France: After the high school and university students, after the demonstrations on October 17, it is now up to the working class to join the struggle based on their own demands and using their own class-based methods!

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The brutal crackdown on young working-class high school students—particularly those from the suburbs—has failed to put an end to the movement, contrary to the government’s hopes (1). In recent weeks, the movement has been joined by university students, who have begun blocking access to their campuses in solidarity with the high school students and in protest of their own living and learning conditions, which are themselves disastrous. The movement was finally joined by hundreds of thousands of people (estimated at between 550,000 and 800,000 across France), who took part in the massive demonstrations against the high cost of living on October 17—a date that had been set in early September by a call to “revive the Yellow Vests” circulating on social media. Elsewhere in Europe—notably in Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, and Spain—similar movements, sometimes turning violent, as in Milan, are beginning to emerge and reflect the same exasperation at the worsening conditions of life, study, and work.

Some of the anger and indignation simmering among the proletariat and the exploited masses in general—who could not help but identify with the plight of the rebellious and repressed proletarian youth—found a temporary outlet in France on October 17: this anger manifested itself in violent and almost immediate clashes with the police (according to official reports, 997 police officers and gendarmes were reportedly injured, including 7 seriously (2)), through acts of vengeance and the destruction of buildings and symbols of the bourgeois state (the burning of Limoges City Hall and the Lyon tourist office, the ransacking of the lobby of Marseille City Hall and the prefectural residence in Bordeaux, etc.).

On Saturday, October 17, and Sunday, October 18, alone, the toll of the crackdown was extremely heavy: more than 2,500 arrests, numerous injuries (a severed hand, gouged-out eyes), and one protester killed in Paris. At a time when summary trials are being handed out left and right (Darmanin promised an “extremely firm judicial response” to crush any hint of revolt (3)), the government has stepped up its security announcements to restore order: deployment of a massive police presence, partial curfews in numerous cities (Paris, Marseille, Lyon, etc., as well as in Guadeloupe), a ban on “illegitimate” demonstrations (sic!), the threat of invoking the “state of emergency” and Article 16, etc. All of these announced and planned measures reveal, once again, the true, hideous nature of the bourgeois state, even when it presents itself under a democratic and republican guise: a pure and simple class dictatorship.

All the bourgeois parties, both on the right and the left—whether or not they pay lip service to the protesters’ demands—as well as the major collaborationist labor unions, have of course joined in calling for “calm” and “condemning” the violence of the “rioters.” In an interview on LCI (October 18), the “Insoumis” presidential candidate Mélenchon—whom the government foolishly accuses of being behind the movement—presented himself as the best guarantor of “maintaining order.” He took the opportunity to label the attacks on state institutions as outright “crimes” and could think of nothing better to do than to criticize the Minister of the Interior and the intelligence services for their “incompetence” in failing to foresee and prevent the violence at the demonstrations (while extolling, by comparison, “the steel-like republican morality ” (!) allegedly demonstrated by the security forces during May 1968)!

In reality, the level of militancy and class hatred displayed by the courageous protesters on October 17—who did not hesitate to respond to state and police violence with violence of their own, and to the violence of capitalist exploitation, poverty, and unemployment with rioting and looting—is a sign that proletarian anger is beginning to find its way, gradually breaking free from the framework of “social peace” within which all the servants of the bourgeoisie and its rotten order seek to confine it: but there is still a long way to go before this mobilization takes the form of a genuine class struggle!

The proletariat must not allow itself to be drawn into the dead end of mobilizations such as those of the “Yellow Vests,” which are interclassist mobilizations that put on a show featuring a so-called “French people” or “citizens” whose class interests are, in reality, opposed. For workers struggling against their condition as wage slaves, there is no “convergence of anger,” no “general citizen mobilization” to be waged, because their interests are fundamentally different from those of the petty bourgeoisie and small business owners who seek to exploit the proletariat’s demands for their own ends. The proletariat must not march alongside them on Saturday but must launch a sustained attack on capitalist production and profits: it must reclaim its class weapons and relearn the reflexes that have been lost due to decades of “social peace” and reformist influence propagated by the various collaborationist political and union apparatuses. The Intersyndicale, led by the CGT, seeks to make people forget its responsibility for past defeats, the most recent example being the sabotage of the struggle against the pension “reform,” which it steered into a dead end through peaceful and parliamentary means. CGT General Secretary Sophie Binet announced on October 21 the need to “generalize the strike” on November 5 (while carefully avoiding the term “general strike”), even though, at the height of the high school and college student protests, she had called for calm and postponed union mobilization until that very same distant date of November 5! The CGT’s press release, of course, says nothing about the nature of this “widespread strike” on November 5, nor does it specify whether this marks the beginning of a renewable strike (which the CGT is careful not to actually prepare for), or whether it is, once again, its usual tactic of sabotaging struggles through sporadic and isolated days of action (4)!

Without waiting for any guidance from the Intersyndicale or the collaborationist unions—which have betrayed them time and again—workers must begin immediately to organize general assemblies throughout their workplaces in order to wage, through the weapon of a renewable and then unlimited strike (with picket lines that truly ensure a total work stoppage), the struggle for their class demands alone (defense of wages, working conditions, and living standards on the broadest possible basis, for both French and immigrant workers); the election of representatives to strike committees from among the most militant and determined workers—representatives who can be recalled at any time; the dispatch of worker delegations to other sectors of production to spread the strike and occupations everywhere, in order to wage the struggle against the bosses and the bourgeois state!

(1) See our statement: “High School Blockades: By confronting the state and its forces of repression, young proletarians are showing the way forward in the struggles for workers' interests,” October 4, 2026.

(2) “‘They’re no longer afraid to attack the police’: A police officer on duty in Paris on October 17 describes the violence and fears ‘the same intensity’ for Saturday’s [October 24] demonstration,” BFM, Oct. 22, 2026.

(3) “Violence: The criminal justice response must be ‘extremely firm’ to prevent residents from taking ‘the law into their own hands,’ says Darmanin,” Le Parisien, Oct. 20, 2026.

(4) In its latest press release dated October 22, the CGT, acting as a staunch defender of bourgeois order, laments the “acts of vandalism and violence [on Saturday, October 17], which the CGT immediately condemned,” reiterates that it “calls for the organization of peaceful demonstrations,” and asserts that “maintaining public order is a prerogative of the State”!

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