“We must thank François Ruffin and Fabien Roussel for putting work back at the heart of the debate on the left”

Lhe place of work in society and in the project that the left must propose to the French should not be controversial. Beyond the slogans and little phrases that were exchanged by each other, François Ruffin (MP for La France insoumise) and Fabien Roussel (MP for the North and national secretary of the French Communist Party) recalled that the aspirations of our fellow citizens are not those of a post-work society, but those of a society that can provide everyone with decent work and a vector of emancipation.

Let’s start by recalling the obvious: there is no society without work. This is true for any economic system, whether capitalist or not. In fact, work, whether salaried, independent, family or produced voluntarily for an association, is the only source of wealth for the community.

The social state was thus constructed

Karl Marx (1818-1883) himself, theoretician of labor value, never denied its importance. When he developed in the middle of the XIX^e century his reflections and his writings on the capitalist system, he denounces the alienation by the work of the proletarian dispossessed of his individuality and his personal contribution.

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The proletarian is he who possesses only his labor power, which he sells against a poverty subsidy. The common idea of ​​the XIX^e century, among all the philosophers and actors of a socialist movement in construction, it is that the emancipation of the workers must go through their association, thus giving them control of the work tool and the benefit of its product.

Faced with the exploited work embodied by wage labor, socialism dreamed of emancipated work, organized collectively by the workers themselves. But wage labor has spread, so much so that at the beginning of the 20th^e century, the conditions of organization of production and of our societies have made it the main vector of income distribution, notably through the creation of Social Security.

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For its part, social law has come to protect the employee, improve his working conditions and defend trade union expression within companies.

The social state was thus built patiently, as the economist Christophe Ramaux reminds us in his latest book, For a republican economy. An alternative to neoliberalism (De Boeck, 336 pages, 21.90 euros). One of its concrete applications was to attach to the status of employee a legal framework aimed at getting out of capitalist arbitrariness.

The same logic of alienation

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