English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Presentation of the book and the two Mai 68s 0:00 Hello Dominique. We're very happy to have you on our youth media outlet. We're going to talk about Clouscard, particularly his book Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire, and about the current relevance of his theses and ideas. For those who don't know you, let me remind everyone that you are a philosophy professor. How is it that there are people who don't know me? Not yet. So you're a philosophy professor and you were a close friend and collaborator of the philosopher and sociologist Michel Clouscard.
0:33 And finally, let me remind you that our media outlet can only develop thanks to the support of its subscribers, and that you can support us to whatever extent you're able via the link available in the video description. And we're starting right away with Dominique Pagani. So right after May '68, with the book Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire, Michel Clouscard foresees, decodes, and describes the path that leads inexorably from Cohn-Bendit to Le Pen.
1:04 He reveals what the ideologues have to conceal, namely that May '68 is a liberal counter-revolution, a Trojan horse of libertarian liberalism. A new market was needed, the market of desire, a new society, one confusing freedom with liberalization. A double profit: the permissive for the consumer and the repressive on the producer, to save capitalism in radical crisis.
1:34 May '68 will have promoted the Marshall Plan just as the Marshall Plan promoted the American dream. So first of all, can you remind us of the main theses of Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire? Well, thank you for starting by summarizing them, because the essential lines are there. In particular—and it's the first time they systematized this aspect in these publications—so from the early 70s, 72 I believe, the year it was published.
2:10 Namely, you said the formula, the path that leads ineluctably from Cohn-Bendit to Le Pen. Hence one of Clouscard's formulas, by the way: under the paving stones, Le Pen. That says quite a lot about what they think of a certain May '68. Careful, there's the '68 of the CGT—I know I'm not teaching you anything, but there may be newcomers, and all the better, because there are always newcomers. As now, what gets media coverage isn't history, but the amnesia of history.
2:47 It's good to make a few reminders anyway. The largest strike movement in the history of the French labor movement—and I'm taking an extensive notion, not just the communists—represented at that time about a quarter of the electorate. Can you imagine, it's too late now, but you'd see four people, and out of the four, one would vote communist. That's not so long ago.
3:19 They make people believe the party jumped on a moving train, that it was the students who set the thing off. On which note, I remind you—I don't know if everyone knows this, but it's worth recalling—that Cohn-Bendit's first action, in the sense of mechanical agitation, as Clouscard says somewhere, was to cause a ruckus in the university residence, so that boys would have the right to go into the girls' dormitories.
Khmer Rouge, Maoism and Western support 4:01 I have nothing against that. It's not my problem. Well, youth has to have its fling, that's fine. But I mean, that's nothing revolutionary. That's how he started. He already started with the societal. And since the students were in a state of ferment at that time, there was the Vietnam War, there was all that, there was a generosity—let me take the opportunity to mention that I used to run into the Glucksmanns, who weren't known at the time.
4:41 I'm talking about the father, not Raphaël. One of the pillars of what was called the New Philosophers, along with BHL. Those were the two main ones. I remember Glucksmann defending the Khmer Rouge. The massacre wasn't known yet. It had barely happened. So, on my anti-eco side—I'm not against ecology, I'm against ecologists.
5:11 Just as I have nothing against the left, but the leftists—it's more pejorative than people of the left. I'm for defending the environment, but the environment isn't only nature. Even amid the admirable landscape of our country, if I see a Romanesque chapel in a wheat field, and there's talk of building a McDonald's parking lot in its place, obviously I'm going to sign the petition against it alongside the ecologists.
5:46 But I'm not defending nature at that point. I'm defending the wheat field, which is elbow grease and intelligence, and the chapel, needless to say—that took architects, masons. All this to recall that the first action, not of Cohn-Bendit this time, but of the Khmer Rouge, was to empty Phnom Penh—in 24 hours, an Asian city of over a million inhabitants, mind you—which was emptied, as we learned afterward, to send people to their deaths in the rice paddies.
6:24 And that's why I call them the Green Khmers. It's a bit of an affectation I allow myself. That was aimed at—what's his name?—the Green candidate, Jadot. He's the only guy I've seen who was anti-nuclear—fine, why not, that's coherent for an ecologist—but not against military nuclear power. Because as for the Russians, we've got to have their hide. If we recall a bit what he used to say.
6:54 So, to get back to it—I'm not losing my thread—since Cohn-Bendit was officially a big environmentalist, I remember Glucksmann speaking all the good he thought of the Khmer Rouge against the Stalinists, meaning the Vietnamese communists, who were at that very moment being buried under a deluge of bombs, when it wasn't phosphorus it was napalm. That whole affair still amounts to 3 million dead.
7:26 But it's mind-boggling. Let me prepare a bit, because some might find it excessive—one can disagree with what's called leftism, the leftists, I'll come back to specifying that notion later—but to go so far as to say that, well, neofascism—I'm recalling serious things. Serious things on the side of the Khmer Rouge, pro-Chinese at the time. If China today had stayed at that stage—that was the period when Mao had somewhat lost his grip on the party, because of the failure of the Great Leap Forward.
8:00 It was a bit what, in political terms, would be called voluntarism—the Great Leap Forward. Well, better that than mercantilism. As a result, there were plenty of little backyard furnaces multiplying across China. You'd give it a hammer blow and the hammer would break. I'm barely exaggerating, but that was roughly it. As a result, he had somewhat lost his grip within the party. But to reconquer the party, he sent in 15-year-old kids—remember, the Red Guards—who, with AK-47s, not Kalashnikovs [sic], would hold up some old Long March comrade, in whose home they'd find a turkey and three chickens.
8:37 I sound like I'm caricaturing, but that was roughly it. So that, the capitalist, etc.—China won't erase that for you. China today, which is, I'll allow myself to say, the hope of the world. So there's an unresolved dispute within French Marxism, and even among those who claim allegiance to a communist movement, whether within the PCF or in groups who say they can do better in terms of communism—but in both cases, this dispute over the pro-Chinese, or Maoist, current—it goes together—is not settled.
9:17 We forget—I seem to be dwelling on this, but it's important for understanding Clouscard's reaction—that each time I try to restore a historical segment. For me, Marxist dialectical demonstration means restoring what the media of power stubbornly amnesia-ize, pardon the barbarism, but you get the idea. We mustn't forget that the Khmer Rouge—I'll keep their official designation for now—made their political education and formed their ideas in Paris.
9:53 That too isn't very well known. People think they were guys who were 150% in harmony with the Beijing of the Cultural Revolution, with the China of the Cultural Revolution. And as a reminder, they were financed and supported by the United States. So, the West against Vietnam. I'm glad I'm not the first to say so.
10:23 People will say that's paranoid again. It's worse than that. There are the confessions of a rather little-known man, unfortunately not known enough, named Sasakawa. Does that ring a bell? Let me quickly introduce him, it's very brief—he's a Japanese man who describes himself as the only one: 'I am the richest anticommunist in the world.' He's a billionaire who made his fortune in the Japanese mafia, in betting, on motorboat races.
10:56 He was involved as early as the 1930s. So he took part in the rise of the military clique allied with the Third Reich, of course. And he was sentenced under a sort of sub-Nuremberg—there weren't many convictions in Japan. He was sentenced—the Americans got him out of prison, to illustrate what you just said—out of prison after 7 months.
11:28 Right? And they had him organize commandos in the Vietnamese jungle, among the highlanders. You know, always play up an ethnicity—you know, the Chechens, the Uyghurs. Well here it was the Hmong, as they're called, the highlanders of Laos. Right. Or the Khmer. You see, there have always been historical rivalries. So, all of this is actually quite homogeneous.
The leftists, a union of three political traditions 11:59 Which is to say it's no hyperbole to speak of neofascism. On the contrary, we're almost falling short of the truth. I'd like to come back to that. But first a preliminary remark, after these digressions I've allowed myself: I am neither a Marxist, nor a Hegelian, nor a Clouscardian, and even less a Paganist. There you go. Every evening I ask myself whether I didn't say something stupid that morning.
12:32 Roughly speaking. I mean, that's nothing original. It's what should be elementary in the Socratic line of the philosopher. So Clouscard, for me, isn't gospel. On the other hand, I know of no reference so exhaustive on the problems we face today as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Clouscard.
13:03 I don't know of any others. I'm leaving a few out. But there you go, that's my form of adherence to most of what I can co-sign in their texts. Because we're not of the same generation. Clouscard is much older than me. He was born in '25. And I in '45. And what's more, he really comes from working-class France. Whereas I was picking up my toys in the governor's garden in Hanoi when I was 6 years old.
13:34 At Christmas, let's say. I mean, there you go, I'm of modest Corsican extraction. If you go back beyond my grandfathers, they were shepherds—let's not exaggerate either. But as soon as you're expatriates, you have a houseboy, someone, a caretaker. I was raised in a milieu of fascist sympathizers. French expatriates, roughly speaking. But calm ones, not like here, you know. Because over there, nothing worried them. There were no unions.
14:06 Calm, but I was surrounded by people who were anticommunist, anti-Gaullist. Interesting to remember—I was in tenth grade when a classmate said to me, 'You're a Gaullist?' Threateningly. His father was a French gendarme. Because he lost Algeria to the Arabs. You see, De Gaulle. Well, so now I come to Clouscard properly. Yes, that path from Cohn-Bendit to Le Pen, that ineluctable path, I believe you said.
14:41 That's the right formula. To recall a thesis, I'm forced to use a somewhat dogmatic term, but it's to be clear, we don't have much time—I'll go back to what I was announcing earlier, analyzing a bit more closely the figure who is Clouscard's almost permanent target, that is, what were called the leftists, especially in '68.
15:14 There you go. So today the notion is completely different, now that there's a shift of society toward the right and toward the far right, alas not only in France—I'd even say that in France it's less advanced than in the AfD, you should listen to their publications, I'm not being funny. They call leftists everyone who is to the left of them, and since they're on the far right, that includes a lot of people—Macron, for them, is a man of the left, a leftist, if you will.
15:47 Whereas now, let me clarify the thesis I'm defending—well, I'm not defending it subjectively, on the contrary I'm trying to give an objective measure—the thesis is that the leftists in '68 were the union, in the sense set-theory mathematicians give that term, the union of three political traditions. I'll start with the oldest so as not to offend anyone: the libertarians, the anarchists, the Trotskyists, the Maoists.
16:24 That's what the leftists were. Their common trait, all three, was that they hated the commies—the PCF and the CGT. I don't know if the name Pierre Overney means anything to you, but you get the impression—because I know many of your generation who no longer know it—well, Pierre Overney, who was killed by, what do you call them, thugs hired by capital to keep watch at Renault—immediately, the leftists held marches saying he'd been assassinated by the CGT, by the PC.
17:04 You should see what it was like. It's a bit—forgive the comparison, but I can't help thinking of it—like the most folksy American, if it were funny, but it isn't really, the Secretary of War, Hegseth, the overwrought one, who nearly ends up with tears in his eyes saying we must crush, we must pulverize Iran in the name of Christ the King. I believe you're Spanish-speaking, you know the world—since the Francoist hordes, we haven't heard 'Cristo Rey' invoked like that.
17:39 It's a slogan of the far right. Not the café far right, the historical far right. There you go. Well, that's the point I want to make—I call leftist the union of the anarchists. Now let me make a distinction here, I'll go into a bit more detail—the libertarians, that's a broader category, ranging from the far right, the American libertarians who wait for the tax man with a rifle at the ranch gate.
18:14 Right? These guys have a computer at home, they consume 10,000 years of accumulated history, but they don't want to owe humanity anything. That's their thing, as far as the idea is decorated. And I'll never say a word against the part of the anarchists who have always been fellow travelers of workers' struggles. I'm not going to lump Louise Michel and the Texas libertarian in the same basket, obviously. As for the Trotskyists—and here again a distinction needs making, which will make my comrade Aymeric howl, my editor comrade Aymeric Monville, who has published very interesting works on the murky relations Trotskyism has maintained with milieus that are anything but left-wing, to put it in a laborious paraphrase.
19:04 But I respect, in terms of memory, the Trotskyists who got themselves shot in the great purges, in Leningrad, etc., after the assassination of Kirov, roughly speaking. Well, that has nothing to do with the Trotskyists—Western Trotskyists, I should say—employed by the Pentagon, the CIA, since the start of the Cold War, which is providential for them, guys who vomit on Soviet power.
19:35 You're most welcome, as it were, to be Trotskyists. And then the Maoists, who were the most radical and a bit the most caricatural. I saw demonstrations in '68 where there was a girl marching, PCMLF, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, of women. Their slogan on a banner was 'We are not castrated.' I don't know, you can't imagine that as a proletarian demand.
Kessler, Jospin, Mitterrand: careers of former leftists 20:05 That came straight out of Lacan's seminar, you see. There you go. And above all, let's be clear now, with the Maoists—I'll finish there—among the three groups that make up the set of leftists, some of the most virulent forms of anticommunism, and hence of anti-Marxism, objectively—we'll see this as we go further into the book—is that figures like Kessler, you know who that is?
20:41 Denis Kessler. Yes, the number two of MEDEF, right? who says no to Gaullo-communism. But he was a Maoist in '68. He said that the coherence of Sarkozy's program was to destroy the achievements of the CNR. There you go. There's a terrifying coherence there. That is, Gaullo-communism—on the right the Gaullists, on the left the communists—meaning, whatever one thinks of either, the two forces that saved honor during the Resistance, after all.
21:15 The only organizations, to be precise. Because there was the whole Resistance—there were even royalists, Aymeric gets annoyed when I say that, but it's true, though there weren't many. There are figures like that. Well, the people of France—but in the main, it was those who got themselves shot, communists who weren't in London, mind you. So making a slogan like that, 'enough of Gaullo-communism,' is really an attack on the Resistance.
21:45 Historically. If you take the words at face value—I'm not interpreting, I'm analyzing the words—and I'm frightened by the program. And the number of leftists who were leftists in '68—that is, in the language of the time, to finish my analysis of the notion of leftist—were supposed to be to the left of the left and to the left of the PC especially. You know, they were seen as bourgeois, since they were still demanding metro-work-sleep. There's a contempt in these formulas that have become commonplace.
22:19 There's a contempt. It's extraordinary really. How can one limit oneself to demands about wages, pensions? What did he call it, as they say—sectional demands. I wanted the revolution. There you go. So, back to another component, the Trotskyists—Jospin, who was a 'trotskard.' Now that's pejorative—Trotskyist covers a range, but 'trotskard' is pejorative. Jospin, to the left of the PC in '68, right, and who, when running his campaign, says, 'my program is not socialist.'
22:58 That's fantastic, journeys like that. And of course, I can't leave it unsaid. The best of all this is still an uncle. It's extraordinary. You have to have seen the photo of Mitterrand introduced to Pétain. Mitterrand beaming, they're arranging for him to meet the Marshal. Right? We've fabricated a story that he was a resistance fighter. But it's extraordinary. What he did was militate in a movement for the defense of war veterans.
23:29 Up to that point, I have nothing against it. But the movement furthest to the extreme right. So that it wouldn't be the communists occupying that kind of fertile ground. And Mitterrand, who — this is a formula of my own, it's caricatural, but take it as you will — but watch all these videos carefully, he winks. Mitterrand does that very often when he speaks. And I have a thesis that every time he winks, he's lying. Once, he didn't wink.
24:00 When he said, just before the presidential campaign in which he ran, but after having been parachuted in as First Secretary of the Socialist Party — which he didn't even have a membership card for, imagine that — he said, we can take 3 million votes from the French Communist Party. There, he wasn't lying. He's a fine bridge player. He fulfilled his contract; you can't say he failed. Because we're still living with the consequences of that. That's the target Clouscard is aiming at.
From the process of production to the process of consumption 24:33 Now, I wouldn't want to confine Clouscard solely to the societal critique that denounces the leisure market. These are themes that are recurrent in his work, right? It's true that in the world of Marxist theory, in Marxist publications — I'm speaking generally here — the most recurrent theme was the processes of production. Clouscard, however, initiated the process of consumption.
25:06 It's true, I haven't read all of that. But when you know these Marxian classics — I say Marxian because it's in Marx's texts — Marx says consumption is still a moment of production. Distribution, circulation — we think production is the factory, and then afterward it's the trucks bringing the goods to Franprix. No, but the truck needs fuel, it needs a driver, it needs roads.
25:36 It is indeed Marx who saw that. Consumption is a moment of production in the human world. And that's where I always recall the first sentence of the text — I'm not the only one to cite it from Marx, it's one of the most quoted — but it has the advantage of containing the most Marx in the fewest lines, for those who are too lazy to tackle the rest, who are somewhat discouraged, especially by the first section of the first book of Capital, which has scared off more than one reader.
26:10 In fact, Althusser advises skipping the first section and reading directly — namely, this first sentence of the 1859 preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: in the social production of their existence, I'm quoting the translation word for word, men enter into necessary, determined relations, independent of their will. In production — one should pause on every word.
26:40 The social production of their existence — Clouscard is not fascinated by consumption alone. It's that there exists an anthropological sphere distinct from the zoological sphere in which we also participate. I myself, until the end of my life, will have to eat to live. That owes nothing to history, to production, or to culture. That's nature, right? But if that were all, it would hold true for the mosquito and the earthworm too. That's not what defines the anthropological sphere.
27:11 What defines it is precisely the opposite. It's a distance from nature that begins with the first chipped flints. In language, we confirm this well: the antonym of natural is artificial. As soon as something is constructed, fabricated — and here's another sentence of Marx's that Clouscard liked to quote when speaking — it's what immediately distinguishes the most obtuse architect from the most skillful bee.
27:41 Because it's true that the bee also builds hexagonal cells in wax — that's fantastic, I'm not being ironic. But what immediately distinguishes the clumsiest architect from the most skillful bee is that the architect has the house in his head before producing it in reality. That's called thought. To illustrate this — sorry, I'm doing Marxist propaganda, but it's needed, it's necessary — I'll quote someone who isn't a Marxist, who is a naturalist, but in the scientific sense, that is, a specialist in the natural sciences, particularly insects.
28:19 It's well known — it's Fabre, late 19th, early 20th century, who produced multi-volume encyclopedias on insects. And he studied a mason wasp — that's why I'm bringing this up — called the chalicodoma of the walls. He says, I observed that to store its food, there are two phases. First it goes into the cell it has built, disgorges its crop of what it has gathered, then backs out ruffling its wings like this, to shake off the pollen load, as he calls it, all the pollen on its wings.
29:00 He says, I watch it perform this routine, and at a certain point I block it between the first and second phase. It comes to disgorge its crop, and just as it's about to do the second phase, I block it with a little straw. If it were a human being, it would resist, it would say, what's going on? It turns around instantly without a hitch. In effect, it disgorges its now-empty crop. That's to illustrate that there is no thought there. Imagine women in the Sahel spending the whole day hauling buckets from a well that has no water.
Naturalism, the dominant neo-positivist ideology 29:30 It comes down to that. If you think for one second, you'd say, but what am I doing here? Right? In fact, it's a program, in the computing sense, that's executing itself. There you go. I don't mean I have anything against nature. I've never had anything against nature. What I'm against is naturalism — that is, wanting, under the pretext of being scientific — I'm thinking especially of Popper, who is typical of this — to disregard, whose principal targets are Marx and Freud.
30:00 Curiously, the two great advances that came after positivism — I'm not criticizing positivism, mind you, it's true it's a bit limited. When Marx says what I quoted earlier, men enter into necessary, determined relations independent of their will, he didn't wait — whatever Althusser said — he didn't wait for Freud. It's a century earlier. Marx, to say that there is such a thing as the unconscious. Things I haven't thought. When I go out onto the sidewalk, I enter into a relationship with Abdallah, who, with the jackhammer, built the sidewalk.
30:35 But I didn't think about that. It's very important to recall all this. The objectivity of social relations. So when I criticize naturalism, I'm criticizing today's dominant ideology. I know I annoy quite a few Marxists by saying this, for whom the principal enemy, ideologically speaking, is idealism. Yes, that was true at one time. Especially when religion dominated society.
31:07 Which is still the case in many places. Perhaps in the American Midwest, passing through the evangelicals — that's no small thing. Or in Brazil. The evangelicals are becoming a force in Latin America generally and in Brazil in particular — without whom Bolsonaro wouldn't have been elected, for instance. But anyway, I mean, in France in particular, we had an eighteenth century. We had an Age of Enlightenment. Religion took a real hit. Which made Goethe say: with Voltaire, a world ends; with Rousseau, a world begins.
31:42 Today's dominant ideology is not religious. It's neo-positivist. So I speak well of positivism — it was courageous at the time. It wasn't bad, Auguste Comte. I mean, he goes a bit delirious at the end with his maid whom he named High Priestess of Positivism. But still, what's good is the law of the three stages: every society passes through the religious age with Jehovahs, Brahmas, then the metaphysical age where it's no longer proper names.
32:18 It's the One, Being, the Beautiful, the pre-Socratics, Becoming. But there's still an absolute principle that explains everything — water for Thales, fire for Heraclitus. And then there's the positive age, characterized by the fact — and this holds up rather well even today — that we drop the search for first causes and final causes and concern ourselves with what lies in between the two, with what we can... There you go. That's what made Voltaire say — I don't often quote him positively, Voltaire, given how relentlessly he attacked Rousseau — but still, when he says one must cultivate one's garden, that's exactly it.
Clouscard the pleasure-seeker against the ideology of desire 32:57 Right? On all these points, I maintain that Clouscard — this isn't someone obsessed with struggle, especially in this book, as an anti-leftist. Of course, that's the essence of his fight, but he was a normal man — I know that's a bit imprecise, let me be more precise — who loved life, who had a wild sense of humor, because you get the impression he's a grouch when he criticizes leisure, pleasure, libidinal, playful, and marginal consumption — that comes back often as his diabolical triad.
33:36 You're a bit of a killjoy. Yes, exactly, at first glance — you're taking the words right out of my mouth. Whereas he was actually a pleasure-seeker, and above all careful to do as little as possible, and he taught me lessons. I didn't know working-class France; I'd grown up in the tropics, you see. So when I'd say to him, oh, I'm starting to teach, how wonderful that feels, that's not a job like any other, how wonderful that feels.
34:08 He says to me, you actually enjoy working, imagine that. Every minute you steal from your employer's work time, going to the bathroom, smoking a cigarette, whatever. He didn't smoke, he was a great athlete. But that's the trick. You have to hear this — it's not true that I revel in working. He was a pleasure-seeker. Exactly, you say he was a pleasure-seeker, but in this book he criticizes the ideology of desire notably championed by Marcuse, according to which desire would be revolutionary.
34:38 Marcuse, and in France of course Deleuze and other philosophers, an author of Anti-Oedipus. Yet Clouscard also criticizes psychoanalysis, but it's not at all the same critique as Deleuze's, because he constantly uses the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. When he talks about repression, except what is being repressed isn't only sexual libido, it's class struggle. He gives it a different content, but keeps the syntax of psychoanalysis, the notions of displacement, which are very fruitful in Freud. And precisely, Marcuse, who denounced the proletariat as having sold out to the system for a mess of pottage.
35:16 There you go, that ties in with 'commute, work, sleep.' Personally, I find there's a contempt for the masses in that which should give us pause. Maybe Africa spared me from that, I don't know. I mean, I was more of a fascist than they were when I was 10. I'd go see the houseboy in the kitchen — how nice it was to talk with him, more interesting than my parents' guests, since people spend their time entertaining, making noise, talking for leisure.
35:46 And I'd say to him, we brought you roads, schools, hospitals — especially me, at 10 years old, coming out with that. You see what I mean by fascist. But they were kind to children, and he'd keep peeling his vegetables while listening. He tells me, ah, when I came this morning, I passed by the hospital construction site, I didn't see a single white man working there. That began to awaken me to political consciousness. I put reason where it belonged.
The middle strata, distinct from the middle class 36:16 So it's really, really important, in fact, everything we're seeing here. And that brings us to the notion of class that Clouscard refined. In this book, it really takes shape — what he's going to call the middle strata (couches moyennes). It's not quite the same as the middle class. Because we're all part of the middle class in some sense. I don't hang out with the bigwigs of the MEDEF, and neither do you, I presume, nor with those drowning while crossing the Mediterranean to flee the results of the World Bank and IMF policies in developing countries.
36:53 Between the two, we're all in the middle class. That's too broad a category — Marx belongs to it. Even Lenin, who was, I believe, the son of a schoolteacher. I mean, but the 'middle strata,' that's new. And that's a product of the post–Marshall Plan era, which he develops very well in there. Yes, he insists a great deal on this concept of middle strata. And for him, it's the key to understanding that era. Of course. And precisely, in his later book, the open letter he wrote to the communists, I believe, he insists strongly on the fact that the Communist Party failed to see the emergence of these new strata and their ideological role.
37:27 Absolutely. And he always voted Communist. But that wasn't a reason not to say what he thought. So can you explain what these middle strata are and what role they play? And the difference with... the middle strata. Well, what characterizes them — I'm quoting Clouscard, restating his analysis — what characterizes them is that they have the discourse of the dominant class while owning nothing, neither the productive forces.
37:57 They decide nothing about the relations of production. You can more or less recognize the type. We all know plenty of people like that. Because unlike the traditional petty bourgeoisie, which owned its workshop or its small property, etc. — of course, you punch identity cards, that sort of thing, a tiny cog of no importance, but at least you owned a workshop, small machines, etc. So there he was talking about the strata of the new civil servants, fashion trades for example, culture. Yes, exactly. That's already better than 'civil servant,' because that's a right-wing theme, a critique.
38:27 But you know that, criticizing civil servants — there's always too much State. I'll point this out, it's the convergence between libertarians and business owners. Too much State, too much regulation, etc. And so it's a typical analysis that says, for example, the reclassification, under the title 'The Elementary Structures of Kinship' — Clouscard, if I may, I don't like the expression, but a reading key that everyone can try to use to understand their relation to psychoanalysis.
39:06 which I'll quote in a moment. There, he cites Lévi-Strauss — it's Lévi-Strauss's doctoral thesis, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the incest taboo, all that — except that Clouscard applies it to the middle strata. Under the Old Regime, he says, there was the eldest son who went off to war, and you couldn't be an officer unless you were born an aristocrat. And the younger son went into the Church. In both cases it was a good deal — we say 'fat as a bishop.'
39:39 I don't know quite what that means, because there were minor clergy who suffered real hardship, but the high clergy, that was scandalous. So he says, there's an equivalent now. The guy who flunked his philosophy prep classes goes and reinvents himself as a consultant at an ad agency. He goes work for Séguéla. Making advertisements. Oh yes, you, you know consumers well, all that, you know psychoanalysis, so you can grab hold of their unconscious.
40:09 That's the reconversions. That's the middle strata. And that's a lot of people. It's the growth of the tertiary sector, which overlaps with it in part. Of course, the tertiary sector. The last company I worked for when I went over to the private sector — that is, when I left public education because I needed to feed myself and my family, having had children young — anyway, I moved to the private sector. I was hired by the Hachette group, in a publishing subsidiary producing textbooks for countries where French isn't the mother tongue, to be precise.
40:43 Right? French as a second language, as it's sometimes called. For instance, I myself was taught French by Beninese schoolteachers when I was in primary school, during the last two years of colonialism. I even had the governor's son in my class, Didier Bonfils. And these were people who spoke better French than our TV presenters, the Beninese. And that brought back something else, because there were 1,800 baccalaureate holders by year's end.
41:14 A tiny country, Benin. It was still called Benin, or rather still called Dahomey at the time. Whereas this immense continent that is the Belgian Congo, present-day DRC, passing through a period called Zaire — we had two very different situations. Well, I'm telling you — why do I take this detour through this example? Because these elementary structures of kinship, these kinds of social layer-cakes he analyzes by dividing the middle class into different strata, remind us all the same that fascism — since that's the subject, right from the title, not neo-fascism, but historical fascism — arose and developed and started spreading like an oil slick at the moment of the greatest economic crisis preceding the one we're living through.
State and state apparatus; there is no such thing as a consumer society 42:14 roughly since 2008, the subprime crisis, etc. — we haven't gotten out of it. So the crisis of 1929? It's the crisis of the '30s, or of 1929, it's the same thing. And we mustn't forget a distinction we worked on a great deal, if I may say so, Clouscard and I, and which, in my opinion, isn't given enough weight: the distinction between the State and the State apparatus. Let me give a very simple example. First meaning of the State: the guy who slaps a ticket on my windshield — that's repression, right, I mean, taking my taxes — I'm speaking like a right-wing man here, seeing only those sides of it.
42:55 There you go. Except that, in principle, I go for a walk, I gather mushrooms — let's say I go gather mushrooms, since I found this in countries where there aren't any, where it's too tropical — and suddenly I come to a wall in the forest with a sign saying, private property, mushroom-picking forbidden. My freedom is rather limited there. And then I walk another two kilometers and I see: state forest of Senlis, of Chantilly, somewhere around there.
43:28 There, I can go in — so can you, so can everyone. That's the State in the Rousseauian sense, of the general will, of the common interest. So what oppresses us is the State apparatus. That's the beginning of the analysis. But the strongest point is the second one: this State apparatus, whom does it serve? This negation of the State that is the private sector. Ah, you have to follow this — it's an extraordinary scheme. Take what Macron did — I don't want to dwell too much on Macron, it annoys me a bit that he gets personalized, since he's only the latest segment, the most harmful one, of something that began with Giscard — the sequence Giscard, Mitterrand, Sarkozy, Jospin, going through Jospin, Sarkozy, Macron — every single time, they've gutted the public service.
44:15 That is, the State in its most defensible sense, general will. There, I don't want — it's just a question that was raised, I don't want to shortchange the other themes. One of the other themes that's very present is the question of the so-called consumer society. Yes. So, are we in a consumer society, and in particular, this lets us come back to Frédéric Lordon's misreading, which you raised in the afterword of that book. Can you talk to us about that?
44:46 Yes, thank you. I'm quoting Clouscard. If there really were a consumer society, tell me where to go, I'd run there right away, he'd say to me. That would be communism realized: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Well, actually, from each according to his needs to each according to his abilities — it's the same idea — communism realized. But what do we have against them? Basically, workers consume what they've produced. I am a citizen of the fifth richest country — that's less and less true, I know, but never mind, somewhere between fifth and tenth — yet I find that I don't consume enough.
45:26 I don't walk into a store grabbing things without looking at the prices. No! I'm not... Because you hear expressions like 'overconsumption.' Well, still, I look, in the big supermarkets, I look at the customers — you understand? I start with the word 'customer.' That the media call, don't they, 'consumers.' Wait, but they're producers! There's a guy who's just come off an eight-hour shift! It's the weekend at Ikea, I don't know, you see what I mean.
45:56 So, there's a little post office employee who gets insulted by the queue, all of it... Oh dear, is this all your queue does? Yes, so, you voted to cut jobs. Listen, you shouldn't complain now. You're not going to take it out on her. I made a fuss like that once. They were all going at the poor girl hammer and tongs, you know, the salary she must be on, you know, the one who receives customers at the counter there. Well, so, consumers are also producers.
46:30 So, the question you're raising with consumer society, it's not a joke when he says I'll go straight there. There's no such thing as a society that consumes. Find me one. There are classes that consume, there are social milieus that consume. At the moment I'm speaking, how many Pakistani workers are doing the dishes in some little restaurant right now? At the same time, a little window opens, and you see him dripping with sweat. I say this because, I presume it's also part of your questioning, is the working class still revolutionary?
47:06 Yes, but we can say yes. I do philosophy, you have to make the words speak. It depends on the extension you give to the concept of working class or profession. Proletarian is more precise, namely, it's the one who has nothing to lose but his chains, according to the famous formula. In that case, the girl who just... I say girl because, you'll understand why, because of the problems that arise in the exercise of her new job, the girl who just finished her exams, her teaching certificate in literature, I'm just making this up, okay?
47:41 And who starts teaching in a region, in a difficult area, as they say euphemistically, okay? And who gets, you know, heckled, who's going to give it all up out of depression. These are common cases. Wait, but if the father is a bit... she has nothing left, especially the substitute teachers, for example, there are plenty of them. So that, now, is that going to be attached to the working class? So if we give it that extension, and there are more and more now who own nothing.
48:13 The working class. Working class. But of course! Who doesn't own. Who produces value, who produces value, while... While not owning their tools of labor. While not owning their tools of labor, that's the most important thing. And also, while not participating in the euphoria of consumption that some enjoy who get by better, because, I'm telling you, it's about the schemes.
48:44 There, that one, he almost finished his philosophy degree, he failed the teaching exam, he's going to work for Séguéla. There, you can find work. You need intellectuals to think about how to capture the customer. And precisely, Lordon's misreading was to say that we were in a consumer society, so he took that for granted. And he said that Clouscard, precisely, had this role of a killjoy, of saying that it wasn't good, precisely. May I allow myself to quote myself, quoting Lordon? Otherwise, I wouldn't do it.
Response to Lordon: the ethical foundation of the claim 49:15 Precisely, he tries to make people believe, you mentioned killjoy, Lordon rather says the prudish father, that the worker, by nature, resists the temptation of consumption, to give this fantasmatic image, I quote Lordon, of the worker, almost religious, you know, he'd always be virtuous, etc. Well yes, actually. And to contradict him, I quote an excerpt from a quite contemporary work, that's it, that's what he called his trilogy, on neofascism, which is The Frivolous and the Serious, where he says this, so first, I quote what Lordon says, so our audience knows well what we're talking about.
50:04 Clouscard's discourse falls, now I quote Lordon, in line with the critique of consumer society, a critique, now I'm speaking, a cantankerous critique typical of old codgers, you know, the old guys, Michéa, who says it was better before too, Michéa, deploring the debauchery of eternal youth, harlequinade, well, you see how today's right has exploited all that. And now I quote Lordon word for word, the critique of the liberal-libertarian counter-revolution isn't new.
50:36 A Marxist sociologist, Michel Clouscard, whose name and work had been fairly forgotten, I like this return of the repressed all of a sudden, he's never been as successful as now, Clouscard, makes a surprising comeback on the intellectual scene, in line with the critique of consumer society. Worse still, this sociologist's puritanism, I'm speaking in Lordon's place, decidedly uptight, Clouscard would attribute it to the valiant proletariat, so attached to the frugality of its condition, long live poverty while we're at it, its condition, that it would have managed to escape the sirens' song of the market by refusing the temptation, sorry, I don't have my glasses, the consumerist temptation, to stick to the modest capital good.
51:27 We owe to Clouscard this fundamental distinction between capital goods and consumer goods, but that's something else again. So, this is where I allow myself to quote myself: 'A truly hallucinated reading that douses with moralism Michel Clouscard's implacably Spinozist analysis.' I'm doing it on purpose, I'm being wicked. Okay? Since Spinoza is Lordon's absolute reference, like Deleuze, like Foucault. Isn't that right?
51:57 Well. I have nothing against Spinoza. Of course. But still, when Lordon uses him all the time to be ironic about the illusion of human freedom, implying that everything is determined, I think that's a bit dishonest. I can allow myself to say this because in my critique of Lordon, I acknowledged everything I can endorse in him politically. I mean, a critique of capital that's often on point.
52:33 The last chapter of Spinoza's most famous book, the Ethics, the title is 'On Human Freedom.' And that, we never talk about that last book. There you go. So, I deliberately say 'A truly hallucinated reading by Lordon that douses with moralism Michel Clouscard's implacably Spinozist analysis' in the same pages of the same work cited by Frédéric Lordon. And here, I quote Clouscard.
53:03 'If the proletarian is in an ethical situation, this has nothing to do with theology or with moral categories.' That's clear. It is, I repeat, the extraction of surplus value that makes the proletarian. No, but people think Clouscard only talks about the leisures of consumption. He's still within the orthodoxy of the production process. Well. All of this can't be separated. It is, I repeat, the extraction of surplus value that makes the proletarian.
53:33 This extraction is precisely the very lack of consumption, the reduction of consumption to the mere reproduction of labor power, the objective site of indigence and misery, whereas, paradox of paradoxes, it's the situation of the producer. We could express this relation with the very simple formula: extraction of surplus value implies deprivation of consumption for the proletarian. Equals ethical foundation—he doesn't choose his words by chance.
54:08 We must remember that in Hegel, for example, the philosopher most often quoted by Marx, ethics is opposed to moralism. It's not, we say ethics, it's morality. No, it's morality as a Hegelian category, objective morality. If, for example, we reasoned from the side of the victims, political theories, and not from the side of the executioners, we would understand what objective morality is.
54:40 I mean, it's about the effects it produces in reality. So, ethics isn't the fantasmatic morality I have in my head. I don't know of any African ethnicity where it's permitted to throw a cow's carcass into the village well. There is an objective morality, an ethics, all right, which is indeed rooted in the Greek ethos.
55:14 That's what you were pointing to with the objectivity of social relations. Exactly, exactly. We could express this relation, so there you go, the ethical foundation of the producer's demand. But by the way, the ethical foundation of Marxism. Just saying, in passing. And I mention this in parentheses for our audience, whom I hope will never take my word for it, I hate gurus. So, you must check, verify. It's in The Frivolous and the Serious, page 117.
Capital goods and playful, libidinal, marginal consumption 55:46 And precisely, against this reading, this interpretation by Lordon, or notably against Marcuse too, as you were saying earlier, Clouscard does clearly distinguish between capital goods and consumer goods. That's huge, that's huge. The car, often even before ecologism—ecologism, I never criticize ecology, I'm not a scientist, what do I know about glaciology?—On the other hand, the discourse, I criticize discourses, I'm a philosopher, the discourse that demonizes man and deifies nature, that's ecologism, it has as little to do with science as scientism has to do with science.
56:25 And so, yes, what's the dichotomy in your question, it's equipment versus consumption. The car, which symbolizes illegitimate and superfluous consumption and which also produces too much carbon, etc., for the bobo, broadly speaking, for the liberal-libertarian, when you live in the suburbs, I don't need to draw a picture, I mean, when you don't have a transit network, not everyone has the Paris metro in France.
57:04 Yes, and then generally, if we lived in the suburbs or in the periurban area, it's because we can't afford real estate in the center. It's huge, the car—most of the time, it's to take me to work, take the kids to school, take me to work, etc. During vacation, we might use it a bit for leisure, not for long because it's expensive, and there you go. And that's when, I remember, I knew a couple of older people than me who had experienced, this was in the 60's, who had experienced the Popular Front.
57:42 And when there were paid vacations, they lived in La Courneuve and they dared to go to the guinguettes on the Marne at Joinville. But that's like going to the Bahamas now, it's still extraordinary. You were talking about this consumption. So, the car is typical of what has become a capital good in the current, modern form of employment.
58:18 So, in fact, these are the goods that are essential at the current stage of capitalism in order to be able to work and meet one's basic needs. But yes, I have a friend who says, 'I don't take the car, I take my bike to help slow down climate change.' I say, 'Yes, but the guy lives in the 5th arrondissement.' Okay? He's a real estate speculator. If I lived, if I had cheap rent in Paris, I mean, that solves the problem. I no longer need to go live...
58:49 I used to live in the 5th, then in the 13th at the end, and then I got pushed out like everyone else by prices, by rent prices. And so now I find myself in Cachan—there are worse places. But I mean, it's still close suburbs. There you go. So here we clearly see what 'capital good' means here. Hence his famous formula: we don't consume a refrigerator, but what's inside it. And household appliances made up the bulk of equipment starting in the early sixties.
59:21 Yes, that's right, the late 1950s, in the United States before that. There you go. It's staggering when you see the gap with the United States, which didn't have the war on its territory. We must never forget that not a single brick of a house, a building, a street was grazed by even one bullet during the greatest carnage of all time. So much the better, I'm glad the United States had no destruction at home. I'm glad. At the end of the war, they were the kings of oil, so to speak. Because all the other possible competitors had been eliminated.
59:54 The Soviet Union, let's not even talk about it. 70,000 towns destroyed, 25 million dead, Japan, Germany, and so on. There you go. I'll close the parenthesis. So, what Clouscard criticizes isn't consumption. It's a certain kind of consumption which he sums up in what he calls the three venomous things: ludic, libidinal, and marginal. I had students in their final year who asked me, sir, what do you think of marginals?
1:00:26 He was asking me an awkward question. Because you talk about Kant, about this and that, what do you think of marginals. I told him, for there to be a margin, look at your notebook, there has to be a page. Right? That means it's a kind of parasite in a way, what you call a marginal. The guy actually realized something. It's notably his critique of the hippie figure, I believe, in that book. Of course, of course. The margin presupposes—it's funny you say that, because Foucault, who seems like such a jokester, had a blast smoking mescaline.
1:01:01 He has the right to, but I'm not moralizing. I mean, it doesn't fit with the rest, in California, at the height of the hippie movement. That never made a revolution, all that. Still. So, ideology of desire, we talked about that, neofascism too. So, how does Clouscard define this neofascism? For that, we're bound to talk a bit about fascism, actually. Right? Because what frightens me now is how blurry it's become.
Historical fascism: anti-French-Revolution sentiment and antisemitism 1:01:39 This is the third time I'm saying that there's been a project underway since the beginning of the Cold War. There, I'm going back a long way. It's got a certain temporal thickness now, so that we don't know history. What I call an amnesia to produce a collective amnesia. Just look at how many people know that nearly a million Indonesian communists were butchered and cut to pieces. The Indonesian Communist Party was one of the strongest in Asia.
1:02:10 For example, I'm not even talking about the Tudeh Party in Iran, which was the most powerful communist party in the East. We'll have to write the black book of anticommunism one day. We're not going to keep adding zeros infinitely like they do now. There was someone yesterday talking about a billion victims. Of communism? That's more than the population of the Soviet Union soon.
1:02:44 There's been enough of that, this is serious. But anyway. So, fascism—there need to be precise determinations. Historical fascism, I'll go a bit fast here because what interests us is neofascism. Historical fascism, I can already characterize it by the first determination: it's anti-French Revolution. Everything that comes from the French Revolution—Chapoutot is very precise on this point.
1:03:16 He shows the extent to which, I mean, Nazi anti-Jacobinism. I say this, it annoys my Corsican compatriots. We can also cite Politzer's book, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the 20th Century. You know it well. It's exactly the same problem. Of course. So, I won't go back over my earlier distinction between the state and the state apparatus. I won't return to it. But there is anti-French-Revolutionism. There's an author named Achim von Arnim among the German Romantics, an exact contemporary of Hegel, same generation, very reactionary, like most German Romantics, who are characterized by a fabulous—these are masterpieces on a literary level—a fabulous escapism.
1:04:01 That's exactly what it means. This is the birth of escapist literature that would radiate throughout the Romantic 19th century, for example. Achim von Arnim, one of whose most beautiful texts, a short story called The Heir of the Entailed Estate, begins by saying: when you glance at the almanacs—these are popular almanacs, very popular in Germany, they were a bit like magazines where you'd find every section from cooking to current events.
1:04:34 When you look at the almanacs from the 1700s, and so on, you can't help but be struck by the richness of life, the fullness—that's his word, fullness of life—that characterized the world and society before this revolution to which France attached its name—that's the first five lines. Right? And then follows a whole delirium. Except that, two pages later, the hero, who is a bit decadent, plays the flute, is a bit in a fog, all melancholy, has an apartment he inherited—the heir of the entailed estate—and across the alley is the Jewish quarter, the ghetto.
1:05:14 There's a violent antisemitic passage, as there have been in all these countries with ghettos. Poland, Germany—I insist, the genesis of Nazism, with its temporal thickness, begins first with this coupling of anti-French-Revolutionism and antisemitism. By the way, I'm in the process of deconstructing—here too, with irony, I'm doing what Clouscard did—I'm borrowing this from Derrida, whom I oppose—deconstructing the notion of totalitarian.
Deconstructing totalitarianism: the part dominates the whole 1:05:49 What is this totalitarianism business? There are two bad guys, Nazism and communism. And since I'm neither one nor the other, I'm a good guy—that's already quite a scam. But there's something much more serious. If it's the whole that rules, if it's the wicked society crushing the poor individual, I don't understand—if the whole is in power, totality, that means you, and me, we're all in it. That's democracy realized.
1:06:19 I don't see what they have against it. It already gives itself away. What we can denounce is when a part identifies itself with the whole. Right? The single class, certain forms of the single party, when it's been misused, to put it quickly—and I get yelled at by the neo-Stalinists. Well, I mean, I'll always have the greatest respect for the man who crushed Nazism under the boot of the Red Army, for the commander-in-chief.
1:06:52 But still, I mean, he had quite a few communists shot who might have been very useful later on. That's my relationship to Stalin. Neither devil nor good god. And so, I insist a lot on this aspect. If it's the totality that's in power—no, it's a part, it's a single class, it's a family, sometimes, in Nicaragua, the Somozas, you hear them talked about, don't you—Somoza, yes, you know Latin America well, north—if I may say—or central.
1:07:30 Somoza sucked the blood of his compatriots. No, but people think I'm joking. No, literally. To make money, he had created a blood export laboratory for labs in the United States. And so, he imposed, you see, blood draws. It's astonishing, really. And especially the massacres carried out by the Contras. I mean, it was appalling.
1:08:03 So, there you go, it's a family that occupies the totality of power. It's a social class. It's a religion. True totalitarianism is the domination—and now I'll sum up and conclude—of the part over the whole, and not of the whole over the part, precisely. That's where the scam of the groupie of the most Nazi of philosophers comes in. Hannah Arendt, not to name her. But of course.
1:08:34 Few people—many people who consider themselves left-wing identify her as being on the left. Hannah Arendt, who criticized totalitarianism, so she must be left-wing. I know quite a few like that. Yes, but they don't know about her political activity. She was against the right to vote for African Americans. Most people don't know that. So, I'm announcing it: find out for yourselves, don't take my word for it. Check it, you're going to learn some surprising and unpleasant things.
Neofascism since the Cold War, Heidegger and public opinion 1:09:06 There. So what exactly does this neofascism that Clouscard denounces consist of? Well, for him, this neofascism begins very shortly after historical fascism, after the Third Reich. That is, right at the beginning of what has wrongly been called the Cold War. Cold, I see, but 3 million dead in Vietnam, 3 million dead in Korea — that already adds up to the figure of the Shoah. In passing. All that because a country 10,000 kilometers from home had the absurd idea of opting for a communist system.
1:09:41 It's really extraordinary. I'm not saying this because I was born in Vietnam, but still, it's appalling. Even now, you know, there are physical monstrosities resulting from the Agent Orange that American planes sprayed over the jungle to kill all the vegetation and expose the Vietcong guerrillas hidden by the Vietnamese jungle.
1:10:12 What it consists of is denial. "We are not fascists." That's where the notion of totalitarianism is fabricated, which contributed to the establishment of neofascism. There, I'm answering your question. There's a chronology. When I say the groupie of the most Nazi of philosophers — because there are still people arguing about whether Heidegger is a Nazi or not.
1:10:43 Now that we know the 1933 notebooks, which for a long time were... because it's a world of forgers. You know, Heidegger's disciples blocked access to certain sources. You have to fight for it. But when we finally got access to the famous 1933 notebooks, we find sentences from Heidegger like "We have a duty of Eros toward the Führer." It's appalling. It reminds me a bit of the baboons Freud talks about in Totem and Taboo or in Moses and Monotheism. Right? Where the young males are reduced because it's the dominant male who takes all the females.
1:11:16 "We have a duty of Eros toward the Führer." That means they're going to have orgies with the SS. It's unbelievable. Really, I mean. Okay. And above all, above all, he heavily criticized metaphysics, Heidegger did. It starts with Plato. The division between essence and appearance. We lost the unity of being. Well, I'm restating these themes very quickly. He's a real philosopher. That's what I hold against him. He's not a nobody. He's not Onfray. He's a real philosopher. And I'm going to try, I'm going to try to be intellectually honest.
1:11:50 It's not up to me to decide, but judge for yourselves. I declare very clearly that I might have been worse than him in the 1930s. With my colonial upbringing, namely — they took Algeria from me. Well, I myself was never in Algeria, but they took my Black Africa from me, those communist bastards who chased us out of the earthly paradise that was the Indochina of my childhood. I could have. Sociologically, I was set up for that. So I don't hold that against him. What I hold against him is that afterward, after the war, he persists, and he continues to put on trial what exactly?
1:12:28 Technology, production. Since everything is connected, the technology of the tool that has enslaved us, the machine has enslaved us. It seems to me that if I have a knife, I can use it to stab my rival — I'm talking like they do in the housing projects. Or, on the contrary, to save your life by cutting out your appendix when you were on the verge of peritonitis. I'm sick of putting tools on trial.
1:13:01 It's not the knife that gets sent to jail, well, I mean, when there's a murder. That's a lightweight argument. There you go. When I say neofascism, it's the fascism that denies fascism, because they understood well that — in other words, it's a fascism that takes into account the power of public opinion. Ever since those bastard French revolutionaries of 1789 created a public opinion with mass force — it's not because I'm Corsican, but let's not forget that Napoleon was elected by referendum, among other things.
1:13:39 He didn't stage a coup. His successor, Napoleon the Little, as Hugo called him, Napoleon III — yes, those were coups d'état. But Napoleon himself came out of the Revolution. He was Robespierre without his youthful idealism. I don't know if everyone knows all that. Whereas he symbolizes... I'll stop there because otherwise I'd have to go all the way to de Gaulle. There's a kind of French constant of Bonapartism, you see, of a right wing that people can think whatever they want of. I always voted against de Gaulle when he was in power. So I can say this. But I prefer that right a thousand times over to certain people who claimed to be on the left, like Jospin at the time, or Mitterrand, who was outright Vichyist.
1:14:17 That's what I mean. Vichyist and then Atlanticist. Yes, exactly. And besides, I don't hate on Americans, I hate Atlanticism, Atlanticist imperialism. So you see, history is catching up with me because now they say the Americans are against Atlanticism. Now he wants to leave NATO. Yes, but Europe is taking over the role by sending weapons to people covered in swastikas, from here to there, in Ukraine. But no, they're not really Nazis. It's... denial of the machismo.
1:14:48 They're just hotheads. There are a few of them, but it's not... You look at the guys who were at Maidan. Swastikas from here to there. We should never forget, on top of that — let me sneak in a few things — we should never forget that the German SS during the war were stunned by the cruelty of the Ukrainian Nazis. The Banderites.
Libertarian liberalism, still current today 1:15:18 Yes, but it's something... No, when you put up a statue to a guy and name avenues after him, that means there's a state policy. Let's not kid ourselves. Precisely, to talk a bit about a debate that's been going on in somewhat Marxist circles lately, especially on the internet and so on, with the current crisis, the impoverishment, the drop in living standards, the accelerating proletarianization you've talked about — do you think we're still living in the liberal-libertarian moment, or are we already in neofascism?
1:15:53 Ah, listen, that's an excellent question, because first of all, since it's asked often, people say, yes, Clouscard, he does good analyses, but really, that's in the past. It's true the liberal-libertarians held the upper hand at that time, which wasn't 68 hours. That Cohn-Bendit — we could say it's over. There, there, there. But at the time — I'll just give an example. Since I worked at a private company, I helped a guy pass his baccalauréat who had always failed it up to then, and who was the son of the owners of the Grands Moulins de Paris.
1:16:27 I don't know if you know the Grands Moulins. There, now there's the university — what's the new university called? Diderot? Yes, thanks. That's too recent for me. There, yes. And so the parents invited me to dinner in the 16th arrondissement. There, the upper bourgeoisie, and as they get to know me, in the conversation they see my positions. And they're a bit stunned. They say, "But I don't understand how someone as cultured as you could be pro-Chinese, if anything."
1:16:59 Really! No, but you had to have lived it. I don't talk like that. I'm not making things up. "You could be pro-Chinese, if anything, that would be more agreeable." But... What's this about? Another list. Well, why am I bringing this up — it's very recent news. Because now, thanks to Trump's trip to Beijing, I'm watching the worst channels, the most right-wing ones, LCI, BFM TV. I never watch them, but during moments like this I watch to see how they're going to backpedal.
1:17:30 You see? When they're about to make short work of Iran, now they're stuck. It's resisting. It's fighting back. Military bases being bombed — that hasn't happened to the Americans in a long time. Anyway. I watch the commentary. They're all pro-Chinese again, if you can believe it. In fact, he's going to ask the Chinese to help them liquidate, to force the Iranians, as if it were the Iranians blocking things, when it's the Americans who are blocking things. It's crazy what they manage to make our public believe.
1:18:03 So I'm answering your question very precisely. Never has leftism, as Clouscard models it in Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire, been as current as it is now, like never before. Even though, it's true, the big difference is that, as you've alluded to in various ways, people are increasingly socially unhappy, increasingly precarious, increasingly worried about their children's future.
1:18:36 And I'm not a right-winger. It's not because of insecurity that I'm concerned. Will they have a job given artificial intelligence, which should be the best of news? As far as I know, the advantage of the machine has always been that it reduces my toil. Even Descartes — as it happens, he's one of Heidegger's targets too — Descartes, in that magnificent passage where he critiques his studies, saying he hasn't learned much of anything solid, said he was especially fond of mathematics because of the certainty and evidence of its reasoning.
1:19:12 For meaning, it's not a revelation from Descartes's pen. "But I did not yet notice their true use." I'm quoting the text. "And thinking that they should only serve the mechanical arts and ease the work of men, I was astonished that their foundations were so solid while so little was built upon them." That's really extraordinary. But now, it's bad news. No — it's the capitalist use of artificial intelligence that can be terrifying.
1:19:45 There can be killer robots. There are some in China, there are some everywhere. But I mean, once again, we shouldn't put the tool itself on trial. If it's robots to do dangerous or difficult jobs, that's very good. Really. So there you have it, liberal-libertarianism is more current than ever, because we keep saying over and over, "We are the democrats since we're liberals." That's important to develop.
1:20:15 "We are liberals, and on the other side there are the authoritarian and therefore totalitarian states." China, Russia, Iran. I note the most brutal military interventions — I'm talking about recent ones, without going back to Vietnam and Korea — namely Iraq, Libya, Syria. Oddly enough, these are the three secular Arab states. So the same people here who bash Muslims all day long are quite happy to have the bearded ones around when it's convenient for...
1:20:49 The best example is Afghanistan, where the Taliban were used to drive out the Russkies. So, I come back to my point. Freedom — all the crimes. I did say that neofascism practically begins at the Liberation. I'm trying to be consistent. Right? And in the Cold War, but with the big difference — the anti-communist repression that existed before, before the war, the trick is that each time you have to make people believe it's a fight not just against communism, but against totalitarianism, which is also fascism.
1:21:28 Right? And so this freedom — I'm analyzing it now — this freedom supposedly embodied by the expression "the free world," it's in the name of the free world that this staggering international criminality took place, still largely ignored. You, who know Latin America well, the number of dictatorships created by Uncle Sam — and not just Argentina, I mean, I believe one of the records in relative terms, per number of inhabitants, is El Salvador, or the other one, Guatemala.
1:22:08 It's appalling, it's the death squads that razed entire villages. So this "free world" that characterizes neofascism, hiding behind a defense of democracy and freedom — that's really the point, "we are the democracies," Macron says it over and over. So, there, to answer your question on this chapter, liberal-libertarianism is still the main and dominant actor today, except that, since society as a whole is suffering more and more from economic worsening, deindustrialization in particular.
1:22:56 The United States — it's striking, I mean it's not limited to France. It's thanks to current events that we're learning everything that was imported when Covid-19 hit. We realized there wasn't a single tablet of Doliprane that wasn't made in China. Doliprane is one of the most common medications, after all. Suddenly you see these dependencies, and then the Russians, supposedly they only know how to produce oil, just oil. Oh really? We learn they can decide on famine because they're the main exporters of fertilizer.
1:23:28 It's a chemical product, nitrogen fertilizer. So what's new is that this liberal-libertarianism has less of the anarchizing posture it had in '68, and increasingly, on the contrary. But that's the implementation of that title. That is, neofascism doesn't come from the National Front. And I'm not saying the National Front isn't dangerous.
Neofascism does not come from the Front National 1:23:59 Because in case of crisis, and a worsening of the crisis, the National Front and Macron — well, and the liberal-libertarians — will join forces to line us all up against the wall. Macron and the fake left? Yes. A typical illustration of this evolution is Bardella. Because, I would say, when I was his age, a long time ago, the far right was what? It never went above 3%, you see, 4% in the best elections.
1:24:29 How did it go from that to between 30 and nearly 40 percent? Because for a long time it made people believe it was the only alternative to the system, you see — "all these regimes are rotten, except us," roughly speaking, I'm going quickly. But Bardella's crowd, they were against NATO, against everything that's dominant. NATO — banco, I'm signing up. Against Brussels' Rome — I sign. Me, I'm for Frexit.
1:25:02 And Bardella, interviewed — how long ago? A year? No, seven months ago. And he says there's no question of leaving NATO, "we are at war." The same phrase as Macron. "We are at war." And in my opinion, that's good news. It means they're going to start weakening. What made their strength was maintaining the illusion that they weren't like the others — "we haven't tried them," as people say now. No point anymore, because now he wants to stay in NATO, he wants to stay in Brussels.
1:25:35 There you go. Yes, so for you, what's still current is this dialectic between liberal-libertarianism embodied mainly by Macron, the fake left, etc., or else the Atlanticist far left and the National Rally, the old-style far right. We're in agreement. When you talk about the Atlanticist left, I think of Raphaël Glucksmann, for example. That guy is frightening. And people know so little about what he did in Georgia. That's frightening too.
1:26:05 People don't know that his patron, Saakashvili, back then, had 40 people gunned down outside parliament. Nobody ever talks about it. So, according to you, is the main enemy today the National Rally, or is it precisely this leftism, this liberal-libertarianism? The main enemy is whoever ignores that it's the same thing. That's not a dodge — quite the opposite.
1:26:35 They're the same forces. Besides, everyone knows, when you look at the history of the Le Pen family, that they're hyper-liberal on the economic level. I mean, since I mentioned earlier the example of the number two at MEDEF, Kessler, who was a Maoist in '68, and now, I mean, if he could even abolish unemployment insurance and all that, he wouldn't hold back. I see articles now with headlines that illustrate this hardening I was alluding to, which marks the difference with the old fascism.
1:27:08 It's "France is the last Bolshevik country." Who said that? I've seen plenty of newspaper headlines circling around the same theme with the same words. "It's a socialist country," etc. Yes, too many nationalized sectors, etc. In short, Chapoutot shows very well that the Nazis, under the Third Reich, were the first to say that nationalizations should be replaced by private agencies. A private entity to handle health care, education.
1:27:40 It's worrying, all the same. What I find most fruitful in Clouscard is that he showed that fascism would come back — neofascism, which was barely embryonic when he was writing about it. That's where he showed quite exceptional lucidity in the early 1970s — but not coming from the official far-right party, which is often, in fact — I'm not saying this to whitewash it — often a neo-Poujadism of small and medium-sized business owners who don't understand that what's ruining them isn't their workers' wages, but big business.
1:28:23 There you go. But the two — to answer your question — the two merge at a certain point. And this is very important, I got interrupted earlier, I'll pick it back up now and conclude — the same crisis of the 1930s I alluded to earlier: compare how it evolved in Germany versus in France. That small portion of what Clouscard would have called the middle strata, in France, broke away from big capital and made common cause with the working class — you see, that gives you the Popular Front, at the electoral level, and above all at the climate level, because if there had only been the elections, it would have suited Blum just fine to leave it at that.
1:29:11 But meanwhile, there were directives from the CGT, the Communist Party, for — you know what came next — strikes that led to what everyone now benefits from, even those who spit on communism: paid vacation and the 40-hour week. So in Germany, that same portion of the middle strata attached itself to the Nazi Party instead. It's huge — that's where you see how, often in critical periods, everything hinges on small shifts that seem marginal — it's a bit like what's happening now.
1:29:51 Some political scientists compare curves: in normal times, at cruising speed, prosperity — it's the Gaussian curve, the bell curve, the normal curve, I believe. That is, the center, center-left, center-right, Giscard, Mitterrand, what I call the extreme center, has the highest turnout in the middle of the electorate. And then there's a far right and a far left forming the ends of the curve. As soon as there's crisis and mass unemployment, the top of the bell curve tends to collapse, forming a U-shaped curve instead, with the extremes rising.
1:30:31 And the fights between the Spartacists and the Nazis in the streets of Berlin, you see, and the lynching of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht — by whom? By the left, that's what it is. Yes, precisely, by — what was his name, damn it? Noske. Noske, well done. I denounce amnesia, and then I see it's just senility. It's a bit like what we're observing today with the rise of Mélenchon and Le Pen. Exactly — they end up making La France Insoumise more likeable to me than ever, because, to be fair, on the Gaza and Middle East files, they really went to the wall, at the cost of being called antisemitic.
Sovereignty against sovereigntism; the French tradition of happiness 1:31:14 So earlier you were saying that Clouscard is coming back somewhat into the spotlight, but we know several readers of Clouscard are drifting a bit to the right. That's a bit of an understatement. There you go. I wanted to ask you — do you think the left-right divide is still relevant today? Or, as some think, should it be replaced by a divide between nationalists and globalists? What are really the current issues?
1:31:46 Well, I'll start with the second part of your question, nationalists versus globalists. I'm not a sovereigntist, but I am for sovereignty. We're starting to make some distinctions here. Ah, more philosophical hair-splitting? Well yes, what do you expect. I hate confusionism. I have nothing against confusion. I have plenty of it myself. That's normal, that's human. But confusionism is the two-faced trick of deliberately maintaining confusion.
1:32:21 And me, denouncing what there is of far-right elements on the island, there's not only that. There's not only that. But sometimes I quote him for credit, not to endorse him. He has a magnificent line when he says "I am tired of all poets. They trouble their waters so that they may seem deep." That's what confusionism is. They trouble their waters so that they may seem deep. Not bad. He knew how to speak, he wrote the best German of his time. So, it's quite clear, I am for sovereignty as against the scandal of a von der Leyen, I do nothing against physical persons, I mean I'm against the dictatorship of European supranationality.
1:33:10 No, but that's the little Europe, Brussels. I'm not against Europe. Europe is magnificent. Geographically, historically, I'm not anti-Europe, but I am against this Europe here, which is an insult to European history. I want to be clear about that. Now let me come to the heart of your question. I repeat my point. I'm for sovereignty. So why am I not for sovereigntism? Because what I think about sovereigntists is that they're for their nation-state, and they're hostile to the rest of the world.
1:33:49 Besides, the main accusation is globalization. I don't see, I have nothing against globalization. First of all, because general and abstract things don't exist. Capitalist globalization is not the same thing as the spread of printing from the 16th century onward, or of writing in antiquity and its globalization.
1:34:19 And here I want to recall the importance of words and semantics and of the communist tradition. I do say the communist tradition. What must be dropped from it and what must be restored and updated. I oppose bourgeois cosmopolitanism—I don't say globalization—bourgeois cosmopolitanism, which means that a Dutch boss and a Japanese boss, despite their difference in skin color or little cultural things, etc., have basically the same life.
1:34:50 More or less in the same technical setting, the same apartment, the same housing, they end up in the same vacation resort, in ski resorts, in season, on beaches and fortunate islands. That's bourgeois cosmopolitanism, which only concerns the privileged. I oppose it not to the nation-state—that's the sovereigntists—but to proletarian internationalism, that's the notion that needs to be restored.
1:35:26 And that's exactly what's happening now, because the BRICS movement—granted, it's not homogeneous, some of them are very involved in the anti-capitalist struggle, others, like India, are a bit more... Sometimes there are even far-right sides to the current Indian government, very identitarian, Hindu nationalist, anti-Muslim, etc. But what's fantastic about the BRICS movement, with China and Russia at the top, ahead of the others in importance, I mean, is that there's a beginning of liberation from what has been ruling—I might surprise you here, you'll think I'm anti-English racist—since Waterloo, the world has been run by the Anglo-Saxons.
1:36:14 It's such an easy fact to measure and verify that we forget how important it is, and we can reconsider a lot of things in light of it. Starting from Waterloo, it's the Anglo-Saxons first—the British Empire, that's enormous. And then the United States took over and now runs the world. There are good sides to it, I'm not racist, I love jazz, that's not the point. There are plenty of things I really like about England. I don't know.
1:36:44 But their politics is characterized first by a puritan religion. That explains a lot of things. There's an environmentalism that I denounce. What's the common point between the environmentalist, the Muslim fundamentalist, the Islamist—not the Muslim, Muslims are the main victims, in numbers, of Islamism, I'll always remind the right of that—between the environmentalist, the Muslim fundamentalist, the Christian fundamentalist, and God knows there are plenty of those now.
1:37:15 What's the common point? It's that their supreme value is purity, integrity, non-defilement, non-pollution. That's important. It's important to understand that. And in puritan cultures, that carries even more weight. I was about to say, and here with us, who is that? In France, there's a German expression our audience would do well to reflect on, because there are plenty of intelligent people in our audience, thankfully. They'll quickly make the connection.
1:37:46 How do you say you're happy? In France we say I'm happy as a king, I'm happy as the pope. In Germany they say—I don't know if you know this—glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich, happy as God in France. No, wait, look at the expression, but analyze it! You'd say happy as God in paradise, why not? No, in paradise it's cold, always the same faces. No, but in France, you know, look at the number of cheeses in this country. Each one is a masterpiece. You know, these regions, the Poitou countryside, Corsica, Brittany, the Massif Central, Paris, which after all remains the most visited capital in the world.
1:38:23 And that's at the same time what explains anti-French hatred too. I'm not chauvinistic, I mean, Pétain and De Gaulle, both are French. I'm not defending an identitarian France. But there is a properly French tradition, which is that of happiness, of which Saint-Just said it was a new idea in Europe. It took a very young revolutionary to dare come out with that phrase.
1:38:53 A century before, Pascal's problem was salvation after death. It's not happiness. Happiness is an enjoyment that lasts a little longer than pleasure. That's why it's often conjugated in the imperfect tense. It was the time when I was going—I'm a bad writer—when I used to have my milk coffee and then head off on the road to school. It's the imperfect that gives it long duration. First condition of happiness. Second, a positive relationship to the world and not to the beyond.
1:39:23 Because the beatitude of the saints—I respect it, I'm tolerant—but that's not happiness. It comforts martyrs, but still, it's not happiness. But happiness, the enjoyment of what is here and now—you see how I'm not puritan here—is increasingly under attack from various fronts. And I recall that Marx said France was the classic terrain, the territory of class struggles. Because of that, everyone wants their share of happiness.
1:39:53 No, but Marx and Hegel share the same expression, the same take on the French. Quoting a French expression that Hegel and Marx liked, the French have their heads close to their caps. That means they get angry easily. Consider that the 19th century is 1789, 1830, 1848, the Commune, it never stops. Then 1917 takes over. Hegel had seen very clearly that this revolution would not be completed.
The working class, worldliness and cultural heritage 1:40:26 That's a text we'll need to work on someday. That brings us to my last question that I'll ask you today. Is the working class, and more generally the laboring class, still the subject of the revolutionary process today? The question arises. It's not an academic question at all. But I already touched on the beginnings of an answer earlier by saying it all depends on the extension we give to the concept of the working class.
1:40:56 If it's the guy in blue overalls, no, that's the wrong empiricist definition. I mean the substitute teacher doing his first year of teaching amid appalling unruliness, which I alluded to earlier, and who still today holds the record for depression in his line of work, if we classify by profession precisely. He's not wearing blue overalls.
1:41:29 So here I'm reacting against certain people who think they're on the left, on the far left, sometimes claiming to be Marxists, who haven't read much, but I don't want to pick a fight over reading lists. But namely, that the poor person as such is a value in itself. No, the proletariat wants to get out of poverty, it's not a value for him.
1:42:01 That's... I'll take the example—I was telling you earlier about the greatest living pianist, at least at the technical level, as for the rest, everyone can have their own taste. There isn't a pyramid with one best pianist right at the top. No, it's more like the Himalayas, there are several peaks close together, and after that it depends—some are better in Brahms, others in Mozart. I'm thinking of course of classical piano, which requires a form of servitude, which requires starting to slog away at age four and doing eight hours a day for decades to have a chance of simply being a concert pianist, the highest level.
1:42:43 Why am I bringing this up? Because one of the arguments—and you see there's still libertarian liberalism at work to dissuade young people from listening to a classical repertoire—is to say classical music is for old, Eurocentric people, and since young people are generous, they like it, they're more open to other cultures than their elders, and good for them. They're fed these dissuasive lines, if you will. How many concert pianists are there in China?
1:43:13 Concert pianists, top level, 66 million, more than the population of France. And most of them, between 15 and 25 years old, that's when they win prizes in Europe too, I mean, not just in China, they're not appointed by the Chinese Communist Party. So these are examples of a Clouscardian category which is perhaps the most important in Clouscard's whole body of work—I'm not saying it's the most important in itself, I'm not saying it's more important, I think, than mondanité [worldliness], I'm not saying it's more important than the productive forces and relations of production, but that's not specifically Clouscardian, that we owe to Marx, of course, and of course it's the foundation, but a contribution proper to Clouscard is this concept of mondanité. When people say, yes but that's outdated, that means you're old-fashioned—but what kind of argument is that?
1:44:15 During the Third Reich, did young people talk about national revolution, yes or no? And when you defended democracy, you were old-fashioned, you hadn't understood anything, and even the SA—it's over, they're too much, they demand nationalizations and all that, we're going to liquidate them, that's the Night of the Long Knives—and it's important, what we're seeing is that there's a worldly [mondain] argument that is completely unconscious and that's never talked about, and it serves to maintain the status quo by dissuading anything that could elevate the proletariat to what it's deprived of, namely the cultural heritage of humanity.
1:44:58 I often say, I fight to give back to young people part of the heritage that's been stolen from them. Still, people say, yeah but that's—and I take the example, the counter-example of Céline, the greatest writer of all time according to some, I mean, what style, etc. Oh really, okay, it's not very clear, or there's nothing one can say, okay, take the testimony of a German who was in the occupation at the Wehrmacht headquarters and who received a visit from Céline, who said, but who is this madman?
1:45:31 He came to tell me, so what, there are still plenty of them, Jews, on rue de Rivoli, and the children too, this issue mustn't be left alone, it's terrible. But what style, that's what's said in certain circles. And as my friend and compatriot François de Negroni says, it's his style that is the most Nazi thing about him. Precisely. Because, to go back to my point, he wants to seem a bit populist, you see, concrete, raw reality. But the worker doesn't need to be taught what pee, poop, filth, and suffering are.
1:46:03 He knows nothing else, he wants to get out of it. But you're not allowed to say that now, they'll say you're not politically correct. I'm thinking of Planchon, does that mean anything to you? No, it's not a generational thing, you couldn't have known him. He was the greatest theater director of his time, a communist, and who, at the TNP, the Théâtre National Populaire, at the Trocadéro, would bring in busloads of workers who were fascinated to see the staging of Molière he did, which wasn't at all stiff like at the Académie française.
1:46:34 There are good things at the Académie française too, but with him it was really, you know, like Monsieur Jourdain arriving with big baskets after his shopping. It's very important not to block access—I know this sounds strange—to Mozart for the working class, but by what right? To Mozart, or to 15th-century Chinese painting, or to Ming porcelain. Of course. That's how I answer that question.
1:47:04 If we take the working class in its most current extension, that is, the precariousness of those who own no means of production, with wages increasingly under downward pressure, then yes, it remains the crucible of revolutionary activity and thought. Very good conclusion. Thank you, Dominique.
1:47:34 Thank you, thank you. First, thanks to the youth of the world. I can't help quoting someone who has died. He's a friend nobody knows who was with me on a local contract in the Ivorian jungle, far from the capital. There were about forty of us French people. Sorry, I'm making you play overtime, but very quickly. His name was Jean-Pierre Berdo, I'll say his name, he was a friend, a guy from the North of France, and I hope his wife won't listen to this show, I don't think that's her style.
1:48:08 He had married a somewhat more upper-class, somewhat more reactionary woman, etc. And so he was always coming to have dinner at my wife's and mine. It reminded him of his youth. Rebellious—I remember because he would raise his glass and say: socialism is the youth of the world. It's beautiful. I'd like to end on that and thank your movement for adopting that title. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming all this way too.
1:48:40 If you enjoyed this show, don't hesitate to subscribe to our channel. And I also wanted to remind those who enjoyed your talk that they can find you on your YouTube channel, which is run by an association, and the channel is called Philosophizing with Dominique Pagani. Simply that. Thank you very much. We cover different topics regularly. Don't hesitate to go check out that channel, subscribe, and follow Dominique's work.
1:49:11 See you very soon. Thank you very much, youth of the world.
