An attempt to look at the Paris riots, with more questions than answers.

The last seven days have been interesting. Here at home there was a large gathering of union workers protesting against the casualisation of labour at Irish Ferries, who plan to lay off Irish workers and employ Eastern Europeans at lower wage rates in their place. In Argentina, demonstrators opposed to the exploitation of Latin America by multinationals clashed with riot cops at the FTAA summit, providing the now familiar unwelcome mat for Dubya. Undoubtedly the focus was on Paris however, as it entered its second week of rioting after two teenagers were electrocuted to death fleeing from police.

Already there is revisionism happening in left circles regarding the events of the last eleven days in the banlieues of Paris (and now further afield). Several commentators and newspapers in France have been drawing comparisons between the rioting in depressed districts of the city with the student and general strike in May/June 1968, while others sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and speaking up in favour of rights for Islamic communities in the aftermath of the War in Afghanistan have been calling it "the French Intifada". Both of these paralells are flawed. The soixante-huitards may have been involved in street clashes with the CRS, but these clashes had an explicit political dimension and statement behind them; and even the tactics used differ markedly from those on the streets of Paris now. Nobody is denying either that the situation of the mostly Black and Arab families is grim, but to suggest that it is equivalent to the oppression suffered by the people in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip is complete hyperbole.