WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, UCL AL #371 - Culture - Read Michel Feher: Producers and Parasites, The Desirable Imaginary of the National Rally (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Published in late 2024 by La Découverte, Producers and Parasites aims to decipher the tension that structures the entire politics of the National Front (now the National Rally) and trace its origins. Philosopher Michel Feher offers us a popularization and a history of productivist thought, this social analysis that divides the world into honest workers who produce all the wealth and the "free riders" who enjoy it without contributing to the effort.

While the book is rich in clear and concise explanations of the doctrine it presents, it is even more so in the questions it raises, questions to which the libertarian communist movement could offer valuable answers. Thus, the book observes that all productivist political movements, both left and right, ultimately accept a racialist and patriarchal dimension in its structuring tension: the honest and conscientious worker is always reduced to the ideal of the good white family man.

Michel Feher seems to attribute this characteristic, in the case of Roosevelt's (left-wing) policies, to the specific atmosphere of America at that time. A more critical analysis might suggest that it is a direct result of the ambiguity surrounding the concept of work in capitalist society.

Furthermore, this productivist analysis also allows us to reflect on the evolution of the far right over the last fifty years. While Michel Feher himself provides a nuanced analysis of his contribution to the National Rally, we could extend this analysis to the entire sphere of the fascist far right. The producer-driven ideology, which Jean-Marie Le Pen struggled to master, and which, refined by his daughter, allowed the most rancid elements of the far right to escape the purely cultural dimension in which it had found itself trapped between the end of the Second World War and the early 1980s.

Fascist organizations have now become political by mobilizing a kind of class struggle, on monstrous proportions, that pits the working class against the "parasites" at both the bottom and the top.

Wendelin (UCL Alsace)

Michel Feher, Producers and Parasites: The Highly Desirable Imaginary of the National Rally, La Découverte, 2024, 270 pages, EUR16.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Michel-Feher-Producteurs-et-Parasites-L-imaginaire-si-desirable-du
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Source; A-infos-en@ainfos.ca