I mentioned earlier that during my childhood my entire family was “communist,” in the sense that the Communist Party was the organizing principle and the uncontested horizon of our relation to politics. How could my family have turned into one in which it seemed possible, even natural sometimes, to vote either for the right or for the extreme right?
What had happened to create a situation in which so many people whose spontaneous reactions had been ones of visceral disgust when they came across figures they took to be enemies of the working class, people who had happily hurled abuse at the television when such figures appeared on the screen (a strange but effective way of taking comfort in one’s beliefs and one’s sense of self), would begin voting for the National Front? I am sure this is what transpired in my father’s case. And what had happened to produce a situation in which a good number of these people, having voted for the National Front in the first round of elections would, in the second round, cast their vote for the candidate of the traditional right wing, someone they would have treated with contempt in an earlier moment? (This finally led to a situation in which even in the first round of the election they voted for a caricatural representative of the bourgeois business classes, who, thanks to their votes, was elected President of the Republic.) What heavy measure of responsibility for this process must be borne by the official left wing? What is the responsibility of those people who, having set aside the political commitments they held in the 1960s and 1970s as the youthful follies of a bygone moment, having risen to positions of power and importance, would do all they could to encourage the spread of right wing thinking, would consign to the dustbin of history anything associated with what had once been one of the essential preoccupations of the left (even, since the middle of the nineteenth century, one of its fundamental characteristics), which is to say the attention paid to oppression, to social conflict, or simply to the effort to create a space within the political sphere for the oppressed? It was not just the “worker’s movement” with its traditions and its struggles that disappeared from political and intellectual discourse and from the public stage. Gone, as well, were the workers themselves, their culture, the conditions under which they lived, their aspirations …1
When I was a young leftist (Trotskyist) in high school, my father was constantly ranting about “students” who were “always trying to tell us what to do” and who “in ten years will be coming back and giving us orders.” His reaction, as intransigent as it was visceral, seemed to me then to be contrary to the “historical interests of the working class” and to be the result of the influence wielded over that class by an outdated Communist Party that had never fully left the Stalinist moment behind and was doing all it could to prevent the arrival of an inevitable revolution. But nowadays how is it possible to think that my father was wrong? Look at what has become of all those who back then had been advocating civil war, intoxicated by the mythology of the proletarian revolution! These days they are just as sure of themselves as ever, just as vehement, but, with only one or two exceptions, their vehemence is focused on opposing the slightest hint of protest arising from the working classes. They have returned to what had originally been promised to them—they have become what they were destined to be—and in doing so they have turned themselves into the enemies of all those people whose vanguard they used to claim to represent, people they accused of being too timid and too corrupted by middle-class aspirations. It is said that one day in May 1968, Marcel Jouhandeau, seeing a column of student protestors passing by, sneered at them: “Go back home! In twenty years, you’ll all be bankers.” We could say he was of more or less the same opinion as my father, even if his reasons for arriving at that opinion were the exact opposite. And, of course, he was right. Maybe not bankers, but “important” people without a doubt, people whose astonishing career paths established them, whether politically, intellectually, or personally, in comfortable positions in the social order, turning them into the defenders of things as they are, the defenders of a world perfectly suited to the people they had become.
In 1981, when François Mitterrand made it possible to hope for a victory for the left, he managed to win over a quarter of Communist Party voters. The Communist Party’s own candidate only received 15% of the votes in the first round, compared to 20 or 21% in the legislative elections of 1977. This erosion of support, a prelude to the total collapse that would soon take place, can be explained to a great extent by the inability of the “Party of the Working Class” to evolve and to break from the Soviet regime (which provided, it is true, a good deal of its financial support). But it was also due to its inability to take seriously the new social movements that developed in the wake of May 1968. To put it mildly, the Party no longer seemed to have much of a relation to the forms of desire for social transformation and for political innovation that characterized the 1960s and 1970s, and that in some ways realized themselves in 1981. And yet the victory of the left, along with the government it put into place (which would include some communists) soon produced a strong sense of disillusionment in working class circles, and a loss of interest in the politicians whom they had previously trusted, and for whom they had voted. Soon they felt betrayed and neglected by them. I remember often hearing the observation (my mother repeated it to me every time we spoke): “Right or left, there’s no difference; they are all the same, and the same people always end up footing the bill.”
The socialist left set out on a major project of transformation, one that became more and more marked as the years went by. With a suspicious degree of enthusiasm, they started to turn to neoconservative intellectuals for guidance. Those intellectuals, pretending to offer a way to renovate leftist thought, in fact set out to eliminate all that was leftist from the left. What actually occurred was a general and quite thoroughgoing metamorphosis of the ethos of the party as well as of its intellectual references. Gone was any talk of exploitation and resistance, replaced by talk of “necessary modernization” and of “radical social reform”; gone the references to relations between the classes, replaced by talk of a “life in common”; gone any mention of unequal social opportunities, replaced by an emphasis on “individual responsibility.” The notion of domination, and the very idea of a structuring opposition between those in positions of dominance and those who were dominated disappeared from the official political landscape on the left, replaced by a more neutral idea of a “social contract” or a “social compact,” providing a framework within which individuals who were defined as “having equal rights” (“Equal?” What an obscene idea!) were encouraged to set aside their “particular interests” (that is, they should keep their mouths shut and let the government do its job). What were the ideological objectives of this so-called “political philosophy,” one that spread widely and was celebrated throughout the media as well as the political and intellectual fields on both the right and on the left? (Its promoters in fact did their best to eliminate any frontier between the right and the left, while encouraging the left—a willing partner—to move ever rightward.) The stakes were hardly hidden: the extolling of the virtues of the “autonomous subject,” and the accompanying effort to do away with any form of thought that took into account historical and social forms of determinism were mainly intended to dismiss the idea that specific social groups—“classes”—existed, and so to justify dismantling the welfare state and other forms of social protection. This was done in the name of a necessary individualization (or decollectivization, or desocialization) of the right to work and of systems of solidarity and of redistribution. Up until this moment such age-old discourses and projects had always been a hallmark of the right; it would obsessively trot them out, lauding individual responsibility as opposed to “collectivism.” Now they became the discourses and projects of a good part of the left. The situation could basically be summed up like this: The parties of the left, along with party intellectuals and state intellectuals, began from this moment forward to think and speak the language of those who govern, no longer the language of those who are governed. They spoke in the name of the government (and as part of it), no longer in the name of the governed (and as part of them). And so of course they adopted a governing point of view on the world, disdainfully dismissing (and doing so with great discursive violence, a violence that was experienced as such by those at whom it was directed) the point of view of those being governed. The most that any of them would deign to do (in the Christian and philanthropic versions of these neoconservative discourses) would be to replace the oppressed and dominated of yesterday—along with their struggles—with the “marginalized” of today—who were presumed to be of a passive nature. They could be considered as the silent potential recipients of the benefits of various technocratic measures that were intended to help the “poor” and the “victims” of “precarity” and of “disaffiliation.” All this was nothing other than a hypocritical and underhanded strategy meant to invalidate any approach to these problems that used terms such as oppression and struggle, or reproduction or transformation of social structures, or inertia and dynamism within class antagonisms.2
This shift in political discourse transformed the way the social world could be perceived, and therefore, in a performative manner, it transformed the social world itself, given that that world is produced by the very categories of thought by means of which it is perceived. But making political discourse about “classes” and class relations disappear, eliminating classes and class relations as cognitive and theoretical categories, does nothing to prevent those people who live under the objective conditions that the word “class” was used to designate from feeling abandoned by those people now preaching to them about the wonders of the “social compact,” and simultaneously about how urgent and “necessary” it was to deregulate the economy and to dismantle the welfare state.3 Whole sectors of the most severely disadvantaged would thus, in what almost seemed like an automatic reshuffling of the cards in the political deck, shift over to the only party that seemed to care about them, the only one, in any case, that offered them a discourse that seemed intended to provide meaning to the experiences that made up their daily lives. This happened despite the fact that the leadership of that party was not made up of people from the working class—far from it! Things had been different in the case of the Communist Party, which was always careful to choose activists from the working class itself, so that voters could identify with them. My mother did finally admit to me, after having denied it for a very long time, that she had voted for the National Front. (“But only once,” she insisted, even though I am not sure I believe her on this point. “It was in order to make a point, because things weren’t going right,” she offered as a justification once the unpleasantness of the confession was behind her. Then, strangely, she added, regarding the decision to vote for Le Pen in the first round of the elections, “The people who voted for him didn’t really want to see him elected. In the second round we all voted normally.”)4
Unlike voting communist, a way of voting that could be assumed forthrightly and asserted publicly, voting for the extreme right seems to have been something that needed to be kept secret, even denied in the face of some “outside” instance of judgment (which is what I appear to have represented, in my family’s eyes). Such a vote had nonetheless been carefully thought over and decided upon. The former way of voting was a proud affirmation of one’s class identity, a political gesture confirming that very identity by offering support to the “workers’ party.” The latter kind of vote was a silent act in defense of whatever was left of such an identity, to which the ruling powers of the institutionalized left paid no attention, or else treated dismissively. They had all graduated from the École Nationale d’Administration or other bourgeois institutions whose function was to produce technocrats. Such places produce and inculcate a “dominant ideology” that has become generalized across all political divisions. (One cannot insist too much on the extent to which elite circles of the “modernist”—and often Christian—left contributed to the development of this rightist dominant ideology. It is hardly surprising that a former socialist party leader—from the north of France, of course, and thus coming from a different class background and a different political culture—felt it to be his heartfelt duty to remind his friends during the presidential election campaign of 2002 that “worker” was not a dirty word.) However paradoxical it might seem to some people, I am convinced that voting for the National Front must be interpreted, at least in part, as the final recourse of people of the working classes attempting to defend their collective identity, or to defend, in any case, a dignity that was being trampled on—now even by those who had once been their representatives and defenders. Dignity is a fragile feeling, unsure of itself; it requires recognition and reassurances. People first of all have a need not to feel like they are being treated as a negligible quantity, or merely as an entry in a statistical table or on a balance sheet, which is to say mute objects about which political decisions are made. If a time comes when those in whom you have placed your confidence seem no longer to deserve it, you place your confidence in others. Even if it happens bit by bit, you end up turning to new representatives.5
So whose fault is it that the new representatives people turn to are of a certain ilk? Whose fault if the meaning of a “we” sustained or reconstituted in this way undergoes a transformation such that it comes to mean the “French” as opposed to “foreigners,” whereas it had used to mean “workers” as opposed to the “bourgeoisie”? Or, to put it more precisely, whose fault is it if the opposition between “worker” and “bourgeois,” even if it continues to exist in the form of an opposition between the “have nots” and the “haves” (which is not exactly the same opposition—it carries different political consequences), takes on a national and racial dimension, with the “haves” being perceived as favorably inclined to immigration and the “have nots” as suffering on a daily basis because of this same immigration, one that is held to be responsible for all their difficulties?
The claim could be made that voting communist represented a positive form of self-affirmation, whereas voting for the National Front represented a negative one. (In the first case, the links to party structures, to party spokespersons, to the coherence of the political discourse in question and its correspondence to a certain class identity, were all quite strong and conclusive; but in the second case such links were nearly inexistent or else quite secondary.) Yet in both cases the outcome of the voting was meant to be, or became in fact, the public manifestation of a group that was giving itself an organization by means of votes cast individually, but also collectively, in order to make its voice heard. What organized itself around the Communist Party was the collective vote of a group conscious of itself and anchored both in the objective conditions of its existence and in a political tradition. Other categories would affiliate with this group when their perception of the world and their political agenda would align, in either the short or the long term, with those of the “working class” in its manifestation as a class-subject. By erasing any idea of social groups with conflicting relations to each other from leftist political discourse (indeed by going so far as to replace the structuring affirmation of a conflictual society, in which one’s obligation was to support the demands of the working class, with a denunciation of social movements that were claimed to be relics of the past, that were, along with their supporters, taken to be somehow archaic, or some kind of a sign of the deterioration of the social bond that the government’s project should be to restore), the goal was to succeed at depriving people who voted together of the possibility of thinking of themselves as a group held together by common interests and shared preoccupations. Their opinions were reduced to individual ones, and those opinions were dissociated from any of the power they might have held in the past, doomed henceforth to a kind of powerlessness. But that powerlessness turned into anger. The result was inevitable: the group reformed, but in a different way, and the class that had been deconstructed by the neoconservative discourses of the left found a new way to organize itself and to make its point of view known.
One sees here the limits of the wonderful analysis Sartre gives of electoral systems and of election seasons as processes of individualization and therefore of the depoliticization of opinion—a “serial” kind of situation—, as opposed to the collective and politicizing formation of thought that happens in the course of a movement or a period of political mobilization—a “group” situation.6 It is certainly true that his example is striking: the workers who participated in the major strikes of May 1968 but then only a month later saved the Gaullist regime by voting for its candidates. Yet this example shouldn’t cause us to forget that the act of voting, while fundamentally individual in appearance, can be experienced as part of a collective mobilization, as a political action carried out in common with others. Viewed in this way, it contravenes the very principle of the system of “universal suffrage,” in which the aggregation of individual voices is meant to produce the expression of the “general will” that in theory transcends any particular desires. But in the situation I have just described (voting communist or voting for the National Front), the opposite happens: a class war is carried out at the ballot box, a practice of confrontation is reproduced election after election, in which one class—or a part of one class—is seen doing its best to make its presence manifest in the face of others, to set up a power relation. Merleau-Ponty, too, while emphasizing that “the vote consults people at rest, outside their job, outside their life,” that is, according to an abstract and individualizing logic, insists on the fact that “when we vote, it is a form of violence”: “Each rejects the suffrage of the others.”7 Far from seeking to collaborate in defining all together what the “general will” of the people might be, far from contributing to the establishment of a consensus or to the emergence of a majority to whose wishes a minority would agree to acquiesce, the working class, or some part of it (and in this it is like any other class: think of the reaction of the bourgeoisie each time the left is elected to power), is there ready to contest the claim that some elected majority represents the “general” point of view by recalling that it considers this majority’s point of view to be that of an adversary who is defending its own interests in opposition to one’s own. As far as the vote for the National Front is concerned, this process by which a political self is constructed happened through an alliance—at least while the electoral campaign was underway—with social strata that at other times would have been considered to be made up of “enemies.” The major effect of the disappearance of the “working class” and of workers—or even, we might say, of the popular classes more generally—from political discourse will thus have been the weakening of the long-standing alliances formed under the banner of “the left” between the working-class world and certain other social categories (workers in the public sector, teachers, and so on), and the formation of a new “historical bloc,” to use Gramsci’s vocabulary, bringing together large portions of the vulnerable popular classes living under conditions of precarity with shopkeepers and tradespeople, or with well-to-do retirees in the south of France, or even with fascist military types or traditional old Catholic families, and thus largely located on the right or even the far right.8 But this was doubtless what was required at a given moment in order to have any political weight—all the more so since that weight had to be thrown against the left that was in power or, more exactly, against the power that the parties of the left incarnated. Indeed, this gesture was perceived as the only way to go on living. Yet obviously, with the formation of new alliances and new political configurations, this group—which included only a part of the former group organized around voting communist—became different from what it had been. Those who made it up began thinking of themselves, of their political interests and of their relations to political and social lives in completely different ways.
Voting for the National Front was probably not, for most of these voters, the same kind of thing that voting for the Communist Party had been: this new vote was more intermittent and less consistent. It was not with the same solidarity or the same intensity that people gave themselves or their thoughts over to the spokespersons who would represent them on the political stage. By means of their vote for the Communist Party, individuals went beyond what they were separately or serially, and the collective opinion that was produced through the mediation of the Party, which both shaped and expressed it, was in no way the reflection of the various heterogeneous opinions of any of the voters; but in voting for the National Front, individuals remain individuals and the opinion they produce is simply the sum of their spontaneous prejudices, latched onto by the party, and taken up and formulated into a coherent political program. Yet even if those people who vote for the party do not subscribe to the entirety of its program, the strength gained by the party in this way allows it to believe that its voters are in agreement with its whole discourse.
It is tempting to say that what we have in this case is a serial collective, one deeply marked by seriality—given that what predominates here are impulsive reactions, opinions that may be shared but are more received ones than they are interests thought out collectively or opinions arrived at through practical forms of action. It is a kind of alienated vision (leveling accusations at foreigners) rather than a politicized concept (a struggle against domination). Nonetheless, this “collective” becomes a “group” by means of its vote for a party which can then, with the consent of those voters, instrumentalize the very means of expression chosen and used by those who themselves instrumentalized that party in order to make their voices heard.9
We should in any case remark that to a large degree voting for someone rarely amounts to more than a partial or oblique adherence to the discourse or platforms of the party or the candidate in question—and this is true for all voters. When I observed to my mother that by voting for Le Pen she had supported a party that actively opposed abortion rights, whereas I knew she had had an abortion, she replied: “But that’s got nothing to do with it. That’s not why I voted for him.” If that is the case, then how does someone choose the elements that count, that weigh in favor of a decision to vote for a candidate, and the elements that are deliberately set aside? Surely the essential factor is the feeling of knowing or believing that you are being both individually and collectively represented, even if it is in an incomplete and imperfect kind of way. That is, what counts is that one feels supported by those one supports; one has the impression of existing and of counting for something in the life of politics by means of participating in an election, by means of a decision to act in this way.
These two antagonistic political visions (the one embodied in a vote for the Communist Party, and the one embodied in a vote for the National Front), these two modes of constituting oneself as a political subject relied on different categories for perceiving and dividing up the social world. (These divergent categories of perception could certainly co-exist in a single individual, caught up in different temporalities of course, but also tied to different places, related to different structures of daily life in which that individual may be involved: it might depend on whether the accent is placed on the practical solidarity that functions within the confines of the factory or the feeling of competition involved in holding on to one’s job, or whether the accent is placed on the feeling of belonging to an informal network of parents who pick up their children from the same school or on a feeling of exasperation at how difficult life in the neighborhood is becoming, and so on.) They are opposite, or at least divergent, ways of dividing up social reality and of trying to exercise some influence on the political orientation of those in the government, but the two ways are not mutually exclusive. That is why, however long-lasting and however disconcerting the alliances that went into forming the National Front electorate may be, it is not at all impossible, and even less is it unthinkable, that some of those people—and only some of them—might be found in a more or less near future voting for the extreme left. This is not to say that the extreme left and the extreme right should be placed on the same level—as is often done by those people who are trying to protect their monopoly over what can be said to constitute legitimate politics. (They make this claim by systematically accusing any point of view, any act of self-affirmation that doesn’t correspond to their definition of politics of being “populist.” Such accusations merely reveal their lack of understanding—which is class-based—of what they take to be the “irrationality” of the people whenever they do not simply agree to submit to the “reason” and “wisdom” of those in power.) But it is to say that the political mobilization of a group—the world of workers and of the popular classes—by means of electoral politics can shift its location radically on the political chessboard; if the overall situation (national and international) shifts, such a mobilization could crystallize within the framework of a different “historical bloc” involving other segments of society. Yet doubtless a certain number of significant events have to take place—strikes, protests, and so on—for any such transformation to come about. It is not all that easy to undo a mental sense of political belonging that is of long duration—even when that sense has been unstable and uncertain—, just as it is not possible to create in a single day a new way of relating to oneself and to others, a new way of looking at the world, a different discourse on the way life works.