5 November: 600,000 Protesters According to the Interior Ministry, 1.6 Million According to the CGT

According to France 24, which is following the day live, nearly 600,000 people marched on Thursday 5 November across France according to the Interior Ministry (Beauvau), against nearly 1.6 million according to the CGT. The live blog's title speaks of social discontent that is "going up a notch", with mobilisations involving civil servants, secondary school pupils, a police union and the question of pensions. The detail of the demands, the proportion of strikers and any incidents is not specified in the material available to us: we will not invent it.

What remains is this figure, or rather these two figures. A million-person gap is not a rounding error; it is a disagreement about what counts as a crowd. Beauvau counts so that the country looks calm, the CGT counts so that it looks upright. Our reading: the truth probably lies somewhere between the two, but the quarrel suits everyone, because as long as we argue about how many marched, we do not argue about what they are marching for.

And what they are marching for is old: how many hours of a life belong to the employer, and at what age those hours are finally returned. Unions, a Gazette note reminds us, fight over the price of labour, its hours, its conditions. Marx judged this struggle necessary but insufficient, since it attacks the effects rather than the system of wage labour. The debate on minimum service, pickets and requisitions is the debate about how much room for manoeuvre workers are willing to be granted. The right to strike is recognised, much as a pedestrian is recognised the right to cross the road: provided they get in nobody's way.

The presence, in the same procession, of civil servants, pupils and police officers interests the analyst. Rosa Luxemburg observed of Russia in 1905 that great mass strikes almost always start from a partial conflict, a wage, a pension fund, a cut in working hours, before tipping into the political, with no clear border between the two (The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions). We do not claim Paris is Saint Petersburg; the comparison stops where prudence begins. But the idea holds here: an "interprofessional" day says precisely that separate angers are starting to recognise one another.

What we do not yet know: whether this day will have a sequel, whether the government will move, whether the strike will be renewed. What we do know: when productivity gains never reach the payslip and retirement recedes, the street becomes the last open counter. The Republic has written the right to strike into its preamble; nobody asks it to love that right, only to reread its own texts. And, as for the counting, to lend Beauvau a calculator.