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Better EMU than Ostrich!

The European road to socialism?

Richard Anthony, Exeter Left Group, questions the traditional Left hostility to Europe as outlined by Ron Thomas in RSW 01.

In RSW 1 Ron Thomas, ex-MP and stalwart of the old Labour 'Left', rehashed the case against European Monetary Union and the EU itself. He starts off by claiming that "most socialists have opposed the Common Market and European Union", but he ends by making many points that I would make in their favour.

Now he may be right about "most socialists". I've not met many who weren't anti-EU. However, that stance seems to have more to do with a folk-memory of the anti-EEC campaign led by Tony Benn and Co than with any well-thought-out objections. These can be summarised in Ron's phrase: "the EU is a capitalist bloc whose institutions operate to serve the interest of powerful multinationalist companies in their global search to maximise profits."

So what else is new? The nation state, that his party exists to serve and currently is trying to govern, is part of the same system. So why aren't more socialists calling for withdrawal from the UK and for city-states to mint their own coinage? A sort of L.E.T.S. (Local Economic Trading Scheme) Utopia perhaps?

In the long-term this might be a good idea, but I thought that "socialists" held to principle that you organised to fight on the same scale of operation as the capitalist opposition. Isn't this what's implied by the marxist theory of dialectics?

Undoubtedly the EU is intended by its present designers to be everything Ron says. Yet international solidarity is still another lefty pipe dream that's been pissed on by Labour governments and trade unions alike. If British workers have yet to grasp their common interest with brothers and sisters in Asia, Africa or Latin America, perhaps they might find it easier to do so with employees in the same companies across the English Channel, who have the same-sized pay-packet and the same bills?

I know this is wildly optimistic, but there's no more mileage in going it alone. Even Ron must remember how, in the mid-'70s, the IMF and its famous "gnomes of Zurich" put the brakes on Labour's plans to borrow their way out of the oncoming recession. Workers in a single country have no hope of combating the repressive nature of 'globalisation' and the so-called 'Free Trade' of GATT and its latest weapon: the "Multilateral Agreement on Investment". MAI means that multinationals can sue the shit out of any government which tries to control their activities - like selling us genetically-screwed-up food - as illegal restriction of trade.

To his credit, Ron knows this and makes the point that "EMU-EU reminds us - if we need reminding - that attacks on workers' conditions ... are not constrained by national boundaries or 'nation states'". He even refers to "strikes & demonstrations across Europe" and "an Euro March", which were not against the single currency as he claims. Rather they were calling for open, democratic and peaceful Europe, which the authors of the Treaty of Rome promised, and for the kind of social justice that one state can't hope to deliver, even if its social democrats weren't conservatives by another name.

When right-wing Tories, including alleged Europhiles, denounce "the European Socialist Super-State", they are not kidding. It scares them rigid. They are only divided on how to prevent it happening, but the smart ones have decided that isolationism is not an option.

Would that those who purport to speak for the British working class had as much sense! They seemed to relate more to "It Ain't Half Hot, Mum" than to "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet" (if you're old enough to remember either programme). In the last year or two there have been some major battles and victories on 'the Continent': the occupation of French Job Centres, the fight to maintain the value of the minimum wage in France and elsewhere and, as Ron points out, a reduction in the working-week and the removal of a French Conservative government.

The response of the traditional left in the UK to these events, not to mention others closer to home like the world-trade summit in Birmingham and the EU end-of-term meeting in Cardiff - has been, at best, pathetic, but more generally: zero. I don't see that staying detached from Europe is going to improve this track record.

As for EMU - why not cut out the middleman and use dollar$?

- RSW 02  Page 4 -

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