High schools and universities blocked: young people refuse to pay the bill

According to Libération, several institutions are blocked in Rennes, Toulouse and Lyon this Tuesday. Youth organisations, determined to "not give an inch" in the face of government announcements they consider insufficient, are calling for mass blockades before joining Thursday's national mobilisation on purchasing power. The details of the demands, the number of institutions affected and the government's response do not appear in the material available to us: we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

We speak readily of "blockades" as if they were a disruption to the timetable. Look instead at what is being blocked: the place where the next generation is made, day after day. In Marxist-feminist thinking, schooling falls under social reproduction, that work which produces people rather than commodities: caring, feeding, nursing, teaching. It is badly paid or not paid at all, and it is filed outside "the economy", until the day it stops running.

The question this mobilisation raises is therefore very concrete: who pays when schooling is cut back? When a teaching post disappears, the work does not evaporate. It moves. Classes fill up, tutoring becomes a family affair, and it is, as always, mothers who patch things together in the evening, between the kitchen and homework. Families who can afford it buy private lessons; the rest make do. Austerity makes no savings: it shifts the cost onto households, quietly.

Note too the link the youth organisations draw with purchasing power. This is no accident of timing. A sixth-former or student knows what rent, food and transport cost. Alexandra Kollontai observed long ago that, even under capitalism, the education of children had become a responsibility of the state; she saw in this a sign that the burden could pass from the family to the collective. The reverse movement, the one we know today, sends that burden back to the family.

Then there is the limit that the trade union movement knows well: blocking means pressing on the price of labour and conditions, not yet changing the system that sets them. But a struggle also serves this purpose: learning to count yourselves, to hold on, not to feel alone. For young people of sixteen or twenty, it is a first lesson in political economy, more effective than a lecture.

We will see on Thursday whether the link with employees takes hold. That is where everything will be decided: a youth that blocks its schools and lecture halls makes noise; a youth that joins workers in workshops, hospitals and schools in strike begins to exert pressure. The government will no doubt judge that its announcements are enough. Those concerned, for their part, know how to count what the bill costs them.