"I could find you a job just by crossing the street", was Macron’s daring reply to a young jobseeker who was telling the president that he couldn’t find a job despite his efforts. Macron talks as if he was unaware that there is an economic crisis and that there are six million unemployed workers in this country!

Ten years ago, the bankruptcy of the great American bank Lehman Brothers marked a worsening of the ongoing crisis of capitalism. We all continue to live under the threat of a new crisis that could cause a catastrophic collapse of the economy. The leaders of the capitalist world may well pretend that the lessons of the crisis have been learned, but they are as incapable of controlling their fundamentally uncontrollable system as they were ten years back.

In 2008, their only initiative was to do all they could to reassure the financial markets that had led the economy to the brink of collapse. The leaders of the great powers gave bankers unconditional financial state support. They opened the floodgates of state-guaranteed credit. After bailing out financiers under the pretext of rescuing the economy, they allowed speculators to come back to life thanks to the billions put at their disposal by the states.

Today, speculation is in full swing, like it was ten years ago. Shareholders are euphoric: for this year’s second quarter alone, they have been paid 500 billion dollars in dividends–-an all- time record.

However, the capitalists themselves don’t believe in the capacity of their economy to continue to grow. They buy more and more financial products because they know that markets are almost completely saturated due to the impoverishment of a huge part of the population. Investing in the productive sectors is a risk they don’t want to take.

The fact that finance is flourishing shows the parasitic nature of capitalism. The tons of money invested in speculation yield huge profits for a minority. But they aggravate the crisis and its consequences. Because capital owners are after “quick bucks” and will readily send their money from one profitable country to the next, their contribution to the development of local economies is marginal. They can even ruin a country, as was exemplified recently with the cases of Turkey and Argentina, when massive investments were withdrawn overnight because another, more profitable niche had been found. Today, the entire capitalist system has become a house of cards–-even more so than in 2008. And it threatens to collapse at any time.

Of course, the crisis of the capitalist system is not being paid by those who are responsible for it. It is being paid by the working people of the world. The hundreds of billions spent to guarantee today’s record financial profits are the result of the intensified exploitation of working people through unemployment, insecure jobs and wage freezes. In order to increase their profits, employers are permanently at war with workers, pushing back their conditions of existence and trying to take away the rights they were obliged to grant in the past.

Since 2008, the successive French governments have all carried out the same policy: supporting the employers' offensive, using an increasingly important part of public spending to fuel finance to the detriment of health, education and social protection.

After Sarkozy and Hollande, it’s now Macron's turn to faithfully serve the interests of the capitalist class. He tends to be more provocative than his predecessors, takes pride in his policy in favor of the rich and openly shows his contempt for workers – as he did last weekend when his reply to the young jobseeker suggested that he was a “slacker”.

But, like his predecessors, Macron is a puppet whose role is to fulfil the demands of the capitalist class. And so it will always be, whatever the government, as long as big capital dominates the economy.

Putting an end to this domination by expropriating the capitalist class is a vital necessity for overexploited workers, but also for the whole of society. Capitalism is leading society from one catastrophe to the next. Only the working class, which is in no way connected with the private ownership of the means of production, has a fundamental interest in overthrowing this system. Working people have the strength to accomplish this. What they need now is to become conscious of it.