's... it's true that one of the ways violence expresses itself in the definition of work is by saying that work is what is turned toward the public, etc. And that what is turned toward the intimate is not work.
2:15:44 It's obviously absurd essentializations — well, not absurd, they refer to power relations, particularly male domination, but not only that. And... I don't have... I can only echo what you say there, without being able to say more or better than what you've said. Thank you. Thank you very much.
2:16:14 Collective workers, the difficulty, there. Collective workers, well, that was the origin of my conflict with the Économistes atterrés or with Calfin, a certain number of union leaders who, up to now, had accepted what I was saying and who, since then, no longer accept it at all. Regarding the pension question, the collective worker can be understood, and...
2:16:48 so, unless my reading of Clouscard is faulty, and there I'll be corrected by you or by Dominique, the collective worker can be understood in a somewhat weak way, let's say, which says: well, it's normal for the wage to be socialized because we can't attribute to each person their own contribution, and we're going to socialize the wage to recognize that there is, for example, a contribution by retirees to the work of the active — but that's going to amount to saying, I don't know, that retirees, when they go pick up their children's kids from school or whatever, well, they contribute after all, just as we've said that women contribute to producing their husband's labor power and to its reproduction, and so it was normal that there be, ultimately, a socialization of wages,
2:17:58 because a whole series of tasks contribute to the upkeep, to the reproduction of the labor value of the active. Obviously, I'm not at all on that position. Precisely, women's work is not a contribution to the production of the value of labor power directed toward the world.
2:18:36 it's something else entirely. Likewise, the contribution of retirees to the production of value is not the fact that they drive the kids — well, their grandchildren — to school, and that therefore, by contributing to the reproduction of labor power, they're entitled to a share of the wage. Well, maybe I'm not... I'm not being faithful to what Clouscard says, but I...
2:19:08 I think we get off too easily with the concept of the collective worker when trying to attribute value production to those who are not strictly in employment, but it's always in service of the reproduction of the labor power of those who are in employment. So, we don't get out of capitalism in this affair.
2:19:39 Well, but I... I'd like Dominique to weigh in on this point. There's no problem with that. On other countries, other countries — for example, there's an extremely important stake in what's currently happening in Italy. That's clear. On what's called the "cassa integrazione dei guadagni," that is, the fact that workers who are unemployed keep their work contract, are not thrown onto the labor market as free individuals.
2:20:13 They remain on the payroll of the enterprise. They don't lose their status as workers simply by being compensated as unemployed, which is what happens in France, but by being kept as members of the work collectives, including in cases where they no longer take part in any productive activity.
2:20:45 Well, there's something interesting there, which corresponds exactly to the CGT's demand for maintaining the work contract between two jobs as a way toward the wage attached to personal qualification in the private sector. And... the Belgians have another quite interesting way, which is not to put any time limit on unemployment compensation. Well, there are things we could rely on for international solidarity and to go further here in...
Clouscard: Vulcan and Narcissus, the ideological front, neofascism 2:21:21 in... the... attribution of the wage to the person and not to the position. Yes, well I fully endorse what Bernard just said about the collective worker business and about... about what Michel Clouscard says about it, in the sense that what he says about it is drawn from a book, "Refondation progressiste," which alongside pages unequalled to this day in their almost anthropological scope — I'm thinking of the opposition between the figure of Vulcan and that of Narcissus, which for him sums up the class struggle throughout history.
2:22:11 Narcissus is the one who spends his time telling Vulcan that he's dirty, that he's black, that he's the one who works, basically. Who spends his time saying "to you the doing, to me the pleasing." That's exactly it. There I pay tribute to the book — though he had many reservations about it, he says himself that the proposal for a parliament of the collective worker, because he proposed a second chamber, of course, what's called the "living forces" — call it what you will — is a concession made to compromise, well, it's dated today, it's no longer at all relevant, it was back when there were still strata, sediments, the period of prosperity of the Trente Glorieuses, it's unthinkable now. I'll specify, however, that where Clouscard is unequalled in his relevance to today's struggle is on the reasons why they fail. That is, Clouscard did nothing
2:23:22 else, as intellectuals often do, but he did much better than others — one must be modest in post-Marxology — in occupying a small segment of the struggle that pits us against capitalism. That segment is the ideological segment, the segment of the front, of the front of the class war. There's also the economic front, there's also the military front, there's also the geopolitical front, there's the economic front, and there's the ideological front — and on that Bernard said many things earlier that go in this direction — we have suffered enormous setbacks, including through our own fault. I was very interested — I don't remember in which interview or lecture — Bernard talks about the way that we must also blame ourselves, I mean, if we have internalized this newspeak of the employers and of capitalism, at a time when we talk a lot about voluntary servitude, I recall this admirable formula of Rousseau: force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them. I'm in it.
2:24:58 we all borrowed a little bit cowardly so I'm in the process of recalling what Clouscard is the only post-war thinker who spoke of neo-fascism with regard to the ideology of desire that's the title of a work published in the 70s ah well he would say now oh la la it's a danger there's fascism everywhere obviously everyone says so but it's too late it's rather late it's never too late it's rather late but here is a writer I don't say they're quite embarrassed at the FNAC do you put him with the historians the philosophers the economists well excuse me this obsession with genres with disciplines but it's important there are social classes there are sexes and there are genders in humanity and these genders which collide starting from the French Revolution when the people of Paris force Louis XVI to put a red cap on the balcony and Victor Hugo will say a few generations later I put a red cap on the old French dictionary in the ancien régime
2:26:08 people were well separated there they collide that's where we are so the only writer I'm taking an extensive term to try to be rigorous and leave nothing to chance he says but no of course there's Le Pen there's fascism that's fascho-poujadism knocked down by history inefficient stupid but useful but the real fascism which sows death and desolation from Afghanistan to Morocco passing through Syria and Iraq which asked Bin Laden to dispatch aid to the Afghan rebels and which distributed to the Afghan rebels the famous Stinger missiles to shoot down Soviet planes so that there would no longer be Afghan teachers teaching women yes yes the same people who told us we're going to intervene because over there the Taliban veil their women it's the same people isn't it who put an end to a regime which for the first time taught women those teachers who taught women during the short period of the Afghan communist regime were mutilated crucified thrown
2:27:18 into cesspits as they say I say that because we also forget that there wouldn't have been the advances of '46 if there hadn't been the Red Army capital finds itself caught in the immediate postwar period in a pincer between two nightmares the resistance inside resistance in the proper sense which existed during the war and social resistance the strikes we would have liked to go back to before the crisis of '29 to daddy's capitalism that's Clouscard's analysis capitalism with the values of effort of saving etc we hadn't yet had Giscard with the éclatement I say that because it's very important what is Clouscard saying that the famous new struggles which appeared thanks to '68 and which I call the old moons the oldest moons there are that we're going to be punished because we sinned I think we agree there but maybe not with the same examples well yes the flood right
Environment versus nature; conclusion on the appropriation of the tool 2:28:28 we sinned so we have too much water Sodom and Gomorrah we fucked too much so we're going to be punished by fire this time not by water I'm not joking well we consumed too much that's exactly what a certain environmentalism tells us and nature takes revenge yes or no it's serious I'm the first to be concerned about a human environment capitalism is a catastrophe for the environment but the environment is not nature what region do you live in I always forget
2:29:03 Lorraine look at the Lorraine countryside listen nature disappeared there a long time ago it's been worked on for 10,000 years places like that that's why the landscape is beautiful ah but the Sahara too is magnificent I know it well and the Colorado Canyon too yes but it's magnificent when you look at it from a car with language with cash in your pocket and with the cooler where there's a bordeaux I say that because those are my lands amid deserts I don't regret it yes yes whereas the African's obsession is not to break down out in the bush before getting back to the capital so what does Clouscard say he says that these uncertain new struggles a certain way of supposedly fighting for the good environment that's so I'm the first supporter for me you have to defend the environment against nature go explain that to an environmentalist it should be taught in primary school as a distinction ever since the chipped flint nature is over so a certain environmentalism there I'm no longer talking about ecology a certain feminism that of women with money
2:30:14 who spend their time blaming women and men without money well yes how come an Afghan veils his wife because he's poor you idiot do a statistic of the places where there's the most machismo and sexism you'll see it's in the least developed countries the more there is everywhere like rich people the billionaires it's not that I'm not talking about male domination I'm talking it's not about these near-slavery holdings regionalism is still what speaks to you the French get out the Arabs get out we see on our walls in Corsica that's indeed regionalism and yes it's David against Goliath it's Kosovo against Yugoslavia isn't it it's Ukraine against Yugoslavia but you see it's all topical it's terrifying what Clouscard saw coming now he saw it coming not from the far right of the time which was 2% Le Pen at that time but from Cohn-Bendit hence his formula under the paving stones Le Pen that's exactly Clouscard's formula it's that Clouscard who is topical here we have retreated because we got taken in with those values with the new struggles
2:31:24 with the societal I think this morning with Bernard I recalled that when there were the last great struggles for pensions the most recent ones but I'm talking about the 2010 fight where it got very heated we lost a lot in the result but anyway I mean you know where the CRS were approaching the fuel oil reserves with the CGT picket lines and in the evening I was wondering how this balance of power was going to end I hear Clémentine Autain say on television forgive me it's rare I use ad hominem ad feminem arguments Clémentine Autain say the only opponents today are women immigrants homosexuals we got taken in that's neo-fascism the one currently bloodying the planet which can progress with total impunity from Gaza to Damascus and the Uighurs isn't it all the way to Morocco passing now through the region that was the most peaceful even though one of the poorest they deserved credit for being peaceful I tell you I would be nasty if I lived a quarter of what they live
2:32:34 I'm talking about sub-Saharan Africa the Sahel Niger Mali where a woman could stay out at 3am without being bothered which doesn't even happen in the Faubourg Saint-Germain on a Saturday why is there war now so that people can no longer sit down without being kidnapped or machine-gunned because we made a mess in Libya that fascism nobody points a finger at it's frightening what's happening in the Mediterranean all the same right we wanted it we did everything for that when I say we I mean those who give lessons to the entire world ah but the elections went badly in Burundi so that's not good it has to be done but come on that's unbelievable we're not going to start again we killed 3 million people in Vietnam 10,000 km away because they dared choose a political regime that didn't suit Uncle Sam but the Monroe doctrine and the domino doctrine so I recall that the courage and lucidity of Clouscard was to have seen that today's fascism the one that's progressing has its roots in the depths of society and not in a margin officially called
2:33:45 the far right by the way which doesn't want to deal with the far right by the way but which is going to blow up in our faces the day capital needs it that's very clear and which will be brought out at the right moment I mean there will always be the union of so-called liberalism and Le Pen and other Hungarian Polish leaders and so on we didn't listen to Radio Maria I happen to listen to Radio Maria in Poland it's anti-semitic anti-Russian anti-communist in fact we're going back to everything we thought we were done with all those nightmares from the very year I was born I was born in '45 that's why I'm a bit sensitized to it we thought never again it has never come back so strongly I was right to talk about Clouscard because it brings us back to the struggles the struggles don't succeed because there is for example a discourse that shames everything to do with production that productivity should be a nightmare and a hell I'm the first to agree but production are we going to forbid the Chinese from making washing machines just because it gives environmentalists nightmares
2:34:55 of the Poitou countryside there's something wrong there that's what I'm recalling it's one of the biggest bolts on our society there's nature and its collaborators and then there's the environment and its resistance movements I'll stop there because I don't want to get worked up thank you very much Dominique thank you Bernard I wanted to maybe stop you would you like to add one last word in conclusion yes maybe about what Léo said what is to be done I think there really is in the current mobilizations I heard students talking about appropriation I think I was discussing with railway union members on strike in Bordeaux yesterday and the day before the question of going further
2:36:05 appropriating the tool saying it's us who work it's us who decide it seems to me that as long as we don't take that step the mobilizations will be I fear I'm rather fearful about what the current huge mobilization of railway workers might yield where there has never been such a strong mobilization of railway workers over the long term such a long strike well I'm talking about strike days simply from the start of the two-out-of-five-day strike but when you add up the strike days and if this mobilization leads to there being no more hiring under the statute that privatizations and competition take hold the setback afterward
2:37:15 is going to be considerable well we're still paying today in national education for the failure of 2003 that's 15 years later it's still hard to mobilize and it seems to me that the stake now of our future mobilizations is how do we self-organize within companies it's the conquest of a practice of work in which we allow ourselves to work as we see fit no I fully endorse this call for a kind of self-sovereignty in the activity of a public
