IThe left-wing parties have formed an alliance for the June 2022 legislative elections, which has enabled them to limit the damage. However, since the constitution of the New Popular, Economic and Social Union (Nupes), each of its components seems to be entangled in its internal issues: dissension within Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV), controversy over the management in La France rebellious (LFI) and congress of the Socialist Party (PS) marked by heartbreak. Common action today concerns little more than the response to the pension reform, which has test value.
But the mobilization against government projects cannot be enough to restore a perspective for the future of the left. This means getting out of the uninterrupted flow of media reactions and taking historical and international detours to understand how we got here.
The left is characterized by the desire to combine freedom and equality, without sacrificing one to the other. She had her best moments when she succeeded in articulating the critique of the inequalities generated by the existing social order and the commitment to collective action to invent something new. It is this perspective that Karl Marx (1818-1883) opened up in his Inaugural Address to the First International in 1864 when he linked the analysis of the exploitation of labor to the recognition of the workers’ triumph represented by the cooperatives, making it possible to anticipate the overcoming of wage labor.
Structural weakness
But this combination between emancipatory criticism, denouncing what turns out to be unbearable, and emancipated action, existing in the present, was quickly lost in a workers’ movement nevertheless claiming to be Marxist. Evidenced by the position of the French Congress fifteen years later, in 1879 in Marseilles, which rejected cooperatives because they diverted from the main battle, the seizure of state power.
The dirigiste and centralizing turn is then accentuated with the advent of Bolshevism and its praise of “revolutionary” violence. In this way becoming totalitarian then opposes the reformism of social democracy which allows after the Second World War notable improvements in the living conditions of the people, in particular in the Scandinavian countries. But its structural weakness lies in its dependence on market growth: when this slows down, the reference to solidarity is attenuated and comes the time of social-liberalism.
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