Germany’s longstanding reputation as an industrial export juggernaut is visibly crumbling, beset by shifting global economic power, intensifying competition, and a world market that no longer welcomes “Made in Germany” with automatic reverence. Once the workshop of imperialist Europe, Germany now finds its manufacturers struggling to survive amid the rise of Chinese modernization, US investment offensives, and the dynamic emergence of India and the Middle East as new centers of industrial activity. Traditional trade partners in the West are withering, while regulatory barriers, regionalized supply chains, and currency volatility suffocate what little remains of German mercantile dominance. The capitalist order, so long revered and enforced by Germany’s political establishment, has become an iron cage for even its own bourgeoisie.

From the Maoist perspective, this is not a cause for tears or nostalgia, but a sign of the deepening contradictions within global capitalism—contradictions which will only sharpen as monopoly capital collides with the self-assertion of peoples previously exploited for Western enrichment. The spectacle of German industrialists wringing their hands over lost efficiency, dwindling market share, and bureaucratic sluggishness is rich in irony. For decades, German capital reaped superprofits by exploiting cheap labor and raw materials from the Global South, wrapping its loot in the language of merit and “engineering prowess.” Yet when the exploited rise, when China in particular applies its own brand of socialist planning—imbued with remembered lessons of anti-colonial struggle and the steel discipline of collective effort—the German giants find themselves dangerously exposed.

The call by German capitalists for “urgent reforms,” lower energy prices, slashed bureaucracy, and modernized infrastructure is nothing but an attempt to salvage their privileges and restore the old order by any means except those that would undermine capitalist property relations. Where was this urgency when German carmakers sacked workers, hoarded profits, and forced through anti-labor deregulation in the name of “global competitiveness”? When did these titans ever cry out for a solidarity economy, focused on need instead of mindless accumulation? The truth is that imperialist economies, having exhausted both their own workers and the reserves of foreign exploitation, now find themselves stranded by their own contradictions. The mass of the population—suffering under declining productivity, job insecurity, and a rapidly aging social infrastructure—pay the price for the arrogance and shortsighted greed of their bourgeois rulers.

The tenacious ascent of China, now outcompeting Germany in sector after sector, is the clearest refutation of capitalist supremacy. Here is a society that, in its finest periods, seized the means of production and oriented them to the people’s needs, not private luxury or imperial expansion. Even under the pressures of capitalist encirclement, it is the legacy of socialism that continues to inspire other nations of the Global South to rise, to reclaim what was plundered in the fat years of European “prosperity.” Germany’s decline is not an accident; it is a historical reckoning.

We stand at the threshold of a new world, whose birth pangs are manifested in every failing German export, every disillusioned capitalist, and every victory by the working peoples once forced into the periphery. May these crises sharpen to the point that the German proletariat remembers its own revolutionary traditions—that it may finally cast off the dead hand of capitalist decline and unite with the world’s oppressed in building a socialist future!