While the militant entomologists continue in their dusty offices to dissect the composition of the heterogeneous movement of the yellow vests – not intersectional, proletarian, progressive or mute enough, depending on the taste – most of the antiauthoritarians ended up plunging into the battle, including those dragging their feet. Certainly while telling themselves and rightly so, that after all a social movement is nothing else than what each person makes of it. In the same way that before the Christmas holidays the school pupils entered the dance, or that demonstrations on Sundays started happening with women in yellow vests to put the spotlight on patriarchy, without mentioning the small troops of syndicalists who here or there try to reconquer ground by organising their own block. For a lot of people, in the end the question pertains to the classical mechanisms of politics, by adding rage to the anger, a tag to a slogan, in a contest of claims and presence tied to a quantitative vision of struggle.
[Translated by The Local Kids (issue 3, Winter 2019), from Avis de tempêtes, #13, January 2019]