GDP down 0.1%: is Macronism really the only culprit?

According to Mediapart, France's gross domestic product fell by 0.1% in the third quarter, which would confirm the stagnation the country is sliding into. The site sees in it the illustration of a complete "bankruptcy" of Emmanuel Macron's economic policy. The rest of this article is our reading, not established fact: the dispatch does not detail the make-up of this decline, nor the share of investment, consumption or exports. We will not invent them.

A tenth of a point, first. It is the margin within which people discuss "technical recession" with the gravity of a conclave, when rounding alone would almost be enough to tip the figure. The notable fact is not this -0.1%, but the stagnation it extends, according to Mediapart: an economy that no longer grows, yet continues to distribute what it produces very unequally.

The thesis of a "personal fiasco" has its merits: it is comfortable. It supposes that another president, better advised, would have got the machine moving again. Our reading is less flattering to everyone. When growth fades durably, the question is not only that of errors of steering, but that of the profitability of capital. In the Marxist tradition, competition pushes firms to produce more than can be sold at a profit and to replace labour with machines, which can squeeze the rate of profit. Investment then seizes up, not out of ill humour, but because placing money no longer pays enough. We do not have the data here to demonstrate this in the French case; it is a reading grid, not a finding.

It has at least the advantage of shifting the question onto austerity policy. If the crisis is a deep-seated tendency, austerity is not its sole cause, but the way it is managed: cutting public spending, containing wages, letting unemployment discipline those who work. The cost of recovery is shifted downward, as in every crisis. This "reserve army" of precarious workers is no accident: it moderates wage demands, which serves profitability, to the detriment of demand, and therefore of growth. The remedy worsens the ill it claims to cure, and nobody at Bercy (the French finance ministry) loses sleep over it.

Let us stay alert to vocabulary. "The economy is stagnating", "growth is flagging": to hear the commentators, GDP would be a capricious organism. This fetishism masks the fact that behind the figure lie investment, budget and wage decisions, taken by identifiable firms, banks and a state. Personalising it excessively around a single man is the political version of the same sleight of hand: one replaces a system with a face.

This in no way exonerates the executive, whose economic policy choices are indeed its responsibility. But swapping heads does not resolve the contradiction. The question, once the detailed figures are known, is who pocketed the profits while growth was dying out.