31 October: the government wheels out the bogeyman before the cost-of-living march

According to Libération, the interior and justice ministers have multiplied alarmist statements and calls for "extreme firmness" on the eve of the new nationwide day of action over the cost of living, on 31 October. The paper also points to references to Halloween masks and to the counter-terrorism prosecutor's office (parquet antiterroriste). We do not, from the dispatch, have the detail of the statements or the expected scale of the security arrangements: everything that follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The starting question is nonetheless simple: people march because their money runs out on the 15th. Yet before the first procession has even set off, the public debate is shifting from wages to criminal records, from the price of a basket of shopping to the smashed shop window. The method is a familiar one: by talking about order first, the reason for marching is left in the shadows. If violence occurs, it should be condemned and prosecuted as such, soberly, without making it the banner of a movement that is demanding the means to live. But to announce it at full volume is already to stage it.

One can read this through what Marxists say about the state: neither a neutral arbiter nor a simple puppet, but an apparatus (police, courts, budget) whose limits are set by the need to preserve the accumulation of capital. When protest touches on the sharing of wealth, the security register becomes a reflex of conservation. To wave counter-terrorism at a march over prices is to deliberately blur the scale: worried workers fretting about their rent do not belong in the same category as armed threats.

There is also a calculation of attrition. A procession described in advance as dangerous is one whose families, pensioners and undecided participants one hopes will melt away. Mass movements, Rosa Luxemburg reminded us, are a school: one learns by marching, by organising, by discovering one's strength. Fear dripped from above aims precisely at shutting that school before the autumn returns.

Then comes the real question, which the dispatch does not settle: will the anger of the 31st turn into lasting organisation, into assemblies, into committees in workplaces, or will it evaporate into one more day, with the union calendar as its only prop? A government that answers the cost of living with communiqués about firmness offers no concession to haggle over, and that may be its confession: unable to answer the question posed, it prefers to change the question. The Halloween masks raise a smile; the government, for its part, plays at frightening itself so as not to have to answer.