Marco D’Eramo, Unrest and Repetition — Sidecar
▻https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/unrest-and-repetition
We cannot but recall the popular revolts that periodically shook the ancien régime and were regularly and mercilessly repressed: the Grande Jacquerie of 1358 (which gave rise to the common name for all subsequent peasant uprisings), the Tuchin Revolt in Languedoc (1363-84), the Ciompi Revolt in Florence (1378), the Wat Tyler’s Rebellion (1381), the Peasant’s War in Germany (1524-6), the Carnival in Romans (1580) and Masianello’s Revolt in Naples (1647). The historian Samuel Cohn has counted more than 200 of these instances in France, Flanders and Italy from 1245 to 1424. But it was the great historian Marc Bloch who noted how the feudal system needed these revolts to sustain itself:
A social system is not only characterised by its internal structure, but also by the reactions it provokes: a system founded on commandments can, in certain moments, imply reciprocal duties of aid carried out honestly, as it can also lead to brutal outbursts of hostility. To the eyes of the historian, who must merely note and explain the relationships between phenomena, the agrarian revolt appears as inseparable to the seigneurial regime as, for instance, the strike is to the great capitalist enterprise.
Bloch’s reflection leads us to the following question: if the jacquerie is inseparable from feudalism, and the strike from Fordist capitalism, then to what command system does the tumult of the NEETs correspond? There is only one answer: a system – neoliberalism – in which the plebe has been reconstituted. Who are these new plebians? They are the NEETs of the US high-rise projects and the neighbourhoods of south Tehran, the subproletarians of the zones sensibles. They are the class that many of today’s so-called ‘progressives’ disdain, fear, or at the best of times ignore.