France: To rebel is justified

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.