Brandt's 750 employees will receive their redundancy letters at Christmas. And how many more workers are in the same situation? Many companies are closing and don’t make headlines!

In industry alone, on top of ArcelorMittal, NovAsco, Valeo, Forvia, Michelin, Stellantis, Blédina, Teisseire and others, 165 sites have been threatened since September, many of them SMBs. Taking all sectors together, the CGT union (Conféderation Générale du Travail) has identified 483 job-cutting plans over the last 18 months and more than 100,000 jobs threatened or cut.

Who is to be blamed for these drastic cuts? We are told it’s all due to “free trade”', “unfair competition” and the “Chinese invasion”. It's a convenient way to create a diversion by absolving from their responsabilities shareholders, big business and all those who’ve enriched themselves for decades at the expense of workers!

Let's not be fooled: we must hold to account those who run and have run these companies and their backers, the major shareholders and the extremely wealthy beneficiaries of investment funds! Will they end up unemployed? Are they afraid of going bankrupt? No. By exploiting workers, they’ve amassed fortunes and they’ll continue to be the masters and the first profiteers of the economy.

We must force these capitalists to foot the bill: they should continue to pay all wages and guarantee that not a single one of their employees has to enter an unemployment agency! We must use the profits and dividends they’ve accumulated to ensure a decent life for all workers!

All political parties are swearing they want to fight deindustrialization. At the head of cities or local authorities, they all have exactly the same policy as Macron and promise tens of millions of euros in public aid to capitalists so that they deign invest in France.

It's a double waste because it doesn't stop closures and layoffs, and it drains the state’s coffers, when the state should be recruiting and creating jobs – jobs that are so very useful – in education, healthcare, assistance and care for the elderly and dependent.

The sole job of capitalists, if you can call it a job, is to make their capital grow. They care as little for workers as they do for organizing the economy in a rational way. They’ve turned China into the workshop of the world because low wages there make exploitation more profitable. When they have sporting goods or cell phones manufactured in China, they’ve got nothing against “unfair competition”!

Nationalization is now being discussed as a solution to deindustrialization. But the workers who experienced the nationalization of the steel industry, carried out in 1982 by the Mitterrand government – which included communist ministers – still have bitter memories of it.

Far from saving jobs, that government saved capitalists by ridding them of a sector they no longer considered profitable enough. For the workers, it was a terrible loss. In twenty years, the workforce in the steel industry plummeted from 157,000 to fewer than 40,000 workers, ruining towns like Longwy in Lorraine and Denain in the North of France.

When the state runs companies instead of the capitalists, it doesn't change the fact that the economy is organized around the pursuit of profit, private property and competition, and that it imposes a frantic race for competitiveness on everyone.

This is also the problem with cooperatives. They prove that workers are capable of running their own businesses without parasitic shareholders breathing down their necks, and that's why big business and bankers dislike them. But the workers who run these Scops (Sociétés coopératives et participatives) remain, like small business owners, prisoners of the capitalist jungle and its rules.

For the economy to meet everyone's needs and to be freed from the pursuit of profit and the unlimited enrichment of a minority, we must bring it under our control. This requires expropriating capitalists and overthrowing the state, which is entirely at the service of the bourgeoisie.

And then, together, we’ll be able to decide what to produce, how, and in what quantity. We’ll be able to eliminate unemployment by sharing out work among all of us. We’ll be able to end destructive competition by cooperating with workers in other countries to benefit from each other's contributions.

It's no utopia because the material and technological means are there, within reach.

Nathalie Arthaud