In France, Houria Boutelja is considered the preeminent representative of “Islamic leftism”. In this disparaging if rather oxymoronic way a section of the French press describes the most radical wing of the decolonial movement in France, although it is abundantly clear that its positions have more to do with the anti-capitalist Left and militant anti-racism than with any conservative version Islamic theology.
Boutelja recently released a new book in France in La Fabrique publications. Its title is “Le Beaufs et les Barbares. Le pari de nous’ and alludes to the central question posed by the book: whether, that is, there can be a ‘we’ that includes on the one hand the ‘Beaufs’, that hard-to-translate French idiom that refers disparagingly to the poor white French , the audience par excellence of the Far Right, and the “Barbarians”, i.e. all those who do not belong to the “white” nation and come from the routes of immigration and colonialism.
Buthelja insists that racism is an organic aspect of state formation in modernity. He considers that what Gramsci describes as the bourgeois “integrated state” is at the same time a “racialized” state from the start. This means that the various variants of “social contract” that this state represented contained from the outset the effects of racism and colonialism in the way they attempted to shape a form of hegemony over subordinate classes, at least those within the boundaries of the nation.
The French contradiction
Boutelja’s thinking is largely focused on France. This makes sense if we consider that it is the country that is historically permeated by the contradiction of being, on the one hand, the archetype of democratic “republican” formation and formation of a conception of the nation as a political community, and on the other hand, having a history of colonialism, aspects of which survive in its internal and external policy. This shows that racism and colonialist logic were not the exception, but rather the norm in the historical formation of modernity.
For Buteltza, this was also reflected in how the Left itself was affected by this development. It thus refers to how the French Communist Party gradually moved away from its original internationalist position and adopted a conception of the “unity of the nation” that blinded itself to colonial practices and logics, culminating in swings towards the national liberation movement in Algeria.
However, Buteltza is not only interested in history but mainly in the present. What interests her is whether two parts of society with an apparently antagonistic position can meet. On the one hand, the “little whites”, insecure, increasingly poor, angry with “official anti-racism” and ready to follow conspiracy theories, i.e. the audience par excellence of the Far Right. On the other hand, the “natives”, the world of the French suburbs, the multiple targeted victims of racist policies. She considers that a dynamic of such an encounter was recorded in a way in the period around the great mobilizations of the “Yellow Vests”, where both the poor “white” strata and the victims of racism seemed to unite in a common mood of rage. But it did not translate politically, as the suburbs and the “natives” may have voted en masse for the Left as expressed by Mélenchon, however a significant part of the poor voted for Le Pen’s National Alarm.
Understanding Fury
But how can this meeting come about? Boutelja believes that the common ground is the way in which all these strata are currently subject to a devaluing condition that actually brings them closer objectively juxtaposes them in modern state policies. But this goes through an understanding of the very reasons for the outrage, including how “poor whites” feel victimized today. It also means understanding the reasons these pieces may be pushing either to the apparent security of the nation, or to a version of “identity,” or even to various variations of “masculinity.”
Not to justify nationalist, racist or sexist views, but to seek the terms of transformation of the anger or resentment that accumulates. And it is this demand for a deeper understanding and recognition that contains the possibility of overcoming seemingly antagonistic oppositions in the struggle for a new “historical block” of the subordinate classes. With the horizon of a meeting that will choose for common history not some national mythology, but all those who fought for emancipation from all oppression.
The break with the EU
One of Boutelja’s most interesting and “provocative” positions is that she believes that the break with the European Union can be a meeting point for “poor whites” and “barbarians”. Contrary to the tendency, post-Brexit, to consider a demand “nationalist” or “reactionary”, Boutelja insists that she can once again give an emancipatory content to a demand for “popular sovereignty” in which, even from different starting points, converge pieces to which it refers.
