The fight against Islamophobia: When Lutte Ouvrière Reverses the Hierarchy of Standards
by Julien Salingue, Christine Poupin, Ugo Palheta, Selma Oumari
Originally published February 2 on npa2009.org
On January 15, Lutte Ouvrière (LO) posted on its website[1] an (unsigned) article "The trap of the “fight against Islamophobia”", drawn from the most recent issue of their monthly magazine Lutte de Classe. Anyone who has followed the positions and analyses of LO concerning the "debates on Islam", which have regularly shaken up the French political field for the last fifteen years, would not have been surprised at the substance of the "Argument”. But LO's arguments and reasoning, not to mention its attacks on individuals and organisations, merit attention ... and deserve a response.
Fight against the fight against Islamophobia
We know LO's precision and rigor, and cannot fail to notice that the use of quotation marks in the title of the article is not trivial: "The trap of the "fight against Islamophobia ". The problem is not, therefore, the term "Islamophobia", the relevance of which LO has regularly challenged, but the "fight against Islamophobia" itself. This is confirmed by the content of the article, whose target is not those who defend the use of the term "Islamophobia" but those who intend to combat Islamophobic violence and discrimination.
It is indeed a novelty: even if LO continues to call the term "Islamophobia" "ambiguous", we are no longer in the phrasing of 2010[2], when we read that " Islamophobia often implies a rejection of all those who share the Muslim faith, which is a nonsense, not only when it refers to the attitude of the revolutionary communists, but even as regards the attitude of French imperialism and those who serve it at the highest level ". Indeed, LO recognizes the existence of discrimination against Muslims, and even adopts the formula "specific oppression": "A part of the French political class currently rejects and discriminates Muslims, at least the poor, those of cities and factories, for it certainly does not reject the billionaires of the Gulf theocracies. And it is understandable that many young people feel they are victims of a specific oppression, which does exist."
It will be noted here that some formulations remain "ambiguous", but even if LO does not recognize or explain this evolution, it is clear that from "the nonsense" to "specific oppression", the path has been traveled In recent years, probably because of the increasingly visible rise of Islamophobia, gained strength after the attacks of 2015-2016. But it is not the least of the paradoxes that we can not find in the rest of the text any analysis of the development of this oppression that constitutes Islamophobia, nor any concrete proposals to combat stigmatization, discrimination and violence targeting Specifically Muslims (or presumed as such). Instead, LO engages in a widely ignorant diatribe of debates and work on the issue [3], thus aiming to legitimize in advance those who are fighting these fights, and to propose as their only perspective the fight against religion in general, and Islamic fundamentalism in particular.
This was accompanied by recurring attacks against the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (New Anti-Capitalist Party - NPA), which was accused of "demonstrating a good deal of demagogy towards Islam " and implicitly abandoning any framework of Marxist analysis.
Statements of intent and ill-adjusted attacks
In a first step, the article of LO undertakes to list various initiatives organized by the "anti-Islamophobia galaxy" (gatherings, meetings, conferences, etc.) and to demonstrate, by "presenting" that these initiatives were "forums for Islamist and communalist organizations", with the support of a part of the extreme left. LO specifies its objective: "These different initiatives do not necessarily lend themselves to criticism. The question is who organizes these initiatives, what ideas they express, and what activists who call themselves extreme left do and say at them. A mere declaration of intent, for even by reading the article carefully, one will never know "what ideas have been expressed" in these initiatives, nor what the militants of the extreme left "did or said".
Instead, a series of attacks on some of the organizations and individuals associated with these gatherings or rallies will be necessary, which, if they contain some of the criticisms we can share, testify above all to the profound ignorance regarding these organizations, or even a propensity for selectivity that borders on bad faith. Thus we learn that the Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (Collective against Islamophobia in France - CCIF) could be summarized by the fact that one of its spokesmen, Marwan Muhammad, is a "former stock trader" who once held a common platform with a fundamentalist imam, signed texts with a leader of a conservative association and "[he] affirmed that polygamy did not concern him". That's all? That's all.
We will not know "what ideas" the CCIF defends in the initiatives complained about (against Islamophobia or the state of emergency), and one will not know either, which is not surprising coming from LO , Which is not in the habit of forgetting to propose class analyses, that this "communalist organisation" pronounced, last spring, against the Labor Law, and called for mobilisations against it . No mention was also made of the statement signed in April 2016[4] by the then CCIF spokesman Yasser Louati, who criticized Valls' anti-social policy and accused him of trying to "mask his budget" by a Speech stigmatizing Muslims. Finally, there is no mention of the article published on the CCIF website last November, whose explicit title should not have escaped LO: "Burkini fiasco: A distraction from the attack of El Khomri’s Work Law on workers.
A few lines are also devoted to the Union des organisations islamiques de France (Union of Islamic Organizations of France - UOIF), present during one of the incriminated initiatives: the meeting of 6 March 2015 "against Islamophobia and the climate of war security", during which, Let us specify it since LO forgets to do so, the UOIF did not take the floor. But LO does not need to talk about the slogans of the meeting, nor about the content of the speeches: only the presence among the signatories of the UOIF is sufficient. Again, the demonstration is a little short. Or it will be necessary for LO to explain why, in October 2004, one could find on its site an invitation to join a demonstration "against anti-Semitism, racism and all discrimination" whose appeal had been signed by many organizations, among others LO and ... the UOIF. Was it because LO felt that the issue was important and the slogans relevant? Probably. Does this mean that for LO the fight against discrimination against Muslims and against the "climate of war security" would be a lesser challenge? It would seem that the answer is yes.
False arguments, real pretexts
The "arguments" of Lutte Ouvrière are in fact very weak, and more resemble pretexts to justify non-involvement in the struggle against Islamophobia. The article is in fact incapable of reporting a single pronounced sentence or a single idea defended during these various initiatives, which would make it possible to qualify the latter as "communalist" or "Islamist" rallies. Obviously, it is not a question of adopting an acritic position in relation to the positions defended by these or other initiatives, but in this case LO ignores these positions - to take an interest in the "ideas which express themselves there". What were these ideas? A critique of the government's discriminatory, authoritarian and war policies, a denunciation of racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, solidarity with oppressed peoples, etc. One reality, everyone will admit, poorly adjusted to the political and theoretical framework of LO. Unless it is the other way round?
We will spare ourselves here, even if we are tempted to do too much about the three lines devoted to the gathering organized on January 18 in Paris against Islamophobia:
"At the rally of January 18, 2015, young people waving flags Algerian, Turkish, Moroccan, panels bearing suras of the Qur’an, and a large banner: "Touch not my prophet". Commentaries worthy of an article by L'Express or the pitiful attempts to delegitimise, on the part of the Zionist mouth pieces, demonstrations in support of the Palestinian people. In this respect, one can not fail to notice that the method of trying to detect at any price the traces of "Islamic fundamentalism" within the fronts of the struggle against Islamophobia is, to be mistaken, similar to the methods of those who try to detect at any price traces of anti-Semitism within the fronts of fighting the policy of the State of Israel. "The current campaign should not make the revolutionaries lose any compass," LO told us at the beginning of his article. We can here only return the compliment to him.
Behind these pretexts, it is difficult not to perceive the total lack of will on the part of LO to mobilize concretely against Islamophobia and to participate in fronts alongside organizations whose anti-capitalists and revolutionaries can also be very distant. A policy which LO is able to carry out when the "cause" seems to him to be just, without requiring certificates of good conduct from all the components of the front, even if he sometimes renounces certain principles that seem suddenly intangible when he " Is working with Muslim organizations.
It will be remembered that on March 6, 2004, LO had the choice to parade, during the annual mobilization for the International Day for the rights of women, in the procession organized by the association Ni putes ni soumises (Neither whores nor subjects - NPNS), which had refused to sign the appeal of the Collectif national pour les droits des femmes (National Collective for Women's Rights - CNDF). Fadela Amara then explained: "Today, the priority is to defend the values of the secular Republic, not to stand against the government[5]. LO, who felt that the urgency of the day, in the midst of a "veil debate", was to express solidarity with women denouncing Islamic fundamentalism, decided to march with the "defenders of the Values of the secular Republic ", and Arlette Laguiller thus found herself, in the lead contingent, alongside, among others, Nicole Guedj, then Minister of the Chirac-Raffarin-Sarkozy government, known to stand on every occasion on the side of the exploited and the oppressed. Strange compass, that of LO ...
The "race" and "white feminism": theoretical confusion ... voluntary?
The "targeted attacks" of LO are, as we have seen, are very awkward and unconvincing, in particular in that they reveal indignations - and principles - of variable geometry, and ignorance of the actors and actions of the "galaxy of anti-Islamophobia ". It is probably to mask these paradoxes and ignorance that the article develops, in a second step, an argument that is more "theoretical", especially regarding the concepts of "race" and "white feminism", but also of the Marxist analysis of religious phenomenon.
Concerning race, LO pretends to believe that to speak of "racialised" implies to affirm the existence of the races in the biological sense, and thus to align themselves with the extreme right (although the extreme right has now swapped its biological racism for a cultural racism much more accepted in the political field). The social implications - both material and ideological - of racism, which are manifested in a systematic inequality of treatment between whites and non-whites, in other words the social construction of white domination and a division which tends to become structural within the proletariat, between those who suffer racist discrimination and those who, on the contrary, are not the object of it.
To deny these social implications is to deny racism and to refuse to see that, according to whether one appears white or not (and one knows how the fact of being identified as Muslim-Sarkozy had spoken of the " Muslim appearance"- can immediately shift to being non-white, access to a job (and especially to a properly paid, stable job, etc.), or housing, will be very uneven. They will not receive equal treatment from institutions (particularly by the police), suffering regular harassment, even humiliation, and so on. The non-existence of biological races in no way implies the absence of oppression and social divisions on the basis of skin color or religion.
Speaking of "racialised" or "social races", political anti-racist activists (but also many human and social scientists) say nothing other than the persistence of racism and material divisions which it creates, consolidates and reproduces within the very bosom of the popular classes. This is not a purely theoretical debate, because a practical consequence immediately follows from this: to put an end to these divisions, it is not enough simply to remove the word "race" with a stroke of the pen, or to banish it from its vocabulary "(as the LO article says); strange way, for so-called materialists, to believe in the power of words (or their absence). In order to put an end to "races" (in the social sense), that is to say, with racial divisions and discrimination, we must end racism as an institutionalized system!
If LO is incapable of admitting the persistence of racial groups (which are the products of racism), but also of structural inequalities of gender, linked to sexuality or disadvantage, it is probably that this simple fact denies the idea of a homogeneous working class that a party could embody through mobilization in the workplace alone. Far from concealing this domination under the carpet of workers' unity, denying or minimizing the implications of this oppression, anti-capitalists and revolutionaries must put them at the heart of their action in order to achieve class unity on the basis of an equality between its various components. This requires active support in the self-organization of the oppressed, as well as the defense of the democratic demands that emerge. Whether it is for women, people who are victims of homophobia, people with disabilities, transphobia, etc., our principle is the right to organise, and if they wish autonomously. The emancipation of the oppressed will be the work of the oppressed themselves!
This constant attention to oppression - in all its forms and in all strata of society, as Lenin argued[6] - is a strategic necessity for addressing the most oppressed but also often the most combative elements of the proletariat. In this sense, the existence and development of women-led feminist organisations, as well as other self-organisation, and therefore potentially autonomous, initiatives such as the decolonial camp, are encouraging signs for the movement that we want to build and for class unity. For this is never given; it is the product of a constant struggle against everything that, in a concrete capitalist society, works daily to divide those who should be united – workers - and to unite those who should be divided - capitalists and workers.
Any movement against oppression, even if its leaders do not pretend to pursue this objective, favors a higher level of unity of the exploited class, even when it appears at first to divide it . For it is by taking account of real divisions and by favoring the self-organization of the oppressed struggling to break down such divisions that concrete work is being done to create class unity and not by appealing for abstract unity around claims which, although they must obviously be defended and popularized, do not magically remove the inequalities and divisions within the class.
"Communism and religion"?
The developments relating to the Marxist analysis of the religious phenomenon are less surprising and original in that they echo much of the debates that we have already had, in almost identical terms, over the last fifteen years. It is essentially a divergence as to the practical consequences to be drawn from the contradictory nature of the religious phenomenon, as summarized in Marx's famous formula: " Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people" [7]
A contradiction which Lutte Ouvrière proposes to solve as follows: "Marx knew that religious prejudices were the consequences of oppression, and that they would not disappear before a profound transformation of society [...]. For all that, Marxists have always considered anti-religious propaganda indispensable. To be a communist is to be a materialist, and to be a materialist is to be an atheist. One can be an atheist and fight, in a strike, alongside a believing worker. But this does not mean that it is the duty of any communist revolutionary to not try to snatch the militants he wants to win over his cause, but even his comrades of work and struggle from the influence of religion. A proposition which is in reality only a negation of the contradictory character of the religious phenomenon.
For the whole problem is that "to be materialistic" is also to have a materialistic approach to the religious phenomenon. A materialistic approach which LO renounces, considering "religion" in an essentialist way, as a reactionary force everywhere and always, that it would be a question of fighting at all times and in all places by the dissemination of "anti-religious propaganda Independently of the political, economic, social and ideological forces. A materialistic approach summarised by Lenin in a 1909 article[8], in which he explains in particular that "the atheistic propaganda of social-democracy [= revolutionaries] must be subordinated to its fundamental task, namely: Class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters. Four years earlier [9], Lenin was already warning: "In no case should we be misled into the idealistic abstractions of those who pose the religious problem in terms of "pure reason", apart from the class struggle, as often radical democrats from the bourgeoisie".
To think of the religious phenomenon is to think of the material reality in which it is inscribed: Marx and the Marxists have repeatedly explained this by stressing that ideas, including religious ones, do not exist independently of the social forces that take it. "Religion can thus express different and even contradictory social and political dynamics: would it come to anyone's mind to pretend that" the "Catholic religion had the same meaning and the same significance, during the years 1960-1970, for the workers of Northern Ireland and for the dignitaries of the Franco regime? Obviously, no. Leon Trotsky[10] said nothing else in 1933 about the United States: "The baptism of a Black man is something totally different from the Baptism of a Rockfeller. They are two different religions. "
The same goes for Islam today: Islam practiced, even claimed, by certain categories of the population residing in France, cannot be considered on the same level as the Islam of the Saudi regime or the Iranian regime, even if, in the last resort, it were the same "religious dogma". In one case, Islam is a religion oppressed by the state; In the other, it is a tool of oppression of the state: this should not leave indifferent militants fixing for task the overthrow of capitalism and its institutions.
Let us go farther: in many cases - as analyzed in particular by F. Engels, R. Luxemburg or A. Gramsci [11] - religion has been the source of popular revolts, the language in which the will of the oppressed was expressed To overthrow the world, and thus the vehicle of their progressive and even revolutionary aspirations. From primitive Christians to liberation theology in Latin America, to the fringes of Christian youth in France in the 1960s and 1970s, the "dogma" could be interpreted in an egalitarian and militant sense, inclining to an action Aimed at bringing a world free from exploitation and oppression to life here without expecting any salvation in the hereafter.
When LO defends the reversal of the hierarchy of norms
Do not the Marxists have to give up fighting in France the influence of the currents of fundamentalist Islam? Obviously, no! But this struggle must be part of the existing relations of forces, and in the specific configuration of the class struggle in France: to paraphrase Lenin, this struggle is subordinated to the development of concrete mobilizations against the bourgeoisie and its capitalist state. The question thus arises: in France in 2017, the development of groups fighting against the authoritarian and warlike forward flight of the state and against discrimination that not only decimates the existence of millions of people but which, moreover, weaken the whole of our social camp, is it a positive or negative element on the scale of the global power relations between the classes? The answer is, from our point of view, in the question-LO's anti-religious obsession led the organization to refuse to participate in fronts that are nevertheless so many corners buried in the "historic block" that the French bourgeoisie is trying to consolidate by rallying to its cause entire fractions of the wage worker in the name of the "fight against terrorism". In this field, LO actually practices a reversal of the hierarchy of norms, subordinating the development of the class struggle to anti-religious propaganda and the struggle against fundamentalism. To reject a priori any specific alliance around a question - racism, here in the form of Islamophobia - which profoundly structures capitalist societies, and this in the name of so-called "materialistic principles", is to refrain to act in concrete terms in the relations of political and social forces.
Forgetting, in passing, one of the fundamental achievements of Trotsky, of which LO loves to claim, which explained in 1928, about the hypothetical alliances with the Chinese Kuomintang: "For a long time it has been said that agreements that are not binding on us in any way and create no political obligation, may, if it is advantageous at the moment, be concluded with the devil himself. But it would be absurd to demand at the same time that on this occasion the devil should convert completely to Christianity ... "[12]. Let us not be mistaken here on the reference to this metaphor of Trotsky: we do not wish to convert anyone to Christianity! But it must be emphasized that in other contexts, Marxists had the opportunity, when they felt that the situation required it, to come to terms with various currents, even very distant, without this signifying That they renounced their independence.
The fronts in which the NPA is participating are not in any way the frameworks in which we clasp our hands, nor the systems of alliance that would oblige us to abandon our criticism of religious fundamentalism, whatever it may be. Contrary to what LO suggests, an initiative involving an individual or a current claiming to be Islam is not mechanically a proselytizing initiative (such as the authors of the law of 15 March 2004, who claim absurd that the mere wearing of a religious sign is in itself an act of proselytism). Unless we consider that the Muslims would be, independently of the positions they defend and of what they say - since, let us recall, LO does not say a word about the content of the initiatives criticized in the article, by their nature proselytes.
Muslims, therefore fundamentalists according to LO?
It seems that according to LO, an alliance between Muslims and Marxists necessarily means that they [Marxists] are "making concessions", never questioning whether the Muslims do not also strongly admonished for having accepted to join initiatives where there are also atheists, even communists. This is the case, however, with fundamentalist currents which subordinate all activity to "Islamisation" and bluntly criticize those Muslims who are accused of compromise: a striking symmetry with the LO's invective towards a part of the far left.
And it is a rather striking element that this essentialisation of Muslim anti-racist militants as necessarily non-Marxists or necessarily from backgrounds resistant to the political culture of the radical left. Where LO only sees in Bibimoune Nargesse as a veiled woman (and according to LO as a "voluntary slave"), we also know from her that she is part of a generation of radically anti-capitalist militants whose Theoretical references are Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis. As she recalls in her book Confidences à mon veile[13]: "Tell them it is not you who pay us twenty-five percent less than men, tell them you are not responsible for the fact that one puts on eighty percent of domestic work, tell them that the polemic against you is again to question the appearance of women without ever focusing on their reflection ".
LO criticizes the NPA for putting forward community issues. But is it not to introduce the identity theme - and contribute to Islamophobia - to assimilate an anti-racist militant to Islamic fundamentalism on the pretext that she wears a headscarf? These remarks have nothing to envy to those held by so many ideologists - from Fourest to Valls, through Finkielkraut, Zemmour and Badinter - who have been working since the mid-1990s to transform secularism and / or feminism into instruments of stigmatization and exclusion of Muslims, and particularly Muslim women.
A large part of the Left and the Far Left - including LO - has been involved in promoting identity themes and in the development of Islamophobia over the last 15 years, Exclusion and disregarding for the words of the people concerned (in particular place Muslim women). We inherit this situation, and the weakness of our social camp, as well as the rise of reactionary and extreme right-wing forces of all kinds, is also an effect of our inability to struggle against the offensive Islamophobia that has been raging for so many years.
Conclusion
To conclude this reply, it should be noted that LO's article received the enthusiastic welcome of Fourest and Clavreul - supporters of Manuel Valls and defenders of a fundamentalist vision of secularism, clearly turned against Muslims - but also of Natacha Polony, a figure of neo-conservative thought. Obviously, we have the friends and the enemies that we deserve. But the essential is not there: it is in (at least) three important divergences between our two organizations.
- The first divergence concerns Islamophobia itself. Contrary to what LO wrote at the beginning of its article, Islamophobia goes far beyond a simple "illusion", "diversion" or "smoke screen". Moreover, as Pierre Tevanian reminds us, "for all those who are not smoking, who do not take this smoke in their mouth, it has the only effect of preventing them from seeing a part of reality. But for those who take this smoke in the face, it is dangerous, it is toxic, for veiled girls, for their families, for Muslims in general. This law not only reduces their field of vision, but reduces their field of life, turning them from school, dropping out of school, desocialising them, humiliating them, brutalizing them at an age where one is fragile. [...] If there is a smoke screen, let us not also forget that it smothers, it poisons a part of the population " [13].
Islamophobia, then, is an oppression and, first of all, as an oppression, it must be combated because it has immediate consequences - material, ideological and psychological - for the lives of millions of people (in France and elsewhere), the vast majority of whom belong to the working classes. Indeed, it is not simply a "smokescreen", but an oppression that arouses and reproduces real divisions among the working classes, that it can play so central a role in the strategies of the French ruling class. For the last fifteen years, it has been on Muslim (but also immigrant), and therefore on the identity and racist grounds, that successive governments have sought the consent of one party to the less workers to the capitalist order - where, on the social ground, workers remain massively opposed to the neo-liberal purge and austerity policies.[14]
- A second divergence concerns the relationship to the first ones concerned by this oppression. The offensive of last summer around the "burkini" was a lesson of things from this point of view: it is always women who impose clothing injunctions, one way or another. But these injunctions are part of the oppression of women, of the control that some try to assume over their bodies. That is why last August, by protesting at the Port-Leucate beach against the municipal decision to prohibit the port of the burkini on the beaches (a decision which was rejected by the Council of State) We sang "too much covered or not enough, it's up to the women to decide". To put it another way, like almost all the feminist movements in the predominantly Muslim countries, sometimes mass movements that LO chooses to superbly ignore, we are equally opposed to those who want to impose on a woman to wear such or such a garment as to those who wish to force her to remove it.
More broadly, we consider that self-organization is not a slogan for feast days: anti-capitalist and revolutionary militants do not have to patronize the oppressed on the best way to lead their struggles. The latter did not wait for LO to defend their interests, and they could have waited a long time, - as we have seen – as LO is more anxious to denounce the fight against Islamophobia than to contribute to it . What can we, as activists and as an organization, do is to make the best allies of the struggles of the oppressed, by popularizing their slogans, demands and proposals when they appear to us to go in the direction of a policy of emancipation and the fundamental interests of our social camp.
It is only by participating in common organisations and common battles that we can convince ourselves that in order to really put an end to oppression we must build class unity and break down capitalist power by revolutionary means. In this struggle for the emancipation of humanity, what counts is not the opinion of the exploited and oppressed on God, salvation, or the origin of the world. As Lenin asserted, "the unity of this truly revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class fighting to create a paradise on earth is more important to us than the unity of opinion of the proletarians over the paradise of heaven." [15]
- A third divergence is, finally, in the conception of politics for a revolutionary organization. As illustrated by its presidential campaign, LO is characterized more than ever by a very narrow vision of the political struggle, largely reduced to conflicts in the workplace, to the defense of an emergency program composed of essential demands, but strictly economic (wage increases, prohibitions of dismissals, etc.) and an abstract propaganda for "communism" (of which LO does not say much if one pays attention to it). As we have said above, this economic reductionism is a thousand leagues away from the political practice of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky or Luxemburg. If a revolutionary organization revels in a position of guardian of the dogma and in a routine essentially destined to self-replicate, showing henceforth incapable of contributing actively to the political battles currently being waged against Islamophobia, Urgency or imperialist wars, what could be its usefulness to really change the balance of power in favor of the exploited and the oppressed?
Notes
1 Lutte Ouvrière, ‘Le piège de la "lutte contre l’islamophobie"’, Lutte de classe n ° 181, February 2017,
http://mensuel.lutte-ouvriere.org/2017/01/22/le-piege-de-la-lutte-contre-lislamophobie_75202.html
2 Lutte Ouvrière, ‘Communisme, religions et intégrismes’, Lutte de classe No. 126, March 2010,
http://mensuel.lutte-ouvriere.org/documents/archives/la-revue-lutte-de-classe/serie-actuelle-1993/article/communisme-religions-et
3 These include Abdellali Hajjat and Marwan Mohammed, Islamophobia . Comment les élites françaises fabriquent le "problème musulman", 2013.
4 Yasser Louati, “Vous revoilà encore, Manuel Valls, avec vos obsessions sur l’islam…”,
Libération, 14 avril 2016.
5 Charlotte Rotman et Blandine Grosjean, « Un voile sur les combats féministes »,
Libération, 6 mars
2004, http://www.liberation.fr/debats/2016/04/14/yasser-louati-vous-revoila-encore-manuel-valls-avec-vos-obsessions-sur-l-islam_1446168
6 LO is far removed from the political tradition in which it claims to be registered. In What was to be done? Lenin opposed the revolutionary Social-Democrat (the word used in Russia at the time) to the trade union secretary (in other words, the trade unionist): "The secretary of a English trade unions, for example, constantly helps the workers to carry out the economic struggle, organizes revelations about the life of the factory, explains the injustice of laws and provisions hindering freedom of strike, freedom of picketing (to publicise the existence of strike in a given factory); It shows the bias of the arbitrator who belongs to the bourgeois classes, etc. etc. and in a nutshell, every trade union secretary leads and helps to lead the '' economic struggle against the bosses and the government ''. [...] The Social-Democrat must not have as his ideal the secretary of trade union, but the popular tribune who is able to react against any manifestation of arbitrariness and oppression, wherever it occurs, whatever the class or the social stratum is experiencing it, knowing to generalize all these facts to compose a full picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation, knowing to take advantage of the slightest opportunity to expose before all its socialist convictions and claims To explain to everyone the historical significance of the emancipatory struggle of the proletariat ".
7 Karl Marx,
Contribution to a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of the right, 1843,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.
8 Lenin,
The attitude of the workers party to religion, 1909,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm
9 Lenin,
Socialism and religion, 1905,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
10 Leon Trotsky,
The Negro question in the United States, 1933,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm#prinkipo.
11 Michael Löwy, “Opium du peuple ? Marxisme critique et religion”,
Contretemps.eu, 7 février 2010, Contretemps.eu, 7 February 2010,
http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article28811.
12 Leon Trotsky,
The Third International after Lenin, 1928,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/index.htm.
13 Nargesse Bibimoune,
Confidences à mon veile, 2016.:
14 “À propos de Dévoilements : du Hijab à la Burqa. Entretien avec Pierre Tévanian”,
Contretemps.eu, 24
https://www.contretemps.eu/a-propos-de-devoilements-du-hijab-a-la-burqa-entretien-avec-pierre-tevanian/
15 Lenin,
Socialism and religion, op. Cit.
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