The Left Against the EU

Excerpts:

What exactly is the EU and what is the effect of the EU on our national politics and economics? These questions — the most important ones facing the British Left in 2018 — have received little serious treatment across the political spectrum since the referendum. Costas Lapavitsas’ book, The Left Case Against the EU (Polity, 2018; ISBN: 9781509531066; 179pp.), addresses this gap by offering a direct class analysis of the European Union. It points to a clear and unequivocal conclusion: anyone on the Left has to be foursquare against the EU.

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Almost the entirety of the British “Left”, by which I mean many Labour-supporting Remainers, is deeply Europhile. Their support for the EU, often so equivocal and hesitant before the Referendum, has deepened and hardened. They make a series of unforgivable analytical errors in their analysis of the EU and of Brexit. They frequently equate the EU with Europe. The slogan “for Europe, against the EU” is often worth repeating, not to make the facile point that “another Europe is possible” but to emphasise that the EU is a non-neutral political institution and is not the same thing as internationalism. One of the most common treatments of the EU on the part of the European Left is that the EU should be defended in the name of this internationalism while its neoliberal policies are criticised — and, moreover, that Britain should stay in the EU in order to change it. Lapavitsas, as a former SYRIZA MP, is particularly concerned to dispel the “remain and reform” argument, concluding that ‘to hope the outlook of the EMU and the EU could be altered through the simultaneous election of left-wing governments in core countries, drawing upon common anti-neoliberal politics and supported by grass-roots workers’ movements, is to add fantasy to misunderstanding’ (p. 11). Relatedly, it is important for the Left consistently to make the case that the EU is not a truly international organisation for a number of reasons, while distinguishing the contingent reasons for this — among others that there are different ideas of Europe than the EU, that the EU’s supposed internationalism comes at the cost of host of exclusions and a brutal southern border, and that there are few if any Greeks who would have felt any international solidarity from the EU since 2010 — from the prior point that the EU as an institution functions to privilege just not the interests of capital over labour, but the interests of specific national capitals (German) over other national capitals.

In sum, Lapavitsas’ book is not just an essential analysis of the economics and development of the EU, but perhaps more importantly it reminds us of two important truths about the Left that are too often overlooked. The first is that the Left is the movement that struggles to expand popular sovereignty, to give all of us a greater say over the decisions the influence our lives. There is no other route to socialism than through popular sovereignty at the national level, drawing its power from democratic processes at the national and local levels. It was a felt loss of democracy — the experience of a decrease of collective power and control — that caused the vote to Leave the EU. It is worth quoting Lapavitsas at length here:

‘The hollowing out of democracy was perceived by the plebeian classes of Europe as a loss of sovereignty. Conceited specialists often imagine that the poor neither appreciate nor understand sovereignty. It is indeed true that the finer nuances of international law, or the rights of states over land, sea, and air, or the more obscure clauses of international treaties are the preserve of experts. But popular sovereignty is immediately and directly understood by the plebeian strata because it means having a say on the conditions of life in the neighbourhood, the local community, the town, and the city. And insofar as popular sovereignty stretches in practice over the mechanisms determining national economic and social policies, it blends perceptibly into national sovereignty. The lower classes are not fooled when external forces shape national tax, tariff, subsidy, credit, and money policies.’ (pp. 4-5.)

The Left needs, urgently, to regain this terrain of democracy from the Right. The risk of the populist Right is real, but it is the re-injection of popular sovereignty into national politics (as the death of UKIP after the Brexit referendum shows) that is the correct response. The second truth Lapavitsas’ book reminds us of is that if we on the Left fail to give a class analysis of the political institutions that make up our political lives, then we will fall back on prejudice and give a voice to the anti-mass tendencies in our movements. This is how the Brexit debate and the reaction to the vote came to be dominated by the Right, with the Left making weak and unconvincing moral arguments about the necessity of voting Remain so as not to be racist. When these failed, many people nominally on the Left turned against Leave voters, accusing them of xenophobia. These arguments have no place on the Left. Rather, we must seek at every step to argue for more democracy, not least the socialist demand of an expansion of popular control from the political sphere to the economic. One thing that Brexit has shown us with crystal clarity is that the Left has little to say if there is not a consistent combination of class analysis and the political defence of democracy.

Source: The European Union and the Left: review of ‘The Left Case Against the EU’ by Costas Lapavitsas, by George Hoare.