Ferghane Azihari is General Delegate of the Free Academy of Human Sciences (ALSH) and member of the Society for Political Economy (SEP). On October 21, he published an essay on the ecological question at the Presses de la Cité.
In 2013, the essayist Hakim El Karoui published a book called
The Struggle of the Ages
. He then observed that the social system consolidated after the Second World War by and for the seniors turns against the new generations, which are burdened with debts and taxes by their ancestors. The financing of pensions is the main vector of this intergenerational plunder: "
The baby-boom generation, who had few children, should have saved to finance their pensions.
», Explains El Karoui in an interview for Le Figaro.
The improvidence of the elderly has turned into a burden for the young working people.
The Molinari Economic Institute notes that pensions alone explain 59% of the growth in public spending and deficits from 1959 to 2017. Today, pensions consume a quarter of public spending and risk weighing even more heavily on people. active if nothing is done to correct this drift.
PAYG pensions and intergenerational plunder: the original sin of Pétain and the National Council of Resistance
This situation was foreseeable. The historian Philippe-Jean Hesse tells us in a work published in 2001 (
Social protection under the Vichy regime
, Presses Universitaires de Rennes) that officials under Vichy were already pointing out to the thurifers of the reparation - who made up the entourage of the Marshal Pétain - that their reform would cause budgetary imbalances due to demographic dynamics. But the law of March 14, 1941 which plundered savings capitalized in pension funds to finance the allowance for old salaried workers enshrined the victory of squandering over provident insurance. The CNR will extend this fatal victory by endorsing a pay-as-you-go pension system that works on the backs of the working people,with the perverse effects that we are seeing today.
The electoral weight of the seniors means that the ruling classes will always prefer the last two scenarios until the explosion of the system.
Ferghane azihari
The distribution constitutes a trap which eventually forces governments to choose between lowering pensions, extending working life or increasing the tax burden on the working classes. The electoral weight of the seniors means that the ruling classes will always prefer the last two scenarios until the explosion of the system. According to the avenues of reform identified in the press, Emmanuel Macron and his government do not intend to upset this ritual. Anyone who shows logic knows, however, that only a return to free foresight and capitalization would allow us to get out of the vicious circle into which Pétain and his successors have thrown us. However, the idea of capitalization comes up against strong social resistance,in particular on the left of the political spectrum.
The classic objection puts forward the intolerable risks to which workers' savings are exposed when they are invested in the financial markets. But one can doubt the sincerity of this argument when it is used by those who denounce for 150 years the exuberant profits of these shareholders who "get rich while sleeping", to use the phrase of François Mitterrand. The same attitude prevails among the followers of Thomas Piketty, who argue that capital has enjoyed outrageous returns (and greater than economic growth) for decades despite crises. Curiously, however, they refuse to draw the conclusion that the French working classes must be allowed to become shareholders in the industry.
When the left fears the increase in collective fortune
Logically, one cannot be indignant at the generous remuneration of shareholders, deplore the fact that the proletarian is reduced to selling his labor power in order to live for lack of being the owner of the means of production, while depriving him of his faculty of recourse. to capitalization.
Unless the ulterior objective is to prevent him from improving his situation.
The question of workers' savings and capitalization alone condenses all the contradictions of the socialist tradition, which are far from new.
Karl Marx also feared that the workers who managed to acquire capital through savings would give up making a revolution against capitalism.
Ferghane azihari
While jealous of the bourgeoisie, Karl Marx feared in a text written in 1847 that these “triple machines of despotism” that are the savings banks which capitalize the payments of the proletarian transform him into a stingy and greedy “bourgeois calculating machine”. by inflating the capital of his enemies. He also feared that the workers who managed to endow themselves with capital through savings would give up making a revolution against capitalism. Forty years later, Jules Guesde, the great French popularizer of Marxism, accused the savings banks ... of perfecting the industrial tool and throwing the workers out of work. During the debates on the law on workers 'and peasant pensions of 1910, the socialist Alexandre Luquet denounced the fact that workers' savings could finance theforeign industry, while it also contributes to the satisfaction of national needs.
The opponents of workers' savings visibly concede its capacity to increase the mass of capital. But they curiously dread this process which distinguishes the developed countries from the nations of the Third World. It is indeed because France is more capitalized than sub-Saharan Africa that a French maintenance worker lives better than a sub-Saharan teacher. And it is because Switzerland is more capitalized than France that a Swiss maintenance worker earns a better living than a French teacher. Capitalization therefore does not only benefit individuals able to save. It increases the collective fortune. It is doubtful, however, that this is enough to convince the followers of a socialist tradition which has always been torn between two irreconcilable ambitions: the desire toeradicate misery and the desire to destroy wealth.
