by Jim Hodgson

Back in the 1980s, a spike in global interest rates sparked a “third-world debt crisis” (yes, at the time, that is what we called it). The crisis became a shock-doctrine opportunity to strengthen a harsher form of capitalism, one that came to be called “neo-liberal economic globalization” or simply neoliberalism or globalization. Governments weakened themselves, cut taxes on wealth and on corporate profits, eased health and environmental protections, and capital became ever more transnational.

We are now more than four decades into neoliberalism. The economic crisis of 2008-09, when banks were rescued instead of people, further widened the gap between the ultra-rich one-per-cent and everyone else.

A decade of Trump and his cronies in power has produced what British writer Craig Murray calls “an epidemic of billionaires.” It is they who are now trying to force a form of transnational corporatist fascism on the rest of us.

In France, high school students lead protests

In North America, it takes some effort to get past mainstream narratives about recent student protests in France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Riots! Violence! Palestinian flags!! U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance blamed immigrants for France’s troubles.

But let’s dig deeper to find out what is really going on.

“Young people are asking for one simple thing: resources to get an education and access to quality studies,” writes French economist Thomas Piketty. He argues that the government of President Emmanuel Macron has presided over a “catastrophic and unprecedented 20% drop in the budget per student since 2017.”

While the government’s budget for education increased from €13.3 billion to €15.5 billion between 2017 and 2026 (up by 17%), inflation over the same period was 22%. And the number of students rose from 2.6 million to over 3 million, an increase of 15%. The result, according to Piketty, is that the budget per student dropped by about 20%:

“Reinvesting in these sectors [education and health] today is not simply a matter of equality between regions or social classes. It is also a key issue in moving further toward the gradual de-commodification and dematerialization of the economy, and, beyond that, to building a different model of development. Let us hope the current movement helps put these issues at the heart of the upcoming elections.”

What do cuts to education budgets mean to students? Matthew Fox of Catholics for the Common Good writes:

“The French student protests began on a small scale in mid-September, in high schools in the poorer suburbs of Paris. Their complaints ran from timetables and class sizes to a shortage of teachers and classrooms that had overheated during the summer’s heat waves, and by early October some protesters were attacking police and school staff. On Oct. 17, a national day of protest against the cost of living drew 550,000 people by the Interior Ministry’s count and 800,000 by the CGT unions.”

Fox goes on to describe responses from church leaders and organizations in France and also Italy, where similar protests grew. On Oct. 5, 12 days before the riots, France’s Young Christian Workers, the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, a Catholic Action movement founded in France in 1927, issued a statement supporting the high school protests. The JOC objected to media coverage showing “une jeunesse qui casse et qui brûle,” a youth that smashes and burns, and it quoted a student in Nantes who criticized protesters who come only to break things. Relying on police intervention alone, the movement argued, signals decision-makers unwilling to negotiate.

(The JOC organizes about 6,000 young people between 13 and 30 from working-class families and neighbourhoods. It belongs to the Catholic Action movement of the Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn and his method of See, Judge, Act – and influential in the development of liberation theology since the 1960s.)

On Oct. 19, the presidency of the French bishops’ conference condemned the violence, expressed solidarity with injured officers and looted shopkeepers, and prayed that the students’ “just demands be heard and taken into account.”

Similar protests also took place in Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and Albania. And in Serbia, what began as a student movement became a representative political movement and won the recent election.

Ana María Aragonés, a French-born specialist in migration law who teaches at Mexico’s national university UNAM, wrote in La Jornada Oct. 19 that protest by growing social movements in Europe is a sign of growing recognition that the existing economic and political order no longer serves most people, be they students, seniors, immigrants, renters and workers. “Discontent touches ever wider sectors of European societies,” she writes.

“Could these social movements represent the beginning of a rupture with the nationalist and xenophobic discourse that for so long has served to divide workers and to preserve the privileges of capital? Could they open the possibility of a convergence between social movements in the Global North and South, not because their conditions are identical, but because they face the same root causes?”

In the United States and Canada, and indeed throughout the Americas, the moment feels a bit different. The urgent feeling now is to defeat Trump and his allies across the hemisphere, as Brazilians did in elections last week and as U.S. voters did Tuesday.

But at some point, we have to see that Democrats in the U.S. and Liberals and Conservatives in Canada have facilitated the same transfer of wealth to the top one-per-cent. Can we learn to see past the daily political headlines to discern the signs of the times that might propel us toward more profound change?