In Nîmes, apprentices join the street: the plane spares no workshop

Según Le Monde, in an article published on 6 November, pupils and teachers at the vocational and apprenticeship training centres of Nîmes and its surrounding area are also mobilised. They remain on the sidelines of the lycée student protests, the daily notes, but share the same worry about their future, as the funds allocated to their sector suffer, it writes, regular cuts from the plane.

What we know stops there: the dispatch details neither the figures for the cuts, nor the number of people mobilised, nor the forms of action. Everything else is our reading.

The phrase "coup de rabot" is perfect: it evokes the joinery of austerity. No grand decree, no tragic scene, just a blade that passes, year after year, and wears away hours, posts and machines. This is the state as Marxists describe it: not a neutral referee, but a manager of the day-to-day affairs of capital, whose budget mirrors its priorities. Apprenticeship is praised in speeches; it is planed down in the accounting tables. The young people destined for the workshop discover that skilled labour counts for less than the balance sheet.

One detail the Le Monde headline hints at is worth stressing: "à l'écart", on the sidelines. General lycée students on one side, apprentices on the other, as if society had taken care to partition youth before it could meet. That partitioning is not natural. It serves order: a youth divided by track negotiates separately, pleads separately, loses separately. That the Nîmes apprentices are setting themselves in motion, even without merging with the lycée procession, is what matters. Common interests are discovered in action, far more surely than in communiqués.

Rosa Luxemburg mocked those who waited, before acting, for perfect organisation and a well-stocked strike fund. Events, she said in substance, liberate workers well before the ideal organisation exists. The apprentices have neither strike chest nor apparatus; they have anger and the obviousness of their situation. That is enough to begin, and it is in that beginning that the rest is learned: speaking in assembly, deciding together, holding on.

The trap, of course, exists. Cautious reformers will offer consultation, a readjusted envelope, a "dialogue social" as a final settlement. The test remains simple: does a measure strengthen the confidence and collective power of young people, or does it send them back home? A top-up wrested by mobilisation is worth having; a top-up that puts the mobilisation to sleep costs dearly. What remains to be seen is what the Nîmes apprentices will make of this, and whether lycée pupils and apprentices will end up marching in step. The plane, for its part, has never distinguished between tracks: it is high time its victims stopped doing so.