While the left is virulently opposed to the pension reform desired by Emmanuel Macron and demands, as one man, retirement at 60, a nagging question returns. What happened so that this left yesterday, owner of an inestimable “political treasure” (the expression is from our columnist Sylvain Fort) – work and its prospects for emancipation, self-realization, etc.? – day after day gives the impression of turning its back on its history? Socialist MP Jérôme Guedj delivers his analysis.
L’Express: You are mobilized; the entire left, LFI and PS combined, is mobilized to fight against the pension reform. None of you have words harsh enough to castigate the text. We have the feeling that work is no longer, for the left, only arduousness, alienation…
Jerome Guedj: Allow me a preamble. The government chants morning, noon and evening like a mantra that the stake of our society is “the value of work”. Paradoxically, here he is tackling the old-fashioned pension reform, completely disconnected from the essential questions that arise from it: wear and tear, the diversity of professional trajectories, the quest for meaning for a certain number of professions, the social utility and the fair remuneration of essential trades for the country… He falls into the trap which he denounces: Elisabeth Borne and her ministers talk about pensions while completely omitting to address the relationship to work.
I now answer your question. According to the cultural definition of the left, retirement is the continuity of work, the retirement pension is nothing but deferred wages. Certainly, the left has also abandoned the discourse on work, it may have missed the boat by not measuring the full extent of changes in the world of work. For too long it was content to believe in a single wage-earning system, molded by a superego of class struggle and the resulting unifying discourse which was to ensure its superpower. We collectively refused to grapple with the difficulties that some of these subjects represented.
Then, we started to correct the situation by addressing themes such as precariousness, exclusion, the working poor. And that revived the approach of the left, renewed the political discourse. From now on, we are the spokespersons for invisible professions, VTC drivers, forklift operators, and all those whom the Covid crisis has revealed, those whom Denis Maillard calls “back-office workers” (connection, care, support, logistics, trade, etc.). Until recently, no one was talking about them except François Ruffin.
But the left seems to have lost sight of the work that emancipates, the work that generates pride and dignity.
The real problem of the left is that it has abandoned to the right what constituted its political DNA – work, the Nation, secularism -, considering that it was natural that the popular and working classes remain faithful to it. But they obviously preferred to turn to others, in this case the National Rally. The words “pride”, “freedom”, have for too long deserted our discourse on work.
We have also witnessed a double movement. The left of government had integrated that a certain number of protections, social or within the Labor Code, became obstacles to this logic of accommodation and accompaniment of liberal globalization. We have contributed to an inversion of the hierarchy of standards.
The alarm had nevertheless been sounded by Pierre Mauroy during the presidential campaign of 2002 when he was sorry to no longer hear the word “worker” in the speeches and programs of the socialist candidate. At present, the popular categories no longer recognize themselves in a technoid, economist discourse. We weren’t the ones who invented the start-up nation, but we had already engulfed ourselves in a story centered on the digitization of the economy, competitiveness and emancipatory innovation, often neglecting the challenges of the country’s deindustrialization, and ignoring that employees can still suffer at work or, conversely, flourish there. And the universal income, as stimulating as it is for the future, has taken us a little further away from the more assertive expectations for the guarantee of employment.
“The universal income, however stimulating it is for the future, has taken us a little further away from the more assertive expectations for the guarantee of employment”
The PS now pleads like LFI for a retirement at 60 years old. The opposite of what you advocated yesterday (in 2022), the opposite of what you did the day before yesterday (Touraine law of 2016). How not to think that this reversal reveals at least the intellectual weakness of the current Socialist Party?
The intellectual weakness is perhaps also to have integrated the constraint at this point by forgetting that there is a popular aspiration to continue the movement of reduction of the working time on the week and on the life. We ourselves considered that this adjustment variable took precedence. We slipped into the clothes of the good student because we did not want to tackle the subject of the sharing of wealth and the distribution of capital/labor.
But when the main candidate on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, takes the leadership defending retirement at 60, it’s hard to say that it doesn’t speak to people. They hear that it is a desirable political horizon. Pensions are like Zidane and cheese is France. It is civilizational heritage. To attack our system of intergenerational solidarity on its very principles, as the government is doing, is to attack what underpins our culture of equality.
But by defending retirement at 60, don’t you fear that the image of a responsible, realistic left will further fade away?
Realism on the left is precisely to understand the popular aspiration to take advantage of the time freed up if work has not been emancipatory. Moreover, the pensioner is not an idler. We must put an end to this vision! Retirees are sent back to a non-productive sphere. Not everything can be quantified in GDP, care, involvement in associations, mutual benevolence, care of grandchildren, help given to their own parents who are losing their autonomy… That’s all the reality and the activity of retirees today.
“Pensions are like Zidane and cheese is France”
Emmanuel Macron said he did not believe in “a victory of irresponsibility”. Do you think there is a risk that this rhetoric will damage the fight on the left?
I think it reinforces it, on the contrary. One day we are told that people are manipulated, now that they are irresponsible. I had understood that Emmanuel Macron advised his ministers not to make waves, to keep a low profile so as not to fuel this or that controversy. He plays the arsonist firefighter because it’s not good to tell people who are mobilizing for a cause that they just think they are irresponsible.
Irresponsibility is the Thatcherian discourse that we are hammered home: “There is no alternative”. We can, however, reform and improve the pension system, including to absorb the economic deficit that no one disputes, but its limited scope in terms of the amount and duration does not justify throwing everything overboard and extending the legal duration. .
Apart from the CPE, the street has not made a government back down on a text for a long time. Should we still see a loss of power of the left?
There are cultural battles in the Gramscian sense which, successful or not, are worth fighting. So even if this one is not victorious, and I think it can be, it will have an extension. From the great strikes of 1995, he left the victory of the plural left of 1997. May 68 allowed 1981, the victory of Mitterrand.
If the text is adopted, it will leave traces that will affect Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term. It remains to be seen who will benefit from it: the RN, in ambush, silent. Or the left. Provided that it remains united and places the social issue, the relationship to work at the heart of its project. The race is on, which is why the battle for pensions is crucial.
L’Express revealed that an internal note to the Socialist Party counts at least a thousand suspicious votes in the first round of Congress. The candidates knew but preferred to close their eyes. We thought this kind of practice disappeared since the Reims congress, an excess of optimism?
A democratic party, which votes, physically, the same day and not in one click, to validate a strategic orientation, it is almost unique in France and it works globally. I trust those, of all persuasions, who organized this election. The results of which have not been disputed by anyone. But I agree, we can still improve, we will do it with a revived party gathered around Olivier Faure!