We must force ourselves to think of the present in terms of a decade, because the changes already underway are reshaping the face of the world. In the next ten years, China will have surpassed America's economic power, by whatever metric one chooses to calculate it. The Chinese navy will deploy six, or perhaps nine, aircraft carriers, compared with the United States' current eleven. Within the decade, China will also have 1,500 deployed nuclear warheads, bringing it level with the current deterrents of the US and Russia. To withstand the tripolar confrontation, America plans to increase its number of deployed warheads to 3,000. Not to be outdone, European imperialism plans to double military spending and is already thinking about a European bomb, drawing from the nuclear forces of France and the United Kingdom. The AI bubble will burst, but a handful of giants will emerge to share out the world market. Today, 6 billion people are connected to the Internet, 5.8 billion have a mobile phone, more than 5 billion are on social media, and 1.3 billion use artificial intelligence. Within the decade, adults and teenagers will virtually all have mobile phones with AI applications; every brain will have its own electronic prosthesis. Artificial intelligence will break into services and manufacturing, resulting in an upheaval in office work and in most factories. Wage workers – our class – will continue to grow by tens of millions a year, exceeding 2.5 billion by the end of the decade. The demographic winter will continue. Therefore, despite racist and even deadly demagogies – as seen in Minneapolis – America, Europe, Japan, Russia, and perhaps China will compete for migrant flows.
Then there are the things that are bound to occur, but we do not know in what forms or with what intensity. The chain of small wars of the crisis in the world order will continue; a great war will remain a possibility, but we do not know where and how war and peace will combine in the struggle to divide up the world. States will move into a cycle of rearmament, and it is likely, but not certain, that they will return to conscription. The global balance between the powers will shift abruptly, but we do not know whether the Atlantic crisis will compromise NATO, or to what extent imperialist Europe will assert its autonomy. Nor do we know how long the limbo of the crisis in the world order will continue; thinking the decade does not mean putting a deadline on the crisis. What we do know is that the internationalist battle has new tasks – starting right now.
The passing of the budget law in Italy was accompanied by a chorus of satisfaction over the soundness of public finances. Marco Fortis, director and vice president of the Edison Foundation, points out that Italy is the only G7 country with a primary surplus, which excludes the cost of interest on the debt; moreover, Italian debt has grown less than in other countries, despite standing at much higher levels in relation to GDP [Il Sole 24 Ore, January 2nd].
Wage devaluation
Marco Leonardi, professor of political economy at the University of Milan and former head of the economic planning department of the Draghi government, instead highlights what is left unsaid in these successes
: The great silence on the collapse of wages
was the headline of Il Foglio on December 30th.
The observation is not out of place: in the days of the lira, the Italian economy tried to keep pace with the competition by resorting to periodic currency devaluations; with the euro, this is no longer possible. What is left unsaid is that the same result is now achieved in part through wage devaluation, which lowers costs for businesses and for the State. Leonardi estimates the damage to workers at an 8% wage loss between 2019 and 2024, a case that is virtually unique in Europe
. We can assume that the resulting savings on public-sector wages are worth at least 1.5% of the State budget. This, too, is an unspoken aspect of the brilliant
performance of the State accounts.
The technique
that made all this possible, as we have already noted, is the generalised postponement of national contract renewals: frozen during the high inflation years of 2022-23, they resumed only in 2024-25, with inflation having by then fallen to 2%. In this way, what has been lost is never recovered: hence the 8% wage collapse.
What the author emphasises is that this represents a politically embarrassing failure for everyone
and is therefore covered by a blanket of great silence
. It is an embarrassing failure for the government because it would be forced to revise its narrative of a model country for public finances, spreads, stability, and employment
, and for the social partners – trade unions and employers' organisations – who missed the most important appointment, the return of inflation
. But it is embarrassing in particular for the trade unions, which, although aware of the problem
, have not been able to deploy the necessary strength to react.
The productivity alibi
In order to avoid confronting the wage issue head-on, a series of alibis
has been constructed, the most important of which concerns low productivity – an old story. Apart from the fact that the thesis is taken as an axiom that wages can increase only in the presence of an increase in productivity – i.e., only as a reimbursement
, and moreover a partial one, for what the worker produces in excess – even in this case something does not add up. It is Leonardi who once again puts his finger on the sore point: it is true that productivity fell in both 2023 and 2024 (by 2.7% and 1.6% respectively), but this is due to the increase in employment in lower value-added service sectors
; it is therefore not a matter of lower productivity among those already employed, and so it does not justify the cut in real wages
.
Low wages and low productivity hark back to the old curse that we denounced in this newspaper more than half a century ago, linked to the interclassist defence of small firm size. We might take satisfaction from the fact that this is now widely recognised, were it not for the fact that this admission was made far too late – and that, above all, it is once again the workers who are paying the price.
Salvatore Rossi, former director general of Bankitalia, confirms that small business size is a problem that dates back several decades
[La Stampa, October 9th, 2025], with the corollary that the eternal struggle between wages and profits, the latter has triumphed in recent years
. Nor does the responsibility of the Italian trade unions escape notice: they seem more interested in pursuing popular emotions aroused by external events
(read: the campaigns of the parliamentary parties) than applying themselves to the task for which they were created, defending the rights of labour in the conflict with capital
.
However, it should also be noted that the lack of social reaction is partly due to the spread of multi-income and rent-based income, which mitigate the effects of the collapse in wages. This is also understood by the governor of the Bank of Italy, Fabio Panetta, when he states that in addition to fiscal measures it is the increase in employment, and therefore of other income sources coming in, that has ensured that the real disposable income of households [has] returned to pre-inflationary levels, offsetting the erosion of purchasing power and fiscal drag
[Il Foglio, January 16th].
Even in Germany, the industrial heart of Europe, trade unions have had their work cut out for them in the face of industrial restructuring that has seen the loss of 120,000 jobs in the past year, 50,000 of which were in the automotive sector [Le Monde, December 4th].
A harsher cycle
There are widespread calls for workers to realise that one cycle has ended, and a harsher one is beginning.
Andrea Nahles, now head of the Employment Agency and formerly minister of labour and president of the SPD, warns that secure employment is now a thing of the past
[Handelsblatt, December 29th]: the labour market has been as stiff as an ironing board for months
. What can be done? The indication is clear: work more.
Heiner Koch, Catholic Archbishop of Berlin, imparts his blessing: the time when things were improving – more peace, more prosperity, more security
– is now over for everyone. Young people will have to work more, pensions will no longer be able to grow as before
[Handelsblatt, December 22nd].
Current Minister for Economic Affairs Katharina Reiche (CDU) proposes introducing more flexible labour laws to make dismissals less costly for companies and thus facilitate restructuring. She put forward these proposals at a symposium explicit in its very title: The social market economy in times of upheaval
[Handelsblatt, December 12th].
Industrialists, for their part, expect the trade unions to display a sense of responsibility
. Hagen Lesch, an economist at the German Economic Institute (IW), an institute linked to employers, presented a study on the increase in strikes in Germany since the beginning of the century, in which he stated that he now expects the trade unions to show a sense of responsibility
. He cites the case of the chemical workers' union (IG BCE), which is approaching contract renewal without a defined [wage] percentage demand, indicating a willingness to make concessions
[Handelsblatt, December 23rd].
Internationalist outlook
The German trade union movement, known for its social-imperialist leanings, is accustomed to balancing heavy demands with a sense of responsibility
. In the current situation, this sense of responsibility
also takes the form of protectionism.
Frank Sell, head of the Bosch works council, complains that Europe is the only continent that is not protecting itself
, unlike the Americans and the Chinese [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 23rd]. In a statement issued on November 7th, the metalworkers' union IG Metall points out that it has long been fighting to improve the framework conditions
in Berlin and Brussels: it now views positively the proposals of the EU Commission, which intends to better protect the national steel industry from subsidised and low-cost imports through tariffs
.
If this is the climate, it becomes an inescapable necessity to ensure that the struggle for wages and jobs takes on an internationalist scope, lest it become a tool in the confrontation between powers in the crisis in the world order and in its commercial, monetary, and even military wars.