The French Student Uprising

0:01 Call zone media.

0:06 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the here is France and the it is it. I am your host, Mia Wong, and... Today we are going to be talking about the enormous and incredibly militant student protests in France. And with me to talk about this is Faiza, who is a political analyst and feminist theorist in France.

0:28 And Faiza, welcome to the show.

0:30 Thank you for having me, Mia. Hello, everybody.

0:32 Yeah, I'm really excited to talk with you about this because there has been so much unbelievably wild stuff happening recently. both good and bad, and like, oh my god, it's like hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, most of whom are like 15, 16. Like, oh my god.

0:59 It is so exciting to watch. I mean, I've wanted to see such an uprising for so long, and it's finally starting to like yeah it's it was a slow build up this past couple years but i feel like something is maybe happening and not just in france like the whole gen z worldwide is really tired of this shit and is uh hitting the streets and i love it and i'm here.

1:32 For it it's amazing It is. And yeah, we're going to be getting more into every other country that's also going up right now because it's like India and Spain and Chile. We've seen a whole bunch of other countries in the past six months go up. But I guess I want to start with going a bit into sort of the background of this and going into what the political situation has been in France that's sort of been leading up to this and what kinds of conditions have been sort of producing this?

2:07 Well, have you heard of neoliberalism? No, like seriously, like that.

2:14 Yeah.

2:15 I mean, well, we've had Macron, which is our very dear president. No, I'm kidding. We fucking hate the guy. The guy is rotten to his very core. So, yeah, he's been president for almost 10 years now.

2:30 Jesus Christ. Yeah.

2:34 Yeah. And the utter and complete destruction of anything public, like public education, public health and everything, didn't start with him. But let's just say that he put the final nail on the proverbial coffin. And he's been like dismantling public education ever since he arrived and took his place. job as president. And if you want an analogy or something in comparison with what's happening in the US with respect to your public education, well, when I saw Like 10 years ago, Betsy DeVos arrived as the Secretary of Education. Well, you remember her. She basically destroyed anything public education-wise. Like she wanted to funnel all the money to private schools and charter schools. And that's basically what has been happening

3:34 in France too, like in these past 10 years. All the money has been funneled in... More or less legal ways to private schools. Yes, I see more or less legal ways because there are a lot of loopholes. And Macron and his government are experts at using those loopholes. Basically, they can look at you in the eye and tell you that what they're doing is legal, technically. Yeah. You know what I mean? And they will say that to your face while... destroying everything you hold near and dear at the same time. So these past 10 years, the money allocated to education has decreased. The number of teachers has tremendously decreased, like dramatically decreased.

4:32 Jesus.

4:33 The number of students by class has increased. The way this project started is, well, A school year in France started in September. It's basically from September to June, July. And, well, in the poorest areas of France, high schoolers arrived in their high schools and found basically not enough desks, not enough chairs.

5:01 Jesus Christ.

5:01 No teachers. Holes in the roof. Water leaking in the classrooms.

5:09 Yeah, ugh.

5:10 No AC, like that goes without saying, like we don't have AC, like this is not the standard thing in France. So you could have like a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in, you know, and with no AC, like people, like high schoolers were cooking in their schools. During the winter, some of these schools, the poorest schools also don't have heat.

5:35 Oh, Jesus.

5:37 Yeah.

5:38 So it's freezing.

5:39 Exactly. I'll let you imagine how you can, how can you learn anything in school while freezing by, I don't know, 50 degrees in your school?

5:48 Yeah. Like, you know, like, I remember thinking back to my high school, and it's like, well, we occasionally had drowned rafts falling out of the ceiling, but, like, at least we had heat in the winter. Like, we would have all died.

6:01 Even the heat is out of the window.

6:03 Like, Yeah.

6:05 There's nothing left in some high schools, like really nothing. And the egregious thing is that you can have a very poor area with the poorest high schoolers, with the most destroyed high school you can see. And in the town nearby, you will find the best high schools with the richest population, like For instance, in Paris, like you have Paris, the capital, and you have Parisian suburbs. Some are extremely rich and some are basically the poorest ones in the whole country. So what is happening is that we don't have states. We basically have regions and departments and stuff like that. Like the way France is cut, the map is cut like that. And so the president of, it's called the Île-de-France. Basically, Paris is part of a region.

7:04 The president of this region is a right-winger, pretty much far right, but officially she's only right-winger. And her specialty is to funnel money, public money, to private schools, private Catholic schools.

7:20 Jesus Christ.

7:21 Of course.

7:23 Many, many such cases.

7:24 I know, right?

7:26 Amazing.

7:27 You see the similarities with Betsy DeVos?

7:30 Yeah, yeah.

7:31 Yeah, that's basically, those two women are the same picture. Let's just say it like that. So that president has been putting a lot of public money in private schools in Paris and in the Paris suburb. Rich ones. But where is she taking that money?

7:47 Yeah. Yeah.

7:49 Well, instead of distributing this money equally across the whole territory that she's leading, she's only distributing that money to private schools, Catholic schools, and schools that are in the richest suburbs and in the richest area.

8:06 That makes sense.

8:07 So that's how you find yourself when you're poor, when you're a poor kid. growing up in a poor suburb, that's how you find yourself going in a high school that has halls basically everywhere, that doesn't have enough teachers, that doesn't have enough desks, enough chairs, that is lacking basically everything, that has rats running in the hallways. Yeah. Yeah.

8:31 So came last September, like a month ago, high schoolers, lo and behold they found their school being just as bad as it was when they just before when they went to like for the summer holidays and stuff like that and so they came back and they they found no teacher they found no desk no chair no nothing and yeah they were mad and they were right and so they started to protest to ask for teachers money for desks, for chairs. I mean, it's the most basic things.

9:14 They're not asking for the latest, I don't know, iPhone or iPad or whatever. You know, whatever the fuck. No, no, they're asking for, like, the most basic necessities.

9:27 Yeah, like, we're asking for it to be a school.

9:30 Exactly.

9:31 Desk plus teacher is, like, the most basic school. Like, what are we doing here?

9:38 And they're asking for a chance at life.

9:41 Yeah.

9:42 You know what I mean? Like, we have a system. It's a system that has been in place since 2018. It started, so, under Macron again. And it's a very, very opaque system. It's a system that is designed, it's an algorithm, basically, that is designed to pick for you what you're going to do next. Basically, when you're in 10th grade, so I was telling you that before we started taping, but high school in France only has three years in it, like 10th to 12th grade. So when you get in 10th grade, you have to choose in 10th grade what you're going to do in college or university.

10:24 Which is ridiculous.

10:26 It is utterly ridiculous. Like, granted.

10:28 Awful. Why?

10:31 You're 15. You're 15. And people are asking 15 years old to pick with high accuracy what they're going to do as adults for the rest of their lives. That's... That is stressful. The level of stress these kids are facing is humongous.

10:48 Ridiculous.

10:49 Yeah. It is ridiculous. And the level of attempted suicide among high schoolers has increased in a way that you cannot comprehend. Like, the numbers are terrifying. Also, that algorithm is a very racist one. It's a very classist one.

11:12 Yeah.

11:12 Yeah. It basically is a black box. Like people, we, the public, we don't know what's in the algorithm. Like we do not have access to it. The only thing that we know is the result. And the result is poor kids coming from poor areas have basically zero chance at getting access to a proper university or a university at all. Yeah. Like you could end in a queue, but like the 5,000 kids in a queue to access a public university. I'm not talking about private schools. I'm talking about public schools. Yeah. It's something that is deeply unfair.

11:59 It's a system of, that when I was in high school didn't exist. When I was in high school, like it was 20, 25 years ago, I'm old. But yeah, when I was in high school, basically the only thing you had to do, you had an exam at the end of high school. And if you pass that exam, you could go to university.

12:18 Yeah.

12:19 And that was it. And then the only thing that matters was your grades. In university. That's it.

12:25 Which is also still like a stressful system, but it's like, we've made it worse!

12:29 Like. Exactly. It was a stressful system, but it made some sense. Yeah.

12:38 Yeah. There's a one-to-one correlation.

12:41 Exactly. There was some logic behind it. The logic now is cruelty. It is violence. It is class violence. It is race violence. It is... ableism, obviously, also. And kids, well, they arrive in high school and they already know that, like, their life is screwed. That's what's happening. So... Yeah. And the government, the state, doesn't give a fuck.

13:09 Yeah.

13:10 Which is basically why you're seeing the footage you've been seeing for the last weeks is this is why the cops have been beating the shit out of high schoolers. Because they don't give a fuck. Yeah. And also they know... that they don't have a choice what they're going to do. Yeah.

13:26 It reminds me so much of the protests in India, where it's like, yeah, you're facing the same thing of like, this, I guess, is one of the things of neoliberalism was like, on the one hand, education was supposed to be like your ticket out, right? It was supposed to be like, if you, you know, like meritocratic, if you were like good enough, you could get into a like elite university and now it's your like ticket out of poverty. And then simultaneously, we're going to make that impossible. And yeah, I mean, just like thinking about like, yeah, like the stories of these kids who are forced into this like unbelievably intense, like competitive pressure and are just getting screwed out of the ability to fight their way out of

14:09 the poverty that they've been born into. And just being like, fuck this. If they're going to rig the system, the only thing we can go do is fight them.

14:17 Exactly. And, you know, you were talking about, like, meritocracy. Like, I'm putting it in between quotes for people who can see me.

14:24 Yeah. Well, I mean, that term was originally a joke. It was originally a joke. It was invented as a joke. Like, it's the same thing with, like, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

14:37 Yeah.

14:38 The whole point of that is that you can't. It was a joke. But no, we've, like, we've decided this is a thing that exists in the world, even though it doesn't. God. Ah! It makes me insane all the time.

14:49 You cannot create a parody out of this reality. Like the level of like a comedy of dramedy is, it's got here. Yeah. I mean, talking about that, like a few days ago, we on my stream were watching a clip from the news. I don't remember which news outlet it was. But they were basically talking about a high school, a very famous one, which is called Henri IV, Henry IV.

15:20 And this high school is inside of Paris. And it is well known for being like a very bourgeois high school. Like this is like basically as bourgeois as you can do, as you can get.

15:34 Yeah, it's a rich kid one.

15:36 The anchor, the news anchor, introduced this high school by telling that it was basically poster child for meritocracy. And I choked. I choked on my saliva. I was like, no, no, you mean it's bourgeoisie. Like you mistook. You used a word for it instead of another word. Like that's not meritocracy. That's bourgeoisie. But basically, that's the same thing. And thank you for saying it out loud. Like I was like, thank you.

16:03 Yeah. And it's so funny because it's like it is in the original sense, which is that it was a joke about how it was just rich kids who got into college. But like it's not in the sense you're trying to use it. Like, come on.

16:15 Yeah, neoliberalism saw the joke and was like, yeah, you know what I can do about it? I can rip the joke out of it. And I can just keep the word and make it something real. How about it?

16:26 Yeah, it's like, what if all of the metaphors became literal now? And that's like the world that we live in. Exactly.

16:32 That's the fucking world we live in. Absolutely. The kids have no prospects. I mean, they don't have any in the US. Like Gen Z won't be able to buy a house. That's the same thing in France. That's the same thing in Spain. That's the same thing in Chile. That's the same thing in every capitalist-based society, basically. So, yeah, what we're seeing worldwide and what we are seeing in France right now is the product of what you're seeing in the US. It's the product of what you're seeing in Spain. It's the neoliberal order. It's white supremacy. And, of course, I mean... To be honest, it's the least surprising thing ever. Like, it's basically one plus one equals two.

17:21 That's what we're seeing. It's a logical product of our society. So yeah, the kids are mad. They have the right to be, and I'm fully supportive.

17:30 Like, really.

17:32 Yeah.

17:33 So we're going to take an ad break because, yeah, we too are subject to the horrifying violence and whimsy of neoliberal capitalism.

17:43 I hear you.

17:55 And we are back. So let's talk about what the students have been up to.

18:02 You mean on the streets or do you mean on social media?

18:07 Yeah, let's get into, I guess, the streets first. What have the students been doing? What kinds of tactics have they been using?

18:14 So they've been using blockades. A lot of them, which is basically a first tradition. We're very good at that. Like whenever there's a protest, especially high school protests and students protests, we build blockades. So we, we go for a disruption. So the purpose is to disrupt high schools, is to disrupt universities and to push the adults basically.

18:42 to listen to the kids and what they want. So that's what has been happening, except that our government basically says, fuck, we don't care, and sent the fuzz. So the cops have been answering to the protest by mutilating kids.

19:05 Yeah.

19:06 And mutilating adults, basically. That's been this government's response to any protest since 2017, since Macron arrived in the Élysée, which is our White House, basically. So this time around, even news anchors have been taken aback by the violence coming from the cops.

19:29 Yeah, because it's like actual children. It is.

19:35 It's children, but on the other side, you have an authoritarian regime. Yeah. And what is evidently behaving as a police state. I mean, come on. Yeah.

19:50 Like you're blowing kids' hands off.

19:53 You know who they've been getting their inspiration from?

19:57 The US?

19:59 ICE.

20:00 Yeah. Yeah.

20:02 Yeah. Our government, when they saw ICE, when they saw how, quote unquote, effective ICE ICE is handling the public and handling protests. Yeah. They didn't even hide that it was their wood dreams. What we're seeing is the logical evolution of policing in a neoliberal society. Yeah. Like the kids are asking for the most basic stuff and the most basic stuff could lead to a semblance of equality and they cannot have that.

20:38 Yeah.

20:39 So let's just send the cops. Let's just bit the shit out of the kids and terrorize the fuck out of adults. And let's teach everybody, the whole population, what protest looks like. It looks like blood. It looks like amputation. It looks like losing an eye. The purpose is very clear. It's to put the fear of God in the population.

21:04 Once the population is scared shitless, the said population will stop protesting and start complaining. Yeah.

21:12 Which, I will say, the kind of upside of drawing from the American ICE anti-protest model is that that didn't work. Doing that stuff in the US just pissed everyone off, and it was only when they stopped doing that kind of confrontation and, like, move to this like quiet ethnic cleansing model i guess where they didn't do comfort mass confrontation that like everything kind of i don't know that they were like really effectively able to carry out the ethnic cleansing which is bleak in its own right but like it did it did backfire on them like sort of spectacularly.

21:46 Yeah but it was a polite ethnic cleansing like What is scaring me, and it's not surprising, but it's still scary as fuck, is that you can do the most violent things with a polite tone, and people just stop, look at it, and just keep living their lives, as long as it's polite, as long as it doesn't make a lot of noise, as long as it's not disruptive. Yeah.

22:12 And our government really understands that, but yours also does.

22:16 Sort of. I feel like they're kind of like, our government's like... Because our entire government is designed to produce content, it took them a while to figure out that this is the way that you should actually do it, because their initial instinct was just to do these giant confrontations to produce content out of, and then eventually they realized if you just do it quietly, then you can actually do the thing.

22:40 Yeah, because if you do it quietly, then you get the liberals behind you. Because liberals, at the end of the day, they're not disruptive. They want to keep on living their lives. They want to keep on being able to consume. They want to be able to go to the movies and go on vacation. They need that kind of scope. They need that sense of normalcy to keep on going. And protests disrupt that sense of normalcy. So once you get back to a semblance of normalcy, you get liberals on your side, basically. Or at least you stop having liberals against you. Yeah. And yeah, that's what has been happening in the US. That's how our government has been rolling for the past almost 10 years now.

23:35 What has been happening, though, with those protests is that liberals have been watching their own kids being beaten up. They've been watching their own kids losing eyes, like being arrested, put up in jail and stuff like that. And that is way too disruptive. This doesn't fly. So they're going to find another way to do things. I mean, I know how they're going to do stuff. They're just going to point their fingers at black and brown folks and say that these kids are the bad ones. And they deserve everything that's happening to them. And that they are, like, manipulating the good white kids and stuff like that, like, through social media, through... So what our government also has been doing these past almost 10 years is vilifying anything

24:27 remotely left-wing. Like, I don't know if you know Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

24:32 Yeah, he's the kind of... The media used to describe him as, like... Francis Birdie, but he's like.

24:42 Actually, that's not so far-fetched. I would say that he's not as left-leaning as Bernie.

24:49 Yeah. It's very funny because, like, when you read about him in the press, he gets described as, like, the hard left guy. And he's like, no, he's not. This guy's, like, to the right of, like, the PCF, who were, like.

25:00 Oh, no, no. His political party, France Unabashed, La France Insoumise, has been categorized as far-left. It's social democracy. Social democracy, yeah.

25:14 It's like, what are we doing here? They're not revolutionary at all.

25:18 They're not anti-capitalist.

25:19 They're trying to save capitalism from you. And you're like, no, you're communist. It's like, no.

25:25 No, they're not even socialist. They got a less harmful capitalism. It's really social democracy. It's Bernie core democracy. basically. Yeah. But they might be a little bit more radical than Bernie here and there. Bernie can be more radical in some stances. But, you know, none of them, neither Bernie nor Mélenchon are far left.

25:50 Like, they're not. They're just not.

25:52 Yeah. But when you have such reactionary politics in power, anything remotely left-leaning seems far left. So... This is how they've been presenting our opposition. And so coming back to what I was telling you, they are linking the protest to the Friends in a Bash party, saying that it was created.

26:14 Yeah.

26:15 It originated from Friends in a Bash and that this political party is instrumentalizing the protest and is basically, it's a big puppeteer.

26:27 The youth yeah this is like exactly the same shit they did in india except for india there was like i guess well actually i i don't know if if the french government has pulled the islamist card yet but like that was the other one oh it already has yeah yeah they're all the same like scott.

26:45 Islamophobia transphobia those two things are at the very core of our reactionary figures political figures and as they are as yours and and my like this is white supremacy basically like they're defending what they see as whiteness and white femininity and islam to them is a danger to white women and so is the existence of trans folks so yeah yeah they're coming they're trying with left-leaning to trans folks, Islam, Hamas, obviously, of course, and, yeah, the Muslim Brotherhood.

27:34 Jesus Christ. At least, well, okay, I'm not going to say at least, but, like, that was the one thing in the U.S. that we at least kind of moved past was, like, we at least kind of stopped accusing everything of being the Muslim Brotherhood because a bunch of people started taking money from the UAE. And then it was like, okay, we're going to quiet it down a little bit.

27:56 It's the same thing in France. The UAE have a lot of financial interest in France. But they're the good ones.

28:03 But they still do a lot of brotherhood.

28:04 Yeah, but they're the good Muslims because, you know, they invest a lot of money.

28:08 Yeah, yeah.

28:09 So that's okay. We can do business with them. So if we want to do business with them, we have to be able to say that they're the good ones. So the good ones.

28:20 Yeah. Algeria.

28:22 Yeah. Palestine and other Muslim countries. Not so much. Not so much.

28:27 I feel like we kind of moved from like, it used to be everything was the Muslim Brotherhood and then that changed into everything is Hamas. But it's like, at least we moved from one to the other. But it's like, no, no, we're still doing the Muslim Brotherhood thing. God damn it.

28:43 Islamophobia is so... Raw. Like, so raw. They don't even think about, like, are they Shiite? Are they Sunni? Are they, like... No. No. Not at all. No, that's like.

28:56 They're just Muslim.

28:59 The problem is Islam. The problem is brown and black people. Yeah. And the problem is the left... which is defending Hamas, which is defending the Muslim Brotherhood, which is defending trans folks. When you look at the arguments, that's basically what they're saying. And I'm not even exaggerating. I wish I were, but I'm not. And it's like, they're not even trying. It's so obvious, but it's the same argument that has been fed to the population through our media. For years now.

29:35 So yeah, people just eat it up.

29:40 I guess that leads into this question of how has the rest of French society been reacting to this? Have other movements been mobilizing?

29:50 Yeah. Well, I was going to say apathy, which is kind of true. If you look at people on the center and on the right, it's apathy. They just want to be able to wear their heads in the sand and keep on going, just doing business as usual. Left-leaning people, some of them are scared. Some of them are in disbelief.

30:19 They want to believe that if things were as bad as Gen Z is saying it is, they would have somehow... managed to see it and a lot of the majority of people still believe that the media are a honest actor which they are not they haven't been for years yeah and as long as basically as long as people keep believing what the media like mainstream media and traditional media feeds them then they're not going to be able to see the problem yeah And it's the same thing in the US. I mean, if people keep watching CNN and MSNBC and stuff like that, how can they possibly know how bad things are on the ground? They cannot.

31:09 They cannot. So that's where we are. And it's scary, but it's the truth.

31:18 There's this quote from the sociologist Raul Zabechi about how Basically, one of the things that social movements do is like in these moments of rupture, they act like bolts of lightning across the sky, like illuminating the darkness. And that's what social movements do to the actual fundamental nature of reality.

31:37 They reveal the structures of like power and domination in the world that are otherwise hidden by the sort of darkness. And that's what you're trying. But part of what you're trying to do with these protests is to like make the actual function of society visible. clear for a moment where i don't know if there is a more clear expression of what neoliberalism is than we took all the money from the schools and gave it to the cops.

32:02 Yeah yeah a lot of signs during the protest like down the streets explicitly say that yeah like the kids know where the money is yeah it is funneled to the very rich through state subsidies and stuff like that And then it's funneled to the cops and to the military complex, defense complex and contractors and stuff like that.

32:26 They know where it's going. So they know there is money. Even when our presidents say that there is no money left. for anything. Like, no, there's always money for the rich somehow. Go figure. Yeah. Yeah.

32:38 There's always money for the police too. It's like, oh wow.

32:42 There's always more money for the police. There's always more budget for the, like for the military. There's always more budget for the cops. There's always less budget for hospitals. There's always less budget for teachers and schools and stuff like that. So people are not stupid. So they kind of like can put two and two together. But People knowing what's happening and people acting on what they know, that's two entirely different things. Yeah. And that's where the issue is, is what people know, people feel the problem like every end of the month when they realize that they don't have any money left in the bank for food and for anything. Yeah. But they don't act on it. Like, it feels impossible to get out of this way of

33:34 life for the majority of people. Yeah. I would call that a liberal mindset also. Like, do you know Thought Slime? Like, do you know the YouTuber Thought Slime?

33:45 Vaguely familiar.

33:48 They made a wonderful video about the way liberals think inside of a box and how even the most revolutionary thoughts are still imprisoned within that scope of thought for liberals. That scope of thought basically is what makes Bernie or Mélenchon far left to them. Because it is so out of the possibilities to them that it feels revolutionary, even though it is absolutely not revolutionary. And that's why people stay in that apathetic state. Like it feels impossible to them to ask for the most basic stuff. And that's what keeps people in that loop of work, waking up, going to work, going back home and wondering how you're going to pay the bills, going to sleep and going back to work the next morning. So I don't think

34:49 that people don't know what the issue is. But I think the issue is that people feel like they have no leverage on their own lives and on their own governments. And if we stay in a liberal mindset, I think they're right. Which is why we have to get out of that liberal mindset. And which is how we have to, like, throw away the liberal playbook. Because if we keep on playing by those rules, we're fucked.

35:18 Yeah, you either get, like, more Macron or you get just the inheritors. You either get the indirect inheritors of the SS or you get the direct inheritors of the SS.

35:31 Exactly, exactly. And they're all defending the same thing. They're defending capitalism. They're defending the very rich and we already know who the very rich are. We saw that about a hundred years ago. So we know who they're rolling for. They're rolling for fascism. Yeah, that's that's all there is.

35:51 So as long as we keep trying to adapt and keep on trying to save liberalism, we're not going to save us ourselves. Like we're not going to save the population. We're just going to save capitalism. It drives me crazy.

36:20 Speaking of doing things, of finding alternatives to saving liberalism, this is all happening at the same time as the giant mass movement in Spain has kicked off.

36:34 Yes.

36:35 Which is about, for people unfamiliar, I guess the short and incredibly bleak version is that basically Spanish authorities evicted an 80, 90-year-old woman. She was 87, I think. Yeah, 87. And she fucking died because of it. And this has set off a massive, massive series of protests. I think they put like a couple of days ago. So we're recording this on like Friday, October 9th. I think like I think on like the 8th, they put 100,000 people like in the streets of Barcelona over this. There's been a, you know, they've been reoccupying some of like the core sort of places where like the 2011 protests were born, like that sort of, the thing that became Occupy, like the movement of the squares.

37:21 There still is a massive protest in Madrid. And yeah, it is beautiful to see the solidarity around that woman and around her situation, how she's been evicted from the place she was living for over seven decades.

37:39 Yeah.

37:40 It resonated with so many people.

37:45 I mean, it's social murder, but it's like normally social murder happens at like one more degree of remove than that. And this is like, no, actually, yeah, she was just murdered by the state and the landlords.

37:56 Exactly. Exactly.

37:58 So directly.

37:59 And yeah. And for everybody to see. Yeah.

38:02 And so I guess I guess my question is like, how are you and how are also like people in the streets kind of like, are people looking at this in the context of like the other movements that are happening at the same time? Or are we kind of still in that? What I would call it like 2018, 2019 mode of like isolation where it's hard for people to see themselves as part of like a broader thing.

38:22 That's a very good question. And I think it's the latter. I think that people are so depoliticized that it is hard for them to link like the most obvious linkable stuff together. Yeah.

38:35 Yeah, or it's like, you and the kids in India, it's the same shit. Exactly. I believe in us.

38:42 That's manufactured. The depoliticization of your population, mine, it's not random. To be able to keep us doing the 9 to 5 and complying and everything, they need a depoliticized population to keep on going forward. So I think that social media managed to get through Gen Z. So they managed to see that what's happening, what has been happening in France has also been happening in other countries. And they managed to put two and two together and they managed to see that, yeah, the issue is capitalism. The issue is white supremacy. The issue is patriarchy and imperialism. But when you start looking at millennials, Gen Xers.

39:29 Yeah. that's Which is also like, hey, if you're a millennial, we've literally, you've done this twice already. I know. We did 2011, we did 2020. I believe in us. I believe we can figure this out. I know we can do this.

39:47 There's a part of me that believes in us, but there's also a part of me that knows how effective the capitalistic propaganda is. So the moment you start owning stuff like a house, an apartment, stuff like that, you start wanting to keep that stuff for yourself. Like, you deserve it. Like, suddenly, meritocracy seems real. And that's where the danger's at.

40:13 Yeah.

40:14 And that's where the danger's at. So, I mean, I see people living their lives and having zero realization.

40:21 Yeah.

40:22 Like, with respect to what's happening in the streets. Like, it doesn't hit them at all. Like, they keep on going, doing their stuff, and they just... don't see how it affects them. Or worse than that, they see how it affects them, but they seem to have accepted, like.

40:41 Yeah, nothing can be done about it.

40:43 Yeah, it's like, I've suffered, you're going to suffer.

40:47 Yeah.

40:48 That's how shit works. And to me, this is the scariest thing. This is the scariest thing. I don't have an answer to how I have to deal with that. I just know that, again, liberal mindset, and we have to get rid of that. I don't think that we're going to be able to convince the majority of people that what we are doing is the right thing. But then again, a hundred years ago, when we were fighting against fascism and Nazism, the majority of people So we don't need a majority of people.

41:26 Yeah, this is the actual lesson of the Storming of the Winter Palace. The actual lesson of the October Revolution is that you don't need everyone on your side. You just need your enemies to stay home.

41:39 Exactly.

41:39 And then you can knock off Kerensky. All you need is for them to stay home. Your enemies to stay home and enough of your allies to come out. And you can do this.

41:51 But you can see this liberal mindset is so hell-bent on trying to convince the majority of people. Like, no, we're not going to make it. It's not going to happen. This is why the very rich are owning all the media. Yeah. Because they know. They know what you want to do. And they see what you want to do. And they have already put their chess pieces in place to... Disrupt that.

42:20 So you have to do something differently. We have to organize differently. Yeah.

42:26 Speaking of doing something differently, I want to close on. So, OK, I think people in France kind of understand like logistically what it means when you're doing a blockade of a school. But for people, for example, in the US, we're like, I guess I have seen schools like I have seen colleges blockaded. But I've never been involved in a high school blockade. What does that actually just look like on a practical level? Is it like we're blockading the street leading up to the school? Is it like we're barring the entrance? What does that actually physically look like?

43:02 Well, basically, physically, you are barring the entrance. Borrowing the street is complicated because for a lot of legal reasons and logistical reasons, it can be really difficult to block a whole street.

43:16 Yeah.

43:16 But yeah, you can block the entry of the school. You can put in front of the school whatever you want, like trash bins, barriers.

43:27 Whatever.

43:29 You can take desks from the inside, put them outside, pile them up. Yeah. Like, anything.

43:36 Classic French revolutionary tradition. Stack all the desks.

43:41 You know, it surprised me when you asked me that because I was like, what? People don't know that? You take shit and you put that in front of the door and that's it.

43:49 Yeah. We have less of a tradition of that.

43:54 Exactly. Just like burning trash cans and stuff like that. It's a tradition. We do that all the time. That's protest shit. Of course we're going to burn the trash. It's normal. It's normal. But yeah, it's that simple. The purpose is to disrupt society. So you do everything in your power to stop people from getting in the school because you don't want them to be able to get in the school because you want them to ask for the same thing as you do so that they can go back to school.

44:32 Yeah.

44:32 So yeah, you forbid them from getting into school and you push them to support you. That's the whole blockade mindset.

44:40 Makes sense.

44:41 That's how strikes work basically also.

44:44 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I guess is the other angle of something I've been thinking about a lot, talking to. Because one of the things that struck me about these protests is the extent to which when you read over the student grievances, it's like, oh, this is exactly the same grievances you would have for a teacher strike. Yeah.

45:00 It's the same things. It's like, oh, wow, class size too big. Don't have teachers.

45:04 That's very good that you talk about that because our teachers are not really supportive of.

45:09 Yeah, which is like, what is wrong with you? You got to go now. Like, if you want your conditions to suck less, you need to move right now. Like, this is the best you're going to get.

45:19 Well, in France, like a few decades ago, teachers used to be seen as left-leaning, left-wing. They're no longer left-wing. They're generally like right-wingers. Like, they want to be paid more, which they deserve to be paid more. Like, really, they're paid. They're not paid enough. But they're not asking for it.

45:39 like in a disruptive manner and basically they're not getting paid more. Oh, shocking.

45:44 I know.

45:45 But so yeah, the, the teachers are not really supportive of the, their students, which shows you everything you need to know about the state of affairs basically. Yeah.

45:57 Which like that has been like one of the things that's been heartening in the U S is seeing a lot of kind of like, like students coming out to support teacher strikes and like, things like that, where, like, teachers are sometimes, like, are supporting, like, student walkouts and stuff. And that's really sad, because, like, I don't know, like, if you were a teacher, like, the thing that you have the responsibility to do is to care for your students.

46:20 And if you're not doing that, then, like, yeah, I mean, I guess you are just the kind of, like, you're doing education in the Napoleonic sense, if, like, yeah, we're cranking you out so you can, like, be cannon fodder for, like, the French Imperial Army.

46:31 Like.

46:32 Exactly.

46:32 No, that's what's happening. Like... Again, neoliberalism is a deeply individualistic way of life. And you can see that in the way teachers are not supporting their students who are asking for stuff that teachers are also asking. So logically, you should see teachers support students. But when you look at reality, they're not so... Yeah, because they only think about what's in it for me. We've been molded into only thinking about what's good for me, what's in it for me. And we've stopped thinking us as a society, but just as a set of individuals. And that's one of the biggest issues we're facing, politically speaking.

47:19 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, do you have anything else that you want to make sure people know before we wrap things up?

47:28 Yeah, I really want to stress the fact that what's happening in France and the problem is at its root, is the same problem that is happening in the US, is the same one that is happening in Spain, in the UK, in Germany, and basically the whole West and even more like in Japan, in South Korea, in India, just like we were talking about, that is neoliberalism, that is capitalism, that is imperialism. that is white supremacy, that is patriarchy. And we need to come together. I don't think that fighting within our borders is going to lead to anything, but we cannot change stuff by just fighting for our countries individually. Like we have to fight together because, well, capital doesn't know borders. So we share the same enemy.

48:25 We share the same enemy and we have to coalesce and organize worldwide in order to fight back and have a chance at fighting back properly yeah so yeah organize internationally talk to your hell yeah french folks to your british folks spanish folks etc and yeah teach what you know and learn from them and i think that's the only way out of that shit.

48:51 Well hell yeah Faiza, thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find your work?

48:59 Thank you for having me, Mia. People can find me on Twitch at Faiza, so F-A-Y-Z-A underscore underscore. And also on Instagram and Blue Sky and sometimes on TikTok.

49:16 Cool. Yeah, we will have links to that in the show notes.

49:19 Yeah.

49:20 Thank you so much for coming on and i don't know i hope i hope y'all fucking win.

49:24 Thank you i also hope that much thank you thank you thank you and thank you again for having me.

49:32 Yeah it's been it's been great.

49:38 It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

49:55 Thanks for listening.