Protesters Injured: Complaint Against Nuñez a Test for the State

According to Le Monde, lawyers are announcing that they will take the case to the Court of Justice of the Republic (the body that tries ministers for acts committed in office) against the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez. This collective complaint concerns at least 18 people injured during the social mobilisation against the cost of living and the conditions faced by students. It will be filed within "three weeks", said lawyer Arié Alimi.

That is what we know. We still do not know the precise nature of the injuries, the circumstances of each one, the weapons or techniques involved, or what the Court will make of the case. The rest is our reading.

It comes down to one question: what does a state do when people march because rent, the weekly shop and student life are no longer manageable? It can listen, or it can contain. When protesters are carried away on stretchers from the procession, we already know which of the two methods won out that day. The complaint will not settle the substance, but it forces the question into the dock.

The choice of the Court of Justice of the Republic deserves a pause. It is the court that judges ministers for acts committed in the exercise of their duties: a special tribunal where power is, if one dares say so, judged in the family. One can see in this a step forward: the minister answers for the order he gives. One can also read it as the admission of a system in which governments have their own counter. We do not prejudge the outcome, which nobody knows. But Marxist tradition has taught us to view the police and the courts not as neutral arbiters, but as institutions shaped by property relations and charged, in the last instance, with protecting them. The state has a degree of autonomy, certainly, and it is a terrain of struggle: a legal challenge can wrest cracks open in it. That does not make it an ally.

This is where Rosa Luxemburg remains useful. She did not despise the gains won within the existing framework, but asked which way they tilted collective trust and collective strength. A case won by lawyers, however valuable it is for the injured, does not replace what the street learns for itself. If the complaint feeds organisation, assemblies and solidarity between students and workers, it serves a purpose. If it becomes the ultimate horizon, if we hand over to magistrates the defence of a right to protest that only mobilisation keeps alive, it demobilises.

Luxemburg also argued that democracy is indispensable to the working class, because it is by exercising and fighting for its rights that the class becomes aware of its interests. A right to demonstrate that is paid for in broken bones is no longer a right: it is a lottery.

Three weeks, then. In the meantime, the street need not wait for the Court's permission to keep speaking.