During three weeks, in the ghettos of the poor suburbs, euphemistically named sensitive neighbourhoods, to the outskirts of the outskirts, thousands of cars have burned, public utilities have been devastated, troops of police forces have been deliberately attacked. Nothing new to what sparked off these incidents, the absurd death of two adolescents seized by insecurity because of the normal behaviour of the police : in the past also there were many more grave and blatant police blunders, nearly always lootings and burnings were the response to these, but were localised. Nothing new neither in the methods employed nor the visible targets : over many years, notably in Alsace, cars are burned on New Year’s Eve or at the time of more obscure commemorations ; and for a long time schools have been vandalised by schoolboys expelled from school, buses or police cars stoned, passengers methodically robbed in public transport. Innovative today is the immediate extension of this violence, its rapid spread, the contamination to the provinces and beyond the borders of a spontaneous and unpremeditated movement.

Movement without explicit claims, except the resignation of a Minister of the Interior disqualified by his remarks and, as everybody knows, scorned by his superiors ; movement impossible to reduce to an ethnic or racial claim, for if the majority of the rioters are of Maghreb or African origin, some of them are of Asian and French extraction ; movement irreducible to the category of youth since the majority of the youths, different to those of May 1968, of the demonstrations against the CIP in 1994, or of the secondary school movement of last spring, have no association there ; movement without spirit nor class consciousness, typical of the common uprising that blurs the conventional distinctions ; movement of "logical revolt" due to permanent poverty and daily humiliation, but movement without strategy, more prone to gaze at itself on television screens, pulling its ephemeral strength from the media coverage it produces, and thus depending on the self-censorship of information put in place to avoid "the telethon effect." Movement nevertheless more Luddite than playful, sustaining itself at the source of real despair, but lacking utopia, with its horizon limited by bars and tower blocks. For sociologists, journalists and certain revolutionaries, incomprehensible movement since it resists the well-oiled arguments they use to explain social movements : neither the social analysis, nor the study of the composition of class achieves defining its specificity. These riots are made by an unidentifiable mob, by rebellious bodies whose existence is reduced to bare life and who have not found another language than that of destructive gestures. Let’s not fool ourselves, in everyday life many of this mob are detestable : some are numbed by religion, many are alienated by permitted consumption, enthusiasts of virile values, sharing with the masters of society the stupid worship of sport - certain riots have been suspended at the time of televised football matches - more often contemptible in their behaviour towards women - the absence of whom in the riots signals an unacceptable limitation - they would certainly not be our friends. It is their revolt that, beyond them, is remarkable. Through their actual contradictions, they represent the dark face of a vengeful social unconscious held back for too long, as those in bygone days representing the dangerous classes. But, at the risk of plunging back even more bitterly in their poverty, it will be necessary for them to draw on the lessons of this experience in order to gain lucidity : already they have seen at work the repressive role of the imams and of Islam, mere auxiliaries to the police, as all religion is ; it still has to get rid of all forms of puritan and virile morale so that women join them as equals - like the women fire-raisers of the Paris Commune in 1871 - to take an active part in all future fights ; likewise, they must finish with the stupid gang rivalry that nails them to their territory and deprives them of a mobile offensive ; finally, they must learn to choose more directly political targets.

In a society where all previous forms of belonging, and therefore of associated consciousness, have been wiped out, these events testify to the eruptive and uncontrollable return of the social question, firstly under an immediately negative form, that fire - emblem of all apocalypses - symbolises. Indeed, contrary to the riots of Los Angeles in 1965 and in 1992, the population of the districts did not massively join the rioters, contrary to May 1968 neither poetry nor intelligence are on the barricades, and no wildcat strike is going to spread widely with these troubles. But the rulers have been hot at the feet and have had to unmask themselves. A democracy that, in order to face up to a quantitatively limited movement, considering the number of participants, is obliged to put back in force an old colonial law, only revealing its constituent deception : that is where the police abuse their powers, the state of emergency gives to its abuse the legitimacy that it lacks ; and this that long ago we called "individual freedom" names itself today discretionary power of the cops. At any rate, what in a flash such warning lights have revealed during these November nights is the return of a possibility that seemed to be lost : that of throwing the power into a panic even when its forces are harassed in a disorganised manner on the whole of the territory by a handful of forsaken casualties. Hence, we can imagine the strength of an uprising that would, beyond the inhabitants of the ghettos, include a whole population suffering from the rise of impoverishment and would turn to civil war against the organs of capital and state. Beyond recent infernos presented as the very image of a nightmare, it is time that the dream of concrete utopia is raised anew.

Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement
November 2005