By Greg Oxley in Paris
The decapitation of the teacher Samuel Paty, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, just north of Paris, by an 18-year-old religious fanatic, has brought mass revulsion among workers everywhere in France, and particularly teachers.
Thousands of workers attended rallies right across France yesterday to honour Samuel. Many of them held placards saying, “je suis enseignant” (I am a teacher) or ‘je suis Samuel”. French newspapers carried interviews with some of those attending to express their support, including French Muslim workers who were outraged by the attack.
The gruesome killing followed a campaign of vilification which involved elements close to Daesh (ISIS) and online death threats go Paty. The murderer immediately sent out pictures of his severed head on Twitter. This terrorist action coincides with the trial of the perpetrators of the attack against the staff of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which left 12 people dead and 11 injured in January 2015.
Fascist ideas draped in religious clothing
Islamic Fundamentalists – that is, people who drape their fascist ideas in a mantle of religious doctrine – justified the attack on Charlie Hebdo by claiming that itscartoons insulted the Prophet Mohammed. Samuel Paty had run classes on civic education. This was part of his job. He used the Charlie Hebdo episode to get his pupils thinking and talking about the right to free speech.
According to reports, it was in reaction to this that one parent began a virulent campaign against the teacher, qualifying the cartoons he showed in class as “pornography”. This is despite the fact that Paty had allowed Muslim students to leave the classroom when he showed the cartoon. According to colleagues, Paty was a conscientious teacher who knew that his life was possibly under threat.
Within days, a young assassin, who had no prior connection with the school, travelled to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, to put Samuel Paty to death, “in the name of Allah”.
This horrific event sheds a glaring light on one of a dangerous and reactionary undercurrent presently at work in French society. The accumulated social despair resulting from decades of poverty, mass unemployment and systemic racial discrimination, with the historical backdrop of colonialism and imperialist interventions against predominantly Muslim countries, has prepared the ground for Islamic Fundamentalism, which sees all non-Muslims as agents of Satan.
Capitalism responsible for hardship and discrimination
Capitalism and imperialism are responsible for this situation, not ordinary workers who are the victims. Where the real world offers only hardship, discrimination, humiliation and the violence of war, ‘honour’ and ‘salvation’ can be sought in religious fanaticism and martyrdom. Of course, the great majority of Muslims, in France and elsewhere, want nothing to do with such madmen, but it would be foolish to imagine that Islamic Fundamentalism does not have any basis of support.
The longer the underlying social and political causes remain, the more fanatical violence we can expect. The growth in the social reserves of reaction is by no means limited to the Muslim community. On the contrary, it is mirrored by the development of far more dangerous nationalist and fascist currents within society as a whole, in France and throughout almost all of Europe.
Of course, Emmanuel Macron sees this tragedy as a means of making political capital. He and his ministers adopt a high moral tone and call for “national unity”. And yet Macron is also, in his own field of action, a fanatic, hell-bent on forcing through vicious policies directed against working people, against pensioners and the unemployed. Prominent members of his party recently staged a parliamentary walkout in protest against the presence of a Muslim woman whose hair was covered, claiming that her style of dress was “against the values of the Republic” and “incompatible with democratic institutions”.
Secular tradition of French culture
Historically, “the separation of church and state”, enacted in 1905, mean that the state should not favour or promote any religious doctrine and that religious practice and, of course, the right to have no religious beliefs, were a “private matter” of individual conscience. But this progressive law has been perverted over recent years as a means of curtailing the right to religious practices, and especially those of the Muslim community who wish to wear a niqab. Macron and his government are now promising even firmer action in this direction.
The terrorist attack which took the life of Samuel Paty is being presented as an attack upon the Republic, that is to say, upon the state. But is this same Republic not an integral part of the regime of social injustice and inequality, of racial discrimination and imperialist wars? Is it this same Republic, tied hand and foot to capitalist interests – as personified by “banker boys” like Macron – that we are now called upon to rally around?
In such critical times, the French labour movement, must face up to its responsibilities, not by echoing the hypocritical blustering of right-wing politicians, but by stepping forward on the basis of an independent policy of militant class action.
Common struggle to defend workers’ interests
We must strive to involve and unite the mass of the working people and the youth, whatever their religion or cultural background, in a common struggle to defend their immediate interests in terms of living conditions: health, housing, education, wages, pensions, rights in the workplace, etc. But this will not suffice to arouse and inspire the population, important as such struggles are. We would also say, above all, it is necessary to open up the perspective of a fundamental change in society, for a society without capitalists, without exploitation and without all its attendant features of inequality, social injustice and racism.
With many nationalist and religious fanatics, the die is cast, and nothing could win them to the side of progress, democracy and socialism. They will stand among our enemies. The vital importance of a revolutionary socialist policy is that, once understood, it could radically alter the balance of forces within society to the detriment of the capitalists and reactionaries, opening the way for the re-organisation of society. It is only in the context of that struggle that “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” can become the real foundation of human relations.
Greg Oxley is editor of the French Marxist newspaper and website, La Riposte
October 19, 2020
