Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Michel Husson
A friend has just left us
Dominique Plihon
To the members of ATTAC’s Scientific Council
We have just learned of the sudden death of Michel Husson.
This news has deeply saddened us. Michel was a long time friend and accomplice, member of the Scientific Council since its creation, co-author of Attac’s books, involved in the working groups of the SC...
Michel was an outstanding person because of his kindness and humour.
He was a high-level economist whose analyses of neoliberal and financialized capitalismand financial capitalism were of great benefit to us.
We pay him a very friendly tribute, and send our most sincere thoughts to his thoughts to his family and friends.
Articles from Michel Husson on ESSF (French and English):
http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?page=auteur&id_auteur=283
Michel in the Dolomites.
Nicolas Sabil
Misère du capital was a book by Michel Husson that I read in 1996. So I was ... fifteen or sixteen years old. Logically, I didn’t understand much at the time about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the different cycles of capital turnover, and I think Ben Garbi didn’t either.
On the other hand, in the second half of the 90s and the first half of the 2000s, the training sessions given by Michel Husson for the LCR or for Attac were fundamental in my political and economic culture.
This former PSU and Ligue activist has marked several generations of young activists. I will read his last book - a critique of Thomas Picketty - which has been waiting for a few months in my library, with a touch of nostalgia, and by measuring the chance that my generation had to be trained economically by people like him .
– Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/nicolas.sabil
Economist Michel Husson has died
Francisco Louçã
Anti-capitalist militant, Michel Husson died in France at the age of 72. A prolific author of articles on economic and political analysis, we recover some of the main articles translated and published by Esquerda.net.
Born on 3 April 1949 in Lyon, it is as a reaction to teaching at the Pathéon-Assas faculty that he “immersed himself in the Marxist culture of the time”, later developing his studies of Marxist economics through André Gorz and Ernest Mandel.
“What I liked about Mandel is that he combined his rather orthodox structure with a comprehensive Marxism, which was not the pure repetition of dogma in the endless analysis of Marx’s texts,” he said in an interview Savoir/Agir [1].
He then began his career as an economist at INSEE, France’s national institute for statistics and economic studies, and then at the Ministry of the Economy between 1975 and 1984, at a time when the direction of the ministry’s public policies was “ambivalent” due to a “neo-classicism that began to suppress the Keynesianism that had been dominant until then”. He describes this period of his work as “schizophrenic” because, in the Ministry of Economy, he “developed the models” and, in Critique de l’économie politique, he “critiqued these models”.
The change in France’s economic policies, which Michel Husson [2] felt had already begun in the 1970s, started in 1981 when the French government “refused to devalue [the currency] on principle”, something he described as “a first form of submission to the international financial system”. Immediately afterwards, the government “affirms its desire not to use nationalisations as a political lever”.
It was in 1982, in reaction to these changes, that the LCR - which had joined in 1979 - launched the “economic working group”, through which it developed work of analysis and internationalist training.
In 1985 he was seconded to INEGI, Mexico’s national statistics institute, where he worked on the country’s economic model. Back in France in 1987, he worked at the industrial statistics service of the Ministry of Industry and then, in 1990, at the Institute for Economic and Social Studies (IRES), with close links to trade unions.
The theme of full employment and the 35-hour working week, ideas that had already been part of Mitterrand’s political programme in 1981 and 1985, reappeared in the public debate in 1993, with Michel Husson defending, against Alain Lipiez, the need to “change the redistribution of the adjusted value between wages and profits”.
His political activity began as a militant of the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), then as a member of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) between 1979 and 2007, having been a member of the central committee between 1995 and 2000, from where he left in disagreement to join José Bové’s candidacy for the 2007 presidential elections.
Michel Husson is the author of several articles of economic and political analysis, translated and published by Esquerda.net, of which recent examples are O capitalismo no fio da navalha [3] Capitalism on the razor’s edge, Não basta medir as desigualdades, é preciso explicá-las [4] (It is not enough to measure inequalities, we need to explain them, Economia política: depois da hibernação [5] (Political economy: after hibernation), or Para onde foi a social-democracia [6] (Where did social democracy go).
In a recent interview conducted by Salvatore Cannavò for Jacobin Italia [7], Michel Husson analysed Emmanuel Macron’s plan for economic recovery after the pandemic crisis, considering that it “reveals a profound misunderstanding of the specific nature of this crisis”.
His bibliography includes Le grand bluff capitaliste (La Dispute, 2001), Les casseurs de l’État social (La Découverte, 2003), Travail flexible, salariés jetables (La Découverte, 2006), and Le capitalisme en 10 leçons. Petit cours illustrés hétérodoxe (Paris, Zones, 2012).
The breadth of his work is available in several languages at hussonet.free.f (link is external)r, a rare documentary source composed of brief, pedagogical texts, but also texts of in-depth analysis thanks to his mastery of the tools of econometrics.
In 2011, Michel Husson came to Portugal to participate in the International Conference “The euro and the debt crisis”, organised by the European Left Party in Porto, an occasion where Esquerda.net interviewed the economist on the subject.
[Video]
July 20, 2021
Francisco Louçã
• Translated from:
https://www.esquerda.net/artigo/morreu-o-economista-michel-husson/75803
Michel Husson: behind the economist, the man
Jean-Marie Harribey
Michel Husson has left us. The news leaves us speechless. Should we first pay tribute to the outstanding economist that he was, or to the man of kindness and devastating humor, endowed with an uncommon sense of pedagogy to dissect the most technical studies?
Michel Husson belongs to a generation of economist-statisticians, trained in scientific rigor while possessing a culture of critical political economy based on the best source: Marx. He is one of the few analysts who have devoted their work to analyzing the evolution of contemporary globalized and financialized capitalism, using the concepts of over-accumulation of capital and the rate of profit, the evolution of which sets the pace for the transformations of capitalism. The consequences of these transformations on work, income distribution and social protection have been at the center of his concerns throughout the neoliberal period. Michel Husson was, among others, one of the most ardent defenders of the reduction of working hours, and his recent work still shows the stakes that it represented, even at the time of the health crisis. And the least of his merits is not to have freed himself from a productivist culture, too long conveyed by the progressive movements, to take into account the ecological crisis and to associate its resolution to that of the social crisis.
One can get an idea of the extent of the work accomplished by Michel Husson by looking at his site “hussonet”, which is an unparalleled documentary mine, made up as much of short and pedagogical texts as of in-depth analyses thanks to a mastery of econometric tools that allow him to show the inanity of many academic works claiming to be orthodox, He was also a mathematician and statistician who was able to show the scientific pretensions of neoclassical models.
But this mastery that he deployed professionally, notably at the Institut de recherches économiques et sociales (IRES) in the latter part of his career, he made it available by participating as actively as possible in associations engaged in the social battle: Attac, the Copernicus Foundation, the Economistes atterrés, not to mention his trade union and political commitments. We no longer count his contributions to collective works on the crisis of capitalism, pensions or public debt, including his participation in the Audit of the Greek public debt in 2015 in Athens.
We can also get a glimpse of the intelligence of his humor if we read the grotesque quotation of a well-meaning economist concerning him, which he had put as an exergue on his site: Michel Husson, “an unknown ideologue of the academic world engaging in incompetent criticism”.
Michel Husson will also be remembered for his contribution to the demystification of the so-called epistemology of neoclassical economics, because, for him, what was undoubtedly most important was to place the economy within the framework of social relations of exploitation and alienation. From Michel Husson’s point of view, the analysis in terms of classes has not aged a bit. May his message be continued in the social battles that remain before us. His death shocks us. Not only for his talent which is leaving, but for the place he held in a collective fight.
July 19, 2021
Our friend, our comrade
Henri Wilno
It is with dismay that we have learned of the death of Michel Husson, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant of current French Marxist economists who never separated his research work from an unshakeable will to change the world. He had chosen his side of the barricade in his twentieth year (he was born in 1949) and, since then, had stuck to it. He was also animated by a caustic humor that did not spare his own person.
He was one of the pillars of the “Ministry of Finance” cell of the LCR and, above all, a central element of its economic working group. He was always available for the animation of economic trainings... but also for initiatives and demonstrations. He left the LCR in 2007 and never belonged to the NPA but accepted without problem to provide interviews and articles to our press and to the press of the Fourth International. He chose to invest himself in the alterglobalization movement and in ATTAC and its scientific council.
An economist and statistician, Michel had both a great knowledge of economic history and the ability to handle statistical series and econometric tools with ease. Despite his recognized competence, he almost always remained a sort of outsider to the “circle of economic reason” (to use the expression of the multi-card courtier Alain Minc). Indeed, Michel did not hide his convictions, worked on subjects such as the reduction of working time, and took apart in an argumentative way the theoretical and empirical fallacies of the productions of neoliberal economists.
For Michel, Marxist economists could not be satisfied with simply reiterating Book I of Capital in an updated form, but had to grapple with the reality of present-day capitalism, using the statistical data available and not ignoring the work of non-Marxist economists. But he always made the class struggle a reality not “beside” economic mechanisms but at the heart of them.
He was the author of many books, contributed to many others and produced a considerable number of articles that can be found on his website http://hussonet.free.fr/. For years, he had been highlighting the declining productivity gains of the major capitalist economies and their consequence: an increasingly regressive economic and social system.
We will miss Michel as a person and also as a thinker whose publications we were waiting for to clarify our point of view. In the face of his sudden end, the NPA addresses its deepest solidarity to his family and all his loved ones.
July 19, 2021
Husson, Presente! Hoje e sempre!
Michel Husson, who died this Monday, July 19th, was more than a great Marxist political economist, whose critical work against neoliberalism leaves a legacy as great as his commitment to the struggle for a new, socialist world, also free from the culture of productivism that is at the root of the ecological crisis.
He was also a fraternal militant, of the French generation of 68 that gave birth to the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), with a fundamental role in the Marxist formation of several new generations of militants and activists.
Still shaken by this loss, it is up to us to continue the fight against Husson, following his militant path and studying his analyses and thought, be it in his many books, as well as in the blog http://hussonet.free.fr (also in Spanish), besides the articles in
https://www.esquerda.net/autor/michel-husson
and www.insurgencia.org
Husson, Present! Today and always!
Ana C. Carvalhaes
Insurgencia
Intellectual at work, much in demand, much respected
Michel was not formally a member of the editorial board of Rouge, the weekly of the LCR. But he was undoubtedly one of those who wrote the most, and who was most often solicited. When we had a new situation, a socio-economic measure that fell during the week, a financial crisis that broke out, a need for an international geo-economic reference point, we said to ourselves: let’s phone Michel? And that’s it.
Who hasn’t browsed his immense digital library-the famous Hussonet-with the jazzy little tune that accompanies navigation, to quickly find arguments, figures, reactions, sometimes acidic polemics, editorials by him republished (and inspiring to do others!), or in-depth studies of certain controversies (for example the “job-killing” RTT, the decrease in salaries to “favor the employment of the unskilled”, and other ritornellos of the neoliberal daily newspaper).
It wasn’t just Rouge (the newspaper). It was impossible to imagine a Summer University without Michel, in dialogue with others: he was a full house. And in our big campaign decisions (unemployment, Europe...) or in the writing of brochures, there was very often Michel’s “theoretical” introduction that framed our reflections.
And everyone called him: militant collectives, associations (Agir ensemble contre le chômage! Attac), colloquiums, other political parties, and trade unions, especially since his work at the Institut de recherches économiques et sociales (IRES). Everywhere he went, he was in demand, and highly respected. He was clearing new questions. He was the intellectual link of many struggles.
Michel often said that “politics” did not interest him much. Perhaps he meant that the jargon that we all use, and that tears us apart, is often not very interesting, compared to the great problems of the world.
Jean-Claude Mamet
With the Cahiers du féminisme
Like other comrades, I learned of Michel Husson’s death with great sadness. It was in the context of the editorial team of the Cahiers du féminisme (1978-1998) that I met him. Our friend and comrade Marie-Annick Mathieu (deceased in 2017), member of the economic commission and of our editorial staff had facilitated the contacts.
For us, the emancipation of the society passed both by a significant decrease of the working time (a hobbyhorse for Michel) and a radical questioning of the social and gendered division of labor. We therefore called on him several times for articles and interviews, hoping to give more echo to our own analyses.
He always responded with great enthusiasm to our requests, but it was also during the summer university of the LCR that we continued our exchanges in a cheerful atmosphere, so much so that Michel’s humor against our adversaries and his self-mockery of the League lightened the climate of the discussions.
We will not forget you
Josette Trat
An intense and ancient complicity
Joëlle AFFICHARD, Jean-Pierre FAUGÈRE, François LANDAIS, Gilles ROTMAN, Roland de VILLEPIN
Six of us began our studies at Sciences po and Sciences éco (Paris) Le concept de concurrence et l’économie politique in 1966. The chance of friendships or political affinities and May 68 had brought us together. A more or less informal work group brought us together, it was the place of intense reflections and memorable work sessions where we learned together about economic theories and their criticism (notably around Carlo Benetti).
These were years of serious reflection and fun, to which Michel Husson contributed with his rigorous analytical skills and the dry humor that never left him.
Four of us, including Michel, then passed the entrance exam to INSEE, after which our careers and commitments took different paths.
We are very sad about Michel’s death and would like to salute his memory in the name of an intense and long-standing complicity.
Joëlle AFFICHARD: I add to this message a reference to what is perhaps the first theoretical text in which Michel exercised his devastating rigor against neo-classical economics. This original sketch illustrates his sense of humor and the quirky way in which he was able to look at the most serious objects. It is taken from our dissertation on Le concept de concurrence et l’économie politique (The Concept of Competition and Political Economy) (1971, off).
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