The mission of our generation

Patrice Bessac Mayor of Montreuil, president of Est Ensemble, member of the National Council of the PCF

Frantz Fanon wrote: “Each generation must, in relative opacity, face its mission: fulfill it or betray it. » The current system in crisis brutalizes the people. Climate change threatens everyone and everywhere. We are on a volcano. The countdown is on. Here as elsewhere, the system is ready to integrate the far right into its backup calculations. We face, like every generation, the disorders of the world, and only one question remains: to betray or to serve our mission.

These lines are written with the conviction that the climate and energy crises concentrate most of the challenges of war and peace, democracy, social justice and the habitability of the world. The task of the present generations is to open the way to the great civilizational leap which, by initiating the necessary transformations for the climate and the living, will necessarily engage human societies in a new future, a new framework of values ​​and cultural, economic and social. Climate and social justice are the inseparable pillars of the future. I write with the conviction that the service of France and of the highest human ideals calls French communists and the entire left to a new effort. I write with the ardent hope that my family, French Communism, will answer the call of duty. Here, in my eyes, are the four current fractures and the necessary bifurcations.

First fracture. We are not only in the Anthropocene, that is to say a geological epoch characterized by the advent of humans as the main force of geophysical change. We are in the capitalocene. The present disaster is the product of a social system that bears a name: capitalism. We have been living for a century in the monolithic framework of capital growth. This system notably produced a new cultural framework, mass consumerism. Our daily bread is delivered by an implacable publicity machine. The destruction of life is the standard mode of operation of capitalism.

Second fracture. We don’t have time to wait. Soothing speeches on raising awareness among young people do not mask our renunciations. Or exhausting it “everyone does it on their own scale”. Stop. The problem is much simpler: a program of governmental action must be written starting from the scale where the problems arise. We must in the short term of ten years plan the bifurcation of the system. And on this concrete scale, the problems of choice of investment, of orientations in matters of energy, of industry, become simpler and more obvious.

Third fracture. The era of individualism, the disqualification of collective effort is one of the victories of liberal capitalism. And one of our dead ends. And now millions of humans are individually imbued with their powerful originality, while producing and consuming the same ephemeral opinions, the same consumer goods, the same aggressiveness. This era is that of the anesthesia of collective forces and of show politics. There are no shortcuts. We must put an end to the media illusion. Without thought, without work, without training, in other words without political strategy, we are doomed to insignificance.

Fourth fracture. What is commonly called the left and environmentalists are doomed to unite. Or to perish. And with them hope. Unite to succeed. The solution is in this camp, and nowhere else. Mayor of Montreuil and president of a community of 400,000 inhabitants, we are united with all the political and civic left. A true, honest union is possible. If we really think that our world is in danger, then we must immediately create the conditions to continue the effort of unity begun with the legislative elections to, when the time comes, give France the government of all the social and ecological left. . The logic of confrontation must give way to the logic of inclusion. We must now bring together social resistance, prepare for the post-Macron period and even more so for the break with the era of capital.

Human history implacably destroys what does not serve the movement of social forces. A single choice has always been offered to women and men who have chosen to serve: to raise their thoughts and their actions to the highest level of general human interest. This is the raison d’etre of communists.