A broad coalition of left parties, under the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front, NFP), formed to contest France’s recent parliamentary elections, after fears of a potential far-right victory.
Led by radical anti-capitalist party France Insoumise (France in Revolt, FI), the NFP won the highest number of parliamentary seats. Despite this, French President Emmanuel Macron refused to allow the NFP to form government and appointed Michel Barnier, from the traditional centre-right Republicans party, as prime minister.
Tempest interviewed John Mullen, a Marxist activist with the FI, about anti-capitalist organising and the need for unity to overcome divisions within the left in France.
Green Left is publishing this abridged interview in two parts. Read part 1 here.
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The far right, led by Rassemblement National, are giving support to the Barnier government. How do you assess the impact of the new government on the growth of the far right?
This support could be very temporary indeed. But obviously the fascists are hoping to advance in the crisis.
First, they want to gain respectability outside their own electorate, particularly in upper-middle-class circles.
Second, they want to pretend they are the realistic alternative to discredited Macronism.
Finally, they need to encourage their fascist core with red meat racist rhetoric. It’s a difficult balance. In addition, they want to build local party structures everywhere. So, they have real strengths, but lots of weak points that antifascists can attack. There are some signs of antifascist activity increasing around the country, including in FI.
While FI has mass support within left-wing and antifascist sections of working-class, migrant and Arab and Muslim communities, there is some criticism of its inability or failure to create a “democratic membership organisation”. In what ways can the revolutionary left relate to FI?
The emergence of the FI over the past eight years represents a remarkable success for mass left reformism, which must be clearly understood if revolutionaries are to react appropriately.
This is an organisation that secured more than 7.5 million votes in 2022 and that speaks of “a citizen’s revolution”. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, calls it “an anti-capitalist force, aiming at ecological planning of the economy”.
Tens of thousands of people have flocked to the movement over the last couple of months. FI organised a summer school with 116 meetings and more than 5000 people in August. It has set up regular educational courses for activists, including “Introduction to Marxism” classes, and is taking the accumulation of cadre seriously.
FI was the driving force behind the coalition that pushed back the fascists — and it is the force attracting the best young activists now. The organisation has succeeded in transforming public debate and breaking the reigning “there is no alternative to neoliberalism” atmosphere.
It has brought opposition to Islamophobia into the mainstream of left politics, from where it had been absent for several decades (although FI and the revolutionary left in France still have some distance to go on this question).
The organisation is organisationally independent of the old reformist left (unlike, say, mass Corbynism in Britain). It now publishes books, organises weekend schools and lectures and seems to be becoming hegemonic on the radical left.
In sharp contrast to left reformist groups in several other countries, FI’s leadership has held firm on the two issues where the establishment pressure has been strongest: Palestine and police violence. Two of its leaders, Mathilde Panot and Rima Hassan, were called into a police station, accused of the crime of “supporting terrorism”.
Mélenchon had an official police complaint lodged against him by the Ministry of Higher Education because he criticised the disgusting attitude of the chancellor of Lille University, who banned the group’s lecture on the genocide in Gaza.
A far-right police trade union organised a demonstration in front of FI headquarters some time back.
In short, FI is the centre of gravity of radical left politics.
Its emergence is the result of two phenomena.
First, there is the generalisation of political class consciousness in France after the mass political strikes of 1995, 2006, 2010, 2013, 2019 and last year (against attacks on pensions or labour protection legislation) and the popular revolts of 2005, 2018 and last year (against police violence or rural poverty).
Second, there was the weakness and division of the revolutionary left, which we would have liked to have become hegemonic. The result is a mass left reformism, seen as an open-ended determination to rethink the whole of society.
It would be disastrous for revolutionaries to primarily see this new force as unwelcome competition. Seeing tens of thousands of new activists flood in to defend a “citizens’ revolution” and “spectacular change” should delight every Marxist.
“Debate, debate, debate” should be the priority — not “denounce, denounce, denounce”! It is essential to take as a starting point what the relation is between FI and workers’ interests, not to start with what effect the rise of the FI will have on our small organisations.
It is easy to read online what the main newspapers of the French revolutionary left have written about FI in the past few years. The organisation is almost never mentioned, except to denounce selected actions, tactics or slogans.
You find almost no debates with its representatives, nor do you find fraternal in-depth articles explaining agreements and disagreements. I think these two kinds of articles should have been present in every issue of every publication.
Mélenchon has written seven books in the past ten years. I have been unable to find a review of any of them in the main far-left publications in France.
This tendency to assess other parties of the left in a sectarian manner has led to some serious mistakes, cutting the far left off from the most promising new masses of activists.
Concerning the kind of organisation FI is building: unimpressed with the results of traditional radical left parties in France, which are frequently bogged down in endless faction fighting, its leadership wanted to try something different.
The party has no formal membership, no one can be expelled, representatives at national delegate meetings are chosen by lottery and local action groups are autonomous. The program is meant to hold the organisation together.
Revolutionaries may agree or disagree with these methods, but they give rise to a situation that has advantages for Marxists. You can be an activist in FI and a member of another organisation. You can openly publish your own paper and have your own meetings.
Personally, I can’t see why revolutionaries won’t work openly inside FI. Two or three Trotskyist groups do, keeping their independent voice. But even groups that prefer to stay outside should be ten times more interested than they are in debating with FI people on the many crucial questions thrown up by the present crisis.
Despite its important work building movements, the revolutionary left is a small player, and needs to recognise this. Mostly, what we have to offer is ideas, analysis and history.
Many debates are in progress inside FI. How should we understand women’s oppression? How can a radical program be implemented? What should we think of the animal rights movements, privilege theory, the crisis of imperialism or left patriotism? Marxists have a huge contribution to make to these discussions.
There are also numerous serious disagreements between Marxists and the leadership of FI over French imperialism, the role of parliament, the potential for constitutional reform and so on.
But in the FI, we have an attractive, dynamic mass organisation looking for a “citizens’ revolution”. We Marxists want a workers’ revolution. But in a situation in which 90% of the working class do not see a clear difference between the two, it’s better to be inside the hall discussing the way forward than standing in the bus shelter across the road, searching through lists of tactical decisions by FI looking for one to denounce.
[Abridged from Tempest.]