5

REVOLUTION, STATUS, AND CLASS

The slave revolt in Saint-Domingue in 1791 paved the way for the end of slavery and colonialism, but the battle for racial equality is still being fought. The same is true of inequalities in status in general: in 1789 the French Revolution took an essential step by abolishing the nobility’s privileges, but it did not do away with the multiple privileges of money—far from it. We shall see that until the beginning of the twentieth century, electoral systems based on wealth qualifications were implemented in many countries, such as Sweden. Other forms of plutocratic systems, slightly toned down, still prevail in many forms today, whether in influencing elections or in concentrating power among stockholders, to the detriment of more competent persons involved in the process of production.

The End of Privileges and Unequal Status?

According to a rather widespread fairy tale, legal equality has been definitively established in Western countries since the Enlightenment and the “Atlantic revolutions.” In this narrative, the French Revolution and the abolition of aristocratic privileges during the night of August 4, 1789, appear to be foundational events. The reality is obviously more complex. The republics of France and the United States were in essence slaveholding, colonial, and legally discriminatory until the 1960s. The same was true of the British and Dutch monarchies. Almost everywhere, the equality of rights proclaimed at the end of the eighteenth century is above all an equality of White men, and especially of property-owning White men.

Although the abandonment of privileges during the night of 4 August remains a seminal event, it must be seen as a long, unfinished battle for equality. There would have been no night of August 4 without the taking of the Bastille on July 14, and especially without the peasant revolts in the summer of 1789. During these revolts farmers and laborers attacked the lords and their châteaux, burning their titles to property. This convinced the deputies gathered in Paris that they had to act quickly to do away with the despised institutions of feudalism. These revolts followed decades of peasant rebellions that the divided government proved increasingly unable to control—the occupation of parcels of land and common goods, violence directed against landowners—particularly during the summer of 1788, when the question of the election of delegates to the Estates-General was finally clearly raised in a nearly insurrectional atmosphere.1

We must also emphasize that if the French nobility definitively lost its fiscal, political, and jurisdictional privileges in 1789, it retained for a long time afterward a privileged social position as a class of property owners. By studying family names in the Paris inheritance archives, we have found that while the nobility represented barely 1 percent of the population of Paris in the nineteenth century, between 1830 and 1840 it included no less than 40 to 45 percent of the wealthiest—just slightly less than it did on the eve of the Revolution. Not until the decades between 1880 and 1910 did the prominence of the nobility among the largest estates finally decrease (see Figure 15).

This persistence is explained by several factors. Exiled in the neighboring European monarchies between 1789 and 1815, the nobility returned en masse to France in 1815 and benefited from very favorable measures during the period of the monarchies, in which electors had to meet a certain tax threshold (1815–1848). We think especially of the emblematic law of the “billion for the emigrés” that transferred to these nobles considerable sums (almost 15 percent of the national income at the time, financed by taxes and public debt) to compensate them for the lands and rents lost under the Revolution. Debated during the first days of the Restoration, this law was adopted in 1825, under the government led by the Count de Villèle, who in that same year imposed on Haiti the indemnity in favor of the slaveowners (many of whom were aristocrats).

FIGURE 15. The Nobility in Parisian Inheritances, 1780–1910

The share of noble names among the 0.1 percent of the largest inheritances in Paris fell from 50 percent to 25 percent between 1780 and 1810, before climbing to about 40–45 percent during the period of the censitary monarchies (1815–1848), then declining to about 10 percent at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In comparison, noble names still represented less than 2 percent of the total number of deaths between 1780 and 1910. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/equality

More generally, we must emphasize that the redistributions carried out under the Revolution were more limited than is sometimes imagined. Church properties, which represented almost 25 percent of the kingdom’s total real estate (including the value of ecclesiastical tithes) were, of course, nationalized without compensation. But instead of being redistributed to the landless, they were auctioned off to benefit those who had the means to buy them. Abbé Siéyès, who had sided with the Third Estate in his famous pamphlet published in January 1789,2 was scandalized by this operation, which would, according to him, only enrich property owners, noble or bourgeois, while at the same time drying up financing for the Church’s charitable works, which included help for the poorest people, schools, and hospitals. In England, the dissolution of the monasteries, decreed by Henry VIII in 1536, had also strengthened the property-owning class. Meanwhile, the House of Lords was becoming an almost exclusively noble assembly, whereas the clergy had previously occupied half the seats. In France as in England, we thus move gradually from a trifunctional ideology to an ideology that can be described as “property-owning” or simply as “capitalist.” In a trifunctional ideology, the position of the two dominant classes, the clergy and the nobility, is supposed to be justified by their service to the Third Estate and to society as a whole, through spiritual guidance and charitable works, in the case of the clergy, and order and protection, in the case of the nobility. According to the newer ideology, private property owners have as their sole mission to find the most profitable use for their goods and to enrich themselves, under the protection of the state, without making any contribution to the general welfare.

The Long Exit of Forced and Semiforced Labor

In the end, the French Revolution abolished the nobility’s privileges while at the same time strengthening the rights of property owners. For those who owned nothing, the balance sheet is ambiguous. The fact that they were no longer subject to the lord’s whims and that they benefited from a judicial system that was centralized at the national level and dealt with all citizens in the same way constituted, in theory, genuine progress. But the concentration of property in the hands of the richest 1 percent of the population, including both nobles and bourgeois, scarcely diminished between 1780 and 1800 before it started rising again between 1800 and 1910. For the poorest 50 percent, there was virtually no progress.3

We must also situate the Revolution in a long process of transforming the status of labor in French and other European societies. On the eve of 1789, servitude was supposed to have disappeared from the French countryside centuries earlier. An often-mentioned explanation is that the relative scarcity of labor, along with the collapse of institutions following the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century, favored the eviction and emancipation of the serfs. Many historians have emphasized the excessively mechanistic nature of this explanation. In reality, everything depended on the local power relationships, which is evident from the calcification of serfdom in Eastern Europe after the fourteenth century and its belated abolition in the nineteenth century.4 For the most optimistic medievalists, it was the trifunctional Christian ideology that made it possible to put a gradual end to servile labor and to unify workers within a single class of laborers who were free and celebrated as such in Western Europe, in accord with a process that was already well underway even before the Black Death.5 That was perhaps partly the case, but in truth the available sources do not allow us to be very precise, so numerous are the local and regional variations.

What is certain is that pockets of serfdom still existed in France at the time of the Revolution, for example on the lands of the Abbey of St. Claude (a great ecclesiastical seigneury located in the Jura Mountains), and that restrictions on moving around to find work were not definitively and systematically lifted until the Revolution. The peasants generally had freedom of movement (a notion that was often merely theoretical when they had neither goods nor networks), but they owed days of unpaid work to their lord. Under the Revolution, these corvées, or labor obligations, would be the object of very lively debates. During the Revolution’s most egalitarian and redistributive phase, in 1792–1794, the members of the Convention emphasized that the corvées betrayed by their very name their origins in serfdom and feudalism, and consequently they demanded that the corvées be abolished without compensation because they were aristocratic privileges, similar to those targeted on the night of August 4. But during most of the Revolution, in 1789 and then again starting in 1795, with the return of censitary suffrage,6 a much more conservative notion was established, namely that corvées were ultimately only rent payments that should be simply renamed as such in the future, and that any other decision would risk damaging, by osmosis, the whole system of property. That is how the feudal corvées became capitalist rents, in most cases without further ado. One day’s unpaid labor each week for example, could be converted to a rent equivalent to one-fifth or one-sixth of the agricultural product.7

We must also emphasize the harshness of the system of discipline at work and the tendency to strengthen property rights in the course of the eighteenth century and during a large part of the nineteenth century. In the United Kingdom, the Enclosure Acts, which were adopted beginning in 1604 and strengthened repeatedly, especially between 1773 and 1801, resulted in the erection of hedges around parcels of land and put an end to the poor’s right to use common lands and pastures. They also helped fill the roads with unemployed workers who were easy to exploit, and whose labor fed British industrialization. The Black Act of 1723 also weakened the most deprived by instituting capital punishment for timber thieves and small game hunters, people who hunted or gathered at night, their faces blackened to avoid being recognized, on lands that were not their own, and that the property owners now wanted to reserve for their own exclusive use.8 The new proletariat, reduced to poverty, was subject until 1875 to the aptly named Master and Servant Act, which gave employers full rights, including a rule that criminalized efforts to poach servants, making it possible to keep wages extremely low.9

In the colonies, the legal system was even less egalitarian: forced labor is clearly present until at least 1946 and even until independence was achieved. In French cities, labor union and worker mobilization, along with intense social struggles, were to make it possible to impose new norms more quickly. In France, laws on child labor were passed in 1841, on labor union freedom in 1884, on accidents at work in 1898, on collective conventions and the eight-hour workday in 1919, on paid vacations in 1936, and on Social Security in 1945. The establishment of regular salaries and a veritable “salaried society” marks a major advance in civilization that has appeared only gradually, in multiple forms, and over very long periods. For example, it was not until 1969–1977 that monthly salaries (guaranteeing a fixed income each month rather than each day or week) were to be found generally.10 We also know that this evolution is partly reversible, depending on political and economic power relationships. Salarial status has thus diminished significantly of late, with the self-employed worker system introduced into the French 2008 law “modernizing” the economy. The keystone of that law is smaller social contributions and fewer legal protections, a development whose harmful consequences for workers could be noted during the pandemic of 2020 and 2021. The development of digital platforms and gig workers paid by the task now constitutes as much a redoubtable threat to salarial status as to our liberties, and we will be able to fight it only if the public authority regains control of the sector and implements new laws.11 We must also insist on the historical fact that the development of a more protective salarial status has occurred especially within the nation states of the North, sometimes at the price of reinforcing borders. Workers in the South have not been much involved in this movement; on the scale of the global economy, they are just as stuck in their territory of origin at the beginning of the twenty-first century as the serfs of the Abbey of St. Claude were in the eighteenth century. The march toward equality and dignity with regard to work is an ongoing battle that now requires a profound transformation of the world economic system. We will return to it.

Sweden in 1900: One Man, a Hundred Votes

Along with the battles for labor laws and workers’ rights, the campaign for universal suffrage is the other great social and political struggle of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1815, Louis XVIII installed a political system like the one he had observed in England, with a Chamber of Peers reserved for the upper nobility (like the House of Lords) and a Chamber of Deputies elected by census suffrage (like the House of Commons, but in a still more limited way). Specifically, during the first Restoration, only the 1 percent of adult males who paid the most direct taxes had the right to vote. The threshold that had to be met to be a candidate for office was even higher, and concerned only 0.2 percent of adult males.12 Suffrage was slightly broadened after the Revolution of 1830: the number of electors under the July Monarchy rose to a little more than 2 percent of adult males, while the number of those eligible to be candidates for office was raised to about 0.4 percent of adult males. Universal suffrage for men was implemented briefly following the Revolution of 1848, and then definitively starting in 1871, before being finally extended to women in 1944. In the United Kingdom, the march toward universal male suffrage was much more gradual (see Figure 16). The proportion of adult males who had the right to vote was scarcely 5 percent in 1820, then rose to 14 percent following the electoral reform of 1832, 30 percent after the reform of 1867, and especially 60 percent with the electoral law of 1884, which transformed the political situation and led to much more redistributive social and fiscal legislation. Universal male suffrage was finally introduced in 1918, followed by universal female suffrage in 1928.

FIGURE 16. The Evolution of Male Suffrage in Europe, 1820–1920

In the United Kingdom, the percentage of adult males having the right to vote (taking into account the taxes owed and property held in order to have this right) rose from 5 percent in 1820 to 30 percent in 1870 and 100 percent in 1920. In France, it rose from 1 percent in 1820 to 100 percent in 1880. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/equality

A particularly interesting but little-known case is that of Sweden. From 1527 to 1865, the Swedish monarchy relied on a parliament, the Riksdag, which included representatives of the four orders or estates that then composed the kingdom: the nobility, the clergy, the urban bourgeoisie, and the property-owning peasantry. In 1865, this system was replaced by a censitary parliamentary system composed of two chambers: an upper chamber elected by a small minority of large property owners (scarcely 9,000 electors, or less than 1 percent of the adult male population), and a lower chamber. The lower chamber was also censitary, requiring property ownership, but considerably more open. Suffrage was not expanded in Sweden until the reforms of 1909–1911; property-owning conditions were completely abolished for men only in 1919, and not until 1921 was universal suffrage extended to include women. Around 1900, with a little more than 20 percent of adult men having the right to vote, Sweden was one of the least advanced European nations.

Above all, the great peculiarity of the censitary system used in Sweden between 1865 and 1911 is that the number of votes an elector had depended on how much tax he paid and how much property and income he had.13 Within the 20 percent of men rich enough to be able to vote, electors were divided into about forty groups, each associated with a different electoral weight. Concretely, members of the least wealthy group each had one vote, whereas those in the richest group had as many as fifty-four votes each. The exact scale determining the electoral weight (fyrkar) of each elector was set using a formula that depended on the amount of the taxes he paid, the properties he owned, and his income. A similar system was used for municipal elections, with the additional particularity that corporations also had the right to participate in these local elections, and they also had a number of votes depending on the amount of their taxes and the amount of their goods and profits. However, for urban municipalities, a single elector, whether a private person or an enterprise, could not have more than one hundred votes. For rural municipalities, on the other hand, there was no ceiling of this kind, to the point that during the municipal elections of 1871, there were fifty-four voting districts in Sweden in which a single elector cast more than 50 percent of the votes. The prime minister, Count Arvid Posse, was among these dictators enjoying impeccable democratic legitimacy. In the 1880s, Posse cast the majority of the votes in the district where he lived and where his family owned a vast estate. There were also 414 voting districts in which a single elector cast more than 25 percent of the votes.

Sweden’s astonishing hypercensitary experiment is interesting in more than one way. In a few decades, Sweden moved from an extremely inegalitarian system based on property ownership to a relatively egalitarian society—at least more egalitarian than all other known societies. This change occurred when the Social Democrats came to power in the early 1920s, after an intense campaign by labor unions and workers, and then remained in power on a quasi-permanent basis from 1932 to 2006. On the eve of World War I, the concentration of property was just as extreme in Sweden as it was in France or the United Kingdom (see Figure 17), and Sweden was incontestably the European country that had gone furthest in the constitutional and electoral codification of its inequality.14 Then, during the interwar period, the Social Democrats took control of the Swedish government and put their country’s state power in the service of a completely different political project. Instead of using property registers and incomes to distribute the right to vote, they began to use them to make the richest people pay progressively heavier taxes, all in order to finance public services. These services allowed relatively egalitarian (here again, in comparison to other countries) access to health care and education for the whole of the population. This experiment shows how little anything is fixed. People sometimes imagine that there are cultures or civilizations that tend by nature toward equality or inequality: Sweden is supposed to have always been egalitarian, perhaps because of an ancient passion proceeding from the Vikings, whereas India and its castes are eternally inegalitarian, no doubt for reasons just as mystical that proceed from the Aryans. In truth, everything depends on the institutions and rules that each human community gives itself, contingent on power relationships, mobilizations, and social struggles, within unstable trajectories that would merit close examination.

FIGURE 17. Extreme Patrimonial Inequality: European Property-Owner Societies in the Belle Époque (1880–1914)

The share of the highest 10 percent of wealth in total private property (real, occupational, and financial assets, net of debt) was on average 84 percent in France between 1880 and 1914 (as compared with 14 percent for the following 40 percent and 2 percent for the poorest 50 percent), 91 percent in the United Kingdom (as compared with 8 percent and 1 percent), and 88 percent in Sweden (as compared with 11 percent and 1 percent). Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/equality

The Metamorphoses of Privileges: Democracy and Money

The path followed by Sweden also shows the boundless imagination that the property-owning classes can show in structuring institutions to their advantage. It would be a mistake to think that this ingenuity no longer exists: today’s billionaires would not dare to openly demand rights to vote like the ones Sweden used to have, but they often resort to other methods to arrive at the same ends. In particular, we must emphasize that electoral democracies have never provided a truly satisfactory solution to the problem of financing political campaigns, far from it. Theoretically, we could imagine that an obvious corollary of universal suffrage would have been to set up an egalitarian system in which each citizen would have the same amount to contribute to parties and political movements of his choice, the keystone of the system being an absolute prohibition on larger donations and a strict limitation of electoral expenditures, so as to put all candidates and all voters on an equal footing. We could even imagine that this political equality might be constitutionally guaranteed, and that these arrangements would be protected with as much determination as universal suffrage itself.

However, not only is this not the case, but the opposite is true. Some countries have developed timid systems of public financing for campaigns and political parties—in Germany in the 1950s, in the United States and in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, and also in France in the 1990s. But these systems are clearly insufficient, and they are usually completely overwhelmed by the flow of private money. This is particularly the case in the United States, where lobbyists have succeeded in convincing judges that no ceiling for political expenditures can be set (and that imposing any ceiling would be equivalent to violating the wealthiest people’s freedom of expression).15 But it is also the case in Europe, India, and Brazil. Almost everywhere, the tax deductions that are granted for political contributions, as well as for other kinds of donations, amount to subsidizing the wealthiest people’s political or cultural preferences with the money of the poorest. In France, a wealthy voter giving 7,500 euros (the current ceiling) to his preferred political party has a right to a tax deduction of 5,000 euros, financed by the rest of the taxpayers. In comparison, the ordinary person has a right to a deduction of about 1 euro per voter in the form of public financing for political parties.16 This example shows the extent to which censitary systems still exist: they have simply become a little less visible.

The question of how to finance the media, think tanks, and other organs that shape public opinion raises the same problems. Laws seeking to limit the concentration of the press or to reduce the power of stockholders relative to that of editors were set up in some countries, often shortly after World War II, but they are notoriously insufficient and have never been adapted to the digital age. In France, a handful of billionaires now owns more than half of the news media. This situation is found everywhere, in poor countries as well as in rich ones. The best solution would be to change the legal framework and adopt a law that truly democratizes the media, guaranteeing employees and journalists half the seats in the governing organs, whatever their legal form might be, opening their doors to representatives from the reading public, and drastically limiting stockholders’ power.17

The essential point is that this critique of contemporary democracy and of its capture by big money must be accompanied by proposals for precise institutional mechanisms making it possible to move toward greater equality. In the course of the twentieth century, the critique of “bourgeois” democracy has too often served as an excuse—by the leaders and bureaucratic classes holding power in the Soviet bloc, but also in some newly independent countries—for doing away with pluralist elections or taking control of the media. The refusal to hold elections is never justified. On the other hand, the establishment of a radically egalitarian way of financing political parties, electoral campaigns, and the media is not only justified but indispensable for being able to speak of a democracy that is truly based on a principle of equality. This must go hand-in-hand with a multiplicity of modes of political participation, notably in the form of citizen assemblies and deliberative referenda. But here as well, the question of how to finance campaigns and achieve equality in the production and diffusion of information must be dealt with rigorously.18

In practice, this protection of democracy and political equality does not exist. In most countries, the constitutions and the courts tend on the contrary to protect the established order, in the sense that they set up very strong legal constraints seeking to prevent a political majority from proceeding, for example, to undertake an ambitious revision of the property system (or even simply to limit the power of stockholders). Redistribution of property is generally subjected to an obligation to indemnify, which in practice makes any genuine transfer impossible. If someone owns everything that can be owned in a country, and if it is necessary to fully indemnify him for any transfer of his properties to other persons or collectivities, that means it is impossible to change anything at all in the initial situation, at least within a legal framework. If we add that the rules governing constitutional amendments tend to make them very difficult (as in France, where the Senate, not a very democratic body, has the right to veto),19 we can see that in some cases this can completely immobilize the situation. Unsurprisingly, each system often tries to prevent the principles it holds dear from being changed, and even attempts to make any effort to challenge them illegal.

The consequence is that these rules have been regularly broken in the course of history. The march toward equality is full of revolutionary moments when political institutions are redefined in order to make it possible to transform social and economic structures. When the Estates General met in 1789, no rule provided that a National Assembly could proclaim itself and give itself the right to abolish the nobility’s privileges and decide to expropriate the clergy’s property while at the same time trampling on the right of veto that the two privileged orders had enjoyed for centuries. We shall note, moreover, that none of the regime changes that have occurred in France since 1789 (there are about ten of them) took place in accord with the rules set forth by their predecessors.20 In the United Kingdom, it was in a climate of extreme tension that the House of Lords, which clearly dominated British bicameralism until the end of the nineteenth century, was forced in 1909–1911 to renounce its right to veto and to yield power to the House of Commons forever, in the eruptive context of the vote on the “People’s Budget” and the creation of a progressive tax on total income.21 In the United States, Roosevelt had to threaten to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937 so that it would lift the veto by which it was blocking his social legislation in the name of free enterprise, even though he had just been reelected with 61 percent of the vote.22 It is probable that episodes of the same kind will occur in the future in times of crisis—times that it is impossible to foresee. Here, too, this observation must be used not as an excuse for trampling on all legal rules, but on the contrary, to propose new rules that are more profoundly egalitarian and democratic than the preceding ones, without losing sight of the fact that the law must be a tool for emancipation and not for the preservation of positions of power.

The Persistence of Censitary Voting: Economic Plutocracy

If there is a domain where censitary voting continues to reign, it is certainly that of economic power. In joint-stock companies, the stockholders legally have all the power, with voting rights proportional to the number of stocks they hold. It might be said that this is the definition of capitalism, but in fact it is a specific institutional arrangement that is not particularly natural and has been established only gradually, in the context of specific circumstances and power relationships.23 Theoretically, other rules are perfectly conceivable. For example, nothing guarantees that stockholders are more competent to manage an enterprise than a company’s employees, or that they are more invested in its success over the long term. Often, the opposite is true: an investment fund can put capital into an enterprise and withdraw it again in a short period of time, whereas employees generally invest a major part of their lives, their energy, and their skills. In many respects, employees constitute the company’s first long-term investors. If we look at the big picture, we can only be surprised by this persistence of plutocracy in economic matters.

More balanced systems have been tried since the middle of the twentieth century, even in nominally “capitalist” countries. In Germany, the system known as “comanagement” (sometimes still called Mitbestimmung, or “codetermination”) consists in dividing up the seats in a company’s board of directors or supervisory board with one half being representatives of the employees and the other half representatives of the stockholders. This system was introduced in 1951 in the steel and coal industries, and then extended in 1952 to all large companies (all sectors taken together). The 1976 law established the system currently in force in Germany, with one-third of the seats for employees in companies with between 500 and 2,000 employees, and half the seats for those with more than 2,000 employees.24 Comparable arrangements were adopted in Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, where the rules also apply to small and medium-sized enterprises.25 On the other hand, comanagement is at this time not very widespread outside Germanic and Nordic Europe.26

In practice, the importance of this transformation must not be exaggerated: in the event of a tie vote, it is still the stockholders who make the decision. Nonetheless, it is a clear modification of the usual capitalist rules. It will be noted that 50 percent of the voting rights are attributed to employees as such, as “investors in labor,” independently of any ownership of the capital. If in addition the employees own 10 or 20 percent of the capital, or if a public collectivity holds a 10 or 20 percent share, then a stockholder can find himself in the minority, even if he owns 80 or 90 percent of the stock.27 From the stockholders’ point of view, this amounts to an unacceptable challenge to their natural rights. These measures in Germany were obtained after extremely tense social and political struggles, in a context in which the power relationships clearly favored labor, namely, after the trauma of the 1929 crisis and the compromising of the economic elites on account of their dealings with the Nazis. The German laws of 1951 and 1952 were passed by the Christian Democrats, but in response to intense pressure exerted by the Social Democrats and especially by labor unions, who at that point were making even more ambitious demands, such as their participation, on an equal footing, in regional and federal planning commissions.

We must also stress that these laws could be implemented only because the German constitution of 1949, the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, had previously adopted an innovative definition of property considered in terms of its social goal. In particular, the constitution asserts at the outset that the right to property is legitimate only insofar as it “shall … serve the public good” (Article 14). It explicitly mentions that the socialization of the means of production and the redefinition of the system of private property enter into the domain of the law, in terms that open the possibility of measures such as comanagement. This text is situated in the tradition begun by the German constitution of 1919, which was itself adopted in a quasi-insurrectional context, and which made possible redistributions of land and new social and syndical rights, rights that were suspended from 1933 to 1945.28 Employers’ groups repeatedly tried to contest comanagement in the courts, notably following the law of 1976 adopted by the Social Democrats, but their complaint was dismissed by the Constitutional Court, on the basis of the constitution of 1949. Conversely, several countries, including France, have retained in their fundamental texts a definition of property seen as an absolute and natural right, a definition that comes from the end of the eighteenth century, so that the adoption of rules of comanagement in the German fashion without an amendment to the constitution would be very likely to be contested in court.29

Participatory Socialism and Power Sharing

In theory, a deepening of the rules of Germanic and Nordic comanagement is conceivable. All studies show that this system has made it possible to achieve a better involvement of employees in companies’ long-term strategies and greater collective efficiency.30 For example, we can imagine a system in which part of the employees’ representatives would have 50 percent of the votes in all enterprises, including the smallest ones, and in which, on the other hand, the share of the voting rights held by an individual stockholder (within the 50 percent of voting rights reserved for stockholders) cannot exceed a certain threshold in sufficiently large companies. Thus an individual stockholder might have a maximum of 90 percent of the stockholders’ voting rights in small companies (fewer than ten employees), and this threshold would be lowered linearly to 10 percent of the stockholders’ voting rights in larger companies (more than ninety employees).31 In this way, a single stockholder who is also an employee of the company could have a majority of the votes in a very small company (in this case, as many as ten employees) but would have to rely increasingly on collective deliberation with other employees as soon as the company became significantly larger (see Figure 18). In a very small company, the maintenance of a strong connection between the amount of capital contributed and economic power can be justified: if all one’s savings are invested in a life work (for example, opening an organic grocery store or a café-restaurant), there’s nothing abnormal about that person having more votes than an employee hired the day before. These types of investors are more likely to reduce expenditures, for example, in order to develop the project.32 On the other hand, if the project involves many employees and collective resources, such a concentration of power is no longer justified. A single stockholder who is not himself an employee would lose the majority of votes as soon as the first employee was hired in the system outlined here. If the employees themselves have contributed capital, even a minority stake, they would obtain a majority of the votes more rapidly. It goes without saying that all these parameters are given only as illustrations and would have to be the object of vast deliberation and experimentation.

The system of “participatory socialism” described here has only one objective: to illustrate the very great diversity of possible economic systems. On the basis of the historical experience at our disposal, it is clear that the establishment of such a system would require very strong popular support. In most countries, as in France, such a transformation would also involve a substantial revision of the constitution, which could probably be made only during moments of crisis, as has often happened in the past. We shall see that such profound changes would also have to be accompanied by a complete revision of the fiscal system, so as to allow a true circulation of property and economic power, as well as the redefinition of multiple international treaties, in particular those that concern the movement of capital. I am not suggesting that such a system could easily be set up next month, but simply insisting on the fact that no less gigantic transformations of the legal, fiscal, and social system continually occurred between 1780 and 2020, and that this process is not going to stop suddenly now. It is therefore not pointless to inquire into the subsequent stages of participatory socialism on the basis of the experience available.

FIGURE 18. Participatory Socialism and Power Sharing

In the system of participatory socialism envisioned here, a single stockholder (owning 100 percent of the company’s stock) has 73 percent of voting rights if the company has two salaried employees (including himself), 51 percent if he has ten salaried employees (including himself), and he loses the majority beyond ten salaried employees. A single, unsalaried stockholder has 45 percent of voting rights if the company has fewer than ten salaried employees, and then this share declines regularly and reaches 5 percent with 100 salaried employees.

Note: Salaried employees (whether or not they are stockholders) share 50 percent of voting rights, and within that 50 percent, an individual stockholder cannot hold more than 90 percent (or 45 percent of the votes) in a company with fewer than ten salaried employees; this fraction falls linearly to 10 percent (or 5 percent of the votes) in companies with more than ninety salaried employees (the unattributed stockholders’ votes are reattributed to the salaried employees). Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/equality

Concerning the question of power-sharing in enterprises, and more generally the debate on the transformation of the economic system and the emergence of new forms of democratic socialism, it is striking to note to what point discussions have gained new vigor since the financial crisis of 2008. In several countries, especially in the United States and Britain, some important political movements have set out to formulate unprecedented proposals intended to establish rules that are inspired, in one way or another, by the Germanic and Nordic systems of comanagement.33 If approved, the conditions for their adoption worldwide could be created. Within the intellectual and syndical world, ambitious collective and international projects like the “Manifesto for Labour Law” remind us to what extent there are several ways of organizing the economic system, and in particular the power relationships within enterprises.34 In addition to the question of comanagement, the whole of syndical law must be rethought at the European and transnational level, thereby facilitating the support and participation of employees, reserving public markets for enterprises that sign collective agreements, and finally generalizing labor unions’ right to enter the workplace and to organize meetings there.35 Although it is too soon to know their impact, these initiatives indicate the liveliness of the debates. We shall also see that the discussions initiated in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s on the subject of “employee funds” (called Meidner funds) have recently picked up again. But before we analyze in greater detail the prospects for future transformations, we have to understand better how the very intense compression of economic inequalities that took place in the twentieth century in many countries, and in particular in the world’s main capitalist powers, was produced.

  1. 1. J. Nicolas, La Rébellion française. Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, 1661–1789 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), which counts eighty-seven anti-seigneurial rebellions between 1730 and 1759 and 246 between 1760 and 1789. Compare G. Lemarchand, Paysans et seigneurs en Europe. Une histoire comparée, XVIe–XIXe siècles (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011), which emphasizes the role of peasant revolts on the European scale, particularly in the years preceding the wave of revolutions in 1848.

  2. 2. “Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? Tout. Qu’a-t-il été jusqu’à present dans l’ordre politique? Rien. Que demande-t-il? A devenir quelque chose.” (“What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.”)

  3. 3. See Chapter 2, Figure 4.

  4. 4. The calcification of serfdom in the East (and particularly around the Baltic) seems to be explained in part by the intensification of cereal exports to the West in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the property owners’ ability to impose a harsher system of labor. See T. Raster, “Serfs and the Market: Second Serfdom and the East-West Goods Exchange, 1579–1859,” unpublished manuscript, Paris School of Economics, June 2, 2019. The abolition of serfdom in Prussia in 1807, in Austria-Hungary in 1848, and in Russia in 1861 was accompanied by compensations paid to property owners by the former serfs until the beginning of the twentieth century. See S. A. Eddie, Freedom’s Price: Serfdom, Subjection and Reform in Prussia, 1648–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); T. Dennison, “The Institutional Framework of Serfdom in Russia: The View from 1861,” in Serfdom and Slavery in the European Economy, 11th–18th Centuries, ed. S. Cavaciocchi (Florence: Florence University Press, 2014).

  5. 5. M. Arnoux, Le Temps des laboureurs. Travail, ordre social et croissance en Europe (XIe–XIVe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2012). Compare J. Le Goff, “Les trois fonctions indo-européennes, l’histoire et l’Europe féodale,” Annales histoire, sciences sociales 34, no. 6 (1979): 1187–1215.

  6. 6. The Constitution of 1793 instituted universal male suffrage, but there was not time to implement it.

  7. 7. On these debates, see T. Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 102–109; and the fascinating R. Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Eddie, in Freedom’s Price, goes so far as to propose the idea that the abolition of serfdom in Prussia in 1807 (with compensations for property owners) ultimately did more for poor peasants than the French Revolution.

  8. 8. See the classic E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975). This act targeted people who hunted stags, cut down trees, poached on fishponds, or pulled up copses. An alleged felon could be sentenced on the spot to be hanged. Initially intended to last three years, this law was extended and hardened over more than a century. We see a similar hardening of property law elsewhere in Europe, for example in Prussia in 1821, which had an impact on the young Karl Marx and helped convince him that property is a social relationship historically constructed and instituted under the aegis of the state and the propertied classes, and not a natural, atemporal reality. For its part, the French Revolution decreed that private lands and woods would be open to everyone for hunting, a measure that is still in force today.

  9. 9. The best proof that living conditions were deteriorating at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century is no doubt the diminution of the height of conscripts, in particular in urban and industrial centers. See S. Nicholas and R. H. Steckel, “Heights and Living Standards of English Workers during the Early Years of Industrialization,” Journal of Economic History 51, no. 4 (1991): 937–957.

  10. 10. R. Castel, Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale (Paris: Folio, 1995) 594–595; R. Castel and C. Haroche, Propriété privée, propriété sociale, propriété de soi (Paris: Pluriel, 2001). Compare C. Didry, L’Institution du travail. Droit et salariat dans l’histoire (Paris: La Dispute, 2016); M. Margairaz and M. Pigenet, Le Prix du travail. France et espaces coloniaux, XIXe–XXIe siècles (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2019). On the long process of the “socialization” of law through the case of labor law, see L. Duguit, Les Transformations générales du droit privé depuis le Code Napoléon (Paris: Alcan, 1912), which is situated in a framework close to the Solidarism and Durkheimian socialism of his time.

  11. 11. S. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019); C. Durand, Techno-féodalisme. Critique de l’économie numérique (Paris: Zones, 2020); S. Abdelnour and D. Méda, Les Nouveaux Travailleurs des applis (Paris: PUF, 2020). The best solution is to define as a “systemic platform” all platforms used by a large fraction of the population and to treat them as a quasi-public service, with strict regulation of the algorithms and respect for fundamental rights.

  12. 12. The direct taxes involved were levied mainly on property (land and buildings) and on licenses (based on business assets: factories, equipment). To simplify, it concerned the largest property owners, just as in other censitary systems. In France the law of the “double vote” promulgated in 1820 introduced the possibility for the wealthiest censitary electors (roughly speaking, the ones eligible for office) to vote a second time to designate part of the deputies.

  13. 13. See the fascinating article by E. Bengtsson, “The Swedish Sonderweg in Question: Democratization and Inequality in Comparative Perspective, c. 1750–1920,” Past and Present 244, no. 1 (2018): 123–161.

  14. 14. Another interesting case, though less extreme, is that of the Kingdom of Prussia, the chief component of the German Empire from 1871 to 1918. From 1848 to 1918 Prussia had an unusual electoral system involving three categories of citizens defined by the amount of taxes paid. More precisely, Prussian electors were divided into three classes defined in such a way that each class paid one-third of the total taxes and then elected a third of the Great Electors, who themselves elected the deputies.

  15. 15. T. Kuhner, Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); L. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

  16. 16. J. Cagé, The Price of Democracy, trans. P. Camiller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); J. Cagé, Libres et égaux en voix (Paris: Fayard, 2020). In all, tax deductions for political donations (benefiting mainly the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers, and especially the wealthiest 0.01 percent) cost the public treasury about the same amount as total official public financing (based particularly on the results of the last elections, and thus granting the same importance to all electors). The author proposes to replace this inegalitarian system with “democratic equality vouchers” of the same value for everyone, and to apply a similar system to philanthropy and to the media.

  17. 17. J. Cagé and B. Huet, L’information est un bien public. Refonder la propriété des médias (Paris: Seuil, 2021).

  18. 18. The success of the referendum organized by Uber and Lyft to preserve their extremely precarious model in California in 2020 illustrates the limits of an idyllic vision of direct democracy, as well as the need to reconceive a salarial status that makes it possible to reconcile protection and autonomy.

  19. 19. In France, the Senate is elected by an electoral college that is structurally conservative because rural zones are overrepresented in it. In 1946, as a result of pressure exercised by socialists and communists, it lost its right to veto ordinary legislation (a right to veto that under the Third Republic had helped delay by several decades many essential fiscal and social reforms), but retained it for constitutional amendments, which must still be approved in identical terms by each of the two chambers by a simple majority vote before being submitted either to the two chambers in joint session, where they must be approved by a two-thirds supermajority, or to ratification by referendum.

  20. 20. Up until now, the most important constitutional revision made by the Fifth Republic, the one adopted in 1962 establishing the election of the president by universal suffrage, was also made on the basis of General De Gaulle’s blatant violation (for which the Constitutional Council he appointed had no difficulty pardoning him). Nothing, then or now, provided that such a revision can be decided by referendum without prior approval by the two chambers.

  21. 21. The Lords took the risk of vetoing this popular proposal. The Liberal prime minister, Lloyd George, feared his party might be replaced by Labour (which it ultimately was). He needed to give guarantees to the new electors coming from the disadvantaged classes, and thus decided to double down. He had the House of Commons adopt a constitutional law depriving the Lords of any legislative veto power, while at the same time calling fresh elections, which he won by a landslide. The Lords then found themselves caught in the trap of the Salisbury Doctrine, a verbal promise formulated in the 1880s according to which the Lords had to agree to ratify legislation for which the Commons had obtained explicit popular support. They were forced to approve the two texts and to sign their own death warrant after the king threatened to fill the House of Lords with several hundred new members if they dared to betray their promise to the country. See Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 176–181.

  22. 22. We may note in passing the archaic nature of the US Supreme Court, whose judges are named for life like the pope of the Catholic Church and the apostles of the Mormon church. However, a pontifical bull of 1970 denied cardinals over eighty years old the right to vote in papal elections, which proves that all institutions can be reformed, even the most venerable ones.

  23. 23. In the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the first joint-stock companies were established, often around a principle of equality among associates. They then gradually introduced systems with several classes of voting rights, so that the persons who contributed the most capital had more votes. However, they did not go so far as to institute a proportional voting system pure and simple, because it was feared that would lead to an excessive concentration of power in a small group of persons, and harm both the quality of the deliberation and relations among associates. In the United Kingdom, it was not until the enactment of the Company Law of 1906 that this principle of proportionality between the number of stocks owned and voting rights became by law the joint-stock companies’ default mode of governance (the statutes may still depart from this principle, and distinguish several categories of stocks and all sorts of specific rules). See E. McGaughey, “Participation in Corporate Governance,” unpublished ms., London School of Economics, November 4, 2014.

  24. 24. E. McGaughey, “The Codetermination Bargains: The History of German Corporate and Labour Law,” Columbia Journal of European Law 23, no. 1 (2017): 135–176. Compare S. J. Silvia, Holding the Shop Together: German Industrial Relations in the Postwar Era (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

  25. 25. In Sweden, employees have only one-third of the seats, but the rule applies to all companies with more than twenty-five employees. The threshold is thirty-five employees in Denmark and fifty employees in Norway. In Austria, the rule is applied only beyond 300 employees, which in practice considerably limits its field of application (almost as much as in Germany).

  26. 26. Several proposed European directives seeking to impose minimal rules (between a third and half of the seats for employees) were debated in 1972, 1983, and 1988, but they met with fierce hostility from the conservative parties (and with the limited enthusiasm of the French socialists and the British Labour Party, who were at the time betting mainly on nationalizations).

  27. 27. For example, the German Land of Lower Saxony holds 13 percent of Volkswagen’s capital, and the company’s statutes guarantee it 20 percent of the voting rights, in addition to 50 percent of the votes going to employees.

  28. 28. “Land, natural resources, and means of production may … be transferred to public ownership or other forms of public enterprise by a law that determines the nature and extent of compensation” (Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, Article 15).

  29. 29. “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (1789) is still part of the constitutional corpus. Article 2 provides that: “The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Man. These rights are Liberty, Property, Safety, and Resistance to Oppression.” The Constitution offers no explanation of the naturalist definition of property (like those provided by the German constitutions of 1919 and 1949), leaving judges free to interpret it as they understand it, and particularly in the conservative way most favorable to maintaining the already established rights of property owners. In 2013, a French law introduced for the first time a timid presence of employees on the governing boards of large companies (one seat out of twelve, a rule confirmed in 2019 with a slight extension of its field of application), but it is very possible that a law according half the seats to employees would be censured in the absence of a preceding constitutional amendment.

  30. 30. E. McGaughey, “A Twelve-Point Plan for Labour and a Manifesto for Labour Law,” Industrial Law Journal 46, no. 1 (2017): 169–184; Silvia, Holding the Shop Together; S. Jäger, B. Schoefer, and J. Heining, “Labor in the Boardroom,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 2 (2021): 669–725; J. Harju, S. Jäger, and B. Schoefer, “Voice at Work,” MIT, unpublished manuscript, June 2021.

  31. 31. Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 972–975. This system generalizes the rules setting a ceiling on voting rights already proposed regarding media companies by J. Cagé, Saving the Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).

  32. 32. The form of the cooperative company based on a strict equality of voting rights among employees can be adapted for certain projects but imposing it systematically would be counterproductive.

  33. 33. See, for example, two bills introduced by Democratic senators in the United States in 2018–2020. The Reward Work Act of 2018 proposes that employees may elect one-third of the board of directors of listed companies; the Accountable Capitalism Act requires that 40 percent of the directors of all large companies be elected by salaried employees, and that political donations be approved by boards of directors by a 75 percent majority (since Supreme Court rulings make it impossible to forbid such political donations). See Reward Work Act of 2018 (S. 2605 and HR 6096; S. 915, introduced March 27, 2019; HR 3355, introduced October 17, 2019 S. 2605 and HR 6096); Accountable Capitalism Act S. 3348, introduced August 15, 2018; S. 3215, introduced January 16, 2020). On the new platform of the British Labour Party, see K. Ewing, G. Hendy, and C. Jones, Rolling out the Manifesto for Labour Law (Liverpool, UK: Institute of Employment Rights, 2018).

  34. 34. I. Ferreras, J. Battilana, and D. Méda, eds., Le Manifeste Travail. Démocratiser, démarchandiser, dépolluer (Paris: Seuil, 2020). Compare I. Ferreras, Firms as Political Entities: Saving Democracy through Economic Bicameralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). See also McGaughey, “A Twelve-Point Plan for Labour,” which proposes that administrators be elected by assemblies composed of both employees and stockholders.

  35. 35. See the platform of the labor federation UNI Global Union. Compare S. Block and B. Sachs, “Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Economy and Democracy,” a project of the Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School, n.d.