We are waiting. Day and night. Events follow one after the other, and we swallow them with little protest. The Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, natural disasters ravaging the Earth… We swallow everything they throw at us, unable to vomit, chained to a powerlessness we can’t shake off. The possible distracts for a few moments and, in the end, it always suffocates. The impossible is nothing more than this despotic reality that, little by little, has imposed itself. We are waiting. We place an absurd hope in a final collapse. We sink into a night tinged with melancholy. The world has closed in on itself, and we tenants of the house know each other very well. The neo-fascist puppets have closed the exit door, as they rush to divide the earth into zones of influence.
The conservative revolution is the culmination of the neoliberal stage of capitalism that began after the workers’ defeat at the end of the 1970s. We are no longer the amused spectators of the old society of the spectacle, we are now reserved the status of victims within a space perforated by borders. Warring states with imperialist aspirations are fighting each other, while acid rain falls, the arctic ice melts and gigantic fires do not even spare the houses of the rich. The militarisation of territory and the depoliticisation of society work together to enlarge the circular desert. We, in return, survive. We have the security provided by the small cages in which we are confined, and also the mirage offered by the idea of belonging to a nation. The law of the jungle is fulfilled to perfection as victims jostle for a crumb of recognition.
The great success of the current conservative revolution is to present its advance as an irreversibility that cannot be disputed. What is more, neo-fascism, and this is true of its different variants, has an immense capacity for ridicule and contempt. The more banal, stupid and criminal it is, the more difficult it is to counteract because – we have to admit it – capital has managed to appropriate the words with which we used to name both subversion and freedom. The partition that has taken place has been ruthless. Survivors are those who have earned a place in the market of Life and deserve an existence. Victims are those who, dispossessed of the force of pain that inhabits them, have internalised fear and guilt. Their class hatred has gone astray and is aimed at the other. The obviousness made of repeated lies that characterises neo-fascism annihilates their thinking. They only aspire to be allowed to live. Because they no longer expect anything, they are waiting.
The victim status that the conservative revolution imposes also gags critical thinking itself and blocks practices of social transformation. When one accepts the playing field that neo-fascism establishes – for example, that immigration is a problem or that the climate emergency is not so serious – it is very difficult to challenge reality and to put forward any form of resistance. The renunciation of all experimentation, the disconnection from historical memory and, above all, the lack of daring, necessarily lead to adaptation. To seek excuses in confusion. To lower one’s head and cover one’s eyes. “He who does not expect the unexpected will not find it because it is neither searchable nor accessible”, said Heraclitus a long time ago. We do not know what the unexpected is, nor do we know if by interrupting the suicidal march of the world, it could save us. What we do know very well is that politics cannot apprehend it. Politics today functions as essentially depoliticising and is not unlike business management. Neo-fascism, for its part, by conceiving politics as war and using the formal structures of so-called representative democracy to its advantage, further negates the existence of political space. There is no room for negotiation. Possibility, burdened by fear and the absence of ideas, can neither bite reality nor stop a laughing right-wing extremist.
And yet, the unexpected is written there on the wall when it cracks: “We are the uprisings of the earth. We are the earth that revolts”. To find the unexpected, you don’t have to dig it up, for it is not hidden beneath the ruins. It is enough to listen to the scream of the blood that is overwhelmed. It is enough to abandon the place of waiting victims assigned to us and to welcome the force of pain. This is what the French movement Les Soulèvements de la terre has done and is doing. Against the masters of noise they have not opposed words of supplication that demand understanding. Nor a silence that would silence too much. What they have done is a critique of politics based on defiance. But first of all, we must explain the origin of the Soulèvements de la terre. This movement was not created at the table of a political party or nor is it the result of a bureaucratic decision. It was formed from the first 200 people who in 2021 formed a ZAD (Zone to Defend) and fought to prevent the construction of an airport in Notre-Dame-des Landes. When, on 25 March 2023, they gathered to prevent the construction of a mega-basin in Sainte-Soline, the number of demonstrators had already reached 30,000. Brutally repressed for hours, the forces of law and order injured more than two hundred people, forty protesters were severely mutilated and two people were in a coma. A few days later, the French state reacted by proposing the outlawing of the movement. Why did this unprecedented growth and the subsequent proposal to outlaw it occur, which was finally suspended due to the reactions?
The answer is both complex and simple. Complex because it would have to take into account both the crisis of the French left and the numerous struggles (various ZADs, yellow vests, etc.) which, in a way, are antecedents of this movement. Simple because their practice, being completely separate from any old or new politics, simply consists of putting the radical gesture in the foreground. But this radical gesture that they invent is not deployed in a symbolic sphere, but takes the form of three types of actions that, as they claim, “bring ecology down” to the real world: 1) Blocking the infrastructures that make environmental disasters possible. 2) Collective and festive dismantling of toxic industries. 3) Land occupations.
In this way, the radical gesture, situated and multiplied, is transformed into direct and mass action. The aim is to “Strike hard and where it hurts”, they state in their manifesto. To flee from protest marches that only amplify resignation and condemn us to be victims of waiting. To combine joy and despair to achieve, at least, small victories that push us to move forward. The traditional question of who is the political subject is erased, as is the question of violence. Les Soulèvements de la terre do not defend nature, they are nature defending itself, as a network, movement, and also political organisation, all at the same time. Their great merit is to have been able to sustain the radical gesture on the basis of a composition of differences that must be both intelligent and generous. It is not in vain that they refuse to be a front or an alliance of political groups. Marx argued that “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past.”[1] For a few moments, and this is the fundamental lesson, it seems that Les Soulèvements de la terre have found concrete ways to get rid of these superstitions which, at bottom, are nothing more than tired repetitions of closed paths.
Santiago López Petit: How to stop being victims of waiting
From Lobo suelto! (15/03/2025)
About the Soulèvements de la terre
We are waiting. Day and night. Events follow one after the other, and we swallow them with little protest. The Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, natural disasters ravaging the Earth… We swallow everything they throw at us, unable to vomit, chained to a powerlessness we can’t shake off. The possible distracts for a few moments and, in the end, it always suffocates. The impossible is nothing more than this despotic reality that, little by little, has imposed itself. We are waiting. We place an absurd hope in a final collapse. We sink into a night tinged with melancholy. The world has closed in on itself, and we tenants of the house know each other very well. The neo-fascist puppets have closed the exit door, as they rush to divide the earth into zones of influence.
The conservative revolution is the culmination of the neoliberal stage of capitalism that began after the workers’ defeat at the end of the 1970s. We are no longer the amused spectators of the old society of the spectacle, we are now reserved the status of victims within a space perforated by borders. Warring states with imperialist aspirations are fighting each other, while acid rain falls, the arctic ice melts and gigantic fires do not even spare the houses of the rich. The militarisation of territory and the depoliticisation of society work together to enlarge the circular desert. We, in return, survive. We have the security provided by the small cages in which we are confined, and also the mirage offered by the idea of belonging to a nation. The law of the jungle is fulfilled to perfection as victims jostle for a crumb of recognition.
The great success of the current conservative revolution is to present its advance as an irreversibility that cannot be disputed. What is more, neo-fascism, and this is true of its different variants, has an immense capacity for ridicule and contempt. The more banal, stupid and criminal it is, the more difficult it is to counteract because – we have to admit it – capital has managed to appropriate the words with which we used to name both subversion and freedom. The partition that has taken place has been ruthless. Survivors are those who have earned a place in the market of Life and deserve an existence. Victims are those who, dispossessed of the force of pain that inhabits them, have internalised fear and guilt. Their class hatred has gone astray and is aimed at the other. The obviousness made of repeated lies that characterises neo-fascism annihilates their thinking. They only aspire to be allowed to live. Because they no longer expect anything, they are waiting.
The victim status that the conservative revolution imposes also gags critical thinking itself and blocks practices of social transformation. When one accepts the playing field that neo-fascism establishes – for example, that immigration is a problem or that the climate emergency is not so serious – it is very difficult to challenge reality and to put forward any form of resistance. The renunciation of all experimentation, the disconnection from historical memory and, above all, the lack of daring, necessarily lead to adaptation. To seek excuses in confusion. To lower one’s head and cover one’s eyes. “He who does not expect the unexpected will not find it because it is neither searchable nor accessible”, said Heraclitus a long time ago. We do not know what the unexpected is, nor do we know if by interrupting the suicidal march of the world, it could save us. What we do know very well is that politics cannot apprehend it. Politics today functions as essentially depoliticising and is not unlike business management. Neo-fascism, for its part, by conceiving politics as war and using the formal structures of so-called representative democracy to its advantage, further negates the existence of political space. There is no room for negotiation. Possibility, burdened by fear and the absence of ideas, can neither bite reality nor stop a laughing right-wing extremist.
And yet, the unexpected is written there on the wall when it cracks: “We are the uprisings of the earth. We are the earth that revolts”. To find the unexpected, you don’t have to dig it up, for it is not hidden beneath the ruins. It is enough to listen to the scream of the blood that is overwhelmed. It is enough to abandon the place of waiting victims assigned to us and to welcome the force of pain. This is what the French movement Les Soulèvements de la terre has done and is doing. Against the masters of noise they have not opposed words of supplication that demand understanding. Nor a silence that would silence too much. What they have done is a critique of politics based on defiance. But first of all, we must explain the origin of the Soulèvements de la terre. This movement was not created at the table of a political party or nor is it the result of a bureaucratic decision. It was formed from the first 200 people who in 2021 formed a ZAD (Zone to Defend) and fought to prevent the construction of an airport in Notre-Dame-des Landes. When, on 25 March 2023, they gathered to prevent the construction of a mega-basin in Sainte-Soline, the number of demonstrators had already reached 30,000. Brutally repressed for hours, the forces of law and order injured more than two hundred people, forty protesters were severely mutilated and two people were in a coma. A few days later, the French state reacted by proposing the outlawing of the movement. Why did this unprecedented growth and the subsequent proposal to outlaw it occur, which was finally suspended due to the reactions?
The answer is both complex and simple. Complex because it would have to take into account both the crisis of the French left and the numerous struggles (various ZADs, yellow vests, etc.) which, in a way, are antecedents of this movement. Simple because their practice, being completely separate from any old or new politics, simply consists of putting the radical gesture in the foreground. But this radical gesture that they invent is not deployed in a symbolic sphere, but takes the form of three types of actions that, as they claim, “bring ecology down” to the real world: 1) Blocking the infrastructures that make environmental disasters possible. 2) Collective and festive dismantling of toxic industries. 3) Land occupations.
In this way, the radical gesture, situated and multiplied, is transformed into direct and mass action. The aim is to “Strike hard and where it hurts”, they state in their manifesto. To flee from protest marches that only amplify resignation and condemn us to be victims of waiting. To combine joy and despair to achieve, at least, small victories that push us to move forward. The traditional question of who is the political subject is erased, as is the question of violence. Les Soulèvements de la terre do not defend nature, they are nature defending itself, as a network, movement, and also political organisation, all at the same time. Their great merit is to have been able to sustain the radical gesture on the basis of a composition of differences that must be both intelligent and generous. It is not in vain that they refuse to be a front or an alliance of political groups. Marx argued that “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past.”[1] For a few moments, and this is the fundamental lesson, it seems that Les Soulèvements de la terre have found concrete ways to get rid of these superstitions which, at bottom, are nothing more than tired repetitions of closed paths.
[1] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852.