TIG of the dump

This is a post about The Independent Group.

My reading about the (now ancient - 1998) dispute between Ellen Meiksins Wood and Nicos Poulantzas as to the status of white-collar ‘new professionals’ has been educational.

Poulantzas argued that these gentrified yuppies: hipsters, lawyers, journalists, media people, architects, lecturers - bubble people par excellence - were not part of the working class at all, they were the new petty-bourgeoisie. They had a distinctive class interest (they were unproductive workers in Marxist terms) and exhibited a contingent relationship with the proletarian class struggle.

Woods observed acidly that in every case we're talking about people who have been dispossessed of means of production, people who need to sell their labour power to survive. Look, they're workers!

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So how come they look so different to the traditional blue-collar manual working class? Our middle-class workers are educated, articulate, individualistic and, where active, fervent on identity issues. Class thoughts never enter their heads. They are post-class.

As always we have to look at the specific evolution of capitalism, particularly over the last decade or so, to understand the real situation here.

The traditional surplus-value-producing working class is, to our surprise, still with us: in car plants, mines, docks, transport, construction and a thousand subcontractors. They have no voice in the media and are rarely seen there, but they haven’t gone away. Instead, a decade of steady but anaemic growth has rendered them apathetically, resentfully quiescent.

The great four-decade expansion of automation, financialisation and globalisation has dramatically expanded the number of jobs in the circulation of capital (sales, marketing, advertising, PR, media), in financial services and for the state. Most of these workers are not directly involved in the production of surplus value per se; they skim the value produced by other workers as Woods reminds us. Yet workers they are, nonetheless. Their jobs are less obviously ‘working for the Man’ - in fact they can offer significant opportunities for autonomy and creativity -  and they are sometimes quite well paid (although by no means always - a source of anger).

It is easy to see why Poulantzas saw this working class fraction as petty-bourgeois. They tend to see themselves as floating free of the production processes of the economy, part of the general cultural superstructure. They internalise the dominant ideology of bourgeois liberalism (not an pejorative term at all here; descriptive) and push it to its pure extremes.

The result is the cult of social-justice, its contours carefully, albeit subconsciously, edited for consistency with the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Everyone talks about material inequality (those huge ratios) yet no-one seriously agitates to do anything about it - it's an abstraction; transgender equality, however, is a cause to die for

No-one talks about class. Even the existence of classes in the context of economic dominance is denied; class is conceded to be at most a cultural signifier, subordinate to intersectional identity.

This sociological fractioning is prevalent across the advanced capitalist countries. All that has changed in recent years is that continuing anaemic growth - which does not offer advancement prospects to either the blue- or white-collar fractions of the working class - has led to mounting (though inchoate) discontent and new mobilisations on the streets.

The traditional blue-collar working class is resentful and votes for Brexit or Trump - the conservative, anti-elite populists. The white-collar working class votes for Sanders or Corbyn - the progressive (in cultural terms) populists. The real political expression of the über-elites, the Osborne-Obama-Macron-Merkel axis, has hit the buffers and is failing to attract support outside those closest to the coat-tails of the international elites, Davos Man and assorted wannabes.

It's a problem.

In UK terms, we see the Tory’s Theresa May defiantly holding a course designed to appeal to the domestic, anti-globalist fraction of the UK national bourgeoisie plus a fraction of the English blue-collar working class abandoned by Labour; we see Labour’s Corbyn and Momentum hoovering up the embittered white-collar workers (together with some petty-bourgeois forces, for sure, students and the artisan self-employed) who want to complete the bourgeois revolution to the max and advance their own prospects.

And then there is The Independent Group, that remnant from the Blairite-Cameron glory days, wondering if there is a social base for its nostalgic brand of neoliberal 'revival'.

I suspect not.

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Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times this morning was talking-up a party representing his own preferences: Blue Labour (and Red Tory). That would be the current Social-Democratic Party.

In common with most people, I had thought the SDP had finally died back in 1990.

I can see why Rod kind of likes this ghost of times past, but the SDP (now) is destined to be even more ineffectual than TIG. It presents a brand of one-nation Labourism/Toryism which articulated the narrative of 1950s ascendant national capitalism, but which is completely inapplicable to the current period of neoliberal decay.

It's a dated answer to a question which has not yet been put.

Theorising the contemporary left, its tasks and prospects

Amazon link

I've just read Ellen Meiksins Wood's rather turgid book (above) where she defends Marxism against the Eurocommunists (remember them?) and those post-Marxist thinkers who were in the process of abandoning class analysis to morph into the identity theorists of today.

She was writing in 1998, when the whole SJW thing was beginning to lift off. I was oblivious at the time, working hard as a network architect with no time for politics.

She's good and she's not. She skewers (although at inordinate length) a number of theorists (most of whom I'd not really heard of) who now, twenty years later, are aged and in retirement. But her analysis struggles to get beyond a restatement of timeless Marxist orthodoxies.

Wood is interesting on the state in a post-capitalist society (one where capitalist relations of production are not dominant). She understands the coordination problems and sees the naivety (her words) in thinking that the state can - as a formation - just 'wither away', or be replaced by endless popular mobilisation through 'councils'.

She is unconvincing as to whether capitalism is perennially problematic for the dispossessed proletariat - some might say that it's on an improving track on a time-averaged scale of decades. She has nothing useful to say about the transition, nor about the well-known difficulties of central-planning and the associated principal-agent problems.

So I thought that overall, her argumentation was sterile and failed to address the issues the heretics were mostly getting wrong. And I wondered where are the young theoreticians, coming into their prime today, who can truly advance a Marxist understanding of the present conjuncture?

Slavoj Žižek?

Really?

A quick review of my plans (no more French classes!)

My little foray into improving my French did not last long. I sent the following email this morning [translation at the bottom of the page].

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Un rapide aperçu de mes projets

"Chère Annie,

J'attends notre cinquième cours cet après-midi, mais je pense que ce sera le dernier pendant un moment.

Cela n'a rien à voir avec ton excellent enseignement! Je suis impressionné par ton travail acharné et ta préparation - tu es toujours incroyablement serviable et sympathique.

Voici ce que je pense. J'ai commencé ces leçons avec toi pour deux raisons. Premièrement, je voulais vérifier mes propres compétences en conversation (pas aussi bonnes que je le pensais!). Deuxièmement, je voulais évaluer combien d'efforts et de temps seraient nécessaires pour atteindre un niveau de base de compétence parlée.

Il semble clair que je devrais passer une heure par jour, presque tous les jours pendant au moins un an, pour atteindre le niveau minimum qui me conviendrait le mieux. Malheureusement, je ne peux pas maintenir ce niveau de travail. Cela prendrait la place d'autres projets que je veux faire.

C'est donc à contrecoeur que j'ai décidé de suspendre mon étude du français pour le moment.

Meilleurs vœux,

Nigel."

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I'm not really surprised. I have a history of throwing myself into things and then deciding that long term, they're just not sustainable .. and then just dropping them. Is that bad? Don't think so. Otherwise I'd be stuck my whole life doing just one thing.

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I asked Annie this afternoon where, in terms of her school-students, she thought I was. She reckoned at AS level (one year into the sixth form). That is roughly the amount of school study I did back in the day.

I shared with her this calculation:

• ten new words a day with almost perfect recall is an additional 3,000 words over a year. That isn't going to make colloquial French speakers effortlessly understandable;


• half an hour of me speaking French to Annie once a week equates to 25 hours a year. Hardly the route to fluency in speaking.

And even this low rate of engagement requires perhaps an hour or so of study a day: working on exercises, checking grammar, looking up words and phrases, reading French text, translating dialogues from English, listening to French broadcasts. Other topics are being neglected. Truly there is no royal road to foreign language competence.

I must say Annie took it well.

----   Here's the translation ----

 A quick review of my plans

Dear Annie,

I look forwards to our fifth lesson this afternoon, but I think that that will be the last one for a while.

This has nothing to do with your excellent teaching! I am impressed by your hard work and preparation - you are always incredibly helpful and sympathique.

Here is what I think. I started these lessons with you for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to check my own conversational skills (not as good as I thought!). Secondly I wanted to assess how much effort and time would be needed to get to a basic level of spoken competence.

It seems clear that I would need to spend an hour a day, almost every day for at least a year to reach the minimum level I would be pleased with. Unfortunately I can't sustain that level of work. It's taking the place of other projects I want to do.

So reluctantly I have decided to suspend my study of French for the time being.

Best wishes,

Nigel.

The next 25 years

Razib Khan has an interesting and well-written piece peering into the future: "The end of America as the world as we know it", a free teaser for his "Premium Posts" where he's seeking to monetize his stuff. Good luck!

Anyway, here are some highlights. Bold shows my emphasis.

"The American elites have always been defined by wealth, but there also remained an element of patriotism and pride in the nation-state. The idea that we are a light unto the nations with our example of robust democratic republicanism. The rise of global capital means that many of the economic oligarchs have weak attachments to specific nations. They are citizens of an archipelago of super-cities inhabited by the financial elite. They involve themselves with the politics of multiple nations but fundamentally are not of any nation in anything more than a bureaucratic sense. Rupert Murdoch is a case in point."

There has been a recurrent sense that the high-bourgeoisie has been 'unpatriotic' since the dawn of 'Monopoly Capitalism' back at the start of the twentieth century. Plenty of observers noted the pro-German appeasement policies of the British elites in the nineteen thirties.

Globalisation has massively amplified the social weight of this class fraction - no-one ever took the concept or vision of a 'borderless world' seriously before; they do now.

"To use Peter Turchin’s framework, the West is a society with declining social cohesion and riven by elite factions due to overproduction in the administrative classes. The “post-World War II consensus” was boring, but it also presented a vision of emulation. A robust middle-class was supported by an economy which was productive and had a use for semi-skilled labor. We are entering a period where old certitudes are fading away. Economic and cultural.

But they are not being replaced by a new system or a new ideology in the West. The neoliberal framework is better than its rivals, but its cold and rational operations are always going to result in only a cult following. The resurgence of classical socialism among young Westerners and the appeal of political Islam elsewhere indicate a genuine lack of new ideas. While “Communist” China turns back toward its own traditions, in India Rightist movements are creating a new understanding of their society that rejects the Nehruvian project that descends from British Fabian socialism."

Good insights here.The masses increasingly perceive neoliberal ideology as pedalled by the mainstream media and public intellectuals as an alien narrative that they don't sign up for. It's also full of bare-faced affronts to the truth of course which irritate the engaged mind.

Yet what is the alternative? All the old ideas of resistance are being dusted off, but none seems to cohere with new realities.

"The end of the unipolar age will affect the ideological tribes differently. The cosmopolitan and broadly liberal upper middle and upper classes will welcome a post-national and global age, but some elements will not acclimate itself well to the reality that this age is not dominated by particular and contingent Anglo-liberal values. That is because of this class’ adherence to a form of economic determinism, where modern technological productive societies go hand and hand with liberalism. History ends, and it ends in their way. Despite the fact that organized “liberal” parties are generally a “Third Force” to the parties of the Left and the Right where they have any power at all (arguably in the United States this “liberalism” was the ascendant ideology in both the Republican and Democratic parties for the 20th century).

We are aware of how the populist Right will react. The call will go out to roll back the clock to the decades after World War II when white Christian America was self-confident and a superpower unparalleled. To a time when the USA could dictate terms and shape the course of the world through its own singular fiat. Its very will. The problem with this vision is American power was always conditioned on exogenous circumstances. The rise of Communism and state and regulatory socialism crippled the long-term trajectory of many nations. World War II reduced the European nation-states and Japan to client states. None of these contingent events can be replicated.

Parts of the cultural Left aim to create a more egalitarian world by deconstructing and tearing down the edifice of the hierarchical Western order that arose over the past few centuries. But this is like organisms adapted toward a niche that no longer exists. The world of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, no longer exists. Inverting the moral message of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-supremacy will continue in the 2020s, but substantively it is a message grounded in the realities of the 1920s. Like the Indian elites’ anger and resentment toward British imperialism, the intersectional critical race theory that is common in the United States is a reflex and toolkit designed for a fundamentally different world. Why continue to muster the armies of the West after the death of Sauron? For glory and position within the administrative state, and the few sinecures available to culture producers.

Finally, the banner of the old Red Flag is now rising once again, like a phoenix from the ashes. Instead of a redistributive economy in a market context, some of these radicals want to reconceptualize economic relations in a Marxist sense. Seize the means of production. They will tell us that “this time it will be different.” I am skeptical that most people will buy into this message. Like the attempt to mobilized racial and sexual minorities against white males, a classical Left economic policy was always optimized for the industrial economy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A message it is, but for a time long gone.

I come bringing news of the death of our old gods. Not news of the birth of the new."

Oh dear, Razib unerringly puts his fingers here on the central weakness of the Marxist left. In my view the analysis of capitalism as a mode of production is as smart and compelling as ever (I am currently being re-impressed by Duncan Foley's "Understanding Capital") but the Marxist judgement of the faults of capitalism is as faddy and derivative, as theatrical and formulaic as ever, while the conceptualisation of transition is so implausible and under-theorised that it resembles the transcendental crisis we see in fundamental physics.  

No-one knows anything.

On the "The Nurture of Nature"

Peter Frost has an interesting post, "The Nurture of Nature", where he writes about gene-culture coevolution, particularly over the last 1,000 years. This is an active topic and Frost is responding to some recent criticisms. He's convincing.

I added this comment.

"Rather than talking in general terms about gene-culture coevolution, we should think about the optimal psychological traits for specific modes of production.

The feudal mode of production would seem to select for traits such as: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity - these are conservative dimensions in Haidt's phenomenological Moral Foundations Theory.

Capitalism's ideal psychological profile seems to be atomised prosociality, reflecting the transactional character of production relations. Thus agreeableness and fairness, those classic liberal virtues.

Conscientiousness and docility in the lower classes seems a transhistorical universal.

As regards post-capitalist socialism, the level of species-wide altruism and general dovishness seemingly required seems beyond the limits of current population variation - and unstable to boot. But perhaps something will be engineered .. ."

The pointlessness of being right

I was reading Danny Finkelstein in The Times this morning. His piece was urbane, civilised, a measured appreciation of Winston Churchill. The great man's anti-Nazi steadfastness had saved the lives of Finkelstein ancestors, yet Churchill had been an avid and brutally-efficient colonialist and a believer in the virtues of Empire.

Churchill, Finkelstein concluded, was a flawed man and in the light of modern progress we should not be afraid to judiciously call him out.

Of course I don't agree with this lazy, self-serving and complacent restatement of the common wisdom. I reject the entire paradigm. 

But who cares what I think? And if Danny Finkelstein lost his establishment pulpit and wrote his very same thoughts from this morning in an obscure blog from the provinces, who would care about his views?

I read somewhere recently that ideas in themselves never count. Never. Only when they are instantiated in effective organisations do they begin to matter. The transition from ideas per se to schools of thought.

My problem is that I survey the visionary movements available right now and don't agree with any of them. 

China dominant in AI by 2025?

Via Bruce Schneier's site, Gregory C. Allen has an interesting report: "Understanding China's AI Strategy: Clues to Chinese Strategic Thinking on Artificial Intelligence and National Security".

He states that "the distance is large between prevailing views in American commentary on China’s AI efforts and what I have come to believe are the facts," although having read the text I have to say that nothing in it particularly surprised me, interesting though it all was.

I found this quote striking:

"In future battlegrounds, there will be no people fighting.” Zeng predicted that by 2025 lethal autonomous weapons would be commonplace and said that his company believes ever-increasing military use of AI is “inevitable […] We are sure about the direction and that this is the future."

My first thought was that this seems more plausible in theatres where there were no civilians, since trying to minimise civilian casualties surely requires AGI and don't hold your breath. But then I remembered Hiroshima and the recent 'liberations' of Mosul and Aleppo and realised that of course it doesn't matter. There are no new issues here at all.

In the comments to Schneier's post, some people with backgrounds in AI proposed that China's claims to global pre-eminence in AI by 2025 are spurious because there have been no conceptual advances in AI at all in recent years. It's all 1970s-style Bayesian statistics and neural nets running on processors now numerous and fast enough to make it all work non-trivially.

There is something in that of course, but I strongly suspect that the road to conceptual breakthroughs to more human-like AI architectures is one which first has to run through those existing ideas and drive them to their limits. If the next step was easy, or even apparent, we'd have a plausible roadmap already. By getting to the front of the engineering state-of-the-art, China can expect to be well placed to initiate and exploit the next set of conceptual advances - indeed, there is no other way.

Not sure about Quillette

I've featured Quillette on the website Blogs sidebar here for a while. It was established to offer a home to those afflicted by the excesses of the SJW 'left', primarily in American academia.

One might have hoped for some deeper, more analytic analysis there of the whole cultural revolution thing currently sweeping through the liberal establishment, the kind of thing Poulantzas was addressing.

But actually Quillette seems to have turned into an 'anti-SJW' version of what Steve Sailer has flagged as Grievance Studies.

In the dialectic, antithesis is a precursor of synthesis.

I do hope things improve.

Diary: benchmarking my ability in French (February 2019)

For a while I've had the vague idea that it would be good if I could upgrade my French to sort-of-conversational. It just seems wrong that I'm stuck in the space between survival and participatory. I did some desultory research into full-immersion but it seemed expensive and hard work. I had visions of a strong inflammation of the brain tissues.

I recalled the story of my brother-in-law, a Catholic priest, many years ago. He was destined for missionary work in Peru, initially without the language. He was put on a full immersion in Castilian Spanish - which nearly killed him, no English allowed - and was then immediately transported to a rural parish in Peru where he was the only English speaker. The locals spoke a kind of Spanish, but it was a far cry from Castilian. Utter incomprehension on both sides.

 I didn't want to go there.

So I have signed-up for weekly one-hour conversation classes, as I mentioned. After two lessons let me benchmark where I am as regards my competence in conversational French.

1. Reading French

So I thought I might just breeze through this - after all it's not Michel Houellebecq - but as usual I'm hopelessly optimistic. I'm having to look up a word or phrase every sentence or two. Slow going. I wish that the Google Translate camera function worked more reliably.

2. Spoken French

I have France 24 en Direct as an app on my phone and try to listen to 15 minutes a day. With great concentration I can get the gist. But it's always vocabulary which derails me; that and the speed at which the presenters, some of them, speak. I'm not totally mystified .. but I'm hanging on for dear life. It's hard work.

3. My ability to talk in French

Not good. I don't have anything like enough phrases locked away in the neurons. I'm keenly aware of how fatiguing it is to my listener when I'm haltingly struggling to circumlocute my way around my lack of active vocabulary. She's earning her frais.

It'll be interesting to revisit in six months and see whether I've really made any progress. We plan to holiday in France this summer so it's not like there isn't a further incentive.

The Subjunctive and the Conditional in French

This is an area I've been directed to study. I have to say I'm hazy about the real difference between the subjunctive and the conditional in French. Perhaps I'm not the only one.

So I found this useful: The Subjunctive and the Conditional in French. Here's what the author has to say.

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It’s all about moods

1) Forms 

Before figuring out the subjunctive and conditional in French, let’s have a quick peek at the forms, in case you don’t have them memorized.

Subjunctive	Conditional
que je parle que tu parles qu’il parle que nous parlions que vous parliez qu’ils parlent	je parlerais tu parlerais il parlerait nous parlerions vous parleriez ils parleraient

 

Note that the subjunctive is formed by taking the present indicative of the ils form and adding the endings, -e, -es, -e, -ions, -iez, -ent. The conditional is formed by taking the future stem (usually the infinitive) and adding the imperfect endings -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient (of course dropping the final -e from -re verbs).

For further information on forming these two moods, you should consult a dictionary. This article deals with when to use them, a far trickier proposition.

2) Background

The rules I’m about to give, properly applied, are what I call 90% rules. That is, they’re not in a grammar book, but they work 90% or better of the time. Whether you’re taking an exam or trying to get by as a pretty good, but not fluent, French speaker in France, they should carry you through. And they should even give you enough of an idea of the mindset behind these moods that if you’re in France you can figure out the last 5-10% on your own.

Before we begin, there is one other thing we need to mention, and that is the indicative. This is the form you use without even thinking about what it is: Parlez-vous français? Oui, je parle français. Il est 9h. Il pleut. These are all in the indicative mood. The French, incidentally, speak of the indicative mode, that is, it’s a manner of speaking, not a mood, per se. The indicative mood shows that the speaker is indicating something. There’s no judgment, no hesitation, no doubt in the speaker’s mind. He or she is just stating what is – as far as he or she knows.

Moods in French distinguish the relationship between the speaker, the statement and objective reality. One way to think of French modes that may be helpful is to consider them as giving signals. That is, in using one mood instead of another, the speaker is giving the listener a cue as to how to take what he or she is saying. Someone speaking in the indicative is showing that he or she is merely giving information. There is no emotional content, no judgment and no meaningful uncertainty. Just the facts.

3) The conditional

3a) The conditional is not an exceptionally troubling mood to understand – once you get the logic behind it. The conditional is used to make a statement that depends on a condition. If I were rich, I would buy a Mercedes. (Si j’étais riche, j’acheterais une Mercedes.)    (condition – thing that will be true if the condition is true = si + imperfect – conditional) This is pure and simple conditional: There is a condition (expressed with the imperfect in French) and then there is a statement in the conditional. The statement in the conditional will be true if the condition in the imperfect is met. The author is not rich. And he doesn’t have a Mercedes. I.e., the condition in the imperfect isn’t met so the statement in the conditional is not true. But drop a million bucks on my doorstep and I will have my Mercedes. Because then the condition will be met, making the statement in the conditional true. 3b) There are two uses of the conditional that trouble. The first (though more obscure) is the use of the conditional for the future in indirect discourse. What’s that mean? An example will make it clear: He said he would bring wine. (Il a dit qu’il apporterait du vin.) In this sentence, the condition isn’t so obvious. There isn’t a big ol’ if-clause flagging it. There are two other ways of writing this sentence: with direct discourse, and with what it means to the French speaker. He said, “I will bring some wine.” (Il a dit, “j’apporterai du vin.”)

Now you see why I said it was the future for indirect discourse. When you give the actual speech (direct discourse) it is in the future. But what does our final sentence mean to a French speaker?

If he does what he said he would do, he will bring some wine.

   (condition – statement limited by the condition)

One could also say:

If he does not do what he said he’d do, he will not bring any wine.

   (The condition is not met so the second half is not the case.)

The French speaker uses the conditional for this type of sentence (as do we) because he does not have objective knowledge of whether the wine is to be brought. He only knows what a person said he or she would do. At 10 o’clock, people might be saying, “Hurray! Tom brought the wine.” They might also be saying, “That lousy Tom forgot the wine,” or that he didn’t show up at all. By then, there might be objective knowledge of whether the wine was brought. But for now – at the time of our example sentence – the bringing of wine was a thing that would be true if Tom’s word was good and false if it was not. It was dependent on a condition.

3c) The last form of the conditional we’re going to look at is the most common and makes the least sense on its face. This is the use of the conditional for the sake of politeness.

Would you like to go to the movies with me? (Voudriez-vous m’accompagner au cinema?)

The if-clauses you could fill in are numerous: “If I’m lucky…” “If you are able…” “If God in His heaven smiles down on me…” You get the picture. Let’s flip this around to see what we’re talking about:

You would like to go to the movies with me?

Or, as you are hoping:

You would like to go to the movies with me.

This is the place where the conditional starts screaming to be in the subjunctive (about which we’ll hear next) but doesn’t actually get there because, alas, it’s not your emotions that get to decide whether Sally or June or Joe or whomever wants to go to the movies with you; their response does. So what we have is a statement that may be true:

You would like to go to the movies with me. -> You want to go to the movies with me.

or may be false:

You would like to go to the movies with me (if I were someone else, if you weren’t so busy, etc.). -> You don’t want to go to the movies with me.

Because it is a statement that is not yet known to be true or false but may or may not be depending on the response, it is conditioned, and thus in the conditional. Here are a few more.

Could you help me with this document? (Pourriez-vous m’aider avec ce document?)

Possible answers include: I can help you with this document (I have the time, know how to fix it, etc.). I can’t help you with this document (I’m too busy, don’t know Microsoft Word, etc.).

Will you (would you) have some oysters? (Vous prendriez des huîtres?)

Possible answers: I will have some oysters (I love them, I want to be polite, etc.). I won’t have some oysters (I’m allergic to them, I don’t put slimy things in my mouth, not on your life, etc.).

3e) To recap, the conditional is used if the statement in the conditional may be true or may be false depending on a condition, but it is not yet known whether the condition has been met.

Part 2: The Subjunctive

4) We saw the forms for the subjunctive on page 1, section 1. Just to briefly review, the endings -e, -es, -e, -ions, -iez, -ent are added to the present indicative ils form without the -ent. Up next is the hard part, usage of the subjunctive.

In French, there are four moods. We have thus far seen two of them: Indicative Describes things as they are to the best of the knowledge of the speaker. Conditional Describes things that may or may not be true, depending on circumstances. The third mood, the subjunctive, is far and away the trickiest. Like the conditional, the subjunctive is not used for simple statements of fact. But rather than depending on an objective condition, it depends on subjective perception. Use of the subjunctive cues the listener that the content of the phrase is strongly affected by the speaker’s beliefs, thoughts, perceptions or emotions. I like to say that it’s all in the speaker’s head, because in a way, it really is. 4a) There are two ways that a phrase can be all in a speaker’s head. The first of these is if the content of the phrase does not exist in reality, only in the imagining of the speaker: I don’t think he is coming. (Je ne crois pas qu’il vienne.) It is unlikely she will have enough time to help us. (Il est peu probable qu’elle ait assez de temps pour nous aider.) In both these examples, the second part of the sentence is not established fact. In the first, it’s even believed to be false! That is, the gentleman’s arrival and the lady’s time are not things of which we are assured. They are hypotheticals postulated for the sake of the argument. Let’s look at some more: I doubt you’re right. (Je doute que vous ayez raison.) It is not certain that the president will decide that way. (Il n’est pas certain que le président prenne cette décision.)

Again, the speaker is not making statements of fact. These are things envisioned in the speaker’s mind so that their likelihood can be discussed.

There is one example in this category that is particularly tricky:

Before he comes, the bedroom must be cleaned. (Avant qu’il vienne, il faut nettoyer la chambre.)

The first phrase is in the subjunctive because the action hasn’t taken place, therefore it must be at this point only in the speaker’s mind.

4b) The second use of the subjunctive will seem the most bizarre to English speakers, and it is the reason I characterize the subjunctive as the “all in your head” mood. In French, there are times when a speaker’s attitude or view about something – even if it is factually known – is the overriding concern in the sentence:

I am happy she is coming. (Je suis content qu’elle vienne.)

She is sad that it is raining. (Elle est triste qu’elle pleuve.)

I regret the fact that he is unhappy. (Je regrette qu’il soit mécontent.)

The primary clause in all these sentences indicates an emotion of the speaker/subject of the sentence. As a result, it is understood that the events in the second part exist not as independent information about the external world, but as imagined events that serve as emotional stimuli for the mind of the subject.

For example, in the first sentence it does not matter whether the girl is or is not coming. What matters is that her not coming would provoke sadness in me. Likewise, we can say of the girl in the second sentence that rain provoked sadness. Whether or not it is raining is not at issue; her response to the rain is. We could therefore go out on a limb and say that were it not raining, she might be happy (or might not) but that once rain started, unhappiness would necessarily ensue since the idea of it raining provokes sadness.

If all the above seemed like too much, why not move on to the third and when we recap the moods it may make more sense.

4c) Our third use of the subjunctive mingles the first and second. It expresses things that may or may not be so and how the subject of the sentence would like to see them. It is what in some forms might be called the subjunctive of the imperative. Forget explanations, here’s an example:

I wish that you would help me. (Je veux que tu m’aides.)

We ask that you would come as soon as possible. (Nous prions que vous veniez aussitôt que possible.)

Long live the king! (Vive le roi !)

The third sentence could be expanded to “We desire that the king would live a long time” (Nous désirons que le roi vive). In all three cases, the subject is expressing what he/she/they would like to see the subject of the subjunctive clause do. We can imagine the subject of the sentence imagining the actions in question coming to pass and the good things that would result.

Now comes the recap, after which all will make sense. Right?

5) The three main moods of French (we’ll leave the imperative for another day).

Indicative	Something the speaker takes to be true.
Conditional	Something that may be true or may be false, depending on whether a condition is met.
Subjunctive	Something that effectively takes place in the subject’s/speaker’s mind because it is either a matter of envisioning a thing not known to be true or focusing on the emotion or feeling the thing provokes rather than the fact of the thing.