Diesel down "without touching taxes": did the price fall on its own?

According to Le Monde, the price of diesel has fallen by "12 to 18 cents" a litre (euro cents) at "more than half" of French petrol stations, Serge Papin, the trade minister, told reporters on Monday 2 November. Emmanuel Macron welcomed "concrete solutions that are bearing fruit", achieved "without touching taxes". The briefing did not say by what mechanisms this drop was obtained, what data the minister relies on, or how much of it is down to crude oil prices. We will not invent that. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First remark: the line of the day conveniently skips over who is acting. Prices "fall", like the tide. Yet a pump price is not a weather phenomenon: it is the sum of decisions, those of refiners, distributors, traders, and a state that takes its cut. What our editorial notes call commodity fetishism consists precisely in presenting relations between people as relations between things. Here the inversion is double: when prices rise, it is "the market"; when they fall, these are "concrete solutions". In both cases, the consumer is politely asked not to wonder who decides.

Second remark: "without touching taxes" is presented as a virtue, even as proof of neutrality. But leaving a tax alone is also a fiscal choice. A fixed-rate tax per litre weighs proportionally more on someone with no alternative to the car, whose wage absorbs an unavoidable expense poorly. The briefing puts no figure on this, and we do not pretend to. But the question deserves asking: by leaving taxation intact, the state keeps its revenue and leaves the rest of the fluctuations to the market circuits.

Third remark, more structural. Marx argued, against the economists of his time, that the price of a commodity cannot be reduced to wages: percentages accruing to profit and rent are added on top (our translation, Marx, Wages, Price and Profit, in substance). Applied to the pump, this invites us to ask how those 12 to 18 cents are divided between production, refining, distribution and the taxman. A declared fall does not say who has trimmed their margin, or whether any of them used the previous rise to widen their own. The figures are missing.

Finally, the trade ministry noting falls at "more than half" of stations also tells us that they have not fallen at the other half. For a rural employee, the arithmetic of the average is cold comfort.

The state as an arbiter above the fray is a convenient figure. Our notes remind us: budgets and taxation are not neutral referees; they are shaped by property relations and by the need not to hinder accumulation. Congratulating oneself on not touching taxes is also a way of saying whom one will not ask to make an effort. What we still do not know: the exact origin of the fall, how long it will last, and who, from refinery to till, has really borne its cost.