Solidarity with the youth on the street in France!

//message of solidarity with youth fighting against, racism, poverty, unemployment, police repression and a call to action in defence of their social and political rights.

//REVOLUTION International Council //2005-11-23

We express our complete solidarity with the youth who have been engaged in pitched battles with the racist police in France for the last three weeks. Their brave actions are a defensive response to interior minister Sarkozy's inflammatory call to ‘scour the scum off the streets’ of impoverished French suburbs.They are a response to years of police racism and intimidation of young people. They are rooted in the poverty, inequality and mass unemployment that is the reality of life for the forgotten poor of the French suburbs.

The reality of the French ‘republic’

France’s structural unemployment rate of 10 per cent is not evenly spread either socially or geographically. It rises to 25 per cent amongst youth and from 30 to 50 percent on the run down estates in the suburbs of Paris and other big cities. Here it coincides with the fact that these estates have become neglected ghettoes for citizens of Arab and African origins. Most are not “immigrants” at all but French citizens. Their parents and grandparents came to France to work in the years of the post-war boom. The long decades of economic retreat, job losses, declining social services have left them, above all the young, in a condition the French call precarité, an insecure hand to mouth existence.

Young people find it difficult or impossible to find a job and know from bitter experience, that an Arab or African name or face dooms their application from the start. They are constantly stopped by the police and made to produce their papers, taking lots of vile racist abuse in the process. Faced with a full scale police invasion of their districts this racist harassment has driven the youth to a full scale revolt.

The bourgeois press; even the most liberal; present it as mindless violence, simple criminality. This is vile lie. If the rising has deep social roots it has an immediate political aim to protest the words and actions of Nicolas Sarkozy the sinister minister of the Interior. Having lit the fires he is now claiming that it is the product of an Islamist conspiracy, and talked darkly of al Qa’ida connections. This too is a lie.

In response to the uprising Chirac has declared a state of emergency, Using a law not used since the Algerian war in the 1950s that gives local prefects the right to ban demonstrations or public meetings, and impose severe penalties on anyone who “hinders” the police. Such is the ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ of the capitalist French republic which Chirac demands the youth of the suburbs assimilate to. A better slogan for this republic would be Poverty, Inequality and Racism.

Build the resistance

Of course in any spontaneous uprising some actions will be ill-judged and self-defeating. But genuine revolutionaries will not deliver patronising lessons from the sidelines let alone call for the restoration of law and order, as if the “forces of order” were not the problem but the solution.

If the workers movement wants to encourage the youth of the banlieus to take collective action; demonstrations, strikes, street blockades; then actions speak louder than words. The unions, the left parties, should organise huge demonstrations against the state of emergency and in defiance of it.

Demonstrations not in the bourgeois city centres but in the suburbs themselves. That alone will convince the youth that they can indeed be integrated; not into the capitalist republic but into the working class movement, one that is fighting to end racism and the capitalist system which spawns it.

The youth must be encouraged to organised, formulate their own demands to fight around, and build protests asserting the right to assemble and demonstrate.

*get the Police out of the estates and keep them out.

*self defence is no offence. Organise the protection of estates, defend the elderly and the must vulnerable from the police. Appeal to the left parties and trade unions for help.

*assert the right to demonstrate and defy the ban.

*call for the immediate withdrawal of the police from the estates, the instant dismissal of Sarkozy, the dropping of all charges against the hundreds arrested during the uprising.

*link the social struggles against privatisation, bad housing, unemployment to the issue of racism and youth oppression.

*fight for the deployment of all the resources needed to improve the estates, employing local youth and unemployed and under the residents own democratic control and planning.

*demand too a massive programme of public works and the cessation of the attacks on the eight hour day so that the work time can be reduced with no loss of pay to absorb all the unemployed. “Where is the money?

*make the rich pay! If they “cannot”, declare their whole system – capitalism - bankrupt. A workers revolution is needed to sweep the bourgeois republic with its flics and its paramilitary CRS into the rubbish bin of history. The whole machinery of state repression needs to be smashed and replaced with a workers militia and a workers republic.

*youth across Europe and the world must declare their solidarity with their French comrades. Demonstrate outside the French embassies Struggles like theirs, along with that of the Italian university and school students shows the need too for mass youth organisations in every country united in a new revolutionary youth international.

*youth across borders unite! Build anti-capitalist revolutionary youth movements in every country as part of a new revolutionary youth international. Together with the masses of the working class and oppressed we can bring this barbaric system – capitalism – to its knees.