Europe | Reaction & Impotence

Impotence Squared

After Trump became president, the leaders of the most powerful European imperialist countries—Germany, France and Britain—declared themselves to be the “coalition of the willing” to ensure Ukraine would win the war. But willingness is one thing, being capable another. In all three countries we see a deep political crisis developing in the face of an upsurge of the right. Already in Britain we have Starmer 2.0: Andy Burnham in government with Farage waiting in the wings. Macron is on his way out, and Chancellor Merz is hanging by a thread in what is already the most unpopular German government in postwar history.

To begin with, let’s remember: who created a unified Europe and for what purpose? It was the U.S. that united capitalist Western Europe against the Soviet Union, integrating powers like Germany and France—sworn enemies for centuries—under the U.S. umbrella. Following capitalist restoration, the U.S. overlord designed the EU as just the right tool for the period of globalization in the 1990s and 2000s. And today, again, it is the U.S. that is pushing to overhaul the whole political architecture of Europe to serve its interests.

U.S. imperialism needs a different Europe now: not a liberal one that raises the rainbow flag and promotes free trade to plunder the world, while the U.S. loses out economically and shoulders all the military spending. Rather, U.S. imperialism needs a heavily armed lieutenant that represses workers and oppressed nations without qualms and ensures Europe stays in line with its strategic objective of subduing China.

This is the reason the U.S. is pushing for higher military spending from the European capitalists. From a formalistic perspective, this seems strange: why would the strongest imperialist power demand its weaker rivals build up their militaries? Of course, as class strategists, the U.S. rulers know that Germany fighting for world domination is absolutely not on the agenda now, and not in the foreseeable future either.

Merz and Macron want to present their arms spending as strategic autonomy. But let’s be clear: overwhelmingly, this arming of Europe means paying the Americans. Last week, Merz was so happy to announce that the U.S. finally allowed Germany to buy millions worth of Tomahawk cruise missiles! The U.S. is using NATO to squeeze its allies. Yes, the European imperialists are strengthening their own arms industries—but not to challenge the U.S. They are shouldering more of the costs of maintaining imperialist control over the world, with the U.S. calling the shots.

We talk a lot about the decline of the U.S. True. But we also need to be conscious of how decrepit the Western European powers are. Germany still has somewhat more industry, but Germany, Britain, France—they are all economically and militarily completely dependent on the U.S.: on U.S.-controlled payment systems, U.S. weapons and, when they build weapons themselves, they need U.S. technology to make them work.

In this situation, it does not help for Marxists to throw around Lenin quotes about interimperialist rivalry. No. We need to be concrete: in order to defend Iran in Germany, you have to mobilize workers against the massive Ramstein U.S. Air Force base! In order to fight militarization and the reintroduction of the draft in Germany, you have to oppose the U.S.-dominated NATO that is behind this. We see that a proletarian struggle against the U.S. empire is, in fact, not a “capitulation” to German imperialism, but part and parcel of opposing it.

The Working Class Turns Right, the Left Clings to Liberalism

As Trump is putting the squeeze on, key elements of the ruling classes in Europe are moving to bring down the liberal consensus of previous decades. But not only the capitalists. More and more workers are looking to the right. Whether Le Pen in France or the AfD in Germany, rightist parties have the most support among workers.

Germany is, in many ways, becoming the focal point of the rightward shift in Europe. For years, Germany was the poster boy for peaceful, progressive globalization. No large-scale wars and, by the mid-2000s, Germany was the world champion of exports, sucking the lifeblood from workers via trade. Those times are gone. The German imperialists’ business model is getting squeezed on all sides, by being cut off from cheap Russian energy, U.S. tariffs and the Chinese industrial juggernaut. This leaves the German capitalists no choice but to attack the working class and destroy their own industrial base. Deindustrialization is accelerating in the two core components of German industry: chemical and automotive. Thus, VW just announced a plan to cut 100,000 workers internationally.

For decades it was the SPD, with the support and cover of union bureaucrats, and the Left Party that pushed through attacks on workers. This produced a horrific downward spiral: unions have massively lost members, the left is more and more discredited and the AfD appears as the one forceful anti-Establishment party.

The one hope propagated by the Left Party is the anti-AfD popular front, the Brandmauer (“firewall”). The Left Party recently announced it would support a CDU government to keep the AfD out...and the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany, disastrously, approved of this! Of course, for leftists to cling to capitalist politicians as a barrier to the right wing is already an admission of their own complete impotence. The left has clung to liberalism for decades; now they do not want to see the results of this complete dead end.

Our first key task is fighting to strengthen workers’ defensive position against the coming attacks. A crucial element of this is to wage a hard fight within the left to face reality squarely and open leftists’ eyes to the complete bankruptcy of the liberal politics that has driven many workers to the right.

Whether in the coming presidential elections in France or in Germany, we need to fight to break the anti-right-wing popular fronts on a class basis—not by simply proclaiming how bad class collaboration is, but through concrete proposals for struggles that can overcome divisions in the working class. One example is our initiative in France for a united Trotskyist campaign that exploits Mélenchon’s contradictions by pushing forward his most left-wing positions in order to expose him and break his hegemony over the left. In Germany, we seek to build an anti-NATO current in the workers movement in opposition to the Left Party leadership.

Ukraine War: Only Proletarian Unity Can Vanquish Imperialism

I have to talk about the Ukraine war: this will be decisive for Europe. We might have thought Russia’s victory would come sooner, but the fundamental dynamics of the situation are clear. Russia is slowly grinding down the Ukrainian army, while Ukraine, being pushed into a corner, looks like it is entering a more protracted political crisis. In fact, Ukraine’s developing military defeat leads it to rely more on the imperialists and make more wild attacks on Moscow and Crimea. The whole situation underlines with full force that, under the current regime, Ukrainian sovereignty is being completely sold out to NATO and that, on Ukraine’s side, the war is being waged to be more subjugated to NATO. This is in fact what support to Ukraine in the war means.

Yes, obviously Ukraine’s sovereignty and freedom are under attack from Russia. But the Ukrainian government’s current prosecution of the war, acting as a NATO pawn, ensures maximum enmity from the Russian population and in fact undermines and endangers the fight for Ukrainian freedom. As we have insisted from the beginning: in this situation, communists must reject support to either Ukraine or Russia. We must fight for Ukrainian freedom through a break with the Ukrainian government’s whole NATO strategy. At the same time, we need to expose how Putin’s invading Ukraine, purportedly in defense of Russia against NATO, in fact plays into the hands of the imperialists and weakens the fight against NATO. Only in this way can we motivate a common revolutionary, proletarian and anti-imperialist strategy that can unite the workers of the region against U.S. imperialism and NATO.