5 November: 70,000 police officers face a strike over cost of living

According to Libération, public and private sector workers are being called by the unions to mobilise this Thursday, 5 November, over the cost of living. Secondary school pupils, students and gilets jaunes (the yellow-vest movement) are expected to join them. The paper reports that the Interior Ministry (the French equivalent of the Home Office) is renewing its deployment of 70,000 police officers and gendarmes. Sophie Binet, quoted in the live blog's headline, denounces "an unprecedented challenge to fundamental freedoms". Libération does not detail, in the material available to us, the precise content of this charge or the measures it targets. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let's be sober about the figures: 70,000 officers is the announced deployment, nothing more. We do not yet know how it will be deployed, or whether there will be incidents. But the scale already says something. When workers demand money to fill the shopping trolley and the petrol tank, the state's first answer is to line up enough uniforms to fill the streets. Social demand, security response: the balance of forces is sometimes written in the simple juxtaposition of two numbers.

Marxists have long described the state as anything but a neutral referee: police, budgets and laws are shaped by property relations and, as a rule, protect them. One must qualify this. The state has relative autonomy and remains a terrain of struggle, but its limits are set by the need to sustain the accumulation of capital. It is no insult to police officers to ask what mission they are being given. That question falls on those who give the orders.

Sophie Binet's alarm about freedoms touches the sensitive point here. Rosa Luxemburg observed that bourgeois democracy draws the whole people into political life, but in the form of a parliamentarism in which class domination is not abolished: it is merely displayed. The right to demonstrate is real; it was wrested from power. But it exists within a framework that tightens as soon as the street becomes too inconvenient. Freedoms are not an asset one owns; they are conquests one keeps by exercising them.

Then there is the question that decides everything: what becomes of the anger after 5 November? Mass movements educate faster than any party school, and the presence side by side of workers, young people and gilets jaunes is a political fact in itself. But a day of action, however massive, can also serve as a safety valve: a march, then a return to the negotiating table. A mobilisation that limits itself to demanding concessions to be managed prepares the ground for them to be taken back when profits require it. The real measure will be whether this Thursday gives workers more power and confidence, or merely a good photograph.

A cordon of 70,000 officers can contain a procession. It cannot contain what people learn while marching.