Faced with the social backlash of the economic crisis, the bourgeois State and opportunism fully reveal their true faces

If we return once again to the violent upheavals that struck the banlieues[suburbs] of Paris and other French towns between the end of October and beginning of November 2005, it is not because we attribute who knows what revolutionary value to them, as many incurable spontaneous activists immediately did.

At the time, we wrote that “these outbreaks – of extreme importance as signs of the fever growing within capitalist society and the limits beyond which ‘endurance’ cannot go – explode and will increasingly continue to explode but, left to their own resources, are destined to pass without a trace (except, unfortunately, that of more dead proletarians), to recede into frustration or – worse still – to be channelled into the cul de sac of anarchist rebellionism as an end in itself or into ethnic or religious fundamentalism, both of which deny any revolutionary class prospects”. [1]

For us, then, those riots were both the demonstration of the unsolvable class antagonism implicit in a society based on capital (even where there exists a relatively solid welfare state: despite all those who see in it the solution to the ever keener ill-being of living and working) and an initial, important break with the social pact in a Europe immersed for so long in a inter-classist and reformist slumber.

At the same time we also wrote that “communists must forcefully affirm that the rebels of the banlieues are proletarians, contrary to all the manoeuvres going on to present them simply as ‘immigrants’ or as belonging to one or the other ethnic, national or religious group.  But they should also confirm that these proletarians do not automatically become the ‘avant-garde of their class’ just because they rebel against social and police oppression.” In all this, what is lacking – and it is the most tragic lack – is the revolutionary party: this means “the only organ or tool capable, after a long period of work in contact with the working class and thusrecognised by them as being a true and reliable guide, of taking up the impulse from below, gathering the anger and energy bursting from the depths of a foul and rotten society and directing it at the real bastion of capitalist power – the State – in order to take possession of it and overthrow it, in order to build its own dictatorship on the ruins as a bridge towards a definitively class-free society”.

The revolutionary Party, faced with class struggles that  will become increasingly widespread and increasingly acute and violent clashes with all the forces that wish to bridle or repress the proletariat’s will to fight, is the only link that can solder together the proletarian movement and the spontaneous response that the latter can advance both on the economic and social terrain, through a political class struggle directed towards insurrection and the taking of power. And we concluded: “This is the only way which, under ripe objective and subjective conditions (including – we must not forget, to the shame of all volunteer efforts – the inability of the bourgeois class to deal with the social crisis) will make it possible for the proletariat to find a way out of the dead ends and ghettoes in which they spend their daily life, even when rebelling with virulence”.

If, then, we return once more to these riots, it is because they have, in a very material way, uncovered not only the social chasm that increasingly splits the supposedly homogeneous society based on capital, but also the political chasm that separates revolutionary positions from opportunist ones (in all their varieties, where those that appear to be the most extremist are also the most reprehensible). It is thus useful to return to the topic with a brief summary of the positions brought into play to respond to the urgency of what has been a brief but significant “social crisis”.    

The bourgeois State and ruling ideology

Let us start, then, with the most obvious and predictable reaction – that of the State and those high up on its payroll: small-time ideologists, teachers, hack writers, the professional perpetrators of disinformation and manipulation. The State’s intervention was military and could not be otherwise. To the disgrace of those who still insist on believing that it is above taking sides, something that “settles conflicts” and “balances contradictions”, the French State (as any bourgeois State would have done) publicly declared that it was a class tool, openly defending the interests of the ruling class, i.e. of capital (both in its personal, individual manifestations, and in its impersonal, anonymous and collective ones). It sent in its special military divisions, arrested hundreds and hundreds of people, threw them into jail, put them on trial and, in many cases, “repatriated” them (wherever the “mother country” of these modern “country-less and rootless” people may be), exhumed a curfew law that had been used at the height of the war in Algeria (not by coincidence, in the very same few days and weeks that “the positive role of the French presence overseas and especially in North Africa” was being celebrated by law!). Briefly, it made sure its cudgel was felt, as befits any State, which is an expression of class dominion.

Close behind this immediate and timely response (which the proletariat must learn to recognize as inevitable from the bourgeois State, abandoning any democratic and pacifist illusions), followed – in dialectic harmony with it – the hullabaloo of analyses by its ideologists, belonging to the variegated zoo of ever paler, more squalid, cruder and more vulgar “bourgeois thought”, above all – in overall terms – incapable of the least reflection on what had happened. And so there were those who dug up anew the “culture clash”, depicting the young people from thebanlieues as “scum”, as the youth division of an army of “aliens” attacking the West. There were those who blamed events on the “polygamous family” (!), seen as the breeding ground for social ill-being, or to “over-permissive schools” which no longer served as the vehicles of sound values. There were also those who attributed the disorders to mere “gangs of criminals”, pushers and small-time delinquents, and those who summoned up the usual ghosts of the “professional agitators”. There were those who placed all the responsibility on the shoulders of the local authorities (right- and “left”-wing) and on the architects and town planners responsible for the distressing suburban “non-places”… And the more the merrier, in a blaze of commonplaces varying from openly racist to frankly stupid, unable, despite the brainpower exerted by their authors, to say anything at all – nothing but a general “intellectual” mobilization, with the aim of drowning in a vortex of true idiocies the widespread anxiety about a possibility the bourgeois class is well acquainted with from historical experience if not from its own cultural resources: the possibility, remote as it may be, of full class war reappearing on the scene, against which timely and precautionary ideological mobilization must be activated (no matter its substance and quality), whilst the forces of repression do their real work punctually and efficiently.

And naturally all this, whether it comes from the rising star of politics Victor Sarkozy or from the hacks of the intelligentsia, like Fitoussi or Fienkelkraut, rather than from the latest imbecile in search of journalistic or television fame, is truly of no surprise to us. As Marx and Engels wrote, “The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas in every epoch; this means that the class that is the material power ruling society is at the same time its ruling spiritual power.”[2]  And so, if these ideas seem so miserable and superfluous, especially in situations of social crisis like this, it is just because that class has, for some time, become miserable and superfluous…

It should not, however, be forgotten that this ruling faction has a “leftist” appendage, represented by all those social-political forces that for decades now have accepted this mode of production as the only one possible and are making efforts to make it more acceptable to those who, instead, feel the destructive burden of it day by day. Social democracy (the various PCFs and PSs that traditionally – it must not be forgotten – govern those very same suburbs that blew up in their hand) have taken up as their battle cry the magic slogan ofintegration: which is none other than the weapon by which reformism attempts to bind the proletariat to the interests of the bourgeois State and of the nation, thus slowing down the (complex and contradictory) process through which it is, instead, able to recognize itself as the antagonist class. “Integration” with what, indeed?With “civil society”, the “nation”, the “citizens”, the “people” in that “inter-class syrup” in which – in the dreams of opportunists from all sides – it is possible to forget that we live, instead, in a society divided into classes, with opposing interests, both immediate and historical, which are, above all irreconcilable. Thus, faced with the rebellion in the suburbs, these characters can do none other than, on the one hand, and of necessity, side with the supporters and imposers of “law and order” and, on the other, accompany this with whining, shopkeeper-style recriminations… “they’ve cut our funds, we can no longer get these young people to feel French.” Briefly, for these characters (who see those that they were supposed to control, in order to earn themselves a little medal for “upholding bourgeois values”, slip through their hands) the real problem is that of… “integration interrupta”! [3]

The useful idiots

There also exists another faction that has made its voice heard significantly in these circumstances and it is that of the “useful idiots”: rabble who, for three decades now, have been paddling up and down the shores of bourgeois politics, covering them “from the left” and carrying out the function that the old PCF in France (already ultra-reactionary and ultra-chauvinist in itself and an appropriate incarnation of the most obtuse Stalinism) finds it harder and harder to maintain because of the changing times. We are speaking, of course, of “Lutte Ouvrière”, a melting pot of Trotskyite origins, similar in some ways to one of the many souls of the Italic Rifondazione Comunista. L.O. have always been spokespeople for an explicit form of opportunism almost embarrassing in its obtuseness, whose only more picturesque element is the eternal re-candidature of Arlette Laguillier at the elections. Who (obviously there are no personal arguments here: the clash is between political positions) sums up L.O.’s opportunist argument very well in the editorials that appear in the newspaper of the same name. Where, for example, she complains that these riots “do not show much awareness” and that Sarkozy gives rein to “demagogic” promises to re-establish security whilst, alas, in the so-called “sensitive” (“sensibles”) suburbs “there are no more community police officers (police de proximité) or permanent police stations and everything is left up to interventions by an ‘army of CRS’ [‘special forces’] which merely serve to spread hatred” (Lutte Ouvrière, 4/11/2005). Or, again, after having emphasized once again “the absence of social consciousness and solidarity” shown by the protagonists of the riots, she complains that, “in those neighbourhoods the State appears only in the basic form of police control or massive CRS action and, at its head, of ministers who express contempt for everything to do with poverty” (Lutte Ouvrière, 11/11/2005).

And so, according to L.O., a) there is no social consciousness among those young proletarians (how and when could there possibly be any? These anti-Marxist readers of Gramsci think that consciousness comes before action…), b) the State (without adjectives: this is the Hegelian State, the personification of the pure idea - impartial!) has abdicated from its duty to be … present in a manner that is … better ramified, in the proletarian neighbourhoods, limiting itself to the dispatch of assault forces. Thus, in their view, more (bourgeois) State presence is needed! In other words: “Prison vans! in the interests of the working class,” as the Communist Manifesto ironized a hundred and fifty years ago referring – not by chance – to the claims of “bourgeois socialism”…

These are concepts that are taken up again and expanded on in the editorial published in the theoretical journal of L.O., Lutte de classe (no. 92, Nov. 2005), where mention is made of “the State’s lack of commitment to anything regarding the living conditions of the ‘popular classes’ [where is a similar monstrosity to be heard if not amongst the different varieties of anti-Marxists?!], i.e. to anything that allows them access to a minimum of resources, a minimum of education.”  It’s the usual tune: if the State really did operate like a good father, if democracy really were democracy for all, if justice were not only justice for the chosen few, etc. etc. etc.! And on with another list of complaints: “It should be State schools to take in hand the children of poorer families from nursery school upwards, i.e. from three or even two years of age, because this is the age when they are introduced to language and to group behaviour, which awaken curiosity and the taste for knowledge. But they should be nursery schools in the true sense of the term and not mere parking places where the children learn nothing, except the law of the jungle.” Or, yet again, “It is the primary school that should create the conditions for every child to learn to read, write and count correctly. But even where the classes consist of children from poor neighbourhoods who speak French at home, in large classes nothing is taught, or only taught to some of the pupils…”

It is as well to stop here, short of vomiting! We shall just quote the final panegyric in which, after having criticized once again the “blind and useless violence, […] which is the sign of profound disorientation and a sign of lack of consciousness,” they wonder: “How, when, following which route, will the working class rediscover the path of class consciousness which, alone, can transform the anger and rebellion against the innumerable injustices of this society into a revolutionary force able to overturn the capitalist social order?” And the frank answer is: “No-one can say. What can be said is that the ability to fight at least for the defence of our own conditions of existence and to rediscover collective awareness of the need to change the social order, will spring up again where the heart of the present social order is to be found, where exploitation develops, in the factories.”

We might have guessed! This is the tenacious rebirth of Gramsci’s doctrine: the myth of the factory, of the proletariat seen exclusively as the “employed and aware industrial worker”! All the rest is unaware and barren. And until this mythical factory worker has reacquired his consciousness (how, L.O. cannot say – at least they are honest about this!), well, “keep calm, lads, consciousness is missing!”

And so for L.O. it’s a question of separating, physically and ideologically, what happened in the French suburbs from the rest of the “working class”, sociologically and opportunistically seen, denying any connection with the economic crisis thatinevitably kicks individuals and groups, proletarians and sub-proletarians and even petit-bourgeois onto the scene, without doing us the favour of waiting for them to first acquire (something they could never do) “class consciousness”. Not only: in a renewed and unsurprising mixture of workerist spirit and reformism, L.O. conceives of this mythical and abstract “working class” we should be referring to and whose reawakening is to be awaited, as being safely locked within company boundaries, inside the factories and inside the trade unions and perhaps also – in view of the eternal temptations and Trotskyite practices of  political entryism – inside the traditional political organisations. To sum up, a “working class” tamed by capital and in a status quo, a zero class – the “class for capital” as Marx called it.

It is clear that similar positions serve no other purpose than to act as spearheads for regaining control “from the left” in view of a potential class reawakening: thus presenting themselves as candidates for the “crisis management” that yesterday was the prerogative of the big social democratic and Stalinist-type parties. Today the useful idiots; tomorrow the “new policemen”.

Walking corpses

If the bourgeoisie cannot do without “useful idiots” covering them from the left, even less can they do without the “scarecrows”, those “bad teachers” to whom they attribute on the one hand all the evil deeds in question and on the other hand turn to for the “inebriating”, “intoxicating” role they have carved out for themselves over time, to the detriment of an entire generation. Real “walking corpses”, now well rooted in French “leftist” politics, always ready to throw themselves like vultures onto anything that moves, the worst minds of the worst infantile post-‘68 thinking did not miss the opportunity to make their own voice heard, preaching in the Italian mainstream press. And so, in the Corriere della seraon 7/11/2005, Oreste Scalzone speaks of “rebels”, of “mutineers”, digging up the gunshot and spontaneous-style lingo of Potere Operaio and thereabouts: then he attacks Sarkozy and his “zero-tolerance politics” and defines him “delirious” because this leads to “a hardened and arrogant move towards warfare from the top downwards, surrounded by propaganda which inflames the souls of its recipients still more,” (as if the bourgeois State could do anything different! As if, in a class régime, the ruling class could refrain from exerting pressure and repression!); he is careful not to talk about the capitalist crisis and its consequences, about the inevitably repressive role of the bourgeois State, about the need for a revolutionary political direction that will help the outbursts of rage and insubordination to get out of their dead ends… It might be objected that some things cannot be said in the Corriere della sera. Exactly: rather than acknowledging their own failure and retiring to private life, the obstinate maîtres à penser, on the wrong track from the very beginning, do not cease to step out into the limelight and preach – saying the same things any reformist would say before reaching the antechambers of power…

Exactly.

Now we all know: where there’s the Cat, there’s also the Fox. And indeed, here is Toni Negri, following Scalzone from the pages of La Stampa on 12/11/2005, and further clarifying the “thought” of these “corpses”. Even more explicitly than Scalzone, Negri declares to the whole world his own “parasitical” nature, as an intellectual in the pay of the more cunning section of international bourgeoisie. People like him are part of the “body of functionaries” (journalists, teachers, technicians, experts…), whose numbers the Welfare State of the imperialist age added to exponentially in the years of plenty, giving them the tasks of controlling and stuffing brains, but whose numbers now threaten to be drastically reduced. Not by chance, in the interview quoted, Negri speaks with nostalgic admiration of the “great contribution of knowledge that sociology brings to the French administration”: this is the breeding ground of these figures, fully bound, by a true umbilical cord, to the form and substance of the bourgeois, imperialist State. And then, if the breeding ground is increasingly “concentrated”, the above-mentioned start to get skittish…

According to Negri, what happened in the French suburbs is (behold! behold!) “a rebellion; but I might even say an insurrection, if we take the term in its tenuous meaning.” And then, after having started by firing off the canons, the mountain gives birth to the molehill: the blame for all this is the “crisis of Fordism”, the “absence of political response”, the “crisis of democratic representation”. To sum up, an insurrection [a tenuous one!] born of the absence of the State, of the “inability of neoliberalism to become a state policy”, of the inability of the “state to exercise governance, i.e. to keep itself in constant contact with the movements” – something that instead “Fordism, with all its evils, was capable of doing.”. What better than an insurrection [a tenuous one!] for proclaiming “a real opening for processes of participation, which are serious things [goodness!]”, because today “participation means questioning the balance of power, schools that work, savings banks with lower interest rates…”

To help digest the substance of this rather heavy mixture: there is a crisis of Fordism, the state (a neutral tool) is no longer able to exercise governance, the “neoliberal wave […] exasperates the conflicts and the revolts,” the (subtle!) “insurrections” reiterate the need for “democratic participation”. Poor intestines! Three decades ago we called them “reformers with pistols”. With or without the pistols, this is what they have remained and of the worst sort – mephitic and cadaverous:  showing that it isn’t only the pistol that counts!

As to the young people in the suburbs, Negri’s analysis is serious and profound: “the problem is that they know what they don’t want, not what they want. It’s a big mess.” Our compliments, professor! And the solution? “The kids from thebanlieues can only look for a way of escape. Doesn’t it seem to you that the right to escape has become a human right?”

Thus the incomparable grand ending, worthy of the theorist of the “multitudes” that were to have taken the place of the “proletariat” (old stuff that the à la pagephilosopher has stored away in the attic): “With Michael [Hardt, co-author of the famous Empire] we tried to imagine a way out for this society in crisis. In the exodus, Moses had Aaron – you need rearguards that also use arms but to defend themselves. Resistance is this, because reality is made this way, the world is like this; and the Multitude operates in this world, hunting for that way of escape, which they are looking for in the banlieues without having yet found it.” Ipse dixit!

Now if we remember rightly, Aaron also had a rod with which, amongst other things, he “smote the waters that were in the river in the sight of Pharaoh.” (Exodus, 7). Sooner or later the proletariat will grasp that rod firmly and give Negri & Co. and all the “walking corpses” a sound beating.

From revolt to revolution

Let us leave the rest of the pearls that can be gathered here and there from a wide range of positions internationally: from those who declare in no uncertain terms that “this movement of young people from the banlieues, despite its faults, is revolutionary” and therefore call on “the proletariat and the people” (and who might it be, this ‘people’? The petit-bourgeois, the shopkeepers, the farmers? Categories which, especially in France, shine by reason of their obtuse reactionary stance) to those who, instead, hint at the “world union of fighting youth [?!!] and the Marxist avant-garde of the international proletariat”, from those who counter the destructive revolt that has “nothing to lose [but] nothing to gain, either” with the “disciplined revolt of the working class, which will necessarily explode, illuminated by the class party, that will truly know where to strike and what must be destroyed [and that] has a whole world to conquer and knows it has it”, to those who complain that “these deplorable events [the violence and destruction] have not developed on the sidelines of a movement with objectives and forms of struggle different and compatible with the independent battle of the proletariat” and are thus “devoid of any political class basis”, or again those who cannot help exclaiming that “The first victims of this destruction are the workers. It is their cars that are burned. It is their places of work that are closed, leaving several hundreds of them on the dole”! All just words flying around.

We repeat what we wrote at the beginning. These riots are the spontaneous reaction of vast sectors of the proletariat obliged to suffer tragic living conditions and daily oppression. They are flare ups that make a dent in social peace but, on subsiding, risk leaving behind them little or nothing in terms of experience and lessons to be learned in their young actors. There is a tragic lack of the revolutionary party: not in the sense of a chief of staff ready to take the lead of any movement (by reason of what delegation or appointment?), but in the sense of the long political work of organization and direction of the class, of theoretical and physical clashes with opportunism (in all its guises, including those that depict and present themselves as being “leftist”), of defence against the attacks of capital and its State and revolutionary preparations for attack, for an assault, an insurrection that is anything but “tenuous”, because it intends to take power and exercise it as a dictature against all enemies of the revolution. The path leading from the revolts (blind, spontaneous, instinctive, destructive, like all revolts always) to the revolution is long and winding. Above all it is not straight and not progressive. It is an illusion to imagine a class resurgence that advances as smoothly as oil thanks to the renewed (it is not clear how or why) consciousness of a working class that is informed, knows, chooses and finally starts to get on the move again, solving all the problems, overcoming all contradictions, proceeding by a geometrical accumulation of numerical and political forces. This is not what the class struggle is. Those who give the illusion or live in the illusion that it is are doing great harm to the proletariat. The class struggle (and above all its return, after over seventy years of counter revolution) is something quite different: it is a contradictory path, consisting of upward surges and falls backwards, advances and retreats, along which the proletarian class (weighed down with all the inertia, the lurid doings, “all the old bourgeois shit”, as Marx called it) will return to fight for its own immediate and historical rights – and it will do so clashing with all the forces that are against it but also with all the contradictions it carries within it and behind it and that surround it, put pressure on it and threaten it from every side. It is not an abstract proletarian class, mythical in its purity and unity, uncorrupted and incorruptible, that already knows what it is fighting for, that knows its enemies, has its own aims clearly before it, advances as one, from the factory to the streets, from the streets to power. It is, on the other hand, the proletarian class produced by capital, which is indeed the bearer of a new mode of production but only inasmuch as it recognizes itself in the revolutionary party: and not by means of sudden illumination but thanks to the difficult and complex work that this party has managed to carry out in contact with it, first during the long period of counter revolution and then at the height of the economic crisis. This work cannot be avoided or abbreviated by acts of will, whether they are generous or venturous – it has to be done and that’s all. Only then will the party be able to “reveal the class to itself” and the class will recognize its own avant-garde in the party. Only then will the bourgeois crisis itself change from a barren (indeed putrefying and foul) situation of stalemate into another fertile pre-condition for revolution. Only then will the objective and subjective conditions increasingly tend to converge and the revolts take place under a sign that is not merely desperation. Only then will insurrection and the seizing of power finally be on the agenda.