PARIS, September 4 — One hundred thousand anti-racists demonstrated in cities across France today condemning the Sarkozy government’s racist attacks on Roma people. But the movement’s leaders — the associations, trade unions and “left” parties — ignored the essential link between racism and capitalism.

Here in the capital 50,000 marched, led by the Roma families whose camp in Choisy-le-Roi (eight miles south of Paris) was razed on August 12.

Gens du voyage* marched side by side with trade unionists in Bordeaux in a protest of 3,500 behind a banner reading “Stop racism — liberty, equality, brotherhood are in danger.” (“Liberty, equality, brotherhood” is the motto of the French Republic.)

The action itself — working-class unity against racism — was excellent. But the slogan suggests that racism is foreign to the bourgeois republic, that it can be ended without destroying the bourgeois state and capitalism itself. It steers the working class into supporting capitalist “law and order,” which the Sarkozy government is supposedly violating.

In fact, government racism against Roma people goes back long before Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux’s July 28 announcement that 700 Roma would be deported to Romania within a month and 300 “illicit” Roma camps would be closed, 150 within three months.

In 2002, when Sarkozy was Interior Minister under President Jacques Chirac, he said the government would “crack down” on Roma people with a new anti-Roma law. No one in the “moderate right-wing” Chirac government blinked an eye and the law was duly passed.

But why attack the tiny Roma population at all? In 2004, there were only 5,000 Roma in France. Today, there are 15,000; that’s 0.024% of the population! Clearly, the French Republic’s long-standing anti-Roma racism has nothing to do with the number of Roma, and everything to do with the needs of capitalism.

First, with official unemployment at 9.4% in December 2009 — plus 5% of the workforce working part-time but wanting full-time work (Dares Analyses N° 50, July 2010) — and with the austerity plan hitting the working class hard, the government needs a racist diversion to focus people’s anger on a scapegoat group. This is widely understood in France.

Secondly, racism performs two vital jobs for the capitalists: (1) it produces super-profits for the bosses through the super-exploitation of the victims of racism (and low wages paid to one part of the working class acts as a brake on all wages); and (2) racism divides the working class, when organized unity is our key weapon in the fight against capitalism.

Thirdly, the racists’ attack on the Roma is a step on the way towards attacking France’s estimated 3.3 million people of North African origin and the1.1 million of Sub-Saharan African origin.

Racism is as vital for capitalism as it is deadly for the working class. Consequently, racism can never be ended under capitalism. That can only happen through communist revolution, which abolishes bosses and profits, the source of racism.

* “Gens du voyage” is the French expression for Sinti and “Gypsy” people who are French citizens, as distinct from the Roma, most of whom are Romanian citizens. There are 400,000 “gens du voyage,” 15% of whom are nomadic.