ON THE RIOTS IN
Instead of thinking up
ways to condemn and dismiss this phenomenon, as many (including some who claim
to be revolutionaries) seem content to do, I prefer to try to understand the
underlying motivation involved, a motivation that it
is increasingly clear is not at all 'specific'. For now, I have read enough of
the 'objective' reports on the riots. What I need, now, to read, to learn
about, is the subjectivity of the rioters themselves.
By now, I am convinced that
the underlying factor of these 'fire storms' is the general socio-economic
conditions these young people face in the 'banliueses'
(sp.?) of France; which is to say, that they are (in my view) a direct,
unmediated response to the unbearable misery of their extreme proletarian
existence. Of course, their existence is not simply proletarian, without
qualification; it is the worst of the entire French proletariat. They are the
most dispossessed, the most excluded, and the most repressed of French capitalist
society. Some would call them the 'underclass' or the 'lumpenproletariat'.
But that serves only to divide them from the rest of their class in order to
more easily demonize them, to set them up as 'the other', thus, 'the enemy' --
as if the ruling class isn't doing that well enough on its own.
Their rage I can fully
identify with and understand, even if I can't identify with their actions. The
thing is, though, that their rage needs to be unleashed and expressed, to show
everyone that they will not peacefully accept their dispossession and
exclusion. And they need to start from where they are placed, their concrete
conditions, what denies and destroys them piecemeal, day by day. They are
showing to the whole world -- but first and foremost to French society -- that
they exist, that they are forced to submit to intolerable social conditions,
that, as far as they are concerned, French society is rotten to the core (not
to say that any other society isn't!), and that they refuse to take it any
more.
I find this phenomenon
exhilarating, even if I know that their fight has no perspective as long as it
remains what it currently is, as long, that is, as it remains simply a war of
destruction, and, eventually, attrition, since nothing real can be won on that
terrain. State control will be the only winner there. My sense of exhilaration
comes from, I think, my understanding that my class is not 'down for the count'
(something I otherwise find myself regularly wondering about); it still lives,
and it is still able to stand up and refuse -- on its own, without mediation or
representation -- to quietly accept the horrific misery of this decaying social
system. This also provides me with hope for the future of humankind.
Wage Slave X