By focussing on 'the thing itself', that is to say trying to answer the question 'what is the EU?', the debate in the British left about Brexit has been as leaden and as uninspiring (with one or two honourable exceptions) as the the ding/dong combat between the would be leaders of the mainstream British right. Centered in the Tory Party, these heroes cheerfuly bounce claim and counter claim against each other, reducing their discussion to a game of 'who is the real liar?' (That is an easy question to answer. Both.)
In the 'grand' (mainstream) debate over Brexit, so far only President Obama and now ex PM Gordon Brown have made some effort to scribble the odd sketch on a wider canvas than simply dwelling on the merits or otherwise of the EU. Both Obama and Brown did consider, albeit momentarily, the creation of blocs of nations and their potential in the context of globalisation.
Unfortunately the 'minor' (non-mainstream) debate among the British left has not even reached that level.
Singling out the fundamental character of the EU ; its irrevocably capitalist character; its defense of the multi-national, neo-liberal and anti-labour cause; the inherent corruption of its institutions and its utterly undemocratic and even ruthless politics, takes the British left's debate away from the essential struggle that the left should be leading; that real people in the here and now have to engage with. In the given reality it makes the left's position more and more abstract.
To understand day to day reality and how it can and must be changed, analysis has to start from a much deeper abstraction than just the role of the EU. Analysis has to start from modern politics and its response to globalisation. The EU is such a response. Following the Common Market, the EU was always set up to create and sustain a system of international and then global corporations, based in Europe, rooted in what was advanced technology, in order to resist US domination and to control the rise of post colonial Asia and Africa. The UK, with its ex colonies forming a post-imperial preference zone, was always unhappy with this Franco/German project. Latterly, Britain's 'offering' of the City and its 'welcome' to US and Asian investment, as a constituent part of the global reach and global leverage of Europe, alongside other European based multi-nationals, made an uneasy alliance more possible; (albeit with the 'necessary' protections from Germany over the City of London's autonomy and independence.)
The new EU politics is, of course, is a far cruder and more vicious thing, than the subtlety and intricacies of its economic arrangements. This is already exposed across the whole of the European population for what it is; a political system that is the unseasoned, disfigured spawn of a rapidly constructed new economic order. The feeble concession to European democracy contained within its structures, the European Parliament, is nothing more than a self-seeking and embittered, marginal fraction of the steadily festering European political class - and rightly mostly ignored by the bulk of European voters. The ongoing destruction of Greece's autonomy and standard of life is the latest example of current EU political and economic savagery - as crude and as basic as the reactions of a Victorian Mill owner to their workers.
Yet Brexit will not remove Britain or its people one centimeter from capitalism's globalisation or its accompanying new politics. That is why the debate between Britain's political leaders is so jejune. Globalisation, and European capitalism's political and economic responses to it, will not change in direction one iota should Brexit succeed, any more than it will change in the UK. Just as the arguments of Britain's new right wing are absolutely hollow as to the supposed benefits of EU exit; less EU immigration, restoration of sovereignty, greater connection to the rest of the world etc., so are the arguments of the prospects for EU reform, whether from a rightist or a left point of view. Both 'strategies' are complete fantasies.
Taking an example of the British left's case in favour of Brexit; is it really EU legislation on nationalisation and privatisation that prevents the collective ownership and control of the nation's assets by the people of Britain? And would not the price of access to the European 'Free Trade' area require nominal adhesion to these rules anyway? And are we not underestimating the reaction of an enlarged and more confident British opposition? To ask the questions is to answer them. Such a potential (Corbyn led?) programme would face the full force of global capitalism and its domestic support, as well as the leadership of the EU - with or without formal membership of its organisation. And the recent argument that now a powerful left wing has emerged in British society, such that it would shift the content of Brexit in a progressive direction, simply underestimates the political relation of forces in British and for that matter in global society. While a new left is emerging, albeit unevenly and without shared core intentions, a new right is organising too. The struggle for a new relationship of forces, since the emergence from the dark decades of the 1980s until 2008, has yet to be joined.
So what is the real 'concrete analysis' and argument, about 'the concrete situation' that the British left should have about Brexit?
Neither Brexit nor EU membership contribute to any strategy for progressive change in the UK. But the impact of the EU referendum will be mainly political in that Brexit would create an opportunity for the regroupment of a new right wing politics in UK society paradoxically much more tuned to the savage political necessities of globalisation.
By winning Brexit, British right wing politicians believe that in the name of removal of red tape and the return of sovereignty, they would be more able to move more directly against their own people, for the defense of multi-nationals, tax havens and the rich, in favour of longer working hours, reduction of pensions etc., etc., exactly as EU leaders try to do in Europe today. In the end, the Brexit manouever turns out to be another a small part of the political jigsaw being created by the latest stage of globalisation. Its place in the modern, global totality has nothing to do with holding back or deconstructing any aspect of globalisation, it is simply another rightist and pre-eminently political adjustment within it. It is undoubtedly creating a crisis for the Tory Party in the UK just as Berlesconi, Sarkozy, and Trump were and are, in their own contexts, tearing up the old ruling class political rules and intending to deal with any threat from the new left most sharply.
Accordingly the British left should advise a vote against Brexit at this time to avoid strengthening and further emboldening the new right wing emerging in its own society. The struggle against the EU, the IMF and Europe's degenerate political institutions has to have the Continental wide scale implied by that line up and the EU, as it is, remains a key obstacle to the people of Europe - and any sort of progressive future. But Brexit does not contribute to that goal at this stage, any more than the idea that the EU institutions and leadership might be reformed.
Britain cannot exclude itself, or bypass, or opt out of the conflict with globalisation. Right at the beating heart of Britain's economics and therefore its politics sits the 'global' City of London - already inextricably tied to the EU's financial engine. The defeat of the European version of global capitalism starts not from the British (non) debate about exit or not, but rather from the development of a positive, continental wide set of answers to the mayhem, misery and oppression that the EU and the City continues to recycle. All but the politically blind recognise that the plight of refugees; that the international scope and power of the banks and the corporations; the destruction of the environment and the competition to the bottom on wages and welfare all and more; all of them require international, and global solutions. It is imperative that the British left turns its face towards its natural allies across the continent and the wider world, standing together with them in their battles - as Peoples Assembly delegations to Calais witness.
Extending common cause across Europe's people involves the call and shared campaign for an international living wage; for a shared, progressive wealth and capital exchange tax; for genuine free movement for all the world's citizens tied to a new Marshall Plan to create the facilities and support needed; for an end to nuclear weapons, first on the continent; an end to all foreign wars and repudiation of the debts from the old system.
Globalisation is not going to go away European country by country; by virtue of a return to the life and dominance of the major individual nations and their elites. (It is worth noting in passing that national independence has never been enough for dominance under capitalism; that the most successful nations in the 19th century West depended on slavery and Empire.) Socialists and others need to create their own responses to late capitalism, and those responses have at least to rise to the level of the new realities.
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