Calls for disobedience: "The sling of the independents against the bureaucratic state does not date from yesterday"

Éric Verhaeghe is a senior civil servant, essayist, economic journalist and lecturer from Belgium, naturalized French.

The self-employed have just won a fine victory this week over the bureaucratic tyranny which seeks to stifle them and to end the sociocide that has been under way for several decades.

The threat of civil disobedience by the restorers driven to the programmed disappearance forced Emmanuel Macron to postpone (temporarily) the confinement.

This tactical victory is one more step in the historic resistance of the French independents to the expansion of regulations that are increasingly hostile to the freedom of enterprise.

From the mobilization of restorers calling for civil disobedience this week, we will remember the retreat of Emmanuel Macron on the issue of confinement.

The risks of a general conflagration around the contestation of the administrative closures imposed on restaurateurs seemed sufficiently serious to the executive power to make the choice of a temporization.

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"No, the self-employed have not become assisted"

It would be wrong to limit the phenomenon to a simple one-off agitation.

In fact, it is part of a long historical series, in which the self-employed stubbornly resist the increasingly intrusive injunctions of a state run by a bureaucracy that hates entrepreneurial freedom and "

crumbling competition

".

The self-employed are largely helpless in the face of managers who have seized power in companies and in political decision-making.

Since the Liberation, the bureaucracy, which asserts itself more and more as the dominant political force in France, has an obsession: to cut all forms of work that escapes it, and to constantly develop the wage system.

Let us recall that, in 1945, around 30% of the working population escaped salaried employment, according to INSEE.

Until the invention of the auto-entrepreneur in 2008, this share was divided by three.

This is a real sociocide, which is not only due to the mechanization of agriculture.

It is also, and very strongly, due to the constant deterioration of the self-employed profession, whose regulatory inflation and fiscal instability is becoming more and more correct every day.

Badly represented politically, the independents are largely helpless in the face of the expansionist aim of the managers who have taken power in companies, but especially in political decision-making.

The history of the resistance to the sociocide of the independents began in 1946. At that time, the bureaucratic caste (largely resulting from the Council of State, with people like Pierre Laroque or Alexandre Parodi) who wanted to impose the monopoly of social security ( in the name of the protection of individuals, of course) comes up against the massive refusal of the self-employed to be integrated into this system which Vichy laid the first stone in 1941. After a show of force in the streets, the independents obtain not to see their pension scheme join the general scheme.

It was not until the arrival in power of other State Councilors, in this case Philippe Bas and Renaud Dutreil, in 2005, for the government to manage to “

repair

” the defeat of 1946, with the disastrous creation of the RSI.

The independents are today the main adjustment variable in the public policies of the technostructure.

During all these years, independents have been able, from time to time, to make their voices heard, notably with Pierre Poujade.

A few decades later, the CNIP has lost its luster, but we feel that social networks are giving a chance to a challenge and to a community of interests which is suffering and still lives a little more in an outcast situation.

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While France is crammed with public subsidies which serve mainly to protect civil servants and employees, it is not kind to the self-employed who want to keep their freedom of work.

These are today the great adjustment variable in public policies imposed by a technostructure that likes obedience and submission to shareholders and funds of all kinds.

The situation of our 250,000 restaurateurs, our 600,000 artisans and traders hit hard by the crisis, throughout the pandemic, has proven it.

More than ever, we understand that the real counter-power, in a democratic state, is not in the ranks of the wage-earner, but in the preservation of independent work.

They are the only ones capable, today, of really making the government back down.

Unlike Marxist delusions, private ownership of the means of production is not an instrument of oppression, but of liberation for society as a whole.