“Faced with the bourgeoisie’s monopoly of speech and finances, I have no other weapons than my body and my integrity. […] I cancel you from my world. I leave, I go on strike, I join my comrades for whom the search for meaning and dignity takes precedence over that of money and power. In grandstand published by Telerama, Adèle Haenel announced the end of her career on the big screen, and her withdrawal from a world of cinema which she accuses of being too complacent towards sexual aggressors, as more generally compared to “the ‘deadly racist ecocide order’. For the actress, “there is no longer a livable future for anyone in the very short term within the framework of capitalism”. And to point to the “collapsed biodiversity”, “the militarization of Europe which is racing” and “the hunger and misery which are spreading”, without much understanding of the link between the environment, the Russian invasion of Ukraine decided by Vladimir Putin, and a resurgence of people suffering from hunger in the world, mainly due to the slowdown of liberal economies during the Covid-19 pandemic…
Revealed in beautiful films like birth of octopuses, Susanna Or The fighters, Adèle Haenel mobilized against the pension reform, coming for example to support the strikers at the TotalEnergies refinery in Gonfreville-l’Orcher. On February 20, during a meeting organized by the revolutionary feminist collective Pain et des Roses and the anti-capitalist student collective Le Poing Levé, she had already attacked the “deadly bourgeoisie” and called for the “overthrow” of the current “shitty world” to lead to a “post-capitalist, that is to say communist, world”.
We could smile at this chic radicalism, in protest against a film industry which, sociologically, leans very largely to the left (just look at the many actors and actresses who have signed forums against the pension reform). We could also regret that the seventh art is losing one of its greatest talents (just look at the Portrait of the girl on fire to be convinced). But the revolutionary turn of Adèle Haenel is symptomatic of a Western youth privileged as rarely in History on the material level, but for whom capitalism would be the source of all evils, climatic as sexist or economic.
Millennial socialism
In 2022, when promoting his Climate ledger, Greta Thunberg called for the overthrow of “the entire capitalist system”, a system made up of “colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide” and “racist and oppressive extractivism”. A Leninist activist who tries to link ecology to Marxism through the concept of “capitalocene”, intellectual figurehead of the anti-basin movement, the Swede Andreas Malm has benefited from a more than benevolent media reception, Mediapart At World, despite the radicalism of his speech. Already in 2019, the magazine The Economist warned against millennial socialismor the resurgence of far-left ideas within a generation too young to have really been vaccinated by the economic disasters and political oppression of the socialist experiments carried out in the Soviet Union or in the countries of Eastern Europe. ‘East.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s, the Western left, like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, moved towards a “third way”, reconciling State and markets. But faced with the rise of themes on inequalities or ecology, veterans of a hard left, like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, suddenly became trendy again and found themselves acclaimed by the younger generations. According to a study from Axios conducted in 2019, 61% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 reacted positively to the word “socialism”, compared to only 58% of them to the term “capitalism”. The gap between the generations is significant, knowing that only 27% of Americans aged 65, in 2019, reserved a positive reception for the word “socialism”. In France, in the first round of the last presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, trained in Trotskyism and who called “to get out of capitalist society”, won 31% of the votes of 18-24 (against 20% for Macron) and 34% among 25-34 year olds.
Today, capitalism is no longer simply accused of fueling social and economic inequalities. For the Marxist feminists of which Adèle Haenel claims, capitalism and patriarchy would be intimately linked. It does not matter if the Industrial Revolution led to a dramatic reduction in the gaps between men and women in terms of income or access to education, as well as in the fall in fertility rates, one of the great emancipatory forces for women all over the world. Similarly, in the eyes of some young environmental activists, capitalism is the main culprit of global warming and environmental degradation. It doesn’t matter if collectivist regimes like those of the USSR or the GDR have calamitous balance sheets in terms of pollution. It doesn’t matter if China, still in the hands of a communist party, now emits 30% of global CO2 emissions. Faced with a complex world, it is easier to take on a single enemy, the big bad capital.
The oblivion of the millions of dead of communism
We can see, in this return of Karl Marx, the consequences of the absence of a real work of memory on the millions of victims of the other great totalitarianism of the 20th century, alongside Nazism. The black book of communism, led by the historian Stéphane Courtois, had aroused a vast controversy by estimating at nearly 100 million the number of deaths caused by regimes descended from Lenin, from the USSR (15 million) to Mao’s China (between 45 and 72 million) to the Khmer Rouge (between 1.3 and 2.3 million Cambodians killed in just a few years, out of a population of 7.5 million). If these figures are still debated, the balance sheet is undeniably bloody, between the elimination of opponents or scapegoats (such as kulaks), major famines and absolute contempt of communist dictators for the value of a human life.
But as the liberal researcher Rainer Zitelmann does, who has just published In defense of capitalism, we can also see in the media revival of anti-capitalist theses the failure, in terms of pedagogy, of all those who are attached to the free market. “The defenders of capitalism, and especially entrepreneurs, have never been able to explain to the masses the advantages and workings of capitalism. They have ceded the media, schools and universities to anti-capitalists. Pro-capitalists should take inspiration from marketing and of the communication of the anti-capitalists, because the latter are, obviously, much better in this field” explains Zitelmann. Adèle Haenel can thus denounce “the hunger and the misery which are spreading”, whereas these last decades have precisely allowed unprecedented progress in the matter. Before the emergence of capitalism, most of the inhabitants of the planet were in a situation of extreme poverty. In 1980, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty still exceeded 40%. Today, it is less than 10%. Even if the Covid pandemic, which has brought globalization and national economies to a halt, has caused an increase in the number of people affected by hunger, it should not be forgotten that the share of the world population in a situation of undernourishment was still 13.2% in 2001, compared to less than 10% today (and 8.3% in 2018).
We can also point out that MeToo and the freedom of speech on sexual violence, of which Adèle Haenel has become one of the symbols, was able to take place in liberal democracies, and not in Leninist authoritarian regimes like South Korea. North. At its last congress, the Chinese Communist Party did not shine with its concern for inclusiveness. Today, the political bureau, the most powerful executive body of the Beijing regime, no longer includes a single woman. A Marxist-Leninist boys’ club, headed by Xi Jinping who openly encouraged Chinese women to stay at home in order to reduce the demographic crisis. But it is probably easier to attack the “deadly bourgeoisie” than an officially proletarian dictatorship.