World | Second night of riots in Paris suburb

See article (leaflet) at link below for more analysis, scornful of simple 'sociological' explanations...haven't had time to read it myself but I'll include the intro as a taster....

Nights of Rage: On the recent revolts in France

Sunday, November 25 2007 @ 06:15 PM PST

from:

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20071125181523286

Original title: Le notti della collera: Sulle recenti sommosse di
Francia by Filippo Argenti

Translated by Barbara Stefanelli

INTRODUCTION

This booklet is a modest contribution to understanding the recent
revolts in France. Needless to say, it is not sociological or, in a
nobler sense, theoretical insight. Revolts can only be understood by
those who have the same needs as the rebels, that is to say by those who
feel they are part of the revolt. After a brief chronology, in fact, the
pages that follow pose the question of how the events of November in
France concern all of us, and also try to give a possible answer.

We would like to highlight a few points in this short introduction.
If we take a quick look at the various revolutionary theories circulated
in France, Italy and in the USA in recent years, we can see how these
revolts were not at all unexpected or unpredictable. Some comrades are
talking of civil war, of explosions that are difficult to identify with
the places where capital concentrates and controls the exploited and of
their total exposition to merchandise. Not by chance have the nineteenth
century theses on the barbarians, on the collapse of any common logos of
the exploited, and the ambivalence of the concept of nihilism, etc.,
been revised. Certain concepts express, even if in an embryonic and
confused way, needs that go beyond the individual. In this sense, there
exits a direct relation between these revolts and revolutionary theory.
It is a kind of dialogue from a distance. According to French comrades,
any attempt at a direct encounter has so far failed. Common hostility to
the police or practical solidarity to the arrested has not been enough.
Evidently these revolts are in themselves a theoretical suggestion, a
reflection on the world. But what do they tell us? Certainly not that
the insurgents want to manage this world, control production and
technology from below. They do not tell us about hard-working multitudes
nor of ‘Zapatista marches’ carried out by intellectual labourers for a
democratic Europe. The flames in France have destroyed all social
democratic illusions of integrating the poor into the society of capital.

Walter Benjamin asked himself how in 1830 the Paris rioters shot at town
clocks, in different parts of the city and without coordinating the
action; for our part we cannot fail to reflect on why wild youths of
today are burning cars. In fact, what does the car represent in
contemporary society? We leave the question unanswered.

If the claim of putting forward great revolutionary analyses that
explain everything and that the proletarians only have to apply
diligently has now disappeared, it is time that revolutionary action
itself was conceived in a totally different way. Instead of the mission
of taking the flag to where the first fire breaks out and the first
barricade is erected, there is now the chance to put up barricades or
start fires elsewhere, as an extension of the revolt, not as its
political direction. In fact, the lamentations of those on the side of
the insurgents who complain about the lack of any political programme
are quite pathetic.

To extend the revolt, however, does not mean to put oneself at the level
of existing practises and multiply them (cars are burning, so we are
going to burn them too), but it means deciding what must be struck, and
how, to uphold the universal significance of the revolt.

At the same time, to transform the angry youths of the suburbs into the
new revolutionary subjects would be equally pathetic. It would be great
to think that the students in struggle against precarity had taken the
baton from the insurgents of November. It is not quite like that. Even
if there were lots of slogans for freedom for the rebels held in jail
since November (most of them underage) in the demos and meetings of
March and April, actual encounters have been very few. And there have
been not a few problems. During the demo in Paris on March 23, for
example, a few hundred ‘youths of the suburbs’ attacked students, stole
money and mobile phones, beat them and insulted them. Moreover they also
attacked those fleeing from police in the middle of fighting and police
attacks. These facts cannot be ignored. Territorial identities,
attachment to commodities, contempt for ‘privileged’ students, etc. are
effects of the problems that new social conflicts will carry with them
as inheritance of a rotten society. No ideology of revolt will erase them.

In order to examine the relation between the riots of November and the
movements that appeared all over France against the CPE (contract of
first employment) it is necessary to intertwine tales, testimonies and
texts. That is why we decided to prepare two different pamphlets. If we
want to avoid journalistic simplification and ambivalent rhetoric we
have to grasp the living element of the experiences of struggle. For the
time being we are simply offering an outline of the facts.

First of all we want to clarify one banal point: the expression ‘people
of the suburbs’ does not mean a thing. First, because the Paris suburbs
alone have over 9 million inhabitants (and the day millions of
inhabitants revolt, it will be quite another story!). Then, the cités
(roughly: whole housing estates with their yards and squares) within the
boundaries of the big cities were also involved in the riots. Many
‘youths of the suburbs’ study in the cities (both in the lycées, which
are secondary schools, and the universities, which are much more
attended in France than they are in Italy). In this sense, a great
number of young and not so young people who took part in the demos,
blockades and fighting in March and April were the same as those who set
the French nights on fire during the autumn. According to reliable
assessments, the insurgents in November were 50,000, whereas a few
million people participated in the movement ‘against the CPE’. Many
‘youths of the suburbs’ in fact had a pacific attitude, while other
‘more privileged’ young people resolutely raised the level of the
fighting. Statistics that explain revolts on the basis of income are a
matter for sociologists. In some provincial towns (Rennes for example)
the encounter between students and the so-called casseurs was quite
effective from a strategic point of view, which caused Sarkozy and his
men to be extremely concerned. In Paris a lot less. Obviously there are
precise reasons for that. Many ‘youths of the suburbs’ find it hard to
reach the demos in the capital: if they are not stopped before boarding
the trains of the hinterland (Rer), they are beaten by anti-riot cops as
soon as they get out of the tube. If they manage to reach the demos they
are kept out by the security services of the unions, cheered by many of
the students. It is petrol on the fire. Furthermore, the ones belonging
to the younger groups, who are not so expert as regards direct fighting
with the police, are isolated during looting and fires, and consequently
they are easily arrested. Of course this does not justify their
indiscriminate hatred towards the other demonstrators, but it is
evidence of different social situations and ways of life. Those who
experience suffocating controls by the anticrime brigade, which often
end up in beatings in the streets or at police stations, find it quite
strange to see marches going on with police escorting them everywhere...
In other words, without ourselves falling into simplification and
bearing in mind some remarkable exceptions, we can say that at present
in France certain wild youths are facing practically alone a kind of
struggle never seen before (since November, as well as the arson, a
number of violent thefts have occurred, with gangs of youths attacking
security vans with baseball clubs, …). For the revolutionaries who
publicly stand on the side of revolt against the side of the State it is
not so easy to be up to the situation, even in a movement of struggle
that proves as radical as that of the latest months.

An example will clarify this. At first the struggle was centred on the
CPE, but it soon became aware that precarity does not depend on a
specific contract; on the contrary it is the product of a whole social
system, and cannot be reformed. Even if the movement were to finally win
its specific objective (as everybody knows the government retracted the
bill in question), it knew that it was still on the defensive. The step
beyond was not so easy. The main slogan of the movement, which was
proposed first timidly and then almost officially (that is through
motions voted at the students’ meetings) became: let’s block everything.
So was it. Stations, roads, universities, bus garages, and motorways:
the flow of men and goods was massively interrupted, amid an atmosphere
of popular complicity. Those who were not ready for fighting the police
found their mode of action in the barricades, following the joyful
complementarity of actions that characterizes all real movements. The
angriest, however, those whose day to day existence is a life sentence
between police and iron gates, concrete buildings and shopping centres,
regardless of the CPE, don’t just want to block everything but also tout
niquer (destroy everything). Revolutionary rhetoric, stingy with courage
and sterile in organisational capacity, has practically abandoned them.
There need to be many more experiences, many more fires and a lot more
looting. But the road is open.

Second night of riots in Paris suburb

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