At LFI and on the left, nostalgia for popular education

Ah! Popular education… Talking about it to the oldest executives of the left is to project them into a bygone golden age, where, between student unionism and training schools, the parties benefited from support and a breeding ground seemingly limitless in youth and beyond. ” It’s finish. It’s over “loose the former first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS) Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, in his time one of the main leaders of the Lambertist movement in the amphitheatres.

Of this long fertile system of relations between parties and student unions, often under the influence of the extreme left, there remains a last generation. She is no longer the one “October”, as the historian Benjamin Stora wrote in his memoirs, a former Trotskyist militant long fascinated – like his young comrades – by the October 1917 revolution. bring workers into the highest political positions. But some 30-somethings still come from youth movements and student unions, notably the neo-deputies William Martinet (La France insoumise, LFI, president of the UNEF from 2013 to 2016), Benjamin Lucas (Génération.s, president of the Young Socialists Movement of 2015 to 2018).

Others have made careers outside. And think about remobilizing the new generations, carried in struggles for the climate or the associative commitment but defiant vis-à-vis the commitment in the parties. Feminist activist Caroline De Haas, former secretary general of the UNEF, launched this summer the idea of ​​a training school for the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) in a grandstand published on the website of Mediapart. Mass training, free, to raise “the level of consciousness and political structuring”. In front of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the sidelines of the “amphis” of LFI, in Valence, she made a quick calculation: if each of the Nupes formations brings together 6,000 people in real and replay, 500,000 sympathizers could be formed from here 2027. Half a million committed citizens, for a campaign, is not nothing, and the “rebellious” leader was not insensitive to it.

Mélenchon, great teacher

But LFI has, for the moment, done nothing about this proposal for Nupes. On the contrary, it organizes its own training, its own school. Saturday, November 26, at the headquarters of the Independent Workers’ Party, the young people of LFI gathered for a weekend. Inevitable highlight: the explanation of the political text of the former socialist senator. After fifty years of commitment, Mr. Mélenchon is free for his role as a great teacher, he who has always preferred to speak in front of a disciplined audience than in the heckling of smoky lecture halls. Jean-Christophe Cambadélis “the goodbye[t] again in a coordination in Tolbiac, get out of his place and get booed. He scolded everyone. Three minutes standing on a table was not enough for him. »

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