Macron and the intermediary bodies: verticality as the school of social crisis

According to Le Monde, in a column published on 29 October 2026, Philippe Sabuco, president of the Télémaque collective, claims that, throughout his presidency, Emmanuel Macron has held the intermediary bodies in contempt. For him, social progress is not decreed from above: it is built through dialogue and negotiation. He calls for a break with verticality elevated into a principle of government. We have here only the summary of the column; we do not know which precise measures its author proposes.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The diagnosis hits home. A power that decides alone, governs by decree and treats unions, associations and local elected officials as mere extras manufactures anger on a production line. When the channels are shut, pressure seeks other outlets: blockades, revolts, abstention. The social crisis is not an accident of communication; it is the product of a method.

But look at where the column leads. "Dialogue" and "negotiation": these are the words of the remedy. Yet the Luxemburgist tradition warns us. Reforms wrested by organised workers count, but they are not the socialism that might accumulate drop by drop within capitalism. The ruling class takes back what it has conceded as soon as profits demand it. The useful question is therefore simple: does a measure strengthen the power and confidence of those at the bottom, or does it demobilise them? A "social partnership" that serves only to oil the machine fails that test.

This is where verticality does not stop at the palaces of the Republic. Intermediary bodies, when they shrink to approved interlocutors, can become the other floor of the same house: negotiations are held on behalf of workers, rarely with them. Rehabilitating the mediators without returning the word to the base is repainting the staircase without touching the lift.

Luxemburg saw in the mass strike a living school: one learns by acting, discovers one's strength, and overflows the pedantic schemes of the leadership. She observed that the reality of struggles does not respect the partitions between the economic and the political, nor the tidy plans of the directorates. Social rights were never the fruit of a polite round table; they were born of relations of force, and the table was laid only afterwards.

We can therefore credit Philippe Sabuco with naming the ill without following him all the way. Yes, contempt from above feeds the crisis. But the answer is not that the summit finally learn courtesy: it is that the base stop asking for an audience. A government that listens because it is compelled to is worth more than a hundred that listen out of virtue, for virtue, in politics, has always been a light sleeper.