The metaphor of a tinderbox is one of the most overused in politics. But how else could you describe the situation in Europe today, where every small spark of resistance seems to be catching and turning into a powerful blaze?
Things kicked off in France in late September, when students in the working-class suburb of Créteil in the South-east of Paris blockaded their school in protest against poor conditions. This has since grown into the deepest challenge French President Emmanuel Macron has faced in his ten years in power. On October 17, students were joined by workers in a national mobilisation of 800,000. Strikes, demonstrations, blockades and riots have all played a role in this movement. It’s not just the radical left comparing this situation to the legendary student and worker uprising of May 1968.
In Spain, anger at the eviction of María del Carmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman whose rent was raised 230 percent when her apartment was acquired by an investment firm, has generated a massive movement for housing justice. The streets have forced the centre-left Sanchez government to call early elections, and typically hesitant union leaders to schedule a general strike for November 11.
Protests have rocked Albania since May, in response to an environmentally catastrophic luxury resort development tied to the Trump family. On October 13, youth inspired by the French protests brought their own demands over education and wages into the mix, turning the movement into a national uprising. Government buildings have been invaded and burnt, and the call for the downfall of Edi Rama’s government is widespread. It is the country’s largest revolt since the fall of Stalinist regime in the early 1990s.
In Italy, mass protests pledging to “fare come in Francia” (to do as in France) last weekend turned into standoffs against the police. In Milan, 250 people were detained, more than 80 percent of whom were minors. Belgium, Portugal, and Ireland have seen mass protests and strikes taking aim at austerity and intolerable working conditions.
This marks the biggest wave of protests on the continent in at least a generation. Anyone who wants to see capitalism one day toppled and replaced with a system really fit for human beings should take great hope from these events.
There’s no telling how long these struggles will continue, whether they will lose momentum, or if massive state repression will succeed in intimidating many off the streets. But this convergence of different struggles provides a glimpse of the possibility of rebuilding class-based politics after a decade characterised by despair and far right ascendancy.
The roots of the revolt
While these different movements are profoundly shaped by their specific national contexts, they have common roots in decades of battered living standards and attacks on workers. An entire generation suffered the consequences of the 2008 economic crisis - wages were slashed, young people were left without the prospect of ever finding a job, and social services were gutted to bail out the banks.
Italy provides perhaps the sharpest example of the consequences of this class war waged by the rich: according to data from Italy's Parliamentary Budget Office, private sector workers have seen their real wages fall by 6.6 percent between 1990 and 2026.
In countries experiencing economic recovery, young people are learning that they bear the costs of boom as well as bust. New jobs created are insecure, and wage increases are offset by soaring housing costs.
This long, bitter experience has brought questions of social class back to the fore and changed the character of struggle. A comparison of the current occupation of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol with the last one is instructive. 2011’s Indignadosmovement shared many characteristics with the protests of today, fuelled by anger at low wages, evictions and the callousness of the political class. It was an inspiring and important moment for the left. But the politics of the movement were organically populist, seeking to build a cross-class alliance of Spanish ‘citizens’ against the political caste they blamed for the country’s ruin. The most popular slogans reflected this - like “real democracy now!” and “they don’t represent us”.
This sentiment was also expressed in a hostility to the organised left and workers’ movement within the occupation - seen by many participants as just another facet of the “politics” they felt alienated from. Unions and left parties were even banned by the movement from participating in its marches. This tragically misguided decision put real limits on the extent to which the struggle could deepen and spread from the square to the workplaces.
Today, the movement is consciously associated with the traditions of the left and working-class struggle. One of the most popular slogans is “Long live the struggle of the working class,”, and visitors to the occupation in Puerta del Sol are greeted with the banners of the radical left, from the anarchist CNT to the Coordinadora Juvenil Socialista (Socialist Youth). They can even take a walk down a thoroughfare protesters have named the “Paseo de Rosa Luxemburg.”
It’s also not surprising that youth in general, and students in particular, have been the leavening agent and the detonator of so many of these struggles. Young people have been the motor behind every great movement of historical change over the history of capitalism.
Today, the lives of a new generation are being shaped by an alarming new political context - characterised not just by class attacks, but also by the reorganisation of world capitalism around rising war and authoritarianism.
That militarism and austerity are just two sides of the same coin is clear to student protesters in France: the government is attempting to pass €54 billion in social spending cuts, while boasting that they are ahead of schedule with plans to double military spending. German students resisting the potential reintroduction of conscription have made the same connection, with chants like “The rich want war, the youth want a future” and “Our only war is the class war”.
Ruling-class hypocrites sermonise about violence
Much of the domestic response to these movements and international commentary has focused on rioting and alleged “violence” of some demonstrators. In a televised address over the weekend, Emmanuel Macron criticised what he called ‘unbridled violence’, asking “how could French people do this to France?”
But much of this ‘violence’ is a response to brutal state repression, a fact which warrants little attention in mainstream media coverage. In France, riots were provoked by outrageous police tactics. One eyewitness account describes: “officers patrolled in groups of four or five mopeds, each carrying a pair of armed officers. One officer stands ready to jump off, beat protesters indiscriminately and speed away before anyone can retaliate.”
The denunciation of violence is particularly ironic from the French president. Macron currently enjoys a narrower social base than many dictatorships (a recent Ipsos BVA-Cesi survey found that 82 percent disapproved of his performance) and has only been able to hold on to power through the routine and systematic use of violence. In the current wave of protests, one student has lost a hand, one an arm, another an eye.
There has also been much establishment consternation about property damage, particularly after the burning of the historic town hall in the French town of Limonge. Karl Marx wrote on this theme 150 years ago, as troops moved in to crush the Paris Commune, murdering thousands of workers: “The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!”
Those who rule over a system based on such brutal violence are in no position to remonstrate about the rights of buildings.
If many of the participants in these movements are willing to defend a variety of forms of resistance, from the strike to the blockade to the riot, it’s because of an inevitable impatience that comes from learning how far you get when you go through the “proper channels.” Anjeza Marku, an Albanian student, told the Austrian newspaper Der Standard: L
“We protested peacefully for 135 days, but those in power merely insulted the participants. The public sees the youth as Albania’s last hope—we have often even been compared to the youth in France. But the government couldn’t care less whether we protest peacefully. It won’t listen to our voices anyway”.
Repression and racism
The establishment's focus on the supposed violence of these movements has two aims. First, to criminalise resistance, and second, for a wing of the ruling class, to racialise it in public consciousness.
The response of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government is typical. It has sent 500 additional troops to Milan and rushed through a new “security decree” further penalising protests and allowing for preventive detention of minors.
At the same time, the government and their right-wing backers in the media have made a concerted attempt to blame the unrest on “maranza, a racist slur for groups of North African youth in working class suburbs. Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini complained the squares were filled with “maranza and rotten left-wing riff-raff.” and has threatened to strip Italian-born migrants who riot of their citizenship rights. Businessman and current Defence Minister Guido Crosetto has accused youth of waging a ‘hybrid war’ against Italian society.
The reason migrant youth have had a prominent place in the demonstrations is obvious. Working-class migrants have to suffer the double blow of economic exploitation and racist humiliation. Moroccan youth who faced down heavily armed police in Bologna last weekend weren’t doing so for the first time. In July, the city saw its own “George Floyd'” moment, when protests erupted after police killed Abderrahim Fakir, a Moroccan migrant suffering a psychiatric episode. Migrants living in Fakir’s neighbourhood of Pilastro are used to being targeted. During 2020 regional elections, Matteo Salvini performed a stunt in the area where he rang the bell of a Tunisian family’s home to ask them over the intercom if they were drug dealers. No wonder that when resistance breaks out, people who are so beaten and repressed rush to the front lines.
This racialised authoritarian response is being carried by the far right from Europe across the world. Trump addressed a Kansas rally on Tuesday to denounce the movement and describe France as a country “conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists.” Here in Australia, Pauline Hanson has warned: “Unless Australia stops importing people who reject our democracy, our way of life … these riots will eventually be coming to Australian cities”. Sky News has attempted to draw the link between the European revolt and sinister forces at home, with segments like: “Pro-Palestine rioters ‘energised’ by anti-West sentiments.” The right-wing press has hysterically denounced an upcoming student strike against Hanson on November 11, accusing the high-schoolers of planning a “France-style riot.”
The sharp divergence of responses to this wave of revolt, described either as the great hope for a more just world or a terrifying plot to Islamicise the west, reflects the depth of the political polarisation that has been produced. But it also reflects the asymmetry of that polarisation, one in which the far right is several orders of magnitude stronger than the left and has had its conspiratorial and fascistic worldview embraced as a permanent and legitimate wing of capitalist politics. The radicalisation on the right continues to build. In Italy where Meloni’s far-right coalition is losing its lustre, it now faces a challenge in the form of the hardline fascist Futuro Nazionale, led by retired army general Roberto Vanacci.
Challenges for the left
These hopeful struggles in Europe have emerged in a pretty bleak period. The ascendancy of the far right and multiplying horrors of capitalism are felt especially by people on the left who are aware of the long-term challenges for our side. Decades of defeat, demoralisation and working-class disorganisation have had a profound impact on the politics of the left. One reflection of this has been the tendency for socialists to lower their horizons and adapt to the politics of the centre-left, accepting Spain’s Pedro Sanchez or Brazil’s Lula da Silva as the height of their ambition.
Another expression of this demoralisation is the retreat in some left-wing circles into doomerism and crisis-mongering, emphasising the potentially apocalyptic direction of world capitalism without an argument about how the forces to resist it could be built.
These struggles show another possibility. They are a vindication of Marxism’s central claim: that the functioning of capitalism contains within it potentially explosive contradictions, which can rapidly burst onto the scene. The capitalist system can never come good on its promises of a good life for the majority. And the potential power of the masses of people that have no real stake in this rotten order can be obscured and repressed, but it can never be eradicated.
People are driven to act again and again. This is the only thing that can open up the possibility not just winning immediate gains but also creating ideological fissures which can lead to a break with the dominant order. Lenin reflected on this basic point after the failed revolution of 1905:
“Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.”
But it’s not enough to champion resistance. The challenge for socialists is not only to act as participants, but to try to give shape and direction to it and argue for a way forward. There will be many obstacles on the road to deepening these struggles, including opportunistic capitalist politicians who want to ride these movements into power, as in Albania, and conservative union leaders who only want strikes according to a neatly planned timetable, as in Spain and France.
The last great wave of European revolt in 2011 generated exciting new possibilities. But ultimately the political forces it generated led things to disaster. In Spain, the populist party Podemos channelled resistance in a parliamentary direction and ultimately ended up in coalition with the centre-left they pledged to replace. In Greece, a party that emerged as a coalition of the radical left ended up forming a government, only to rapidly capitulate to the financial pressure of the ruling class and become as bad as the centre parties they had denounced.
But despite the weight of so many crushing defeats, a new generation is standing up and grasping toward radical solutions to the radical problems posed by capitalism. The challenge for socialists is to grab hold of this opportunity and begin building the forces for revolution in the 21st century.
