Paul Fabra, a law graduate of the Institut d ́études politiques in Paris, began his career as a journalist at the weekly L ́Entreprise (1953) and La Vie française (1954-61). He continued it at the daily newspaper Le Monde (1961-93).
Responsible for the weekly supplement Le Monde de l ́économie (1967-84). Contributor to various French and foreign magazines, including the Wall Street Journal. Editorialist, attached to the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le Monde (1984-93). A columnist for the newspaper Les Echos (1993-2009) Paul Fabra received the Jacques Rueff Prize (1979) and was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour (1985).
Paul Fabra published his first weekly column in March 1985 in Le Monde and then, from April 1993, Les Echos. The last of these regular columns in the latter newspaper was published on December 8, 2009.
His main book is “Capital for Profit”, which main ideas has contributed as the foundation of the FOOE.
"This book aims at nothing less than a reversal of the perspective of current economic thought. Contemporary society is still analyzed according to the abstract models proposed at the end of the nineteenth century by neo-liberal economists. Their artificial constructions today form the basis of the doctrine taught under the name of economic science in all the universities of the West. These economists have been called hedonists because, for them, the origin of value was to be found in need or, if one prefers, in the desire for consumption, which led them to posit the axiom – on which our modern "consumer society" is based – that, in exchange, "the main fact is demand and the incidental fact supply" (Léon Walras, 1874).
This principle is contrary to the requirements of our time. It is collapsing under the blows of events. Conceptually, it is completely opposed to the tradition of the English classical school which, with the great David Ricardo, founded political economy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by taking up and "criticizing" the ideas expressed by Adam Smith in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. / What has been striking in the history of economic thought since then is, apart from a few partial discoveries, its regressive character, which makes us think of what happened to physics and biology as long as scientists did not return "to the very sources of knowledge" (Jacques Monod).
It is in the name of the theory of labour-value, taken up by Marx but misinterpreted by him (he made labour the "substance" of value), that the Marxist explanation of profit (and wages) is rejected here. It should not be surprising that the same arguments make it possible to refute the marginalism of the neo-liberals, because the latter, by repudiating the Ricardian heritage, have in turn fallen back into the traps set by Adam Smith's pre-scientific thought. It is from top to bottom that political economy must be revised, otherwise it will be difficult to prevent society from yielding to the temptation of imaginary solutions: the Revolution or its opposite, the counter-Revolution. “