By Henry A. Giroux November 7, 2026
This article was originally published by https://truthout.org
Youth around the world are rising up against capitalism and for democracy.
Young people are taking to the streets across France, Italy, Belgium, India, Serbia, and Albania, refusing to surrender their futures to a capitalist system that has abandoned them or to a politics that Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have described as “end times fascism.”
These protests are fueled by mounting anger over deteriorating schools, economic insecurity, unaffordable housing, political corruption, and a ruling class increasingly indifferent to the needs and voices of the young. As far right governments in Europe, the United States, and Latin America cancel out a future plagued by endless wars, climate catastrophe, staggering inequality, deepening poverty, and deteriorating public institutions, young people are rethinking the language of politics, resistance, and hope.
A 21-year-old student protesting in Milan captured this spirit of resistance in an interview with Reuters, declaring: “It’s vital to take part in people’s spontaneous movements born from an explosion of rage that made collective action possible.” She added, “I think the worst damage this ruling class has done to my generation is stealing even the ability to imagine a future, to dream.” Rather than address these grievances, governments have increasingly responded with curfews, protest bans, and brutal police repression, treating the democratic aspirations of young people as threats to be crushed rather than demands for justice to be heard.
These uprisings are driven by more than economic grievances. They express a growing refusal to accept the moral and political cruelty of a system that has declared the young disposable. At their core is a recognition that neoliberal capitalism has robbed an entire generation of the promise of a better future and that austerity is class warfare disguised as economic necessity. As reported in Rolling Stone, Mathys Le Coz Ndzié, a 17-year-old Parisian student, noted: “The current government hasn’t managed to give us a clear picture of the future, or the world we’re heading into. So we feel completely lost. … We haven’t been prepared for the world that’s coming. The one they’ve prepared us for no longer exists.” This war on youth is intensified by the destruction of social protections and the rise of governments that increasingly rely on surveillance, criminalization, and police repression to enforce obedience, especially among the poor and racially marginalized.
Yet out of these conditions of abandonment and repression, something more profound is emerging: a moral and political awakening rooted in the struggle for economic justice and a collective refusal to accept a world in which human dignity is sacrificed to private profit, democracy is hollowed out, and the very possibility of imagining and creating a different future is stolen from an entire generation.
Carlotta Magoga, writing in European Democracy Hub, is right in stating that, “From Serbia to Bangladesh and Senegal, young people are becoming a driving force for a more democratic world. … In search of alternative routes, they are developing new forms of civic engagement — through artistic protest, online campaigns and storytelling — and rewriting the rules of political participation.” Through their courageous presence in the streets, they are fashioning a form of activism “as a way to rethink how democracy works.”
For example, in France, students have challenged overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages, and a university admissions system that reinforces class inequality. In Italy, students have joined workers in protests over low wages, unaffordable housing, deteriorating public services, and increased military spending. In Genoa, port workers and students have also protested the use of ports for arms shipments. In Serbia, where opposition to government corruption has been central, students have demanded investigations into public contracts, government spending, and the political control of public institutions. These movements do not all embrace an explicitly anti-capitalist agenda, but their demands expose conflicts over who controls public resources, whose interests governments serve, and how economic and political power is organized and maintained.
Capitalism, in one of its more disingenuous moments, celebrates youth rhetorically as the future but denies youth the resources to have a future. What governments fear about these revolts is that students are moving beyond demands to make capitalism more humane. Protests across Europe and beyond are challenging gangster capitalism as a political order marked by corruption, neoliberal austerity, authoritarianism, militarism, racism, and the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a financial elite. At the heart of this confrontation is a struggle over the moral and political values that will govern society and determine the fate of future generations.
Two radically opposed moral visions are confronting one another on the world stage. One is rooted in solidarity, justice, and democratic possibility; the other in greed, racial hatred, organized brutality, and authoritarian domination. What is at stake is the future of democracy and whether coming generations will inherit a world governed by human dignity or one surrendered to the cruelty of the powerful. This culture of moral depravity finds one of its most revealing expressions in the U.S. billionaire class, where technological achievement is increasingly invoked to excuse political and moral cruelty. In an October 20 article in The Dispatch, Marian L. Tupy asks: “Is Elon Musk Worth the Trouble?” His defense of Musk turns technological achievement into a moral alibi for authoritarian politics, reducing the suffering produced by the exercise of billionaire power to an unfortunate price of technological progress.
Missing from this calculus is any serious reckoning with Musk’s role in dismantling USAID, an assault on humanitarian assistance associated with catastrophic human suffering and potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths. Tupy’s invocation of Henry Ford is equally revealing. Ford’s antisemitism is reduced to an unfortunate character flaw, conveniently excused in the gratuitous celebration of industrial progress. This is the poisonous morality of gangster capitalism: technological progress divorced from justice, human suffering reduced to an acceptable cost, and billionaires shielded from moral accountability. The victims disappear while their powerful tormentors are celebrated. This is the moral rot of a political and economic order inhabited by the living dead, a world in which wealth and power can shield predators from accountability. The crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, who preyed on and trafficked underage girls for sexual exploitation, offer a chilling illustration of this culture of impunity. In this world of rapacious political zombies, wealth becomes a shield against accountability, and the victims of predatory power are condemned to silence.
This culture of cruelty and unapologetic viciousness also reaches into electoral politics. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign released an ad featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, physician Amy Acton, denouncing her daughter as a liar. Acton has publicly described being removed from her mother’s custody at age 12 following sexual abuse by her stepfather. Her mother reportedly remained married to the accused man. Ramaswamy’s weaponization of Acton’s childhood suffering for political advantage reveals a political culture in which private trauma becomes electoral ammunition and cruelty becomes a badge of political power.
This politics of dehumanization is also evident in the racist rhetoric surrounding the November elections. At a campaign event in Michigan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared: “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce — they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Field prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
These examples are not isolated instances. They expose a political culture and pedagogical regime organized around fear, racial hatred, and the degradation of human life. The language of social justice and compassion is increasingly displaced by the discourse of fascist cruelty, in which conscience is treated as weakness, domination becomes the measure of political power, and human suffering is transformed into a public spectacle. This is how a culture of cruelty becomes the pedagogical foundation of authoritarian rule.
Against this culture of organized cruelty, young people are taking to the streets, transforming their anger into a collective struggle against the economic and political forces that have stolen their futures.Youth are rejecting the neoliberal fiction that individuals alone are responsible for their suffering. They are connecting private troubles to public injustices, building alliances with workers, teachers, and trade unions, and transforming anger into collective political agency.
These struggles remind us that culture is not merely a reflection of politics — it is a central site of contestation where consciousness is formed, identities are shaped, and political possibilities are either destroyed or brought into being. Schools, media, digital platforms, and public institutions are powerful pedagogical forces. They can manufacture ignorance, obedience, and political indifference, or nurture the critical consciousness, historical memory, and collective agency essential to resisting authoritarian power.
The United States cannot afford to regard these youth uprisings as distant spectacles. They offer a powerful indictment of the political and economic forces that are also destroying the foundations of U.S. democracy. Donald Trump’s response to the protests in France — referring to “people coming into the countries that hate the country” — reveals the fascist logic underlying his own war on youth, immigrants, and democratic dissent. Rather than acknowledge the legitimate grievances of young people protesting deteriorating schools, austerity, inequality, and the destruction of their futures, Trump has portrayed the unrest in France as the consequence of immigrants flooding Europe, claiming that France is being overrun by migrants who threaten Western civilization.
This is the poisonous logic of fascist politics: erase the social conditions that produce resistance, transform the oppressed into enemies, replace demands for justice with racial hatred, and turn legitimate protest into a pretext for massive police repression. Under the Trump regime, the assault on public and higher education, the criminalization of dissent, the erosion of social protections, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a billionaire ruling class have become defining features of an increasingly fascist political order. Schools and universities are being transformed from institutions of critical inquiry and democratic possibility into laboratories of ideological conformity, corporate power, and political intimidation. Young people are being robbed not only of economic security but also of the public institutions, critical capacities, and collective hopes necessary to imagine a future beyond the brutality of gangster capitalism. What the United States needs is a generation unwilling to be schooled in obedience, stripped of historical memory, or taught to regard injustice as inevitable. It needs young people capable of challenging the machinery of authoritarian power and reclaiming education as a force for democratic resistance.
The struggles unfolding across the globe offer a crucial lesson: Democracy cannot be defended through appeals to civility, symbolic gestures, or concessions designed to contain popular anger while leaving existing structures of power intact. It requires organized movements capable of uniting students, workers, educators, and communities in a sustained struggle for economic justice, human dignity, and democratic power. For too long, young people who have taken to the streets to challenge their political exclusion have been met with a mixture of admiration and condescension, celebrated for their idealism while their demands for fundamental change are dismissed, diluted, or met with brutal state repression.
In France, this assault on dissent has taken an especially vicious turn. The French Senate has approved legislation dubbed the “Rioters Pay” bill, which could impose financial penalties of up to €10,000 on protesters, including those who did not personally cause property damage, while threatening to seize welfare benefits from impoverished families and parents of minors. This is both an attempt to crush dissent through financial intimidation and an act of state terrorism that threatens to turn poverty into an instrument of political repression, imposing devastating economic hardships on students and families already struggling under a punitive, austerity-driven neoliberal state. Rather than address the injustices driving young people into the streets, the government is seeking to make resistance itself a source of economic impoverishment. The irony here is particularly vicious. While the French government has met with student leaders and promised to meet several of their demands — including abolishing the controversial university admissions system, increasing funding for teachers, and investing in improvements to public schools — these promises have yet to be translated into concrete action. What has moved forward, however, is the machinery of repression. In fact, Amnesty International France condemned the French government for adopting “authoritarian practices [that seek] to silence dissenting voices by restricting space for expression.” Promises of educational reform remain unfulfilled, while the state moves with unrelenting speed to punish those who have taken to the streets demanding justice.
Serbia offers a powerful rebuke to this politics of containment. Refusing to be pacified by cosmetic reforms, government reshuffling, or empty promises, student protesters transformed their outrage over corruption and authoritarian rule into a nationwide movement that ultimately defeated the ruling party of longtime right-wing leader Aleksandar Vučić in the October 25 election. Their victory demonstrates that young people need not settle for a place at the margins of a political system that has betrayed them. They can challenge the foundations of that system and turn collective resistance into a force capable of breaking the grip of entrenched power.
In France, too, student resistance has begun to yield results, forcing the government to promise to replace Parcoursup, the deeply unpopular university admissions platform, a limited but significant concession that demonstrates how collective struggle can compel those in power to retreat. India’s “Cockroach” movement over the summer has generated widespread unrest “contesting the Hindu-nationalist movement” led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, suggesting “that he is vulnerable.” These struggles offer a lesson that extends far beyond Serbia, France, and India: Democracy has no future if the young are merely permitted to protest against the destruction of their futures, the brutality of austerity, and the systematic assault on their dignity and rights, while those responsible for these injustices remain securely in power.
These uprisings are exposing a truth that neoliberal capitalism and its authoritarian defenders can no longer conceal: A system built on organized inequality, racial domination, dispossession, and the disposability of human life cannot be redeemed through cosmetic reforms or appeals to civility. Their struggle is not simply for a more humane capitalism, but against a system that has turned human life into a commodity, public goods into sources of private wealth, and democracy into a hollow ritual emptied of economic and political power. Frederick Douglass understood what is at stake when he declared: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” He added, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
These young people are refusing the politics of resignation. They are insisting that a radical democracy must be fought for, that justice demands more than the redistribution of suffering, and that the future must be wrested from those who have made greed, violence, and domination the governing principles of society. Vuk Bačanović, writing about the Serbian student uprising, captures the spirit of resistance that now animates young people confronting authoritarian power across the globe. He writes: “At a time when democracy is retreating before the power of capital, authoritarian caprice, and a corrupt cynicism elevated to the status of statesmanlike wisdom, one generation has demonstrated that history has not ended, that obedience is not humanity’s destiny, and that no government is eternal.”
Their revolt carries a message that ruling elites and authoritarian regimes can neither dismiss nor silence: The task is not to make the machinery of capitalist oppression more tolerable, but to dismantle it and struggle for a world in which justice, equality, and human dignity are not empty promises but the very foundations of democratic life.
The challenge now is to transform these diverse uprisings into an international movement capable of sustaining their revolutionary energy, forging new forms of solidarity, and building the collective power necessary to bring an end to gangster capitalism and create a world in which democracy can breathe again.
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