And what if it was here, in this discreet restaurant located in the town of Pantin, in Seine-Saint-Denis, that the future of a part of the left was being played out? There, between the garden furniture and the fairy lights of this “solidarity third place” (the Relais Pantin) would something emerge that would bring the inexorable rise of the extreme right in France to its knees? It was with this hope that several hundred people of all ages, alone or accompanied, activists or not, made the trip on the evening of July 10, a few days after the defeat of the National Rally and the surprise comeback of the New Popular Front at the polls, to attend the “great political meeting” organized by the “decolonial” media Paroles d’Honneur.
Anyone familiar with activist vocabulary probably imagines a meeting of insiders with a pompous title. Not quite: three large screens broadcast the evening live. One outside, on the garland side, another inside in a first space, and a last one in the large room where everything happens. The event is also broadcast live on the Paroles d’Honneur YouTube channel, and followed by several thousand people. To date, it has been viewed nearly 40,000 times.
The reason: all the personalities and collectives present this evening alone represent the equivalent of a decade of “struggles” by the social movement. And for some, just as many controversial statements. From the decolonial activist Houria Bouteldja to the philosopher, economist, and figure of Nuit Debout Frédéric Lordon, via the radical ecological movement Soulèvements de la Terre and the Jewish decolonial collective Tsedek. Several members of France Insoumise, including the recently re-elected MP Ersilia Soudais, sitting in the front rows, and Amal Bentounsi, a disappointed candidate in Meaux, are also there.
Discuss the major strategic directions for the left, but which left? That of François Ruffin, the man on the ground determined to win back the working-class electorate? That of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the maximo leader of the Insoumis? That of Raphaël Glucksmann, the social democrat? Or that of Marine Tondelier, the very pugnacious leader of the ecologists? In a few hours, a course will have emerged, with its modes of action, its guiding ideas… And its targets. Not only Jordan Bardella, to whom we will tell that he can go “eat his little dead”, nor even Emmanuel Macron, “the other imbecile”, but also personalities located in his own ranks. Even if it means making the recent “purges” within the Insoumis clan seem like a dress rehearsal.
A “fascist” can hide a social traitor
Here, no one is unaware of who the “enemy” is. The far right, “fascism”, those against whom the New Popular Front has obtained, as some will say in the assembly, a “reprieve”. But we are not safe from a “Bonapartist Trafalgar blow that would come from the extreme centre rather than the extreme right”, warns the one who opens the evening, an activist from the collective Action antifasciste Paris-Banlieue. It is barely 8pm and already, a first course has been set: no question of “letting antifascism and popular resistance practices be confined to the fight against the far right”. We will therefore talk about the enemy (“fascism”) but we will not miss either an “adversary to be wary of”: “the left as mediation of capital”. This evening, there will therefore be the “classic” left or “left of betrayal”, as opposed to the so-called “rupture” left.
Where there is treason there are traitors. Marine Tondelier, François Ruffin, Raphaël Glucksmann, the response will be without them. Guilty of having participated, according to Frédéric Lordon, in the “attempts to retread [de la sociale démocratie]”. Then it’s the newspaper’s turn. The World, LiberationRadio France, France Télévisions, up to Mediapart and the review Looksaccused in turn of having been enlisted in a “concerted operation of intoxication carried out on a countrywide scale with a view to demolishing the leading opposition political party” – meaning La France insoumise. Without forgetting, finally, the journalist Edwy Plenel, who was not spared either…
In the room, not the slightest sign of indignation. It must be said that in the decolonial sphere, the co-founder of Mediapart has made enemies recently. In June, he had notably denounced on X “the authoritarianism, egotism and sectarianism” of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, before withdrawing his tweet so as “not to add division to division”. In reality, the list is as long as it reveals the point of tension: “the refusal of confrontation, the party of appeasement or the government of tenderness are doomed to end up objectively as collaborators of the only appeasement known to the bourgeois order: bourgeois appeasement”.
The “evidence” of radicalism
Make no mistake: the trial of this vaporous “social democracy” is not only motivated by strategic disagreements. When L’Express asks some members of the public about the Ruffin case, even though he is one of the first supporters of the working class that Frédéric Lordon describes as a “spearhead”, the answers converge on one qualifier: “reactionary”. If the simple fact of having accused Jean-Luc Mélenchon of being a “drag” is enough to fuel criticism among some, others highlight his “fantasized vision of a white proletariat, à la Ken Loach. Of course there are still white people in the mining basins, but… And then we don’t hear him on LGBTphobic speeches”, argues a tall boy with a pleasant look. “‘Soc-dem’ [pour social-démocrate : NDLR]it has become an insult: today, when you are on the left, it is obvious to be in a form of radicalism.”
Should we see here the excitement of an intellectual and activist sphere, of a youth too, free to indulge in excess unlike a political world held by the negotiations underway on the left of the hemicycle? “Social democracy no longer has as important a role as it did in the past”, said a few minutes earlier Thomas Portes, Insoumis recently re-elected in Seine-Saint-Denis and surprise guest of this evening (his name did not appear on the program). “If you look at the addition of the scores of the Socialist Party and Europe Ecologie-Les Verts [aux élections européennes]that’s 300,000 to 400,000 votes fewer than in the last elections […] The list of La France insoumise represents a million additional votes. If today we have a left of rupture, we owe it to Jean-Luc Mélenchon”, he continued to thunderous applause. This, just before calling for “blocking the country” so that the program of the New Popular Front can be implemented, and taking his leave. “I must leave, we are in a rather unusual period, it has not escaped your notice: we must watch our partners like hawks”. Laughter in the room.
“Overflowing” the left of rupture
The problem with this “breakaway” left is that it could well end up being overwhelmed on its left in turn. “Marine Tondelier, she is racist. Raphaël Glucksmann, let’s not forget who his partner is,” lists with L’Express a young man with a look straight out of the 1990s. Among the white left (and it’s not an insult to be white, it’s a social category, he specifies) La France insoumise is the only party to defend blacks and Arabs”. La France insoumise is saved, at least for tonight. But for how much longer? Already, during the exchanges, and in the wake of others before her, Houria Bouteldja called for “overflowing” the said left of rupture, “even if we support it”… Go further, but then how far, for what purpose?
On the level of ideas, first of all, the decolonial activist advocates for example the exit of France from Europe. Far from shocking our previous interlocutor who affirmed for his part that “the State [qui] obeys Brussels, is completely polluted by European imperialism”. In this hunt for “imperialism”, this new left, as opposed to the “old left”, does not seem to be averse to the words of Ramy Shaath, an activist of Palestinian and Egyptian origin who drew attention in November 2023 for having declared that Israel has “no right to defend itself” before refuting the terrorist nature of the Hamas attack. These words had been reported to the courts by Laurent Nuñez, the Paris police prefect. “If you want rights in Palestine, you cannot prevent our way of obtaining our rights, that is to say our resistance”, he argued that evening in English, wearing a keffiyeh on his shoulders.
“We must purge”
Then comes the question of actions. We must “go further than the NFP program, which is just a basic socialist program from the 1981s,” by thinking about the first “revolutionary measures,” explains a member of the radical ecology collective of the Earth Uprisings, full of emotion. He gives an example: “disarming the police can be done both physically and by law” (laughter in the room). Physically? See you on July 20 in La Rochelle, the date on which all the spectators of the evening are invited for “[prendre] the city as we will be led to do in the weeks and months to come to unhook Macron from his rock and bring about a shift.”
“We need popular banquets everywhere, starting this summer, starting tomorrow. The same popular banquets that led to the Revolution of 1848. [et] “brought down Louis Philippe,” suggests Ritchy Thibault, a former yellow vest, co-founder of Peuple révolté and spokesperson for PEPS (For a Popular and Social Ecology). Before calling for the creation of “popular self-defense brigades everywhere, because the cops and the fascists work hand in hand.”
In his passion, this history student even goes so far as to validate the famous purges within the Insoumis clan: “yes, we must purge [l]”the black sheep who spend their time chasing the extreme right.” “Ruffin and his little friends […]this old left that is left only in name must be greatly replaced by activists who truly and valiantly embody the fight against the extreme right,” he dares. So what do we do, among the supporters of the “rupture”, after this July 7? Purges. The rupture will have to wait.
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