AMONG popular French political witticisms the following is arguably the most amusing: “When you are twenty-one and not yet a leftist, it means you have no heart. But when you are forty-one and still belong to the left, it can only mean you have no brains.”

Diehard leftists no doubt feel uneasy with such remarks. “Life is not about the survival of the fittest,” they protest. “It is not a question of the more intelligent, the harder working and the better talented getting the larger piece of the cake; it is a question of equal rights.”

The French Socialist Party’s disastrous defeat, the fourth since it came to power three years ago, in last month’s local elections has led many political analysts to believe that the time of the leftist ideology is already over. In the words of Regis Debray, himself a world-famous revolutionary in his student days who had travelled to Cuba to join hands with Che Guevara, “The French left is dead; what remains there is nothing else but a pathetic parody.”

Other experts underline the fact that the idea comes as a shock only because we see it in the light of many social and political developments within our own lifetime. They point out that, as compared with the histories of monarchies, military dictatorships or bourgeois rules that date centuries back, almost to the beginning of human civilisation itself, the leftist ideology is hardly two centuries old and came into existence as a reaction to the world’s industrialisation in the mid-nineteenth century.

They insist that as we are now rapidly entering an age of global capitalism that is offering us many new ways of developing, and making money while we are about it, the slogans of social justice and equal rights for the working class have lesser and lesser meaning. In fact, in some cases industrial labourers are getting better salaries and enjoying more comfortable working conditions than many so-called bourgeois employees.

These analysts further explain that the once exclusive demands of the leftist movement such as the right to form trade unions, have health care and social welfare benefits and go on strikes today form an inseparable part of the conservative agenda as well. So who really needs to be a leftist?

But not every leftist intellectual is totally convinced that global capitalism is causing the definitive destruction of Socialism. Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique recently the economist Frederic Lordon remarks: “Capitalism, taken at the same time as economic logic and as a social motor, is no doubt a juggernaut that is advancing practically unhampered. Nevertheless, in a moral sense it remains a tyrannical force that has to be stopped at some moment. And who can do that if not the leftist ideologists?”

Lordon’s argument, despite its undeniable elegance, does not appear to be a generally agreed concept in today’s France. The Socialist Party’s stunning defeat in the local elections equally brought to the public eye deep conflicts within the French left itself, thus putting into question Francois Hollande’s re-election chances in the 2017 presidential election. Last month the party and its allies lost in almost half of the sixty districts they had held before, with former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front grabbing a number of seats off the hands of the Socialists.

At the moment, from every point of view, President Hollande appears to be in a dire fix. While he has made brave bids offering tax breaks to businessmen in an effort to bring in fresh investments and to revive France’s straggling economic growth, to his utter disappointment unemployment has continued to rise. Worse, his moves are being seen as very non-socialistic and have caused wide divisions within his own party.

But such is history and, in the words of Karl Marx, it repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, April 12th, 2015

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