Paris & the Modern Workers

Paris appears suddenly as if the train has travelled through a gate. Before we reached the gate, it was a landscape of rolling hills covered with grass and wheat and cheerful bunches of trees and stand alone farmhouses with whitewash walls and red tile roofs. Out in this countryside we flashed past steel box food processing factories and grain silos, and warehouses; part of the infrastructure of the means of production. And then again the blurred brush strokes of blooming hawthorn bushes and chestnut trees. And now here is Paris. The outer suburbs with grim block housing, the monotonous scrap-metal of motorism, a desolate anti-social imagery of traffic and thick roads and concrete flyovers.

Paris is a giant concrete, glass and steel organism with occasional outbreaks of red bricks, cobblestones and limestone blocks. Even in the centre of the city, the railway lines are surprisingly green. Plants grow at the edges of the tracks and underneath the overhangs of the platforms. These parcels of land are too small to build on and as they don’t interfere with the trains, they are left wild. Buddleia and even small trees grow here with their ecosystems of flowers and bugs.

The blocks of flats thicken and the roads narrow. Multi-coloured LED signs flash ‘open’ outside the shops selling yams and sweet potatoes in boxes on the street; a hairdresser, nail bar, luxury kitchens, wedding dresses, mobile phones, patisseries and express supermarkets.

And then there is a great spilling out of people from the train to the platform of the Gare du Nord. I descend into the seeming chaos of the metro station with everyone moving in different directions. I wait in the queue and buy a ticket for Puteaux, being careful to ask if it’s possible to also use the tram with this ticket. The man goes to ask a colleague who confirms it’s ok. I ask the Black railway worker on the platform if this is the RER to La Defense. ‘No’, he tells me in French, ‘You need to go over onto the other platform’. Thousands of metro workers around the world know the experience of working underground all day with the coming and going of trains. We hear little of their stories.

The RER train is muscular and industrial, loud and fast and noisy, built to withstand the constant assault of the people of Paris. As it pulls in I can just see the driver through the windows of the cab. The whole train has the feel that it’s travelled a hundred thousand miles today, covered with the desert sand, the dust of forgotten tracks, the strange particles within the tunnels deep beneath Paris. The driver never sleeps, he endlessly moves around the subterranean city without ever seeing the sunlight or sky or feeling the wind and the rain.

At La Défense my ticket won’t let me onto the platform for the tram. A woman in a train company uniform is helping sort out a multitude of passenger problems. I wait my turn and explain my ticket won’t work in the barrier. She looks at me from under her dark peaked hat with red trim. ‘This is because it’s not for the tram’, she tells me and directs me to the overground suburban railway and then she is once again in the swirling mass of people, ‘this ticket doesn’t work’, ‘how do I get to Montparnasse’, ‘can I get a train from here to Chartres’, ‘what time does the station close’, ‘I don’t like the government’.

On the first evening I ate at a Vietnamese cafe. The food was already prepared on trays and payment was by weight. The woman behind the counter suggested I take a seat while she sorted it out. It was inexpensive, uncomplicated and delicious.

Part of the plan to be in Paris was to visit the Louvre over several days. But I forgot to buy a membership card in advance and when I arrived one Sunday morning there was already a queue of several hundred people.

Here was another one of those young Parisian women in a smart uniform and a peaked hat with red trim who each day deal with all the problems of the city and its people. They should all be brought together and given the power to run the place. I could imagine immediate and vast improvements to a thousand problems and issues, many of which career politicians would not even know exist. She was explaining very clearly a few points to some tourists who seemed to think that if they asked the same question over and over again the answer might change. I caught her eye and she raised an eyebrow in return. I had presented her with the opportunity to escape them.

I asked her if I had to join the ever lengthening queue to buy a membership. She explained I would still have to queue but it might be better if I arrived early in morning before the Louvre opened and the crowds arrived. I said that sometimes it was easier to come and ask and that websites weren’t always correct, or very easy to follow. She smiled and said, ‘yes, and sometimes in Paris, what people say they will do, and actually do are different things’. She spoke these words based on long and deep experiences. A voice emerged from the walkie-talkie she was holding and she moved off to resolve some new outbreak of confusion among the visitors and we said au revoir.

Days in Paris were long and lazy sounding but with a great deal going on. I read Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and Prawer’s Karl Marx and World Literature and Balzac’s César Birotteau. Around mid-morning I’d go out to the local patisserie and buy a couple of pan au chocolats. The woman who served me was perhaps twenty but with shoulders carrying the weight of the whole shop, of the whole Parisian baking industry. When she wasn’t serving the endless customers she would be cleaning the counter, arranging the cakes, re-aligning the baguettes on the wooden shelf, sweeping the floor. Early in the morning, and when I came back in the evening, she was always working.

I bought ginger beer and biscuits and breakfast cereals and yoghurts and rice pudding from the local bio-supermarket on a regular basis so began to slightly get to know the staff. On one occasion a worker in black, wearing a red apron, held out his hand which contained a small white sack with what looked like Japanese rice crackers. I took one and it set me on fire for a minute or two.

One afternoon I walked from Puteaux to Suresnes to visit the Garden City. As I climbed the hill, more and more of the city of Paris was revealed across the horizon. This felt like a different Paris, somewhere that has never been discovered by any visitor but is well-worn for its denizens.

The garden city was fantastic. People leaning out of their windows at ground level and standing on their balconies day dreaming and thinking and looking out just for the pleasure of seeing what was going on. Five or six storey blocks of apartments, masses of trees and greenery, squares and gardens and a park, three good quality and well designed schools, a protestant and a catholic church and an impressive theatre building.

The housing was built in the 1920s when the militant socialist Henri Sellier was the mayor. The founding principal of the estate was that it should support the development of the child. The schools seemed to exude an atmosphere of well organised learning, the ideas and practice of supportive and caring communities, the cultivation and nurturing of a child’s curiosity, an immense commitment by the teachers and the school staff to provide a place in which every child can thrive.

In Suresnes too is a museum of the town and much of it traces the history of the building of the housing and the amenities. There are films and photographs and the books and notes and pens and the writing desk of Sellier himself. It expresses a real and proper sense of municipal civic pride, an old fashioned reformism that it is the duty of the state to provide for the workers. Paternalist and corporatist it may be under less intelligent governance and impractical hands, but historically, under the control of socialist councils it has worked well. Not everyone wants to spend all day on committees and going to meetings; that’s one of the reasons to vote other people to do it for you. If they do it well, then people have the advantage of high quality and low cost housing, good schools for their children, nice, leafy squares and gardens to sit in, parks to play boules and a theatre for plays and films and entertainment.

Sellier refused to cooperate when the Nazis occupied Paris. He died in 1943 and the fascist authorities banned any form of funeral procession. Thousands came out into the streets in open defiance.

Saturday is the day for exploring cities. The streets are less business like and the atmosphere is more about the people even if this is transitory and semi-illusional. Work forces us into lanes that we must stay in. This desk in this office, the same cab of the same lorry, the same cab of the train with the same routes repeated over and over again. Standing in the exact same spot by the conveyor belt, the supermarket check out, on the construction site until the building is completed, in the windowless CCTV control room, stuck in the service areas of the giant buildings.

If we are not at work on a Saturday these chains are lifted. We can roam with freedom, without a plan, without being constrained by the start and end times of machines and vehicles and shop openings, without work instructions, orders, task lists, production and sales targets and key performance indicators.

It’s possible to just set off, not really thinking anything to start with, following points of interest on the slowly changing street horizons.

I walked along the edge of the Bois de Boulogne and through the 16th arrondissement. Collections of well built apartment blocks with gated fortifications. In fact, entire streets which are gated. Even to look through the railings is to arouse suspicion and perhaps even fear in the residents. This really is another world, a world most of us are likely to feel awkward and inferior within, conscious of how suddenly our clothes feel cheap and tardy, that we aren’t quite clean enough, the very money in our pockets inadequate and of a lesser value to the demands and desires that permeate such places.

But one thing it does provide is a template for what all housing should be like. Not in terms of the organisation of fear and paranoia or being gated, but in terms of the intelligent design, the obviously large size of the apartments, the quality of the construction, the well maintained trees, gardens and streets. Even the best of the municipal housing of the 1920s, in the Île-de-France, Berlin, Vienna, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and elsewhere was constrained by costs. This led to flats that would have been better if larger and higher and broader. The municipal socialists achieved a great deal and have left an impressive legacy in the built environment; but I left the 16th arrondissement with a feeling that this should be the template for our future public housing. This however will require universal socialist administration, not just at the municipal level; and that will require a revolution or two.

By the time I reached the Avenue Charles de Gaulle the rain was becoming heavier, and purely impressionistically, felt wetter. I stood underneath the canopy of a surprisingly busy shop. Fruit and vegetables in boxes on top of orange crates. All sorts of people coming in and out. An elderly man stopped and started talking to me. He explained that he was born in Paris and it is the best city in the world. He continued along the avenue and I watched him as he slowly examined the windows of each and every shop he passed. The rain kept falling and as it washed across the cobblestones the whole history of the city was revealed.

I walked this way again a few days later. I noticed that the map of Paris I was carrying required a small repair. An inch or two of sellotape (to use a brand name which has become synonymous with the actual commodity). I like this map and want it preserved. There is something optimistic and rather sunny about its presentation. It may be the orange colour palette, the clarity of the type faces, the lack of the clutter of online maps where everything is drenched in the commodification of space. It was bought in a second hand bookshop in London and was published in the late 1960s. It is a map of a different Paris and in some ways I prefer that alternative version.

It is a map of the time of student protests and in my romantic fantasy moments I imagine it is a map such as this that Guy Debord used when writing The Society of the Spectacle. There’s a florist on the corner, they will have some tape.

The florist very kindly stops working on the creation of a large bouquet (I feel guilty about this) and carefully cuts just the right amount of tape and I hold the map so that it can be repaired. She skilfully applies the tape in just the right place. She looks up at me and smiles at me and it’s done. I am very pleased with this whole interaction. The possibility of losing a small piece of the map had been bothering me in a disproportionate way.

With more thought I would have walked the streets on sunny afternoons and visited department stores and museums on rainy days. But I was affected by ‘mood’ and ‘inclination’ and ‘desires’. Strange forces that came and went and that seemed to be out of my control. One hot afternoon I explored Printemps on the Haussmann Boulevard.

I visited it as if it were a museum of contemporary design and fashion, which in a sense it is. I walked slowly, through each department, taking time to look at all the displays and the range of commodities on sale; the colours, brands, shapes; the character of the objects, the use-value of the objects, the price of everything. Here are the first few chapters of Capital on display, here the role of money in society can be examined, how money brings impossibilities together.

The immediate impression is not of something based on the exploitation and oppression of labour; it is of complexities of emotions and aesthetics, a measuring of consumer hopes that appear as if natural inclinations, the ignition of unknown desires, the urgency to satisfy addictive pleasures.

There are long supply chains for all of these commodity-objects. There is a hierarchy of labour types. The lowest labour is the child-miners in central Africa who dig out the rare-earth metals. The summit is the labour that shapes materials in the luxury ateliers of Paris itself. The perfumers and fashion workers and ceramics and glass makers and jewellers. And here are the shop workers, smartly dressed, with acting skills of elegance and grace; they wear theatrical masks and are trained to speak well-rehearsed verse and dialogue.

I ask a man at one of the perfume counters whether it’s ok to take some photographs. He says in a rather subversive way ‘there are no signs to say that you cannot’. It could be sarcastic but it’s not; it’s nicely on the right side. The area has a number of mirrors, I assume so that it’s possible to get a glimpse of the full shape of the bottles of scent and lotions and creams.

‘I’m not keen on seeing myself in mirrors’, I explain, ‘I just think, who is this old man staring at me?’
He puts his hand to the middle of his chest, a move understood to be the location of the heart.
‘It’s here that counts’ he says.

From Printemps I walk across the sunlit streets to the Gare St Lazare to sort out a travel card. Trains are being organised to travel west, to Dieppe, Bayeux, Cherbourg, Le Harve. I think with affection of all the cycling tours travelled in the area. Of the first time I arrived in Cherbourg at six o’clock in the morning after an overnight sea crossing. How cold and wet it was and how dry and snug and warm the first cafe I found. I drank hot black coffee surrounded by French workers drinking early morning liqueurs. They wore overalls and boots and smelt of wood and tar, sweat and leather, dust and grime and cigarette smoke. Thick fingers and big hands of the docker class. It is tempting to just take the first train and discover where it goes. But today I must commit to Paris.

I made a mistake. I think it was in the queue to buy the travel pass. I saw something, perhaps a leaflet, or a poster, or maybe I was reading something on someone else’s phone. I misread the phrase ‘modern wonders’ as ‘modern workers’. I had to look again, ‘modern workers’ had become ‘modern wonders’ once again. But modern workers stuck.

A girl in a black leather jacket ducks as I stop to take a photograph and smiles back towards with me with Paris chic and cool. She’s a modern worker, perhaps she works in a marketing team for a Paris commercial real estate company or a publishing firm.

And later when I get onto the metro, I try to guess what all these people ‘do’. By ‘do’ I mean in terms of jobs and occupations. I realise this is based on people I know, or know of, and encounter, or read about. Man over there, about forty; he’s a logistics manager on a big construction site. The woman on the next seat is a doctor, and there’s a project manager, a software developer, a translator and writer, an architect, first line IT support, building maintenance, lorry driver, shop assistant, town planner, CCTV operator, community engagement, database administrator, teacher, publishing designer, financial advisor, research scientist, bricklayer, factory worker, artisan producer, dock operative, social worker, arts administrator, engineer, civil engineer, lecturer, train driver, dental assistant, accountant, shop fitter.

Some support Paris St Germaine football team and some have no interest in sport at all. They have heard stories from their grandparents about what the Nazi occupation was really like, the deportations and murders and beatings and who the Resistance were and the days when the general strike in August 1944 led to armed civilians fighting the fascists in the streets. They listen to Taylor Swift and African High Life, blues, jazz, Bob Dylan, hip hop, garage, punk rock, opera and Beethoven sonatas. A layer of them are fed up with not getting paid enough and the petty humiliations from their managers. They read Zola and Balzac and modern French writers and some work in offices and read Marx and Engels.

They all produce for the capitalists; be it in the aerospace and pharmaceutical and manufacturing industries in the Paris region, or in the cafes and bars. It is all productive; aircraft engines and cups of coffee, vehicles and bus journeys, goods and services.

I’m on a metro train full of modern workers, I’m in a city full of modern workers. The girl who ducks as I take a photograph, the young woman at the Louvre who tells me that what people do and say in Paris can be different things, the metallurgist I talked to in a cafe who explained the organisation of steel making in France, the helpful man who sold me a travel pass at the Gare St Lazare, the train driver I glimpsed through the grimy window of his cab, the shop workers in Printemps, the woman in the local patisserie who was constantly working, the florist who fixed my map; the mass of people in the crowds, the people who I observed when I walked through the vast concrete-block housing estates of Nanterre.

These modern workers are organised by the capitalists into the factories and warehouses and train depots and construction sites that the train from Calais passed, what seemed like a century ago. This is Paris & the Modern Workers.

And through a complex global division of labour and international organisation of production, all modern workers are connected to all other modern workers. This is what the expansion of capital does. The Chinese workers in Foxconn who work in intimidating and threatening conditions for 80 hours a week, often with unpaid overtime and worthless contracts, who build the iPhones that fit in the pockets of the modern workers in New York and Shanghai. The migrant construction workers in Dubai and Kuwait and Qatar and across the Middle East who build the 50 storey buildings, at one level, producing a form of homogenised abstract human labour which flows into the general labour time which builds all high rise buildings across the world.

All modern workers are selling their labour to the capitalists through coercive social relations. The idea that this is a free market of buyers and sellers is a mystification, an illusion; it is a lie. And it is through this lie that all modern workers must live, the extraction of their labour-power is a loss to them and a gain to the capitalists. The selling of labour by the worker is a moral loss, a spiritual loss, a dissolving of dignity, a corrosion of the soul.

The exploitation of labour strengthens the capitalists and weakens the head, hand and heart of the workers. Each contact with the means of production by the hands of worker is like a tiny drop of human substance being taken from the worker and given to the capitalist. These drops are like atoms, imperceptible but essential. Each atom is extracted by the capitalist and fused together; they become buildings, extraordinary cities; sheets of steel, giant ships; tiny transistors, immensely powerful microchips.

But it does something else too. At the immediate point of production, where the worker constantly adds their tiny drops of human substance, each modern worker is immediately, and in some ways intimately, connected to every other modern worker. A vast dynamic force is created, a network of human energy, a thousand million touch points which if organised would irrevocably destroy capital.

It’s the last day in Paris. I walk once more along the Rue Richard Wallace and along the side of the Bois du Boulogne and through the 16th arrondissement. Up to the Arc de Triomphe and along the Champs Elysée. People queuing up for the luxury brand designer shops, slow moving crowds stopping to take photographs, considering what to buy, where to eat, what to do next.

Lutetia is my muse and beckons me with thin ghost-milk fingers, she slips a silver chain around my neck and pulls me with her. Into the back streets, outside a church, a street beggar on the steps, hunched into a animal shape, rough, unwashed, thick black hair matted and oily, a weather beaten paper cup on the ground before him.

The people seem to float, to be from other realms, a chasm opens in the cobble stones, a golden cavern revealed, walls of jade and marble, a turquoise floor, sumptuous luxury, it closes as a heavy industrial bin truck momentarily stops. Two workers dressed in lime green high viz uniforms jump off the back and start to throw rubbish boxes into its gaping jaws. The lorry moves off again, the workers jump back on to the standing platform and hold on to the metal rails. One wears the Red Cap of Liberty. His great desire is to free his own soul.

I have arrived at the final page of Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and slowly close the book. For now.