The first fifteen days of September have been marked by dramatic developments. Work stoppages, followed by a management lockout, took place at the Audi plant of the Volskwagen (VW) group in Brussels on the 9th and 10th. The same night, an umpteenth bloody bombardment by the Israeli air force resulted in nineteen dead and sixty wounded, adding to the macabre list of victims in Gaza. On the 11th, the American Anthony Blinken and the British David Lammy were in Kiev to discuss with Ukraine the use of Western missiles on Russian soil. On Thursday 12th, a strike broke out at Charleroi airport in Belgium. Putin has declared that the use of Western missiles that require Western satellites and specialists to strike territory NATO countries consider to be part of Russia would put NATO countries in a state of war with Russia. The spiral of imperialist war and direct confrontation between the great nuclear powers is accelerating.

Also in September, following the breakdown of contractual agreements signed with the unions and the announcement of plant closures, workers at several VW plants in Germany demonstrated in front of the workshops. Employees at major hotels in the USA and Canada are preparing to strike. At the same time, support and arms supplies from Western countries to Ukraine on the one hand, and from Iran, China and North Korea to Russia on the other, continue to grow ; as does the slaughter at the front and in the rear and as it does in Gaza and now Lebanon.

Rallies and protests at Boeing’s Seattle plants, particularly over wage demands, were large enough to force the IAM union to call a strike. [1] The rejection of the union’s agreement with management and the 96% vote in favor of strike action left it with no other option for the time being, at the risk of being outflanked by workers and discredited. These demonstrations of workers’ combativeness, however limited, are taking place at a time when, in the United States, Europe and the rest of the world, every government and state is exploding budget deficits to urgently rearm at all costs, to adapt the production apparatus to the necessities of preparing for generalized war.

The mobilizations we are witnessing are, in fact, the beginnings of a response to the bill for the crisis and the war, which is being presented to workers. In the U.S., Bidenomics aims to reorient and restructure the entire U.S. production apparatus towards the new necessities defined by the march to war. China and Russia are already in a de facto war economy, due to the historical conditions of their own capitalist development. The European powers, the big losers in the current imperialist polarization, are seeing their imperialist, military and economic power collapse.

The former President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, has written a report on The Future of European Competitiveness [2] for the European Union. Broadly speaking, it echoes the themes and objectives outlined by French President Macron in his Europe Speech [3] on April 25, 2024. It advocates a European plan that would be the counterpart of the American Bidenomics, to catch up with the USA and China in new technologies, AI, semi-conductors, etc., in capital competitiveness and labor productivity, and finally in armaments and defense capabilities. Both the report and its presentation [4] to the European Parliament speak volumes about what is at stake today between the imperialist powers, and in passing about the weakening of Europe, as well as the fact that the question of imperialist war is taking precedence over purely economic considerations:

“The starting point is that Europe is facing a world undergoing dramatic change. World trade is slowing, geopolitics is fracturing and technological change is accelerating. It is a world where long-established business models are being challenged and where some key economic dependencies are suddenly turning into geopolitical vulnerabilities. Of all the major economies, Europe is the most exposed to these shifts.” [5]

To counter this fatal decline, Draghi proposes a kind of European plan, the counterpart of the plans put forward by Biden in the USA, to be financed by European loans. [6] In so doing, the Draghi report illustrates how the issue of war, of “security” and military defense, has become the central factor in determining the policies to improve.

“Security threats are rising and we must prepare. For Europe to remain free, we must be more independent. We must have more secure supply chains for critical raw materials and technologies. We must increase production capacity at home in strategic sectors. And we must expand our industrial capacity in defence and space. But independence comes at a cost.”

This cost? It will be paid by the proletariat. “The cost of developing our defence capability will be substantial. (…) In the defence sector, this consolidation of spending should be matched by selective integration and consolidation of EU industrial capacity, with the explicit aim of increasing scale, standardisation and interoperability.”

In other words, in addition to paying for the explosion in budget deficits, the proletariat will also have to pay for the restructuring of European capital, its increased concentration through the closure of factories and production sites unsuited to the accelerating race to war, and the increase in labor productivity. This means lower wages, directly or indirectly through taxes and cuts in insurance and other social benefits to “reduce deficits”, increased exploitation of labor and, for many, lay-offs – particularly in sectors that have become obsolete, or not “essential” to the war effort.

For the proletariat today, there is only one slogan and one way out if it wants to escape misery and war: start by refusing to pay the bill.

On September 10, some two hundred workers at Detroit’s Marathon refinery went on strike for higher wages. Dare we say it: this tiny strike shows the way. Or rather, to be as precise as possible, all these proletarian demonstrations show what the first step is for the world proletariat to rise up and assert its response to the capitalist crisis and imperialist war.

Let us be clear: we have little hope, or illusion, that any of the Detroit workers are aware of the historic significance of their participation in the strike. We cannot rule out the possibility that a tiny minority of VW or Boeing workers make the connection between their resistance to the attacks on their living conditions and the crisis of capital, but we doubt very much that there are many who are also aware that in so doing they are tending to rise up against and slow down the race towards generalized rearmament and war.

This is all the more true as these mobilizations are still very limited, localized, and initiated and controlled by the unions. They remain within the legal confines of the “right to strike”. They can be banned and repressed at any time. Is this not what the Canadian government has just shown once again last August in the face of a railway strike? [7] Bourgeois democracy generously grants the “right to strike” on condition that it remains ineffective from the point of view of working-class struggle. In particular, that there is no risk of it being extended and generalized beyond sectors and corporations. So it is not just in China and Russia that strikes are banned and repressed.

Whatever the degree of “consciousness” of the strikers themselves, and however pronounced and great the limits and weaknesses of these few proletarian reactions are, they open the door – barely, we are aware – to the only path the proletariat can and must take: that of defending its economic class interests; that of collective resistance to the inescapable worsening of capital’s exploitation of labor. In so doing, the two hundred Detroit strikers are objectively pressing the brake, or adding a tiny grain of sand in the gears, in American capital’s preparation for the war effort.

Refusing collectively the sacrifices is the first step we must take. The path is very long to the only alternative to the generalized war: the workers’ insurrection, the destruction of the bourgeois states and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. These can only be realized if the international proletariat is equipped with its political party, the only material force capable of advancing these slogans. Politically, in terms of the balance of power between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the path to an effective party is still far too long, but to progress on this march requires the proletariat to start by taking the first step: that of struggle. That is the slogan of today. The other marches and slogans, carried by the communists, and provided that they are carried out en masse by the proletarians, will then follow as experiences develop. There is no other alternative to the barbarism of capital and the bloody tragedy that it promises.