EDITORIAL
France: To rebel is justified
Published Nov 29, 2007 12:20 AM
Just five days after a one-day strike of 5 million workers in France, another
rebellion by youth has rocked the suburbs of Paris. Reports indicate that these
youth have taken steps to better organize themselves than in the 2005
rebellion. According to reports in the corporate media and from the police, the
youth have weapons—which wasn’t true in 2005—and are using
them in a systematic way.
As in the previous rebellion, the spark that ignited this year’s
rebellion was the death of two teenagers. The cops say the youths ran their
motorbike into a police car; residents say that the officers fled the scene and
didn’t stop to assist the two youths. Within an hour of the incident,
young people had hit the streets.
Regardless of the incident, the rebellions are yet another explosion of the
powder keg of poverty, racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia, and constant
police harassment of youth in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities.
Workers World stands in solidarity with these youth, who are bravely taking a
stand against the violence they face in their lives on a daily basis.
In describing the 1992 rebellion in Los Angeles, the late Workers World Party
Chairperson Sam Marcy wrote at the time: “After every stage in the
struggle of the workers and oppressed people, there follows an ideological
struggle over what methods the masses should embrace to achieve their
liberation from imperialist monopoly capital. There are always those who abjure
violence while minimizing the initial use of violence by the ruling class.
...
“Marxism here again cuts through it all. The Marxist view of violence
flows from an altogether different concept. It first of all distinguishes
between the violence of the oppressors as against the responsive violence of
the masses. ...
“As Marx would put it, such a rising is a festival of the masses. The
incidental harm is far outweighed by the fact that it raises the level of the
struggle to a higher plateau. The wounds inflicted by the gendarmerie will be
healed. The lessons will be learned: that a spontaneous uprising has to be
supported with whatever means are available. ...
“Spontaneity as an element of social struggle must beget its own
opposite: leadership and organization. Consciousness of this will inevitably
grow.”
The French ruling class has opened an offensive against the entire working
class in the form of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s attack on workers’
pensions and other benefits. In the U.S., massive layoffs and social-benefit
cutbacks have always harmed Black, Latin@, women and all specially oppressed
workers most. The sub-prime mortgage crisis here disproportionately hurts the
most oppressed, as the massive list of foreclosures in Detroit, a mostly
African-American city, shows.
In France, too, the damage to the most oppressed is exacerbated when French
neo-fascists from the National Front and a right-wing president like
Sarkozy—who has used racist language to describe the poor of the
suburbs—attempt to divide the working class by scapegoating people from
other cultures, mainly non-European and Muslim immigrants, who may have lived
in France for three generations.
Will the working class in France, with its wonderful tradition of struggle that
includes the Paris Commune, the massive general strikes of 1936 and 1968, and
the anti-Nazi resistance, overcome the ruling class attempt to divide them by
religion or nationality or by level of organization?
The world is looking to see if organized labor in France will express its
solidarity with the oppressed youths of the impoverished suburbs fighting
racism and racist cops, just as it looks to see if organized workers here stand
in solidarity with immigrants under attack and with urban African-American
communities that rise up to fight police repression.
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