25.03.1999

Neither the pound nor the euro

European Union

This week’s European Union summit in Berlin has an unusually packed agenda. Overshadowing the entire meeting are the military actions by Nato forces in rump Yugoslavia. The ministers assembled in Germany naturally want to present a united face to the world. Besides Kosova/Serbia, the main item of discussion are the plans to reform the EU’s budgetary system - especially farm spending, which accounts for some 50% of the total budget of £60 billion. They will also be looking at plans for EU enlargement, with Poland and Hungary already halfway through the door. And Tony Blair insists that Britain’s annual rebate of around £2 billion is sacrosanct.

On top of all that, the EU is still feeling the effects from the dramatic events of the last two weeks, which saw the shock resignation of (“red”) Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister, and the even more sensational mass resignation - or, to be more accurate, sacking - of the 20 EU commissioners. This has turned the Berlin summit into a political hot-house, as national governments look for a replacement for Jacques Santer, the disgraced former EU president.

Blair is waving the flag for the ex-‘official communist’ (ie, social democrat), Romano Prodi, the former Italian prime minister, who has been described by Downing Street as “a man of considerable ability and a very high-quality person”. He is a Euro-reformist in the Thatcher mould. Prodi savagely slashed public spending, privatising everything that moved, in order to meet the Maastricht criteria and hence enable Italy to join ‘the club’.

It should come as no surprise that the EU bureaucracy is characterised by cronyism, nepotism and corruption. With billions of euros sloshing around the corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg, it would be a minor miracle if this was not the case. The behaviour of Edith ‘no regrets’ Cresson is typical. Appointing your ageing 79-year old dentist to head the EU Aids research centre on a salary of £60,000 (despite suffering a heart attack) is all par for the course for the arrogant bureaucrats who run and staff the EU proto-superstate.

Yes, ‘accountability’ and ‘democracy’ are not words you associate with the EU gravy train. Blair’s answer to the corrupt antics of the unelected EU commission is to bring in a not yet corrupt ... unelected commission. A gaping democratic deficit indeed.

How should communists in Britain respond to the great EU scandal? Perhaps by defending ‘our’ parliament and ‘our’ pound sterling from the ‘Brussels bureaucrats’, and by having a general sneer at all things European? Naturally, this is the automatic reaction of the Communist Party of Britain/Morning Star camp. Just more grist to the ‘no to the euro’ mill for the likes of the CPB, committed as it is to a national road to socialism.

However, ‘left’ jingoism is not confined to the sad relics of the CPB.  Scargillism - therefore the Socialist Labour Party - shares the same national socialist delusion. Arthur Scargill has long dreamed of decoupling Britain from Europe in order to emulate Cuba or North Korea. Despite claiming to be a man who does not believe in slogans, he is now fond of saying, ‘Vote us in, to get us out’.

And some Trotskyites share a similar faith to Scargill - or at the very least exhibit a strong degree of theoretical confusion on this matter. This was exemplified by last week’s letter from Alan Thornett of Socialist Outlook. Attempting to justify his organisation’s ‘no to the euro’ position, the comrade writes:

“The idea that we can be indifferent to how the class enemy organises against us seems bizarre. We are not neutral when an individual employer reorganises against the workforce or when a national government takes measures which increase exploitation or attack the working class. Why should we be neutral when this is done by the European bourgeoisie?” (Weekly Worker March 18).

The comrade spectacularly misses the point. The CPGB is not “indifferent” or “neutral” to attacks on the working class. Exactly the opposite. We are fully aware of what lies behind the single currency and the euro - a bankers’ Europe ruled from above. But to use comrade Thornett’s own - and rather apt - analogy, if company B decides to launch a merger or takeover of company A, communists do not go round advising the workers to ‘defend’ the bosses who run company A. Class politics is not about choosing the butcher. It is time SO and all those who advocate a ‘no’ vote come the referendum realised this basic fact.

No, the CPGB are not ‘Europhiles’ in the mould of John Palmer, old sparring partner of Tony Cliff and a contributor to Red Pepper. He says that the EU and the single currency are excellent. With the proviso of course that the left tries to make it worker-friendly. What John Palmer and Alan Thornett are doing is asking us to side with different sections of the bourgeoisie - symbolically the pound or the euro.

There are useful historical analogies and precedents to look at. For example, the heated debate surrounding the protectionist Corn Laws in the 1840s. This saw a struggle between the liberal free-traders and the Tory protectionists. Marx’s comments in particular are illuminating - did he side with the protectionists against laissez-fairism? Or vice versa? No. He polemicised against both from a working class viewpoint, whilst seeking to identify and advance all developments which create the objective conditions for human liberation. Hence, in his address to the Democratic Association of Brussels in 1848, Marx stated:

“But, generally speaking, the protective system in these days is conservative, while the free trade system works destructively. It breaks up old nationalities and carries the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the uttermost. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I am in favour of free trade” (The Poverty of philosophy Peking 1978, p207).

Does Socialist Outlook really believe that Marx would have said ‘no to the euro’, let alone campaign to “sink the euro”? Like Marx, the CPGB “in this revolutionary sense alone” is in favour of the single currency and a European superstate.

It is essential that we see a vigorous debate on the EU and democracy - or the lack of it. The logical demand for the working class is for a constituent assembly of the European Union. And this goes hand in hand with fighting for the maximum democracy - the working class is thereby readied for revolution. In this way we ‘conquer’ democracy - not by abolishing it, as some Trotskyists seem to believe, but by extending it so that it breaks the limits imposed by capitalist social relations. Hence the struggle for democracy by the working class is the way to socialism.

Instead of being defensive when confronted by the single currency and the EU, the left should be equipping our class with its own independent policy.

Danny Hammill