2023-08-23 11:30:08
Roger Martelli, in Paris, May 11, 2022. SILANOC
For those who would be surprised to see the lefts railing against each other barely a year after the conclusion of a legislative alliance, the historian Roger Martelli offers some answers. His latest book, Why the left lost. And how she can win (Arcane editions, forthcoming), sheds light on this paradox of a political family eternally under tension. “The alliance, but always subject to conditions: the terms of the debate seem set at the start of the 20th century; they will remain so until today”he warns.
For the historian of communism, author in particular of Party red. A history of the PCF (Armand Colin, 2020), the two modes of expression of the left, the “old social democracy” and the “Bolshevik stock” have completed their course. In their place emerged this “curious political object” what is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise, then the New People’s Ecological and Social Union. Object which made it possible to avoid the disappearance of the left, but without reconnecting with the summits. The cumulative score in the 2022 presidential election is indeed the “third worst score” of the history of the left, “Barely at the level of 1969, when the communist Jacques Duclos had outclassed the socialist Gaston Defferre”.
“Political tension maintained”
Besides, why continue to speak of the left when the left-right divide is called into question and when other words, “people” for example, seem much more unifying? Analysis in terms of blocks, “bourgeois bloc”, “popular bloc”, which appeared in particular in the speeches of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has the advantage of being simple. But the downside of being “sufficiently blurred to encompass any potential adversary”, notes the historian. These blocs are far from being superimposed on well-defined social categories, at a time when the workers first tend to vote for the far right, when the left is establishing itself “preferably among executives and middle strata”.
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The historian returns, in three examples, to these moments when the left-right divide was erased: the terrible year, in 1871, when the “Republic itself becomes suspect in the eyes of a large section of the working world” ; the beginning of the 1930s when the French Communist Party advocated a tactic of “class against class” ; finally 1947, when the PCF was not “neither to the left nor to the right but to the east”. The temptation to get rid of the “left”, old among the proponents of the class struggle, is often unsuccessful.
Today, from the “yellow vests” to the urban riots after the death of Nahel M., at the end of June in Nanterre, through the demonstrations against the pension reform, the succession of struggles does not seem to serve the advancement of the LEFT. In question, the cultural victories accumulated by the extreme right but also the failures of a left which “has worked to stir up anger more than to nurture alternatives”, to maintain the “political tension”, minus the politicization. The historian calls, in conclusion, to “the construction, patient, but started without delay, of a center of emancipation with a majority vocation”. More than a program, a project… that the parties don’t seem to be in a hurry to launch.
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