France – 10/09 and beyond: class struggle and popular neighborhoods
We hereby share a translation we received from an article by La Cause du Peuple on the recent and massive strikes that took place in France.
September 10 and 18 brought more change than some might think. As we have pointed out in other articles, new forms of struggle have emerged as a result of collective analysis of the current situation and past experiences. Admittedly, the transformation has not been complete and therefore has not yet been able to reveal its full political potential, as the new takes time to establish itself. One of the notable events that has received very little attention is the mobilization in popular neighborhoods, which took the form of popular demonstrations in Rennes, Limoges, and Lyon. In Lyon, responding to the call of the Comité Populaire d’Entraide et de Solidarité (CPES) [Translator’s note: People’s Committee for Mutual Aid and Solidarity], at least 400 mass people from the ‘États-Unis’ popular neighborhood demonstrated combatively to assert their rejection of Macron’s politics and the system in general. On the 18th, this happened again and led to severe police repression with arrests. In the ‘Kennedy’ neighborhood (Rennes), the masses mobilized in the same way, and in Limoges they took part in a blockade.
We must understand that in the neighborhoods, on the one hand, there is the bourgeois state, which socially abandons the neighborhoods (destroying non-profit organizations, social life, closing schools, etc.), militarizes them to “stop drug trafficking” (using force in a way that would be unacceptable elsewhere in the country), and destroys public housing through a policy of “renovation” in an attempt to gentrify them. We also have the exploitation of the problems of popular neighborhoods by opportunistic left-wing politicians who try to earn votes and those who claim to represent the neighborhoods because they come from them, but offer nothing except victimization and the ballot box. In truth, we have aspects that seem contradictory at first glance but are part of the old politics of the bourgeois state, its direct and indirect intermediaries, conscious and sometimes unconscious, let’s admit it.
On the other hand, there is a small contingent of a younger generation of communists who have decided to live, work, and struggle alongside the masses, because the masses are the makers of history. It is grassroots work based on mobilization around the concrete problems faced by residents of popular neighborhoods that has made it possible to increasingly organize workers, mothers, and young people by developing their political consciousness. Above all, it is the political line followed that makes all the difference, not the practice itself, which can be confused with non-profit/charity. Only the proletarian, class-based line, carrying the struggle for power, the politicization and organization of the oppressed, marks the difference with all non-profit/charity activities; here we have a strictly different character. The neighborhoods are part of the proletariat; they have specific problems, but the main problem is the question of power, as everywhere else. The vast majority of workers in the neighborhoods are manual workers and employees, but there are also small business owners who, due to their material and social conditions, are mostly on the side of the proletariat.
There is no denying that there were mobilizations in popular neighborhoods, and even large ones, at a certain time, but their goal was only to improve life, not to transform society as a whole; to pursue reformist policies, not revolutionary ones. For 40 years, the slogan was “listen to us, please, we really are French citizens, we want to be integrated.” Given the reactionary response unleashed by the state and the criminalization of neighborhoods, the bottom line is that the situation is worse than it was 40 years ago. The progress that has been made, thanks to billions given to non-profit organizations, has created a clientele for city halls and the state, which has not questioned the root of the problem. This clientele could only exist if it constantly asserted that the neighborhoods are different. We often hear disillusioned old activists say, “The neighborhoods have their own histories, their own lives, their own existences,” but what do these political positions mean if not the denial that the masses in these neighborhoods are part of the French proletariat? This was a trap set by the reactionaries, and we must now escape it. Fighting against the atomization of the working classes means, in particular, protecting ourselves from fascism in the not-so-distant future. There can be no counteroffensive by the working classes against the bourgeoisie without a unified policy. That is communist policy, the only just policy, which wards off the traps set by reactionaries around “differences.”
The historic decision by a group of young people to break with their former lives, most of them light-skinned and non-Muslim, is one of the defining features of this first act in the recomposition of the proletariat. The situation in France, a revolutionary situation developing unevenly, can no longer be satisfied with false debates and must seek solutions in revolutionary practice. What these young people realize is that gender, religion, skin color, and culture are secondary in the struggle, that foresight and respect are enough to prevent them from becoming lines of division. Problems exist, as elsewhere, and are of all kinds, but first we need to unite in a common policy, which is the defense of our rights as residents and proletarians. Importing problems that exist but are not brought to the forefront by the masses today would be totally counterproductive; it would be leftism. Women are the major actors in the return of revolutionary politics to the neighborhoods, which is a fact of great importance in the face of all the lies that are told or fantasized. Young people of African and Arab origin, for their part, will be major players in the revolutionary transformation of the country. They are already an important group with whom to fight. The main point is that all working-class people in this country face the same fundamental problem—an oppressive bourgeois state—and have the same solution: the socialist revolution.
Pursuing a policy in the neighborhoods based on differentiation plays into the hands of reactionaries. Adopting a proletarian line means moving toward unity, toward the solution. So, we understand that there’s only one way to the truth. It is clear that the dividing line is between those who pursue a class-based policy and those who, whether on the right or the left, want to exploit the neighborhoods and their populations. The demonstration in Lyon, which brought together 400 people—workers, mothers, young people, and older people—behind clearly revolutionary slogans, is the best weapon against the reactionarization of society. This is how we must ward off fascism, not by conquering town halls. These are clearly the elements that show the return of the Socialist Revolution to the forefront in the country, uniting the most oppressed classes with the communists in the making.
