Protest
France has a new political and philosophical prophet. Step asideJean-Paul Sartre. Step forward, Stephane Hessel, 93. Mr Hessel'sslim volume - very slim - called Indignez-vous! ("Protest!" or "Cryout!") is a publishing and social phenomenon across the Channel.More than 600,000 copies have been sold since October. The "book",19 rambling pages of conversations with a sweet and honourable oldman, has been chosen by the readers of Le Monde as the publishingevent of 2010. "Publishing event" is right. The success of MrHessel's book is eloquent and telling. The book itself is not.
Indignez-vous! urges young people to emulate the wartime spiritof resistance to the Nazis by rejecting the "insolent, selfish"power of money and markets and by defending the social "values ofmodern democracy". The book, or pamphlet, is rather poorly written.It is repetitive, unoriginal, simplistic and frustratingly short.
The message - "indifference is crippling; be angry; revolt,peacefully, for what you believe in" - is admirable enough. As amanifesto for renewed faith in social-democratic politics in a worldwhere democracy and politics are losing control and respect (tomarket fundamentalism; to the power of China; to the blabberingglobal village of the internet) the pamphlet is lamentablyinadequate. It contains no deep analysis; no memorable writing; noprescriptions for action, except vague exhortations to "indignation"and "peaceful insurrection".
Here are a couple of brief extracts. "I would like everyone -every one of us - to find his or her own reason to cry out. That isa precious gift. When something makes you want to cry out, as Icried out against Nazism, you become a militant, tough andcommitted. You become part of the great stream of history ... andthis stream leads us towards more justice and more freedom but notthe uncontrolled freedom of the fox in the hen-house."
"... The productivist obsession of the West has plunged the worldinto a crisis which can only be resolved by a radical shift awayfrom the 'ever more', in the world of finance but also in scienceand technology. It is high time that ethics, justice and asustainable balance prevailed ..."
Honourable enough sentiments but hardly original or penetrating.How can one explain the book's extraordinary success in France?Partly, it is a tribute to Mr Hessel, a German-born Frenchresistance hero who survived torture and concentration camps tobecome a human rights advocate and diplomat after the war. Partly,it is a reflection on the well-meaning but unreflective, gutleftiness of a section of the French chattering classes. The book isbeing translated into English and several other languages. It isdifficult to image it being such a triumph elsewhere.
And yet, and yet. The success of Mr Hessel's book - if not thebook itself - may tell us a great deal. There is, not only inFrance, but also in Britain, the rest of Europe, and even in the US,an incoherent and, as yet undirected, popular anger and anxiety. Asthe German philosopher, Anselm Jappe, says in a new book, IndebtedUnto Death: The Decomposition Of Capitalism, the 2008 crash was notonly a financial crisis but a "crisis of civilisation".
The Western world has lost one religion (the post-Thatcher andReagan blind worship of markets) but cannot yet bring itself tobelieve in another one. There is widespread anger that the samemarket institutions, which were bailed out by state funds in 2008-9, used that money, in effect, to speculate against state debt in2009-10. There is incomprehension that the total value of money"invested" in world financial markets (700,000bn, according to arecent French parliamentary report) should be equivalent to 12 timesthe value of the annual world GDP.
To continue such vast, virtual speculation is, we know, insane.To try to curb it might, the markets tell us, send the globe into aneven more catastrophic recession. The people who play in thisspeculative casino hand fortunes to one another. Meanwhile, publicspending, we are told, must be cut to prevent those same people fromspeculating against the euro, or against sterling, or against thedollar.
We know that the growth-led model for economic and politicalsuccess threatens to destroy the planet. At the same time, we cannotseriously imagine any other model. Meanwhile, little by little, notinvisibly but visibly, China, representing an entirely different setof political values to the West, is buying up Western debt andWestern industries and, in effect, Western consciences and Westernsouls. We should, as Mr Hessel suggests, logically, be turningtowards the "left" and a renewed belief in the importance ofregulation, common action and state investment for the public good.There remains, however, a morbid terror of anything labelled "left" -driven by memories of the Soviet debacle and the alleged failures ofthe post-war welfare state.
These fears are rigorously encouraged, and enforced, by a largepart of the Western media - certainly the British and American media- which continues to believe in, or at least, peddle versions of theold market fundamentalism. Worse, there is a deepening contempt -also enforced by part of the media and the autarchic instincts ofthe internet - for all mainstream politics, politicians and even fordemocracy itself.
Mr Hessel's book touches on all these themes with varying degreesof imprecision. What he fails to offer is any coherent new response,other than "indignation". The runaway success of his book suggeststhat there is a vast, potential followership (and not just inFrance) for a new political Messiah of the centre-left: someone whocould articulate the anger and frustration of the middle classes(the new "masses") and offer a convincing, democratic way throughthe sinister muddle of the early 21st century.
The alternative - a kind of fascism-lite - can already beglimpsed in the Tea Party in the US and the rise of middle-class,anti-immigrant populist parties in Europe (G&T parties?) The successof Mr Hessel's book is telling sign of the times. Regrettably, it isunlikely to change them.
j.lichfield@independent.co.uk
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