Book. Admirer and reader of Jean Jaurès, Paul Magnette was inspired by him to title his “ecosocialist manifesto”. “We are not ascetics, we need the wide life », replied Jaurès to his adversaries. But what does the president of the French-speaking Belgian Socialist Party, former minister of energy and climate, mayor of Charleroi and professor of political theory at the Free University of Brussels mean by that? That instead of describing, in vain, “the circles of hell” into which global warming could plunge humanity, we must demonstrate that the climate transition will be the instrument capable of improving “ the well-being and pleasure of an immense majority of the population”.
To the asceticism advocated, among others, by the German philosopher Hans Jonas, whom he has also read a lot, the Belgian leader, former destroyer of CETA – the Euro-Canadian trade agreement – therefore opposes the vision of a reinvented, optimistic socialism , finally able to overcome the capitalist system. On condition, not only, he prophesies, of integrating the ecological dimension into his action, but also of arousing popular support for essential but still misunderstood reforms, including on the left.
The right – in which he includes Emmanuel Macron – has, he says, no vision of the environmental issue, or that of a “green capitalism” supported by a technical conception which will only lead to the enrichment of multinationals. As for the ecological current, it would have neglected the social question and would suddenly appear as a “climate oligarchy” unlikely to lead to real mobilization. What about young climate activists? They would have a few lessons to learn from the history of the labor movement and should consider that no deep reform is possible if the group that promotes it does not manage to share it with other categories of the population. . However, railway workers, nursing staff, farmers, middle managers in ecological planning… all can find themselves in a common fight, argues the author..
Renouncing material prosperity
Ce “mesh of struggles”advocated by the leader of an essentially managerial party and
sometimes victim of politico-financial excesses, will surprise more than one. Like the critique of a socialism which, Magnette writes, “has slipped too easily into the imagination, aesthetics and language of the productivist society”. This intellectual, who had come to active politics, did not hesitate, when the social-democratic left in northern Europe was struggling – with the notable exception of the French-speaking part of Belgium – to advise him to give up his sacrosanct idea of material prosperity as the only factor of emancipation. Before him, the Italian communist Enrico Berlinguer was one of the few to endorse, in the 1970s, the notion of a left adept at a certain austerity, based on the values of “rationality, rigor, justice and the enjoyment of authentic goods”such as culture, education, or “a healthy and free relationship with nature”. But it is a left that does not neglect pleasure, would add Paul Magnette.
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