Murder in schools: Behind the monstrous acts, a monstrous society!

On 10 June, in Austria, a former pupil living in ‘extreme seclusion’ killed ten people and injured eleven others in a school in Graz. On the same day, a schoolboy murdered a supervisor at Nogent-sur-Marne secondary school in France. He was only 14! Both arrived with weapons: the first with a firearm, killing by shooting ‘indiscriminately’, the second with a kitchen knife in his bag, intent on stabbing someone. That someone was the 31-year-old mother who had decided to work in a secondary school to help young people, to protect them. And that's exactly what she was doing that morning, when the police were searching bags at the school entrance. In recent years, outside the United States, where the phenomenon has become almost commonplace due to the widespread possession of firearms, these horrors have also multiplied in schools and universities across Europe, in Finland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia and elsewhere.

Everywhere, the same no-future that tortures humanity

Why such acts? Sometimes it's hatred of school, of that institution of the state that sends out the image of ‘no-future’, that makes us feel good for nothing, that crushes us under the weight of despair, fear, withdrawal and humiliation. The murderers are themselves kids crushed from the inside by a violent society that really has no future, a capitalist society that is rotting away. They often can't put into words the rage that burns and consumes them, turning their distress into blind vengeance and people into cold-blooded killers. So they strike back at society: they kill as they are socially crushed, they murder a class sister or brother.

Society is fragmenting and disintegrating. Unemployment, misery, problems with housing, work and healthcare are everywhere. Everywhere, wars are multiplying. Everywhere, the planet is going haywire. Everywhere, the anguish of seeing no future. The absence of perspective is the most profound cause of stress and even profound psychological disorders. For example, in 2025 in France, 25% of teenagers will suffer from generalised anxiety disorders, 40% will have depressive symptoms and 17% will be likely to suffer from moderately severe or even severe psychological disorders[1].  And it's the same in every country in the world. Capitalism is breaking down and dragging all hope and future with it. It is the collapse of capitalism upon itself that is driving this nihilism, across all generations and in all countries.

In Sweden, the number of complaints lodged by teachers about violence against them has doubled in 10 years[2]. In the United Kingdom, dozens of teachers are assaulted by their pupils every year, one of the highest rates in Europe[3].  And stabbings are on the increase everywhere, leading to growing paranoia both inside and outside schools. In 2022, a report by the research arm of the US Department of Education predicted 93 shootings in a year, compared with 10 ten years earlier. In all four corners of the globe, the ‘epidemic’ of violence is raging, affecting younger and younger teenagers.

Everywhere the same responses

And to deal with it, the bourgeoisies are not competing in originality: hand-held cameras and self-defence courses in the United Kingdom, cameras and security gates in the United States, even arming teachers. And politicians are advocating greater judicial ‘firmness’. In France, just after these minutes of horror, Prime Minister François Bayrou proposed security gates, a stronger penal response and a ‘mental health’ plan[4].  Marine Le Pen could think of nothing more original than advocating the condemnation of parents.

Here and elsewhere, the only response that capitalism can provide to the increase in violence is ever more violence and repression. A 14-year-old is locked up without any real psychological help, parents are sentenced without any educational help, teachers are being given guns in response to shootings, and so on.

But to support a developing adult, you need human and financial resources, you need teachers and educational assistants in large numbers, you need doctors, school nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists, you need individual follow-up, you need help for families... Instead, we  see repression and, in the face of the crisis, the reduction in the number of professionals and care facilities.

Only the working class can reverse this phenomenon

These young murderers are not monsters. They are human beings who commit monstrous acts. They have been born into a sick, dying society. Their hatred and murderous intoxication are first internalised under the permanent terror of capitalist social relations, then explode in a series of despicable acts. Whether we are 14, 31 or 70 years old, we are all suffering the effects of the decomposition of capitalist society and its ravages around the world. What young people need is not surveillance cameras, punishment or law reform, but hope. And hope is to be found in the fight for a better future, first and foremost against poverty, job insecurity and the horrors that capitalism inflicts on us, and ultimately in the fight for a new society, without exploitation, crisis or war. And to fight together, across all generations and all trades, against the barbarity of the system. Only the struggle of the working class has a perspective to offer. "Workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Manon, 10 July 2025

 

[1]  Baromètre du moral des adolescents

[2] En Suède, l’inquiétude face à la violence croissante contre les enseignants

[3]  Royaume-Uni : des solutions face aux agressions des professeurs par leurs élèves

[4] Finally, Macron is going to endorse THE solution: banning the sale of knives to minors…