The leader of the Socialist Party deputies is preparing to release a new book on Friday. He, who also has presidential ambitions, intends to move away from market logics.
Another publication. The books of presidential candidates or potential candidates flood the bookstores. On Friday, the leader of the socialist deputies, Boris Vallaud, will release “Nos vies ne sont pas des marchandises” (Seuil). He initiates the debate on “the commodification” of society, a theme that he presents as a subject of reconquest for the left in the presidential context.
This is a topic that the deputy from Landes had already highlighted at the last congress of the Socialist Party in May 2025. Leading the internal rebellion against the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, and accusing the party leadership of not producing ideas, he wants to weigh in on the presidential debate with this concept, which aims to remove certain sectors of activity or common goods from the market.
“The world has become a huge store, everything is for sale, from birth to death,” he decrypts on France Inter this Thursday. He also details water, land, health, education, culture, sports, public services, even “our free time, our personal data, our bodies, our private lives are for sale,” he laments.
Putting limits on the market
He believes that the left now “needs a rallying cry. Commodification can play this role,” he specifies in the weekly Le Nouvel Obs. “A number of social democratic tools have reached their limits, have run out of steam, and now we need to set limits on the market and even take out of the market what we consider essential in life,” affirmed the one who called on Saturday in a column for a “credible and mobilizing project,” without primaries or Insoumis. An ambition supported notably by Raphaël Glucksmann, the head of Place publique, and the Green senator, Yannick Jadot.
However, de-commodifying is not “a return to centralizing statism or a nostalgia for administered economy. The goal is not to abolish the market but to put it back in its place,” he writes. “This can also involve nationalizations, but I am not proposing the nationalization of everything, there are other tools,” he specifies.
