Helotage

I wrote an article about Jean Jaurès for New International, and I recommend all my readers read it and my subscribers subscribe to that magazine. Here's an excerpt:

Jean Jaurès is not well-known or much-translated in English. The hero of turn-of-the-20th-century French socialism was revered across the international left following his assassination in 1914. He was dining with friends when a nationalist shot him dead.

You can read the essay here.

You can subscribe to New International here.

This morning Jean-Luc Mélenchon tweeted that “The US could not choose the left: there was none. When there is no left, there is no limit to the right.” He is correct. The enthusiasm generated by the Bernie Sanders campaign and resistance mounted to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 has been exhausted in the Democratic Socialists' broken marriage with the Democratic Party. Over the same time period, the French radical left was able to break with their liberals and build a force capable of resisting the rise of the far-right. ¹

There are, of course, many differences between France and America that make it impossible to copy-and-paste the success of the France Unbowed across the Atlantic. However, the Unbowed can and should be studied as Americans try to rebuild a left from the wreckage of 2024. To begin, we should go back to 2016 and work forward from an interesting wrinkle of history: the Unbowed took technology from the Sanders campaign. This marks the beginning of the differences in strategy which have led to relative success and failure.

The 2016 Sanders run spilled over into the Democratic Socialists of America, a post-New-Left holdover. The DSA has the form of an association with (nominally) dues-paying members participating in local chapters. The first Trump term grew the organization fifteen-fold, and it has since sprouted caucuses that fill out the lack of regional coordination on broadly ideological lines—and contend for influence within the organization's internal democracy. The Sanders campaign itself would get rebooted for another go-round in 2020.

Meanwhile, the Unbowed took the Sanders campaign's technology and repurposed it to build a new, modern platform: Popular Action. The Popular Action website allows anyone to sign up to order materials, attend events, and connect with local Action Groups, which are usually neighborhood-scale committees of a dozen or so people. The Unbowed do not structure themselves as an association or a political party: there is no membership or dues per se. Rather, people are free to participate as they wish, coming and going as they see fit. There are various leadership roles at a local and regional level like facilitating Action Groups or managing social media accounts, but there is not the kind of internal democracy or formal tendencies like in the DSA. Ultimately, each Action Group is autonomous, with only a national ethics committee intervening if the established Principles of the Movement are not respected. Instead of abstract ideological consistency, the Unbowed are united by their shared commitment to a practical program: The Future in Common.

As the 2010s waned, American democratic socialists saw several stars rise, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These celebrity politicians connected directly with the public via social media. The push for key policy proposals like Medicare for All and The Green New Deal motivated activists to seek concessions within the orbit of the Democratic Party. Although the Democrats had been caught undermining the Sanders campaign, he decided to support them again in 2020. As far as I can tell, Sanders' theory of the case was the same as in 2016: by running for President he could use the bully-pulpit to advance a broadly social-democratic agenda within the Democrats' center-left coalition.

By contrast, the Unbowed had produced a coherent theory of action as elaborated in Mélenchon's book, The People's Era. In short, the current French constitution, the Fifth Republic, is insufficiently democratic and must be abolished as a critical step in social revolution. Specifically, the constitution gives too much power to the President. The solution is to win the Presidency and use it to abolish itself. To build a coalition, the Unbowed continually develop their holistic and detailed program. By constantly mobilizing in and with labor, ecological, peace, etc., movements the Unbowed hope not only to gain the votes needed, but the support in the streets necessary for revolutionary social transformation: a rupture with the capitalist world-order.

And what about those social movements—like the George Floyd Uprising or Palestine solidarity encampments? You tell me what the Democrats did. The Unbowed came out and joined the Yellow Vests.

Sanders and AOC rode with Biden all the way into the ditch, and only the smoke drove them out of the wreckage. They contorted in undignified ways, junior partners in a party and supplicants of an administration arming and funding genocide. Democratic Socialists became split on how to respond, with the DSA national and New York City leadership publicly contesting whether or not to endorse AOC. Ideological fissures within the DSA became more pronounced as old-timers accused entryists of trying to capture the organization. Harris spat in the face of her base, trotting Bill Clinton out to Dearborn to inform this key constituency that Israel was “forced” to kill civilians. And of course, Harris lost to Donald Trump. In some Dearborn precincts she came in third place, after Jill Stein.

In France all the polls said that Le Pen's far-right National Rally was supposed to win the snap legislative elections. And yet, the far-right did not win. The left won, because the Unbowed were able to build a left coalition on the basis of their program and mobilize people all over the country to do the groundwork. Note something important: the Unbowed left the center-left Socialist Party and deviationist Communist Party—and in a few years the Unbowed were able to build a coalition on the basis of their program. The Socialists and Communists are the junior partners in the New Popular Front.

So what can we take away from this comparative summary?

1. A new American left is necessary.
2. That left needs to be radical, not liberal or social-democratic.
3. That left needs to organize as a movement and work with other movements.
4. That left needs to be independent, not hitched to the Democratic Party.
5. That left needs to be programmatically unified, not ideologically homogeneous.
6. That left needs to avoid internal tendency battles and entryism by avoiding the form of a party or association.
7. That left needs to theorize the present, not rehash the failures of the past.

In 1898, the great socialist Eugene V. Debs wrote about his time, and how the experience of European comrades influenced American politics: ²

It is scarcely necessary to observe in this connection that capitalism is the same everywhere, that like causes produce like results.

Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.

If we believe the situation is hopeless, what is there to do but get drunk and lie down in misery? If we choose to hope that a better world is possible, let's stand with dignity and fight like hell for the living.

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1. For details see the new book published by the Institut de la Boétie, Extrême droite : la résistible ascension. ↩ 2. Eugene V. Debs, “The American Moment”. ↩

The constitution of the Fifth French Republic is designed to produce definite legislative majorities led by a strong executive. There have been a few historical examples of “cohabitations” where the sitting President's party is rejected in a legislative election and he is forced to share domestic political power with a Prime Minister that he, by democratic tradition, is induced to name despite himself. The current situation in France is straining that constitutional system, and raises two questions: can the country be governed—and by whom?

After the French legislative elections ended on July 7th with the New Popular Front (NFP) winning a relative majority in the National Assembly of 180 seats, president Emmanuel Macron was silent. He had called the snap elections with a relative majority of 245 out of 577 total seats; after his gamble, he lost 86. No political party, bloc, or alliance was left with anywhere near the 289 deputies needed for a ruling majority. Three days later, Macron published an open letter claiming that “nobody won”, and announced his intention to attempt a coalition government instead of following democratic norms and recognizing the NFP's victory. A new page in the history of authoritarian neoliberalism was turned: the extreme-centrist ideology of “neither left nor right” metastasized into electoral denial.

The next day, Sophie Binet, head of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), warned that the ongoing political “crisis” caused by Macron called for a “permanent mobilization”. According to her, the far-right was defeated, yes, but “waits in ambush”. If Macron succeeds in his attempt to “reverse the results of the election” and continue to advance his agenda, then the far-right would be guaranteed a “clean sweep” in the 2027 presidential elections. For Binet, these two threats to French democracy represented by Macron and Le Pen must be overcome by a “rupture” with the neoliberal status quo. The “incredible feat” of the NFP victory must result in real change for the good of the workers today and the defeat of the neofascists tomorrow.

The next day, Jean-Luc Mélenchon live-streamed an hour-and-a-half address to members of France Unbowed (LFI). He began with a reprise of why and how his movement began: opposition to the European Union's neoliberalizing power and a big-tent organization of organizers. The LFI is, for him, not a place to debate abstract theory but “study the present moment” and promote “those distinguished by their actions”. Mélenchon argued that the victory of the NFP is due to popular self-organization and vindicates the strategy of the LFI to organize the disorganized and get out of the vote of habitual non-voters. For him, a critical element in the success of the NFP was the tireless work of activists “in the political movement against the genocide in Gaza, [for whom] the exploitation, domination, humiliation, bombardment, rapine, and murder testifies to and mirrors their own situation.” The effort of pro-Palestine protesters bridged spectacular indignation to political self-activity. Mélenchon went on to stress that the election results, even the Republic itself, must be defended: “we are a people born from a revolution, and we continue by successive revolutions”.

Every day the bourgeois press has sought any means available to break the Popular Front. The most obscene example was recently broadcast on French public radio when  Green Party (EELV) leader, Marine Tondelier, was expressing her condolences with the victim of the botched assassination of Donald Trump. As she brought her remarks to a close, she raised her concern for the threats of violence made by the French far-right, when one of the talking heads replied with