Julien Anchaing and Enzo Tresso, Left Voice.
A generation caught in global chaos is rising up in the face of a capitalist system.
That grows more corrupt by the day.
After Madagascar, Nepal, Bangladesh, Peru, Morocco, and Kenya, Gen Z is shaking up Europe. Starting in Albania and France, the uprising is spreading to Italy, Germany, Spain, and now Portugal and Greece. The similarity of the slogans — against militarism, austerity, and the genocide in Gaza — and the simultaneous arrival of European youth on the political stage signal the emergence of a new social subjectivity in a continent marching toward militarization.
To fully grasp the strategic potential of this emerging subjectivity, a brief portrait of Generation Z is necessary, at a time when it is demonstrating exemplary vitality and audacity in confronting a capitalism that grows more corrupt by the day.
A Cosmopolitan Youth
From the pro-Palestinian slogans of German high school students to the Palestinian flags at French blockades, and the Italian mobilization against the genocide last year, the ongoing revolts are deeply rooted in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Contrary to portrayals of an apathetic, individualistic, and pessimistic generation, European Gen Z displays radical ambition in posing the major questions of its time — and a determination to begin resolving them.
The mobilization of the “Gaza generation” — which the media dubbed the “COVID generation” a few years ago, after previously calling it the “climate generation” — is inseparable from a firsthand experience of global chaos (in which planetary imbalances fuel the emergence of pandemics), an experience that has acted as a catalyst for awareness.
Following the climate strikes — driven in particular by Greta Thunberg, who visited the Paul-Éluard High School in France to support the students — the global COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point in the politicization of this generation. After decades of austerity that gutted public health services, Western governments — refusing to invest in equipment that could have curbed infections and protected the most vulnerable, particularly the elderly, and then refusing to challenge the profits of multinational pharmaceutical companies in order to carry out a global vaccination campaign — were forced to impose lockdowns on the population, which left deep scars on a segment of young people. The feeling of having lived through a global event that combined a foretaste of the end of the world with a form of authoritarianism is widely shared. Faced with the anger of young people, some reactionaries shamelessly ask: Shouldn’t we have sacrificed the lives of the elderly rather than the teenage years of an entire generation?
Corporate profits and massive investment in truly adequate public health measures are, of course, left out of this cynical equation. “Each of us is brimming with anger that has no outlet. We feel our youth slipping away without having been able to live it. We’ll never get back the outings, the laughter, the misadventures we never experienced,” explained a high school student from Bra, Italy, at the time.1
If we repurpose the idea of “cosmopolitics” — which, for Kant, denoted the natural and irreversible tendency of the system of states to move toward perpetual peace, an illusion that the last three years alone are enough to refute — we could describe certain events of our time as “cosmopolitical” in the dual sense that they challenge the world order while simultaneously raising, by their very nature, the question of a “global politics.”2 While the pandemic is undoubtedly one such event, the genocide in Gaza has only amplified this dynamic. For three years, hundreds of millions of people have witnessed the genocide of the Palestinian people, the sickening complicity of all Western governments with Israel, and a reversal of all values: the victims of genocide becoming the perpetrators, and those who denounce genocide being labeled potential terrorists. With Gaza, imperialism has laid out for all the exploited and oppressed people of the planet a horizon of shared suffering — a common condition in the face of the future that in itself constitutes the basis of negative internationalism.
This moral crisis — of global and civilizational proportions, affecting all the narratives through which the ruling classes justify their domination — has inevitably translated into internationalism in action, with young people at the forefront of the international movement of solidarity with Palestine, from the encampments to “Blocchiamo Tutto” (“Let’s Block Everything”), when Italian high school and college students experienced the power of uniting with workers. After a brief lull, this energy was just waiting for the right moment to resurface.
On October 16, the high school climate strike — following a scorching summer marked by massive wildfires — took on a new character: while Meloni is attempting to push through an Italian version of the French Yadan law — which exploits the fight against antisemitism to criminalize the Gaza solidarity movement — the occupation of the Cavour High School in Rome spread like wildfire, and tens of thousands of young people mobilized that day and in the days that followed. The other trigger for the mobilization was the introduction of a racist cap of 30 percent on foreign students per class, announced on September 20. Demanding the repeal of these measures, the high school students are also, above all, opposing militarization and austerity, which are at the heart of their slogans. The grassroots union USB (Unione Sindacale di Base) had called for a national strike against war and militarization on October 30, and the convergence with the labor movement was on everyone’s lips.
But this radicalism does not stem solely from this generation’s cosmopolitan experience. We must “pay attention to the emerging challenges of coming of age in a world in the midst of a severe crisis” to understand these young people caught in global chaos, as sociologist Cécile Van de Velde explains. She highlights their “strong desire for global unity.” But we must also view this within the context of a broader rejection.
A Revolt against a Life Held Back
While the pandemic and the genocide in Gaza represent two extreme poles of this generational experience — the “life not lived” to protect corporate interests and the remote experience of the mass death of the Palestinian people — this generation is also affected in its day-to-day reality by violence and the global crisis of authoritarian neoliberalism.
Van de Velde had already recognized this in Gen Z’s first wave of struggles, which primarily affected semicolonial countries under imperialist domination — whether in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Peru, or Morocco:
The profound meaning of these movements is the defense of essential goods. Everywhere, the “Gen Z” movement is rebelling against a sense of dispossession. In Madagascar, young people are rising up against water and electricity cuts. … In Morocco, the issue is notably access to health care. In Nepal, corruption and the ban on social media have sparked an outcry. … At the Moroccan protests, you can hear people chanting: “We don’t want stadiums, we want hospitals.”
Jean-François Bayart emphasizes the link between economic precariousness, a saturated job market, and the authoritarianism of the puppet regimes that govern these countries on behalf of imperialism:
These young people, often college graduates and better connected, cannot find their place in the sun and are bearing the brunt of the effects of this transformation. Many are caught in a vise between an ‘Uberized’ job market, dominated by precariousness, and the closure of Western countries’ borders. For societies in the Global South, this restriction on migration also results in a collapse of remittances — an essential source of income in the face of declining international aid. Humiliation in consulates and deaths in the desert and at sea are reigniting anticolonial and antislavery resentment.
Following the Serbian students in 2025, Albania has been at the forefront of the movement’s expansion across Europe. Fresh off a massive mobilization this summer against Jared Kushner’s real estate and colonial projects — which sought to privatize part of the country’s Adriatic coastline to boost profits for the tourism industry — young people took to the streets again to protest neoliberal university reforms, the housing and employment crisis, and the policies of Edi Rama’s government, which has been in power since 2013. The protests were explosive, with several government ministries set on fire. With French high school students joining the fray, Gen Z has arrived at the heart of an imperialist power.
The colonial history of French imperialism, the daily police harassment in working-class neighborhoods, the state policies that create and perpetuate poverty there, and the effects of austerity undoubtedly explain why it was high school students from French overseas territories, followed by the youth of Seine-Saint-Denis (the “93”), who were the first to take up the torch in this initial wave. But if the anger of French high school students spread so quickly — to the point of rallying the support of a large segment of the population — it is because, in Europe as well, young people’s lives are increasingly hampered.
Above all, high school students are denouncing a system of impossibilities. Austerity and the deterioration of public services that prevent them from studying. Parcoursup, France’s university-admissions platform — a “robot that decides our lives,” as one high school student put it — prevents them from choosing their own future. And an 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule prevents them from having a social life, among other things. In short, Gen Z is characterized by a massive rejection of social heteronomy and all external authority. The movement in Spain — and now in Portugal — against the housing crisis stems from the same sentiment.
A protest movement had begun in late September, but the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal from the home where she had lived since 1956, followed by her death in the hospital at the age of 87, sparked an outburst of pent-up social anger. The young people who had mobilized in support of Palestine are at the heart of the occupation of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. It is also this stifled way of life — forcing young people to live in squalid apartments with exorbitant rents or to remain with their parents — that has driven them to oppose Pedro Sánchez’s government after eight years of institutional left-wing rule, and to challenge its policies favoring property owners and vulture funds.
The movement coincided with the start of a rolling strike in Madrid’s education sector on October 14, while young people pushed the major labor unions to call for a general strike on November 11. Greece is now joining the fray, after fifteen years of social stagnation, the crushing of the protests of the 2010s, and a massive austerity purge continued by the neoreformist government of Alexis Tsipras.
Finally, young people are more broadly affected by the poverty plaguing society as a whole. The contradiction between a saturated labor market and a mass university system — which the ruling classes are trying to resolve by raising tuition, depriving students of financial aid, or imposing increasingly harsh forms of social or racist sorting — is undermining young people’s vision of the future, while the impoverishment of families weighs as a double burden on working-class youth. After surveying high school students about their work in “formal, informal (undeclared employment), [or] illegal (by nature, such as drug trafficking or prostitution)” activities, the Center for Studies and Research on Qualifications noted in a recent report that “nearly a quarter of students — and nearly one in three high school students in vocational programs — report engaging in paid work during the school year (evenings, weekends, and school breaks, excluding summer vacation).”
Behind all these manifestations of heteronomy lies, ultimately, the bosses’ control over our lives — the control that “cultivating, as in a greenhouse, his or her productive skills, while stifling a world of impulses and productive talents,” as Marx put it.3. A corporate power that devours lived time, making the present unlivable and the future hardly enviable. Every daily deprivation, every missed meal, every “laugh not experienced” — each is a corporate demand that is satisfied. And while the youth in struggle do not (yet) identify the bosses as their direct enemy — except perhaps in Spain, where Maricarmen’s eviction has brought into sharp relief the role of landownership in the ordeal of every generation in the country — they are already challenging the interests of the bosses, simply because a visceral rejection of the existing state of affairs stirs within them. And this is the foundation of these emerging alliances with workers, particularly in education: as a teacher at Feyder High School in Épinay pointed out, “their conditions of study are our conditions of work.”
A First Blow to the “Wartime Mentality”
This internationalist concern and this broader rejection of choices imposed by a neoliberalism in crisis have already had a major strategic consequence: the development of a new form of antimilitarism on a continent at the heart of the crisis of global imperialism. On the one hand, the mobilization for Palestine has resulted, for an entire generation, in the “conquest of autonomous knowledge regarding global social relations.” The spectacle of the ruling classes’ complicity has ultimately cast suspicion on their geopolitical ambitions and, by extension, on rearmament.
Young people have made an initial distinction between friend and foe: solidarity with an oppressed people has turned into opposition to the governments complicit in that oppression. On the other hand, the drive to mobilize young people en masse in the service of the ruling classes’ reactionary interests is inseparable from an ongoing authoritarian crackdown — which Karl Liebknecht described in his time as “militarism directed inward” — and from a brutal austerity policy that can only clash even more sharply with this generation’s anti-authoritarian aspirations.
Since 2014, European Union member states have doubled their military budgets. The war in Ukraine has triggered a profound strategic crisis for the European bourgeoisie. After decades under the umbrella of U.S. military protection, Trump’s threats of disengagement, his designs on French, Danish, and British colonial possessions, and the possibility that yesterday’s allies might become tomorrow’s enemies have pushed European imperialists onto a path of rapid rearmament.
To avoid being marginalized on the international stage in a confrontation between the United States, Russia, and China, the European ruling classes will stop at nothing, as evidenced by the European Commission’s Rearm Europe initiative, which aims to free up nearly €800 billion to fund the rearmament of European armies, to the benefit of major corporations such as Thales, Rheinmetall, and Leonardo. In France, the massive increase in spending under the military programming laws is the national manifestation of the same policy being pursued across the continent, particularly in Germany, where Chancellor Merz wants to make the Bundeswehr the continent’s leading army.
This increase in military spending inevitably entails the dismantling of the education system. From the streets of Brussels to those of Athens, the issue of militarization resurfaces daily in protests. “More money for health care, not for tanks”: a simple sign seen at most European protests sums up the anti-militarist sentiment emerging among Europe’s youth. In Germany, too, young people are mobilizing against rearmament and the far right. “The rich want war, the youth want a future,” chanted high school students on September 26 during the country’s fourth school strike against Merz’s plan to gradually reintroduce military service and against the rise of the AfD, which has taken control of a state — a first for the far right since 1945. The awareness that this march toward militarization is accompanied by an increasingly authoritarian turn is, moreover, very clear, especially since 2022, when European leaders began making statements such as Josep Borrell’s, then the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy: “We are in a time of war, and we must have a wartime mentality.”
The radical nature of the protests in recent weeks thus triggers a strategic crisis for the warmongering agenda of Europe’s ruling classes. Giorgia Meloni’s government is a case in point. She dreamed of making Italian imperialism the reactionary link between the European Union, the United States, and Israel that would unite an imagined West. Instead, she has sparked deep hatred of the Italian ruling classes — accomplices in the massacre — among broad sections of Italy’s youth and working classes, who are now demonstrating en masse, not only against the genocide in Gaza but also against rearmament.
From “Illegitimate Power” to Dual Power?
Here we touch on the most important aspect of the subjectivity of this generation in motion, expressed in all its complexity by the idea of “putting an end to the contemporary era.” Undoubtedly, the radicalism expressed by young people on October 17 in France, their combativeness against Meloni’s Far Right and Merz’s militarism, and their determination in the face of Europe’s most militarized police forces constitute a form of negation of the ruling classes’ “symbolic maintenance of order” and their austerity-driven and warmongering agendas.
But this process of “desacralization” is at the same time grounded in the affirmation of an autonomous culture, as Samuel Hayat notes:
As Roger Chartier demonstrated regarding the French Revolution, the end of the ancien régime was made possible by a long process of desacralization of traditional authorities, particularly through forms of social interaction that eluded them. Everything seems to indicate that a similar process is at work today. New digital technologies are establishing new forms of social interaction and opening up the possibility of rapid, decentralized information sharing, which enables phenomena of imitation, resonance, and support, even across national borders. As early as the 2010s, these technologies demonstrated their potential utility during youth uprisings and their capacity to foster a generational political culture. In this culture, independence, a sense of justice, and the desire for equality play a major role, making young people receptive to discourses that denounce an established order portrayed as authoritarian, unjust, and unequal.
Hayat’s insight could be extended in two ways. On the one hand, this “generational political culture,” which is now being expressed in the streets of Europe, has taken the form of what might be described as “illegitimate power,4” which is no longer content merely to remind the bourgeoisie of its own principles or to challenge the “legitimate authorities,” but asserts the existence of different moral — even existential — values, particularly regarding Gaza and solidarity with oppressed peoples.
On the other hand, whenever they speak out, young people impress with their ability to sum up all the defining features of the current situation by linking it to their lived experience. “You are arming the country and disarming our future. All government spending goes toward the military. They’ve given the police a license to kill instead of prioritizing our schools,” said a high school student from Sarcelles. While the rhetoric of those in power attempts to divide the movement and separate the struggles by presenting the causes of the various uprisings as incomparable and utterly distinct, the voices of the high school students possess a deconstructive power, to quote the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács. In History and Class Consciousness (1921), he emphasizes that the anarchy of a mode of production based on the separation of private producers and the division of labor — in the factory as well as in society — gives rise to a process of “reification” of consciousness that prevents it from connecting the fragmented parts of the social whole to form a comprehensive view. By contrast, the high school students’ statements are striking for their ability to grasp the deep coherence of the various attacks they face, and they demonstrate a “will to know” that is radically opposed to that of the bourgeoisie.
This capacity for synthesis is crucial. On the one hand, it is a subjective factor that contributes to the spread of the revolt, not only among the youth of other countries but also among other sectors of the population, owing to its ability to put forward hegemonic slogans. As for the courage of the French high school students, it has already enabled them — in the face of brutal police repression — to rally the democratic support of a majority of the population, while the radicalism of French and Spanish youth has exerted considerable pressure on the union bureaucracies, which ultimately decided to call for strikes on November 11 in Spain and November 5 in France. On the other hand, its creative force starkly exposes the absolute moral void of the ruling classes in crisis, who have responded to the high school students’ anger only with batons, tear gas, and detention.
This generation has thus opened up a strategic field across Europe. For this “illegitimate power” to become a “counterpower,” and for this emerging system of values to assert itself as a material force in opposition to the state, self-organization will be decisive. It is by multiplying general assemblies among high school students, college students, and workers that it will be possible to give this force the coherence of an alternative to the established power structure. For the power of private property and big capital cannot be reduced to the regime’s centers of power or its police apparatus. It will not be enough to strip the ruling classes of some of their privileges or to bring about a renewal of political leadership to end the reign of these architects of social heteronomy and these thieves of life whom young people denounce.
From this perspective, the emerging convergences between the labor movement and the youth in Italy, Spain, and France point the way forward: days of national strikes will set the pace for the November mobilizations and are beginning to identify the main enemy. They could play a major role in confronting the French state’s authoritarian turn and the violent repression in Italy and Spain. But above all, they must serve as a springboard for building an open-ended strike in our respective countries — and perhaps for moving toward more ambitious internationalist actions. It is still far too early to compare the youth revolt in Europe to the great uprisings of 1848, when the peoples of Europe rose up in unison. But it may already be possible to invoke their memory at a time when, as in those days, a certain specter is haunting the continent …
Originally published in French on October 25 in Révolution Permanente.
Notes
| ↑1 | These sentiments are widely shared, as evidenced by an Ipsos poll conducted in 2021 among 3,000 college and high school students in France: 79 percent of those surveyed felt they had been “deprived of their best years,” and 71 percent believed that young people had been “unfairly singled out” in connection with the spread of the virus. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | See Étienne Balibar, Cosmopolitique. Des frontières à l’espèce humaine, Paris, La Découverte, 2022. See also Palestine, face au génocide, Paris, Divergences, 2026. |
| ↑3 | Karl Marx, Le Capital: Critique de l’économie politique, livre 1 (Paris: Éditions sociales, 2016), 353 (translation ours). |
| ↑4 | This formulation draws on the analysis offered by Max Weber in The City of the association of the popolo in Italian communes under the rule of the nobility and patricians in the 13th century. In referring to the first political group fully aware of its illegitimate and revolutionary nature, Weber describes the emergence of a force of resistance that breaks free from the dominant order’s criteria of legitimacy in order to define its own existence. |
Left Voice: Journalism That Takes the Workers’ Side
Corporate media gives bosses and billionaires a megaphone. Left Voice puts workers, organizers and people fighting oppression at the center of the story. A revolutionary socialist news site and magazine, it covers labor struggles, confronts imperialism and challenges both parties’ service to capital. Its international perspective connects struggles across borders—and treats journalism as part of the fight for a different world.
Read Left Voice. Share its reporting. Support journalism that challenges the people who own the headlines.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.