Ni patrie ni frontières !
This is an important left-wing contribution to the critique of the ‘anti-imperialism of fools’.
Although the context is French and Dutch there are many implications for Britain and the wider anglophone world.
From mondialisme.org, the journal: Ni patrie ni frontières.
Antiracism and class struggle in France : dialogue around the PIR (Parti des Indigènes de la République).
Late 2014, early 2015, a debate took place in the Netherlands between various leftist organizations and Sandew Hira, a historian who has taken the initiative, together with others, to build the Decolonise The Mind (DTM) movement in the Netherlands. The debate began after rapper Insayno was rejected to speak at an anti-racist demonstration. In one of his raps he had asserted : “The treatment of the concentration camps is only a joke compared to our slave trade”. After some discussion about the scientific nonsense, the political destructiveness and the heartlessness of comparing the various massacres in this way, the debate quickly turned to how to organise against racism, the role of white people in the anti-racism struggle, and how the Left and the DTM movement could struggle side by side.
During the debate we asked Hira about the ideas and principles of DTM. He explained them quite clearly, but we did not really get to know much about the practice of the new movement. At the moment it seems mainly engaged in the training of activists, most of whom seem to have been active in the anti-racism and pro-Palestine movements. DTM is still a relatively small, mainly academic movement that does not organize actions or campaigns by itself.
In the debate and also in various meetings Hira often mentioned that he has two important international friends with whom he cooperates very closely : Ramon Grosfoguel of the Berkeley University of California and Houria Bouteldja of the movement “Les Indigènes de la République” in France. That organisation celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2015 and already had quite some time to build a movement, even outside the universities.
We asked two French comrades what they knew about those Indigènes. How does this movement operates, and how are their ties with the extra-parliamentary Left ? In this way we might be able to take a little look at the future of a part of the anti-racism movement in the Netherlands. That’s important, because as those who followed the debate may have noticed, we at Doorbraak are not too keen on how Hira and DTM try to insert some not so liberating ideas into the growing movement against racism.
Of course, the French situation is very different from the Dutch one. In both countries there is indeed a lot of racism, a legacy of the shared colonial past, but the Left and the anti-racism movement in France are really much bigger. Progressive intellectuals also play a much more important role, and there are constantly great nation wide debates, also on racism. However, the practical organizational activism seems to be relatively modest.
We asked our questions to Nad, with whom we organized two meetings in 2012 on the jobless movement RTO in which she is active, and Yves Coleman of the magazine “Ni patrie ni frontières” (“No country, no borders”) and our regular translator. Both live in Paris and are very involved in the anti-racism struggle. Nad answered the first three questions, and Coleman the rest. And because both, of course, did not always agree with each other, we offered them the opportunity afterwards to respond on each others answers with critiques and additions. So we started with Nad.
The present document is a record of questions put to Nad and Yves Colman.
It should not be necessary to say this but both are, by PIR terms, indigènes.
The initial section of the debate takes up the origins of the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR) and their 2005 Manifesto L’appel des « Indigènes de la République . Many people, including this writer, were struck by the serious tone of the latter document. It was set out by a variety of individuals, mostly involved in minority immigrant associations. Its wider support included political activists of the mainstream left, various ‘other globalisation’ movements (Attac) active in those days, and some on the Trotskyist left.
The group was soon criticised by people for whom who I have respect. Claude Liauzu (1940 – 2007), author of the indispensable Histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France, du XVIe siècle à nos jours (2007) accused them of ” reducing colonialisation to a crime, and reducing present-day problems to the reproduction of colonial racialism, and reducing the study of the past to a search for repentance. (Manipulations de l’histoire. Claude Liauzu. Le Monde Diplomatique April 2007).
As a ‘party’, created in 2008, the group continues to influence debate on race in France.
But it has been challenged on the left.
Last year this was translated: Toward a materialist approach to the racial question: A response to the Indigènes de la République. Malika Amaouche, Yasmine Kateb, & Léa Nicolas-Teboul Vacarme (June 25, 2015).
The PIR’s spokesperson, Houria Bouteldja, has, over the years, made many ‘controversial’ comments, including the claim that homosexuality does not exist in low income “popular” French areas,
The group has always expressed suspicion of “race mixing”.
They continue to be defended by the French feminist, Christine Delphy, whose recent diatribe (2015) against French secularism and backing for the Indigènes can be read on the Verso Books site .
The Indigènes have admirers on the British “intersectional’ left, notably Richard Seymour.
It is, of course, no surprise that the UK based Islamic Human Rights Commission, aligned to the Tehran totalitarian state, has promoted the PIR’s ideology,
IHRC were privileged to welcome Houria Bouteldja from the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PiR). in France to speak about her work as a decolonial activist and thinker. Her topic, ‘Decolonising France’ presented the history of PiR, as France’s first decolonial political party and the challenges they have faced in standing up to Eurocentricism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism and Zionism.
IHRC 2013.
In the United States some members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) backed their condemnation of the “veneration of the racist publication as an example of “heroic” and “enlightened” Western values in the face of Muslim intolerance” by citing the PIR. They were also used in this attempt to protest at the failure of the ISO to challenge “the very type of racism and bigotry published by Charles Hebdo, which is the same “free expression” that the statement says must also be defended.” (January 2015. No tolerance for Islamophobia).
The ironically named US publication Jacobin also published a piece at this time, by PIR members of Houria Bouteldja and Malik Tahar Chaouch, on the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which concentrated on attacking National Unity in face of the slaughter, and Charlie’s ‘racist’ ‘Islamophobia’.
The present text analysis the development of the PIR from the launch of the Manifesto to its present operations.
It is lengthy, and should be read in full.
But familiarity with French politics is not needed to get the principal message.
Many of the arguments used in the comrades’ critique – pointing to the confusion between criticisms of Islamism with a ‘phobia’ against Muslims, suspicion of of glib anti-imperialism, a recognition of traces of anti-semitism on the ‘left’, and the need to replace inward looking cultural relativism – are established internationally. But in this instance the Indigènes de la République illustrate a whole range of faults concentrated in one organisation.
(this..) led to the creation of an association, much smaller and with a more specific orientation. On one hand it started organising anti-colonialist events with other collectives, on the other hand it developed a theoretical discourse which evolved towards a clash with class analysis. The initial manifesto evoked all oppressions without necessarily giving priority to one in particular, but then a very aggressive analysis was developed in which class analysis was supposed to mask the major domination: the neo-colonialist domination within the French Left.
This criticism was rather anachronistic, since in reality class analysis was not very present any more in the radical Left or in the Left. Left and far Left militants talked more and more of anti-liberalism and anti-globalisation, and less and less of anti-capitalism. Ten years of anti-globalisation rhetoric had led to abandonment of the critique of the wage system, and most of the Left has moved towards the defense of “fair trade” against “the multinationals”, and defence of the “little honest entrepreneur” against large industrial groups, etc. So the indigènes have not revolutionised anything when they decided to adopt the mantra according to which the concept of class struggle does not correspond to reality. Actually they are not revolutionising anything in general. For example, their evolution towards a perpetual questioning of the existence of anti-Semitism today, their denunciation of the Shoah as a “civil religion”, their way of pitting the anti-racist struggle against the fight against anti-Semitism, all these positions are similar to the positions adopted by many other radical Left groups since the early 2000s. The same goes for their relationship with Dieudonné..
The Indigènes followed the attitudes of that part of the Left which first “critically supported” this comedian, then condemned him with some reservations. Their “condemnation” was rather superficial, since they always ended up by saying Dieudonné was the”victim” of an unjust punishment.
This is the present context for anti-racist movement in France,
It’s important to underline that, in the years 2005-2010, part of the youth which decided to participate in social struggles did so on the basis of their religion and/or community, and this applies to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Whether they decided to be active in humanitarian or political organisations, or created new media, religious beliefs were very much the source of their collective commitment, which often took a reactionary form, even if it was not always the case. At the same time, the rise of the far right also affected the whole society, and fascists have been able to launch a cultural revolution which allowed them to reach absolutely everyone, including minorities who are victims of fascist actions.
The PIR has played a damaging role in these conditions.
And what about the PIR in this context? The reactionary rhetoric I just described can also be found in all the radical Left, which revealed, during the last fifteen years, many flaws on all subjects: nationalism, technophobia, anti-scientific discourse, apology of pre-capitalist societies and old orders. If one reads Sadri Khiari, one of the leaders of the PIR, and his delusions about pre-colonial societies, his glorification of tradition, his rejection of progressivism, all that fits in the same reactionary pattern. And in terms of socio-professional composition, the leaders of the “Indigènes” are not proletarians, obviously; they belong to the professional groups we talked about before are obviously influenced by the ideologies we are discussing.
More generally, while everyone talks about the alleged “non-integration” of people with migrant background, I think the success of Dieudonné or Soral (Note: an open Holocaust denier), as well as the victory of the tough wing of the right in many popular neighbourhoods and the influence of religion, all these evolutions show, on the contrary, that the migrants’ integration process has worked very well: there are no major differences between the political evolution of those with migrant background and the rest of the population. The difference is simply due to traditions, habits and customs whose appearance differ. The rise of reactionary religious currents remains the same, be they Muslim or Catholic. One has seen that Dieudonné and Soral attract all sorts of people. And today, violent armed struggles based on crazy ideologies affect everyone: there are many departures to Daesch on one side but also of neo-Nazi terrorists on the other side. Class struggle is usually invisible to the class which wages it. It’s culturally devalued.
This is the wider political-intellectual environment,
The “Indigènes” want to impose the concept of “Islamophobia” in the political field. Indeed, the PIR but also many Left and far Left academics or anarchist militants, believe (or rather pretend to believe) that “Judeophobia” has been replaced by “Islamophobia” and that it could play one day, or actually plays, the same role in the West today as anti-Semitism in the 1930s.
They don’t need to fight for more “freedom of expression” because they advocate or share postmodern-multiculturalist-thirdworldist ideas which dominate French University, at least in fields like history and social sciences (sociology, ethnology, anthropology). Today we find ourselves in the same situation as when the structuralist fashion, in the 60s and 70s, invaded the same disciplines and exercised an intellectual hegemony which was hard to criticize and demolish. Moreover, the starting point of their supporters (“humanities” and “cultural studies” university departments) is partly the same.
Their stand on Islamism?
Houria Bouteldja and her comrades ignore the centuries-old dhimmi discriminatory status in Muslim societies, a status devised against Jews and Christians a long time before Western imperialism intervened in this part of the world. They ignores that the Koran denounces the Jews as “criminals”. They ignore the writings of many Muslim theologians who build a demonic image of Judaism through the centuries. In short, they ignores anti-Semitism has a history in so-called Muslim countries and believe it started in 1948…
And their position about slave trade is not better.
For example, Martial Ze Belinga, of Afrikara website, said in an interview to the PIR: “Middle Eastern and inter-African slave trades which spread over a longer period [than European slave trade] were less intensive and had an immeasurably small impact on these societies (29)”.
This kind of slavery denial, favoured by the lack of testimonies and written documents on Middle Eastern and inter-African slave trades, did not push Sadri Khiari, his interlocutor, to react and object to such a nonsense.
We can observe the same complicit silence when Willy, from the Black Cit izens Alliance utters an enormity: “the other slave trades [Middle-Eastern and inter-African] have not affected me at all (30)”. As if the Caribbean Afro-descendants should be indifferent to the plight of Mauritanian, Tunisian and Egyptian Afro-descendants whose ancestors were victims of slavery. Indifferent because they live in “Muslim” countries of course, because the Afro-American example itself is constantly quoted as a reference which “affects” and concerns West Indians!
These are only two examples, among many others, of the reactionary absurdities produced by identitarian theories whose “anti-racism” is very unstable and incoherent. We find the same kind of ethnic corporatism in Raphael Confiant’s article in which this novelist invokes the necessary solidarity “between French Blacks and Caribbean Blacks who stayed home”, but at the same time he explains that a “black man living in Aubervilliers or Nanterre [Parisian suburbs] can’t know what’s good for a West Indian living in Basse-Pointe (Martinique) or in Vieux-Habitants (Guadeloupe) and vice versa (31)!
This is a long interview-debate and the document should be read in full (distinguished the different contributions of Nad and comrade Yves Coleman.
In France, criticising the PIR has become something very important for Left and far Left racists; it has become a central point for those who support the so-called “minorities’ tyranny” thesis: in many ways, the PIR plays today the fantasy role played by the French Jewish Defence League for the anti-Semitic Left and far Left wingers. It crystallises a hatred whose object is not this or that political organisation in itself, but the minority it’s supposed to embody; and criticizing the PIR is now one of the ways to express this hatred under a respectable cover.
The critique of the PIR developed by social democrat, communist as well as anarchist groups has for them a last additional advantage: by presenting the PIR as an “organization external to the workers movement and radical Left”, which has supposedly influenced the far Left as an alien virus would have done, many activists erase, about anti-Semitism as about other questions, ten years of drifts, theoretical and practical collusions with far Right anti-Semitism. A phenomenon in which the “Indigènes” haven’t played any central role because the (trotskyist) NPA, (reformist) Front de Gauche, “Le Monde Libertaire” (anarchist), and many others did not need anyone to retrieve a legacy rooted in our political histories.
Recognising this fundamental fact would have had painful consequences even for those who didn’t participate directly to the anti-Semitic offensive, but had a passive attitude, or weakly protested without ever questioning their alliances: it’s clearly much easier for radical Left militants to unite against the PIR and try to exclude this group from political initiatives than to attack comrades and organisations with which they cooperate every day.
For example, it’s much easier to put the blame on so-called “PIR islamists” for the anti-Semitic events which occurred in certain pro-Palestine demonstrations during the summer of 2014, than to denounce all its organizers, i.e. those with which one works locally and throughout the year on every issue. This highly visible political calculation already led me necessarily to question the meaning and use of criticising the PIR if we wish to draw some progressive consequences from this critique. After January 2015, this germination process came to end and gave many nefarious results.
The interviewer asks, “Do you think the Indigènes are made bigger and more important in France than they really are?”
I sincerely confess the PIR does not interest me at all for months. Within a year and a half, the probability that the radical fraction of the parliamentary Right and the far Right will take power is huge. Such a situation will strengthen enormously all racist and anti-Semitic movements, not to mention other dangerous consequences. As a worker in an insecure job and as a communist, this is what really concerns me. And seeing that one fraction of the far Left spends its time criticising the PIR, while the other fraction is obsessed with “Zionists”, pushes me to take a more and more distant attitude towards my original current.
Precisely because the social question is my priority, and because I see too many far Left militants who try to destroy and not to build positive movements. By this I mean not only radical Left militants, including the PIR, who share racist and/or anti-Semitic obsessions, but also those who equate migrant autonomous struggles with a “racialisation” process as it has happened with many critiques directed against the last March for dignity and against racism of the 31st of October. As regards anti-Semitism, the “Indigènes” are only modest propagators, in restricted circles, of theses popularised by far more powerful and innovative currents.
Comment.
Many will rightly consider that the most important objective for anti-racists in the UK at present is to fight against the wave of anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiment in Europe, bolstered by the xenophobic Brexit campaign.
But this does mean fighting with an anti-racist movement that has in effect adopted some views similar to the PIR, above all, a failure to act against ” reactionary religious currents” – Islamisms.
This contribution by the two comrades from Ni Patrie ni Frontièrs to clarifying the terms of that – often avoided – discussion is invaluable.
Tendance Coatesy 
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