In a short sentence pronounced on September 11 at the Fête de l’Humanité, “The left must defend work and not be the left of allowances and social minima“, Fabien Roussel sparked controversy. The reactions were immediate from his Nupes allies: “That’s what the right says. That’s what Emmanuel Macron says” (Eric Coquerel). “I have the impression that this is an almost reactionary speech” (Marine Tondelier). “To oppose each other is not the left” (Clementine Autain). “The boss of the French Communist Party seems to espouse the logic that has always been that of the right to make people who don’t work feel guilty” (David Corband).
Fabien Roussel would therefore take up the words of his opponents. Which did not fail to surprise him, as he told us on Wednesday on franceinfo: “Unemployment kills, it ruins lives. I therefore say that the ambition that we must have for the country is to guarantee everyone to find their place in society, to give meaning to work and to guarantee everyone a job , training, salary. After all, Fabien Roussel would have only defended work and workers.
Are the criticisms directed against Fabien Roussel unfounded?
No, it’s the opposite. They seem perfectly understandable to me. In rhetorical terms, what Fabien Roussel does is what is called an antithesis. He puts two terms in opposition: work and allowances. Now, by definition, what we oppose is what is the object of an alternative. There are only two terms between which one can choose. Therefore, if there is reason to oppose work and allowances, it is by definition that some would choose to receive allowances rather than return to work. But that, Fabien Roussel does not even need to say it. The implicit is clear enough for everyone to hear.
In case that wasn’t totally diaphanous, he drove the point home again: “There are those who defend the right to be lazy. There are those who defend the idea of putting the RSA at €1,000. That’s also what killed the left, which maintained this income system of lifetime substitution for some families.”
“The right to laziness”: an eloquent vocabulary! Laziness is the taste for idleness, the avoidance of effort, in short laziness. Fabien Roussel, here, clearly implies that some French people would prefer unemployment to employment. He had even been even more explicit during the Fête de l’Humanité when he had declared: “The French talk to us about assistantship, telling us that they work, unlike those who receive the social minima.” Assistantship is the word traditionally used to castigate the unemployed who refuse to take a job. Certainly, Fabien Roussel does not take it on his own, but he chooses to bring it back. He cannot ignore what political reading he is summoning.
Basically, is he wrong?
From my point of view, yes. All Pôle Emploi studies show that the vast majority of the unemployed are actively looking for work. But it’s a tricky question. We may have the opportunity to come back to it in detail if the government decides to present a new reform of unemployment insurance, as it seems in the pipes. And above all, it is not the main thing. Because all of this is what Fabien Roussel hinted at last weekend. However, when he returned to the subject in the middle of the week, the tone had already changed slightly. On Wednesday, on the set of C à vous, on France 5, the secretary general of the PCF declared: “Bosses need to have a pool of unemployed people on hand to put pressure on employment in their company. ‘Aren’t you happy? You’re leaving. And then we’ll take someone else in your place who is ready to work’. It was Karl Marx who said that.”
Here, Fabien Roussel is effectively referring to a Marxist concept: the concept of “the reserve army of capitalism”. The idea behind this term is that the higher unemployment is, the more the balance of power between employees and employers becomes overwhelming for employees. The solution proposed by Fabien Roussel would be purely and simply to eradicate unemployment. He does not tell us how he intends to go about it, but why not. What is interesting is that, indeed, as he says, there is a competing proposal, one that is notably supported by the economists Bernard Friot and Frédéric Lordon. For them, the only way to escape this totally unbalanced balance of power against the workers (they even speak of “survival blackmail”) would be precisely to set up a lifetime wage paid by the state. And amusingly, they lay out this proposal in a book called In work, conversation about communism.
On the left today there are two competing visions of work and even two competing visions of communism. If Fabien Roussel had brought this to the fore last weekend, we could undoubtedly have witnessed an interesting controversy. Instead, he preferred to oppose the workers and the beneficiaries of social protection. He probably spoke to his electorate, he may have gained personal visibility, but from my point of view, we have unfortunately lost the opportunity for a real intellectual debate.