The Dispossessed

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.

Introduction Part 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