the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Mar 31, 2025
We translated the following article from one that appeared in Lutte de Classe, #247, published by comrades of the French Trotskyist organization, Lutte Ouvrière, April 2025.
Trump’s successive announcements—a hand extended to Putin, threats to stop defending Europe, a desire to annex Greenland and Canada, exorbitant tariffs—cast a harsh light on relations between the powers vying for control of the world. What appears to be a U.S. policy U-turn in the war in Ukraine shows that small nations are mere pawns, and that the rivalries between the U.S. and the E.U. are just as important as the rivalries that opposed each of them to Russia. Whatever the bluff in Trump’s announcements, they reinforce “the uncertainty, unpredictability and irrationality of the world,” in the words of the Governor of the Banque de France (quoted in Les Echos, March 17, 2025). The only certainty is that the bourgeoisie and its political servants will intensify the exploitation of workers in every country, and make the popular classes pay.
The U.S.-Russian rapprochement and the opening of official talks between representatives of the two countries may have come as a surprise to many. However, for the past three years, the behind-the-scenes discussions have never ceased, and neither have the calculations of the leaders of the American State apparatus on the advisability or otherwise of prolonging the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In February 2024, CIA Director William J. Burns wrote that the war was “a relatively modest investment with significant geopolitical benefits for the United States and notable benefits for U.S. industry.” He added, “until an opportunity for serious negotiations presents itself.” Today, Trump and his team, who could not act without the consent, if not the assent, of the upper echelons of the State apparatus, seem to feel that the time is ripe.
The massive destruction, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian casualties, weighed nothing in this decision. On the battlefield, the Russian army is nibbling away at Ukrainian territory, at the cost of thousands of deaths on both sides of the front. As for the Ukrainian population, it is increasingly hostile to this butchery of which it is the first victim, and which has created a bloody gulf between two peoples linked by centuries of common history.
As far as American leaders are concerned, the war has now brought the United States most of the advantages it could have expected. In addition to the “notable spin-offs” for their weapons industrialists, this war has weakened Russia, which was one of the U.S. objectives. But, in a different way, it has weakened the European powers competing with the United States, starting with Germany, deprived of Russian gas. The German economy has been in recession for several quarters.
For American capitalists, it seems the time has come to settle the score by pushing for an end to the fighting, so they can exploit the mineral resources, rich farmland and infrastructure of Ukraine they’ve already got their hands on. For his part, Putin has made offers of collaboration, inviting what he once again calls his “American partners” to come and exploit rare earth minerals in Russia.
By invading Ukraine, Putin wanted to show the NATO countries that he would not accept more of their pressure and control over countries that had emerged from the break-up of the Soviet Union. He came up against a Ukrainian State that had been on life support from its Western protectors for decades. That support has rapidly increased over the last three years. The Ukrainian State resisted, at a human and economic cost that Ukrainians will pay for decades to come. But Putin, too, has been able to maintain his power at the cost of multiple sacrifices imposed on his own population.
The war in Ukraine is just one of the many flashpoints created around the globe by imperialism’s permanent struggle for global supremacy in the midst of a deepening economic crisis. In the face of ongoing instability in many regions, it would be to the advantage of American leaders to involve Russia in maintaining the imperialist order, and to have it endorse their choices. This is particularly the case in the Middle East, where the situation has been modified over the past year under blows coming from the Israeli army. It is also likely that the United States is seeking to dissociate Russia from China and, by moving closer to the former, is trying to isolate the latter.
This open collaboration to enforce the capitalist world order is nothing new. Since the Laval-Stalin pact signed in 1935, the rulers of the imperialist powers on the one hand, and the bureaucrats at the head of the Soviet Union on the other, from Stalin to Brezhnev, have come together to defend the imperialist order. Each in his own zone, sometimes in collaboration, they put down revolutions or popular uprisings, weakening or toppling regimes not submissive enough in their eyes. Times have changed, the Soviet Union has disappeared, and Putin, who defends the interests of Russian bureaucrats and oligarchs, can even more easily get along with Trump and other imperialist leaders than could his predecessors.
The American change of heart is not, therefore, “an unprecedented reversal of alliance” (Le Drian). If European leaders are offended, it’s because they have been treated by Trump with the contempt they themselves usually reserve for the heads of state of poor countries. If they are indignant today because the brigands Trump and Putin are reconciling to share Ukraine’s wealth, if they are agitating to stay in the game, if they are increasing their military budgets, it’s because Europe’s leaders fear being deprived of access to precious minerals, rich farmland and the market for rebuilding a destroyed country. Sébastien Lecornu, France’s Minister of the Armed Forces, admitted as much on “France Info” on February 27: the French government had been negotiating with Ukraine for months to get its share of strategic metals such as rare earths.
It takes the hypocrisy of the leaders of European countries and the class servility of the media to pretend to discover that relations between them and the United States are nothing more than relations between unequal powers fighting mercilessly to corner markets. One hundred years ago, analyzing the political and economic power relations between America and a fragmented and weakened Europe at the end of the First World War, Trotsky wrote: “What does American capital want? What is it aiming at?... In a word, it wants to reduce capitalist Europe to the smallest possible portion, in other words, to tell it how many tons, liters or kilograms of this or that material it has the right to buy or sell.” [In “Perspectives of World Development, 1924.”] One hundred years later, after the Second World War, after decades of unfinished and unfinishable European construction, after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the wholesale control over East European countries by Western capitalists, the imbalance of power between the United States and Europe has increased. The divergence of interests between the States even worsened as the economic crisis exacerbated competition between capitalists.
The congenital weakness of Europe’s bourgeoisies, which has never been overcome, stems from the fact that, emerging from feudalism, they relied on competing markets and States, within national frameworks that very soon became too narrow. Faced with powerful American imperialism, there is no single European imperialism, with a single State apparatus defending the fundamental interests of a single large European bourgeoisie. There are competing European imperialisms, representing national capitalists, with economic interests that are sometimes shared but often opposed.
The war in Ukraine has reinforced these antagonisms between European countries, while at the same time making them less competitive with the USA, if only because of the sharp rise in energy prices in Europe. Thus, according to the French Treasury, manufacturing output has fallen in several European countries since 2022, particularly in Germany (-6.7%) and Italy (-5.7%), due to lower production in the chemicals, pharmaceuticals and automotive sectors. The former president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, had warned in September 2024 that the European Union was facing an “existential challenge.” Faced with the United States, he said Europe was threatened with “slow agony” unless there was massive investment in infrastructure, research and renewed means of production.
Draghi called for an “investment shock” of 800 billion euros in Europe, and appealed to private investors. But capitalists, in Europe and elsewhere, have no homeland. They invest their capital where they choose, i.e., where they expect the greatest profit. Long before Trump’s return to the White House and his announcements of tariffs of 25%, 50% and even 200%, Biden had stepped up protectionism in the United States, with far greater resources than the European States. His Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) dumped billions in subsidies on capitalists who settled in the United States.
Attracted by this windfall and by energy prices three times lower in the U.S., European groups in the chemicals, automotive and battery industries transferred part of their production to the other side of the Atlantic. On March 6, at the very moment when Macron was appealing to patriotism in the face of desertion by its former American ally, Rodolphe Saadé, the boss of CMA CGM, which owes its development and fortune to the largesse of the French State, was invited to the White House, where he promised Trump 20 billion dollars in investments in the United States and the creation of 10,000 jobs. And everyone remembers the blackmail by multi-billionaire Bernard Arnault who, invited to Trump’s inauguration, threatened to relocate his companies if the French government raised its taxes. The capitalists’ only flag is profit.
In the global economic war, there is no European policy, but rather national States acting in the interests of their capitalists, and first and foremost those who weigh most heavily on these States. For example, when the European Union on October 30 imposed additional taxes (up to 35%) on electric vehicles manufactured in China, Germany voted against them to protect the interests of its automakers, who export a great deal from China. During the latest discussions on the Mercosur treaty, France was against its ratification in the name of protecting “its” farmers, while Germany wanted it to help its automakers sell cars in Brazil and Argentina. On March 27, Trump announced a new 25% tax on all foreign-produced vehicles imported into the United States. This is likely to hit German automakers hardest, as they export 450,000 high-end vehicles to the U.S. every year, to the tune of 24 billion dollars. It’s a safe bet that the European front against U.S. taxes sought by Macron and Merz will be reduced to the lowest common denominator between German and French capitalists.
On the other hand, in every country, the economic war intensified by the Trump administration is being used as a pretext to impose increased productivity on all workers and new sacrifices on the popular classes. This war does not kill directly, but it has already eliminated jobs by the hundreds of thousands and plunged cities and regions into desolation through factory closures. The State subsidies paid out to wage this war are swallowing up hundreds of billions of dollars and euros which hospitals and schools lack.
This class war is set to intensify with the transition to the “war economy” called for by Europe’s leaders. Macron, who has regained some political oxygen by donning the costume of warlord, wants to double France’s military budget in five years. Across Europe, the alleged Russian threat and the brutality of the American U-turn in Ukraine are being used to justify increased military budgets, to condition the population to accept further sacrifices, and to prepare them to pay the price of a conflict, increasingly presented as inevitable.
In Germany, even before he was sworn in, Friedrich Merz, the next chancellor, had the constitutional law amended to lift the “debt brake” so he could spend hundreds of billions of euros on the army. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, has authorized member States to spend up to 800 billion euros to “rearm Europe.”
But the European States will have no more influence on the discussions surrounding a hypothetical peace in Ukraine than they did in prolonging the war. The dispatch of a “reassurance force” to Ukraine, as proposed by Macron and Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, is conditional on Trump and Putin agreeing to a ceasefire, and on both sides accepting that the Europeans will play the role of “peacekeepers.” Behind their saber-rattling, Europe’s leaders know who’s the master. Treated like doormats by Trump, they go paying tribute to “our American ally,” without whom they are powerless, lacking, for example, enough satellites.
To take account of the possible withdrawal of American military protection, European leaders are talking of building a “Europe of Defense,” reviving an old Cold War tune. But there can be no European defense today any more than there was yesterday, because there is no European State. The various European States may engage in joint military action and find themselves temporarily united, but this unity disappears as soon as the balance of power on which these agreements are based changes. Their interests and priorities are rarely the same: countries like Poland and the Baltic States, for example, consider it vital to remain under American protection.
The differences begin long before battles break out, with weapons orders, where each State protects the interests of its respective merchants of death. Dassault owes its fortune to the unwavering support of the French State over the past century, and more recently to the ability of French governments to buy its Rafale aircraft or to promote them to Indian and Egyptian rulers and Gulf oil kings. Significantly, neither Britain nor Germany owns a single Dassault aircraft, just as the French army has never bought Leopard tanks built by the German firm Rheinmetall.
Even more indicative of their subordinate relationship to the United States, 64% of the weapons imported by European NATO member countries since the start of the war in Ukraine have been purchased from American manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop. In a bid to reduce this proportion, the European Commission’s SAFE plan requires weapons purchased with EU-backed loans of up to 150 billion euros to include at least 65% European components. This is mainly a publicity stunt, as most arms orders are placed without recourse to this type of loan.
For the time being, the reinforcement of the “defense of Europe” and the announcement, already made in 2022, of the implementation of a “war economy” are first and foremost a huge economic stimulus plan that will benefit a myriad of industrialists and financiers. It’s a windfall for arms merchants, whether European or not. The CEO of Thales, which produces radar systems and has already raked in a record 2.4 billion euros in profits in 2024, envisages “a decade of growth and maybe more,” (Les Echos, March 4, 2025). Since these announcements, the stock prices of all weapons-related industries have soared.
This agitation about the alleged Russian threat and the need to revive the arms industry in order to defend ourselves is not just intended to feed the arms merchants.
It serves to impose sacrifices on the population and to aggravate the exploitation of the workers. “We’ll have to revisit our national priorities”; “We’ll need reforms, choices, courage.” Macron’s message—relayed morning, noon and night by political leaders, by employer spokesmen and by the herd of journalists—is unambiguous: the extra billions for bombs, drones or Rafales will be taken from social housing, schools, hospitals. The transition to a war economy will be used to justify extending working hours, postponing the retirement age, and cutting days off.
This climate of war serves to prepare the population and young people to accept sacrifice and deprivation today, and to accept suffering and death in the trenches tomorrow. For war is part and parcel of the worsening contradictions of a senile capitalist economy, of the intensification of rivalries between capitalists and the State powers that defend their interests, to control raw materials, win markets, weaken or sink competitors.
War rages in the Middle East. It is bloodying African countries, starting with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. Who would dare bet that the rivalry between the United States and China will not, sooner or later, turn into open warfare? How will the trade war between the USA and Europe evolve? What will happen if the United States annexes Greenland, administered by Denmark today?
It’s impossible to predict which confrontation might end in general military conflagration. These imperialist wars for world domination will not be the workers’ wars. On the contrary, they will serve to defend and strengthen the interests of those who exploit them.
Even before the war, all the parties vying for the right to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie are forming a national union. Even those who want to distinguish themselves from Macron stand at attention before the army chiefs. Le France Insoumise (LFI, France Unbowed, a left-wing parliamentary coalition) has welcomed non-alignment behind the United States; the French Communist Party (PCF) is calling for a purely French military industry and army; while the ecologists and socialists invoke the defense of “European humanist and democratic values” to prepare to don the heavy helmet. As for the leaders of the National Rally (RN), while they call for peace in Ukraine and reject a European defense, they applaud the increase in the military budget to “reinforce national sovereignty.” For their part, the trade union leaderships have also rallied behind the need for a war economy. For Marylise Léon of the CFDT, “the international context is worrying. We haven’t gone to war, but it’s a call to responsibility.” As for Sophie Binet of the CGT, she never misses an opportunity to defend national sovereignty: “You can’t talk to us morning, noon and night about a war economy and let our industry die.”
All those, whether union or party leaders, who talk about “national sovereignty” today, conceal the fact that in this nation there are exploiters and exploited—capitalists whose patriotism consists in putting the means of the State at their disposal to increase their profits, and workers who produce everything and keep society running. Twice in the 20th century, the workers were sent to die on the battlefield to guarantee capitalist profits during world wars. The capitalists and their political servants have no qualms about doing it again, and are actively preparing to do so.
Opposition to the bloody future that capitalism is preparing for us begins by refusing to get behind our leaders and the national flag. Opposition to the capitalist future begins by denouncing today the fact that schools and hospitals are being sacrificed to finance bombs and cannons, by demanding the requisition of arms dealers’ profits. There will be no peace until the workers overthrow the dictatorship of the capitalists.