by AD Nachalo
In late June a police officer in Nanterre, a working class suburb of Paris, shot and killed 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop. While the police attempted to justify the murder by claiming that the young man attempted to hit them with a vehicle, video evidence quickly proved that this was a lie. Nanterre is a large working class neighborhood that is no stranger to this type of police terror, and the masses of people quickly and spontaneously took to the streets in rebellion. On the other hand, the officer who murdered the young man, Florian Menesplier, is no stranger to inflicting violence, having been decorated with medals for terrorizing workers during the Yellow Vest protests.
The first night of rebellion resulted in more than 180 people arrested and more than 170 police officers injured. In Nanterre and Paris proper, the masses fought the police with fireworks while in neighboring Mantes-la-Jolie, approximately 30 miles from Paris, the town hall was sacked and burned for hours.
The next day, the spark of rebellion spread east of Paris where another town hall was burned and a prison was attacked. The masses intensified the struggles against the police by attacking 27 police stations, 14 municipal police stations and 4 police barracks. The attacks were carried out with fire and stones. Town halls all over France became the legitimate targets of the people and continued to be burned. The selection of targets indicates a very real understanding that the problems they face go beyond the police.
The rebellion spread beyond the national borders of France, into neighboring Belgium and Switzerland, as well as overseas French colonies including French Guiana, Réunion, Guadeloupe and Martinique. These have continued with the same fury as the French uprisings, with nearly all of them seeing violent protests. In Switzerland protesters allegedly used Molotov cocktails, while in French Guiana the police reportedly came under gun fire from protesters and a government worker caught in the crossfire was killed. It is no wonder that the masses in the French colonies responded so quickly, as they have suffered centuries of national oppression and exploitation at the hands of the French imperialists. Merzouk himself was of Algerian and Moroccan descent, both of which were former French colonies and continue to remain dominated by French capital today.
According to reports, over 3,000 arrests have been made related to the uprising in France alone. The French state has mustered its repressive forces, issued curfews and suspended public transportation in an effort to crush and quell the rebellion. The reaction has simultaneously used calls for peace and tranquility, asking the people to stand down and let the corrupt justice system take its course. The masses of Marseilles gave their answer by expropriating a local gun store and arming themselves.
While the liberals and false socialists condemn the rebellions and call for a bloody “peace” with the old state, the revolutionaries of France walk shoulder to shoulder with the people, raising the slogans of the people and enriching them with a revolutionary perspective. It is beyond a doubt that the revolutionaries alongside the people, especially the working class people, must develop stable organizations and formations able to transform the spontaneous and justified rebellion of the masses into a protracted struggle for political power. They can and they will: the contradictions between the classes spark mass rebellion, and in this process leadership is forged; it is the duty of the revolutionaries in France to reconstitute their Communist Party in the midst of fighting, and this is a task that will inevitably be achieved in time.
After 7 days of fighting against the forces of the Old State the masses have gone back to their subjugation, and the ruling class imperialists of France have issued their vulgar assessments of the causes of the rebellion. The most asinine among these comes from the fool Macron who as chief butcher of the French working class suggests that it was the influence of violent video games rather than a lifetime spent poor without prospects that make the youth carry out actions against the state. On the other hand, international imperialist media monopolies take the favored approach of identity politics and suggest that racism and Islamophobia are solely to blame not only for the murder itself but for the tension felt by the youths in revolt. These claims remove the burden of guilt from the capitalist class and its state and instead place it on average people or culture, forgetting why racism and religious discrimination exist in the first place and how capitalism produces this to facilitate exploitation.
The next card in the trick deck of the ruling class is always to individualize the cause to bring it back to the individual who was killed, to rally the families of Merzouk or George Floyd to call for non-violence and condemn the masses in revolt. It must be said that a funeral is for a dead person while a riot is for the entire oppressed. An uprising goes far beyond the individuals unjustly murdered by state agents of the ruling class that were the initial catalyst. Such murders serve as a spark because they resonate with the masses, who all have a victim or potential victim to state repression among their families and friends. In this sense, an uprising is for those who demand to live and not to die.
The causal claims of the ruling class always fall apart upon analysis because they are incapable of seeing or speaking the truth. And the truth is that they are a decaying class, that their rule will see its inevitable end just like the French monarchy—this is what they cannot come to terms with, and this is why they cannot provide a correct analysis. France has been rocked by uprisings for years, and what the uprisings all have in common is the participation of the French working class, the grave diggers of the French capitalists, who have been an inspiration to the workers of the world. The ongoing Yellow Vest movement that erupted in 2018 and the recent uprisings in response to pension reforms earlier this year are a few notable examples.
Chairman Mao Zedong once said that the youth are like the morning sun, and this is true. It is not surprising that the majority of the people arrested in France were young people averaging 17 years old. It is likewise not surprising that the rebellions they initiate have a certain intensity: the future belongs to the working class youth and they will take it by force, bite by bite and piece by piece. This means starting small and forging leaders, it means injuring more than 800 police officers, destroying or damaging more than 1,100 buildings—including 250 police stations—burning more than 6,000 vehicles, and inflicting more than a billion euros in damage—all of this across over 500 cities, towns, and villages. These are pittance toward the debt owed to the poor, and the working class will collect all its debts and revenge all its injuries and insults.
