Denis Maillard is a political philosopher, social relations consultant and author. His latest book,
Indispensable but invisible - Recognizing those who make society work
, was published in 2021 by Aube editions.
FIGAROVOX - The crises follow one another but remain. Beyond the rebels, what are the causes of the anger expressed in the country?
Denis MAILLARD -
We are currently living in a paradoxical situation.
Contrary to what the unitary slogan "
64 years old means no!"
», the mobilization against the pension reform seems to me to draw its power, and therefore the massive support of public opinion, from a prior crisis of work, of an anthropological type: the terminal convulsion of Fordism!
Indeed, we are finally emerging from the Fordist model of society based on the power of scientifically organized numbers, with its mass production, its rationalized, shifted and fragmented work, its standardized mass consumption, and even its institutions... At the time of immediate consumption and permanent choice, made possible by the process of individualization and its digital extension, work is in turn caught up in these new conditions of life in society.
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Except that the service economy, as it has been organized for 40 years, does not allow a whole part of the world of work – what I have called its “back
office
” – to flourish, nor for the other party to organize itself as it would like in order to transform its work into an act of consumption, that is to say a fluid and sensational experience... Hence this movement of refusal of a reform seen above all as a continuation of Fordism: “
Work – two more years – and shut up!
However, if the labor crisis has gradually emerged as a central subject, the social movement, on the other hand, has not experienced any extension in the Assembly or the Senate.
To speak of the convergence of struggles is in reality to agree to make an acknowledgment of programmed failure: the struggles never converge.
Worse, at a time when causes are fragmented, they remain impermeable to each other.
Denis Maillard
So much so that all of this ultimately leads to a real political crisis, almost institutional, which is diffracted into a multitude of anger, but also violence.
So much so that public opinion now sees radicalization as a response to the government's deafness and the calm, informed and reasonable expression of opposition to reform.
It is clear that since March 16 and the announcement of the use of Article 49.3, we have entered another political moment, full of tension and violence.
And as a movement is structured by what precedes it, we find ourselves today in the presence of a diffuse violence as in the time of the "yellow vests" but with the know-how, the determination and the material of the black blocks...
Can the multiplication of sources of anger create a convergence of struggles and a great conflagration?
We can clearly see what the far left and the populist left, LFI type, can imagine gaining by pushing their conflicting vision of society through the multiplication of sources of anger, like so many
focos
pseudo-revolutionaries in the street, in high schools, at university, in certain companies and in places of ecological protest.
But there are two problems with this policy;
the first is tactical, the second ethical.
On the one hand, in fact, to speak of the convergence of struggles is in reality to agree to make an acknowledgment of programmed failure: the struggles never converge.
Worse, at a time when causes are fragmented, they remain impermeable to each other.
Most of the time, climate justice activists ignore the struggles for working conditions, which themselves have nothing to do with the struggles against racial or sexual discrimination, which oppose each other on the support for the different labor demands. equality, especially between women and men,
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The vertices of the “gender-race-climate” mobilization triangle, currently agitating society, rarely fall back on each other.
And long gone are the days when the idea of a better society made it possible to unite activists, who were also multi-committed citizens.
There remains the all-out agitation which poses, on the other hand, an ethical problem: under what conditions can society be put under tension without paying the political, democratic, even human price?
Indeed, if antagonism and rivalry are specific to life in society, democracy normally tames their most deleterious effects.
The strategy aimed at creating conflict as many situations as possible amounts, in reality, to emptying politics of its legitimacy, to giving the feeling of a permanent effervescence of which we end up losing meaning.
Denis Maillard
However, the strategy aimed at creating conflict as many situations as possible amounts, in reality, to emptying politics of its legitimacy, to giving the feeling of a permanent effervescence of which we end up losing the meaning, to releasing the violence contained in the anger of which we have spoken and thus risking a rise to extremes, the effects of which we are unable to control.
From this point of view, supporting the mobilization of April 19 in Deux-Sèvres and, above all, calling for demonstrations there, illustrates not only this problem of juxtaposition of causes, but also amounted to taking the risk of a conflagration in the context of the increase in violence around the pension reform.
Because if the militants engage each in their corridor of mobilization, the violent ones, pass easily from one to the other.
How can the return to order be expressed?
We currently have three problems: a level of violence that can make us fear the worst, the images of gendarmerie vehicles in flames and the violence in Sainte-Soline which has resulted in dozens of injured on both sides, including two in absolute urgency, are not bearable.
Especially if we add to this the threatening letters received by deputies, the attempts to set fire to public buildings and the attacks on elected officials.
Then, an end of non-receipt addressed to the trade union movement as a sort of arm of honor, which can only weaken them and swell the anger: what good are the unions if they get nothing?
Offering them, if not a victory, at least a way out from above, seems more necessary than ever.
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Finally, a political crisis of which we had believed, in 2017, that Emmanuel Macron could be the solution and of which discovers that it was one of the last symptoms.
Since then, it has only worsened with the final erosion of the right.
To all this, democracy offers no other solution than the domestication of conflict and debate, that is to say politics.
Which, for the moment, has unfortunately not yet made its effects felt.
I doubt that the President of the Republic can wait very long, except to make us take, in turn, democratic risks.