Lecornu with neither money nor a majority: the street holds up a mirror to the government

According to franceinfo, the intersyndicale (the alliance of France's main trade union confederations) is calling a major mobilisation on Thursday over purchasing power, while youth organisations continue their blockade operations. Still according to franceinfo, the Lecornu government has few levers to respond to this persistent discontent, six months before the presidential election. The article's headline quotes a line that rings like a confession: "We have neither money nor a majority". What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

At this stage, we do not know what the executive is prepared to put on the table, and the extract we have says nothing about the detail of the demands or the expected size of the turnout. So let us stay with the structural question, which is the most interesting one.

A government without a majority and without budgetary room is parliamentary management laid bare. Budgets, taxation and spending rules are not neutral referees: they are shaped by the need to let capital accumulate, and public power remains a prisoner of that, even when it enjoys a certain autonomy. Saying "we have no money" is rarely a description of a desert. It is a statement about where the money will not be sought. Profits, for their part, do not appear on the agenda of scarcity.

So can the government give anything up without a class confrontation? Perhaps a bonus, a gesture, a one-off cheque, calibrated so that Thursday remains just another Thursday. But Rosa Luxemburg warns us: reforms wrested by organised workers do count, but they are not socialism in kit form, delivered in small instalments. The ruling class takes back what it has conceded when profits demand it. The criterion, then, is not the size of the concession but its effect: does it strengthen the confidence and collective strength of those who won it, or does it send them home pacified and disarmed? A compromise that demobilises is a bill deferred.

This is where the blockading youth and the intersyndicale have a card to play, provided they do not allow themselves to be reduced to a drawing-room balance of forces with Matignon (the French prime minister's office). Luxemburg saw the mass strike as a living school: one leaves the atomisation of everyday life there, discovers that one is many, and learns by doing (The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions). She also mocked the opportunists who dreamed of a class struggle reduced to a parliamentary duel; history, she said in substance, has answered otherwise.

The Assembly theatre, with its arithmetic of avoided 49.3s (the constitutional device that lets the government pass a bill without a vote) and brandished censure motions, will no doubt go on. But while the accountants count votes they do not have, others are counting their strength. Six months before a presidential election, a power with neither money nor a majority may discover that what it lacks most is something no budget can fund: consent.