By Gauthier HORDEL
For several months, France has been in a political crisis. In 2022, Macron was re-elected not out of support to his policies, but out of fear of seeing Marine Le Pen in power. He played the masquerade card of the “republican front”, of the “me or the extremes and chaos“.
In the legislative elections that followed a few weeks later, Macron failed to secure the majority he needed to govern. The government of Élisabeth Borne had to use 49.3 [the section of the constitution allowing government to by-pass the assembly] no less than 19 times, notably for a highly contested pension reform. To get out of this situation, Macron opted for the dissolution of the National Assembly.
During the legislative campaign, Macron played the same card again, by trying to instill fear, but he only succeeded in further weakening his position. The “centre” is eroding to the far right and the left – and particularly Melanchon’s party, La France Insourmise, LFI. Macron had appointed losers at the head of his government, and Michelle Barnier and his team were forced to resign.
Francois Bayrou has now been appointed Prime Minister, but he will find himself with the same difficulties as Barnier. In this lies the political crisis, and it results in a paralysis of the institutions of the capitalist republic.
Macron is in a parliamentary deadlock. This is a huge problem for him and for his supporter and therefore it follows that it presents a considerable advantage, not only for his opponents in the National Assembly, but also, at least potentially, for all those who fight outside the Assembly against all Macron’s reactionary policies.
This has not been understood by everyone. Fabien Roussel [national secretary of the French Communist Party, PCF] and André Chassaigne [president of the Democratic, Republican Left, GDR], for example, are alarmed by the “blockage of institutions” and have declare themselves “available” to help Macron get out of the impasse in which he finds himself. By doing this, they show us the extent to which they are entangled in a reformist and institutional vision of politics.
Let us be clear: any attempt to resolve the parliamentary impasse, by the leaders of the left, through their “availability“, can only end in failure and, worse still, in a betrayal of the fundamental interests of the cause they claim to embody.
The possible economic consequences of political instability
The institutional impasse has consequences on the economic level. In recent weeks, banks have increased interest rates with the French state, to a level higher than that of Greece, a country considered to be much less financially solid than France. On the same day that François Bayrou was appointed Prime Minister, Moody’s downgraded France’s rating, which is likely to push borrowing rates even higher.
The political and budgetary instability of the French state will certainly have a negative impact on the economic outlook. French capitalists will slow down investment even more. The same applies to foreign investors. Capitalists seek to optimize their profits and social and governmental instability threaten the profitability of capital. A contraction in output would increase unemployment and accentuate social economic problems. Economic growth would plunge further and worsen the state’s finances.
But before blaming these economic prospects on the political crisis and the deputies who voted for the motion of censure on Barnier, it is necessary to recall what the economic situation of France was like before. For decades, despite fluctuations, the overall rate of return on capital has been falling. This is a phenomenon that not only concerns France. It is global.
Successive economic crises in the last 50 years are linked to the decline in the profitability of capital. Global growth is on a downward trend and may result in a new debt crisis. In France, the increase in public debt reached €3.2 tn in the first quarter of 2024, or over 110% of GDP. These are phenomena inherent in the functioning of the capitalist economy.
Capitalist rapacity
The economic slump is undermining the living standards of workers. Yet in the EU, France is in first place in terms of dividends paid to shareholders. In 2023, the total amount paid to the shareholders of the top companies [in the CAC40 share index] amounted to €63.2 billion, an increase of 8.7% since 2022. Over the period 2017-2023, the increase was 31%!
Among the companies that paid the most were Engie, which accounted for a quarter of the total increase, L’Oréal, Hermès, Vinci, Safran and Thales ( see our article on the arms business). According to asset manager Janus Henderson, the increase in dividends will be around 3.9% for 2024.
This contradiction between the general economic situation and the benefits to the CAC40 shareholders can be explained by the fact that a minority of capitalists are concentrating more and more capital in their hands. Those who can’t compete with them are absorbed.
The major contractors subjugate and crush their subcontractors to increase their profits and pay a large part of their profit to shareholders, to the detriment of their employees and investments. In the large multinational companies, we can blatantly observe the antagonistic interests between capital and labor. While some of them are making record profits, wages are stagnating. Wage increases are below inflation. In 2017, when Macron was first elected, he claimed to be able to revive the economy by relying on the “trickle-down theory”, i.e. that it was necessary to relax the levies on companies so that employees could benefit from this situation. However, we see in these multinationals that there is no correlation between the level of profits and the increase in wages.
Class Collaboration and the Role of Workers’ Organizations
Faced with these figures, it is easy to draw the conclusion that the main problem is not political instability, but the very functioning of the capitalist system, based on private ownership of the means of production and the market. The accumulation of capital and the search for profits create a system full of contradictions, with an ever-more powerful capitalist minority on the one hand and a stagnating economy on the other.
Workers, students and pensioners no longer trust the political organisations that have monopolised political power until now, and which claimed to be able to reconcile the irreconcilable: the interests of workers and those of capital.
We should expect that all workers’ organisations, their political representatives and trade unions explain the impossibility of resolving the contradictions of capitalism, as long as they remain within the framework of capitalism.
We have seen that the leaderships of certain political organizations are concerned about the instability of institutions (see our article ‘unblocking institutions is not our fight’). But now, unfortunately, the CFDT, FO, CFE-CGC and CFTC [trade union federations] have signed a joint communique with the MEDEF and CPME [employers’ organisations] in which they call for a return to political stability on the pretext that “the instability into which our country has fallen poses the risk of an economic crisis with dramatic social consequences”.
In other words, we must return to the previous situation, where capitalists could count on stable institutions functioning in their interests. What weighs heaviest at the moment is the threat of economic sabotage on the part of the bosses, if ever a future government acts against their interests.
The union leaderships who signed this communiqué, at the head of organisations that are supposed to represent the workers, are practising class collaboration. They are uniting with the capitalists precisely at a time when it is the contrary is necessary: when they should to exploit the weakness of the regime, all the better to defend the interests of workers, and to open the eyes of the population to the rapaciousness of capitalism and the need to overthrow it.
No, alas. They prefer to defend the established order and stifle any prospect of change in the process. They add confusion to confusion. Decidedly, betrayal is inherent in reformism.
This article based on an article in the French Marxist website, La Riposte, and the original is here.
[Top picture: Elysee Palace, from Wikimedia Commons, here]
