November 5 strike: 270,000 on the streets at 1pm, according to the authorities

According to France 24, the national day of action called by the intersyndicale (the coalition of trade unions) drew 270,000 demonstrators on Thursday 5 November across 180 processions, outside Paris. That tally, taken at 1pm, comes from the authorities and was given out by the entourage of Laurent Nuñez, the interior minister. The channel headlines with "up to 700,000 demonstrators expected" nationwide. It also brings in grand reporter Pauline Godart and sociologist Karel Yon, a researcher at the CNRS (France's national research centre), though we do not have the detail of what they said here.

What we do not yet know, and it is a great deal: the final count, the share from Paris, the figure the unions will give, and the precise list of demands carried by each procession. The dispatch does not detail them. We will not pretend to know them.

Still, the mechanics of the numbers are familiar to everyone. A tally at 1pm, supplied by a minister's entourage, is an official snapshot, not a census. Another will follow, then another, and the unions will count differently. The battle over numbers is part of the strike: saying that there are few of you is already an attempt to make it so. So let us keep the sobriety reserved for sums drawn up by one of the parties.

On substance, our reading is this. When an intersyndicale marches 180 processions on a Thursday, workers lose a day's pay to say that their pay is no longer enough. The unions are fighting over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. The fight is necessary, as Marx would have said, but it treats the symptoms rather than the wage system itself. It nonetheless has a virtue that ministerial communiqués do not measure: it builds solidarity and trust. People learn to count themselves by counting one another.

We will be told, as always, that the street is not reform. Rosa Luxemburg, who studied the Russian mass strikes, nonetheless observed that they almost always begin with a partial conflict: a wage in a small factory, a cut in hours, a pension fund. Then the line between the economic and the political becomes, in her view, almost impossible to draw. In other words, asking for a heavier payslip quickly raises the question of who decides, and who benefits.

This is where the quarrel over figures becomes almost secondary. Productivity gains, profits and wages are not distributed by chance: unpaid labour, which theory calls surplus value, does not need a cruel boss to exist. It is enough that the distribution remains what it is. The Republic, which inscribes equality on its public buildings, could at least make room for those who remind it of its own motto.

We therefore await tonight's tallies, those of the unions and those of the place Beauvau (the Interior Ministry's headquarters), bearing in mind that none of them will say what the procession meant.