France is witnessing one of its largest high-school student mobilizations in decades. What began with blockades over teacher shortages and deteriorating conditions has spread across the country, with hundreds of schools affected and thousands of students taking to the streets. The movement is demanding more resources for public education, adequate staffing and better school infrastructure, while confrontations with police and the use of tear gas have further intensified tensions.
Against this backdrop, the Union of Communist Youth (UJC), the youth wing of the the youth wing of the Revolutionary Communist Party of France (PCRF), issued the following statement on October 3, expressing its solidarity with the mobilizations and calling for the students’ struggle to be broadened and strengthened.
Support and Intensify the Struggles and Demands of High-School Students
Statement of the UJC Secretariat
For almost a week now, high-school blockades and demonstrations have been multiplying across France. The Union syndicale lycéenne reports that more than 600 high schools have been blockaded, while university students and student unions have also joined the movement and mobilized.
In this movement, which is both trade-union-led and spontaneous, young people are demanding the effective replacement of absent teachers, increased funding for education, the renovation of deteriorating school infrastructure, and the abolition of selection platforms such as Parcoursup.
The struggle being waged by working-class and popular youth is taking the form of an extra-parliamentary struggle. We salute this initiative and call on young people to join it and help expand it. Faced with these demands for decent education, police repression has been unleashed and continues: the use of tear gas, violent arrests and intimidation.
The Union of Communist Youth stands in solidarity with these demands and calls for them to be broadened in order to strengthen mass, class-oriented trade unionism among working-class and popular youth, vocational high-school students and apprentices, while stepping up efforts to encourage young people to join trade unions and student unions.
The Union of Communist Youth also calls for the demands to be extended to include an end to all forms of compulsory unpaid work, such as company internships undertaken by students in vocational high schools.
As the successive bourgeois governments of Emmanuel Macron move toward a war economy, the repression of high-school students demonstrates the predatory character of the French monopolies and their state. The violence being unleashed today is the violence of a mode of production that prefers imperialist wars and anti-social offensives to education.
Working-class and popular youth, organize your anger!
Everyone into the struggle! Support and intensify the struggles of high-school students!".
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