Sommier, Isabelle

Poles apart: Today’s radicals versus yesterday’s extremists - 2021.


83

The groups presented as radical today—and who often define themselves as such—are poles apart from, and sometimes in opposition to, the principles (belief in progress and promotion of work, perspective of the seizure of state power) and the means of action (determined by vertical mass organisations) that have accompanied the institutionalisation of the worker’s movement under the hegemony of Marxism. They are in sharp contrast with the post-1968 leftist groups. Their current upswing seems to close a historical period and open a new one with uncertain or even chaotic outlines.