TotalEnergies: war is bad news, except on the balance sheet

According to franceinfo, TotalEnergies is reporting "exceptional" profits for 2026, well above its results for the first two quarters and above those of 2025. The broadcaster attributes this surge notably to the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. That is what we know. The precise amounts, the share paid out to shareholders, changes in the wage bill and the tax paid do not appear in the dispatch we have, so we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First reflex to correct: the grammar. We read that profits are "driven" by the conflicts, as if war were favourable weather and the accounts a cherry tree bending under its fruit. This is the fetishism of commodities in CAC 40 form: prices "rise", markets "worry", and nobody has decided anything. Yet the price of oil is not a natural phenomenon. It results from production choices, supply strategies, sanctions, speculation, and a company's decision to pass on, or not, what the market will bear. Behind "the economic climate" there are people who set prices and others who pay them.

Second shift: who produces this wealth? In Marx's analysis, profit comes from surplus labour, the part of the working day that wages do not pay for. Here the nuance matters: part of a crisis's windfall stems less from direct exploitation than from a rent of position. When supply becomes scarce, whoever owns the wells, refineries and petrol stations pockets the difference without having worked any harder. But this rent is converted into dividends, share buybacks and, possibly, investment, and it is precisely this distribution that should be the subject of public debate. Our reading is that, as long as workers in the sector and household consumers have no say over this distribution, "exceptional profit" mostly means "exceptional transfer".

Third angle: the contrast. A household heating its home or filling its tank helps finance this balance sheet, in its own way. Record profits alongside tight budgets is the surplus-value relationship made visible, to borrow from our own working notes. What remains is to check, figures in hand, what the dispatch does not say: how much of the extra will go to wages, to the energy transition, to the community?

We will be told that the company takes risks and that lean years exist. That is true, and so are fat years. The question is not whether TotalEnergies is "wicked"; that would be a matter of morality. It is structural: a system in which war enriches the holders of fossil energy while its effects are paid for in purchasing power does not need individual cynicism to function. It only needs to redistribute nothing. A windfall tax would be a start; but it would still have to be called by its name, rather than waiting for "the market" to decide.