TotalEnergies pockets 8.3 billion in one quarter: the diesel windfall, and it pays

According to Le Monde Économie, TotalEnergies recorded net profit of $8.3 billion in the third quarter, up 124% on a year earlier. The French major, whose refineries are running flat out, is profiting from global tensions over diesel. So much for what we know. The dispatch does not detail how these gains are divided, nor the dividends, nor employment, nor pump prices: we will not invent them. What follows is our reading.

First observation: a profit that more than doubles in a year hardly resembles the reward of suddenly brilliant management. Le Monde itself attributes it to global tensions. In other words, the price of an indispensable commodity rises because supply tightens, and whoever refines it pockets the gap. This is a rent of circumstance, not a feat of skill. The refineries were already running, the oil wells too; what changed is the price at which the world is willing, or compelled, to pay.

This is where old political economy proves its worth. Marx, in Wages, Price and Profit, mocked those who saw profit as a simple percentage added on top of wages. The present case is a neat counter-example: no wage rise inflates the bill here. The price climbs, the margin explodes, and the mass of living labour mobilised has, by all appearances, not budged an inch. The profit comes from elsewhere: from surplus value extracted from the sector's workers, certainly, but here disproportionately inflated by a market price that geopolitics has swollen.

It is worth noting that this kind of manna is rarely presented as such. We speak of "tensions" and "nervous markets", as if diesel had moods. The fetishism of the commodity adores this vocabulary: the social relations that decide who pays and who receives vanish behind the weather of prices. Yet the motorist, the haulier and the farmer do pay, and their bills are the exact flip side of the quarterly balance sheet.

Hence the predictable return of the windfall tax debate. Our reading: the idea is less radical than it looks, since it does not pretend to abolish the wage relation, only to skim a share of a gain nobody produced through their own effort. Its limits are well known: an exceptional tax can be circumvented, spread out, negotiated, and changes nothing about who owns the means of production. It does have one pedagogical merit, however: it forces us to name the rent.

What remains unknown, and what readers will want to know, is how much will go to shareholders, how much to investment, and how much to employees. That, rather than the record figure, is where the true division of the spoils will be read.