When tractors enter Paris, the market loses its monopoly on reality

To see 350 tractors crossing Paris is to be reminded of something modern administrations prefer to forget: people can still force their way into appearance. Power is not the same as violence; it arises when men act together and holds only so long as they do not disperse. @Power is a relational potential that springs up between people when they act together and vanishes when they disperse; it is largely independent of material factors such as numbers or means.

The EU-Mercosur deal is defended in the language of totals: GDP, export gains, aggregate “competitiveness.” Farmers answer with a blunt counter-claim, “No country without farmers.” Between these two slogans stands the modern confusion that politics is merely an instrument of “society,” that is, of the life process and its management. When decision is reduced to economic function, the citizen is invited to behave like a producer or consumer, and not like an acting person. @Modern functionalization of politics as a mere function of society predates Marx; with the rise of society, household matters became collective public concerns, erasing the ancient gulf between private and public.

It is no accident that the conflict centers on trade. On the exchange market, one does not appear as a person at all, one appears as a bundle of products, and meets others only through commodities. @On the exchange market, participants appear not as persons but as producers showing only their products; the market is held together by a combined "power of exchange" acquired in isolation, lacking the relational power that springs from action and speech. The farmer becomes “costly beef” opposed to “cheaper beef,” and the only question left is which cost the administration can tolerate. This is precisely what produces the rage against “rules,” because rules then look like arbitrary obstacles inside a machinery whose purpose remains unquestioned.

But the farmer’s world is not exhausted by income. Land is not merely wealth. Property once meant a located share in the common world, a place from which one could speak and be heard. @Property is the privately owned share in a common world—the basic political condition of worldliness—so expropriation coincides with world alienation; the modern age began by alienating groups from the world. If you take that place and translate it into a line item in a trade balance, you do not simply impoverish people, you estrange them from the world that makes them visible.

Still, I do not trust the phrase “food sovereignty” when it becomes a dream of homogeneity, as though soil could dictate political belonging. The task is harder and more sober: to create European institutions where those affected can judge and speak before agreements are signed, not after, and where compensation is not a substitute for participation. Otherwise, the tractors will return, and they will be right to do so.