You are an AI assistant.
system
Is it economically rational for Germany to maintain persistent current-account surpluses above 7% of GDP while southern Europe experiences mass youth unemployment above 25%?
user
No. The surplus is not “Germany’s” gain; it is the export-oriented bloc of German capital’s gain, extracted at the cost of (1) the German working class, whose wage share has been held down by two decades of “competitiveness” pacts, and (2) the entire peripheral zone of the euro-area, whose markets are locked into a currency union that prevents the normal way out of permanent deficit—devaluation.  

What looks like national thrift is, in class terms, a gigantic transfer of surplus-value: German banks lend the surplus back to Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy; the interest flow north, while austerity is imposed to guarantee the debt. The result is a reserve army of unemployed youth in the south whose labor-power is devalued, and a low-wage service sector inside Germany (“mini-jobs”) that keeps domestic consumption anaemic. Both zones of workers are disciplined by the same mechanism.  

So the surplus is “rational” only for the fraction of capital that lives off interest and export rents. For the European proletariat—German and southern alike—it is a direct barrier to the reproduction of labor-power and therefore to capitalist accumulation itself. The moment the southern states tried to break that discipline (Syriza 2015), the European Central Bank, the Commission and the Bundesbank jointly strangled them financially. That shows the surplus is not an innocent macro-economic imbalance; it is enforced through the dictatorship of finance capital institutionalised in the euro-zone treaties.  

The only economically rational course for workers is to repudiate the illegitimate debts, impose capital-controls, and exit the euro under workers’ control, coordinating such exits across the periphery so that German capital cannot play them off against one another. Until then, the surplus will persist and youth unemployment will stay a weapon to hold wages everywhere down.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Is it economically rational for Germany to maintain persistent current-account surpluses above 7% of GDP while southern Europe experiences mass youth unemployment above 25%?
user