“Macronism is not violent by chance”

2023-05-15 08:00:06

On says a lot of bad things about Emmanuel Macron about the forced passage of the pension reform, but we forget that he is the man for the job, whose historic function today consists of pursuing a project that is beyond him . Explain the impasse of the current power by the opportunity offered by the V^e Republic to resort to means that do not conform to political liberalism is therefore not enough: the 49.3 is here only the generic weapon of a war that is both more specific and broader, as are the police forces and their immoderate use of violence.

Read the decryption: Article reserved for our subscribers Between Emmanuel Macron and the street, the battle for legitimacy for pension reform

It is urgent that we clearly understand how neoliberalism, not to be confused with the non-intervention of the State, is the governmental practice of a civil war against democracy, in the sense that Michel Foucault argued that “Civil war is the matrix of all power struggles, of all power strategies”.

Neoliberalism was born at the turn of the 1930s with the objective of establishing a political order that would guarantee the “economic freedoms”. It was necessary “renovating liberalism” by making the state the protective membrane of market competition, the laissez-faire policy of the classical liberals and their doctrine of the minimal state having failed to preserve the market from the dangerous desire for equality of the masses.

From the outset, the supporters of neoliberalism thus explicitly identified one of the main problems that threatened their project of fluidification of the market by the State: democracy, which is always likely to endanger the functioning of the market. Their political strategy, which finds its roots in a deeply reactionary demophobia, has remained invariable from Hayek to today. It consists in neutralizing all the forces which would attack the principle of competition by taking advantage of social justice, denounced as a myth.

But is it legitimate to speak of “civil war” to describe the establishment of the strong neoliberal state against social and political forces hostile to capitalism or simply desirous of more equality and solidarity?

Worsening of seizures

In this regard, the history of the relationship between neoliberal doctrine and governmental practice is not misleading. As early as 1927, the economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) applauded, in Vienna, when the emergency powers given to the police to repress a workers’ demonstration caused 89 deaths. The three Nobel Prize winners in economics Friedrich Hayek (1974), Milton Friedman (1976) and James Buchanan (1986) met at the Société du Mont-Pèlerin, a liberal think tank, to celebrate, in 1981, the dictatorship of Chilean Augusto Pinochet, at the height of his repression.

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