Cost of living: 70,000 police for Act III, and French Guiana is parched

According to RFI, this Saturday, 31 October, brings a new day of demonstrations across France, the third "acte" of a movement against the cost of living. Unions, secondary-school pupils and Gilets jaunes are expected in the marches. The Interior Ministry describes the day as one of "very high risk" and announces an "exceptional" security operation: 70,000 police officers and gendarmes, just as during the 24 October mobilisation.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. First a caveat: the RFI dispatch says nothing about French Guiana, nor about the record drought or the water shortages you may have heard about. We therefore have no figures or testimony to offer on that territory here. What we can do is ask the structural question, and it is less remote from the Paris boulevards than it might seem.

In mainland France, the cost of living is a matter of tight budgets. In the overseas territories, it is a permanent condition, inherited from an economy built to export towards the centre and import from it. Analysts of dependency describe this mechanism: one is not "behind", one has been configured to supply raw materials and markets. When water runs short in a territory that is rich in forest, rivers and rain for half the year, drought does not explain everything. One must look at who invested in the networks, who neglected their upkeep, and who decides from far away.

Guiana is also a territory where gold, land and timber have long attracted outside appetites. For Marxists, this dispossession is not over: concessions, the privatisation of services, and the transformation of common goods into capital continue under more polite forms. A dry tap is its domestic face.

There is finally the climate. The populations who have emitted the least are the first to bear what endless accumulation offloads onto ecosystems and the poorest. A "record" drought is a meteorological event, but its social effects, who goes thirsty, who waits for the tanker truck, who pays for bottled water, are a matter of social organisation.

One may wonder, with a bitter smile, that the state can mobilise 70,000 agents in a single weekend to police anger, yet struggles to guarantee running water to French citizens 7,000 kilometres from Paris. This is not a charge against the police, who carry out orders. It is a question of political priorities.

What we do not yet know: the exact extent of the shortages, the communes affected, the local and national responsibilities. What we do know is that the same logic, that of a centre managing its peripheries at a distance, links the marches of this Saturday with the queues for water. Protesters in the Hexagone speak of prices. Those in the overseas territories could legitimately speak of dignity, and the first does not go without the second.