What has been happening in the past few days has caused quite a stir France, especially among the beautiful souls of a certain left. A boy of African origins is killed by the French police in circumstances yet to be ascertained, but the revolt in the suburbs against the police and the government in general is followed by a counter-revolt of many people which produces two facts. One surprising, the other disturbing.
The surprising one is a sort of winning counter-narrative compared to the easy and comfortable anti-fascism of these times: the collection of people in favor of the policeman who is under arrest far exceeds the figure that has been raised for the family of the 17-year-old killed. The disturbing fact sees the establishment of patrols made up of citizens who, armed with bars and sticks (as well as, often, outstretched arms and slogans of fascist origin), roam the suburb with the stated intention of restoring “law and order” where these bulwarks of civilization would have been dismembered by immigrants and foreigners.
Read also from Andrea Bellelli’s blog
I follow the French revolts and think of my students: I believe that the distinction is responsibility
The way worse to understand these phenomena – which is obviously the most popular in a certain self-styled left – would be to cry out to the scandal of fascism and point the judging finger at the racism and violence of those who adhere to that ideology.
Mind you, that Europe is moving to the right it is such an evident fact that it is very trivial to even repeat it. The point, however, is that this does not happen because an “evil” alien and coming from another dimension than the earth has mysteriously descended on our planet a century after the first appearance (it was 1922 when fascism Italian).
Today as then, in fact, there are common conditions that it would be wrong not to point out.
The most macroscopic concerns the crisis of capitalism: unemployment, various types of exploitation of labour, decline in social rights and protections, are phenomena that affect a large portion of the European population (compared to a few who are increasingly wealthy and privileged).
Secondly, there is the incapacity of the forces of the left to counter the phenomena mentioned above: in the 1920s we were speaking of a left that looked to the soviet revolution thus misleading its own inability to act on Western capitalism in crisis. Today we are dealing with a self-styled left that looks obsessively and exclusively at civil rights and presumed individual freedoms, deluding itself that it is hiding its total inexperience in elaborating a credible and structured project of an alternative society to that of extreme liberalism.
Today as then existential and social distress of large segments of the population, essentially abandoned to their fate by those who should protect their rights and look after their interests (the speech on trade unions would be lengthy), translates into anger, the search for easy-to-identify culprits (yesterday the Jews, today the immigrants) and naturally consent to politicians who know how to ride the discontent.
See also
The navigation of the Vespucci taken from the drone. The training ship of the Navy lands in Marseille, the first stage of the world tour
It comes from here the war between the poor affecting the French banlieues these days, with on the one hand second, third and fourth generation immigrants who are unable to feel French but know nothing of their countries of origin (this generates desperation and deep frustration, which can only be translated into violence and destruction); and on the other side French citizens living the hardship of the poorest and most marginalized areas of their own country, but know nothing or remember little of the colonial past of France, one of the most cruel and voracious nations in exercising a ruthless imperialism especially towards African and South Asian countries. If the European right has often exploited racism, xenophobia and the guilt of the different in general, the European left has forgotten the colonial question since then, neglecting at the same time the unease of many Western people who live on the outskirts of cities, often also due to the fault of those migrants or foreigners whose desperate and delinquent condition is the ultimate product of the same colonial question.
In a splendid and forgotten book of the 1944 The great transformation, the sociologist Karl Polanyi highlighted the dual role of fascism at the time: to repress workers’ protests and in fact represent the solution with which capitalism was able to stall and reconfigure itself after the terrible crisis of the 1920s and 1930s. Looking at France today, but in a certain sense also at Europe as such, I wonder how real is the risk of a repeat of history…