The legislative elections that are looming see, for the first time in several decades, an agreement concluded between several left-wing parties with, moreover, the radical left as the guiding force. Defensive Deal or, as Hammered Speech refers to it, “new popular front”his exegesis has not finished being made.
Break free from the conditioning of capitalism
Where the radical left has difficulty is in the definition of a true collective design including that of individual emancipation as the supreme goal. It therefore lacks a crucial element that can compromise its long-term action. This element is as much the renewal of an intellectual progress that has long been lacking on “the left” as it is a real spiritual revolution, a revolution that emancipates everyone from the grip of consumerism and productivism and gives everyone back the keys to his own fate. Emancipating oneself from a form of conditioning specific to the most predatory capitalism is not easy, but it is indeed one of the objectives of our time.
Something is therefore missing from the Nupes which, in this sense, is more of the Cartel des gauches than of the Popular Front, it is the spiritual dimension. Even when the so-called “progressive” alliance talks about culture, it reduces it to the astronomical addition of promised additional credits, an addition that any cultural actor knows is impossible to absorb in a short time.
This electoral agreement still lacks that something that makes an administratively chosen date for an election a moment in human history. Isn’t it because June 1936, June 18, 1940 or August 1944 had a significance other than their mere concrete and material character that History has retained these dates? What crossed our country at the time of the fire of Notre-Dame de Paris transcended its sole heritage dimension and did not escape either President Macron or, moreover, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The latter looks like, alas! more to Perón than to Lucien Herr…
Vision of the world and collective impulses
These are two philosophers in particular who are currently renewing thinking in this area. One, Ivan Segré, both a recognized Talmudist and thinker of the extreme left, is carrying out a vast project enabling a solid reflection on the future of revolutionary combat to be linked to a Jewish tradition to be rediscovered. The author of Misery of anti-Zionism (L’Éclat) professes to disturb the certainties of his camp.
The other, Foucauld Giuliani, integrates faith into a very political thought, does not take a stance either, advocating “self-surrender” and taking into account “the political dimension of faith” (life forfeited, DDB). Their theses can, and above all should, spread among their readers and beyond. The symbolic universe, the vision of the world are the ingredients of collective impulses which exceed by absorbing them the concrete and the material. In this moment of global crisis, to do without these calls for reflection would be a mistake.
“Intellectual progress and the emancipation of humanity”, said Lucien Herr… Still to be found!