According to the conservative estimates of the French press, between 500,000 and 800,000 people took to the streets across France on Oct. 17. Carrying slogans and signs that rivaled each other in sheer creativity, these massive crowds gathered to protest the high cost of living and to bring down the extremely unpopular Macron government.
Yet that is not the account of events that Quebec’s mainstream media presented to us. “Violence in France: The Latest Developments,” “Violence and Looting in France,” “Paris Is Burning”—there have been countless alarmist headlines and hysterical opinion pieces published about the inspiring mass movement that swept across France.
Many of the slogans in the protest drew parallels with the rich revolutionary history of the French people, whether it was the Paris Commune or May 68. The mood was one of revolution—and that is precisely what terrifies the ruling class and its media henchmen in Quebec. Their focus on the vandalism in all this is nothing more than a distraction.
Media psychopaths
“Send in the army!” thundered Benoît Dutrizac on QUB Radio. Mathieu Bock-Côté, resorting to his usual racist insinuations, spoke of an “anti-French insurrection” with a “proclaimed ethnic dimension”—a laughable idea to anyone even slightly acquainted with France’s traditions of social struggle. Richard Martineau didn’t hold back on the insults either: “What we saw on the streets of Paris this weekend weren’t protesters. This was scum. Looters. Savages.” Language worthy of a Marine Le Pen… whose own remarks Martineau shared on Facebook.
Conservative leader Éric Duhaime, a new member of the National Assembly, was outraged over the solidarity rally in Montreal supporting the French protesters, expressing surprise that “there were Palestinian flags and even one from Algeria” and viewing it as “a display of political Islam and the radical left.” This comment is not only stupid but also ignorant: the rally was also intended to commemorate the massacre of Oct. 17, 1961, when the Paris police drowned tens of Algerian protesters in the Seine—the same police force that to this day resorts to extreme brutality against protesters.
All these commentators get on their high horses to condemn the violence at the protests. But none of them have ever said a word about the high school students who had their eyes gouged out, their hands torn off, and who were beaten by heavily armed riot police. Nor, for that matter, about police violence right here at home, after it was recently revealed that an SPVM officer had allegedly urinated on a homeless person while on duty.
While they lecture the protesters about violence, they haven’t stopped calling for violence themselves—against the protesters. Bock-Côté went so far as to urge small business owners to defend themselves, in lieu of a police force he likely considers too lenient. It is these people who are adding fuel to the fire by demanding that the movement be cracked down on even more brutally and, like Dutrizac, by calling on the SPVM to ban and “nip in the bud” the solidarity movement emerging in Quebec.
We must not be fooled by their holier-than-thou posturing: serving the ruling class, they behave like barking lapdogs. Devoid of all scruples, they fantasize about violence, as long as it is carried out by the ruling class and the state.
Who are the real looters?
The blame for the crisis lies with a completely different group of vandals than the ones the media keeps harping on about: the social vandals in the government, in the banks, and on corporate boards. Cuts to public services, evictions, mass layoffs, massive inequalities, racism—it is the entire capitalist system that is violent, all the time. In such a system, outbursts of anger, whether organized or not, are inevitable.
A recent study revealed that wealth inequality in France has now reached unprecedented levels. French people living below the poverty line account for 15.6 per cent of the total population, and the unemployment rate is at its highest since 2021. For millions of people, daily life has become unbearable. The prospect of even more drastic austerity measures looms on the horizon, while billions of euros are being swallowed up by the war in Ukraine and France’s ultra-rich are lining their pockets. It is no surprise that, under such pressure, the lid has blown off.
There is only one way to resolve the crisis: address the root causes of the anger by providing decent living conditions for everyone. But capitalism, in its senile decay, is simply incapable of doing so. That is why the French ruling class has nothing else to offer but ever more ruthless repression.
Same causes, same effects
In Quebec, all this outrage against the protesters feels like déjà vu. During the 2012 Quebec student strike, the same cries of outrage rang out when the media circus tried to make us believe that the violence came from the students on strike. More recently, it was the pro-Palestinian movement that was criminalized, smeared with false claims of anti-Semitism and the bogeyman of “political Islam.”
Whenever the oppressed rise up, the oppressors try to silence their just demands by burying them under a cacophony of hypocritical accusations, gross exaggerations, and outright slander. But no pile of lies, however heavy, can stifle the truth.
And the truth is that right here, our own social looters are setting the stage for a massive upheaval. More than one in five workers in Quebec is already living paycheque to paycheque, and inequalities are growing ever deeper. Furthermore, at a time when public services are already under severe strain, the PQ has promised to limit social spending growth to 1.9 per cent per year—a threshold even lower than during the period of austerity under Philippe Couillard. Sooner or later, the same causes will produce the same effects.
The system’s watchdogs can keep barking, panicked at the coming period of class struggle. The communists, for our part, have never been more confident in our ability to sweep away the scum at the top of society: the ultra-rich and their henchmen within the state, the police, and the media.
To achieve this, we must channel this anger toward a clear goal: replacing the government of the rich with a government of the workers. The French ruling class, up to its neck in debt, cannot offer the protesters what they are demanding without incurring the wrath of the financial markets; Quebec capitalism, like its French counterpart, can no longer afford the welfare state. Capitalism is running out of steam. We need a new system.
By nationalizing the major banks and the key drivers of the economy and placing them under the democratic control of workers, it will be possible to mobilize society’s immense wealth and invest it in high-quality public services and a general improvement in the standard of living for all. This is what we call socialism—the only viable path forward for social movements—in France… as well as in Quebec.
