31 October: 320,000 or 500,000, and who speaks for the street?

According to Le Monde, between 320,000 and 500,000 people marched on 31 October across France, calm for the most part, at the call of unions and youth movements. Still according to the paper, clashes broke out at the end of the march in several major cities, just as night was falling and the gatherings crossed calls to protest on the occasion of Halloween. The dispatch says nothing more: not the detail of the demands, not the toll of the clashes, not the identity of those who provoked them. We do not know yet, and we will not pretend otherwise.

What the dispute over numbers tells us is another matter, and this is our reading. The unions put the figure at 500,000, the ministry at 320,000. A gap of 180,000 people is no mere quarrel over arithmetic. To count is to decide who has the right to say "we". A government that lowballs is not seeking the truth; it is seeking a balance of power: the thinner the column looks, the less the street weighs against Parliament. The organisers, for their part, are happy to inflate, and that is not innocent either: the battle of the figures has become their main terrain, as if the strength of a movement were measured by a headcount rather than by what it is capable of blocking, organising and deciding for itself.

This is where the Luxemburgist tradition is useful. Rosa Luxemburg saw in mass action a living school, where one learns by doing, not a parade choreographed in advance by a general staff. An authorised march, on a marked route, that ends on the dot, is the opposite: a demonstration, not an apprenticeship. She also wrote that May Day, that "lame horse" (to use the phrase she cites in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions), could regain its place of honour when the mass struggle prevailed. A march is worth only what it prepares.

As for the clashes at the end of the day, caution is required. It would be too convenient to make them, as a certain press will insist, the sole face of the day, and equally too convenient to excuse them with a wave of the hand. What can be noted is the mechanism: when the head of the procession has finished its route and the union stewards pack up, the street finds itself facing the police with no one left to organise anything. The disorder of the night is also a mirror of the agenda.

The real question, then, is not 320,000 against 500,000. It is whether those hundreds of thousands of people leave with more power and confidence, or with the feeling of having been counted and then sent home. A crowd that is tallied remains an audience; it becomes a force only on the day it stops asking to be counted.