lPolitical life loves absurd oppositions. They structure the landscape, feed big speeches and provide a distraction when we have no ideas. One of the most successful oppositions of recent years is that of the suburbs and peripheral France, or that of immigrants who oppose the “little whites”. The “yellow vests” were there, so was the geographer Christophe Guilluy, and the success of the national demonstration finally validated this theory. On the left, François Ruffin attacks Jean-Luc Mélenchon because he abandoned “the France of cities”On the right, Republican leaders have long embraced this opposition, denouncing the “suburban billions”.
We are of course reminded of the 2011 Terra Nova article “Left: what electoral majority for 2012?”, often used to characterise Mélenchon’s electoral strategy. At the time of its publication, it was clear from this work that social-democratic intellectuals were abandoning the world of work to theorise the alliance of women, youth and minorities, according to the model that had been so successful in the American Democratic Party in the 1990s. An ex post rationalisation? Lionel Jospin won 11% of the workers’ vote in 2002. Or simply a change of perspective? After all, half of workers and employees are women, a good number of them are young and most minorities come from working-class backgrounds, particularly blue-collar workers.
Rather than grouping “workers” into one big bag, the Terra Nova article took another approach to addressing this population: no longer that of socio-professional categories, but that of personal characteristics, considering that being young, female and/or an immigrant sometimes more effectively described the outsider, or even subordinate, status of those involved. The real break came with Marxist analysis, which reduced individuals to their socio-economic position, not to the electoral goals of the left.
Same type of forgery
This error in the analysis of the Terra Nova note is interesting, because it is the same kind of falsification that is at play in the construction of the opposition “cities versus towers”. Let us leave the order of the discourse and look at reality. In fact, we see something completely different from an opposition between suburbs and sub-prefectures, whites and dark-skinned people. The most fragile categories all have the same problems: too low purchasing power in times of inflation, excessive and flagrant unemployment when we look at the issue from the point of view of social stratification, greater exposure to the consequences of climate change, which will become increasingly worse. The deindustrialisation that François Ruffin so appreciates has affected small towns, mining and industrial areas in the East and North, as well as the former industrial suburbs of large cities. The share of workers has melted away. And among these workers, there were French people of long extraction, like many recent immigrants.
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