The 5 November strike: wages, sixth forms and roundabouts in the same street?

According to Le Monde, the trade union organisations have called for marches and a stoppage this Thursday, 5 November, across the whole of France. The youth movements, school pupils and students, had asked for a relay from the world of work; the paper also points to the presence of "gilets jaunes" and the bet on a convergence. Among the demands: higher wages, the safeguarding of public services and the defence of the right to protest. We do not know at this hour the real scale of the processions or the proportion of strikers: the dispatch does not give them. The rest is our reading.

The word "convergence" comes back every social autumn, like fallen leaves and anxious editorials. But the useful question lies elsewhere: who, in this odd pairing, really holds a power to block? The sixth-formers can make noise, the roundabouts can frighten, but only the employees who stop working touch production, and therefore profit. That is why they were for so long asked to strike "without bothering anyone", which amounts to asking for a cocktail without the alcohol.

On purchasing power, the reasoning is simple. A wage pays for what it takes for the worker to come back tomorrow; for the rest of the day, the employer pockets the difference. This is what Marxists call surplus value, and it has nothing to do with the nastiness of a boss: it is down to the mechanism. When productivity gains pile up on one side and payslips go nowhere on the other, the relationship becomes visible to the naked eye. Demanding a wage rise is therefore about reopening the division of those hours, not begging for a bonus.

There is also the line on defending the right to protest. The rules on picket lines, requisitions and "essential services" are debates about the lever we are willing to leave to employees. The Republic proclaims the right to strike in the preamble of its 1946 constitution; it should read it aloud more often, at the very least before legislating on public order.

Then there is the old lesson of Rosa Luxemburg, who watched Russia in 1905: large mass strikes almost always start from a modest conflict, a wage, working hours, a pension fund, and slide almost without a border towards the political. For her, the movement's worth lay not in the absence of an economic starting point but in the speed with which it changes scale. Transposed with caution, the idea says this: a one-day strike for wages can become something else when young people and the roundabouts join in. Can, not must.

The unions, for their part, are conducting what their tradition calls the economic struggle: necessary, never sufficient, since it haggles over the price of labour without touching the wage system. On Thursday, then, the test is not whether we march together, but whether we stop together. Processions make fine photographs; it is the silent workshops that make the negotiations.