From the Uprising in the Banlieues to the Proletarian Revolution - Part 2

From the Uprising in the Banlieues to the Proletarian Revolution  

Presentation by PCm Italy at the International Meeting held in Paris, April 2006 - Part 2

In the revolt, the youth of the banlieues put forward demands of freedom, transformation, sociability, re-appropriation, rejection of the ordinary way of living, dressing, thinking, which animate the youth in France as well as in other imperialist countries, whatever the colour of the skin and the country of origin. The proletarian youth has put in radical forms, ultimate, even symbolically, the relevance of the scientific law that there is no construction without destruction. The proletarian rebellion scares even more the bourgeoisie when the youth take the place in the frontline, because it means that they do not face a flash in the pan but a potential new wave of revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.

Youth always anticipated the more general revolutionary movement of the proletariat and masses.

The revolt of the proletarian youth in the banlieues showed how all aspects, all the ferments that drive the youth movement may turn against the State.

The rap music, the organizations of football fans, social phenomena that usually emerge in ambiguous forms, between adaptation to the existing society and transgression, when they merge with the economic and social conditions, solve their ambiguity and the youth turn them against the capitalist system, its laws, its face concentrated in the police state, that tries to impose that system and its laws as untouchable.

The young proletarians protagonists of the revolt are certainly young immigrants and children of immigrants who live on their skin the double oppression of being at the same time proletarian and immigrant, and so suffering discrimination, of being considered second-class citizen, strangers in their own home, foreigners in the land where they were born, of "non-white race", marginalized at any time of their existence.

This is the result of the imperialist nature of the country in which they live, the fact of being born, living or have come in countries where the wealth is concentrated in the few based on robbery of the many. The laws of the imperialist system and the current division of the world produce huge fluxes of immigrants escaping from poverty, hunger, disease, war, etc., and make these immigrants and their children born in the imperialist countries the most exploited proletariat. This affects the composition and the consciousness of the proletariat, that brings in its struggle the issues of transformation of the two sides of the planet of the current imperialist system: that of the country of origin oppressed by imperialism and that of the imperialist country.

In the consciousness of this new proletariat feudal legacies of the oppressed countries and rejection of the decay of imperialist countries merge, as riches and limitations. This is a feature of modern diversity of the imperialist countries, and this diversity can and should be transformed into richness of the struggle because it concentrates in the struggle of the proletariat the aspirations to the transformation of the two sides of the planet.

The young immigrant proletarian and sons of immigrants with their "exclusive" revolt give voice to the "excluded", the exploited of the whole imperialist system.

The proletarian youth today is essentially composed of young unemployed, temporary workers, children of workers who have also become unemployed and precarious workers. So It is clear that often they do not have the same gathering places - the factory, the place of work - the same tools, unions and political organizations, by which the struggle and class consciousness of workers and proletarians grows. In France and many of the imperialist metropolises the proletarian youth is multinational, multiracial, filled as it is with young children of immigrants or immigrants, and it is concentrated in ghettos, expelled from the city center, from the wealthy neighbourhoods. The revolt has concentrated all these aspects and it is also a result of the concentration of all these aspects.

Of course these aspects do not show up in the same way in all the imperialist countries - for instance in Italy the presence of immigrants in the neighbourhoods is still low, immigrants are mostly of first generation, the second generation exists only "patchily". Bourgeois and reformist analysts use these differences to isolate the revolt in France, exorcise the contagion and stress the differences instead of the common conditions, to consider the revolt a rare event, "French" , unrepeatable.

Nevertheless, this kind of revolt did not occur only in France but also in other imperialist countries, from Los Angeles to Brixton, etc.. But even if it were true everything that is said, through the dialectical lenses of the class analysis, and not the mechanical, scholastic and metaphysical thinking of many so-called analysts and self-styled Marxists, we can see what is particular and what is general in the revolt of the French proletarian youth.

Is not proletarian youth in all the imperialist countries, whether or not concentrated in suburbs, in its vast majority, precarious, underpaid, voiceless, ghettoized? In Italy, are not most of the southern cities, large, small, medium, marked by a similar type of youth? And who said that the lack of concentration can not become an expansive factor in every area of the imperialist metropolises of the reasons and opportunities of rebellion for proletarian youth? Even if not on the base of skin color, origin and language, all forms of discrimination, marginalization are reproduced in shapes similar to those in the French banlieues, and are made more acute by the social contrast between the rich, at the centre of which are the bosses, who have their neighbourhoods, restaurants, circles, shops, their ways of life, and the universe of proletarian youth, huge masses of excluded.

Towards this proletarian youth the forms of repression, control, persecution of the modern police states are being concentrating. And in all forms of aggregation of these young people - the neighbourhoods, the spread factory of precarious work - a world apart develops, made of ties, communities, groups, gangs, where anger and rebellion grow, along with the boredom and exclusion.

At the same time, what are and what are becoming the factories for the young workers? Of course they have a job, more money, and this influences their way of living and thinking out of the factory, but, inside the factory, are not they experiencing marginalization, exclusion, repression, control, exploitation, denial of life, a wage slavery, a flexibility, a precariousness that ripens in them the unacceptability of an eternal life as exploited? Among the young workers there are the same feelings of revolt. At the factory, the face of the cop is that of the chief who asphyxiates, insults, threatens, controls, to force them to do anything for the profits.

Reformists, opportunists and fake communists do not see the same fire under the ashes, because they are part of the system of the enemy oppressor and eat at his table, sometimes disguised as union activist or "leftist". The petty bourgeoisie philistinism and the official "left" are against the rebellion of the proletarian youth and are inside the political system, culture, ideology that dominates the society.

The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communists, the young people they organize are and should be conscious vanguard and active observers of this dark but true side of the class struggle in the imperialist metropolises. They should be nourished by the same hatred, become the front line and active organizers. With the weapon of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and building the vanguard organization of proletariat, they learn the language of the rebel proletariat. They are, with the mind and the plan when they cannot with their rooting, inside the whole dynamic of the revolt, they analyse it as a class war, they look to the spontaneity as an embryo of consciousness. With the mass line - that is not and can not be to the development of a peaceful mass movement - they focus their work in transforming the demands of the masses from a confrontation with bourgeois power into a struggle for power, in the fire of class struggle.

End of part 2 - to be continued