Andrée Michel was a rebellious, antimilitarist, feminist, and
anticolonialist woman who, as a researcher at the CNRS (French NationalCenter for Scientific Research), always pursued research topics that
responded to social inequalities and discrimination. She was wary of
identity-based designations and doctrinaire ideologies. Her committed
writings are all based on facts, evidence, and official statements from
those (and now those) who are destroying the world. Highly independent,
she was close to anarchist, communist, and feminist ideas, but she
excessively cultivated her freedom of thought, reflection, and research,
which caused her some problems with the CNRS. She participated numerous
times in Nelly Trumel's program "Femmes Libres" on Radio Libertaire.
Living in Montreuil, she frequented the Maison des Femmes founded by
Thérèse Clerc, but she disagreed with their intransigence against the
Islamic veil and other ideological rigidities. A staunch
internationalist, she believed that women around the world had more
relevance in their emancipatory actions than in France, where political
politicking encompassed everything. An anti-militarist, she was on the
Peace Boat against the war in Iraq, which didn't stop her from being a
suitcase carrier-because most often, these famous "suitcase carriers"
were women during the war in Algeria. The list of her commitments is
long, the latest of which was to denounce rape as a weapon of war and
support the women of the DRC (Congo) raped by militiamen and/or army
soldiers since 1994 (Appeal of the 52 Godmothers). Against war and
everything that engenders it. "Before," explains Andrée Michel, "I
called myself a pacifist. Today, I prefer to declare myself
anti-militarist to express my opposition to all operations carried out
to promote the production and sale of weapons."
Here is a tribute text that reflects on the career of this comrade!
I wanted to pay tribute to Andrée Michel, sociologist, feminist, and
anti-militarist, who passed away in February 2022, for her book Feminism
and Anti-Militarism (Éditions Ixe, 2012).
Andrée Michèle was both a researcher at the CNRS and an activist.
Grenoble played an important role in her career, as she studied and
taught philosophy and literature there. In her work, she devoted herself
first to family, then to work, economics, politics, migration, and the
militarization of our societies. Around the 1980s, she focused her
research on the connections between industry, business, and arms, in
conjunction with civil society and women. She analyzed the
military-industrial complex using economic, sociological, and historical
data, as well as statistics provided by international institutions. At
the same time, she became involved in European and American feminist
networks against war and militarism, a tireless commitment she would
pursue until the end of her life.
In her essay, she demonstrates that patriarchy is embodied in the arms
industry, arms sales, and war, and that this military-industrial complex
is linked to financial capitalism. Military personnel, industrialists,
scientists, bureaucrats, bankers, and lobbyists-generally all former
students of prestigious universities and the major civil service-belong
to the highly disciplined elite civil servant caste. From this elite
class, women are excluded, as are social and racial diversity. Since the
beginning of the 21st century, there have been some stirrings of change
that could be called equal opportunity or gender quotas, but the
military-industrial stronghold remains so heavily guarded that it barely
stirs at its core.
Andrée Michel explains that a country's militarization policy generates
violence against women by worsening the sexual division of labor and
resulting unemployment. This militarization policy only increases the
profits, power, prestige, and might of the military-industrial complex
at the expense of other social classes. It demonstrates that military
spending generates fewer jobs than other categories of public spending.
One million dollars invested in the manufacture of a bomber aircraft
produces 58,000 jobs. The same million invested in education produces
more than 118,000.
Within a country's borders, the military-industrial complex uses the
rhetoric of national security to suppress any demand for social and
environmental justice. Thus, defense becomes the greatest enemy of
citizens and democracy. Beyond its borders, this military-industrial
complex is exported and fosters the proliferation of wars. It's worth
remembering that France ranks second or third in the world in arms
sales, depending on the year!
In the early 1980s, the countries of the Global South found themselves
deeply in debt due to some thirty years of imposed development policies.
They were then subject to significant exports of agricultural, forestry,
and extractive raw materials. At the same time, the countries of the
Global North reduced international subsidies for basic products and
public funding for health, education, and transportation. For women in
the Global South, the impoverishment was multifaceted, especially as men
took over export crops and, in effect, reduced the subsistence
agriculture that women used to feed their families. Arms exports from
the Global North further exacerbated this debt and the social situation
in these countries. After World War II, the military-industrial
complexes primarily exported wars to the Global South. In 1987, an
international conference was held entitled: Is there a gender policy
within the policy of war, or is there a policy of war within a gender
policy? Every war, every military base, brings an accelerated increase
in the destruction of women's lives. In addition to prostitution and
rape, there are abortions and fatherless children.
I would like to quote a short excerpt from Andrée Michel's essay, which
she could have written since the recent presidential election in the
United States:
NATO can be considered one of the privileged fields of action of the
American military-industrial complex, whose supreme commander is always
an American general. He is responsible for influencing international
military policy so that it is favorable to his country. He is also
tasked with persuading allied governments to reduce their social
spending and increase their military spending. This reduces the
competitiveness of European civilian industry by reducing investment and
allows for more arms sales to Europe. NATO thus exercises political and
economic control over its European allies.
Andrée Michel's research implicitly reveals the destructive power of
class, racial, and gender hierarchies generated by the
military-industrial complex.
Needless to say, during wars, people believe they are dying for their
commitments, but in fact, they are dying for the shareholders of
multinational defense corporations!
The military-industrial system not only profoundly degrades social
relations, destroys and kills humans, but it also contributes to the
massacres of animal and plant species, as well as to climate change. It
alone generates numerous genocides and ecocides.
Christiane Geoffroy, 2025
https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4452
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