Mass marches rebuff state repression. Strikes andworkers’ self-organisation must follow

A human wave of courage and defiance, of solidarity and militancy, swept through France on Saturday. The government threw everything it had at smashing the movement in the streets. It failed. And that’s a glorious victory.

President Emmanuel Macron, prime minister Sébastien Lecornu and their ministers flooded the country with 70,000 police officers. They put the RAID and GIGN special forces into action. Armoured cars rolled through Paris. They imposed curfews and banned protests nearly everywhere.

All power to those who defied them. Everyone who braved the possibility of arrest, gassing, baton charges, beatings and worse has lifted up the whole of Europe, Brazil, Chile, India and elsewhere in revolt. 

The French government wanted a climate of fear; it reaped a harvest of resistance.

Hundreds of thousands marched in Paris in a demonstration that stretched over four kilometres.

Tens of thousands marched in Marseille with a joyful spirit. Then the cops attacked, although they faced serious resistance in response from some protesters.

The repression was real, with cops often assaulting protesters towards the end of the marches. In Bordeaux, over 10,000 braved driving rain and directly defied the ban on demonstrating in the city centre. The cops then drenched Place de la Bourse with tear gas

At the end of a demonstration in Nice, police used tear gas and water cannons. A young woman fainted after inhaling the gas. “Everyone hates the police,” chanted the protesters.

In Lyon, around 20,000 marched despite the authorities mobilising Centaure armoured vehicles. In surreal scenes, brass bands joined marches and other protesters handed out free coffee and cakes as cops fired volleys of tear gas.

Despite their best efforts, many people who wanted to march could not do so. Police arrested hundreds of people, and they aggressively blocked protesters in some cities. In a handful of cases, union officials disgracefully held back young people from marching. 

On the same day 300,000 marched in Madrid, Spain, for a pensions demo (a warm-up for mass demos and general strikes in the coming weeks), the French marches signalled a qualitative shift. This is far more significant than the French mass strikes and demos in 2019 and 2023. In 2026, the state is not sure it can contain the fury from below.

There is also a generational break with the past―one that is not wholly about age but is about political generations. The activists at the centre of these mobilisations are shaped by the anti-imperialist Palestine movement, the rise of fascism and the far right, the demands for limitless military spending, endless wars and the environmental emergency.

Whether they are 15 or 85 years old, these people will not stay on the tramlines laid down by conventional parties, campaigns and unions. And they are not confined to one issue. In Spain, housing issues detonate demands about all conditions of life.

In France, the agitation around schooling has expanded to draw in everything about societal priorities. 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who marched in Paris, celebrated “Total victory for the social movement” and said they were the “biggest demonstrations since the start of the movement”. 

But this cornered, frustrated, angry ruling class will not just give in. It will order more arrests, a “search for troublemakers” and agitators. That’s why workers’ actions that directly target the source of profits are so crucial.

We don’t need “safe” demos constrained by timid union leaders and politicians. We need escalation.

The French revolutionary Daniel Bensaïd used the metaphor of “when history was biting us on the neck” to describe the intense, urgent, and volatile political landscape of the late 1960s. Seize the time now!

Strikes….now!

The government’s elimination of virtually all protest rights, its determination to ram through a budget with £46 billion cuts, its repression of the school students…and the need to intensify the revolt all point to the need for mass strikes. 

Lecornu called the union leaders to talks this week. The trade unions should not have turned up without school and university student representatives. That gave the government the opportunity to offer a few token concessions to the unions and try to isolate the youth rebellion.

But this ruling class, conscious that the bond markets are watching their every move, and terrified of being seen as “soft”, insulted the union leaders and offered them nothing. Instead, he lectured them on social order. This forced them to talk of escalation. 

Union bureaucrats are fixated on compromises between workers and capital. They look for deals within the system, not to overthrow it. But that requires the other side to offer something. When their pleas for concessions are spurned, they sometimes have to call for action.

The CGT union federation responded by accelerating the calls for a general strike on 5 November.

It said, “The country is going through a deep crisis rooted in the degraded social situation of the majority of the population: high cost of living, declining wages, precariousness, public services cut back, and a lack of prospects for young people.

“Workers, high school and university students, retirees, and the unemployed have had enough.

“The CGT calls for general assemblies everywhere in the workplace to decide on the generalisation of the strike on 5 November, the date of the day of strike and demonstrations decided by the unions.”

Workers need to use that call but push for action sooner. Every day, every hour matters in raising the action.

And workers need to do more than back school and university students (important though that is). They need to advance their own demands about wages, union rights, price and rent freezes, money for key public services, not the military, the rich, expropriate the fortunes of the elite, and so on. 

An unlimited general strike, renewed each day through workers’ democracy, would smash even this ruthless state.

Trappes: racist murder after racist lies

Racist words, racist propaganda, racist politics, and political careers made around racist outpourings produce racist actions.

The horrific events in Trappes and neighbouring La Verrière, west of Paris on Friday were not random events. A Nazi, named as Kevin T in press reports, drove around for nearly 20 minutes trying to kill as many black and brown people as possible. He particularly targeted Muslims.

He killed a 26-year-old in Trappes, and a 21-year-old was taken to hospital in a critical condition after being shot multiple times at a petrol station. In La Verrière, he shot a 12-year-old girl and several other people.

The mother of the girl who was shot said she had suffered eight gunshot wounds. She told French broadcaster RTL her daughter had been wearing a headscarf.

President Emmanuel Macron, during a visit to Trappes, later confirmed the attack was a “terrorist and racist attack” in which people were targeted because of their “religion and the colour of their skin”.

The mayor of the town where the shooting took place had earlier said it was “a racist, probably Islamophobic attack”.

Politicians of all stripes, including neoliberals, conservatives and fascists, have said how awful the attack was. Many of them, including Macron, are vile hypocrites.

For years they have backed legislation against migrants, refugees and Muslims and echoed the fascist politics of the RN.

And the vile tirades reached a crescendo after last Saturday’s street revolts. The shooter specifically echoed this.

Le Monde newspaper says he “congratulated himself, in essence, on having ‘avenged the shopkeepers’ by attacking ‘blacks and Arabs’.” He also had a copy of Mein Kampf at home.

I gave numerous examples of politicians’ racism, hatred of the working class, and racism in my last post. But here are just three.

“Yes, there is a link between mass immigration creating security problems and what happened,” said Bruno Retailleau, the conservative LR’s presidential candidate. He’s not a fringe figure. He was interior minister (home secretary) in the Macron-appointed Bayrou government, as well as the preceding Barnier government from 2024 to 2025. 

Among many foul speeches, one in which he said “Down with the veil” was particularly racist.

Maud Bregeon, the government spokesperson, said the primary culprits on 17 October were “the scum,” “that type of population.” What type might that be?

Fascist presidential candidate Eric Zemmour was the most explicit. “What we saw on 17 October is the true face of the Great Replacement,” he said. He was referring to the racist lie that there is a deliberate plan to replace the white, Christian European population with Africans and Muslims through immigration.

He said the “face” was “a horde of Maghrebi and African barbarians entering the cities”. He claimed the rioters’ faces, voices and language showed “who they are” and “where they come from”. Zemmour might not grab a gun and try to wipe out the “barbarians”. But some people will.

And there is a particular example of racist bile about Trappes. RN president Jordan Bardella said the Trappes shootings were a “barbaric act of unprecedented gravity”. This is the same Bardella who, in 2022, claimed, “Trappes is an Islamic republic in miniature, the European capital of jihad.”

This is what fuels racist murder. Imagine if a murderer had Mélenchon propaganda at home and reflected LFI talking points. We would never hear the last of it, and the calls to ban LFI would multiply.

“The racist attack in Trappes will not be the last,” warned Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, himself the target of a relentless racist campaign since his victory in the March municipal elections. “It is your responsibility, “ he added, addressing Macron.

Referring to Bardella’s remarks in 2022, Green Party MP Léa Balage El Mariky, said. “You target, they kill.”

All sympathy and solidarity with the victims and injured after the shootings, their loved ones and those wider groups who the shooter targeted. Nothing but contempt for the hypocrite politicians.

Bosses want an iron fist to restore profits

“A wave of shock has swept through the business world. From CEOs of major corporations and heads of employers’ organisations to small business owners, everyone we interviewed expressed the same sense of devastation and astonishment.” Martine Orange in Mediapart has taken the temperature of the corporate world, and found bosses stunned, furious, and open to embracing MarineLe Pen as the only hope to “restore order”.

The militancy and defiance of the 17 October revolt terrified the business sector. “They felt they were witnessing a collapse of the state, of power. The condemnation of the government, accused of ‘weakness’ and ‘incompetence ’, is unanimous.” 

One manager at a major corporation reports their counterparts in other countries “seeing images of Paris on fire and asking if it was a civil war”.

“We’re no longer facing a political crisis; we’re facing a crisis of the regime,” added a former CEO. “If Macron had any sense of duty to the state, he would resign. But he won’t. He’s going to ruin the country completely.”

Orange adds that a deep pessimism about the future, a complete disenchantment with the political class, has gripped business leaders. 

“We have a useless, unworthy, incompetent political class. Retailleau, Attal, Philippe, Glucksmann—there isn’t one of them worth anything. They have no vision, no plan. They only think about their own little businesses, about their future positions,” fumed an investment banker.

Orange concludes, “The Le Pen-Mélenchon duel, long predicted by polls and for which many business leaders have already prepared, seems inevitable to many. 

“While not entirely trusting Marine Le Pen, some believe she alone will be able to ‘restore the authority’ they crave, and that the business world will always be able to suggest the right policies to her.”

The corporate mood echoes that of Germany in the 1930s, where some bosses came to believe that Hitler’s thuggery and demagoguery were required at a time of deep social emergency—and with the militant working class and the Communists coming for their money.

That’s why some bosses, headed by steel manufacturer Fritz Thyssen, funded the Nazis and encouraged their rule.

They thought they would use Hitler and then cast him aside. Media titan Hugenberg said, “If Hitler sits in the saddle, then I will have the whip.”

And one of his co-conspirators added, “Within two months, we will have pressed Hitler into a corner so tight that he’ll squeak.”

Their action in making Hitler chancellor set in train a process that within months saw the fascists implement the total destruction of workers’ organisations—and the murder of their leaders—and the elimination of all opposition activity. The barbarism eventually included the murder of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Roma people, LGBT+ people, disabled people, socialists and others.

This further underlines the urgent need to build the revolts and strikes now in France and across Europe.

»>I wrote more about this process earlier this year. ‘From impasse to fascists in office? France’s crisis’. Read it here

Vile reaction then and now

“The poor and vicious classes have always been and will always be the most productive breeding ground for all kinds of wrongdoers: these are the ones we will designate as the dangerous classes.”
Honoré-Antoine Frégier,1840

“I believe that what we saw yesterday is the true face of the Great Replacement. It is that of a horde of North African and African barbarians entering the cities. They have Palestinian, Algerian, and Moroccan flags. They have allies in the Antifa militias, a legal front in the LFI (La France Insoumise) members of parliament, and a modus operandi in the looting.”
Éric Zemmour, president of fascist Reconquête, 18 October 2026

What’s happening in the presidential polls?

Despire the outrageous witchhunt against Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his LFI party― which the ruling class blame for violence, destruction, the end of Western civilisation etc―JLM remians second in the polls whht his rating hardly changed.

But there is a hardening for Le Pen and a fall for Mélenchon in a potential run-off. Perhaps temorarily, the assault on LFI has encouraged the “forces of order” to accept her rather than the “rioiters’ friend”. But hey, who really thinks these figures matter much at the moment or are in any way a reflection of a stable mood!

What I’m reading this weekend

What I’m reading this weekend

Opinion piece – Revolutionaries in the Mélenchon campaign: Razmig Keucheyan, Gilbert Achcar, Michael Löwy, and Ugo Palheta argue that revolutionaries must maintain their “strategic autonomy” while actively contributing to a united front in support of voting for Mélenchon. Read here

Strategies of Resistance by Daniel Bensaïd, edited by Alex de Jong. A new expanded edition of selected writings from the French revolutionary, a central participant in May, and in the actions and debates on the left afterwards. “”What still interests us is not the ashes of May ’68, but its embers, the resurgence of vanquished and repressed possibilities.” Order here

A powerful video

A parent in Aubervilliers denounces the cops. “A tear gas canister landed in their playground. There’s a law that forbids parents from hitting our children, and that’s a good thing. Why are the police allowed to hit our children? And they go home at night saying, ‘I hit 15 kids’ or ‘I fired my LBD like this’? It’s completely unacceptable.”

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dd_Ij-YAZbV/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet