Fallen Communist Party

In France, up to the 1960s, handing out radical leaflets at factory gates could result in being beaten up by Stalinist heavies of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT, the union controlled by the Parti Communiste Français). A young member of the Communist Party’s (CP) student organisation once proudly showed me the truncheon he’d recently used against Trotskyists in his working class suburb. The CP professed to be the party of the working class, or often passed as such, and the top CGT man always served in the party’s political bureau. In the 70s, more than 7 million French people lived in a town with a CP mayor.

Those days are gone. With a membership smaller than that of the more avowedly conciliatory Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, the CGT is no longer the largest confederation, and no CGT leader has their seat reserved in the CP’s bureau national (polit-buro sounded too Orwellian). Actually, the present CGT general secretary, Sophie Binet, never belonged to the CP, and was a long-time member of the socialist party. In general elections, the CP has fallen from about ¼ of the votes (nearly 30% in 1946) down to less than 3% in 2024. Its leaflets and posters eschew class talk and prefer talking of les gens (people). In the 21^st century, a harmless CP appears reasonably moderate, no longer perceived as a threat to national identity, and no-one would think of denouncing it, as a Minister of the Interior did fifty years ago, as “a totalitarian party with fascist leanings.” (In fact, in 1927, another Minister of the Interior exclaimed “Communism, there is the enemy!” Today’s slogan would rather be: Russia is the enemy!)

Hardly Worthy of a Resurrected Red Scare

Contrary to a now respectable Parti Communiste Français, La France Insoumise (LFI) is now regularly typecast in the public eye (meaning the media, social media included) as the villain of the French political scene. In particular, since any serious critique of Zionism is currently equated with anti-Semitism, a widely accepted view is that LFI (not unlike Corbyn in Britain) is inherently anti-Semitic. LFI’s provocative symbolic gestures in parliament (waving Palestinian flags and displaying pictures of children killed in Gaza) are said to prove a hatred of Israel and an acceptance of Hamas terrorism (more on Israel later in this text). Politics feeds off bogey men.

Before its birth in 2016, LFI originated from the Parti de Gauche, founded in 2008 as a split from the Parti Socialiste. A major reason for the left wing of the party to go its separate way was the result of the 2005 referendum. Voters had been asked to decide whether the French government should ratify the proposed constitution of the European Union. The “No” won with 55% of voters rejecting the treaty out of a turnout of 69%. (Even the French Greens were divided on that issue: an internal party vote opted for “Yes” only by 53%). The decision was later overridden by the French parliament. (That same year, a similar process took place in the Netherlands: although 61% did not comply, the European constitution was accepted by the Dutch senate.) Most media and political comments explained away the “No” vote as an expression of ignorant lower-class dissatisfaction and xenophobia, as opposed to the informed “Yes” to Europe from the educated, open-minded middle class. As for the socialist left, it interpreted the event as the opportunity for a political space on the left of the left, with possible rich electoral dividends. In response to the general drift to the right of socialist parties, exemplified by the French 1983 turn to austerity and Blair’s New Labour, a sizeable socialist minority believed it was possible to reverse the course that led to privatisations, labor market flexibility, trade liberalization, banking deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, increased social inequality, etc. To put it shortly, LFI, headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, hopes to cure the left parties’ identity crisis by putting forward a credible alternative to social-liberalism.

Now, what’s in a name? And in this day and age, what’s in a logo?

However confused and confusing words can be, when a group or party names itself communist, socialist, labor, anarchist—or conservative, liberal, national—the party at least gives some idea of what it stands for. Emblems also have direct political meaning; the hammer and sickle is a symbol of the working masses which the far left claims to represent.

Insoumis means unbowed, refractory, unsubdued. In French, it also refers to a soldier who deserts their unit or does not show up for mandatory conscription. It conveys no specific political message, let alone program. Besides, LFI’s logo is the Greek letter, φ phi, which in French sounds just like “FI”. “We chose the symbol phi because it begins the word philosophy [and also] out of affection for those who taught us democracy” Mélenchon declared. The letter, however, is redrawn in a special way, so the party leader added: “Some will see a little man making a fist, others the symbolized signal of a feminized gender, others will see what they really want.”

What is it that LFI members and voters want? LFI’s name and symbol emphasize a rebellion inspired by a philosophical love of wisdom, not subversion or direct action; when LFI takes to the street, it is always as a backing to parliamentary lawmaking. And let’s not take insoumission literally: LFI never suggested French soldiers should go AWOL, and when in 2024 dozens of Ukrainian soldiers deserted from the elite Anne of Kiev brigade during their training in France, it was certainly not with LFI’s approval or assistance.

LFI speaks to and for “the people”, defined as those who work and contribute to real wealth, which raises the question of what and who is included and excluded. Jet-setters, stock brokers and high frequency traders of course do not belong. That leaves a people made of nearly 99% of the population. LFI’s inclusiveness, however, concerns the French people, i.e. those within a national framework. Granted, contrary to far right politics, LFI’s nation is multi-ethnic and secular, it encompasses Europeans as well as non-Whites, and does not discriminate against immigrants and undocumented people. But it still thinks in terms of a nation, albeit an open-minded and welcoming one. LFI’s internationalism is limited to what the word says: an association of nations, i.e. national states engaged in an extensive political and economic cooperation. LFI accepts a world where populations are politically structured in national states, which will coexist in peace if they are run by governments truly representative of their people. This replicates the Second International’s politics: fitting into a national system, hoping for the best from nations, and making do with the worst when war breaks out in 1914.

From Class and Disaster in Valencia in Issue One of Heatwave:

The people can be the totality of citizens subject to the rule of a particular government. Or, the people can be defined more narrowly by language, food, traditions, religion, race. Usually both definitions sit on top of each other. In either case, state institutions are the most important element that create the people: either the abstract fact of being subject to a specific government, or more concrete institutions like the school system, immigration enforcement, language laws, subsidies for certain kinds of cultural events. Being a people is, to a large extent, a question of having a state, and states justify their rule by being the state of a particular people.

No wonder LFI’s leaders refer so much to 18^th century Enlightenment rationalism, secularism and constitutional law, and a lot more to French Revolution Jacobins than to early communist Babeuf. One of LFI’s main efforts is to build up a broad consensus by proposing the formation of a new Republic, a 6^th one after the 5^th established by de Gaulle in 1962. In other words, social change backed by constitutional change, thanks to a referendum—a proper one, this time, unlike the 2005 flop.

No harm in adding a touch of vivid red to faded socialist pink.

Yet despite such innocuous politics, red-baiting is back. Though the French ruling elite has nothing to fear from LFI, it has become standard practice for political pundits to portray them as “dangerously extremist,” “a real threat to French Jews,” “pro-terrorism,” “a disaster for the left,” “totalitarian,” etc.

The truth is more down-to-earth.

At the moment in France, the right is too weak, the left too divided, and the far right unacceptable for the time being. The right-of-center is running the show, yet leaning further to the right, with Prime Minister Bayrou saying that immigration is leading to a “feeling of submersion.”1 The absence of a definite majority is no major problem, because a “central bloc” minority government can get support from the far right on law-and-order issues (more police power), and from the right and moderate socialists on anti-social policy (fewer social budgets and unemployment benefits).

Well-minded people search for a “real” left but what are the real and unreal lefts? Before 1914, only a number of anarchists and a few Marxists (notably Anton Pannekoek) had understood that revolution was an “add-on” to the daily reformist activity of nearly all socialist parties. A striking example was the committed Marxist Jules Guesde, die-hard challenger of Jean Jaurès’ reformist approach, leader of the “intransigents,” and a fierce opponent of socialist participation in bourgeois governments. In 1914, national defense against the German invasion turned into Guesde’s absolute priority, and he became a member of government until the end of 1916.

“Moderate socialists” has one word too many.

Popular Front: Reality & Myth

LFI’s remedy is part of the disease. In June 2024, it promoted a Nouveau Front Populaire that associates LFI, the CP, the socialists and the Greens, plus a few small parties. One wonders if LFI really thought its partnership with those who have implemented anti-labor policies for decades could alter the course of events. In fact, no partner seriously believed in this (already breaking up in 2025) electoral alliance, which was only temporarily useful to the participants while they kept jockeying for position. In contemporary parlance, politics is a zero-sum game—some win because others lose.

In that respect, the reference to the 1936 Front Populaire is an imaginative publicity gimmick, together with a historical fallacy. The French Popular Front had its reality, but now also serves as a myth. Its bedrock was three components: the Radical-Socialist Republican Party (the center-left backbone of most governments throughout the 3^rd Republic), the socialist party (which for the first time had a majority in parliament), and the CP (which was part of the Popular Front but chose not to have ministers). What really mattered were the May-June 1936 widespread sit-down strikes which were mostly initiated by the rank-and-file and pushed the newly elected government to grant deep social reforms. But the strike wave ebbed off, the socialist party only stayed in command for a year, and by mid-1937 the Front Populaire was over in all but name. The Radical-Socialists came back into office, abolished the 40-hour week, and introduced an anti-foreigner policy. In 1938 an attempted general strike called by the unions was met with severe repression and ended in complete defeat. After France was invaded by Germany in 1940, a huge majority of the radicals and the socialists granted full power to marshal Pétain, who introduced a reactionary and fiercely anti-Jewish puppet regime.

Nearly a century later, the Front Populaire still keeps a positive image but as in 1936, even from a purely pragmatic reformist point of view, any new Popular Front is bound to be hampered by its structural coalition with middle-of-the road socialists. LFI now associates with the party it chose to separate itself from, as if the left was an extensive family where honorable members have to put up with insufferable cousins on special occasions.

The new Popular Front is wide enough to accommodate components as utterly opposed to each other as Trotskyists from the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste- L’Anticapitaliste (NPA-A), and left liberals like Raphaël Glucksmann.

Raphaël Glucksmann’s life reads like a 21^st century Balzac novel narrating the ascent of a skilful climber perfectly adapted to globalised contemporary politics. In 2007, he supported right-wing candidate Sarkozy in the presidential elections, and between 2005 and 2012, he was an adviser to Saakashvili, the president of Georgia. His then wife, also special adviser to Saakashvili, later became First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine from 2014 to 2016. Back in France, in 2018, Glucksmann founded the center-left political party Place Publique, and in 2024 his list in the European Parliament won over 13% of the votes (nearly as many as president Macron’s defenders). An oddity and a sign of the times.

How can a Trotskyist NPA-A fraternize with the likes of Raphaël Glucksmann? Mao explained that “contradictions among the people are not antagonistic”—only those “between the people and its enemies” are.2

Leaving aside the meanderings of internal politics, let’s take a look at the far left on foreign affairs issues.

From the River to the Sea

Without delving into the details of the Israeli/Palestinian question, let’s remember that Zionism has the probably unique peculiarity of being born (and remaining) both a national movement and a colonial one, with the result of two peoples having to live on one single land. Though there might be a future way out of this historical contradiction, it is not in the offing.

Israel’s founding fathers did not deny Palestinian Arabs’ right to exist, but never on an equal footing with the Jews. The title of Tom Segev’s informative biography of Ben Gurion, A State at Any Cost, adequately sums up the predicament. Within Israeli territory, Arab citizens (about 20% of the present population) can live, work, benefit from social and political rights, elect their own MPs, etc., providing they accept that Israel is first and foremost the Jewish homeland, i.e. an ethnic democracy. Outside Israeli borders, Arabs have to admit that at best they come second. If they don’t, it is legitimate to force them into submission, or eventually to expel them. A Jew from London or Milan has more right to a home in Israel than a non-Jew whose family has been living there for three centuries. As an Israeli once said, “I don’t want to live any more in a country where I belong to the minority group.” Such is the foundation of Zionist logic, and it can logically be applied—differently, of course—to areas which were not part of Israeli territory in 1948: the West Bank, the Golan Heights, possibly south Lebanon, and Gaza.

It is historically relevant that the phrase “From the [Jordan] River to the sea” can be used both as a Palestinian rallying cry and as an Israeli slogan.

So far, no peaceful and/or violent Palestinian movement has been able to secure a decent place for the Arabs, and whatever number of Arabs it displaces or kills, the Israeli State will not get rid of millions of landless, homeless people. Moreover, in the West Bank, the so-called Palestinian National Authority has never had real authority on its statelet—a series of isolated Bantustans enveloped by Israeli territory and under Israeli military rule. So even before 2023, both the bi-national solution, and the two-state solution (put forward by an array of political forces, right, left and far left, LFI included, and officially by some countries, Britain and France for example) were devoid of reality. In the West Bank, since the time of the Oslo Accords (1993), the number of Jewish settlers has kept going up, and more and more land is being taken over by the Israelis. People have made fun of Trump’s absurdity of a new Riviera in Gaza but the idea of a Palestinian State is just as much a fantasy, bizarrely harboured in unexpected quarters: “The Gaza war will be followed by more violence until Israelis and Palestinians create a state called Isratine where they can live together in peace, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said in remarks published on Thursday.”3 The following year, the Libyan dictator was overthrown and killed.

There simply is no room for either Isratine or for an independent separate Palestinian State.

Demonization

By a sadly ironic twist of history, it is now the far left, above all LFI, which is charged with anti-Semitism, even more so after the October 2023 Hamas-led attack.

For years there has been an anti-Jewish undercurrent in the far-right National Front, and Jean-Marie Le Pen (its leader until he was expelled from his own party in 2015) was repeatedly attacked and convicted for his professed anti-Semitism and genocide denial. However, in March 2024, Jordan Bardella, second-in-command of the Rassemblement National (the National Front renamed itself in 2018) visited Israel, shook hands with the prime minister, met the president of the Knesset and was granted a private tour of the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Taking part in a conference on anti-Semitism among a variety of international speakers, he made no reference to his party’s past, but denounced “the deadly honeymoon between Islamism and the extreme left” (read: LFI). A few days before, French left-wing MPs and officials had their visas to Israel cancelled on the grounds that they could act against the state. For the vast majority of the French political class and for all mainstream media, it is now an undisputed fact that LFI is anti-Semitic. As a matter of fact, this is consistent with French law which in 2019 linked anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The far right used to be openly anti-Arab and covertly anti-Jewish; it now is only anti-Arab, while the far left is branded as dangerous pro-terrorism extremists.

Ukraine and the Art of Contradiction

As explained above, the Nouveau Front Populaire is not even a marriage of convenience, but rather a civil partnership. Anyhow, as long as it lasts, the NPF has its own foreign policy. In June 2024, it asserted its desire to “defend Ukraine and peace on the European continent,” and approved “the delivery of necessary weapons.”

Together with the rest of NATO, France is already waging war against Russia by proxy—half warmongering is warmongering all the same. LFI affirms the existence of a consensus within the New Popular Front on the necessity of sending arms to the Ukrainian government, while at the same time LFI rejects further French involvement that would entail a risk of escalation. This is forgetting that Ukraine, in its inevitable effort to break the stalemate, keeps asking for more and better weapons that imply some degree of escalation, therefore more French (and European and American) commitment. If, as Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” this is true of all political parties, left, right, soft and hard left.

As for refusing to have “boots on the ground,” i.e. European soldiers in Ukraine, it goes against Macron who does not rule out the possibility of sending forces onto the battlefield, but it does not mean much, since those European Union or US soldiers that might be sent to Ukraine would not be labelled “fighters” but United Nation-style “peace-keepers.” In 1999, NATO planned to send “heavy peace keepers” to Kosovo. After all, NATO already has its Partnership for Peace, a military cooperation program between members and non-member states, including post-Soviet countries, with special interest in central and Eastern Europe. Britain’s war office has been called the Ministry of Defence since 1964. Maybe Ukraine will be blessed with a “reassurance force.” Politics is the art of squaring the circle; it is also the art of words.

When socialist party eminence Olivier Faure said pacifists were in the West, but missiles belong to the East, i.e. Russia, he was echoing President Mitterrand in 1983, at the time of the American Pershing vs. Russian SS-20 crisis, who said “pacifism is in the West and the Euro-missiles are in the East.” The socialist party stood and will always stand for NATO.4

Despite its insistence on “non-alignment,” LFI is the political ally of a party decidedly aligned with one camp against another.

The Trotskyist Way

One would expect a Trotskyist group like the NPA-A to come forward with a very demanding policy. It does. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the NPA-A recalled that in the 1960s and 70s true revolutionaries called for the USSR to provide Vietnam with arms to defend itself against the US without sending Russian troops on the ground. Likewise the NPA-A has now called for the US to provide Ukraine with arms without sending American soldiers on the ground.

The NPA-A lays claim to solidarity with “the people,” not with Zelensky. The trouble is, “the people” is not a historic player by itself, only acting via the state that rules the population.

Besides, according to the NPA-A, “The war has created new forms of self-organization and politics from below. The mobilization of the people for the war of liberation has strengthened people’s sense of common cause and made them understand that it is thanks to ordinary people, not oligarchs or corporations, that this country exists. The war has radically changed social and political life in Ukraine, and we must prevent these new forms of social organization from being destroyed and, on the contrary, develop them.”5

Who can seriously believe that the Russian invasion has resulted in a new Ukrainian society, where bottom-up forms of organization wage a national liberation war uncontrolled by the government’s regular army? During World War II, anti-German resistance movements in occupied countries, though much larger than Ukrainian grassroots initiatives, were able to harass and weaken the Wehrmacht, not defeat it, until the Allied French, British, American and Russian armies had the final word. Only in Yugoslavia and Albania did the resistance movements win, because they were more than partisans, they were the military arm of a political state structure gradually taking control of the whole country, and nobody will argue that post-1945 Yugoslavia and Albania were ruled bottom-up.

If “the war has radically changed social and political life in Ukraine,” it is unlikely to be the sort of change favored by the NPA-A. Though not as repressive as Putin, Zelensky consistently clamps down on protest, censors the media, bans dissenting political parties and infringes on labor rights (in the name of national interest, needless to say), the exact policy that the NPA-A would denounce as oppressive and dictatorial in any other country. Nothing unusual here—it is standard practice in wartime to curtail civil liberties.

One last quote, from the French Committee of the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine: “We demand that France, instead of selling arms to dictatorships, seriously help the Ukrainian resistance, without increasing its own military spending.” Simply put, French-made tanks and guns meant to be shipped to Riyadh should be diverted to Kiev instead, with no additional cost to the tax-payer.

The NPA-A supports this committee.

Though it has at most 2,000 members, and barely any political influence, the NPA-A is representative of a disorientation that prevails among the far left, even among some anarcho-communist or more or less Marxist groups.

To avoid being charged with Trot-bashing, let’s add a quick word on parts of the evolving, splitting and merging Trotskyist galaxy. Founded in 2009, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste gave birth in 2022 to the NPA-A (“A” because of its magazine L’Anticapitaliste). Calling the NPA-A “Trotskyist” is a misnomer as the NPA-A prides itself on its openness. It welcomes Marxists and “libertaires,” although not the rightist neo-liberal libertarian kind, but in the anarchist sense of those committed to liberté. Plus, libertaire sounds a lot more palatable than old-school anarchism. Other NPA splits generated the NPA-Révolutionnaire, and Révolution Permanente, which both stay within a Trotskyist framework (zero risk of council communist, Bordigist, anarcho-communist, situationist deviations), but they regard the Ukrainian war as an inter-imperialist conflict and side neither with Moscow nor with Kiev. For its part, Lutte Ouvrière (Worker Struggle), which has never belonged to the 4^th International, also does not support Ukraine (and NATO) against Russia.

Why?

Back to reformers, another (minor) illustration of their quandary is the fate of Nouvelle Donne party (“New Deal”, an obvious hint at the US in the 30s), launched in 2013. Advocating a thoroughly ecological policy, public regulation of finance, and innovation in the working world (in particular, a 4-day week), the party gathered a number of progressives dissatisfied with the socialist party. After a modest but promising start, Nouvelle Donne withered, and its small remains have gone back to the fold of the moderate left.

LFI is of course a more forceful competitor than Nouvelle Donne ever was. It might receive more votes, maybe (who knows?) get a foothold in a future left-wing government, but no party can renovate social-democracy at a time when there is no political space for it.

Such a statement sounds counter-intuitive when so many facts point to a looming overall crisis.

Globalization has neither brought prosperity, nor harmony between countries. In this early 21^st century, the earth is a multipolar planet where imperialist blocs (the US, China, Russia, Europe as a big market that lacks political unity and military power) face each other, no one knowing who might eventually be allied with whom. In domestic policy, phenomena such as Brexit, the socialists’ ever more determined swing to the right, and the rise of so-called populism are symptoms of imminent upheavals that call for political reshuffling. With the climate catastrophe on top of that, socialist dissidents like Mélenchon were hoping that such unstable times would be propitious for change, opening the door to newcomers on the reformist stage.

Indeed LFI is doing its utmost to become a government party, trying to appear at the same time radical and acceptable. Its leader Mélenchon did rather well in the last two presidential elections (nearly 22% of the votes in 2017 and 22% in 2022), and the number of LFI MPs went up from 17 to 70 (out of a total of 577) between 2017 and 2024. But the party is still restrained by a limited local rooting (it has few mayors, councillors, presidents of regional councils, etc.) and its poor influence in the trade-unions. On the contrary, the much declined CP and the Parti Socialiste still have extensive local bases. It took decades for the old socialist party before 1914, and later for the CP, to build up strongholds wherever they managed to express working class (and sometimes small farming) interests and contributed to a bettering of workers’ lives. They conquered local councils before they got seats in parliament. LFI has not achieved anything comparable, nor is it in a position to do so.

What’s missing? One key factor.

In-depth reform implies a social background of mass strikes and crowds demonstrating in the streets. In contrast, what has been happening since the 1980s is the failure of social movements to do more than try and resist factory closures, casualization, and attacks on welfare. To give just one recent example, in France, a succession of demonstrations against the new pension law (increasing the retirement age from 62 to 64) only succeeded as an exercise in damage limitation. Overall, the bourgeois are winning and the proletarians are fighting back in retreat. Capital is mobile, labor is not—unless it is rootless labor imported by “rich” countries (North America and Western Europe) from the “poor” countries (Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa). This prevents parties like LFI from achieving what social-democracy, French and Italian CPs, and British Labour managed to do in the past, when they were well entrenched in workplaces, rooted in local communities, and where family and neighborhood ties contributed to solidarity and unionization.

Reformers now find themselves in the situation of actors out of role, either in France or abroad. Portrayed by The Economist as an outdated reincarnation of Lenin, Jeremy Corbyn has now been safely sidelined, and a Blairite PM is now in office. Spanish Podemos once offered a far-reaching political platform to be put into effect by a broad alliance that inevitably watered down such a program. In Greece, ex-political disruptor Syriza hoped to replace the PASOK as the new mainstream center-left party, until it plummeted in the polls. Die Linke has proved de-radicalized enough to be accepted in coalitions with the socialists and the Greens in several Länder. Bernie Sanders embodied a leftward shift in the Democratic Party, before he realized he could not be nominated for the presidential election and chose to fully support Hillary Clinton. It bears repeating that lesser evilism only succeeds (if it does) by giving up on even mild change and siding with moderate politics that not only achieve nothing, but in fact increase the public appeal of “evil” politics.

Sanders’ program had been compared to Roosevelt’s, but therein lies the problem; the New Deal was backed by wildcat strikes and the CIO’s novel unionization drive of unskilled laborers.

Like its foreign equivalents, LFI must be content with expressing the eternal bad conscience of the left.

In the highly unlikely event of a Nouveau Front Populaire government, its far left wing might be able to impose piecemeal measures, but won’t be strong enough to reverse anti-labor politics.

So what?

However bleak the picture, there is no need to prophesize doom. In any case, nearly two hundred years after Marx and Engels’ Manifesto, communist theory has still not been validated by history—there has been ample time to give up on revolution. Indeed quite a few have.

Proletarians have experienced more counter-revolutions than revolutionary attempts and, possibly worse, they have led themselves into many a political deadlock. Two centuries of capitalism have shown us that utter misery does not automatically pave the way to revolution. Neither does the failure of reform.

There are now more large-scale and lengthy strikes than the bourgeois press cares to report (“bourgeois” sounds old-fashioned, but we do not live in a classless age, especially when 90% of French mainstream daily papers are owned or controlled by millionaires), and not all labor conflicts end in defeat. After a nearly two-year strike in 2019-21, Paris hotel cleaners (mostly women) won a substantial pay rise and better workplace conditions. In the rest of Europe and elsewhere, notably in Asia, struggles go on, and the writers as well as the readers of this text obviously take part when we can—otherwise our communist perspective would only be words, words, words. But we also know that revolution is more than a continuation of the ongoing tug-of-war that capital/labor confrontations happen to be most of the time.

The future will not play to any preordained scenario.

No doubt the “realist” school of politics will dismiss our point of view as uselessly negative: “So what do you propose other than a critique of everyone and everything?!”

In the endless “revolution vs. reform” debate, we can only say that pragmatic reform has failed to prevent war (world wars included), that it has proved incapable since the 1980s of countering anti-welfare policies, that it now cannot put an end to the far-right wave currently sweeping a lot of the Western world, not to mention its helplessness in front of the accelerating catastrophic climate crisis. So, who is a dreamer? Who is a realist?

Expect the worst, prepare for the possible best.

G.D., June 2025

Gilles Dauvé has worked as a translator and a schoolteacher. He is the author of essays and books on Russian, German, and Spanish revolutions, and on democracy, war, morals, crisis, sex, and class. Read more here

Notes

“French PM Bayrou Sparks Outrage with Immigration ‘submersion’ Remark.” Le Monde with AFP. January 28, 2025.

Mao, Zedong. On the correct handling of contradictions among the people. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1957.

“Gaddafi refloats one-state idea after Gaza war.” Reuters. January 22, 2009.

“Débat sur L’Ukraine à L’assemblée.” franceinfo, Radio France. March 12, 2024

Sotsialnyi Rukh, “Ukraine : La guerre a créé de nouvelles formes d’auto-organisation et de politique par en bas.”, l’Anticapitaliste n°633, October 18, 2022.

• 1“French PM Bayrou Sparks Outrage with Immigration ‘submersion’ Remark.” Le Monde with AFP. January 28, 2025.
• 2Mao, Zedong. On the correct handling of contradictions among the people. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1957.
• 3“Gaddafi refloats one-state idea after Gaza war.” Reuters. January 22, 2009.
• 4“Débat sur L’Ukraine à L’assemblée.” franceinfo, Radio France. March 12, 2024
• 5Sotsialnyi Rukh, “Ukraine : La guerre a créé de nouvelles formes d’auto-organisation et de politique par en bas.”, l’Anticapitaliste n°633, October 18, 2022.