The left is at an impasse. But why ? We hear it repeated periodically, both in Quebec and in France and in the United States, that it has abandoned the economic field, abandoned the proletariat to talk only about questions of identity, diversity, racial discrimination, heterosexists, transphobes, etc. However, far from being based on facts, this discourse is rather pure (reactionary) sentiment. And although it presents itself in the guise of an old left which no longer recognizes itself there, it is rather in fact that of a new right which does not say its name. It’s time to take stock.
First, the base. Since the 1960s-1970s, the left has noticeably broadened its thematic spectrum, paying more attention to issues of race, imperialism, gender and ecology. Beginning in the 1990s, however, the establishment ‘left’ around the world converted to neoliberalism, which is also adept at coopting and declawing notions of inclusion and diversity. However, and against this technocratic neocentrism, others have since taken up the torch from the left. Moreover, by examining today the political programs of Québec solidaire (QS) and La France insoumise, we see immediately that the questions which dominate their respective programs remain largely linked to housing, employment, improvement of public services (health, transport, education) and ecology.
At QS: “fight against poverty”, “public transport at half price”, “public dental insurance”, “construction of 50,000 social housing units”, “free contraception”, “new agricultural policy”, etc. Across the Atlantic, what about the program of the NUPES (New People’s Ecological and Social Union)? “Establish the guarantee of employment”, “launch major ecological projects, job creators”, “guarantee a dignified retirement”, “establish food sovereignty through ecological and peasant agriculture”, “socialize the fundamental common goods” .
But what do the facts matter, do they? Moreover, when on the left we tackle economic questions head-on, aren’t we invariably treated as utopian dreamers? During the 2006 election campaign, Françoise David and Amir Khadir were the only candidates to present a costed program (a tradition that continues at QS). However, that didn’t stop anyone from continuing to call them “cloud shovelers”, as if reality had no hold. Recently in France, even if La France insoumise has gone to the front against the pension reform, it is rather the National Rally, which has remained silent on the subject, which is reaping the benefits of anti-Macron sentiment.
But let’s take a closer look. By consulting recent history, we realize that it is first in reality the right which, since the 1980s, has racialized the labor movement and applied itself to fracturing it around divisive cultural issues. If Reagan had his welfare queens (obviously coded as Afro-American), in France, strikers in the automobile industry were discredited by insisting on their Moroccan and Turkish origins, and by insinuating supposed “Islamist” motives into their mobilizations.
Indeed, before the left itself, it was the demographic composition of the world of work that was in fact considerably transformed. During the Glorious Thirties, affordable access to property bourgeois the white proletariat. The immigrant workforce that replaces it at the bottom of the ladder, the normalization of the presence of women in the labor market, then the growing visibility of LGBTQ+ people contribute to complicate the politics of the left. It is becoming imperative to address racial, sexist and homophobic discrimination, major barriers to access to decent housing and decent working conditions. Recently, the COVID-19 crisis has dramatically highlighted this, since one of the categories most brutally hit by the virus, after seniors in CHSLDs, was precisely the cohort of precarious immigrant workers who took care of them.
Emancipation and human dignity are the true soul of the left. This cannot remain true to itself by limiting itself to crude economicism. However, it is essential to understand how the issue of inclusion is also a material, economic and security challenge.
What the so-called “traditional” left pretends to ignore is that beyond the elementary dialectic of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, our colonial capitalist system excels at the proliferation of multiple subordinate subclasses unequal, thereby transferring to them the burden of social control, thus maintaining a constant downward pressure on wages, working conditions and living conditions for all. Faced with this old ruse of the dominators, these battles against discrimination and racist and gender violence, in the same way as ecology and political economy, are so many fronts in the same fight against capital, impoverishment and to the destruction of the common good.