Convergence of Catastrophes, page 15
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From a strictly mathematical point of view, if France were to reinstate the 40-hour workweek (minimum), limit holidays and ‘bridges’, reduce paid vacations for everyone to four weeks a year, abolish all mandatory retirement ages and suppress 50 per cent of subventions to non-workers, the unemployment rate would be significantly reduced. French public opinion would never accept such measures, however, and no government would have the courage to take them.
To ‘put France back to work’, according to the consecrated formula, is not possible today, with the current mentality, which has been long encouraged to boast of the lack of bad consequences of the welfare state, the cult of rights and acquired advantages, the ideology of the lack of connection between production and wealth, the detestation of hard work and personal discipline maintained by public education, without speaking of the weakness of a state without authority. Work will return to popular taste, like the return of a pendulum, only under the heavy and painful constraint of a giant crisis, a catastrophe, matters both predictable and unavoidable.
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The 35-hour workweek is an economic injustice and a social imposture. According to Maurice Thévenet, who teaches at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM) and the prestigious business school ESSEC (École Supérieure des Sciences Économiques et Commerciales), and wrote Le Plaisir de Travailler,[165] the law on the 35-hour workweek is not responsible for the slight drop in unemployment, which is essentially due to an ephemeral and accidental economic recovery, independent of the government’s intentions. On the contrary, without this intrusive law limiting economic activity, the economic recovery would have been much stronger.
Thévenet also notes that the law on the 35-hour workweek does not penalise large capitalist businesses, especially the multinationals, but handicaps mainly small and medium-sized French businesses. Once we recognise the Trotskyite origins (a cosmopolitan and international ideology) of the inspirers of the Aubry laws,[166] we begin to understand.
He then asserts that this law was inspired by a hatred of work. He writes, criticising the decisions ‘made from above’ by technocrats and rule-makers, that, ‘Some people take pleasure in the activities that deep thinkers judge as “part-time jobs” and they deserve to be heard, before being criticised, neglected or despised.’ He adds, judging that the workplace is not necessarily a hell, ‘It is necessary to leave behind this permanent denunciation of work and abandon the idea of making people happy in spite of themselves.’ For the dominant ideology on ‘the Left’, the ideal of the unemployed person, the welfare recipient, the person living off investments or public assistance has replaced the ideal of the worker.
But limiting the hours of work is just as much a social injustice in the middle term. Whether you like it or not, the 35-hour workweek has a price, in terms of payments by the state (that is, the taxpayers) and new costs for businesses. As soon as the current economic growth slows down (which will happen before long), businesses will start looking to move from France to find a workforce that works longer for the same salary. In general, by making the cost of labour in France more expensive and in reducing its productivity, the 35-hour workweek represents a competitive advantage for the salaried workers of other countries and will therefore eventually contribute to job loss, the inverse of the law’s intended goal. Like the PACs,[167] this is a question of ideological demagogy taken by the most reactionary Left in Europe, who always sees the economy through the spectacles of the socialist old fogies of the Nineteenth century.
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Let us now discuss the sociological aspect of this question. This discussion will inform us about the relations between the French and work, relations marked by the syndrome of sloth.
According to the most recent report of BIT (Bureau international du travail), published on 16 December 2000, the French work 33 per cent less in real time than Americans, 37 per cent less than the Japanese, 17 per cent less than Germans, and 20 per cent less than the Dutch. Stop the applause!
The 35-hour workweek only aggravates an old phenomenon: multiplying holidays, the sacrosanct ‘bridges’, the five-week paid vacations, augmented by falsely claimed sick leave, repeated strikes by protected professions, and so on.
All of this ends by weighing down productivity and reducing collective wealth. One can be an old hand in a society of sloth, like the Situationists[168] of yore, California eco-freaks, Left-wingers or ‘anti-utilitarian’ dreamers (Guy Debord,[169] Raoul Vaneigem,[170] Guy Hocquenghem,[171] etc.). Today their ideology influences the politics of the ‘plural Left’. Why not? In this case, however, you must choose. It is not possible at the same time to insist on driving a 4 X 4 with bullbars, claim 20,000 francs a month of minimum income, benefit from cradle to grave healthcare insurance and also enjoy the standard of living of Luxembourg or Switzerland.
For, in the end, who is going to pay? Who is going to work? For the foundation of the economy and prosperity — this is what neither the Left-socialists nor the adepts of global finance have understood — is work, in quantity and quality. The money (of the unemployed, those on welfare, the retired, speculators on the stock exchange, etc.), this money that everyone needs, even the ‘anti-productivists’, is only the price you have to pay, the concrete result of production. And we really need someone to do it!
The current pathology of vacations and leisure as an ideal of life indicates one more serious social malady: work is perceived as punishment, a work gang, and no longer as an act of self-accomplishment, a vocation, a creation, a means of participating in society. For work is not only a material production of goods and services, but a communitarian cement for a family, a group, a nation. The modern West has promoted passive sloth (one of the symptoms is the non-stop audiovisual spectacle) to the rank of civic virtue. A people whose dream is that of an independently wealthy spectator (the syndrome of Rome’s decline and the dying aristocracy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries) can ask questions about its future. For who is going to work in its place?
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Why is the French economy getting poorer? In ten years, the French standard of living (GDP per capita) has passed from third to twelfth place in Europe, according to Eurostat. The Trotskyite socialists deserve much of the credit. The 35-hour workweek (‘working less to earn more’), the neo-Marxist Law of ‘Social Modernisation’, the expensive jobs programs for unskilled youths, the massive arrival of welfare parasites from the global South, the brain drain to the Anglo-Saxon world (200,000 creative French living abroad in America), the lowest employment rates in Europe in the competitive sector and the largest in the overprotected and swollen public sector, the dogmatic refusal to plan retirement by capitalisation instead of funding it from each year’s taxes, scuttling high-level research budgets (military, nuclear, biological, etc.), the corporatism of unrepresentative unions and the culture of strikes, and so on. There is a very long list of the pathologies that augur that France is going to become poorer and poorer.
Here are some brute facts that are symptoms that speak for themselves of the spreading evil. 1) A study published by APEC (Association pour l’emploi des cadres) in early February 2004 anticipates, from 2004, a lack of 40,000 managers a year. We are not going to find replacements for them in Africa. 2) Six million persons (10 per cent of the population) are below the poverty level (Insec). 3) The cost of construction is 30 per cent higher in France compared with our partners in the European Union (Eurostat). 4) Despite the burden of the Mezzogiorno (the south of the peninsula), Italy has a real standard of living 10 per cent higher than that of France. 5) According to the IMD[172] in Lausanne and the World Economic Forum of Davos, France is ranked twenty-fifth in the world in business competitiveness, because the French state, instead of helping business as in the USA, taxes them and is bent on constructing for them a legally and economically unfavourable environment. 6) France is the world champion in foreign investment — hurray! ahead of the USA — quite simply because its businesses move away from France and prefer to create jobs outside the Hexagon.[173] The annual net French investments abroad were 900 billion francs in 2001, or 10 per cent of the GDP, representing a fantastic haemorrhaging of capital and know-how. Jean-Pierre Robin in Le Figaro Économie (17 January 2002) wrote, ‘By what miracle would a country that holds the European record for unemployment among its population of working age claim to be more prosperous than other countries?’ France is quite simply undermined with laziness. The awakening will be brutal. So much the better!
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France is losing its entrepreneurs and its economic patrimony. 50 per cent of each class in the top business schools (HEC)[174] plans to emigrate to Anglo-Saxon countries. 40,000 creative young French managers have left for Silicon Valley and even more for Great Britain. They are driven away by high taxes and bureaucratic paralysis. These elites, creators of added value, are replaced by masses of immigrants from overseas, of whom only 5 per cent are ‘workers’ in search of a job (and even they are unskilled). The rest are looking for a handout. In four years 800 billion francs of capital investors have left. Because of confiscatory taxation, 200 MEP (moyennes entreprises patrimoniales, or medium-sized family businesses) with strong technological value were sold to foreign groups who moved them out of France in four years. Educated French workers are fewer and fewer. There is a lack of skilled workers (the brain drain has become a brain haemorrhage) and a plethora of the unskilled, due to the growing mass of a working-age population that is unskilled or receiving social services, coming largely from immigration. The economy will end up as a Third World economy, the final stage of all this. This is good news for the United States.
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The French economy is becoming a Third World one. The recent law of ‘Social Modernisation’, of wholly Marxist inspiration, which, like the 35-hour workweek, makes the Anglo-Saxon press laugh — even the Russian press! — is going to end with a hiring freeze, the ebbing of foreign investments and the movement abroad of French businesses. The phenomenon has already started. France is the Western country that invests the most abroad and whose managers leave in the greatest numbers. Is this good news? No! This is flight, not conquest. The Vivendi-Messier affair[175] attests to it. The vital forces of France are fleeing to the Anglo-Saxons.
200,000 French managers have left or are in the process of leaving. Who will replace them? Battalions of unskilled welfare recipients who have come from rural cultures in the global South.
The burden of bureaucrats gets heavier; the competitiveness of businesses shrinks because of the 35-hour workweek. ‘Let us work less to earn more!’ is the slogan of the plural majority.
French industry, which was one of the most productive in the world, is losing ground, because instead of supporting it, the French state is puncturing it — the old Marxist culture. In the USA the state helps national industry instead of sponging off of it. A report published in early January 2004 by the Groupe des fédérations industrielles (GFI), which represents 85 per cent of industrial businesses, expresses fears of a decline of French industry on the world scene in the next few years.
What are the concrete threats that weigh on French industry?
1) Financial investment is jeopardised by bureaucracy and high taxes, but also by the belief in a ‘post-industrial service economy’ without factories. Now industry is vital for the French and European economy, first so as not to depend too much on foreigners to supply material goods, and finally because factories and manufacturing is still very important. This insight is the opposite of the myths spread by the bards of the ‘new economy’. French industrial production of the secondary sector represents 170,000 businesses, 4.1 million salaried jobs and 760 billion euros (4,985 billion francs) in sales, of which 35 per cent is in exports. The heralds of the ‘new economy’, which is centred on service, the Internet, information and computers, soon forget that there will always be a need for factories to make computers, televisions, and smart cards!
2) If French big businesses are massively influential abroad, they are fleeing France, whose competitiveness is affected by bureaucracy, legislative dictatorship (the 35-hour workweek, etc.), continually rising labour costs, insufficient research funding, excessive obligatory taxation, and so on. In 2000, France was in first place in the world, ahead of the United States, in foreign investments! French industries prefer to do business abroad.
3) Because of this fact, importation of capital is drying up and industrial investment in the Hexagon is stagnating. From 1996 to 2000 France moved from sixteenth to twenty-fifth place worldwide in terms of competitiveness.
4) Professional education in technology is managed very poorly. The professional tax paralyses productive investment. Industry is insufficiently connected with technological instruction (another Marxistoid knee-jerk reaction) and is left to the vagaries of ‘national education’. It is well known what a fantastic job public education is doing.
The ‘Colbertist’[176] and later ‘Gaullist’[177] tradition of the French state was to support national industry — exactly as in the USA, which ignores the ‘liberal’ and ‘free trade’ image it presents to the world. The system worked rather well during the 1960s and 1970s: nuclear energy, high-speed trains (TGV), support for aeronautics and space industry were inspired by the ‘Gaullo-Colbertist’ model. On the other hand, with computers and biotechnologies, the model has been a complete failure. Today, the worst of cocktails is prevailing: at home a reactionary and paralysing bureaucratic socialism (of Left or Right), with ultra-liberalism abroad.
The Demographic Coma
The most recent UN population report indicates that the world’s population has grown from 2.52 billion in 1950 to 6.06 billion in 2001, and is predicted to rise to 9.32 billion in 2050. The number of Europeans (including Russians) is going to decrease: 548 million in 1950, 727 million today and 603 million in 2050. According to these projections, Africa will grow from 794 million today to 2 billion in 2050. These raw statistics do not explain what ‘Europe’ will mean if a growing number of people of non-European origin continue to immigrate here to settle permanently, as in North America. If these statistics do not change, the estimates are that Whites (including all countries), who represented 1 out of every 2 humans in 1950 and are presently 1 out of 5, will be only 1 out of 8 in 2050.
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Wolfgang Lutz and Brian O’Neill of the Vienna Institute of Demography issue a warning cry that points out an unprecedented cataclysm: ‘This has never happened before. Waiting to confront it will amount to swimming upstream against an inexorable phenomenon of economic compression and an ageing population.’ Fatalist . . .
Europe’s birth rate, the lowest in the world, is 1.5 babies per woman. (A birth rate of 2.1 is necessary just to replace each generation.) If this birth rate continues until 2020, Europe will lose 88 million inhabitants in 2100 (and if the mortality rates stay the same). In addition, late pregnancies are going to increase the deficit of active workers. The proportion of active to retired is about to pass from 4 to 1 in 2000 to 3 to 1 in twenty years. Those who oppose revising the retirement system seem not to realise what this will mean.
The consequences include risks of the collapse of economic productivity, the end of the social security systems and widespread poverty. The authors of the UN report, obviously, do not recommend a serious pro-natal policy, but, on the contrary, extol immigration as the best solution. Being politically correct is more important than facing an emergency, even a life or death one.
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The French media recently celebrated a victory dance. French demography, along with Ireland’s, is the strongest in Europe since 2000: 1.9 babies per woman. The French population (60.1 million) has passed the population of the United Kingdom.
The media forgot to mention three considerations: 1) An increase in population does not prevent its ageing. 2) This birth rate of 1.9 — which is below replacement level — is due to foreigners, most of whom live on welfare. The birth rate of European couples does not exceed 1.6.
3) France’s neighbours are experiencing lower birth rates than ours. We are only the one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind. Despite large-scale immigration, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc., have lost population every year since 1995.
Here are the facts for Russia, reported by the Russian Observer. Since 1992, Russia has lost 2.8 million inhabitants, which led to a policy devoted to repatriate Russians from the colonies of the former USSR. The Russian Academy of Sciences fears that in 2050 Russia’s population will fall below 100 million. It would require 3 million births a year to stabilise the population. In 2000, there were 1.3 million births, not even twice that of France, with only a third of the population.
If nothing changes, according to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques (ASMP), the population of Europe and Russia (including immigrants) is going to shrink from 727 to 606 million by 2050 (a reduction of 17 per cent), while the population of Africa will grow from 591 to 1.697 million (an increase of 187 per cent), in spite of infant mortality, wars and epidemics. European women have a birth rate of 1.4 — replacement level requires 2.1 — and African women have a birth rate of 5.9. These statistics are serious and they foretell catastrophe.
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According to a confidential report from the section on demographic studies of the United Nations, in 2050, if birth rates do not rise, Europe will have 40 million fewer inhabitants than today, a decline of 10 per cent, despite the massive immigration from which it is suffering. Right now, Europe is losing 157,000 inhabitants a year, and the phenomenon will probably only get worse. The countries most affected today are Italy, Spain and Germany, whose populations started to decline for the first time in their histories in 1999. To the colonising immigration aimed at permanent settlement is added an ageing population and the depopulation of native Europeans. The governments of our continent display only total indifference to these developments.
