“Any appeal to the white working class, as in today’s alt-right populism, betrays class struggle.” Slavoj Žižek, The Philosophical Salon, 2019.
Commenting on the political aspects of Shelley’s life and poetry, Virginia Woolf asserted in 1927 that the poet’s England “has already receded, and his fight, valiant though it is, seems to be with monsters who are a little out of date, and therefore slightly ridiculous.” Woolf was referring to Shelley’s nineteenth-century opposition to a system in which journalists were imprisoned for being disrespectful to the Prince Regent, men were stood in stocks for publishing attacks upon the Scriptures, weavers were executed upon the suspicion of treason, and boys (Shelley included) were expelled from Oxford for avowing their atheism. Dramatic in its own time and context, by the decadent mid-1920s such activism had indeed become a little anachronistic on paper, even if I disagree with Woolf that it had become slightly ridiculous. The exertion of political power, after all, is a monster that may change costume and migrate in certain seasons, but is also a fixed reality of human relations and therefore no more ridiculous, in any guise or era, than the people it rests upon.
The profundity of Woolf’s comment, for me, therefore lies less in its discussion of Shelley’s poetry than in its exposure of Woolf’s own interwar sense of political security. It is this sense of political security that today seems the more out of date, and therefore slightly ridiculous, especially as we live in an age where the monsters of the past, present, and putative future, are perpetually invoked in all areas of life. Today, people are imprisoned for being disrespectful to certain races, men are stood in the postmodern equivalent of stocks for attacking certain ideologies, workers are today arrested more often for patriotism than treason, and children are threatened with expulsion for the new sin of ‘racism.’ Woolf’s smug security, and not Shelley’s poetic demonology of the political, thus seems quaint at a time when everything in the tumultuous present is discussed via reference to monsters that may at any moment return from their slumber or drop their mask, and are certainly not to be laughed at.
How does one fight today’s monsters, and who is fighting them? One of the most interesting aspects of the persistent Yellow Vest protests, about to enter their tenth weekend and once more growing in size, is that they have been claimed by almost everyone on the political spectrum. As such, no-one is yet clear as to what monsters the Yellow Vests fight, or which monsters the movement itself may give birth to. Although coming from an avowedly Marxist/Maoist perspective, Slavoj Žižek is almost certainly correct is his recent assertion that:
The yellow vests movement fits the specific French Left tradition of large public protests targeting the political, more than the business or financial, elites. However, in contrast to the 68’ protests, the yellow vests are much more a movement of France profonde (“deep France”), its revolt against big metropolitan areas, which means that its Leftist orientation is much more blurred. (Both le Pen and Melenchon support the protests.) As expected, commentators are asking which political force will appropriate the energy of the revolt, le Pen or a new Left, with purists demanding that it remain a “pure” protest movement at a distance from established politics. One should be clear here: in all the explosion of demands and expression of dissatisfaction, it is clear the protesters don’t really know what they want. They don’t have a vision of a society they want, just a mix of demands that are impossible to meet within the system, even though they address them at the system.
Attempts to define the protesters in simple terms appear doomed to failure. Not only have factions of French Yellow Vest protesters been filmed fighting each other in Paris, but in almost every attempt to export this protest model there have been similar splits and fights, as competing groups attempt to see themselves, and only themselves, in the Rorschach of riotous assembly. Most recently, in London, pro-Brexit Yellow Vest protesters and anti-Brexit Yellow Vest protesters clashed at Trafalgar Square, with reports of both sides calling each other ‘Nazis.’ Both the collapse into Yellow Vest vs Yellow Vest, and the mutual use of the ‘Nazi’ pejorative, are illustrative of the wider confusion of ideology and childish terror in the face of name-calling in postmodern politics. These phenomena also illustrate the fact that, as Žižek points out, none of these groups have a vision of a society they want (or will admit to wanting). One guide to characters in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is titled “Who’s Who When Everybody is Somebody Else?” — a question that could as easily be put to the labyrinthine and evasive nature of a postmodern political activism in which identities are claimed and simultaneously disavowed by all concerned.
The disavowals create their own rhetorical-ideological mazes. A staid and tired Old Right fights the Left’s almost recreational allegations of Fascism by asserting that it opposes the “real Fascists.” Meanwhile, at the first accusation of racism, “Nationalists” like Steve King frantically defend and enunciate their doctrine as meaning there is nothing special about their nation beyond a set of abstract values — values that are, in King’s words, “attainable by everyone … people of all races, religions, and creeds.”
That’s quite a nationalism. Our contemporary political context is thus one in which the Fascists are anti-Fascists, but anti-Fascists are Fascists who call the anti-Fascists Fascists, and while Nationalists like Steve King are apparently also multicultural Globalists, we are assured that the only thing we can sure about is that everyone is a Nazi. This isn’t a sentence from Joyce’s Wake, but it could be, because in today’s political zeitgeist Everybody is Somebody Else.
While the more ideologically senile elements of the Old Right are tragically entertaining and infuriating in equal measure, this isn’t to say the Left is free from its own conflicting and contradictory abstractions and evasions. Far from it. Žižek smugly observes of the Yellow Vests that their demands are a “combination of contradictory requests — ‘Please protect our environment while providing cheaper fuel!’” But isn’t the Left full of even more ridiculous contradictory requests? ‘Please let in droves of foreign workers while providing higher wages!’ ‘Please protect our environment while building masses of cheap houses for our growing foreign population!’; ‘Please keep us safe and free while importing terrorists and monitoring the internet activity of racists!’; ‘Please stop sexual harassment and objectification while encouraging the sexualization of all aspects of life!’; ‘Please fight racism while reminding everyone of the particular evil of the White man!’ The motto of the French Left’s protests in 1968 was ‘Soyons réalistes! Demandons l’ impossible!’ (‘Let’s be realistic! Demand the impossible!) It was uttered, at the time, entirely without irony, and yet how could the Left, which has internalized the motto with comical earnestness, escape irony now? The Left is now the embodiment of irony; a joke at its own expense, a bundle of contradictions wrapped in childish impetuousness and naivety.
Are the Yellow Vests, as Žižek implies, also a joke? Not in the most material of terms. Thus far, 12 people have died, about 1,700 protesters have been injured, and a thousand members of the security forces. Four people have had their hands permanently destroyed by explosive tear gas grenades, 60 have been shot in the face with rubber bullets, and 12 people have lost at least one eye. Fueling these sacrifices is a swelling rage, and there is a case to be made that the Yellow Vest movement is, even if it can’t itself see it, in large part and in its origins, ‘the Sound and the Fury’ of the abandoned White working class, with all the indecipherable raw emotion of the opening chapter of Faulkner’s magnificent novel of the same name. Setting aside the issue of violence, which is no rarity in multicultural France, the Whiteness of the Yellow Vests alone appears sufficient to send media traitors into hyperbolic spasms. (The [White] working-class and their difficult economic conditions are made clear in this documentary.) American feminist and journalist Lara Marlowe, Paris correspondent for the Irish Times, has asserted that “the revolt is ideologically closest to the far right. Gratuitous violence, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia are the dark side of the movement that has plunged France into its worst crisis of the past half century.” She continues, with laughter-inducing earnestness:
The yellow vests’s hatred of high finance often translates into anti-Semitism. Just before Christmas, a group of yellow vests were filmed in Montmartre, making the quenelle, a version of a Hitler salute invented by the humourist Dieudonné. That night, a 74-year-old woman watched three men in yellow vests doing the quenelle in the metro. “That’s an anti-Semitic gesture. I am Jewish. My father died at Auschwitz. Please stop,” asked the woman. “Get lost, old lady,” shouted one of the men. “This is our country! This is our country!” chanted another, repeating the slogan of Le Pen rallies.
Rampant Yellow Vest sexism on display Rampant Yellow Vest sexism on display
Aside from anecdotes and overheard chants, however, one struggles to find something tangible in the Yellow Vests — a movement that appears proud of rejecting all political parties, yet suffering from the lack of focus such a relationship might offer. Is there anything in this movement that is useful or meaningful beyond its need to be seen and heard, and to achieve a couple of specific (and almost certainly temporary) changes in policy? Media commentary has become repetitive on this issue, revolving almost exclusively around the theme of visibility. “If the hike in the price of fuel triggered the yellow vest movement, it was not the root cause,” said the geographer Christophe Guilluy. “The anger runs deeper, the result of an economic and cultural relegation that began in the 80s. … Western elites have gradually forgotten a people they no longer see. … Whatever the outcome of this conflict, the gilets jaunes have won in terms of what really counts: the war of cultural representation. Working-class and lower middle-class people are visible again.” But is it enough simply to be seen? (See also this this interview of Guilloy, large portions of which were read by Tucker Carlson on his January 16, 2019 show (here, beginning at 31"). Carlson, like Guilluy, emphasized that this disconnect between elites and the [White] working class marks all Western societies.)
Amidst the sea of evasions, disavowals, and contradictions, it remains the case that the White working class has been abandoned by both the Old Right and the Left. In some cases, the White working class is the reason for the same evasions, disavowals, and contradictions: they are an uncomfortable, and now more visible, reminder of broken promises and unfulfilled obligations. Guilluy adds that “the economic divide between peripheral France and the metropolises illustrates the separation of an elite and its popular hinterland. Western elites have gradually forgotten a people they no longer see. The impact of the gilets jaunes, and their support in public opinion (eight out of 10 French people approve of their actions), has amazed politicians, trade unions and academics, as if they have discovered a new tribe in the Amazon.”
I disagree that visibility, presented in passive terms, is the key issue here. In fact, I believe a better analogy would be that of an Amazonian tribe that had been systematically targeted for extinction, and was assumed to have been incapable of mustering any kind of resurgence. We shouldn’t forget that it became common practice on the Left to pretend the White working class didn’t exist, and that it was also viewed as explicitly oppositional on the Left and among cosmopolitan elites to offer the White working class, as an ethno-economic group, any kind of material or ideological support. Žižek himself argues that “in a state of racial tension and exploitation, the only way to effectively struggle for the working class is to focus on fighting racism (this is why any appeal to the white working class, as in today’s alt-right populism, betrays class struggle).” In Žižek’s malicious dialectic, one betrays a real struggling class in order not to betray a hypothesized struggle of classes (which is actually a racial struggle). This dialectic is common language in Left-Liberal circles, and it’s the reason why quasi-Romantic talk of a “forgotten people” is much too kind to our enemies — enemies who betrayed, attacked, slandered, and debased rather than “forgot.”
The Marxist rationale for the abandonment of the White working class has been adopted across the Left, despite its most obvious flaw— a monoethnic state wouldn’t experience racial tension and would therefore theoretically be a better, or at least less distracted, arena for putative class struggle. In order to remain true to some amorphous future ‘class struggle’ then, working class Whites are being systematically deprived of employment, culturally marginalized, ethnically cleansed from their former strongholds, and submerged in racially agonistic social scenarios until, traumatized by chaos, loss, and violence, they might finally either collapse into the arms of the same Left that brutalized them, or, emaciated and emasculated, dissolve dismally into the multiethnic cauldron.
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