Attacks on all fronts: for the past ten months or so, redundancies worldwide have been running into the millions. This reflects a crisis affecting all sectors of the economy, with the notable exception of the arms industry: IT (Ubisoft, Oracle, Cap Gemini, IBM), the automobile sector (Aston Martin, Stellantis, Volkswagen, Bosch and all the sector’s subcontractors, such as Goodyear), the glass industry (Arc, Verallia), the retail sector (Auchan, Jennyfer), banking and financial services (ABN Amro in the Netherlands, Block in cryptocurrencies), logistics (Amazon, UPS, Ziegler), the press (La Tribune, Washington Post), and various industrial sectors (Heineken, SEB, Erasteel, Lanxess and BASF) are all affected. Added to these figures are the redundancies resulting from the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into production processes, particularly in IT, with tens of thousands of engineers, technicians and staff finding themselves unemployed, with little chance of finding work quickly. To this we can add job cuts among civil servants worldwide, with Trump and Musk following a few months on from their precursor Milei and his 'chainsaw’. The French national education system is another good example for the coming period.
No national economy can escape the purge afflicting capitalism as a whole. China is affected just as much as the rest, despite the opacity of unemployment statistics in that country. Germany is particularly hard hit, since its industrial sector, long buoyed by the growth of the Chinese domestic market, can no longer rely on it. It faces fierce competition, notably from Chinese industry, in its most iconic sectors: machinery, chemicals and the automobiles, resulting in a cascade of job cuts in a country unaccustomed to such measures: Volkswagen and Opel, as well as Bosch, Aumovio and all the automobile industry’s subcontractors, are planning drastic staff cuts. BASF is seriously considering relocating part of its administrative services to India and Malaysia; the chemical company Lanxess is also set to reduce its workforce. All these announcements at the heart of European industry are the result of a general economic downturn. In Germany, new jobs are mainly part-time, whereas the jobs lost were skilled, full-time, productive and well-paid.
The list is endless. Even the UN is making mass redundancies of its staff worldwide!
These redundancies are accompanied by a tightening of governments’ social and health policies and increasingly severe monitoring of the unemployed: in Argentina, the Milei government is further deregulating the labour market to facilitate redundancies, extending the daily working day from 8 to 12 hours, and allowing holiday leave to be split up... Belgium, for its part, is set to limit the duration of unemployment benefits, automatically cutting off a portion of the unemployed from any income.
Young workers are particularly hard hit worldwide: in England, the system for funding higher education, based on variable-rate student loans, is creating situations of colossal debt for young graduates. In India, more than half of young graduates will not find work. The same problem exists in China, where the youth unemployment rate is well above the national average: more than one in six young people there are out of work. Youth unemployment is even becoming an increasingly central concern for the government, alongside the rampant ‘curse of 35’ (age-related redundancies).
The global economy increasingly marked by the decomposition of capitalism
All these attacks are the consequence of capitalism’s plunge, over the past fifteen years or so, into an increasingly uncontrollable spiral of economic crisis: financial crises (the subprime crisis in 2008 and sovereign debt crises), the destabilisation of the global economy during the Covid pandemic, and the global economy being dragged into the maelstrom of war (Ukraine, Gaza, Iran…). Inflation is exacerbated by an increasingly unstable global situation, a war economy marked by a staggering explosion in military spending, rising energy prices driven by the conflict in Ukraine and now in Iran, rising tariffs almost everywhere in the world, supply chain disruptions linked to local conflicts such as the blockades in the Strait of Hormuz, and the increasingly exorbitant cost of environmental destruction.
On the other hand, the increasingly marked stagnation of the global economy (excluding armaments) highlights the historical limits of the system: permanent overproduction, the inability to move beyond national economic management policies, and fierce competition between rival nations are driving the bourgeoisie into increasingly self-destructive strategies: it is dismantling all the safeguards and countermeasures put in place after the Second World War to implement even minimally coordinated policies aimed at combating the effects of capitalism’s historic crisis, such as the opening of markets, the limitation of customs duties, the development of common standards, and the implementation of coordinated monetary policies. Overproduction is clearly the cause of the unfolding crisis that is leading to redundancies. China, for example, is reaching the limits of its domestic market despite huge subsidies designed to enable it to absorb its production. It has no choice but to flood the world and its competitors with goods that it cannot sell on its domestic market.
The impact of the decomposition of capitalism is reflected in an acceleration of increasingly short-sighted state measures. All this is marked by the ever-sharper fragmentation of the national bourgeoisies over the policy to be pursued, by irrational and demagogic populist programmes (such as the tariff war triggered by the Trump administration), and by the ideological blindness of bourgeois cliques hysterically clinging to their privileges. The impact of decomposition on the economy has intensified sharply, as the bourgeoisie has no coherent economic policy to offer to mitigate the effects of an irreversible crisis.
The brutal and lasting plunge into crisis we are witnessing is profound: no serious, comprehensive counter-trend in bourgeois policy is visible, and the destruction we are witnessing in countries at war will probably never be repaired. Besides, who would finance it?
Fighting back against these attacks means beginning to fight capitalism
The historic crisis of capitalism is the crisis of an economic system based on the increasingly ferocious exploitation of those proletarians who are still fortunate enough to have a job, and on the cynical abandonment of the rest. Overproduction affects all commodities, of which labour is the most tragic! This barbaric reality, which the working class is experiencing ever more starkly, demonstrates the bourgeoisie’s inability to offer them any prospect other than war, relentless exploitation and destitution.
Admittedly, the road ahead is still long and difficult for workers to succeed in putting forward the revolutionary perspective. But by fighting against the effects of the crisis, our class confronts the very heart of capitalism: the exploitation of man by man, wage labour and private property. By being forced to fight for survival, it is reconnecting with the only ground on which the proletariat can build its strength: that of economic demands, of strikes, of assemblies to organise the struggle, and of street demonstrations. The struggle enables the proletariat to gradually rediscover what makes them strong: their unity, their solidarity, the need to organise themselves, and conscious reflection on the goals to be set for the movement.
The crisis currently unleashing its destructive effects reveals the true future that awaits the proletariat if they do nothing to defend themselves. Despite the enormous suffering that capitalism inflicts on the proletariat, the crisis of capitalism nevertheless remains the proletariat’s ally.
HD, 9 April 2026