FORTRESS EUROPE

We have to stop being so naive!

It's becoming increasingly clear that the rise of the far right in Europe is not an “unfortunate consequence” of the neoliberal system, but a real plan by the European Commission.

    Indeed, with the establishment of populist authoritarian regimes (called “illiberal”, when in fact they are economically speaking ultra-liberal, as illustrated by figures like Trump and Milei) with the active help of the so-called “centrist” parties, useful idiots or cynical accomplices, neoliberalism will be able to live happily ever after, without trade unions, hostile press or contradiction (opponents being systematically disqualified as “extremists”).

    The racist wave is part of this scheme, the aim of which is to prepare, in every European country, a government like Orbán, Meloni and today Macron (and tomorrow Le Pen). 

    Since the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, Jean Monnet's Europe has been transformed into Fortress Europe, before our eyes and, above all, our impotent votes.

    We absolutely must begin to resist. And we can.  This is how.

    1) Support all movements (not political parties) that defend social, ecological and human rights. Join locally and nationally, and internationally if possible.

    2) Support free media, while they still exist.

    3) Get out of  Unions (all corrupt) and form new autonomous structures with the help of committed labor lawyers.

    4) Share alternative economic ideas as widely as possible.

    5) Meet, form groups, and start open debates.

    6) Abandon rhetoric and references to the “glorious past of the Left” and find new terms that the majority of citizens can understand: let's no longer speak of “proletarians”, but of the “working poor”, for example.

    7) Create a positive dynamic of revolutionary rather than “reformist” thinking: it's the whole system that needs changing, and everywhere.

    8) Found political entities (not "political parties") with a truly horizontal and radically inclusive mode of operation.

    9) Do not favor one struggle by making the others invisible.

    10) Be clear. Always. And refuse fatalism, despair and discouragement as tools of neoliberal domination. 

       Remember: to imagine you are free is to be free.

FORTERESSE EUROPE

 Assez de naïveté!

Il apparaît de plus en plus évident aujourd'hui que la montée de l'extrême-droite en Europe n'est pas une  "conséquence malheureuse" du système néolibéral, mais un véritable plan de la Commission Européenne.

    En effet, avec la mise en place de régimes autoritaires populistes (dits "illibéraux", alors qu'en fait ils sont économiquement parlant ultra-libéraux, comme Trump et Milei) avec l'aide active des partis dits "centristes", imbéciles utiles ou cyniques complices, le néolibéralisme pourra couler des jours heureux, sans syndicats, sans presse hostile et sans contradicteurs (les opposants étant systématiquement disqualifiés comme "extrémistes").

    La vague raciste fait partie de ce dispositif, dont le but est bien de préparer, dans chaque pays européen, un gouvernement comme Orbán, Meloni et aujourd'hui Macron (et demain Le Pen). 

    L'Europe de Jean Monnet s'est transformée, depuis les traités de Maastricht et de Lisbonne en Forteresse Europe, sous nos yeux et surtout nos votes impuissants.

    Il nous faut absolument entrer en résistance. Et c'est possible.    

    1) Soutenir tous les mouvements (et non partis politiques) qui défendent les droits sociaux, écologiques et humains. Il faut adhérer localement et nationalement, voire internationalement, si c'est possible.

    2) Soutenir les médias libres, tant qu'il en reste.

    3) Dégager les syndicats (tous corrompus) et former de nouvelles structures autonomes avec l'aide d'avocats du droit du travail engagés.

    4) Partager le plus possible les idées économiques alternatives.

    5) Se rencontrer, former des groupes, voire des cellules de réflexion actives,

    6) Abandonner les discours et les références à un "passé glorieux de la Gauche" et trouver de nouveaux termes que la majorité des citoyens peuvent comprendre: ne parlons plus de "prolétaires", mais de "travailleurs pauvres", par exemple.

    7) Créer une dynamique positive de pensée révolutionnaire et non pas "réformiste": c'est tout le systèmne qu'il faut changer, et partout.

    8) Fonder des entités politiques au mode de fonctionnement réellement horizontal et radicalemenmt inclusif.

    9) Ne pas favoriser une lutte en invisibilisant les autres.

    10) Être clair.e.s. Toujours. Et refuser la fatalité, le désespoir et le découragement comme des outils de domination néolibéraux. 

    N'oubliez pas: Se penser libre, c'est être libre.

Giorgione's “Tempest”, from “monologue” to “dialogue” - a reflection on a “false” mystery.

A few years ago, I wrote an article which compared the narrative modes of “The Tempest” by Giorgione and “Correspondances” by Charles Baudelaire. I indicated, among other things, that the similarity in the experience of the spectator and the reader came from the false unity at the center of the two compositions: indeed, if, from a distance, the painting and the poem seem to display a visual or stylistic coherence, we quickly realize that the real center, the “meaning”, is elsewhere, and even, in the case of “The Tempest”, untraceable or absent. Indeed, if these two works can be considered without hesitation as metaphors, Baudelaire’s poem is the most telling: it is an image of poetry itself, as pure “artifice”, a radical mise-en-abyme of the poetic object as such, and I believed that it was the same for Giorgione in view of the 57 different and divergent interpretations listed by Salvatore Settis in his excellent book “The Invention of a Painting”, published in 1978.

However, in 2016, participating in a conference of the A.C.L.A. (American Comparative Literature Association) which took place at Harvard University, I visited its beautiful museum and came across the small painting attributed to Titian, entitled “An idyll: a Mother and a Halberdier in a Wooden Landscape . ” Its direct link with “The Tempest” immediately appeared to me, as it did to many others before me - the museum's notice also indicates the proximity of the two works, but only as belonging to the same wave of fashionable subjects during the Renaissance in Venice, i.e. the “Bucolics”:

 

“ The subject of printed, painted, and drawn images, landscapes of shaded groves, musicians, shepherds, and languid nymphs were a quintessentially Venetian genre in the early sixteenth century. The most celebrated, and perhaps most enigmatic, of these is Giorgione’s Tempest, which shows the same configuration of a seated woman and a standing figure found here.”

 

This similarity however seems to me much more important than it is suggested. Indeed, Titien’s painting is literally the inverted mirror of "The Tempest". All the elements are in fact there: the soldier, the seated woman and her child, nature, the sky, etc., but in opposition. The soldier, armed in Titian’s work, is weakened in Giorgione’s, without a breastplate and with a simple staff in place of the halberd. The seated woman, naked and breastfeeding in Giorgione, is dressed in Titian's painting, and the child does not suckle. Nature is welcoming and the sky is blue in the “Idyll”, somber and threatening in “The Tempest”. Likewise, where a river forms an obstacle between the characters in the foreground and the city in Giorgione's work, it has disappeared in Titian's painting, replaced by a welcoming village which is just a stone's throw away.

We know that Titian was the pupil and the disciple of Giorgione, and the approximate dates of the two paintings correspond to this period: 1505-1508 for “The Tempest”, 1505-1510 for “An Idyll”. The link between the two paintings therefore becomes obvious and is established as the center of a double narration: one, imagined by us, of the student with his master, and the other, of the subject, of the real meaning of the metaphor, which is split in two. Titian explains Giorgione, and places “The Tempest” at the heart of a dialogue, and no longer as an isolated mystery. If we compare the motifs of the two paintings one by one, everything becomes clear - or at least in part, because, to be honest, I am absolutely no specialist in the Italian Renaissance, nor in art history in general.

The soldier of Idyll could represent Strength, and his gaze that leads out of the picture is that of the guard, who observes and protects, while the fallen soldier of Giorgione would embody Weakness and Lust - his staff is not an efficient weapon and his gaze is on the naked woman, whose oblique is accentuated by the swelling of his sex.

The woman, in the “Idyll” could be Virtue, symbolized by the simplicity of her clothes and her gaze directed towards Strength, avoiding crossing that of the spectator. Her child, a Christ-like symbol, sits peacefully on her knees and is standing facing the spectator. He does not suckle, because he is divine. In Giorgione's painting, the woman is naked, barely covered with a cloth, and breastfeeds her child. It is the Eve of the Fall, carnal and mortal, who turns her back on the City, from which she may have been cast out. Her gaze is on the viewer, perhaps to remind him or her of their own mortality, and the child who needs milk to survive could thus symbolize human vulnerability.

As for nature in the composition of Titian, it is peaceful and harmonious. All the elements of the decor are interconnected, and if the tower, symbol of power, dominates the landscape in the background on the left, the village and the city located in the background are accessible, because peace reigns. In “The Tempest”, on the contrary, the elements are unleashed (the lightning) or threatening (the gray clouds rolling in the sky), the city is hidden behind a wall and is only accessible by a fragile bridge, and nature is strewn with ruins, including a broken column, which in all probability symbolizes Death.

We therefore see clearly that all the essential elements of the two works correspond to each other, and can only be understood in relation to each other, and that it is indeed a dialogue, and not simply a similarity or thematic proximity. The meaning, or the key, is the fruit of this connection - or rather, the meaning becomes only visible through this connection. It is a mirrored philosophical and spiritual metaphor, but physically separated into two works where they are usually combined into one.

If my interpretation is limited and certainly open to criticism, even laughable for specialists, it simply seeks to show that the identity imposed on “La Tempête” as a “mysterious” work because it is “unique” is not entirely accurate, because it is in fact part of a philosophical dialogue which should, on the contrary, have been perfectly explicit for the intellectual circles of the time. To be clearer, “The Tempest” would not be an individual meditative work of which the meaning is “hidden” or “lost”, but rather “half” of a philosophical and moral metaphor, quite clear if one contemplates it in its entirety. If there is a mystery, it lies therefore elsewhere: in the particular choice of the commissioner, who seems to have favored the “Ominous” over the “Ideal”, and in the genesis of Titian's painting - exercise, command, dialogue? This is perhaps the greatest of mysteries, no longer in the object, but in the intention - a deeply and radically human enigma.

Short Bibliography:

Doubinsky, Sébastien, « Vanishing Point »- a contrastive study of Baudelaire’s « Correspondances » and Giorgione’s “La Tempesta”, Orbis Litterarum, volume 69, issue 6, December 2014 pp. 441-469.

 

Settis, Salvatore, L’invention d’un tableau, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1978.

 

 

COVID-19, VIRUS OR SYSTEM "BUG"?

Since its appearance in November 2019 in China, the Covid-19 has successfully undermined all authoritarian narratives of governance, from the extreme Chinese fascist dictatorship to our ultra-liberal semi-democracies. It took a microscopic grain of sand, a particle of natural chaos to literally seize all of our systems.

With the Covid-19, all the illusions, the false decorations, the hollow slogans fell by themselves, revealing the sad reality of the stupidity and the inhumanity of the politico-financial models which pretend to direct us. The Covid-19 is, on the one hand, the revelation in broad daylight of the face, as brutal as it is ineffective, of proven dictatorships (China, Iran, soon Russia and others) and their system of social control, and on the other, the outright annihilation of the false smiles and Self-Help slogans from the political sales reps in the EU, England and the USA.

It is certainly not the first time that an epidemic has hit the world, but what is different is that today, it is us that it strikes and that the bankruptcy of an effective response by many country comes from a perfectly identifiable cause: the disinvestment of governments in essential structures such as health, education or basic administration in favor of private capitalization without control and without moral responsibility (nor financial, since when that goes bad, it's up to the State, therefore us, to pay up for their mistakes ...). However, like Hitler in his bunker in 1945, our states continue their maddening denial of responsibility in the middle of a field of ruins. But today even the media behind them can no longer divert attention and find other causes for our problems. The proof: they never actually talk about the causes. They cannot. If they talked once about the reduction of beds in the hospitals, the slashing of useful jobs in administration, the policy of criminal savings in all the infrastructure of the nation, they would open the Pandora's box, whose monsters would risk taking them too.

But this total failure of our leaders is also the failure of a whole part of the education of our elites: that of business schools. The whole construction around Maastricht and Lisbon was built around a weak, harmful and totalizing ideology. What this crisis proves is that a country is anything but a business. That what constitutes the rationality of a decision is not the analysis of the results of an algorithm, but a human reflection from the real. The Covid-19 is more than a virus, it is a huge computer “bug”, which reveals all the flaws of a system which was seen until now (and which is still seen, no doubt) as the worthy and unique representative of “the end of History”, to use Francis Fukuyama’s moronic formula.

Propaganda will certainly take on the task of repainting the world in a few months' time, and will certainly claim an usurped victory from those who actually fought to save lives, despite the system. But I think, without being a prophet, that the bug will remain and that it has infected the machine much deeper than she imagines.

Because, with its tens of thousands of deaths and its ineffective and even criminal policies (To think that a natural “mass immunization” could work, when we see in history how many deaths were caused by smallpox only before the discovery of his vaccine is unfathomably stupid and sinister), our system is more than bare: it has become transparent. All the fears that one might have about his ideology are now not only confirmed, but undeniable. Even China has not been able to hide the real volume of the funeral urns, which means we have to multiply all their figures at least by 10. The society of surveillance of citizens is being transformed into a society of surveillance of the State, and ironically, thanks to purely commercial tools (social networks, among others). Oh the sweet irony it is when you think that “money has no political color”...

The Covid-19, a bug that has succeeded in a global “system error”, is therefore an essential element for a regenerated thinking of our political, social and environmental system. If it is nothing in itself but than a dirty disease that has killed far too many of us, it is nonetheless the paradoxical ally of all current social thought, whether deeply reformist or revolutionary. The machine also coughs, has a fever and is on a ventilator. But there is no hesitation here about whether to disconnect it or not. Its disappearance will no doubt save millions of lives.

COVID-19 AND THE GLOBAL POTEMKIN VILLAGE

In 1787, to impress his ex-mistress, Catherine II, then on a trip to the Crimea, Minister Potemkin ordered the construction of false villages in order to make her believe that her people were happy and hide the real misery of the country.

Since the 1980s, neoliberalism with the help of the media has built a global Potemkin village, where we are taken for walks whenever we have doubts. So far, it has worked perfectly, and the happiness provided by finance and (false) competition seemed to be more or less established, and those who challenged it were considered, at best, to be in bad faith, at worst, as supporting terrorism.

It was, alas, without counting on nature, that damn nature which neoliberalism still cannot get rid of, despite its repeated "greenwashing" operations. Now nature, which knows nothing in politics, cares little for newspeak and economic-political nuances.

China, the fascist regime and worthy heir to Mussolini, was the first victim, despite its ultra-totalitarian policy of super-control. Unable to face the truth, it now pays for it with a death toll probably ten times higher than the figures announced.

But then, the covid-19, who decidedly does not respect anything, came to us, after having visited the totalitarian Iranian theocracy. And there, the masks (for those who had them) began to fall: all our hospital infrastructure, dismantled since the 80s to make room for the private sector and its financial interests, are failing us. Our hyper-technological algorithmic society is useless. Factories close, shops close, restaurants close, museums close, everything closes except hospitals and supermarkets.

Our governments turn out to be helpless at best,criminal at worst (heavy glance directed at all those who preached "group immunity", that great Nazi idea). The finance experts, who we saw every day parading sternly in TV shows are now MIA - trembling with fear in their villa in their week-end villas.

Those who save the country are the underpaid employees in supermarkets, the nurses and health personnel in the hospitals, the teachers who are doing their best to teach from home, and all the usually invisible world of logistics or social infrastructures. All those to whom the system sometimes said "they should work more to earn more", or that they are "nothing". If there weren't so many dead, we could joke that we find ourselves in a classic XVIIth century fable. But one can, without joking, wonder what will be the moral of this story. What did the neoliberal system do after the 2009 financial crisis? Nothing. What will it do after the covid-19 crisis? Probably nothing.

The problem is that if Potemkin had built the villages for the Tsarina, the neoliberal system built them for itself and it does not even realize that they are false. Or rather, if they are "real" for them, then they must be "real" for everyone else.

Covid-19, a dirty little revolutionary virus in spite of itself, has just shown everyone that solidarity is better than competition, that strong social structures allow crises to be better managed than with a confetti of privatized companies, than strategic institutions and productions must remain national, because if not, well, everything falls to the ground like a bad cinema set.

When the crisis is over, we will then have to fight with all our might so that this Potemkin village can never ever be re-built again, and claim that reality is on our side and not theirs.

LE COVID-19 ET LE VILLAGE POTEMKINE GLOBAL

En 1787, pour impressionner son ex-maîtresse , Catherine II, alors en voyage en Crimée, le ministre Potemkine ordonne la construction de faux villages démontables afin de lui faire croire que son peuple est heureux et cacher la misère réelle du pays.
Depuis les années 80, le néolibéralisme avec l'aide des médias a construit un village Potemkine global, où l'on nous promène à chaque fois que nous aurions des doutes. Jusqu'ici, cela a parfaitement bien marché, et le bonheur assuré par la finance et la (fausse) concurrence semblait à peu près établi, et ceux ou celles qui le contestaient étaient considérés, au mieux comme de mauvaise foi, au pire, comme des suppôts du terrorisme. 
C'était, hélas, sans compter sans la nature, cette satanée nature dont le néolibéralisme n'arrive toujours pas à se débarrasser, malgré ses opérations de "greenwashing" répétées. Or la nature, qui ne connaît rien en politique, ne se soucie guère de la novlangue et des nuances économico-politiques.
La Chine, au régime fasciste et digne héritière de Mussolini, en a été la première victime, malgré sa politique ultra-totalitaire de super-contrôle. Incapable de faire face à la vérité, elle le paye aujourd'hui d'un nombre de morts probablement dix fois supérieur aux chiffes annoncés.
Mais ensuite, le covid-19, qui ne respecte décidément rien, est venu faire un tour chez nous, après avoir visité la théocratie totalitaire iranienne. Et là, les masques (pour ceux qui en avaient) ont commencé à tomber: toutes nos infrastructures hospitalières, démantelées depuis les années 80 pour faire place au privé et à ses intérêts financiers, sont prises en défaut. Notre société hyper-technologique algorithmée à mort ne sert à rien. Les usines ferment, les boutiques ferment, les restaurants ferment, les musées ferment, tout ferme sauf les hôpitaux et les supermarchés. Nos gouvernements se révèlent au mieux impuissants, au pire criminels (regard dirigé vers tous ceux qui ont prêché "l'immunité de groupe", belle trouvaille nazie). Les financiers, que l'on voyait chaque jour faire leur important dans les émissions télé sont désormais aux abonné absents - en train de trembler dans leur villa à Belle-Île ou à Trouville. 
Ceux et celles qui sauvent le pays sont les employé.e.s à 1200 euros dans les supermarchés, les infirmières et soignants des CHU, les profs qui font cours de chez eux, et tout le petit monde invisible des infrastructures logistiques ou sociales. Tout ceux à qui le système disait tantôt de "travailler plus pour gagner plus", tantôt qu'ils n'étaient "rien". S'il n'y avait pas tant de morts, on pourrait dire en plaisantant qu'on se retrouve dans une fable de La Fontaine. Mais on peut, sans plaisanter, se demander quelle sera la morale de cette histoire. Qu'a fait le système néolibéral, après la crise financière de 2009? Rien. Que fera-t-il après la crise du covid-19? Probablement rien. 
Le problème est que si Potemkine avait construit les villages pour la Tsarine, le système néolibéral les a construits pour lui-même et ne se rend même pas compte qu'ils sont faux. Ou plutôt, s'ils sont "vrais" pour eux, alors ils sont "vrais" pour tout le monde.
Le covid-19, sale petit virus révolutionnaire malgré lui, vient de montrer à tous que la solidarité vaut mieux que la compétition, que de fortes structures sociales permettent de mieux gérer les crises qu'un confetti de sociétés privatisées, que des institutions et productions stratégiques doivent demeurer nationales, parce que sinon, hé bien, tout tombe par terre comme un mauvais décor de cinéma.
Il faudra alors, la crise passée, lutter de toutes nos forces pour qu'on ne puisse plus jamais bâtir ce village Potemkine, et protester que la réalité est bien de notre côté et pas de la leur. 

30 ANS APRÈS, L'EFFONDREMENT DU DEUXIÈME MUR?

Il y a 30 ans, le mur de Berlin s'effondrait, offrant un court espoir de démocratisation mondiale, bien vite dissipé par les convulsions des Balkans, la fin de la pérestroïka, l'élargissement de l'OTAN et l'installation progressive du "mainstream" commercial comme seule manifestation culturelle autorisée à l'Ouest.  Depuis, le néolibéralisme a clamé haut et fort sa victoire, et en a profité pour détruire toutes les structures d'entraide sociale et de solidarité dans les pays où il s'est lourdement installé. L'Europe, une de ses premières victimes consentantes, s'est fait inoculer le très cher poison, pour se transformer en monstre de Frankenstein aussi destructeur chez lui qu'impuissant ailleurs. Mais, depuis quelque temps, devant la propagande permanente assénée par les grands médias tous possédés par le 1%, on se sent atteint de dissonance cognitive: on nous assure que tout va pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes, et tout brûle autour de nous. Les slogans à la Orwell qui nous assurent que le bien, c'est le mal et que la liberté, c'est la consommation, commence à résonner comme des haut-parleurs crachotant et déglingués. Nous nous rendons aussi compte que la force du néolibéralisme ne vient pas d'un hypothétique "ruissellement" pécuniaire faisant le bonheur des petits et des grands (surtout des grands, d'ailleurs), mais de la violence de ses outils de censure et de répression. De plus en plus de gens ouvrent les yeux et se rendent compte qu'ils ne faisaient pas un cauchemar, mais qu'ils sont bien en plein dans le cauchemar! Cependant, pour garder espoir, il faut se dire qu'il y a 30 ans, toute une idéologie totalitaire, deuxième puissance mondiale, s'est effondrée comme un château de cartes à cause de son modèle économique, qui n'était plus viable. L'ironie est qu'il en sera très vraisemblablement de même avec son grand ennemi, le capitalisme, dont le mirage de la "croissance" rappelle la formule magique de Matérialisme Dialectique et du Gosplan. Comme l'URSS, le monde néolibéral sombrera avec son idéologie attachée aux pieds comme un énorme bloc de ciment. Et ce jour-là, ce ne sera pas un mur en béton qui s'effondrera, mais bien le mur de l'argent.