The attacks on our living conditions are extremely brutal. We would have to go back to the 1930s to find any trace of measures this severe. Faced with this unbearable situation, anger is growing throughout society. This discontent is widespread and we are seeing a need to fight back in every country. In 2022 workers in Britain mobilised en masse loudly proclaiming: “Enough is enough!”
For weeks Bayrou has been on every TV channel claiming that debt was leading us to bankruptcy, that we are living beyond our means, that the “boomers” were selfish and privileged, and that we had to accept the need to give up our “privileges” for the sake of our children's future. What a disgrace! And at a time when the state is investing hundreds of billions to strengthen the military and the “ultra-rich” are reaping dividend after dividend.
The Bayrou government has fallen and Bayrou organised his departure before today's mobilisation to avoid giving the impression that it’s the street that rules. But we should not be under any illusions, regardless of whatever the next government is, the state will continue to want to inflict all these brutal attacks on us.
REGARDLESS OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT'S POLITICAL ORIENTATION, THE BOURGEOISIE WILL STILL INCREASE ITS ATTACKS ON THE WORKING CLASS.
In Belgium, Italy, Spain and the United States, governments everywhere are cutting back on social welfare, on wages, laying off workers and increasing workloads while they increase their spending on the military by billions.
Germany, despite its reputation for economic stability, is facing an unprecedented wave of redundancies. Under commercial pressures and the demands of war, 112,000 jobs have been cut and thousands more are threatened. The government is planning major austerity measures to fill the hole of 30 billion euros expected by 2027. At the same time, Friedrich Merz promises to provide Germany with “The most powerful army in Europe”. The defence budget is expected to increase from 62 billion euros in 2025 to 153 billion euros in 2029 (compared to 44 billion euros in 2019).
Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech is embraced by all governments, left, right, far right or populist. Regardless of the political affiliation of those who run the state, they all defend the “national interest” which is the interest of the national bourgeoisie. At this very moment, the same attacks are being waged in Britain by a Labour Government.
The debt they want us to shoulder is not a mark of our so-called privileges but of the historic crisis of capitalism.
This is the only future this bankrupt system can offer: ever increasing misery, ever increasing war!
WORKING CLASS STRUGGLE IS WORLDWIDE
In the face of such brutality, the workers are no longer willing to bow down. For more than three years, the proletariat in France, Britain, Sweden, Korea, the United States, Canada and Belgium have rediscovered and developed the capacity to respond. Yet there is little media coverage of this - a real black out.
Why? Because the bourgeoisie does not want us to become aware that the problem is global and that the we need to respond internationally. It does not want the exploited class to realise that they share the same interests everywhere, that they are fighting the same struggles everywhere. Even more, it fears they will develop their solidarity and international unity:
- In Belgium: from the “days of action” in December 2024 to the demonstrations during the summer, the workers' combativity and their desire to unify the struggle remained strong.
- In Canada: after the strikes in Montreal, there are now strikes in Quebec.
- In the United States: there were strikes at Boeing, in the automotive sector and in the ports, even in the midst of the election campaign.
- In China: despite fierce police repression, strikes broke out in August in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, textiles, packaging and component parts.
All these struggles show that the working class is no longer willing to sacrifice itself on the altar of the national interest and its exploiters!
IS THE “BLOCK EVERYTHING” MOVEMENT AN EXPRESSION OF WORKING-CLASS STRUGGLE?
“How to struggle?” This is the question posed for us today and for tomorrow too. The current movement is proposing the struggle to “block everything” to “put pressure” on Macron to achieve an “equitable and fair-minded policy” from the new government.
Yes, we must fight! Yes, we must fight en masse! Yes, we must take to the streets! But this “let's block everything” movement is conceived as a coming together of French citizens, of the “people,” where many groups (small shopkeepers, business owners, restaurant owners, etc.) are mobilising against the government's tax policies, against the attack on their status or corporate privileges. What can we expect from a movement that wants to boycott the economic machine and calls on us to reduce our consumption, block transportation, limit the use of our credit cards, and spread ourselves across roundabouts? What can we expect from a movement whose slogans favour civil disobedience and the Popular Initiative Referendum (that of the yellow vests), whose logic is to target the elites who run the country? Where does such a movement lead? To sowing the illusion that the solution is to put pressure on the policy makers and that a better government for the “people” is possible. Just because other sectors of the population are also victims of government attacks does not mean that the working class should follow such a movement, where it loses its identity as a class. It is solely the working class, an internationally exploited class, that has no national interests to defend. Its struggle against exploitation and the defence of its living conditions is not a struggle for the improvement of its social status but contains within it the seeds of the destruction of the capitalist system itself, the abolition of exploitation, the state, classes, borders, and nations. The “let's block everything” movement does not breathe new life into the fight against capitalism. The publicity given to the movement by all the media and left and far-left parties aims to draw workers into a movement that serves as an outlet for their frustrations, diluting them into the “people” as “angry citizens.” This deafening campaign is hyping up a movement in which workers' demands are drowned out and the futile actions are not in any way our own. It makes use of the current difficulties which the workers have in recognising themselves as a class by derailing them onto the path of the democratic illusion in which the only solution lies in the change of government or president.
WITH THE RIGHT AND WITH THE LEFT: A CAMPAIGN OF LIES
In response to our determination to fight, all the political forces of the bourgeoisie attack us ideologically, dividing us or promoting illusions in capitalism. Bayrou’s speech blaming the “boomers” for the debt is despicable. It is despicable that the bourgeois state seeks to drive a wedge between generations, pitting the younger generation, who are called upon to take up the fight against capitalism, against those who, in May 1968, were the protagonists of the largest strike in the history of the workers' movement, possessing a wealth of experience to pass on to this new generation. The propaganda of the left and the far left, to make people believe that the crisis does not exist, that it would be enough to take money from the rich to solve all problems is misleading.
Yes, their billions are sickening in the face of the growing poverty within the working class but this is the very expression of the logic of profit in capitalist society: a system of exploitation of the majority by a controlling minority. Neither in France nor elsewhere can the workers' struggle have as its objective a “fair” distribution of wealth, because there is no such thing as “fair” capitalist exploitation.
The objective of the workers’ struggle has to be to put an end to capitalist exploitation and the law of profit in order to finally be able to satisfy the needs of all of humanity.
HOW DO WE FIGHT BACK?
In France, as everywhere else, in order to build a balance of forces that will enable us to resist the relentless attacks on our living and working conditions, which will become even more severe in the future, we must come together, wherever we can, to discuss and promote the methods of struggle that have made the working class strong and enabled it, at certain moments in its history, to shake the bourgeoisie and its system:
- seeking support and solidarity beyond one's factory, company, industry, town, region, or country
- workers' self-organisation of struggles, particularly within general assemblies, not leaving control to the so-called “specialists” in organising and managing struggles, the unions.
- the broadest possible discussion on the general needs of the struggle, on the positive lessons to be learned from the struggles but also from the defeats, because there will be defeats, and the greatest defeat is to suffer the attacks without reacting; the first victory of the exploited is to enter into the struggle.
We conclude with this historical example which holds valuable lessons for the future: in Poland, in 1980, workers came together in huge general assemblies to take control of their struggle and decide amongst themselves on their demands and methods of struggle. They did not “shut down the country”, but organised themselves into assemblies and as a class, and that is how they were able to create a balance of power with the state and to push back against the austerity measures. They even took it upon themselves to organise production and economic life to satisfy the strikers own needs and in the interests of the entire population, in a gigantic surge of solidarity and consciousness-raising. This is one of the seeds planted by our predecessors on the long road to revolution, one of the seeds we must nurture in the future, one of the things we must prepare for by coming together and discussing after today so that this class struggle is possible in the future. Because, in the end, the only alternative will be:
World Revolution or the Destruction of Humanity
International Communist Current (10 September 2025)