On the 10th of September

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The call to “Block Everything” on September 10, 2025 is very different from the Yellow Vests’ call to occupy the roundabouts in October-November of 2018. Its source is not clearly identifiable, although Les Essentiels, a small pro-“Frexit” group, appears to have started it. Above all, it contains no reference that could signify a collective or collectives around a recognizable emblem, as the yellow vest or Hong Kong umbrellas may have been. The current mood, it would seem, is one of revolt, or at least anger or indignation (the aim being to cast a wide net), as if that’s all that’s needed to relay the call and embrace every possible demand and mode of action, from the most limited, like unplugging your devices, to the most extreme, like surrounding Paris. In this vague, vaporous environment, it’s easy to forget that there isn’t just one enemy on the other side (whoever the main enemy is taken to be — the state and its police, the government, Macron), but an entire organization of social relations in which we willingly or unwillingly participate, with their arrangement of hierarchical, reciprocal dependence and sedimentation, and which structures domination in a far more complex way than simple opposition between them and us, as if there were only two forces facing each other and it were enough for “us” to take the initiative any time why want, so why not on September 10?

In retrospect, the Yellow Vests movement displayed an astonishing ability to designate objectives that took into account the geographic and social situations of its participants. They were conscious of their inability to truly block anything, because they were aware of their relative exteriority to the relations of exploitation and production. The sites selected for occupation were therefore not production nodes, but areas of circulation that anyone could appropriate, if only temporarily, or at least repurpose (from the exchange of flows of goods to the exchange of words, without this being formalized in speech for speech’s sake, as was sometimes the case with Nuit Debout, or in the endless discussions “radicals” are so fond of). In short, they concretely turned their weakness into a strength, rather than simply exhibiting that weakness for all to see, as the proponents of the bogus “convergence of struggles” did at the time. The strength of the Yellow Vests was, among other things, that they kept a balance between direct action, free but measured speech (divisive issues were more often than not sidelined or deemed secondary), and the movement’s day-to-day reflexivity about itself. It never got lost in the weeds of discourse, nor did it engage in dialogue with the authorities or the media — hence its relative irreducibility, and the fact that there was never anything to negotiate.

What’s the situation today? The reasons to be angry are still there, and even amplified. We don’t have much reliable information on the people behind the September 10th call, but what we do know for sure is that they have no way of “blocking everything,” unless the truckers go into action. Conversely, during the health crisis, we saw that the fractions of employees or other workers suddenly designated as essential were essential precisely because their activity continued during the crisis, and, by comparison, the provisional activity of others ceased.

According to a few surveys, such as that of Le Monde on September 2, 2025, the initiative is particularly rooted in small and medium-sized towns, less so in the big cities, a trait that makes it both similar to the Yellow Vests — a movement that was not very urban — and different from it, since it isn’t concentrated in outlying areas. Workers/employees and retirees, two central groups among the Yellow Vests, are under-represented. Conversely, managers, high-school students, and economically inactive folks are over-represented. The “Block Everything” campaign is driven less by direct experience of economic precarity than by strong left-wing politicization, even if it wants to be autonomous from the parties and doesn’t engage in union-style forms of action. Added to this is a desire to get involved “for others,” which seems to motivate their mobilization. Now, while there really do exist “others,” they do not seem to constitute the preferred “target” of the politicized fringe, which reasons only in terms of “causes” rather than concrete situations (the issue of purchasing power thus appears only indirectly, through the desire to combat social inequality; and the critique of state-consumerism seems risky if, departing from its original degrowth framing, the movement ends up joining a broader critique of the state’s social intervention — as can be seen with the proposed new budget, the government’s emphasis on debt reduction, the restriction of medical aid to foreigners, etc.). In short, this voluntarist concern for others is likely to yield little reward, leaving its actors in the position of commanders without an army.

This external approach does not manifest itself here in a call to block public spaces, as in roundabouts or street demonstrations, but rather in a call to organize so that we can do everything from home and on our own terms, pandering to the idea that we dominate machines rather than them dominating us. The idea is to individually block the economic “system,” as if it were something external to us. First and foremost, it is a conception of an unblemished people that can’t help but call up bad memories¹; it also pretends that this “people” has already set itself in motion thanks to its ability to “hack” micro-technologies. While some (e.g. Paolo Virno²) boast about the supposed “collective intelligence” of movements, which have already incorporated the general intellect, and, why not, AI while we’re at it³, it’s enough to raise doubts about its alleged “autonomy,” for here we are far removed from the original workerist theses that Virno supposedly claims as his own.

The call for a “consumer strike” only heightens this exteriority and underscores the sociological background of the campaign’s initiators, given that a relatively large proportion of the population has already “gone on strike” against vacations and anything other than the purchase of basic necessities.

In the same way that the government’s imposition of Article 49.3 drowned out the June 2023 pension movement under a deluge of democratic arguments put forward by forces having little to do with the movement itself, the September 10 movement has already achieved the unintentional feat of being stifled, even before hatching, as attempts at infiltration are made by political forces (the parties of the former New Popular Front and the various groups of the “left of the left”) or trade unions (SUD), who have vowed not to be fooled a second time, after their blindness to the Yellow Vests movement.

The “indeterminacy” mentioned by some⁴ is therefore much lower than it was with the Yellow Vests; as for the question of its power, it cannot be assessed in the absence of any real setting in motion of what is, for the moment, only a call and not a movement. Today, there’s a certain amount of confusion between what used to be called a social movement — even in its variants in the “new social movement” from 1986 onwards, for example in France, with the train drivers’ and nurses’ movements, during which the red thread of class struggles was not yet cut (coordinations temporarily supplanting unions) — and movements like those emerging from the second half of the 2010s onwards. Following in the footsteps of Stéphane Hessel, the Nuit Debout initiative promoted indignation and public speaking through a sense of civic involvement. The Yellow Vests, for their part, expressed the immediacy of people who were fed up and direct action, albeit with a gradual reference to the French Revolution that historicized and politicized the movement from within, rather than through the intervention of outside forces. In spite of the criticisms leveled at it⁵, the promotion of the RIC [an initiative for referendums —trans.] showed a desire to move towards instituting, rather than signaling a will to institutionalize itself; what was sought were direct democracy practices that lay outside the forms enshrined in historical proletarian struggles. This tendency counterbalanced a tendency towards dégagisme [“Throw them all out!” —trans.] that is also present in the appeal today, which seems to combine civic-mindedness and left-wing populism (which explains the full-throated support from La France Insoumise).

Equally dubious is the suggestion that the movement’s “indeterminacy” ultimately could be a source of strength or power. In fact, power presupposes strong determination, as we saw in the state’s reactions to any forces that genuinely threaten it (the Yellow Vests in France, criminalization of struggles elsewhere). The Yellow Vests derived that strength not from the indeterminacy of their class composition and the heterogeneity of their demands, but from their action, from the confrontations with the state that occurred wherever their various collectives of struggle intervened in public space.

As Michaël Foessel wrote in Libération on September 4, 2025, the virtual mobilization of an “On ne veut plus” [We won’t go on any more] from below corresponds to an “On ne peut plus” [We can’t go on any more] from on high, a situation historically defined at the beginning of the 20th century as constituting the premise of a pre-insurrectionary phase — with the difference that words only have meaning in a precise historical context. There are reasons to doubt a “We won’t” from the grassroots, when it so often resembles a “We can’t” (form a collective, go on strike, etc.). As for the “We can’t go on any more” on high, it involves a specific government with its own constitution and voting system, which presupposes two blocs and not three. This is just one particular case of political deadlock in the more general context of a crisis in democratic regimes, but we’re not in 1917 Russia, when Lenin uttered his famous quote.

Nevertheless, while criticizing mainstream media, the initiators have no qualms about using its methods, as well as those of politicians: the announcement effect isn’t real, but it does generate real effects, as Foucault might have put it. Hospitals and clinics have canceled operations originally scheduled for September 10.

As for those who could actually enact meaningful blockades if they wanted, they’ve called for a strike on September 18, not wanting to get mixed up with “Block Everything” and lose the potential leadership of what exists only as a project. On the face of it, the unions’ hopes of signing onto a kind of new May 13 (1968) agreement, when the movement (essentially made up of students until then) decided to beg for support in exchange for a general strike, appear very slim here; they would no doubt be content if the government withdrew the planned elimination of two public holidays. Indeed, despite Mélenchon’s incidental call for a general strike, their tactics do not imply any revolutionary syndicalist reversal, suggesting that they have learned the lesson of the failed pension struggle in 2023. From the end of summer of 2023 right up to the present day, what dominates is clearly a diffuse fear on the part of the powers that be, but also a feeling of defeat and despair among those who fought them. In this sense, the fire is not smoldering beneath the usual surface of daily acquiescence.

Contrary to what is claimed by current-day proponents of the autonomy hypothesis, recent movements — at least in their outcome — do not attest to the growing autonomy of social movements, which those movements never aimed at to begin with, but to an autonomization of the social itself, insofar as the old social question has been “invisibilized” (to use a buzzword). This has led to the isolation of movements that, the media tell us, almost everyone supports... from a distance. The honking of horns here, the banging of pots and pans there, have no more influence than the cheering of fans in stadiums everywhere...unless you believe that everything is just a spectacle.

Translated by Ill Will

Cover image: A bus is torched on a freeway near Rennes, France, on September 10, 2025