The return of “crazy money”

It is with "political" legends as with urban legends, they are all more unfounded than the others. Thus a political legend is spreading which seems, as I wrote in a previous column , to contribute to closing the coffin of the Social Security of Ambroise Croizat and Pierre Laroque. One morning this week again, the host of the France Culture morning show took up the old refrain of "60% of French people who receive more from the State than they contribute to it" .

This is a new version of the " crazy money " denounced a few years ago by the President of the Republic. And it is yet another hoax. The Social Security transfers, whose 80th anniversary we are commemorating these days, are purely assimilated to state payments, in total contradiction with the spirit of the Social Security system desired by Laroque and Croizat.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”

What are contributions according to the founding fathers? Deferred wages socialized according to the principle of solidarity "from each according to their means to each according to their needs" . These contributions are based on the product of employees' labor, regardless of the distribution between the employee's share and the employer's share. Thus, a good part of Emmanuel Macron's "crazy money" is our money, and we would only be crazy if we refused to see it recognized as such.

With the decline of social democracy under the liberal offensive from the seventies of the previous century, a battle of words – yet another one – will be lost and in the dominant discourse, “contributions” will be replaced by “social charges” . The link to salaried work is dissolved; with charges and exemption policies, we will witness a hold-up of the fruits of labor for the benefit of capital.

Certainly, with the emergence of mass unemployment, with the growth in health expenditure and improved coverage by Social Security – even if this has been constantly distorted by successive governments since the Gaullist ordinances of 1967 – a portion of health expenditure will be financed by taxation and new systems such as the CSG promoted by Michel Rocard.

However, the appropriation by the State – in fact by governments in their political communication – of all social transfers is a new stage in the erasure of the social democracy desired at the Liberation and built in workers' struggles and dialogue between unions and employers. The latter are largely dispossessed of the prerogatives that were theirs.

In all areas, collective bargaining and joint management are being restricted by the increasingly authoritarian liberal political power. If very recently the board of directors of the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM) modestly rebelled and refused to double the deductibles , we know that the new government will take no account of this vote.

As I wrote in other columns, at a time when popular mobilizations are looming , sometimes uncertain, but which reflect the pain and dismay of a growing part of the population of our country, the urgent need would be for the workers to reappropriate the social security system that Croizat and Laroque had initially wanted to entrust to them.