5 November strike: can we make the bosses pay by acting from the bottom up?

According to Reporterre, a French environmental news site, the intersyndicale is calling a strike for 5 November. Anasse Kazib, a candidate in the presidential election, believes the movement, if it is to last, will have to organise "from below". In an orange high-visibility vest and with a broad grin, he was handing out leaflets to commuters at the Gare du Nord in Paris on 3 November. "It's for Thursday's strike!" he explained to the puzzled. The title of the interview sums up his thesis: "With a strike, you hit big business where it hurts, in the wallet." Support for young people, purchasing power and wage rises: those are the themes he cites. The rest of the interview is not in our dispatch, so we do not know the details of his proposals or the exact content of the intersyndicale's call.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The word "wallet" is the most honest in that sentence. A strike is not a petition, it is a subtraction: while arms are folded, profits stop. If we follow the logic of surplus value, the wage covers what is needed for the worker to return tomorrow, and the rest of the working day enriches someone else. So when productivity gains do not reach the payslips, demanding higher wages amounts to demanding the return of part of that time. The debate over purchasing power is, at bottom, a quarrel over who owns the hours.

Unions, as is readily recalled in the Marxist tradition, fight over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. That is necessary, but it does not challenge the wage system itself. And the right to strike, which we love to celebrate in preambles, is always discussed in terms of leverage: how much power are we willing to concede to those who stop work, and at what point does the minimum service become a minimum of strike action?

Then there is the "from below". Rosa Luxemburg, observing the mass strikes in Russia, noted that they almost always began with a modest conflict: a wage dispute in a small factory, a struggle to shorten the working day, or over a pension fund. The boundaries between the economic and the political, she said, became almost impossible to draw. We are not comparing France in 2026 with Russia in 1905; that would be ridiculous. But the lesson holds: movements are not decreed from a station leaflet. They arise when a payslip demand meets shared anger.

A candidate handing out leaflets to hurried travellers is not running a strike. At best, he is doing his job as an activist. The question is whether workers themselves will organise in their workplaces so that 5 November is not just one more day in the calendar of social rituals. The Republic promises equality; the bosses, for their part, are moved only by cash. Thursday will show whether they tremble.