Over the last 20 years, the French sovereign debt tripled while the wealth of just the wealthiest 500 French people multiplied tenfold to €1.2 trillion. This surge in private wealth was overwhelmingly driven by financial speculation, as the European Central Bank loaned trillions of euros in public funds to banks and corporations in a wave of bailouts in 2008, during the 2010s, and in 2020. The French state is bankrupt, the industrial fabric of France and Europe is devastated, and Frenchman Bernard Arnault (net worth €190 billion) is often cited as the world’s wealthiest man.
Over this period, European Union countries collectively plunged hundreds of billions of euros into military spending increases, and also into a US-led war with Russia that has left Ukraine shattered and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians dead. Macron’s proposal earlier this year to send troops to Ukraine, even as Washington backed Israel’s genocide against Gaza, epitomizes the bourgeoisie’s suicidal recklessness. Having bankrupted France, Macron was proposing an operation that would open a path to global nuclear war.
The budget crisis in France shows this: society cannot afford either the wealthy, or the militarism of the NATO imperialist powers that threatens to blow up the planet.
An explosive struggle is brewing between the working class and the Macron government, which will escalate as the nature of this budget becomes ever more widely understood. In this struggle, the working class must be armed with a clear political program and perspective. Imperialist war and police-state repression must end, and the social needs of the population must be funded by impounding EU bailout funds and nationalizing the banks and corporations that received them.
The working class cannot fight for such a program alongside Mélenchon, LFI, the NFP and related union bureaucracies. They strangled the pension struggle last year, simply calling off strikes after Macron had rammed through his cuts. In this July’s elections, they formed an election alliance with Macron, supposedly to keep the RN out of power, withdrawing their own candidates to help elect Macron’s candidates. Totally oriented to maneuvers within the parliamentary machine with Macron, they will oppose a struggle by workers against war and to nationalize the economy.
This struggle will require a massive mobilization of rank-and-file workers, in organizations independent of the NFP and the union bureaucracies. In this fight, the best allies of workers in France are workers internationally. The essential precondition of such a struggle, however, is a clear understanding that there will be no simple, partial reformist solution to this crisis. The defense of the working class requires not a national revolution of the people as proposed by LFI, but a struggle for an international socialist revolution transferring power to the working class.
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Publish date : 2024-10-29 20:02:00
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