Learjet in Florida: nine dead, and a 31 October mobilisation we cannot document

According to Al Jazeera, nine people died in the crash of a Learjet at Greenacres, near West Palm Beach, Florida. The aircraft, a private jet, was flying between Austin, Texas, and the Bahamas. At this stage, the dispatch says nothing about the victims, the cause of the crash or the rescue operation. We will not invent it. First, a thought for the dead and their families.

The editorial brief for the day was different: to write about the 31 October mobilisation against the rising cost of living, and about Emmanuel Macron's insistence on placing the ballot box above the street. But the dispatch we have contains neither an account of that day, nor turnout figures, nor any remarks by the president. We will therefore not attribute to anyone words we have not verified. What follows is our conditional reading of a question of structure rather than a finding.

If a government keeps repeating that the ballot paper must trump the demonstration, what is it doing? It is setting two forms of politics against each other, as though one must extinguish the other. Yet the vote splits anger into isolated individuals, one per polling booth, every five years. The street gathers it together. Rosa Luxemburg said as much of the mass strike: workers must come together en masse, leave the factory and the workshop, and overcome the atomisation imposed on them by the daily yoke of capital. She saw in it, she wrote, "the first natural and impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle of the proletariat" (our translation, Grève de masse, parti et syndicats).

The reflex of a state is to channel: to turn grievance into a programme, the programme into a campaign promise, the promise into a deadline. Nothing illegitimate in that in itself, and nobody is asking anyone to scorn the vote. But the right question is not "ballot or street". It is the one Luxemburg asked about reforms: does a measure, a timetable or a compromise increase the power and confidence of those who are fighting, or does it demobilise them? A concession won through collective pressure can be taken back as soon as profits demand it. A mobilisation redirected towards a distant electoral deadline risks fading before it has won anything.

To judge whether this is what is at stake after 31 October, we would need to know what was said and done that day, and what the organisers intend to do with it. We are waiting for the facts. In the meantime, a plane has come down in Florida, and social anger has never needed a flight plan: it always lands somewhere. The question is whether it touches down on a runway or in a ploughed field.