The most important event in world politics right now is clearly the struggle in France. The protesters say openly that they want a revolution.

This brings to mind the classical Marxist tradition, to which Lenin and the early Third International contributed so much. In that tradition, imperialism is the latest stage of capitalism, a stage whose essential features are “wars and revolutions”.

It is widely accepted that we are living in a period of war. It is much less widely accepted that this is also a period of revolution. This is because the left is in crisis, and many on the left have forgotten about revolution.

But the struggle in France is a clear reminder that this is also a period of revolution.

The root cause of this eruption, which is happening not only in France but in many countries around the world, is the crisis of the imperialist system. Above all, the US, together with Israel, is facing defeat in the Middle East.

Throughout history, defeat in an imperialist war has always produced a major crisis. It splits the ruling class and raises the confidence of workers and the oppressed. This is what is happening now.

Defeat in imperialist war

The economic crisis is also an important cause, alongside the crisis of imperialism. What triggered the struggle in France was sweeping cuts to education, attacks on pensions and an increase in military spending. Social problems such as inequality are intertwined with the problem of imperialism.

Recently, the governor of the Bank of France insisted that France is not in the position Greece was in 2008-10. But the fact that he had to say so is itself evidence of how serious the situation is. And France is not alone. Many countries, including the US, face a serious crisis of government debt.

Government debt is not the only problem. Instability around the AI bubble is also growing.

Massive investment in AI is reshaping and expanding productive capital, above all in the US and to some extent across the world. But this change is being driven by massive speculation.

Now the AI bubble is fuelling anxiety in the financial markets. As negative forecasts about the future profitability of the big tech firms that have invested in AI gain ground, those firms are finding it harder and harder to borrow. The economy is edging closer to the cliff. Of course, it is very hard to predict when a bubble will burst. But it is certain that a bubble exists and that it will eventually burst.

In this situation, a tendency for the struggle to spread can be seen in many parts of the world. This matters because when revolt spreads like this, it produces political crises.

France is at the sharp end of this crisis because of the impasse French politics had reached: for many years, no government was able to drive through a full-scale restructuring of the economy. Macron emerged out of that impasse, and now he too is completely paralysed by it.

So sections of French capital began to look to the fascist National Rally (RN) as the force that could break the impasse. And the revolt that has now erupted is also an enormous reaction from below against the advance of the RN.

The RN leader Marine Le Pen supports the state’s repression of the revolt. Mélenchon of the radical left party La France Insoumise (LFI) criticises the repression and government policy, and he is being carried upwards by the mass movement from below.

France is at the sharp end, but the same dynamic is developing much more widely. Spain is obviously part of this. Italy, which already had a strong Palestine solidarity movement, is catching up. Even in Albania a huge social movement is erupting.

And it extends beyond Europe. In Argentina a powerful student movement has developed against the far-right Milei government. In India the “Cockroach movement” of young people is erupting again, standing up to brutal state repression by the far-right Modi government. In Tunisia there have been big union-backed demonstrations. The conditions sparking revolt are spreading beyond Europe. So Jang Dong-hyeok, the far-right leader of South Korea’s People Power Party (PPP), is not wrong to worry about his own country.

It is no surprise that people are talking about a new May 1968 in France, when 10 million workers went on strike. The speed with which the crisis and the mobilisations cross borders is similar too.

Parallels with 1934-35

But we should also pay attention to the parallels with 1934-35. In the 1930s too, the far right was advancing in France. In February 1934, full of confidence, it staged a quasi-coup on the streets.

This provoked a huge backlash by the working class movement, which developed into a united front. But it then went on to the launch of the Popular Front, which included cooperation with bourgeois parties in the name of “gathering wider forces”. After the Popular Front government came to office on 5 June 1936, there was for a time a wave of mass strikes and factory occupations. But in the end Popular Front politics demobilised the workers who had fought those struggles.

Here in South Korea we are experiencing the difficulties and potential dangers of popular front politics at first hand. The Lee Jae Myung government declared a shift to the right before the local elections had even been held, and its popularity has collapsed, halving within a few months. Yet the popular-front left is avoiding organising resistance from below against the Lee government.

Popular front politics also appeared in France two years ago, in the New Popular Front (NFP) made up of LFI, the Socialist Party and others.

So could such an alliance be relaunched in France this time? At present, competition between the forces that made up the NFP looks more likely than a relaunch. This is because the political distance between Mélenchon’s LFI and the more moderate reformists is much wider now than it was then.

The Socialist Party and the rest of the French centre left have just chosen Raphaël Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament, as their presidential candidate in a primary. He is a supporter of mainstream neoliberal and imperialist politics, a figure who could fairly be called the extreme right wing of the centre left.

Mélenchon, on the other hand, has built up his position by taking quite tough left-wing stances. Earlier this year, for example, he did not give in to pressure to join in the mourning for a fascist thug killed in a clash with anti-fascist protesters. And he is defending the school students’ protests that are erupting now.

He may hedge more as the presidential election (18 April and 2 May next year) gets closer. But at this stage LFI’s message is encouraging action on the streets. This may reflect a genuine shift to the left on Mélenchon’s part. Of course, it is also a strategy to win more votes. He can, after all, perfectly well support the struggle and compete electorally at the same time, right up to the election.

Three main fronts

So this is a situation in which the question of imperialism, the more concrete issues of class struggle and even electoral politics are tightly intertwined.

Three main fronts stand out in the current situation. The first is the anti-war movement. Opposition to the war — the US and Israeli war — is widespread within the movement and plays an important part in its politicisation. French protesters chanting for Palestine and waving Palestinian flags are a common sight.

It is true that the level of mobilisation for the Palestine solidarity movement has fallen somewhat, and in some countries it is at an impasse. (Though we will have to see what effect the international dockworkers’ strikes and actions at the end of October will have.) Even so, the Palestine solidarity and anti-war movement remains a focus for radicalisation internationally, and fertile ground for it.

One of the ways Mélenchon built up a base in the heavily Muslim banlieues, the working class neighbourhoods on the edge of France’s cities, was precisely by not bowing to pressure from the establishment over Palestine. Nor can it be an accident that Spain, where protests are erupting over all sorts of social and economic issues, is a country where support for Palestine has been massive.

The second front is the anti-fascist movement. This matters not only because of the political crisis in France, Germany and elsewhere, and the threat from the far right and fascists advancing in elections. It also matters because the popular explosion is leading to a rise in anti-fascist struggle. In France, action is now being prepared against the conference of the fascist RN in Orléans on 24 October. If the anti-fascist movement rises in France, it will affect every other country where the far right is on the march.

The third front is the struggle over social and economic issues. The struggle in France shows how important this is, and so do the huge mobilisations over housing in Spain.

Revolutionaries must not stop at building separate movements on each of the three fronts. They must work to link the three fronts and generalise the movement. That means arguing that today’s crisis is a crisis of the system as a whole, and that the answer is revolution with the working class at the centre. Revolutionaries also have a role to play in filling the strategic vacuum that is so evident in the current explosion.

Amid a broad radicalisation of young people, there is talk, as noted above, that France is coming to resemble May 1968. That was also a period of rebirth for the revolutionary left. But such a rebirth never happens automatically. Right now the left as a whole, not just the reformist left, has shifted a long way to the right. In many countries this is having a harmful effect on the far left as well.

Rebuilding the revolutionary left is a crucial task. And the current situation offers an opening to carry it out, in South Korea too.