Clémentine Autain: "It's time to be more offensive, the overhaul of public services is part of the engine for winning"

Your book is dedicated to promoting "public spirit." Is this a new political movement?

No, it's more of an idea, that of the necessary decommodification of society . My diagnosis is that today our needs are adapted to the productive apparatus to satisfy those of capital. In the process, a whole series of artificial needs are created with marketing and advertising . Under this regime, inequalities are widening, the planet and our desires are being damaged. We must do the opposite: adapt the productive apparatus to our needs.

This requires reviving the public spirit, a term by which I mean three things: a sharing economy that respects the planet , a strategic state, and a democratic requirement. This is how we will grow the common good and make the universality of rights and equality between individuals and between territories a reality.

Why the words “public spirit”?

Echoing the fair question posed by François Ruffin the day after the 2022 legislative elections on the difference in voting depending on the territories , I had an obsession: how to unite the working classes of the cities and the countryside? Improving public service seemed unifying to me. Whether we are in Sevran, Pamiers, Sauxillanges or elsewhere, the inhabitants tell us about the hospital which is in bad shape, the school which is suffering, the transport problems, the post office which is closing...

While working on the subject, I noticed that the fish was rotting from the head. The logic of the common good and public spirit had left the top of the State. A small caste had blurred the lines between public and private, suggested that the private sector was doing better than the public sector, and had privatized everything en masse....