The path and the goal: real democracy

From the depths of the country, from the trough of waves of suffering and difficulty, rises a dull anger, powerful movements of rejection of a system that plunders work, blocks futures, and fuels wars.

Listening to our fellow citizens means hearing the difficulty of living on low wages and poverty-level pensions when prices are rising for the fortunes of the big owners of shopping centers and real estate agencies. Listening to the country means hearing the cry of this single woman, now a grandmother, having worked hard all her life, forced to live on a pension of less than a thousand euros or this other constraint of going to the food distributions organized by the Secours Populaire Français…

Listening to the country is like being gripped by the story of a farmer who, having started working at 17, is offered a monthly pension of €565 at the age of 63. It is about measuring the difficulty this young working-class couple with two children has in finding accommodation with a monthly income of €2,650. It is about being moved to tears by the story of Joël and Françoise who are penniless on the 15th of the month even though they both work.

To listen is to hear the difficulty of finding a general practitioner, a dentist, an optician; to be caught up in territorial divides, to sense the worries about tomorrow of the younger generations. To listen is to perceive the extent of the destruction of public services so essential to an easier life.

Listening to our fellow citizens, workers, cashiers, teachers, doctors and caregivers, executives, working farmers, students, is to measure the weight of the precariousness of life and insecurities. Listening is to hear the weight of citizens worn down, despised, rejected, by the headquarters of ministries and the board of directors of business circles. We must hear their shrill cry coming from the depths of our cities and our countryside: listen to us at last!

None of us can accept that large companies are capturing, without control, 211 billion in direct public aid to relocate, reduce employment, and sacrifice training and essential technological innovations.

No one can accept that the wealth of the 500 richest people should multiply by 14, while the number of citizens living in poverty exceeds 11 million. The widening of the political divide mirrors the class divide: the rich are getting richer while the poorest continue to get poorer. And the media hodgepodge, served up during the organization of the Prime Minister's parachute jump spectacle, on the level of savings and the 9,000 billion in inheritances currently being passed on, will not change this reality much. On the contrary, they reinforce it.

Our fellow citizens, who are mobilizing in various ways, have understood this well. The cup is full.

The curtain of feelings of helplessness is being torn away. Movements for peace, against the genocide in Gaza, and against the sordid war against the Ukrainian people are gaining momentum. A petition collected more than two million signatures in the middle of summer, against the so-called "Duplomb" law of agrarian concentration, which would lead to a worsening food supply, has sent a signal.

The joint union statement against Bayrou's austerity plan, the popular movement of September 10th, the union action days of September 18th, and many others signal a renewed sense of unity. The stifling heat, the terrible fires now attacking homes and farms, combined with severe storms, have accelerated awareness of climate change.

More or less confusedly, a majority of our fellow citizens understand that it will not be enough to change the Prime Minister. It is the economic and institutional system that protects him that is at fault. The aspiration for a change of power for a change of policy is seeking a path.

A fundamental question is being posed again to the people and workers: to become sovereign in the places where they live and work. It is becoming unbearable that their votes, their "citizen power," continue to be diverted into permanent delegation to professionals in the exercise of power whose eyes are only fixed on the next election, while it is the future of the next generation that is at stake. The old clothes of presidentialism and a so-called parliamentary democracy concocted by the bourgeoisie in its sole service are so deliquescent that citizens tend to abandon them at the bottom of the wardrobe of a battered republic. The discredit of politics with its intrigues and scheming, its underhanded tricks and lies, its cartloads of vanished promises, its sound bites and petty ambitions reach the top of the disgust scale.

Designed to perpetuate the domination of the wealthy over society and work, the institutions of a dying Fifth Republic cultivate all the failings of the society of the spectacle, divert popular expectations, direct consumption and production, debates to manufacture opinions, stifle individual and progressive voices in the mainstream media, unlearn how to think and reason, standardize culture, cultivate the fields of war.

From this point of view, we would be wrong to underestimate what Bayrou has infused into society over the past two weeks, to the rapturous applause of a conniving mediacracy: the reform of state medical aid, the shameful accusations of "profiteering from the system" against retirees and those on social security, the supposed need to work more to earn less, the dishonest ideology that aims to make the debt pay off through work and not through big capital... Better still, he will have succeeded in making it clear that the Prime Minister is of little importance because it is the financial markets that determine France's policy. He did not hesitate to let it be said that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was going to put France under supervision, just as prefects, who look like police officers, do on duty in front of town halls that they are putting under supervision. Transforming himself into Dr. Diafoirus, the mayor of Pau solemnly declared in his farewell to Matignon that " France's vital prognosis was engaged." The country would therefore be on the brink of death. Ridiculous! Capital's agents hesitate at nothing: to instill fear, to organize panic to obtain submission. It was piquant to see all these political leaders who have held power for forty years parade to the podium of the National Assembly to denounce the evils they themselves have created.

This only reinforces the fundamental demand to build a real democracy , a popular democracy where the sovereign is not the financial institutions and big capital, but the citizens.

This means ceasing to constantly confuse the seizure of power at the top with the need for social, ecological, democratic, feminist, and anti-racist transformation, which is only possible through the united action of working people. Without this conscious, determined majority movement, there will be no progressive structural transformation.

Real democracy cannot be confused with electoralism . It calls for communist initiative, that is to say the establishment of collectives of the "common", collectives broadly open to all citizens, in places of life and to all employees in the workplace, up to national collectives to organize information, exchange, analysis, reflection and joint development for progressive changes at the pace decided by the citizens themselves. This is what is happening at the Fête de l'Humanité during hundreds of debates, discussions, meetings arranged to be included in the agendas of change.

This is what was attempted with the collectives of the New Popular Front. An organization that does not belong to self-proclaimed leaders, nor is inspired by "gas," nor by delegation of power, nor by televised bon mots, but allows for the collective self-organization of resistance to big capital, emancipation, solidarity, and assistance in the conquest of power over work, production, and monetary creation, an essential condition for human development and the preservation of life. Such collectives are already emerging in climate struggles, in the formation of cooperatives, in associative and solidarity movements, in municipal actions for food, housing, or health.

It is this real movement that is working to abolish capitalism, which is increasingly monopolizing the fruits of labor and nature, increasingly militarized, and which gives impetus to aspirations for justice, freedom, and peace, which alone is capable of transforming society. It calls for a democratic renewal. A necessary political renewal that seriously challenges the forces of social and ecological transformation so that they can get in tune with this movement that is groping and searching. This would give strength to a new project that would ward off catastrophe: the seizure of power by authoritarian and fascist forces, war, and possible ecological chaos. The Fête de l'Humanité this weekend will be the largest place for the exchange of information, analysis, reflection, and sharing of experiences and new ideas . It will be an immense center of culture and democracy.

This is the fundamental issue: real democracy is the path and the goal.