After three weeks of strikes, the government is looking for a way out, not necessarily yours

According to franceinfo, the mobilisation is entering its fourth week and could regain momentum as early as Monday 2 November, boosted by the return to school. Opposite it, again according to franceinfo, the government is "hammering out" potential ways out of the crisis. So much for the facts. As for the rest, we don't know yet: the dispatch says neither what these exits are, nor precisely what the protesters are demanding, nor how many of them there will be. What follows is therefore our reading, not a finding.

Let's start with the vocabulary, always instructive. We speak of a "way out of the crisis", as if the crisis were a weather system and the government a forecasting service. But a strike is not a storm: it is a balance of power. And when an executive seeks to "get out" of one, the real question is whether it wants to put out the fire or answer those who lit it. Calming the streets and meeting the demands are not two ways of saying the same thing, even if official statements like to confuse them.

The usual toolkit is well known. There is the cosmetic concession, which costs little and sells well: a "review clause", a consultation, a mission. There is the appeal to responsibility, which reminds parents that children are going back to school. And there is, never far away, the debate over "essential services", that is, over how much power we are willing to tolerate in those who stop work. That debate never concerns the hours of people's lives, only the hours of traffic.

Trade unionism, Marx reminded us, fights over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. A necessary fight, but one that treats the effects rather than the wage system itself. And perhaps that is why governments are so skilled at negotiating: you can concede on a figure without ever conceding on who owns the hours. One index point here, one year more or less of work there, and the order of things stays in place.

Rosa Luxemburg, however, observed about the mass strikes in Russia that almost all of them begin with a partial conflict, a wage, a length of the working day, a pension fund, before very quickly moving through the stages to political demands. She writes that it is "almost impossible to draw a border" between the economic and the political (our translation, Rosa Luxemburg, "Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions"). There is no need to transpose 1905 Russia to Paris: let us simply note that what begins as a technical quarrel tends to overflow.

That is the dilemma of the week. If the "exits from the crisis" are merely a manual for defusing tension, they risk feeding what they are meant to extinguish. If they touch the substance, that is to say who gains what and who controls time, then we can speak of a response. We will wait to see the content before handing out medals. In the meantime, the Constitution guarantees the right to strike; the government, for its part, mainly guarantees that it is looking for a way out. We would simply like to know which side of the door it is standing on.