Portside

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 Éric 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.