Nous ne somme pas Charlie Hebdo!

Most of the Left publications we have seen identify the violent attack on the French
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo as an attack on the sacrosanct free press. We do not. All
historical evidence says the Free Press is a fiction in class society. CLASS WAR and
the Liaison Committee of Communists see this as a reactionary attack on what the
perpetrators say is blasphemy. Far from being a left publication, it is a liberal after
birth of the 1968 events; Charlie Hebdos satirical viewpoint today is decidedly
bourgeois and in as bad taste as the term bourgeois connotes in France.
Revolutionary workers and socialists oppose censorship. Bourgeois laws that impose
censorship are always directed against the publications of and speakers for the working
class, sooner or later, and usually sooner. We see tremendous hypocrisy both in calls for
censorship from the Wahhabi inspired right, presumably the backers of the assailants in
Paris, and from the parallel calls by French and western liberalism who routinely confuse
freedom for the bourgeois press with freedom of speech.
First and foremost these attacks must be put in the context of the war on terror, which
is really an attempt by U.S./EU imperialism to contain the Arab National Revolution. To
win the ideological and propaganda aspect of this war the ruling-class-owned free press
reduces the class war to a clash of civilizations between the barbarian hordes and the
enlightened and democratic west. The free press wants to hide from you the fact that
the war is a consequence and a cost of doing business in the region, because the
subjective factor, the anti-imperialist aspirations of the masses, challenges the economic
interests of declining U.S. imperialism and their comprador henchmen for control of
states and aspirant states sitting atop the oil and on the geo-strategic pathways for the
delivery of that oil.
We denounce individual terrorism as it is not a legitimate tactic of the revolution
(democratic or proletarian). Individual terrorism, even for the most salutatory motives,
permits propaganda victories for and repression by the enemy social class. We are for the
effective action of the masses to wage decisive warfare against the ruling class oppressors
and imperialist exploiters. The Charlie Hebdo event was a terror attack and does not
correspond politically to any small unit action by any power of the working class. It does
not advance the revolution; it pushes the masses already trapped by Social Democracy
and the Stalinists forms of social chauvinism further to the right.
Some youth mistake the terror attacks of religious zealots for defense of Islam and are
drawn, by the vacuum of leadership in the revolution, to jihad. Every Islamic warlord
who wants to disguise his bourgeois ambitions to become an oil magnate as a caliph who
exploits the weakness of the revolutionary leadership by calling upon oppressed and
unemployed young Muslim workers around the world to join the jihad against the 'West'.
Their military operations and terror attacks are then characterized by the corporate
bourgeois media as asymmetric warfare initiated by the Sunni Fellahin and not as a

response to the armed-to-the-teeth imperialists centuries-long history of brutal

subjugation.
Let there be no mistake, CLASS WAR takes the side of the Arab revolution. But the
forces of the religious right in the Arabic speaking world are not a part of it. They are the
internal enemies of the revolution and are either past or future partners with the
imperialist masters. What future could an ISIS or any Boko Harram regime hope to have
while embracing the market and private property, as matters of religion and culture,
without the sponsorship of some imperialist master? Each of these movements aspires to
rule after the fashion of the Saudi monarchy, any of their professed republicanism not
withstanding and even immaterial. The revolution stands for the greatest religious
freedom and this immediately puts revolutionaries in collision with all theocrats, each of
whom seek a monolithic religious state and in this their enmity towards Iran and/or Israel
is a fake. Only the greatest religious freedom can permit the organization of intercommunal militias to guarantee the safety of each and every community. The workers, as
the revolutionary class, have the responsibility to organize these militias.
Right now Syria is the front line of revolutionary struggle; the working class position is
for the defeat of the Assad dictatorship. Stalinism, in the form of the Syrian Communist
Party and the neo-Stalinist sects (Marcyites, Castroists, etc.,) has played a reactionary
role in Syria; consequent of their stagist theory of revolution, which finds progressive
agency in the national bourgeoisie of semi-colonies. When the spark of the Arab Spring
ignited the Syrian masses the neo-Stalinists ignored the butchery of the Assad regime,
which they cast as progressive, and placed it in a progressive bloc which they have
conjured out of the Russia-China alliance. Alongside these fakers to leadership, the faux
Trotskyists (ICL, IBT, Socialist Fight, Revolutionary Tendency, etc.) see the hand of the
CIA behind every anti-Assad action and so ignore, denounce or oppose the legitimate
uprisings of the masses that took form in the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC.).
These LCCs struggle to maintain independence from imperialism while battling the
Assad regime, the jihadists and now ISIS.
Now Washington is cozying up to Assad in its tack toward returning Iran to the pro-U.S.
imperialist fold. The U.S. no longer objects to Irans building of nuclear facilities in
areas under Assads control. And we hear none of the alarm we are accustomed to
whenever the Geiger counter ticks in the region giving excuses for Israel to launch first
strikes. Instead, Zionism is given a green light to attack anti-Assad rebels in Syria,
expand settlements in East Jerusalem and welcomed as a victim in the anti-Semitic
attacks that followed the Charlie Hebdo bombing.
We denounce the French regime and its entire response to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo.
The Hollande regime is social-imperialist in a way that is as brazen as any we have seen
in the century since Social Democrats supported their bourgeoisie at the outbreak of WW
I. We condemn the CP for being errand boys for Hollande and for supporting every
imperialist attack going back to the days of the Algerian independence struggle.
France has played a nationalist propaganda card in support of the U.S.-led war no. 3 in
Iraq, both by manipulating the mass revulsion against the political assassinations at

Charlie Hebdo, the real attack on free speech of the Islamist right and by redoubling its
commitment to the U.S. war, sending the aircraft carrier and battle group Charles De
Gaulle to join the U.S.-led air campaign.
Official France, of the bourgeoisie, has allowed itself to be viewed as an ally of Israel,
which it is, a police force in Mali, Chad and the Central African Republic and the
U.S.A.s no. 1 client for threats, bombing and logistical support against the Libyan
revolution. We call for a Lets go home movement amongst the French troops and
political strikes against Obama and Hollandes wars. Revolutionary workers in the
imperialist centers of the U.S., France, and the U.K. must take a defeatist position against
their own bourgeoisie and advocate for their labor organizations to form up international
workers brigades to support the Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi revolutionaries that build the
inter-communal fight against imperialism, Assad and ISIS.
France has deployed 120,000 troops to augment its police in defense of Jewish
institutions. France with 500,000 plus Jewish citizens has the largest concentration in
Europe, but we have no confidence that this deployment will prevent real anti-Semitic
attacks. Similarly we dont see the armed bodies of the bourgeois state protecting
Frances Muslim population in any meaningful way. Quite the contrary, the police
particularly suffer from the same racist reactionary mindset as their brothers in blue in the
U.S.A. and are anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Roma and not incidentally anti-Semitic
and belong to a variety of reactionary groups from Le Pens National Front to the Croix
de Feu and latter day neo-fascist groupings. We distinguish between real anti-Semitism
and self defense by Palestinians and their supporters who stand against attacks by
Zionists on the streets, as has happened numerous times over the summer of 2014, when
tens of thousands in France protested Israels Mowing the lawn war on Gaza. The
police, in all capitalist countries, are the guarantors of the availability of the option for
authoritarian rule. The nominal champions of democracy, the Social Democrats, have as
usual enabled the state forces of repression to expand their budgets and operations and
this can only be bad for the working class and its manifestations.
France is right at the center of the capitalist crisis in Europe. The World Bank has just
announced their 2015 forecast for the world capitalist economy and it is flat at 3%
growth. The world population is expected to grow 3% and this renders the growth
fictional. But in France there is no forecast for 3% or even a larger fraction of 1%
growth, while France almost as much as Germany is the holder of the bad debts of
Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. So the bourgeois regime can be expected to attempt to
take more austerity out of the life and flesh of the French workers and anti-Muslim
hysteria will serve that purpose and has even begun to do so now.
Minority religious communities need to be defended and we can only entrust this task to
the working class. The way to put an end to rightist violence against Muslims and Jews
in France is for militant workers, their organizations and inter-communal defense guards
to smash the fascists on the street, putting no faith in the troopers of the state. Unlike the
Committee for a Workers International (CWI), and not them alone, we declare the plain

truth that cops are not workers but the gunslingers of capital. Their only relationship to
the means of production is their role as strikebreakers.
In the U.S.A. we are calling for the expulsion of the Police Benevolent Associations from
all labor movement bodies and for the formation of workers tribunals and militia exactly
to begin suppression of racist violence, racist police murders, and for community
prosecution of racist murderers. In this way black, brown and immigrant communities
will be defended by the working class as a whole. Naturally this puts the LCC in
collision with identity politics which we see as ultimate props under bourgeois property
relations. Since each identity politics denies or subordinates the class question to their
utopian project, be it feminist, nationalist, or other separatist tendencies, each of which
would leave the oppressor capitalist class fundamentally unmolested in the commanding
heights of the reproduction of their social order.

Notes:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/01/18/french-hate-speechlaws-are-less-simplistic-than-you-think/
The specific wording of French law forbids insult, defamation, or provocation to
discrimination, hatred or violencetoward a person or a group of persons because of
their origin or their belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race, or a
determined religion.
French citizens are perfectly free to challenge or blaspheme religious ideas, symbols,
practices, and even leaders. Obnoxious, insulting, highly offensive speech is protected
speech. Charlie Hebdo has been sued not only for its depictions of Muhammad, but also
for caricatures of the pope. In fact, Catholic groups have sued it for anti-religious
speech more often than Muslim ones. Charlie Hebdo prevailed in all of these cases,
except for one (which was initiated by the Catholics).