The current reinforcement of neoliberalism is not the result of some theoretical error or the propagation of ‘false ideas’. No intellectual magisterium will ever be enough to put the world to rights. Keynes was wrong to claim one-sidedly that ‘soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, that are dangerous for good or evil.’1 To understand neoliberalism in action, we must examine the collective forces and particular oligarchies pursuing it. The question is how a sufficiently powerful coalition crystallized to impose this logic as the sole acceptable ‘reality’. There can be no reinforcement of neoliberalism without a coalition of different groups, and no coalition without passionate motivation and a mobilizing project. It goes without saying that the formation and activity of this coalition differ from country to country, depending on the history of national institutions. Here we shall mainly be dealing with the French case.
We must first rid ourselves of the neoliberal imaginary, which dissolves power into communication networks and institutions into the smooth, flat world of generalized commerce (the overly famous ‘global village’). Neoliberalism does not boil down to globalized commodification and anonymous financialization. As a project and system, it has faces and names. It is implemented and legitimized by political groups, social forces, economic powers and media circles, forming a ‘new aristocracy’, which has already radically subverted democratic principles.2 Financial capitalism does not only consist of magma flows handled by interconnected computers. It has its institutions, its rules and even its territories. For if the normative logic that has become established on a world scale is embodied by powers with global reach (multinationals, financial actors, international organizations, European Union, etc.), the national powers which implement its norms are as much co-producers as importers.
Let us use the term neoliberal oligarchic bloc3 to designate this coalition of elite groups, which have specific interests in the various institutions and social sectors where they are dominant, and common interests inasmuch as they can only dominate through the organic solidarity that unites them. This composite power, at once national and international, is jointly ensured by parties, businesses and public institutions. It is embodied and soldered by individuals who circulate from one end of the social sphere to the other, and who seem to be characterized by a social and geographical ubiquity that enables them to mobilize the most varied resources in power relations.4
In political philosophy, ‘oligarchy’ in the singular refers to the class of the wealthy gripped by the demon of limitlessness.5 When analysing the concrete forms of neoliberal oligarchic power today, it must be used in the plural. Oligarchies are the various powers caught up in the subjective vertigo of accumulation and they are mutually supportive. They legitimize themselves by believing that extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a small number is the sole guarantee of relative preservation of the welfare of the great majority of the population.
We can distinguish four main components in such power: the government oligarchy and senior bureaucratic caste at the head of states and international organizations; financial actors and the top management of major enterprises wielding increasing corporate power, especially in the financial sphere; the leading opinion and entertainment media, to which we should add counselling and communications professionals; and academic and publishing institutions, as producers and diffusers of the discursive ‘cement’ of oligarchic power. These components are not all political in the strict sense, but they all play a political role without which we cannot explain the current neoliberal radicalization.
The bloc’s power stems from its diversity and its dual character, national and international. In it, naturally, we find the principal beneficiaries of the economic system, possessors of considerable private wealth or the most senior private sector executives, who are the other major beneficiaries of shareholder capitalism. But we also find the most senior national and international civil servants, quick to head for the most lucrative posts in financial capitalism, who have a close relationship with professional politicians enjoying the satisfactions of power and sometimes, too, the charms of personal enrichment. Mention must also be made of the political and economic system’s media spokespersons – conformist economists and editorialists – mixed with showbiz and sporting idols, who together feed the hypnotic spectacle of a manufactured ‘reality’. Not to forget the ‘shadowy actors’ who manufacture economic models and legal tools facilitating the globalization of markets and the transformation of states into ‘agencies’ at the service of business. These closely connected hubs, where we often find the same names, the same networks and the same dynasties, possess economic, political, intellectual and media resources enabling them to accumulate wealth and power at the same time.
The dominant oligarchic system has three main features: entrenched self-reproduction of political and economic elites; systemic corruption rooted in ‘return favours’ and the exchange of ‘mutual services’; and dual inscription, national and international, of its power apparatuses. Three factors in the oligarchy’s operation work to consolidate this bloc: the neoliberal coherence of government policy, whether right- or left-wing; the professionalization of politics, monopolized by a small oligarchy of unshiftable ‘barons’ and moonlighters; and the fashioning of ‘reality’ by the dominant economists and media. The bloc’s fragility is the flip side of its strength: the autonomy detaching it from the rest of society. Its confinement within the circular operation of its interests, its economic and cultural internationalization, its profound ignorance of what goes on ‘below’, and contempt indeed for anyone outside the oligarchic sphere – these strip the ‘elites’ of all legitimacy in their claim to lead society, and prompt their massive rejection in angry gestures that take unpredictable forms.
Professional politics, which dates back to the very beginnings of representative democracy, is a highly effective vector for imposing neoliberalism. Today it is the target of new forces, such as Podemos attacking the ‘caste’ in power in Spain, and old forces, like the National Front belabouring the ‘UMPS’.6 The very grave crisis afflicting ‘representative democracy’ today stems from the conjunction of a structural vice – the professionalization of politics or caciquismo – and the effects of neoliberal rationality’s assault on the great mass of the population. Since the 1980s, the main parties ‘of government’, whether right-wing or left-wing, have implemented a programme to liberalize financial markets, international trade and the labour market in a constant ratchet. They have done so by exploiting the particular advantages of professional politics, which shield them from the consequences of their own measures and laws. In the face of repeated scandals about tax fraud by elected representatives or government members, the illegal financing of parties, the misuse of company assets, the fixing of public works contracts and the hidden commissions that go with it, the ‘nation’s representatives’ have been forced to introduce certain rules of transparency and caps to elective mandates. But there is still a long way to go.7 For the most part, the professionalization of politics remains unaffected: the appropriation of power by eternal feudal lords is flourishing, as is the political corruption which forms its inseparable shadow.8 Some of those found guilty of fraud and abuses of all kinds calmly continue their political career as if nothing had happened.9 This is because professional politics is based on a ‘hidden electoral property qualification’, which affords it comparative shelter from popular protest and which, whatever happens, ensures the political controls remain in the hands of the oligarchic bloc. However, it breeds massive resentment.10
The main parties’ oligarchies import the imperatives of the new global capitalism into the political arena. The ‘national’ or ‘republican’ rhetoric used and abused by French political leaders does little to conceal the transfer of norm creation to unelected, inter-governmental or international bodies, operating independently of any control by citizens. The traditional adversarial game between Left and Right has given way to a game of alternation between two fractions of one and the same political and economic oligarchy, unified by the entrepreneurial transformation of the state. Of course, the two fractions of the political oligarchy are not quite identical, for electoral competition presupposes a minimal differentiation of the platforms ‘on offer’. But the distinction is wearing dangerously thin for these parties, and they are losing credibility. The left fraction of the oligarchy is traditionally more liberal in the area of ‘values’, morals and individual liberties, whereas the right fraction flaunts its conservatism in these domains. But they have long since coincided in their adherence to the same economic doxa, as well as more recently agreeing on the pre-eminence of the executive and approving the strengthening of the police’s administrative powers at the expense of judicial oversight. Electoral democracy is thereby completely deactivated, reduced to an illusion in a shadow play.
The spectacle of former political leaders like Aznar, Blair, Schröder, Sarkozy, Clinton or Strauss-Kahn using their fame and address book to make a fortune out of lectures and advice to investment funds, banks and large firms, reinforces the rejection of a corrupt caste. Over and above these lucrative conversions, the accumulation of wealth is a powerful oligarchic glue. It is the objective that welds them, the principle that in practice destroys the legal frameworks and regulations which the oligarchs are supposed not only to uphold, but to enforce. To explain the advent of neoliberalism, it is not enough to emulate orthodox Marxists and blame the dominant class’s resolve to restore profit margins. In reality, the pursuit of wealth tends to become ‘the Law and the prophets’, as Marx put it, not only for capitalists, but for all elite groups in their respective fields – politics, art, sport, media, and even areas utterly alien to economic logic, such as higher education. Today, all oligarchies tend to identify with the figures of the ‘manager’, the entrepreneur, even (in the case of the most uninhibited) the ‘billionaire’.11 The logic of accumulation is even taking root in the state bureaucracy, so obvious has it become that increased ‘corporate margins’ must govern public policy across the board. Private-sector principles are imposed with the introduction of New Public Management, the development of public–private partnerships, opaque bonus systems, and the outsourcing of expertise and auditing to private companies.
While the interpenetration of the corporate world, the state bureaucracy and professional politics is not a new phenomenon, it has assumed an unprecedented structural character today.12 The situation may be characterized as systemic corruption at every level, from local bodies to the apex of the state. Where once it could be said that in ‘the modern age’, on account of ‘rapid and constant economic growth’, ‘the dangers of corruption and perversion were much more likely to arise from private interests than from public power’,13 we have to recognize that those days are well and truly over. Corruption now emanates as much from the public sphere as from private interests.14 The scandals that regularly erupt in ‘democratic’ countries, involving political figures, banks, pharmaceutical industries, utilities and construction multinationals, not to mention organized crime,15 are merely its most blatant aspects. The systemic dimension of corruption, based on generalized collusion between oligarchies, translates into a confusion of roles and interests, into the protection enjoyed by big bosses and bankers regardless of what they do, into financial support for politicians from large enterprises and the media, into group properties in construction, banking or armaments. The bulk of this systemic corruption is covered by state protection that survives alternation in office and by a highly effective omertà. Only a few very courageous investigators and whistleblowers break this silence, without always unveiling its systemic character, precisely because they treat misdeeds as ‘affairs’ or ‘scandals’.16 The new ‘welfare state’ now looks primarily to the welfare of ‘investors’, in the official terminology for the wealthy. And when, despite all the protection they enjoy, major banks like HSBC, UBS or Crédit Mutuel are belatedly accused of tax evasion costing the state billions, they get off with fines that are far from equivalent to the loss.
States have fostered globalization without social or environmental norms and, in so doing, allowed a shadow economy to develop composed of shell companies, hedge funds, offshore accounts, and sophisticated judicial-engineering constructs that render financial flows utterly opaque. Corruption has become coextensive with the existence of states.17 The latter have helped the dominant classes to ‘neuter taxes’ with the aid of tax law professionals, experts in ‘niches’, and to protect fraudsters by leaving access to tax havens open.18 The first major cause that began sealing the oligarchic bloc, by knitting together the interests of privileged milieus and professional politics, was the dismantlement of progressive taxation. This facilitated rapid growth in the income of business leaders and shareholders, and the amassing of fortunes by the tiny minority of the ultra-wealthy, initially in the USA and UK from the 1980s onwards. This deliberate policy contributed significantly to state debt, with governments borrowing on the financial markets the sums they stopped raising in taxes. This was a doubly profitable stroke for owners of finance capital: the sums they were no longer paying in taxes yielded them interest payments.
The iron system of neoliberalism thus resulted in a series of political decisions by ‘lead’ governments. All the rest followed, arguing that it would be suicidal for growth and employment not to conform to these aggressive practices, the only ones that can attract capital and firms, depriving other countries of tax revenue and lowering social standards and wages. The Europe of competition has been a chosen land for this kind of collectively self-destructive practice, as indicated by the fiscal pillage practiced by Luxemburg and Ireland. More generally, inter-governmental and international organizations (IMF, WTO or OECD) elevated the ‘right to dumping’ – social, fiscal and environmental – to the status of a norm, before belatedly trying to limit its most destabilizing effects on the global economy.19
Giant conglomerates, significantly strengthened since the 1980s by privatization and the ‘opening up of markets’, dominate national markets and, through the number of their subsidiaries and the volume of their trade, the world economy. They have a political power that stems from their financial might, their sometimes exponential growth (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc.), their influence on employment and growth, their collection of data about consumers, their ability to incite competition between social and fiscal legislative regimes to evade taxes, and their corrupting influence on political leaders through forceful lobbying.20 In this sense, large companies are full-fledged political actors that have developed specific strategies for influence, nationally and globally. This entrepreneurial power, known as corporate power in the Anglophone world, commands a comprehensive discourse and a battery of arguments attuned to the ‘game’ imposed by globalization on its major economic protagonists.
The globalization game lends weight to the new international norms of ‘governance’ that dictate the content of the ‘structural reforms’ to be implemented. In this respect, neoliberalism is not the political economy of pure, perfect markets associated with neo-classical economists. It is international politics in the service of the large enterprises dominating economies and societies.21 Financial deregulation, the flexibilization of jobs markets, the lowering of corporation tax and taxes on the highest incomes, the obstacles erected to health reform in the US or the introduction of the Tobin tax in Europe, all the curbs placed on the ecological transition by supporters of ‘green capitalism’ – these are so many results of the collective action of big businesses capable of acting politically to great effect. They lobby elected representatives and administrators, promise positions and orders, blackmail the authorities over investment and relocation, and finance electoral campaigns and parties.
Corporate political power extends and enhances capital’s social power over the organization of work, consumption and lifestyles.22 The quasi-constitutional principle of ‘business competitiveness’ now underpins all economic, social, educational and even cultural policy. The symbolic submission of French political leaders declaring their ‘love of enterprise’,23 or (when crossing the Channel) their ‘love of business’, is of the utmost significance. ‘I love enterprise’: the phrase used by a French prime minister during an employers’ meeting should be taken seriously. It attests to the new hierarchical relations between the legitimate sources of power. The shift from love of God and King (His temporal representative) to love of country or nation marked a transition between two political eras. The shift from love of country to love of enterprise, including ‘France plc’, marks another. As representatives of a supreme authority, the purveyor of ‘wealth’, ‘employment’ and ‘happiness’, business leaders and (via their mediation) shareholders participate directly in determining national policy at the highest level, and inflect international trade rules and national laws in line with their own interests.24
Large enterprises have been awarded public service contracts in numerous areas (telecommunications, computing, Internet, research, motorways, health, etc.) and thus exercise a pervasive influence on public action and society. Corporate power comes in two phases. Large businesses are governing institutions in that they possess the ability to inflect government policy. But these governing institutions are themselves governed by shareholders, who are narrowly focused on maximizing share prices and dividends.25 It is through them that the mimetic, irrational, short-termist behaviour of financial markets is transmitted throughout the economy, state and society. Far from ushering in a democratic capitalism, pension funds and other savings collectors play a decisive role in centralizing capital. This gives them greater power over corporate boards on account of the cross-ownership and volatility of their shares in large enterprises.26 The managers of large enterprises have seen their own interests aligned with those of property-owners, especially fund managers, via stock options and other benefits (bonuses, pension pots, etc.), whose value depends on share prices. They have become autonomous to the point where they form a separate caste, ruled by a ‘global market of executives’ whose pay has nothing to do with that of the wage-earners at the summit of the firms’ internal hierarchy.27 In this narrow but powerful circle, transnational norms are established for salaries and benefits that make these managers bearers of the ‘new values’ of neoliberal capitalism.
One aspect of corporate power is the aid from which the banking oligopoly has benefited for its development. Liberalization of the financial sector from the 1980s onwards resulted in a hyper-concentration that procures super-profits and encourages dishonest practices by a banking cartel which reckoned itself untouchable. François Morin has exposed the oligopolistic structure of banking globally.28 A highly concentrated sector in terms of balance-sheet sizes, and closely interconnected, it is especially potent within the system of corporate power. Mega-banks have knitted a web of interests of such density between states, territorial collectivities and multinationals that it has become very difficult to contain the financial control they exercise over the political field. Fraudulent trafficking of the Libor or Euribor interbank rate,29 organized tax evasion, risk-taking in speculative markets, deliberate lies about the quality of securities sold, and manipulation of derivatives markets – these attest to a sense of total impunity consequent upon the power acquired by the global banking oligopoly in the 2000s.
The seizure of control of political decision-making bodies by groups and individuals closely connected with economic and financial lobbies is one of the most striking aspects of the neoliberal oligarchic system. The abrupt replacement of rulers in Italy or Greece by ‘technocrats’, who are themselves often former bankers, is indicative of the increasingly direct ascendancy of financial actors over the world of politics. That Mario Draghi, appointed head of the ECB, was a former ‘partner’ in Goldman Sachs, responsible for sovereign debt at a time when this investment bank was advising the Greek government on how to doctor its accounts, tells us much about European political leaders’ complete lack of moral scruples.
It is sometimes thought that the admirable French Republic is immune from the universal ascendancy of finance. This is mistaken: the hard core of the oligarchic bloc is formed by the increasingly close imbrication of the senior civil service and the world of finance, nationally and internationally. Capitalist rationality has taken root at the heart of the state in the name of ‘globalization’, which has become a kind of self-sufficient abstract reason for legitimation purposes.30 The ultra-rapid conversion of the senior state bureaucracy to economic and financial globalization attests to the remarkable flexibility of leaders quick to cast aside the idol that previous generations of state administrators affected to worship: public service, the common good, the Republic.
The osmosis between senior civil servants and the economic and financial oligarchy is now such that the latter does not need to intervene directly to advance its point of view. The Court of Auditors, the Budget directorate and, above all, the Treasury shoulder the task of defending economic orthodoxy and corporate interests. The traditional organs of the French state’s administrative dirigisme have become levers of neoliberal rationality, while also engaging in an ultra-corporatism to preserve their own benefits. Institutions believed to be devoted to public supervision are, in fact, sites of connivance with market finance. This is not a new phenomenon. Yves Mamou demonstrated almost thirty years ago that it was not French capitalists who implemented measures to liberalize finance but the Treasury, which was particularly sensitive to competition from other financial centres. The journalist used the formula of ‘the Treasury team’s state liberalism’ to refer to the ideology of this body of civil servants, converted since the start of the 1980s to the new global doxa.31
This demonstration is more relevant today than ever. ‘Bercy’ is the name for the inter-state power that has been imposed on all other ministries. It pressured the French government into capitulating to the banking lobby when it came to regulating banking activities, into defending creditors’ interests at all costs in the euro crisis, blocking the Tobin tax, and protecting high frequency trading: ‘In France, there is no longer an impenetrable barrier between private high finance and public high finance. They are inhabited by the same people, who blithely risk confusing administrative power in the service of the general interest with discretionary power in the service of the banking sector’s short-term interests.’32 One can no longer count the Treasury directors and other personnel, right-wing and left-wing alike, who have moved on to private banks. It is enough to cite the names of Jacques de Larosière, Christian Noyer, Michel Camdessus, Jean-Claude Trichet, Philippe Jaffré and Louis Gallois to register the extent to which their bearers concentrate both financial power and political power in their hands.33 Michel Pébereau, one of the main protagonists in the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s, who subsequently became head of the BNP bank, has been one of the most influential figures in French political economy over the last thirty years – a major promoter of austerity policies and the managerial transformation of the state when head of the Institute of Enterprise, not to mention the influence he enjoyed as head of the governing body of the Institut d’études politiques in Paris (Sciences Po) for a quarter of a century, from 1988–2013.34
These senior civil servants have long been closely connected by their membership of ministerial cabinets as well as the boards of large companies, and by their presence within the organizational structures of banks. Their careers, which see them pass from the Treasury to the directorate of large private banks, from the Bank of France to the European Commission, the ECB or the IMF, and vice versa, are enough to show how they form the core of the French, European and, sometimes, global oligarchic system. Thus, Rawi Abdelal has demonstrated the important role of ‘French policymakers’ in constructing the codes of global finance from the 1980s onwards.35 The consanguinity of civil service and banks, which is not to be found to the same degree in any other economic sector, helps us understand the internal logic behind the ‘single policy’ pursued by all governments as regards the concentration of banks or the remuneration of CEOs. Therewith we can more clearly appreciate what it is, at the heart of the state apparatus, that prevents any serious challenge to the financialization of the economy, painted as an inexorable natural phenomenon. For it is these individuals, wedded to the norms of international finance, who dictate political choices via the oligopoly of private ratings agencies and the IMF. They can assert that what is at stake is the very ability of states to function, with the result that, through their mediation, states incorporate systemic risk by buying private debt securities and making taxpayers accountable for the risks which are actually down to creditors.
Via senior state and banking officials, the imperatives of financial institutions refashion public policy by prioritizing the protection of holders of ‘sovereign debt’ over any social responsibilities. The banking law of 18 July 2013, designed by Pierre Moscovici and labelled ‘for the separation and regulation of banking activities’, is typical of the influence of French financial lobbies, which defend the power of large, French-style systemic banks. An alibi law protecting the speculative operations of the four systemic behemoths – BNP, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, BPCE-Natixis – it deliberately preceded the European process initiated by Michel Barnier to destroy it from within, with German and, naturally, British backing. And when the European Parliament sought to take control of the financial regulation dossier, the French government and numerous MEPs, left and right alike, vigorously opposed it.36 This is because it was necessary, in the name of ‘economic patriotism’, to protect the super-profits of the four French giants – profits only made possible by public cover of the risks taken in markets.37 The lesson of Dexia and the tab of ten billion dollars left for taxpayers to pick up have served no purpose.
Kant made it a secret article of his considerations on government: ‘The possession of power inevitably corrupts the free judgement of reason.’38 But the corruption of judgement does not always take the same form. The economic language in which political figures think and express themselves has an insidious corrupting effect, in that it legitimizes purely individual motives for acting, discourages any collective action, and promotes the market as a site of equity and source of prosperity. But what above all characterizes the oligarchic system in this regard is the ban on supposing that a political logic different from neoliberalism could possibly exist. We cannot overlook what the discourse cementing the oligarchic bloc owes to its academic component.39 Here we need to identify the political role of mainstream economic expertise when it places itself directly at the disposal of neoliberal governments and uses the media as echo chambers. This public role is denied, and the modelling and mathematizing apparatus of academic economic discourse serves as a convenient cover. However, with their reports, notes and opinions, orthodox economists, empowered by their monopolization of university posts since the 1980s, have established themselves as the main experts in public affairs, be it the environment, teaching, employment, health, the media, or research. The ‘scientific authority’ they don derives, above all, from the balance of forces in the economic field. Invested thus, they have actively helped determine the intellectual schemas echoed by the media and closed down any real debate on the underlying causes of the 2008 crash, as well as the policies pursued thereafter. Their crude errors before the 2008 crisis have not stopped them – quite the reverse – ruling the roost in the media, universities and among political leaders or bank executives. For several decades, the voice of heterodox, dissident and ‘dismayed’ economists, however productive, creative and pluralistic, has found it very difficult to make itself heard in scholarly institutions, as well as the media and mainstream politics. The explanation may seem rough and ready, but it corresponds, alas, to the dire reality: mainstream economists, in addition to the academic benefits accruing to them from their conformism, write and say what their sponsors in business circles want to read and hear. In other words, as Paul Krugman has rightly said, it is not merely a matter of scientific error but of ‘soft corruption’, thanks to which there is a great deal of money to be made.40 Orthodoxy can pay big dividends.
The great majority of journalists and editorialists who ‘occupy’ the broadcasting studios suffer from neoliberal parroting. In this respect, the power of the media, far from exercising some kind of ‘counter-power’, as a corporate narcissism would have us believe, is an integral part of the oligarchic system. It ‘sells’ the neoliberal vulgate to public opinion, naturalizes it, and helps radicalize its manifestations by demanding that government ‘stay the course’ with the ‘necessary reform’ of society. It is not that the media make it their duty to extol the occupants of official roles, as in an ordinary totalitarian dictatorship or classical authoritarian regime. On the contrary. The ‘editocratic’ power of the dominant media consists in bringing government back into line when it deviates from neoliberal normality, and calling public opinion to order by invoking the ‘realism’ of ‘external constraints’ against any hint of dissidence. In this sense, there is indeed a ‘manufacturing of consent’ to neoliberalism, to adopt a formula from Noam Chomsky.
In Europe, the way the leading media ‘covered’ the European Constitutional Treaty, austerity policies and, more recently, the euro crisis or the Greek crisis shines a bright light on the integration of the dominant journalistic norm into the system’s functioning. The normalizing function of this journalism is not explained solely by criteria of urgency (the news ‘scoop’) or market compulsions to sensationalism. The ownership structure of the assets of media groups controlled by industrialists or bankers is far more decisive.41 Still, the stranglehold of finance and industry over the media does not explain everything. We must also consider the structure of the social and professional relations between politicians, journalists and economists. The same schools, the same ideological reference points, the same company: a whole ‘milieu’ has formed that supports systemic power and for which the popular classes do not exist – except when they make themselves heard by some improper way of voting, in which case they must be taught a lesson by an appropriate pedagogy, so as to come to appreciate the rationality of what causes their suffering.
The journalistic and intellectual oligarchy tolerates a few rare and precious exceptions. Above all, it meets with an internal opposition in media and publishing which plays a valuable role, far beyond that sector alone, in countering the logic of intellectual requisition peculiar to the oligarchic bloc. To castigate neoliberal rationality for its abuses, excesses, conflicts of interest and political lies – manifestations of the systemic corruption of the oligarchies – in the manner of independent, genuinely critical journalists, is in this sense to do public health work.
Once in government, the ‘Left’ does not even attempt to change things. It follows them, precedes them, or even precipitates them. François Hollande is often criticized for ‘betraying’ his promises. However, it would not be difficult to show that Hollande and those around him had long since rallied to neoliberalism. Did they not declare as early as 1985 that ‘competition is left-wing’?42 This ‘betrayal’, which we have seen elsewhere, is in fact simply the clearest demonstration of the political effects of oligarchic domination. It is true that in France the switch in public discourse was abrupt. Scarcely two years after the lyrical flights of Hollande’s 2012 Bourget speech, Emmanuel Macron – énarque, inspector of finances, investment banker at Rothschild – became economics minister with the aim of implementing the political line he had helped define at the Élysée, as deputy secretary-general to the president of the Republic.43 Three years after his victory, more discreetly, Hollande appointed François Villeroy de Galhau – polytechnicien and énarque, inspector of finances, and former deputy CEO of BNP Paribas – as governor of the Bank of France. The financial oligopoly had indeed regained its place in the institutions of the Republic – the one it had first acquired under Sarkozy. For, with Hollande, it is this ‘new aristocracy’ that continues to govern and apply the only policy deemed ‘rational’ by the senior bureaucratic caste, whatever the human cost. Raymond Barre’s competitive supply and strong currency policy remains the pensée unique of the whole French oligarchic bloc: its ideological cement. Some journalists and analysts have noted the similarity of this policy orientation to that of the previous presidency.44 Once engaged in this infernal ratchet, the neoliberal Left is ineluctably led to call into question everything the historical Left regarded as its achievements. Pensions, the thirty-five-hour week, industrial tribunals, permanent contracts, labour law, public service status – all of it must be refashioned in accordance with the prevailing norm. How to explain this seemingly incomprehensible drift to the many voters who still believe in the Left? In truth, neither individual character, nor good or (invariably) bad faith, count. What matters is the totality of environmental effects, educational matrices and relations of interest that make the oligarchic bloc work. And the ‘Left’, which must be described as on the Right, is an integral part of it.