Racism, riots and anticapitalism. posted by Richard Seymour

France was aflame again last night, and the rioting spread to hitherto untouched regions. To hear "French business leaders" tell it, they can no more understand it than they can predict its destructive path through industrial estates. We do much to help these people, one such person told the BBC. I don't suppose I'm alone in thinking that the philanthropy of the rich merits a considerably harsher reaction than mere rioting, but leave that to one side. The reactionary French government's version is that there is "gangrene" and "scum" that needs to be washed off the streets - that's Sarkozy-speak for getting tough on the dusky skinned Muslims. And, of course, the Le Peniste discourse bubbles away under the surface, and not just in France where 20% of the population voted for the FN. The racist narrative is that the sight of insurgent Muslims really confirms that these different cultures can't subsist together - and since 'us whites' got here first, they'll just have to retreat back to the ex-colony and seek poverty wages at one of our sweatshops or ramshackle mines.

In fact, ominous connections are already being drawn between this and the Birmingham riots. Some American blogs are already creaming their pants about 'Eurabia'. They could hardly be more happy if bin Laden himself claimed responsibility for the riots: "As you bomb, so shall you be bombed; as you kill, so shall you be killed; ooooh, almost forgot, we directed the Blessed Operation against the carpet factory in Aulnay-sous-Bois. Call it carpet-bombing." The racists are already foaming from every orifice and their unwitting ideological alibis are mouthing off about Islamic extremism.


Sarkozy's early retirement vehicle.

Let's just get a few things straight, then. The proximate cause of this revolt is the deaths of two young boys, who were fleeing police on a suburban council estate on Thursday 27th October. These boys, contrary to early claims made by grubby politicians, were not guilty of misbehaviour of any kind. They were not even behaving suspiciously - although, to be fair, in Britain that can earn you a destroyed brain, instantly utterly. Three boys returning from a football match were kicking a ball around, and were chased by police. Desperate to escape, they climbed a three-metre-high wall surrounding an electricity plant: two were burned to death on the electrified barbed wire; one is still in hospital. Residents of these neighbourhoods, where poverty and unemployment is astronomically high, complain of frequent and arbitrary police violence. Le Monde reported earlier this year that “2004 was marked by an 18.5 percent increase in complaints of illegal police violence.” Outrage was compounded on Sunday 29th October when "a tear gas canister was hurled into a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois, apparently by riot police. Hundreds of worshippers fled into the street in panic."

Now, you might want to ask why some people think that this is connected to the Birmingham riots, where the riots erupted over allegations of the gang-rape of a Jamaican girl by 'Asians'. In one case, suspicious deaths involving a notoriously violent and armed French police, cause unrest. In the other, rumours provided the spark to simmering tensions among some and between some people of 'both communities' to cause a conflagration.

Both, you could argue, have something to do with poverty, unemployment and the ethnicisation of what New Labour like to call 'social exclusion'. Both could have some relationship to the segregationist housing policies of local authorities. But the connection, inevitably, is supposed to be between violence on the part of non-whites. News reports offer the suggestive phrases "Islamic assertiveness" which shades easily into the more sinister connotive phrase "Islamic militancy". Regardless of context and cause, the implicit assumption is that 'these people' just can't help it. It is the latest emergence of the 'cultural aversion' theory that 'anti-racist' racists like to purvey, and which Nick Griffin of the BNP has effortlessly adopted as a public version of the BNP's neo-fascist ideology. It isn't new: the argument of many Serbian warmongers during the assailing of Bosnia was that Serbs could not live with Muslims and Croats, that it would inevitably lead to bloodshed. It should not be a surprise that those most willing to deploy that kind of argument are often those most willing to deploy or support or take quiet satisfaction in that kind of bloodshed.


Abolishing the ghettos.

I mentioned Le Pen and his election successes, not to mention the growing racist reaction, (particularly pungent among the rural middle class), but it is important not to miss the other side of polarisation in France. Le Colonel Chabert links to an opinion poll showing that most French people reject capitalism by two to one. The Trotskyists have done extremely well in the French elections (although less well of late). They were extremely active in the campaign to abort the Euro constitution, and in the end carried a majority of voters with them. The Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire, who have resisted the Islamophobia of the French Left somewhat more than others, appear to have reacted well to the situation, calling a protest to demand the sacking of Sarkozy and an end to the government's repeated scapegoating of immigrants while it dismantles public services and labour rights. The French state, which is busily fulfilling its time-honoured role in subjugating Haiti, is also trying to get away with transforming what remains a Keynesian state into a neoliberal one: a process that has affected or is affecting most capitalist states, and which is accompanied by a sharp ideological reflux against it. From the 'polarisation' article linked above:

The rebuilding of working class hegemony is today the condition for overcoming the internal divisions created or widened by capitalist restructuring (young/old, public/private, ‘French’/’immigrant’) and for undermining in the long term the Front National’s influence among the popular electorate. It is the structuring of a class front which can also shift, in a more productive way, the demarcation lines between those ‘classist’ forces (notably in the PCF and the CGT), which are anti-capitalist but often reluctant to act in unity with others and limited to ‘workerist’ horizons, and the forces of the far left (essentially around the LCR), very at ease in the context of united fronts and the dynamic of mobilisations from below, but with weak roots among workers.

The establishment of an anti-capitalist pole going beyond existing organisational fragmentation and the building of a hegemonic class politics are therefore the dual conditions for the success of an anti-neoliberal front capable of leading the popular movement onto the counter-offensive and to victory. The time to take the initiative has come.