The revolutionary confrontation between workers and youth erupted across Europe on Saturday engulfing France, Belgium, Portugal, Italy and Albania.
In France, the large CGT union estimated 800,000 took to the streets across the country where they were confronted by brutal attacks from the police, let off the leash by the French government, which on Friday reversed an earlier ban on the police using deadly weapons against protesters.
The ban was introduced following a 14 year old’s hand being blown off by the police grenade at an earlier demonstration.
This uprising of workers and youth follows weeks of protests by school students and teachers that was sparked by a single blockade of a school in a deprived working class area of Paris over the systematic devastation of the French educational system by a bankrupt capitalist system.
French president Emmanuel Macron at first attempted to appease the students with promises of limited relief packages of financial support for schools – proposals that were rejected out of hand by students who recognised them as false pledges designed to hold back the tide of anger.
On Saturday, while Paris burned and over 200 demonstrators were arrested in the capital, Macron and his wife enjoyed a Celine Dion concert seemingly without a care in the world, while tens of thousands marched through the street chanting ‘everyone hates the police’ and ‘Macron resign’.
Youth were joined by hundreds of thousands of workers with trade unions representing nurses, teachers, farmers and taxi drivers joining in, while the call went out on social media for the ‘Yellow Vest’ movement to be reinvigorated.
The Yellow Vest movement started in 2018 as a countrywide mobilisation of workers against rising fuel prices and the rising cost of living.
The Yellow Vest mass movement threatened to bring down Macron, a fate he narrowly avoided by withdrawing the most savage cuts to social spending.
Today, however, with the cost of living spiralling out of control driven by the oil and gas crisis resulting from the US war on Iran, Macron and the French ruling class are in no position to offer any concessions to workers and youth.
With a national debt of around 3.53 trillion euros – 115% of the French GDP – there are no concessions to be made, as the bond markets and central bankers demand super-austerity cuts be imposed on the working class.
The class war carried out by the capitalist state erupted in Belgium where a demonstration by students, who have been protesting for weeks against tuition fees, was attacked by police firing gas and water cannon.
In the Portuguese capital Lisbon tens of thousands of protesters marched against the cost of living crisis, low wages and affordable housing shortages.
Meanwhile, in Italy violence erupted as riot police fired tear gas to disperse protesters as thousands took to the streets of 13 Italian cities against the high cost of living, low wages, increased taxes and opposition to imperialist war against Iran.
Demonstrations have also taken place throughout the week in Albania where students fighting tuition fees and poor university conditions have joined with workers incensed by the plan, linked to Trump’s son-in-law, to buy an Albanian island and turn it into a millionaires’ resort. Police fired rubber bullets at protesters in the capital Tirana demanding Albanian PM Edi Rama’s resignation on Saturday.
The working class throughout Europe is rising up against a capitalist system determined to inflict its historic crisis on their backs.
The powerful working class, with youth in the vanguard, will never accept having their lives sacrificed to keep a decaying capitalist system from crashing into bankruptcy.
The central issue for the working class in Europe, along with Britain and the US, is to build revolutionary parties prepared to lead this revolutionary upsurge to smash capitalism and go forward to the United Socialist States of Europe.
This means building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required for the victory of the socialist revolution.
