Raphaël Rubio is a freelance writer, poet and columnist-journalist. Professor of philosophy, he is also secretary of the Egali-terre association. Christophe Madrolle is president of the UCE (Union of centrists and ecologists) and regional councilor for the southern region.
An equation haunts French political thought. Reconciling ecology, liberalism, and social protection would involve squaring the circle. The difficulties, moreover, seem insurmountable. Tight on its pensions, fractured and crippled by certainties, our country would not be ready.
The candidate Macron, in 2017, had tried to break the spell. A collective project was taking shape: a break with the ideologies of the 20th century, confidence in the practical activity of social actors, pragmatic ecology and deepening of relations between European states. If, in fact, the ambition remains intact, part of the left opposition protests against the wind. Measures such as the partial abolition of the ISF, the reduction of APL, or even the reform of unemployment insurance would prove by A plus B how much the equation is impossible to achieve.
Our optimistic nature, however, encourages us to refuse the insurmountable.
We want to clear virgin lands and rethink social democratic ecology.
From this perspective, a set of epistemological breaks seems as urgent as necessary.
First, it is up to the center left to cast off.
The leaden soles of American post-Marxism, better known as “wokism” and “cancel culture”, are dragging down a drifting French left.
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The collapse of Marxist theories has left its followers flabbergasted. Where a rationalist sociology was capable of thinking the world dialectically, concepts such as race or gender have come to seize up the doctrinal corpus of a certain left. Out of ideas, deprived of its traditional social bases, the latter has renounced secular and republican discourse. The duty of the centre-left is therefore clear: to review its alliances, while remaining firm on universalism.
Revisiting republican universalism will, secondly, determine a marker for social-democratic ecology. American post-Marxism seeks to make race (more precisely Ethnos) an essential political category. Our duty, on the contrary, is to reconnect with the Aristotelian ideal. In the eyes of the Greek philosopher, political space (the polis) takes precedence over biological identities. Maintaining the superiority of the republican bond over that of blood remains a categorical imperative.
Here we want to take a concrete example. A number of French citizens, following the example of one of the co-authors of this forum, are described as “racialized” by the new American post-Marxist ideology. This biological reductionism is experienced by most of those concerned as racism. He condemns a whole part of the population to justify their skin color. Above all, it enclaves individuals in the depths of almost immutable identities. This is how “existential psychoanalysis” forcefully denounces our confinement in the original determination of childhood. The relationships established with others, with the worlds and with our body, would, according to André Gorz, always be questionable and transcendable. On condition, of course, of agreeing to achieve an emancipatory tension towards Freedom.
Fixist, the environmentalist left suffers from schizophrenia.
Betting on the one hand on the fluidity of genres, it paradoxically imprisons individuals in absolutely closed cultures, appearances or religious structures.
Raphael Rubio and Christophe Madrolle
We reproach, in particular to Europe Écologie Les Verts, this repression of the individual freedom, true negation of the citizen subject, with the profit of an ethnicization of the political field. Fixist, the environmentalist left suffers from schizophrenia. Betting on the one hand on the fluidity of genres, it paradoxically imprisons individuals in absolutely closed cultures, appearances or religious structures. Make no mistake. The convergence of struggles for individual emancipation and those concerning the “recognition” of cultural, even religious, identities, under the guise of “intersectionality”, is in reality perilous. We leave to the ecological left the care, improbable, of being both existentialist and structuralist.
This ambiguity is found, moreover, on other questions, including the crucial one of secularism.
The Greens' project for 2022 is eloquent in this respect.
After a digression against a pseudo “State atheism”, the text comes out in favor of “the public expression of religions”.
Here again the schizophrenia is palpable.
How for example to promote, in class, a universal, rational and scientific knowledge, while allowing a certain religious communitarianism to have a voice in the chapter?
The contradictions of the ecological left therefore undermine the emancipatory promise, carried by the Republic, and the content of which does not constitute, in any case, a supposed "white" good conscience. We affirm it serenely. Civic republicanism and the project of secular emancipation are still alive. Our marker, as we have said, is clear: social-democratic ecology is intimately universalist. This is why we invite social democracy to a saving Big Bang.
The third rupture concerns, then, its positioning in relation to liberalism. Here we turn our gaze towards the German Greens. Their slogans could be summed up as “social because liberal”. The creation of a free society implies, for our friends across the Rhine, the fight against negative externalities, support for green innovation, massive investment in climate protection as well as a new industrial and concern for technological sovereignty. These realistic ecologists, in a position to govern both with the moderate right and with the responsible left, assert a bold social ambition: increase in the minimum wage, housing plan, introduction of an unconditional income.
Clean, practically inexhaustible, provided that its framework is transparent and democratic, nuclear power seems to be an asset for the future.
Raphael Rubio and Christophe Madrolle
Finally, a fourth rupture must animate our desire for refoundation. Social-democratic ecology alone can be able to combine the precautionary principle with the innovation factor. For too long, a backward-looking left held a semi-reactionary discourse on modernity and its avatars. If we reject the colonization of minds by the technological imagination, we are nevertheless aware of the value of scientific progress. Resolutely looking to the future, we believe that green innovation can contribute to the low carbon transition. More broadly, we are in favor of building a world, that of tomorrow, that is much more resource-efficient. Renewable energies, resilient territories, fight against plastic waste and marine pollution,taken head-on with the issue of fine particle emissions, we affirm a demanding and responsible ecology. The nuclear issue, for its part, must be treated without taboo. Clean, practically inexhaustible, provided that its framework is transparent and democratic, nuclear power seems to be an asset for the future.
The conclusions are therefore clear: Social democracy must change its skin.
Secular, republican, universalist, liberal and social, its vocation is to found a “civic ecology”, which tomorrow will have to irrigate all public policies.
