And in these days, as we are about to close this issue of our newspaper, we come to the uprising in the French suburbs. It’s not the first explosion of discontent, but the most angry and widespread in the French banlieues, extending to hundreds of towns large and small, and has even crossed national borders, infecting Switzerland and Belgium.

A revolt without organization, without a political program and without immediate social objectives, like the previous ones, with assaults on shopping centers, ATMs, and police stations, carried out mostly by young and very young people.

These features of spontaneity and the absence of demands lend themselves to the falsifications of the bourgeois press, which must conceal that their king is naked and make a society in decay, decomposition, and putrefaction, presentable and worthy of defense.
The blame for the riots, according to some, lies with immigrants of the Islamic faith, whose children, now French citizens, are unable and unwilling to integrate. Or the parents, of the loss of family authority. Two inconsistent and mutually incompatible explanations.

This revolt may be, at least for now, without a political or social program, but its intensity and extent makes it an expression of a deep malaise that cannot be dismissed by the miserable and impotent justificatory explanations of the bourgeois parties and press. A malaise expressed by thousands of unemployed youth.

It is an uprising of proletarian youth in an era in which 100 years of counterrevolution — Stalinist, fascist and democratic — have deprived the world proletariat of its party and class unions. Perhaps only now has the proletariat resumed the march of struggle, which will lead it to regain possession of its fundamental weapons of war, by which it will tear down rotten capitalist society. France may be one of the theaters of this new beginning.

Under these historical conditions, it could not be otherwise. It is not surprising that such uprisings do not attach themselves to parties, trade unions and other organs of social struggle. But this will happen, to the extent that the working class, in France and in all countries, is able to equip itself with genuine trade unions, ousting the agents of the bourgeoisie from the leadership of the present organizations, and defeating every form of all political trade union opportunism. It is a process whose success goes hand in hand with the strengthening of the International Communist Party.

The proletarians of the banlieues are not “integrated” into French bourgeois society because it is the entire proletariat that is less and less so, pushed back day by day into its real condition as an oppressed and exploited class, for which the words “citizenship”, “rights”, and “democracy” are only hateful and deceptive trappings.

We do not, therefore, lament the lack of integration into bourgeois society of the proletarians of the banlieues and all the slums of capital’s urban monstrosities, but we need to work toward their integration into the anti-capitalist struggle for the defense of the immediate needs of the entire working class.

In France the movement against pension reform, and earlier strikes for wage increases, marked an important step forward in strengthening class unionism. But the weight of regime unionism is still heavy, and the influence of opportunism in the combative trade union currents equally so. This restrains the integration of all its forces, including the invaluable forces of unemployed youth, into the proletarian struggle.

Confronted with the uprising, the new confederal leadership of the CGT could do nothing better than to issue its federation’s communiqué on June 29th framing the police officers: “Drama in Nanterre: the authorities must react!”.

The CGT leadership is not appealing to the workers to mobilize against police violence, also widely manifested in the movement of struggle against pension reform, but to the “public powers”, who are nothing more than cogs of the regime wielding such violence! They appeal to the executioners. After all, they organize the fuckers in the same union as the fucked.

“Unitè Cgt”, the area in which most of the conflicting currents of this regime union converge, which at its latest congress last March gained about 36% support, issued a communiqué calling, in the event that the government decreed a state of emergency, for a national general strike to force the resignation of the government, the dissolution of parliament, and the reform of the police and other institutions.

This is a false appeal for workers’ mobilization: in fact, the state of emergency is already in place, with 45,000 officers mobilized every night, thousands of arrests, and the courts summarily trying and sentencing hundreds of young people every day. The goal of reforming the institutions, the police, that is, the bourgeois State, makes explicit the reformist wishful thinking of such conflicting currents.

Young proletarians and the entire working class need a party that tells them clearly that this is the true face of the bourgeois regime, that democracy is only a veil to hide the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class. The goal that will assert itself in practice is not reform, but the destruction of the bourgeois State through the revolutionary seizure of power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only the political power of the working class will be able to crush the resistance of the ousted capitalists and implement the revolutionary transformations of the communist program.