Lettre de Londres n°2 - Confinement Time, or Le Temps des cerises
« J’aimerai toujours le temps des cerises
C’est de ce temps-là que je garde au cœur
Une plaie ouverte !
Et Dame Fortune, en m’étant offerte
Ne pourra jamais calmer ma douleur...
»
« In sleepy Londontown, there’s just no place for a street-fighting man. »
Having only lived in London since September 2019, I have been astounded by what seems to me, as an American, a precocious and glorious spring. On my daily walks around my neighborhood, Maida Vale, I have delighted in the bloom of the cherry trees. For a few brief weeks, cherry trees explode in color and sensuality, and just as quickly are forgotten for another year; their blossoms serve as exuberant reminders of life’s joy and also its fragility and unescapable passing. Inevitably too, cherry blossom season reminds me, as a scholar of 19th- century France, of the song “Le Temps des cerises,” which became the unofficial anthem of the 1871 Paris Commune.
The last of France’s 19th-century revolutionary upheavals (after 1789, 1830, and 1848), the Paris Commune occurred after months of siege by the Prussians after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. Instead of accepting the capitulation proposed by the newly formed French Third Republic (Republicans in name only...), Parisians revolted against both the national government and the Prussians, declaring the city a self-governing Commune. It began on March 18, 1871 – exactly 149 years later, the French Prime Minister would declare all public places closed to stop the spread of the Coronavirus. For two brief and extraordinary months, the Commune governed itself as a direct democracy. For two brief months, Parisians began to dream of a better world, and to make that dream into a reality (see Kristin Ross). Separation of church and state. Abolition of child labor. Abolition of interest on debts. Rent moratorium. Ten-hour workdays. Prohibition of nightwork in bakeries. Citizenship for foreign residents. Factories run by workers. Equal pay for women and for all civil servants at every level. Civil unions. Abolition of prostitution. These dreams, these realities, were crushed at the end of May when the newly reconstituted French Army invaded Paris from Versailles and slaughtered between 10,000 and 20,000 people in a single week. “J'aimerai toujours le temps des cerises/ C'est de ce temps-là que je garde au cœur/ Une plaie ouverte !” (“I will always love the cherry time/ that’s the time I will keep close to my heart/ An open wound”).
Nearly a century and a half later, when the entire world finds itself under siege from what many politicians describe as an invisible viral enemy, the causes the Communards fought for have largely been accepted. It may even seem incredible that so many were willing to kill thousands of their countrymen to curtail such basic human rights. We are used to thinking of conservatism as a nostalgic mindset, whereas the left unsentimentally plans for a utopian future. And yet, history books and collective memory erase the leftist struggles and victories of the past. With every political spring, whether 1871 or 1968, or perhaps 2020, the basic ideas of equality and decent living conditions for all appear to be forever new, completely radical. They blossom like the cherry trees in spring, and wither under the oppressive summer sun.
That oppressive sun, posing as enlightened governance, goes by the name Neoliberalism. Over the last few decades, what many have come to call the neoliberal consensus has reigned in Western democracies. While it is difficult to ascribe an ideological consistency to neoliberalism’s hodge-podge of 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism, free-market capitalism, social scientific classifications of identities, political correctness, and technocratic governance, one way to define it would be the belief in the extension of the logic of markets to ever-broader domains of human existence. Democracy, in this world view, is necessarily representative, where sociological groups can see among the governing classes someone who resembles them, but poses as an expert, a technocrat (The Trouble with Diversity). Decisions, whether at the state or corporate level, involve a maximizing of market potential and an uneven distribution of the profits among political and economic “stake holders.” Change happens incrementally, policies encourage people to modify their behavior through incentives rather than transforming underlying economic and political structures. Equality and justice lie forever in the future, with the path towards them laid out in increasingly distant steps.
Despite neoliberalism’s espousal of the free market, in the market of ideas neoliberalism has claimed a monopoly. Since Margaret Thatcher’s famous proclamation that “There Is No Alternative” (TINA), neoliberals have argued that, because of their expertise, they are uniquely capable of understanding the present and seeing into the future – a future that looks exactly like the present (Jacques Rancière).
Those wishing to propose other visions of a different kind of politics, a different economic justice, have been characterized as backwards, ignorant, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, or sexist. Whether the Gilets jaunes of France, Corbyn’s Labour Party in the UK, or the mythical Bernie Bros of the US, populist and left-leaning groups have been the target of unfounded media attacks that seek to delegitimize alternative ideas as outdated and unsavory according to shifting definitions of political correctness, collapsing the far-left with the far-right. Marginalized ideas are associated with marginalized people, who are kept out of government to protect democracy from the demos, the “basket of deplorables” as Hillary Clinton called them, the “racaille” in Nicolas Sarkozy’s words.
In the span of a single week, the world has learned that neoliberalism had no plan for the future, and perhaps worse, an incomplete understanding of the present that it had largely created. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the health and well-being of the elite few very much depended upon the health and well-being of the deplorable demos – underpaid cooks, housekeepers, Uber drivers could spread the disease to their rich employers. Epidemiologists warned us that without the confinement and isolation of everyone, millions would die around the world. The initial shock of imposed loneliness gave way to a deeper shock, the idea that our salvation relied on the paradox of a solidarity of seclusion. For our own selfish needs, we urgently have to find housing for the homeless. We have to ensure running water for those whom we told several times a day to wash their hands (in Detroit, several thousand homes still lack access to water, though will we do the same for the millions without clean water in poorer countries?). Low-wage workers in the gig economy must be guaranteed an income so as not to risk their health (our health!) by continuing to work. Understaffed and unprepared hospitals need ICU beds by the thousands – thousands that had been eliminated over the past few years in the name of austerity. Neoliberalism’s faith in the wisdom of capitalism came crashing down when the logic of the marketplace was weighed against the lives of millions. In its place the logic of state sovereignty and Keynesianism was restored, this same state that Reagan’s supporters had wanted to “drown in the bathtub,” and which now is called upon to secure the lives of citizens and shore up the power of politicians.
“But how will you pay for that?” Neoliberalism’s TINA goes hand in hand with a mistaken concern for fiscal austerity, repeating as a mantra that there is simply no money to pay for the rights of all in a world with limited resources. But now that many economists are forecasting an unemployment rate reaching as high as 30% (higher than anything seen in the United States in the 20th century), conservative governments that only weeks ago were chiding profligate countries like Greece are now throwing around hundreds of billions of euros to workers in order for them to simply stay home. Trillions of euros will be lent to banks to keep the illusion of a market economy functioning and to stave off societal collapse. The money, of course, was always there to help, but the technocrats didn’t want to spend it. And yet a virus which, in historical terms, is not particularly lethal, has revealed that our economic system worldwide keeps far too many people on the edge of financial, medical, and social ruin.
Banished for over a generation, old socialist ideas of economic solidarity, of public ownership of the means of production, of public health, of quite simply the public welfare – the Res publica – have been resuscitated and relegitimated. What only weeks ago was the incoherent babble of despised “populists” on the margins of the political spectrum has been adopted as sound policy by the center – for however brief a time...
But this summer, if in the best-case scenario, we have gotten control of the virus’s spread and found an effective treatment to COVID-19, will we remember that practically everyone in the Western world could stop working for two months, and yet all of our basic needs could be accounted for? Will we remember that the vast majority of jobs are “make work” and non-essential? Will we remember that we could finally breathe fresh, non-polluted air? Will we remember that we didn’t need to consume and buy constantly to fill the void of our working lives? Let us not let this moment, both terrifying and yet with a glimmer of promise of a different kind of world, be forgotten in a few months, carried away with the cherry blossoms by the winds of capitalist oblivion.