The French movement of March 2006 shows potential that reminds the entire world of May 68. It was the young protesters themselves who made this symbolic reference explicit at each of their marches and at each of their attacks on the barricades constructed by the police to impede the occupation of the Sorbonne. But it is not only this.

After the signature of the CPE [First Employment Contract, which authorizes contracts for an experimental period of two years (reduced after the protests to 12 months) for workers under the age of 26. During this period these workers can be fired without any justification whatsoever] by French President Jacques Chirac, and unprecedented nighttime protest of more than 10,000 youths crossed Paris from South to North and headed toward the Sacre Coeur—monument dedicated to the memory of the defeated Paris Comune—where the protesters wrote, “1871-2006,” in this way identifying themselves with the Comunards.

Obviously, the present movement has very problematic origins which are very different than those of the “Joyful May” of 1968. May 68 arose like the Spring of life against the oppression of the “full” industrial employment whereas the movement of 2006 was born in the face of the anxiety created by the crisis of that very same full employment.

In 1968 student subjectivity, while it was the product of a long period of economic prosperity, rebelled exactly against that which was implied by the “security” made possible through a pre-established future where the massification of education and the university were already a prefiguration of what would be the end result of a disciplinary society functioning under a factory centered regime.

But now, to the contrary, the CPE seems to be fighting against the lack of this very same “security” and exactly against the a law that is attempting to deepen the level of precarity, in this way making the “future” of these youths every more uncertain.

From the beginning of the 1990’s, a new subjectivity has been constituted from the most diverse figures of this precarity; the students in technical schools, audiovisual workers, alumni in work-programs, the sans-papier, the youth of the peripheral suburbs, and now university students as such, together with thousands of other precarious figures of metropolitan precarity.

Networked global capitalism seeks to capture a diffuse labor in these social territories and thus seeks to reduce social cooperation to a conjunction of disordered fragments that compete amongst each other. Capitalism, through the direct organization of production in the Metropolis, is able to recognize the multiple dimensions of work that becomes productive without entering the waged relation.

At the same time, command is reorganized at the state and global level exactly at the limit that separates the free multiplicity of labor as potential for life from the atomized fragments of life ready for work.

Within this division, at times imperceptible and at times scandalous, the different work laws are organized under a change that highlight, at one extreme, forms of free activity (forms of life that produce other forms of life), while at the same time at the other extreme there emerges the forms of a new slavery (the subordination of all of life to accumulation).

In France, throughout the last two decades of the last century, the resistance struggles were able to hold back the neoliberal assault. This was possible because this battle could be pushed to the “margins” of the society; if the “central” sectors of the work force were able to maintain at least part of their previous gains, the precarity that was imposed on immigrants and French youth (emerging from African and North African immigration) segregated to the metropolitan periphery and discriminated (and fragmented) by a racism that is each time more explicit and organized into political force.

The Real Impasse

Now, those margins no longer exist; they were burned in the fires of the insurrection of the peripheries, which took place in October and November of 2005—a time when these youths “entered politics.” In other words, the CPE is the legitimate child of the becoming political of the “banlieues,” social fragmentation and spatial segregation that can only be governed by fully open appearance of the normality of the state of exception. The state of exception is not limited to the suspension of the constitutional rights of assembly of the periphery. To the contrary, it becomes the effective procedure for the management and control of the labor market, that is, for the total generalization of precarity.

This “forces” the government of the French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, to generalize the battle. Otherwise, it is impossible to explain the fact that Villepin himself has taken on they paternity of the CPE to such an extent that its eventual withdrawal will imply his own downfall. After the CPE and the management of the crisis the situation seems to be characterized less by political “calculation” and more by the emergency created by a real impasse: How can a project for social integration be reanimated that will pass through “full” employment while recognizing that “full” employment can be reached only through the deepening of its very precaritization, that is, through the loss of its inclusive qualities.

The struggle against unemployment by the periphery would thus have to pass through social fragmentation. There is an attempt to confront the French youth of African and Arab descent with their white contemporaries or those who on the whole are more integrated. The integration of the periphery thus requires the peripherilization of the center.

But this impasse is not particular to the government, it also involves the movement itself and above all its most organized base, and this to the extent that it continues to defend an integration for “work” that is definitively limited to smaller and smaller sectors of the population. For the movement against the CPE, the challenge will be to abandon the traps of “the work of the past” and instead understand their own productive exceptionality: they must go beyond the defense of industrial era legislation and affirm that flexibility and mobility do not necessarily imply precarity and risk.

If the step from one job to another, from training to work, are today the ontological dimensions of work itself, it is necessary to recognize the productive dimension of all of these situations, something that can only be achieved through the implemenation of “existential” wage, something like the contruction of a common that will allow all the singularities involved to move about and be flexible and productive of a new common.

The is the challenge of the jigsaw puzzle that only struggles like that around the CPE can “solve.” The homage paid by the Parisian youths to the Paris Commune may very well be more actual that was previously realized.