08.11.2012

Socialist Party: Euro confusion reigns

Harley Filben reports from a Socialism 2012 session on Europe and the euro

SPEW’s politics around Europe and the European Union have more than once drifted into pretty dubious territory (cough, cough, No2EU), and a Socialism session on the euro zone crisis brought out many of the problems SPEW has on the issue.

Introduced in a fairly straightforward manner by Lynn Walsh, SPEW/Militant veteran and editor of Socialism Today, the group’s theoretical magazine, the central analysis goes something like this. There are those on the left who consider the EU progressive, in that it undermines outdated national boundaries. There are others who consider it reactionary: a ‘bosses’ club’.

For comrade Walsh, the first of these arguments is fundamentally false - because the EU is utopian. Capitalism as a mode of production is unable to transcend the nation-state. All attempts to do so without a move to socialism will end in disaster. The euro crisis is simply a particular form of this impossibility. (Much of his talk consisted of laying out in considerable detail just how dire the situation is for the single currency.)

What about Marx’s attitude to German unification, he asked? The analogy simply does not hold. The petty German statelets were at least united by a common national culture and language. Capitalism, in its ascendant and progressive phase, was able to turn such an agglomeration into a nation. The EU, however, consists of tens of different language groups. Basic economic practices like accounting and banking vary widely from one country to the next. Capitalism simply cannot overcome such incoherence.

No explicit link was made between this analysis and the implied political demand for withdrawal from the EU. Comrade Walsh had not been prepared to advocate the withdrawal of Greece around the spring elections, but only because the Greek working class was too far behind such a “radical” demand. In other situations, presumably he would.

How does this differ from the Europhobia of the right, one might ask? The Socialist Party would always combine a call for withdrawal with demands for nationalisation of the banks and the commanding heights of the economy, and unspecified solidarity with those at the sharp end of the euro zone’s convulsions. What is the difference between that and the Europhobia of Stalinism and left social democracy? Answers on a postcard, please ...

The debate that followed consisted of a great deal of ‘What if...?’ questions. I intervened early, criticising the implication that the nation-state is the natural political basis for capitalism. Even the UK is not a nation-state, but a multinational state. The failure of the EU to produce more convergence is only partly a matter of capital in the abstract; the fact is that Britain’s role in it has been to undermine the EU’s internal cohesion, keeping it as far as possible as a free trade bloc, in the interests of the USA. Capital is fundamentally international in nature, and erodes borders just as much as it throws them up.

Comrade Matt Dobson of Socialist Party Scotland seemed to object to this last part, saying that the internationalisation of capital was a phenomenon of the last 20 years of ‘globalisation’. When I objected with the point that the first capitalist states were mercantile and therefore international by nature, he clarified his argument to the effect that there had been a particular period of the building up of free trade zones, etc, in the last two decades, which is now coming to an end.

Far more reasonable, but that leaves the fundamental point - that capital is not tied to the nation-state - untouched. Most of the rest of the contributions reasserted the necessity of this link, with the exception of SPEW comrade Allan Coote, who directly questioned it, and comrade Lucy Parker of Platypus, who wondered whether the left was strong enough to fully assert its demands.

A more interesting thread was raised by comrade Dobson - the apparent trend for decomposition in European states. A Scottish independence demonstration in Edinburgh had received Catalan, Basque and even Venetian separatist contingents. It was difficult to gauge the attitude of the SPEW comrades to this development - they did not sound too enthusiastic, but their adoption of a substantively left-nationalist line in Scotland rather problematises this. It seems that the CWI as a whole is happy to interpret separatist movements as anti-austerity in thrust, and attempts to give the campaigns a ‘socialist’ coloration - a pretty economistic line, all told. I may be putting words in their mouths, but this is certainly the approach adopted by the Scots contingent.

Summing up, comrade Walsh was a little more nuanced. He acknowledged that there was a fundamental contradiction between the international nature of capital and the existence of the nation-state - and conceded that it would be better to call such states ‘territorial’ rather than ‘national’. Still, that contradiction was insuperable. Replying to comrade Parker, he “would put it a little differently” - the working class is strong, as can be seen from militancy in Greece, Spain and elsewhere. What is lacking is leadership (the off-the-peg, pat Trotskyist answer to everything).

Closing the meeting, chair Glenn Kelly specifically thanked those who had raised disagreements for helping his organisation clarify its ideas. A very positive attitude - but a shame there is such a dying need for that clarity.