Budget 2027: an empty chamber, sluggish growth, and austerity on autopilot

According to Le Monde, discussions on the 2027 budget are continuing in a thinly attended chamber, where deputies are voting on amendments whose fate remains uncertain. The paper also reports that the debates have turned into criticism of the Macronist economic policy, following the Insee's publication of bad news for growth. A vote is scheduled for Tuesday 10 November on the revenue side of the budget. We know no more than that: the dispatch does not detail the Insee figures, the content of the amendments, or the precise positions of the groups. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us start with the set. Empty benches for voting on amendments nobody knows will survive: the spectacle is a fairly good metaphor for parliamentary work on the budget. We debate at length, we vote now and then, and we save for last the awkward question, that of revenue. The 10 November vote bears precisely on that, namely how the state gets its money: who is taxed, who is spared.

Then there is "growth". When it disappoints, one readily hears that "the economy is slowing", as one might say the weather is turning. This is commodity fetishism in its pure form: a number acts, people suffer, and nobody decides. Yet a slowdown means firms investing less, hiring frozen, wages stagnating. Choices, then, made by identifiable actors, and not a matter of weather.

In our view, the stakes lie here: a accumulation of capital struggling to pick up again, and a question of how the bill is shared. In the Marxist tradition, the state is not a neutral arbiter; under constraint, it manages the conditions in which capital goes on accumulating. It retains a certain autonomy, and the Assembly remains a terrain of struggle, but its room for manoeuvre is measured by what it can demand from holders of wealth and profits without alienating investment. Hence, by default, the drift towards austerity: cutting spending rather than raising more where surplus value is concentrated.

For surplus value, let us recall, is that part of labour which the wage does not pay for and from which profits derive. When growth falters, the temptation is to restore the rate of profit by squeezing what goes to workers and public services, and to let unemployment quietly do its disciplining job. The reserve army need not be summoned: it is enough that it grows.

Whether the amendments voted in this fine empty chamber will touch revenue or merely graze it remains to be seen. The answer comes on 10 November, if those present care to stay to the end. We will watch above all for one thing: not the number of billions, but the identity of those who pay them.