Photograph Source: FreCha – CC BY-SA 4.0

Across France, Spain, India, Belgium, and other parts of the world, young people are taking to the streets, giving voice to a growing international revolt against the destruction of public education, the collapse of social protections, the erosion of democratic rights, and the cruel politics of austerity. Despite their different national histories, these struggles share a growing anger at the savage machinery of neoliberal capitalism, its abandonment of the young, its concentration of wealth and power in the hands of ruling elites, its embrace of militarism, and its systematic destruction of the public institutions and social protections on which democratic life depends. In France, what began as protests against overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating schools, and teacher shortages has grown into a nationwide movement drawing support from parents, university students, workers, and trade unions.

As Martin Barnay  argues in New Left Review, the revolt recalls an important history of student resistance in France, from May 1968 to the high school uprising of 1990, when young people challenged the failures of political authority and helped turn educational grievances into broader social struggles. Today, students are confronting a political establishment that serves the interests of financial elites, the military-industrial complex, and corporate power while dismantling the public institutions and social protections on which working-class and poor communities depend. As Jon Henley observes, the crisis facing French students extends far beyond immediate material hardships. It reflects a growing fear that neoliberalism has robbed them of economic security, political agency, and the possibility of a meaningful future. He writes: “This generation fears its future will be one of diminishing prospects, poorly paid, unstable jobs, unaffordable living costs and steadily decaying public infrastructure – the end, in short, of the basic socioeconomic security their parents, mostly, enjoyed.”

These fears arise from the brutal realities of a capitalist system that has made social abandonment, human suffering, and the disposability of entire generations central to its exercise of economic and political power. Neoliberalism is a cruel and merciless economic, political, and cultural system that has produced staggering inequalities, widespread human suffering, and a relentless assault on democratic life. It operates as a war machine against the social state, dismantling public institutions, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of ruling elites, and creating the conditions in which authoritarianism and fascist politics flourish.

Under its rule, democratic values and social obligations are subordinated to the imperatives of privatization, militarization, patriarchy, unchecked self-interest, and the accumulation of wealth and power. Prabhat Patnaik arguesthat as neoliberalism fails to deliver on its promises of prosperity and loses political legitimacy, ruling elites increasingly embrace neofascist politics, mobilizing racism, ultranationalism, and repression to redirect popular anger away from capitalism and protect their wealth and power. The victims of this savage system include the poor, the working class, women, people of color, immigrants, and especially young people, whose lives and futures are sacrificed to the demands of capital. Yet such brutality also breeds resistance. As William Robinson observes, the suffering inflicted by neoliberalism, from Latin America to the streets of Europe, exposes a deepening crisis of capitalist legitimacy while giving rise “to the upsurge in popular radical struggles from below.” As neoliberalism’s legitimacy crumbles, the uprisings in France and elsewhere expose a struggle that reaches beyond the war on youth to the future of democracy itself.

Neoliberalism celebrates the “free possessive individual,” reducing citizenship to consumerism and freedom to the relentless pursuit of private gain. As David Harvey and Thomas Piketty make clear, neoliberalism pathologizes the social, destroying the civic bonds and collective responsibilities on which democratic life depends. This assault on the very foundations of solidarity is reinforced by an ideology that, as Stuart Hall warned, portrays the welfare state as “the arch enemy of freedom.” Within this ruthless logic, redistributing wealth, protecting workers, providing public services, and confronting social injustice are condemned as assaults on individual liberty. Corporate power is liberated from democratic accountability, while ordinary people are stripped of the protections and institutions that make freedom meaningful. The ultimate cruelty of this ideology lies in its attempt to convince people that solidarity is a form of tyranny, social responsibility is an assault on freedom, and the pursuit of private wealth is the highest expression of human liberty.

Milton Friedman gave this ideology its bluntest expression when he declared that the sole social responsibility of business was to increase its profits. In this worldview, corporate greed becomes a virtue, while the human suffering it produces is dismissed as an acceptable cost of doing business.

Wendy Brown warns that neoliberalism is hollowing out democracy, turning its institutions and principles into “ideological shells concealing their opposite” (Chapter 3, p. 52). This assault reaches beyond elections, civil liberties, and judicial independence. It also targets public education, historical memory, and the critical capacities people need to recognize injustice and resist authoritarian power. When education loses its democratic purpose, society loses one of its most important defenses against the return of fascist politics. The destruction of historical consciousness makes the nightmares of the past easier to normalize and the possibility of collective resistance harder to imagine.

Neoliberalism’s war on youth reveals the cruelty of a system that destroys the institutions young people need to build meaningful lives while punishing them for resisting their abandonment. As Jean and John Comaroff suggest, youth occupy a contradictory position under global capitalism, celebrated as symbols of the future while increasingly burdened with the fears and failures of the present. As the social state gives way to the punishing state, investments in education, health care, housing, and economic security are sacrificed to corporate wealth and military power. Young people, especially those from poor and working-class communities, are denied the resources necessary to exercise meaningful control over their lives. When they demand justice, their resistance is increasingly met with surveillance, criminalization, and police violence. This is the brutal logic of gangster capitalism: a system that robs young people of their future and then treats their refusal to accept that fate as a threat to be crushed. The French student revolt gives political expression to this struggle, as young people challenge the capitalist forces that have robbed them of economic security, democratic agency, and the right to shape their own future.

France’s Students and the Politics of Abandonment

The anger sweeping through French schools has been fueled by years of austerity, overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages, crumbling buildings, and inadequate educational resources. These conditions fall most heavily on working-class students, particularly those in the impoverished suburbs of Paris, where educational opportunities have been devastated by years of neglect and widening class inequality. For these young people, the destruction of public education is inseparable from the broader assault on their dignity, economic security, and right to a future.

As Melissa Bell reports, the protests began on September 21 at Saint-Exupéry High School in a Parisian suburb, where students joined striking teachers demanding additional staff and educational resources. Although the authorities eventually responded to the immediate demands, the protest had already ignited a much wider movement. Within weeks, demonstrations and school blockades spread across France, drawing hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and trade union members into the streets. On October 6 alone, the Interior Ministry estimated that approximately 256,000 people demonstrated nationwide, while student organizers placed the number at 450,000. Ellen Francis and Victoria Bisset, writing in The Washington Post, reported that on October 18 “nearly 800,000 people, including students, public workers and others across the country” took part in demonstrations. What began as a local struggle over schooling had become one of France’s largest student uprisings in decades. The movement’s rapid expansion exposed years of accumulated anger over an education system increasingly unable to meet even the most basic needs of its students.

The depth of the crisis becomes especially clear in Bell’s account of the conditions facing French students. Despite an increase of approximately 250,000 secondary school students since 2008,........

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