5 November: general strike, unions' dream or a real balance of power?

According to Libération, a broad union coalition is calling on private-sector workers and civil servants alike to mobilise over their pay this Thursday, 5 November. The CGT speaks of a "generalisation" of the strike. The paper notes the hope that, this time, the government will offer concrete and immediate answers. What we don't know at this hour: the real scale of work stoppages, which sectors will follow, and how much the executive is prepared to give up. The rest is our reading.

The words "this time" say it all. They presuppose there have been earlier times, when people marched, counted the demonstrators, heard a minister "take note", then went home. The dated day of action has become a republican ritual, almost a bank holiday without pay: the workers put their heart into it, the government puts its patience into it, and the payslip gains nothing.

Yet the question being asked is the most elementary there is: who gets what from what work produces? The Gazette's notes recall that profits are born of unpaid labour beyond what is needed to reproduce the worker's labour power. Productivity gains that never reach wages, a frozen civil-service index point alongside comfortable dividends: there is the mechanism, made visible, without any boss needing to be wicked. A union demanding higher pay is fighting over the price of labour. It is necessary, Marx would say, but not sufficient, since one debates the effects without touching the wage system itself. Still, struggle has one virtue: it builds solidarity and trust, two commodities the economy does not hand out on its own.

The word "general" also deserves a pause. Rosa Luxemburg, watching the mass strikes in Russia, noted that they almost always start from a very ordinary conflict: a wage in a small factory, working hours for shop assistants, a pension fund for railwaymen. And that the line between economic and political struggle becomes almost impossible to draw. In other words, a general strike is not decreed from a communiqué: it is born of a concrete conflict that spills over. Libération speaks of a "dream"; Luxemburg would say rather that the dream wakes when one group's demands meet another's.

Then there is the state's response, which will be the real test. It has two repertoires. The first: consultation, "elements of language", the promise of a timetable. The second: requisitions, minimum service rules, denunciation of the "hostage-taking" of users. Every debate on "essential services" is in fact a debate about the lever one is willing to tolerate in the hands of those who work. The motto speaks of liberty and equality; the right to strike appears in the 1946 preamble. Let's see whether the government rereads its classics, or whether it contents itself, once again, with watching the procession go by.