French riots in autumn 2005

hello,

bellow you will find the final chapter of the short pamphlet on the riots in suburbs in french in 2005 published by our group. all criticism is welcomed, although because of my poor english my participation on this board will be rather limited...

cheers!

Several Notes instead of Conclusions

(the last chapter of the pamphlet We Bark To Be Heard: Riots in France, Autumn 2005;
written and published in Czech by – 1155; Collectively Against Capital)

1. However the events in banlieues attracted lots of attention, it would be a mistake to attach more importance to it than it had in reality: it would also be a sign of eurocentrism to miss conflicts in Asia, social struggles in Latin America (in Bolivia, Argentina or Peru), or the situation in Iraq, just because of these recent French events. We are living in the era of expansion of Capital over the entire planet, when the capitalist production of value is so complex, that it would be a destructive restriction of our (counter) class perspective to pay attention only to those struggles that we can 'geographically' grasp. Indeed, this rebellion caused lots of fuss, because it happened in the very heart of developed capitalist society...but, from the other point of view and with some simplification, such countries as France are not the 'window of production of value' anymore. It is rather e.g. China where capitals flow, trying to gain as much of the decreasing global portion of value as possible, so that millions of people have to flee agricultural areas for work in industrialized regions. That causes not only massive inner migration, that has reached its historical peak and pace (1), but also a lot of social conflict (2).

2. What is the point of the November riots, then? To put it briefly, it is a tiny sample of the huge capitalist crises, it is a peak of an iceberg that appears when we pay attention to the context.

The easier it is to produce real wealth (thanks to science, technical progress in production, etc) (3), the more proletarians become redundant and useless for capital. Workers are substituted for goods, that were produced by their labour: computers, machines, robots. Why should a capitalist spend money on employing people on more costly (and potentionally less disciplined) living labour (labour of proletarians) when it can be done by machines (dead labour)? Why should he risk losing in the competition with other capitalists because of higher expenses?

That is why the capitalist is forced to modernize and automatize production, to use machines to make proletarians become only their appendages, their 'extended hands'...but it also means that while one specific capitalist makes money from the other capitalists thanks to cheaper production, Capital as a global process becomes troubled. Commodities produced in modern production contain less living labour - and capital can only live on this labour: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.“ (4)

The development of capital has reached its own limits due to its own contradictions (these are not only of an 'objective' character, but appeared also in interaction with the activity of the working class).

The proletariat in the banlieues is an example of this process. In some respect, it is difficult to speak about it as about a reserve army of unemployed, traditionally used to push down wages and to discipline employed proletarians, and then used in production again. The inhabitants of the poor suburbs are apparently not playing even this role. They are out of the official capitalist economy (while they can take part in some parallel economy (5)) and one of few roles they can play in the system is, that capital can strengthen racism through them, and weaken our class.

3. What have the riots brought concerning class struggle?

The autumn riots have posed many questions.

Was the fact that the rebels did not articulate any specific requirements of their struggle the sign, that they are so alienated to capitalist society? That they refuse to reduce their struggle only to specific aspects of life under capital? That they refuse to resign to reformist changes in life of boredom, exploitation and alienation? Indeed, the radical anger of many class struggles was pacified through 'realistic' demands towards the system instead of trying to overcome it (6). But when struggles miss a clear and radical vision, they have too much space in which to exhaust themselves and ...to die.

And further on:

The riots did not produce any groups which would have been mediators of the real rioters, mediators who would have spoken 'in their name' (and the fact, that no muslim group became such a mediator, is still good news). It is clear that giving space to groups which take the chance and 'pragmatically' start to negotiate with the system to ensure their own power as established partners of the state and capital, means that... the struggle is stolen. But where was self-organisation, where were the struggles spread and centralized? Where was some unification of the most advanced rebels?

The rebellion was not coopted either through 'realistic' requirements to negotiate, or through organisations, that are here only to achieve and to keep their position as partners of capital and state, as cops and peacemakers. But was the riot not coopted before it started?

There were only two attacks against police stations (the first one took place the first day in Clichy-sous-Bois), only one meeting against the police. Attacks against schools were attacks against institutions that mean nothing for the youth, a symbol of the arrogant state. But most of the violence did not find its class target- it was targeted against suburban working class family cars, there was at least one attack against a shop assistant from a supermarket, against a bus with local people, in which was seriously burnt one passenger. Nothing against violence („Who never felt the thirst to destroy everything – despite the risk to be lost within it – doesn´t change the world nor himself/herself. The rejection of violence equates to acceptance of the status which exists around us.“ (7)), and even nothing against the violence against the parts of the working class which stand up for the side of capital (blacklegs, defenders of capitalist status quo in revolution), this was not that case. The poor parts of the banlieues are not noman's land, as we assumed in the beginning, where there are not more suitable targets than a neighbour's car (8). There are more than 70 thousand enterprises, workshops and shops, even the banlieues have their places where value is produced, their bosses, job agencies, etc... But these were not attacked, there was no mass expropriation of goods from supermarkets (9), no mass meetings (with only one exception in Clichy-sous-Bois) and no mass confrontation with the police. Rebellion did not contain any women or older proletarians, which is a very important fact outlining the limits of the struggle.

Total defiance, breaking point and wild anger is a good start, which contains the liberating moment of subversion. Indeed, communism is not the positive development of capitalism, but its negation, it is the negative development and the overcoming of its contradictions, it is not accumulation of successful struggles of the past, it is the negation of an illusion that any struggle can be successful in capitalism. But if the primary angry defiance does not reveal (and the process of the struggle does not willingly overcome) the limits that were immanent to it when it started, there is a serious risk that it will not become struggle for communism against barbarism, but only sample of the barbarism of capitalism.

4. Problem of political perspective
Struggles in capitalism can not be unambiguously of the antagonistic sort, even less so in eras of low class mobilization. In the era of counterrevolution, people struggle for more money, not to abolish it. In such times, it is necessary to search for 'the assertion of communism' in ambiguous processes, when it appears only as a tendency (because it fully bursts only in the real revolutionary moments, when it materially appears on the list of things to do for the day). It only appears as a tendency – against tendencies leading towards ratifying present social relationships.

When making inquiries of specific struggles, the point is to find out how they contribute to class struggle as a whole, not to judge their bearers in some moralistic fashion. (And neither are such judgements convenient in case of the November rioters: the signs of their class weakness are not only what the young rioters without experience did, but also what the older proletarians did not do).

Any conflict in capitalism is both for and against capital at the same time. As class struggle is a process (which is based on the continuing antagonism between capital-labour), so is the class itself (much more than a static factor). The task of those who stand up for revolutionary overturning a society based on commodity exchange, is to find out the balance of these two moments (which also struggle as the class of itself and class for itself), which are bound to each other and struggle against each other. The goal is to find out the contradictions of the movement, to make criticism of its limits, to put these into context and find out to what extent they can contribute to the generalization and radicalization of the class struggle.

In these terms, the perspectives and chances of the autumn riots in France are weak. As the riots were a sign of capitalist crises, so they were sign of weakness of our class and limits of its activity.

- 1155; Collectively Against Capital
Spring 2005

(1) The population of migrants who left rural areas to be absorbed by low-waged work in towns in southeast China (for transient period or permanently) now numbers 150 million people. The number of urban habitants was increased because of the flood of migrants (from 17.9 percent of all population in China in 1979 to 41. 8 percent in 2004). (China Development Brief, January 2006)

(2) While the government filed 58 000 acts of “public order disturbance“ in 2003, it was 74,000 one year later and 87,000 last year (a rise of 6.6 percent). (According to China Development Brief, January 2006). Unrest which is often violent indicates unstability of society in China in a period when the economy is growing at a rapid pace. There are many problems behind these disturbances: low compensation for land requisition, disastrous consequences of enviromental destruction, corruption of officials, monstrous social contrasts and arrogance of the rich.

(3) This process corresponds to the transition from the phase of formal dominance of capital (during which capital governed the process of production) to the phase of the real dominance of capital (during which it penetrated into all pores of society). This is one of the interpretations of the concept of formal and real dominance (subsumption) of capital which was outlined in text known as Unpublished Sixth Chapter of Capital by Karl Marx.

(4) Karl Marx: Capital Vol I, Prague 1954, Chapter VIII, page 251.

(5) Nevertheless, to differentiate, from moralist and legalist stand-points, between the black and the official economy is debateable: the black economy is for many proletarians the same necessity as the official one for others – and the parallel economy contributes to the creation of value in the same way as the legal one.

(6) Such “realistic“ demands could be seen also in autumn “events“ in France, for example proposals for funding more “local policemen“ who would have a more kind attitude towards teenagers in suburbs than racist and arrogant police etc.

(7) Gilles Dauvé: Ce que nous voulouns: Rien, In: Lettre de Troploin č. 5, February 2006;
[[a poor translation from French into English by us!!]]

(8) How in this respect should be interpreted the sympathy which some of the owners of burst cars had towards the riots? It was hardly an expression of class solidarity for spreading of (street) fight against the power. Cars didn´t go out on barricades. Rather it was an expression of the acceptance of class defeat when the class, backs-to-the-wall wants to resignedly believe that if the depressed proletarian community applies to itself a sort of masochism, power will take care in a normal way of its problems.

(9) This was the case during the riots in Los Angeles in 1992 (collective expropriations were one of their main expressions) or Vaulx-en-Velin in France in 1990 or Quarto Oggiaro in Milano in 1968-1977.