France : Mobilising Islamophobia to mask the deepening authoritarian state

Lisbeth Latham

Since the brutal murder of Samuel Paty in October, there has been a ramping up of rhetoric from the French government against the Muslim community in France. This rhetoric came to a head with the announcement of draft legislation to prevent “Islamic Separatism” by French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin which makes more explicit the state's vision of the Muslim community as a threat to the Government’s vision of Republican values. This attack on the Muslim community, and any critics of racism, islamophobia, or colonialism within French society – is paired with the introduction of new security laws that would further protect France’s repressive state apparatus from scrutiny for violence against France’s social movements -repression which has been dramatically escalating since the declaration of a state of emergency following the terror attacks in Paris in November 2015.

On October 16, Paty, a history teacher, was murdered in Paris, he was publicly beheaded by Abdullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Chechen refugee from Russia. The brutal murder had been motivated by Paty’s sharing with students, in a class on freedom of expression, satirical images of the Prophet Mohammed published by Charlie Hedbo in 2015, which had provoked a terror attack on the office of that publication and across Paris. Paty’s display of the images caused significant anger not only within France’s Muslim community, but globally, and followed a familiar pattern of anger at the previous publication of similar images globally. This included the sharing of a video by Abdelhakim Sefrioui an Imam describing the Paty as a thug and denouncing him for displaying the pictures and arguing he should be disciplined.

In the wake of the murder, President Emmanuel Macron described the attack as “a typical Islamist terrorist attack”, whilst describing the motivation of Paty’s murder as being “for teaching children freedom of speech”. Seven people were quickly arrested. This included students who had pointed the teacher out to the killer, Sefrioui, and Brahim Chnina a parent of a student at the school who had protested outside the school and sought a meeting with the school’s principal with Sefrioui’s support. Darmanin made a public statement indicating that up to 51 institutions faced dissolution including BarrakaCity and Collectif contre l'islamophobie en France (Collective Against Islamaphobia in France – CCFI) which he described as being “enemies of the Republic”, and threatened to move to dissolve them. This was despite the fact that there was no evidence that the CCIF, which was formed in 2003 to monitor and combat Islamophobia in France, making any statement supporting the attacks. Darmanin went further arguing that it was an “Islamist dispensary”. French Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, also argued that indigenist, racialist, and “decolonial” ideologies,’ imported from North America, were responsible for ‘conditioning’ the violent extremist who assassinated school teacher – a position endorsed by a manifesto of 100 academics published in Le Monde on November 1. This attack on anti-racist academics has prompted a counter open letter against the threat of "threat of academic authoritarianism"

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On November 9, Darmanin announced the final draft of the “law confirming republican principles”. This legislation contained the following proposals: 

• An extension France’s public school student ID system to students enrolled in private schools; Make it an offence to share online information which allows an individual to be identified; 
• Provision for summary trials of individuals accused of “online hate speech”; 
• Make it illegal to intimidate public officials, including teachers; 
• Will allow judges to bar individuals convicted of certain offences, such as provocation of acts of terrorism, or incitement of discrimination, hatred, or violence – from entering places of worship; 
• Requiring associations seeking public funding to agree to "respect the principles and values of the republic" and return the money if found to have flouted the rules; 
• All foreign donations above €10,000 must be declared.

While not stipulated in the bill, the government has requested that France’s Muslim federations form a national council of imams. This council will be in charge of proclaiming new imams. The council must also draft a charter of "republican values", which will stipulate that Islam is a religion and not a political movement in France.

While on the face of it some aspects of this legislation could be seen as necessary protections or limitations, the reality is they are both very vague and open to abuse. This combined with the fact that they are aimed at France’s marginalized Muslim community specifically, rather than France’s Catholic-inspired far-right and neo-fascist organisations reflects a racist vision, shared throughout many western countries, that Muslim communities are the real threat rather than far-right extremist groups.

Coinciding with this assault on the rights of France’s Muslim community. Has been the release of the draft legislation of the “Global Security Law”. This law:

• authorizes the police and gendarmes to film their interventions by "mobile cameras", to access the images they have recorded and to transmit them in real-time to the command post; 
• authorizes the deployment of drones to monitor public space; 
• prohibits the public from disseminating "the image of the face or any other element of identification of an official of the national police or of a soldier of the national gendarmerie when acting within the framework of "a police operation" and when this dissemination is made "with the aim of harming his physical or mental integrity”.

This new legislation has created considerable anger in the context here over the past five years, there have been escalating levels of repression against France’s social movements, most notably the Yellow Jackets, labour and students movements – with “non-lethal” weapons being regularly deployed at protests resulting in injuries, most notably the maiming and death of protestors – with riot squad units in both the CRS (Republican Security Companies) within the National Police and gendarmerie (France’s national police force which is part of the military) acting with impunity against the social movements.

While releasing two such anti-democratic and repressive pieces of legislation would normally be a tactical error, as it would provide an opportunity to unite an even more diverse array of social forces against the bills, in this case, it is likely to have the opposite effect. This is because like the rest of French society, much of the French left and other progressive forces hold deeply Islamophobic outlooks, which are justified on the basis on the need to defend laïcité (the French concept of secularism) and women’s rights. However, these actions, particularly the bans on the wearing of the veil and attempts to control the Muslim community, are premised on anti-secular, racist, and sexist ideas about the right of the state to control not just how people practice their religions, but its right to control the lives of women within the Muslim community.

In the past sections of the French left have supported the ban on the wearing of the hijab in public schools, bans on the burqa and niqab, and participated in attacks on other left parties, like the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (New Anti-Capitalist Party – NPA), who have stood candidates who wore the hijab. There have also been broader problems of the left being slow or inconsistent in their response to attacks on the Muslim community in France. While some of the left have been very clear regarding their rejection of this attack on the Muslim community, most notably the NPA, other parties have not been so explicit, the Communist Party and France Insoumise however have both argued that while they argue that the law fails to address the marginalization of significant sections of French society and instead seeks to hide the social crisis behind the stigmatization of Muslim communities.

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France: Support for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France in the face of the attacks of Macron and Darmanin!

Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste
November 20, 2020

Last night, we learned that the Ministry of the Interior had just notified, by mail, the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France - CCIF) of its intention to initiate a plan to dissolve. Gerald Darmanin[1] thus carried out his threatened action and claimed to be acting "in accordance with the instructions of the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister".

By attacking this organization whose role is to combat Islamophobic violence and discrimination, especially including through the support of victims and the publication of an annual report on Islamophobia in France, the government is taking a further step in its authoritarian state policy.

While the content of the pre-bill "separatism" (renamed "strengthening republican principles") has just been made public, confirming that the government continues its headlong authoritarian and Islamophobic rush, the desire to silence the CCIF and, through it, those who stand up against stigmatisation and discrimination against Muslims, is revolting.

Thus, the Minister of the Interior who wants to ban the denunciation of police violence also wants to prohibit the denunciation of Islamophobia. Everyone should understand that these are two sides of the same policy, whose aim is to silence any criticism of their "republican order", at a time when the government's bankrupt failure to manage the health crisis makes it fear social explosions.

The NPA condemns this attack on the CCIF and assures its facilitators and volunteers of all its support in their indispensable action against Islamophobia. It is the whole of the social movement and the labour movement that should now stand against this new authoritarian measure: the future of the anti-racist struggle and, more generally, all the struggles of our social camp are at stake.

[1] Minister of the Interior in the government of Prime Minister Jean Castex

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Capitalist Class Fractions and Socialist Tactics and Strategy

Lisbeth Latham

The last decade has seen the growth in significant differences within the capitalist class, both globally and within individual countries. The open intra-class hostilities reflect the increasing instability and uncertainty within the capitalist system. The uncertainty which is both the result of external factors, such the climate crisis and the COVID pandemic, and also within the system with the ongoing long-run crisis in capitalist accumulation of the past five decades since the end of the long post-war boom.

Within capitalist societies the capitalist class act in the interests of the class and the system as a whole these include: 

• Achieving constant growth in profits; 
•  Achieving a stable environment in which capital accumulation can occur; 
• Stability for the system as a whole;

However, despite these shared interests, conflicts between sections of the ruling class can occur. These different segments of the capitalist class, or class fractions, can develop on both the different needs of the fractions for the accumulation of capital in their specific sector of the economy. This can be a simple as the interests of finance capital versus industrial capital, or export-focused industries versus industries primarily focused on selling within the domestic markets (a conflict that has given rise to historic tensions between pro-free trade versus pro-protectionism wings of the capitalist class) or on differences in subjective political outlook as to how best achieve the interests of a specific class fraction or the capitalist class as a whole. These differences also articulate themselves as conservative versus more liberal wings of the capitalist class, which in itself can have further differentiations.

The primary mechanism via which intra-class conflict within the ruling class has been mediated is through the state and governmental structures. During the early period of parliamentary democracy, when the franchise was more limited in terms of ownership of capital in some form, parliaments held greater power over the state, however as the franchise expanded, and parties emerged that represented the interests of the subaltern classes emerged and there was a danger of these parties gaining control of or having significant influence over the government, the state in many countries became more independent from the government with the creation of career bureaucracies, primarily loyal to the state, and thus the ruling class.

While some sections of the bureaucracy are drawn from the capitalist class, the vast majority of the bureaucracy are drawn from other classes and as the bureaucracy has gotten ever larger and the working class more educated, increasingly from the working class. Whilst this could be seen as a threat, the processes of education and reward tends to build an outlook within the bureaucracy, particularly its leadership (which is overwhelming drawn from sections of the ruling class and increasingly moves freely between capital and the state), that it views its interests with that of the capitalist class.

This relative autonomy, although primarily aimed at mediating and protecting the interests of capitalism, also creates space for these state actors to shift directions and support between fractions of the ruling class, based on either their judgements as to the best interests of capitalism, for a class fraction, or their own interests as a bureaucratic caste. This can also give rise to conflicts within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and the capitalist class fractions most clearly reflected in their more extreme forms in young officer movements and military coups.

Whilst the capitalist class has interests that tend to converge as outlined above, there are periods of time where the interests of individual capitalists or groups of capitalists can diverge from those of other capitalists. Whilst, this can be an objective divergence of interests, it can simply be subjective, i.e. that they believe what they need for their interests to be advanced are different from what other capitalists or the state are advocating or pursuing. This can particularly be the case during periods of crisis, or where new technologies are emerging casting into the question the survival of sections of capital. 

Because the world is complicated, and no one is omniscient, divisions can open up as to how to respond to this uncertainty. These differences may be in relation to the focus re industries to be supported, but it can also be in relation to the level of aggression that should be deployed in responding to challenges to capitalist power. Repression or undermining of rights, whilst they can cement the position of capital and reinforce capitalist accumulation, can also result in unintended consequences. Most notably, rather than forcing the popular classes into retreat, repression can instead intensify class antagonisms and force subaltern groups to defend themselves resolutely, resulting in further destabilisation of the state, the system, or both. It is for this reason that sections of the ruling class, or at least their mouthpieces in the mainstream media, may publicly oppose actions by the government or state which on the face it might appear to be in their immediate interests because those sections of capital have made a judgement that course of action is too dangerous, and ultimately against their interests.

The convergence of interests between subordinate classes and ruling class fractions As conflict occurs between the ruling class and subaltern classes, the intraclass conflicts within the capitalist class can bring into alignment, at least partially and for a limited period, the interests of subaltern class(es) with those of a capitalist class fraction. In these circumstances, it is possible to build alliances with these capitalist class fractions in order to strengthen the position of the subaltern class forces. Doing so is important. Not just because we cannot be indifferent or ambivalent about intra-class conflict within the capitalist class - those conflicts can have dire consequences for the rest of society - but because they can create new opportunities for challenging the system and shattering the class unity which the capitalist system relies so heavily on to reproduce and maintain itself. The classic example of this includes alliances within national liberation struggles which include sections of the national capitalist class which have been in revolt against colonial powers.

Whilst such alliances can be important in bolstering the position of the working class and its allies, any such alliance should only be of a tactical nature, around specific demands where interests converge, and not be strategic in character, most notably this means that the working class and its allies must seek to maintain their independence from the “progressive wing” of the capitalist class fractions and resist efforts by these sections to co-opt the movement, and instead seek to maintain the leadership of the movement. This is not a question political class purity, but a recognition that as conflict escalates, there is a danger that the “progressive-wing” of the capitalist class will move to defend capitalism and support escalating repression against radical forces as these forces become a greater threat to their class interests than other wings of the capitalist class or the course of action which they had been proposing.

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This article is posted under copyleft, verbatim copying and distribution of the entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. If you reprint this article please email me at revitalisinglabour@gmail.com to let me know.

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