Down With Racist Cop Terror!

Ghetto Youth Upheavals Sweep France

The following article is based on a leaflet issued on November 5 by our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France.

PARIS, November 8—On October 27, two youth of African origin, Ziad Benna and Bouna Traoré, were electrocuted in a power substation where they had sought refuge from a police dragnet in Clichy-sous-Bois, near Paris. For over a week, immigrant and minority ghettos and neighborhoods have been in flames. Thousands of cars as well as some warehouses and stores have burned. The unprecedented unrest in the suburban ghettos has also flared up in the center of Paris and spread to suburbs all over France and beyond. Cars were set ablaze outside the main train station in Brussels and in a working-class neighborhood of Berlin.

The French government continues to fuel the outrage. A state of emergency invoking sweeping police measures has now been imposed against the seething ghettos. Some 10,000 police have been deployed while more than 1,200 youth have been arrested and some have already been sentenced to months in jail. We demand the immediate release of all the jailed youth and the dropping of all charges! Down with racist police terror against youth in the immigrant ghettos! We also oppose Vigipirate, a plan consisting of racist joint police and army patrols in train and metro stations and airports, which has been on “code red” for five months now.

The explosion started in Clichy-sous-Bois, a rundown ghetto with a population consisting heavily of immigrants and French youth of immigrant descent. The official unemployment rate there is 25 percent; in reality, probably more than 50 percent of youth there are unemployed. No wonder Clichy exploded. The bourgeoisie does not have much to offer these youth except police patrols, jail and death—in some prisons about 80 percent of the inmates are of Muslim background, whereas Muslims make up less than 10 percent of the population of France.

A recent sociological study documents “apartheid at school,” with racist segregation now even more intense in high schools than in housing. As a result, these youth have little to no perspective of finishing school or getting a job. And the situation has gone from bad to worse over the last 20 years, under “left-” and right-wing governments alike. Racism is inherent to capitalism, and in France it is rooted also in its colonial past: the French bourgeoisie still seethes over its defeat in the Algerian liberation struggle over 40 years ago. A consistent fight against racist oppression requires a fight to overthrow the whole capitalist system.

Riots such as these are an expression of despair by unemployed youth so marginalized that they are deprived of any means to be a factor for effective social change. The unrest has also included incidents of indiscriminate attacks on individuals who happened to find themselves in the wrong place, and has devastated the neighborhoods these youth have to live in. Yet despite the vast energies expended and the devastation suffered, these outbreaks usually change nothing.This makes it even more important for workers to fight for better conditions for residents of these neighborhoods. The working class is the social force that has the objective interest and power to overturn this whole system of capitalist exploitation, racism and misery, and build a workers state based on a planned economy.

Aulnay-sous-Bois is another city in the 93rd district, a heavily working-class and immigrant region outside Paris that was prominent in the recent riots. In Aulnay there is also a large Citroën auto plant where young workers, mostly of North and West African immigrant origin, carried out a winning strike this past March. Thousands of youth from the area have jobs at the nearby Charles de Gaulle Airport, one of the largest in Europe. The power of the multiethnic workforce of the area, French and immigrant, can be unleashed to fight against the terrible conditions in the ghettos and in defense of the oppressed youth. But for this to happen, what is necessary is a relentless fight against the chauvinist trade-union bureaucracy, which restrains and betrays working-class struggles because at bottom it shares the bourgeoisie’s concern that French capitalism be made more “competitive” against its international rivals.

The government’s vicious attack against a whole generation of youth is intended to fuel racist divisions within the multiethnic working class of this country in a context of savage attacks against the whole proletariat and growing working-class resistance. After the seamen of the Corsica-Mediterranean ferry line lost their strike, stabbed in the back by the CGT union leadership (see “Corsica and Class Struggle in France,” WV No. 857, 28 October), the government, wielding an anti-strike court injunction, is now trying to break a month-long strike by Marseille transit workers. A strike has been called for November 21 by all the major unions of the SNCF railway. This makes it all the more urgent for the organized workers movement to oppose the government’s racist onslaught. For the working class, it is a life-and-death question to stand united and fight off the attacks on its standard of living and on social services. As the LTF wrote in Le Bolchévik (September 2005):

“An attack against one is an attack against all. The whole workers movement…must mobilize in defense of its most vulnerable class brothers, the workers coming from North and West Africa in particular, who form a strategic component of the proletariat of this country, whether in construction, auto or among the sanitation workers of Paris. What’s needed is a campaign to unionize the temp workers, time-limited jobs and ‘new hire contracts’ [a new type of contract below union standards]. Down with Vigipirate! Down with racist expulsions and deportation charter flights! Full citizenship rights for all those who are here! French troops out of Africa!”

Neighborhood Police and Riot Police: Guard Dogs of the Bourgeois Order

The trade-union bureaucrats and the reformist parties should be condemned for their refusal to protest the government’s racist onslaught in Clichy-sous-Bois and other neighborhoods. They mainly complain that Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy is a crazed maniac, only pursuing his career to become president. Thus they give backhanded support to his rival, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (a close ally of President Jacques Chirac), who has even increased the level of police repression since he took over the situation after the first days of rioting. The reformists condemn Sarkozy for sending riot police on hit-and-run operations against the minority ghettos. Instead of Sarkozy’s raids, they promote the so-called good old days of the “neighborhood police” put in place by the late popular-front government of Lionel Jospin of the Socialist Party (PS) and Marie-George Buffet, the current head of the Communist Party (PCF). The PCF and Lutte Ouvrière (LO), which is linked to the American pseudo-Trotskyist organization Spark, have even attacked Sarkozy for reducing the number of police working daily in the ghettos. LO wrote in Lutte Ouvrière (8 July):

“In complete contradiction to his promises, the minister Sarkozy has conducted the same policy on his turf as his colleagues: playing tricks with the numbers to hide the decrease, closing police precincts, budgets without funds.”

The “neighborhood police” was a favorite concept of Jean-Pierre Chevènement, minister of police in the Jospin government, who is still widely hated by undocumented immigrants and by ghetto youth, whom he liked to refer to as sauvageons (little savages). He introduced new laws enabling charges to be brought against anyone found helping undocumented workers. The harking back of the PS and PCF to Jospin and Chevènement’s “neighborhood police” days is a deadly omen for immigrants and youth. It was Jospin’s cops who killed Habib Ould Mohamed in Toulouse in 1998, provoking a riot for three full days in the Le Mirail neighborhood, which was quelled by a massive mobilization of the riot police, exactly as Sarkozy/de Villepin are doing now. Again, in April 2000, a neighborhood patrol killed Ryad Hamlaoui near Lille, provoking another wave of unrest.

The PCF issued a special statement (l’Humanité, 4 November) on Clichy demanding: “Place the police at the service of the whole nation, which means democratization, training, neighborhood residency and adequate funds.” LO’s editorial on Clichy mentions immigration or racism only once, in order to warn that Sarkozy’s antics will “encourage more repressive attitudes among the police and racism among many of its elements.” As if putting a different top cop in charge and throwing a few “bad apples” off the force would create “good” French cops. All these reformists are trying to rehabilitate the police in the eyes of oppressed youth, thus promoting deadly illusions in the bourgeois Republic. The police cannot be reformed to serve the population. Promoting the lie that they can be reformed is what distinguishes reformists from revolutionaries. Like the other armed bodies of men that constitute the core of the state (prison guards, the army), their function is to protect private ownership of the means of production by the capitalists. The capitalist state has a legal monopoly on weapons in order to maintain the capitalist system: the police are the guard dogs of the bourgeoisie, not “workers in uniform.” Police, prison guards, out of the unions!

PCF, LCR: Architects of a New “Popular Front”

In its statement, the PCF speaks accusingly of Sarkozy: “The government has shown that it is incapable of guaranteeing public order.” The PS and PCF are using the current riots in order to refurbish their much-tarnished credentials and present themselves as those who are more capable of maintaining order in the largely minority neighborhoods, and thus can be relied upon by the bourgeoisie to run the bourgeois state more smoothly.

At bottom, the issue for the PCF is to push forward a new coalition, including with bourgeois parties like the Greens, Chevènementistes and Left Radicals, to win the 2007 elections. And the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) as well as LO (albeit more indirectly) are helping them out. The “left,” including the PCF and the pseudo-Trotskyists from the LCR and LO, are sharing a platform on November 8 in Paris with two little Chevènementiste bourgeois parties, MARS and MRC, supposedly against the privatization of the EDF electricity monopoly. Thus, the LCR and LO promote illusions that you can fight the capitalist onslaught by uniting with capitalist parties!

Down With the Racist Campaign “Against Terrorism”!

In early October at Charles de Gaulle Airport, baggage handlers went on strike for permanent hiring of casual workers and for higher wages (following the privatization of Air France under the previous government of Jospin/Buffet). The strike was broken by the government, using Vigipirate and a supposed terrorist threat posed by luggage not being sorted. This shows very concretely what we have been saying for years: Vigipirate targets all immigrants and minorities, as well as the working class as a whole. It may be wielded again in coming weeks if a major strike gets underway at the French railway.

LO has from Day One refused to oppose Vigipirate and this goes hand in hand with its leading role in pushing the racist campaign to expel young women wearing the headscarf from school. In France, Islam is a religion of the oppressed and of the ghettos. The headscarf represents a reactionary social program that confines women to the home in a position of servitude. The expulsion of Muslim girls from school can only reinforce their isolation and oppression and fuel racism against all immigrants. We oppose these racist campaigns and defend the girls who wear headscarves against the bourgeois state. Instead of that, LO welcomed Chirac’s law banning the headscarf, a racist law that is part and parcel of the daily harassment against Muslims, and LO spokesman Arlette Laguiller even linked arms at a 6 March 2004 march of women from immigrant neighborhoods with Nicole Guedj (then-Secretary of State for prison construction from Chirac’s UMP party)!

LO does mobilize on behalf of undocumented immigrants, just as many bourgeois liberals do who believe the French Republic should be able to integrate those immigrants who often have been in France for years and have raised families in this country. However, racism against ghetto youth runs deep and goes to the core of French capitalism, serving to profoundly divide the working class. LO consciously evades the issue, talking only of “poor neighborhoods,” avoiding the key question of racial oppression. What is needed is to forge the revolutionary unity of the working class, starting with workers mobilizations against racist police terror. We fight to build a multiethnic revolutionary workers party, committed to leading the proletariat of this country in socialist revolution.