FRANCE: HOW CAPITALISM IS SHIFTING ITS CRISIS ONTO THE WORKING CLASS

From our French comrades

For several decades, French public debt has been steadily increasing due to abysmal deficits: under the Sarkozy government, public debt increased by 622 billion euros, under Hollande’s government by 425 billion, and finally under Macron’s government, the debt increased by 1087 billion, reaching a total of 3345 billion euros, equivalent to 113.9% of GDP.

However, debt is not a peculiarity of the French state; all states are burdened by debt. Just consider Japan’s debt, which reaches 229% of its GDP, Italy’s at 138%, and the United States, whose public debt reaches 120%, etc. And if we refer to private debt, then the level of indebtedness explodes: 208% for South Korea, 200% for Chinese imperialism, 182% for Japan, etc. The list is very long.

Bourgeois propaganda wants to make people believe that if the state is in debt, it’s the workers’ fault: their pensions are too high, public services cost too much, there are too many pensioners compared to the working population who don’t work enough, etc. The big bourgeoisie and its various governments, whether right-wing or left-wing, have no problems with lying and misrepresenting the truth.

The reality is that the capitalist system on a global scale is in crisis. The purpose of production under capitalism is not the satisfaction of human needs, but the accumulation of capital. Capitalists invest, and this investment must yield a profit; and if this profit is not sufficient, the capital is invested elsewhere, where the profit is higher. To realize a profit, it is necessary to sell the production, which then allows a new cycle of accumulation to begin. This leads to production for the sake of production. But there comes a point when production exceeds the capacity of the market, both national and international; goods accumulate on the shelves, inventories increase, production slows down and then stops, defaults and bankruptcies explode, workers see their standard of living plummet—in short, there is a classic crisis of overproduction typical of the capitalist mode of production. During the Ancien Régime (feudal era), agricultural crises occurred due to bad weather and poor agricultural yields, resulting in famines. Under capitalism, unemployment and misery are the result of an excessive abundance of goods!

From 1945 to 1973, following the massive destruction of the Second World War, the crises of capitalism did not extend beyond a national level for the United States and England, and the regional level for other countries; in fact, the crisis remained limited to one sector of production, while another sector of production took over. But since the great international crisis of 1973-75, overproduction crises have been international and recurrent. As a result of the increase in labor productivity, the rate of profit itself decreases, which translates into a general slowdown in capital accumulation and therefore in industrial growth. For example, industrial production in France grew by an average of 6% per year between 1952 and 1974, while between 1974 and 2007 the same annual growth rate fell to 1.2%, and today, after the great recession of 2008-2010, French industrial production has decreased by 12% compared to the peak reached in 2007. What is true for France is also true for world capitalism, whether it be the United States, Russia – which has become a secondary imperialist power – Germany, Japan, etc. And even the younger capitalist countries, such as China, which after experiencing frenetic rates of capital accumulation, are themselves affected by the crisis of overproduction. They therefore try to offload their crisis onto other markets, including the European one. And in every crisis, what does the bourgeois state do? It rushes to save the capitalist mode of production, along with the privileges and interests of the ruling class, whether the government is democratic or openly totalitarian (as in Russia or China). This is why it does not hesitate to incur heavy debt, as it did under Sarkozy. The essential thing for the bourgeoisie is to safeguard the banks, the stock market, the large monopolies, etc. Hence the general indebtedness of all states.

This situation has been aggravated by the economic policies pursued by the large financial and industrial bourgeoisie with support by their states. An entire sector of industrial production has been relocated to countries where the profit rate was higher because workers could be exploited more ruthlessly. This same democratic bourgeoisie then speaks without any shame about “human rights.”

Depending on the country, this offshoring has been more or less significant; France, for example, has lost 2 million jobs in industry, which obviously leads to a decrease in contributions and taxes, which has resulted in a structural trade deficit of almost 100 billion Euros per year. At the same time, large multinational corporations have begun to subcontract a whole part of their production to medium-sized companies where working conditions are harder and wages are lower.

This economic policy has allowed the global bourgeoisie to gain thirty years. However, the “remedy” proves to be worse than the disease. Sooner or later, the debt becomes unsustainable, and new imperialist monsters emerge, altering the balance of power on a global scale and leading to new imbalances.

To return to French capitalism, every year the French state pays almost 270 billion euros to companies without any counterpart or control. The famous multinational corporations are the ones that benefit the most, while making fabulous profits, profits that they then distribute to that group of parasites we call shareholders. Thus, in 2024, French companies paid shareholders the staggering sum of 68.8 billion euros, a record amount in Europe. Despite the crisis, since 2021 the amount of dividends has broken all records. This is a real plunder supported by the state and the various governments that have succeeded one another.

Well, as always, it’s the workers who have to pay the price. We still live in a class-based society, where the ruling class lives off the exploitation of the working class.

Capitalism has become a parasitic system that hinders the development of humanity and is plunging us into a terrible global crisis and towards a third world war, of which we are seeing the first signs today with the invasion of Ukraine by Russian imperialism, intending to resurrect Greater Russia, and the massacres in the Middle East perpetrated by the Israeli state, which is nothing more than an American Fort Alamo in the Middle East.

The solution exists; capitalism itself has produced it by socializing the forces of production. By replacing small-scale peasant and artisanal production with large-scale industrial production based on the collective labor of the proletariat, which owns neither the means of production nor the product of its labor, capitalism has developed on a large scale the economic basis of communist society.

There is only one thing left to do: expropriate the big financial, industrial and landowning bourgeoisie, abolish capitalist relations of production, wages and capital, suppress all commercial accounting and trade, and move to a communist management of production and distribution.

But to do this, the first step is to organize into genuine class-based trade unions, replacing the opportunist leadership with a truly class-conscious one; but above all, the proletariat must find its leadership in the International Communist Party, which aims at the overthrow of the big bourgeoisie and the transition to communism, that is, to a classless society where all relations of exploitation will have disappeared.