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Most of the Left publications we have seen
identify the violent attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo as an attack on the sacrosanct
free press. We do not. All historical evidence says the “Free Press” is a
fiction in class society. CLASS WAR and
the Liaison Committee of Communists see this as a reactionary attack on what
the perpetrators say is blasphemy. Far
from being a “left” publication, it is a
liberal after birth of the 1968 events; Charlie Hebdo’s
satirical viewpoint today is decidedly bourgeois and in as bad taste as the
term bourgeois connotes in France.
Revolutionary workers and socialists oppose
censorship. Bourgeois laws that impose
censorship are always directed against the publications of and speakers for the
working class, sooner or later, and usually sooner. We see tremendous hypocrisy both in calls for
censorship from the Wahhabi inspired right, presumably the backers of the
assailants in Paris, and from the parallel calls by French and western
liberalism who routinely confuse freedom for the bourgeois press with freedom
of speech.
First and foremost these attacks must be
put in the context of the “war on terror,” which is really an attempt by U.S./EU
imperialism to contain the Arab National Revolution. To win the ideological and
propaganda aspect of this war the ruling-class-owned “free press” reduces the
class war to a “clash of civilizations” between the ‘barbarian’ hordes and the ‘enlightened
and democratic’ west. The ‘free press’ wants to hide from you the fact that the
war is a consequence and a cost of doing business in the region, because the
subjective factor, the anti-imperialist aspirations of the masses, challenges
the economic interests of declining U.S. imperialism and their
comprador henchmen for control of states
and aspirant states sitting atop the oil and on the geo-strategic pathways for
the delivery of that oil.
We denounce individual terrorism as it is
not a legitimate tactic of the revolution (democratic or proletarian). Individual terrorism, even for the most
salutatory motives, permits propaganda victories for and repression by the
enemy social class. We are for the effective action of the masses to wage
decisive warfare against the ruling class oppressors and imperialist exploiters.
The Charlie
Hebdo event was a terror attack and does not correspond politically to any
small unit action by any power of the working class. It does not advance the
revolution; it pushes the masses already trapped by Social Democracy and the Stalinists’
forms of social chauvinism further to the right.
Some youth mistake the terror attacks of
religious zealots for defense of Islam and are drawn, by the vacuum of
leadership in the revolution, to jihad. Every
Islamic warlord who wants to disguise his bourgeois ambitions to become an oil
magnate as a caliph who exploits the weakness of the revolutionary leadership
by calling upon oppressed and unemployed
young Muslim workers around the world to join the jihad against the 'West'. Their military operations and terror attacks
are then characterized by the corporate bourgeois media as “asymmetric warfare”
initiated by the Sunni Fellahin and not as a response to the armed-to-the-teeth
imperialists’ centuries-long history of brutal subjugation.
Let there be no mistake, CLASS WAR takes
the side of the Arab revolution. But the
forces of the religious right in the Arabic speaking world are not a part of it.
They are the internal enemies of the revolution and are either past or future
partners with the imperialist masters.
What future could an ISIS or any Boko Harram regime hope to have while
embracing the market and private property, as matters of religion and culture,
without the sponsorship of some imperialist master? Each of these movements aspires to rule after
the fashion of the Saudi monarchy, any of their professed republicanism not
withstanding and even immaterial.
The
revolution stands for the greatest religious freedom and this immediately puts
revolutionaries in collision with all theocrats, each of whom seek a monolithic
religious state and in this their enmity towards Iran and/or Israel is a
fake. Only the greatest religious
freedom can permit the organization of inter-communal militias to guarantee the
safety of each and every community. The
workers, as the revolutionary class, have the responsibility to organize these
militias.
Right now Syria is the front line of
revolutionary struggle; the working class position is for the defeat of the
Assad dictatorship. Stalinism, in the form of the Syrian Communist Party and
the neo-Stalinist sects (Marcyites, Castroists, etc.,) has played a reactionary
role in Syria; consequent of their stagist theory of revolution, which finds
progressive agency in the national bourgeoisie of semi-colonies. When the spark of the Arab Spring ignited the
Syrian masses the neo-Stalinists ignored the butchery of the Assad regime,
which they cast as progressive, and placed it in a “progressive” bloc which they
have conjured out of the Russia-China alliance.
Alongside these fakers to leadership, the
faux Trotskyists (ICL, IBT, Socialist Fight, Revolutionary Tendency, etc.) see
the hand of the CIA behind every anti-Assad action and so ignore, denounce or
oppose the legitimate uprisings of the masses that took form in the Local
Coordinating Committees (LCC.). These LCCs
struggle to maintain independence from imperialism while battling the
Assad regime, the jihadists and now ISIS.
Now Washington is cozying up to Assad in
its tack toward returning Iran to the pro-U.S. imperialist fold. The U.S. no longer objects to Iran’s
building of nuclear facilities in areas under Assad’s control. And we hear none of the alarm we are
accustomed to whenever the Geiger counter ticks in the region giving excuses
for Israel to launch first strikes. Instead,
Zionism is given a green light to attack anti-Assad rebels in Syria, expand
settlements in East Jerusalem and welcomed as a victim in the anti-Semitic
attacks that followed the Charlie Hebdo
bombing.
We denounce the French regime and its
entire response to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. The Hollande regime is social-imperialist
in a way that is as brazen as any we have seen in the century since Social
Democrats supported their bourgeoisie at the outbreak of WW I. We condemn the CP for being errand boys for
Hollande and for supporting every imperialist attack going back to the days of
the Algerian independence struggle.
France has played a nationalist propaganda card
in support of the U.S.-led war no. 3 in Iraq, both by manipulating the mass
revulsion against the political assassinations at Charlie Hebdo, the real attack on free speech of the Islamist right, and
by redoubling its commitment to the U.S. war, sending the aircraft carrier and
battle group Charles De Gaulle to join the U.S.-led air campaign.
Official France, of the bourgeoisie, has
allowed itself to be viewed as an ally of Israel, which it is, a police force
in Mali, Chad and the Central African Republic and the U.S.A.’s no. 1 client
for threats, bombing and logistical support against the Libyan revolution.
We call for a “Lets go home” movement amongst
the French troops and political strikes against Obama and Hollande’s wars.
Revolutionary workers in the imperialist centers of the U.S., France, and the
U.K. must take a defeatist position against their own bourgeoisie and advocate
for their labor organizations to form up international workers brigades to
support the Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi revolutionaries that build the inter-communal
fight against imperialism, Assad and ISIS.
France has deployed 120,000 troops to
augment its police in defense of Jewish institutions. France with 500,000 plus Jewish citizens has
the largest concentration in Europe, but we have no confidence that this
deployment will prevent real anti-Semitic attacks. Similarly we don’t see the armed bodies of
the bourgeois state protecting France’s Muslim population in any meaningful
way. Quite the contrary, the police particularly suffer from the same racist
reactionary mindset as their brothers in blue in the U.S.A. and are
anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Roma
and not incidentally anti-Semitic and belong to a variety of reactionary groups
from Le Pen’s National Front to the Croix de Feu and latter day neo-fascist
groupings.
We distinguish between real anti-Semitism and self defense by
Palestinians and their supporters who stand against attacks by Zionists on the
streets, as has happened numerous times over the summer of 2014, when tens of
thousands in France protested Israel’s “Mowing the lawn” war on Gaza. The police, in all capitalist countries,
are the guarantors of the availability of the option for authoritarian
rule. The nominal champions of
democracy, the Social Democrats, have as usual enabled the state forces of
repression to expand their budgets and operations and this can only be bad for
the working class and its manifestations.
France is right at the center of the
capitalist crisis in Europe. The World
Bank has just announced their 2015 forecast for the world capitalist economy
and it is flat at 3% growth. The world
population is expected to grow 3% and this renders the “growth” fictional. But in France there is no forecast for 3% or
even a larger fraction of 1% growth, while France almost as much as Germany is
the holder of the bad debts of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. So the bourgeois regime can be expected to
attempt to take more austerity out of the life and flesh of the French workers
and anti-Muslim hysteria will serve that purpose and has even begun to do so
now.
Minority religious communities need to be
defended and we can only entrust this task to the working class. The way to put an end to rightist violence
against Muslims and Jews in France is for militant workers, their organizations
and inter-communal defense guards to smash the fascists on the street, putting no
faith in the troopers of the state. Unlike
the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), and not them alone, we declare
the plain truth that cops are not workers but the gunslingers of capital. Their
only relationship to the means of production is their role as strikebreakers.
In the U.S.A. we are calling for the
expulsion of the Police Benevolent Associations from all labor movement bodies
and for the formation of workers tribunals and militia exactly to begin
suppression of racist violence, racist police murders, and for community prosecution
of racist murderers. In this way black,
brown and immigrant communities will be defended by the working class as a
whole. Naturally this puts the LCC in
collision with identity politics which we see as ultimate props under bourgeois
property relations. Since each identity
politics denies or subordinates the class question to their utopian project, be
it feminist, nationalist, or other separatist tendencies, each of which would
leave the oppressor capitalist class fundamentally unmolested in the commanding
heights of the reproduction of their social order.
Liaison Committee of Communists
30 January 2015
Notes:
The
specific wording of French law forbids “insult,” “defamation,” or “provocation
to discrimination, hatred or violence”…“toward a person or a group of persons
because of their origin or their belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group,
a nation, a race, or a determined religion.”
French citizens are perfectly free to
challenge or blaspheme religious ideas, symbols, practices, and even leaders.
Obnoxious, insulting, highly offensive speech is protected speech. Charlie Hebdo has been sued not only for its
depictions of Muhammad, but also for caricatures of the pope. In fact, Catholic
groups have sued it for anti-religious speech more often than Muslim ones.
Charlie Hebdo prevailed in all of these
cases, except for one (which was initiated by the Catholics).
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