Halluin “La Rouge”

Halluin is at the northern tip of a French bridgehead toward Belgium, and Menin or Menen, the Belgian town opposite, could be a district of it, or vice versa. The development of the fundamental textile industry, first in Roubaix then in Halluin, was linked to its earlier development in Flanders whose origins dated back to the widespread diffusion throughout the eighteenth century of the cultivation of flax and its cottage weaving: first in Roubaix, because Halluin until the 1840s was very backward. Two consequences arose from this backwardness. One was the singular and persistent mental traditionalism of the employers unrestrained by any counter-power of the workers. The second consequence was the workers’ training from the experiences that their comrades had lived and were living in Roubaix, more advanced experiences corresponding to a more dynamic capitalism. It was they who directed the first important social conflict in Halluin, and they provided the immaterial and material structures including the people’s house. The construction and the successful management in balanced conditions of the people’s house of Roubaix surprised many at the time and still continues to surprise today. The budget of the cooperative and the management of the people’s house of Roubaix were in balance only thanks to the “self-financing” activities: parties, meetings, paid entertainment, and cultural initiatives which, due to their popularity and attendance, provided considerable financial contributions. Thus, it was politicization that allowed the sustainable development of the people’s house and not vice versa. This was the lesson that came from the experience of Roubaix: the people’s house will be the result of a process that can be set in motion and sustained only by the previous political maturation. Therefore, anyone with a sense of logic understood that the extremely backward state of the proletarian politicization of Halluin made it impossible to transplant initiatives such as the people’s house to obtain this maturation: it would have been like reversing the cause-effect relationship. But the improbable proved possible and was achieved. While in Roubaix the Workers’ Party won the municipal elections in 1892 and the people’s house was inaugurated in 1901, in Halluin the socialists won them in 1919, but the people’s house had already been there since 1907. While in Roubaix class consciousness and political action were the center and lever of social restructuring, from which followed the development of the cooperative and the people’s house, in Halluin the people’s house was at the center of social restructuring. For this reason, to make it come into being it was necessary to use faith against science. Similarly to the Italian case, that of Halluin confirms that the formula is applied especially when the need for inclusive innovation is acute. In conditions of delayed development, the needs and desires of the proletariat are widely perceived as very distant from reality, a distance that becomes urgent to remedy by a large number of people who change their ways of thinking and living. The years that saw the maturation of the idea in Halluin, then the realization and the consolidation of the people’s house were times of structural crisis that would be further aggravated by the war. It was a season of exhaustion of the consolidated forms of social organization, and the local dimension was inserted into a critical scenario at the national level. In such conditions, the birth of the people’s house due to the exercise of faith against science was followed by growth, for which the exercise of science against faith was essential. Science was a “theorem” learned from the experience of Roubaix. Statement: the people’s house is the place of proletarian self-emancipation. Demonstration: the people’s house gains credit by solving workers’ problems; therefore, an interactive relationship is established between the social and political body, which uses the traditional forms of social interaction, which lead to further consensus and the ability to solve problems as well as the ability to modify those forms of social interaction in a progressive sense. Against the belief that prosperity for the proletariat would come only after the destruction of bourgeois power without having to demonstrate improvements in the process leading to the conquest of power. This local communism vector of identity was born and grew in the people’s house, the “machine” whose eclectic capacity was truly surprising, in particular, through the investment in traditional forms of social interaction, revisited to serve the generative proletarian narrative. The staging of the “funeral” of the Director of the Industrial Consortium Désiré Ley, truly represented the condemnation and the overcoming of a system, affirming an opposite one, but not through formal coherence, but rather through the complex and ambiguous combination of the disorganized and fragmentary reference to tradition on the one hand, and on the other, as a cultured, explicit, original, active discourse in tension toward the hegemonic. This was the “strange” combination brought back to unity as it meshed with the social group, with the community of Halluin “The Red”, through the gesture of the staging of the event and the symbol. But at a certain point the Halluin communists lacked science. In 1928-29 a major strike put them to the test, and they made a mistake in overestimating their own strength. Thus, at the moment when faith should have returned to the field, that mistake caused another with serious consequences: it was the end of an era. The Halluin case therefore allows the clarification of two points regarding the formula faith against science and science against faith. Science must dictate the configuration of objectives by measuring them against resources. However, at a certain point, a leap of faith is needed to overcome obstacles that may appear insurmountable on the basis of resources. One can always make the wrong choice of a moment, as there is no recipe for identifying it correctly. But if one makes a mistake, one must not lose faith. When faced with failure, the temptation to believe that one’s own capabilities and resources in relation to the objectives are inferior to what they actually are, can be great. In that case, one mistake would be added to another, and the consequences could be serious. Secondly, a clarification is needed regarding the nature of “science”. It is not the science of formal coherence but rather that of engagement with the social group, Warburg’s “nameless science”. Indeed, the ultimate mistake could be precisely that of giving it up believing it to be lacking in order to resort to formal science that would be extraneous, unproductive, even destructive in view of collective action for innovation and inclusion.