face of the systemic struggle for predominance that was under way at the time. Starting in the late 1960s, that struggle pitted established companies against new entrants whose costs were lower.
Still, we can follow Giovanni Arrighi when, in his responses to Brenner’s analyses, he stresses the intensification of conflicts between labor and capital from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s.67 These conflicts were particularly pronounced in Europe, especially in France and Italy, where they marked the exhaustion of “Fordian” arrangements. In a framework subjected to a Fordian (or Keynesian) mode of regulation, the production of industrial goods was achieved locally at the cost of increased standardization of products and labor. Redistribution of the profits derived from increased productivity was supposed to lead to increased revenues for salaried workers, which would enable them to acquire the goods produced for themselves. But workers’ demands (most often transmitted via labor unions) concerning salaries, working conditions, and job security intensified simultaneously with stagnation in the expected earnings from increased productivity. During the 1960s and 1970s, these combined developments triggered a major crisis in the capitalist mode of regulation: salaried workers received the larger share of increases in earnings, and stockholders, who saw their profits decrease as a result, responded in part by reducing their investments in production.
Taking back the initiative, the institutions of “central capitalism” (in Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s sense),68 acting in concert with economic and political agencies of central governments, began by re-engineering the production lines and management structures of the big companies in the hope of increasing their productivity, especially by shrinking the scales on which productivity was measured (a process facilitated by the development of computer technologies), sometimes down to the level of workshops and departments or even individuals, so as to eliminate workers deemed unproductive or useless. This skimming resulted in a situation of structural unemployment whose effects were initially attenuated by government aid and especially by monetary inflation, so that consumption could be maintained in the face of mediocre economic growth.69 However, as this new policy proved inadequate, central capitalism adopted the strategy of using legal arrangements for financial deregulation that favored the rapid circulation of capital and direct investment abroad, in countries where wages were low (those later labeled “emergent”) and where there was a plentiful supply of workers lacking job security.
That strategy led to delocalizing an increasing segment of local industries and to underutilization of the productive capacities of Western European countries, where many potential workers found themselves without jobs. The rise in unemployment was a factor in disrupting what had been called up to that point the working class, whose members, more and more dependent on protective measures and support from central governments, came to constitute a sort of “plebeian” class. Associated with intense movements toward the concentration of capital, the strategy had the effect of restoring “central” capitalism’s hold over “peripheral enterprises” – that is, local and dependent businesses – and empowering it to influence price fixing so as to generate higher than average profits, reinforce stock values, and thereby extend its scope in the struggle for differential accumulation.
The displacement of production, encouraged by a significant decrease in the costs of transporting merchandise (owing in part to the increased use of shipping containers in the 1980s), had the effect of maintaining a relatively high level of consumption and an abundance that the so-called consumer society needed to maintain itself, since everyday products (clothing, household appliances, and so on) manufactured in low-wage countries were less expensive than products made locally. But this shift in production sites also raised the question of how the people remaining behind would find work, and in particular the young people coming out of a rapidly expanding university system, a majority of whom came from the upper or middle bourgeoisie.
This is the context in which the shaping of an enrichment economy has to be interpreted. The process consisted in putting previously marginal forms of wealth creation at the heart of economic activity, which had long been dominated by manufacturing. Economies based on tourism or luxury goods already existed, but they had far less importance than they were to acquire later on, chiefly because their principal customers were less numerous and more locally rooted. But the wealthy and ultra-wealthy individuals who had benefited from the financial, industrial, and digital economies, as well as from the lowered costs of travel, were increasing considerably in number and becoming much more mobile. The development of an enrichment economy stimulated exports, which included more and more high-end goods. But it also enabled the highlighting and exploitation of resources that either could not be moved (such as landscapes and monuments) or were difficult to transport. These factors led to a doubling of the objects offered for consumption (this was particularly clear, as we have seen, in the case of food products): things manufactured in low-wage countries, intended for low-income households, were sold at relatively low prices, while things intended for the wealthy, identified with reference to their local and historical origins (which protected them from competition by conferring on them a specificity with monopolistic effects), could be offered for sale at high prices.
The intensification of trade in these exceptional goods also benefited from a change that constituted one possible exit, and perhaps the main one (though Giovanni Arrighi deems it temporary), from the crisis capitalism was undergoing, which has been labeled the “financialization of the economy.”70 This phenomenon, triggered by a repatriation of capital toward its most liquid forms in response to the lowered profitability of productive investments, including on the part of non-financial enterprises, was amplified when the system of fixed exchange rates was ended in 1973, a move that stimulated speculation on currencies and the creation of new financial products intended to play the role of insurance in order to diminish the uncertainty of derivative contracts, which had themselves rapidly become speculative instruments. The growing role given to financial activities almost certainly benefited the development of an enrichment economy, in two different ways. First, by increasing inequality. Financial gains are concentrated at the top, in private fortunes. Much more than is the case with industrial profits, these gains favor the wealthiest to the detriment of the middle classes, not to mention the mass of workers excluded from the profits drawn from this type of trade.71 Indeed, ultra-rich individuals constitute the most sought-after clients in an enrichment economy, the most interesting in pecuniary terms, especially in the real-estate sector. Second, by increasing the level of uncertainty of returns on speculative investments. The sometimes gigantic sums that have fallen into the hands of the lucky agents of successful financial operators have presumably72 been used, at least in part, for the acquisition of goods of high patrimonial value, such as exceptional homes, antiques, or works of ancient or contemporary art, rather than being reinvested on the financial markets in new operations whose outcome would be more or less uncertain. Rather than being investments destined to bring in profits, these acquisitions thus have played the role of permanent placements that shelter capital by investing it in goods that are very likely to maintain their prices over time at a high level, even while remaining relatively liquid, in the sense that the investor could plausibly hope to sell them eventually, even in the worst of cases, without loss.
Partisans of things 73
In the effort to understand the formation of an enrichment economy, we must go beyond a sociology or ethnology of the rich,74 of their way of life, their patterns of consumption,75 their tastes, their preference for luxury goods, and more generally everything in their behavior and approach to life that is rooted in a quest for distinction so as to maintain the gap that separates them from the other social classes.76 As useful as it may be, such an approach often tends to take an atemporal turn, if only insofar as one can bring to light traits that characterize the dominant classes, whatever the period or even the culture considered. What is required for our purposes is a dynamic analysis of the relation between different ways of generating wealth. This detour constitutes a necessary preliminary to an understanding of the changes over the last few decades that have affected not only the dominant classes – for which the term “bourgeoisie,” inherited from the nineteenth century,77 hardly suffices to evoke the most contemporary features – but also