19.08.1999

Europe and the politics of the offensive

For establishment politics in Britain the European Union represents a fundamental fault line. This is hardly surprising. The EU is a continental-wide superstate in the making. Cherished identities, borders, beliefs and symbols are being destroyed or have declining use-value and therefore engender ideological crisis. There are also narrow, sectional business and party interests at stake.

European integration has advanced qualitatively since the Treaty of Rome was signed between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands in 1957. The customs union - born of the Cold War - has become a single giant embracing 350 million people and 15 counties with free trade and movement of labour. Economically it is the world’s biggest home market. It has a combined GDP of about $6 trillion - as compared with $5 trillion for the US and $3 trillion for Japan.

Politically, however, the EU resembles something like the creaking Austro-Hungarian Empire which straddled 19th century middle Europe. The EU is an amalgam of unevenly developed state units. But the direction is clear. Wider, in the form of candidates like Poland and the Czech Republic. Deeper, in the form of politico-legal institutions. The EU has a council of ministers, the European Commission, an elected parliament and a European Court of Justice.

With the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties the tempo of integration increased. In January 11 EU countries subsumed their national currencies into the euro - overseen by a powerful central bank. Economic discipline is enforced by a stability pact which limits government borrowing to three percent of GDP. A social chapter has also been put in place to facilitate convergence along with provisions for common foreign and military policies. Chris Patten, commissioner responsible for external relations, recently argued for a coordinated arms procurement policy and predicted that a Eurocorps could be operational “in the not too distant future” (The Guardian August 17).

Behind integration lies a blood-drenched past. Twice in the 20th century Europe has been the storm-centre of world war. Both times Europe was left devastated, exhausted and much reduced. World War I saw the collapse of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian autocracies. The main focus of world economic activity shifted from Europe to the Atlantic and from there to the Pacific. Twenty-five years later, under the terms of the Yalta agreement, half the continent was incorporated into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence and through bureaucratic revolution ‘Sovietised’. As to Western Europe, it was shorn of the glories - and booty - of empire. Humiliatingly it had to crouch under the US nuclear umbrella against the much exaggerated threat from beyond the iron curtain. The need to avoid another internecine conflict, and the creation of a bulwark against bureaucratic socialism, drove the states of Western Europe, in particular Federal Germany and France, towards an historic compromise.

There is, however, another, more important, factor at work. Inter-imperialist rivalry. Europe has to compete with the US and Japan. They might have marginally smaller markets. Nevertheless due to an historically constituted nationality and an economically centralised territory they are blessed with a single working class and a single political and business elite. Like every other commodity, labour power can easily move, and therefore be brought and sold, anywhere in the US or Japan. Europe is not only divided by history, but culture. Commodities circulate without let or hindrance. But not the special commodity, labour power. Language is a material barrier, except for those with higher education (worst paid labour being a partial exception). A multinational, and therefore fragmented, political and business elite constitutes a similar handicap for Europe. To successfully compete the EU must as a minimum forge a federal superstate from where its radically reorganised transnation-als can reach their tentacles out to every corner of the planet. Survival necessitates political integration and overcoming the division of Europe into antagonistic national capitals.

In Britain this ongoing process precipitated well known hesitations and fustrations. The residues of empire arrogance clouded the brain. Britain applied late and suffered the ignominy of rejection. Barred from the Common Market in 1963 by de Gaulle’s veto, the British ruling class tried to maintain its quasi-empire, along with the ‘special relationship’ with the US and a foot in Europe through Efta. But neither the Commonwealth nor the conceit of being Greece to the new Rome added up to a viable strategy. Britain eventually entered the EEC in 1973 under Heath’s Tory government (along with its Danish and Irish Efta allies).

Apart from its extreme rightwing around Roy Jenkins, the Labour Party was highly critical of the terms and conditions. Nonetheless in 1975 Harold Wilson’s government successfully fought a referendum on the issue of continued membership. The main opposition came from a Tony Benn-Enoch Powell patriotic front. The Labour Party remained officially uneasy with European integration till the leadership of John Smith and then the government of Tony Blair. A parallel shift occurred in the TUC with the appointment of John Monks. New Labour and its coterie of middle class career politicians loyally and openly serves the interests of the most competitive, most internationalised sections of British capital. The subaltern working class pole of Labourism is today a marginalised appendage and is treated with barely concealed contempt. So it was not TUC opposition which stopped Britain entering the euro during round one, but treasury worries and Sun-informed public opinion polls.

It is the Tories who are organically divided. While Lady Thatcher calls for a “fundamental renegotiation” of Britain’s relationship with the EU, an embattled Heseltine-Clarke wing joins the Lab-Lib pact in order to fight the forthcoming referendum on the euro. These pro-big business traditionalists will operate within the Britain in Europe campaign under Blair. Smith Square and the Tory front bench for their part articulate the interests of the least competitive sections of capital and bang the drum of English xenophobia. The Tory Party goes into the next general election pledged not to join the euro for at least one parliamentary term. The Hague Tories constitute little more than the politics of fear.

What of our own movement? If the British ruling class has been irresolute and narrow-minded, the groups, factions and sects of the left have manifestly proved utterly incapable of providing anything like a serious working class alternative.

The reformist and national socialist left adhere to backward-looking and parochial positions on the EU. They instinctively recognise that European integration makes a mockery of their utopian British road to socialism. In terms of rhetoric and immediate programme, the Bennite rump in New Labour, the SLP Scargillites and the official communists of the Morning Star are virtually indistinguishable from Thatcher and the UK Independence Party. Together they want to preserve the pound sterling and restore the halcyon days of British sovereignty. Naturally with the likes of Benn, Scargill and Griffiths, it is excused in the name of socialism ... but surely this is the socialism of the criminally insane. The best these benign ‘liberators’ could achieve in reality is a British version of Stalinism, Kim Il Sungism or Pol Pottism - ie, state slavery - and that imposed onto a capitalistically advanced country fully integrated into the world economy. What in the past cost the lives of millions could only but be repeated many times over as a still greater tragedy in the future. On all criteria civilisation would not be advanced an inch but thrown back miles.

Proletarian socialism - as the first stage or phase of communism - is international or it is nothing. There can be no socialism - transition to communism - in one country because capital, as an exploitative social relationship, resides not within a single national state but internationally in the realm of the global economy. Due to isolation bureaucratic or national socialism just brings back all the old capitalist crap, albeit in different forms. That is why as long ago as 1845 Marx and Engels emphatically rejected all localist schemes and insisted on the contrary that: “Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples ‘all at once’ and simultaneously” (MECW Vol 5, Moscow 1976, p49).

As gurus, Peter Taaffe and Lynn Walsh of the Socialist Party in England and Wales have proved their real worth over the EU. They rashly staked their reputations as seers on the ‘Marxist’ prediction that European integration and the euro were impossible. Such bluster says everything about them as self-serving charlatans and nothing about Marxism. A seemingly more sophisticated ‘Marxist’ position has been advanced by the so-called Fourth International and its Socialist Outlook group in Britain. Unfortunately its internationalism is not the genuine article Socialist Outlook’s demand for British withdrawal is a slavish echo of the national socialism of the Labour left, SLP and CPB. Yet because it is done in the language of internationalism this opportunist tailing of national socialism is all the more insidious and dangerous.

Writing in Socialist Outlook’s pamphlet Even more unemployment: the case against Emu, Alan Thornett admits he will be in league with the reformist left and the Tory right in trying to secure a ‘no’ vote in the euro referendum. Naturally comrade Thornett calls for a “progressive ‘no’ campaign”. He does not actually want to share a platform with Thatcher, the UK Independence Party or the BNP. Nevertheless, when stripped of the internationalist veneer, Socialist Outlook has in actuality the very same conservative-progressive programme as the reformist left (which logically leads it organisationally into the most dubious company):

“We are for the dissolution of the EU or Britain’s withdrawal from it. It is a capitalist club designed to organise the restructuring and concentration of capital to the advantage of the bosses. But our aim is not a capitalist Britain outside the capitalist EU. We want a socialist Britain in a socialist Europe” (p11).

The shallowness of comrade Thornett’s internationalism can be neatly illustrated if we apply his method to Britain itself. It is a well established “capitalist club” designed to “organise the restructuring and concentration of capital to the advantage of the bosses”. Should we call for the “dissolution” of Britain, as do Welsh and Scottish nationalists, or even a working class “withdrawal from it”? The suggestion is simply too stupid.

Interestingly before the October Revolution of 1917 Lenin and the Bolsheviks confronted similar manifestations of national socialism. The tsarist empire was a vast prison house of nations. While fighting for national self-determination up to and including the right to secession, the overriding, central strategy aimed at the highest and most extensive workers’ unity throughout the tsarist empire - in order to overthrow the tsarist empire.

Unwittingly comrade Thornett places himself outside the international communist tradition. A tradition represented by his claimed mentors Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Unflattering though it is, comrade Thornett stands in the camp of Joseph Pilsudski and his Polish Socialist Party. Formed in 1892 it adopted a national socialist programme for the reconstitution of an independent Poland out of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empire (which between them all but partitioned it out of existence at the 1815 Congress of Vienna). Rosa Luxemburg and Julian Marchleweski split with the PSP in 1893 over this perspective. Objective conditions, they rightly said, demanded the unity of workers - Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians, Latts, etc, against tsarism.

In defence of the past, in particular the welfare state and the post-World War II social democratic settlement, comrade Thornett presents a programme that would at best weaken the EU. It would, however, also severely weaken the European working class movement if its strongest detachment forced upon their capitalists a withdrawal - a road that would lead not to a national socialist paradise but the hell of increased national exploitation and eventually national counterrevolution.

Marxism does not look fondly upon an anti-working class past (the welfare state) or seek to preserve the status quo. Our programme emphasises the massive advantages of the workers being organised into the largest, most centralised states. All the better to make revolution and begin the advance to communism. The working class can only but suffer one cruel defeat after another if it confines itself to defence. Communists stand for the politics of the offensive. Hence we say, to the extent that the EU becomes a superstate, so must the advanced part of the working class organise itself into a single revolutionary party to overthrow it.

The EU is undoubtedly a reactionary, anti-working class institution. Amongst consenting Marxists that hardly needs proving with statistics concerning spending limits and welfare cuts. The real question is what attitude we adopt to it. The CPGB advocates consistent democracy. Concretely that means fighting for the maximum democracy in the EU: eg, abolition of the council of ministers and the unelected commissioners, a constituent assembly, an armed working class and substantive equality for all citizens. Without such an approach talk of socialism in Britain or a socialist Europe is but empty chatter.

As to the euro versus the pound sterling referendum we refuse to take sides. Essentially the ‘yes’ camp argues that workers will be better off if we are exploited by European capital; the ‘no’ campaign with equal cynicism says we will be better off if we are exploited by British capitalists.

Our approach is to stress working class independence and the communist horizon. We can draw useful lessons from the writings of Marx and Engels on the bitter contest between free trade and protectionism in their day. In June 1847 Engels wrote in the Deutsche-Brüsseler Zeitung that, whichever system “held sway”, the “worker will receive no bigger wage for his labour than will suffice for his scantiest maintenance”. Nevertheless in spite of the subjective intentions of the bourgeoisie free trade tended to clear the way for the “last decisive battle” between the “propertied and the propertyless, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat” (MECW Vol 6, Moscow 1976, p94).

Marx reasoned along exactly the same lines in the second half of September 1847, and for flavour added a touch of irony:

“If they [the protectionists] speak consciously about the working class, then they summarise their philanthropy in the following words: it is better to be exploited by one’s fellow-countrymen than by foreigners.

“I do not think the working class will for ever be satisfied with this solution, which, it must be confessed, is indeed very patriotic, but nonetheless a little too ascetic and spiritual for people whose only occupation consists in the production of riches, of material wealth.

“But the protectionists will say: ‘So when all is said and done we at least preserve the present state of society. Good or bad, we guarantee the labourer work of his hands, and prevent his being thrown on to the street by foreign competition.’ I shall not dispute this statement; I accept it. The preservation, the conservation of the present state of affairs is accordingly the best result the protectionists can achieve in the most favourable circumstances. Good, but the problem for the working class is not to preserve the present state of affairs, but to transform it into its opposite.

“The protectionists have one last refuge. They say that their system makes no claim to be a means of social reform, but that it is nonetheless necessary to begin with social reforms in one’s own country, before one embarks on economic reforms internationally. After the protective system has first been reactionary, then conservative, it finally becomes conservative-progressive. It will suffice to point out the contradiction lurking in this theory, which at first sight appears to have something seductive, practical and rational to it. A strange contradiction! The system of protective tariffs places in the hands of capital of one country the weapons which enable it to defy the capital of other countries; it increases the strength of this capital in opposition to foreign capital and at the same time it deludes itself that the very same means will make that same capital small and weak in opposition to the working class. In the last analysis that would mean appealing to the philanthropy of capital, as though capital as such could be a philanthropist. In general, social reforms can never be brought about by the weakness of the strong; they must be brought about by the strength of the weak” (MECW Vol 6, Moscow 1976, pp280-1).

A short while later Marx received a request to address the free trade congress at Brussels. After paraphrasing the above argument in his, non-delivered, speech, he made the following telling point - as reported by The Northern Star’s German correspondent (Engels) - “We are for free trade, because by free trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon a greater extent of territory, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions into a single group, where they stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate the emancipation of the proletariat” (MECW Vol 6, Moscow 1976, p290).

The same message was propounded before the Brussels Democratic Association at a public meeting in January 1848. After attacking the hypocrisy of free traders in Britain - Bowring, Bright and co - Marx concluded with these words:

“Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticising freedom of commerce we have the least intention of defending protection.

“One may be opposed to constitutionalism without being in favour of absolutism.

“Moreover, the protective system is nothing but a means of establishing manufacture upon a large scale in any given country: that is to say, of making it dependent upon the market of the world; and from the moment its dependence upon the market of the world is established, there is more or less dependence upon free trade too. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free competition within a nation. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeois as weapons against feudalism and absolute monarchy, as a means for the concentration of its powers for the realisation of free trade within the country.

“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 antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the uttermost point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I am in favour of free trade” (MECW Vol 6, Moscow 1976, p465).

In the same spirit we can conclude that European integration and the euro objectively unite the working class on a larger scale and across a huge territory and thus prepares the “struggle which will itself eventuate the emancipation of the proletariat”. In this revolutionary sense alone, we in the CPGB are in favour of the EU.

Jack Conrad