The politics of protest(2)

It is part of how society reproduces itself. But there is also change. Conflict is built into society. People can find that their expectations and ways of living are suddenly out of step with the new social position they find themselves in. This is happening in France today. The n the question of social agency and political intervention becomes very important.

The heart of Marxism is the struggle by the working class for its own emancipation. Where do you place the struggles of the working class within the spectrum of the social movements you are involved in?
Seattle brought together organised labour and various single-issue campaigns. They were often mobilised on different political bases, but they influenced one another. That is new. For the first time we have the possibility of aggregating these kinds of people who were very suspicious of one another.

In France we have this tradition of workerism which is anti-intellectual. The unions are very hostile to intellectuals and the intellectuals are very distant from workers. In 1968 it was very visible. Now for the first time because of the failure of Soviet Marxism we are free from that. So I can speak with a CGT official as I am speaking to you. They are very open. In a sense intellectuals like me did not exist 20 years ago. People like Sartre and Foucault were sympathetic to the movement, but they did not have much empirical knowledge of workers.

Seattle is very important in showing how new forces are developing. The small farmers' leader Jos?Bov?is well informed. He expresses himself clearly without the oversimplification which you hear from politicians. He is an intellectual. But at the same time he works on his farm.

I recently organised a meeting of all the leaders of the social movements in France--the unemployed, the sans papiers immigrants, some trade unionists. You had anarchists, Trotskyists, Marxists--all types. The discussion was at a level you could not imagine. You can see the revival of a left political culture in the huge sales of Le Monde Diplomatique. Some suspicion still remains among those who are working together, of course. But at the end of the meeting they gave Raisons d'Agir, the group I am involved in, a mandate to issue a charter for a European social movement. We must escape nationalist division and have an international movement to fight against global capital.

How can the movements generalise and how will the different ideas within them be clarified?
The way the movement will develop is open. It is a process. We plan to publish an appeal for a European movement against neo-liberalism in May. We are seeking the support of the DGB union federation in Germany, the CGT in France, intellectuals, social movements and many different organisations. There will be a meeting in September of different movements to elaborate this charter. Then we will hold a conference in Athens in March of next year to discuss that and try to create the foundations of a social Europe. We have many ideas, but we must work on them. The aim is to create an intellectual and practical opposition. It is not only intellectuals. One of the most important leaders of one of the main unions in Greece wants to fund the conference. Our mission is to organise and try to help people to communicate.

There is a division of labour in this developing movement. Social scientists can help to overcome difficulties. If we want an effective social movement at the level of Europe we must overcome that--otherwise we will disappear.

There are powerful political obstacles between people. The main obstacles come from the social democratic movement. If we succeed in overcoming these it will lead to a genuine Third Way which will be much more radical. We need to build the left of the left. In the ecology movement you have people who are really on the left--even among the Communist Party, which has had a deadening effect on the left in France.

Many people are coming to realise that globalisation is more of a political imperative than an economic fact. Three quarters of the exchange of goods in Europe is internal to Europe. The social democratic parties in power could implement policies to limit the free market.

How will we force them? Will we require a new political party?
I don't know. It would be nice if we could force them, but I am not sure if we can. It seems to me there is a crisis of the social democratic governments. In Britain the crisis of Blairism has well and truly started. There is also the crisis of the right wing parties in much of Europe, particularly the CDU in Germany. The true left has always faced a false choice: you vote for the right or you accept this fake left wing. We have had the same problem in France since 1981.

Forces other than the left are trying to gain a hearing. So we see the Haider phenomenon in Austria. But he has not gone unchallenged. The recreation of a true left wing movement will be the main instrument of the destruction of Haider. Nobody spoke about Le Pen and the National Front in France during the hot winter of 1995 in France. The mass movement in defence of pensions in Italy also marginalised the far right.

Whether the revival of the left will lead to a new party is an open question. So too is how ideas will be clarified. The main thing is to build the movement. No one should doubt the radical changes that are happening in the way people think. I am more optimistic about the future than at any time in the last three decades, despite the seeming triumph of global capitalism.