PARIS: IT'S RIGHT TO REBEL! news & analysis + other local events announcements
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Nov 9, 2005, 3:15:19 PM11/9/05
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1. News: Paris - IT'S RIGHT TO REBEL!!!
2. Events: Revolution Books Book Club - "From Ike To Mao" by Bob Avakian
3. Events: World Can't Wait - Nov.2 was just the beginning - meeting Sat 3pm
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1. News: Paris - IT'S RIGHT TO REBEL!!!
Tonight will mark TWO WEEKS of the continuing righteous uprising by proletarians, mainly of Arab & African heritage, in Paris France. It has since spread also to cities all over France, as well as a few sparks in other European countries such as Germany & Belgium. Despite the extreme significance & rare of a proletarian uprising in a major imperialist citadel, this event hasn't gotten much coverage in the US media, although it was finally on cover of Seattle Times yesterday. Of course, if you want the truth about it, you will need to read something besides the Seattle Times. At bottom of this message is three articles about the uprising, one from latest Revolution newspaper, & two from latest A World To Win News Service.
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2. Events: Revolution Books Book Club
"From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist" by Bob Avakian
November 13, 27, December 11 (every other sunday)
6:30pm, Revolution Books 1833 Nagle Pl on Capitol Hill
book description:
Bob Avakian has written a memoir containing three unique but interwoven stories. The first tells of a white middle-class kid growing up in '50s America who goes to an integrated high school and has his world turned around; the second of a young man who overcomes a near-fatal disease and jumps with both feet into the heady swirl of Berkeley in the '60s; and the third of a radical activist who matures into a tempered revolutionary communist leader. If you think about the past or if you urgently care about the future ... if you want to hear a unique voice of utter realism and deep humanity ... and if you dare to have your assumptions challenged and your stereotypes overturned ... then you won't want to miss this book.
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3. Events: World Can't Wait - Nov.2 was just the beginning
Next WCW meeting:
SATURDAY NOV.12, 3PM
CAFE VIVACE, BROADWAY & DENNY, CAPITOL HILL
CONTACT: sea...@worldcantwait.org or 206.3127398
The next major step is plans to protest & drown out Bush's "State Of The Union" address -- based on lies -- in January, as well as present our own message & demands -- based on truth.
See HTTP://WORLDCANTWAIT.ORG for more.
(Also, for reports & pictures of Nov.2 actions around the country, check http://worldcantwait.org & http://revcom.us)
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...and here's the articles about the Paris uprising...
1) Revolution newspaer - The Fire In France
2) A World To Win News Service - The revolt of France's "low-class scum" lights up the sky
3) A World To Win News Service - From a reporter's notebook: conversations in Clichy-sous-bois
The uprisings started in Clichy-sous-Bois, a working class suburb of Paris. On October 27, two teenagers, Bouna Traore, aged 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, on their way back from playing soccer by some accounts, ran from police and, clearly afraid for their lives, climbed the 9-foot barbed wire fence of an electrical substation and burned to death.
Fed up with intense and increasing discrimination and police brutality, largely immigrant and working class youth took the streets of their communities and refused to back down in the face of heavy police attacks.
The youth, mostly the children of Arab and African immigrants, have made burning cars their symbol--setting more than 2,000 cars and buses on fire in the first week of rebellion.
In one rally in one housing project, rebel youth demanded the resignation of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy--who has made himself notorious by called immigrant youth "scum" and saying that suburbs need to be "scoured with industrial cleanser."
Sarkozy deployed the hated and brutal national riot police against the rebels-- including 1,000 into the suburbs north of Paris. And even with such invasions, the police have still not been able to maintain control after dark.
Night after night, the uprising has spread from Paris suburbs to other parts of France: to Rouen and Lille in the north, Marseille and Toulouse in the south, Rennes in the west, and Dijon and Strasbourg in the east.
France has more than 700 working class suburbs like Clichy-sous-Bois with the endless rows of aging apartment buildings, as shown in the film La Haine (Hate).
For decades, millions of immigrant workers were drawn to France to perform hard and degrading work for the lowest wages. And then, as the economy changed, many were simply thrown out of work and abandoned in these rundown housing projects outside the major cities.
Unemployment among immigrant communities have risen to 30 percent. The youth in particular face constant beatings and worse from the police. And the abuse has intensified because of a growing anti-immigrant climate in Europe, and in France in particular--where harassment and repressive laws are encouraged by government leaders and reactionary parties, often under the guise of protecting the country from "terrorism" and "Islamic extremism."
The response of the government officials and much of the media to the rebellion has been to escalate their calls for a crackdown on working class immigrants and the youth. The youth have been demonized as "gang members." The conservative newspaper Le Figaro claimed that the current rebellions "are the consequence of an uncontrolled immigration policy", echoing the demands of the fascist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen that France be "cleansed" of immigrants.
Arab and Muslim people are treated like criminals and unwelcome strangers--after their home countries were colonized by France, after their labor was exploited in France for decades, and even after many of the youth were born and raised in France.
This righteous rebellion is their answer: that they will not accept this mistreatment and that they demand profound changes in the direction France has taken.
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"When you're an immigrant here, you're just stuck in your shit. Does it really surprise you it's going up in flames?"
-- Momo, Age 26, Aulnay-sous-Bois
A World To Win News Service. 7 November 2005. The rulers of France are facing their worst crisis in decades. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has invoked a half-century old law that has not been used since France's colonial war in Algeria, allowing local authorities to declare a state of emergency and impose a curfew forbidding anyone to be on the streets at certain hours. Although de Villepin ruled out turning to the army at this point, his critics point out that once such measures are imposed, they can be taken as a challenge, and if sufficient force is not used to enforce them, the government could find its situation deteriorating still further. The problem, for them, is a revolt by the people France's Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called not human beings at all but racaille, rabble or low-class scum. The once-voiceless youth from the cités (housing estates or projects) have put themselves at the centre of events, and forced everyone else to define themselves in relation to them.
Shortly after he took his present job, Sarkozy declared "war without mercy" against the "riffraff" in France's suburbs. He said he would take a Karcher, a high-pressure water hose most famously used to wash dog excrement off sidewalks and streets, to "clean out" the cités, home to much of the immigrant population and the lower section of the working class of all nationalities. This was not just talk. He unleashed his police to harass and humiliate youth even more than usual. It is common for young men walking down the street alone at night to be suddenly jumped by a carload of cops for an "identity check" that often means getting thrown on the ground, handcuffed if they open their mouth to protest, and slapped around. In recent weeks, the police have sharply stepped up this persecution. From time to time youths responded by burning cars at random, something that has become a common act of rebellion in France in recent years.
Their smouldering anger first burst into flames on 27 October in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb to the east of Paris formerly considered a quiet town. A group of young teenagers were coming home after an afternoon spent playing football. Later the police claimed that someone had tried to break into a construction site office in a vacant lot that lay in their path, although there are no offices on the lot, or anything of value. A carload of police showed up – the BAC, a special brigade whose job is to brutalise cité youth. The kids ran. Three of them tried to escape by climbing over a metre and a half-high wall. Several youth who had been arrested earlier and were being held in other police cars overheard the cops' communications. One cop radioed in a report, saying they had seen some teenagers climbing over the wall into an electrical power substation. "They're in mortal danger," he said. "Well," came the response, "they won't get far." Almost an hour later, the firemen's rescue squad showed up and finally had the current cut off. They found two boys dead, and a third severely hurt.
Small groups of youth burned rubbish bins and cars and threw rocks and bottles at police that night. The next afternoon there was a silent march in solidarity with the families of the two dead youth, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna. The media described them as 15 and 17 years old, although some local people say both were younger than reported. Bouna, whose family came from Mauritania, was known as a good soccer player. Zyed, of Tunisian origin, was considered a nice kid by older neighbours because he offered to run errands for them. The next night saw more local outbreaks on about the same level as the previous one.
In the following days, Sarkozy helicoptered into a nearby town – local youth say he didn't dare come to Clichy. Striking his most macho pose, he ranted about "hoodlums" and racaille in what his critics and supporters alike took as a deliberate provocation. On 31 October, the police fired a tear gas grenade into a mosque crowded with worshippers celebrating an important night of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. The effects lingered for the rest of the week. The authorities refused to apologize for anything. The parents of the two dead boys stood firm in the face of government efforts to conciliate them.
Instead of dying out after the weekend, the flames grew higher and spread. Hundreds of cars were burned and scores of people detained every night. A week later, as the fighting died down here, an even bigger clash between youth and police took place in nearby Aulnay-sous-Bois. Small groups of very young teenagers set cars on fire in some 20 towns around Paris, many of them in department 93, east and north of the capital. A police station, an unemployment office, big and little stores, two schools and a bus depot were burned down. By Friday 5 November, 900 cars had been burned in the Paris region; the next night flames consumed 500 cars in the Paris region and nearly 800 more in half a dozen cities across France from north to south.
With one possible exception, a retired autoworker killed in his parking lot in murky circumstances, there have been very few reports of the youth deliberately attacking ordinary people of any nationality in the cités or anywhere else, although a handful of bystanders have been hurt. In fact, there seems to be much less fighting between youth of different neighbourhoods than usual. The targets of the youth are very clear and not at all random in the broad sense: the police, the government and anything seen as its representatives, and the prevailing social order. Burning cars is a form of disorder and challenge to authority that the forces of order, as they call themselves in France, cannot tolerate.
The police answered with water cannons – Sarkozy's Karcher, and especially rubber bullets, along with tear gas and clubs. Youth say the "flash ball" bullets really hurt, especially in the face or neck. On 4 November, for the first time in France, helicopters hovered just over the rooftops of massive public housing complexes in Paris and at least one other city. They shined searchlights onto walkways and into apartment windows, filming everything and coordinating mobile squads of police. But the tactics of the authorities have gone through stages. At first there were not many arrests. The police would sweep up everyone they could catch at a given scene, and later release most of them. The authorities seemed to be hoping the youth would lose heart, and worried about further inflaming them. Almost a week and a half later, with the youth becoming bolder than ever, Sarkozy proclaimed, "Arrests – that's the key." After that, hundreds were taken into custody every night. By 7 November about 20 had already been sentenced to prison and 30 more were awaiting trial for what the government threatens will be very serious charges. According to official figures, half of those in jail at that point were under 18, and almost all under 25.
The authorities are howling that the youth are "using real guns", which would be unusual in France. In the only such incident reported, police in Grigny, south of Paris, said they were "ambushed" by groups of young men with baseball bats and guns. It turned out that two officers were slightly wounded by non-lethal birdshot. The police claimed they had found an empty real rifle shell on the ground afterward. This may be a way for the state to justify the use on their part of far more deadly force.
An editorial in the so-called leftist daily Libération claimed that the fighting is being "organised" by "gang kingpins eager to clear out the police so they can deal drugs, and by imams seeking cannon fodder for their jihad." As far as the first charge is concerned, the press itself has quoted cité residents pointing out that serious dealers are not going to organise anything that disturbs business. As a man from Aulnay said, "It's the state that's very happy to see drugs flood into the ghettos." The underground economy in all forms thrives in the cités, but that's not what lies behind this outbreak.
Some politicians claim to see the hand of Al-Qaeda behind it all, which is a coded way of saying that the proper response to these youth's actions is a bloodbath. But even the charge that it is a consciously Islamic upsurge or that imams are leading it is totally wrong. Muslim leaders in the cités have been sending out their followers to try and pour water on the outbreaks since the beginning. Even if they sympathise with the youth against the government, they are against what they consider unruly behaviour. The Union of French Islamic Organisations issued a fatwa (religious ruling) forbidding all Muslims to participate in or contribute to "any action that blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack on someone's life."
The French government's attitude toward Islam is two-faced. It attacks the rights of Muslims under the guise of secularism. It banned women wearing a head covering from entering a school – as if depriving observant young Muslim women of an education is anything but racism and more oppression of women. At the same time, Sarkozy has spent great efforts to pull the imams under the government's wing, so that the government presides over their appointment and financing, and in some ways turn them into an organised arm of the state to be used to control immigrant communities. In Aulnay, a woman remarked, "Every time something like this happens they build a new mosque. That's not what all of us want."
The basic problem with this revolt, as far as the powers that be are concerned, is not who is behind it, but that no one is. No one started it, so there is no one to call it off. The foreign media have exaggerated certain aspects of the fighting. There have been few full-scale pitched battles, and even the hit-and-run actions have left very few police seriously injured. Most youth most of the time seem to be avoiding head-on confrontations they feel they can't win. The reason for the French government's crisis is that whatever Sarkozy thought he was doing, the situation has gotten out of his or anyone else's control. It has turned out to be not proof of the power of the state's steel hand, as Sarkozy may have hoped, but of its limits and of the power of the streets. The state has been unable to stop these disturbances so far. Not only have their efforts failed; they have just fanned the flames, and worse, spread burning oil to every part of the country. Their state itself is not in danger, but the youth are contesting their authority.
The Minister of the Interior's CRS, the national riot police, are said to be stretched thin and tiring. Significantly, an emergency meeting of ministers on 4 November included not only Sarkozy and the various ministers responsible for aspects of life in France's ghettos, but also the Defence Minister. Calling out the army, however, may not be a solution either, especially in the longer run. In one town in department 93, a shopkeeper who was critical of the youths for destroying property explained why he thought the government was hesitant to bring in the regular armed forces. "If the army comes it, that's it. I'm shutting down and so will every other shopkeeper in 93. No one will stand for that." In fact, extreme hostility to such a government action would extend far more broadly than the department and its shopkeepers. It might create a polarisation in which many people who do not stand with the youth now would consider the government unacceptable. For historical reasons that have to do with the French state's collaboration with the Nazi occupation and with the French colonial war in Algeria and the May 1968 revolt that rocked the country, dislike of the forces of order runs particularly broad and deep in France.
This crisis has had contradictory effects on the ruling classes and what in France is called "the political class", those who take turns running the government. It has set them against one another at some moments, and pulled them apart at others. At first Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin tried to distance himself from his Interior Minister, Sarkozy, a political rival whom he criticised for using intemperate language. For the first few days and to some extent afterward, President Jacques Chirac distanced himself from both of them with his silence. Criticism of Sarkozy's language even came from one of Sarkozy's fellow cabinet members, the token Arab junior minister for "Equal Opportunities". One of the several police unions called for Sarkozy to shut up because he was endangering cops. But a week or ten days later, very few establishment figures had anything bad to say about Sarkozy in public – his big mouth had become the least of their worries.
The youth are demanding Sarkozy's resignation. That demand is almost universally repeated by people from immigrant backgrounds and very widely supported by people of all nationalities in the cités and far more broadly, including a large part of the middle class. Sarkozy is the most open face of repression, a man who styles himself as an "American"-style politician in the sense of a boastfully reactionary bully who doesn't try to hide it. That suits his position as Interior Minister, which is probably why his rivals gave him that office. His job is to represent the hard edge of the state against the people, using force against not only immigrants and their children but also strikers, and imposing repression in general. Maybe at first de Villepin and Chirac were hoping that Sarkozy's arrogance would be his downfall. But no one in the political class could accept a situation in which the racaille drove the country's chief cop from office.
The Socialist Party doesn't dare try to take political advantage of the situation to reverse their own decline, at least right now, even though their rank and file would welcome going after Sarkozy. Their leaders argue that "restoring calm" is a precondition for even talking about anything else and explicitly refused to join the call for his resignation.
The revisionist Communist Party is no less unhappy with the situation. They try to heap all the blame on Sarkozy and the right, as if when they were in power the so-called "left" parliamentary parties didn't take the same stance toward the cité youth (a Socialist education minister called them "savages") – and more importantly, as if during their many years in office these parties didn't help make French society what it is today. The party does call for Sarkozy's resignation, but at the same time it has distanced itself far away from the cité youth. Asked on radio if youth who burn cars are "victims or offenders," party head Marie-Georges Buffet quickly answered, "Offenders." Her party's press called the rebellion "the disastrous result of disastrous policies." They clamour for an "investigation" of the death of the two boys, as if the facts weren't clear enough – as if this were not clearly a case of right and wrong and the people had not already reached a verdict. While CP elected officials held a "peace" demonstration in front of the Prime Minister's offices, their local forces tried to organise "peace" demonstrations in working class neighbourhoods. In the last weeks youth have risen up in towns run by Socialist, Communist and rightwing mayors without distinction because which party is in power makes no difference in their lives.
The truth is that France has seen far too many years of "calm" in the face of oppression and the kind of "peace" that comes from the downtrodden accepting their fate. What's so good about quietly accepting the kind of life imposed not only on these youth but on the great majority of people in France? Violence within the ranks of the people seems to be at a low point right now and the spirits of the youth are soaring. Their rebellion is not a "disaster". It is very good. It represents fresh air amid political and social suffocation – something positive amid a pervasive atmosphere of cynicism and just putting-your-head-down-and-trying-to-get-by that has prevailed for far too long since the defeat of the May 1968 rebellion and the betrayal of people's hopes represented by the Socialist-led and revisionist-supported Mitterrand government. These youth want to fight, not vote – and they are going up against the predominant idea that nothing can be changed in a country where the electorate united against the openly fascist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen a few years ago, only to elect Chirac and get Sarkozy. Whatever mistakes the youth may be making, this rebellion represents the best hope that France has seen in decades for a different kind of society.
Is important to note that one of the main carrots offered by Prime Minister Villepin, who plays the "good cop" to Sarkozy's stick, is a programme that would allow youth to leave school at age 14, instead of 16, so that they can start working as "apprentices" in below-minimum wage jobs of the dead-end kind reserved for school dropouts. In other words, the best that is being promised them is more or less what their parents endured, when their parents endured that in the hopes that their children would get something better. What the phoney socialists and revisionists refuse to admit is that even if the capitalists and their government wanted to, they couldn't offer these youth decent jobs and still employ them profitably. That's why the ruling classes consider the unemployed and especially the immigrants and their children "useless" people to be suppressed and gotten rid of to the extent possible. Sarkozy's policies are an expression of this underlying economic reality.
The often-heard complaint among mainstream and even many "far left" "political people" that these youth are "apolitical" is one-sided and mainly nonsense, although these youth have not gained the conscious understanding that would be necessary for them to go further, even in the limited sense of having a clear understanding of the nature of their enemies and seeking allies against them. It is not "apolitical" to reject the only life the system can offer them – it is breaking with the bourgeois definition of what politics are allowed and whether the starting point of politics is, as another article in Libération said, the "recognition" that the present system is the only possible one. In fact, not only have the youth refused to accept the circumstances in which they themselves are imprisoned, they pay more real attention to key world affairs such as in Iraq and Palestine, or at least feel them more deeply, than many of their elders who have let their opposition to imperialist crimes go soft because "their" government tries to appear uninvolved.
These youth are neither "victims" nor "offenders". They have become makers of history, taking action on a scale that no one else has in a country where the majority feel ground down at best. They have stormed onto the stage of political life that has been forbidden to them. There is a consensus among mainstream political parties and the tolerated opposition that this outbreak should be stifled and/or crushed, but above all ended – quickly. These youth are struggling to awaken, in a country full of sleepers, and it's about time.
A World To Win News Service. 7 November 2005. In the early evening about a week after the death of Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna here in Clichy-sous-Bois, at the bottom of a hill where the cité ends and a neighbourhood of small one-family houses begins, a bar/tobacco shop with an after-work crowd was the only public place for several kilometres in any direction.
A reporter walked up to the bar and told the people there he wanted to hear what they had to say about what was going on. The sole woman was a young girl at the cash register. The men in the front were all white. A man about 30 and his friend, in his 60s, were the first to speak. The younger man complained that burning the cars of people who need them to go to work was just a matter of people hurting their neighbours. His car was fine, but he expected insurance rates to skyrocket. He'd lived his whole life in the cité, practically since it was first built in the early 1970s, like so much of French working-class housing. It had been pretty at first, he said, with flowerbeds, but little by little it had fallen apart. The building owners did nothing about upkeep at all, but he blamed his neighbours as well. Too many people didn't really want to find a job; they were content with living on the dole, a few hundred euros a month. "Practically none of these kids have a steady job," he said critically.
The older man seemed to agree with him at first. "I started working construction when I was 15, like we all did then. I had 50 years of social security payments when I retired. Kids nowadays don't find permanent jobs 'til they're 30, hardly any of them. Like you, for instance – you just started work as a truck driver, and I helped you get that job." Nearly everyone in Clichy – in both the big cité tower blocks and the family houses – is a worker. One of the main differences is not which industry they work in but how much their particular job involves skill or a strong back and how steady their jobs are. Many of the fathers of the older generation worked in construction and their mothers, if they worked, as cleaning women. Among their children, especially the youth of Arab and African origin, as many as half are unemployed at any one time, and most of the jobs don't seem to last.
All of the dozen men at the bar were upset about the deaths of Bouna and Zyed. They all felt that a crime had been committed and someone had to be punished for this killing. The young truck driver started to say, however, that if the boys hadn't been doing anything wrong – which was what everyone said, and has even been admitted by one of the officers – they shouldn't have run from the police. The bartender, in his early 20s at the most, and maybe from a Portuguese family, came over to interrupt him. "You know the cops would have smacked them around. They do that to all of us. Me too, I'd run." The men nodded in agreement when one said, "If Sarkozy becomes president, we're all fucked." But they were upset about the burning of property. "It's not them who'll pay", the driver said, gesturing toward Paris and the world of wealth and power. " We'll be left to foot the bill."
A young man left from the other side of the bar for a back room, carrying a cup of coffee. There 15 or 20 young men, from teenagers to a 30-year-old, were playing two old-fashioned pinball machines. None were drinking alcohol. "We're not from around here," they said warily in response to questions. At first they claimed to be visitors from Brittany in the north. "Everyone around here is doing fine; they have no problems." Then they made it plain that "not from around here" meant they were from "up there," the cité just up the hill. "Around here" meant the small houses down across the street from the bar, the neighbourhood to which the bar "belonged". They were "down here" tonight, they said, because there was nowhere up there where they were allowed to be right now. When they shook hands, they touched their hearts with their right fist, an Islamic gesture adopted by French lower-class youth in general in the same way that the African-American "high five" greeting has been adopted even in the UK. They were relaxing before going out to a nightclub.
They began by describing the housing. Their cité was privately owned. They felt this explained why it been allowed to deteriorate so badly. It is far from the worst, they said, since most of the buildings are inhabited by only a few hundred people, rather than the many thousands in grotesquely enormous towers of the biggest HLMs (government-owned public housing). But because it is private, the rents are comparatively high, around 600 euros for a family, which doesn't leave much left over from the thousand or so euros a worker with a full-time job could expect to bring home. "Do you think it's normal," they demanded, "for a whole town not to have a library or even a cinema?" A major complaint, heard everywhere in the suburbs, is that these housing complexes were deliberately located far from everything, from any place people might want to go, with public transportation only to where they're supposed to work and practically no good way to get around at night – certainly not to Paris. "Even if you have a car, department 93 plates are like a signal to the police to humiliate you," the youth said. "Why did they build blockhouses to keep us in, instead of normal housing?" one young man insisted. They call the cité a ghetto, not in the American sense of being inhabited almost exclusively by one or two nationalities but in the original sense of a place where certain people are forced to live and barely allowed to leave.
"It's because of who we are – foreigners – from Algeria, Morocco, Mali and Turkey." As the Portuguese, Spanish and other white kids who live in the cités will tell you – the bartender, for instance – the cops don't like anyone who lives there.
One of these youth talked about the killing of Zyed, his neighbour. They also described the recent police raids on buildings occupied by recent immigrant squatters and Sarkozy's pledge of mass deportations. These things showed what they are up against, signs that official society sees them all as less than human – in fact, worse than animals because they are considered dangerous. They were all French citizens, but that made little difference. "If they say our communities have to be cleaned out, that means they think we're filth, that we should be gotten rid of," one of them explained bitterly. Another added, "If you have a certain kind of name, most companies won't hire you. And if your address is in department 93 and someplace like Clichy, you'll never even get an interview. The only place most of us can work is in an illegal garment sweatshop in somebody's apartment, and now there's even less of that. Besides, we don't want those jobs." Some of the older among them did have jobs; the younger ones weren't eager to discuss how they got by.
The youth in this bar thought of themselves as Islamic, in the sense of that background being part of their identity and especially the identity by which the world judged them. But their thinking was more secular and their goals in no way religious. Many people all over the region were especially angry about the tear-gassing of the mosque (in this case, a converted warehouse). More than an attack on their religion, they considered it an insult to their humanity. These youth explained it like this: "There are two or three churches around here and a synagogue" – the synagogue is, in fact, practically adjacent to the cité. "No one has ever attacked any of them. That's because we respect people no matter what their religion. If they attack a mosque, it's to show us that they have no respect for us at all."
They were asked what they hoped to accomplish by their actions. "If they don't give us what we want," one said, "it's war." It was pointed out that the other side had a real army and couldn't be defeated by stones and Molotov cocktails. But they didn't see it that way. The government couldn't deal with them, they said, especially not all of them all over the country. The police would have to back off eventually. They didn't have much to say about the threat of facing the army.
"We'll make them listen to us!" said Zyed's neighbour. When you go home, turn on the television – you'll see all of France is burning."
This marked the end of our conversation. The bar was closing, and the youth were ready to move on. It was shortly before this point that one of them said something very illuminating. The question was put to all of them. "This guy at the bar over there says that it's wrong for you to be burning the cars of your neighbours who need them to go to work. What do you say to that?"
"We burn cars, monsieur, because cars are what burn best", hotly retorted a young man who had played a leading role over the last several hours. This seemed to convey what was best about these youth, and their shortcomings. They are determined to rebel against injustice by any means at hand, they feel they have nothing to lose and sometimes they are fearless. But they also need revolutionary science so that they can understand more clearly what they were up against and what would have to be done to bring about radical change. Mao Tsetung said that the most basic truth of Marxism is that it's right to rebel. When these two elements come together, proletarian rebels and a scientific outlook, the future of France, and of the countries like it all over Europe, will look very different.
Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (Seattle)
http://seattle.rcyb.info
"Revolution" newspaper
http://revcom.us
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1. News: Paris - IT'S RIGHT TO REBEL!!!
2. Events: Revolution Books Book Club - "From Ike To Mao" by Bob Avakian
3. Events: World Can't Wait - Nov.2 was just the beginning - meeting Sat 3pm
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1. News: Paris - IT'S RIGHT TO REBEL!!!
Tonight will mark TWO WEEKS of the continuing righteous uprising by proletarians, mainly of Arab & African heritage, in Paris France. It has since spread also to cities all over France, as well as a few sparks in other European countries such as Germany & Belgium. Despite the extreme significance & rare of a proletarian uprising in a major imperialist citadel, this event hasn't gotten much coverage in the US media, although it was finally on cover of Seattle Times yesterday. Of course, if you want the truth about it, you will need to read something besides the Seattle Times. At bottom of this message is three articles about the uprising, one from latest Revolution newspaper, & two from latest A World To Win News Service.
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2. Events: Revolution Books Book Club
"From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist" by Bob Avakian
November 13, 27, December 11 (every other sunday)
6:30pm, Revolution Books 1833 Nagle Pl on Capitol Hill
book description:
Bob Avakian has written a memoir containing three unique but interwoven stories. The first tells of a white middle-class kid growing up in '50s America who goes to an integrated high school and has his world turned around; the second of a young man who overcomes a near-fatal disease and jumps with both feet into the heady swirl of Berkeley in the '60s; and the third of a radical activist who matures into a tempered revolutionary communist leader. If you think about the past or if you urgently care about the future ... if you want to hear a unique voice of utter realism and deep humanity ... and if you dare to have your assumptions challenged and your stereotypes overturned ... then you won't want to miss this book.
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3. Events: World Can't Wait - Nov.2 was just the beginning
Next WCW meeting:
SATURDAY NOV.12, 3PM
CAFE VIVACE, BROADWAY & DENNY, CAPITOL HILL
CONTACT: sea...@worldcantwait.org or 206.3127398
The next major step is plans to protest & drown out Bush's "State Of The Union" address -- based on lies -- in January, as well as present our own message & demands -- based on truth.
See HTTP://WORLDCANTWAIT.ORG for more.
(Also, for reports & pictures of Nov.2 actions around the country, check http://worldcantwait.org & http://revcom.us)
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...and here's the articles about the Paris uprising...
1) Revolution newspaer - The Fire In France
2) A World To Win News Service - The revolt of France's "low-class scum" lights up the sky
3) A World To Win News Service - From a reporter's notebook: conversations in Clichy-sous-bois
THE FIRE IN FRANCE
Revolution newspaper #22. 6 November 2005.
As
we go to press, the youth of France are on their tenth day of an
uprising that began in the belt of impoverished suburbs that surround
Paris.The uprisings started in Clichy-sous-Bois, a working class suburb of Paris. On October 27, two teenagers, Bouna Traore, aged 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, on their way back from playing soccer by some accounts, ran from police and, clearly afraid for their lives, climbed the 9-foot barbed wire fence of an electrical substation and burned to death.
Fed up with intense and increasing discrimination and police brutality, largely immigrant and working class youth took the streets of their communities and refused to back down in the face of heavy police attacks.
The youth, mostly the children of Arab and African immigrants, have made burning cars their symbol--setting more than 2,000 cars and buses on fire in the first week of rebellion.
In one rally in one housing project, rebel youth demanded the resignation of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy--who has made himself notorious by called immigrant youth "scum" and saying that suburbs need to be "scoured with industrial cleanser."
Sarkozy deployed the hated and brutal national riot police against the rebels-- including 1,000 into the suburbs north of Paris. And even with such invasions, the police have still not been able to maintain control after dark.
Night after night, the uprising has spread from Paris suburbs to other parts of France: to Rouen and Lille in the north, Marseille and Toulouse in the south, Rennes in the west, and Dijon and Strasbourg in the east.
France has more than 700 working class suburbs like Clichy-sous-Bois with the endless rows of aging apartment buildings, as shown in the film La Haine (Hate).
For decades, millions of immigrant workers were drawn to France to perform hard and degrading work for the lowest wages. And then, as the economy changed, many were simply thrown out of work and abandoned in these rundown housing projects outside the major cities.
Unemployment among immigrant communities have risen to 30 percent. The youth in particular face constant beatings and worse from the police. And the abuse has intensified because of a growing anti-immigrant climate in Europe, and in France in particular--where harassment and repressive laws are encouraged by government leaders and reactionary parties, often under the guise of protecting the country from "terrorism" and "Islamic extremism."
The response of the government officials and much of the media to the rebellion has been to escalate their calls for a crackdown on working class immigrants and the youth. The youth have been demonized as "gang members." The conservative newspaper Le Figaro claimed that the current rebellions "are the consequence of an uncontrolled immigration policy", echoing the demands of the fascist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen that France be "cleansed" of immigrants.
Arab and Muslim people are treated like criminals and unwelcome strangers--after their home countries were colonized by France, after their labor was exploited in France for decades, and even after many of the youth were born and raised in France.
This righteous rebellion is their answer: that they will not accept this mistreatment and that they demand profound changes in the direction France has taken.
*****
"When you're an immigrant here, you're just stuck in your shit. Does it really surprise you it's going up in flames?"
-- Momo, Age 26, Aulnay-sous-Bois
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THE REVOLT OF FRANCE'S "LOW-CLASS SCUM" LIGHTS UP THE SKY
A World To Win News Service. 7 November 2005. The rulers of France are facing their worst crisis in decades. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has invoked a half-century old law that has not been used since France's colonial war in Algeria, allowing local authorities to declare a state of emergency and impose a curfew forbidding anyone to be on the streets at certain hours. Although de Villepin ruled out turning to the army at this point, his critics point out that once such measures are imposed, they can be taken as a challenge, and if sufficient force is not used to enforce them, the government could find its situation deteriorating still further. The problem, for them, is a revolt by the people France's Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called not human beings at all but racaille, rabble or low-class scum. The once-voiceless youth from the cités (housing estates or projects) have put themselves at the centre of events, and forced everyone else to define themselves in relation to them.
Shortly after he took his present job, Sarkozy declared "war without mercy" against the "riffraff" in France's suburbs. He said he would take a Karcher, a high-pressure water hose most famously used to wash dog excrement off sidewalks and streets, to "clean out" the cités, home to much of the immigrant population and the lower section of the working class of all nationalities. This was not just talk. He unleashed his police to harass and humiliate youth even more than usual. It is common for young men walking down the street alone at night to be suddenly jumped by a carload of cops for an "identity check" that often means getting thrown on the ground, handcuffed if they open their mouth to protest, and slapped around. In recent weeks, the police have sharply stepped up this persecution. From time to time youths responded by burning cars at random, something that has become a common act of rebellion in France in recent years.
Their smouldering anger first burst into flames on 27 October in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb to the east of Paris formerly considered a quiet town. A group of young teenagers were coming home after an afternoon spent playing football. Later the police claimed that someone had tried to break into a construction site office in a vacant lot that lay in their path, although there are no offices on the lot, or anything of value. A carload of police showed up – the BAC, a special brigade whose job is to brutalise cité youth. The kids ran. Three of them tried to escape by climbing over a metre and a half-high wall. Several youth who had been arrested earlier and were being held in other police cars overheard the cops' communications. One cop radioed in a report, saying they had seen some teenagers climbing over the wall into an electrical power substation. "They're in mortal danger," he said. "Well," came the response, "they won't get far." Almost an hour later, the firemen's rescue squad showed up and finally had the current cut off. They found two boys dead, and a third severely hurt.
Small groups of youth burned rubbish bins and cars and threw rocks and bottles at police that night. The next afternoon there was a silent march in solidarity with the families of the two dead youth, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna. The media described them as 15 and 17 years old, although some local people say both were younger than reported. Bouna, whose family came from Mauritania, was known as a good soccer player. Zyed, of Tunisian origin, was considered a nice kid by older neighbours because he offered to run errands for them. The next night saw more local outbreaks on about the same level as the previous one.
In the following days, Sarkozy helicoptered into a nearby town – local youth say he didn't dare come to Clichy. Striking his most macho pose, he ranted about "hoodlums" and racaille in what his critics and supporters alike took as a deliberate provocation. On 31 October, the police fired a tear gas grenade into a mosque crowded with worshippers celebrating an important night of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. The effects lingered for the rest of the week. The authorities refused to apologize for anything. The parents of the two dead boys stood firm in the face of government efforts to conciliate them.
Instead of dying out after the weekend, the flames grew higher and spread. Hundreds of cars were burned and scores of people detained every night. A week later, as the fighting died down here, an even bigger clash between youth and police took place in nearby Aulnay-sous-Bois. Small groups of very young teenagers set cars on fire in some 20 towns around Paris, many of them in department 93, east and north of the capital. A police station, an unemployment office, big and little stores, two schools and a bus depot were burned down. By Friday 5 November, 900 cars had been burned in the Paris region; the next night flames consumed 500 cars in the Paris region and nearly 800 more in half a dozen cities across France from north to south.
With one possible exception, a retired autoworker killed in his parking lot in murky circumstances, there have been very few reports of the youth deliberately attacking ordinary people of any nationality in the cités or anywhere else, although a handful of bystanders have been hurt. In fact, there seems to be much less fighting between youth of different neighbourhoods than usual. The targets of the youth are very clear and not at all random in the broad sense: the police, the government and anything seen as its representatives, and the prevailing social order. Burning cars is a form of disorder and challenge to authority that the forces of order, as they call themselves in France, cannot tolerate.
The police answered with water cannons – Sarkozy's Karcher, and especially rubber bullets, along with tear gas and clubs. Youth say the "flash ball" bullets really hurt, especially in the face or neck. On 4 November, for the first time in France, helicopters hovered just over the rooftops of massive public housing complexes in Paris and at least one other city. They shined searchlights onto walkways and into apartment windows, filming everything and coordinating mobile squads of police. But the tactics of the authorities have gone through stages. At first there were not many arrests. The police would sweep up everyone they could catch at a given scene, and later release most of them. The authorities seemed to be hoping the youth would lose heart, and worried about further inflaming them. Almost a week and a half later, with the youth becoming bolder than ever, Sarkozy proclaimed, "Arrests – that's the key." After that, hundreds were taken into custody every night. By 7 November about 20 had already been sentenced to prison and 30 more were awaiting trial for what the government threatens will be very serious charges. According to official figures, half of those in jail at that point were under 18, and almost all under 25.
The authorities are howling that the youth are "using real guns", which would be unusual in France. In the only such incident reported, police in Grigny, south of Paris, said they were "ambushed" by groups of young men with baseball bats and guns. It turned out that two officers were slightly wounded by non-lethal birdshot. The police claimed they had found an empty real rifle shell on the ground afterward. This may be a way for the state to justify the use on their part of far more deadly force.
An editorial in the so-called leftist daily Libération claimed that the fighting is being "organised" by "gang kingpins eager to clear out the police so they can deal drugs, and by imams seeking cannon fodder for their jihad." As far as the first charge is concerned, the press itself has quoted cité residents pointing out that serious dealers are not going to organise anything that disturbs business. As a man from Aulnay said, "It's the state that's very happy to see drugs flood into the ghettos." The underground economy in all forms thrives in the cités, but that's not what lies behind this outbreak.
Some politicians claim to see the hand of Al-Qaeda behind it all, which is a coded way of saying that the proper response to these youth's actions is a bloodbath. But even the charge that it is a consciously Islamic upsurge or that imams are leading it is totally wrong. Muslim leaders in the cités have been sending out their followers to try and pour water on the outbreaks since the beginning. Even if they sympathise with the youth against the government, they are against what they consider unruly behaviour. The Union of French Islamic Organisations issued a fatwa (religious ruling) forbidding all Muslims to participate in or contribute to "any action that blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack on someone's life."
The French government's attitude toward Islam is two-faced. It attacks the rights of Muslims under the guise of secularism. It banned women wearing a head covering from entering a school – as if depriving observant young Muslim women of an education is anything but racism and more oppression of women. At the same time, Sarkozy has spent great efforts to pull the imams under the government's wing, so that the government presides over their appointment and financing, and in some ways turn them into an organised arm of the state to be used to control immigrant communities. In Aulnay, a woman remarked, "Every time something like this happens they build a new mosque. That's not what all of us want."
The basic problem with this revolt, as far as the powers that be are concerned, is not who is behind it, but that no one is. No one started it, so there is no one to call it off. The foreign media have exaggerated certain aspects of the fighting. There have been few full-scale pitched battles, and even the hit-and-run actions have left very few police seriously injured. Most youth most of the time seem to be avoiding head-on confrontations they feel they can't win. The reason for the French government's crisis is that whatever Sarkozy thought he was doing, the situation has gotten out of his or anyone else's control. It has turned out to be not proof of the power of the state's steel hand, as Sarkozy may have hoped, but of its limits and of the power of the streets. The state has been unable to stop these disturbances so far. Not only have their efforts failed; they have just fanned the flames, and worse, spread burning oil to every part of the country. Their state itself is not in danger, but the youth are contesting their authority.
The Minister of the Interior's CRS, the national riot police, are said to be stretched thin and tiring. Significantly, an emergency meeting of ministers on 4 November included not only Sarkozy and the various ministers responsible for aspects of life in France's ghettos, but also the Defence Minister. Calling out the army, however, may not be a solution either, especially in the longer run. In one town in department 93, a shopkeeper who was critical of the youths for destroying property explained why he thought the government was hesitant to bring in the regular armed forces. "If the army comes it, that's it. I'm shutting down and so will every other shopkeeper in 93. No one will stand for that." In fact, extreme hostility to such a government action would extend far more broadly than the department and its shopkeepers. It might create a polarisation in which many people who do not stand with the youth now would consider the government unacceptable. For historical reasons that have to do with the French state's collaboration with the Nazi occupation and with the French colonial war in Algeria and the May 1968 revolt that rocked the country, dislike of the forces of order runs particularly broad and deep in France.
This crisis has had contradictory effects on the ruling classes and what in France is called "the political class", those who take turns running the government. It has set them against one another at some moments, and pulled them apart at others. At first Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin tried to distance himself from his Interior Minister, Sarkozy, a political rival whom he criticised for using intemperate language. For the first few days and to some extent afterward, President Jacques Chirac distanced himself from both of them with his silence. Criticism of Sarkozy's language even came from one of Sarkozy's fellow cabinet members, the token Arab junior minister for "Equal Opportunities". One of the several police unions called for Sarkozy to shut up because he was endangering cops. But a week or ten days later, very few establishment figures had anything bad to say about Sarkozy in public – his big mouth had become the least of their worries.
The youth are demanding Sarkozy's resignation. That demand is almost universally repeated by people from immigrant backgrounds and very widely supported by people of all nationalities in the cités and far more broadly, including a large part of the middle class. Sarkozy is the most open face of repression, a man who styles himself as an "American"-style politician in the sense of a boastfully reactionary bully who doesn't try to hide it. That suits his position as Interior Minister, which is probably why his rivals gave him that office. His job is to represent the hard edge of the state against the people, using force against not only immigrants and their children but also strikers, and imposing repression in general. Maybe at first de Villepin and Chirac were hoping that Sarkozy's arrogance would be his downfall. But no one in the political class could accept a situation in which the racaille drove the country's chief cop from office.
The Socialist Party doesn't dare try to take political advantage of the situation to reverse their own decline, at least right now, even though their rank and file would welcome going after Sarkozy. Their leaders argue that "restoring calm" is a precondition for even talking about anything else and explicitly refused to join the call for his resignation.
The revisionist Communist Party is no less unhappy with the situation. They try to heap all the blame on Sarkozy and the right, as if when they were in power the so-called "left" parliamentary parties didn't take the same stance toward the cité youth (a Socialist education minister called them "savages") – and more importantly, as if during their many years in office these parties didn't help make French society what it is today. The party does call for Sarkozy's resignation, but at the same time it has distanced itself far away from the cité youth. Asked on radio if youth who burn cars are "victims or offenders," party head Marie-Georges Buffet quickly answered, "Offenders." Her party's press called the rebellion "the disastrous result of disastrous policies." They clamour for an "investigation" of the death of the two boys, as if the facts weren't clear enough – as if this were not clearly a case of right and wrong and the people had not already reached a verdict. While CP elected officials held a "peace" demonstration in front of the Prime Minister's offices, their local forces tried to organise "peace" demonstrations in working class neighbourhoods. In the last weeks youth have risen up in towns run by Socialist, Communist and rightwing mayors without distinction because which party is in power makes no difference in their lives.
The truth is that France has seen far too many years of "calm" in the face of oppression and the kind of "peace" that comes from the downtrodden accepting their fate. What's so good about quietly accepting the kind of life imposed not only on these youth but on the great majority of people in France? Violence within the ranks of the people seems to be at a low point right now and the spirits of the youth are soaring. Their rebellion is not a "disaster". It is very good. It represents fresh air amid political and social suffocation – something positive amid a pervasive atmosphere of cynicism and just putting-your-head-down-and-trying-to-get-by that has prevailed for far too long since the defeat of the May 1968 rebellion and the betrayal of people's hopes represented by the Socialist-led and revisionist-supported Mitterrand government. These youth want to fight, not vote – and they are going up against the predominant idea that nothing can be changed in a country where the electorate united against the openly fascist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen a few years ago, only to elect Chirac and get Sarkozy. Whatever mistakes the youth may be making, this rebellion represents the best hope that France has seen in decades for a different kind of society.
Is important to note that one of the main carrots offered by Prime Minister Villepin, who plays the "good cop" to Sarkozy's stick, is a programme that would allow youth to leave school at age 14, instead of 16, so that they can start working as "apprentices" in below-minimum wage jobs of the dead-end kind reserved for school dropouts. In other words, the best that is being promised them is more or less what their parents endured, when their parents endured that in the hopes that their children would get something better. What the phoney socialists and revisionists refuse to admit is that even if the capitalists and their government wanted to, they couldn't offer these youth decent jobs and still employ them profitably. That's why the ruling classes consider the unemployed and especially the immigrants and their children "useless" people to be suppressed and gotten rid of to the extent possible. Sarkozy's policies are an expression of this underlying economic reality.
The often-heard complaint among mainstream and even many "far left" "political people" that these youth are "apolitical" is one-sided and mainly nonsense, although these youth have not gained the conscious understanding that would be necessary for them to go further, even in the limited sense of having a clear understanding of the nature of their enemies and seeking allies against them. It is not "apolitical" to reject the only life the system can offer them – it is breaking with the bourgeois definition of what politics are allowed and whether the starting point of politics is, as another article in Libération said, the "recognition" that the present system is the only possible one. In fact, not only have the youth refused to accept the circumstances in which they themselves are imprisoned, they pay more real attention to key world affairs such as in Iraq and Palestine, or at least feel them more deeply, than many of their elders who have let their opposition to imperialist crimes go soft because "their" government tries to appear uninvolved.
These youth are neither "victims" nor "offenders". They have become makers of history, taking action on a scale that no one else has in a country where the majority feel ground down at best. They have stormed onto the stage of political life that has been forbidden to them. There is a consensus among mainstream political parties and the tolerated opposition that this outbreak should be stifled and/or crushed, but above all ended – quickly. These youth are struggling to awaken, in a country full of sleepers, and it's about time.
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FROM A REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: CONVERSATIONS IN CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS
FROM A REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: CONVERSATIONS IN CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS
A World To Win News Service. 7 November 2005. In the early evening about a week after the death of Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna here in Clichy-sous-Bois, at the bottom of a hill where the cité ends and a neighbourhood of small one-family houses begins, a bar/tobacco shop with an after-work crowd was the only public place for several kilometres in any direction.
A reporter walked up to the bar and told the people there he wanted to hear what they had to say about what was going on. The sole woman was a young girl at the cash register. The men in the front were all white. A man about 30 and his friend, in his 60s, were the first to speak. The younger man complained that burning the cars of people who need them to go to work was just a matter of people hurting their neighbours. His car was fine, but he expected insurance rates to skyrocket. He'd lived his whole life in the cité, practically since it was first built in the early 1970s, like so much of French working-class housing. It had been pretty at first, he said, with flowerbeds, but little by little it had fallen apart. The building owners did nothing about upkeep at all, but he blamed his neighbours as well. Too many people didn't really want to find a job; they were content with living on the dole, a few hundred euros a month. "Practically none of these kids have a steady job," he said critically.
The older man seemed to agree with him at first. "I started working construction when I was 15, like we all did then. I had 50 years of social security payments when I retired. Kids nowadays don't find permanent jobs 'til they're 30, hardly any of them. Like you, for instance – you just started work as a truck driver, and I helped you get that job." Nearly everyone in Clichy – in both the big cité tower blocks and the family houses – is a worker. One of the main differences is not which industry they work in but how much their particular job involves skill or a strong back and how steady their jobs are. Many of the fathers of the older generation worked in construction and their mothers, if they worked, as cleaning women. Among their children, especially the youth of Arab and African origin, as many as half are unemployed at any one time, and most of the jobs don't seem to last.
All of the dozen men at the bar were upset about the deaths of Bouna and Zyed. They all felt that a crime had been committed and someone had to be punished for this killing. The young truck driver started to say, however, that if the boys hadn't been doing anything wrong – which was what everyone said, and has even been admitted by one of the officers – they shouldn't have run from the police. The bartender, in his early 20s at the most, and maybe from a Portuguese family, came over to interrupt him. "You know the cops would have smacked them around. They do that to all of us. Me too, I'd run." The men nodded in agreement when one said, "If Sarkozy becomes president, we're all fucked." But they were upset about the burning of property. "It's not them who'll pay", the driver said, gesturing toward Paris and the world of wealth and power. " We'll be left to foot the bill."
A young man left from the other side of the bar for a back room, carrying a cup of coffee. There 15 or 20 young men, from teenagers to a 30-year-old, were playing two old-fashioned pinball machines. None were drinking alcohol. "We're not from around here," they said warily in response to questions. At first they claimed to be visitors from Brittany in the north. "Everyone around here is doing fine; they have no problems." Then they made it plain that "not from around here" meant they were from "up there," the cité just up the hill. "Around here" meant the small houses down across the street from the bar, the neighbourhood to which the bar "belonged". They were "down here" tonight, they said, because there was nowhere up there where they were allowed to be right now. When they shook hands, they touched their hearts with their right fist, an Islamic gesture adopted by French lower-class youth in general in the same way that the African-American "high five" greeting has been adopted even in the UK. They were relaxing before going out to a nightclub.
They began by describing the housing. Their cité was privately owned. They felt this explained why it been allowed to deteriorate so badly. It is far from the worst, they said, since most of the buildings are inhabited by only a few hundred people, rather than the many thousands in grotesquely enormous towers of the biggest HLMs (government-owned public housing). But because it is private, the rents are comparatively high, around 600 euros for a family, which doesn't leave much left over from the thousand or so euros a worker with a full-time job could expect to bring home. "Do you think it's normal," they demanded, "for a whole town not to have a library or even a cinema?" A major complaint, heard everywhere in the suburbs, is that these housing complexes were deliberately located far from everything, from any place people might want to go, with public transportation only to where they're supposed to work and practically no good way to get around at night – certainly not to Paris. "Even if you have a car, department 93 plates are like a signal to the police to humiliate you," the youth said. "Why did they build blockhouses to keep us in, instead of normal housing?" one young man insisted. They call the cité a ghetto, not in the American sense of being inhabited almost exclusively by one or two nationalities but in the original sense of a place where certain people are forced to live and barely allowed to leave.
"It's because of who we are – foreigners – from Algeria, Morocco, Mali and Turkey." As the Portuguese, Spanish and other white kids who live in the cités will tell you – the bartender, for instance – the cops don't like anyone who lives there.
One of these youth talked about the killing of Zyed, his neighbour. They also described the recent police raids on buildings occupied by recent immigrant squatters and Sarkozy's pledge of mass deportations. These things showed what they are up against, signs that official society sees them all as less than human – in fact, worse than animals because they are considered dangerous. They were all French citizens, but that made little difference. "If they say our communities have to be cleaned out, that means they think we're filth, that we should be gotten rid of," one of them explained bitterly. Another added, "If you have a certain kind of name, most companies won't hire you. And if your address is in department 93 and someplace like Clichy, you'll never even get an interview. The only place most of us can work is in an illegal garment sweatshop in somebody's apartment, and now there's even less of that. Besides, we don't want those jobs." Some of the older among them did have jobs; the younger ones weren't eager to discuss how they got by.
The youth in this bar thought of themselves as Islamic, in the sense of that background being part of their identity and especially the identity by which the world judged them. But their thinking was more secular and their goals in no way religious. Many people all over the region were especially angry about the tear-gassing of the mosque (in this case, a converted warehouse). More than an attack on their religion, they considered it an insult to their humanity. These youth explained it like this: "There are two or three churches around here and a synagogue" – the synagogue is, in fact, practically adjacent to the cité. "No one has ever attacked any of them. That's because we respect people no matter what their religion. If they attack a mosque, it's to show us that they have no respect for us at all."
They were asked what they hoped to accomplish by their actions. "If they don't give us what we want," one said, "it's war." It was pointed out that the other side had a real army and couldn't be defeated by stones and Molotov cocktails. But they didn't see it that way. The government couldn't deal with them, they said, especially not all of them all over the country. The police would have to back off eventually. They didn't have much to say about the threat of facing the army.
"We'll make them listen to us!" said Zyed's neighbour. When you go home, turn on the television – you'll see all of France is burning."
This marked the end of our conversation. The bar was closing, and the youth were ready to move on. It was shortly before this point that one of them said something very illuminating. The question was put to all of them. "This guy at the bar over there says that it's wrong for you to be burning the cars of your neighbours who need them to go to work. What do you say to that?"
"We burn cars, monsieur, because cars are what burn best", hotly retorted a young man who had played a leading role over the last several hours. This seemed to convey what was best about these youth, and their shortcomings. They are determined to rebel against injustice by any means at hand, they feel they have nothing to lose and sometimes they are fearless. But they also need revolutionary science so that they can understand more clearly what they were up against and what would have to be done to bring about radical change. Mao Tsetung said that the most basic truth of Marxism is that it's right to rebel. When these two elements come together, proletarian rebels and a scientific outlook, the future of France, and of the countries like it all over Europe, will look very different.
Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (Seattle)
http://seattle.rcyb.info
"Revolution" newspaper
http://revcom.us
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