Virginie Despentes is a perfect illustration of what Milan Kundera called the wisdom of the novel. For the great writer of Czech origin, the form of the novel, conducive to relativism of points of view, prevents dogmatisms and ideologies. A novel is smarter than its author. Virginie Despentes was thus able to sign formidable literary fictions that marked their time (fuck me, Vernon Subutex and the latest, Dear asshole), while regularly delivering distressing forums. Ten days after the massacre of Charlie Hebdothe writer for example declared her love for the jihadists, hailing their “desperation” and their “clumsiness”.
His text which appears in the collective book You don’t dissolve an uprising (Seuil, published June 9, 184 p., €11.50), in support of the Earth Uprisings movement, confirms the trend. The former Goncourt Prize juror invites “the end of capitalism” rather than “the end of the world”. She tells us that with “the pension reform, the repression of demonstrations in Sainte-Soline, the Wuambushu operation in Mayotte”, the Macron government is sowing terror on several fronts for a Machiavellian project: “to put an end to democracy” . The executive would only be the representative of “anarcho-capitalism”, a hydra which works for “the alienation of peoples and the absolute freedom of financial movements”. Despentes unfolds a conspiratorial thesis: the Macron government is there “to give the keys to the far right and then it will finally be settled. Investors will be at home”. It is difficult to see how the sovereignty and demagogic economic program of Marine Le Pen, which earned her criticism from a number of liberal economists, starting with the Nobel Jean Tiroleplay into the hands of “financial movements”.
Visibly just as unfamiliar with international events, the novelist believes that “in Europe, the kick-off of this demolition of democracies took place in Greece, when in 2009 a nation was deprived of the legitimacy of his vote. We said to ourselves – our banks are well worth their democracy. And Greece rose up, for months, during demonstrations which were very similar to those which inflame France today. It was an experience. What happens if you deprive a country of its democracy and hand it over to the Taliban of currency? Yes, what’s going on? Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the moderate right have just largely won the legislative elections, far ahead of the radical left of Syriza. The Greeks thus hailed the economic recovery of the country, with European aid, marked by growth of 5.9% in 2022, unemployment reduced from 25 to 10% in ten years and a spectacular reduction in public debt. But what are the figures worth compared to the ideological convictions of a writer who compares European budgetary rules to Islamic fundamentalists?
Alain Damasio
In addition to Despentes, we find in You don’t dissolve an uprising the contributions of intellectuals or activists who spoke out in favor of the Earth Uprisings, threatened with dissolution by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin following the violent clashes in Sainte-Soline. Professor at the College de France, Philippe Descola brings his university guarantee. The venerable anthropologist, fascinated by Amazonian societies preserved from “merchant capitalism”, sees in “the existence of alternative territories such as the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes” a “deadly threat against the devastating social and economic model of planet and profoundly unequal”. Science fiction author Alain Damasio delivers a poem. Extract: “Darmanin the dwarf: no, but in the water what! / FN-SEA, that’s three letters too many”. The editor Isabelle Cambourakis, promoter of ecofeminism, aims to get out of the violence/non-violence dichotomy, and certifies that there is “a place for a creative, effective and non-oppressive counter-violent practice”. The science historian Christophe Bonneuil makes the rural exodus not a massive movement of populations towards urban areas to raise their standard of living, but a movement of exclusion of “millions of peasants” by the “actors agro-industrials”. Historian François Jarrige pays homage to the Luddites, the craftsmen who broke the first looms in early 19th century England.
Two activists, Gaïa Marx and Terra Zassoulitch, take up the concept of “kapitalocene” (or capitalocene) popularized by the Swedish Leninist Andreas Malm, which makes the capitalist system the central cause of all environmental ills. “Inseparable from colonial domination, the invisibilization of women’s work, the privatization of the commons and the commodification of life, capitalism is indeed this way of organizing the planet which has led to a shift into another era of Earth” writes the duo, based on a few figures: “Between 1700 and 2008, while the population increased tenfold, capital increased a hundredfold. And the poorest 20% held 4.7% of the world’s income in 1820, but only 2.2% in 1992”. It should be remembered that over the past 200 years, global life expectancy has fallen from 30 to 70 years, while the share of the population living in extreme poverty has been reduced from 90% to less than 10%. In 1800, only 12% of the planet’s inhabitants could read and write, compared to more than 85% today. There are worse results.
Junction of struggles
In an entry entitled “queer”, journalist Cy Lecerf Maulpoix even tries to cross environmental and LGBTQI struggles, without really understanding the link between global warming and sexual freedoms: “It’s a movement that shakes the present, a movement of resistance in the face of the considerable impoverishment in which our social constructions plunge us, intrinsically linked to the social reproduction of capitalism. Queer is the recognition of our hybridities, the insurrection of a feverish and non-dogmatic desire to inhabit more fully our bodies, our sexualities and our sensibilities, the vital need to put in crisis all that obstructs our powers of life and our ways of organizing our relationships”. In the same book, there is a contribution from the Confédération paysanne, one of whose emblematic founders, José Bové, said he was hostile to the PMA and the GPA. The proof that from Larzac to gender studies, the junction of struggles is perhaps not so obvious as that.
The Uprisings of the Earth movement announces a demonstration on June 17 for the stopping of the Lyon-Turin railway site, which should however make it possible to reduce road freight as the number of people taking the plane to reach Milan. Would the reduction in carbon emissions be less important than the anti-capitalist struggle? In the meantime, this collective work confirms that it is indeed stupid, as Gérald Darmanin wants to do, to ban an ideological current, even if it means transforming it into a martyr. We do not dissolve an uprising: we rather let it develop its vision as radical as it is caricatural, we contradict it on the ground of ideas and figures, and we accelerate the climate transition.