320,000 protesters in France: who pays for the cost-of-living crisis?

According to the BBC, more than 320,000 people demonstrated in France against rising living costs and the shoddiness of public services. Some protesters clashed with the police, and the broadcaster describes a protest movement spreading to other countries in Europe. The rest of the dispatch is thin: we do not yet know who was calling the protest, how many were injured or arrested, or how the government intends to respond. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Note first the usual order of the headlines: the "clashes" arrive quickly, the 320,000 people a little less so. It is a classic. When hundreds of thousands of people say they can no longer make it to the end of the month, the worry is about the shop windows. Public order has become the official commentary on social matters.

At bottom the question is simple: who pays for the crisis? The cost of living is the price of rent, of a tank of petrol, of the weekly shop, set against a wage that has not kept up. As for public services, they are what one might call the social wage: the hospital, the school, the railway, everything you do not pay for twice. When they decline, it is a pay cut that does not admit its name. The worker loses on one side on his payslip, and on the other at the counter.

The old mechanism of surplus value does not need a cruel boss to work. Workers produce more than they are paid, and the gap feeds profit. When productivity gains go to dividends while wages run behind inflation, the street is simply reading the accounts aloud. And to whoever replies that there is no money, it asks where it went.

The unions fight over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. Marx considered this fight necessary but insufficient, because it treats the effects rather than the wage system itself. One can add that it has one virtue: it teaches solidarity and confidence. A procession of 320,000 people is also a collective lesson in how things work.

Rosa Luxemburg observed that the great waves of strikes rarely begin with a grand slogan: a wage dispute in a small factory, a pension fund, a right to organise. Then everything follows in sequence, from the economic to the political. She also noted the reverse: isolated struggles, even warmly supported, can die without provoking a general storm. The question is which case we are in. The dispatch does not say, and nobody knows yet.

The Republic likes to recall its motto. "Égalité" holds a prominent place, between two price rises. If the mobilisation takes hold, the government will have to choose between responding on wages and public services, or going on responding with riot shields and tear gas. Recent history suggests it prefers the second option, which is cheaper in the short term.