WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, OCL CA #334 - Territorial struggles and class struggle (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

For several years we have seen a rise in mobilizations on environmental
issues and against development projects desired by the State in flagrant
contradiction with its agreed environmentalist discourse. Recently, many
collectives have started to appear everywhere, often outside of big
cities. Here we give you some thoughts from a debate on these questions
at the OCL libertarian meetings this summer. ---- So-called territorial
struggles are waged in a specific geographical, human, economic and
cultural space that its actors know and control relatively well because
they live there, are inserted there and are its driving forces. These
struggles arise against technocratic and/or anti-social projects which
will disrupt this space and which some of the inhabitants refuse.
They are most often the complete opposite of the famous Nimby syndrome
("Not in my backyard"). It's not because it's HIS territory that we
oppose these projects! This is because we are against everything they
mean in terms of the conception of social relations and the way
decisions are made. And when this is not the case at the beginning, it
appears more and more clearly as the struggle develops: the "neither
here nor elsewhere" have supplanted the "not at home, elsewhere if you
want"! The "...and his world" attached to the rejection of a project
indicates more of a desire for globalization than a cautious withdrawal.
The territory is the place in which we live and have the best control to
act effectively because we know its geography, history, economy, people,
and power relations. Its limits are not drawn on paper by technocratic
planners, they are those below which we feel capable of confronting the
adversary, and beyond which we begin to lose ground in favor of the
adversary due to lack of knowledge and intimacy with the field.
Identities are constructed in these struggling spaces which seem
controllable.
Knowledge is the sine qua non condition for countering external state
bureaucracy, but also that which a movement can generate on its own
internally. Bureaucrats have no territory in the sense we understand it.
Theirs is the one they draw on a map, it is the one they want to
administer from their office according to their interests or those for
whom they work.

The factory, a space to be destroyed to make it a territory of life
So many questions on which we must remain vigilant: when we are part of
one of these movements, we must know how to spot in the passing wind the
trends, the slogans, the proposals which can incline towards a sort of
"nationalism" of territory, to fight them. It is important to emphasize
the fact that we are fighting against capitalist land use planning.

Classifying these struggles in the strictly ecological category, as is
most often done, is an error. First, it is having a very restricted
vision of ecology which would only concern major projects as
environmental questions, leaving their social and political meaning
aside. Then, it is to ignore the history of the workers' movement which,
to exist, to fight and sometimes to win, has always relied on the
existence of a territory, however small it may be, but which was a
controlled space, " to oneself", from which we attempted to exclude
enemy forces. Let us think of the great struggles against the
dismantling of the steel industry at the end of the 1970s, of the
struggle of Breton fishermen in 1998 which caused the fire of the
Parliament of Brittany, or of that of the LIP in 1973 and of the
countless ghost towns following to factory closures or layoffs. There is
indeed a reappropriation of a reconquered space without which there is
no social struggle. The Renault factory in Billancourt, the famous
"workers' fortress", was a veritable city that workers competed with
management and... union bureaucrats from time to time! The labor
movement had its territories: factories, neighborhoods, certain cities,
etc. What the pension movement sorely lacked was precisely a territory,
a circumscribed living space in which the demonstrators and strikers
could have recognized themselves and which would have remained under
their control. The local inter-union organizations or the inter-pro AGMs
held after the demonstrations could have played this role.
The development of capitalism exploded these territories by dispersing
the proletariat. But the latter has not disappeared, quite the contrary,
and the class struggle, still central and omnipresent, is insinuating
itself into spaces newly taken into account with the rise of ecological
demands; but also in areas such as squatting movements to reclaim
housing or simply a living space; or the struggles which are beginning
to develop against touristification which only brutalizes social
relations. These are also territorial struggles.
Take the case of opposition to bedpans. Behind the simple resistance to
territorial planning, we find a struggle over the distribution of
wealth, a class struggle between the richest and the poorest. The
opposition movement is also crossed by divergent interests: the
different orientations are not simple points of view of different ideas
which are confronted and discussed, they also correspond to class
affiliations. For example, when the representatives of EELV multiply the
declarations condemning in advance the "incidents" and the "black
blocks", before the demonstration against the A69, it is not only out of
ideology/non-violent point of view ( moreover, they support the Israeli
offensive in Gaza), but because it harms their strategy of integration
into the political game and because they represent an ecology of safety
and care representative of the educated middle classes of the city centers .
We see almost everywhere that these struggles are a place of
politicization, in the sense that after the refusal of a specific
project which can modify their way of life, we arrive at a taking into
account of the global context in which it fits this project, that is to
say to a perception of the interests which underlie them. This is how,
in the fight against basins, we have seen over the years a rapprochement
between political activists and those who were simply critical of a
project. There may even have been an interaction with this struggle and
the movement on pensions.

Winnable struggles?
One of the reasons why these struggles have developed is that, faced
with the failures of the social movements of recent years, they appear
to be winnable, at least in part, and this is what mobilizes people who
do not were not previously part of regular activist practices. We see
for example that, as in Ardèche or Normandy, the struggles against THT
lines and other projects have set in motion people who had not seen fit
to oppose nuclear power plant projects in the past. Perhaps because they
did not see the possibility of winning then.
The dynamic that is created brings in new people as soon as they have
the feeling of existing in the movement, and not of serving as a
springboard for politicians. The fight against the Notre-Dame-des-Landes
airport is not for nothing in this feeling, and if many projects
continue despite opposition, we see here and there quite a few
abandonments, postponements or hesitations of the share of powers.

Autonomy above all
 From this arises the absolute necessity of the autonomy of the
collectives which have multiplied in recent times. The problem is
complex and the margin is narrow, because there is no shortage of
candidates to flirt with and then "coordinate" these collectives.
The help that more seasoned, older, more organized activists can provide
them in the form of infrastructure and experience is important and
positive: often, in the movement against basins, in Deux-Sèvres and
Vienne for example. , these are activists who traveled from neighboring
towns to try to raise awareness among the population against this or
that project and help form a local committee.
But the distance that separates simple help from a management role which
would end up dispossessing the collectives of their initiatives is thin.
It is important to be vigilant so that these collectives remain
autonomous and so that, if there must be coordination, it is directly
that of the grassroots collectives and not of groups which speak in
their name. Let's bet that these collectives are strong enough to take
what is useful from the assistance offered to them while remaining
autonomous. In any case, for our part, when we are present, it is this
orientation that we defend.

These struggles have not yet been absorbed by elements of the political
class (who are doing everything they can to catch up), which leads to a
certain desire to participate and the feeling that for once we are
serving a purpose. But the path is not without obstacles: often, the
first initiatives consist of documenting ourselves, collecting and
making public information, in short, becoming specialists too... and
exhausting ourselves in expert and counter roles. expert which end up
discouraging certain people and producing the opposite of the initial
dynamic.

As we close this issue we have some reasons to be optimistic. The
government's attempt to scare opponents and break the momentum that
emerged by dissolving the Earth Uprisings fizzled. No one cares about
this dissolution because much more serious and worrying is the use of
the conflict in Gaza to further reduce freedom of expression here. It is
much easier to label Hamas as "terrorist" than the black blocks or the
so-called activist environmentalists! The government pretends to fear
that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be exported to France. In
fact, he could well take advantage of it by arguing for the need to
restore order to reconstitute the national unity that the bourgeoisie is
calling for.

Le scribe

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article3987
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