[D66] Macron’s Anniversary

[A.O.]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/emmanuel-macron-start-up-neoliberalism-reform

Macron’s Anniversary

By David Broder, jacobinmag.com
View Original

A former freight depot and now a residential “start-up campus,” Paris’s
Station F is exactly the kind of project with which Emmanuel Macron
wants to associate his presidency. Hip, modern, and housed in a building
where “old-fashioned” workers used to labor, it gels with his vision of
France as “une start-up nation.” His remarks on “France 2.0” are
peppered with terms inspired by Silicon Valley, spoken in English for
added effect.

For his supporters, Macron is a hero in standing up for “open Europe,” a
dynamic political innovator who has pushed aside the old parties of both
Left and Right, and he gave full voice to his “modernizing” agenda when
opening Station F. Celebrating a new “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Macron
called for his compatriots “not to be ashamed to make money” and
credited the assembled start-uppers with “writing a new page for the
planet.” It was fitting, he said, that these tech pioneers should be
housed in a station, “a place where you come across people who succeed,
and other people who are nothing.”

It might seem odd for a democratic leader to refer to “people who are
nothing,” but from the beginning of his presidency Macron has embraced
this arrogant posture. His muscular liberalism adopts a tough “pull
yourselves up by your bootstraps” line. In similar recent provocations
he has called public-sector workers “slackers” and told students missing
their studies for protests that they could not expect easy
“chocolate-coated exams.”

In this performance, Macron knows that he really does speak for part of
France. His Thatcherite revolution, aggressively confronting the trade
unions as he sings the praises of free enterprise, has long been an
aspiration of the country’s right wing. But he has no need for the Tory
social conservatism which associated them with bygone eras. Instead,
Macron is a true market utopian, someone whose vision of France can look
upon laid-off workers and disenfranchised Muslim youth for what they
really are: potential startuppeurs.
End of the Line

Even if you haven’t seen it, you kind of know what Station F is already.
It’s a bit like every episode of Black Mirror, a life-work “hub” fitted
out with the gaudy Google-office paraphernalia of colorful beanbags and
foosball tables. The current plan is for a clear separation between its
residential section and the “makerspace.” A special group of
underprivileged residents, “the Fighters” are also welcome in “the
ecosystem.”

In a sense, this is, indeed, a campus, just like a university but for
people who want to run start-ups. Yet it is also notable for the fact
that you have to pay to sign up, and that it is selective. Though this
is a private project, and therefore not a real “campus,” it chimes with
Macron’s vision for the French university system, the latest target of
his pro-business reform agenda.

A “Student Orientation and Success” Law issued in March introduces
selection into university admissions and gets rid of re-sits. Together
with a rise in fees, this has alarmed teaching and student unions who
fear a new increasingly elite and expensive system that will hit the
poorest hardest. They foresee the introduction of “two-speed” education
system in which fees play an increasingly prominent role.

Twenty-five universities have been occupied in protest at the reforms,
fearing the eventual creation of an American or British-style system in
which the student-consumer takes out a massive debt as an “investment”
in their education and future career. The occupiers fear that students
will become a bit like a start-upper at Station F, not the recipient of
a public service but a private entrepreneur selling themselves as a product.

The other confrontations on which Macron has embarked in his first year
in office follow a similar model. Most notable is his current fight with
the rail workers, as he seeks to withdraw the employment protections
which allow them to expect to keep their jobs in the long term. Macron
presents these public-sector workers as a “privileged” group whose
existing rights give them an unfair advantage over other, more
precarious workers.

It is easy to see the kind of dynamic that this perspective could
produce. All employment rights are based on guarantees, and indeed, the
restriction of the labor force. The most fundamental of workers’ rights
is the right to not have to constantly compete for one’s own job. To
advocate not the generalization of this right, but the removal of it as
a “privilege” is to open the way to a race to the bottom, in which all
power rests with the employer.

Macron’s success, in this regard, is to adopt an apparently insurgent
agenda which in fact draws almost all ruling-class and media support
onto his side. He has not just broken through the old center-left /
center-right divide, but united the forces formerly aligned with each
behind his own leadership. His presidency is the pure expression of a
political landscape where the market has not only conquered democracy
but increasingly society itself.
Festering Wounds

Macron serves as an example for liberals around Europe, given both his
sharp rhetoric and his sudden electoral rise on the basis of his new
“online-platform” party, La République en Marche. Receiving 24 percent
of the vote in the first round of the 2017 presidential contest, placing
him far ahead of the conservative François Fillon and the shattered
Socialist candidate, allowed him a runoff against the Front National’s
Marine Le Pen.

Macron’s thumping victory over the far-right candidate in the second
round marked a hiatus in the recent series of electoral setbacks for the
liberal, pro-European consensus. Figures from Italy’s Democrat leader
Matteo Renzi to Jeremy Corbyn’s ultra-Remainer opponents in the Labour
Party hailed Macron as proof that the center could indeed hold, and an
example to follow. Yet the picture remains far from rosy.

6.6 million French citizens are either unemployed or chronically
underemployed. This figure has fallen slightly since 2017 but remains
above pre-crisis levels. Alienation from the old parties has hardly won
such voters to Macron, whose agenda entrenches the very processes that
caused the disaster of ex-industrial France. Nor do Macron’s plans for
European reform seem likely to survive contact with German opposition.

Macron’s condemnation of the “adventure” of the “yellow brick road” out
of Europe clearly appeals to deep-seated sentiments. In the wake of the
election, even the Front National has played down its calls for a break
with the eurozone. Its racist identitarianism does at times intersect
with economic protectionism, but this latter element is clearly
subordinate to the former, the glue of its coalition of support.

The Front National remains beyond the pale for large swathes of the
population. This toxic, xenophobic force was Macron’s ideal opposition
as he sought to rally the Left to his “open,” neoliberal project.
However, an IPSOS study after last May’s election found that just 16
percent of his vote owed to agreement to his program, 33 percent to
“political renewal” and 43 percent to opposition to Le Pen.

Macron’s support has declined in recent months, but not as disastrously
as his predecessor François Hollande. A survey published by Le Figaro on
May 2 found that 64 percent of French people declared themselves
“disappointed” by his first year in office. Supporters of the
center-right party Les Républicains have, however, become increasingly
positive about Macron, whose own party LREM claims to stand above
left-right divides.

Given Les Républicains’ weakness against a slick centrist rival, the
main opposition (at the level of public opinion, if not in parliament)
comes from the Front National and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise.
These forces are intensely opposed to one another, each seeking to
hegemonize the discontent among the old industrial France defeated and
abandoned by a series of governments.

France Insoumise offers an opportunity to challenge the Front National
on this terrain. In 2017 its remarkable rise among the young and
unemployed offered a particular sign of hope. Yet it still has
conflictual relations with social movements and trade unions, and a
sometimes-unattractive leadership model. Nor should the Front National
be dismissed: it was disappointed to receive 34 percent of the vote last
year, yet this doubled its 2002 result.
People Who Are Nothing

One of the finest pieces of writing during the 2017 campaign came from
young novelist Édouard Louis. His first novel, a semi-autobiographical
work about growing up gay in small-town France, had connected its
brutality with a climate of ennui and social despair. His works are a
tale of the cruelty meted out among the disenfranchised, the petty quest
for control among those whom society condemns to have nothing.

In a piece for the New York Times, Louis spoke of why his father voted
for the Front National. Injured in an industrial accident, his father
was embittered against a Left that no longer spoke gave voice to
“suffering, pain and exhaustion” or protested inequality but merely
vaunted modernization and harmony. It spoke of a brave new world, just
as Macron does: but one that offered no place for people like his father.

Louis’s intention was not to prettify his father’s choice or still less
the Front National. It was to point to what happens when those who have
nothing find no one to stand up for them, to recognize their basic
dignity. Such a heartfelt sense of abandonment is particularly acute
when, in Macron’s terms, the disenfranchised are not people who have
nothing, but people who are nothing.

Perhaps Macron does believe that just anyone could become an
entrepreneur. But very few of them can do it at the same time.
Particularly unlikely to do so is the stigmatized Muslim teenager, ever
the target of the “emergency” anti-terror measures which Macron has now
made a permanent constitutional fact. Particularly unlikely to do so is
the middle-aged rail worker whose job is today under threat.

For the Front National, these two have antagonistic interests. Emmanuel
Macron’s project is to set them in a purer competition. The challenge to
him, and the marketized future that he represents, lies in their
realization that they have more in common than they yet know.