[Marxism] "Sarkozy Calls for Revamping of Capitalist System"

[Shawn Redden]

At 5:31 PM -0400 10/18/08, S. Artesian wrote:
>Huh?  What are you talking about?  Like the bourgeoisie count how many are
>throwing rocks before launching the police into the fray?
>
>Doesn't anyone here recall Sarkozy's remarks during the struggles of the
>banlieue?

Comrade Artesian,

The pure numbers matter less than does their composition.

I doubt that Sarkozy would have used that same politically charged 
language - the language that thrust him (as interior minister, if I 
remember correctly) into the limelight as a character around whom the 
right could mobilize post-Chirac - if the torching of cars was 
carried out amidst an angry mobilization of students from the 
Sorbonne & College de France, Left parties, and labor unions.

The vast majority of those those protesting the WTO in Seattle were 
white - college students, environmental activists, union members, 
etc.  If the mobilization in Seattle and the violence that 
accompanied it (to some degree, almost certainly, by provocateurs) 
would have been carried out chiefly by Black people, Clinton would 
have no doubt been railing against 'thugs' and 'hoodlums' while 
squealing for the forces of order to intercede even more viciously 
than they did.

Solidarity,
Shawn

"The uprising of the proletariat is the abolition of bourgeois 
credit, for it is the abolition of bourgeois production and its 
order. Public credit and private credit are the economic thermometer 
by which the intensity of a revolution can be measured. The more they 
fall, the more the fervor and generative power of the revolution 
rises."

- Karl Marx, _The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850_