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Riots are
a class act - and often they're the only alternative
France now accepts the need for social justice. No petition,
peaceful march or letter to an MP could have achieved this
By Gary Younge
11/14/05 "The
Guardian" -- -- 'If there is no struggle, there is no
progress," said the African American abolitionist Frederick
Douglass. "Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate
agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground;
they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean
without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing
without a demand. It never did and it never will."
By the end of last week it looked as though the fortnight of
struggle between minority French youth and the police might actually
have yielded some progress. Condemning the rioters is easy. They
shot at the police, killed an innocent man, trashed businesses,
rammed a car into a retirement home, and torched countless cars
(given that 400 cars are burned on an average New Year's Eve in
France, this was not quite as remarkable as some made out).
But shield your ears from the awful roaring waters for a moment and
take a look at the ocean. Those who wondered what French youth had
to gain by taking to the streets should ask what they had to lose.
Unemployed, socially excluded, harassed by the police and condemned
to poor housing, they live on estates that are essentially open
prisons. Statistically invisible (it is against the law and
republican principle to collect data based on race or ethnicity) and
politically unrepresented (mainland France does not have a single
non-white MP), their aim has been simply to get their plight
acknowledged. And they succeeded.
Even as the French politicians talked tough, the state was suing for
peace with the offer of greater social justice. The government
unrolled a package of measures that would give career guidance and
work placements to all unemployed people under 25 in some of the
poorest suburbs; there would be tax breaks for companies who set up
on sink estates; a €1,000 (£675) lump sum for jobless people who
returned to work as well as €150 a month for a year; 5,000 extra
teachers and educational assistants; 10,000 scholarships to
encourage academic achievers to stay at school; and 10 boarding
schools for those who want to leave their estates to study.
"We need to respond strongly and quickly to the undeniable problems
facing many inhabitants of the deprived neighbourhoods," said
President Chirac. From the man who once said that immigrants had
breached the "threshold of tolerance" and were sending French
workers "mad" with their "noise and smell" this was progress indeed.
"The impossible becomes probable through struggle," said the African
American academic Manning Marable. "And the probable becomes
reality."
And the reality is that none of this would have happened without
riots. There was no petition these young people could have signed,
no peaceful march they could have held, no letter they could have
written to their MPs that would have produced these results.
Amid the charred chassis and broken glass there is a vital point of
principle to salvage: in certain conditions rioting is not just
justified but may also be necessary, and effective. From the poll
tax demonstrations to Soweto, history is littered with such cases;
what were the French and American revolutions but riots endowed by
Enlightenment principles and then blessed by history?
When all non-violent, democratic means of achieving a just end are
unavailable, redundant or exhausted, rioting is justifiable. When
state agencies charged with protecting communities fail to do so or
actually attack them, it may be necessary in self-defence.
After the 1967 riots in American cities, President Johnson set up
the Kerner commission. It concluded: "What white Americans have
never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget - is
that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White
institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white
society condones it." How else was such a damning indictment of
racial discrimination in the US ever going to land on the
president's desk?
Following the inner-city riots across Britain in 1981, Lord Scarman
argued that "urgent action" was needed to prevent racial
disadvantage becoming an "endemic, ineradicable disease threatening
the very survival of our society". His conclusions weren't perfect.
But the kernel of a message black Britons had been trying to hammer
home for decades suddenly took centre stage. A few years later
Michael Heseltine wrote a report into the disturbances in Toxteth
entitled It Takes a Riot.
Rioting should be neither celebrated nor fetishised, because
ultimately it is a sign not of strength but weakness. Like a strike,
it is often the last and most desperate weapon available to those
with the least power. Rioting is a class act. Wealthy people don't
do it because either they have the levers of democracy at their
disposal, or they can rely on the state or private security firms to
do their violent work for them, if need be.
The issue of when and how rioting is effective is more problematic.
Riots raise awareness of a situation, but they cannot solve it. For
that you need democratic engagement and meaningful negotiation. Most
powerful when they stem from a movement, all too often riots are
instead the spontaneous, leaderless expression of pent-up
frustration void of an agenda or clear demands. Many of these French
youths may have had a ball last week, but what they really need is a
party - a political organisation that will articulate their
aspirations.
If Kerner and Scarman are anything to go by, the rioters will not be
invited to help write the documents that could shape racial
discourse for a generation. Nor are they likely to be the primary
beneficiaries.
"During the 80s, everyone was desperate to have a black face in
their organisation to show the race relations industry that they
were allowing black people to get on," says the editor of Race &
Class, Ambalavaner Sivanandan. "So the people who made this mobility
possible were those who took to the streets. But they did not
benefit." The same is true of the black American working class that
produced Kerner.
Given these uncertain outcomes, riots carry great risk. The border
between political violence and criminality becomes blurred, and
legitimate protest risks degrading into impotent displays of
hypermasculinity. Violence at that point becomes not the means to
even a vague aspiration but the end in itself, and half the story
gets missed. We heard little from young minority French women last
week, even though they have been the primary target of the state's
secular dogma over the hijab.
Finally, violence polarises. The big winner of the last two weeks
may yet prove to be Sarkozy. The presidential-hopeful courted the
far-right with his calculated criticisms of the rioters; if he wins
he could reverse any gains that may arise. Le Pen also lurks in the
wings.
The riots in France run all these risks and yet have still managed
to yield a precarious kind of progress. They demand our qualified
and critical support.
Power has made its concessions. But how many, for how long and to
whom depends on whether those who made the demands take their
struggle from the margins to the mainstream: from the street to the
corridors of power.
g.younge@guardian.co.uk
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