Introduction

Recently, Etienne Klein popularized the quote from the statistician Georges Box: ''All models are false, but some are useful'. 

Like all maxims, this one is questionable, particularly due to the abusive use by some economists, to justify the absurd assumptions of their model. But personally, I see in it a very effective vaccine against dogmatism that everyone should know. Thus, rather than criticizing it, I propose to supplement it:

All models are false, but some are useful, and anyway, we have to use a model to understand the world.

Those who think that he does not use a model, but common sense or evidence or reason simply do not see the model he uses and are therefore prisoners of it. And it’s the same for ideology, all are full of flaws and blind spots, which become glaringly obvious when applied, but all have their usefulness in understanding the world, predicting the future and improving it. And in any case, we have no other choice but to have an ideology, so we might as well choose it consciously while being as aware as possible of its shortcomings and limits.

Besides hoping to make a better choice, it allows for an easier change when it turns out to be unsuitable for the situation one is in. In any case, it is much easier than if one claims not to have one or to strive for neutrality and objectivity (often, through this approach, one only sinks further into ideological dogmatism).

But, the best advantage of this philosophy is that it allows a better acceptance and understanding of the diversity of viewpoints within a society. It allows us to better understand why others are attracted to ideologies we do not like, thereby allowing us to better prevent it (I remain committed).

Indeed, its strength is to admit that the ideologies of others have strong points that can seduce them and that ours has weak points that can disgust them. Recognizing this forces us to challenge our ideologies to improve them and to ask ourselves who could be most easily seduced by it.

For example, neoliberalism, so despised by the left, has strong points that we must acknowledge and study if we want to understand why it is so appealing, even outside the most privileged circles.

And on the contrary, the traditional ideology of the left has flaws that explain the lasting discredit it currently suffers among the majority of the population and particularly among the part of the working classes that has chosen to turn its vote towards the RN rather than towards abstention, after the rightward shift of the PS.

Personally, I think that the most appealing aspects of this ideology for the working classes are its implications in education and work.

Private or public education

Let's take the example of education, because it is both the most surprising and the least discussed.

The traditional left defends the obligation for all children to go to the same public school, while the right defends the freedom for each family to choose their school. Often on the left, this divide is interpreted from the perspective of class struggle and the defense of secularism.

For the left, behind this demand for freedom, lies the communalism of the rich (the only truly dangerous one for the republic). That is to say that the wealthy would want there to be a school for the rich that is better funded and with more demanding programs where poor children will not set foot (except for a small minority handpicked to maintain appearances), in order to ensure that their offspring remain advantaged.

But for the left, behind the defense of school freedom also lies the desire of reactionary families and Christian sects to indoctrinate their children from an early age. To protect them from the possibility of hearing ideas other than those of their parents and subjecting them to a discipline that for normal people is considered as abuse.

Let's not forget that the non-sexual abuses observed at Bétharram and Stanislas, although less spectacular, are just as chilling due to their deliberate and intended nature by people vile enough to send their children there, fully knowing what they are doing (no, I'm not targeting anyone, you're imagining things). In short, there's no shortage of good reasons on the left to oppose school freedom.

But, people often forget the good reasons to oppose it, which resonate much more in the lived experience of the working classes than the misdeeds of the reactionary bourgeoisie or the possibility of social mobility through school, which in reality concerns far more the middle class than the working class. For example, the fact that a centralized public school requires entrusting one's children to an institution over which they have no control. A school where they rightly feel despised, judged on criteria they do not understand the relevance of and taught knowledge they find perfectly useless and uninteresting.

Personally, I think that their knowledge is far from being useless or uninteresting, but I also think they are right to rebel against the obligation imposed on them without explanation to devote themselves body and soul to a learning they don't see the usefulness of, and to the punishments and ridicule they have to endure if they do not comply. While at the same time, much more fundamental knowledge such as how to read a payslip, what our rights are as workers, how to enforce them,how to fill out his tax form (well that's a bit obsolete), are never addressed.

And speaking of punishment, one could also talk about the discipline to which we are subjected at school, the competitiveness, ... In short, how can one blame those enticed by the promises of neoliberals that everyone can regain control over the education of their children by turning the families who frequent it into customers to satisfy. To be able to tell an overly arrogant teacher that if he doesn't change his attitude, then they will go elsewhere. To have an alternative other than homeschooling in case of harassment. To have programs that better match our expectations.

And even among left-wing activists, in truth, we are seduced by the possibility of being able to create, on a small scale, more emancipatory alternatives to education, which can then infuse into the national education system. If we simply deny the problems of the model defended by the left, we condemn ourselves to always having to defend the indefensible in front of neo-liberals who are all the more confident because in France their model has not yet been applied on a large scale, and as a result their shortcomings are not blatantly obvious to anyone.

Teachers are like journalists, we know that we must defend them, but if we do not combine this defense with a left-wing critique of the flaws of this profession and of the organization promoted in the past by the left, then we will do it without conviction and we will lose.

Rather than defending education as it is, we must defend education as it should be. Let's stop being on the defensive and, just like the liberals, propose a system that would have the appeal of novelty, without any illusion that it will also have its imperfections and will in turn need to be surpassed.

To the centralized and public education of the left city which is totally discredited, to the decentralized and private education sold by the right, let us oppose a decentralized and public education. A system or place would be locally managed by those who frequent it. See, let's dare to dream by the students themselves (but that's probably too revolutionary for our time).

Let us free the school of all its meritocratic discourse, of its mission of equal opportunities. School is not there to justify equality in our society or to enable social mobility.

She is here to educate the citizens of tomorrow. She is here to provide the knowledge for a citizen's life such as knowing how to read, write, count, debate, organize, understand the legal system, know how the state, a company, an association works, how to start a business, how to read a contract (you know that paperwork that we sign without reading most of the time), what consent is, how to tell him that I want to kiss him without being heavy, how to respond to a child's tantrum and all of this sprinkled with a generous dose of philosophy.

And only there if there is remaining time, we can approach differential equations and other useful things for general culture or simply to exercise the mind (because yes, math has the same utility for the brain as weights for the muscles and this is the main reason why it is taught to everyone and not just future scientists).

As for professional knowledge, for me it should be carried out by an institution completely separate from national education and on a completely different timetable. For me, we cannot simultaneously train the citizen of tomorrow and the employee of tomorrow.

Left-wing populism or class struggle

That was for education, but it’s valid for everyone.

All the ideologies, institutions, slogans, and laws created by the left must be constantly criticized, questioned, and surpassed to avoid giving an advantage to the reactionaries. We must never fight on the ground desired by our enemies, never let them decide the divide between two necessarily imperfect ideas to position ourselves and change the divide when our enemies and their overwhelming media force have taken hold of it. Faced with their well-disciplined and funded army of propagandists, we must adopt a strategy of cultural and ideological guerrilla warfare.

And it's from this perspective, in my opinion, that we should understand the success of the left-wing populism strategy. Indeed, the French left owes much of its renewal to Jean-Luc Mélenchon's decision in 2017 to abandon the denunciation of capitalism and bosses to focus on denouncing the elites and the oligarchy.

Despite its obvious success, this turn has rightly been heavily criticized. Populism, whether from the left or the right, is a discourse that overly simplifies society and prevents us from seeing quite a few fundamental phenomena.

For example, the people invoked by populisms do not exist and are in fact a combination of different groups with completely different opinions and interests. There is no unity of the people or people in motion or who demand I don't know what, because the people do not exist and will never exist (or at least I hope they never will, because that would mean that we have created a totalitarian dystopia where the individual must forget themselves in the face of the collective).

But, the Marxists of the old school or the editorialists who criticize often forget that the same can be done to their own model. And yes, let's not forget the red thread of this article: all models are false, but some are useful. Class struggle, left-wing populism or ultra-liberalism are all extremely simplistic models that obscure large parts of reality, but depending on the context, they can be useful.

Indeed, in the same way that engineers continue to use Newtonian mechanics even after Einstein revolutionized our understanding of gravity, I see nothing wrong in politics with using simplistic models to understand a situation or try to convince.

Yes, the class struggle is a model that does not take into account the various interests that run through the employers, or that there are people who are neither proletarians nor owners.The text provided appears to be a single letter "M" which is the same in English.But to understand a strike, what is the point of going further in the analysis?

When a small boss revolts against a corrupt, incompetent administration, with arbitrary rules and taxes that suffocate him, why should he need to go any further than the criticism of neo-liberals? Because if he does...did, he would see that big corporations are just as corrupt and incompetent as the State.

That the problem he is facing does not come from the fact that his large structures are public or private, but from the fact that they are centralized and not democratic.

He would see that while presenting a tantalizing vision of a privatized and decentralized world that would solve his problems, neoliberal politics actually lead to a more centralized and privatized world that would serve his interests even less. In his case, there would be an interest in pushing the analysis further.

The question is therefore not whether a model is perfect, but whether it is suitable for the use we want to make of it.

The left wants to aggregate as many people as possible to demand a more democratic world. A world where citizens would no longer need to entrust their collective fate to shareholders, politicians, in short decision-makers. In short, a world where all powers (and not just economic power) would be better distributed.

For this, for a while, the left relied on the model of class struggle which over-simplifies society into a binary opposition between the private and public. But in reality, both are our enemies.

Both are centralized organizations serving the powerful who lead them and whose embryonic democratic functions have been torn from great struggles and are regularly trampled on or questioned.

Saying that our state is parliamentary or that parliamentarism is democratic are coarse simplifications that can sometimes be useful, but in general do more harm than good.

Let's stop defending parliamentarism in the name of democracy and let's stop defending the state against the private sector. This has led us, the few times we have been in power, to entrust it to the elites running the state with the wonderful results we know from the USSR, China, and all the states that have achieved a communist revolution.

Our enemies are not part of the elite, but the very existence of an elite. Our enemy is not capitalism, but any organizations, systems, or ideologies advocating a hierarchy of men and authoritative operation.

And this model of class struggle, in addition to being a poor compass to guide our actions once in power, no longer has the quality to easily unite the citizens or to win the debates?

On the contrary, faced with the new generation of neoliberals, it forces us to defend a state and a salaried class legitimately hated by an entire section of the working classes.

That's why I think the left should not regret abandoning class struggle and consider populism as its evolution. In the same way that Einstein only widened our understanding of gravity, left-wing populism only better targets and names our enemy (even though, as I said, it's a simplistic discourse and therefore very imperfect and also subject to abuses).

Moreover, to prove to you the continuity between these two ideologies, it is enough to note that the proponents of these two ideologies put anti-racism struggles at the forefront of the agenda for the simple reason that in our strongly racial societies the main obstacle they encounter in their desire for unity is the racial division of the dominated (and also of gender).

For unlike the historical rewrite that right-wing propagandists try to make us swallow, its struggles have nothing new and have always been a priority for the labor movement. Certainly, this would well deserve to be nuanced, given the long love story that the left continues to maintain today with racism and colonialism.

But, she quickly understood, at least in a superficial way, that there would be no possible progress without unity and no union without true internationalism that takes into account the specific needs of each individual.

And above all, the solution of right-wing populism (a nice name for fascism) consisting of denying or forcibly eradicating its differences is totally futile.

Independent central banks or at the service of politics

Often on the left, we are very critical of the independence of central banks which was established all over the planet in the 70s/80s.

Most left-wing movements would like the central bank to be again under the control of politics and to directly finance the state budget again.

However, personally, I consider the independence of central banks to be one of the few good things put in place by neoliberals. But here, I am putting the cart before the horse and I will first explain what the two opposing models here are.

To put it simply, as far as currency management is concerned, traditionally, 3 models are competing:

The model of the liberal right

The old model of the right before the collapse of classical liberalism in the 20s/30s, but also that of bitcoin supporters: there should not be a public institution like a central bank managing the currency. It should be private banks competing with each other who should decide in a decentralized manner how much money to print and who to lend it to.

This was the model in place in the USA until the beginning of the 20th century, but it was abandoned for various reasons, more or less respectable. The most respectable argument being that this system caused permanent financial instability and serious recurring financial crises.

However, outside of the USA, very early on, in order to finance the costly European wars, the right-wing parties resigned themselves to the existence of a central bank.

But in that case, they wish it to be as much as possible controlled by private actors or for it to be obliged to respect a rule like the gold standard (at least in times of peace) which amounts to never using monetary power.

In a word, for them, if the private sector cannot have monetary power, then nobody should have it (unless it's about financing the military).

Outside of libertarian circles who are proponents of bitcoin, who are trying to revive this model with pseudo-scientific arguments, it has been abandoned, as it causes far too much misery and financial crisis.

Not to mention that it gives far too much power to the wealthy who control it (probably a coincidence that the most fervent promoters of Bitcoin are the billionaires of Silicon Valley).

The traditional model of the left

The traditional model on the left consists of monetary policy being in the hands of the government.

This means that it is the government which decides to whom, for how much, and under what condition the central bank lends or gives money (and it can force the central bank to give it money). This model has enormous advantages and experience has shown that it is much more stable than the previous one.

For example, unlike the previous one, it allows total financial stability. By introducing an all-powerful public actor, who can print money infinitely at any time and who has the power to compel all financial actors to respect the rules it dictates, we can create risk-free assets like treasury bonds on which the financial system can rely.

With a public actor who is not forced to make profits to survive and therefore to adhere to the market rules, countercyclical policies can be implemented.

That is to say, to begin lending during crisis periods when we do not know who is solvable or not. We have a lender of last resort that completely eliminates the risk of a crisis occurring due to a liquidity problem (that is, we have created central banks and dismissed stupid rules like the gold standard, it is impossible for a financial crisis to occur because all the clients of a bank would want to withdraw their money at the same time).

This system allows for coherence between fiscal and monetary policy, which is severely lacking in the Eurozone today and is completely impossible in the previous model.

On the other hand, this system has a huge flaw often presented as its quality: it allows the state to finance itself without resorting to debt by printing bills indefinitely and stimulating the economy by lowering rates whenever it wants.

You might ask me why I think it's a defect? Said like that, it sounds like something amazing that would annihilate unemployment, misery, and the ecological crisis by financing the production and distribution of everything we lack.

So great that you tell yourself it's too good to be true. That it looks like the magic money so vilified by politicians as well.Corrupt as well as incompetent, whose only defense, faced with the waste and irresponsibility with which they have managed public money, is that they are serious.

The proof, they have a tie, a 3000 euro suit, and flawless haircut. We are not going to trust scruffy guys in jeans who spend so much time with their nose in the accounting books that they forget to go to the barber every day. What good can it do to budget, to wonder about the impacts of the taxes we are implementing, their consistency with existing ones, or whether what we finance will be useful. It's much better to manage the state's money by instinct and based on what will allow the most beautiful speeches on TV.

Off topic, you might say.

Well, not at all, because contrary to what one might think, as incredible as it may be, magic money does indeed exist and the billions that fell from the sky following the 2008 crisis and Covid in 2020 prove it. However, who could believe for a single minute that it's a good idea to entrust such power to our politicians.

And, regardless of their side. I am just as opposed to entrust this power to Mélenchon as to Macron or Lepen. Who can believe that they will use this power for the common good or a reasoned approach? The truth is, they will use this power to stay in power, and this regardless of the consequences for the country or the population.

And it's not just a theory, but what ultimately happened and continues to happen in the few countries where the central bank is not independent. In the same way that oil rent is in most countries a curse funding corruption at the expense of the productive system, monetary power always ends up being used for clientelistic or demagogic purposes when entrusted to the government. You will tell me that there are exceptions.

France under De Gaulle or Putin's regime today. But precisely, just like the countries like Norway that have managed to manage their oil rent well are an exception, governments that know how to refrain from using monetary power excessively are rare.

As much as I despise De Gaulle, I must admit that he was an exceptionally honest politician (at least when dealing with white people, because when he dealt with former colonies, he had no problem trampling on concepts of integrity and legality). He is one of the few politicians in history who has twice voluntarily chosen to step down from government simply because it was the right thing to do according to his morals.

Can we really base the operation of the system on the fact that such a man is at the head of the country? And even if you are convinced that your candidate will be up to the task, what about the next one?

Of course, here, the traditional left will tell me that precisely, it does not want the state to be led by a providential man, but by a representative parliament with a free and independent press and powerful intermediary bodies capable of playing their role as a counter-power.

To this, I would simply respond that on many issues, it would be great to switch to a parliamentary system, but that parliamentarism is not democracy.

Even if we manage to make parliamentarians ideologically representative, they will never be sociologically representative.

It will remain the dominant ones who do not have the same interests as us and are more likely to use this power, to preserve their position and that of their loved ones rather than the common good.

Members of Parliament are just as susceptible as dictators to demagogic measures, careerism, electoral politics, short-termism and clientelism.

And to top it all off, gatherings of this type are subject to all sorts of decision-making paradoxes such as theaggregation paradox of judgments , which makes them very unlikely to take consistent and logical measures.

And then, for obvious reasons, all parliamentarians cannot be specialists in monetary policy and economic theory. Of course, this subject can be entrusted to a parliamentary committee and all its members can be trained, but they will inevitably skim over the subject given the massive number of topics they already have to give their opinion on.The text you provided, "et", is Latin and it simply translates to "and" in English. the brain juice they must devote to preparing for their future reelection and to the courtyard games, during the little time when they are deputies.

The model of the neoliberal right

For me, it's better to limit the role of assemblies to what they know very well how to do: define and prioritize objectives. On the other hand, we should let professionals take care of determining the means to achieve these goals.

It's like when you want to modify your car and you know nothing about mechanics. You can choose a mechanic you trust and tell them what you want, but they decide how to do it and what it will cost. You have to trust them and you can only turn against them if the result is not as promised.

For the currency, it's the same.

The parliament decides on the goal that the central bank must achieve (currently in Europe it's maintaining inflation at around 2% per year and if possible without harming the first goal, use monetary policy to help the European Commission achieve its objectives), the parliament should decide on who is appointed to head the ECB, but that is decided by the heads of the EU states.

But once the mandate is given and the president is chosen, the ECB does whatever it wants. The only recourse against it is to file a complaint with the European Union Court of Justice if it is believed that it is not respecting its mandate.

For me, it's a system that wherever it has been implemented has proven its superiority over direct control by the government of the central bank.

However, just because it's better doesn't mean it's ideal or even simply acceptable. We must accept that the model proposed by the left has its limits, but also that this model proposed by the 'new' neo-liberal right is limited as well.

Already, as is often the case with the models proposed by the right, this system is extremely undemocratic. Not much less than the previous one, so much so that theParliamentarism is in fact a system that is not very democratic, but it is still bothersome to entrust so much power to a technocracy.

Of course, one could tell me that with this system, the bulk of the power is in the hands of the parliament which sets the objectives for the ECB and of the court of justice which can sanction it if it does not respect them. In theory, this is true. But, in practice the mandate given to the ECB is so broad that it can do pretty much anything it wants, including extremely political acts that a democratically elected government would not dare to assume. In fact, as it stands, the only thing that the ECB cannot do is oppose the European executive.

For example, during the Greek crisis after the election of Syriza, the president of the ECB decided to cut off Greek banks from their access to ECB liquidity, with the blessing of François Hollande's supposedly left-wing government (source:Understanding the shocking decision of the ECB to close part of the taps to Greece. That which forced the newly elected government to renounce its program and accept the dictate of the troika.

Even if it does not infrive in any way on its mandate (it does not risk to create inflation and it helped the commission had clearly announce that it wanted to make Greece yield), it is clear that an unelected technocrat (or rather a council of unelected technocrat given that for each decision, it requires the approval of a majority of the governors of the central banks of the euro zone countries), should not have the right to subject such blackmail to an elected government.

It's a bit as if the general of the air force had the right to threaten a city with a bombing in order to force a mayor to give up a decree. We would rightly consider this a scandal. And this, even if he does it to support a government decision that the mayor opposed.

In a rule of law state, a disagreement between a local and national power must be settled in court. In a representative system, it must be resolved either by a negotiated agreement between the elected officials concerned.

But, certainly not by an administration that would decide to settle the debate in favor of the national by threatening to stop providing a vital service if the local power does not lie down.

The model that I propose

So, if all the models we have are unacceptable, it means we need to invent a new one. What I propose is not to entrust the keys of monetary power to parliamentarians, but to introduce representatives of civil society into the governance of the ECB. And also to decentralize the decision-making process.

Indeed, even though I understand very well why there needs to be a minimum of harmonization between the monetary policies of different central banks, why should this policy be identical in all countries, regions or even departments? Why are central banks only allowed to buy back state debt securities? Why couldn't they decide to buy back the debts of certain important projects for the local economy, or pay them subsidies using the printing press?

Of course, the volume of money creation or purchase of securities or subsidies must continue to be decided at the level of the euro zone in order to keep inflation under control.

My proposal is not to print infinite magic money, but to create this money differently. To no longer impose the respect of rigid rules. To optimize the inevitable need for monetary creation so that it favors projects deemed useful by society and not just by financial markets. A monetary creation that should not only be in the hands of private banks and should not only have the effect of triggering a surge in the price of financial assets such as apartments and stocks (note that the surge in real estate prices in France is primarily due to metropolitanization, cohabitation and the aging of the population, not the ECB's QE).

So, we decentralize, but we also democratize. For me, it's necessary for half of the voting rights at the local level to go to representatives of civil society (union, citizen drawn by lot, association, chamber of commerce, ...).

And it is necessary that its local branches of the central banks send representatives with a mandatory mandate to negotiate the national and European monetary policy of the central banks.

Of course, it won't be perfect and you will easily find hundreds of flaws in my proposal. There is no doubt that if we put these systems in place, errors and corruption issues that are impossible with the current system would occur.

However, the question is not whether it is perfect, but whether it is better than the current one. If it is temporarily the most useful.

All models are false, but some are useful and all are just a step towards an even better model.