Interview with Eric Hazan, French publisher of "The Coming Insurrection"

Translation of recent interview with Eric Hazan, publisher of the first edition of "The Coming Insurrection."

A rebel publisher, Eric Hazan fires off a dozen books per year against the capitalist world. The Coming Insurrection, attributed to Julien Coupat and the Invisible Committee, remains his best shot. Interview with Eric Hazan, French publisher of "The Coming Insurrection"

Eric Hazan: "My books are weapons"

A rebel publisher, Eric Hazan fires off a dozen books per year against the capitalist world. The Coming Insurrection, attributed to Julien Coupat and the Invisible Committee, remains his best shot.

[ ... ]

Question: What is the reason for the resurrection of the communist idea?

Eric Hazan: People feel that there is no longer a choice between the Right and the Left, but between ways of getting out of capitalism. That's the key question. If it remains in the domain of ideas, one can only go round in circles. For me, thinking about communism isn't heading towards a political organization, but towards practical reflections.

Question: Like what?

Eric Hazan: How to abolish the salariat?[4] What to replace it with? The history of the Soviet Union shows that the collective appropriation of the means of the production is not true communism. It led to a disaster because the salariat was retained. Another key problem: how to dislodge work from its central position in social life? How to organize things so that work is no longer a key element around which everything is organized? If one remain in a Marxian problematic, if work remains central, then one situates oneself on the adversary's terrain and inevitably loses.

Question: Does the end of work remain a purely theoretical idea?

Eric Hazan: I'm not extolling the end of work but the end of salaried work. One must no longer consider work to be the basis of social organization. But one must continue to work, of course.

Question: Are you interested in political ecology, which reflects the place of work in social organization?

Eric Hazan: I don't know anything about it. Ecology bothers me. I have reservations about the notion and the word. We will soon publish a new book by Badiou, L'Ecologie, nouvel opium du peuple. Ecology is a new way for power to do everything that it wants to do.

[ ... ]

Question: Would the Tarnac Affair have been possible ten years ago?

Eric Hazan: No. The Perben Laws[7] marked a turning point. And the anti-terrorist laws that followed them. Never before had an individual accused of sabotaging a train's power line been indicted for "association of criminals in relation to a terrorist enterprise." Previously, he would have been prosecuted for damaging public property.

Question: What do you think about the new category, the internal enemy?

Eric Hazan: The traditional internal enemy -- the Islamist terrorist -- cannot be found among us. To legitimate the police-related and legislative arsenal put into place since Sarkozy became the Minister of the Interior, the State had to construct an internal enemy. In the Spring of 2008, I published an essay entitled "Les habits neufs de l’ennemi intérieur" in Politis. Some young people had been arrested for having a smoke bomb in their trunk. As for the surveillance of the people from Tarnac,[8] it started well before the business with the train line. They have been seeking to fabricate a credible internal enemy for a long time. Power is terribly afraid of an explosion in the banlieus. It has put everything into place to be able to control a possible uprising in the hours that follow.