The Impossibilities of Money

Paris rain. It gets everywhere. Even deep under the city in the Line 1 Metro there’s rain. On the umbrellas of those who’ve just got into the carriage. It drips onto the floor. The rain is on people’s shoes and hair. It’s on the bronze silk skirt of the young woman with the black hair and white jacket who stands looking into the distance. There’s a man opposite me reading a Simenon novel. It’s a battered copy with a faded cover and pages turned up at the corners. He reads it intently absorbed in some crime of another age while the new age of Paris is all around him. I glance up to see where we are. The announcements of the stations sound nothing like the way they are written.

I’ve been reading the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and Balzac’s César Birotteau; a good combination. Especially when I reached the section in the Manuscripts about money.

‘If money is the bond which ties me to human life and society to me, which links me to nature and to man, is money not the bond of all bonds? Can it not bind and loose all bonds? Is it therefore not the universal means of separation? It is the true agent of separation and the true cementing agent, it is the chemical power of society’.

Marx quotes from Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. And from those starting points he writes:

‘It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion of things; it brings together impossibilities’.

….

‘The inversion and confusion of all human and natural qualities, the bringing together of all impossibilities, the divine power of money lies in its nature as the estranged and alienating species-essence of man which alienates itself by selling itself. It is the alienated capacity of mankind’.

I should have read more, written more, thought more. But Paris was there, just outside the door of the studio I’m staying in. The whole of Paris. And now I”m on the Metro Line 1 again with a vague idea to go to Montparnasse and to visit the Musée de la Libération de Paris, Musée du Général Leclerc, Musée Jean Moulin. The woman who stands near me is picking at the map of the Metro system stuck to the window of the door as she talks to someone on a mobile phone.

I’m enjoying a sense of freedom in Paris. After all, it’s also a holiday. I can feel the oppression of work. How oppressive workplaces are. The fact that the management often seem oblivious to this oppression makes it worse. Do they think we are only speaking tools and that we uncritically buy into their ideas and culture? Speaking tools. AI could do my job and would be welcome to it. But we need money; this is why we sell our labour power, and in the process we sell our very selves. Marx’s is brilliant on all of this. It’s really another essay, I have a lot of notes, I need to sort them out and that will be done when I get home. Along with an essay on the Garden City of Suresnes and Henri Sellier, the radical socialist mayor. It’s Saturday morning and I want to feel the whole of Paris all around me.

I change to the Metro line 6. It comes out into the open air, above the ground. There is a thin mist over Paris which provides an enigmatic cover for the mystery of the city. The Eiffel tower can just be seen through a grey haze. It looks old and rusty, as if it’s passed it’s sell-by date.

The visitor to the museum is guided through the first part of the twentieth century in chronological order. The First World War, the rise of fascism in Italy, the depression, the rise of the Nazis in Germany, Spain; Anschlus, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. There’s a giant photograph of the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Stalin is grinning like a manic idiot. We really need to get rid of this whole leadership thing.

The story is told in a matter of fact way, which means that a great deal is omitted and there is no analysis of why anything happens. The class dynamics of the Second World War are poorly understood by sections of the left so it’s not going to be clearly represented in a museum of this type.

It is a more detached sense of history, making use of photographs and films to bring raw emotive power to the complex machinations of internal French and external international politics. The museum would have to be much larger to even begin to explain a little of the development of global capitalism and the political manoeuvrings of various ruling classes with their self-interests of empire, capital accumulation, imperialism and the weird and horrible psychologies of the leaders of grim and ghastly political parties. And why so many people get duped by all of this.

Following the defeat of France, the story being told becomes much darker and more frightening. People’s lives are at stake. People are captured, tortured, killed, deported to concentration camps. The homes of 38,000 Jewish people are looted. The occupiers have either fled abroad, gone into hiding or been arrested and sent to the camps. Their goods are stored in a huge warehouse. Cups, saucers, teaspoons, pots and pans, bed linen, everything. Everything becomes a compromise. To resist, but how? To keep one’s head down, but how? To look away when someone is being arrested and marched into the back of a truck full of soldiers? It is a daily compromise of one’s own existence.

There are recordings of members of the Resistance who were tortured, deported, sent to the concentration camps. A woman with a long braided hair plait looks down and away from the camera as she describes what happened. And then she looks up at the camera again. In those moments the gates of hell open. Midnight in the century lasted a long time. Jean Moulin is captured by the Gestapo in 1943. It’s believed he died around the 8th of the month as a result of torture. Many of those involved in this barbarism escape after the war, or are co-opted into the armies and secret service and bureaucracies of the Allies.

On the 15th August, 1,654 men and 546 women prisoners were deported to Buchenwald and Ravensbruck concentration camps. This was to be the last of the deportation trains. Metro workers, police officers and gendarmie went on strike. The next day, 35 young members of the FFI went to the Bois de Boulogne for a secret meeting. They were betrayed to the Gestapo and gunned down. By the 18th, there was effectively a general strike across the city and masses of people began to build barricades and prepare for insurrection.

De Gaulle, fearing a communist take over, persuaded the US military command to allow the French 2nd armoured division, led by General Leclerc to rush to the city. Permission was granted and they were supported by the 4 US Infantry division. By the 25th August, the city was liberated. The footage of the barricade building and street fighting are breath taking. There is jubilation, cheering, revenge, retribution. The museum achieves something that all museums should attempt; make you want to find out a lot more. And this it does most successfully.

I’ve been in there for nearly four hours and am about to leave when I notice one more room. It’s a lecture hall named after Antoinette Sasse, the immensely rich woman who was a personal friend of Jean Moulin and also a member of the Resistance. She provided the funds for this museum to be opened. Inside the room are photographs and stories of athletes and sports people who also fought the Nazis. It’s really worth going to see this before you leave for a glimpse into the immense bravery, defiance and humanity that people can conjure up.

It’s stopped raining and the Paris traffic just gets on with what ever business it’s up to. After the intensity of the museum, the city looks different now. It’s possible to imagine the Paris of Marx; there are traces of buildings of the time and Notre Dame cathedral was in existence then and the Seine was in the same place.

But the Paris of the 1940s is within living memory. There are people alive in the city who directly experienced the fascist occupation and there are a large group of people whose parents and grandparents would have told them stories of that time. Of what different members of the family did, of who resisted, who kept quite, who collaborated. Those living memories will have been passed down to those who will listen and are still being passed along today. Tales of bravery and brutality, of what really happened and what it was really like.

When I come out of the museum I walk along the Rue Daguerre and here the reality feels more that it belongs to me, that it’s something real, away from the chains of work relationships and something that I experience for myself, in my time, with my senses. There’s a very easy going atmosphere in this street and I immediately like it.

Marx writes in the Manuscripts that our work within capitalism is an alienation of our very being. We sell ourselves because we have to and this very fact is a gross distortion of our self. In the process, we lose our sense of reality. It is made worse the more we understand what is really going on because it is an affront to our consciousness and philosophical relationship with our own identity and the world around us. It is a horrible trap. Marx suggests that there are occasions when the alienation is broken; through conversation, conviviality, comradeship, meeting, talking, drinking, discussing. I like the idea that something as difficult as alienation could be broken so easily, that we don’t need to construct a baroque machine to break from its power, we simply have to overthrow the rule of capital and money.

Outside a butchers there’s a good collection of appetising food in a rotisserie There’s no one to sell anything so I walk into the shop and ask. The woman has very sparkling blue eyes and well groomed blond hair. In a mixture of French and English I ask how to order some food,

‘Come with me’, she says, which could potentially take me anywhere. I follow her out on to the pavement.
‘What would you like?’
I point to one of the trays
‘Ah, Dauphinoise Potatoes’, she says.
‘Which would you like?’ She suggests either a tray where the top potatoes are crispy, or a tray where they’re not.
I look at her and she catches my meaning.
‘I would go for these’, she says, pointing to the non-crispy version.
‘I’d prefer the crispy’, I say, my stomach prompting me to find my voice.
‘Ha ha ha’, and she selects that one and chuckles all the way back into the shop were I pay for them.

Potatoes in cream. What other place on earth could dream up such a lovely combination. I am too awe-struck by this whole performance to have the wits to ask for a wooden fork so I eat them with my fingers.

I have done so much walking that I’m in a trance-like state, a haze of Paris on a Saturday afternoon. All the immediate senses are at work; listening to the city, looking at the city, running my hand along a row of ornamental stone, feeling the ground under my feet. I stop in front of a genuinely weird second hand shop, take a detour into a yard filled with empty tables and chairs and flowers in pots and baskets. I later discovered that Agnes Varda lived in this street and that there was worker’s cooperative housing built here; but that will have to wait for a return visit.

I sit in a cafe and eat two pain au chocolate and drink coffee from a vending machine. I like these sort of places. You never feel self-conscious in such a place when you’re sitting on your own. Immediately you become part of the background, which is sometimes a good place to be. It’s easier to observe when background. When I come out, I’m no longer walking or even thinking, now there is a secret hidden force at work. A power from beyond the known physical dimensions has wrapped itself around me and lifts me from the ground and it’s like floating through the city.

It’s beyond the place were thinking happens, like watching a three dimensional film, a dream sequence with multiple images coinciding, never colliding, in a disconnected harmony; a boy having a haircut in a big barber’s chair, chatting to a big burly barber who listens carefully to what he’s saying.

A man standing on the step of a shoe repair shop holding a black and white cat while he talks to a couple of people on the pavement. His face is deeply lined, well tanned, with thick black hair that refuses to grey. He’s a character from Balzac’s Human Comedy; he never dies, but is endless reincarnated in the stories of the city. A group of men outside a Moroccan cafe, huddled round a table on which is placed a mobile phone. It’s been set to speaker phone and they are listening to a football match. Two women unexpectedly meet each other in the street. They both laugh and their faces light up and they hug and chat and keep touching each, a hand upon a sleeve, a hand upon a hand. It’s a short moment but it’s now part of their story.

‘Do you remember that afternoon when we met in the Boulevard ?
And they’ll both laugh, because after all, it is funny when you meet someone you know in a place the size of Paris.

I’ve become scruffy and chic and my coat’s covered in the dust and debris of centuries that’s been kicked up from the cobblestones. There are particles in the air that Danton breathed, drops of blood that have never been washed away from the Revolution and the Commune, there are torn scraps of paper lying in an attic somewhere, the missing paragraphs from the Manuscripts, there in Marx’s original handwriting. But we get the gist of what he was saying even if some words are gone.

I thought ten days in Paris would be too much, but if this single day stretched out for one hundred years it would not be long enough.