Only the working people of Europe can save the continent from destruction by the neo-liberal regimen.
Richard D. Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs at The New School
From ancient Greece and Rome to the present, Europe has played central, crucial roles in the development of human civilization. Late in its feudal period, European colonialism undertook globalization. That subordinated the rest of the world to Europe’s needs and capabilities. Europe’s transition from feudalism to capitalism transformed its colonialism and more thoroughly and deeply subordinated the rest of the world: not only economically but also politically and culturally.
The last generation has produced changes in the global economy that have sharply reduced Europe. No longer playing central or crucial roles, Europe displays little in the way of the technological leadership exhibited by China and the US in computers, robots, AI semi-conductor chips, electric vehicles, and so on. The Ukraine war exposed the atrophy of Europe’s military relative to that of the US, on one side, and to that of the China/Russia alliance on the other. Finally, the hollowing out of large segments of manufacturing industry in the US was even more pronounced in Europe as global manufacturing moved massively to China, Asia, and the developing world. As its booming growth in manufactures stimulated China’s hi-tech industries and its military modernization, deindustrialization in Europe further hampered its achieved technological level and its military capability. Finally, the sanctions dimension of the Ukraine war raised Europe’s energy costs and thus badly damaged the competitiveness of its products. The fact that Mercedes-Benz engaged in serious discussions with high US authorities about moving its operations to the US in 2025 speaks volumes [https://www.reuters.com/business/mercedes-declined-lutnicks-bid-move-us-ceo-tells-pioneer-2026-01-28/].
Then came the falling out among the capitalists. Trump’s second presidential term saw the US move to reduce Europe (as well as other parts of the world) into a source of tribute from its prior status as trade partner and NATO ally, etc. In exchange for lower tariffs than Trump originally threatened, Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President committed over $ 700 billion in European purchases of expensive US liquified natural gas and a similar sum to be “invested” in the US (both over the next 10 years). This humiliating commitment to tribute has not been repudiated or rejected by the Europeans. They are only slowly and partially grasping all it means.
Quite simply, Europe finds itself slipping into a very secondary status in the emerging new world economy. The US on one side and China on the other are the two dominant poles of the world economy. They are what Europe was but is no longer. Moreover, the future they face is for further decline without limit or else a desperate effort to stop and reverse that decline. That effort, already underway, will be desperate because it will plunge Europe into its gravest imaginable crisis. In the 20th century, Europe tore itself apart in World War 1. Then, a few years later, a still Europe-centered world economy tore itself apart in World War 2. In this century, with or without another world war, Europe risks being a mere footnote to how others, the world’s major powers, work out their relationship. Such is the long arc of decline from Greece, Rome, and the peaks of Europe’s colonial empires to Europe’s historic contemporary eclipse.
When Trump withdrew military protection, imposed tariffs, obtained tribute, and lectured Europe on the need to now “go it alone without US support,” Europe confronted an existential threat. What was to be done? To avoid eclipse, Europe would need to develop its own military protection, replacing what the US had provided. Germany led the way with its government’s commitment to spend hundreds of billions on a military build-up in the next few years. Other European countries will likely follow suit, not only to offset Trumps’ withdrawal, but to also prevent Germany from dominating the rest of Europe militarily. Of course, to have a military that is NOT dependent on purchases from the US, Europe would need a well-developed high tech sector itself since that has become key to advanced military systems such as those wielded by the US, China and Russia. The same applies to a large, diversified and well-developed manufacturing sector that can support what ongoing military production requires. That is a problem also for the US whose manufacturing decline also threatens the military capability it seeks to reach.
For Europe to build the military system and its allied technical and manufacturing foundation – given their decline over the last 75 years – it would need to spend an immense amount of money for many years. It has no empire from which to draw the necessary resources and now it is burdened with tribute owed to the US. Nor is European borrowing, given the risks it entails for creditors, capable of funding the kind of spending needed to seriously address the problem of Europe’s historic decline.
What Europe will likely do, given its employer class’s dominant political power, is increase taxes but, more importantly, change how it spends its tax revenue. It will raise taxes on its working classes. More importantly, it will also cut funding for much of the social welfare that Europe once pioneered and proudly offered as a model for much of the rest of the world. Europe’s working class had fought for and won more generous welfare systems in member nations than most other working classes had achieved (including in the US). The political forces holding power across much of Europe – chiefly the center-right parties, but also part of the center-left – are ready and willing to cut spending on social welfare and raise broad-based taxes. They will protect the wealth, income and political powers of the top 10 % in their countries as they always have. They can and will sell all this to their patrons: a way to reverse Europe’s decline with minimal cost to them. Instead it will be the working class that pays more in taxes while getting less from the government.
But, of course, will the politicians in power be able to do this, however eager and willing they are? Europe must act quickly to catch up to the US and China since both of them keep moving forward in their manufacturing, technical, and military capabilities. Thus Europe must spend very heavily in the immediate years ahead. Political leaders must take much away from the social welfare of its working class. Hard times for them are the plan. Will the working class permit Europe’s employer class and its politicians to solve their system’s national and international problems at the working class’s expense? Europe’s great crisis entails the already emerging class war between employers and employees struggling over how to cope with Europe’s decline.
Because the sums involved are huge and the time horizon for action is short, the risks associated with the emerging crisis are many. The workers may resist by voting out existing parties and voting in leftist and possibly rightist politicians if they stand against the plan. The workers may resist by street action, boycotts, general strikes and all the other class struggle weapons developed across capitalism’s history. The employers and the political elites they control in many parties will fight back. They too will use the tools they developed for class wars. One of these is mass repression. That points to yet another reason to build up European armies.
Another tool, nationalist ideology, deserves special attention because of its special role in today’s geopolitics. Employers have long dispersed, distracted, and dissolved organized working class struggles by substituting national issues for class issues. Politicians insist that the urgent issue of the moment is some threat from abroad or from domestic agents of foreign powers. Thus we must all unite in the nation and set aside less important internal divisions and issues for the sake of prevailing in the national struggle affecting us all. Kaiser Wilhelm famously said in 1914 as World War 1 began that he recognized no capitalists or socialists but only Germans. At the end of World War 2 and after President Franklin Roosevelt died, leading politicians in the USA undid the New Deal and the class struggles that produced it by insisting that the greater struggle was between all Americans and the Soviet Union’s “evil empire” that included domestic Communists, etc. In the same vein, Europe’s political elites today articulate a collective hysteria that focuses on Russia (35 years after it rejected and ended its Soviet period) and the direct military threat it poses to invade and seize all of Europe.
The over-the-top anti-Russia hysteria serves to hide the class project of slowing or ending Europe’s decline at the expense of Europe’s working class. It seeks to give all Europeans a unifying purpose and goal of blocking Russia’s evil intentions. It justifies Europe’s military build up and the savage destruction of Europe’s social welfare states as necessary responses to the external threat all Europeans must unite to fight. Starmer, Macron, Merz et al lead Europe’s campaign. They must insist that Russia must NOT win in Ukraine because, for them, perpetuating Ukraine’s losing war also perpetuates the demonization of Russia as the evil enemy. Portraying Russia as anti-peace and pro-war serves nicely to justify government tax increases and massive spending on the military, hi-tech, and manufacturing. For Europe’s employers and their political leaders, demon USSR morphed easily into demon post-Soviet Russia. That is because their demonisation had chiefly to do with domestic class struggles against each nation’s working class and only very secondly with the capitalism vs socialism issue.
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