TotalEnergies cashes in, the left fails: the crisis pays mostly the shareholders

According to Libération, TotalEnergies' profits have reached colossal levels since the start of the crisis in the Middle East. During the budget debates, left-wing MPs tried to increase the company's tax contribution, without success. The government, for its part, defends the major's action on pump prices. That is what we know. The dispatch gives neither the exact amount of the profits, nor the details of the amendments, nor the vote tally: we will not invent them.

The structural question remains, and this is where our reading begins, not the established facts. A war that drives up the price of oil does not make the barrel harder to extract for a group whose wells are already drilled. It raises the selling price of a commodity everyone needs, from the nurse filling up her car to the haulier passing on the bill. The exceptional profit then looks less like a reward for efficiency than a windfall of position: accumulation feeds on the world's disorder without needing to cause it, which is very convenient.

The government points to the effort on pump prices. Fair enough. But the comparison is instructive: on one side a measure presented as a company's goodwill gesture, on the other a tax rule that would be imposed on it. The first belongs to good will, the second to law. That the executive prefers the first says a great deal about the hierarchy of emergencies, and about what is discreetly called "investor confidence".

If excess profits are so hard to tax, it is also because we talk about them as if they were the weather. "Markets are worried", "energy is soaring": this language turns prices into natural phenomena and erases the social relations behind them. Yet a profit never falls from the sky. Its ultimate source, in Marxian analysis, is surplus labour: the part of the work employees perform beyond what covers their wage. Record profits alongside wages struggling to keep up with inflation: there is the relation of surplus value made visible. The dispatch says nothing about wages at TotalEnergies; the question deserves asking nonetheless every time a group announces exceptional results.

Why does the left fail? The dispatch does not detail the majority's arguments, and we will not put words in their mouths. One can nonetheless note a classic pattern: taxing capital is presented as a risk to investment, while taxing labour is presented as an accounting necessity. The consumer, meanwhile, pays twice, at the pump and then at the tax office. As long as the debate is limited to whether the company was "reasonable" rather than to who is entitled to the proceeds of the crisis, excess profits will remain what they are: super, and rarely shared.