Fear in the service of militarized capitalism

So, at the highest levels of government, a week of stirring up great fears has been organized. The highest officials in internal security and the armed forces, whose duties should be carried out with the utmost discretion, have been mobilized by the President of the Republic to catapult a pedagogy preparing for the acceptance of new sacrifices and new cuts to public freedoms, against the acceleration of militarism.

The stage was thus cleared for the President of the Republic, who, incidentally, did not do his military service, to step into the rigid garb of a warlord, sitting at a lectern at the Ministry of the Armed Forces. He, who promised to henceforth consult our fellow citizens—on everything and nothing—did not even consult Parliament before announcing tens of billions in budgetary increases for rearmament and pushing diplomacy aside in favor of the policy of force.

To this end, he orders the national representation not only to vote for an upward revision of the military programming law, but also not to vote of censure against Mr. Bayrou's shaky government team, charged with making the final cut to human investments. From declaration to declaration, therefore, from the NATO summit to meetings with the British Prime Minister, the German Chancellor and Polish leaders, war has become the political project of decadent Macronism.

The head of state boasts of doubling the military budget since 2015, bringing it to €64 billion, and justifies future increases by citing the fragility of the French army. It is undeniable that the French army, which serves national defense, now has multiple "vulnerabilities." And for good reason! For decades, more than 10% of the military budget has been devoted to nuclear weapons, to the detriment of the conventional army and new tools essential for defense, while our soldiers were "projected" to bring order to various African countries.

Mr. Macron proposes to pursue this strategy, as seen in his worrying agreement with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose country has long-standing, very specific military agreements with the United States, since it cannot use its nuclear weapons without authorization from the imperium. Will our so-called "nuclear deterrence" be subject to the same fate in the fog produced by the constant expectoration of the word "sovereignty"?

The Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Mr. Thierry Burkhard, gave two main reasons for the over-armament: " France cannot ignore Africa, because it has interests there" and " Russia constitutes a threat by 2030. "

In other words, the strategy is twofold: on the one hand, to pursue neocolonialism towards the south to allow capitalist firms to control territories, to seize the resources of the soil and subsoil, uranium for nuclear power plants, oil and gas while the fossil industry leads us every day a little closer to the abyss, as well as all the rare metals necessary for electric cars and mobile phones, while the African peoples face poverty, overexploitation and global warming. A militaristic strategy to perpetuate, therefore, predatory capitalism.

On the other hand, the rearmament of the European Union responds to the dual injunction of the United States confirmed at the summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on June 25: to hold the eastern flank, to allow the United States to continue the confrontation with China and to increase military budgets to purchase North American equipment. By following the NATO conclusions, the President of the Republic continued to distort the very meaning of the French National Day, seizing this opportunity to effect a further shift in the major undertaking of transforming Europe into a sphere of influence of the " new sheriff in town ," Trump.

The transatlantic security partnership goes hand in hand with the purchase of American equipment, as US Secretary of State Marc Rubio claimed after the adoption of the €800 billion "Rearm Europe" plan. An American arms industry that now operates in tandem with the technological oligopolies that ensure digital integration, increasingly taking the form of a straitjacket for the European Union. Any weapon sold in European countries is subject to the approval of the Pentagon and the White House before any use.

We are a long way here from the Europe of arms that is boasted about in the corridors of our palaces and those of the European Commission. And the agitation of the Russian threat to Europe is only a decoy to hide the war that the West and Russia are waging, on the backs of the Ukrainian people, victims of a war of conquest aimed either at their attachment to the ultra-liberal European Union or their forced integration into Mr. Putin's Eurasian empire project.

V. Putin's goal is not to invade Europe, and France is not "his primary enemy ," as fearmongers claim. Putin's plan is to rebuild the "Great Russian Empire" between China and the European Union to open up new areas of exploitation for his country's capitalism. The Ukrainian people are paying for this in their flesh and blood, with a thousand sufferings and losses in Ukrainian and Russian families under the profitable arms trade project that gratifies a few shareholders of the global military-industrial-digital complex.

Mr. Macron explained on July 13 that he expected to reap the rewards of this strategy for French capitalism, because, he explained, it would revive growth and improve the gross domestic product. In short, in the name of this strategy, he asks the working class and all workers to rally under the withered banner of "national unity," excluding all social and political conflict, so that industrial and financial powers are free and supported by the State, which is increasingly placed at the service of transferring to big capital the wealth produced by labor that will be even less well paid—and the unemployed and the most deprived are increasingly deprived of their meager subsistence allowance.

The privatized arms industry is overjoyed with this head of state, allowing our country to remain the second largest arms exporter in the world and operating a war capitalism based on public procurement, which already amounts to 22 billion euros.

By stating that this additional spending must be done without additional debt, the head of state implicitly confirms that it is the workers who will see the pace increased, wages frozen, social security recipients put on a diet, the unemployed less compensated, public services, local authorities, and associations dried up, and people's savings drained while foreign companies supplying raw materials, particularly semiconductors, and financial institutions make their money from the race to manufacture death engines.

Clearly, international capitalism and its local lackeys are engaged in a dangerous race that tastes of sweat, blood and tears, punctuated by the general sound of boots, at the very moment when we should be investing in human development and climate stabilization.

Mr. Macron's chest-thumping phrase, " To be free in this world, you must be feared. To be feared, you must be powerful ," speaks volumes about the cynicism and brutality of a small man who is laughed at in chancelleries in Burkina Faso, Congo, Niger, Mali, Chad, Senegal, and elsewhere after having to pack up and leave under the spit of the population, while being unable here to finance the construction of Canadair jets and the equipment needed to fight forest fires. We are not happy about this. We feel sorry for the France of the Enlightenment, for the France of Jaurès and the communist and Gaullist resistance.

This also makes the White House laugh, as it is imposing considerable increases in customs duties on us, causing the dollar to fluctuate to support North American capitalism, while the European Union has just abandoned the project of minimum taxation of multinationals and is delighted that military budgets will constitute significant transfers to the US military and digital industry. At this time, it is not Putin who is threatening Europe, but rather Trump who is draining and weakening it.

New parliamentary, municipal, citizen, and union initiatives are essential to halt this downward spiral. The presidential monarch is becoming dangerous.

It is completely irresponsible to beat the drums of war while diplomacy is knowingly withdrawn from the Aventine Hill to Gaza, Ukraine, Algeria, Sudan and other places in the throes of conflict and war.

We are at a time when workers, creators and thinkers must build their international unity against the instigators of social and military war.

We are at a time when the invention of post-capitalism must be debated and put into action to prevent humankind from being pushed into the precipice.

This is a time when workers must unite their struggles to take control of production and work. If they had the power, they would certainly not choose to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, but rather production for the cause of life, the protection of the climate, and all living things in a world of peace, brotherhood, and a better life. This fight for life must be waged.