Thanks to the Gilets jaunes in France, a few astute social theorists are finally being heard on YouTube, despite mainstream resistance and diversion. They are finding words more lucidly than could be achieved in the absence of such revolutionary upheaval.
I’m referring to the renowned French economic analyst and essayist Charles Gave who, in his near-twilight years, has broken rank with his class in order to impart a penetrating and devastating analysis of the current French melt-down, based on the original work of French social geographer and author Christophe Guilluy. ((“Gilets Jaunes : Vers une Guerre Civile ?”, interview, YouTube channel Planetes360, uploaded December 12, 2018.))
Guilluy has been describing an emerging Gilets jaunes backlash for some fifteen years, through his analysis of the class structure, and its geographical, demographic and ideological basis, in France; which is virtually identical in most Western nations, certainly the UK, Canada, the USA and many more. ((“France is deeply fractured. Gilets jaunes are just a symptom”, by Christophe Guilluy, The Guardian, December 2, 2018.))
Basically, what was a relatively stable, balanced and integrated post-second-world-war working-class / middle-class / professional-class / managerial-class societal structure, has, over the course of several decades, and accelerated by the fall of the Soviet Union, devolved into three classes separated by large geographical, wage, ideological and mobility gaps.
The dominant class is comprised of the “bobos” (“bourgeois-bohème”). This is the highly-paid professional class of financial managers, media pundits, politicians, corporate lawyers, institutional professionals, governance civil servants, and so-on. They are urban, and espouse humanistic global “values” such as “free trade”, “human rights”, climate concerns, immigration justice, and so on.
The recently manufactured underclass is comprised of the imported immigrants that serve the bobos. They are restaurant workers, parking attendants, child-care workers, cleaners, cab drivers, food producers, and so on. They are malleable and obedient, as they benefit from First World amenities. They generally live in the urban-satellite suburbs and are provided with efficient mass-transportation to work, and so on. They are kept in-line and policed as needed.
The third class are the “deplorables”. ((“Clinton: Half of Trump supporters ‘basket of deplorables‘”, BBC News, September 10, 2016.)) They live outside of the large urban centres, in rural France, USA, UK… They are Trump, Le Pen, Brexit, the Gilets jaunes… They were the white factory workers, farmers, loggers, miners, industrial plant workers… who have largely been made redundant by the globalization that is managed by the bobos, always to the great and increasing benefit of the bobos, of course.
As such, the societal structure has evolved towards two camps: Those who are mobile and could live the same life anywhere, and those who want to live their lives where they are; those who share grandiose global values and those who struggle to stay at the same level.
The bobos run the show and see little utility in the rural remnants of the former society; a “remnant” that comprises half of the national population and is fiercely proud and nationalistic, while being imposed “values” that are out of sync with their daily concerns.
The transformation, especially since the early 1990s, has been spectacular. Executive salaries have skyrocketed. Professional salaries have increased disproportionately. Taxing of the ultra-rich has been eliminated. “Democracy” has been mechanized, with virtual impossibility of grassroots representation. Globalization logic is the new mantra, and protectionism is made to sound Neanderthal.
National sovereignty has been eliminated wherever possible. Sanitized globalist doctrine is infused everywhere: climate alarmism, generic anti-racism, generic gender equity, generic human rights, political correctness of language and attitudes… Meanwhile, actual genocidal military campaigns of economic blockades (“sanctions”), regime change, conquest, and nation destruction are the main drivers of the whole system. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, Palestine… to name just the most recent and ongoing trillion-dollar mass-murder and plunder projects.
Language is one of the strongest indicators of the new social-structure’s pathology. George Orwell could not write his novel today because it would be perceived as a second-rate current affairs report. Forced speech has reached epidemic proportions. Its importance cannot be over-stated. With virtuous regulated language comes the instant ability to recognize those who stand out and must be eliminated.
The conflict clearly opposes two distinct ideologies: Globalism and continued economic elitism versus nationalism and reconstruction of rural communities. The elitist “Left” has been globalist and reckless. The rural Right wants to preserve place and home. The battle is not capitalism versus socialism. The battle is between re-establishing class balance within national boundaries versus continued and accelerating global class exploitation, carbon taxes and all. ((“Most Oil Sector Emissions Will Be Exempt From Federal Carbon Pricing: Report”, by Canadian Press, Huffpost Business, updated December 11, 2018.))
Both sides have much to lose, and the bobos can manipulate the two underclasses to oppose each other rather than cooperate to force restructuring. Will Western societies completely become managed serfdoms and parallel favelas? Or will a more egalitarian and stable structure be imposed by the deplorables?
Theoretical physics studies of the stability of dominance hierarchies are relevant and provide a guide for the macroscopic approach that would newly stabilize society. From his PhD research, Joseph Hickey writes: ((“How Societies Form and Change”, by Joseph Hickey, Dissident Voice, December 26, 2017.))
The model thus suggests that the violence of societal interactions (?) and the degree of authoritarianism (?) in the society must be kept in check in order for the society to retain its structure over long periods of time and not degrade into a totalitarian state. As either of these features of inter-individual interactions is increased the inequality of the society increases. When the level of inequality becomes large enough that the society nears the transition into runaway deterioration of its class structure, the society may be required to reduce one or both of the parameters in order to retain a viable structure. Analysts have suggested that several recent major political events, including Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, are best understood as backlashes against increasing societal inequality. According to the model, for such backlashes to have a stabilizing effect on the social hierarchy, they must result in decreases in the violence of societal interactions, the degree of authoritarianism in the society, or both.
The enabling institutional mechanisms that accompany the said “degradation into a totalitarian state” of gap-divided classes were described by me here. ((“Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017.))