Class and power
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25.11.2016
Didier Eribon, Sociologist; Interview: Alex Rühle
The French sociologist Didier Eribon achieved the surprise success of the year with the translation of his book “Return to Reims” in Germany. Eribon, who comes from the simplest of backgrounds and became known for books about Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the history of the gay movement, uses his mother to tell in his non-fictional Reims novel how the rural population has been facing the front since the XNUMXs She turned to National because she felt that the socialists no longer care about her. Can this diagnosis be extended to other countries? Is there such a thing as classes at all? And what should be done? Let's ask him himself in a café in Paris before he comes to Berlin next week on a reading tour.
SZ: Mr. Eribon, Trump won the election and. , ,
Didier Eribon: Look, I don't know what you all want. I wrote a book about my mother and now I'm supposed to explain Brexit, Trump and the world. Well, it's probably because of the chapters in which I use my mother to show how an entire class of society has gotten the feeling of being forgotten over the past three decades - and how it has reacted to it.
What happened in the 30 years?
The left politicians started, with WTo work together, industry panels have paid for them and think tanks financed, and they have announced that the boundaries between right and left must finally be broken. Throughout history, this has always meant the left giving up its positions and moving to the right. And that's how it turned out: Social democracy has thrown its central concern, the question of social justice, overboard.
At that time, Gerhard Schröder and Tony Blair would have answered that effective social policies must be primarily labor market policies: we make the newcomers fit for the market. We give them responsibility, everyone is now from his luck blacksmith.
This only works for the few who have a blacksmith shop. Look around in the UK. The whole north is a social political desert. The great lie of the modern left was and is to say that there are no more classes. But there are all these suspended people. My parents felt absolutely betrayed by the leftist parties. And then they chose those who promised to take care of them.
They describe how your parents and all those around them in the collective have switched to FN. But everyone for themselves. Not with the unanimous pride with which they once confessed themselves to the Socialist Party, but secretly, with a guilty conscience, just as one goes into porn cinema with his collar turned up. Where did this shame come from?
They only exist in their generation. Today the right has the cultural hegemony, you acknowledge it, after all, everyone does it, it's cool. But for my mother this party was actually still the archenemy. So when I asked her if she had ever chosen FN, she initially denied it all around: “Never! How did you get it." When I insisted, she said at some point: “Well, I'll admit it, once. But that was only intended as a warning shot! "
What did she mean by the warning shot?
The same thing a man said after the US election: “I voted Trump to show that I exist. Since nobody can hear me, I'm making a noise now. "
But the thesis that only suspended whites would have chosen Trump can not be sustained. In Beverly Hills, almost 50 percent have voted for Trump.
Of course, Trump has reached voters from all walks of life. But if the Democrats or here with us the various leftists no longer even convince their regular clientele, then that is a crucial point in the election. And it's not just a cross every four years, people get into their discourse sphere, read the Breitbart fake news stuff or our identity blogs and next time vote with full conviction the right-wing populists. I have seen in my family how the worldview has changed. “We workers against the bourgeoisie” gradually became “We French against the migrants”. Today that is completely solidified.
But was this earlier “we down here versus those up there” a nobler dichotomy? Were the communists better people? In your book you describe very clearly how narrow-minded and mean the climate was.
Oh God, I don't want to glorify the arch-reactionary Communist Party or the three decades that you call the economic miracle and ours “Trente Glorieuses”. Glorios was nothing at home at home, it was gray misery, I was often hungry. And of course there was massive prejudice against everyone who is different. As a gay man, I had to flee from this family. But this exclusion of the marginalized groups was not the focus. The big story was: We simple people against the bosses. If politics then suddenly denies that there is such a thing as an underclass, if you suddenly just tell people that there is no social determination, everyone can do it, then they look for their affiliation differently, please, are we are not a class, but rather the neglected people from whom the refugees are taking away the social allowances.
In what you say two arguments are mixed up, the sociological one - there are classes - and the political strategic one: you have to give voters a sense of belonging. After Brexit and the Trump election, many say the left is not charismatic enough. Do you think the Argentine sociologist Ernesto Laclau is right when he postulates left populism?
Is it long ago. Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, these are left-wing populist parties. Podemos fascinated me at first. But I believe that this left-wing populism plays with fire.
In what way?
Because he uses dangerous rhetoric: We, the people, against the oligarchy, we, the nation, against globalization - that is, word for word, the discourse of Marine le Pen. Podemos pretends that there is a homogeneous people that home as a common reference point. Then they say, left, right, that has survived, everyone comes to us. But they are preparing the ground for other mechanisms of exclusion, of which we spoke earlier: Do homosexuals belong to the people? Refugees drowning in the Mediterranean?
There were other attempts at left-wing populism that did not go through identity politics: The “99 percent” in America or “Nuit Debout” in France.
Yes. And both movements are based on a lie in life. The 2000 Paris students and artists who protested at the Place de la République. I'm absolutely on their side, but if they say they're the people, you have to tell them, are not you? The people live in the empty rural areas, have no idea that you are standing around here, and vote to 30 to 40 percent Front National. And the few people who camped in Zuccotti Park also have very little in common with the lower 50 percent of Americans.
Many say after the US election also: The Democrats have taken too much care of the rights of various groups. Let's just stay that way with your minority policy and take care of the social issue. It is no wonder that the simple white man feels abandoned when only discussing transgender toilets.
I think fighting for the rights of women, LGBT people or refugees is very central. And if people like the American Mark Lilla denounce that now, I would enjoy that with caution. Lilla has always been an arch-conservative thinker, who himself wrote against feminism and published authors who have been beating gays and lesbians.
Lilla is not the only one who wrote something like that. In France, Alain Badiou argued quite similarly, and Slavoj Žižek attacked the US Democrats in the summer.
Badiou and Žižek describe homosexuals as egoists who terminate the social contract and are only interested in their decadent, particular interests. The witch hunt against André Gide was carried out with the same arguments in the XNUMXs. At the same time Jacques Lacan attacked feminism for weakening the father's place and destroying the “symbolic order”. It's easy to get to the healthy national body, and every minority that demands special rights for themselves disrupts the well-established functioning of society. Marine le Pen says nothing else: we have paid homage to individualism and thus lost sight of the simple French.
ILet's summarize: Movements such as Podemos use a populist-catchy, but nationalist rhetoric, the people of Nuit Debout squat in their cosmopolitan bubble, and the self-critical left begins three weeks after the election with their own people to exclude. What would happen in your opinion?
Žižek is not a self-critical linker, but a fascist Feuilleton clown. We need social movements that network cross-border. We have to get involved much louder and more offensive. And in the long run, the most important thing is to radically reform the school system.
We are experiencing the most dramatic crisis of democracy, and you want to rebuild our schools first?
A card with the constituents of right-wing populist parties in France, Austria, Great Britain is always identical to the card, which breaks down the level of school graduation. The more early school leavers, the more popular the FN.
The Nate Silver has just done the same for the United States: the higher the scores in a constituency, the more votes it gets for the Democrats. And vice versa. So it seems to be something to it. But as far as your reform proposal is concerned, the school system has become more porous, is not it?
Do you dream? The preparatory classes for our Grandes Écoles, the few schools through which the future elite will have to go through today, are more socially closed than 1960. They do not find a single employee child, let alone workers. We have enormous social segregation in schools.
In May, France elects a new president. Or for the first time a president. Do you have a forecast?
I'm predicting a runoff between Marine le Pen and François Fillon. Fillon's role model in economic policy is Margaret Thatcher - anyone who goes on strike should be locked up. But he is also an arch-conservative honest man who is popular with the Catholic fundamentalists. In this respect, le Pen will have a hard time against him, the modern, moderate Alain Juppé would have been an easier opponent for them. If that happens, many French will have to vote a rock-hard right in May to prevent Marine le Pen.