Recent decades have witnessed protests that are unlike many of the social movements of previous centuries. They are not led by any party, union or leader, but by ordinary people. Their deep roots are existential rather than material.
These protests are not driven by class consciousness or ideology but by the sense that people have been abandoned, stripped of their rights and shunted out to the peripheries of social and economic life. This is the movement of the dispossessed - of a mass of ordinary people who have gained a will of their own and are no longer content to comply with the directives of elites who want to tell them how to live and behave. The high-profile political events of recent years - Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of right-wing parties - are merely surface tremors of a much deeper tectonic shift caused by the slow displacement of a forgotten continent.
In this book Christophe Guilluy uncovers this forgotten continent of the dispossessed and shows how ordinary people are rising up and responding to their programmed disappearance by forging an alternative to a doomed model.
These protests are not driven by class consciousness or ideology but by the sense that people have been abandoned, stripped of their rights and shunted out to the peripheries of social and economic life. This is the movement of the dispossessed - of a mass of ordinary people who have gained a will of their own and are no longer content to comply with the directives of elites who want to tell them how to live and behave. The high-profile political events of recent years - Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of right-wing parties - are merely surface tremors of a much deeper tectonic shift caused by the slow displacement of a forgotten continent.
In this book Christophe Guilluy uncovers this forgotten continent of the dispossessed and shows how ordinary people are rising up and responding to their programmed disappearance by forging an alternative to a doomed model.
Table of Contents
IntroductionPart 1: The sea
Chapter 1. Access to the sea
Back to square one
The ‘unbowed’ bourgeoisie and the sense of heritage
Chapter 2. The forbidden city
Urban cloning
The cemetery of the political left
The forbidden city
Chapter 3. The social imprint
Ecologically responsible, socially irresponsible
The peril of social distancing
Part 2. The fog
Chapter 4. Cinema
From narrative to cinema
Their cinema
The transclass, an Oscar-worthy role
The realm of whiners
Chapter 5. ‘There is no majority’
The language that renders people invisible
The parent company is Netflix
The utopia of a new people
Coming out of one’s reserve
Chapter 6. Apocalypse Now
Act I: Enter the Prince of Darkness
Act II: The announcement of dark times
Part 3. The horizon
Chapter 7. The radical nature of ordinary life
The survival instinct
The electoral hard discount and abstention
Chapter 8. Not against but elsewhere
A dialogue of the deaf
And what about a summit conference on living conditions?
Chapter 9. Return to the centre
The Idiot
The West doesn’t need anyone else’s help to decline
It’s now okay to be pragmatic
Epilogue
Notes
