Sixth-formers on blockade: austerity in the classroom, and the cost of living on the street

According to France 24, sixth-formers and students mobilised again on Thursday 5 November morning to denounce the lack of resources in the Éducation nationale (France's state education system), ahead of demonstrations planned across France later that day against the cost of living. In Aubervilliers, pupils gathered outside the Lycée Le Corbusier. According to the broadcaster, a police intervention there injured one of the teachers who had come to support them, in the head. The precise circumstances of that injury, the number of protesters and the number of schools blocked are not in the summary we have: we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the coincidence of the day is no accident. The same morning, a school gate is blocked over posts and classes worthy of the name, and in the afternoon people march against prices that are strangling them. Two grievances, one question: who pays? When the budget guts the school, it is a choice, not an accounting fate. The Marxist tradition describes the state as a manager of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie: it is not a neutral referee, and its budgets, tax laws and police bear the mark of property relations. It keeps a relative autonomy, and that is a terrain of struggle, but its limits are set by the need to let capital keep accumulating. Austerity is the ordinary illustration: savings are made on classrooms, never on dividends.

Next, the scene in Aubervilliers says something about the state's relationship with its young. Teenagers demand that the public school works; they are answered with a police intervention, and a teacher comes out injured. If the facts were confirmed, that would be a strange civics lesson: the state teaches by example what it does with demands that cost money.

What remains essential is what this movement teaches those who take part. Luxemburg saw in mass action a living school, where people organise by acting rather than waiting for the party line or a perfectly stocked strike fund. A high-school blockade is a very small school of that kind: you learn to vote for an action, to hold a picket line, to talk to a teacher who has become an ally, to understand that the budget is a political matter. No ministry offers that course.

The trap would be to give up a few posts in exchange for calm. A reform is worth first by what it does to the power and confidence of those who wrung it out: does it increase their strength, or send them home? A concession taken back next year, when the accounts demand it, is not worth a generation that has learned to organise.

The afternoon marches will show whether the link between pupils, teachers and wage-earners takes shape. For now, one thing is certain: those we are told are too young for politics have just shown they have already read the budget.