We are living an age of clash in which one needs to pay more attention to the ground on which opposition is given rather than to the participating factions. The political identities – starting from the right/left and progressives/liberals divisions and so on – aren’t just a cover but old and misleading categories, unable to provide the meaniest tool for interpreting the present.
Two civil wars of variable intensity are ongoing in France. There is the one which is proposed by Marine Le Pen and by the party of order: a religious war (broadly speaking), an effect of the global war in which there is a hard work in order to contain the clash along the line of colour. The war that, in the end, the Front National and Daesh lead side by side, by jabbering on about values and unbelievers, by proposing a great return to imaginary communities and petty capitalism. It is the civil war of the attacks and of the ordinary – by now – State of Emergency.
But during the Hollande government there was so much more, too. It is the underground civil war, without either political representation or force of a project matching the current stakes, that sporadically appears in the reaction to police violence by the popular neighbourhoods, that turned into a gigantic movement last spring in order to oppose “socialist” will of exploiting living labour in an increasingly violent way, that emerges in the continuous blockades of high schools by (a small part of) mostly young people that decided to not bow their heads anymore.

The first one, on closer inspection, it is merely the umpeenth imperialist war, which is in this time played with an endo-colonial flavour, for assimilation and exploitation of migrant labour. The second one is played by the bottom against the upper class, trying to find again a vocabulary and a strenght of their own.

Macron and Le Pen. For now, the French elections do not tell us about the fall of a system, but of the radicalisation of a clash. The question remains always the same: is there any space to turn the imperialist war into the (“good”) civil war?