The society in which the baby boomers were born resembles the current society very little. Since the beginning of humanity, societies have faced a lack of essential needs. François Perroux, driven by a humanist vision, sought how to satisfy needs. He assigned this function to production. We know that Perroux did not like Marx, but he borrowed some of his main ideas about society. Marx’s key idea is that wealth comes from human labor. Protagoras had said in his time that ‘man is the measure of all things,’ but it was Marx who established the relationship between human labor time and wealth. According to Marx, the price of things can, once business margins have been deducted, be reduced to two things: the money paid to the wage earner and the surplus value extracted by the capitalist boss from the same wage earner. Both seek to take the world out of scarcity. They have been looking for ways to first produce what men will want to buy, what they need. If producers play such an essential role, it is normal that these producers benefit from it. This implies not only the material, but also the social. Perroux the humanist, and Marx the revolutionary joined in betting on human emancipation through the collective of labor. For Marx, it is by forming a large collective that producers will replace capitalists. For Perroux, the solidarity among producers became what gave meaning to social life.

Taking the world out of scarcity means, above all, overcoming the famines that have occurred here and there since the beginning of humanity. Perroux understood that Christian charity would not be enough, that it would be necessary to reorganize productive activity. From the Marxist side, the CGT, for a long time the main French workers’ union, adopted a beautiful motto: “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs,” the assertion that the union was willing to push union members to work as long as the essential needs of everyone were met.

The dream of the work collective was very well conceived among the workers struggling against capitalist exploitation: the collective exists in the way it reacts to the orders and rules that the hierarchy tries to impose on it. If the boss was replaced by the party, there was hope that both capitalist exploitation and alienation would cease, and that wage-earning proletarians would become masters of their own destiny. On the Christian humanist side, there was no need to abolish any social category: it was imagined that wage-earning workers could take charge of the organization and goals of their work by themselves. For the latter, the subjugated collective became a creative collective and master of its destiny. In both cases, it was about changing society through work.

The generation I belong to, the “baby boomers,” has really tried to achieve Marx’s goals, or those of Christian humanism, or both at the same time. In fact, we have achieved impressive results. We have overcome scarcity. With the help of advances in science, whether in engineering, organization, or medicine, we have found a way to produce in sufficient quantities everything humanity needs to feed itself. We are the generation that has seen famines disappear, as long as human conflicts leave free access to areas of famine. We are the generation, and there is no other generation in the history of humanity, that has lived while more than doubling both life expectancy and the number of individuals of all humanity. Nevertheless, we have been largely disappointed by attempts to implement an ideal society under the guidance of a single party, even if it is Leninist. On the humanist side, it must be said that the utopias of a society organized around collectives of self-managed producers are far from being realized. What has happened?

We have overcome the lack of production of basic needs. Nowadays, one can live an entire life without dominating other humans and without producing wealth in the Marxist sense. In this way, the levels of response to the needs and goals of the Christian humanists of which Perroux was a member were achieved. Be careful, the world food situation is not good; it is simply better than before because we have managed to produce enough food for the entire world population, and we can also bring this food where it is lacking. For some time, we have been developing inexpensive food products, with good nutritional benefits and easy to transport. So, the world today does not resemble at all the one I was born into. And yet, the new generations do not seem satisfied.

What have we missed? Or rather, what remains to be done?

Responding to needs did not allow the formation of a universal human collective as Marx predicted. It has also not facilitated the functioning of formal work collectives (unions, parties, social movements) or informal ones (groups of workers who self-manage their production at the grassroots). On the contrary, the end of famines seems to encourage individualism. In the face of scarcity, joining forces seems like an interesting approach. In the face of abundance, what is the point of maintaining complicated relationships with other humans?

Why work when machines can do it for you thanks to automation? It is worth noting that I prefer the word “automation” to the overused “Artificial Intelligence”, which I was already talking about in 1993. Machines have continued to increase human power throughout human history. They can do more, they can do it better. But they are not us, that is, they may not do what we want. When they obey us, they increase our abilities tenfold, but when we lose control over them, they do not improve the situation. Automatism is never intelligent in the human sense; intelligence is the way humans perceive reality and strive to master it. Automatism aspires to nothing, does not seek to dominate matter, it works according to the way it has been constructed.

What Marx and Perroux had forgotten to see was that most work was never earned with a salary. It was a utopia to see most work done by employees. The essential part of value-generating work is domestic; it consists of taking care of oneself and loved ones. This work can be paid, but profitability is not guaranteed here. I dress and wash myself, which means I save a lot of money by dressing and washing with external employees. Food has mainly been women’s history, and it may surprise you to know, few people knew it. This is still the case today in much of our planet. Here is a dialogue between a young Sub-Saharan who arrived illegally in France and a volunteer who welcomes him to an association in Lyon. The presenter: “What does your mother do?”

The young man: “She doesn’t work.”

R: “Does she sit all day?”

J: “No, she cleans and cooks for us.”

R: “What does she cook with?”

J: “With vegetables she grows in our field.”

R: “And with the surplus vegetables, what does she do?”

J: “She goes to sell them at the market; she gives us money.”

For this young man, as for most men in sub-Saharan Africa, work is a man’s thing. They consider themselves employed or unemployed. Women are left out of the game. This discourse is completely astonishing, but for me it was common at the beginning of my life. Apparently, it is not always easy to recognize where the work that creates true wealth comes from.

Increasing productivity solves the problem of basic needs. Work allows you to go beyond the satisfaction of basic needs and, therefore, access other desires. If we are satisfied with basic needs, and we can do it increasingly faster, then we can do it for all humans, whether they work or not. And this is what we have set out to do, both humanists and communists. And as we can see, increasingly less human labor is needed to achieve it. So, the option of not working becomes more acceptable, both for the people involved and for public authorities.

And, as a result, we see more and more people considering not working or working little, whether in Western countries, but also in China, where the government can claim to value human labor, but it faces more and more young people who, when confronted with the jobs offered, prefer to stay at home. Famines are created by wars, not by a lack of food. So why does it keep working?

I see two reasons for this: one would be to give meaning to life: “I work because it connects me with the world and gives me a useful place in it.” The other reason, quite common, is to earn money to satisfy desires. We have left the society of needs for that of desires. Although it is possible to satisfy needs, it is impossible to satisfy all desires. The lack of response to need gives rise to the awareness of lack. The lack of response to desire gives rise to dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction can be an engine of change, of improvement, of more justice. It makes it more difficult to create collectives. Collectives need a common dream, a utopia, or a collective transcendence to sustain themselves. And that is the problem. The lack was an evident collective goal for everyone. It brought together the poor and the workers. Desires split among groups that want this, groups that think that. The dream of a golden age in which society would respond to needs united people. The idea of envy divides. Envy is etymologically synonymous with jealousy: “I want what someone else has.” Need unites people because everyone shares the same needs.

Let’s return to us, the boomers, we thought we were heading in the direction of continuous progress. And my generation has undoubtedly made a qualitative and quantitative leap for humanity. A leap that no one before us, and probably no one after us, will be able to make. Over the course of my life, humanity has more than doubled in number, and has more than doubled its life expectancy. We had the impression of advances toward peace and happiness. Luckily or unluckily, this is not the case. There are still things to do and invent for the generations that will come after us. Our children and grandchildren (because we have also done a lot) will have to solve problems that we did not anticipate.

The first current social problem has therefore become the expansion of individualism, that is, the reduction of the need for the State, the need for solidarity. But our world could not function if everyone acted only in their own interest. There will always be a need for people who propose to give meaning to their lives by dedicating them to improving the lives of others. From this point of view, the reduction of funding for humanitarian NGOs is both a warning and a scandal. Yes, we have become capable of meeting the essential needs of humanity, but we must allow the existence of a society that makes this possible.

“We will have bread, golden like the girls

Under the golden suns

We will drink wine, of the type that shines,

Even when it sleeps.

Our blood will flow through our white veins

And most of the time Monday will be Sunday

But our era then

Will be the golden age…”

Léo Ferré, “The Golden Age” 1966