Last Wednesday, Macron urgently summoned all the ministers and main leaders of his majority to discuss the need to cut public spending. This took place while they dined on a seafood platter in the reception rooms of the Élysée Palace.
For several weeks now, the government has relentlessly pointed out this issue. We are told that “public spending has spiraled out of control”. But the workers certainly haven’t benefited from the state's generosity!
All the workers who only have their salary to live on, all those who have lost their job or go from one precarious contract to another, all the retired workers who only receive a meager pension after a lifetime of work, have seen their living conditions get worse in recent years.
The state coffers have been emptied by big firms that pocket all possible forms of aid and subsidies amounting to at least 200 billion euros a year. Workers should not have to pay for the deficit or for debts incurred for the sole benefit of capitalists!
But, when the politicians who serve the bourgeoisie declare – as Economy Minister, Bruno Le Maire has just done – that “the state must cease to be a welfare state”, it doesn’t mean they’re going to reduce the handouts they give to big business and the rich. The government has just decreed a budget cut of 10 billion euros for this year and it has announced that another 20 billion euros will have to be saved in 2025. We know exactly what they mean by “savings”: new attacks on the working class!
It's the workers, the unemployed and even the sick who are going to be hit. When the Health Minister talks about modifying the system covering long-term illnesses and the conditions for reimbursing medical transport, he is preparing to reduce access to healthcare for millions of people, which may have dramatic consequences.
At a time when teachers and parents are mobilizing to denounce the lack of funds, the situation in state schools is going to get even worse! And the same will be true for hospitals and nursing homes – where the situation is already catastrophic – for housing and for all the most essential services the population needs.
At a time when business bankruptcies are soaring again, the unemployed are threatened once more with the loss of part of their resources, through lower unemployment benefits or shorter compensation periods. The government is preparing to launch a large-scale attack that will set living conditions back for the entire working class.
While millions of people are finding it harder and harder to make a decent living, the capitalist class continues to grow richer than ever. The CAC 40 companies, the most powerful in the country, have just announced profits of over 150 billion euros in 2023, a record broken for the third consecutive year. For shareholders and their highly-paid bosses, such as Carlos Tavares, head of Stellantis, who earns 100,000 euros a day, there’s no austerity.The capitalists have raked in these huge profits by increasing exploitation, lowering wages and receiving billions in public funding.
The government claims that there's no money left to pay ambulance drivers or reimburse medical care, but it finds billions of euros for war. Macron boasts that he has doubled the military budget since coming to power, and is asking manufacturers to switch to a war economy.
In other words, tomorrow we’ll have cannons, missiles and Rafale jet fighters but no doctors and no hospital beds! Hardship, deepening crisis and more wars, that's the future promised by the leaders of the capitalist world!
To counter this, workers possess powerful weapons: they make society function, they have the strength to run it and offer it a different future than capitalism with its crises and wars.
Nathalie Arthaud