Histoire industrielle et éthique

This text was intended to highlight the idea that the ethical requirement of virtue and justice - in the Nicomachean sense - is relatively stable over time, while the forms that industry takes are eminently variable. An excessive fascination with observing and measuring the ever-changing forms of economic and industrial activity could then too easily lead one to believe that "disruptive" "industrial types" that do not stand the test of time are "disruptive". Iran and Greece today account for a tiny fraction of world GDP and even less of industrial value added. Ironically, these countries where the state and democracy were born have been at the forefront of the news in the course of 2010, Greece because of its economy at the antipodes of the German industrial model and Iran because of its nuclear and geostrategic ambition based on Shiite spirituality. A small and very old country could have sunk the construction of Europe. Another "small and very old country" wanted to create the first "Islamic republic" in 1979, which Michel Foucault welcomed in 1979, even if we may not share his enthusiasm afterwards. In the first century A.D., India and China together accounted for nearly 60% of the world's GDP, while Rome accounted for a little more than 20%. In 1820, they still produced 49% of the world's GDP, while France and the United Kingdom together accounted for only 10%. However, it was the French revolutionary ethic that served as an anchor for the Marxist revolutionaries in Russia and China. And it is Smith's invisible hand that has organized the world economy for two centuries. India has chosen a path of its own. Hence a simple conclusive proposition: is it not ethics and ideas that explain, even if they do not determine them, industrial history? The economic balance of power has, in fact, changed significantly only in the last two centuries and seems to be reshaping its historical course over a very long period of time. To this must be added men, their number (and their dignity): "there is no wealth except in men" said Jean Bodin, a contemporary of Montaigne in the 16th century. Under these conditions, the most noteworthy industrial transitions would be those of China, India and Africa, where the population is or will soon be the most numerous. The "industrial" transition illustrated by the GAFAMs would then be more of a financial transition, if we follow François Perroux's model according to which domination is first industrial then commercial before becoming financial. If Perroux is right, China would be in phase 2 (commercial) and the "commercial war" unleashed by the United States would be a poor rearguard action, perhaps the beginning of the end of this empire, as was the very chauvinistic revaluation of the sterling after the First World War. It would seem that it was the liberal ideas of Western Europe, the political concepts of the Enlightenment and the Euro-Marxian aggiornamento of the 19th century that dominated recent economic history, giving it meaning, significance and expressing, for better or for worse, universal values. In "industrial and ethical history", contrary to the dominant doxa, it should then be remembered that it is ethics that is ultimately decisive and not industry. This text began below Kondratiev, at a time when more than half of productive capital was made up of agricultural land in the most advanced countries. At the beginning of the 20th century, in the USA, about 55% of capital (expressed as a % of National Income) was financial and 40% was made up of housing (Piketty p. 239). Such a proportion is very stable in the short and medium term except in the event of a major crisis (wars, 1929 crisis in particular). Wallerstein & al (2014) observe, in the Braudelian tradition of world economies, that cataclysmic events such as the French Revolution, the First World War or the fall of the USSR occur about once a century. The French Revolution thus marked the end of the political and ethical hegemony of the Great Nation, the First World War that of Europe. The end of the USSR in 1989 was first the end of the dream of a matrix economy of the value of work, which had been developed by the mathematicians of Gosplan, and then the - brief - fear of the American hyperpower, to quote Hubert Védrine. It is above all the beginning of the rise of Chinese state neo-capitalism, heir to what Marx called "Asian despotism". This is perhaps one of the possible futures of the "new industrial world" in relation to which it will be necessary to create weapons of critical analysis that will allow us to continue to hope that other alternatives remain not only possible but also, and above all, that they will be able to be used in the future.