Universities and sixth-form colleges blocked: young people crash the party before 5 November

According to Le Monde, the blocking of around 15% of higher-education institutions continues this Tuesday, 3 November, with fresh "disruptions" also reported in lycées (sixth-form colleges and secondary schools). It comes two days before the nationwide interprofessional mobilisation (a strike involving unions across different sectors) on 5 November, and after the government's first announcements aimed at young people.

That is what we know. The rest, in the dispatch we have, is missing: we do not know the details of those announcements, the list of demands from students and lycée pupils, or how many people are expected on Thursday. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established finding.

First observation: the government has given something away before the big day itself. Nobody announces gestures "aimed at young people" out of pure fondness for lecture halls. When a government negotiates in advance with young people who do not yet have an employer, it has understood that the stakes go beyond classes. Lycée pupils and students are blocking the gates, but they are discussing what awaits them on the other side: how many years, for what salary, with what right to catch their breath.

This is where the question of working time comes back through the window. A generation promised long careers, pushed-back retirements and diplomas that protect against nothing has good reason to ask who owns its hours. The Republic writes "liberté, égalité" (liberty, equality) above the entrance of its lycées; it could add, in small print, "subject to productivity". And productivity has climbed sharply for decades without wages following: in economic language, that is surplus value; in general-assembly language, it is "we work more for nothing".

Second observation: the sequence itself is instructive. Rosa Luxemburg, studying the Russian mass strikes, noted that they almost always begin with a partial conflict, a wage dispute in a workshop, a pension fund, a cut in hours, and move very quickly from the economic to the political. We are not in Russia in 1905, and the comparison stops there. But the idea works as a compass: a "local" university blockade and a nationwide interprofessional strike day are not two separate movements, they feed one another. The government knows this, hence its concessions ahead of the deadline.

Third observation, more prosaic: trade unionism fights over the price and duration of work, which is necessary. But it always runs into the same limit, that of a system in which one negotiates the effects without touching the cause. The question is whether the executive's announcements are a response or a firebreak. The answer comes on Thursday, in the streets, and no doubt beyond.