The force of a political movement does not consist only of the capacity to realize its objectives, which in the case of the intermittent workers consists of repealing the new accords protocol on their unemployment conditions. This, in fact, depends first of all on the relationship of cognitive force. The force of a movement also depends on its capacity to pose new problems and create new solutions. The struggles of the intermittent workers have posed numerous new problems that need new responses. Lets take a few into consideration.
The "aesthetic" war
The cultural and communication industry is not a new terrain of the capitalist accumulation. The culture and communication industry produces the sensible (desires, beliefs, wants) of the subject of the society of control. The intermittent workers function as an interface between this industry and the public and consumer constitution, which are the clients of the various industrial activities. The production of the sensible comes before the production of the material. That means that before producing a material, you need to construct it’s clientele, the consumer-communicator. The clientele is constructed using marketing, commercials, the politics of communication, and using "artistic" methods. The definition of Duchamp could be applied to the production of the sensible, according to which "the opera" is half a result of those that realize it and half a result of those that see it, hear it, read it. The production of the consumer is done with the implication of the consumer itself. From this, the radical changes that touch "culture" and "art" can be understood; these are one of the reasons why a "exception culture" cannot be talked about anymore, because the cultural practices, from a formal and material point of view, are integrated parts of capitalist production. The intermittent workers, for the inside of this situation, pose the problem of how to situate ourselves in this capitalist codification of the sensible and invites us to question the new forms of contemporary exploitation. In the same mode in which industrial capitalism appropriated the natural resources and the work force, exploiting to produce merchandise, contemporary capitalism freely captures the cultural and artistic resources, using them for the logic of profit. An example of the exploitation of community wealth of culture and art can be taken from this event: During the movement of the intermittent show workers a curious phenomenon was produced: the hotels and the merchants of Aix-en-Provence made a legal denouncement against XXXX, the director of the festival, because the closure of the lyric art festival caused by the show workers’ strike, provoked a 30% income loss to the local tourist industry, that exploits the relationship with the art for its exclusive profit. The tourist industry, the world leader in employees and sales is, along with the cultural and communication industries, the most greedy towards cultural resources (traditions, forms of life, rituals, world visions, etc.) and artistic resources (festivals, theater, works of every type and epoch). The common wealth that are works of art, architecture, natural landscapes, and historical city centers are colonized by the tourist industry that takes possession of them for free, changing their status: from the "property of humanity" to the private property of the tourist industry. It is enough to simply "cross" a historical center of a European city to realize how the transformation of the experience of time and urban space into merchandise happens; or to go on vacation to understand how capitalism captures the experience of the relationship with nature, with cultural arts, with other traditions and with other forms of life. The reduction of social cooperation into commercials and clients, also regarding the activities of the cultural and communication industries (appropriating the forms of verbal and non-verbal communication, the forms of life, languages, artistic experiences etc.) A mass of free work is activated and valorized without any contribution in return.
The struggles over common wealth
The struggles of the school professors and the intermittent show workers in the spring of 2003 are not simply new salary struggles. They are not only constituted by a subordinate relationship (legal issues and salaries) to a private or public boss, but also question the nature of creativity, the realization of common wealth (culture and education) and the multiplicity of the subjects that participate in them. They pose the problem of the institutional and technological devices necessary for the creation and the distribution of communal wealth; of their financing and of the right to the access of whatever subject in the cooperation of these public goods. But these struggles also question the processes of the production of subjects that schools, cultural productions, the media, and artistic experiences organize.
The continuity of rights while facing the discontinuity of employment
On this problem we can let the Coordination des intermittents et des précaires d’Ile de France speak directly: "Our vindications are not to be confused with a struggle for privileges: flexibility and mobility that tend to generalize must not imply precariousness and misery... The elaboration of a compensation model for unemployment based on the reality that our occupations (continuous activity but discontinuous paid activity) is an open base to every form of expropriation of circulation, of contamination in the direction of other sectors." The intermittent workers are mobilized on this terrain, even though after 4 months the movement is organizing, together with the unemployed and with the precarious workers a European day of "income for everyone" for October 30th. In fact, all of them, be it the intermittent or the unemployed, are dependant on the same accord for insurance compensation that will go into effect on January 1st, 2004 and that expects the exclusion or reduction of compensation for 850,000, and for the intermittent workers a mass firing (35% of the profession will be cut out of the category).
New problems and new answers
The intermittent workers and teachers’ struggles of the spring and the summer and ask us to pose new problems and to find new answers: inventions of new modalities of activity that are not embezzled into work subordination (public or private), financing the creation and the realization of common wealth and not based only on the value of the labor; to disassociate the work time from the cost, accessibility for all to the non-subtle temporalities, also those creators of richness and subjectification processes; to un-hinge the financial forces of bio-power (welfare) that look to reproduce the subordination to work (workfare), towards the financing of individuals (whatever subjectivity) and the infrastructures of the creation of common goods; to construct the neutralizing conditions of the division between inventor and reproduction, between creator and user, expert and non-expert, imposed by the management of intellectual property; to integrate the multiplicity of the subjects that participate in the development of social cooperation in a new concept of democracy that transforms them from clients, users, unemployed, precarious, etc., into political actors of a new public, not state, sphere.
