Livret A for the atom: popular savings at the capital's bedside

According to Mediapart, a broad coalition of unions, parliamentarians and associations is calling for the withdrawal of the proposal to finance new nuclear power by drawing on the Livret A. These organisations fear that the funding of social housing will suffer as a result, and they denounce the absence of democratic debate. The details of the mechanism envisaged, the sums involved and the timetable do not appear in the summary we have to hand: we will therefore not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The Livret A is household money: wages set aside, out of prudence, for the unexpected, the children's studies or the rent. To send it towards industrial investment is to shift a reserve of already-paid labour towards projects whose profits, if any, will not return to those who saved. Savers supply the capital; others will draw the rent and the industrial power.

The central question is that of risk. A new-generation reactor is a long-term gamble, with costs reputed to spiral, but we are not putting any figures on it here, for want of data in the dispatch. When financing is private, the investor can lose his stake. When it is backed by popular savings, the loss is pooled: the risk is socialised, while any eventual profit remains, quite comfortably, privatised or captured by the State-as-shareholder. The Livret A saver, for his part, has never signed a prospectus.

Choosing social housing as the point of friction is hardly innocent. The savings collected today house people whose wages do not cover the market rent. Yet, within the logic of surplus value, rent is one more deduction from a wage already calibrated for the sole reproduction of the labour force. Trimming the funding of affordable housing means making that reproduction dearer, and so pushing down what workers can demand, while the queues of the badly housed serve, in their own way, as an industrial reserve army: the person who is badly housed more readily accepts any job going.

Finally, let us watch the vocabulary. We will hear that "the markets" will not finance the transition alone, that "the effort" is necessary, that the "need" for capital is inescapable. This way of speaking lends agency to abstractions and strips it from those who decide: government, banks, operators. It is the fetishism of the commodity applied to the budget. Behind the "financing need" there are choices, and therefore those responsible.

The revolt demands democratic debate. On at least one point it is right: deciding how to use the savings of millions of people without consulting them is precisely what a so-called market economy does best. What remains to be seen is how the government will respond, and on what guarantees: that is what we do not yet know.