These are, in the end, international processes. My ongoing research in France suggests that the mass demonstrations which began with the French Occupy movement Nuit Debout (see Susser 2016, 2017) in 2016 and continued through a variety of strikes among students, transportation workers and others until the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations of fall 2018, and finally the massive pension demonstrations of 2019/2020, represent an effort to rebalance the pendulum in the struggles against the ever more virulent neoliberal assault. Austerity policies should be seen not simply as a consequence of the Great Recession in the wake of the financial crisis but rather as the latest most destructive stage of a neoliberal assault that began worldwide in the 1970s. Here I consider long-term research among street protests in France in relation to the post-Covid outrage against police brutality.

In these important new developments, we have seen an international mobilization which may now be breaking down, or breaking through, some of the fragmentations of the working class between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship and other forms of historical subordinations. However, this time the Paris protests included the Gilets Jaunes but focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. This was followed by international demonstrations, including massive demonstrations in Paris against police brutality, a common theme of the Gilets Jaunes, a protest starting in November 2018 that I was studying.

On May 31, 2020, the US exploded in protest to address the super-exploitation of racism, which has uniquely scarred its history.

Forged in fire cutting deeper ida