For left-wing voters who follow the social and ecological program of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it is painful to have to compose with its positions on Russian power, on Syria or its silences on the fate of the Uighurs in China
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Analysis. In 1936, a writer signed a magnificent letter, which held a place of honor in the archives of lucidity. The libertarian activist Victor Serge (1890-1947) is addressed to André Gide, traveling companion of the French Communist Party. When he challenges the famous French author, Victor Serge barely releases Soviet jails. Born in Brussels in a modest family, he was of all fights. In 1919, he fighted alongside the Bolsheviks. Excluded from the party in 1928, then arrested, he knew the rigged trials, the camps, the climate of generalized denunciation, which he will describe in his novels, starting with if he is midnight in the century (1939), his leader -Aly.
He was released in 1936 thanks to an international campaign led by André Malraux, Romain Rolland and André Gide. The letter he later sends to the latter combines gratitude and franchise. He urges the author of terrestrial foods to break with blindness and recognize the immense crimes committed in the name of the communist ideal: “If I really understand you, dear André Gide, your courage has always been to live your eyes Open, he notes. You cannot close them today on this reality. “Thus, asks Victor Serge, can we pretend to fight fascism in Europe when we endorse mass purification in Russia? He warns: “We are facing fascism. How to block the road with so many concentration camps behind us?”
a painful paradox
With this letter, Victor Serge transmitted the torch of a tradition certainly minority but long prestigious among the progressives: that of an antitotalist and internationalist left which wanted to maintain living socialist hope despite the Soviet nightmare. This anti-user internationalism, which inherited the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment itself, affirmed a simple principle: one cannot claim to fight for emancipation here when one endorses oppression elsewhere. This principle has largely structured what is called “the left”, far beyond its only revolutionary fringes. Over time and through the tests (Spanish War, Colonial Conflicts, etc.), he was many times abused. Our era allows us to verify that it is now dead and buried.
Painous paradox: in France, the man who will have played the role of gravedigger is also the one which we could have expected to save this internationalist morality. Because finally, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, now all-powerful leader of the French lefts, been not trained at the Trotskyist school? Did he not read the texts of the Antistalinian dissidents, and in particular those of Victor Serge, what did his former Lambertist comrades liked? Has it not been imbued with the concern of the world that has always made the identity of this meager revolutionary troop? In theory, yes. In an interview published by the International and Strategic journal (n ° 100, 2015), he declared, moreover,: “I have always considered that geopolitics commanded politics.” But, precisely, if we take M. Mélenchon In the word, and if we admit that his geopolitics “commands” his policy, then it appears that it targets something other than an future of emancipation. The history of its positions, even recent, attests to it.
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