Tomjo, who has run the website chez.renart.info for several years, has compiled several texts in this book focusing on the sugar beet industry, the agri-food sector, and gigafactories (battery manufacturing plants). These are among the main pillars of the industrial reconversion (excuse me, Transition!) of the Hauts-de-France region, a project we've been hearing about for over 30 years now-ever since the announced closure of mines, textile mills, and steelworks. This 200-page work oscillates between a well-argued industrial critique, historical narratives and colorful biographies, an anti-tech indictment that doesn't shy away from class struggle, and even a cookbook... you'll learn a recipe for anti-tech pizza dough! The whole thing serves as a salutary reminder of the devastating social, health, and environmental consequences of capitalism in the North, based on serious investigative work conducted by the author over many years. Here are a few questions we asked Tomjo to entice you to read his writing.
1) Why did you choose to write about beets, pizza, and batteries?
It came about through current events! It all started with our legal action with ASPI (Association for the Elimination of Industrial Pollution), which we created in 2014 with friends and our girlfriend, an environmental lawyer. We joined a lawsuit against the TEREOS group-the world's fourth-largest sugar producer, but the largest in France, and a specialist in sugar beets. In April 2020, during the lockdown, the factory in Escaudoeuvres (Nord) accidentally released the equivalent of 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools of "wastewater" into the Scheldt River-a river that flows from Cambrai to Antwerp, passing through Tournai and Ghent-causing the death of dozens of tons of fish. The media, preoccupied with the pandemic, barely covered it. At the same time, testimonies were emerging about working conditions akin to slavery in the TEREOS sugar cane fields in Brazil. That's when I decided to focus on sugar beets! With ASPI, we won a victory in early 2023 against TEREOS, which received a larger fine than Total for the Erika oil spill. Yet, we found ourselves quite alone against such a disastrous and centrally important industry for the Hauts-de-France region. You could say we were completely ignored by elected officials. This entire political class, which remained silent about this historic catastrophe, was marching in demonstrations barely a month after the verdict to prevent the factory's closure. From La France Insoumise (LFI) to the right wing, everyone defended the sugar company, completely ignoring the workers' conditions and the environmental impact of the beet farmers. To justify themselves and lend themselves historical weight, everyone trotted out the old imperial myth of sugar beets, of this industrial heritage of which they were supposedly so proud-concepts that greatly interest me (1)-and the fabricated story of Napoleon's invention of beet sugar to circumvent the Continental Blockade. I tell all about it in the book!
The topic of frozen pizzas was a suggestion from the publisher (Service Compris), my friends at Pièces et Main d'oeuvre. In 2022, the Buitoni factory in Caudry, right next to Escaudoeuvres, sold pizzas contaminated with E. coli bacteria. Seventy-five children fell ill, most were left disabled, and two died. By following the case closely, you stumble upon some incredible scenes. The arrogance of Nestlé executives, assuring everyone of the factory's impeccable hygiene, was contradicted the very next morning by a state inspection. Minister Olivier Véran, on camera, assured everyone of the factory's good condition, while the prefecture's hygiene department had been warning about its state for over ten years. And then you dig deeper and you uncover the shameful, hidden history of Buitoni, a company founded by an early fascist, a close associate of Mussolini and organizer of the March on Rome. I confess, I enjoy this kind of research! And then, as with TEREOS, the health scandal raises fears of the factory's closure, and this whole little class of local bigwigs suddenly rises up to defend jobs, while they haven't uttered a word of compassion for the dead.
Finally, regarding gigafactories, the issue is unavoidable here, with the opening of five battery plants and ministers parading around every other day in their hard hats. Courant Alternatif has already dedicated an issue to it (2). So, like any well-intentioned citizen, I kept a close eye on the media, read the impact studies and consultation documents, and, as with Buitoni, I stumbled upon the shameful history of the SAFT company during the war, the main French battery company that opened the first gigafactory - called ACC in Billy-Berclau/Douvrin - at the National Archives. My interest in gigafactories also stems from the massive and rather clumsy propaganda surrounding the "Transition," to the point that no critical voice exists. Here again, you come across some truly remarkable scenes where anti-nuclear associations and parties wholeheartedly applaud factories that can consume the energy of a single reactor. But the local environmental movement is full of surprises, as I already mentioned in *The Green Hell*, in 2013.
2) Your point is striking. But actually, is the North really so bleak? Why is it such a unique region in your opinion? In its economic and political history, its geography?
Why did we get to this point? There are several factors, some more well-known than others. First, the North, Flanders, which belonged to the Netherlands, saw the emergence of early capitalism. Without being exhaustive (3), you observe: an agricultural revolution that freed the workforce from servitude as early as the 12th-13th centuries; the historical presence of a textile industry that traded from the Baltic to Syria; an extremely wealthy bourgeoisie that invented the Stock Exchange and triggered the first speculative crisis in history, the Tulip Mania (1636); an early division of labor in the textile industry and shipbuilding; A republican revolution two centuries before the French Revolution, in the United Provinces, with a fervent Protestantism as its ideological foundation, advocating hard work. Finally, though this story is better known, there's the tragedy of coal mining from the late 18th century onward, which devastated the textile, railway, and steel industries, among others.
The North was at the forefront of capitalism, and local capitalism is now at the forefront of managing its own negative impacts. We can mention these data center and battery warehouse projects on land too polluted to be used for anything other than paving it over. A friend came up with the expression "while it's still too late...", which we used for an exhibition in Roubaix, to describe this perpetual cycle in which disaster creates opportunities for new disasters. Finally, on a cultural level, I would say that we are paying the price for centuries of paternalism in textiles, mining, and sugar. For 150 years, your boss was your landlord, your mayor the one who built your church, organized your leisure activities, paid your medical bills, and sent you on vacation. A totality took hold, encompassing all of life, so much so that you have a terrible time escaping this industrial fantasy. Look at the reactions to promises of jobs in the automotive, steel, battery, and nuclear industries: we are still subject to the benevolent care of the good boss who will create a good future for us.
3) Your anti-industrial critique is scathing; no one is spared, whether it's the bosses and the state (of course!), but also the unions and the workers who produce crappy products... But you manage to stay on the razor's edge between "anti-tech" criticism and class struggle. In your opinion, what are the possible connections between these two aspects?
One can have a class position while being anti-industrial. The history of the labor movement proves this. In early 19th-century England, the Luddites smashed up the looms that competed with them, stealing their livelihoods and autonomy. Various sectors rose up against their mechanization/proletarianization: typesetters, printers, locksmiths, and some silk weavers (canuts), who were at the forefront of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Many more examples could be cited, in England, Belgium, and elsewhere.
We can therefore consider both sides, provided we delve into the Marxist legacy. Marx was brilliant at understanding the socio-economic consequences of the division of labor and capitalist appropriation, but his political errors are definitive: the development of the productive forces did not create the conditions for transcending capitalism, but quite the opposite! The single example of nuclear waste illustrates this. It places us, for millennia, under the authority of experts, technocrats, and their police.
The socialists believed that the interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were irreconcilable. They are indeed irreconcilable when it comes to the distribution of value and power. But an alliance systematically forms whenever it is necessary to preserve the means of production, however deadly they may be. We see this right now with Arcelor-Mittal in Dunkirk. Everyone agrees on saving "French" steel, as if the factory were a little earthly paradise, as if this industry didn't degrade the environment for centuries to come, as if it weren't the essential sector of the most disastrous industries: arms, automobiles, and nuclear power. No one disputes either decarbonization or the new steel production lines for electric motors. The only people I've heard speak out against Arcelor are those with asbestos exposure or retirees (4). I have only ever seen workers once demanding the closure of their factory, and that was in 2012 at the Ilva steelworks in Taranto, Puglia (5). Since then, I have no other examples.
Notes:
1 - For several years, Renart.info has offered a tour operator, "Nord-Pas-de-Calais Adventure," to explore the region's worst industrial sites, which have profoundly marked their surroundings. Recently, Tomjo has also started offering a guided tour of the now-vanished Saint-Sauveur district, a significant site in the local working-class history.
2 - See issue 350 of May 2025, available on the website https://oclibertaire.lautre.net
3 - For further explanation, read with interest the various chapters of the series "Blue Like an Orange" that Tomjo wrote on Flemish capitalism, which logically finds extensions in Northern France and elsewhere.
4 - See "Not a Penny for the Transition" and "Decarbonization or Hope in a Kit," renart.info. On the critique of work and the myth of miners, see 100% Death Postscript, directed by Modeste Richard and Tomjo in 2017, when the mining basin became a UNESCO World Heritage Site amidst piles of silicosis-ridden corpses.
5 - Read "Death in Taranto," La Brique no. 33, Oct.-Nov. 2012
Pizzas - Beets - Batteries. These three regional specialties illustrate the same phenomenon, as total as it is undeniable: the subjugation of a region, its landscapes, its inhabitants, and its utopian ideals, to the industrial exploitation regime that has reigned for at least two centuries.
Here is the publisher's description. Service included.
Follow the guide. Tomjo tells us the astonishing and true story of the sugar beet, the pizza machine, and the electric battery. Enough to verify firsthand that electrical energy, whatever its source, is neither "sustainable" nor decarbonized, and that the so-called Giga-Transition is in fact merely continuing the scorched-earth policy by other technological means. Two centuries of deadly industry have replaced the mines, weaving mills, and steelworks between Lille and Dunkirk with new calamities. As if the people of the North were doomed to the curse of a land poisoned by factory waste; as much as they are by the hard, mindless, and unhealthy jobs they are all too happy to accept, in order to produce and consume the junk food they are force-fed.
We don't really know what's left to save in the North, or what hope remains; except perhaps the hope of speaking out about what we see, what we know, what we think; for those who refuse to die peacefully alongside industrial society.
Tomjo, a troublemaker from the North, an environmentalist and anti-industrialist, runs the website Chez Renart ("news from the North and elsewhere"), as well as guided tours of industrial wastelands and devastation in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. He has published *L'enfer Vert* (Green Hell), a project paved with good intentions (L'Échappée, 2013), and numerous articles of technocriticism.
The book can be ordered in bookstores:
"Nord c'est noir" by Tomjo, Service compris, 2025 (ISBN 9791094229903)
By mail to Renart bookstore: EUR19 + EUR2.50 shipping, by sending a check payable to ASPI to the following address: Renart, Chez Rita, 49 rue Daubenton, 59100 Roubaix, France.
Or through Renart's online bookstore.
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4669
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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