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	Workers Vanguard No. 867	31 March 2006

Racist Hysteria Against Ghetto Youth: Tool to Derail Struggle

Mass Protests Shake France

No to a New Popular Front!

For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Party to Fight for Workers Rule!

Correction Appended

MARCH 28—The protests by workers and students rocking France have created the sharpest political crisis in years for the French bourgeoisie and the rightist government of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Provoked by the government’s attempt to impose a new measure, the First Employment Contract (CPE), stripping young workers of any job security, the protest movement has electrified workers throughout the European Union. This is especially the case in Germany, where the government is similarly trying to roll back the wages, rights and benefits won by the working class through decades of struggle.

In the seven weeks since the protests began, dozens of universities around the country have been occupied by students or shut down. The movement spread to the country’s high schools and, in the last couple of weeks, to the decaying minority ghettos (banlieues) on the outskirts of France’s cities. More importantly, the trade unions have played an active role in the protests. The massive and growing response against the CPE has led to divisions within the bourgeoisie, including opposition to de Villepin in his own party.

Today, some three million people were out on the streets throughout France. There were strikes by railroad, air transport and city transport workers in more than 70 cities. Teachers were heavily mobilized, with over 50 percent of high school teachers on strike. This was the widest strike mobilization since the beginning of the struggle against the CPE, affecting not only the public sector but also the private sector, including auto and other metal industries, with their heavily minority workforces. At the same time, the strikes were partial, with the Paris public transport system, for example, largely continuing to function. The government responded to the mobilizations with a heavy hand, with cops firing tear gas at protesters and carrying out at least 400 arrests. While union and student leaders threaten further protests against the CPE, the de Villepin government shows no sign of backing down.

In an attempt to divide and derail the protest and strike movement by pitting workers and student youth against oppressed minority youth, the government and the press have whipped up hysteria against “violence” by “casseurs” (hooligans), a racist code word for ghetto youth. The anger of the ghetto youth in the face of ceaseless police repression and rampant discrimination exploded in mass upheaval throughout France’s ghettos last November. The racist hysteria against ghetto youth is being wielded by the authorities and their mouthpieces to try to disappear the bloody violence of the police. Cyril Ferez, a member of the SUD-PTT postal union, lies in a coma after being beaten by riot police during union demonstrations on March 18. Another demonstrator has also suffered head trauma at the hands of the cops. At the March 28 demonstration in Paris, the SUD trade-union federation carried a banner, in honor of Cyril Ferez, against repression and led the union contingents in the march.

There is an “air of manipulation,” as the French expression goes, to the anti-casseur hysteria. One of the worst rampages supposedly carried out by “casseurs” took place in St. Denis at the same time that representatives of the left were planning a referendum to extend the vote in municipal elections to immigrants. The police admit to using plainclothes cops to infiltrate student protests, supposedly to evict “violent” elements. Meanwhile, on March 14, fascists of the National Front and other outfits, armed with metal bars, attacked student protesters near the Sorbonne under the protective eyes of the CRS riot police.

From the start of the anti-CPE protests, our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France have intervened at demonstrations, student assemblies and trade-union mobilizations to stress the urgent need for the workers movement and the student protesters to embrace as their own the cause of the ghetto poor. However, the trade-union misleaders, the reformist Communist (PC) and Socialist (PS) parties and their tails on the “far left” have aided and abetted the racist assault. In fact, as a 15 March supplement to Le Bolchévik pointed out (see “French Trotskyists Say: Down With Racist ‘First Employment’ Law! Defend Ghetto Youth!” page 6), “It was their support to the government against the ghetto youth revolt that emboldened de Villepin to launch his CPE and ‘unequal opportunities’ law in January.” Now the reformists have joined in railing against “casseur violence,” and some protest organizers have even criminally called on the racist cops to throw ghetto youth out of the demonstrations.

At today’s march in Paris, many contingents were surrounded by daisy chains aimed at keeping out youth from the banlieues. There were incidents of plainclothes cops stopping youth on the sidewalks from getting closer to the demonstrators in the streets. The SP-affiliated CFDT union federation announced from their loudspeakers their opposition to violence and their intention to fight against “hooligans” who might try to disrupt the demonstration. The LTF intervened in Paris and Rouen at today’s demonstrations in opposition to the campaign against ghetto youth, selling over 150 copies of Le Bolchévik and distributing thousands of our 15 March supplement.

The government’s First Employment Contract law creates a national two-tier system in which newly hired youth would become second-class citizens with no protections against layoffs for two years. The CPE is an attack on the entire workers movement as the bourgeoisie tries to use youth who are anxious about their future—unemployment in France tops 20 percent for 18- to 25-year-olds—to drive down wages and working conditions for all workers.

In particular, the CPE is directed against minority youth in the banlieues who are victims of cop terror, discrimination and massive unemployment (48 percent in the most recent census). The CPE is an amendment to the so-called “equal opportunity law” that was passed as a direct response to the rebellion of ghetto youth last fall (see “Down With Racist Cop Terror! Ghetto Youth Upheavals Sweep France,” WV No. 858, 11 November 2005). That law legalizes night work for 15-year-olds and allows apprenticeships starting at 14 years of age, making France the only European country other than Serbia where schooling is not mandatory up to the age of 15. While the racist capitalist media insists on referring to them as “immigrants,” France’s minority youth are mostly French citizens, born and/or raised in France. They are the children and grandchildren of immigrant workers who came in the 1960s and ’70s from the countries of France’s former colonial empire, especially from North Africa and, more recently, West Africa. The LTF demands full citizenship rights for all who have made it to France, including undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers!

The reformist working-class leaders, whose sights are trained on presidential and legislative elections next year, are seeking to put together a new popular-front coalition. The popular front is a class-collaborationist alliance between mass parties of the working class, such as the PCF and PS, and bourgeois parties, such as the Greens or the grouping around ultra-nationalist Jean-Pierre Chevènement. This treacherous policy subordinates the working class to the class enemy, undercutting class struggle and demoralizing the proletariat.

The multiethnic French working class can be mobilized against racist attacks. On 9 November 2005, in Bobigny, a working-class suburb of Paris, a demonstration that had been called by the trade-union leaders around economic demands became focused instead on the racist cop terror that was sweeping the ghettos. At the demonstration were workers from the Citroën auto plant in Aulnay-sous-Bois, where the workforce is largely of immigrant origin. Several of them underscored the link between the layoff of 500 temporary workers the previous month and the revolt in the minority housing projects of that same city.

It could not be clearer that the fight against the bosses’ anti-labor attacks must place at its center the defense of the minority population against racist terror and discrimination and that this in turn requires a political struggle against the parties of the popular front. A small but telling example of this point was seen at a Rouen student assembly on March 24 when our comrades introduced a motion calling for “freeing all students and banlieue youth arrested now! And to lift all charges against them!” This motion was initially favorably received by the bulk of the 150 students at the assembly. It was the “far left,” acting as the fighting vanguard of the racist popular front, that ensured the defeat of this elementary statement of unity between the students and the ghetto youth.

A speaker for Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR), affiliated to Peter Taaffe’s British-centered Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) and Socialist Alternative in the U.S., called on the students to enlist the support of the police in demanding the release of those arrested. This expressed the CWI’s notorious position that the bosses’ cops are “workers in uniform.” GR’s call provided an entry for a speaker from the UNEF student association, which is supported by the PS and Alain Krivine’s Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, to openly defend the cops for doing their job when they arrested “casseurs.” A counterposed motion, which avoided explicitly defending the banlieue youth, was passed with the support of the entire “far left,” including some of the anarchists present.

Some of these anarchists later admitted to our comrades that they had made a mistake in not supporting our motion. At a March 27 meeting of the student assembly in Rouen, upon our comrades’ initiative a motion was passed demanding the exclusion of police from the protests and calling for cops “out of the labor unions and the workers movement!”

At a student assembly in the Paris suburb of St. Denis on March 24, where our comrades also argued for defense of the banlieue youth, a speaker from Lutte Ouvrière (LO) explicitly defended the use of goon squads to physically exclude “casseurs” from the demonstrations. Our comrades have engaged in sharp political struggles with the anarchists and social democrats over our defense of the Russian Revolution of 1917, whose final overturn in 1991-92 paved the way for the current anti-working-class and anti-immigrant assault.

Racist attacks on minorities are a hallmark of the popular front as it enforces capitalist austerity against the working class. The Vigipirate plan of racist cop terror in the ghettos was introduced by the popular-front government under President François Mitterrand in the lead-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In the fall of 1998, in the face of a growing movement by high school students demanding more teachers and protesting the lousy conditions in their schools, the popular-front government led by Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin responded by unleashing police terror against minority youth. The “immediate action plan” proposed by the Jospin government included the creation of 10,000 five-year contracts for “youth jobs,” in which youth would work under a special contract at starvation wages with no guarantee of permanent employment.

Then as now, the LTF was unique on the French left in coming to the defense of the hundreds of youth rounded up by the police at demonstrations or through arbitrary identity checks. As the LTF wrote in “‘Casseurs’: Code Word for Racist Terror—Only Workers Revolution Can Provide a Future for Youth!” (Le Bolchévik No. 148, Winter 1998-1999):

“Throughout France, the cops have violently attacked youth from the minority ghettos, using the racist code word ‘casseurs.’ This code word is a veritable license to kill directed against youth of immigrant origin….

“The capitalist PS-PC government, the bourgeoisie’s executive committee, is trying to set youth from the minority ghettos in the suburbs against the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois youth of the white city centers. Using racism, the government is encouraging the latter’s tendency to defend education for the privileged while trying to turn them away from fighting for education for all.”

As protests continue in France, Germany has been engulfed by a two-month-long cascade of rolling strikes by the Ver.di public employees union against plans to cut bonuses and to increase the workweek from 38.5 hours to at least 40 hours. In addition, the current coalition government of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats seeks to abrogate the law protecting workers against arbitrary firings and to impose a two-year probation period on all new-hires. The eyes of workers throughout Germany have been fixed on the events in France. Many argue for the need to use “French methods” against the employers, though in the mouths of the union tops this is a warning to the government that they should settle or face increased social unrest. The head of Ver.di in the state of Baden-Württemberg, a stronghold of the public sector strike, declared in a solidarity message to the French workers and students: “Our enemies are already working together. Let’s do it, too!”

Throughout West Europe, capitalist governments are intent on overturning the remains of the so-called “welfare state,” the social measures introduced mostly during the anti-Soviet Cold War after World War II by bourgeoisies fearful of the spectre of social revolution. Following capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe in 1989-92, the rulers of the European Union (EU) embarked on a wholesale assault on the workers movement aimed at ratcheting up profitability in order to more effectively compete with their imperialist rivals, particularly the U.S. “hyperpower.” First and foremost, this has meant racist terror and other attacks directed at immigrants, asylum-seekers and the oppressed minority populations, largely Turkish- and Kurdish-derived in Germany and African- and North African-derived in France. At the same time, these minority workers, as part of the proletariat, have significant social power and have shown great combativity in numerous struggles in recent years to resist the bosses’ assaults. However, as long as such struggles are channeled into the dead end of class collaboration and new popular-front governments, the rulers’ attacks will only continue and multiply.

Against the reformists’ appeal for a capitalist “social Europe,” we call for proletarian revolutions to achieve a socialist united states of Europe. At the time of massive public sector strikes in France in 1995, we warned against the reformists “who claim to offer leadership to the workers only to behead their struggles and divert them into electoral channels” (“For a New, Revolutionary Leadership!” WV No. 635, 15 December 1995). Indeed, the combative 1995 strikes were derailed by the reformist misleaders and used to bring to power the racist and anti-working-class Jospin popular front. Our warning is no less true today. What is needed above all is the forging of revolutionary workers parties committed to the complete and unconditional political independence of the proletariat. Those who labor must rule!

Correction

In "Mass Protests Shake France" (WV No. 867, 31 March), we wrote, referring to a 1998 government attack on minority youth and the current racist attacks, "Then as now, the LTF was unique on the French left" in coming to the defense of the arrested youth. But as the accompanying article explains, while other left groups initially refused to defend the youth arrested during last fall's ghetto revolt, several have since raised the call for amnesty for those arrested. (From WV No. 868, 14 April.)