18.02.1999

Euroland and internationalism

Around the left

On January 1 the European single currency was successfully launched. Some on the left had foolishly declared in advance that this was impossible. Others on the ‘refusenik’ left view the euro with overt misapprehension, harbouring the suspicion that an EU ‘superstate’ will scupper their pristine plans for socialism.

So, Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party wants nothing to do with the European Union - single currency or not. Similarly, the Socialist Party will also say ‘no’ to the euro in any referendum, while the “internationalist” Socialist Outlook too wants to “sink the euro” and keep the pound sterling. Now it looks like we must add the name of the Workers International (to Rebuild the Fourth International) to the ‘no to the euro’ roll call.

The WI is one of the many anti-Healy fragments of the late and very unlamented Workers Revolutionary Party. It endeavours to be implacably orthodox in its Trotskyism. So much so that WI members Dave Temple, Cliff Slaughter and Bob Myers have very recently “placed themselves outside” the WI for raising criticisms of the Fourth International and Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional programme - ie, they have been expelled. The WI as a matter of biblical certainty rejects all minimum programmes or demands as heresy. It fights for nothing less than the ‘transitional programme’. To this end, an editorial in the monthly Workers International Press polemicises against the Weekly Worker’s position on the EU and the single currency.

Despite the fact that the author of the editorial thinks there is “political confusion” amongst the left on the question of Europe and the single currency, it has to be said that exactly the same could be said of the WI. We can discern this quite easily. Clearly puzzled, it quotes from the Weekly Worker of January 7:

“The single currency is a harbinger of political union - just as capitalism itself is the harbinger of socialism. In so far as an ‘EU superstate’ lays the foundation for advanced socialism, it is to be welcomed. But this in no way means we throw our hats in the air and exclaim, ‘hurrah for the euro!’ or ‘three cheers for the City bankers and speculators!’ The single currency and Euroland represent an undemocratic union from above” (February).

The editor comments:

“So it is a big ‘yes’ and a little ‘no’, as far as the Weekly Worker is concerned, although the article points out that the European commissioner Jacques Santer has called for more ‘modernisation’ and ‘flexibility’, the classic buzzwords which august organs like The Telegraph or The Times normally salivate over.”

Well, comrades from WI, in a certain sense it is indeed “a big ‘yes’ and a little ‘no’” to the single currency. As Marxists it is our internationalist duty tosupport, nurture and foster all movements and developments which help to create the objective conditions for universal human liberation - which of course can only truly happen on a world scale.

How does saying ‘no’ to the euro and the single currency alongside John Redwood and Dennis Skinner assist the development of these objective conditions, WI comrades? Obviously, it does not. But neither would voting ‘yes’ to an undemocratic union from above of bankers and technocratic politicians.

Seemingly slightly upset by our robust language, the editorial states:

“The Weekly Worker implies that all leftwing opponents of the European Union are blinkered nationalists. However, despite its ‘internationalist’ appearance, the position of the Weekly Worker shows a no less dangerous limitation. Despite the occasional mention of a socialist future [?], its proposals for a supra-national workers’ organisation are tied to an agitation for bourgeois democracy - ‘crucially an EU constituent assembly’.”

It seems that “bourgeois democracy” exists mainly in the eye of the beholder - if you are a Trotskyite anyway. Of course, nowhere in the above Weekly Worker article would you find “agitation for bourgeois democracy”. WI must have a very low opinion - or expectation - of democracy if it really thinks we have got it already in Europe. Presumably, for the WI, it is now time to move on to the more interesting socialist ‘stage’, seeing how the ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ was completed aeons ago.

Naturally, as apostles of Trotskyite orthodoxy, the WI is prejudiced against the fight for a minimum programme and the struggle for democracy. As it says,

“To limit a European workers’ movement to the horizon of bourgeois democracy is to condemn it in advance to impotence ... Fighting for a principled, internationalist stance and building unity between the workers of different countries in Europe will require not a minimum programme fighting for a bourgeois democracy that is under threat [it is? - DP], but a transitional programme. That is, one which shows that integral to the day-to-day struggle of workers for economic and political rights is their role in abolishing capitalism and creating a socialist society.”

In reality, it is the WI’s approach which is “impotence”. Despite its lip service to the “day-to-day struggle of workers for economic and political rights” (my emphasis), the only political fight it actually calls for is “rebuilding the Fourth International”. However, to achieve the WI’s “socialist society” the workers must cease to operate as a slave class and become a political class, a class that can act as a hegemon over society. The workers can only do this by becoming the champions of democracy. Only by upholding and defending the democratic rights of all oppressed classes, groups and strata and by mastering all political questions can the workers be made into a ruling class. This requires fighting for minimum or immediate demands now, in order to place real, as opposed to abstract, socialism on the agenda.

Typically, the much vaunted ‘transitional programme’ method of dogmatic groups like the WI leads to economism, and its “day-to-day struggle of workers for economic and political rights” leads to reformism. And if the WI is advocating a ‘no’ vote for the referendum on the single currency its ‘internationalism’ will only be a thin cover for national socialism - “blinkered” or otherwise.