This week sees yet another desperate round of talks between the two leaders of the eurozone, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy, to come up with an agreement on how to deal with the eurozone debt crisis.
They are meeting in an attempt to come up with an agreed proposal to put to an EU summit on Friday, but already the splits between France and Germany are glaringly apparent.
Sarkozy is demanding an enhanced bail-out fund that will pump trillions of euros into the debt-ridden economies like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland.
The money for this necessarily huge bail-out fund is to be conjured up by printing, or creating electronically, vast amounts of worthless paper money.
Merkel, on the other hand, lives under the shadow of a powerful German working class that has imprinted on its consciousness the memory of the hyper-inflation of the 1920s and 30s, where this led to the deutschmark becoming worthless and paved the way for the ascendency of Hitler.
Unable to fall in with Sarkozy, Merkel is pushing for complete economic and political integration of the EU as the only way to save the euro.
Under this plan the EU, in other words Germany as the most dominant economy, would exercise complete and strict control over the economic policies of the eurozone countries.
This plan has already been implemented in Greece and Italy where unelected governments – supposedly run by ‘technocrats’ – have been imposed to drive through savage austerity measures.
A taste of what this means was revealed at the weekend in Italy which is now ruled by a government led by Mario Monti who was appointed as prime minister and minister of economy and finance.
Monti, an economist who previously worked for the EU as well as for the global US investment bank Goldman Sachs and as an advisor for the Coca Cola company, revealed the extent of the pain the EU is determined to inflict on the Italian working class in order to pay off the bankers.
This amounts to tax rises and spending cuts totalling 24 billion euros.
One of the most savage attacks is on pensioners, with all but the very lowest pensions being frozen whilst the retirement age is increased.
The poorest are also to be hit with a property tax on housing.
The wealthy, naturally, escaped any penalty with no tax increase for high earners.
All this proved too much even for the welfare minister, Elsa Fornero, who broke down in tears on television when announcing the pension cuts claiming they had taken their ‘psychological toll’ on her.
We have news for Ms Fornero, the toll they will take on the Italian working class will produce not just tears but a revolutionary upsurge.
As for Sarkozy, while he is firmly behind junking bourgeois democracy and imposing financial dictatorship on Greece and Italy, he is acutely aware that France itself is on the slide into state bankruptcy.
As very much the weak partner to Germany, Sarkozy is desperate to get a proposal for a more federal type of eurozone, where France will still retain at least a semblance of national sovereignty.
What is absolutely clear is that the depth of the world crisis is driving European capitalism into a war against its own working class whilst at the same time creating a huge split and conflict between the German and French bourgeoisie as to who will be the economic masters of Europe.
The only way forward for the working class of Europe is to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead a revolutionary struggle to overthrow the EU and advance to the United Socialist States of Europe.
