The Ministry for the Future

55

La Vie Vite! It was a time.

The gilets jaunes shifted the model for how to proceed, away from May 68 or any fainter impressions of the Commune or 1848, not to mention 1793, which it has to be admitted is now like a vision from ancient history, despite the evident satisfactions of the guillotine for dealing with all the climate criminals sneaking off to their island fortress mansions. No, modern times: we had to get out into the streets day after day, week after week, and talk to ordinary people in their cars stuck in traffic, or walking past us on the sidewalks and metro platforms. We had to do that work like any other kind of work. It wasn’t a party, it wasn’t even a revolution. At least when we started.

But soon we saw that people wanted to talk to us. They all knew they were being used, that they were just tools now. I myself was a kid, the main thing that got me out there was how much I hated school, where I had always been made to feel stupid. I was slotted into the bottom classes early on and my life was sealed at that point, on a track to servitude, even though I knew I had real thoughts, real feelings. So the main thing for me in that initial break was to get my ass out of school. Although parenthetically I have to admit that I later on became a teacher.

Something then caused us to all converge on Paris. In France, that’s where you go. No one had to direct us. It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse, and I think that’s what happened here, some trigger or combination of triggers, the extinction of some river dolphin, or another refugee boat going down offshore, who knows, maybe just lost jobs, but suddenly we were all headed to Paris together, often on foot when the highways jammed. Of course once we got there we couldn’t take on the police or the army, that would be suicide, we had to overwhelm them with numbers. And eventually there were so many of us we couldn’t be contained, everything ground to a halt. At that point problems immediately jumped out of the pavement and hit us in the eye. Some were simply logistical, a matter of food and toilets. Others were ideological. The younger we were the more we wanted. Older people were hoping just to make things a bit better. So the traditional infighting began, but I have to say this was mostly a discursive battle, we weren’t like Spain in Franco’s time, killing each other or watching the Russians kill us. It was France on its own now, and really we are the country of revolution. Now we had to show what could happen in our time. So we took over the city, Paris was ours by way of sheer bodies jamming the streets. And of course some of us had read about the Commune and realized if we didn’t win decisively we would be hunted down and killed, or at best jailed for life. So at that point it was win or die, and we buckled down to making it work as an alternative system of life, a kind of commons that was post-capitalist, even post-money, just people doing what it took to keep everyone fed. And I must say, so many Parisians came out and helped us, cooked food, provided rooms, manned the barricades in every way, that again we had to realize that it wasn’t just those of us in the streets, it was all France, maybe even the world, we couldn’t tell. But for sure what happened then was the most intense and important feeling I could ever live in this existence. Here’s what it was: solidarity. We could see so many others with us, all on each other’s side. Paris was a commons, France was a commune. So it felt. Later that proved to be impressionistic to that time, but while it lasted it was amazing.

But also exhausting. To live without habits, making it up day by day, trying to get a shower, a meal now and then, find the right way to pitch in, it’s much more work than if you’re just a wage slave. Much more. But people felt it was important, all over they were dropping what they had been doing and joining the fray and giving it all they had, and it felt right. Somehow we kept finding the ways to give it our all. This we felt was a French thing above all, a kind of political improvisation that our whole history and even our language made us good at, if we could figure it out and pull it off.

Help came from weird places. When the internet was killed the union of proof-readers, historically anarchist which is of course very funny, came out of their tiny niches in the publishing industry and plastered the city with posters—posters on walls, as if the world was still real! And we realized that social media actually meant many things we had forgotten, and could be taken back under our own control, at least sometimes. Simply talking was the strongest social media of all of course, it was obvious once we rediscovered it, but those posters made the city itself our text, as it had been more than once before.

But under all that, the right was regathering their forces. And in fact we didn’t have the logistics set up to keep it going forever. We didn’t have a good plan to change government itself, and we argued with each other about how to proceed. A movement without leaders is a good idea in theory, but at some point you have to have a plan. How to make one wasn’t so clear. State power is a mix, first of the government proper in all its parts, but then also the military, finance, and the population’s support, and you need all of these working together to make any lasting progress. In our case, supporters in the populace began to complain they couldn’t get to their usual bakery, it wasn’t open when they got there, and so on. And if there’s no plan, if there’s nothing that follows the moment of occupation, or the moment of the Commune, then we’re stuck in helplessness and a drift back toward the center. And as someone said, in France the center has neither a left nor a left. So we were in trouble.

And so the police waited until after midnight one night, and charged us. Pepper spray and men with giant shields, like Roman soldiers in a nightmare. I had a paving stone to throw at them, but at the last moment I couldn’t, because a vision of a wounded man came to me, of what it would feel like if that heavy stone in my hand hit me. So I threw it at the ground itself, I was weeping with fury that I couldn’t fight properly, and then I joined all the rest who lay down and forced them to drag us off to their vans. They beat us with batons and pepper sprayed us right in the face, the spray was amazingly painful, my whole face convulsed and tears poured out of my eyes and nose and mouth, even out of the top of my head it felt like. But all through that I kept thinking fuck it I don’t care, I refuse to care, if they kill me here and now at least I’ll have died for something I believe in. And in the end they just tied our arms behind our backs and dragged us off. There were so many vans.

After that it was all over but the shouting, which of course has never subsided. No one agrees on what happened or what it meant. But I know that a lot of what we did mattered, and it was supported at the time by ordinary Parisians, especially the women of the city, they were the real organizers when it came down to it, not the people at the microphones. And now of course a lot of us are back in yellow vests talking to people driving by in the roundabouts, and there is a lot of support for what we say. One driver when the traffic had stopped leaned out his window and said to me, Look it’s all about how we treat the land, the revolution will happen there. Another man said I don’t own my kids’ teacher, I don’t own my doctor, I don’t need to own my house. I just want to pay the collective for it, not some landlord.

So maybe someday the solidarity will overcome the splitting. I hope so. During the occupation I didn’t want reform, I wanted something entirely new. Now I’m thinking if we can just get the fundamentals working, it would be good. A start to something better. I don’t like to think of this as giving up, it’s just being realistic. We have to live, we have to give this place to the kids with the animals still alive and a chance to make a living. That’s not so much to ask.

Of course there is always resistance, always a drag on movement toward better things. The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change. So we don’t change, and one hard thing now is to go through a time like that, like ours during Paris, two hundred days of a different life, a different world, and then live on past that time in the still bourgeoisified state of things, without feeling defeated. For a time everything seemed possible, you felt free. You feel things so intensely when you’re young, and really it’s the first time I spoke to the world, the first time I wasn’t just the stupid kid in school, but a real person with a real life. Those seven months made me, and I’ll never forget it, never be the same. I only hope to live long enough to see it happen again. Then I’ll be happy.