Introduction

For years, in the public debate, there has been a lot of talk about the sixth republic, RIC, sortition, ... In short, about making the state more democratic.

It is a development that I find extremely positive, however, I think we are partially aiming at the wrong objective. What we should aim for is not a democratic state, but a democratic society. For me, to achieve that, it will also be necessary to move away from liberal capitalism.

To democratize society, the power of billionaires must be challenged.

Indeed, in a liberal capitalist society, most decisions are not made by the state, but by companies. However, in a liberal capitalist society, companies are not democracies, but small aristocracies led by a dozen major shareholders (and on a daily basis, one might even speak of a monarchy).

As a result, in most cases, the power to decide is not in the hands of the state leaders, but in the hands of a handful of billionaires who own the majority of the world's companies.

For example, the hundred billionaires who run and own all the car manufacturers are the only ones who can decide whether or not we will switch to electric vehicles. And whatever they decide, their choice will be imposed on society and will not be politically neutral. Switching to electric vehicles is just as much a political choice as staying with combustion vehicles.

And it applies to all the decisions made by billionaires. When Zuckerberg decides to implement fact-checking on Facebook, it is a politically significant act with consequences. When he removes it, it is also a political act. When major oil companies decide to invest a portion of their profit in renewable energy, it is political, and when they do not, it is also political.

In conclusion, in a liberal capitalist society, only a small class of ultra-rich can decide what is produced and how it is produced. However, it is precisely these decisions that most affect our lives and concern the citizens of most countries in the world. Therefore, for me, if we want a democratic society, we must move away from liberal capitalism.

It is indeed the billionaires and not the consumers who drive the economy.

The classic objection is that their decisions are not driven by ideological considerations, but by consumer satisfaction.

Indeed, since Adam Smith (mEven if he never wanted to say thatIt is considered that the main motivation of economic actors is greed and that in a free market system, to maintain or expand their wealth, billionaires are forced to satisfy consumer desires.

If they don't do it, a competitor will appear to do it in their place and take their market share. Consequently, the one who would have the real decision-making power would not be the billionaires, but the consumers.

Yes, in addition, if we believe that our systems are meritocratic, capitalism would be a democracy where the right to vote would be proportional to income, which itself would be proportional to our contribution to production. Thus, a system where producers democratically manage production.

It's almost as beautiful as the international. Unfortunately, we can all see in our daily lives how false each of the assumptions of this reasoning are.

In the rest of this post, I will go over each of its assumptions and explain why, from my point of view, they are false.

• Billionaires (and humans in general) are not solely, or even primarily, motivated by the thirst for money or power.

  For example, if what motivated Jeff Bezos was a thirst for money or power, his investments in Blue Origin would be incomprehensible. At the time he did it, the expected return/risk ratio of new space was very poor.

  The same for Musk, when he invested in Tesla and Space X in the 2000s. And, despite what conspiracy theorists say, if Bill Gates wanted to increase his power or fortune, he would have much better things to do than invest in vaccines and agricultural technosolutionism in Africa. And Bolloré would earn much more money and political influence if he stopped promoting far-right ideas.

• To increase their wealth and power, in many cases, satisfying consumer desires is not the best solution.

  Being a computer scientist, the examples that immediately come to mind are from computing. For example, many people have forgotten, but originally, Skype was a service based on a decentralized and distributed P2P (peer-to-peer) architecture. However, it was acquired by Microsoft, which immediately decided to make it a fully centralized service. This, of course, led to an increase in the maintenance costs of the application and a degradation of the service. And when they made this decision, they knew it (the advantages and disadvantages of a decentralized or centralized architecture are basic in computing). They knew that if Skype initially chose a decentralized infrastructure, it was because it allowed reducing theCosts without degrading the quality of services (and even improving it given the poor quality of internet connections at the time).

  However, Microsoft made this choice because it allowed them to have complete control over the application's operation and to capture the personal data of its users. Skype's initial business model was profitable, but not as much as models that required degrading the quality of the service. As one of my engineering school professors used to say: the right level of quality is the one that maximizes profit margins. Consequently, our supermarket shelves are filled with absolutely crappy products, even though making better quality products would not have required more work or resources (and might even have cost less). And, we could also criticize the market mechanisms' failure to account for negative externalities or the long-term effects of a decision, but that would take us too far.

• Moreover, even if satisfying consumer desires was the best way to make money and if one was solely motivated by profit, the decisions made would still not be in the interest of consumers, because contrary to popular belief, liberal capitalism is one of the systems with the least actual freedom to undertake.

  Indeed, liberal capitalism leads, after a few decades of application, to the concentration of the majority of a country's wealth in the hands of a small number of billionaires. However, to undertake on an industrial scale, a lot of capital is needed. Therefore, in a country where capital is concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires, only they have the actual means to create an industrial enterprise. Consequently, if for one reason or another, the billionaires all agree that an enterprise should not be launched, then it will never be created, regardless of what the rest of the population thinks.

  And since they are only a small number and live in constant isolation, there are plenty of topics on which a consensus has developed within their small group. And this consensus rarely corresponds to the reality as experienced by the rest of the population. The myth of the big company born in a garage is just that: a myth. The GAFAM companies were all born during a meeting between an investor and a project leader, in the plush room of a major investment bank. For example, Musk could never have created TESLA if billionaires or pension fund managers had not poured 20-30 billion dollars over 10 years.

I will quickly go over the last two assumptions as it is obvious that they are false.

• First of all, our societies are very little meritocratic. Indeed, it is obvious that if Bernard Arnault is richer than his cleaning lady, it is not because he works more or because he contributes more to society. It is obvious that the free market does not reward individuals based on their merit or their actual contribution to society, but based on their race, their gender, their social class of origin, their ability to comply with orders with a smile (also called'savoir-être' in managerial language) and to a lesser extent on the amount of work they provide (I do mean the amount and not the quality).

• And as we have all experienced throughout our lives, our purchases in no way reflect our deep convictions about what should be produced and how it should be produced. Most of the time, we buy what we can or what we must. And still, we must have had the opportunity to develop an informed conviction on these subjects.

  Democracy is not about voting, but about the emergence of informed consensus through debate. On their own, most consumers are quite incapable of knowing whether an electric vehicle is environmentally friendly or not. Or if organic is really better for the environment than conventional.

4) Conclusion and digression

I therefore return to my initial conclusion: if we want a democratic society, we must move away from liberal capitalism.

And the good news is that there are plenty of alternative systems. Some that we have already tried and others not.

For example, we can expropriate billionaires and redistribute their wealth, so that no one has more than 10 million euros. If we add a 100% inheritance tax beyond 10 million euros and zero below so that capital never reconcentrates in a few hands, we will sustainably have a capitalism of small owners.

Or else declare that it is no longer the billionaires, but the employees who run the companies (or more modestly that the employees co-manage the large companies as is currently the case in Germany). We will then have a capitalism to collectivize.

Or try to implement the system theorized by intellectuals like Bernard Friot, which I personally call neo-communism.

A little digression, I call his system neo-communist in analogy to neo-liberalism, because for me, neo-liberalism was a revision of classical liberalism to respond to the failure that was the implementation of liberalism in the West (it led to war, the crisis of 1929, and fascism) which fed on the critiques of Marxists, the discoveries of social sciences, and practices contrary to classical liberal ideology which nevertheless proved extremely effective in getting closer to the objectives of liberals. However, the system proposed by Friot seems to me to be a revision of Marxist ideas to respond to the failures of attempts to implement classical communism, which fed on the critiques of liberals and practices contrary to classical communist ideology which nevertheless proved extremely effective in getting closer to the objectives of communists.

For example, before the Second World War, the CGT and the Communist Party were against the principle of a centralized social security and preferred the obligation for employers to contribute to small local mutual funds managed democratically by the workers, as they feared that the state or employers would take control of a centralized social security (they were not wrong). And yet, after the Second World War, it was indeed the communists who created social security, as it was the only means they had to achieveTheir social objectives, without offending the non-communist members of the post-war government (and also because he had not anticipated that a military coup would put an end to parliamentarism in France less than 15 years later). And today Bernard Friot has made it the model of how a communist economy should be organized.

Another example, the classic communists want to eliminate competition, the market, and free enterprise, whereas the neo-communists have nothing against them. On the contrary, they say their system will create a society of entrepreneurs.

But let's close this digression and conclude this blog post by summarizing the message I wanted to convey: If we want a democratic society, it is not enough to democratize the state, we must also democratize the management of the economy. For this, tons of solutions exist and many are neither extremist nor utopian. Some have even been partially successfully experimented with for decades by major countries.

PS: if you want a more detailed argument on the problem posed by the existence of billionaires in a society that claims to be democratic, I recommend this video by Philoxime, whose name I have freely borrowed:Les milliardaires, compatibles avec la démocratie? (ft. ‪@Osonscauser‬)