Contribution of the Communist Revolutionary Party of France

Intervention, Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire de France ( PCRF ),  ECA, 16/02/2025.

On the struggle of the communists against the EU, its war economy and the involvement of bourgeois governments in imperialist wars.

Dear comrades,
Today, the three years of inter-imperialist war in Ukraine, its effects on the world system of imperialist states, but also within the international communist movement, will allow the PCRF to make a rapid assessment of two aspects. Firstly, the relationship between the French monopolies and the European Union, and its evolution since the war. Secondly, the position of communists on the war and the tendencies revealed by the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine on the question of inter-imperialist alliances.
We cannot in a short space of time return in detail to our analysis of the strategy of the French monopolies, but concerning our question today, it is important to return to two objectives in the process of completion of these monopolies, whose successive Macron governments express the political choice in view of this strategy. These are the liquidation of social gains and of the bourgeois democratic freedoms won by armed anti-fascist resistance. This programme, which is in the process of being completed, is also a social offensive, aimed at making up for France's lag behind Germany, with the EU playing a central role so that the French monopolies can derive their own interests from this strategy.

In 2024, France had around 25 of the 500 largest groups in the world, compared with 28 in 2017. Positions have been gained on every continent, and France is still one of the dominant imperialisms, but despite its leading companies, competition between imperialisms is being reinforced in particular by explosive growth in certain sectors and regions. Positions can therefore obviously be lost, particularly to China (142 groups in the 500) and the United States (136).

The current political crisis in France is a reflection of the recent economic difficulties. Until 2024, Macron was able to rely on economic results that were praised by the boards of directors of the monopolies. However, this economic map has crumbled under the impact of ever stiffer international competition that is more unfavourable to French capitalism. For example, France's main economic partner is Germany, whose recession for the second year running (a fall in Gross Domestic Product (GDP)) is having a negative impact on the profits of French companies.

In the field of warfare, record sales of French weapons continue, with 18 billion in 2024 and a doubling compared with 2023: Caesar cannons, Rafales, ships, submarines, optics. 76% of sales were made in Asia (India 30%) and the Middle East. But it has also lost markets to neighbouring competitors such as Italy, with the most recent example of Italian-Algerian contracts for the manufacture of helicopters and various types of high-performance ships, or Morocco, which prefers not to continue with French Caesar guns in favour of Israeli artillery - the latest sales figures. Everywhere, production rates are being stepped up in French armaments factories. The French Defence Procurement Agency (DGA) has even identified the automotive, chemical and energy sectors as areas in which to step up the industrial war effort. The first contracts will be signed in 2025 to benefit from their know-how and production capacity. 

The inter-imperialist war has enabled the French monopolies to accelerate this catching up through intense participation in the war effort, reflected ideologically and politically by the war consensus of support for the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, ranging from the Rassemblement National (National Rally) to the pseudo ‘New Popular Front’. A recent military exercise in autumn 2024, called ‘Breakthrough’, organised in absolute secrecy, simulated the intervention of more than 3,000 French soldiers in Ukraine supported by drones and spy satellites, confirming Volodimir Zelensky's declaration in January 2025 that, following a new bilateral meeting with the French government, he would send contingents and train Ukrainian soldiers and pilots with the delivery of Mirage 2000 aircraft. The participation of the French army itself is designed to ensure the huge economic benefits that the monopolies hope to reap. The ‘Ukraine fund’, which brings together major French monopolies such as Thalès, Dassault and Enedis, has raised €200 million for the post-war ‘reconstruction’ of Ukraine, in addition to the bilateral partnerships of 2024, which provide for €3 billion in military aid, as well as for infrastructure and the establishment of factories in the country.

A recent survey by the French institution Statista shows that French capital is ultimately involved to the tune of 4.6 billion euros both militarily and financially, not even counting its financial participation in the European institutions.
These central issues for the French bourgeoisie explain the Macron government's repeated insistence on strengthening the EU's strategic autonomy in military terms. Witness the repeated plans for a unified European army, which have yet to find a compromise among the other European bourgeoisies, as well as the European ‘strategic compass’, a roadmap for a war economy in which the Macron government has been at the forefront alongside Germany. If the EU has been a lever for the interests of the French monopolies in the inter-imperialist contradictions, the imperialist war in Ukraine has reinforced this use of the EU in a context of social struggles intensified in France during the battle against the recent pension reform.
At the last European Council, Macron proposed a European preference for the purchase of military equipment. Instead, the 27 agreed on a possible revision of the 3% stability pact, making military purchases an exception to the deficit rule. The creation of European private banks could also be used to drain part of this formidable savings of 1400 billion (more than the United States at 800 billion) to invest in war. The European Union as an inter-imperialist alliance has also acted as a catalyst for internal contradictions within the communist movement in Europe, but also in France, raising for the organisations claiming to be Leninist the question of the link between tactics and strategy. There is first of all a universal angle on the question of the EU, touching on the way in which communists understand the content and form of inter-imperialist alliances. For our Party, imperialist alliances are first and foremost inter-state alliances representing the common interests of the bourgeoisies of the Member States.
Their common interests are the growth of their monopolies, the strengthening of their competitiveness in the conditions of exacerbated competition in the world imperialist system, and the common confrontation with the workers' movement, with the aim of neutralising the revolutionary communist parties. However, the community of interests of the monopolies of the different states of an imperialist alliance cannot make inequality disappear, nor the organisation into national states on which capitalist accumulation is based. The community of interests cannot make competition and contradictions disappear within a given imperialist alliance, but also between different imperialist alliances and coalitions. The example of the EU and a European war economy is typical here. Far from attenuating the contradictions within the EU, the joint commitment of the European bourgeoisies to support the Ukrainian regime has actually accentuated certain internal contradictions.
If we go back in time to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany announced on 27th February 2022 that it was responding to NATO's official request in 2014 for its members to increase their military spending to at least 2% of their annual GDP, whereas until now it had been content to devote 1.3%. A huge envelope of 100 billion (twice the defence budget of 48 billion) was also released on the same day to modernise the army. In France, the military programming law already provided for a near doubling of the military budget for 2019-2025, giving it a head start, which was accentuated by the recent budget of the Barnier then Bayrou government for 2025, giving the Ministry of the Armed Forces €3.3 billion and its Minister Lecornu declaring that there was no question of touching this budget even in France's deficit situation. Direct proof, if proof were needed, that the debt finances the war economy, a debt then borne by the working people.
The European Rapid Reaction Corps or Eurocorps, which is not attached to the EU but has 5 permanent members (Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and Spain), has been much more successful in being attached to NATO, of which it is part as a ‘high-readiness force’, than to the latter, since it is not integrated into the official EU framework. Another example is the SCAF, a project that has brought France, Germany and Spain together since 2017 to develop an integrated air combat system by 2030, with long lead times and tough negotiations between the monopolies over the distribution of contracts. It has also been called into question by the announcement in March 2022 that Germany will buy 35 US F-35s. Finally, at the same time as France is modernising its Rafales aircraft with the F5 stage (incorporating a stealth drone, hypersonic nuclear missiles, etc.), the first phase of production of these new SCAF warplanes has been launched in 2023, but the compromises and internal dissensions within the European bourgeoisie over questions of leadership and the ascendancy of national monopolies over others are still evident.
In view of these realities, the PCRF considers that it has to fight two possible tendencies on the question of the struggle against the European Union: Of course, against the tendency of the PCF, social democracy and Trotskyist organisations to support the framework of the EU as a place for social and democratic transformation, a tendency which places the popular movement under the flag of the cartel of bourgeois states in Europe. But also against the nationalist tendency which, disconnecting the anti-EU struggle from the struggle for socialism and class orientation, can push the popular movement under the flag of social-chauvinism.
The struggle against the EU therefore implies a struggle and a national strengthening of each party against its own monopolies, linked to the question of the European Union, a struggle that can make workers aware, on the basis of their own experiences, of the link between the struggle against its own bourgeoisie in its own national framework, in order to succeed in getting out of the EU. Without this self-made experience and the strengthening of our Party through struggle, the question of the EU will remain taken up under the illusory social-democratic option or a chauvinism which leads us to prefer other imperialist alliances for our monopolies. The second, chauvinist tendency, spearheaded by the opportunist pole, has openly declared itself through the WAP and the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine.
Our party has launched the production of a new poster and visuals with the slogan ‘Money for people's needs, not for wars’ in support of its campaign for peace under the banner ‘Let's blame capitalism’. We have created a website dedicated to this broad-based campaign and have already collected several thousand petitions on paper and online.
It is the working peoples of the various countries, through their communist parties, who are capable of putting an end to the EU once and for all by coordinating national class struggles, showing the need for parties like ours to become ever stronger nationally within and with European Communist Action.