Moch, Jules

Born Mar. 15, 1893, in Paris. French politician and statesman. One of the leading theoreticians of the French Socialist Party. Son of a colonel. Graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique. Engineer and lawyer by education.

From 1928, Moch was a parliamentary deputy. He served as minister of the interior and minister of national defense and held several other posts in a number of cabinets. A member of the French delegation to the UN from 1947 to 1960, he was France’s permanent representative on the Disarmament Commission from 1951 to 1961.

Characteristic of his views is a tendency to make a fetish of scientific and technological progress, which he regards as the factor that fundamentally transforms the laws of development of bourgeois society in the context of state-monopoly capitalism. According to Moch, under the bourgeois system the intervention of the state and the trade unions can make wages “social”—that is, completely in correspondence with labor costs. “Confronting” the teachings of K. Marx with the “facts of our times,” he attempts in the works Confrontation (1952) and Living Socialism (I960) to demonstrate the “extinction” of the class struggle under contemporary capitalism. Moch has also written many works on disarmament, including Alarm! (1954) and The World’s Fate (1969).