By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
The Germans wanted to make a revolution but they were afraid to do it, so they had Hitler do it.
Wilhelm Reich
No, it is by no means certain that Marine Le Pen will soon evolve into a kind of Hitler, more precisely a small regional ally of a “Hitler” in the United States. But nor would it be wise to completely rule out this possibility if the ongoing wars of the “collective West” escalate further or if a wave of a major economic crisis hits it.
In any case, the launch into the political arena of a force that comes from French fascism and is the bearer of a slightly covert authoritarian ideology, which is at odds with the ideology dominating post-war France, has its significance. It creates the conditions for a regime of neo-fascism, conditions that cannot appear overnight.
The first round of the French parliamentary elections had an obvious winner, the far right of Marine Le Pen and the unknown young “star” Jordan Bardella. The French Far Right is not an exception. Understanding politics as an advertising industry they need also young and beautiful stars. Younger, handsome less experienced, less educated, more easily manipulated.
But the first round of the French election had, as we will try to show, two other bigger but “secret” winners behind the scenes: the big banks and … Benjamin Netanyahu, a prominent figure of the Western party of war and totalitarianism.
The French election result is certainly of historical importance. We do not yet know whether or not the French far right will win an absolute majority and whether or not it will form the next government. But we do know that it has the wind in its sails. It represents the relative majority of the French people and has a dynamics of expanding influence. At a certain point, the constant appeals to the French people not to vote for it, especially from the representatives of a hated and rotten establishment, are having the opposite effect.
The second death of Voltaire and de Gaulle
Throughout, the country of Voltaire and Rabelais, of Balzac and Zola, of Jaurès and de Gaulle, of Camus and Sartre is preparing, desperate and in deep decline, to surrender now, or if not now in two or three years, to the descendants of Vichy and Petain, of the OAS, of the tortionnaires and butchers of Algeria. The country that gave birth to modern European civilisation, from the Enlightenment onwards, is now producing incredible political and intellectual nonsense, such as the stupid and racist theories of the great replacement.
The country that jealously kept its independence from the Americans throughout the post-war period, until Sarkozy came to power in 2007, has now become an annex and a base in Europe for NATO and, in particular, Israel, governed now by the far-right of Benjamin Netanyahu, who even wants to expand his war throughout the Middle East!
What we see is an incredible triumph of Dialectics, an unbelievable Inversion of meanings. The poison of totalitarianism has now re-grown on the very people who have been its victim par excellence. The governing (not very) elite of the country of human rights has become the supporters of the Genocide. The elite of French Jews consider now the Left as antisemitic and the Fascists as acceptable allies https://www.defenddemocracy.
We have thus arrived to the point that Netanyahu (the promoter and ally https://www.defenddemocracy.
Antisystemic vote for a “crypto-systemic” party
A vote for Le Pen is in principle an “anti-systemic”, “anti-regime” vote, in the sense her voters understand it. That is, it is a vote of indignant and rebellious people who want to protest against many things that are happening, such as the so-called “identity” issues, the discomfort with the extremism, the absurdities of liberal and “leftist” political correctness regarding LGBTI people, trans people, etc., about the problems caused by the degradation of the areas where they live, about the transformation of the suburbs in “favelas”, about the discounting of their country and their nation, about France’s complicity with NATO’s war against Russia.
By siding completely with NATO, a part of the French Left has contributed heavily to the rise of the appeal of RN which is perceived more pro-peace than the Left. This is probably not true, but it is already producing electoral and political results.
But the two fundamental, very big issues that are causing the indignation of people in France and all over the West since many years now and the two issues which have caused the shift towards Le Pen in France are:
· The constant and rapid decline in living standards of the popular strata
· The sidelining of ordinary people, the contempt for the citizens and their opinion, the gradual consolidation of a financial oligarchy’s dictatorship veiled as democracy.
These two issues were also at the basis of the almost revolutionary Yellow Vests uprising that shook the whole country in 2018-20, before the coronavirus lockdown broke it up to a large extent. The divide in the movement itself between “antivax ” and “provax” factions, along with the consequences of its “allergy” to any vertical organisational hierarchy have also contributed to that. This tendency shifted into completely flattening dimensions; the Vests even rejected the idea of having a Coordinating Committee or a Press Office, fearing the bureaucratic degeneration of the leaderships. The trend emerged as a reaction to decades of repeated betrayals by the successive leaderships of the left movements, culminating in the miserable, sordid behaviour of the leadership of Syriza and Tsipras. This was told to me by the Vests themselves during the two visits I made at that time to their general assemblies. The way in which Tsipras himself and the Syriza-ANEL government forgot in one week why the Greeks voted for them, what they was saying before ithey won the elections and the result of the referendum itself that it caused, all things completely outrageous and without historical precedent in any other country in the world, shocked not only the European but also the world public opinion and undermined the credibility of the “radical left” worldwide, strengthening inversely that of the extreme right).
On the same night of the humiliating capitulation with the signing of the third memorandum, Marine Le Pen said: “Tsipras has betrayed!”. In other words, don’t trust the leftists, come to me. Four years later, the Yellow Vests are the first major social uprising in French history to avoid using the red flag -it was a first “yellow card” of the people to the left. Nine years later, the far-right Le Pen is on the verge of power, taking first place among those who challenge the system, although a significant section of “antisystemic” voters are not ready to trust her, hence the not insignificant percentage of the “New Popular Front”. In France today, we are witnessing a development that is beginning to resemble the electoral statistics of Socialists, Communists and Nazis at the end of the Weimar period (1)
The present rise of the French Far Right is also the result of repeated capitulations and defeats of the Greek, Spanish, British and German Radical Left. Under Jean – Luc Melenchon things went better for the French Radical Left, but there also there were very serious weaknesses.
The totalitarian “Democracy” of the Markets
What the Yellow Vests demanded above all, the two demands that garnered the support of 80% to 90% of the French population in the opinion polls were the restoration of the living standards of the popular strata and the introduction of the institution of a referendum on popular initiative. In other words, that citizens should have the right to put to referendum and approve or reject laws passed by the National Assembly, that they should have the right to introduce laws for voting and to recall elected representatives.
That is, in reaction to a system that impoverishes them and makes “democracy” virtual, they demanded the right to control it.
Of course, both of these demands are “revolutionary” in the present conditions, in the sense that their application would constitute a radical change in the very basis and on the power relations under the present neoliberal capitalism and its European incarnation, the European Union, which is a machine of constant “liberalisation” of markets and constant enlargement of the EU, leading in the long term to a collapse in the standard of living of the European periphery in particular, including France itself and, in the long term, of the other EU countries. This system tends towards the most extreme centralisation of financial capital, turning into a kind of post-capitalist neo-feudalism and leading to the effective absorption of nation-states into a system of ‘super-imperialism’, i.e. an unequal integration of the states of the ‘collective West’. In the context of this transformation and in combination with the indirect imperialist war against Russia (masqueraded into a “defrense of Ukraine”), Europe is currently ‘killing itself’ economically, destroying the very foundations of its post-war prosperity (cheap energy from Russia and low military expenditure) and becoming a complete vassal of the USA.
No such strategy of even limited questioning of Euroliberalism appears now in the “National Rally”. On the contrary, Marine Le Pen has been putting a lot of water in her wine since the 2010s when, following the radical left of the time, she strongly challenged “Euro-liberalism”. The predecessor of RN did the same during the 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty. Already during the election campaign, the emerging prodigy Bardella was removing day by day the elements of social welfare and criticism of NATO from the programme.
After all, if he had not made such concessions and if he had not also made promises of full support to the leader of the Israeli far right, how would he have had the huge support or tolerance he had from the media, which, it should be noted, are all more pro-NATO than NATO itself https://www.defenddemocracy.
In the same time there is a huge redirection of emphasis from the social problems and the problems created by the neoliberal EU to the problematic of identity wars and, in particular, the idea of a struggle of the West against Islam, one of the more extremist ideas of the post-Cold Warriors in particular around Huntington and Netanyahu (the other pole, around Soros, prefers wars against Russia and China).
As we noted in a previous article https://www.defenddemocracy.
The very deepening of the profound crisis of Western capitalism that began in 2008, as well as the ongoing wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, perhaps China tomorrow, but also against civilisation and Nature, need and are accelerated by the rise of the Far Right in Italy, France and tomorrow in the USA. A far right that consolidates its positions today sometimes as a ‘lamb’, as in Italy, but may well show its teeth as a ‘wolf’ tomorrow when big capital decides it needs to. Already, moreover, the demolition of democratic rights is now accelerating in a West that is becoming increasingly militarised.
Only the timely emergence of a great social, anti-war, democratic and ecological mass movement, constituted on a democratic organisational basis and with great programmatic seriousness, will be able to stop the march towards Fascism and War, if not the destruction of humanity, which we have never come so close to.
Note
(1) Trotsky’s articles of 1929-33 are indispensable tools for understanding the rapid changes of consciousness in our period. Dismiss him as a politician if you like, but read them, they are, like the History of the Russian Revolution, unique texts in the history of global political literature for analysing the rapid changes in the political psychology of the masses in times of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary crises. Without studying them it is simply impossible to understand completely the intra-war period of Europe, a century ago, which led to WWII and which tends to repeat itself in some aspects at least.
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