Over the past fifteen years, the world has seen a multiplication of revolts in
the face of the increase in the prices of basic necessities. In 2008, there werethe riots that were described as "hunger" in the international press, even ifthese terms did not always mean much from the point of view of local societies:it was the first time, in history, that such numerous and such differentpopulations rose up together across the planet in the same context of soaringcommodity prices. Since then, we have witnessed the birth of collectives "againstthe high cost of living" in many African, Asian and Latin American countrieswhere mobilizations in the face of rising prices have followed one another untiltoday. In a more hidden way, this phenomenon has also affected Europeancountries: while the revolt of the Yellow Vests, in France, started from theincrease in fuel prices in 2019, the "Don't Pay" movement, in the United Kingdom, has led hundreds of thousands of Britons to rally against rising gas prices in2022, with some even tearing up their bills in the public square.My book questions this growing role of prices in social anger in the 21stcentury. He mainly talks about Africa - and, in particular, Burkina Faso andNiger, where I carried out several years of research - but also about Europe andFrance in particular. I strive to show that the anger at the high cost of livingcannot be explained solely by the growing instability of prices, even if this hasan obvious weight in a context of scarcity of fossil fuels, global warming andpolitical conflicts. As historians have shown, there is no mechanicalrelationship between social anger and the deterioration of living conditions: onthis criterion, we have much more reason to ask ourselves, not why we rebels butwhy we don't do it more often. To understand the anger in the face of the highcost of living, we must ask ourselves why prices feed more or less significantfeelings of injustice depending on the times and societies considered. This iswhat I do in this book, focusing on the representations that people from modestbackgrounds have of the economy. While there are societies, particularly inEurope, where today we will be quicker to believe in the market as an autonomousreality about which we cannot do much, there are others, particularly in Africa ,where the power relations that preside over the formation of prices - andtherefore the responsibilities that the latter incur - will be more obvious tothe eyes of the greatest number. In a way, I thus propose to reflect on thecommon representations of power in our capitalist world.Two main reasons seem to me to explain the strong attribution of responsibilityto price levels in most African societies. The first lies in history: in Africa,price regulation has played an important role in social policies in the past, incontexts where the public authorities had the meanslimited, whether under colonization or after independence. Far from being guidedby moral imperatives, these policies were mainly driven by the desire to maintainsocial order when it was threatened, especially in cities. But they havenonetheless remained, in shared memories, as traces of ancient times when theauthorities assumed their social responsibilities with regard to the community.This explains why price increases today are often perceived as the mark of apolitical failure, much more than that of an economic imbalance.The second reason, which explains the important place of prices in social anger,lies in contemporary material reality. In most African countries - in any case,the poorest among them - the working classes consume a small number of goods andservices on a daily basis: each evening, it will be easy for each make anexhaustive list that will be repeated from one day to the next. However, trade ineach of these daily elements is often dominated by a very small number of largeprivate companies, linked by tacit relations with the political authorities. As aresult, in Africa the working classes will often have an extremely concrete andvery personalized perception of what will be called elsewhere, in a more abstractway, "finance" or "capitalism". From this perspective, there is every reason tobelieve that prices, when they rise, are being pushed up by real people in aposition of power, rather than by an abstract market that you can't do anythingabout. Generalizing, one could say that there is less of a tendency to believe inthe market - in the neoclassical sense of the term - in African societies than inEuropean societies, where the violence of capitalism will be perceived in laborrelations more than in the consumer space.What does all this teach us about social anger in Europe? For the moment, this isoriented by work and the rights it confers, much more than by prices. Just lookat the millions of people who are currently taking to the streets in France todefend a fairer pension system, without necessarily thinking about their ownfuture: if these questions have a very strong resonance in the shared feelings ofinjustice in this country is that social rights have been gradually conqueredthere with reference to the salary condition since the end of the 19th century,including for non-salaried people. But nothing says that it will always be so,while the wage system continues to crumble under the blows of neoliberalpolicies. With the Yellow Vests, we saw the place that prices could take in theanger of people for whom wage labor no longer constituted a model of socialprotection. We have also seen how a government can develop a pricing policy tocurb this anger, sometimes quite surprisingly: while the participation of privatecompanies in political power is obvious to many in Africa, there is little We areused to seeing a European president asking big contractors to lower their pricesto face social anger. Anthropologists have defended the idea that Africaconstitutes a privileged space for observation to understand the more generalevolution of the world in the neoliberal era: from the angle of the high cost ofliving, I can only agree with them .http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article3783_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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