Strikes and Blockades: What If Victory Is Being Sought Right Now?

According to Reporterre, which publishes an interview with journalist and activist Arya Meroni, the social movement is carrying on after several intense weeks: the strike of 5 November, blockades returning to lycées (French secondary schools), and an "acte IV" (fourth day of action) planned for Saturday 7 November. Her idea, as the outlet summarises it: interweave strike tactics with spillover tactics, and win victories "right now". The dispatch is thin: we have neither the precise demands, nor participation figures, nor any detail on what this activist means by victories. What follows is therefore our reading, not a report on the interview.

Let us start with the strike, that old notion that the working day belongs to whoever sells it. Trade unionism, our notes remind us, fights over the price of labour: wages, hours, conditions. That is necessary, Marx said, but not sufficient, because you treat the symptoms without touching the wage system itself. Yet a strike remains a school: you learn solidarity, trust and, above all, that the machines do not run by themselves.

The problem is that the balance of power is now under surveillance. Minimum service rules, picket restrictions, requisitions: the debate over "essential services" is a debate about how much power we are willing to tolerate in the hands of those who work. An isolated strike, for one day, with lost pay attached, costs the person who strikes dearly and the person who suffers it very little. Hence the appeal of spillover: blocking means shifting the pressure to where it hurts, including onto those who cannot afford to lose a day's pay. And the lycées reopening the blockade front are a reminder that the refusal of work sometimes begins before one even enters the workplace.

Rosa Luxemburg had seen the trap of waiting. In her writing on the mass strike, she mocked those who held that a perfect organisation and a full treasury had to come first: political events, she said in substance, liberate workers long before that ideal is reached. Mass movements erupt from tiny sparks and teach faster than any party school. But the opposite tradition, that of discipline and political clarity, poses the awkward question: does anger become a lasting organisation, or does it fade after acte IV, and then acte V?

This is where "winning victories now" takes on its meaning. An immediate victory, however modest, proves that struggle pays, and it is the best recruiting tool there is. It would be absurd to scorn it in the name of the great day to come. What remains is the structure: as long as productivity gains evaporate before they reach the payslip, every concession wrested away is merely a down payment on stolen time.

The Republic loves to remind us that liberty is a right. It would do well to specify that the freedom not to work for a day, to block, or to gather in an assembly is part of that right, when everything else is locked down. Perhaps spillover is nothing more than this: the very Republican demand that our hours be given back to us.