The place of work in society and in the project that the left must offer to the French should not be controversial. Beyond the slogans and the little sentences which have been exchanged by each other, François Ruffin (deputy La France Insoumise) and Fabien Roussel (deputy of the North and national secretary of the French Communist Party) recalled that the aspirations of our fellow citizens are not those of a post-work company, but those of a society that can bring to everyone a worthy work and vector of emancipation.
Let’s start by recalling obvious: there is no society without work. This is true for any economic system, whether capitalist or not. In fact, work, whether employee, independent, family or volunteer for an association, is the only source of wealth for the community.
The social state has thus been built
Karl Marx (1818-1883) himself, theorist of work value, never denied his importance. When he develops in the middle of the nineteenth e century his reflections and his writings on the capitalist system, he denounces the alienation by the work of the dispossessed proletarian of his individuality and his personal contribution.
The proletarian is the one who has only his work force, which he sells against a subsidy of misery. The common idea of the XIX e century, among all philosophers and actors of a socialist movement under construction, is that the emancipation of workers must go through their association, thus making them mastery of the work tool and the benefit of his product.
Faced with the work exploited embodied by wages, socialism dreamed of emancipated work, organized collectively by the workers themselves. But the wage earning has extended, so much so that at the beginning of the 20th th century, the conditions for organizing production and our companies made it the main distribution of income distribution , in particular by the creation of social security.
For its part, social law has come to protect the employee, improve their working conditions and defend union expression within companies.
The social state has thus been patiently built, as the economist Christophe Ramaux recalls in his latest work, for a republican economy. An alternative to neoliberalism (de Boeck, 336 pages, 21.90 euros). One of its concrete applications was to attach to the status of employee a legal framework aimed at leaving capitalist arbitrariness.
the same logic of alienation
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