monte said:
we have the radical liberal approach towards the riots which seems to be: we must be very careful who & what we are supporting because the behaviour of some individuals goes against our model of class action. We must wait & see till after the riots have finished & class anger been quelled before we decide what all that was about. We cannot fitfully show solidarity for the riots because real workers were not involved.
the anarchist approach seems to be: this is a genuine expression of class anger & who are we to judge or condemn the actions & activities of those who after years & years of state repression & hostility, social exclusion & deprived economic circumstances are finally taking things into their own hands. Despite the lack of focus or organisation our job is to support the collective struggle of those fighting, almost always despairingly, against their condition.
Thora, Monte is quite clearly presenting his own view in that second paragraph, albeit in opposition to a straw man of other people's.
I don't see anything on his website even mentioning that these events are happening, let along expressing support (for that matter Cockney's organisation appears to have about 30 articles from November and none about this issue). Since he's using this as an opportunity to personally smear people I work with, I think I should point out that even though we nearly lost our entire site this week, we've been posting as much decent information as we can find on the riots on libcom since they started. At this stage, trying to get first-hand sources on what's going on, and beginning to understand the implications of these events is the best we can do.
As sovietpop says, it boils down to the semantics of the word 'support'. I think the discussion of those semantics has a degree of merit though - in the same way that the dialogue over the definitions of capital, class, communism etc. have some merit. Not all of them (including this thread), but some do.
None of us can offer practical solidarity, certainly not at this stage, so any statements of "support" are hollow. What we can do is try to get decent information out to as wide a variety of people as possible, and attempt to learn from these events through an honest assessment of their potentialities.
out of date now, but more on its way:
http://libcom.org/news/article.php?story=france-riots-2005-updates
