10.11.2005XXI century Gavroshes
Social dynamite is blowing up in Paris. Both the left-wing intellectuals and far-right populists like Le Pen have already warned that there will not be lack of dynamites. It turned up that the dynamites are more them supposed: as a rule street pogroms and riots come to the end for the third day, but here, after a whole week of scuffle and mess, the police don’t know where they are needed more.
In America gloat over misfortunes of French and say that they shouldn’t have reproached them for their Negroes. In the French government there are their own backstreet intrigues concerning to the rivalry between the Prime Minister Villepin and the police minister Sarkozi, whose chances to change the wearied president Chirac in presidential post are likely to be decided just now. On intellectual level the European dominant influences are in a hurry to pass round each other in elegant passes and on perpetual subjects “who is guilty?” and “what to do?”. And if more clear and in Russian then the diagnosis leads to one word – “limita”.
In 1950s, when the past nightmares of the Great Depression and Fascism stepped back and proletarians of the West helped to make a step up in class hierarchy in sake of social world and containment of communism, there was lack of labor on lower levels. The ones who wished to concrete, tidy up in homes and streets or stand at production lines by that time the Europeans easily found in their former possessions: the English in Pakistan and Jamaica, the German in Turkey and Yugoslavia, the French in Algeria and Senegal. In almost the same way Moscow authorities pumped out young and unpretentious labor from Russian villages while constructing the underground, and today from Moldova and Tajikistan. The “limitchiks” were promised citizenship (in Moscow it is called registration) and they plowed like the villagers in the near past believing in the better future of their children.
Today these children are breaking the glasses of windows in Paris. Certainly their life is not that hungry as it used to be their parents’ in distant villages, but it is not a subject of comparison for them. Social mobility was stopped in crisis in 1970s for the West. The cheap labor was not needed any more: the production was transferred to Mexico or China with their reserves of peasantry on their first stage of development. Millions of children of European “limitchiks” were desperately left in uncertainty.
Whose sons are they? By culture and lifestyle most of them are completely assimilated citizens of Western cities: they wear jeans and snickers, play football, eat hamburgers and ice cream, French or English are native languages for them. But their origin is still written on their faces and reminds natives about it all the time; in his time general Denikin was complaining that his semiliterate concierge in his emigrant house mumbled after him “dirty Russians”. From such a treatment one wants proudly and to spite everybody to put on Russian officer’s uniform or something Moslem or just hooligan (it depends on test).
According to optimistic forecasts of the theory of modernization the former peasants should automatically turn into modern citizens with reliable status of middle class or a regular proletariat. Alas the theory didn’t work. Today in all over the world we come across a class which even doesn’t have a proper name. In Latin America they are called marginals, in Germany-lumpens, in Russia, by the time of young Gorky’s wanderings, bosiaks. French sociologist Pier Burdie has suggested a better analytical term- sub-proletariat.
The Sub-proletariats are not peasants any more, but they are not citizens as well as they don’t have stable and worthy working places. Such intermediate strata in transmission from their ethnic surrounding to foreign cities are not organized in regular trade unions and parties. Their life is too casual for an organized protest and is devoid of a prospective to make a program on. Russian thinker-anarchist duke Peter Kropotkin precisely worked out a dilemma according to which “revolutions are connected with hopes and despair only gives birth to riots”.
The origin of this problem is not only French, it is global. The recent attack in Nalchik is the response of the same tectonic break-up as in Paris. It is not the matter of Islam. Religion just coincided with the barrier of contemporary European lifestyle which is beyond the reach of certain social groups, that’s why religion has turned into the symbol of confrontation.
Peasant lifestyle, with its traditional rituals and obedience, headily disappears from the planet. It’s a very dangerous historical transition. The industrialization in its time “mixed” both French and Russian with contemporary citizens, though that history was full of its barricades and revolutions.
Today the Third world has appeared within the First world. Up till now the problem in Europe has been solved through philanthropy and police control. It doesn’t work as it didn’t in the XIX century. The problem was than settled by developing mass employment and mass democracy, and in the middle of the XX century the Western workers turned the revolutionists into reformers. But who and how can do it now on global level?
For the moment barricades and desperate dark skinned Gavroshes reappear.
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