The enduring traditions of the French left
The disappearance of mass communist and socialist parties, along with the decline of radical left-wing politics in France over the past four decades, mirrors similar developments in many other European countries during the same period. These include the relegation of the ‘official’ Communist Party—following the end of Soviet financial support—to a marginalized, fringe political force; the Socialist Party’s shift into the neoliberal camp and its transformation into one of its principal agents; and the overall decline in union membership.
Similarly to most neighboring countries, these developments were rooted in a structural shift occurring at the very heart of the French economy and society. This evolution can be loosely summarized by the decline of traditional manufacturing and extractive industries, accompanied by the outsourcing of production to the Global South, and the subsequent closure of factories, mines, and warehouses. This has given rise to a new working class, constantly struggling to define its political identity and chart its own course.
But it is also clear that the lack of a strong, unified working-class force in France is not only a result of the aforementioned structural evolution. The tradition of the main historical left forces weighs ‘like a nightmare on the brains’ of the working classes in France. It can be argued that the destiny of those working classes—their political choices, the sterility of their political formations, and the wavering and wobbling of their electoral politics—was, to a large extent, shaped by three main traditions: official communism, official reformism, and Trotskyism. The third remained largely irrelevant until the advent of the 21st century; the first two were deeply character-forming in the history of French left-wing politics. Their influence on political thinking extends far beyond the original political formations in which they were born—namely, the PS (Parti Socialiste) and the PCF (Parti Communiste Français).
We will start by examining the structural shifts that occurred primarily over the past century, which ultimately split the traditional working class into an old and a new working class. We will then turn to the legacy of the historical Socialist and Communist parties and conclude by analyzing the case of the NPA (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste), which initially appeared to be breaking free from the pitfalls of traditional Trotskyist factionalism, only to succumb, more recently, to a devastating internal split.
The Disneyland economy and the French “industrial core”
Since the late 1960s, a great deal of ink has been spilled in France over the transition to the so-called ‘post-industrial society.’ This thesis has been endorsed—albeit to varying degrees—by many left-wing thinkers, who began to loosely base their ‘post-socialist’ strategies on it. The idea behind it seems fairly simple, and the empirical evidence supporting it is compelling: the service sector, following the Second World War, has overtaken both manufacturing and mining as the largest contributor to France’s national GDP, now accounting for approximately 70% of the total. This evolution has given birth to a new working-class layer, with its own sensitivities and interests, breaking the long-standing prominence of the traditional French working classes. The old bulwarks and centers of union-organized, Communist- or Socialist-aligned working-class populations disintegrated and crumbled within the span of just a few years.
The collapse of the French industrial heartlands in the North and the East can be accounted for in very simple terms. The rise of cheap Asian manufacture, alongside the advent of neoliberalism and globalisation all contributed to the decline of the traditional industrial centers in Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Alsace, where mining, textiles, steel, and mechanical industries were once predominant.
First, coal was facing enormous competition from other energy sources. Moreover, the exploitation of mines themselves was becoming increasingly unprofitable. The last coal mine was shut down in 1990. Second, from the 1970s onwards, steel and textile began to encounter similar issues, involving a lack of competitiveness, and the rise of the Asian market — particularly in clothing and textiles—which led to a massive campaign of factory closures.
Subsequently, this has led to the now-familiar phenomenon of ghost towns. Entire areas and neighbourhoods were outright abandoned, including parts of Paris, where a number of warehouses were converted into homes or residential buildings.
The resulting shift towards the service-based economy was highly peculiar. Not only did the service sector as a whole become the highest contributor to the GDP – making up 70 to 75 % of the total – but within the service sector itself, tourism and entertainment emerged as the most prevalent and profitable economic activities, owing in part to France’s extensive tourism infrastructure, rich historical heritage, and enduring popularity as a tourist destination.
In 2024, France generated a total of 71 billion euros in international tourism revenue. In 2023, the entertainment and media market was valued at 94.58 billion USD. The contribution of tourism alone to the French economy now surpasses that of manufacturing.
Ever since its inauguration in 1992, just a couple of years after the closure of the last coal mine, Disneyland Paris became one of the biggest levers of the French economy, creating approximately 100,000 jobs through both direct and indirect employment, and heralding a new era, in which tourism and entertainment emerged as the backbone of the whole national economy I.
The new economy has created an entirely new class of workers: unorganized, more precarious, and lacking a clear political identity. In contrast to the old working class, the new service workers typically earn lower wages and are often employed through short-term contract arrangements. The overwhelming majority of the new working class belongs to the younger generation and has no experience whatsoever in union or collective action.
Trade union membership has declined considerably over the years, reaching an all-time low, with only 10% of the workforce unionized today, compared to 30% in the 1970s. This is worth mentioning not because trade unionism is inherently the primary site of socialist activity, or because unions possess, independently of other forces and institutions, a revolutionary potential capable of transforming society in a post-capitalist direction. Rather, this decline is a clear symptom of the broader disorganisation and demobilisation that the working class has experienced in the wake of the destruction of France’s old industrial base. The service sector illustrates this most clearly, as it remains the least unionised and the least protected by collective bargaining
Politically speaking, the new working class is highly amorphous and malleable. It has few, if any, ties to – or sympathy for – the traditional parties of the establishment, including those on the left. This is not to say that the young working class is lacking in radicalism, rather, its radicalism tends to manifest through NGO activism, single-issue campaigns, and social media presence, etc.
The generational gap between the old and new working classes should not be underestimated either. Most young students and workers have never experienced the ‘glory days’ of the official Communist Party, the May ’68 student movement, or the Cold War. For many, socialism and communism are seen as little more than outdated ‘boomer ideologies’ from a bygone era.
Another determining factor in the political life of the new working class is the rise of identity politics, especially among university students. In many ways, it has thwarted any serious attempt at real working-class unity, diverting attention from the universalist message of socialism and fragmenting the movement along lines of race, gender, and immigration background.
The foregoing analysis should not lead us astray, however, as a strong industrial core remains at the heart of French society— although it contributes less to the annual GDP in proportion to the service sector. France’s weight in Europe has not declined, nor has its economy suffered along with the disintegration of its traditional industries. The French economy remains highly diversified, and the aforementioned “core” still plays an important role within it.
France still maintains major undertakings in several vital sectors, including arms, defense, energy, aerospace, and other high-tech industries. Its infrastructure is relatively modern, its workforce highly qualified, and its services encompass a wide range of high-end and luxury products.
Workers within the ‘industrial core’ are among the most unionised in the country. Nevertheless, even this segment of the workforce is highly atomised on the political level, with its loyalties scattered across the party spectrum—largely due to the recent political reconfiguration, which saw the collapse of many traditional parties and the rise of new ones
Before concluding this section, I would like to revisit the thesis of ‘post-industrial capitalism’ in light of the historical narrative just presented, in order to assess its merits and limitations.
The “post-industrial” chorus gained traction in France even earlier than its counterparts in other parts of the world, including the United States. In 1969, Alain Touraine published his La Société Post-Industrielle, exactly four years before Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Touraine’s problematic was quite distinct from Bell’s, as he was trying to account for the emergence of the New Left, as well as the events of May ‘68, rather than theorizing the rise of a new ruling class in the form of the so-called “knowledge class”, as Bell did.
Philosophers such as Antonio Negri and André Gorz can be included in this strain of thought, if only loosely, despite the sharp disagreements that separate them from Bell and Touraine. It is noteworthy that three out of the four influential authors mentioned lived and worked in France at some point in their lives.
The common themes shared by the various authors writing in the “post-industrial” tradition are numerous. The most notable are by now familiar: the centrality of knowledge within the production process, the primacy of “immaterial production,” the irrelevance of the old factory-line production, and so on. Their diagnoses regarding the transformation of the working class and its political affiliation are astonishingly similar, despite apparent differences. From Touraine’s new social movements and Bell’s “knowledge class” to Negri’s “multitudes” and Gorz’s disappearing proletariat, we witness a gradual disavowal of the traditional view of the working class as a revolutionary subject.
André Gorz’s view is more nuanced. Instead of beginning from the same prosaic platitudes about the “centrality of knowledge” and the predominance of the “service economy,” he examines the labour process itself, focusing on its underlying logic of productivity, mechanization, and alienation. His thesis is that this logic, along with the immense fragmentation of the labour process, inevitably leads to the dissolution of working-class identity—an identity once rooted in traditional industrial production. This, in turn, supposedly renders any socialist project in the old sense—including the workers’ self-management schemes so dear to many French socialists—largely meaningless II). Hence his programme of ‘exiting from work,’ centered on a universal income and a reduction in working hours.
The “post-industrial capitalism” thesis is far from being unanimously accepted by the mainstream left, and it has—rightly—been the target of vigorous criticism in France as well as in many other parts of the world. The traditional Marxist resistance to this thesis remains both warranted and necessary. For despite the relevance and reality of the transformations emphasized by the aforementioned authors, they do not render Marx’s Capital, his theory of value, or the revolutionary potential of the working classes obsolete.
The real value and the major lesson that should be assimilated from the empirical and theoretical insights of the “post-industrial” tradition in France – and elsewhere – is that the old working class, as it existed in the 19th and 20th century, with its distinct social features, is a thing of the past. It must be acknowledged that the transformations of the past half-century have rendered collective organisation significantly more complex and costly than it once was. However, the infamous, far-reaching conclusions that are usually drawn from this, regarding the never-ending quest for a “new revolutionary subject”, need to be avoided at all costs.
In the earlier era of factory-based production, workers were, by and large, subjected to the same forms of factory despotism. Despite all the ideological mystifications, exploitation and oppression remained plainly visible. Workers of that time clearly understood that cooperation and collective action against capital offered far greater advantages than any gains that might arise from individual competition. It is against this background that many passages of the Communist Manifesto should be read. Marx and Engels were not claiming that socialist consciousness would emerge mechanically from ‘material conditions’. Rather, they argued that the concentration of workers in the factory was decisive in uniting the working class against capital—constituting them as a class, organized in a political party.
This, of course, must be revised in light of today’s conditions—not in the direction of “post-industrialism,” but by acknowledging the existence of a fragmented and divided working class, composed largely of precarious and unorganised young people, as the starting point for any project aimed at building an independent, mass, socialist/communist party.
The legacy of the ‘official’ left parties
Now that we have laid bare the structural transformations of the economy, it is time to turn our attention to how various French political parties have sought to exploit both the rise of the new working class and the disillusionment of the remaining segments of the old working class with the established left-wing parties.
The French party landscape has undergone significant reshuffling, including the collapse of the traditional two-party system, following the crisis of representation and leadership that emerged in the lead-up to the 2017 elections.
Throughout the history of the French Fifth Republic, power was shared in a repetitive, cyclical, and predictable fashion between the centre-right—initially shaped by the Gaullist tradition but increasingly aligned with status quo, pro-European, and Atlanticist policies—and the centre-left, represented by the Socialist Party. But this picture was abruptly shattered in the 2010s.
The first symptom of this shift was the rise of the far-right Rassemblement National—originally known as the Front National—and its transformation into a permanent fixture in local, national, and European elections III.
The Socialist Party began its long descent into irrelevance around the same time, with its presidential candidate Benoît Hamon securing only 6% of the national vote in 2017—despite the party having held both executive and legislative power for five years. Just before the 2017 presidential election, a scandal led to the downfall of the centre-right Les Républicains candidate François Fillon, which prompted the French ruling class to place its faith in the young and charismatic representative of the banking sector, and new prophet of pro-business policies, Emmanuel Macron. Macron quickly mobilized a new political movement, which was soon transformed into a party—La République en Marche—in preparation for the legislative elections. The party drew in a mix of careerists, opportunists, and last-minute converts.
Another notable and remarkable milestone in this drawn-out refashioning of the political scene was without doubt the rise of Luc Melenchon’s Left Party, which participated in founding France Insoumise – a big tent gathering of various left forces – in 2017. In reality, France Insoumise is a left populist umbrella group of identitarian leftists and anti-neoliberal reformists who see Mitterand as the pinnacle of French “Socialism” IV
To their credit, Mélenchon and his party are among the very few on the left to grasp the crippling effects of the Fifth Republic’s constitution—which makes their call for the establishment of a Sixth Republic all the more laudable—the urgency of averting the looming ecological catastrophe, and the importance of recruiting younger generations and immigrants into a left party. Nevertheless, they remain unable to transcend the limitations and failures of the Socialist Party in the twentieth century. Decades later, they still raise the banners of tried-and-failed reformist Keynesianism.
But what exactly did the Socialist Party under Mitterrand stand for?
The Socialist Party is sometimes seen as a simple continuation of the old SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International). However, in reality, it was more than that. In the wake of WWII, the SFIO spent the last couple of decades of its existence trailing the Communist Party, which—supported by Moscow and buoyed by the high esteem and credit it had gained through its participation in the Resistance—routinely secured around a third of the vote. With the founding of the Socialist Party, however, Mitterrand not only managed to gather a myriad of leftist, non-communist political groups—either from within the now-defunct SFIO or positioned to its left—but, most importantly, succeeded in creating a political vehicle that would, in 1981, serve as his ticket to the realisation of his long-awaited dream: the presidency of France.
Of course, Mitterrand was not a convinced socialist, despite claims to the contrary. In his youth, he was aligned with rightist and Catholic anti-republicans. During the war years, he openly collaborated with Vichy and the Nazi occupiers. Soon enough, the Socialist Party was flooded with all sorts of careerists, like Mitterrand himself, who sought positions in a Socialist-Communist government.
The Socialist Party’s tenure during Mitterrand’s presidency is very telling, as it marked the complete moral and political bankruptcy of the so-called “social-democratic left” and, more significantly, the beginning of the end for post-war Keynesianism in the context of an increasingly globalized and deregulated neoliberal world economy.
In 1981, the new “socialist” government under Mitterrand sought to implement the programme commun—a reformist platform of nationalisations and stimulus policies—agreed upon by both the Communists and Socialists. Between 1981 and 1982, the government nationalised 36 banks and financial institutions, along with five major industrial groups. This was accompanied by increased public spending, new labour protection laws, and a higher legal minimum wage. The results of these policies, however, proved catastrophic: amidst a systematic campaign of capital flight and speculative attacks on the national currency—the franc—inflation soared, and the government was forced to intervene three times between 1981 and 1983 to devalue the franc, before finally abandoning its initial programme and imposing a series of new austerity measures starting from 1983 in what was known as the tournant de la rigeur.
This short experiment is often cited by many leftists, especially some Trotskyists, as a living proof of the impossibility of an “electoral transition to socialism”. But this misses the real point. The early reign of Mitterrand served to prove two important points.
First of all, it signaled the end of national Keynesianism as a plausible policy. The extreme capital mobility that emerged from the relaxation of global capital controls rendered most Keynesian-reformist measures moot. If capital was dissatisfied with a powerful trade-union movement or exceptionally high wages, it now had the luxury of moving abroad in search of higher profit rates.
The inability of the French government to implement its programme commun was not solely the result of large-scale capital outflows, but also of its explicit commitment to European integration. Membership in the EMS (European Monetary System)—the precursor to the euro—meant that France had limited room for manoeuvre and virtually no autonomy in its own monetary policy. Maintaining a fixed exchange rate between the franc and the German mark meant that the French government prioritised currency stability at all costs.
But most importantly, and in more general terms, the French experience of 1981–1983 exposed the inherent limitation of any “socialist” platform that confines itself to managing and reforming capitalism without transforming it in a post-capitalist direction. Given the modern separation between state and economy, the state remains dependent—whether it likes it or not—on the performance of capital accumulation for its own survival. When the “rules of the game” are left unchallenged, any party in power is ultimately compelled to betray the very people who elected it, in order to serve the imperatives of capital accumulation.
France Insoumise’s struggle is directed against the neo-liberal variant of capitalism, but not against capitalism itself. They refuse to learn from past mistakes. Their programme rests on a fully-fledged national Keynesianism, impossible to implement so long as France remains within the European Union and the globalized economy. On the other hand, taking this programme seriously, with all the isolationist logic it entails is neither possible nor necessary. It would be a far cry from the Eco-Socialism that Mélenchon envisages, which at any rate could only be international and global, given that the so-called “national road to socialism” is an impossibility.
The political tradition of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the 20th century was marked by two distinctive lines: first, a consistent defense of protectionism and the “national economy” against Atlanticist and pro-American policies, even though protectionism had already been denounced as reactionary by the Second International nearly a century earlier; and second, under Georges Marchais, a strong opposition to immigration, justified on the grounds that it threatened French workers’ wages and social cohesion. These positions, while articulated within a communist framework, left a paradoxical legacy. On the one hand, they fed into the contemporary left, notably France Insoumise, with its critique of globalization, the EU, and neoliberalism. On the other hand, they prepared fertile ground for the far right: the Rassemblement National now claims both the mantle of defending French sovereignty against international capital and of opposing immigration. It is thus unsurprising that many former PCF voters today find it natural to vote for the RN, which appears—however distortedly—to carry forward themes once central to the communist tradition.
From Post-Trotskyism Back to Trotskyism: The NPA’s Trajectory
The New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) was founded in 2009 under the leadership of Olivier Besancenot, following the relative success of his presidential campaigns in the early 2000s. It was conceived as an attempt to overcome the sectarian divisions that had long plagued the French far left, particularly among Trotskyist organisations, and to build a broader anti-capitalist formation capable of attracting militants outside of traditional revolutionary circles. The NPA explicitly sought to move beyond the confines of orthodox Trotskyism, positioning itself as an anti-capitalist, eco-socialist, and feminist party that could respond to the challenges of neoliberal globalization and inspire a new generation disillusioned with both social democracy and the radical right. At its foundation, the NPA attracted significant media attention and recruited thousands of members, raising hopes that a new mass party of the anti-capitalist left might emerge.
However, the project soon ran into the very difficulties it sought to avoid. The ambition to transcend sectarianism clashed with the persistence of ideological rigidity and entrenched habits of the Trotskyist current from which the NPA emerged. The party became internally divided into two irreconcilable wings: one more open to alliances and participation in broader social movements, and another clinging to a purist revolutionary line. In practice, this meant that the NPA was constantly paralyzed by internal disputes, unable to present a unified strategy or to develop into the type of mass party it had envisioned. The irony, of course, is that this pattern of internal division—culminating in what is technically a split within the organisation—is a recurring theme in the history of Trotskyist politics worldwide.
The shortcomings of the NPA’s political platform further deepened this crisis. While its founding documents proclaimed the necessity of transcending the capitalist state and economy, they offered little in the way of a concrete path forward. Instead of articulating a clear programme for transition beyond capitalism, the party’s electoral platforms often fell back on a familiar Trotskyist repertoire of transitional demands: radical reforms designed to expose the limits of capitalism but rarely presented in a manner that struck voters as either genuine or achievable. This created a serious credibility problem. To the broader public, the NPA’s programmes appeared neither here nor there—too radical to be implemented within the existing framework, yet too vague and half-hearted to be taken as a serious revolutionary alternative.
In electoral terms, this ambiguity proved fatal. The NPA consistently failed to build on Besancenot’s earlier popularity, and its results declined steadily, with the party reduced to marginal scores in presidential and legislative contests. Its insistence on remaining distinct from formations like France Insoumise meant that it often appeared isolated, unable to capitalise on the broader disillusionment with neoliberalism. While the party claimed to oppose capitalism itself, not merely neoliberalism, its inability to present a coherent strategy or inspiring vision left it sidelined by movements that, even if reformist, seemed more pragmatic and convincing to ordinary voters.
In the end, the NPA’s trajectory underscores the broader dilemmas of revolutionary left-wing politics in the contemporary era. The aspiration to found a mass, anti-capitalist party not confined to resisting neoliberalism was laudable in principle, and it attracted a layer of youth and activists frustrated with the compromises of the Socialist Party and the collapse of the Communist Party. Yet in practice, the NPA became trapped in the contradictions of its own tradition. Unable to break decisively with the transitional-programme logic of Trotskyism, yet equally unable to reinvent itself as a credible electoral or mass movement force, the NPA drifted into irrelevance, its divisions sapping its energies. In this sense, the NPA illustrates how the revolutionary left, unless it can resolve the tension between ideological purity and political effectiveness, risks perpetually repeating its own history in miniature: a cycle of hope, internal conflict, fragmentation, and eventual marginalisation.
In sum, the history of the French left is marked less by renewal than by the weight of inherited traditions. From the Socialist Party’s reformist dead-ends to the Communist Party’s national-protectionist and exclusionary legacies, to the Trotskyist milieu’s sectarian cycles, each current has bequeathed both insights and burdens. Their afterlives continue to shape contemporary movements—sometimes in paradoxical ways—yet the absence of a genuine break with these traditions leaves the French left trapped in repetition, haunted by its own past.
Mohamed ALSIBAI is a non affiliated socialist in Paris.
- These views were expounded primarily in Adieux au prolétariat (1980) and Métamorphoses du travail (1988).[↩]
- These views were expounded primarily in Adieux au prolétariat (1980) and Métamorphoses du travail (1988[↩]
- In 2014, Marine Le Pen’s party, then called Le Front National, secured around 24% of the seats allocated to France in the elections to the European Parliament, the largest share among all French parties. Le Pen reached the second round of presidential elections in 2017 and 2022, losing on both occasions to Emmanuel Macron. [↩]
- For more on Mélenchon praising Mitterrand in French see: https://www.marianne.net/politique/mitterrand-quand-melenchon-nostalgique-raconte-son-vieux?utm_source=chatgpt.com. [↩]