15 November 2005
Badiou's l'Organisation politique on the French Situation
UPDATE: Translation of the first part of Badiou's piece from today's Le Monde at Le Colonel Chabert
[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]
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.
Ever since the night of the 27th of October, confrontations have taken place in Clichy between dozens of youths and the police. Cars have been burned, a school, stores and bus shelters have been attacked. The following night, these confrontations spread to Montfermeil. Some days later, the CRS [Compagnie Republicane de Securite – riot police] threw a tear gas grenade at the entrance of a mosque in Clichy. Once again the government denies that the police are responsible. During the night of the 31st of October the riots spread to the whole of Seine-sans-Denis and to other estates throughout France.
It is above all against the ideology of security [sécuritaire] and against the incessant police harassment that these kids are rising up, against the cops in the estates who everywhere and at all times exert their control, with insults and intimidations, even of kids of 13 or 14. These days an estate is a squad of listless and malevolent cops, an unhinged command centre [commissariat], all too happy to throw themselves on a few kids playing football, on small gathering of youths, who Sarkozy, their great chief, has personally authorised them to treat as "scum" [racaille]. This after all the parties have spent months and months campaigning against young girls who wear the headscarf [foulard]...
The Minister of the Interior wishes to teach judges and justice itself a lesson, and the police find themselves invested with full powers: in schools, on the streets, in the family. The police become the guarantor not simply of public order but of "the Republican order", that is to say of society and "citizenship". In a strict sense France is occupied by its police, to which the Government accords everyday (the Perben laws (1), curfews) more areas of competence and power.
It is against workers without papers [sans papiers] that this politics was road-tested and put in place: laws of exception, campaigns concerning irregular immigration and the association with delinquency and terrorism, the incessant practice of stop and search, of arrests and expulsions. Doesn't L’Organisation politique say that we must stand beside workers without papers, to demand their regularisation on the basis of work, to demand respect for their belonging to France, and that this battle is not marginal (as too many people believe), but decisive? Who does not see today that, even when it is a matter of the French-born youth of the estates, Sarkozy raises the question of foreigners [des étrangers] as a central question, to the point of declaring outside of any legality, that he will demand the expulsion even of regularised [régulière] foreigners caught up in the youth riots? He does this to mobilise the country against the youth, to declare that it too is "not from here".
The politics of police and security is consensual, it is shared by all the parties. Consider the paralysis of the Socialists [PS] and the Communists [PC] in the face of Sarkozy and Villepin and the most extreme measures such as the curfews. Why do they not try to organise a great demonstration to protest against what has happened? Because they share the same vision, save for a few nuances (the police, but a "neighbourhood" [de proximité] police). What the youth riots show is that this politics is not consensual at the level of people [les gens]. It is a politics against people and the youth say so by doing what they do, with their own means, which are not political means but an uprising [soulèvement] of the youth.
What is dramatic is that the youth are alone in front of the police. Mayors and elected officials, associations and local administrations organise actions against the youth in the name of a "citizens network" [réseaux citoyens]. Once arrested, the youths will be heavily sentenced by a more than expeditious justice. For how much longer can adults and parents remain silent? The youth must not be left to face the police alone. It is necessary to rise up against the police harassment of which they are the object. Parents must stand side by side with them. At least those who do not let themselves be organised by the theme of the defence of material goods, because they know that burnt cars or buildings mean nothing when compared to the question of what will become of the youth. A huge question which, after these youth riots, has become a question posed to everyone, a question for everyone, just like the question of the workers without papers and their regularisation.
II. One can enter into a discussion of politics in France today through this question of what is for everyone [ce qui est pour tous]. Only in that way can we face up to a catastrophic situation unleashed against the people.
Successive governments have developed a politics of great violence, more and more opposed to the respect of the right of people, more and more denying the state of law. After 2002 (and the collapse of Jospin) the government and the parties are on high alert about the fact that politics at the sole service of financial capital does not generate a consensus among people. This was shown by the "No" to the European Referendum, just as it is now shown by the youth riots. Through the instrument of voting, just as through the instrument of confrontations with the police, people desperately try to oppose this politics. Burning cars and pelting the police with stones might appear as a tit-for-tat response to Sarkozy, a response which is effective there where voting is useless. But the police are the practical support of Sarkozy's politics, they are not his politics. The question of what a politics capable of combating the politics of Sarkozy, Villepin and Chirac may be is indeed the least clear question today, if we put aside what l'Organisation politique and the Rassemblement [of workers without papers] do for their part.
There is a parliamentary consensus about the fact of leaving the state of law. The state gives up on a pacified public order. A large share of the approved laws put in place instruments of police persecution and have this as their overt aim: the Chevènement-Sarkozy law on identity cards [papiers] (2), the Fillon law on schools (3), the Perben laws on justice, the curfew decrees...At the same time the police, local administrations and many public bodies and institutes give free reign to racist practices: stop and search [contrôles au faciès], refusal of employment [refus d’embauche], refusal of housing permission [refus de contrats de location] (in the HLMs in the name of "social mixing" [mixité sociale]) or of sale, the treatment of people as potential delinquents. Islam has become an official problem of the republic. Islam is a phenomenon to be combated, mosques are places to be controlled, the wearing of the veil is the object of a systematic persecution. People speak of sending children to work, that is to the streets, from the age of 14 onwards. Entire populations are declared guilty populations. There is truly a marked partition between the French and foreigners, children and grandchildren of foreigners and others, economic division is matched by the division between the French and the foreigners, between suburbs and estates and city centres, and so on.
To the extent that the reality of contemporary France, of the new France, of the new country, appears, with people who have come from all over, including from here, themselves or their parents or their grandparents or further back, this reality is denied in the politics of the government, and the situation decays, things get worse. "Worker", "youth", "foreigner", are devastated ideas and realities, just like "pupil", "high school student", "university student", "intellectual" or "inhabitant of the banlieus", or of the estates [cités]. There is no principle of respect, no idea of counting everybody for what he is, and no collective project. No idea of a possible for the country which might be shared [partagée et partageable], and no sign that this situation may change on the side of the state and of its parties, on the contrary. It is therefore up to people themselves to take these questions into their own hands. It is possible.
What makes a country is not where one comes from but what one does together within it and what one wants to do with it. It is the present and the future that unite, not the past. When one does something, it is not enough to say what one is against, who one is addressing and why. One must not just have a vision of the adversary, but also a vision of oneself, otherwise one traces what one is from the adversary and one remains in his game, in his space. A political capacity at a distance from the state is therefore more than ever the crucial question. These questions have been put on the agenda for everyone today by the youth riots.
L’Organisation politique calls on you to inform yourself (read Le Journal Politique) and to discuss the political principles which it supports:
- Parents, be with your children in the face of the police, not against them! Amnesty for the children.
- If you are here you are from here: France is everyone who lives here!
- Work counts, workers count!
- Abolish the Chevènement-Sarkozy law and regularise on the basis of work!
- Abolish the Fillon and Preben laws and the laws on the headscarf and the teaching of colonisation.
L’Organisation politique – http://orgapoli.net – Le Perroquet BP 84 75462 Paris cedex 10
MEETING samedi 10 DECEMBRE 2005 à 14h 30, salle des Diaconesses 18 rue du Sargent Bauchat 75012 PARIS métro MONGALLET, ligne 8
.................................................................................
1. The Perben law expands the prerogatives of the police and police repression on the basis of a supposed response to the transformations in delinquency and organised crime. See here.
2. The Chevènement-Sarkozy law is also called the "10 years law" in Orgapoli material since it only gives sans papier workers certain rights (regularisation) after they have worked for ten years (and can prove it). Discussed on the Rassemblement site here.
3. The Fillon law abrogates much of the 35hr legislation, much of the labour code and allows bosses to negotiate punitive forms of overtime and irregular contracts - apperently bringing law on work back to before 1982. See here.
[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]
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.
Ever since the night of the 27th of October, confrontations have taken place in Clichy between dozens of youths and the police. Cars have been burned, a school, stores and bus shelters have been attacked. The following night, these confrontations spread to Montfermeil. Some days later, the CRS [Compagnie Republicane de Securite – riot police] threw a tear gas grenade at the entrance of a mosque in Clichy. Once again the government denies that the police are responsible. During the night of the 31st of October the riots spread to the whole of Seine-sans-Denis and to other estates throughout France.
It is above all against the ideology of security [sécuritaire] and against the incessant police harassment that these kids are rising up, against the cops in the estates who everywhere and at all times exert their control, with insults and intimidations, even of kids of 13 or 14. These days an estate is a squad of listless and malevolent cops, an unhinged command centre [commissariat], all too happy to throw themselves on a few kids playing football, on small gathering of youths, who Sarkozy, their great chief, has personally authorised them to treat as "scum" [racaille]. This after all the parties have spent months and months campaigning against young girls who wear the headscarf [foulard]...
The Minister of the Interior wishes to teach judges and justice itself a lesson, and the police find themselves invested with full powers: in schools, on the streets, in the family. The police become the guarantor not simply of public order but of "the Republican order", that is to say of society and "citizenship". In a strict sense France is occupied by its police, to which the Government accords everyday (the Perben laws (1), curfews) more areas of competence and power.
It is against workers without papers [sans papiers] that this politics was road-tested and put in place: laws of exception, campaigns concerning irregular immigration and the association with delinquency and terrorism, the incessant practice of stop and search, of arrests and expulsions. Doesn't L’Organisation politique say that we must stand beside workers without papers, to demand their regularisation on the basis of work, to demand respect for their belonging to France, and that this battle is not marginal (as too many people believe), but decisive? Who does not see today that, even when it is a matter of the French-born youth of the estates, Sarkozy raises the question of foreigners [des étrangers] as a central question, to the point of declaring outside of any legality, that he will demand the expulsion even of regularised [régulière] foreigners caught up in the youth riots? He does this to mobilise the country against the youth, to declare that it too is "not from here".
The politics of police and security is consensual, it is shared by all the parties. Consider the paralysis of the Socialists [PS] and the Communists [PC] in the face of Sarkozy and Villepin and the most extreme measures such as the curfews. Why do they not try to organise a great demonstration to protest against what has happened? Because they share the same vision, save for a few nuances (the police, but a "neighbourhood" [de proximité] police). What the youth riots show is that this politics is not consensual at the level of people [les gens]. It is a politics against people and the youth say so by doing what they do, with their own means, which are not political means but an uprising [soulèvement] of the youth.
What is dramatic is that the youth are alone in front of the police. Mayors and elected officials, associations and local administrations organise actions against the youth in the name of a "citizens network" [réseaux citoyens]. Once arrested, the youths will be heavily sentenced by a more than expeditious justice. For how much longer can adults and parents remain silent? The youth must not be left to face the police alone. It is necessary to rise up against the police harassment of which they are the object. Parents must stand side by side with them. At least those who do not let themselves be organised by the theme of the defence of material goods, because they know that burnt cars or buildings mean nothing when compared to the question of what will become of the youth. A huge question which, after these youth riots, has become a question posed to everyone, a question for everyone, just like the question of the workers without papers and their regularisation.
II. One can enter into a discussion of politics in France today through this question of what is for everyone [ce qui est pour tous]. Only in that way can we face up to a catastrophic situation unleashed against the people.
Successive governments have developed a politics of great violence, more and more opposed to the respect of the right of people, more and more denying the state of law. After 2002 (and the collapse of Jospin) the government and the parties are on high alert about the fact that politics at the sole service of financial capital does not generate a consensus among people. This was shown by the "No" to the European Referendum, just as it is now shown by the youth riots. Through the instrument of voting, just as through the instrument of confrontations with the police, people desperately try to oppose this politics. Burning cars and pelting the police with stones might appear as a tit-for-tat response to Sarkozy, a response which is effective there where voting is useless. But the police are the practical support of Sarkozy's politics, they are not his politics. The question of what a politics capable of combating the politics of Sarkozy, Villepin and Chirac may be is indeed the least clear question today, if we put aside what l'Organisation politique and the Rassemblement [of workers without papers] do for their part.
There is a parliamentary consensus about the fact of leaving the state of law. The state gives up on a pacified public order. A large share of the approved laws put in place instruments of police persecution and have this as their overt aim: the Chevènement-Sarkozy law on identity cards [papiers] (2), the Fillon law on schools (3), the Perben laws on justice, the curfew decrees...At the same time the police, local administrations and many public bodies and institutes give free reign to racist practices: stop and search [contrôles au faciès], refusal of employment [refus d’embauche], refusal of housing permission [refus de contrats de location] (in the HLMs in the name of "social mixing" [mixité sociale]) or of sale, the treatment of people as potential delinquents. Islam has become an official problem of the republic. Islam is a phenomenon to be combated, mosques are places to be controlled, the wearing of the veil is the object of a systematic persecution. People speak of sending children to work, that is to the streets, from the age of 14 onwards. Entire populations are declared guilty populations. There is truly a marked partition between the French and foreigners, children and grandchildren of foreigners and others, economic division is matched by the division between the French and the foreigners, between suburbs and estates and city centres, and so on.
To the extent that the reality of contemporary France, of the new France, of the new country, appears, with people who have come from all over, including from here, themselves or their parents or their grandparents or further back, this reality is denied in the politics of the government, and the situation decays, things get worse. "Worker", "youth", "foreigner", are devastated ideas and realities, just like "pupil", "high school student", "university student", "intellectual" or "inhabitant of the banlieus", or of the estates [cités]. There is no principle of respect, no idea of counting everybody for what he is, and no collective project. No idea of a possible for the country which might be shared [partagée et partageable], and no sign that this situation may change on the side of the state and of its parties, on the contrary. It is therefore up to people themselves to take these questions into their own hands. It is possible.
What makes a country is not where one comes from but what one does together within it and what one wants to do with it. It is the present and the future that unite, not the past. When one does something, it is not enough to say what one is against, who one is addressing and why. One must not just have a vision of the adversary, but also a vision of oneself, otherwise one traces what one is from the adversary and one remains in his game, in his space. A political capacity at a distance from the state is therefore more than ever the crucial question. These questions have been put on the agenda for everyone today by the youth riots.
L’Organisation politique calls on you to inform yourself (read Le Journal Politique) and to discuss the political principles which it supports:
- Parents, be with your children in the face of the police, not against them! Amnesty for the children.
- If you are here you are from here: France is everyone who lives here!
- Work counts, workers count!
- Abolish the Chevènement-Sarkozy law and regularise on the basis of work!
- Abolish the Fillon and Preben laws and the laws on the headscarf and the teaching of colonisation.
L’Organisation politique – http://orgapoli.net – Le Perroquet BP 84 75462 Paris cedex 10
MEETING samedi 10 DECEMBRE 2005 à 14h 30, salle des Diaconesses 18 rue du Sargent Bauchat 75012 PARIS métro MONGALLET, ligne 8
.................................................................................
1. The Perben law expands the prerogatives of the police and police repression on the basis of a supposed response to the transformations in delinquency and organised crime. See here.
2. The Chevènement-Sarkozy law is also called the "10 years law" in Orgapoli material since it only gives sans papier workers certain rights (regularisation) after they have worked for ten years (and can prove it). Discussed on the Rassemblement site here.
3. The Fillon law abrogates much of the 35hr legislation, much of the labour code and allows bosses to negotiate punitive forms of overtime and irregular contracts - apperently bringing law on work back to before 1982. See here.
