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Is it still ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles?‘ Germany experienced revolutions in 1848 and 1918. Both failed. Should ‘Germans’ come to the point of considering another one then the only revoulition that matters to it, and to the world is the one that sees enlightment, common sense and rationality finally realise that it’s time for socialism above all.

Peace dividend bad for military-industrial complex.

‘European military stocks have tumbled, defying broader positive market sentiment, as traders assessed the White House meeting that brought fresh hope for a Ukraine peace deal.

On Monday, US President Donald Trump met with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and key Western European backers. The talks came two days after Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, which both sides described as a step toward peace between Russia and Ukraine.

The STOXX Europe Total Market Aerospace & Defense Index fell 2.6% as traders viewed the ongoing negotiations as a chance to take profits following a strong rally in the sector. Shares in Italian defence firm Leonardo and Germany’s Hensoldt were down 10.1% and 9.5%, respectively. German defence supplier Rheinmetall and tank components maker Renk also declined 4.9% and 8.2%, respectively.

“Any de-escalation of tensions between Russia and Europe, and talk of spending more on US equipment, is negative for these companies,” Craig Cameron, head of European equities at Franklin Templeton, told the FT.

According to analysts, shares in defence groups could be seen as a rough indicator of progress in the Ukraine peace talks, as military supplies tend to benefit from ongoing conflicts.

European defence stocks surged in the first half of the current year, driven by Germany’s announcement in March that it would ease its strict debt limits to enable a new wave of investment in defence and infrastructure, amid growing concerns that the US may scale back its role in European security and the Ukraine conflict. The EU also launched a $900 billion defence industry drive to militarise its economy citing an alleged Russian threat as a key reason for the increase.’

Conscription.

More about conscription in Germany which was previously referenced in SOYMB in July.

https://soymb.com/2025/07/militarism.html

‘The German cabinet has approved a draft law introducing voluntary military service for teenagers as part of a wider militarisation push by officials who have repeatedly claimed that Berlin must be “ready for war” by the next decade.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz vowed to turn the Bundeswehr into the “strongest conventional army in Europe,” in a speech delivered less than a week after the world marked the 80th anniversary of the fall of the Third Reich in May. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated in July that volunteer enlistment alone may not suffice to achieve that goal.

During a special session held in a secure bunker at the Defence Ministry in Berlin, the German cabinet approved a new program targeting up to 40,000 young recruits annually by 2031.

“The Bundeswehr must grow. Only then is deterrence against Russia truly credible,” Defence Minister Boris Pistorius claimed, repeating the NATO talking point about a looming Russian attack. Moscow has dismissed this speculation as “nonsense.”

The plan would require all 18-year-old males to complete a questionnaire assessing their willingness and fitness to serve beginning in January 2026. The questionnaire would be optional for women. Selected candidates would undergo a minimum of six months of basic training. The initial intake is capped at around 20,000 recruits next year due to logistical constraints, with gradual expansion planned over the next six years.

The legislation also includes a mechanism for a potential return to universal military conscription, which was suspended in 2011, but critics have demanded automatic reactivation of the draft should the voluntary scheme fail to deliver sufficient numbers. The plan must still be approved by the Bundestag and will not be passed without “significant changes,” according to ruling CDU/CSU defense spokesman Thomas Erndl.

Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in early 2022, Berlin has significantly increased military spending and has become the second-largest supplier of arms to Kiev after the US. Ukraine used German Leopard tanks in its incursion last year into Russia’s Kursk Region – the site of the largest tank battle of WWII.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in late May that Berlin’s “direct involvement in the war is now obvious,” warning that “Germany is sliding down the same slippery slope it already followed a couple of times in the last century.”’

Unemployment up.

‘Unemployment in Germany has risen to its highest level in a decade, official figures released showed. The labour report comes as the country’s faltering economy risks contracting for a third consecutive year.

The figures showed the number of unemployed individuals having topped three million in August for the first time since 2015. The month-on-month increase came in at 46,000 to put the tally at 3.02 million in seasonally unadjusted terms, or 6.4% of the population.

Federal Employment Agency chief Andrea Nahles blamed the labour market struggles on Germany’s weak economy. The EU’s largest economy shrank by 0.2% in 2024 after contracting by 0.3% in 2023. This year, following a 0.3% expansion in the first quarter, output fell by 0.3% in Q2 as uncertainty grew over new US tariffs. The International Monetary Fund recently warned that Germany could face a third consecutive year without growth.

Germany’s economic downturn has coincided with Berlin’s decision to halt imports of low-cost Russian energy, which was vital for its industry. European gas prices rose sharply after Russian pipeline deliveries largely stopped and the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged later that year. Before the sanctions, Germany sourced 55% of its gas from Russia, but has since shifted to pricier liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from the US and Qatar.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz admitted last week that Germany is facing a “structural crisis” rather than temporary “weakness” and said that steering the economy toward growth has proven more difficult than expected. Key industries such as the automotive segment “no longer truly competitive,” he added.

The country’s automotive sector has shed more than 51,000 jobs just in the past year alone, according to recent data.’

War not butter.

‘Germany’s welfare state is no longer financially sustainable, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned, citing mounting financial constraints. 

Merz made the remarks during a speech to fellow Christian Democratic Union (CDU) members in Osnabrueck, a city in Lower Saxony that is home to carmaker Volkswagen. 

“The welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed with what we can economically afford,” Merz said, calling for a fundamental reassessment of the benefits system. He noted that welfare spending hit a record €47 billion ($55 billion) last year and continues to rise this year. 

Social welfare outlays have surged and are expected to climb further this year as Germany’s population ages and unemployment rises. The country provides a wide range of support measures, including housing and child benefits, unemployment payments, family allowances, and subsidies for the care of the sick and elderly. But with the economy stagnating in 2025 under both structural and cyclical pressures, the burden on the system is growing. While most benefit recipients are German citizens, a significant share are foreign nationals. 

In the same speech, Merz said Germany was experiencing a “structural crisis” rather than a temporary weakness, conceding that putting Europe’s largest economy back on track has proven more difficult than he anticipated. Once the EU’s economic powerhouse, Germany’s economy has slowed sharply since 2017, with GDP rising just 1.6% compared to 9.5% for the rest of the Eurozone. 

Merz’s warning came as official data showed Germany’s economy contracted by 0.2% in 2024 after a 0.3% decline in 2023, marking the first time since the early 2000s that Europe’s largest economy has shrunk for two consecutive years. Industrial production fell during Olaf Scholz’s tenure and has continued to weaken under his successor, with GDP dropping 0.3% in the second quarter of 2025, according to the latest data from Germany’s statistics office. The downturn has been driven by high energy prices, elevated interest rates and a shortage of skilled labour.’

On 29 August 1833 Britain’s first Factory Act came into law.

The below is from the Socialist Standard January 2015

‘One of the iconic images from the early years of industrial capitalism is that of young children working in mines and cotton mills. Here we examine the history and current situation regarding child labour.

Labour by young children was at the heart of capitalism from the start. Factory production was preceded by domestic industry, whereby small-scale manufacturing took place in workers’ homes; this included the textile industries, where the earliest examples of factories arose. Working in their own homes, handloom weavers could have their children, perhaps as young as four, working alongside them. Down to the 1820s a cotton spinner working in a factory would often have his wife and children working with him, thus preserving the family group. Workers generally saw this last as a positive point, even in the unpleasant conditions of the early factories. Even after families working together in factories declined, children continued to work there. In 1851 there were 600,000 children under fifteen working in England, Wales and Scotland, including 180,000 in textile factories, 130,000 in agriculture and 38,000 in mines. Toiling in such unhealthy environments naturally led to many children suffering health problems, such as curvature of the spine, not to mention the lack of any decent education to speak of and little time or opportunity to play.

As a specific example, from 1813 George Courtauld employed girls, and some boys, aged ten upwards, as apprentices at his silk mill in Braintree. They came from London workhouses, and he paid the workhouse for each child. The children signed a contract that committed them to work at the mill till they were twenty-one. The company went on to become one of the world’s largest producers of artificial fibres.

Child labour was generally seen (by the wealthy, at least) as something entirely natural and unexceptionable, though various objections on moral grounds were made. Others saw it as socially advantageous, since idleness on the part of children was supposedly the road to criminality. There grew up a tension between the desire of some members of the capitalist class for abundant cheap unskilled labour power in factories, which children could provide, and the increasing need for workers with some basic education in terms of literacy and numeracy. Consequently the British Parliament introduced a number of Factory Acts to regulate working hours for children and women, the provision of education and various basic safety measures.

The 1802 Act limited the working hours for apprentices and required them to receive some form of instruction. More significant was the Act of 1833, which prohibited the employment of under-eighteens at night in textile factories. Children (defined as those aged nine to thirteen) could work a maximum of nine hours a day, and young persons (aged thirteen to eighteen) a maximum of twelve. Children could not work in textile mills, except in silk mills (where foreign competition was a problem). Similar regulations were gradually extended to other industries, such as to bleaching and dyeing works in 1860.

The 1870 Elementary Education Act made school attendance compulsory in England and Wales between the ages of five and thirteen, but only in areas where there was a School Board which decided to introduce this. In 1878 the ‘half-time’ system was set up: children under ten could not be employed in factories and those under thirteen were required to split their time between school and employment.

Incidentally, Karl Marx was quite keen on a combination of work and education, mentioning that factory inspectors felt that this made each more congenial to the child than limiting them to just one. And he looked forward to ‘the education of the future, an education that will in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics … the only method of producing fully developed human beings’ (Capital, vol 1, ch 15, sec 9). Much would depend, of course, on the age of the child and the kind of labour involved.

Further restrictions on children working were introduced in the first part of the twentieth century, together with further requirements for education. The 1918 Education Act put an end to the half-time system, though not immediately. In 1935 the Conservative government produced an Education Bill that would raise the school leaving age from fourteen to fifteen; but it allowed children to leave at fourteen if they had ‘beneficial’ employment. Many poorer workers needed the wages of their fourteen-year-old children, while many employers wanted the cheap labour power involved. One MP, the Duchess of Atholl, noted in the parliamentary debate on the bill that some work in textile factories required ‘small fingers’, and that excluding fourteen-year-olds would mean ‘placing a very serious handicap on one of our most important export industries … not one of our great commercial competitors in Europe has raised the school-leaving age to 15’. The Second World War prevented implementation of the Act, and children left school at fourteen until 1947. In the early fifties there were some proposals to put the leaving age back to fourteen again, but nothing came of these. It was eventually raised to sixteen in 1972.

And what of the current situation? It might be thought that children toiling in sweatshops and so on is a thing of the past. After all, even those who want an absolute minimum of government interference in the economy will generally agree that laws prohibiting child labour are acceptable. Surely capitalism in the twenty-first century has no need to employ children? In fact, globally child labour remains widespread.

The minimum age for employment varies across countries, being as low as fourteen in some places, with eighteen as a common minimum for hazardous work. But legal requirements are often ignored in the name of profit. Though the number is declining, 168 million children are reportedly still involved in child labour (this figure is taken from the International Labour Organization (ILO) website, which contains a lot of relevant information: www.ilo.org). In an echo of early capitalism, child workers mostly take part in unpaid work for their family, rather than being in paid employment. In sub-Saharan Africa, roughly one child in four is a child labourer. Furthermore, child labour is in no way confined to the poorest countries; one estimate from 2000 was that 300,000 children were working illegally in the US, and 2.5 million globally in ‘developed countries’, though such figures have to be taken with a large pinch of salt. In addition many child workers in developing countries work in effect for multinational companies, often via subsidiaries much earlier in the supply chain.

Over half of the 168 million are in hazardous work, defined as work which ‘jeopardises the physical, mental or moral well-being of a child, either because of its nature or because of the conditions in which it is carried out’. The very worst forms include trafficking, debt bondage, compulsory recruitment to armies, prostitution, pornography and drug smuggling.

Even mining and quarrying still employ around a million children, working deep underground in tiny tunnels, pounding boulders or using toxic substances such as mercury; this is primarily in informal, small-scale, often family-based operations. An ILO report from 2007 found that girls did not take part in underground extraction work, but could be used to transport rubble and pan for precious stones or gold. In Peru some girls as young as ten could work twelve hours a day in bars that served the mining community, leaving them open to physical and sexual abuse.

The ILO runs an International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, which has the goal of ending the worst forms by 2016, but it is accepted that even this limited aim will not be met. The ILO has promulgated various conventions on child labour, and many countries have ratified these, but of course this does not imply that any significant action will be undertaken. In October 2013 the Third Global Conference on Child Labour was held in Brasilia: this produced a Declaration which noted that ‘child labour impairs the realisation of children’s rights and its eradication constitutes an important issue for development and human rights’. It speaks further of encouraging this and promoting that and strengthening something else, but it fails to recognise that child labour and its associated horrors will continue as long as global capitalism enforces widespread poverty, employers benefit from the employment of children, and the poorest workers and peasants have to resort to putting children to work in an attempt to relieve their own poverty.’

PAUL BENNETT

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2015/no-1325-january-2015/little-children-suffer/

Friday 29 August 7.30 p.m.

Have you heard the News?

Discussion on recent events

To join the meeting click https://zoom.us/j/7421974305

In Charles Dickens 1850 novel, David Copperifeld a character, Wilkins Micawber, opines that  ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery. ‘

Obviously, there are not many readers in various governments who have learnt from Mr Micawber.

‘Britain is facing the prospect of a repeat of its crippling 1976 economic crash as soaring debt and borrowing costs raise doubts over Labour’s budget policies, leading economists have warned, according to a Telegraph report.

The crisis nearly fifty years ago saw a Labour government forced to seek an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after deficits and inflation spun out of control. It became one of Britain’s worst postwar crises, with the bailout bringing deep spending cuts and Labour losing power a few years later.

Now Chancellor Rachel Reeves faces similar warnings, with forecasts showing a £50 billion ($68 billion) gap in the public finances and debt interest set to exceed £111 billion. Debt now exceeds 96% of GDP. At around £2.7 trillion, it is one of the heaviest burdens in the developed world. Government borrowing costs have surged, with yields on 30-year bonds climbing above 5.5%, higher than those of the US and Greece.

Jagjit Chadha, former head of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, told the Telegraph the outlook was “as perilous as the period leading up to the IMF loan of 1976,” warning Britain could struggle to meet pensions and welfare payments.

Andrew Sentance, once a Bank of England policymaker, said Reeves was “on course to deliver a [former UK Chancellor Denis] Healey 1976-style crisis in late 2025 or 26,” accusing Labour of fuelling inflation with higher taxes, borrowing, and spending.

The warnings come weeks before Reeves is due to present her first autumn budget, where she is expected to announce further tax rises to cover the shortfall – a move critics argue would deepen the downturn. The Labour government also faces deepening political and economic challenges, including declining support.’

The Mail Online carries similar a similar Cassandra woe and thrice woe story about France.

‘France is facing a staggering £2.58trillion ‘debt explosion’ and could soon be forced into the humiliation of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout as Emmanuel Macron‘s government teeters on the edge of collapse.

Eric Lombard, the Minister of Economics and Finance, issued a stark warning that ‘a risk exists’ that the IMF will be forced to bail out Paris. 

The revelation comes amid widespread predictions that the French Government may be toppled in a matter of weeks after Prime Minister Francois Bayrou, 74, said he would seek a confidence vote in Parliament. 

Opposition parties from Jean-Luc Melenchon’s radical-Left France Unbowed to Marine Le Pen’s hard-Right National Rally have vowed to bring Bayrou down. Even members of Bayrou’s own camp have branded the vote plan reckless with MP Nicole Dubre-Chirat calling it ‘suicidal’.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15038207/France-faces-catastrophic-2-85TRILLION-debt-explosion-meltdown-minister-warns-country-heading-IMF-bailout-Emmanuel-Macrons-government-verge-collapse.html

The optimistic Mr Micawber was also fond of saying that something will turn up. The exploited majority who continue to support capitalism and provide the means for capitalists to increase wealth and power at the expense of the majority should not be waiting for capitalism to plunge into crisis which will affect those dependent upon wages, salaries, pensions and state benefits and not the minority wealth owning class.

With all its contradictions capitalist will not collapse completely of its own accord. So it behoves the majority not to wait hopefully for something to turn up but to take positive steps to educate themselves about socialism and to then work to ensure that capitalism is consigned to the dustbin of history where it should have been put long ago.

SPGB Summer School Talks on Zoom

To join:  https://zoom.us/j/7421974305 

Friday 22 August 19.15 – 20.45 (GMT + 1)

*MARXISM AND MARX – CAN THEY EVER BE FRIENDS? *

/Speaker: Keith Graham/



Saturday 23 August 10.00 – 11.30: (GMT + 1)

*MARXISM, REFORMS AND REFORMISM*

/Guest speaker: Cat Rylance/



14.00—15.30 (GMT + 1)

*DO SOCIALISTS NEED MARX? *

/Speaker: Howard Moss/



19.15—20.45 (GMT + 1)

*FOR MARXIST PLURALISM*

/Guest speaker: Edmund Griffiths of the Communist Corresponding Society/



Sunday 24 August 10.00—11.30 (GMT + 1)

*MARXISM AND THE SOCIAL REPUBLIC. MARX AND KAUTSKY ON THE DEMOCRATIC

TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE*

/Speaker: Darren Poynton/

So-called rare earth elements, such as scandium and terbium, play an essential role in the functioning of mobile phones, electric cars and so on. Most are currently mined in China, at vast environmental cost but with great importance for the country’s finances and bargaining power.