French Greens Begin to Crack.

After Die Grünen, the EELV (Europe, Ecologie, Les Verts)…

Noël Mamère, former Presidential Candidate of the French Greens, les Verts (2002, 5,25% of the vote), has just resigned from the party.

I decided to leave the EELV because I do not recognize the party that I represented for the presidential elections in 2002. Our party does not create anything: it is a prisoner of its tactical calculations and its cliques. We have become a trade union for our councillors and MPs.  I feel  that we stuck in denial about the the role we can play in society. That will not stop me from leading a municipal election list at Begles, I do not need the party label. For me the page has turned.  I am quitting without regrets, without any particular emotion. This is the result of observation and analysis. Le Monde.

This follows the decision of Pascal Durand, their National Secretary, elected as part of the fusion between Europe Ecologie (led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit) and the Green Party, not to  stand again for this post.

Mamère holds a grudge against the leadership of the French Greens,

The real bosses are the so-called “firm” that is, Cécile Duflot and friends. Although Cécile Duflot is a good minister, she did not let  go of the control of the Greens. But the Greens  were not created to be dependent on the wishes of one particular party grouping.  This is the opposite of what environmentalists defend.

Cohn-Bendit says he shares Mamère’s   feelings,

I share this feeling of being utterly fed-up with the clannish, terrifying couples who rule EELV. “Christmas Mamère (…) represents all the contradictions of political ecology. he is a reformist mayor which, through small steps, is trying to change , to reform, to make avandces for his town of Begles. At the same  time, ipolitical ecology is completely commited to being a parliamentarian, and a spokesperson for  radical humanist ecology.

Cohn-Bendit referred to the case of Pascal Durand.

Others have noted that Mamère has quite a history of making similar gestures. His less than principled participation in the manoeuvres that led to the annulment of the Presidential candidature of left-wing Green, Alain Lipietz is not forgotten, here at any rate.

Underling this is are a number of problems facing the French Greens.

They have a very high ratio of elected representatives to their membership.

In 2012 EELV claimed  14 869 full members and 17 371 supporters (‘co-operants’), (the figure has gone down since, many of the latter joined only for the Presidential election campaign).

It has 18 deputies in the National Assembly alone, and hundreds and hundreds  of local councillors at all levels.

Some claim that the ratio of real members to those holding some kind of office is as high as one to four, and that most ‘activists’ hold some kind of elected position.

Critics alleges that as a result the driving force of the party has become the interests of these politicians, which is, unsurprisingly  for many, their careers (Mamère not excepted)

That is before we look at the policies of the present Socialist-led Government and President Hollande.

But it should be noted that Mamère  is not a critic of Hollande’s aggressive stance on Syria: like Cohn-Bendit he, as the New York Times states, backs a Western intervention to the hilt.

Les Renards Pâles. Yannick Haenel. Situationism Reborn?

Les Renards Pâles. Yannick Haenel. 2013. Situationism Reborn?

“The memory of Guy Debord and the Situationist International went through me like the flash of a flaming comet: they were the last, in France, to give life to the word ‘revolution’, and to live that out as true freedom.” (Page 26)

Jean Deichel, the narrator of Les Renards Pâles (the Pale Foxes), is 43 years old and unemployed. Rent unpaid, living in a kind of stupor, he leaves his flat and goes to live in his car, a Renault 11 Break, in one of the last streets in Paris where parking is not metered.

Turning the radio on Jean finds that a new French President has been elected – he had chosen not to cast his ballot. As he listens he keeps hearing the word “work”. Work? It destroys people’s lives. After having slogged his guts out in the Parisian suburbs, he has decided that he simply does not want a job. Jean imagines what would happen if everybody refused to be docile, to obey the “republican duty” to labour, a general strike against work…

A very different story to the man who loses his post and pretends to go out to the office every day follows. Jean roams Paris, guided by his ‘I Ching’, En attendant Godot, found in the glove compartment. He is unconcerned with current events, sensitive only to the changing “clouds and overgrown weeds that cover the last empty spaces of Paris.”

Something of a psychogeographer and a cousin of Walter Benjamin’s Flâneurs Jean does not linger in the modern Arcades, les Halles, or the luxury elsewhere but remains outside, often in the 19^th and 20^th Arrondissements. He sees the phantoms of the Commune rise, thinks, at Tourelles, of an Internment Camp for ‘undesirables’, refugees and resistance fighters, in 1941. Jean is aware of the hidden civil war that continues in France right till today. It was if the “blood of revolutionaries had never ceased flowing in France.” (Page 95)

A Belleville encounter with an acquaintance, and his circle of rebellious “artists” (the inverted commas are Haenal’s) rises into an intoxicating debate about confronting the “nouvel élu” (the President). Jean announces that he had voted for Max Stirner, the author of the Ego and His Own, (1844). Is this an affirmation of his “uniqueness”? One, Bison, is a veteran of the Genoa 2011 protests. He does not stop talking about the G8, that it crystallised the world split into the resistance and the repression. Corned about his own politics, Jean admits, to the disdain of his questioner, that he voted for nobody. He finishes by thinking that the phantoms of the state take a life of their own, “politics eats the body of those who have the weakness to believe in it.” (Page 43)

Two of this group leave to join the Tarnac Group (L’inssurection qui vient). Yet Jean’s own itinerary leads to perhaps a more radical end.

The Dogans and Les Renards Pâles

Fascinated by a wall slogan, La Société n’existe pas, Jean ponders the idea that there is no place for him, or us, in a society that talks of “re-educating” the unemployed through compulsory labour. He meets Malian migrants, working as dustmen, “picking up France’s shit to feed Mali.” A mysterious woman, nicknamed ‘La Reine de Pologne’ who visits the swimming pool he uses to keep clean, takes him to a Griot (Malian Sorcerer) who explains the story of the Renards Pâle, a creature of their cosmology, “cet animal anarchiste qui s’étatait rebellé contre la Création” (page 109) The cruelty of this anarchist animal, inspiring divination, could come to Paris and in an insurrection that could overturn our world.

The novel unfolds into that tumultuous uprising: “un spectre hante la France, c’est L’Afrique”. Treated as slaves, massacred under colonial rule – as “brutes” in the Heart of Darkness – Africa has come to France as the ‘sans papiers’ (‘illegals’). The deaths of two Malians, Issa and Kouré, set the wheels of rebellion in motion. An “Insurrection of masks”, abolishing the very of countries, and…at the conclusion, masks and identity papers. “Cette nuit à travers les flames qui la consacraient, la place de la Concorde reprenait son ancien nom: elle était à nouveau la place de la Révolution.” (Page 173) The old name, Revolution, is restored, and, in a world where nobody has identity papers any more, the conclusion left just beyond the tips of our tongues. That may well be a world without borders, and free from the “republican duty” to toil in misery.

André Breton spoke of. “convulsive” beauty. He would have been stunned by Les Renards Pâles. The novel’s pages are studded with agitated movement (a frequent word is ‘tituber’), and glimpses of the majestic beyond. The past weighs in both through nightmarish revenants, and reappears through more kindly Furies. Heanal has made a political and artistic intervention that breaks the boundaries of what appears possible – and impossible. In this sense it is truly in the line of all that was best in Situationism. That is not all. The prose and delivery of Les Renards Pâles stands muster with the best contemporary world literature.

Le Monde critic Jean Birnbaum is amongst many who have fallen for Haenel’s “hypnotic charm” and “sublime voice” (le Monde des Livres. 23^rd August 2013) This book is important: it must be read.

* The Tarnac group’s ideas are clearly referenced by Haenel, ““S’organiser par-delà et contre le travail, deserter collectivement le régime de la mobilisation, manifester l’existence d’une vitalité et d’une discipline dans la démobilisation même est un crime qu’une civilization aux abois n’est pas près de nous pardoner; c’est en effet la seule façon de lui survivre”

L’insurrection qui vient. 2007.

Account in English here.

Andy Newman Next Labour MP for Chippenham!

Marxists back Newman in Chippenham!

Andy Newman is the Labour Party prospective candidate for the Chippenham constituency.

Congratulations!

On the excellent Andy Newman For Chippenham blog Labour’s proud record is defended,

We should be very proud of what was achieved by the Labour government between 1997 and 2010.

The Labour government with Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and Alistair Darling as Chancellor, had introduced a number of specific and targeted measures that boosted the economy.

Comrade Newman spent much of this time backing the Labour Party by supporting candidates of Respect and Socialist Unity.

He was Swindon spokesman for the Respect Party and, amongst other activities,  invited George Galloway to speak at the town.

Newman ran the Socialist Unity site.

We say, phooey! and whatabout?  to this past.

In a gesture of solidarity we announce our intention to campaign for Comrade Newman.

Chippenham Map for Socialist Canvassers. 

Hat-Tip, Facebook.

Update: a bit tardy but worth waiting for, Andy Newman announces his candidacy on his own site.

The Wiltshire Daily Small Pig Breeder and the North Wiltshire Digital DJ, Alan Patridge Jnr, have given this extensive coverage.

The contest looks a close run with Labour scoring 6.9% in Chippenham at the last election.