Simon Pearson

The People’s Tribune and the Sixth Republic

March 22, 2025

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Now, the People! Revolution in the 21st Century, published by Verso books, is a sweeping and urgent call for a citizens’ revolution, rooted in French republicanism but alive to the crises shaping political struggle across Europe and beyond.

***On Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s* *Now, the People!***

“Revolution is back. It seemed as if it had been buried… but after an initial wave of revolutions against authoritarian regimes… revolution is back with a vengeance, across the world.”

“We now have only a limited time to try and change course… For the first time since the earliest critiques of capitalism, the debate between reform and revolution has been rendered obsolete.”

Jean-Luc Mélenchon has always had a flair for the big statement. In Now, the People! Revolution in the 21st Century, his new work published by Verso books, and translated by David Broder (a regular translator for Verso), the long-time leader of La France insoumise sets out a sweeping case for what he calls “the age of the people”. It’s not a party manifesto, nor a collection of campaign pledges, but a call for a full-blown citizens’ revolution. The goal? A Sixth Republic, built on the ruins of the Fifth, and fit for an age of climate breakdown, digital surveillance, and deepening class rule.

He’s not new to this. A former minister who broke with the Socialist Party in disgust, Mélenchon has been carving out a new path for the French left for over a decade. Though he’s often lumped in with the likes of Corbyn or Podemos, Now, the People! reads less like a populist tract and more like a throwback to when politics still dared to be big. At times, it feels like early Marx rewritten for a century in crisis.

“A whole moneyed class,” Mélenchon writes, “has forgotten what happened almost a century ago, when its far-right guard dogs leapt up on the table and ate from its plates.”

Mélenchon is, without apology, a Marxist. But his attention isn’t fixed on the factory floor. The central idea here is that a new kind of collective subject is taking shape, not the old industrial proletariat, but a broader bloc made up of workers, renters, the underpaid and over-connected¹, bound together by ecological and economic crisis. He calls it “the people”. The enemy is the “oligarchy” not a secret cabal, but the dominant class stripped of even the pretence of democracy.

His gamble is that this people can become a force in motion, through protests, strikes, elections, and eventually a new constitutional order. He’s been building this in France, with some success. In Britain, of course, we had Corbyn, and we saw what happened when the Labour Party refused to back its own rupture with the centre.

“The citizens’ revolution is the expression of a society that is trying to unblock itself, to free itself from the straitjacket that stops it fulfilling the tasks of the day and satisfying its essential needs.”

There are moments in this book that will feel oddly familiar to readers of New Left Review, though Mélenchon writes with more urgency and far less chill. He’s closer in spirit to Raymond Williams than Perry Anderson – interested in how political change emerges from lived experience, not just historical patterns. His chapter on the “noosphere” – the shared mental space shaped by digital life – wanders, but it speaks to something real: that politics today is shaped as much by screens and logistics as by parliament or the press.

What sets Mélenchon apart is his insistence that power must be rethought. Not just won, but remade. In Britain, the state still wears the same clothes it did a century ago – monarchy (just), police, civil service mandarins. We haven’t had a new constitution; we’ve barely had a conversation about one. Mélenchon’s demand for a Sixth Republic is foreign in form, but not in substance.

“The Constituent Assembly for the Sixth Republic that I am talking about in France is not some technical arrangement to fine-tune the machinery of state. It is a revolution in the political order, in order to establish popular power.”

The Network Lords

Mélenchon writes about “networked capitalism” his way of describing how the economy now runs not just through factories and offices, but through cables, code, and the compulsions of digital life. This is capitalism that doesn’t clock off. It lives in your pocket. It mines your attention. It wraps itself around you like infrastructure.

No one embodies it more clearly than Elon Musk. Since buying Twitter (or X, as he insists), Musk has stripped it of any remaining pretence of neutrality, turning it into a megaphone for the American far right. Alongside Trump, he represents a new type of dominant class figure: less suited bureaucrat, more tech overlord, anarchic, authoritarian, and self-mythologising.

“The new global capitalist space–time fits into a smartphone. Capitalism has changed once again… Networking is the emergent property of our age. It is at the root of a far-reaching reorganisation of the productive apparatus as a whole.”

What’s happening in the US, the gutting of institutions, the rise of online disinformation, the elevation of billionaires as political saviours, is no aberration. It’s the logical endpoint of a system that no longer needs democracy to function.

“Access to the means of this circulation becomes crucial. Here we can see the capacity of network capitalism to draw on a new source of accumulation: the tribute levied on this right of access.”

Mélenchon doesn’t rail against technology itself, but against the private ownership of its nuts and bolts: the servers, the satellites, the platforms. His solution? Take the networks back. Make them public. Turn data into a commons. Shorten the working week. Reclaim time. It’s the kind of politics that dares to ask: what would it take to live well, rather than just survive?

The Revolution’s New Clothes

One of Mélenchon’s most compelling chapters is on the gilet jaune the hi-vis vest of the French protests and what it says about revolt today. It’s not about branding. It’s about visibility, about presence, about refusing to be ignored. The vest became a symbol not because it was chosen, but because it was there: the legal minimum, turned into a demand for more.

“The masses in movement do not act for ideological reasons or in the name of a party… The only dividing line they wanted to emphasise was the one between ‘them’ and ‘us’.”

These movements don’t look how the old left expects them to. They’re messy, improvised, often not fully formed. But they’re real. The British left has seen similar energy, the student protests, Occupy, the wave that built around Corbyn but too often it’s been allowed to fade. Mélenchon insists that these energies need form, not to tame them but to hold them.

“In many towns and villages, the citizens’ assembly on the Gilet Jaunes’s roundabouts behaved like a countersociety… it is a body that almost immediately begins to function as a counterpower – and to see itself as such.”

He argues that the battle now is not just in the workplace, but in the delivery depot, the food bank, over the benefits system, the credit score algorithm. The modern working class is fragmented, precarious, overloaded. But that doesn’t mean it’s powerless. It just means we need new ways to see it, and new ways to fight.

Blueprints and Frontiers

The final chapters stretch further out: into diplomacy, international solidarity, even space. Mélenchon calls for a break with the old global order, not in favour of nationalism, but for a new internationalism based on equality, ecology, and cooperation. It’s ambitious, and sometimes feels like a sketch more than a plan. But the impulse is right. The left can’t win by hunkering down. It has to look outward.

“The revolutionary strategy can be defined by the struggle to convene and hold a constituent assembly. This alone provides the democratic legitimacy that today’s revolutionary project needs in order to set out along a new path of ecological and social transformation.”

He even takes aim at the billionaire space race. Where Musk and Bezos dream of private planets and orbital escape routes, Mélenchon talks about reclaiming space for public good, as the next frontier not of conquest, but of cooperation. It sounds utopian. That’s because it is. But we could do with a bit more utopia.

“My optimism for action is designed to convince people of the need to look clearly at the obstacles ahead of us. Knowing that we are mortals encourages us to live life fully. Knowing that we are mortals encourages us to live life fully.”

Beyond the chapters covered here, Now, the People! also ranges across Mélenchon’s views on political education, media monopolies, secularism, and the slow work of constructing political will. Some of it is idiosyncratic, some feels very French, and there are diversions – on language, the press, the republic – that won’t travel as easily. But the aim is clear: to build a political subject capable of confronting capital, climate catastrophe, and collapse, armed with ideas and organisation.

In the end, Now, the People! is less a blueprint than a provocation. It asks what the left is for, and whether we’re serious about building the kind of world that could actually sustain life, liberty, and equality in the century ahead. It’s a French book, with French flourishes. But its questions are ours too. And its urgency is hard to ignore.

Book Review, Books, France

Footnotes

By “over-connected,” Mélenchon refers to those whose lives are constantly mediated and exploited through digital infrastructure, always online, but isolated, surveilled, and subjected to new forms of capitalist extraction. ↩︎