After a classic start, the current social crisis has gradually taken on another dimension. A dimension that the economist, historian and anthropologist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) can help us to decipher. For him, the capitalist mode of production requires commodification « fictive » land, money, and labor. Fictional, because these three elements of society are not ” Really “ goods and services: they are not “products to be sold”.
The biosphere pre-exists humanity, so it is not “produced”. Monetary creation is not a market production for commercial purposes, but an essential sovereign act. Work – that is to say human life – is created, of course, but not with a view to sale: we do not create children with the aim of selling them! And yet…there is a market for natural resources, a financial market…and a labor market.
Ces “fictitious goods” are at the foundation of the revolution inherent in capitalism: the biosphere, society, human life are placed at the service of economic efficiency… instead of the economy being placed at their service, or subject to their imperatives. This inversion puts society under tension. The productive imperative moves into an individual imperative to act in an instrumental, efficient way, and provokes a destruction of the social and political bond. For Polanyi, it was this social disintegration that caused the democratic collapse and the emergence of fascist regimes in the 1920s.
Argument of financial urgency
Contrary to this process, the post-war construction of social protection for employees can be analyzed as the – partial – reintegration of economic issues into the social and political sphere – a reintegration that averts fascism and preserves democracy. . This reintegration held until the 1990s, before being gradually and methodically challenged within the framework of what is often described as a “neoliberal political regime”. This questioning has weakened social ties and put employees under tension.
Today, the urgency well understood in Europe is obviously to repair this social bond, to rethink a system allowing to maintain the common good, in ecological constraints finally integrated. However, this is not the choice made by the President, who, despite a fragile relative majority, has chosen to go further, stronger, more brutally, in the deconstruction of what appears to him to be a “old world” and in the assertion of the necessary domination of the principle of market and efficiency in all non-regular domains.
You have 55.9% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.