AWill we be able, as we were in the middle of the 20e century, to build the new consensus the world needs to face the threat of spreading war and the dramatic acceleration of climate change? At the dawn of a decisive week for French politics, perhaps it is necessary to place the current social conflict over pensions in a broader perspective.
In May 1944, in the middle of the Second World War, the delegates of forty-one countries adopted in Philadelphia the new objectives of the International Labor Organization. Their statement proclaimed that ” work [n’était] not a commodity” and reaffirmed that“A lasting peace [pouvait] be established only on the basis of social justice”. Three months earlier, the National Council of the French Resistance had announced the establishment, as soon as the territory was liberated, of a comprehensive social security plan.
In June, the senior British civil servant William Beveridge (1879-1963), previously commissioned by the government to define the framework of a social security system (“Report to Parliament on Social Security and Allied Benefits”, 1942), presented in 1944 the method to follow: a resolutely Keynesian policy and strong state intervention, mobilizing a level of public expenditure and investment as high as necessary, strictly regulating private investment and organizing vast redistribution.
Questioning
But in the 1980s began the neoliberal turn and the establishment of the Washington Consensus, characterized by a belief in the self-regulating capacities of the market and a radical critique of state intervention, Keynesianism and collective protections. . The political scientist Vincent Gayon recounts, in epistemocratie (Reasons for Action, 2022), at the end of what internal battles, what alliances and what conversion of the elites this turning point was made possible at the heart of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the institution that will organize the dissemination of the new reference.
It shows the major role played by economists and their new conception of unemployment, public spending and the market, and how they ended up triumphing. The courses of the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) at the College de France, published under the title Birth of biopolitics (Seuil, 2004), showed how state intervention was gradually discredited and placed at the service of the market, as well as the way in which all the constituent elements of previous social policy were called into question one following the other. others.
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