--- title: "The Fever" description: "«The Fever» is, without a doubt, the best series of 2024 and will probably be remembered as one of the three best series about politics of the last 25 years" date: 2024-08-20 updated: 2026-02-10 author: "Communalia" lang: en category: "Narratives" canonical: https://maximalism.blog/the-fever image: https://maximalism.blog/assets/the-fever.jpg license: EUPL-1.2 license_url: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eupl-text-eupl-12 site: Maximalism --- # The Fever ***La fièvre*** (The Fever), is the best series of 2024 and is, without a doubt, one of the three best so far this century. It is worth paying the platform subscription for a month just to watch and enjoy its six episodes. For that reason, **we are not going to spoil** the plot in this article or reveal all of its twists and turns. We will focus on its thesis and its political proposals. ## Éric Benzekri [La fièvre (Fever)](https://www.movistarplus.es/series/la-fiebre/ficha?tipo=E&id=3307673), is the latest creation of [Éric Benzekri](https://www.radiofrance.fr/personnes/eric-benzekri), the author of ["Baron Noir"](https://www.canalplus.com/series/baron-noir/h/6251363_50001). Benzekri was drawn towards the majority tendencies of French Trotskyism during his University years and later became associated towards the end of the 90's with the *Gauche Socialiste* tendency of [Mélenchon](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_M%C3%A9lenchon) and [Dray](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Dray), which grouped a part of this milieu within the ranks of the Socialist Party. Between 2000 and 2002 he worked as Mélenchon's chief of staff while the latter was Minister Delegate for Vocational Training. In 2005 he left and began to collaborate as a scriptwriter in well-known series such as *[Lascars](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascars_(s%C3%A9rie_t%C3%A9l%C3%A9vis%C3%A9e))*. His political imaginary is a realistic and not at all complacent, even if a bit morbid, vision of party mechanisms and political communication, replete with references to the workers' struggles of the late seventies. In an interview published this June in *[Les Inrockuptibles](https://www.lesinrocks.com/series/pour-eric-benzekri-createur-de-la-fievre-la-communication-ne-sert-a-rien-sans-la-politique-619360-14-06-2024/)* he recalled: > The adventure of the Lip[^1] watch factory was very important for me. I think it's really a powerful thing to say and discuss in a collective context that we don't need bosses nor a “superior” politicized avant-garde to produce something that sells and that we are proud of. [^1]: On the Lip strike in 1973 and the organization of production by the workers until 1976, you can read this [summary in Le Point](https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/il-y-a-50-ans-l-aventure-en-autogestion-des-montres-lip-11-02-2023-2508266_23.php#11) and a [couple of books documenting it](https://www.slate.fr/culture/pages-dhistoire/lip-lutte-usine-greve-autogestion-50-ans-deux-livres). ## The themes of *La fièvre* 1. The tricky logic of **polarization** and how it is constructed -and instrumentalized- from the communication cycle in order to build power that feeds itself off of **generalized passivity** and **constant noise** in the media. The whole toolbox of everyday dirty politics is present: the pseudo-artistic figure of the monologuist, [astroturfing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing), *media writing* (using leaked news and making *suggestions* to journalists to make certain politically useful opinions seem like organically generated *revelations*), [echo chambers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)) to manipulate - or harass - subnetwork leaders, segmentation into political archetypes ([methodology *Destin Commune*](https://www.lafranceenquete.fr/les-six-familles/)) in order to pose an array of positions that generate improbable consensus. No tool is missing. The goal: to open [Overton's window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window) to make social taboo acceptable to the point where it can change existing legislation. 2. **Identitarianism** as an existential danger and how it is constructed on the left (*indigenism* of an academic nature that follows the racialist and feminist model of Anglo-Saxon identitarianism) and on the right (new populist ultra-right). *La fièvre* points out the differences between the two sides but without failing to lose sight of how both ultimately undermine the possibility of building collective alternatives. 3. The **fragility** of the state and coexistence in an environment increasingly marked by **polarization** and **identitarianism**. The permanent ghost of a silent [*civil war*, used in the narrative as a metaphor of this era](https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/a-la-source/a-la-source-chronique-du-samedi-27-avril-2024-8806264), is present throughout the entire plot starting from the protagonist's inner journey and persisting up to the final scene. A famous Stefan Sweig quote about the early days of the Great War is repeated several times in the first half of the series: > It soon became impossible to converse reasonably with anybody in the first war weeks of 1914. The most peaceable and the most good-natured were intoxicated with the smell of blood. Friends whom I had looked upon as decided individualists and even as philosophical anarchists, changed over night into fanatic patriots and from patriots into insatiable annexionists. Every conversation ended in some stupid phrase such as: “He who cannot hate cannot really love,” or in coarse inculpations. Comrades with whom I had not quarreled for years accused me rudely of no longer being an Austrian; why did I not go over to France or Belgium? They even hinted cautiously that sentiments such as that the war was a crime ought to be brought to the attention of the authorities, for *“defeatists”*—that nice word had just been invented in France—were the worst betrayers of the fatherland. 4. The **way out** of this situation: A [new *social software*, as Jérôme Fourquet calls it](https://www.marianne.net/agora/entretiens-et-debats/la-serie-montre-le-reel-a-ceux-qui-ne-veulent-pas-le-voir-on-a-vu-la-fievre-avec-jerome-fourquet), which for Benzekri (and for us) necessarily entails the restoration and reconstitution of all that is communitarian from the ground up, starting with the intimacy and trust created by collective production. At the center of it all: the creation of cooperatives, whether they be worker's cooperatives ([Scop](https://www.les-scop.coop/)) - the [transformation of Duralex into a cooperative](https://www.francetvinfo.fr/economie/entreprises/duralex-transformee-en-cooperative-les-commandes-affluent_6728256.html) is a reality that is very much on everyone's mind in France at the moment - or *collective interest* cooperatives ([Scic](https://www.les-scop.coop/les-scic)), in which all the concerned and affected parties of the social fabric participate. The latter model, which is the one that appears in the series and which has garnered [a lot of strength in France](https://www.les-scic.coop/), is also taking off at the moment in the USA and is currently being considered by business owners to be [the best option to ensure generational replacement](https://www.common-trust.com/). ## The sting created by “The Fever”. Benzekri does not delve into the origin of the current socio-political picture. He does not make a critique of the 1990's, of the leaden ideology and cynicism of political and business power in that decade and those that followed. The world during that decade, a world of decaying neighborhoods and in which workers became ashamed to be workers, resulted in almost three decades of the depletion and impoverishment of a productive and communitarian fabric. Absent in ***La fièvre*** is an analysis of the *Big Bang* that occurred when this reality encountered the 2008 crisis and the then emerging social networks. The total passivity in which an entire generation has grown up has since then been transformed into a spectacular and morbid desire for *those at the top* to fall or at least suffer, wherever the blows may come from. Social networks make it possible to enjoy the spectacle, even feed it, without having to get involved in building anything collectively - the great taboo of the ideology of the 90's that has persisted up to our times. But none of that seems to worry the [Jaurès Foundation](https://www.jean-jaures.org/), which constitutes the hard nucleus of what remains of the French ***Parti Socialiste*** after the 2017 electoral debacle and serves as the mothership of those intellectuals that populate think thanks while *awaiting assignment* in the State... La Jaurès commissioned a whole battery of papers on ***La fièvre*** which made up a [123-page booklet](https://www.jean-jaures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/fievreOK2.pdf), in order to *rescue* what is *usable*, that is, what is *business as usual*, while simultaneously undermining the subversive aspect of the series. That is, by characterizing as *utopian*, *simplistic* and *impossible*, rebuilding the community and opting for cooperativism in order to overcome passive violence and the specter of civil confrontation. The General Secretary of the CFDT union, [which until the 1980's defined its ideology as «Self-managed Socialism»](https://blogs.mediapart.fr/theo-roumier/blog/230319/quand-la-cfdt-voulait-le-socialisme-et-l-autogestion), naturally could not refrain from collaborating in the booklet. *"For all of us, the series was like a slap in the face,”* confessed Raphaël Llorca, the Jaurès communicator in charge of directing the project. Small wonder. Benzekri, in the [interview in *Les Inrockuptibles*](https://www.lesinrocks.com/series/pour-eric-benzekri-createur-de-la-fievre-la-communication-ne-sert-a-rien-sans-la-politique-619360-14-06-2024/) responded with irony: > Maybe we need to mobilize people, give them spaces where they are sovereign over themselves. But as soon as we say that, we worry [about the consequences]. Did the organized world of French cooperativism at the very least show support for the show or intervene in this conversation? No. And that is significant. The supposed *[workers' self-management advocates](https://autogestion.asso.fr/)* are apparently too busy recruiting cannon fodder for the war in Ukraine to do so and the [member organizations](https://www.entreprises.coop/) of the [ICA](https://ica.coop/) are not even worth mentioning. They are neither present nor expected to be present in the debate opened up by “The Fever” nor in any *political debate* in general. The famous *neutralism* of ICA. ## Coops and politics In the final episodes of “The Fever” the question of neutralism, a position increasingly questioned both [in Europe](https://communalia.eu/notes/communalia#the-minimalist-and-managerial-approach-to-ica-cooperativism) and [in the USA](https://communalia.eu/notes/radical-cooperativism), is openly raised. The debate is treated somewhat superficially, but the community cooperative ultimately appears as the last bastion from which to defend *the larger community*. It is precisely this **opposition** between the **community that self-organizes and structures itself around work** and a **society that has become disarticulated and maligned by the information sphere**, which turns ***La fièvre*** into a so urgently necessary *"slap in the face"* of all that is "commonly accepted". In France, where the transformation of Duralex into a cooperative is fresh in the minds of everyone, “The Fever” has achieved what it has intended: to open Overton's window to a simple but hitherto taboo idea: that conquering work and organizing it to restore healthy communities is the first step to changing everything.
This post was also published in Spanish as «La fiebre»
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