HENRY GIROUX
OCTOBER 23, 2026

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 Hallwarned, 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, France now has fewer secondary school teachers than it did then. More than 70 percent of public-sector classrooms have over thirty pupils, while teacher absences routinely leave students without instruction. Silvana Solano adds further evidence of the systematic neglect of public education. According to figures she cites from the Ministry of National Education, “9.8 percent of secondary teaching hours were left unfulfilled during the previous academic year due to unreplaced teacher absences.” Students describe leaking roofs, broken toilets, inadequate heating, and classrooms where temperatures during heat waves reach between 35 and 40 degrees Celsius, “rendering learning environments intolerable and hazardous to health.” Many schools also lack sufficient nurses, social workers, and administrative personnel. Such conditions make meaningful education almost impossible, reducing public schools to institutions of managed deprivation rather than spaces in which young people can develop the knowledge, critical capacities, and political agency essential to democratic life.

The class character of this educational crisis is especially visible in Seine-Saint-Denis, where Barnay reports that students can lose the equivalent of almost an entire year of schooling because absent teachers are not replaced. Such deprivation reinforces the inequalities that shape their lives long before they enter the classroom. Education becomes another instrument for reproducing class privilege rather than challenging it.

The grievances extend beyond deteriorating buildings and missing teachers. Solano (2026) reports that students have also challenged exhausting and poorly organized schedules, the psychological pressures associated with the Parcoursup university admissions system, and the growing uncertainty surrounding their educational and professional futures. Their demands are both specific and far-reaching. They call for the immediate redirection of public resources toward education, the hiring of permanent teachers and substitute personnel, additional nurses and social workers, the renovation of deteriorating school buildings, an end to budget freezes, more reasonable schedules, and fundamental changes to the university admissions system. These demands expose the systematic deprivation of the resources young people need to learn, exercise political agency, and participate in shaping the society they will inherit. As Bell observes, unlike the students of May 1968, who famously demanded the impossible, today’s protesters insist that they are asking for the bare minimum: an education that allows them to learn.

France’s spending priorities expose the brutality of these political choices. According to Savage Minds (2026), the proposed 2027 budget would increase military spending by approximately $7.2 billion while allocating only an additional $1.2 billion to education and eliminating 1,588 permanent teaching positions. Students have responded with signs demanding “money for schools, not war.” Their message cuts to the heart of gangster capitalism: the state finds enormous resources for militarism while claiming it cannot afford the teachers, classrooms, and public institutions necessary to sustain a generation’s future. Such priorities expose a state willing to finance the machinery of war while starving the institutions that sustain the lives and futures of its young.

From Educational Grievances to a Generational Revolt

The revolt against deteriorating schools has become a wider struggle against Macron’s austerity policies and the destruction of the social state. Students demanding teachers and decent classrooms are finding common cause with workers, parents, and trade unions confronting the same system of economic exploitation and political abandonment. These emerging alliances carry the possibility of transforming scattered grievances into an organized political struggle against gangster capitalism.

As Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic report, protests have spread to more than forty French cities, drawing students from working-class suburbs, affluent neighborhoods, prestigious schools, and universities. Parents, teachers, and trade unionists have joined the demonstrations, transforming a revolt over deteriorating schools into a national movement. Their solidarity challenges the class divisions that have long structured educational opportunity in France and brings the defense of public education into a wider struggle against capitalist austerity.

What gives this developing movement particular importance is the growing involvement of organized labor. Vračar reports that members of major trade unions, including the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), have joined student demonstrations, in some instances forming protective lines between young protesters and the police. The CGT has emphasized that today’s students are tomorrow’s workers and should not be forced to bear the consequences of austerity. This recognition opens the possibility of a broader alliance between young people struggling for educational opportunities and workers confronting deteriorating wages, weakened social protections, and growing economic insecurity. The participation of labor unions also provides the student movement with organizational experience, historical memory, and connections to struggles extending far beyond the classroom. As Vračar notes, the coming together of student organizations, trade unions, and sections of the parliamentary left has created the possibility of a wider collective movement capable of challenging the government’s political and economic priorities. As the revolt expands to confront rising living and fuel costs, attacks on retirement benefits, and “the degrading of public services,”the possibility of a broader movement against capitalist power becomes increasingly concrete.

France has a long history of student resistance, with protests over education repeatedly becoming catalysts for wider political upheaval. As  Barnay observes, the May 1968 student revolt helped unleash a nationwide strike, while the high school protests of 1990 demonstrated the capacity of young people to challenge political authority. Macron’s government now faces the possibility of a convergence des luttes, a coming together of struggles against austerity, declining wages, rising living costs, and the erosion of social protections. The memory of the Yellow Vest movementcontinues to haunt the political establishment. The prospect of students joining forces with organized labor threatens to turn a revolt over education into a much wider confrontation with capitalist power.

The class interests behind Macron’s austerity policies are impossible to conceal.  Barnay reports that estimates from France’s Cour des Comptes indicate that corporate tax cuts and reductions in social-security contributions introduced since 2018 were costing public finances approximately €62 billion annually by 2023. While corporations and the wealthy benefit from these policies, unemployment protections are tightened, the retirement age is raised, and public services are starved of resources. The government then invokes fiscal necessity to demand further sacrifices from workers, students, and the poor. This is gangster capitalism at work: the state protects accumulated wealth while forcing those with the least power to bear the costs of austerity. The student revolt exposes austerity as a political weapon wielded in the interests of capital, rather than an unavoidable response to economic necessity.

The protests are also acquiring an international character. Barnay notes that French demonstrators have carried placards invoking Gen Z movements in Nepal, Morocco, and Madagascar. These references suggest a growing recognition among young people that their struggles against austerity, corruption, and political exclusion are connected across national borders. Across these different national struggles, young people are challenging the concentration of wealth and power that condemns their generation to economic insecurity, political dispossession, and an increasingly unlivable future.

The protests in France are also part of a widening international revolt against neoliberal capitalism. Barnay notes that French demonstrators have carried placards invoking Gen Z movements in Nepal, Morocco, and Madagascar. These references suggest a growing recognition among young people that their struggles against austerity, corruption, and political exclusion are connected across national borders.

The uprisings in Italy and Albania give further political force to this widening revolt against gangster capitalism. Ana Vračar reports that massive demonstrations in Italy have brought students, teachers, workers, and trade unions into the streets to challenge austerity, the destruction of public education, militarization, and the far-right policies of Giorgia Meloni’s government. In Albania, as Democracy Now! reports, students have joined a wider movement against corruption, economic insecurity, deteriorating universities, and the plunder of public resources, including opposition to a planned luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. In both countries, as in France, these movements have been met with police violence. These revolts expose the accumulated consequences of more than four decades of neoliberal policies that have transferred enormous wealth and power to ruling elites while dismantling the social state and condemning millions, especially young people, to lives of insecurity and dispossession. The political power of these struggles lies in the growing solidarity among students, workers, and educators who are transforming their collective anger into organized resistance against a capitalist system that has robbed them of their dignity, democratic rights, and future.

The violence directed against these movements reveals another disturbing feature of the neoliberal order: the growing reliance on the punishing state to crush dissent and protect established power. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authoritarian government has unleashed a massive police crackdown on young protesters challenging alleged electoral manipulation and the erosion of democratic freedoms. As Amnesty International reports, police have beaten demonstrators, dragged them through the streets, arbitrarily detained thousands, and imposed restrictions on movement and internet access. What is unfolding in France, Italy, Albania, and India reveals a disturbing international pattern: governments increasingly treat young people demanding justice, dignity, and democratic accountability as enemies of the state. The use of police violence against youth is also a form of political education, designed to teach fear, enforce obedience, and convince an entire generation that challenging established power carries a heavy price. Despite such repression, young people continue to take to the streets, refusing to surrender their political agency or abandon the struggle to overthrow a capitalist system built on exploitation, inequality, and the concentration of wealth and power. Rather than address their grievances, the French government has joined Marine Le Pen and the far right in directing blame toward students and the political left.

The courage to resist state violence does not emerge in a historical vacuum. It is shaped by political struggles, collective memories, and educational traditions that teach young people that injustice can be challenged and power held accountable. As Will Bunch  remarks, French students inherit a political culture shaped by powerful traditions of collective resistance and the defense of democratic rights. Drawing on sociologist Dana R. Fisher, Bunch emphasizes the importance of relationships among students, families, and trade unions in sustaining political protest.  French schools also play an important role in keeping these traditions alive. As  Kitty Sayersobserves, students learn from an early age about their country’s revolutionary history, the struggles that secured democratic rights, and the obligations of the state to its citizens.

The French Revolution and the student revolts of 1968 are part of their education, while classroom debates encourage young people to develop political opinions and defend them. Sayers writes that “The language of rights, citizenship and collective power is woven into French education.” Such lessons offer young people a language through which to understand injustice, challenge authority, and recognize protest as a fundamental democratic right. They also help cultivate a sense of solidarity and collective responsibility that challenges the neoliberal celebration of possessive individualism, competition, and the belief that individuals alone are responsible for their fate.

In this tradition, democracy is inseparable from the struggle for social rights, public accountability, and the collective power to confront injustice.  Sayers also states that French youth, taught to engage as citizens, are more than willing to take to the streets in order to hold power accountable. Through demonstrations, political organizing, and alliances with workers, teachers, and trade unions, French students are putting these lessons into practice. Their resistance demonstrates how historical knowledge and political education can become weapons in the struggle against austerity, state repression, and capitalist domination.

The Punishing State and the Criminalization of Youth Resistance

The French government’s response to the student uprising exposes the growing brutality of   neoliberalism’s embrace of the punishing state. Young people demanding teachers, decent schools, and a livable future have been met with riot police, mass arrests, tear gas, and weapons capable of inflicting permanent injuries. As the social state is dismantled, the machinery of repression expands. Students who demand democratic rights are increasingly treated as enemies of public order, their resistance criminalized by a government more willing to punish them than to address the conditions that brought them into the streets.

As June Loper and Harrison Stetler report in The Nation, the French authorities have responded to the student movement with an extraordinary deployment of police power. By early October, arrests were approaching 7,000, with approximately 87 percent of those detained estimated to be under 18. The scale of these arrests exceeded the early levels of preventive detention associated with the Yellow Vest movement, which itself became notorious for violent confrontations between protesters and the police. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez made the government’s position unmistakable when he declared, “There are no orders for restraint.” The consequences have been devastating. Young demonstrators have suffered shattered jaws, serious head injuries, permanent loss of vision, and mutilated hands. One fifteen-year-old in Lens lost his hand following the explosion of a police grenade, while another teenager in Tours was blinded in one eye. These injuries expose the barbarism of a state willing to maim children and adolescents in defense of its political authority. The police crackdown intensified public anger, while acts of looting, arson, and vandalism by smaller groups provided much of the mainstream press with an opportunity to shift attention from the students’ grievances to the spectacle of disorder.

The severity of the crackdown has drawn criticism from human rights organizations and civil liberties advocates. Loper and Stetler report that Amnesty International France warned against the disproportionate use of force, citing evidence of chokeholds, tear gas canisters fired directly at protesters, and the widespread deployment of rubber bullets. By October 8, France’s police oversight authorities had opened eighteen investigations into allegations of misconduct during the demonstrations. Such abuses expose a state that increasingly treats the democratic rights of young people as subordinate to the preservation of political authority. The criminalization of protest becomes a means of disciplining an entire generation whose demands threaten the interests of those in power.

The repression also exposes the racial and class hatred embedded in the exercise of police power. As sociologist Arthur Vuattoux told Loper and Stetler, the student uprising has been treated as an urban riot partly because it emerged from disadvantaged neighborhoods. He describes a process of “adultification,” in which poor and minority students are stripped of the protections ordinarily extended to children and portrayed instead as dangerous delinquents who must be disciplined and controlled. The contrast between the policing of students in working-class districts such as Seine-Saint-Denis and those at elite institutions such as Sciences Po demands closer scrutiny. The class and racial inequalities that deprive poor and minority students of a decent education also place them at greater risk of being criminalized and subjected to state violence when they resist. For poor and minority youth, the denial of educational opportunity is reinforced by a state that increasingly regards them as dangerous populations to be controlled rather than young people exercising their democratic rights.

The government’s attempt to criminalize the uprising has intensified the conflict. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornuwarned that “ultraviolence” had struck at the doors of French high schools, while government officials accused left-wing organizations of exploiting student grievances and fueling unrest.

Once again, the criminalization of dissent finds a disturbing echo in sections of the mainstream press. In an October 19 article in the New York Times, Amelia Nierenberg, Lynsey Chutel, and Catherine Porter  opened their account of the protests with images of riots, looting, shattered glass, and burned cars, relegating the students’ demands for decent schools and economic justice to a secondary position. Such reporting transforms a mass movement for educational justice into a spectacle of disorder, pushing the political demands of hundreds of thousands of students behind images of shattered windows and burning cars. Even The Guardian   acknowledged that the demonstrations were “for the most part, defined by peaceful protests,” involving hundreds of thousands of people, including schoolchildren and their parents.

The acts of vandalism, arson, and looting were carried out by much smaller groups. The spectacle of destruction becomes a political weapon, allowing the Macron government to portray a struggle against austerity and educational abandonment as a crisis of law and order. When the burning of cars receives greater attention than the destruction of public education, when damaged property becomes more visible than the damaged lives and stolen futures of young people, journalism becomes complicit in a politics of diversion that helps legitimate state repression. The structural violence of capitalist austerity, class exploitation, and the abandonment of youth is pushed out of public view, while the state’s repression of dissent is recast as the defense of public order. As Elijah Dale argues, ending a blockade does not resolve a teacher shortage, and restoring order outside a school does nothing to repair the conditions that produced the protest. The government’s emphasis on security, reinforced by a media culture drawn to spectacles of destruction, threatens to bury the very grievances that brought hundreds of thousands of young people into the streets.

The criminalization of dissent also takes economic forms. Loper and Stetlerdescribe a proposed “breakers-pay” law that could expose protesters to financial penalties for damage they did not personally cause and potentially punish their families through deductions from certain social benefits. If enacted, such measures could impose another burden on working-class families already suffering from austerity. The cruelty of this proposal lies in its attempt to extend state punishment beyond the protesters themselves, making working-class families financially vulnerable to the criminalization of dissent. Under the punishing state, poverty becomes a source of vulnerability to further punishment, while the exercise of democratic rights carries the threat of economic retaliation.

State violence is also a form of public pedagogy. Police brutality, arbitrary detention, and economic punishment teach young people whose interests the state protects, whose lives it regards as expendable, and what happens when capitalist power is challenged. The spectacle of repression teaches fear, obedience, and the dangers of challenging authority. Yet it can also produce anger, solidarity, and a growing recognition that injustice must be confronted through collective struggle. The streets become sites of political education where young people discover their collective power and begin to challenge the institutions responsible for their suffering.

The repression of French students exposes the punishing state as an instrument of capitalist domination. But the violence directed against these young people has also helped make visible the political forces responsible for their suffering. Their struggle now reaches beyond the defense of public education toward a wider confrontation with a system that treats democratic rights as obstacles to the accumulation of wealth and power.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Future Beyond Capitalism

The French student revolt carries a warning that extends far beyond the classroom. A generation denied economic security, decent schools, democratic rights, and the possibility of a livable future is refusing to accept its own disposability. These young people are confronting a system of gangster capitalism that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a ruling elite while treating the needs of the many as expendable. Their revolt exposes the moral and political bankruptcy of a system willing to sacrifice the future of its children to protect the fortunes of the wealthy. The struggle unfolding in France points toward the necessity of overthrowing a capitalist order whose survival depends on exploitation, inequality, and the destruction of the public good.

Jean and John Comaroff’s writings on youth under global capitalism illuminate one of the central contradictions of neoliberal society. They argue that youth embody the deepening contradictions of a society that celebrates them as symbols of the future while denying them the means to build one. Young people are welcomed into the marketplace as consumers, yet increasingly excluded from economic security, meaningful citizenship, and political power. They inherit a world in which the promises of progress have given way to precarious lives, social abandonment, and the destruction of collective responsibility. Their anger becomes politically explosive when they recognize that the system demanding their loyalty is responsible for the destruction of their futures.

How a society represents its young reveals much about its political and moral character. Under neoliberal capitalism, young people are celebrated as consumers and symbols of innovation as long as they submit to the demands of the market. When they resist, they become objects of fear, surveillance, and punishment. As Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? makes clear, neoliberalism has produced a political culture in which young people, especially the poor and racially marginalized, are increasingly represented as dangerous populations to be surveilled, disciplined, and controlled. The French government’s response to the student revolt exposes the brutality of this machinery of disposability. Young people demanding decent schools and a livable future are confronted with police violence and criminalization. Their refusal to surrender their future becomes grounds for repression, revealing how deeply the punishing state has become an instrument for protecting capitalist power.

The political significance of the French student revolt lies in the growing capacity of young people to recognize how their personal hardships are rooted in structures of capitalist exploitation and political domination, organize collectively, and imagine a future beyond the existing order. Through collective struggle, they are breaking with the neoliberal culture of possessive individualism and the belief that capitalism represents the limits of political possibility. Their alliances with teachers, workers, and trade unions point toward the formation of a collective political consciousness capable of transforming anger into organized resistance. Through these struggles, young people are asserting themselves as historical actors with the power to challenge and transform the conditions of their existence.

Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance insists that education is central to the struggle over consciousness, political agency, and the capacity to imagine and fight for a world beyond capitalism. At a time when gangster capitalism has turned ignorance into a political weapon and education into an instrument of conformity and repression, critical pedagogy becomes indispensable to collective resistance. Young people need the historical knowledge, political imagination, and courage to recognize how their private troubles are connected to larger structures of exploitation and domination. They need an education that enables them to question authority, expose the violence of capitalist power, and recognize their capacity to intervene in history. Such an education must become part of a broader struggle to overthrow capitalist power and create a society organized around human needs rather than private profit.

The French student revolt has begun to transform a struggle over educational deprivation into a broader confrontation with capitalist domination. Its political significance lies in the recognition that repairing schools, reversing austerity, and restoring social protections, while essential, cannot by themselves dismantle the structures of power responsible for the crisis.

What is required is a radical break with a capitalist system that places private profit above human life, legitimates obscene inequalities, and condemns entire generations to lives of insecurity and disposability. The struggle unfolding in France carries the possibility of transforming youthful anger into a mass movement capable of confronting capitalist domination and creating new forms of democratic life. Such a struggle demands critical education, mass political organizing, and solidarities capable of crossing national borders and generations. It also requires a political imagination unwilling to accept the ideological fiction that capitalism represents the end of history.

The young people in the streets of France remind us that history remains unfinished and that the existing order is neither natural nor eternal. A society that wages war on its young is waging war on its own future. The students’ refusal to accept that fate carries a demand that reaches far beyond France: the overthrow of a capitalist system that has made the disposability of young people a condition of its survival, and the creation of a radically democratic society in which human dignity, economic justice, and the right to a future take precedence over the savage and cruel demands of capital.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

First Published on CounterPunch.org.

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