[[link removed]]

INSOUMISSION  
[[link removed]]


 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon & Tariq Ali
July 11, 2025
Sidecar [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The liberals say it’s every man for himself and the fascists say
it’s everyone against the Arabs. They have their worldviews, and we,
the left, must offer another way of seeing the world. That’s what
we’re trying to do. _

,

 

TARIQ ALI: _Let’s start with Gaza. We are in what is hopefully the
final stage of this Israeli war. Its toll in casualties is going to be
in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps close to half a million. No
Western country has made any meaningful attempt to stop it. Last
month, Trump ordered the Israelis to sign the ceasefire deal with Iran
and when Israel broke it he was enraged. To use his immortal words:
‘They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.’ But that leads
me to the question: do you think the Americans know what the fuck
they’re doing?_

JEAN-LUC MÉLENCHON: We must try to understand the rationale of these
Western states. It’s not simply that Trump is crazy or that the
Europeans are cowards; maybe they are those things, but what they are
doing is nonetheless based on a long-term plan, one that has failed in
the past but is now in the process of being realized. The plan is,
first, to reorganize the entire Middle East to secure access to oil
for the countries of the Global North; and, second, to create the
conditions for war with China. 

The first objective goes back to the Iran–Iraq war, when the US used
Saddam Hussein’s regime as an instrument for containing the Iranian
revolution. After the fall of the USSR it launched the Gulf War and
Bush Sr. proclaimed a ‘new world order’. My view from the
beginning was that this was an attempt to establish control of oil and
gas pipelines, and to protect US energy independence by keeping prices
sufficiently high, at the profitability threshold for oil extracted by
fracking. When we grasp this as the Empire’s main ambition, we can
make sense of various other events. For example, what did the US do in
Afghanistan after it invaded in 2001? It prevented a pipeline from
being laid which would have passed through Iran. The Daesh war against
Syria was also, in many respects, a struggle over a pipeline route. 

So there you have it: a fairly consistent line of reasoning. An empire
is only an empire if it can maintain control of certain resources, and
this is precisely what is playing out today. The US has decided to
redraw the map of the Middle East, using Israel as its instrument and
ally. It knows it must reward Israel for this work, and this takes the
form of support for the political project of a Greater Israel, under
which the Palestinian population in Gaza and elsewhere must disappear.
If Europe and the US had wanted to stop this war, then it would have
been limited to three or four days of Israeli retaliation after
October 7th. Instead, it has lasted more than twenty months. So no one
can say that the Americans don’t know what they’re doing, as some
have said. What’s happening in the region is all deliberate,
planned, organized jointly by the US and Netanyahu.  

TA: _You mentioned that the second part of America’s plan is
conflict with China. A lot of liberals and left-liberals are now
finally recoiling from the events in Middle East and saying that our
real target should be China. But what they don’t realize is that the
real target _is_ China, because, as you say, if the United States
controls all the region’s oil – as it would if Iran were to fall
– then they would control the flow of this basic commodity. They
could force Beijing to beg for it, which would help to keep it in
check. So the US strategy in the Middle East might seem completely
crazy – and it is crazy on various levels – but there is also a
deep logic behind it: that it’s better to fight China in this way
than to go to war with it. This has already started to create huge
problems across the East. I noticed that neither the leaders of Japan
nor South Korea, two countries that have major US military bases,
attended the NATO summit in June – which is something that’s never
happened before. _

JLM: The conflict between the US and China is over trade and resource
networks, and in some respects the Chinese have already won, because
they produce almost everything the world consumes. They have no
interest in fighting a war because they are already satisfied with
their global influence. Yet this is both a strength and a weakness.
When 90% of Iranian oil goes to China, for instance, blocking the
Strait of Hormuz would cut off crucial supply chains and bring a large
part of Chinese production to a halt. So China is vulnerable on that
front. You are right to say that some in the West would prefer a cold
war to a hot war, encirclement and containment rather than direct
conflict. But these are nuances, and in reality it is easy to move
from one to the other. One of Biden’s top economic advisors said
that there is no ‘commercial solution’ to the problem of
competition with China, which means there can only be a military
one. 

The point about Japan and Korea is also significant. Not only them,
but also many other powers in the region, are now strengthening ties
with China. Vietnam was supposed to be in the US bloc, but they’ve
signed agreements with the Chinese. So has India, despite the tensions
between the two countries. The backdrop here is that, throughout much
of Asia, capitalism is still defined by dynamic forces of trade and
production, whereas in the US it has assumed a predatory and tributary
character. That is to say, Washington now tries to use its power to
make the rest of the world pay tribute, as was clear from the NATO
meeting you mentioned, where it decided that every state should be
spending 5% of GDP on defence. This money will not be used to build
planes or submarines domestically, of course, but rather to buy them
from America. 

I once had an interesting conversation with a Chinese leader. When I
said to him that China was flooding the European market with its
overproduction of electric cars, he replied, ‘Mr. Mélenchon, do you
think there are too many electric cars in the world?’ Of course I
had to answer ‘no’. Then he said: ‘We’re not forcing you to
buy our products; it’s up to you whether you want to purchase
them.’ Here was a Communist explaining to me the benefits of free
trade. It was a reminder that when it comes to the US and China what
we have is a competition between two different forms of capitalist
accumulation – even if it is reductive to describe the Chinese
economic model as simply capitalist. When I asked about the military
balance of forces, went on to tell me that China was in a favourable
situation, because, as he put it, ‘our front is the China Sea.
America’s front is the whole world.’ 

So the battle with China is already underway, and yet we are also
still in a preparatory phase. Right now there are North American
warships and weapons all across the globe, which Washington would need
to concentrate in the run-up to any attack. So we still have a few
years ahead of us, a window of opportunity. France remains a country
with the military and material resources to intervene in the global
balance of power. I firmly believe that one day we will have
an _insoumis_ government that will be able to assert sovereignty
over our own domestic production and foreign policy: one which
recognizes that, even if China is a systemic threat to the empire, it
is not a systemic threat to us. This is what I am campaigning for.  

Germany is a different matter. You know, in France we often say ‘our
German friends’. Well, the Germans are nobody’s friends. They are
self-interested. They break agreements with us all the time. Now
they’re willing to pour $46 billion into their war economy because
they lost the battle for the automobile industry more than fifteen
years ago. Yet even the Germans have been taught a harsh lesson by the
US. They ended up relying on Gazprom for their energy. Mr. Schroder
went to work for the company and secured a good deal with the
Russians. Then the Americans said ‘No more’ and Nord Stream was
destroyed. You see, the empire will strike anyone who disobeys it. 

TA: _What do you think the world we’re living in will look like at
the end of the century?_

JLM: The only thing we can know for certain is that either human
civilization will find a way to unite against climate change, or it
will collapse. There will always be human beings who manage to survive
the storms, the droughts, the floods. But the technocrats will not be
able to keep society as a whole running. In France we have some of the
best technocrats in the world, but they are stupid enough to believe
that everything will stay fundamentally the same. They are planning to
build even more nuclear power plants as part of their climate
strategy; but you can’t run nuclear power plants without cooling
them, and cooling them requires cold water, which is in increasingly
short supply. We have already been forced to start shutting down
nuclear plants because the heat is too extreme. This is just one
example, but there are dozens of others where political decisions are
made as if the world will remain as it is today. As materialists, we
must think about political action within the parameters of an
ecosystem threatened by destruction. Unless we start from this
premise, our arguments will have no value.

Today, 90% of world trade is conducted by sea. But this is not the
easiest way to transport goods. There have already been a few studies
which show that transport by rail is safer, faster and often cheaper.
So one can imagine that, as the climate worsens, the Chinese will
explore the possibility of finding alternative routes for their
products. The Beijing–Berlin route will be fundamental in terms of
their link with Europe; remember that China once chose Germany as the
end-point for one of the Silk Roads. And the other major route goes
down through Tehran and enters southern Europe. China will have a
global advantage in developing these new trade channels because it is
the dominant power in terms of technical efficiency: an essential
asset under traditional capitalism. The US, by contrast, has no
technical prowess. The Americans are incapable of even maintaining the
international space station orbiting the Earth, whereas the Chinese
change the team on their station every six months. The Americans can
barely send anything into space, while the Chinese recently landed a
robot on the dark side of the moon. ‘Westerners’ – I put the
term in quotes because I don’t like it; I don’t consider myself
Western – are so full of themselves, so arrogant, so pretentious,
that they cannot admit this imbalance. 

In short, if capitalism continues to dominate, with neoliberals in
power, then humanity is lost, for the simple reason that capitalism is
a suicidal system which profits from the disasters that it causes.
Every previous system has been forced to stop when it creates too much
disorder. Not this one. If it rains a lot, it sells you umbrellas. If
it’s too hot, it sells you ice cream. Over the coming decades,
collectivist regimes will demonstrate that collectivism is a more
satisfactory outlook for human beings than liberal competition.

I also want to make a bet. I think that by the end of the century,
maybe even sooner, the United States of America will not exist. Why?
Because it’s not a nation, it’s a country that has been at war
with all its neighbuors since the moment of its birth. Samuel
Huntington described it as a fundamentally unstable structure and
predicted that the language that will eventually become dominant there
is Spanish. A huge proportion of the US population now speaks Spanish
at home, and this part of the population is mostly Catholic, in
contrast with the ‘enlightened’ Protestants who founded the
country. These linguistic and cultural dynamics are very important.
People care deeply about their native language: the one their mother
used to sing them to sleep, the one they use to tell their partner
that they love them. In California – a state that was torn away from
Mexico, with an economy that’s the fourth largest in the world in
terms of GDP – Spanish is spoken everywhere, more so than English.
It is no wonder that the campaign for Californian independence is
gaining traction, with a referendum to be held perhaps as early as
next year. I don’t know whether it will work, but it is striking
that a major state within the world’s leading power is already
considering the possibility of secession. We’re going to see more of
this. And the country’s dominant ideology – ‘every man for
himself’ – is not going to hold it together. 

TA: _You write in your recent book that the French people can erupt
without warning like a volcano, that there is something constantly
bubbling beneath the surface of French society. The last person I
heard make a similar point was Nicolas Sarkozy. When he was president,
some fawning journalist said to him, ‘You are so popular, Mr.
Sarkozy, your ratings are so high, you have such a beautiful wife’,
etc. And Sarkozy’s reply, to my surprise, was that people who ask
questions like that don’t understand France, because in France the
same people who are praising you today will burst into your bedroom
and kill you tomorrow. _

JLM: This aspect of French society comes, first of all, from our
history. Two empires and three monarchs in less than a century. Five
Republics in two centuries and of course three revolutions. This has
produced a collective culture of _insoumission_. I chose that word
for our movement because it’s exactly the ethos we want to embody: a
rebellious instinct, an ever-present ability to reject the order that
is being imposed on us. If we want to develop a revolutionary
strategy, we have to build on these cultural foundations. People used
to say, in hushed tones, ‘I’m a Communist’ or ‘I’m a
Socialist’. Now they say ‘I’m an _insoumis_’. 

But that is not the only thing. There are also demographic changes,
the blending of different populations. To submit to the established
order, you have to be integrated into it to a greater or lesser
extent. The servant must be taught to accept his position as a
servant, because his father was one, his grandfather was one, and so
on. But if you’ve just arrived in France, if you’ve risked your
life to get here and you’re full of enthusiasm for life, then you
want to succeed rather than submit. You want your children to succeed
as well, to get a good education. And that creates an internal dynamic
within these populations that the dominant classes, with their usual
arrogance, cannot comprehend. Mitterand was elected in May 1981
because the Communist Party organized the traditional working class
and the Socialist Party organized the upwardly mobile social classes.
But today there are no longer any upwardly mobile social classes in
France other than in immigrant communities. 

We in _La France insoumise_ have never believed that the French have
become racist, closed, selfish. Yes, there is some of that. But there
are also opposing forces which are numerous and strong. That is why we
focus on working-class neighbourhoods – including immigrant ones –
and young people, because these are two sectors that have an interest
in opening up society rather than closing it off. We are not a people
like the Anglo-Saxons, who are very business-minded. This is the only
country where, when you want to criticize someone, you use a popular
expression like _heureusement que tout le monde ne fait pas comme
vous_ –  ‘it’s a good thing everyone doesn’t do what you
do’. In other words, what’s good is what everyone does. There is a
spontaneous egalitarianism in France that filters into our everyday
speech. 

This is a nation built through revolutions, organized around the state
and social services. All our achievements – technical, material,
intellectual – come from the power of the state. Consequently, by
destroying the state, neoliberalism is destroying the French nation
itself. Do you want a catalogue of the destruction? One school per day
closing down; one maternity ward per quarter; 9,000 kilometres of
railroad tracks decommissioned; ten refineries gone. The oligarchy’s
war on society means the destruction of public property for the
benefit of private property. And yet, as a result of this
impoverishment of the state, private investment has collapsed. All the
money has flowed into the financial sphere. The rich are not creating
jobs. They are not buying machines to make things. They are profiting
by doing nothing, simply manipulating the speculative financial
machinery.

Our political strategy is based on combining this material diagnosis
with cultural analysis. Socioculturally, there are other countries
where people might say ‘Yes, this is perfectly normal; it’s their
money, they can do what they want with it.’ France is different.
Here you have to _justify_ what you do. You are accountable to the
collective. This is not some kind of abstract nationalism. It’s not
that I think the French are better than anyone else; they too can be
pushed to compete against one another. But this deep collective
impulse nonetheless makes me optimistic when I see the fascists try to
impose their bleak view of existence. They have no ambitions for
society, no proposals for the future. All they know is that they
don’t like Arabs or black people. 

It’s very easy to provoke the fascists. You wave a red flag and
suddenly they all come running. I recently remarked that the French
language belongs not to the French but to those who speak it. This
caused huge controversy. ‘French belongs to the French!’, they
cried. Well, actually, there are 29 countries where French is the
official language. By recognizing this we can start a discussion about
language as a common good. When you tell a fascist that there are 100
million Congolese who speak French, they faint. When you tell them
that, on average, the Senegalese are more educated than the French,
they can’t abide it. Even worse in their eyes: Muslims from North
Africa tend to perform better in school. I think that when confronting
fascism we need to provoke a full-frontal cultural war at the same
time as waging an economic battle. We mustn’t be afraid. Obviously
it can be unpleasant, but this is how people come to understand human
reality most deeply. We may be workers, but we are also lovers, poets,
musicians – and these identities also have their place in politics.
I don’t know if that sounds too romantic to you.

TA: _France has not been immune to the global rise of the far right.
The traditional liberal and left-liberal intelligentsia has been
incapable of fighting back, because it’s the system they support
which has allowed these reactionary forces to grow so fast. Do you
think it’s possible that a party led by a figure like Le Pen
or __É__ric Zemmour could win on its own and form a majority
government in France?_

JLM: The rise of the far right has been an intellectual catastrophe.
Part of the reason why they’re so strong is that we have lost the
coherent reference points of critical thought. Social democrats have
no interest in this kind of thinking: rather than offering
comprehensive explanations, they simply repeat a few stale economic
principles which you and I have heard for forty years. This is not
enough, especially for young people or for those who have lived a
difficult life: who have worked hard, paid taxes, contributed, and
want to know why they are now living in such a rotten world. The far
right gives them a whole arsenal of certainties: men are men, women
are women, white people are superior. Most people are vigilant about
such propaganda, but many others embrace it. Which means we are facing
a situation where – yes – the far right is capable of winning on
its own by absorbing the right.

Stefano Palombarini writes that there are three blocs in France: the
left, the right and the far right. To this, we would add a fourth
category: not a bloc, not a homogeneous actor, but a mass of people
who are disillusioned with everything. There are millions of them, and
we are fighting to bring them back into the political family of the
left. But the far right has a much easier job. That’s partly because
of the decline of the right, including the Macronists. They’re
starting to realize that they can no longer convince people; so they
are embracing the ideology, the rhetoric, the culture of the far
right.

The Minister of the Interior recently ordered a day of immigration
raids in train stations to root out people who didn’t have the
correct papers. It was horrific. I’ve told my comrades that we need
to prepare for a much more intensive fight against these raids in the
future. As the right and the far right converge, this kind of racism
is becoming the norm. If you’ve worked in France for ten years and
the authorities fail to send you your renewal papers, you can now be
picked up off the street and deported. Your whole life can be thrown
away in a matter of moments. No, no, we cannot accept this. It is
unbearable. 

So as well as playing a leading role in social struggles, we must also
fight this battle of ideas. That’s why we have created a foundation,
L’Institut La Boétie, to link intellectuals with wider society.
We’ve hosted lectures, organized panels, published books. Most of
the speakers are from France, but some have come elsewhere too. David
Harvey came to speak about critical geography; Nancy Fraser set out
her vision of materialist feminism and social reproduction. The goal
is not to ‘recruit’ intellectuals but to diffuse their ideas,
which are suddenly reaching audiences of thousands. We’ve gotten
requests for such meetings all over the country; there have been more
than eighty so far. 

TA: _Would a coalition of the far right and the right in France be
different in nature to Meloni’s government in Italy?_

JLM: In France, racist rhetoric has become extraordinarily intense
and violence is increasingly tolerated. Only a few weeks ago, a police
officer who shot and killed a young woman who was travelling in the
passenger seat of a car had the case against him thrown out.
Dismissed. No prosecution. There are scandals involving police
brutality almost every week. The police force is dominated by these
elements. As a result, a far-right regime in France would be even more
violent, even more aggressive, than in Italy. 

The far right think they are living in the France of the early
twentieth century, where immigrants kept quiet. They don’t realize
that our populations have merged. There are 3.5 million people with
dual French and Algerian nationality: people who have deep ties to
France and parents who are over there. And there are 6 million French
Muslims. But the far right are unaware of this, or they refuse to
believe it. They see Muslims as invaders because of their religion and
try to forget that this is a country that experienced three centuries
of religious civil war between Catholics and Protestants. 

The entire political and intellectual machinery of the French ruling
class is now moving in this direction. That includes the miserable
little left, led by the Socialist Party, who bark at us from morning
to night. They don’t realize that they’re participating in a
broader establishment strategy: acting as the left-wing auxiliary of
the right. They live in a dreamworld, wanting France to be like
Germany, with a grand coalition of the centre: Social Democrats who
are indistinguishable from liberals, Greens who are always clamouring
for war. These people are doing the work of dividing us every day
while pretending to be for unity. 

It’s very twisted, very vicious, but hey, that’s the struggle.
It’s hard? Well so what? Was it ever easy? I don’t mean to give
the impression that I think the far right has won. I often tell my
younger comrades: you didn’t know France back when the majority of
people in the villages went to church every week and the priest
explained to them that they should have nothing to do with the
Communists or the Socialists. I knocked on doors when I was a young
man in the 1980s and people would say ‘You’re allied with the
Communists? They are against God. And we can’t vote against God.’
I tried to explain that God had nothing to do with the French
elections. It’s about what kind of world you want to belong to. If
you don’t know the answer, then you’ll either end up with the
liberals or the fascists. The liberals say it’s every man for
himself and the fascists say it’s everyone against the Arabs. They
have their worldviews, and we, the left, must offer another way of
seeing the world. That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s why
sometimes people will say I’m lyrical and romantic. Yes, I am, and
there’s no shame in that.

TA:_ Best of luck._

_Translated by Rym __Khadhraoui_

_Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the founder of La France Insoumise._

_Tariq Ali is an editor of New Left Review._

_Sidecar is the NLR blog. Launching in December 2020, Sidecar aims to
provide a space on the left for international interventions and
debate. A buzzing and richly populated left-media landscape has
emerged online in the past decade, but its main English-speaking forms
have been largely monoglot in outlook and national in focus, treating
culture as a subsidiary concern. By contrast, political writing on
Sidecar will take the world, rather than the Anglosphere, as its
primary frame. Culture in the widest sense – arts, ideas, mores –
will have full standing. Translation of, and intellectual engagement
with, interventions in languages other than English will be integral
to its work. And while New Left Review appears bi-monthly, running
articles of widely varied length, Sidecar will post several items a
week, each no longer than 2,500 words and many a good deal shorter._

* France Unbowed
[[link removed]]
* La France Insoumise
[[link removed]]
* Left Unity
[[link removed]]
* far right
[[link removed]]
* social democracy
[[link removed]]
* socialist strategy
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]