7 November: 70,000 police officers against the cost of living, the state's response

According to franceinfo, the Interior Minister, Laurent Nuñez, announced on Friday that the security arrangement for the 7 November demonstrations would be "renewed", with 70,000 police officers and gendarmes mobilised. "The risk is exactly the same as for the previous Saturdays," he judged. That is what we know. The rest of this article is our reading.

The dispatch says nothing about the specific demands, the number of protesters expected, or any measures the government might be considering on the cost of living. We therefore do not pretend to know them. What is quantified, by contrast, is the police response: 70,000 uniforms. When the state knows so well how to count its agents and so poorly how to count its concessions, the question answers itself.

Let us stay sober. Police officers do a job; they carry out an instruction, and a minister in charge of public security may legitimately want to prevent violence. Nothing in what we have before us suggests that the demonstrators are anything other than people protesting difficult end-of-month finances. But sobriety does not rule out the question: why is the only visible response to social anger a public order deployment, rather than an answer on wages or prices?

The Marxist tradition offers a reading grid, to be handled with care. The state is not a neutral arbiter; it is shaped by the property relations it protects, even if it remains a field of struggle, with its relative autonomy. Its room for manoeuvre is governed by one imperative: that capital continue to accumulate. Faced with a demand on the cost of living, which touches profits, rents and energy, the temptation is strong to manage the street rather than touch what drives people onto it. Whether that will be the case here remains to be seen; the dispatch does not prove it.

Luxemburg also warns us against the other illusion: believing that concessions won through struggle accumulate peacefully towards socialism. The ruling class takes back what it gives when profits demand it. The right question is therefore not only "will we obtain something?", but "does this mobilisation strengthen the confidence and organisation of those who carry it out?" A day of marching, however massive, is not enough. It is over time, in assemblies, in the strike that is learned by doing, that a balance of forces is forged.

On Saturday, 70,000 police officers and gendarmes will be posted on the pavement. We shall see whether the government has planned as many ears as shields. A democracy is measured less by the size of its cordon than by what it is prepared to hear behind it.