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austerity
Hundreds Arrested in France at Anti-Austerity 'Block Everything' Protests
"We're fed up with paying, we're working hard, we're barely managing to keep our heads above water and to think that the hole in the deficit would be our fault is unbearable to hear," said one labor representative.
Sep 10, 2025
On his first full day in office Wednesday, newly appointed French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu was greeted with nationwide protests, organized online by the decentralized "Block Everything" movement, with demonstrators condemning the government's austerity measures that they said would likely be continued by the new leader.
Lecornu, the former defense minister and a close ally of President Emmanuel Macron, was hand-picked by the president to succeed outgoing Prime Minister François Bayrou two days after Bayrou lost a confidence vote in the National Assembly over the government's plan to cut the federal budget by over $50 billion.
Bayrou had proposed eliminating two national holidays, freezing pensions for 2026, and cutting billions in health investments to reduce the deficit.
The proposals have intensified anger that's already been brewing over inequality and poverty in France, both of which are on the rise according to the country's statistics bureau.
Research by the EU Tax Observatory has shown that ultrawealthy individuals in France pay an effective income tax rate of about 0.1%; the National Assembly voted in favor of a 2% minimum tax on wealth exceeding €100 million, or $117 million, earlier this year, but the measure was rejected by the Senate.
Eric Challal, a representative of SUD Rail-Paris, one of two unions that joined the protests on Wednesday, told Euronews that the anger "being expressed today is what we've been feeling all summer, fed up and angry since the Bayrou budget plan was announced, asking us to work more."
"We're fed up with paying, we're working hard, we're barely managing to keep our heads above water and to think that the hole in the deficit would be our fault is unbearable to hear," added Challal.
A university student named Thomas told the outlet that "it's time for Macron and politicians to understand we are serious."
"We're angry with the political system and the fact that the ultrarich and corporations are not paying enough taxes," he said.
The protests included demonstrations at train stations such as Gare du Nord in Paris, one of Europe's busiest travel hubs, where several hundred people gathered Wednesday morning and chants of "Step down, Macron" rang out. Police officers, 6,000 of whom have been deployed in Paris alone to quell the unrest, fired tear gas at the protesters, with some travelers caught in the chaotic scene.
Demonstrators set garbage cans on fire and attempted to block highway traffic in eastern Paris, while police clashed with dozens of students who had blocked the entry of a high school in the area.
The decentralized "Block Everything" movement was organized largely on social media and was originally embraced by far-right activists before garnering the support of progressive France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and left-wing groups including labor unions, which are also planning broader workers' strikes for September 18.
Demands listed in one document that's circulated online include strengthening public services, fighting media consolidation, and taxing the richest corporations, and a survey by the left-wing Jean-Jaurès Foundation found that a majority of people involved with the movement were "educated, highly politicized and angry far-left sympathizers," according to The New York Times.
A recent poll by Ipsos showed that 46% of French people support Block Everything, with strong backing from left-wing voters as well as more than half of far-right National Rally supporters.
Outgoing Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said Wednesday morning that "law enforcement has the order to not tolerate any violence, any vandalism, any blockage, any occupation of our nation's essential infrastructure." A total of about 80,000 officers were deployed across the country to respond to the demonstrations, and more than 200 people were arrested.
Though Bayrou is no longer in power, Marine Tondelier, the leader of the French Green Party, told the BFMTV news channel on Tuesday that Macron's choice of Lecornu to serve as the new prime minister was a "provocation" that showed a "total lack of respect" for French voters who remain distrustful of Macron's government.
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Despite 'Clear Defeat' in Key Buenos Aires Election, Argentina's Milei Pledges to 'Deepen' Austerity Measures
One governor called the defeat of right-wing President Javier Milei's party a "wake-up call from the citizenry."
Sep 08, 2025
Voters in Argentina's Buenos Aires province on Sunday sent a clear message to right-wing President Javier Milei, delivering a decisive defeat of his La Libertad Avanza party and forcing him to concede after his party's candidate to lead the country's most populous province won just 34% of the vote.
But even as Milei admitted LLA had suffered a "clear defeat," he suggested he'll do little in the way of course correction ahead of Argentina's midterm elections scheduled for October and will instead move full grospeed ahead with his so-called "chainsaw" economic austerity measures.
Former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner advised the president, "Get out of your bubble, brother" as her progressive Peronist party's candidate, Gabriel Katapodis, won 47.4% of the vote.
"Did you see, Milei?" said Kirchner on social media. "Things are getting heavy."
But Milei said his party will not retreat "one millimeter" from its plans to slash public spending, and will "deepen and accelerate" its push for deregulation, which has also included the dismissal of tens of thousands of public employees.
Last month, the country saw mass protests after Milei vetoed a bill that would have increased pensions and disability spending. He said the legislation had been approved by Congress in an "irresponsible manner" and said the spending increases would amount to too much of the gross domestic product.
"The only way to make Argentina great again is with effort and honesty, not the same old recipes," said Milei at the time, echoing US President Donald Trump, who has also presided over mass firings of civil servants and demanded massive cuts to public spending to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans.
While Argentina's inflation rate has gone down in the first two years of Milei's presidency, unemployment numbers are at their highest since 2021 and many Argentinians have trouble affording basics.
Axel Kicillof, the left-wing governor of Buenos Aires province, said Sunday's vote had sent an undeniable message to the president.
"The ballot boxes told Milei that public works cannot be halted. They explained to him that retirees cannot be beaten, that people with disabilities cannot be abandoned," said Kicillof.
Nacho Torres, governor of Chubut province, added that the election was a "wake-up call from the citizenry."
The Peronists now control the largest bloc in Argentina's Congress and have passed social spending measures, countering Milei' "chainsaw" agenda.
In order to make his desired cuts, Milei needs to expand his party's small minority in Congress next month. Half of the seats in the lower chamber and a third of Senate seats are in play in the upcoming elections.
Sunday's results represented "a key data point to understand the social mood—where the opposition stands, the state of Peronism, and the level of support for the government in Argentina's most important electoral district," Juan Cruz Díaz, the head of the consulting group Cefeidas Group, told The Associated Press.
How Milei reacts, Díaz added, "will be crucial to understanding the evolving political map."
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Finding Each Other and the Stakes of Public Education
If a return to an imagined “normal” is actually only a mirror of the present horrors, just at a different scale, what does that mean for how we struggle for–or through—schools?
Aug 20, 2025
“If they close the school, how will we find each other?”
This question was posed by a New York City high school student in 2010, as their school was being “phased out”—one of many caught up in the sweeps of school closings that characterized the violent austerity measures of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. The pedagogy of the question compels us to consider what is lost when a school is closed or phased out, and what public infrastructures, like education, have to do with “finding one another.”
The question becomes ever more urgent in our current context of the Trump administration’s austerity measures and the broader dismantling of public education. Far from perfect, for many, public schools have been quotidian diaries of state divestment, policing, and criminalization. Yet they have also—unromantically and consistently—been places of survivance: where everyday people have cared for and found each other and sometimes, come together for common cause. In recent months we have also seen the power of schools as sites of resistance, where the abolitionist principle of “we keep us safe” has countered fascist violence, criminalization, and disposability with fierce solidarities, community defense, and the praxis of sanctuary.
A recent New York Times article, however, highlights the right’s growing critique of praxes such as these—which it has labeled broadly as “empathy.” According to the critique, empathy encourages a sort of lawlessness, where the recognition of shared humanity becomes the driving force for action—instead of rigid and narrow conceptions of legality and rights. In other words, according to its critics, it is empathy that emboldened educational workers to unite and refuse the entry of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to public school buildings. It is empathy that inspired Jaime C., a Los Angeles Metro Bus driver who refused to let ICE agents onto his bus, noting, “Part of our job is to make sure everyone is safe… I’m not going to open my doors, regardless if there’s retaliation or not. I’m going to do what is right...” According to the critics of empathy, these brave, bold, and solidaristic actions—which for many of us have provided moments of inspiration during the dark year that has been 2025—are marked by confusion rather than clear thinking, due to lack of an understanding of the need for “order.”
The fight against austerity, to meet our material needs, and redistribute wealth in the Belly of the Beast, must be rooted in an ever expanded understanding of what it means to find each other.
In her book, The Capital Order, Clara Mattei reminds us that the fascist order accelerated through the Trump administration’s austerity measures is an entirely old one, that needs to be understood as essential to capitalism. As many have noted, the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2025, otherwise known as the One Big Beautiful Bill [OBBB], accounts for the largest one-time upward redistribution of wealth. It also needs to be understood as a weapon that is meant to protect capitalism by targeting public infrastructures and by making us even more reliant on the market. As the remaining vestiges of the welfare state that guarantee some form of social provision for the reproduction of daily life and also present the possibility of finding each other are hollowed out—we become even further alienated and separated from one another: consumer-citizens entrenched in self-interest and perpetual competition against one another.
What austerity also makes clear, Mattei argues, is the entrenched relationship between liberalism, fascism, and imperialism. In the case of education, this alignment confirms, on one hand, what Black and Indigenous organizers have been saying for some time: that public schools are a site of confinement, violence, control, and harm—making clear, for example, that it is not about transitioning from school to prison, but rather, historical and contemporary nexus between the two. It also affirms what students and educational workers in solidarity with Palestinian liberation—exposing how schools run not only on exclusion and disposession “at home” but also on extraction and genocide globally—have likewise clarified about the limits of liberalism, demonstrating that democratic rights and institutional safety only exist for those who dare not question the terms of the capital order.
If a return to an imagined “normal” is then, actually only a mirror of the present horrors, just at a different scale, what does that mean for how we struggle for–or through—schools?
The question becomes ever more urgent with the passage of the OBBB which, alongside other measures enacted by the Trump administration, seeks to restructure education as we know it. One key piece of the “how” of the restructuring is the establishment of a national voucher program. While conservative efforts to publicly fund religious schools have been consistently blocked by the courts, the voucher program provides a work-around through what we might understand as a federal not-for-profit-industrial complex. The new federal program provides a 100% tax credit (a $1:$1 return) to anyone who contributes to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO). The nongovernmental entity of the SGO can then redistribute funds that can be used to pay for religious, private, home, or segregated schools—allowing, as former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos envisioned, funding to directly follow students instead of school systems or buildings. Any family earning up to 300% the area median income would be eligible to apply for funds.
Two provisions—a state opt-in requirement and a cap of $1,700 annual tax credit per individual—establish some guardrails for the immediate growth of vouchers. However, with the establishment of an infrastructure for the voucher program alongside the gutting of the Department of Education (McMahon v. New York) and the Trump administration’s Russian roulette of withholding (and then releasing) billions of dollars for public education, it is not hard to imagine how—with a push for increased devolution to states—that the program might soon grow (the cap for federal payouts for 2026 is $10 billion, with 5% increases annually). Moreover, the combined impact of the OBBB’s violent Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid cuts disproportionately impact families who rely on public schools as well as critical infrastructure for special needs students and food safety and mental and physical health services for students more generally—while the bill also exponentially expands federal dollars for surveillance, detention, deportation, and ICE. These provisions, along with the OBBB’s broader shrinkage of public benefits—or Health and Human Services’ reinterpretation of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, which, among other aspects, bans undocumented families from accessing Head Start programs)—are not meant to “save money.” In 2024, for example, public education only accounted for 3.9% of federal outlays.
In the context of such assaults, the question is not if we fight to defend the public, but it is urgent to keep at the forefront what kind of public we are fighting for. The austerity measures enacted during the Great Recession provide some lessons. For instance, in New York City, some public schools sought to mitigate budget cuts by increasing individual and private foundation donations. Not only did this strategy (often enacted through the expansion of school choice programs and policies) intensify inequity and segregation, but it also ceded ground to the market, fortifying a sense of consumer citizenship and a version of the public that is not antagonistic to the capital order, or the relations it seeks to police. What Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore call “creative aggression” is helpful in thinking about what might be done differently. As they note, creative aggression clarifies that the violence of austerity need not always lead us to the trap of affirming the violence we are used to. Instead, its accompanying contradictions can help clarify opportunities to “[use] whatever weapons are available—which sometimes can be things like constitutional provisions, using lawfare to fight—to support that creative aggression reworking social reality to make abolition geography.”
If a return to “normal” is only an affirmation of violence, then key to fighting for the public in the context of austerity and fascism is the reworking of social reality to make abolition geography. The fight against austerity, to meet our material needs, and redistribute wealth in the Belly of the Beast, must be rooted in an ever expanded understanding of what it means to find each other. As Robin D.G. Kelley reminds us, we cannot have socialism without anticolonialism; finding each other must be rooted in internationalism.
It is this clarity, coupled with creative aggression, that informed for example, the National Education Association’s (NEA) 7,000 Member Representative Assembly recent vote. In a stand of solidarity with Palestinian liberation and the advancement of worker, civil, and human rights, the NEA decided to cut ties—including contracts—with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Likewise, the Profession Staff Congress’ (PSC, CUNY) vote earlier this year to divest from Israeli companies and government bonds and (as part of a joint campaign with the MORE Caucus of the United Federation of Teachers) recommend that their pension system—Teachers Retirement System (TRS)—also divest $100 million from the same. Such organizing mobilizes the public as a space to widen the terrain, and terms, of struggle and is not only powerful, but also considered dangerous to the capital order: Both votes were challenged and eventually overturned.
Examples such as these are a reminder that in the struggle for public education—the schools and institutions we have—while not an end, does present a critical site through which to enact creative aggression and practice collective governance that builds capacity for protracted struggle, while rooting spaces where we can find each other to expand our political horizons and grow fierce, loving, and dangerous solidarities toward collective liberation.
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