Turning a reprieve into an alternative for power
On 10 July, at the call of several organisations and alternative media, including Contretemps, a rally was held in Pantin on the theme of ‘After 7 July, what next?’ This is the talk given there by Stathis Kouvelakis.
The question we are trying to answer this evening is: what can we do to ensure that the success of July 7 is more than just a reprieve?[1] Make no mistake about it: with more than 10 million votes, i.e. more than a third of the votes cast, and 140 MPs in the Assembly, with a whole media ecosystem at its service and the now acquired legitimacy of a potential government acceptable to the bourgeoisie, the far right is lying in ambush, ready to capitalise on the widespread feeling of decay that is permeating growing sectors of French society.
To find some answers, we need to take a closer look at the driving forces behind the popular mobilization that shaped the result of July 7. i.e. the unexpected victory of the New Popular Front (NPF). It may have surprised and relieved us, but it is by no means a miracle. We could even say that it comes from a long way back, from the sedimentation left behind by the social and political battles of recent years. There are two layers to this. The first was provided by a succession of mobilisations that set in motion diverse and massive sectors of French society. To mention only the main ones: the 2016 struggle against the Labour Law, the gilets jaunes uprising, feminist and anti-racist mobilisations, last summer’s revolt in the banlieues, last year movement against pension reform, not forgetting the decisive battle of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Admittedly, none of these movements has been victorious. But it was thanks to them that an atmosphere of politicisation, a capacity for action and a widespread feeling of belonging to a broadly identifiable social camp took root across the country. It was this accumulation of experiences that made possible the largely self-organised grassroots mobilisation that was the secret of the reversal of momentum between the two election rounds (June 30 and July 7.) and the halt to the rise of the brown wave.
The second layer is the emergence of a pole of rupture on the left, on the ruins left by the Socialist Party’s conversion to neoliberal management and its descent into hell under the Hollande presidency. Launched in 2012, this pole asserted itself in 2017 with La France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s candidacy in the presidential election. In 2022, it confirmed its centrality on the left and succeeded in drawing the rest of the left into a common programme for a clear break with neoliberalism. Despite the limitations and internal fragility of this precedent, the 2022 NUPES coalition, which led to its break-up, it made it possible to set up the NPF in record time. And it was this NPF that foiled Macron’s plan with his dissolution of parliament. A plan based on fragmenting the left and repeating a face-off with the far right, Macronism’s deadly founding pattern. It was this NPF that also made it possible to defeat the other part of the government’s strategy: to stigmatise and isolate La France Insoumise, in order to return to the situation of a domesticated left, a left content to occupy a subaltern position in a political system dominated by the perverted couple formed by the bourgeois bloc and the far-right, both serving the same class interests.
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Faced with the imminence of the fascist threat, the framework of the NPF made it possible to go beyond the cartel-form of parties that had defined the NUPES. It facilitated the involvement of trade unions, grassroot organizations and social movements, laying the foundations for a genuine united front of popular forces. Let’s be clear: the existence of this framework is part of the gains of the period, and its dislocation can only pave the way to disaster. The difficulty lies in defending the NPF while preserving the hegemony within it of its radical wing, the hegemonythat made it possible and which is in fact the only way to consolidate and further deploy it. To put it another way, the golden rule in this type of situation is always to let the most “moderate” sectors take responsibility for any break in the unitary framework and bear the cost for this break.
So, we are not starting from scratch. This achievement is all the more precious in that it is the result of hard-fought battles, battles rooted in the long history of what must be called the great revolutionary tradition of this country and this people. Nowhere else in Europe is there a comparable configuration to be found. The significance of the battle we are waging extends far beyond our borders, and on the evening of 7 July we saw the extent to which our joy was shared all around the world. Our responsibility is therefore immense.
There is no room for complacency or relaxation. Because the only way to maintain and defend what we have achieved is to build on it. The task is all the more urgent because the situation remains fraught with extremely serious dangers. One of the aspects that remains to be clarified is the strategic hypothesis in which the gain in question should be placed.
I am obliged to be brief here, which means oversimplifying the argument. I will formulate my hypothesis as follows: a coalition government of popular forces, on the basis of a programme of radical break, as the only means of building an alternative for power. Indeed, when fascism presents itself as an allegedly “antisystemic” alternative and reaches the gates of power, it can only be durably defeated by another alternative for power, but a real alternative since it represents abreak with the existing social and political order. But to do this, and this is the decisive point, this alternative of popular government must be part of a dynamic that goes beyond it, thanks to the mobilisation from below of the forces that brought it to power. The long experience of left governments in France and the rest of the world teaches us that if the two ends of this difficult dialectic are not held together, failure and even disaster lie at the end of the road.
At a time when a whole section of the left, from Marine Tondelier of the Greens to François Ruffin and Clémentine Autain, who recently left the ranks of LFI, has only the words ‘appeasement’ and ‘repair’ on its lips, we need to emphasize that there is no way to preach ‘appeasement’ when you are faced with a determined and aggressive adversary. And, as far as I know, you only try to ‘repair’ something if you've decided beforehand that it should work as before, i.e. if you’ve given up trying to transform it.
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The point here is not to display some narcissistic radicalism, but to demonstrate a capacity for an elementary political realism. Being in government and taking power are two very different things. Because most of the power in the type society we live in does not reside in its representative institutions, but where economic power is concentrated, where the hard core of the state apparatus lies, in the top bureaucracy and the apparatus of repression, not forgetting the tentacular power of the media, increasingly annexed by economic power. To this must be added an international environment that is, by definition, hostile to any attempted break with the existing order, particularly embodied in the European Union and the *markets of international finance. And to complete the picture, we need to mention the imperialist military framework under US domination, of which France is a part and in which it is itself an important player, albeit a secondary one compared to the American hyperpower.
It is completely irresponsible to believe for a moment that these forces will allow without reacting an undertaking which would challenge even a fraction of their power. The only way to be victorious in this showdown is to combine action from above, that of a government implementing radical measures, with mobilisation from below, which is indispensable to overcome the resistance of the dominant forces and go further down the road of social and political change.
This is the strategic possibility at the heart of the double achievement of the sequence we have just witnessed: a united front of popular forces which, sooner or later, in one configuration or another, will come to power on the back of struggles and whose action will amplify the dynamic of popular mobilization. This is the only way to keep open the possibility of a break with the neoliberal order, and to strengthen the political pole which supports such an option. It is the only way to counter the internal and external pressure to give up and capitulate, as has been the case so far with so many left-wing governments in France and elsewhere.
Let’s regroup our forces and get organised to build without delay this united popular front!
Translated by David Fernbach
