September 22, 2025 editorial of the New Anticapitalist Party-Revolutionaries (NPA-R) in France, translated from French.
The strike and demonstrations on September 18 added to the success of those on September 10, with over a million demonstrators and all kinds of actions (blockades, picket lines, general assemblies, etc.). What will happen next?
Ministers come and go, but the program remains
Prime Minister Lecornu continues to want us to pay the “debt”: 44 billion in budget cuts? 25 billion? It will depend on the balance of power. But in any case, it will involve cutting thousands of jobs in the public service, freezing salaries, slashing hospital budgets, and reducing reimbursements for drugs and healthcare… In consultation with big business, to keep on financing the merchants of death, Dassault, Safran, Thalès, to offer 270 billion in subsidies and tax exemptions each year and to line the pockets of the shareholders of large companies.
Strike while the iron is hot…
Faced with the declaration of war on the working classes that the draft budget constitutes, the call to “block everything” on September 10 shook the trade union confederations out of their lethargy. September 18 was an even greater success, with strike rates not seen in a long time, such as in the transport sector, and many young people taking part in the demonstrations.
But what do the trade unions propose to follow up on this success? A hollow “ultimatum,” which is like passing the buck back to Lecornu. For their part, the PS (Socialist Party), PCF (Communist Party) and Greens agree to talk with him in order to negotiate the sacrifices they would like to impose on us. La France Insoumise (LFI, left), for its part, refuses to meet with him and, the day after the 10th, called for the movement to continue… to give the prospect of Macron’s impeachment, i.e. a return to obscure institutional maneuvers. But to stop the bosses’ policies, to reverse the tide, it will take much more than Macron’s departure, much more even than a simple amendment to the Constitution. We will have to attack the bosses’ power to exploit us and the bourgeois class itself, which never lacks politicians to serve it and crush us.
To force the government and the bosses to back down, we will have to compel them by blocking the economy through strikes, and not just a few days of successful strikes: we saw this in 2023 with the movement against the smashing of pensions. We need a strike that spreads to all workplaces and lasts long enough to paralyze the profit machine….
…by forging our demands
Such a movement cannot only demand a “better budget” or “conditions” for the plundering of hundreds of billions of euros of our taxes by big business! Who would go on strike to tax 2% of fortunes that have quadrupled since Covid? Or to “freeze” the retirement age at 63 instead of 64?
For millions of workers to risk their pay and, for the most precarious, their jobs, it has to be worth it: wage increases that push the end of the month from the 15th to the 30th, new hires that put an end to hellish production rates, and much more. This is about our lives: no one knows better than us what we need. It is up to us to determine our demands.
Let’s take the opportunity to discuss this in workshops and offices, before and after the demonstrations, in order to organize ourselves at the grassroots level, to decide for ourselves how to fight, and to build the stages of our struggle. Dozens of strikes have broken out in the last two weeks. Each one is a small battle in the struggle between us, the workers, and our enemies, the capitalists. But, so as to win, we must strike together and move towards a general strike, which is the only way to truly “block everything”!
