I was asked by my good friend and comrade Donald Parkinson to draft a letter on the situation in France. Since this is a letter I will go against my scientific instincts and resort to some combination of personal reflection, conjecture, and historical analysis.

I am in the south right now, on the Mediterranean sea, a special place for me. One of my grandmothers was the child of an Italian immigrant who moved here from Tuscany, she grew up here. My Algerian grandfather migrated here before the revolution to work. They were married here. A thing about me: both my grandmothers are European, both grandfathers are Algerians, and I was born in Paris while most of my family lives in France or Algeria. So, the Mediterranean is in many ways my absolute home, when I see the south of France or Algeria I see the same land, the same water, the same plants, the same orange light, and pines and olive trees. But despite the joy I feel in returning here, in having the privilege of travel, I also feel a combination of anxiety, anger, and sadness. The whole country is careening rightward, fascitizing. I fear for my family.

The great ghost of the French Republic is the French Empire. France has always struggled with the fact of Algerian migration, in fact the migration of any peoples of a former colony. Algerians began migrating here en masse since around World War I. They fought for the French Republic/Empire, and the first communities were industrial workers settling in cities like Paris and Lyon. Yet, the politics of the Fifth Republic now seems to revolve almost exclusively around the poles of migration, identity, and culture war. Sitting at a cafe, I hear an old man complain that “outside the city with the Arabs there is no law”. This was not uncommon in the past, suffering racist slights, insults, especially in the South, which is right-wing with its massive Pied Noirs population, but now it has exploded into an all-encompassing miasma, and not just in the South. You hear it everywhere. Walking around in the village, you see nothing but Rassemblement Nationale signs, nothing else.

The Rassemblement Nationale (RN), is the rebranding of the Front Nationale (FN). The FN was founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The RN/FN draws on a long history of fascist or proto-fascist politics in France, which goes as far back as the 1890s in the anti-Dreyfusard politics of parties like L'Action Française, who drew upon the nationalist and royalist doctrines of Charles Maurras. I recommend Zeev Sternhell’s book Neither Left Nor Right which traces this long history of proto-fascism in France, a history older even than Italian fascism, therefore awarding France the questionable title of fascist innovator. Jean Marie was a fascist, and this is not a term of abuse but a description, though of course some pedant will say he was actually a poujadist or whatever. He is a Vichyist and defends Vichy. He was a paratrooper in Vietnam and in Algeria, a guard of troops notorious for massacres, torture, reprisals, the burning of villages, and who knows what else. For many years, the FN was considered outside the pale of polite society, getting single-digit percentages of the presidential vote. In 2002, La Pengot relatively close to the presidency and it was a shock. Quickly, political society across the spectrum closed ranks to deny him power. theFN/RN was and is a reactionary, anti-migrant, islamaphobic, and pseduo-republican party which is fiercely committed to the rule of capital.

In 2011, Marine Le Pen, his daughter, took the reins of the party. She implemented a strategy of dédiabolisation, of trying to sanitize the image of her party, to make it seem “normal” and “unfringe”. This meant , to some degree, less extreme language, and fully trading anti-semitism for Islamophobia. At the end of the day it was the same reactionary, scapegoating politics in new guise. The discourse was simple: France was once a great nation. France is suffering a civilizational crisis. The Muslims are the problem. Get rid of the Muslims. Then, apparently, all problems of poverty, crime, alienation will be solved. With the various crises of the 2008-2010s, this singular messaging, already a powerful current, became the center of gravity of all French politics, a veritable black hole defining the event horizon of all discourse. The “centrists” under Macron, unable to effectively rebuild a basis for capital accumulation by “freeing” capital from the constraints of the state, have tried to undercut the far-right by accepting the terms of battle. The whole country is now obsessed with identity.

There is one party with a mass basis who resists all of this. This is La France insoumise (LFI), led by the inimitable Jean Luc Mélenchon (JLM). JLM was born in Morocco before migrating to the mainland with his parents young. He began as a French Trotskyist, more specifically a Lambertist. In 1976, he joined the Parti Socialiste (PS). He became a left-wing Mitterrandist and senator during the presidency of Mitterrand. Ultimately, the presidency of Mitterrand was a major defeat for the left when Mitterrand betrayed his original intentions, and junior partners, and implemented an austerity programme. Eurocommunism was condemned to the dustbin of history, the Parti communiste français (PCF) condemned for its junior role in the government, and with the collapse of the USSR slowly lost its’ hegemonic position in most developed sections of the proletariat. After serving as minister delegate of vocational education under Lionel Jospin, Mélenchon left the Socialist Party, and in the wilderness tried to coordinate with other left parties to create a sort of Refondazione-style regroupment. That did not work out. He then founded LFI in 2016 by himself. Since then, LFI has become the loadstar of the French left.

JLM’s politics are, by the standards of imperial core politicians, excellent. He is by political standards, the standards of a politician, an intellectual giant. In his book, Now, the People!: Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, he begins with a social analysis of the state of society and capital, of state and ecology, which he himself calls a “historical materialist” analysis. In his various writings and speeches, his thought draws on sources as varied as Marxism and chaos theory. He speaks of the “socialization of time”, of ecological transformation and technical minutiae of geothermal versus nuclear power, he discourses on the religious wars in Europe to contextualize the much-abused French doctrine of laïcité, and he talks of Capital as process, not a thing. Imagine a US politician saying anything so remotely interesting. His intellectual powers make Bernie Sanders, who I always detested but tolerated for lack of alternative, look like the fly he is. He is a genius political orator, the best debater in the French nation, mixing high French with the humorous quips of your curmudgeon uncle, but he is not cynical, but bright and optimistic and full of fight. Unlike our tepid, pathetic official left, he has shown courage on the great moral issues of our generation, to no detriment to his image or popularity, and he has been clear from day one about the genocide in Gaza and refuses to condemn the resistance to that genocide.

Yet, ultimately, JLM rejects key propositions of, what I take to be, an orthodox Marxism. I do not criticize him solely for rejecting orthodox Marxism because I like it, but because I think those propositions are more or less true. He is on the most abstract plane, a left-populist in the style of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, whom he praises, with historical antecedents in the French reformist, humanist socialism of Jean Jaurès. The goal is to mobilize an amorphous “people”, constructed through “struggle” or "discourse", to confront the “elite” , in order, for Melanchon, to convene a constituent assembly to reconstitute a new constitution and republic built on more participatory and egalitarian principles. The mode of achieving this citizen revolution will more or less be through elections: the people will elect JLM or a leader to convene this process, which will be based on popular deliberation and participatory democracy. The working class is part of this “people”, but it is not centered and its interests are not privileged but taken as one set next to so many others. This is all rather vague, and I have yet to read more that convinces me it is a very realistic apprehension of how political revolutions have or will occur.

JLM has an intensely ecological bent to his politics, which is refreshing. And finally, whatever you may hear in the US left, he is the most openly anti-racist popular politician in France, though his French republican patriotism can be clodding and annoying given the reality of nationalisms in the 20th century that sent the French working-class to the meat grinder in World War I in the name of La Republique. He embraces the “créolisation”, a term coined by French and Martinique intellectual Édouard Glissant, of French society, which recognizes the trans-historical and present facts of immigration, mixing, and the exchange of cultures, and celebrates it. We should learn as much in the US, which if it celebrates immigration, does so by requiring migrants to live up to some abstract yardstick of USianism.

The LFI has grown year after year since 2016. Its success culminated in 2024, with the winning of the parliamentary elections and the formation of the New Popular Front. In the French system, because the presidency is monarchical in character, the president decides to form a new government. Macron refused to recognize the new left coalition as government, putting in place a number of mediocre conformists of the French political class and Grandes Écoles. Since then, the Socialist Party, a gaggle of pseudo-technocratic and petty-bourgeois cretins, has more or less caused problems and fractured the ersatz “Front”. Mutual recriminations are thrown around, but given the degenerated character of the PS, it is a valid hypothesis that the weasel, bureaucratic “socialists” share outsized blame for implosion given their hatred of LFI playing a leading role.

Now it is 2027. Macron’s presidency has ended in the discrediting of the French center. In 2018, the FN , Madmen style, rebranded itself the Rassemblement Nationale. Marine Le Pen has been, by acts of legal warfare, forbidden from running in politics (though she likely did engage in corruption). In her place, since 2021 Jordan Bardella, a young politician from the Parisian suburbs, whose grandfather, by the way, was Algerian, takes the reins. Now the French presidential elections work like this. In the first round, a number of parties run. The two best go on to a second round. The RN has, in many polls, receives over 30-40% of the vote in the first round. In distant second, LFI has around 10-15%. Things are not looking good. The far-right is closing in on power. Its base is most likely white, petty-bourgeois, and rural. Now Mélenchon tends to increase his share of the vote during an electoral period owing to his political and oratory powers, he has an uncanny ability to make up for lost ground. But to keep the right-wing out will require the center-right, center, and “fauxcialsts” to support or vote for LFI. But many of the center and right will either vote RN or abstain. The ruling-classes are more terrified of Melanchon, with his talk of 100% taxes on salaries over 360,000 and on inheritances over 12 million, than of Bardella with his pretend petty-bourgeoid economics but, in reality, total surrender to the dictates of capital. After all, the RN, in typical fascist style, has begun to court capital and petty-bourgeois elements by promising deregulation and tax-cuts and all kinds of goodies. Whatever populism fascist or fascistic politics initially promises, it spits on the much vaunted “people”, because “national greatness” (really the greatness of capital) demands a sacrifice of the masses at the altar of accumulation. And while Mélenchon has tried to develop a New Democracy style discourse about a national versus comprador bourgeoisie, in order to court elements of the bourgeoisie to not throw a capital strike should he win, no one is buying it.

Should Bardella win we can expect a Reagan à la France style economic programme, but also expect the ramping up of deportations, the furthering of fortress Europe which will kill untold thousands, attacks on naturalization, attacks on dual citizenship (except for Israel of course), the crackdown on free speech that comes hand-in-hand with further support of Zionism, support for Zionist genocide in provision of arms, diplomatic cover, and the building up of the police and surveillance state. Law of the jungle in the 21st century. Should LFI win, however unlikely, it will win on a weak basis of having glued together antithetical elements, a glob torn this and that way by the centrifuge of myriad class interests. It will not have a mandate to implement its’ programme and will be blamed for the paralysis and chaos. Things are not good.

LFI for all its strength, especially compared to the dogshit we have in the US, needs to reconstitute after this cycle. Mélenchon will not last forever; he is an old man. The intense dependence of the LFI on the charismatic figure is a structural weakness. Its’ “tyranny of structurelessness” must end. The putative horizontalism is a lie. It condones ineffectual elements to day-to-day headless activities while the executive and cerebral functions are monopolized by a protected layer, operating in a party-affiliated think-tank, handing out and down the overall strategy. It must embrace a democratic centralized structure that will mobilize and educate and engage the proletarian element while also endowing it with effective and accountable leadership. Finally, enough of this populism bullshit. Lie all you want, class-struggle is real. No “discourse” (or popular figure) can negate it. In our world, it is either class or race struggle. We Marxists choose the class struggle, and no group can be motivated to the task of constructing socialism like the working class, diverse, international, and powerful as it is.

Jibreel Kateb