Communia

Yesterday Macron appeared on national television. His speech presented the summit on the 10th, during which he hopes to launch a European army, as part of a "historic change". The change in question is the shift on a firm footing to a war-readiness economy whose driving idea is that "we can no longer depend on others to feed us, to cure us, to inform us, to finance us."

The three axes put forward by Macron are a condensed version of what militarism means: industrial autarky, energy independence and accelerated military development. In other words, subjugation of the entire productive structure - and inevitably of the state - to the needs of preparation and organization for the war to come.

But the drastic change in the way of orienting national capital does not come for free. The Economist clearly points out that the process of bloc formation that is now gaining momentum will mean, in the terms Macron points out, necessarily less growth and more inflation.

To begin with, as the European Commission was pointing out yesterday, the change of energy matrix associated with the Green Deal has become a strategic issue for European capitals, so it doesn't matter to them whether it is more expensive. In Macron's words, one must "accept to pay the price of peace, freedom and democracy". And that in fact goes beyond energy. Former Spanish President Felipe González said this morning:

40% of our imports of sunflower, cereals, many minerals, various inputs... come from Ukraine. Our response implies sacrifice. The impact is strong. We in Spain should make a great national pact in response to the crisis between the two central actors -PSOE and PP- plus those who want to join in. It would be like the Moncloa Pacts, which were income pacts to avoid hurting ourselves with a never-ending race of inflation and prices. In other words, it would be a matter of sharing the effort and sacrifice..

Felipe González today in El Confidencial

It would be pretty hard to ask them for a clearer speech: it all boils down to wages growing less than inflation, that is, to reducing the purchasing power of wages in order to maintain the profitability of a capital that will be increasingly constrained within the borders of geopolitical blocs.

That is where we come in: "sharing the effort and sacrifice" of "paying the price of peace" means renouncing basic needs, accepting worse working conditions and a poverty that will inevitably grow.

The inevitable political reflection can be glimpsed on the Russian horizon, a borderline version of militarism on the march. The Duma has just approved a tightening of the penal code punishing with 5 years imprisonment the dissemination of unofficial information about the army.