A month of protests, bodies broken: what State violence tells us

According to Le Monde, which publishes an investigation today, 3 November, many people involved in the social movement have been seriously injured since the start of the school blockades, and even more so after the peak of mobilisation on 17 October. The daily gives the floor to several victims and questions the use of weapons as well as the responsibility of the security forces. One article's headline carries this cry: "I feel as though I've lost my leg". We do not have here the precise number of injured, the detail of the weapons involved, or any possible legal follow-up: we will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us begin with what this account demands: respectful silence before people who were frightened, who were hurt, and who, for some, saw their lives change in a matter of seconds. High-school students and protesters, who came to voice their anger, are going home with damaged bodies. No analysis should come before that.

But the political question remains, and Le Monde itself raises it: who answers for these injuries? We like to say that the police are a neutral referee, that they protect "order" the way one protects a common good. The Marxist tradition is less naive. Police, courts and budgets are not referees: they are institutions shaped by property relations and charged, in the last instance, with keeping them intact. More recent Marxists add nuance: the state has relative autonomy, and it is also a terrain of struggle. Fair enough. But when a social movement blocks, disrupts, disturbs, the nuance is measured by the distance between the protester and the baton, or the projectile.

We must be cautious: the investigation questions responsibilities, it does not settle them, at least in the summary we have. What remains is a pattern we know all too well: power invokes social dialogue while the street pays in flesh for its impatience. Cautious reformers, for their part, deplore "the violence" in general, placing those who strike and those who are struck back to back, then go back to negotiating a compromise that will cost capital nothing.

Yet a movement that rises up, starting from schoolchildren, has this precious quality: it learns fast. Mass movements, Luxemburg said, educate their participants more surely than any party school. What these wounded people learn, despite themselves, is the real nature of the order set against them. There remains the question that will tell whether this anger lasts: will it turn into organisation, solidarity, collective memory, or will it fade away in hospital and court corridors?

A state that wounds those who speak to it in the street has already chosen to stop listening to them elsewhere.