Macron-Le Pen: two sides of the same coin

Five years ago, in May 2017, we were reacting to the election for the second round of Macron and Le Pen. Macron, who for 5 years has favored his banker friends, castigated the « France from below », criminalized the yellow vests — mutilating them in the process -, who has further divided France in his « war » against Covid, and now sings with the sirens of the countries under the yoke of NATO in the Ukrainian war, will have nourished the hatred of the other and deepened the destruction in progress Thus feeding the extreme right. And then they would like to make us believe, thanks to their media spokesman, that they are profoundly different and thus do the « useful vote » trick again. 

The fact that in France a Rothschild-backed banker is vying for the throne with Marine Le Pen says a lot about European, or rather Western, decadence, which would leave us with no choice but between black and grey. Gandhi, a few hours before he was assassinated, had expressed that he no longer wanted to live in « this world that was plunging into darkness ». The height of darkness is to see the light in it and not to admit that you are lost in it. In the dramatic case of the French elections, it is even more disturbing, because it is the very darkness — Le Pen — that would illuminate the one that nothing illuminates — Macron.

By the grace of comparison, what would have been unacceptable in one context becomes tolerable in another. We no longer vote « for », we vote « against », is the current sophism. But will it be necessary to admit that by voting « against » one votes, whatever one does, « for »; that to give one’s favor to what would not be « extreme » makes us forget that the one we will plebiscite is also « extremist », in the sense that the philosopher Alain Deneault, whom we had met, gives: « Extremism in politics has wrongly been associated with the position of the cursor on the left-right axis. Whereas extremism, in the moral sense, refers much more to an attitude that consists in being intolerant to what is not oneself. The extreme center consists in being intolerant of anything that does not fit into this ultimately very narrow setting of the agenda of the oligarchic program. It is a center that has little to do with the left-right political axis, in the sense that it is a center that aims less at being on that axis than at abolishing it, and at presenting a vision of things as the only valid one⁽¹⁾. The extreme center is thus to tolerate nothing else than this discourse that arbitrarily presents itself as belonging to the center. This center that calls itself that because it will not say it is radical, destructive, imperialist, and violent in many aspects. But it presents itself instead as balanced, as pragmatic, as normal, as true, as fair, as balanced, as reasonable, as rational and so on. All these epithets, all these presumptions, all these claims, all these qualifiers, aim at making it seem obvious, and basically exclusive from the point of view of the right conduct of reason, a discourse that is in reality extremist, violent, cruel, destructive and blind, summed up in a few points: more money for the oligarchy, less rights for those who are not part of it « ⁽²⁾. Macron, of course, is no exception to this description: his policies are imperialist, destructive, racist, radically unequal in favoring the fortunes of the minority and deepening the divide between this minority oligarchy and a majority⁽³⁾ who can’t get enough of these extremist policies that exclude them.

But more than the duel that the media feeds us like geese in the Périgord, it is the normalized injunction to vote « good », therefore « against », that dominates the media jousts. The one who would be the most opposite of the system, out of the norm, will play the perfect role of the « evil that defines the good ». Because being supposedly less bad, Macron would immediately be better, and therefore good… We know however that taken in the absolute, that is to say without comparing him to the FN candidate, Emmanuel Macron is only a spectacle, that of the democratic pantomime, a valet of the powerful, Rothschild and his colleagues, who will articulate his arms and his head, like Hollande, to give him the direction to take: the one that will ensure the perpetuation of their enrichment, and of his own. It goes without saying that nature, equality, respect for the sovereignty of non-Western peoples, the fight against indecent wealth, tax havens, etc. will be deserted and unknown domains for the new straw man of big capital.

The one who said:  » We need young French people who want to become billionaires « He orchestrated, while he was a banker at Rothschild, the takeover of Pfizer’s infant formula business by Nestlé from Danone, in a deal valued at nine billion euros, a portion of which he will receive, and which will put him « in the clear for the rest of his life. As head of the State, he will continue to work for the same people — the bankers — who, like them and the big fortunes, will receive most of his income from capital and not from work, which he nevertheless overvalues (he has to make people believe that it is work that generates his income). It shows and will show a complete lack of interest in the question of the distribution of wealth, but also in what should be inescapable: the reduction of production and consumption, the only way to ensure the future of humanity on earth. One does not care much about the collective well-being and nature when one earns in 13 years 3.6 million euros (the equivalent of 23,000 euros per month), with a ceiling of 2.5 million euros in 2011 and 2012, or 105,000 euros per month⁽⁴⁾. When one is « scandalously rich », one indulges the scandalously poor… When one loves growth, one loves pollution, death, cancers, and the exploitation of the South.

ANTI-FASCISM: A CLASS WEAPON

The decadence has begun and we will only stop it by refusing to participate in the game, the one that remains because we accept its rules. Let’s not ask anymore to choose between the worst and the worst. Bourgeois bien-pensants, they do not dare to name the « France from below », the very one that is totally absent from the considerations of the political actors, except under the features of deception. Who is Macron the banker interested in when he talks about France? The billionaires or the working classes? And the heiress Marine Le Pen? To the people do you think? She doesn’t care about that and plays on the identity markers and the fears, suffering and perdition generated by globalization that she will work to continue as soon as she is in place. Except that the FN, a party that collects the votes of the disgusted, is the instrument of the political and media power that ensures that « their » candidate will pass, with their ideas, the same ones. It is their necessary enemy, the one they promote all the time, the scarecrow that makes people forget the real enemy that the oligarchy fights behind the FN: the working classes!  » Because the problem is that it is not the National Front that influences the working classes, but the opposite. The FN is only a symptom of the working classes’ radical refusal of the globalized model. The antifascist armchair approach is not aimed at the FN, but at the whole of the working classes, which should be fascized in order to delegitimize their diagnosis, a « diagnosis from below » that is called « populism ». This designation implies that the most modest people do not have the capacity to analyze the effects of globalization on daily life and that they are easily manipulated  » ⁽⁵⁾.

Macron-Le Pen, two sides of the same coin, a pairing generated by more than three decades of unbridled liberalism, deregulations, privatizations, sovereignty abandoned to a European Commission whose current president alone symbolizes the caste it serves. « Realists », so stop equating those who refuse to say we should vote Macron with Le Pen, or do so only if you agree to equate those who refuse to say we should vote Le Pen with Macron. Because the Le Pen and others are only the fruit of a long social break-up orchestrated in particular by the governmental left, which, with the right, had, once generated the « monster », well need of him to adorn itself with the virtue. Their virtue, however, is only the mask behind the vice, which is the same as that of their false enemy (the extreme right): racism, imperialism, oligarchy, social destruction. But now they are gargling, equating the « extreme lefts » that refuse to pronounce themselves on the « useful vote » to the « extreme right », sweeping away at the same time the ideas of sharing and equality that they often carry. As a result,  » As a real class weapon, anti-fascism is indeed of major interest. It confers a moral superiority on delegitimized elites by reducing any criticism of the effects of globalization to a fascist or racist drift « ⁽⁶⁾. While fighting supposedly against fascism, they are fighting above all for the benefits of unbridled globalization and the competition of all against all, from which they benefit above all.

En Marche, towards excess for the billionaires, the illusion of becoming one for the patient majority. En Marche towards the antifascism of the oligarchy, the anti-racist « resistance » of the elites, flatly followed by those it dominates. From  » Bernard-Henri Lévy to Pierre Bergé, from the media (controlled by multinationals), from the Medef to the CAC 40 companies, from Hollywood to Canal Plus, the whole of the dominant class is launching itself into armchair resistance « ⁽⁷⁾. This anti-fascism, a perpetual refrain born on the ashes of a fascism that it sanctifies by constantly summoning its risk of resurgence, contains however a much greater danger than that of seeing the unlikely return of the demons: that of not recognizing the fascism of the present system, that of the bankers and bosses, of the media that belong to them, of the CAC 40 and of the tax havens, which divide, impoverish and kill.

On the march towards growth, the one that destroys everything, and that, if we don’t stop it, will see nature take over and stop us.

At that moment, choosing between Macron and Le Pen will seem very derisory, and will leave us with the bitter taste that the alternative was elsewhere than where we wanted to see it.

Alexandre Penasse