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Elections and Class Struggle in France: How useful is Jean-Luc Mélenchon? (Part One)

With the French Socialist Party in ruins, the France Insoumise is proposing a new version of left reformism. How useful is it to French working people?


02/03/2022

The French presidential elections take place in April 2022. With two far-right candidates, and with Macron playing a strong hand, there is plenty of bad news, but there is a hopeful side too. This article (part one) will look at the usefulness for working people of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s campaign and organization. Part two will look at his left patriotism, foreign policy, and at some major disagreements of Marxists with his strategy.

Mélenchon got seven million votes (19.5%) in the first round of the French presidential elections in 2017, the biggest radical left vote in France since 1945. France Insoumise (FI) votes were particularly common among blue-collar voters (24%), low-paid white-collar voters (22%) and among 18-24 year-olds (30%). At present, at over 11% in the polls, Mélenchon has at least three times the support of the Socialist Party, which held the presidency till 2017, and no other left candidate comes near. In the last elections, 21.4% was enough to get through to the second round. Fewer may be sufficient this time, and Mélenchon’s team is hoping to mobilize those working-class voters who usually stay home, to create a surprise on election day.

Mélenchon’s pitch and his programme [1]

The fact that, after five years of Macron, the 500 richest families in France have doubled their wealth, while the number of children living in poverty has risen by 40%, along with the remarkable combativity and class consciousness of French workers in recent years, guarantees that there is plenty of space for the radical left. Mélenchon and his team believe it is possible to bring about a “citizens’ revolution” to usher in “the epoch of the people”, to quote the titles of two of his many writings [L’ère du peuple, Paris, Fayard, 2014].

It is hardly surprising that so many are inspired and encouraged. The FI programme proposes dozens of measures to radically reverse the trend of wealth being siphoned off ever more by the 1%. It proposes to freeze prices on a series of basic necessities and to develop a policy of a basic quantity of free electricity and water for every household. A sharp rise in the minimum wage and of minimum pension rates is promised, while the laws passed by Macron and Hollande which restricted workers’ rights to organize and to have stable contracts, are to be repealed. The programme plans a completely free health service (at present most people take out complementary insurance). It also promises retirement at 60 and a shorter working week.

The vision put forward is one that takes full account of the urgency of climate deterioration: policies include the end of nuclear power before 2030, a move to 100% renewable energy, and the creation of a million and a half climate jobs. The intention is to set up massive support for organic agriculture, creating 300,000 jobs and moving quickly to 100% organic farming.

The programme reacts to recent movements by reserving a billion euros for the fight against sexist violence. And, after the recent scandal of large-scale mistreatment of elderly people in the Orpea chain of private retirement homes (1,100 homes across France), an FI government would only allow retirement homes to be run by non-profit organizations or by local governments.

A determined effort is planned to tax the rich more and stop the use of tax havens. On inheritance tax, Mélenchon’s programme would impose a twelve million euro maximum. Anything more than that would go into the public coffers (and, calculations show, could pay for student grants for all). For the rest of us, up to 120,000 euros of inheritance would be completely tax-free.

Finally, the France Insoumise [2] wants to change the constitution and sharply reduce the power of the president, moving to a sixth Republic (the Fifth was established in 1958). If Mélenchon were to be elected, he would call a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.

In a world where austerity, privatization and individualism are sold to us as inevitable, it is a breath of fresh air to watch Mélenchon and FI members of parliament on television defending these reforms. And the reforms are popular. Early February, the manifesto was number six in the list of best-selling books in France, and the YouTube channel had 700,000 subscribers. A recent opinion poll [Harris, August 2021] showed that 88% of people approved of a sharp rise in the minimum wage, and 90% agreed retirement pensions should never be below the minimum wage. Eighty per cent said enough water for basic needs should be free and 86% are in favour of aiming towards 100% renewable energy, while 63% want a change in the constitution and the establishment of a sixth republic.

In addition to its radicality, the FI campaign has an insurgent tone, which drew millions of voters in 2017 who had previously stayed home at election time. Mélenchon quotes the great French writer Victor Hugo, saying “From now on, this word ‘Revolution’ will be the name of civilization, until it is replaced by the word ‘harmony’”. He likes to repeat in meetings that great left slogan “Ecology without class struggle is just gardening really”. And he insists that “the only thing that can limit exploitation is resistance to exploitation”.

Islamophobia

Like the rest of the radical and revolutionary left in France, the France Insoumise does not sufficiently mobilize a fight against islamophobia. Macron’s dissolution of groups that assisted victims of islamophobia was greeted only by angry press releases by the whole of the left. However, Mélenchon’s recent positions, with encouragement from anti-racist groups based in multi-ethnic, working class neighbourhoods, represent a historic shift in France on the question, as the islamophobic consensus on the left is now thoroughly broken. Fascist candidate Eric Zemmour accuses Mélenchon of “lying down passively before the Imam”, and he is regularly attacked for being “soft on Islamic fundamentalism”.

In December 2019 there was the first ever mass demonstration specifically against islamophobia in Paris. Mélenchon was there (whereas the Socialist Party refused to support). Unlike some, Mélenchon refuses to apologize for having been at the demo. This demonstration caused some dissensions within the Communist Party, and within the France Insoumise, with one of their MPs, François Ruffin, famously commenting that he wasn’t going to this demonstration “because I have football on Sundays”.

Since then, Mélenchon’s defence of Muslims against racism has only become louder, clearer, and more systematic. The FI group was the only parliamentary group to vote against the islamophobic laws – supposedly against “Muslim separatism”– pushed through by Macron last year. Mélenchon declared that “separatism” was “ a stupid concept” invented “in order to stigmatize Muslims”. He now regularly reminds his mass audiences that “hatred for Muslims is a central factor of division allowing the powerful to remain powerful”.[3]

It is not an accident that some influential Black anti-racist groups are calling to vote for him, when they are often uninterested in “white politics”. One explained it was because Mélenchon “had broken with the Islamophobic consensus” and because he defends “the creolization of society” (a term Mélenchon has often used) and explicitly rejects a White identity for France.

Usefulness in struggle

The fight against the power of capital has always had three main aspects: [4] Firstly, the concrete fight – gaining wage increases, union rights or permanent contracts; secondly, the political fight – pushing through laws that help our class (whether it be bigger health budgets or gay marriage) and finally the ideological fight, to push back the idea that “There is No Alternative” to vicious austerity and militarism, and to push forward the idea that capitalism can be overthrown, and explain how this might be done. How useful in these struggles is the FI?

If Mélenchon gets a strong vote in the first round, every concrete struggle will be encouraged. If he should get to the second round (and the large number of candidates means this is not impossible) it will be a political earthquake. Already in 2022, solid railway strikes and education strikes for pay have shown that a fightback is coming – a large radical left vote will help this along.

The France Insoumise has at present 17 MPs elected to the National Assembly, including a call-centre operator, Adrien Quatennens; a librarian, Danièle Obono; and a nursing assistant, Caroline Fiat. They have carried out intensive parliamentary work since 2017, occasionally managing to push through an amendment in the interests of the 99%, but more often proposing bills or amendments that are voted down, but that nevertheless allow a debate in parliament and in the media on a wide range of social questions. On the question of police racism, for example, the FI proposed an amendment that would oblige all police officers who checked someone’s ID to give a certificate to the person concerned. This would improve the situation in particular of Black and Arab men, by making repeated checks several times a day impossible. The FI MPs have stood out in their denunciation of police violence.

The vocal FI support in parliament and in the media for the successful campaign in 2019-2021 to push back Macron’s plan to smash pensions was certainly useful, as was the support for the Yellow Vests. The MPs organized a minute of silence during a parliamentary debate for the Yellow Vests killed and injured during the movement “because of their commitment to be citizens”.

FI MPs know how to attract the media. A couple of years back, when one of Macron’s ministers mocked those protesting at a cut of “only five euros” in Housing Benefit, France Insoumise MPs upset the government by coming into parliament with some shopping, to teach the minister what you can buy with five euros when you are poor. Last week, François Ruffin brandished a huge cheque for many billions of euros in parliament, symbolizing the money given by Macron to big business during his presidency.

On the key question of antifascism, Mélenchon is the one who had the courage to stand directly against Marine Le Pen in her own constituency in 2012, and the FI were central to the organization of last year’s rare mass demonstration against fascism. Meanwhile, one FI MP, François Ruffin, is responsible for the two best mass-distributed political documentaries in the last 30 years: “Je veux du soleil” (2019) [5] about the Yellow Vest revolt, and “Debout les femmes” (2021) on the work and struggles of women cleaners and care assistants.

The France Insoumise sees the presidential campaign as a time of crucial political education and debate (two and a half hour political interviews on prime-time TV is the way we do things here!). [6] Three of Mélenchon’s recent long TV interviews received more than 1.5 million visits on the FI YouTube channel. He is an extraordinarily good speaker. His February meeting at Montpellier, entitled “The rich are idlers” got an audience of 8 000 people, and 300 000 YouTube visits. For the political struggle of our class, the France Insoumise is doing its bit.

Libel and slander

Naturally, Mélenchon is the target of impressive smear campaigns, which have loudly trumpeted that he is a megalomaniac, a racist, an Islamist, an antisemite and, most recently, a friend of Putin’s. These smears usually come from the Right, the Socialist Party, the Greens or the mass media, but are occasionally taken up by people on the far left. [7] The smear campaigns run in the usual manner, with Socialist Party press releases saying “He’s a friend of Putin’s”, soft left papers saying “It is widely believed he is a friend of Putin’s”, and many foolish people vaguely on the left chipping in helpfully with “Can you prove he isn’t a little pro-Putin on Tuesdays?” There are not enough people on the left who understand that any section of the left must be fiercely defended against smear campaigns by the whole of the left. The Corbyn experience in Britain shows how crucial this is.

The aim of this first part has been to explain the importance of the exciting left election campaign of the France Insoumise, which is generally underplayed on the international left. In part two, I will look at Mélenchon’s vision of foreign policy, of left patriotism, and some other places where Marxists have important disagreements with him.

John Mullen is a Marxist activist in the Paris region, and a supporter of the France Insoumise. His political website is here.

Footnotes

1 You can find online, in English, the Table of Contents of the 2017 version of the programme, which gives an impression of its nature and tone.

2 For reasons which have mostly to do with how the French language works, the best translation of “La France Insoumise” is “France in revolt” not “France unbowed”. Firstly, “soumis” and “insoumis” are relatively everyday words in French, whereas “bowed” and “unbowed” are not, in English. More importantly, “France unbowed” suggests the whole of France is referred to, whereas “la France Insoumise” can refer to that part of the French nation which is in revolt. This is why you can see terms such as “La France vaccinée”… ( word for word “vaccinated France”…) to speak of that section of French people who are vaccinated, or “La France syndiquée” (“unionized France”) to speak of those in France who are members of trade unions.

4 These were mentioned by Marx as early as 1850.

5 At least 200,000 people saw it in French cinemas.

6 Two and a half hours of the Green candidate here and of Jean-Luc Mélenchon here.

7 Leading member of the New Anticapitalist Party, Olivier Besancenot, in this interview for example.

To stop the war we need political clarity

Nearly 20 years after the great mobilisations against the Iraq war, the Left is now dangerously divided. Where did it all go wrong?


01/03/2022

A war is always a moment of truth, and it is truly shocking to see so many (former) comrades collapse like a deck of cards under the impact of events. In these last few days I’ve seen everything on the miserable world of social media, from calls to purge “Putinists” (whatever that is) from the Left to those who think of themselves as particularly radical for demanding harder sanctions against Russia (capital of course is against that, you see, so they think this gives their reckless calls for escalation an anti-capitalist flair).

Many are circulating an obscure letter by the proverbial Ukrainian leftist that accuses the “Western Left” of being in cahoots with Putin for pointing out that NATO is still a thing (there is probably also a proverbial Ukrainian leftist in the Donbass who is imploring us to support Putin`s invasion as a continuation of the Red Army’s assault on Berlin). Shocking as all of this is, however, understanding should come before judgement. Where did it all go wrong? Here’s a modest attempt in that direction.

Twenty years ago, we experienced a relative revival of the Left under the twin impact of both the alterglobalization movement as well as the movement against the war on Iraq. While it was easy to be against George W. and the neocons in this unipolar moment, it was not always easy to analytically discern the root causes of things like the “war on terror”.

A minority of us made the argument that the state and imperialism were still a thing, and that the fact that we now lived in a unipolar moment did not mean that the state was irrelevant or that challengers to this order would not ultimately appear. Indeed, we argued that the war on Iraq was not the result of neocon-groupthink but a badly organized flight forward to prevent the emergence of such challengers to US hegemony.

But a much significant proportion of those radicalized held on to another theoretical framework, based more or less on Toni Negri’s Empire. It argued that interstate rivalries were a thing of the past, and things like Iraq were merely police operations undertaken on behalf of a networked and neoliberalized global capitalist class (forgive the under-sophistication, but this general description holds true about the direction of the argument). It was Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism theory reloaded.

The political conclusions many drew were manifold. First, it was passé to talk about imperialism. If you did that, you were labelled an authoritarian Stalinist of the “primary/secondary contradiction”-variety. I remember a history professor during my first semester at uni in 2003, whose course basically consisted of praises to Empire as the “21st century’s Communist Manifesto”.

Another lesson was quite reformist in the literal sense – it was to support European integration as a benign project that merely needed to be reformed in a progressive direction. This was basically the line followed by Syriza, Die Linke, and others in Europe, with all the known consequences.

Accompanying Negri “domestically”, was Holloway`s Change the World Without Taking Power, a manual on how to turn your low impact on actual politics into a moral asset. Under the impact of Occupy, many Hollowayists would suddendly discover that politics matters after all and become self-declared left populists, but that’s another story.

Iraq was a disaster. It accelerated the process it sought to prevent. Regional powers were strengthened – Iran, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey, and others. The US overstretch meant others like Russia and China found a breathing space and could challenge the US up to a certain degree.

Then the 2008 war in Georgia happened. Market capitalist Russia could tolerate this much globally, but not in what it regarded as its own backyard – the post-Soviet space. It maintained its own sphere of influence there after 1991, with “peacekeeping” operations in the Caucausus, Moldavia and Central Asia.

Now, the US was encroaching on that space too, and was even dangling NATO membership to the Ukraine, the buffer zone between Russia and post-expansion NATO (as to why, check out Brezinski`s “Grand Chessboard” among others). Every Western action resulted in an increasingly assertive counterreaction, Crimea and Syria to name the most important ones.

I don’t know exactly what went on in the heads of those who thought imperialism was a thing of the past, but it looks like two thought processes kicked in, which are now merging into one. If the whole world was so decentered and networked, it didn’t really matter where you were. And if – channelling Holloway – your political impact on your own rulers was near zero, you had to denounce everything and everyone, become a propagandist or worse, hope your own rulers could be persuaded to do something about what you thought was wrong in this or that part of the globe.

So through the rabbit hole of social media we had those great exercises of moral blackmail against a “Western left”, or “tankies”, or what have you not, that clinged on to an archaic anti-imperialism. We were told, Russia was also “imperialist” (as if this was news for us), even as they called for imperialist no-fly zones in Syria and drew ridiculous analogies to the Spanish Civil War.

On the other hand, it looks like the processes of electoralism and institutionalization that many from the noughties generation went through got the better of them. If you make peace with the fact that your own political impact is close to zero, then what’s left is to opportunistically attach yourself to any kind of “popular” (i.e. manufactured) mood, hoping to become its progressive wing and win this election or enter that coalition in government. Politics transforms itself into mere marketing – “I’m also against NATO, but it’s not exactly what people care about at the moment”.

So, now we have many from that side who are shocked that Russia, an imperialist state, would do an imperialist thing. And this leads to those insane Paul Mason-types who pass as left-wing but call for strengthening the “nuclear deterrent”, to sound credible. AOC is calling for the authorization of military force (i.e. World War III) before congress, even as no serious US policymaker is contemplating this at the moment.

They effectively argue that, it’s not all imperialisms that should be condemned now; it’s that *only* Russian imperialism should be condemned. For some, Western countries are now flawless democracies and not imperialist any more, whereas other condemn NATO and Western imperialism solely in the abstract, fully detached from any analysis of the concrete situation unravelling in the Ukraine. Truly, their condemnations reveal themselves to be simply justifications for their “own” imperialism, except they don’t call it like that.

We live in dark times and darker times are still ahead. This senseless war should end immediately. We need disarmament and de-escalation on a European and global level. Solidarity and fighting our own rulers, whether in Washington, London, Berlin, Mumbai, Damascus, Kiev or Moscow, must prevail.

Stop the War!

Statement by the LINKE Berlin Internationals on Ukraine


28/02/2022

Deutsche Version unten

We condemn the Russian state’s aggression and demand that it withdraw immediately all its forces from Ukraine. We believe that there can be no justification for this aggression. We support Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, and the Ukrainian people in their resistance to the invasion. We stand with the Ukrainian people against this aggression, and embolden our efforts against fascisms and authoritarianisms in all their manifestations.

At the same time, we oppose a military offensive or any escalation of the conflict by NATO and the EU. Diplomatic solutions, not further military escalation, should be used to stop the war.

We reject the push to war over Ukraine. In nearly every war, working class people die for the greed and power lust of our rulers. Wars are usually fought in the name of one nation or another, but we agree with the Communist Manifesto when it says that working people have no country. For this reason, we also demand that all those fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine who wish to come to Germany are granted asylum.

The current escalation is a result of imperialism – where economic competition leads to military conflict. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin are threatening to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In particular, the Western suggestion that Ukraine join NATO breaks an agreement that George H.W. Bush made with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.

The main task of socialists is to oppose the militarism of our own ruling class. As Karl Liebknecht said, the main enemy is at home. This means that we should also demand that Germany leaves the military alliance of NATO, as a step towards the dissolution of NATO.

Calling for an end to German militarism does not mean lining up alongside Putin or Russian nationalism. Putin has a track record of imperial intervention – in Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea. He is a neoliberal tyrant and is no friend of the working class – in Russia or elsewhere. Our answer is solidarity with the anti-war movement from below in Ukraine, in Russia, in the USA, and everywhere.

While we must oppose Putin, talking about his crimes without mentioning the crimes of NATO only feeds the drive to war. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Gulf Wars, claims of brutality on “the other side” have been used to feed the drive to war, while similar atrocities from “our side” are systematically ignored. The ruling classes throughout the world are brutal, and must be opposed through popular uprisings, not war.

Western politicians and the media have suddenly decided that they oppose militarism and expansionism. Yet from Korea to Vietnam, from Afghanistan to Iraq, NATO has a history of invading other countries and abusing human rights. Whatever the problem is, NATO cannot be any part of the solution.

We urge the media to avoid dangerous bias and to confront this dangerous situation sincerely. We’ve witnessed the way the Western media broadcast the Afghanistan and Iraq wars at the beginning of this century as a live TV show. We are currently seeing the same process in the Russian media. RT (Russia Today) announced that the invasion was carried out to “denazify” Ukraine. This is just a mirror image of “War on Terror” during the Bush administration. Only chauvinists will be convinced by this partisanship journalism.

Although Germany now has a Red-Green-Yellow government, this does not guarantee a peaceful foreign policy. A Red-Green government willingly supported Germany’s first military interventions since the Second World War – bombing former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The German government has just broken a long-standing practise of not sending weapons to conflict zones. Sending German weapons to Ukraine only serves to add oil to the fire.

We make the following demands:

  • Stop the war

  • Stop the Russian aggression towards Ukraine

  • Germany should offer a safe passage and haven to deserters and other people fleeing Ukraine ohne wenn und aber

  • Germany takes in all refugees – whether Ukrainian, Afghan, Syrian, Yemeni or Somalian – and provides the same support system for all

  • NATO troops must withdraw from Eastern Europe

  • Germany should leave NATO as a step towards its dissolution

  • Demilitarize Europe

  • Better controls on all imperialist propaganda

  • Speed up the transition to renewable energies to break Germany’s dependence on Russian gas

We call on all Berlin LINKE Internationals members and supporters to take part in the many rallies for peace, a ceasefire, and disarmament.

The International Anti-War movement stands united. Hoch die Internationale Solidarität!

Stoppt den Krieg!

Erklärung von DIE LINKE Berlin Internationals zur Ukraine

Wir verurteilen die Aggression des Russischen Staates und fordern den sofortigen Rückzug aller Streitkräfte aus der Ukraine. Wir glauben, dass es keine Rechtfertigung für diese Aggression geben kann. Wir unterstützen die Unabhängigkeit und territoriale Integrität der Ukraine und das Ukrainische Volk in seinem Widerstand gegen die Invasion. Wir stehen mit dem Ukrainischen Volk gegen die Aggression und bekräftigen unsere Bemühungen gegen Faschismus und Autoritarismus in all seinen Manifestationen.

Gleichzeitig lehnen wir eine militärische Offensive oder jegliche Eskalation des Konflikts durch die NATO und die EU ab. Diplomatische Lösungen, nicht weitere militärische Eskalation, sollten den Krieg stoppen.

Wir lehnen den Vorstoß zum Krieg um die Ukraine ab. In nahezu jedem Krieg sterben Menschen der Arbeiterklasse für die Gier und Machtlust unserer Herrscher. Kriege werden üblicherweise im Namen der einen oder anderen Nation geführt, aber wir stimmen dem Kommunistischen Manifest zu, wenn es sagt, dass Arbeiter kein Vaterland haben. Aus diesem Grund fordern wir ebenso, dass allen vor der russischen Invasion in der Ukraine Fliehenden, die nach Deutschland kommen wollen, hier Asyl gewährt wird.

Die derzeitige Eskalation ist ein Resultat des Imperialismus, in dem wirtschaftlicher Wettbewerb zu militärischem Konflikt führt. Die Ausdehnung der NATO nach Osteuropa und die imperialen Ambitionen von Vladimir Putin drohen hunderttausende Leben zu kosten. Insbesondere der Vorschlag des Westens, dass die Ukraine der NATO beitritt, bricht eine Vereinbarung, die George H.W. Bush und Michail Gorbatschow 1990 trafen.

Die Hauptaufgabe eines Sozialisten ist es, den Militarismus der herrschenden Klasse abzulehnen. Wie Karl-Liebknecht sagte, der Hauptfeind steht im eigenen Land. Das bedeutet, dass wir auch fordern sollten, dass Deutschland die militärische Allianz der NATO verlässt als einen Schritt hin zur Auflösung der NATO.

Nach einem Ende des deutschen Militarismus zu rufen bedeutet nicht, sich neben Putin oder den Russischen Nationalismus zu stellen. Putin hat einen Streckenrekord der imperialen Intervention in Tschetschenien, Georgien und der Krim. Er ist ein neoliberaler Tyrann und ist kein Freund der Arbeiterklasse in Russland oder anderswo. Unsere Antwort ist Solidarität mit der Antikriegsbewegung in der Ukraine, in Russland, in den USA und überall.

Auch wenn wir uns Putin widersetzen müssen, nährt das Sprechen über seine Verbrechen ohne die Erwähnung der Verbrechen der NATO nur den Drang zum Krieg. Von der Kubakrise bis zu den Golfkriegen wurden Behauptungen zur Brutalität „der anderen Seite“ benutzt um den Drang zum Krieg zu nähren, während ähnliche Grausamkeiten „unserer Seite“ systematisch ignoriert wurden. Die herrschenden Klassen in aller Welt sind brutal und Widerstand muss durch Volksaufstände, nicht durch Krieg erfolgen.

Die westlichen Politiker und Medien haben plötzlich entschieden, dass sie Militarismus und Expansion ablehnen. Aber von Korea bis Vietnam, von Afghanistan bis Irak, hat die NATO eine Vorgeschichte der Invasion anderer Länder und des Missbrauchs von Menschenrechten. Was immer das Problem ist, die NATO kann kein Teil der Lösung sein.

Wir drängen darauf, dass die Medien gefährliche Vorurteile vermeiden und sich dieser gefährlichen Situation ehrlich stellen. Wir haben erlebt, wie die westlichen Medien über die Kriege in Afghanistan und dem Irak am Anfang dieses Jahrhunderts in live TV Sendungen Bericht erstatteten. Wir sehen derzeit den gleichen Vorgang in den russischen Medien. RT (Russia Today) kündigte an, dass die Invasion zur Entnazifizierung der Ukraine erfolgte. Das ist nur ein Spiegelbild des „War on Terror“ während der Bush-Regierung. Nur Chauvinisten werden von diesem parteiischen Journalismus überzeugt sein.

Obwohl Deutschland nun eine Rot-Grün-Gelbe Regierung hat, garantiert das keine friedliche Außenpolitik. Eine Rot-Grüne Regierung unterstützte bereitwillig Deutschlands erste Militärintervention seit dem zweiten Weltkrieg und bombardierte das ehemalige Jugoslawien und Afghanistan. Die Deutsche Regierung hat gerade mit der langjährigen Praxis der Nichtentsendung von Waffen in Konfliktzonen gebrochen. Deutsche Waffen in die Ukraine zu senden heißt nur, Öl ins Feuer zu schütten.

Wir haben folgende Forderungen:

  • Stoppt den Krieg
  • Stoppt die russische Aggression gegen die Ukraine
  • Deutschland sollte sicheren Durchgang und Zuflucht für Deserteure und andere Flüchtlinge aus der Ukraine ohne wenn und aber bieten
  • Deutschland nimmt alle Flüchtlinge auf, ob sie Ukrainer, Afghanen, Syrer, Jemeniten oder Somalier sind und stellt die gleiche Unterstützung für alle bereit
  • Die NATO Truppen müssen sich aus Osteuropa zurückziehen
  • Deutschland sollte die NATO als einen Schritt hin zu ihrer Auflösung verlassen
  • Demilitarisierung Europas
  • Bessere Kontrolle über alle imperialistische Propaganda
  • Beschleunigung des Übergangs zu erneuerbaren Energien um die Abhängigkeit Deutschlands von russischem Gas zu durchbrechen

Wir rufen alle Mitglieder und Unterstützer von DIE LINKE Berlin Internationals dazu auf, an Demonstrationen für Frieden, eine Waffenruhe und Abrüstung teilzunehmen.

Die internationale Antikriegsbewegung steht vereint. Hoch die internationale Solidarität!

A century later: the origins of fascism in Italy.

100 years after Mussolini’s March on Rome, how can we understand Fascism?


27/02/2022

In this brief contribution to the cultural debate of The Left Berlin, I will not hide that I found the drafting of this contribution challenging. This was due the complexity of the topic and quantity of studies that, over the years have undertaken to explain the fascist phenomenon.

I will thus try, to present, 100 years after the Marcia su Roma coup d’état, what is to be meant by fascism and to describe its class nature.

Italian fascism presents some peculiarities reflecting the specific situation of the country at the ending of the First World War. In Italy, the fascist movement took the form neither of an intellectual minority tendency, as in France [1]; nor of a mass political force legitimating its societal hegemony in the electoral arena, as in Germany [2]. We should remember that from the very beginning, as the then secretary of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) Palmiro Togliatti said in his popular “Course on the adversaries” – that it would be a mistake to believe that what was true for Italy – should be true and fitting all the other contexts. Fascism can take different shapes in different countries [3].

Over the first Post-War period, Italy was shaken by deep social and political upheavals. The chronic crisis of the liberal institutions was only the exterior, superficial, aspect of the inadequacy of a bourgeois democracy regime that could not face challenges posed by the likely radical, paradigmatic change following the October Revolution in Russia and the spreading revolutionary wave on a continental scale. Guided by their organizations, workers and peasants, that more than anybody else had borne the war catastrophe, acquired a political awareness that guided them in the elaboration of increasingly advanced demands.

The toughening of the class struggle led the Italian bourgeoisie to question itself on the most effective modes and forms of response. Fascism was born, in this perspective, as the most aggressive and regressive form used by the national capitalist class to repress the workers’ demands that threatened its very existence. The workers had been taught by the historical lesson of the soviets.

It is important to underline an aspect still overlooked in the analysis on the origins of fascism. Too often, even in left political discourse, there is the tendency to value some “schematic” and rather dogmatic theses. These were also criticized in 1935 by Togliatti when commenting on the judgment on the origins of fascism given by the social democrats and the German communist movement. Such perspectives reflect a fondness to see fascism narrowly, as an organized expression solely of the petit bourgeoisie, terrified by the real prospect of mass impoverishment stemming from the economic crisis following the First World War. Fascism was certainly a mass movement in which the reactionary petit bourgeoisie found fertile ground for building a political anti-worker platform.

However, fascism was also something else, which cannot be studied separately from imperialism. In what sense? As  Togliatti said, in order to understand fascism, we need “to connect two elements: the bourgeois dictatorship and the movement of the petit bourgeois masses” [4]

It is  in this bright application of dialectical materialism as an interpretive key of the real course of events, that – from my point of view – is the core of the matter. On the one hand, Fascism presents itself as a mass movement that managed to organize the petit bourgeoisie thanks to an eclectic and confused ideology (going from the most extreme forms of nationalism, to illusory and only apparently anti-capitalistic proposals in the economic sphere). On the other hand, fascism also grew in synergy with great financial capital, with the same big bourgeoisie that, at least in words fascism claimed to be fighting against. That was according to the fascist political manifesto of 1919.

The political program of the National Fascist Party, was influenced by the general orientations expressed by the big bourgeoisie. They –  feeling the threat to Italian capitalism posed by the workers’ advancements during the Biennio Rosso (1919-1921), tried to pursue different paths to end the impasse [5]. In this course of events, the Mussolini coup d’état of 1922 was identified as the best path to defeat the workers’ movement, although, as reminded by the history of the 20th century, only temporarily.

Footnotes

1 S. Berstein, „Fascism and anti-fascism in France from the Twenties until 1945”, in Antifascismo e identità europea, A. De Bernardi, P. Ferrari, Carocci, Roma, 2004, p. 109.

2 Particularly significant are the words of the German historian Lutz Klinkhammer: “The German people was not the first victim of Nazism”. Cfr. L. Klinkhammer, “The youth resistance against the national socialist regime”, in Antifascismo e identità europea, A. De Bernardi, P. Ferrari, Carocci, Roma 2004, pp. 135-153.

3 P. Togliatti, „Course on the adversaries”, in P. Togliatti, Opere, vol. III/2, E. Ragionieri, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1973, p. 534.

4 P. 533.

 5 P. 546-49.

“Real life, when it has passed, inclines towards obscurity”

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is riddled with an analysis of class, misogyny and political compromise


26/02/2022

I.

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is an international sensation. The depth of the storyline, its vivid descriptions of feeling, its frantic pace, and the intricacy of Neapolitan culture interwoven into the personal narratives have been discussed, dissected, and showered with praise by better writers than myself.

Yet what has been overlooked is an adequate appraisal of the politics that emanates at each step. Whether it is the force of the dominant ideology, limited space in columns or complacency about history that causes reviewers to overlook the fascinating political currents running through the quartet, they deserve attention for a modern left that is perpetually haunted by the ghosts of its past iterations. In this sense, the quartet functions as a history lesson on an understudied polity: post-war Italy.

The tumultuous, tragic lives of Lenu (Elena Greco) and Lila (Raffella Cerullo) are shaped by the tug of war between ascendant communism and the unspoken union between Christian Democracy and organised crime. Born into an impoverished, working-class neighbourhood of Naples under the shadow of the “two great forces of Italian reaction”, the two girls find in each other a source of intellectual and moral sustenance.

It begins with Lila throwing Lenu’s doll into a cellar belonging to the dreaded Camorrist loan shark of the neighbourhood, Don Achille Carracci. Lenu retaliates in kind. Lila forces Lenu to go with her to demand their dolls back from Don Achille. Walking up the stairs to Don Achille’s apartment, Lila offers her hand to encourage Lenu and, though deeply afraid of what the terrifying man might do, Lenu grasps it. Their fates would be intertwined for the next six decades.

When Don Achille is confronted by Lila, he is amused by her boldness and gives the girls some money to buy new dolls, but they buy instead a used copy of ‘Little Women’. A creative and literary passion within the two girls starts, with Lenu acutely self-aware of her intellectual shortcomings. It inspires a contest between the two to read voraciously from the school library and they push each other to excel academically.

For a Global North generation born after the “end of history”, it is difficult to grasp the life-changing impact of social guarantees like schooling. The distinctly feminist lesson of the quartet manifests through the educational divergence between the two. Though Lenu is acutely aware that her friend is the true prodigy, possessing an intellect and a will that is uncontainable, it is Lenu’s parents who, after rancorous quarrels, support her education after the age of 12. Lila’s family recognises no financial benefit of paying for a girl’s education through books and stationery. Their fates diverge even if their friendship remains. Ferrante effortlessly melds the themes of class and patriarchy into one.

Lenu goes on to excel and eventually study at the Normale in Pisa, publishing successful novels and writing columns for national newspapers, while her friend sees her passions steadily ground under the mill of misogyny and poverty. Yet she gravitates back to the culture of the stradone and her childhood milieu. Chief among whom is Nino Sarratore, The brilliant son of part-time poet and journalist Donato Sarratore. Both men have a profound influence on Lenu’s intellectual passions, with Nino serving as an object of desire for both Lila and Lenu.

II.

Reading about Lenu’s exceptional rise into a petit bourgeois milieu from the humblest beginnings reminded me of an excellent essay by John Merrick discussing the conflicts of working-class achievement. The character’s infiltration of the bourgeois society of Italy is intensely unsettling and she resists, with varying degrees of success, to not let herself be unmoored from the stradone of Naples.

The central marker of this cultural gulf is expressed through the Neapolitan dialect, which serves as a private language for the purest interlocution of thoughts between the inhabitants of the neighbourhood and also as a target for class prejudices – something that Lenu is continually subjected to due to the imperfection of her adopted visage of refinement. Consequently, she experiences the inner conflicts of pursuing dreams in a world where those of her ilk are forbidden to dream, of inhabiting exalted spaces designed to exclude her, to achieve ends that become more ephemeral the closer she gets to achieving them.

Today, regional and linguistic distinctions often enshrine a system of class-cultural stratification, fomenting resentments that find terrible expression through the ascendant far-right in the absence of a coherent leftist movement like that of the PCI (Italian Communist Party). The social and cultural divide that grows in today’s societies requires us to understand and empathise with the web of emotions that working people feel and are made to feel, as modernity drags them through the seas of change like a forgotten appendage.

Ferrante’s literary style inverts the standard depiction of political narratives, where political actors and events are central and participating characters peripheral. Instead we are given minimal exposure to the political heavyweights of the era such as Rudi Dutschke, Enrico Berlinguer, Aldo Moro, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. We experience the 1968 movement as an individual situated in the period mixed in with the tumults of ordinary life, giving the narrative a pedagogical quality.

III.

To what extent was Lila’s intellectual promise destroyed by the misogyny that prevailed in deeply conservative Catholic Italy? Entire episodes in the story made me reminisce about family and social life in my native Pakistan. Perhaps Pakistanis and Italians are not so different and we simply exist in a state of asynchronicity. But what about the deep poverty described in the novel? Lila is incredibly bright, but on account of her being female her intelligence goes unrecognised and uninvested. Would a more mediocre and male Lila be given the chance to flourish?

Enzo Scanno, the son of the fruit seller who returns traumatised from military service, becomes a successful IT professional despite his childhood reputation as the class dunce. Yet he would be the first to credit his success to the brilliance of Lila’s tutelage and creativity. It is the grit of this exceptional woman that breaks through the class ceiling society imposes upon her, and perhaps in the process robbing the working class of an organic leader. We would be remiss if we were to assume the totality of patriarchy in deciding the fate of Ferrante’s women: Lila defies containment. She spends her entire life in Naples, yet her spirit and her acts are felt across borders. Her geographical confinement proves no hindrance to her evolution. This uncontainable nature echoes Beauvoirian ideas of woman. A woman that is at various times impetuous, imperious, and indifferent. Envious, competitive, and mean. Yet enduringly loyal, generous with her time and money, determined to surmount the socioeconomic challenges of Naples, the neighbourhood, her own conservative family, and the Camorrist brothers who threaten her life and her livelihood. Though men try to break her through physical, economic, and sexual abuse, she defies them and exacts in due time her revenge.

She is not a woman, but Woman; in all the multiplicity of Woman. In her defiant multiplicity is expressed a feminist message that demands that women be able to practice their full subjectivity without constraints. That they may not be Vestal maidens, doting mothers, loyal companions, resilient fighters or any combination thereof. This yearning to be uncontainable is a powerful (re)expression of second-wave feminism. These are lost lessons that demand reiteration for a new generation to appraise them and shape their thinking.

IV.

Ferrante reveals the evolution of work in Italy after the war through the lens of proletarian life. We see Lila’s father start out as a cottage entrepreneur, making and repairing shoes, while the wealthier Solaras make money through a pastry shop and loansharking, among other unknown criminal enterprises. Sandwiched in between is the upwardly mobile son of Don Achille, Stefano Carracci, who runs a grocery store and harbours ambitions to expand. These ambitions of upward mobility spur him to enter financial agreements with the Solaras, a choice that will seed his ruin. Three sets of entrepreneurs with contradictory interests, that are resolved in time with the Solaras totally dominating the other two.

Workers and their working conditions feature prominently, with Lila’s life of toil in the Soccavo sausage factory providing a grim insight into an all-too-often romanticised industrial working-class existence. We learn through Lila’s organising in the workplace how solidarity is never guaranteed, but won through blood and sweat – quite literally. The union of fascism, bosses, and organised crime becomes logically consistent when we witness the confluence of their economic interests. The working class is never supine and it resists through militancy in the workplace and beyond, most sharply through the Red Brigades that capture and execute the Christian Democrat Prime Minister Aldo Moro.

In the interwoven narration of this shocking historical event, orchestrated in the aftermath of the Historic Compromise between the PCI and the Christian Democrats, the intellectual tensions of timeless leftist debates are brought to the fore. An upwardly mobile petit bourgeois intellectual strata starts to form and perhaps the Red Brigades were acutely aware of the splintering this would inspire in the politics of the Italian working class, foreshadowing the dissolution of the PCI itself. Seen in this light, the execution of Moro seems like a desperate act in the face of modernity’s unceasing encroachment on their present. Lila and Enzo are beginning their careers as IT specialists in the same period, finally escaping the economic confines of working-class destitution even though they remain wedded to the social sanctuary of their neighbourhood.

The march of modernity, the “necessary” political compromises it would entail, the visions of a more prosperous future unfettered by the paralysing war of aggression between left and right; these themes find their expression most faithfully through Nino Sarratore. He encapsulates the essence of the third way that would come to dominate the long 90s. The social and romantic carnage left in his wake in the lives of Lila and Lenu mirror his political evolution. In the words of Lenu’s mother-in-law, the quintessential left bourgeois intellectual Adele Airota, ‘for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else’.

Nino’s arriviste character leads him to the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The third way will eventually prevail and Nino will be one of its self-aggrandising leaders. The PCI would dissolve itself in 1991.

V.

History, when it has passed, inclines towards obscurity, not clarity. It is part of the left’s function to remember beyond the ordinary lifespans of humans, to bear the torch that illuminates the past and to craft a narrative of it that makes it vivid. Ferrante does this through the urgent realism of her narrative. For us on the left she has gifted us with words that can help us explain, relate, and articulate a narrative for our present, unceasing, encroaching modernity. We are the generation that succeeds her characters and so through this insight into their history, we may learn to practice that optimism of the will that Gramsci had advocated a generation earlier.

Editor’s note: for further reading on Gramsci’s analysis of fascism, we recommend the following texts: