An avalanche of economic attacks is raining down on the working class everywhere

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All over the world, the bourgeoisie is making the proletariat pay for the economic crisis of its system and the expansion of militarism through a deluge of attacks on workers. It is this accumulation of attacks, leading to a process of massive impoverishment, that is now provoking ever-growing anger among the population, particularly the working class, and a determination to fight back and refuse to accept the sacrifices demanded of them.

New attacks on workers are inevitable

In order to survive the economic war in the international arena and to finance its preparations for war, the bourgeoisie has no other solution than to impose increasingly draconian austerity measures on the working class. But far from being a solution to the crisis, these measures only exacerbate the contradictions of the capitalist system. While debts are abysmal and, on the one hand, it is cutting all social budgets, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie is spending astronomical sums on armaments. For all powers, from the smallest to the largest, the logic is the same: to make a historic war effort that the working class must pay for! This orientation is already at work in the industrialised countries of Europe and North America. And let us have no illusions: any return to a more bearable previous situation is out of the question; there is nothing to appease the legitimate anger. Let us judge for ourselves! The most industrialised countries of Europe are at the heart of the turmoil:

In Belgium, since the beginning of 2025, the working class has been mobilising against the federal government's measures to impose 26 billion in budget cuts in order to increase the competitiveness and profitability of the national economy, while spending tens of billions on the purchase of military equipment. This broad austerity programme will have a major impact on the entire working class, with workers in private companies already being laid off en masse, automatic indexation of wages and benefits being eroded, overtime and night work bonuses being reduced, work flexibility being increased, and the right to unemployment benefits being restricted. In addition, deep cuts are being made to pensions and health insurance, the total number of civil servants is being reduced, the tenure of teaching staff is being jeopardised, etc[1].

In Germany, too, the new government plans to save several billion euros on universal income (Bürgergeld) over the next two years. Expenditure is expected to fall by €1.5 billion next year. This saving is expected to reach €3 billion in 2027. At the same time, 10,000 industrial jobs are being destroyed every month and German companies are planning to lay off more than 125,000 workers. In addition, the number of unemployed exceeded 3 million in August and a study by the Institut der Deutschen Wirtschaft (IW) proposes reducing the duration of unemployment benefits for senior citizens.

And while a country like Spain appears to be an exception to this general trend, with a GDP growth rate of 2.5% that is the envy of its neighbours, the reality for the Spanish proletariat is less idyllic: economic ‘good health’ is supported by strong downward pressure on wages, by the massive influx of underpaid foreign labour, which pushes average wages down, increasingly decoupled from the increase in the cost of living.

The most recent and ‘spectacular’ case illustrating this situation concerns France, where the proletariat is also going to be hit very hard. On 15 July, Prime Minister Bayrou announced a series of measures to reduce the French economy's colossal public deficit, which do not mince words: the outright elimination of two public holidays for all employees, increased control and surveillance with yet another tightening of the rules on compensation for hundreds of thousands of unemployed people, reduction in the number of civil servants (by not replacing one in three civil servants), a freeze on pensions and social benefits, liberalisation of the labour market... To this must be added all the measures constituting additional obstacles to access to healthcare or sick pay under the pretext of ‘social equity’ and ‘combating abuse’. The unspeakable hypocrisy of their justification is matched only by the violence of these announcements.

No section of the world's proletariat is spared

In countries such as Argentina[2] and the Philippines[3], the bourgeoisie is pushing the conditions of exploitation of the working class to the extreme. In India, the massive ‘reform’ of the Labour Code constitutes a frontal attack on working conditions by weakening or even eliminating all forms of security or legal rights, such as the minimum wage, fixed working hours and job and workplace security. In addition, soaring unemployment following the increase in US tariffs, combined with rising inflation, is having a severe impact on the living conditions of the working class.

The working class in China has not been spared. A wave of bankruptcies in the real estate sector has already led to hundreds of thousands of layoffs, as well as significant wage cuts in construction, property management and supply chain companies. Tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance are announcing significant job cuts. Workers have been deprived of their wages for months. Heavily indebted municipalities are prioritising bond repayments over the payment of civil servants' salaries. Youth unemployment has already reached unprecedented levels, with one in four young Chinese workers unemployed.

Far from being immune to violent economic attacks, the working class in North American countries is directly exposed to all the consequences of economic warfare, growing chaos and the explosive expansion of militarism. In the spring, in the United States, cuts of nearly $1 trillion were decided in social budgets for health care (Medicaid). In concrete terms, this will result in the loss of health coverage for nearly 15 million people. Similar measures were taken against the Food Assistance Programme (SNAP), where cuts of £186 billion will result in the loss of some or all food assistance benefits for 22.3 million people. It has also been announced that around 225,000 federal civil servants will be made redundant, which will undoubtedly be followed by tens of thousands of redundancies in the education sector due to a budget cut of €7 billion, as well as similar budget cuts affecting federal student loans and federal employee pensions.[4]

The global economic crisis and war tensions at the heart of the attacks

How did we get here? Following the banking crisis of 2007-2008 and the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone in 2010-2012, the bourgeoisie experienced significant difficulties in keeping its economic system afloat. This vulnerability was reflected in its chaotic management of the COVID crisis in 2020 and was illustrated by the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the Middle East. These conflicts led to a huge increase in military production, the shelving of the ‘green economy’ and the destabilisation of commodity markets, industrial targets and trade routes. “The capitalist economy was already in the midst of a slowdown, marked by rising inflation, increasing pressure on the currencies of the major powers and growing financial instability, and the war is now exacerbating the economic crisis at all levels.”[5]

The economic policy of the Trump administration is itself a major factor in global economic instability, particularly due to its protectionist stance (symbolised by its tariff policy), its abandonment of multilateralism and the management of the global economy through international conferences and bodies (WTO, World Bank, GATT treaty, etc.) in favour of bilateral negotiations between states. Such a policy is in total contradiction with the needs of the global capitalist economy.

What we are witnessing is “the USA’s current attempt to dismantle the last political and military vestiges of the world imperialist order established in 1945 (which is) paralleled by measures that clearly threaten all the global institutions set up in the wake of the Great Depression and World War Two to regulate world trade and contain the crisis of overproduction”. [6]The removal of these institutions will have the same effects as the protectionism that followed the 1930 depression and exacerbated the global crisis.

The increasingly violent and uncontrollable upheavals in the economy only serve to expose the insoluble problem facing the bourgeoisie: the global crisis of generalised overproduction of decadent capitalism, which pushes each national capital to exploit the working class more harshly in an attempt to remain competitive in an oversaturated global market. Indeed, the world today is faced, in a generalised and definitive way, with what Marx in the 19th century called “an epidemic which, in any other era, would have seemed absurd: the epidemic of overproduction.” [7]

Overproduction, which was cyclical in the 19th century, has become global and permanent since capitalism entered into decline.

There is no solution to the crisis of capitalism within this decadent and rotten system. Today, the working class is being called upon to tighten its belt; tomorrow it will be called upon to have its skin pierced in the wars of capitalism, as is already the case in various countries. Faced with the lies of the bourgeoisie, which would have us believe that the crisis is the product of greed, of the ‘rich’, or of the stupidity of this or that government, the responsibility of revolutionary organisations is to clearly highlight the historical issues at stake and the need to fight the capitalist system as a whole and the trap of democratic illusions that accompany it by seeking to exonerate it. In short, all the hypocritical and treacherous rhetoric of the bourgeoisie about the need for consultation and possible alternatives to be achieved through democratic representation, which, in one way or another, directs the social movement towards the ballot box. The purpose of this rhetoric is to muddy the waters, to corrupt consciousness and undermine the conditions of the struggle. The fundamental task for which the proletariat must prepare is therefore to respond with an independent struggle, on its own class terrain, to the sabotage of the extension and unification of its struggle by the trade unions and to the mystification of a ‘popular’ government advocated by left-wing politicians, these false friends of the workers who, behind their fallacious rhetoric, are always preparing further rounds of austerity by seeking to disarm the working class.

Stopio, 28 August 2025

 

[2] Inflation there has already reached 214.4%, a rate much higher than that predicted when the Milei government came to power in 2023. Since then, 3 million people have fallen into absolute poverty (the worst in 20 years) and child malnutrition has reached levels that are now only found in places such as Gaza or sub-Saharan Africa.

[3] Constant increase in the cost of basic goods while wages stagnate

[5] 26th ICC Congress Resolution on the international situation (May 2025), International Review 174

[6] ibid

[7] Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848

Rubric: 

Crisis of capitalism