This article takes the French student-led protests and unrest between September and October 2026 as its point of departure. It rejects the mainstream interpretation of the movement as a broad multi-class alliance of diverse demands, and instead argues that it reflects a deep internal differentiation and fragmentation of the proletariat under digital capitalism. While affirming the student group’s role as a “quasi-proletariat” and an early outpost of struggle, the article contends that the movement remained at a pre-Marxist spontaneous stage because it lacked a scientific program and the integration of an advanced party. It proposes “actual control over the production of labor power” as the core criterion for class analysis and describes the movement as a “dislocated” struggle shaped by an ideological collusion between bourgeois narratives and the movement’s own political weaknesses.
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