1 November: gas goes up, parcels get taxed, pensions follow (from a distance)

According to Le Monde, several changes take effect this 1 November: the price of gas rises, a new tax on small parcels is introduced, and private-sector pensions are uprated. The paper also mentions changes to consumer credit and eviction proceedings. The summary we have does not give the percentages, the amounts or the detailed application dates: we will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

Take gas, the most honest entry in this affair. You heat your home, you cook, you do not "consume" for the pleasure of it. When the price of a basic necessity rises, a larger share of the wage leaves before you have chosen anything at all. Now, in the Marxist analysis, the wage corresponds to the cost of reproducing the labour force: housing, heating, food. Making these items dearer without raising wages amounts to eroding the worker's reproduction, or pushing them towards credit. And as it happens, consumer credit is also on the day's agenda. A coincidence of the calendar, no doubt, but a convenient one for illustrating the cycle.

The vocabulary deserves a pause. "The price of gas is going to rise", we readily write, as if the price were the weather. It is the result of decisions by suppliers, of tariffs, of taxes, and therefore of human and political choices. This way of handing the initiative to a figure rather than to those who set it is what Marx called the fetishism of the commodity: relations between people appear as relations between things. The dispatch does not say who decides what here; the question remains wide open.

The tax on small parcels is more ambiguous. It may hit the platforms, and that is its probable billing, but at this stage we do not know who will actually pay it. A rule of thumb: a tax on a good is passed on wherever the balance of power allows. Between a logistics giant and a customer ordering a pair of socks, guess who has the least room to negotiate. To be checked, then, once the details are published.

Then there is the uprating of pensions. It is good news for private-sector pensioners, and we will not turn our noses up at it. But an indexed pension merely runs after prices: it protects purchasing power, it redistributes nothing. Pensions are deferred wages; their adjustment says above all how much social struggle and the rules on contributions manage to retain of the value produced.

The provisional tally, then: compulsory outgoings are rising, credit waits for those who can no longer make ends meet, and the compensations remain partial. Meanwhile, nobody announces an uprating of profits, which have no need of one. We will return with the figures as soon as they are confirmed.