Joshua Clover, in an essay for Verso titled “The Roundabout Riots,” writes,

“The quest to discover the true subject of an insurrection always misses the variegations within the crowd. City dwellers and banlieusards have been present from the outset. Moreover, it is not the case that the French peripheries comprise a uniform populism with no commitments other than consumer shortfalls; this is simply what brings together actors with disparate concerns. People arrive at the movement without a direction, or with a hesitant intuition, and the events function as a sort of school for them. The inciting occasion of a riot, a movement, an uprising, is never identical with its meaning. Since the outset there has been a struggle within the struggle, a contest over its direction; it is always in this encounter that revolutionary possibility lives. While we are familiar with street movements drifting right — Brazil provides a disastrous example — the Gilets Jaunes have seemed to reverse this course at moments over the duration of disturbances, particularly as the weekly calls for Saturday convergences have meant a certain urbanization and have moved toward a broader proletarian base, including actors such at the Adama Committee. “The Truth and Justice for Adama Traoré committee” formed after Traoré’s 2016 death in police custody north of Paris — an event which sparked riots identical in kind if not scale to the three weeks of rioting that, in 2005, leapt from Clichy-sous-Bois to encircle Paris, landing in suburbs across France and beyond.

[…]

It is perhaps useful to think of the Gilets Jaunes events as an early climate riot, just as we understand much contemporary immigration to be driven by climate collapse. These two problematics — global circulation of populations and ecological crisis — will not simply serve as occasions to consolidate state power but are certain to converge, over the next decade, into something like “green nationalism” through a discourse of resource preservation and purportedly humanitarian provisions against climate refugees. There is no universalism that will not oppose this development through struggles for both open borders and for communal power in matters ecological.”