Renée Fregosi is a philosopher and political scientist. She has been a member of the PS since 1976 and recently published French still an effort… to remain secular! (Ed. L'Harmattan, 2019).
Whether it calls itself "radical" or "reformist", the political and "intellectual" left in France today has generally exchanged the notion of exploitation for the theory of domination dear to the supporters of Pierre Bourdieu, and the struggle of classes against the struggle of races. What remains of the left (which is expressed in the media) has become Islamo-leftist, multiculturalist, feminist victim, and in every way moralizing. And if some like François Hollande at the end of his term of office, Bernard Cazeneuve probing a future candidacy, or today Laurent Joffrin, with the launch of his movement, claim to have become "social democrats", these are only new impostures!
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On the one hand, the French socialists were never predominantly social-democrats, whereas in the Nordic countries social-democracy had produced, notably in Sweden since the 1930s, profound sociological changes by considerably reducing income disparities through sharing in the greater number of both political decision and material and cultural goods. France indeed has the particularity of tending regularly towards the hegemony of an authoritarian rather than libertarian left. In 1920, the Bolshevik fraction won within the French Socialist Party (SFIO). But this division did not however allow the clear expression of the republican socialism advocated by Jean Jaurès and later of a socialism of "the exercise of power" sketched out by Léon Blum with the Matignon agreements in 1936 which unfortunately never did. been erected into a coherent and conquering political model. And from the 1980s, despite (and perhaps also because of) its various periods in government, the PS never managed to decide definitively in favor of a genuine transformative social democracy.
Since the 1970s, in fact, the new PS had defied and mocked the alleged lukewarmness of social democracy.Because the verse was in the fruit of the new "party of Epinay", with the rise in power of a social-technocracy without conviction or attachment except the modernist mirage and allegiance to François Mitterrand. In the deep party, the drift was then carried out gradually, quietly, with the abandonment of the working class as indicated by Marcel Gauchet in 1986, and the renunciation of the secular spirit and the anti-totalitarian demand that protected together against the misdeeds of the clerical influence and the “secular religions” resulting from Bolshevism. As Michel Rocard said in one of his most recent interviews, “if we had to designate the killer of socialism… his name is François Mitterrand” , and we can add that François Hollande, his direct heir, has become its gravedigger.
Since the 1970s, in fact, the new PS had defied and mocked the alleged lukewarmness of social democracy. From Chevènement to Pierre Joxe via Lionel Jospin, the “true left” remained the revolutionary left, the one which had to break with capitalism and not regulate it. And up to and including François Hollande, the supporters of “archeo” or “neo” Bolshevism were treated with complacency and cowardice even as they scolded the Socialists. Also, when, a year before the end of his five-year term, François Hollande played a social democratic “coming out”, his conversion appeared for what it was: insincere. Improvised and clumsy, too late also to be a founder, this profession of faith simply responded to the need to steal this image both from Manuel Valls and Emmanuel Macron who played on this register, just as illegitimately moreover.
They do not agree to deadly racialist, sexist, anti-Zionist or more openly Islamist diversions.Current attempts to reclaim the name of Social Democracy are therefore both grotesque and indecent on the part of those who have helped to prevent the social democratic aggiornamento of the French left. And this when there was still time perhaps, that is to say when capitalism could still be regulated and agreements negotiated within the framework of nation-states. Because today, there can no longer be any question of resuscitating the old social democracy that the European social democratic parties themselves have betrayed and abandoned for lack of having been able to coordinate to face the new challenges of capitalism in its last phase.
So definitely no! the gravediggers of democratic socialism will not be the renovators of social democracy or of the left in perdition. Even if those who form the largest party in France, namely the former members of the PS for four decades, no doubt the great majority aspire to find a new path, international, social and democratic. An organization that faces globalization by attacking financial super-profits and upgrading productive labor and workers rather than organizing a needy global society of assistance and tolerance of the intolerable. Of course, they are no doubt overwhelmingly convinced that it is only within a framework of the “social democratic” type that has been deeply renewed that the vital issues, in particular damage to the environment, can be faced. But they do not agree to the deadly racialist, sexist, anti-Zionist or more openly Islamist diversions.
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Like many of those who today challenge the growing inequalities within our societies and the elites who disregard and despise "those below," grassroots socialists and at heart seek PS desperately. But it is not the “has-been” of past failures, shameless, cynical lesson-givers and greedy for derisory powers, who will be welcomed by them as saviors.