#'Resistance was born on the morrow perhaps even it was born on the eve'

[centrifuge-politics]

Brick Club 4.1.4

This chapter gave me freaking whiplash, when can I just talk about Enjolras and the fact that I love him again?

We start off with a truly mind-boggling claim. “The terror which arises from social struggles is chargeable neither to the king nor to the democracy…let us, then, impute these terrible collisions only to the fatality of things. Whatever these tempests may be, human responsibility is not mingled with them.” Ooookay, this has me saltier than the Dead Sea. What are you saying, Hugo?? What happened to society and power are the villains? Let us, then, impute these terrible essentialist arguments only to the temporary blindness of an old privileged white guy. “God makes visible to men his will in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious language.” If only God had invoked a series of people’s uprisings against sundry monarchies and empires, so mysterious, if only we knew what he meant by all that. France witnessed six regime changes in as many decades from 1789 to 1848; I was under the mistaken impression that God knew French.

“Factions are blind men who aim straight.” Oof, partisanship, am I right? We all agree that something is wrong, but we can’t seem to agree on what it is and why or how best to fix it. Hugo says “factions,” but he pretty clearly means neo-royalists legitimists. The grand old parties…

The socialists are here! Finally, my people. They take the philosophy the revolution and the sundry political parties and say, ok, what do we do with this? How do we utilize the resources of society to ensure people are happy? “From these two things combined, public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity.” Be still my Marxist heart, someone has been reading The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844! What he’s describing here is the elimination of alienation from one’s labor and from society at large (public power) and a system that allows workers to proportionally benefit from the fruits of their labor.

Hugo rips on England for being capitalist pigs, but assures us that “It is of course understood that by these words…we designate not the people, but the social constructions.” Hugo says destroy the free market, increase strengthen the welfare state and social security, raise the minimum wage, free universal education, and nationalize the shit out of everything. He’s only doing this because I dragged him too hard in the last three and a half chapters and he wants to win me back…it’s working.

We turn the corner on 1832 and the slow moving lava is now a lightning storm, all of France can taste electricity in the air. The scene isn’t looking better on the international stage, but I’m not quite prepared to try and sort out that European mess. Worth mentioning is the sister revolt of silk workers during the First Canut Revolt in Lyon in 1831, a labor uprising to match Paris’s political uprising, “one the city of thought, the other the city of labour; at Paris civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities the same furnace glare.” This revolt, and its follow-up in 1834, were praised by Marx and Engels as the first uprising of the working class (in the Industrial era at least) and it inspired a number of other proletariat revolts both at home and abroad. That’s class consciousness, baby.