Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Inkwell welcomes Ida Susser, PhD, a Distinguished  Professor of
Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. We'll be discussing her
recent book, THE YELLOW VESTS AND THE BATTLE FOR DEMOCRACY: TAKING
TO THE STREETS OF PARIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY, which focuses on
commoning movements and new visions. Her previous books include: 
NORMAN STREET, a study of working class opposition to cutbacks
during the New York City fiscal crisis and the transition of
Greenpoint-Williamsburg from a working class neighborhood to a
gentrified enclave, and AIDS, SEX AND CULTURE: GLOBAL POLITICS AND
SURVIVAL IN SOUTHERN AFRICA, a history of the power of social
movements to transform health.

Leading the conversation with Ida is David L. Wilson, who has been a
member of the WELL since 1994.  David studied anthropology and did
fieldwork in France and Tunisia studying the immigrant workers who
came to France for work from Algeria and Tunisia.  He later went to
work for the regional planning agency in the Twin Cities
administering government housing programs.  He left that to work for
nonprofit community development agencies to build, preserve, and
advocate for subsidized housing.  He last worked to correct the
injuries suffered city-wide in East St. Louis, Il from an elaborate
mortgage fraud scheme.
  

    
You have quite a diverse background in academia.  Your research
interests range from the Kalahari Desert in Namibia to New York
City, France, and Spain.  What led you to become interested in
political movements in present day France?
  

    
I was brought up by political parents in exile and I have always had
a curiosity about the world and how to change it. Born in apartheid
South Africa of parents who worked with Nelson Mandela I was taught
very early to analyze government and social policies critically.
However, as a young girl, although I had excellent academic
opportunities, I could never sit long in the library. I always
wanted to talk with people directly to understand what they thought.
It was partly this restlessness combined with my belief in the
possibilities of changing unjust situations that has led me to
explore many parts of the world. I found the rare discipline of
anthropology that allowed me to do this.
  

    
How did you become interested in protest movements? Was it a
professional interest or was there
something more personal involved.
  

    
As the early feminists said, the personal is political. As I was
born in the shadow of World War !!, I could not help but be
concerned with politics. One of my cousins escaped from Germany and
said he would never run away again -- so he became an activist in
the underground movement against the fascist -apartheid government
which took control in South Africa after the war. As a little girl,
I was taken to protests and then when my parents left for the U.K. I
was taken on the Aldermaston marches against the atom bomb.
As a college student on the Columbia University campus (Barnard
College) in 1968, I saw firsthand how participating in
demonstrations transformed people who acted for change as well as
transforming the university and the wider context.
My own take from my early experiences in South Africa where people
fought for over 30 years until the successful liberation has always
been to believe that social transformation might be possible. I
wanted to research in what ways or through what processes people
might become agents of their own futures, and promote a better
worls, even in the most difficult circumstances.
  

    
The Yellow Vest Movement got scant attention in the US media in 2018
when it started. If I remember
correctly there was something about truck drivers and farmers
blocking the roads in rural France. As the

movement picked up steam we heard a little more. As the protests
moved to the Paris the media here
characterized it as something like the Occupy Wall Street protests
in NYC. What was the genesis of the
Yellow Vests and how did it grow and flourish?
  

    

Yes the Yellow Vests first rushed through  the streets of Paris on
Saturday November 17 2018.  This became an iconic date and the
Yellow Vests rushed through Paris and other large cities every
Saturday for the next 2 years. In fact they continued until the
Macron government shut down protests in the face of the Covid
epidemic in March 2020.
 However, the Yellow Vests were not FROM Paris, they were actually
from the provinces and had been meeting in the traffic circles of
France outside the big cities for a while. They had been protesting
a new diesel tax proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron since
early summer 2018. Truck drivers alongside working class cheap
diesel car drivers had taken up the call and began to put Yellow
Vests on their windscreens to indicate their support. Yellow Vests
were the bright yellow construction vests that the French government
required every car to carry. They were meant to protect drivers in
case the car broke down and they had to stop on the highways. As
Yellow Vest protesters began to recognize each other they built
cabins at the roundabouts (rondpoints) and met almost daily to
discuss their problems and political demands. Over time, as I
describe in the book, the Yellow Vests became a protest movement
against the drastic government cutbacks and privatization of health
care, education, public transportation and other services. The book
shows the ways in which the Yelllow Vests came to join with other
movements, such as the union fight to maintain pensions and the
movements for Environmental justice. Although they won the battle of
the gas tax as Macron rescinded it within a few weeks, the
protesters by then had understood that they shared many other
difficulties and they emerged as part of an ongoing protest movement
to protect the welfare state as well as to fight for the
environment. One of their new slogans over time became "From the
end of the month (ie food and rent) to the End of the World".
  

    
Welcome to the WELL, Ida! I haven't read your book yet and don't
quite know what questions to ask right now. But the subject of
populist uprisings is fascinating to me, and I'll be reading along.
  

    
I am almost through this book, I somehow thought the conversation
began tomorrow...Ida, can you say more about how disability
rights/disability justice came up during the time of the Yellow
Vests? I recently read Robert McRuer's "Crip Times: Disability,
Globalization, and Resistance," which looks particularly at disabled
activism in the UK under the politics of austerity in the 2010s.
McRuer also writes about Spain, Mexico, Chile and Greece, but not
France. 

I'd also be interested in hearing more about how Yellow Vest
activism intersected and interacted with movements for queer rights.
  

    
Molo, Isa! [ Xhosa: Good Day -- coming or going.]

> As I was born in the shadow of World War !! .... Born in apartheid
South Africa of parents who worked with Nelson Mandela ...

Ditto and likewise. (But born during WW2 : 1942) My parents taught
Nelson Mandela in high school at Healdtown. My college sweetheart
Sarah Christie worked with the second-tier at Robin Island after
Mandela was released.

One of them said he wanted just to retire to a Transkei hillside and
never see .. or HEAR ... the Ocean again! 

 (Sarah  later became a senior official  in the World Bank.)
  

    
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s-and-page01.html>.

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This conversation will continue for at least two weeks, through
August 24. Thanks for being part of it!
  

    
Looking forward to learning about this-- I somehow missed that the
Yellow Vest movement had expanded beyond the first things I heard
about it when it started--the diesel tax, farmers, and truck
blockades.

The French have a history of street activism that feels much more
deeply culturally ingrained than what happens in America, even
though we do have large street protest history. I wonder if you
might say something about that, as an anthropologist who's seen
activism efforts in multiple cultures. I would guess that the roots
are in the French Revolution, but I'd love some more informed
thoughts.
  

    
(7)
Dear Frako
I'm also very interested in populist movements - or at least
figuring out if that's a useful description! Hope to hear what you
think after reading the book!
  

    
(8)
Dear Katherine
I am not an expert on the disability movement in France - although
my friends Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg have published quite a bit
on this including I believe internationally. I saw the movie on
Crips at a camp in the US which was phenomenal and inspiring. During
my fieldwork, I saw many people in wheel chairs participating in the
protests. There was one man who was quite ubiquitous, pushing his
wheelchair as he ran. It was understood as a cornerstone of the
movement that people with disabilities joined -especially at the
meetings in cabins at the roundabouts, where they told their
stories. As you many have noticed in the book, a Yellow Vest in the
French countryside talked about his need for access to a nearby
hospital and he says that he joined the Yellow Vests to fight to
save his access to health care. Since cutbacks in health care have
been ongoing in France (as elsewhere) this was definitely a central
concern.
  

    
(9)
Dear Alan
it's great to meet you - at least on this site! I am sure our
parents would have known each other or known about each other - when
my mother was alive I would say a name and she would give me a
genealogy! - although it sounds like your parents might have been a
slightly older generation - my parents went to medical school at
Wits while Mandela was a law student there - and they worked
together on campus mobilization. Did you move to the US? Most of the
exiles from those movements that I knew ended up in London for a
while and many returned to SA - although my family didn't.
  

    
(11)
Dear Jane
Yes the Yellow Vests did continue in some form or another for quite
a while - and certainly their demands got much broader. They didn't
accept the fact that Macron dropped the diesel tax as an answer to
their fundamental concerns to prevent the destruction of the welfare
state and then much more, as they incorporated questions of
environment and police brutality into their protests.
Definitely France has a dramatic history of protest, as I outline in
the first few chapters of the book - from the French Revolution, The
Paris Commune and much more. the British Marxist historian Eric
Hobsbawm once argued that the French had the political revolution
while the Brits led the industrial revolution and each incorporated
the other.
  

    
Ida, can you expand on the tradition of rebellion that Jane raised. 
Here in the US we too have a tradition of rebellion.  Yet while they
share a lot, there are important differences.  What are the
differences and how have they been expressed when they play out?
  

    
In 2014 I visited my American sister-in-law who was living in
Toulouse. I know Toulouse was a regional stronghold for the Yellow
Vest movement. Can you surmise why Toulouse? Is there something in
its history that embraces an uprising like that?
  

    
(16)
Dear David and Jane
Yes the French have a long tradition of taking to the streets. My
book discusses this history in some detail and suggests that indeed
the French have a different approach to government. People insist
that the state is theirs. They are prepared to pay from their taxes
for public service which they regard as their right. When the
government institutes neoliberal cutbacks - people often describe
this aw stealing the state which they have strugglee so hard over
centuries to establish.
Before the French Revolution were the Jaqueries, peasant uprisings
who attacked the rich landowners and aristocracy - historians
describe these as very chaotic and disorganized and some people
today dismiss the Yellow Vests by calling them Jaqueries, or riots
without direction.

After the French Revolution there were a series of uprisings as
first Napoleon took over and then after Napoleon the monarchy was
reinstated
in various forms, followed by rebellions which expelled the royalty.
It was only after the Paris Commune that the Third Republic was
established and France has remained a Republic without a monarch or
an emperor since then.
However, even then, we are now in the 5th Republic, established by
de Gaulle, and the Yellow Vests and others have called for a 6th
Republic.
People can imagine the changing of the constitution (which happened
with each Republic) through civil protests. This is particularly
true nowadays because De Gaulle established such a powerful
President and a weak National Assembly (much less power than the US
Congress) that people go to the streets to try to change things.
  

    
(17)
 I think that is a very interesting question which I would like to
research further.
I'm not sure what in particular is specific to Toulouse - places
like Nantes, Montpellier, Lille had strong Yellow Vest movements.
However, I do think further research might reveal something - 
  

    
I can remember while protesting the war in Vietnam (1968-1972 in San
Francisco) as an 18 yo kid hearing about some protests in France
coinciding with our on-going antiwar activities but being young, I
did not research the French protests, as such..but I do remember
that the French protests coinciding with ours, the word solidarity
being discussed in reference to the on-going mutually occurring
protests in France and America..
jest my two cents and no, I have not read the book but it is
definitely on my list to read it when I clear up my backlog of books
that I want to read..
  

    
Question via email from Les Levidow:

When the Yellow Vests movement began, it attracted attention from
various groups promoting broader political agendas.  Some were
Right-wing racist populists, who expanded the initial demand to an
anti-tax agenda, even anti-migrant.  Others promoted a Left-wing or
progressive agenda.  The outcome was not predictable early on.  How
did the yellow vests go in their eventual direction -- rather than
another?
  

    
That is a good question.  To piggyback on it how does the Yellow
Vest movement fit in with other protest movements such as
anti-racism and environment concerns?
  

    
When the Yellow Vest movement began there was no obvious ideology -
people met at the roundabouts to share their anger about the
increase in the gas tax. Many had no political allegiance and some
had never voted. Others had voted for the far right Marine Le Pen
and others had voted for the far left, Jean-Luc Melenchon.
When they joined one another at the roundabouts, it was cold and
often rainy (November) and they built shelters and cabins where they
shared barbecues - people bringing cheap sausages from the
supermarket and other provisions. 
As I spent time at roundabouts, cars going by honked in support,
some gave money for food, some gave juice or other food through
their car windows. It was an unusual social mixing.
Even to build the cabins, they had to acquire wood from somewhere
and know something about construction - many of the participants
found ways to get things they needed through their connections with
a broader public of construction workers, truck drivers, and others.
In the book, I describe how some of the guys who were building a
cabin in a highway triangle surrounded by trucks with their drivers
sleeping inside told me that they could get anything from anywhere -
people were turning a blind eye as they acquired the materials.
Although it was an idyllic scene, with little children running
around and a small cabin that the Yellow Vests had built for them as
a toy house, it was in fact all illegal.
After people (men and women, old and young, of color and "old'
french,) had built the cabin they met there on a saints day holiday
and shared food and conversation.
Within a couple of weeks, the police came and destroyed both cabins
- leaving the participants shocked and upset at their loss.
It was through experiences like these that solidarity was created
among the Yellow Vests and people began to find they agreed on
demands far beyond the gas tax
  

    
As one woman wrote down for me as I asked her to describe her
experiences, (this was a common process and many people were very
enthusiastic about writing and giving me such testimonials) she said
she came to the roundabout the first time about the gas tax, but
after a few weeks she was angry about all the cuts in public
services and entitlements.
A few weeks later she drove 7 hours to Paris and joined a saturday
street demonstration where she got trapped and teargassed.
Now she calls herself an "autonomist"
She is a secretary, over 60 years old with a husband and grown
children! She certainly had no clear ideological stand before the
Yellow Vests and now is still not really "ideological" in a
consistent way. She told me she voted for Melenchon in the last
elections, She learned much in the process of spending time with
protesters at Yellow Vest demonstrations.
  

    
I call those processes I just described of people meeting together,
building the cabins and joining street protests commoning - it's
like walking across a footpath until it becomes your right of way.
Like the Woody Guthrie song, This land is my land -"I saw a sign and
it said no trespassing, but on the other side it didn't say nothing"