The cover design of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2025) reminds me of the first hardback edition of Ralph Miliband’s Marxism and Politics (OUP, 1977), although there wasn’t as much red on that one. Just one red wedge in the Malevich style surrounded by pale and navy-blue opponents. Whereas Mélenchon’s blue squares float self-assuredly on a sea of red.

The comparison with Miliband’s book doesn’t end on the cover. A criticism often levelled at Miliband was his “undialectical” style of argument. The Miliband-Poulantzas debate of 1972 is famous for having stereotyped Miliband as something of an unreconstructed, outmoded thinker, antagonist of the French structuralist wave which was all the rage in Britain in the early seventies. In Marxism and Politics the approach is piecemeal, a patchwork of citations and references to Marxism’s pioneers, set against the author’s own contemporary revaluations.

This is similar to Mélenchon’s approach in Now, the People!, although his references, mostly to current affairs, UN reports and doom-laden environmental case studies (something of a personal obsession), aren’t remotely academic. Mélenchon makes no effort to engage with and certainly doesn’t patronize intellectuals in his grand appeal to The People. If he’s taking the intellectuals with him on the path to Revolution in the 21st Century, then either they’re coming on his terms or else they’re not coming at all.

Who are these “people”? Defining the word is one of the most fraught and disconcerting challenges of contemporary politics. In the Normandy dialect, peuple, the French word for “people”, is a peuplier: the “poplar tree” for hanging “strange fruit” in the southern breeze. In Balzac’s Adieu, the Countess Stephanie, traumatised and rendered insane by Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, cuts a branch from the “crown of a poplar tree” which the peasant girl Genevieve (also insane) uses “to chase away the flies and freshen the atmosphere for her sleeping companion.”

Like much of the European people, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France is traumatised, though not yet insane: just another run of the mill post-ideological Ponzi scheme gone horribly wrong. Obviously, when looking at the “alternatives” (spread out in the shape of a congressional fan made out of dog shit), Mélenchon and La France Insoumise represent the best hope there is of achieving a certain progressive left-of-centre government of the Fifth Republic (and Sixth if Mélenchon ever gets his way). To the extent that Now, the People! is able to help advance LFI’s manifesto, it will have served its frank, unpretentious and—in the nicest possible way—unremarkable purpose.

So buy, read and enjoy it. And in fact the book is rather thought-provoking, albeit not in the way Mélenchon intends. I have no axe to grind with the citizen, and if it turns out that he does, by some minor miracle, manage to turn the tide, then I will be one of the people waving poplar branches at his triumphant entry into Paris. My interest in Mélenchon relates to the Symptom, not the Cause, which is to say the car crash of French parliamentary capitalism that his illustrious person represents in 2025.

The first issue I have with this book aside from its grandiloquent prose—for most of its 274 pages it tries to be nothing less than a catastrophic epitaph for human civilization: seriously, did we all die already and not notice?—is its absent subject: matter, not person. I know who is speaking, how could I possibly forget? There’s no mistaking his master’s voice. The way Mélenchon writes is like the way he speaks, often for hours on end, at rallies or on social media (this seems to have changed lately, or maybe I’m misremembering those YouTube videos of his, which seem to have disappeared from his channel). He may be a charismatic orator, but before opening his mouth Mélenchon might have considered Marshall McLuhan’s thesis that the medium is the message. With JLM the message is the medium, his message, leaving the question of what we think, or indeed who we, “the people”, are, somewhat taken for granted, ill-defined or enigmatic.

This question won’t go away. Take chapter 5, “Our Involuntary Servitude” and its subheading “A spell over humans’ social existence,” where Mélenchon remarks that commodity fetishism is both an objective social fact of class society and a categorical imperative: “For me, the specific political responsibility of the world of production cannot erase the responsibility of the enthusiastic voluntary servitude of human beings as consumers …” (p. 86). No doubt FNAC and Carrefour will be delighted to hear it.

A conversation my friend and I have been having since I picked up Mélenchon’s book concerns not so much whether or not a Marxist concept of “people” exists, but whether any such concept exists at all. On reflection I think the second possibility is exaggerating slightly, as long as we limit the conversation to democratic politics and don’t drift off into political philosophy. On this latter subject we could readily cite Agamben’s “community of forms-of-life” or Badiou’s “idea of communism,” according to which any collective “ensemble,” any totality (“people” might be one of any number of historical signifiers) is woven together from an indifferent multiplicity of bodies (for Badiou, it might be said that anyone can be communist, meaning anyone can take part in an egalitarian political sequence, providing they’re in the right place at the right time: or perhaps the wrong place at the wrong time).

Mélenchon goes to great pains to distance himself from any hint of Marx and Marxism(s), although he doesn’t deny that class exists. Or, rather, that class did exist, was created through the division of labour, which gave rise to class struggle on a global scale, but which has ultimately moved on to “the new age of capitalism,” “the world of networks,” which “have a massive impact on the conditions of the ecosystem” (p. 149). Mélenchon has more euphemisms up his sleeve than Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, “networks” and “ecosystem” being two of his favourites. Listen to him here:

In a way, networks reformulate the class struggle by extending it to every aspect of daily life … Far from erasing this struggle or leaving it behind, they root it in more people’s everyday experience… This is because new cohorts not integrated into the world of salaried work are entering the battle over networks: people ranging from students to artisans, pensioners to the unemployed. They stand opposed to the masters of the core networks, the new oligarchy made up of the collectors of user fees. Networks can be the key to extracting profit or the basis for meeting our collective needs, but never both at once. One logic or the other must prevail. (p. 149)

Where to begin with all this? Like a labourer who thinks he needs two job descriptions to walk and push a wheelbarrow at the same time, Mélenchon is asking us to believe that one can’t be both student, artisan, pensioner or unemployed and a class subject as well. As for his commitment to the people, it’s a discursive strategy for countering his opponents’ accusations of Marxism and communism. He needn’t have bothered; it hasn’t remotely worked. One wonders why he doesn’t simply accept the epithet, even if it isn’t true, which it no longer is, in order to defuse this manufactured controversy: “I’m a communist and you’re a fascist. So what?”

The idea that “people” and “citizens” could ever be taken as an adequate description of a society shaped by glaring class inequality is a criticism that Mélenchon is alert to. The problem, however, is that his definition of class struggle is so impoverished as to present nothing but a Dickensian parody of social injustice and economic exploitation. Is Mélenchon seriously saying, in the long extract I’ve just quoted, that because “the masters of the core networks, the new oligarchy” dominate “the people” and “our collective needs,” class struggle has been extended to “every aspect of daily life”? It’s a staggering thought, utterly ludicrous obviously, although I’m grateful to the author for underlining the stupidity of the “famous formulation” of the 99%, which the book’s translator attributes to David Graeber (p. xviii). 1% of the world owns 41% of its wealth, ergo the class struggle has been “extended.”

People are strange, that’s for sure. What mysterious and immaterial forces of repulsion and attraction, as Newton would have put it, what spooky “action at a distance” could possibly explain our voluntary servitude at the hands of the oligarchs? Dorothy Gale experiences something akin to this intangible alienation, this profound unease, that something kooky and at the same time fundamentally unfair is being orchestrated behind the scenes, when she goes off in search of the Wizard of Oz. And yet when she finally gets to meet him, she realises that there was nothing untoward going on. Quite the reverse, in fact: the spectacle of her alienation was created for her. Dorothy’s exile to Oz was a benign ploy to have her realise that the answers to her problems were there waiting to be discovered in her heart all along.

The political equivalent of tragic recognition is given famously in the International’s edict that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. Why waste time and energy admonishing the Wizard when he’s nothing but a frail old man whose imperiousness is simply the effect—the mirror image—of the fear he induces in his subjects and the knee-jerk contempt in which he’s held as a result? Grandiloquent denunciations of the oligarchy may bring about a certain regenerative effect, a sudden feelgood factor. Apart from that they’re a political dead end.

But this is the cul-de-sac that Mélenchon has entered into, along with countless others on the left. One detects the same symptomatic admonishment, the same projection, whenever “the people” is conjured up in political discourse. It’s centre stage throughout the English Civil War (the people’s war is waged between Royalist and Republican literatures as much as between subjects and citizens) in Salmasius’s diatribes against “the dregs of the people” and “the wickedest rabble.” It’s in Milton, too, who strives in both his poetry and political writings to be the champion of “the real people” and God’s “chosen people,” even if he also scathingly criticises “the dregs of the populace” and “the blind superstitions of the mobs.”

Mélenchon’s historical point of reference for “people” and “citizens” is the Jacobins. However, theirs is a long tradition which extends from the French Revolution of 1789 and survives, greatly diminished yet still intact, up until the Paris Commune of 1871. Although Mélenchon identifies himself with the inauguration of this historical sequence and the triumphant establishment of the First Republic of 1792—one which he endeavours to appropriate as a rallying point for all of France’s contemporary ills—the truth is he’s much closer in his political orientation to the Second Republic of 1848-1852, which succeeded the February revolution and the overthrow of the Citizen King Louis-Philippe (the day after the Communist Manifesto had rolled off the press on 21 February) and ended with the establishment of the Second Empire exactly one year after Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851.

This is the sequence Mélenchon should really be thinking about. For in that conjuncture class struggle had finally begun to drive a coach and horses through all the patriotic illusions that had hitherto held the French nation together. Nothing in the politics of the Second Republic was able to keep the reality of class struggle and the bourgeois political economy from dismantling France’s hard-fought liberté, égalité et fraternité. No appeals to patriotism, to the Universal Rights of Man and of the Citizen, not even fairy tales of the spectre of communism variety would do the trick, however hard radical republicanism tried.

One particular try-hard of the doomed Second Republic was the Jacobin deputy Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, who made his name as a leading member of France’s provisional government of 1848, but would soon besmirch it by joining the five-man Executive Committee, which oversaw the June days massacre of three thousand Parisian insurgents.

Reading any of Ledru-Rollin’s political speeches the similarities with Mélenchon’s petit-bourgeois thinking are obvious. Here he is speaking in 1841 to the Electors of Sarthe:

For our fathers, the people meant the whole nation, in which each man had an equal share in political rights, just as God has given him an equal share in the air and sunlight. Today, “the people” means a herd led by a few privileged persons like you and me, gentlemen, who are called electors, and then by some even more privileged persons who are dignified with the title of deputies.

Now apply this abstract Jacobin universalism to the politics of the 21st century and marvel at how French deputies and European MEPs (those other useful idiots who could bore you to death with their Universal Human Rights speeches in the European Parliament) are miraculously transformed into “privileged persons”: the modern-day 1%, the millionaires, the billionaires, the Masters of the Universe, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But long live the ecosystem! and pray to God we can get back “an equal share in the air and sunlight.”

On 13 June 1849 Ledru-Rollin and other members of the left parliamentary opposition (the so-called “Mountain”) would march in protest at Bonaparte’s decision to invade Rome, alleging that the French constitution forbade such foreign interventions. In the event Bonaparte’s imperial adventure served as a pretext to crack down on domestic opposition to his presidency. Ledru-Rollin’s spirited “defence of the constitution” might well have been the inspiration for Mélenchon’s more recent marching up and down the boulevards of Paris, decked out in his masonic regalia, warning the people that this time Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal dictatorship has really overstepped the mark, with its fuel tax hike, pension reforms, police brutality, the stolen election, etc.

It’s unlikely that Mélenchon, who is certainly the inheritor of Ledru-Rollin’s dynastic left or “Mountain” party, will end up fleeing into exile, as Ledru-Rollin did following the aborted insurrection of June 1849. Having said that, however, and with so many little Napoleons on the loose nowadays, stranger things have happened. When Ledru-Rollin ran out of political options in France he retreated to the “perfidious Albion,” where along with Giuseppe Mazzini and Lajos Kossuth he founded the Revolutionary Committee of Europe (I wonder who Mazzini and Kossuth would be to Jean-Luc’s Ledru-Rollin—any ideas?).

I can’t imagine Mélenchon aping such a move, mainly because truth-seeking dialogue, not to mention power sharing, isn’t one of his fortes. But the people are the main problem, or rather Mélenchon’s, in the sense that he cannot countenance a future in which people voluntarily decide, whether through their own “servitude” or other contingent set of circumstances, to give up on “the emergence of a single human people” (p. 229). One might do well to shatter those illusions.

Featured image: Front covers of Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, by Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Verso, 2025), and of the Spanish edition of the same book by Fondo de Cultura Económica. Cortesía de Jean-Luc Mélenchon le blog

Jason Barker