A-Infos (en) France, Union Communiste Libertaire AL #297 - Essay: Repression, the state faces political challenges (fr, it, pt)[machine translation]

Zadists, trade unionists, students, launchers and whistleblowers, environmental activists, 
yellow vests, refugees, journalists, anti-capitalist, or simple protesters are more and 
more frequently and severely affected by repression. Not a day goes by without those who 
challenge the established order face repression, whether police, judicial or 
administrative. ---- Beyond this observation, Vanessa Codaccioni's Repression, The State 
in the Face of Political Challenges , provides a better understanding of the forms that 
this criminalization of protest can take and examines the logic that is at work in this 
strategy. government has accelerated since 2016 and the Labor Law. Through five short and 
lively chapters, the author poses irrevocable conclusions. A double mechanism is 
reinforced with the stacking of repressive laws, the last one being the one of March 12 
and aiming to "maintain order during the demonstrations" .

On the one hand, the State delegitimizes the struggles, depoliticizing them, that is to 
say by denying the political nature of these actions, particularly (but not only) when 
they are "violent": the activists become then delinquents or terrorists. The political 
offense becomes a common law offense, participation in a prohibited event becomes 
participation in a group to commit violence against property and people. It is thus easier 
for the state to repress hard not protesters but thugs ... especially since he knows to 
rely on the mainstream media to relay and maintain this depoliticization.

And in this logic, it is the arsenal police and legal anticriminal and antiterrorist is 
mobilized, especially in terms of intelligence, surveillance and preventive repression. If 
the prohibition of demonstrations is the most egregious example, the massive use of 
anti-crime brigades and brigades of research and intervention - and even the army - in the 
operations of "policing" is the most concrete translation ... and the most brutal.

Vanessa Codaccioni logically ends her book on the need to fight to make recognize the 
political motivations of repressed people, pointing nevertheless the risks, in the period, 
to lead to a "regime of exception" and a specific and no less severe repression ... And - 
it may be less consensual in some militant circles - she does not forget to point out the 
dangers of differentiation-prioritization (politics and others) that would stand out from 
the other victims of the violence of the State, and especially the working class and 
racialized youth.

FB (UCL Montreuil)

Vanessa Codaccioni, Repression, The State in the face of political challenges , textual 
editions, April 2019, 96 pages, 12.90 euros.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Essai-Repression-l-Etat-face-aux-contestations-politiques
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