„The torrent is called violent, but the riverbed that constricts it is called violent by no one.“ Bertolt Brecht
Not much has changed since Jean Baudrillard, in an article on the riots in the banlieues in 2005, spoke of how a system that is slowly imploding has no chance of integrating its immigrants and surplus population, who are both products and cruel analysts of the system’s decay. The cracks that are opening up in the Parisian suburbs are only a symptom of the division of a system that is at war with itself. So it is only logical that the French police unions, in a statement on Friday, speak of a war to be waged against harmful elements in the country.
If the fatal shot that hit Nahel, which may be considered a symptom of police violence in France, was the immediate trigger for the nationwide riots, the spatial segregation in the banlieues, where population groups are included and excluded according to income in combination with ancestry and origin, is an additional factor. The mixture of a high proportion of immigrants, economic impoverishment, lack of social prospects and brutal architecture makes the French satellite towns a symptom of the „Third World“ in the metropolises. Yet segregation is less an ethnic problem than a social one. It is not „the Arabs“ or „the blacks“ who live together in certain areas of the banlieues, but groups with low incomes or difficulties in getting a flat elsewhere live close to each other.
Also in the past few days, the best that the West has to offer – cars, schools, shopping centres – have been set on fire. There has also been looting, but this is not just to be understood as a run or affinity of young people for Western branded consumer goods, but at least suggests a redistribution of general wealth (in the 1970s such actions were still called „proletarian shopping“ in Italy). This is related to property damage, which symbolises a specific form of property critique. If the uprisings do not refer to an explicit strategy, they certainly bring a political articulation into play, as a radical negation. The most important surplus is the actively negating, the resisting youth in the erupting moments of mass mobilisation, which condense into an event in which the uprising explodes the police management of a concrete situation and at the same time radically decouples itself from everyday life. However, as soon as the situation rests somewhat, as we saw in the night from Friday to Saturday, the state gradually deploys its entire apparatus of violence and makes visible who has the monopoly on violence.
A member of the ritots write: „The young participants, many of whom are teenagers, are methodical. They have attacked county offices, city halls, and sites of executive power, all for obvious reasons. But they are also attacking the schools that segregate and exclude and force people into the capitalist system; the police stations in which the cops capture their friends and beat them; the surveillance cameras that monitor their movements; public transportation infrastructure, which is rare in the “quartiers” and often newly built to shuttle gentrifiers to their newly flipped suburban houses; and the construction sites building new and instantly obsolete infrastructure for the Olympic Games, which are playing a significant role in the gentrification of the suburbs.“
The movement has shown its creative power in the field of looting, especially through the role played by cars and scooters. Cars are used to break down doors and fences, while scooters are used to make a quick getaway afterwards. Scooters also play a crucial role in clashes with the police. Mobility is crucial for the fights that take place at night.
What is looted? Almost everything, but contrary to what is portrayed in the media, most of what is looted is particularly expensive : the vast majority of the loot consists of basic products and medicines. This suggests that the movement triggered by Nahel’s death is also an expression of an anti-capitalist rejection of precarity and the high cost of living.
The most important reservoirs of the uprisings in France are once again young people who are blocked from entering the employment systems, but more generally the surplus population, which is directly confronted day and night with the controlling state crisis management. The French police have a special role to play here.
The police essentially have three lines of descent, namely the slave plantations, the maintenance of colonial order, and the hunting down and imprisonment of people who were considered abnormal. In its practice, the modern French police adopted the doctrine of counterinsurgency from the Algerian war and has since applied it to ensure control in the colonised territories, in prisons, in the banlieues, in struggles and social revolts. According to this doctrine, the population is a constant source of unrest and must therefore be pacified through a form of police warfare.
Through neoliberal and security globalisation, counterinsurgency has become part of government programmes in the West. The transformation of neoliberal capital has increasingly exacerbated precarisation and social and racial inequalities in the suburbs. In the police, in turn, it has led to the creation of units dedicated to counter-terrorism, maximising repression and equipped with high-tech weapons. This involves paramilitary equipment as well as the permanent testing of the latest security technologies. This goes hand in hand with the expansion of security laws, the continued strengthening of impunity for police crimes and the globalisation of anti-terrorism as a form of government.
The revolt for Nahel should be understood as an explosion of subversive rage, due at least in part to the social problems and police control of poor and racialised groups touched on above. But it is also a self-organised social movement that is also directed against places of power (city halls, prefectures, police stations…) and is part of the long history of struggles against police crime and popular resistance to state violence.
It is important to understand in this context that the French political and economic system always also reproduces a socio-racial segregation historically created in colonial history, an internal coloniality that can be called socio-apartheid. After 5 nights of revolt, the government has now mustered its elite forces and anti-terrorist units to intensify the civil war against the youth.
Finally, to understand these riots, they must also be read in the context of the class struggles in France. France has seen nationwide social movements and a wave of riots since the gilet jaunes. Macron and his government were only able to stay in power thanks to police violence. Because they understand the structuring power relations that link the state, the government, the police and the population, right-wing and fascist police unions have methodically organised themselves to concentrate more and more social benefits in their hands, as well as the technical and legal means to control the population.
translated by deepl.