“A people’s revolt against the king. Something utterly French.

” An Interview with
Toni Negri

Macron has always presented himself as beyond traditional political categories. In this
interview with the Huffington Post, Toni Negri argues that the gilets jaunes
movement, which can be characterised as neither Left nor Right, has now challenged
Macron on his own representational ground, and forced centrist populism into its first
great crisis.

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Put in this way, the issue seems both simple and complex, but certainly alarming.
From the French capital, his home for many years, Toni Negri is trying to make sense
of the protests that have been rocking the country for weeks. The gilets jaunes protests
are not easy to read, even for Negri, who certainly knows a thing or two about
workers’ and student movements. Because they represent a new phenomenon, Negri
argues, “this is not ’68, which was too much of its century. This is something
different, and most importantly, it is neither of the Left nor the Right: it is against
Macron, who has destroyed all intermediary bodies and finds himself with no
possibility of mediation and not even the slightest chance to make a Gaullist appeal.”
Negri’s reading makes recourse to grandiose historical comparisons, to de Gaulle’s
celebrated appeal to the “France liberated from the Nazis” in 1940, intended to
underline the gravity of the situation. The fact that Macron has no room to
manoeuvre, continues Negri, “is a very serious problem, a disaster that should pose
questions for the architects of centrist populism… “

Angela Mauro: In a reflection published on the blog Euronomade.info you speak

about insurrection. Is this what we are dealing with?

Toni Negri: The word insurrection implies success, here the phenomenon is still
developing. We can certainly say that we are dealing with a people’s revolt against the
king, the sovereign, to put an end to the people’s misery. It is something utterly
French. But if the sovereign does not agree you can also take him to the guillotine:
this is how the nature of the relationship.

AM: In what sense?

TN: In the sense that it is not only a revolt: it is a radical revolt. You can see that in
the pickets taking place across the country, it is not confined to the city. There are
pickets in the middle of the countryside, pickets have been held everywhere to mark
the presence of the gilets jaunes,their behaviour seems almost mechanical. They will
not be stopped.

AM: Macron has backed down over the increase in petrol taxes, the issue that sparked
the protests in mid-November. Now he has even eliminated the taxes. Is this not an
adequate solution?

TN: No. It is no longer enough. If he had done it after the first Saturday of protests,
the 17th November, perhaps the situation could have been resolved, perhaps… But we
can be sure that it is no longer just about the petrol tax. My impression is that the
protest’s demands have accumulated to become a demand for fiscal justice and even
justice in other senses: it is about the cost of living. This is why this move by Macron
has failed to quell the revolt.

AM: Why has this happened and why has it happened in France?

TN: Because, at the beginning of his ascent to power, Macron had picked up on this
discontent and had made it the basis of his success. This now means that the revolt is
against him: he had presented himself as the “sovereign” and he won, he was able to
impose his rule. Now what is happening is that Macron’s promise is being overturned:
Macron has always presented himself as beyond Left and Right, he has sought to
manoeuvre himself on a different terrain of representation, yet he is now confronted
with movements that express themselves according to the same guidelines. It is, in
short, a failure of centrist populism, populism’s first great crisis.

AM: At the beginning the gilets jaunes were seen as mainly a right-wing movement.
Is this the case?

TN: Right and Left have been erased, they do not exist anymore, and they do not exist
among the gilets jaunes. The South of France is full of blockades. Initially, they were
spoken about as right-wing blockades, “they’re hunting types”, people said here in
France. In only a few days, however, a whole variety of different categories of people
had gathered around these blockades: pensioners, workers, people living in poverty
posing the problem of inequality. And it is interesting that, at least until now, they
have not been speaking about immigration, it does not figure among their demands.
As such, the gilets jaunes’ protest presents itself as culturally closed, the central
themes being focused on the cost of living, it is almost parochial. There is certainly a
risk that it could drift to the right, but for now we cannot simply say that it is a right-
wing protest.

AM: Are there differences between the revolt of the gilets jaunes in the provinces and
the protest in the city?

TN: Yes, but the protests are everywhere, even though you perhaps won’t necessarily
see gilets jaunes in the city. Yesterday, for example, students occupied one of the
buildings of the Sorbonne, there are high-school students on strike, and a truck
drivers’ strike has been called for Sunday. And then we are beginning to hear rumours
that the security forces will not hold up….

AM: Is it possible that they will join the protests?

TN: I am not saying that, but there have been incidents of insubordination. It is not
difficult to imagine when you think that the average gendarme lives in conditions that
are clearly reflected in the gilets jaunes’ protests…

AM: Since you mention the truck drivers’ strike, in Italy many people are comparing
this French revolt to the phenomenon of the so-calledforconithe protest of the Italian
truck-drivers of some years ago…[1]

TN: That has nothing to do with the gilets jaunes. The forconi movement was a
Sicilian and Turinese phenomenon, there are no similarities whatsoever. Indeed, I see
more similarities with the No Tav movement in the Susa valley in terms of the level of
radicality…

AM: With the old working class in crisis and precarity having become the norm, is
this perhaps what we need to prepare for: revolts that cannot be defined as Left or
Right, a general anger that projects our digital age backwards rather than forwards, to
pre-19th century historical phases and to, I would say, “primitive” protests, far
removed from the intellectual elaboration of ’68.

TN: I do not believe that Right and Left are finished. The parties of the Right and the
Left are finished. The mechanisms of representation have been blocked up. The class
struggle continues to be fundamental, even if it sometimes manifests itself in spurious
ways. In France, it sometimes seems like a repetition of the revolution… of 1789, but
it is only an illusion…

AM: Is this the end for Macron?

TN: I don’t know, we need to wait and see what happens. For sure he has everyone
against him. Besides, this is not ’68, which was too much of its century.This is
something different, and most importantly it is neither of the Left nor the Right: it is
against Macron, who has destroyed all intermediary bodies and finds himself with no
possibility of mediation and not even the slightest chance to make a Gaullist appeal. It
is a very serious problem, a disaster that should pose serious questions for the
architects of centrist populism…

AM: I imagine that alarm bells should be ringing for those in Italy who hope to follow
Macron’s example, I refer here to Renzi…. But if we turn to Italy: we have no gilets
jaunes. Will we ever have them?

TN: Italy is still an open case: the PD is about to split, the movement around Renzi
that is breaking away has fallen from grace. Aside from this, I do not know whether
there is a risk of an Italian gilets jaunesmovement: it depends on what will happen
with this unnatural alliance between the League and the 5 Star Movement. I have
always viewed the 5 Star Movement as a derivative of multitudinous behaviour. And
it is true that they are now having to deal with growing discontent, precisely because
of their alliance with the League. But it all depends on what happens with this
government, which is, moreover, completely isolated within Europe, it is quite
incredible…

[1] The “pitchforks” movement, a movement began by agricultural business owners in

Sicily then extended to include truck drivers across the country. The movement held
protests and blockades during the winter of 2011/2012, and a nation-wide strike on
road-freight that also involved some petrol stations. The movement declared itself
non-partisan, though in reality both the far-Right and organised crime played a role.

This article was originally published in the Italian edition of Huffington Post. It has
been translated from Italian by Bethan Bowett.