“Everyone needs a right of free movement, because the world belongs to no one; . . . goods move in large ships, even as human beings are deprived of the right to circulate . . .”
Manifesto of the School of Acts. Aubervilliers, 2018.
I’m not a prophet, but on the eve of the second round of French presidential elections of April 24, 2022, I had an experience that left me with the feeling of peering over the horizon into the deep future of the twenty-first century. I was in Paris for one of several visits to finish a research project. During a previous stay, I had read about a “micro-institution” called l’École des Actes. It was a unique French association with educational, cultural, social, and political objectives addressing intellectuals and lay people, native French and foreign born. I studied the website of the École but found it hard to visualize. The School of Acts welcomes and claims to have a place for everyone. The languages of its constituents are mentioned: Soninké, Bambara, Fula, Arabic, Bengali, English, etc. It advertises workshops for art, theater, film, dance, and law, special programs for children, and literacy classes for adults. It reaches out on an equal and elevated cultural level to the most vulnerable, including those without legal standing in France. This April, I made contact with and had the good fortune to interview Judith Balso, a co-founder of the School, and Julien Machillot, its resident philosopher.
This was when much of the world was united in outrage at the Russian aggression in Ukraine. Less attention was paid to that other ongoing conflict with its Mediterranean crossings and border skirmishes along the Rio Grande, its drowning victims, its casualties of hunger and thirst, its exhausted prisoners and intercepted wide-eyed children. These refugees are fleeing similar perils. Their numbers are no smaller and their plight no less severe. Yet hardly anyone considers their full trajectory from its causes to its consequences. A globalization imposed by the advanced economies has led to climate deterioration, the disruption of traditional societies, the failure of states, and to forms of oppression causing millions to flee elsewhere for safety and opportunity. The Right claims that these refugees are invaders manipulated by Western elites. The Left speaks of humanitarian crises, as if tidal waves were unforeseen emergencies. Poland absorbed three million Ukrainian refugees while callously blocking refugees from Africa, Syria, or Iraq. We can’t abolish the borders between states, but we can begin to break down the borders in our minds. This is why I was attracted to the “micro-institution” of l’École des Actes in Aubervilliers.
I took the Metro to Fort d’Aubervilliers. It was a warm afternoon, but coats and dozing passengers, many of them Black, signaled that these were workers from early morning shifts returning exhausted from their jobs in the center. Exiting at a station that looked provisional, I came out on a busy street lined with brick apartment complexes. It was wide and treeless but hardly the high-rise hell of French Netflix crime series. Across the street in a circular strip mall is the modest facility of the School of Acts. I found my way in and attended French language instruction given by Pierrette Azais-Blanc who welcomed me into the circle.
Several days later, on Saturday, April 23, I am seated at the same table with Andrew (Pfannkuche). We are interviewing Judith Balso, a co-founder and in effect director of the School, and Julien Machillot, its resident philosopher. We are told that before the pandemic forced all interactions out of shared spaces, this room was often filled with as many as eighty participants crowded in for instruction in French. While we wait for a late arrival, Balso contextualizes the School by referring back fifty years to the disillusionment that set in after May 1968. Since political parties could only participate in elections with reactionary outcomes, it was resolved to create new spaces outside the orbit of partisan politics such as l’École des Actes. She and her fellow activists had learned that abstract discussions of capitalism motivate no one. It would be necessary to approach criticism of the system from the vantage of its impact on people. It would be necessary to set forth positive demands based on critical propositions. No proposition would be more important than embracing new arrivals in France as a resource rather than a problem. The workers sans papiers, whom we call undocumented workers, must be accepted as equals. Legal and undocumented workers must join forces. Not pleas for aid but affirmative declarations issuing in demands are in order. The theory and practice of the School evolved from this kernel of insights.
The School of Acts opened its doors at the start of 2017 on the initiative of the Théâtre de la Commune of Aubervilliers. Its director Marie-José Malis and assistant director Frédéric Saccard were looking for ways to make their institution relevant to a public that had undergone transformations as the immigrant population swelled. In May 2015, Malis and Saccard enlisted eight sans papiers to perform in a pièce d’actualité. Trained by the two directors, the eight, all male and all but one from Africa, dramatized their passage to Europe and their life without legal standing or steady work. The actors were subsequently granted or promised official documentation.
The production was part of a sea change in the valuation of the migrant. I recognized this shift in the German novel Gehen-Ging-Gegangen (Go. Went. Gone.), published by Jenny Erpenbeck in 2015, from the recent exhibit at the Berlin Haus der Kulturen (academics interview migrants about their experience), and from Nigerian filmmaker Ike Nnaebue’s documentary of the migrant trek from Lagos to Tangier (No U-Turn, 2022). The undocumented migrant is no longer simply a pitiful wretch but a figure of courage and solidarity. The Brechtian directors knew that more needed to be done. Securing documentation by having migrants go on stage to perform as themselves is hardly an adequate response to mass misery; but the pièce d’actualité broke barriers separating theater from a voiceless constituency. It modeled the object of oppressive forces as a subject, articulate in setting forth new terms of humanity. To speak or to be spoken for on the stage highlights the authority and presence of the subject.
An additional traumatic impulse that led to the founding of the School according to Julien Machillot was the shock imparted by the 2015 slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo staff, followed by the massive and horrifying murder of young people at the Bataclan. The founders of the School saw a precondition of those massacres in the mutual segregation and alienation of immigrant youth and the working-class and educated middle-class youths who all occupy distinct cultural and physical spaces. The School is intended to constitute a common ground. This is laudable, but it occurs to me that we have mass shootings in America without the separation. White people are killed by white people who frequent the same schools and workplaces.
Machillot emphasizes educational reform and experimentation as a purpose of the School. Asked what sort of experience made him become oppositional, he cites the negativity of his educational experience. The failure of the French school system is a recurrent theme both in the interview and in the documents that I receive from Balso. The Charter of the School quotes the words of participants recalling that their schools had deprived them of a sense of community, made them fear and distrust their friends, doubt themselves, and lose their joy in life. The School generalizes that while demanding conformism, French educational institutions are places of separation: of pupils from one another, from their teachers, from their families, and of education itself from what is real. What is real is the world of work. Work is what the newly arrived migrants strive for. Work is understood not only to provide the material basis of a decent life, but to confer dignity and belonging. Work is the criterion that unlocks the paradox of a society where the new arrivals cannot find real work while those who already live here appear to act out work which isn’t real. Those engaged in creating the School are called its fabricants. Learning French means “working” on French. Those who do so are dignified as “writers,” “readers,” and so on in accordance with the skills they labor to develop.
The emphasis on work is a criterion that distinguishes two directions implicit in social reformist thinking: the outlook on the one hand that calls for “green jobs” and, in so doing, supposes that significant work should be entrusted to all. In the program of the Green New Deal proposed by US socialists and leftist Democrats, this is the “Civilian Climate Corps,” recalling one of the most radical and arguably most successful programs implemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Depression. In America, we still enjoy the many parks, murals, civic buildings, and monuments from that public program, even as the structures erected for private profit crumble and disappear. The tasks of saving and restoring the planet could provide meaningful work for all of its inhabitants. The alternative to this proposal of work for all is the guaranteed income which, taken in its purest form, would not require work. Andrew Wang championed this as a presidential candidate. Combinations of the alternatives are conceivable, but at their purest they assume distinct notions of the human being in society: the collaborative worker or the person freed from the necessity of work. The School of Acts comes down on the side of work.
The one public assembly that I am able to attend is chaired by Balso with input from Machillot. The event takes place in the auditorium of a theater before a diverse crowd of approximately 100. It combines two tenuously connected discourses. The first revolves around a group of ten African men seated facing the audience. They are attending for the first time. A dignified African man in a djellabah translates from and into Fula. These men are recent arrivals whose concerns gravitate to the practical. A second discourse focuses on a set of political positions to be embraced on the war in Ukraine. It is boilerplate, warmed over from previous meetings and not intended for open debate. One might suppose that it is of minimal interest to the Fula-speaking migrants. But the statement comes right to the point: all refugees should receive the same treatment, not Ukrainians one kind and Africans another. The laboriously translated exchanges allow the marginalized Africans to assert their presence and gain a certain limited recognition.
The first Manifesto issued by the participants in the assemblies of the School of Acts in 2018 reads like a new Declaration of the Rights of Man updated for the nomadic proletarians of the twenty-first century:
- “Everyone needs a right to be there, to be able to have some place in the world.”
- “Everyone needs a right to fraternity, because fraternity is the cement binding human beings; and fraternity bespeaks that in which France was great and good.”
- “Everyone needs a right to work, since no one wants to live from aid. And work is the foundation of everything in life . . . . To give someone something to do which can be called work: It amounts to saying: ‘You are one of us, you count.’”
- “Everyone has a need for a right to shelter by all the means for arranging one’s own lodging, in occupying an uninhabited house. For living in the street is not normal, it is not acceptable.”
- “Everyone needs a right of free movement, because the world belongs to no one; and today goods move in large ships, even as human beings are deprived of the right to circulate, crossing the waters on inflatable rafts, the desert like packages, and snow-covered mountains, at the risk of their lives.”
- “Everyone has a right to be known to the population, because to know them is to know that they have good in them; whoever arrives from somewhere should be able to declare their presence, their background and their future intention.”
The deliberations behind these new “Rights of Man” reflect the daily experience of the sans papiers and the global system of work, trade, and migration. From the vantage of the migrant, globalization can rival the nightmares of twentieth-century visions of the labyrinths of law and repression. We know those visions from accounts of prisoners, refugees, and victims of fascism. Flight, conflict, and repression are constants in a world of extreme polarization. The purpose of legal repression is always the same: to separate the haves from the have nots and the safe occupants of the global lifeboat from those struggling and drowning in the water. What distinguishes the School of Acts from the countless agencies and organizations that exist to assist the needy is its insistence on “friendship, not aid.” Model letters are formulated to demand payment from employers who cheat the sans papiers out of pay. Funds are collected to assist those without recourse. Work, not aid, fraternity, not sympathy, constitute the program of the School. This is the essential point of acceptance or rejection, the seed to be spread abroad to institute what Balso calls a “transnational,” as opposed to national or international, context of political and social organization. The Manifesto of the School of Acts should be emulated wherever nomadic proletarians struggle to assert themselves and survive.
What unites the participants in the School and its Assemblies is not victimhood or multicultural identities but a shared allegiance to truths worked out in collective deliberation. The future will undoubtedly see increasing movement and flight among the losers of globalization. This will force the more fortunate to choose between hatred, pity, and fraternity. The situation will confront us with the choice either to accept or resist a world precariously split between global winners and losers. In a world of systematic repression and lethal borders, Aubervilliers is a micro center of resistance.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
May 14th, 2022
Normal Thoughts 