At Malpassé, pupils want to block, but no longer know for whom

According to Le Monde, at the Diderot lycée, a state secondary school in the working-class Malpassé neighbourhood of Marseille's northern districts, the start of term was marked by several attempts at blockades. The paper also describes a lasting frustration among pupils shut out of the city-centre mobilisations, and students who hesitate over what to do next with the movement. The rest of this article is our reading, not the newspaper's account. We do not have, in the dispatch, the precise demands, nor the number of pupils involved: we will not invent them.

Which leaves the question that interests us: why does anger run up against the pavement? Between Malpassé and the city centre there is transport, time, sometimes money, and above all the sense that the movement is happening elsewhere, without you. A blockade is not just a matter of willpower. It presupposes someone minding the little brother, a parent who won't worry too much, a school record you can afford to put at risk. All of this is invisible work, and it weighs heaviest in modest households.

This is what Marxist feminist tradition calls social reproduction: the labour that produces people rather than commodities, caring, feeding, educating, minding. Largely unpaid or badly paid, mostly done by women, it is treated as external to "the economy". When public services retreat, this work does not vanish; it falls back onto households. A lycée in a working-class neighbourhood is precisely the place where one sees that transfer: pupils who study, and who on top of that keep up part of the home.

Alexandra Kollontai already observed, in Communism and the Family, that the education of children, even under capitalism, had become a responsibility of the state. The principle is set down: the public school is a collective burden. But a collective burden that is badly funded becomes private again. When the institution lacks resources, families make up the difference, or give up.

Conversely, one could read the pupils' hesitation as a simple lack of conviction. We see it rather as a realistic calculation. Trade unions have long learned this: solidarity struggle builds confidence, but it does not start from nothing. It needs relays, marches where you feel expected, people who come to fetch you. A movement that stays in the city centre and regards the northern districts as a suburb of protest reproduces, in its own way, the hierarchy it claims to fight.

We still do not know what the Diderot pupils will decide. What can be said is that their hesitation is not disinterest: it is a message addressed to those who organise. If the movement truly wants to speak in the name of the public school, it will first have to ask who, within that school, has the means to come to its door, and who is still waiting for someone to knock on theirs.