Make the margins the center

In Switzerland, France, and indeed all over Western Europe and the United States, the Left no longer resembles itself. The news never ceases to bear this out. This observation by Geneva MP and philosopher Jean Romain is the diagnosis of a major shift, itself based on electoral considerations.

In the 60s and 70s, until François Mitterrand, the socialist doxa dominated: universities, schools, newspapers, publishing houses, the media, intellectuals. People voted right, but thought with left-wing mental categories. After May 68, these intellectuals expected the working people, the «damned of the earth», to endorse the ideal of revolution and become the spokesmen of the triumphant new world.

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The wait lasted some twenty years; nothing happened, because the modest social classes wanted to rise to the level of the middle classes, to climb the social ladder, and instead of fighting it, they adopted the capitalist system. They even began to vote for the hard right! The Grand Soir was slipping away. Especially as the years following Mitterrand's election (1981) were those of the burial of socialist government hopes.

The left's denial of itself

We had to find other, more docile porters to carry the torch of the intellectually all-powerful Left. Various margins, various currents (feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, LGBT, pro-Muslim, immigrationist, communitarian, etc.) capable of draping themselves in the ideal of anti-capitalist revolution, of uniting them under the same banner to make them numerous, and of federating behind them the left disappointed by a proletariat disinclined to dictatorship. It was federated, but in this subordination it lost entirely its doctrinal specificity. Basically, it fragmented, as did the substitute minorities it served.

She lost almost all her convictions, even if it meant becoming essentialist, anti-secular, communitarian, Islamogauchist and today woke. And often defend the indefensible, such as censorship: interrupted university lectures, alleged cultural appropriation, places off-limits to whites, etc. The socialist left drowned all its ideals in the sickening soup of these minorities. It added to this what had come from the United States, namely a neo-progressivism which is the cancel culture, thus abandoning any reference to universalism.

And now...

But these minorities were reinvigorated, and historic socialism paled in proportion. So much so, in fact, that in order to avoid staggering, we had to re-designate the enemy - a ghostly far-right with vague contours - and bang the big drum of anti-fascism. The least unequal societies in history were thus branded «patriarchal», racist and oppressive. Basically, we need to make the margins the center: replace the so-called oppressor with the so-called oppressed.

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