This essay is the second part of The Dislocation of Vendémiaire, following Part I, “The Disruptors of the 21st Century and the Ideological Collusion.” While Part I interprets the 2026 France-centered student-led protest wave as a politically dislocated movement—one misread by mainstream discourse as a multi-class coalition when it is in fact an expression of fragmentation within the proletariat—Part II develops the theoretical argument behind that claim. Drawing on Marx’s thesis of society’s polarization into two hostile camps, it distinguishes between “property” and “proletarianization” in the sense of national economics and in the sense of political economy. The essay argues that class should be analyzed through the actual control over the production of labor-power, and that digital capitalism increasingly enables capital to dominate labor-power directly, beyond the mediation of formal ownership of physical means of production. On this basis, it explains why many who appear as middle-class or petty-producer subjects in national-economic terms—scholars, franchise shopkeepers, senior programmers, platform creators—are in political-economic terms being proletarianized, while carrying petty-bourgeois habits of political compromise, individualism, hostility to centralized discipline, and identity- or interest-based linkage. The result is a form of struggle that is radical in appearance but conservative and spontaneous in its core: it completes the first step of linkage through identity and affinity, but fails to return to the common ground of class interests and to connect with the broader industrial working class.
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