09.05.2013
Anti-EU left: Being pulled to the right
Ukips anti-EU nationalism is mirrored by the CPB. Michael Copestake takes a look
The main success of the UK Independence Party, despite its results in last week’s local elections, should perhaps not be measured in terms of votes, but rather in its ideological influence on wider society and political discourse. This ferociously nationalist, Thatcherite party threatens to pull not only the Tory Party, but the whole of national politics, to the right, totally nullifying the positive effect it may have in splitting the Conservative vote. However, the fact that so much of the allegedly ‘internationalist’, ‘Marxist’ left finds itself fundamentally in agreement with Ukip’s programme in relation to the European Union is a cause for despair and a symptom of the opportunism that will only assist in the further ratcheting of society to the right.
This is most clear in the case of the Morning Star and its Communist Party of Britain. One gets the feeling that the national-roadist Star is embarrassed by the proximity of its own Europhobia to Ukip’s. It is for that reason perhaps that these Stalinites would like to wish Ukip out of existence, as indicated by the headline above its April 30 editorial just two days before the elections: “Ukip’s just a distraction”. While the Star accepted the possibility that the Ukip vote may “cost the Tories hundreds of seats”, it thought this would mainly come in the form of “assisting Labour”. In the event Ukip enjoyed 139 gains, taking its total number of councillors to 147.
By contrast, its May 4 editorial, titled “Ukip success a wake-up call”, demonstrates a rather different estimation - no longer should the party be regarded as “a distraction”, it seems. The media is blamed for giving Ukip coverage “out of all proportion to its importance” and the Star complains: “Even negative coverage … usually comes accompanied with a suggestion that [Ukip] may be speaking for voters’ real concerns on key issues”. What an outrageous thought.
Or is it? The Star goes on: “Ukip does speak for ordinary voters on one key point - withdrawal from the EU.” After all, “You don’t have to be a fruitcake, lunatic or closet racist ... to be deeply alarmed by how the EU is ordering public-sector cuts right across Europe.” Quite true, of course, but one’s political response to this, and to the wider European question, has a lot to do with whether one is a nationalist, of the left or right variety, and whether or not one has a positive programme to confront capitalism as it is, in its most historically developed form, and which seeks to raise working class consciousness to that level.
But, like Ukip, the Star longs for a mythical past. It yearns for the time when capital was less integrated on a global scale and national social democratic parties (in a very historically specific context, ironically enough) could extract concessions from the ‘national’ capitalist class, thanks to a good, old-fashioned Keynesian economic regime. Nostalgia, in other words. A nostalgia that the Morning Star shares with voters who it says are “hungry for a return to the spirit of 1945 and Labour’s creation of the NHS and the welfare state”.
This sort of utopian pining for days gone by is entirely reactionary. Ukip’s attitude to Europe is reactionary because it is a petty-bourgeois nationalist outfit, for whom political achievements can only be implemented by the nation-state and which is therefore bereft of any programme to take society - international, global society - forward. In its own way this is equally true of our CPBers (not to mention those on the revolutionary left who similarly call for a British withdrawal from the EU). Their entire political project is fundamentally nationalist in character, based as it is upon a cross-class ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ to be operated on the level of the UK state. The EU appears to the national socialist only as an obstruction - something alien that must be shied away from, not confronted and positively superseded.
The nostalgia of the right nationalist finds its mirror in the nostalgia of the left nationalist. The former is at least in part an expression of British post-colonial decline, looking back to a rose-tinted past when Britain was commander of its own empire and master of its own destiny. The latter wishes to return full political power to its ‘own’ (allegedly more democratic) capitalist state in order to facilitate the advance of the national working class. For them the class struggle is basically a confrontation between the national proletariat and the national bourgeoisie: look after the national struggle and the international struggle will take care of itself!
Progressive nationalism?
It is basic Marxism that larger, more unified states are objectively progressive relative to smaller and fragmented states. This is because the formation of larger, more integrated state units is but itself the reflection of the development and integration of the world capitalist economy - as capitalist production supersedes non-capitalist production, big capital displaces small capital and each nation-state is ever more integrated into the economic life of every other nation-state. This same progressive historical process generates a global working class - as opposed to local atolls of workers isolated in a sea of non-proletarians, as was the case in tsarist Russia.
The more integrated capitalism becomes economically and politically, the more developed is the international working class. This is a process that cannot be rolled back because it upsets nationalists, just as the existence of the nation-state, no less a “bosses’ club” than the EU, cannot be wished away by those who might long for a return to pre-capitalist forms of society; or just as the domination of big capital cannot be abolished for the benefit of small capital, or machine production be replaced by handicraft production.
The call to withdraw from the EU represents a failure to face up to reality, and not just in the broad sense of historical development. Just as the growth and centralisation of industry comes at a price, it nonetheless brings into being the international working class, and thus creates the possibility of the eventual victory of communism. The acquisition by the EU of state forms is also multifaceted, with its positive and negative sides. Positive, because it raises the class struggle to the continental level and obliges us to forge a common identity with workers throughout Europe through practical confrontation with the EU. It allows us to bring our internationalist programme to the fore, making internationalism an integral, tangible part of the actual political practice and outlook of the European working class in its common actions. This is at the level of actually existing political necessity.
Imagine for a moment the political consequences of British withdrawal from the EU following a referendum. Ukip leader Nigel Farage will once again feature on many front pages, pint of British beer in hand; the Murdoch press will carry jingoistic front covers sticking a finger up to the Germans; small capital will rejoice that it is now free to ignore the various EU social charter regulations; and the Stalinite CPB will celebrate the return of power to the ‘democratic’ national bourgeoisie, thus taking us a further step down “Britain’s road to socialism”. At last we can start moving towards an ‘independent’, ‘socialist’ Britain - as if the failure of the left to advance the cause of the working class can be laid at the door of that damned EU. In reality nationalist sentiment will have been strengthened and society will probably experience a sharp shift to the right.
Perhaps our national socialists should take the fragmentary process further and apply it to Britain itself. They could proclaim that the break-up of Britain would open up the way to a “socialist Scotland”, as does the Scottish Socialist Party. If the UK state is weakened, that must strengthen us, surely? Sections of the British left seem to be thinking along the same lines as the Scottish left nationalists - after all, the Socialist Workers Party is to recommend a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum on Scottish independence (in contrast to the CPB British left nationalists, who will vote ‘no’).
This does not mean for one second that the Weekly Worker is soft on the EU. The problem with much of the left is that it is already too soft - abandoning the field without a fight in favour of its imagined nationalist or economistic utopias. Instead our aim must be the energetic, coordinated pursuit of the class war across the EU by a united European working class. That is why we aim for the establishment of European-wide trade unions campaigning for the levelling up of working conditions and wages across the continent, and a Communist Party of the European Union fighting for a united Europe under the rule of the working class.
Far from demanding the withdrawal of Britain, we should demand democratisation of the EU in the interest of our class. That means, to start with, the abolition of the council of ministers, the concentration of political power in the EU parliament, not the Brussels bureaucracy, and the right to recall MEPs.