Halloween riots as youth uprising pushes on
Halloween weekend saw mass protests throughout France, Albania, Germany, Switzerland and Portugal, with riots erupting across multiple cities.
As Gen Z–led insurrections flare up globally, a neo-fascist surge has risen steadily alongside them. In the UK, the assault on Freedom Bookshop sounds a clear warning and a reminder that the street-level provocations escalating across the country over the past few years are happening for a reason.
Systemic actors seek to keep the youth’s insurgent tendencies in check, deliberately redirecting anger toward vulnerable groups such as migrants. This manufactured resentment is predictable amid ever-increasing housing and living costs for the working classes, pushing an increasing number of people to the margins.
At a time when Western superpowers engage in proxy wars and genocides abroad while leading an arms race at home, they ask their citizens to live with less and prepare for disaster.
Video: Contre-Attaque.net
This dynamic stems directly from the neoliberal restructuring of Western production in the 1980s. Designed to crush the advances of previous labour movements, it enforced the TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) dogma across politics and culture alike. Consequently, it has become increasingly difficult to imagine alternative ways of surviving, let alone navigating complex issues like personal liberty, identity, equality, and disagreement.
What mainstream news decries as a “shocking” resurgence of patriarchal misogyny among young people is often just youth mimicking adult behaviour—mirroring the brutality of genocidal wars and the competitive ethos of streaming media. Reproduced in schools and everyday life, hegemonic neoliberal ethics instil a worldview based on survival of the fittest, top-dog dominance, and “kill or be killed.”
Yet what this apparatus of indoctrination tries to suppress is the simple fact that when left to their own devices, most people naturally build networks of communal solidarity and mutual aid. In Serbia, following the Novi Sad canopy collapse and subsequent police violence, student movements organised their resistance through confederated horizontal councils, effectively shifting the national political narrative. When elections arrived, they took the difficult decision to form an independent list that won national elections on 25 October 2026, ousting the Vučić regime after 15 years in power.
Video: Indymedia.pt
Representative democracy may not be a vehicle for social revolution, but this effort demonstrates the power of prefigurative politics. It proves that young people can mock authority, circumvent top-down structures, and channel the rage generated by class war into creative, radical action.
Where horizontal councils represent organised prefigurative power, the unguided unruliness of marginalised youth represents its raw, volatile foundation. Neofascist networks, nurtured by neoliberal centres, actively attempt to capture this untapped energy—redirecting class anger away from the ruling class to protect existing power structures. Yet as Gen Z leads insurrections worldwide, state attempts to enforce “law and order” inevitably generate contested spaces of disorder.
Radical left and anarchist currents meet the youth in these spaces, where bands of poor kids raised in the hinterlands of 21st-century capitalism disrupt the peace of petty bourgeois business owners. Their unguided discontent with the commodity society is a crude but authentic attempt to claim back autonomy. When survival is squeezed down to petty crime and syndicate work, roaming the streets at night with loot in hand becomes simultaneously alienating and liberating—an experiential truth of street-level autonomy that no top-down political theory can fully capture.
This reality explains the state’s aggressive attempts to criminalise and persecute horizontal protest structures, such as Palestine Action in the UK, which has not only struck major blows against domestic arms supply chains but has inspired offshoots across Europe and the US. The state relies on an old tactic: conflating separate legal cases to try activists together as members of an organised crime enterprise. The goal is to prevent the generalisation of dissent.
The group Rouvikonas, who in Greece have also been targeted in this way, noted in a recent statement: “The symbolic weight of our actions strips political capital from the top and transfers it down to the grassroots of society. And when our actions go beyond symbolism and secure small victories, we are no longer just talking about political capital, but a threat by example.”
No matter how hard the efforts to divide insurgents between “good protesters” and “bad rioters,” it has once again proven difficult to prevent the struggle within the struggle from emerging—a tension “between the ‘protest-revindication-reform’ tendency linked to the left, and a more autonomous, more aggressive tendency that proposes a direct attack on State institutions and commodities.”
Feelings of anger cannot be buried; social rage drives a diverse body of people to the streets to express their discontent through varied means, uniting their voices to demand an end to systemic oppression. The current wave of revolts reminds us that the state, its fascist proxies, and the political establishment can only keep people feeling helpless temporarily. Against every attempt by state and capital to capture insurrection, life finds a way to break through the paved floor—revealing the beautiful chaos of decentralised communal organisation among free living beings.
The post Halloween riots as youth uprising pushes on appeared first on Freedom Press.
|
Attachments:
|
| signal-2026-11-01-11-27-21-428.mp4 |
