For those who lived through Richard Nixon’s lurch toward authoritarian rule, the period after his reelection in a landslide in November 1972 was frightening. (And it was a real landslide, with 60 percent of the vote.)

As French parliamentary elections pushed the leftist New Popular Front into first place, a pleasant sort of shock greeted revolutionary and progressive-minded people in France and around the world who had feared the triumph of the neofascist National Rally party.

It is important to see both Marx’s brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

France’s mass strikes have mobilized millions, persisting into a sixth day, in an attempt to forestall severe cuts to the social gains of the working class.