Vol 5 – Issue 3 by Catalyst

Author:Catalyst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-08-25T20:34:59+00:00

Culture Against Class

Obliged to reinvent themselves as they abandoned any serious project of social transformation, French socialists would strategically choose the cultural battle to become their new raison d’être. While endorsing a neoliberal economic agenda, they expanded their action on the cultural front and promoted a modernized anti-racist discourse, slowly abandoning a straightforward defense of class struggle. Only a year after the austerity turn, socialist militants created SOS Racisme to promote a narrowly moral anti-racism, framed around equal opportunity and disconnected from any broader concerns about redistribution. The organization was created as a way to co-opt the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism that was launched by young French Arabs after a spike in racist crimes hit France during the early ’80s.25 Beginning in Marseille in October 1983 with seventeen people, the march crossed the whole country, traveling through Strasbourg and Grenoble and ending up in Paris in December of the same year, accompanied by one hundred thousand people. Not overtly political, the movement was led by Toumi Djaïdja, a young Franco-Algerian activist who, after being shot by a police officer, imagined a march for civil rights in reference to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But unlike the French march it was inspired by, the socialist NGO created in its image ended up advocating an apolitical conception of anti-racism made of public concerts, television shows, and support from celebrities and wealthy liberals. Used as a political tool by the socialist government, SOS Racisme promoted a narrow understanding of racism disconnected from the broader struggle against inequality. Reduced to a question of stereotypes, anti-racism soon became a politically empty enterprise, leading, to quote Gérard Noiriel, “to mobilizing racial vocabulary for problems that [had] their root in social relations.”26 Issues of police brutality, housing, and employment after deindustrialization had hit immigrant workers hard, but they were inherently sidelined by the government’s framing of the problem.

The most striking part of such depoliticization was the cultural framework used to describe these young, second-generation immigrants. By popularizing the term “beur” to refer to young Arabs, this modernized anti-racist discourse put their culture at the center of the political discussion, accelerating the split from working-class struggles for this generation.27 This shift was particularly important, as it played a part in a broader disqualification of a series of strikes between 1982 and 1984. Taking place in several auto factories owned by Citroën and Renault, the strikes were led by unionized immigrant workers around traditional questions of working conditions and wages. But the lack of support from the government and the infamous depiction of the strikes as “Islamist agitations” had profound effects on the French labor movement. As the sociologist Abdelalli Hajjat noted, while the young Arabs of the march became examples to promote tolerance and made their symbolic entry into public space, unionized workers were depicted as Muslim agitators.28

In a way, religion was emphasized over class struggle in the workplace, while in the suburbs, culture eclipsed social problems like housing and employment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.