Long Sunday

Chirac Shellack and Shlock

Any Long Sunday correspondants in France wish to take issue with the President?  (That's usually about as far as we get over here (sorry Brits, but whatever do you have to compete with Kos on the crucial anti-war front? In a perfect world, it would be the most deserving reincarnation yet of lenin, sure but...) – but why bother with neoliberal context when there's a freshly fallen star figurehead to bin every six years?)  They do permit you to talk about him over there, don't they?  And in movies now, even?  Doug Ireland writes:

When Chirac himself (left)-- whose invisibility during the violence had been much criticized in the press -- finally went on TV a few days later to address the nation, he, too, had little more than empty words. His only concrete proposal was the creation of a "youth volunteer service corps" to help prepare kids for careers in the army (half of the program), the police, and health services, with a goal of 50,000 such minimum-wage posts within three years -- a drop in the bucket. But even that was a phony -- within 24 hours, the press reported that Chirac had simply consolidated and given a new name to already-existing programs in the three sectors. No new money was involved.

Perhaps the biggest void in Chirac's and Villepin's proposals was the absence of any new money or enforcement mechanisms to fight racial discrimination in hiring and housing. France has laws on the books against such racial bias -- but spends almost no money to make them stick, and employers and landlords are free to discriminate against people of color with impunity. And they do. Life in the 750 suburban ghettos throughout France will go on as before. No wonder that a poll for the Journal de Dimanche showed that only 29% of the French thought Chirac had anything to offer to counter the causes of the rebellion (read the whole thing).

Where, oh where, are the future leaders of the fr$$ free world? This shit is so depressing.

Negri on France

Toni Negri: Finally a Little Revolt

Interviewed by Jacopo Iacoboni, La Stampa, 12/11/05

TN: What gangs! The explosion of the banlieues is not some random jacquerie. Even if it were, it would be in a radically changed social context, whose basic features are the crisis of Fordism and the absence of a political response – not only in France - to this crisis. That is why for me it remains a revolt, but I could even say insurrection, if we understand the term in a mild sense. There is a lack of political consciousness of the objectives, what Marx called the for-itself. This movement wants something, but it does not yet know what it wants.

Badiou's L'Organisation politique on France

[I've kept some of the French in square brackets where translation is not straightforward; some points of clarification are also included, as are details of some of the laws mentioned (in the footnotes). If anyone has any more detailed knowledge of these laws/any corrections, please email me at infinitethought [at] hotmail.co.uk. This piece is also posted on my own site]

On Riots that come after Pain…

I. The 27th of October in Clichy-sous-Bois, three adolescents chased by policemen hid in an electric transformer. Two of them, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré died from electrocution. The third, Muttin Altun, was severely burned. The Minister of the Interior and the Prime Minister immediately declared that these youths were wanted following a burglary and then, later, of a theft from a construction site. They denied any chase by the police. But these are patent lies. Not only was there neither burglary nor theft, not only did the policeman chase a whole group of adolescents, who were coming back after a football game, and saw them go into the transformer, but they did not warn the EDF [French electricity company] who could have cut off the current and prevented the terrible accident. That day the daily harassment of the youth of the estates by the police ended in crime. The crime of the police covered by the lies of the highest authorities of the state.

Le Soleil Pourri

On October 27th, violence came to the the suburbs of France, a violence that is apparently now under control, things are returning to normal. But what if the normal, what passes for the normal has, for a very long time, been violent in its turn, in les banlieues, and not only there?
(I'd barely written the sentence above, when I get a call that the Prefect of Police in Paris is invoking the "state of emergency" to ban all gatherings in Paris that could "result in" violence, and that there is also a call for demonstrations. )