The wave of high-school protests in France, which began in late September 2026 in the suburbs of Paris and spread to many other cities, has revived an old question on the radical left: is a riot left-wing simply because its form is radical? Drawing on the Marxist tradition, this article separates three levels of analysis: the social cause of a protest, the form the struggle takes, and its political direction. It argues that these do not necessarily coincide. The legitimacy of a demand does not guarantee the legitimacy of every form of action. The radicalism of a form of struggle does not guarantee the radicalism of its political content. And the political outcome of a movement is not necessarily what its first participants intended. The left’s criterion should be neither the intensity of images from the street nor even the form of action itself, but the capacity to convert scattered anger into organized social power. The article warns against two traps at once: glorifying disorder for its own sake, and accepting the frame in which the state reduces every protest to “urban violence.”

The current protests in France began with entirely material grievances: a shortage of teachers, overcrowded classrooms, decaying school buildings, mounting pressure to perform, and anxiety about a future that looks less secure to much of this generation than it did to the last. The first protests took shape in the Paris suburbs. According to reports, they were spontaneous, with no central organization or political leadership. In parts of the movement there were clashes with the police, property destruction and arson, and the state’s security response became one of the factors escalating the confrontation. The government has called the students’ demands legitimate while describing what is happening in the streets as “urban violence.”

Yet the movement has not stood still. In recent days, student organizations at both school and university level have called for convergence, and with the support of teachers’ associations and parts of the union movement, the protests have moved from the high schools to the universities and into a broader social arena. In this sense the movement is itself demonstrating the distinction at the heart of this article: the difference between an explosion of discontent and the building of collective power.

At such a moment, part of the radical left drifts toward a simple reading: the more violent the street, the more left-wing the movement. Another part, seeing broken glass and burned buildings, reduces the whole affair to “disorder.” Both readings share the same error. They equate the form of struggle with its political content, and so avoid the central question, which is the question of power.

Three Things That Are Not the Same

Any analysis of a social protest has to distinguish at least three levels.

The first is the **social cause**. What objective contradictions produced the protest? In France the answer is clear: a crisis of public services, austerity policy, and educational inequality.

The second is the form of struggle . How is the protest organized, and what means does it use? Riot, occupation, destruction of property, street fighting, strike, blockade, or civil disobedience.

The third is the political direction . Whose interests does the protest ultimately serve, and what relations of power does it change?

The common mistake is to slide from one level to another. Because the cause of a protest is legitimate, we conclude that every form it takes is also legitimate and effective. Because the form is radical, we conclude that its direction must be emancipatory. To clear the ground, three propositions should be set side by side:

The legitimacy of a demand does not guarantee the legitimacy of every form of action.

The radicalism of a form of struggle does not guarantee the radicalism of its political content.

And perhaps most important: the political outcome of a movement is not necessarily what its first participants intended.

The last proposition lifts the problem out of the moral register of “good violence versus bad violence.” The question is no longer whether the protesters are right to be angry. It is what their action does within the real network of social forces.

No Form Is Inherently Left-Wing

By “form” I mean the repertoire of tools and methods of action: riot, occupation, destruction, street fighting, strike, blockade, and civil disobedience. The essential point is that none of these is inherently left or right.

In Marxist logic, the fact that a crowd occupies a street, fights the police or sets fire to a government building says nothing in itself about the class character or political direction of the movement. A riot can be anti-capitalist or anti-austerity. It can be the cry of the dispossessed against the state. It can also be a purely local, defensive reaction, or one with no definite class orientation, and under some conditions it can even strengthen the far right.

The same holds for the strike. A strike by workers in a private firm for higher wages can remain entirely within the framework of redistribution inside capitalism, while a riot can, in other circumstances, be part of the politicization of the subordinate classes. The distinction I want to draw is therefore not between “bad riots” and “good strikes.” It is between the radicalism of form and the radicalism of content. The radicalism of form concerns the apparent intensity of an action: how aggressive, how spectacular. The radicalism of content concerns the depth of the change an action can produce in relations of power. The two sometimes arrive together and sometimes come apart.

From Trajectory to Capacity

The great temptation here is to construct a linear formula: protest, then strike, then organization, then class alliance, then victory. The history of social movements offers no such straight line. France today shows that protest, organization, repression, solidarity and politicization can occur simultaneously and in back-and-forth patterns.

The question, then, is not whether every protest must pass from demonstration to strike and from strike to revolution. The question is whether the form of struggle that is chosen increases the capacity for organization, solidarity and collective power, or wears it down. A legitimate protest may build solidarity in one situation and destroy it in another. This depends not only on the intentions of the protesters but also on the response of the state, the media, the political forces on the scene, and the wider social conditions surrounding the movement.

The Criterion of Power

If I had to reduce the issue to a single question, the serious Marxist question is not “Is this riot left-wing?” It is this: what kind of social power does this protest produce, and who will ultimately use it?

A riot may disrupt the state for a few days. But if it cannot build organization, class solidarity and durable power, it subsides, leaving little but the memory of flames and, often, the heavy burden of repression. A strike that looks calm, by contrast, can exert far greater pressure on capital if it disrupts production, transport, energy and public services.

Even so, the social power of subordinate classes should not be reduced to the ability to disrupt accumulation. That would be an economistic reading, and it is not even Luxemburg’s account of the mass strike. For her, the mass strike is not merely a tool for halting production. It is a political and social process of self-organization, of the spread of consciousness, and of linking economic struggle to political struggle. The social power of the subordinate classes comes not only from their capacity to cause disruption but from their capacity to organize, to widen solidarity, and to turn temporary disruption into collective and political power. Political radicalism should be measured by this capacity, not by the intensity of the pictures that travel from the street to the television screen.

Answering a Serious Objection

Defenders of the logic of the riot may argue the following. People who have won no concessions through institutional channels have no choice but the language of revolt. The riot is, in some circumstances, the political expression of groups excluded from formal means of organization. And experience shows that states often retreat only under the pressure of visible disruption.

This argument contains part of the truth. Riots have at times drawn public attention to crises that had been ignored for months, and at times they have forced governments to negotiate. It does not follow that the riot is always a politically ineffective or backward form. E. P. Thompson’s work on the “moral economy of the crowd” showed that collective action without formal organization should not be dismissed as irrational or as lacking consciousness.

The issue, therefore, is not to strike the riot from the list of legitimate forms of struggle. It is whether the riot is embedded in a broader process of organization and class conflict, or takes its place; and whether it dissolves into a wider movement or overshadows it. Without this distinction, a critic from the left could easily say that we are repeating the liberal line: protest is fine until it turns violent. That is not my position. My position is that both the critique of repression and the critique of ineffective forms of action spring from a single concern: the power of the subordinate classes.

France Today: Evidence for the Distinction

France is instructive because it shows both sides of the problem at once. On the one hand, clashes, destruction and arson are part of the reality of the protests. On the other, what has given the movement greater weight and reach is not the intensity of the confrontations but its spread, both horizontal and vertical: students, university students, teachers, parents, and union organizations. This convergence is the product of a capacity that grew out of shared material demands, not out of the flames.

The French left is not uniform in its response. La France Insoumise has supported the protests, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, according to reports, has stood with the students and sharply criticized police conduct. There are also reports of disagreement among the students themselves over methods of action. This disagreement is not accidental. It shows that the question of form is alive within the movement itself.

Crisis, Image, and the Battle over Meaning

One of the most important things the left must take seriously is that a social crisis always unfolds in a political field, and in that field both the radical left and the far right try to convert discontent into political capital. The dangerous sequence can be described as follows: crisis, then images of violence, then social fear, then the elevation of security as the central issue, then a demand for order, and finally an opening for the far right. At every link in this chain, media and political representation play a decisive role. The phrase “urban violence,” which the government used from the first days, is itself part of this struggle over meaning. It is a name that conceals the social cause and reduces a structural crisis to a matter of policing.

The analysis by Stuart Hall and his colleagues in Policing the Crisis, though it belongs to a different historical and geographical setting, Britain in the 1970s, shows how a social crisis can be transformed through media and political representation into a question of “law and order.” It should not be taken as a direct explanation of France today. But it is a clear warning to the left: a society can explode, and the result may be not socialism but more authoritarianism, a more securitized politics, and a stronger far right. The issue is therefore not only the ethics of protest. It is the battle over what a protest means in public space.

The Second Trap: Accepting the State’s Frame

There is a trap on the other side as well. Suppose the state erodes public services, weakens education, and leaves a generation in insecurity, and then, when that generation protests, reduces the whole affair to “violence.” The left must not accept that frame. According to reports, the extensive use of police force, riot-control weapons and mass arrests has itself become an aggravating factor. Two propositions can therefore be true at once:

First, state repression and police violence must be criticized.

Second, not every violent act by protesters necessarily advances the social movement.

There is no contradiction between the two. The contradiction arises only if we assume that criticizing repression requires praising every form of resistance, or that criticizing one form of resistance requires agreeing with the state.

In the Marxist tradition, social discontent is not yet class consciousness; class consciousness is not yet class organization; class organization is not yet political power; and a riot, however intense, is not yet a revolution. A society can be deeply discontented without being organized. It can riot without producing power. It can weaken a government without weakening capitalism. It can even destabilize a political regime and open the space for a more reactionary force.

For this reason, the left’s final question about the French protests should not be “Is this riot radical enough?” It should be: can this protest move beyond a momentary explosion of discontent toward the lasting organization of the subordinate classes, toward a bond between the young generation, teachers and the working class, and toward collective forms of social power? There is no guarantee, and no predetermined path. But one can ask of each form of action whether it increases this capacity or wears it down.

Here a sharper criticism can be made of a particular tendency in the contemporary left: the substitution of the intensity of action for the politics of power. This is a left that turns “the street” into a value in itself, as though the more violent and unstable the street, the more left-wing the movement. The classical Marxist tradition, by contrast, is fundamentally about converting scattered discontent into the organized power of a class, not about glorifying disorder. This criticism does not mean silence in the face of state violence, nor does it condemn young protesters. It means taking them seriously enough to want their protest to become power rather than memory.

For the left, the question is not how fiercely the street has burned. It is what remains of the power of the subordinate classes after the fire has gone out.