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bounty44 -> RE: Brexit Vote Results (7/2/2016 7:17:55 AM)
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quote:
The positive argument for joining the EU tends to be made by the liberal and center-left. For them, the EU is a fundamentally benign institution ("although of course it is not perfect") which has helped prevent war in Western Europe since 1945, established rights for workers and citizens, and regulated the impact of businesses on health and the environment...
the EU sets certain "minimum" and "adequate" conditions for worker's rights (these are the actual words used in the legislation). In many cases, however, these rights were fought for and won before states joined the EU--including the UK...
But even where the EU has passed potentially useful legislation--like, for example, the Working Time Directive (WTD)--it always comes with opt-out clauses that unorganized or weak groups of workers can be forced to sign for fear of losing their jobs. The WTD hasn't helped the junior doctors in England who are currently striking for, among other things, a reduction in their hours.
More generally, the EU has not prevented attacks on workers by the Hungarian and Polish governments, nor is it preventing the French state from attacking workers at the moment. Indeed, one of the ways in which the EU is helpful to neoliberal governments is precisely because the latter can use the EU's rules on competition and so on as an excuse for doing what they would have done anyway.
But the problem is not simply that the EU is a weak or nonexistent shield. It has led the onslaught on wages and conditions in Southern Europe--above all in Greece.
When this is pointed out to EU enthusiasts--some of whom claim to be internationalists--they tend to respond by saying that, since the UK is not in the eurozone, it would not be subject to the same treatment. But surely as internationalists, we should want to put an end to an institution which has caused such suffering to so many people, rather than smugly reflect on the protection that Britain's semi-detached status affords it?
At this point, the question of EU "reform" is usually raised ("We must stay in to change it"). But the EU is structurally incapable of reform. Why?...
In 1939, Freidrich von Hayek wrote an article in which he argued that "Interstate Federalism" at the European level would be desirable. Why? Mainly because it would ensure that economic activity should be removed as far as possible from the responsibility of meddling politicians who interfered with the market order to win electoral support from ignorant voters.
Consciously or not, the EU followed Hayek's advice by centralizing power in the hands of appointed officials, above all in the Commission, which alone has the power to initiate legislation, three types of which--regulations, directives and decisions--are binding. The parliament has a right to be consulted, in certain circumstances, but none to initiate legislation in its own right. In this respect, it has far less power than any national government--or for that matter, even any devolved government like the Scottish or Catalan.
But this is not the only democratic deficit. If the Commission is a supranational body, the European Council is an intergovernmental one. It consists of the heads of state or heads of government of the member states, who are, of course, elected in their own countries, but not by the inhabitants of the other countries whose fate the Council decides. It proceeds by "consensus"--in other words what is acceptable to France and German axis, and increasingly, to Germany alone. No votes are conducted or minutes taken, and decisions are signaled by the President arriving at a "conclusion."
These structures are one reason why we should reject claims that the EU is as amenable to reform as any nation-state. In fact, it is much less so...
[much more follows, too much to copy/paste]
Is Remain the "Lesser Evil"?
Many socialists would agree with most, if not all of this, but still argue that we have to vote for Remain purely on contingent grounds: Namely, that a majority vote for Leave will only strengthen the hard right--not so much the actual fascists of British National Party, but the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the euro-skeptic wing of the Conservative Party, and their media loudhailers in the Murdoch press and other right-wing newspapers.
As a result, the argument for remaining in the EU most commonly expressed by members of the radical left is essentially a negative one. As they correctly point out, the main drive for withdrawal from the EU has historically come from the hard right, and the UKIP popularized this position by focusing on the question of national sovereignty--specifically by highlighting the inability of the UK to control its borders in the face of supposedly unlimited migration either from within or, in the case of refugees, via the EU.
The success of UKIP in turn emboldened the euro-skeptics within the Conservative Party. The referendum is therefore only happening in response to pressure from these forces, and the campaign for exit is being conducted according to their racist agenda. If there is a majority vote to leave, the argument goes, it will immediately mean that non-UK citizens and their families from the EU who currently have right of residence here face the danger of expulsion or, at the very least, will face a much more precarious situation.
Left-wing campaigners can also point to the way in which the official Leave campaign has unleashed a poisonous racism and xenophobia into British politics, regardless of the result. One horrifying result of this seems to have been the fatal assault on pro-Remain Labour MP Jo Cox on June 16, by a man with a history of both mental illness and association with far right--who apparently shouted "Britain First" as he attacked Cox and who later gave his name in court as "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain."
In this context, voting to remain, while not necessarily leading to any positive result, would at least avoid a negative one: It is the "lesser evil."
[again, too much more to copy/paste but what follows is insightful and close to what you were saying maria]
The EU organizes a section of the international ruling class, not the working class. As Trotsky once wrote in another context, a brake cannot be used as an accelerator. There are no EU-wide political parties or trade unions or movements.
In any case, solidarity across borders does not depend on constitutions or institutions, but on the willingness of workers to support each other, even if in separate countries. The struggle against neoliberal capitalism is unlikely to begin simultaneously across the whole of the EU, or to be confined within its boundaries.
What we are likely to see is an uneven series of movements of different intensities, within different nation-states which, if victorious, could form new alliance and ultimately a United Socialist States of Europe. But that will involve destroying the EU and replacing it with institutions that represent our interests and not those of our ruling classes.
I think what im seeing, in rough form is, the idea of an EU was/is desirable, but it was not working out the way the socialists would have liked.
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