Chapter 1 Marx poses the problem
Let us begin by clarifying the reading we make of Marx's great book, namely Capital. We speak well of the work Capital, and not Communist Party Manifesto in our eyes of less interest.
The first chapters of Capital present in great detail the notion of added value. Marx explains that this surplus value is distributed between the worker and the capitalist, and that in large-scale industry, the share that goes to the worker tends to be reduced to the strict minimum allowing the working class to “reproduce itself”. This is the minimum income allowing just survival, once contributions from the work of women and children are included. Like Jean-François Revel, we believe that the impression of rigor resulting from Marx's imposing formalism is an illusion, as is often the case in economic science. Indeed, in previous modes of production, surplus value already existed, and was distributed between, on the one hand the producer, peasant or artisan, and on the other hand the privileged, ecclesiastics, aristocrats, or bourgeois. The share of the privileged corresponded to taxes, and could just as easily lead to misery for producers. This is evidenced by the Jacqueries periodicals. It is therefore not in formalism that Marx's contribution seems most relevant to us.
Structural flaws of capitalism
Indeed, where Marx masterfully challenges his time is when he explains that contrary to the intuitive idea that progress should be mainly beneficial, industrialization in a capitalist context produces four types of major and structural social disruption.
First social disruption: the change in work organization is suddenly imposed on everyone. Indeed, by increasing productivity not by a few percent, but by a factor that can be 100, in a market economy, industrialization produces a collapse in prices, and consequently, those who persist in producing in an artisanal manner are simply ruined.
Second social disruption: industrialization disrupts the fragile balance between worker and employer, to the detriment of the first. In the low productivity economy before the industrial era, in times of economic prosperity, it was the production capacity which limited growth, therefore the artisan who was the main element of production had some arguments to negotiate with your employer. In the industrialized economy, four factors weaken the position of worker. First, a shift in the factor limiting growth, from production capacity towards the capacity to sell production. Secondly, the main element of production tends to become the machine, therefore capital and not labor power. Third, the machine tends to make human work elementary, repetitive, therefore making the worker easily replaceable by another. Fourth and finally, each major technical advance in industry suddenly throws onto the street a large number of craftsmen supplanted by a few machines, who, like refugees, will hardly be in a position to defend their interests. In fact, Marx concludes that the lot of the worker can only be improved by law or class struggle.
Third social disruption: we have seen that industrialization moves from growth limited by production capacity to growth limited by the capacity to sell. This creates greater instability. Indeed, one or more new arrivals can now supplant the existing ones in a very short time, ruin them and therefore make them disappear, with cascading consequences at the level of subcontractors. Ultimately, all this results in repeated crises.
Fourth social disruption: the massive increase in processing capacity linked to the industrialization of manufacturing mechanically causes an upstream increase in the need for raw materials, and downstream the need for outlets for finished products. This increase was so massive that national capacities quickly found themselves saturated, causing a strong incentive for the intensification of colonial policy to access new sources of raw materials and create new captive markets to sell finished products.
What is striking, and which probably justifies the important place occupied by Marx in the history of social thought, is that these four structural defects remain perfectly valid at the start of the 21st century. Let's start again.
Concerning the first social disruption linked to the change in organization which is imposed on everyone, Marx takes the example of Indian weavers, who were ruined en masse by the arrival of industrially produced goods in England: “The bones of the weavers whiten the plains of India.” We find the same kind of phenomenon today with Indian farmers. Fertilizer suppliers arrive. Production increases, prices end up falling significantly, and those who have not agreed to use the fertilizer are ruined. But the story doesn't end there. Some bad harvests arrive, and those who agreed to use the fertilizer, in debt, find themselves expropriated in their turn. Even if the phenomenon is slower and cushioned by periodic intervention of the State, a bit like in Marx's England, it is the same story that has been playing out with small French agriculture for decades, simply instead of of fertilizer in the Indian case, it is necessary to transpose by agricultural machines plus fertilizer, and instead of bad harvests, it is necessary to transpose into bad harvests plus price fluctuations. What we can remember from this first point is that as soon as he has to make significant investments to produce, and no longer just sweat, the small independent producer becomes dependent either on the State or on finance. . In the second case, it's very simple: it disappears. The first case is what Marx called for. Let's return for a moment to the case of French agriculture. The permanent tensions reflect a system in which small, independent farmers have become dependent on mechanization and the use of fertilizers, but the State does not want to assume all the consequences and does not support them in the process. practice only at a minimum, so as not to go against liberal dogma while avoiding massive disasters like in India. In fact, the State behaves a bit like a general practitioner who would only agree to treat a patient when his temperature exceeds 40°C. In other words, we are not trying to solve the problem, but just to contain its effects. If in the short term, it is a pragmatic attitude, in the long term, it becomes a dangerous game, because it contributes to the progressive degradation of confidence, which creates the basis for populism. However, it is the same attitude, barely more determined, than that of the English government of the time described by Marx: "What therefore strikes us in the English legislation of 1867 is, on the one hand, the necessity imposed the parliament of the ruling classes to adopt in principle such extraordinary measures and on such a large scale against the excesses of capitalist exploitation, and on the other hand the hesitation, the repugnance and the bad faith with which it lent it in practice. » (1)
Concerning the second social disruption, namely the imbalance of negotiating power between the worker and the capitalist to the benefit of the second, here again, Marx's observation remains relevant. What must be understood is that the period that we call 'the glorious 30s', and which we tend to consider as a golden age that should be rediscovered, was not in fact the product of progress in the management of state affairs, but simply an indirect and temporary benefit linked to the war, and that therefore, the end of its benefit was inevitable. In other words, as Thomas Piketty shows very well in Capital in the 21st century, the two world wars of the 20th century caused a temporary interruption of the natural progress of capitalism, nothing more. From the 1980s onwards, we gradually returned to something quite close to what we had known during the Belle Époque, namely an imbalance in the distribution of wealth in favor of capital, accompanied by great precariousness of workers. Let's take two examples. First example: the evolution of the standard mode of development of business management software. In many companies, the IT director is an employee that the CEO avoids confronting. Indeed, the latter being a 'digital illiterate', he is not capable, in fact, of effectively managing the organization of his company since it is based on software, the ins and outs of which he does not understand. and outcomes. We therefore had here a counter-example of what Marx describes, since the balance of the relationship was for once favorable to the worker. However, we have observed a massive movement towards outsourcing IT development to external IT services companies (2), or even delocalised ones. This model is not effective, because the management software is at the heart of the company's organization, its culture, so outsourcing tends to amplify the gap between the real activity and what is developed. On the other hand, this brings power back to capital, because the programmers employed by subcontractors are in fact more easily squeezed. IBM, a legendary company of the second half of the 20th century, gradually shifted from an American company marketing infrastructure and structuring its market, to an Indian IT services company managed by the stock market. Second example: the 'Industry 4.0' concept (3). Once you remove the things that are generalities or futurology, what are you left with? Not much else, except the glorification of precariousness, based on examples of 'free and independent' workers because they are capable of constantly adapting. In this sense, Industry 4.0 is only one of the avatars of the general political discourse which no longer aims to resolve the problems of precariousness, but to make the population accept precariousness, via a chosen vocabulary where we replace, for example 'precariousness' through 'flexibility', and by hiding this primary intention in the middle of numerous other concepts, with the benefit of no longer even needing to concede measures to limit the negative effect, contrary to what a speech imposes direct such as flexicurity for example.
This naturally brings us back to the third social disruption denounced by Marx. Indeed, a major source of the problem of precariousness is the instability of the capitalist economy. Since changes are rapid, it is illusory to think, or to try to make people believe, that the weakest will not be left behind. Have things changed at this level? Certainly, following the crisis of 1929, we understood the importance of saving the situation through State intervention when the liberal economy enters into crisis, but we also understood with the Lehman Brothers affair of 2008 that capitalism is irresponsible by nature, so when the State saves the economy, it saves it overall, but it does not save those left behind, quite the contrary: it accelerates inequalities because the smartest and the least scrupulous take advantage of the transitional disruption. We can also cite the Japanese experience of Lean manufacturing as described in the book The Machine That Changed the World which shows how a different organization of production made it possible to stabilize the Japanese economy for a time, with lifelong jobs at stake. However, the Olympus affair (4) proves that in the absence of a more profound transformation of the production system, the alternative model did not hold. It will be the purpose of this book to propose a more complete model.
Let us end by examining what is happening today to the fourth social disruption denounced by Marx, namely the increased pressure of colonization to ensure the supply of raw materials and outlets for manufactured goods. On this point, we clearly see a shift in the model of colonization, from an English and French system where the colonized country is run from the mainland, to an American system, where we simply intrigues behind the scenes to ensure a favorable government. A perfect illustration is Françafrique. Does this change anything for the people? Is the natural resource curse over? Nothing seems less certain. At this level, only Dien Xiaoping's China seems to mark a discontinuity compared to what Marx describes. However, it is a discontinuity which illustrates and confirms Marx's point rather than invalidating it. Indeed, it is because it has established a hybrid system with strong state control over the market economy that China has for the moment managed to no longer be a simple victim of appetite for new markets from already industrialized countries.
The first assessment is that the four structural defects of the system denounced by Marx are still relevant today. Let’s take this opportunity to define what the system is. The 'system' is in fact the combination of two elements: on the one hand, the main power held by the bourgeoisie, that is to say capital, as opposed to the aristocratic power of the Ancien regime or politics of communist systems; on the other hand, the industrial revolution which literally exploded productivity in certain areas. Let us now note that these two aspects have been massively united again since the end of the 20th century. Indeed, on the one hand, the ultra-liberalism resulting from Friedman's economic theories conquered the United States then Europe via England. In France, we have thus moved from an economy with a State driving the creation of champions (Nuclear, Aeronautics, TGV) and arbiter of social dialogue under De Gaulle and Pompidou to an economy conforming to the European model where the State is content with role of market policeman, and precariousness, renamed flexibility, is once again becoming the social model considered the most effective. On the other hand, we witnessed the second industrial revolution, that of computing and robotics, with the same sudden and massive gains in productivity, activity by activity.
Usually, what we call the 'second industrial revolution' corresponds to the advent of electricity, oil and the automobile, that is to say the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. In this work, we considered that this is the continuation of the first industrial revolution, which is that of the engine which makes it possible to advantageously replace the physical capacities of humans in a good number of tasks. Conversely, what we have chosen to call here second industrial revolution corresponds to the advent of computing which makes it possible to advantageously replace the mental capacities of humans in a number of tasks. In both cases, the replacement results in a productivity gain such that humans cannot fight against machines.
The philosophical question emanating from progress
Let us now come to the central philosophical question posed by Marx: why does the abundance resulting from the explosion of productivity translate into an explosion of inequality, resulting in a worsening of workers' living conditions?
Let's start by understanding why this question suddenly became relevant, specifically in Marx's time, and is becoming relevant again today. To do this, let's go back briefly to the period from Antiquity to the 16th century. What then characterizes production is low productivity. This severely restricts the number of viable models of social organization. One would consist of having only farmers and artisans, with no hierarchical structure above them. The problem with a community adopting such an organization is that as long as it is located in a somewhat favorable area in terms of natural conditions, it will quickly be invaded by a neighboring group with military capabilities. So the minimum is either a community bringing together all individuals, both peasants and soldiers, or artisans and soldiers, which poses a problem that is probably insurmountable with the means of the time in terms of training, equipment, and defining the limits of the 'all united' zone, i.e. a community made up mainly of individuals employed in agriculture and crafts, to which is added a military caste. But the quality that prevails at the military level is rather brutality, which does not prepare well for managing internal problems, hence the addition of a third aristocratic or religious state, often both. This is what we find in areas where living conditions are favorable, from Antiquity to the 16th century. Once society is organized in this way, the only two great evils it encounters are on the one hand natural disasters, famines and epidemics, and on the other hand invasion by an external empire. And in fact, no one questions the validity of the system in its main principles, including that of more or less strict slavery. What individuals hope for is just to be able to rise to the aristocratic category, so all the system needs to put in place is what we today call a credible 'social elevator', e.g. the freeing of slaves among the Romans, or ennoblement for acts of bravery, or otherwise, in medieval society.
Everything changed in Marx's time, with industrialization, which made other organizations possible due to the simple fact that covering the basic needs of the population no longer necessarily occupied almost all of the available workers. From that moment on, the traditional model of society was no longer self-evident. For example, we can interpret the Civil War in the United States in this way: the north, which had started its industrialization, is ready to change its social model, the south which remained in agricultural production is not. In other words, a social organization involving slavery is not shocking as long as it corresponds with a few nuances to an economic necessity, but becomes morally problematic for a certain number of individuals, therefore causing significant social conflicts, as soon as it is no longer justified by natural constraints, and that it is not masked by distance. The same goes for extreme precariousness. It is therefore not surprising that the second industrial revolution, that of computing and robotics, following the new surplus of productivity that it allows, brings to the forefront the questioning concerning the relevance of our social model , as in the time of Marx.
To clarify the current relevance of the question posed by Marx, let us start by asking ourselves: is the crisis of confidence in the system, which results in the rise of populism? The result of the fact that everyone asks the same question of the relevance of the system as Marx, without necessarily doing so explicitly? A symptom of distrust of elites as a social class? The result of an anemic functioning of the social elevator which serves as a stabilizer for any unequal society? Several elements lead us to believe that we are witnessing, above all, a crisis of confidence in the relevance of the system in allowing everyone to benefit from progress, and that the poor image of the elites as well as the weakness of the functioning of the social elevator are only aggravating factors. First of all, the emergence of ecological sensitivity which combats the incapacity of the current system to preserve the future. Then, the observation that tolerance towards the four structural defects of capitalism noted by Marx has considerably decreased, particularly in terms of factory closures which are one of the consequences of capitalist instability. Finally, the observation that Europe, the ideal of brotherhood of peoples based on a model of capitalist social organization, no longer makes us dream. Furthermore, the criticism commonly made of Europe, rightly or wrongly, for being technocratic and champion of liberalism, and not corrupt, also tends to show distrust in the system more than in the political class. In summary, it seems to us that it is indeed the model of capitalist society, whose undesirable effects were noted by Marx, which is no longer morally acceptable following the new technological capabilities resulting from the second industrial revolution, which have the effect of raising the level of requirements vis-à-vis the social system.
The absence of a supported solution
We have just seen that Marx is the thinker who poses the great philosophical question linked to the qualitative insufficiency of the social system, following technological progress, and that this question has become burning again today, due to the second industrial revolution. , that of computing and robotics. Very generally, resolving a problem, here the qualitative insufficiency of capitalist social organization, involves four steps: recognizing the problem, conducting a correct analysis, developing a relevant solution, and finally implementing it. Let us first note that the majority of works are content, like Zola, even today, to limit themselves to the first stage, namely to observe and denounce. What makes Marx's work unique is that he covers the second stage by carrying out a detailed analysis, the broad outlines of which we have just given. Let us now see what Marx proposes at the level of the third and fourth stages, namely the development of a solution and its implementation. For this, it is necessary to differentiate two Marxs. That of Communist Party Manifesto on the one hand, that of Capital on the other.
At the level of Communist Party Manifesto, Marx and Engels simply recommend class struggle, which must result in the abolition of bourgeois property, that is to say in modern terms, a nationalized economy. This is the solution that was implemented in the USSR in the 20th century. However, the accounts of witnesses to the Russian revolution clearly show that a dominant trait is unpreparedness, improvisation. All attention had been focused on the seizure of power, not on the theorizing of its subsequent exercise. In fact, once power was won, due to lack of preparation, we decided on new structures for the exercise of power, but presupposing their relevance. However, the naivety of the solution, and the absence of reflection concerning its implementation, can be traced back to Marx, and more precisely to Communist Party Manifesto. Indeed, if Marx does not seek to detail an operational system, it is probably because he presupposes that the shift of the main power from capital to politics is sufficient to make progress profitable for all. We will return to this in more detail in Chapter 7.
If at the level of Communist Party Manifesto, Marx and Engels correspond well to the image that we associate with them via the word 'Marxist', with regard toCapital, the solution developed by Marx corresponds more to what we today call social democracy. In fact, it is about the regulation of work and the market by the State, by means of the law. It is important to note that almost all current systems, from communist China to the United States via Europe, correspond to the more or less determined application of the recommendations formulated by Marx in Capital, namely the regulation of market savagery through laws aimed at promoting education, and strengthening the rights of workers compared to what they could obtain in a pure market economy. Indeed, in Capital, Marx does not deal with the political system, democracy or autocracy. It simply deals with the relationship between free enterprise and the state. In the end, regarding the solution proposed in Capital, Marx leaves us with a mixed impression. On the one hand, its solution has become almost universal, but on the other it remains at a level of generality which makes it almost ineffective since it boils down to a simple sentence: the State must regulate the market by law. In other words, here again, Marx is satisfied with a simple concept as a solution, as opposed to the development of an alternative system. We will return to this point also in Chapter 7.
It remains to be clarified why in this chapter we have remained focused on the work of Marx, to the exclusion of the many other thinkers who theorized social organization in the 18th and 19th centuries. When tackling a delicate problem, the interest of the proposed solution is not only due to the rigor and breadth of the reasoning, but also, and often much more, to the way in which the problem was posed, formulated, and to the way chosen to approach it. However, it is precisely at this level that Marx innovates and differentiates himself from others. He starts from field observations, seeks the causes, then establishes a theory, where others stick to observations like realistic novelists, or remain in the world of ideas like enlightenment philosophers.
In summary, Marx distinguishes himself from other thinkers by the fact that he does not simply denounce, but that he carries out a relevant analysis of the functioning of capitalist society, and that what he observes remains news. On the other hand, in terms of developing a solution, and even more so its implementation, it remains very insufficient. Let us point out in his defense that Marx did not have at his disposal the sociological tools to guide him in developing a solution. These are the tools that we will discuss in the following chapters of this first part.
(1) This sentence corresponds to Roy's translation, and revised by Marx himself, page 213. In the version edited by Lefebvre published by Quadrige / PUF in 1993, we find, page 555: “What is therefore striking in this English legislation of 1867 is, on the one hand, the need for this Parliament of dominant classes to admit the principle of such extraordinary measures of such magnitude against the excesses of capitalist exploitation; and on the other hand the insufficiency, bad will and bad faith with which he went about carrying out these measures. »
(2) Computer Engineering Services Company
(3) The term 'Industry 4.0' designates a new way of imagining the means of production of the future, and the associated social organization. It appears to have first appeared in 2011, at the World Industry Forum in Hannover. The 4 refers to a 4th industrial revolution.
(4) The Olympus affair is a financial scandal which broke out following this company's attempt to hide losses linked to speculative investments made in the 1990s. What is revealing here is the difference in perception of this affair. in the West and Japan. For the West, what predominates is the financial scandal, and therefore the incomprehension of the attitude of the Japanese leaders who seem both eager to get out of it, and incapable of accepting the facts, this which is probably wrongly interpreted as a form of corporatism. On the other hand, for the Japanese, what is most serious is the breakdown of the social contract that this scandal reveals. Indeed, the Lean social contract presupposes a search for stability, to be able to guarantee jobs for life. So what is most serious in this affair from the Japanese point of view is not so much the loss, but the simple fact of having participated in the crazy financial speculation of the 1990s.
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