Ignacio Ramonet and the intellectual defeat of France's left

Ignacio Ramonet, director of the monthly, considers that "the left's latest failure [in the French presidential election] is primarily intellectual. It has failed - through inertia, loss of contact with grass roots or incompetence - to produce a new political theory for the construction of a fairer France, when all the social structures were in a state of upheaval after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalisation. The left lost the battle of ideas. It lost the battle in government, with wage freezes, factory closures, job cuts, destruction of industrial areas and privatisation of part of the public sector. It lost the battle when it undertook a task that was against its nature: to adapt France to globalisation and modernise it for the benefit of capital at the expense of the workforce."

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