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NEWS & LETTERS, February-March 2006The French 'riots' reconsideredMontpellier, France--The government and the media blame the riots in France alternately on "Islamic fundamentalists" and on "the dirty rabble" ("la canaille") spawn of "promiscuous polygamists," whom Interior Minister Sarkozy proposes to "scrub away with a high-pressure hose" (Karchèriser). The scrubbing takes the form of violent police sweeps that remind me of the anti-Algerian ratonnades ("rat-extermination expeditions") I witnessed as a student in Paris 50 years ago. The riots were provoked not just by deliberate racist taunts. They weren’t about Islam, although the media and the government here like to play it that way. Like the riots in the U.S. (from Harlem 1964 to LA 1992) they're about police brutality. They're about dead-end kids of Arab, African and West Indian descent, most of whom have never seen the inside of a mosque--or the inside of a factory. They're about the redundant "French" children of "immigrants" from France's colonies--imported as laborers and parked in barren projects with minimal services. The religious issue is a red herring. The problem, besides unemployment, is discrimination. There is no legal segregation here, but after 20 years in Montpellier I can't recall seeing a single Arab policeman, nor indeed any Arab civil servants behind plastic windows at post offices, railroad offices, state agencies. Nor are Arabs visible as on-camera news reporters or facing the public in business and shopping areas (except as security guards). There are apparently no Arabs in the National Assembly to speak for France's estimated six million (?) Arabs. (Since the Republic is officially color-blind no records are kept). France really is color-blind--in denial about seeing its own racism. Instead of facing up to an unbroken tradition of institutionalized anti-Arab racism dating from the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s, the French establishment conjures up the myth of dominant political Islam--only to submit to it by empowering the conservative Imams as the legitimate spokesman for the ghetto kids in the hope of restraining them! --Richard Greeman * * * Chicago--In a society that values commodities and private property over human life, the sons and daughters of North African immigrants respected their qualitative values (and the subjectivity of police brutality victims) by destroying what destroys us as a whole. It is true that we need more than just riots and other direct actions like looting, sabotage, and wildcat strikes to negate existing conditions and create more desirable ones. The French youth also are taking an important step forward by realizing their collective action has the power to effect existing conditions. To their credit, they have followed the patterns of autonomy that other poor Black rebellions and revolts against late capitalism such as Watts, the LA Rebellion, and Benton Harbor followed by refusing representation from leftist, religious, and nationalist partners. While we should avoid the ideological trap about the "clarity" of youth (anybody who has lived through adolescence knows how confusing it can get) proletarianized people everywhere have gut reactions against authority in all of its flavors. The Left in general has nothing relevant left to say to those who want freedom now. The 20th century saw the gradual retrogression of much of post-Marx Marxism into state capitalist dictatorships and parliamentary parties that replaced revolution with gradualism and bourgeois democracy. There are still anarchist currents that fetishize earlier responses to earlier forms of capitalism, such as anarcho-syndicalism, at the expense of rigorously analyzing the present. Perhaps the core problem of the Left has been that many leftists want to organize others instead of organizing themselves first. They see themselves abstractly and by extension see others as victims and/or potential recruits and/or constituencies within Power's terms and so on. They can't or refuse to see aspects of themselves in others. People throughout the French suburbs are communicating more now--whether they agree or disagree with the riots. Critics of riots tend to forget that they could open up more unfiltered public communication than passive acts like voting. --Ken Wong |
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