Labels have shattered. Logos, banners, and flags mean very little today. Who is who? Who thinks what? Who will or will not do what they were elected to do? Left-wing? Right-wing? “Both left and right”? And hungry for glory and power?
Two underlying lines form the basis of our deep divergences.
The first is an irreparable divide between those who accept and those who oppose unrestrained economic liberalism, resulting in deregulated capitalism, a relentless pursuit of profit, greed, excessive consumption in a morbid process leading us to our own downfall by consuming our fundamental resources ever more rapidly. Financial and commercial globalization, neo-colonialism, outsourcing, pollution, exploitation of nature and man by man—this liberalism is one of the root causes of social crises and environmental disasters.
The second is a dividing line between those who give up and those who refuse to compromise on our freedoms and fundamental rights. Everywhere, identity withdrawal, taking advantage of the terrorist threat and the fear of violent death, revives the security approach of relinquishing certain freedoms under the pretense of combating those who seek to destroy our freedoms. Cultural differentialism, the return of xenophobic assimilationism, the persistence of anti-Semitism and the rise of Islamophobia, the rejection of the “other” under the guise of a national narrative, the rejection of migrants, and the penalization of solidarity, populism and demagoguery, the return of order, authority, and the cult of leadership—all of this forms a very tempting whole, feeding off collective anxieties and pushing us to believe in a difference in nature between “us” and “them,” making us forget that, as all humans, we are only self-destructing.
To reject unbridled liberalism and its social and environmental damage is to establish an ideological line based both on a thought of social equality and on ecological thinking. Whether called social ecology, political ecology, or ecosocialism, it matters little.
Fighting against identity and xenophobic withdrawal is to reaffirm the equal dignity of human beings, the universality of rights, and humanism.
We can lose ourselves in endless terminological debates, but the foundations are there and impose themselves upon us. Ecosocialism and humanism are two facets of the same guiding principle that must lead us through the turmoils of our political consciences and the troubles of the moment.
by David Nakache, President of the association “Tous citoyens!”
