A specter is haunting education: the specter of the “lumpen-scolétariat” (lumpen-schooletariat). All the powers of the academic order have joined forces in holy contempt against this specter: the minister and his rectors, inspector-generals and algorithm designers, teachers, professors, and even their students.
The lumpen-schooletariat are not just those students disappointed or set back by Parcoursup,1 failing or waiting to fail, the “struggling students,” “dropouts,” or the average student spoken about in OECD achievement surveys. The lumpen-schooletariat is the underclass of the school system, composed of students with erratic trajectories—a scattered, festering rash of adolescents who, even back in primary school, were deemed “unmanageable” by the schoolmistresses, and whose entire educational experience has been left in tatters.2 These are the students who the institution identified early on as maladjusted and disruptive, whose lack of “academic capital” it mercilessly translated into grades, whose social defects it labelled as psychiatric diagnoses and digital records, whom it reoriented as early as sixth grade, whom it rejected from one school after another: absentees, excluded by wear and by exhaustion, those who never knew how to sit still and stay on a chair for six or seven hours a day. They are those who “lack the codes,” do not even know how to cheat, who’ve always been out of the game of academic choice, the specialized subjects, the options, the various educational tracks, and the orientation algorithms.
A faultline runs through the October 2026 crisis that, to a “false consciousness,” appears almost natural: the separation between, on one hand, the high school student movement and, on the other, the “rioters” (casseurs) who mix themselves up in it; some of the lycéens (high school students) themselves have said these individuals discredit the legitimate demands of the youth engaged in the blockades. A separation between the fine wheat grain of pacifist students, capable of converting their academic capital into speeches, and on the other, the chaff, masked and clothed in black, who physically attack schools and law enforcement.
Such is the official narrative and the consensus between opposing parties, adversaries, and defenders of the movement: The “rioters” are exterior to the lycéen movement, and their violence “has nothing to do with” the demands put forward by our good, well-educated youth. Across the media, an explicit denunciation of “violence” (burning trash cans, throwing projectiles, etc.) is the prerequisite for acceptable speech. “Do you condemn the violence?” is the “open sesame”; you have to start out with condemnation for anything else you say to be authorized. Since this separatist narrative is shared by ideologically opposed camps, it constitutes the blind spot and critical nerve center of the ongoing crisis, and therefore requires the most questioning.
Intruder Alert!
Yet more than feeling ignored by an infantilizing society or scorned by their own parents, blockading students are afraid of having their movement stolen by their own peers, that’s to say, the “ragged” students who lack the proper social codes, possess no voice, and assert nothing beyond their own raw existence. The “thief” (larron) rather than the “parent” (daron) is the intimate enemy of the high school struggle. This separation in the October movement reproduces the fundamental rift upon which the school system itself is built.
The sixteen-year-old sub-proletarian, cast off by the educational system and bearing every stigmata—no plan, no choice, unemployable, precarious mental health, alienated by an academic path chosen by others—is the quintessential embodiment of the selectivity that the “respectable,” politically active student decries in the context of Parcoursup. The “ragged student” is the specter of the “normal” student: what the normal student doesn’t want to be, is afraid of becoming, has always been made to fear becoming—the bogeyman held up as a warning ever since kindergarten. Don’t be like him. To the average high schooler, the ragged student is what the homeless person is to the good, disposable, and re-employable worker under a neoliberal regime of flexible labor: his specter, that is, his doppelgänger and his worst nightmare.
What the normal student—the son of service-sector employees, the daughter of a small-business owner, a child from a single-parent household, or the child of a secretary or a nurse—might only discover later in their educational journey (i.e., the futility of the diligence and hard work demanded of them via homework), the ragged student has already experienced, by necessity rather than by accident. A specter’s lucidity is in anticipation, a nebulous prescience: The specter is always a step ahead of consciousness. The ragged student, déclassé from the outset, peripheral, racialized, and stigmatized, is the vanguard of the symbolic violence of scholarly production. For the school produces, like a factory, like any industry: It doesn’t just teach, “impart knowledge,” or “train,” to use the usual terms that constitute its spiritualist point of pride; under these moral pretexts, it actually produces success and failure, and it shapes and produces subjects—forms of subjectivity. There is the disciplinary subjectivity (for future office and service workers), the entrepreneurial or project-based subjectivity (for future business owners), and so on. Subjectivation is the purest product of the school-factory—the production that the plebeian student resists, and which drives them off the assembly line. Thus, they arrive aggressively from outside the school—from the very place where the school cast them out to. A lumpen-boomerang. They are coming back. Intrusion alert! The intruders are those we have excluded.
The lumpen-schooletariat is never qualified as such; in relation to the school structure, it is invariably described in pejorative terms: as a swarm of incidental parasites (“breakers” “hordes,” “thugs,” “savages,” etc.). From its liminal position, that of an intimate enemy, a borderline presence, both inside and outside, this group alone directly escalates the power struggle, breaking the law and launching attacks. The members of this lumpen-schooletariat, rejected by the school system and scorned even by the high school students whose movement relied upon their strength, at least know how to light up ephemeral sparks of insurrection in urban space.
Since October 1, young people from “outside” the blockaded high schools have served as a tactical support for the movement. More than the One Piece3 pirate flag, pyrotechnics at the school gates became the movement’s true banner, in a gesture of political appropriation, echoing the massive wildfires that ravage French forests each summer. Fire, walk with me. The black smoke from burning polyethylene, aerosol cans, lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes thrown into the fires, fireworks, and break-ins at schools to trigger evacuations—the tactics employed by groups of hooded youths at high school gates were partly developed and practiced in the context of the suburban (banlieue) riots.
Yet, during the movement that began in October 2026, these techniques migrated from their peripheral zones—temporarily detaching themselves from illicit underground economies—to be relocated, refocused, and mobilized around educational institutions. Without the burning rubbish bins, without the intensity of the clashes with the police, without the rapid movement of support groups from one secondary school to another, the sit-ins and aura battles would not, on their own, have been enough to stand up to the repressive police forces allied with the school authorities for very long. The mobile gendarmerie does not deploy fifteen trucks at 6:30 a.m. in front of a high school just to get a few recalcitrant teenagers sitting in front of the school gates to stand up; the targets of the police deployment are the “invisibles” who have emerged from their ghettos, the mobile support forces that the lumpen-schooletariat class can contribute to the movement, enabling it to cross the threshold into a qualitative transformation.
The rubbish bin on fire, beyond its symbolism (the rejects of the system setting fire to the system that made them feel like trash), serves as a boundary: Through its ostentatious presence, it disrupts the daily normalization of what is taken to be the “natural” order of school life. Power is so diffuse, so deeply woven into our every gesture, that we no longer even see it. We think we are wandering aimlessly, yet we follow the sound of the chimes, the designated paths, the prescribed directions. We raise our hands. We vote in student council elections. We ask the CPE (head of student services) for permission. It is only when a machine breaks down or jams that it suddenly steps out of its routine, allowing us to perceive it once again as a machine—as a collection of cogs, gears, and mechanisms. In the same way, an exceptional event—a disruption—is required to reveal the power that lay dormant within the “practico-inert” structure of the school. It then manifests in the form of the police, who work visibly to restore the very routine that the fire had abruptly interrupted. The fire brings about an immediate shift in consciousness. Suddenly, power is rendered visible, manifested in its purest form—by shifting the struggle into the imaginary realm of violence and danger.4
Whatever the high school student movement might, at its most rational, be able to secure from the government through the legitimate channels of demands, representation, discussion, and negotiation—all of this depends first and foremost on crossing that threshold, which is its real prerequisite. The fire may certainly be extinguished, but once that threshold has been crossed, it irreversibly alters the balance of power.
By virtue of a necessity inherent in its social form of existence, the lumpen-schooletariat cannot help but be dispossessed by the very movement it has nurtured and whose power it has increased, just as the worker is dispossessed of their labor power in the commodity, just as the wife is dispossessed of her invisible sexual and domestic labor within the heterosexual couple, just as consumers are dispossessed of their invisible digital labor in cognitive capitalism, which appropriates their value production for its own profit, and so on and so forth. Having no institutionalized student consciousness (they don’t believe in student unions), reforms to the baccalauréat don’t concern them. They make no formal demands. These declassed individuals form a multitude, sometimes gathered together, often scattered, yet highly flammable and ready to explode at the slightest spark beyond the school walls, but, precisely because of their sheer numbers, they are logically incapable of organizing themselves or being represented.
The lumpen proletariat, at school or elsewhere, can never have a manifesto in a declarative sense. In a school system whose normativity is based on their social decline, the lumpen-schooletariat cannot, in principle, align itself with a rational framework designed to direct or program its actions. Their only manifesto, therefore, is their manifestation (protest, demonstration), in the phenomenological sense of the term. An intermittent and flamboyant manifestation, always on the verge of dying out and vanishing into disparity and invisibility. A demonstration is, in fact, always phenomenological before it is pushy: through and within the demonstration, those who do not usually appear make themselves visible. Dogmatic and routine individualism, like a veil of Maya, suddenly dissipates, revealing the social forms of existence it had concealed. Yet, teachers and education professionals stopped manifesting their presence at demonstrations quite some time ago. We just don’t see them. Slow processions of colorful flags which, time and time again, march as if around a hearse at their own funeral. – What’s that, Mum? – Those, you see, are teachers who are unhappy with their benefits. – Why are they bleeding? – After the demonstration, everyone goes home.
In just a few days in October 2026, the lumpen-schooletariat have managed to lay bare the raw reality of the modern-day pupil, where all the school’s various professions combined have, for so many years, failed to make themselves seen by a society that has frozen their resilience along with their pay scale. Suddenly the fire, suddenly the thaw.
Originally published in French by lundimatin, October 15, 2026. Translated by Rona Lorimer. The text has been edited for length and clarity.
Parcoursup is the school admissions web portal for post-baccalauréat education in France, introduced in 2018. Its critics have focused on its lack of transparency, with frustrated students remarking that it operates like an algorithmic sorting mechanism to further entrench existing social inequities.—Trans.
The “lumpenproletariat”—or “ragged proletariat”—is a term coined by Marx to designate a nonindustrial “sub-proletariat” that lacks class consciousness and remains beyond the reach of trade union or political organization; it is composed of declassed individuals who survive through various expedients—thugs, thieves, sex workers, beggars, mercenaries, police informants, and the like.
One Piece is a manga series written by Eiichiro Oda. Lycéens have been dressing up as Monkey D. Luffey, a character from the series, and also waving the One Piece pirate flag. The flag has become a revolutionary symbol in recent years, appearing in “Gen Z protests” in Nepal, Madagascar, and Morocco.—Trans.
A note on the tactical reversal of a security apparatus against itself. October 2026: A “horde of vandals” breaks into a high school; the administration triggers an intrusion alert, which blares through every corridor. Inside the classrooms, people go into lockdown—lying on the floor, silent, connected via an emergency chat on the Pronote interface, and linked by their phones to the live footage of the assault itself, which the attackers are broadcasting on social media. (Though mobile phones have been banned in high schools since the start of the 2026 academic year, they ironically become—within the framework of the Plan Particulier de Mise en Sûreté (PPMS), or “Specific Safety Implementation Plan”—a vital lifeline connecting those in lockdown to the outside world.) The entire PPMS protocol is rehearsed annually by teachers and students as a security ritual. Yet it was conceived for a different context than that in which it is actually applied in October 2026: It was tailor-made for the contingency of an Islamist terrorist attack. This “lumpen-school” intrusion—as a political technique for destabilizing power structures—operates primarily within the realm of the imagination; in a flash, it activates the very “terrorist” imagery for which the PPMS was originally designed. While the destruction caused by the “intruders” is certainly real, it is directed primarily at property—classrooms, windows, and reception areas. The true tactical “violence”—the effective violence—lies in this case in the ability to tap into the collective imagination and paralyze through it, thereby turning the security apparatus against itself. The apparatus ends up generating its own terrifying specter.
