PARIS – Modern police has 3 main genealogies:
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the slave Plantation and the maintenance of colonial order
- witch hunts and the confinement of bodies deemed abnormal;
- the management of the poor classes concentrated on the outskirts of the big bourgeois city
In its ideology and practices, the French police has domesticated the counter-insurgency doctrine created in the Algerian war, and is redeploying it to ensure the control and repression in colonized territories, prisons, segregated neighborhoods, struggles & social revolts.
According to this doctrine, the “population” is the permanent matrix of subversion, and therefore needs to be “pacified” by a form of police warfare. Through neoliberal and securitarian globalization, counter-insurgency has become a program of government. The development of neoliberal capitalism has continually deepened precarization and socio-racial inequalities in the suburbs.
In the police, it has determined the multiplication of units specialized in ferocity, maximizing captures, equipped with toxic and mutilating weapons, military equipment, testing & showcasing the latest security technologies. It has been accompanied by a proliferation of security laws, the continued reinforcement of judicial impunity for police crimes and the globalization of anti-terrorism as a form of government.
The revolt for Nahel is an explosion of general anger linked to the multiplicity of injustices and police oppression against poor and racialized communities.
Nahel, a 17 years-old from Algerian descent, said he was well-loved in Nanterre where he lived with his mother Mounia and had apparently never known his father. Shortly after nine in the morning on Tuesday he was fatally shot in the chest, point-blank, at the wheel of a Mercedes car for driving off during a police traffic check. At 17 he was too young for a licence.
The French police officer who shot Nahel M., following a stop operation in the Parisian suburb of Nanterres, was presented to the judge at the end of the afternoon and accused of voluntary manslaughter, confirming his preventive detention. The police unions have already contested the words of the prosecutor and the President himself about the conduct of the motorized police, considering them an “interference in an ongoing criminal process” and denouncing the “pressure” exerted on the magistrates.
It’s also a self-organized, politically conscious social movement, targeting places of power (town halls, prefectures, police stations…) and part of the long history of struggles against police crime and popular resistance to state violence.
It’s important to understand that the entire political and economic system is based on the reproduction of a socio-racial segregation historically rooted in colonial history, an internal coloniality that can be called socio-apartheid. After 3 nights of clashes, the government brings out its elite units and anti-terrorist forces to stage the war against the people. On the people’s side, many demonstrations in solidarity were called throughout the country, in defense of equal rights to life & dignity.
We asked some questions for Mathueu;
France has a history of revolts and radical protests against the institutionalized order of the state and it’s current neo-liberal reforms from the 2016 Loi travail protests to the 2023 protests and General Strikes against the Pension Reforms. Even so, in the end it seems that the results are not as good as expected by the people, why so?
The deep dynamics of the system is accumulation of capital and concentration of power and in the neo-liberal and security age of imperialism, there is no more place and time for the regulation of capital so the dominating classes are doing all of what they can to maximize the accumulation and concentration of power, we are not in a time where there could be placed a regulation or social democracy politics. That means that, if social movements don’t build the power to take what they want, we don’t get anything.
So, we need to build movements and organizations that have the power to take it, and right now, at my point of view we do not have this power. We need to focus our efforts to build a strong self-organized mass revolutionary movement.
Another phenomenon witnessed across this last decade in France is the constant increase and rise of the far-right nationalists and their partners across Europe, due to their approach towards immigrants and the consequences created by the capitalist modernity itself, how the protests and revolts are affected by it?
We have to notice that the extreme-right is part of the system, it’s like a reserve of ideas and practices, cadres, networks and strength for the dominating classes inside of the police and the institutions of the state. There is an embryo of the extreme-right on the system of governance, that means that the structures of fascism are inside the normal form of the working imperialism, inside colonization, the politics of borders, inside the politics of prisons, in the periphery of imperialism the fascists structures are the normal working of the system and sometimes when capitalism faces crises of accumulation or social revolts or revolutionary processes, then the system opens an age of counter-revolutionary fascism and there is a link between the imperialist fascists struggles and the counter-revolutionary fascism that the system creates a bridge between them both.
They make this bridge to build hegemony, to build mass consent, it uses the dominating media but also the school and many cultural institutions to make the dominated classes collaborate with the system by subcontract the domination, the counter-revolution and that is what is happening in France right now but also in many other centers of imperialism.
The extreme-right in France is like a para-military, para-state militias. They attack immigrants, left-wing activists, in these last days during the social unrest some of their units attacked and captured people that were protesting and gave them to the police. A big part of the owners of the dominating media spread the extreme-right discourse and culture. So there is a daily collaboration between capitalism, racial order, patriarchy, the state and the extreme right.
A really important thing to be noticed is how across the globe revolts against the established system of capitalist modernity are ongoing and growing up, had a step back with covid-19 in 2020 and 2021 but are once again growing and popping up. However, the lack of a structure or organization with a clear strategy to build an alternative have led this revolts into repeating the cycle of the system, contemplating small reforms at the most. Why is important to the people – specially the Youth, to be organized around a paradigm and praxis?
We can see trough history that the dominated classes always resist, even during the total oppression of the concentration camps or in the slavery plantations, the resistance always succeeded in reorganizing by themselves, so inside the dominating relations of power that are gaps and spaces where the dominated classes prepare the resistance. In this gaps, the people really organize their resistance and their self-organized way of life, solidarity, mutual help…it can be in sports, arts, the social relations, the organization of women that usually are invisible to the people, inside of the community, etc. The point is that, inside this daily resistances there are the seed and roots of the new Revolt and Insurgencies. The question is, how can we make this revolts become revolutionary processes.
For me, and many people related on the struggles, we do think that we need to create a movement that is able to build collective strategies, theory and praxis of our emancipation but build from the grass-roots, for and by the oppressed people. We have to break with the age of class of intellectuals, revolutionary intellectuals and in the other part the oppressed masses should do what they say. I am part of a movement where we think that the oppressed have to become their own intellectuals, we have to create a theory and collective strategy from the ground by and for the oppressed people. That means we have to build structures of self-educations, specially collective education about critic and self-critics, critical investigations so the oppressed people can make their own strategies of emancipation. It has it’s roots in the praxis of Jineolojî.
