Social Security Budget: No Majority, So Parliament Tinkers While Capital Waits

According to Le Monde, the 2027 Social Security budget bill goes to the Senate after being rejected by the deputies. Lacking a majority, the National Assembly first watered the text down, then voted it out. Senators must therefore examine the government's original draft, without knowing whether the government will invoke Article 49.3 (the constitutional device that lets it pass a text without a full vote, at the cost of a no-confidence motion) or take the untried route of ordinances (decrees that bypass parliamentary debate altogether). So much for the facts. The rest is our reading.

The dispatch does not say what the text contained, nor which amendments "watered it down". We therefore do not know, at this stage, which revenues or savings were at stake. We will not invent figures. What remains is the structural question, which depends on no particular detail: in a social budget, someone pays, and someone else collects.

Let us recall what Social Security is: a portion of the wage, pooled through contributions, to finance health, pensions and family benefits. Any cut in its spending is, plainly, a cut in the socialised wage. Any exemption from contributions is, conversely, a transfer towards profits, that is, towards the share of value created that workers never receive. This is the relation of surplus value, in public accounting form.

We often hear that "the markets are waiting" or that "the accounts demand" an effort. A neat sleight of hand: decisions taken by states, banks and companies become forces of nature. The accounts demand nothing; people write them, and choose who will be spared the effort. This is the fetishism of the commodity applied to the deficit.

The parliamentary episode has its irony. An assembly without a majority can unmake a text, but cannot make another one. The government, for its part, has tools to do without it: Article 49.3, or ordinances that would have the elegance of abolishing the debate. It is worth recalling here, with the Marxist tradition, that the state is not a neutral referee but a terrain of struggle, whose margins are bounded by the need to let capital accumulate. It enjoys a relative autonomy, certainly; the Assembly has just measured its limits, or rather proved how narrow they are.

The paradox is that the deadlock stems not from an excess of democracy but from its powerlessness: one can vote against austerity without being able to impose anything else. If the government forces the text through, it will confirm that the budget calendar weighs more than the vote of elected representatives. If it chooses ordinances, it will settle the question by taking it away from those who raised it.

What we will learn in the coming days: the executive's choice, and what the Senate keeps of the text. What we would like to know: how much of the effort will fall on wages, and how much on profits. On this point, the dispatch's silence is already information about how these debates are presented.