Students on the streets: the cost-of-living bill, seen from the lecture hall

According to Le Monde, between a third and a half of higher-education institutions were disrupted on Tuesday by blockades and demonstrations. Mobilised students say they want to "not give up" and to keep up the pressure, notably by marching through city centres. One unknown remains: the validation of their first semester.

That is what we know. The Le Monde piece does not detail, in the material available to us, the precise demands, nor the table of seven European countries cited by our newsroom. We will not invent it. There remains a question that this silence does not excuse us from asking: who, exactly, pays for a student to keep going until the exams?

In our reading, the answer has little to do with the lecture hall and a great deal to do with the kitchen. Housing, food, healthcare, getting around: all of this makes up what the Marxist-feminist tradition calls social reproduction, the work that produces and sustains people rather than commodities. A large part of it is unpaid or badly paid, long shouldered by women, and filed outside "the economy". When rent climbs and benefits do not keep pace, this work does not vanish: it shifts onto families. The father who transfers money at the end of the month, the mother who fills the fridge after the weekend, the student who stacks shifts at the checkout between lectures: that is the invisible expenditure.

Alexandra Kollontai observed, in Communism and the Family, that even under capitalism the education of children, from primary school through higher education, had become a responsibility of the state (our translation). The idea deserves turning over: if the state takes it on, it must bear its real cost, which includes the daily life of those it educates. Otherwise it passes the burden on to households, and to the most modest ones first.

There is also a lesson in method in this mobilisation. Trade unions fight over the price of labour; students fight over the price of the life that makes studying possible. It is not the same thing, but the logic is close: the strike and the blockade build solidarity and trust, and remind us that a balance of power is built through collective presence, not through pleading. Debates over what may be blocked are, as with picket lines, debates about the room for manoeuvre left to those who have nothing but their numbers.

As for the first semester, its fate is a small piece of blackmail on the scale of the university: the threat of losing credits for having demanded the means to live. What the authorities will decide is not yet known. We will follow it, keeping one image in mind: behind every march, there is a kitchen table where people are counting.