A short essay.
There are many political studies that have picked through the meaning of Britain's Brexit. And the Brexit vote was also accompanied by a storm of data, as social scientists tried to pick out a hundred-and-one different characteristics of the voting Britons in the 2016 Referendum.
The leading analysts of public affairs, Ipsos, produced the largest summaries of Brexit voting (see Ipsos ) and their view of the basic patterns of Brexit voting were the most accepted across the British media. The North of England, the Midlands, the West of England and Wales, and the older working class, were the sections of British society that mostly voted to leave the EU. But a sea of other analysts and social scientists also studied the vote, some less in terms of traditional British social blocs (A, B C1, C2 D - Upper Class – Elite, Upper Middle Class, Lower Middle Class, Working Class, Poor) but rather the response to Brexit of particular sections of what might be understood as the working class population as a whole (see, for example, blogs from the London School of Economics). Which does at least suggest that some of Britain's pollsters tell quite significantly different stories.
The various political accounts of Brexit across the British mainstream society and even at the edges of British society, were initially more homogeneous. Early on there was a general acceptance that there had been a (delayed) reaction in the West to globalisation and that the impact that it had made on larger, poorer and ignored communities had produced a 'democratic' revolt of those who were 'left-behind.' It was far from just the left in Britain that defined the Brexit movement as a working class upheaval, starting from working class hostility to prolonged austerity and the hostile political systems that maintained it.
In reality the content of being 'left behind' has always been a complex and unresolved matter. Often, depending on a range of political arguments and certainly on unique national, regional and demographic contexts, support for Brexit meant that being 'left behind' was (and remains) a multiple and uneven experience. But in Britain in 2016 most right-wing inclined commentators began to identify three fundamentals among the voters who voted to leave. The first was the perceived danger of immigration (associated with the large refugee crisis in the mainland EU). The second was the pressures on the welfare state and particularly on the NHS. These two concerns were often combined. The third was the belief that EU immigrants lowered wages and conditions in the jobs-market. The most effective slogan of the Brexit argument turned out to be 'Take Back Control' from the pro-Brexit campaign. This was duly interpreted by the right as the working class wanting the British government to reduce immigration, increase funding to certain services and allow British workers' wages to rise, all of which were prevented by EU membership. This became the simple and accepted political explanation for the British rightwing when it came to the governmental requirements of Brexit.
Today, the British rights's desperate political conundrum lies not in their broadly agreed version of the meaning of the Brexit vote as such, but rather in the division of its main political party and, most critically the Tory's historic break from its historic mission to represent the heights of British capitalism. Trying to sort out the schism between the most powerful sections of the ruling class and its betrayal over EU membership by the Tory Party is now the critical question for Brexit going forward as far as the political right are concerned.
A big part of the left on the other hand took Brexit as working-class hostility resulting from the experience of austerity - as the real root of their class objection to the EU, which is, after all, the main machine organising globalisation in the European continent. Big Capital based in Britain were desperate to maintain EU membership and that showed who really had the most interest in remaining in the EU. Racism, it was claimed by some of the left, was mainly promoted by UKIP and the Tory right who had access to the media momentum in the Brexit campaign among large sections of the working class and which thereby distorted the real fundamentals of the real working class view. The Labour Party's leadership over the Brexit vote was a half-hearted shambles thus creating the space for UKIP etc. It was argued by (some of) the left for example that 'Taking Back Control' had diametrically different implications from its right wing version and instead the slogan showed universal hostility to Britain's political class and the need to replace it. The working class who voted for Brexit in 2016 were therefore right. They were sticking to important principles. Ultimately the EU was a large-scale capitalist operation and it was in the working class interest to remove their country from it.
While UKIP and the Tory right defined a crude and ill-thought-out meaning for the Brexit vote (which they still stick to) the left, from Blairite Labour MPs through to radical left groups - have yet to establish a generally accepted understanding.
Before answering the question: How should we (really) read Brexit? It is worth noting that Britain's Brexit has allowed, indeed provoked, the central political and social questions of British (indeed Western) society from behind their 'normal' fog and now key terms like 'working class interests' and 'capitalism' are widely acknowledged as key starting points in respect of any real understanding of how society works. This clarification is not the result of any academic heave. It comes directly from Britain's deep political crisis. The crisis has capped the oil of British political hypocrisy that ruled generations of Britain's political leadership. Not surprisingly therefore the British Parliament is shocked to find itself dealing with real, big matters of wealth and power (not normally available to Parliament) and they can barely believe themselves or anybody else. The parliamentarians rant and cry at each other as they find themselves incapable of resolving a genuinely decisive political question.
We know that for Britain's rightwing, Brexit's past is already established, but its future means the narrow but deepening chasm concentrated in the heart of the Tory Party. And that certainly will be a key part of the overall meaning of Brexit. And the implications will continue to blossom over the next 2 years at least. But teasing out the meaning of Brexit-past is more difficult for Britain's left. Leaving aside the (shockingly understated) working class split in Britain over the EU membership vote, where does a reading of Brexit start from?
It starts from removing a widespread but entirely mechanical version of politics and society which is reflected in the idea among some of the left that there are immovable principles - like stop lights. While processes in society form patterns, like a kaleidoscope those patterns are never exactly repeated. Everything is unique. In the context of eternal change and movement, which is what makes everything unique, there are both major and minor shifts. Some shifts in the pattern of society are so decisive that they transform everything, including society itself. War, revolution, plague, disasters, rip societies to pieces - and sometimes reconstitute them.
Wars are always bad, destructive and deadly. But some wars are inevitable, even necessary. It was necessary to reconstitute Nazi Germany. But that required horrible destruction, including the violent military defeat of the Nazis. In other words there are few if any inevitable or universal responses to the developments of the world. And that applies dramatically in the capitalist world, which is partly defined by its constant, social-economic movement. Some social, political and economic movement moves slowly in a reasonably predictable fashion. People often assume that they will live their lives in that way. But mostly, since their origin, capitalist societies have moved convulsively and combatively towards their own and towards other peoples.
The institutions created by capitalism, most essentially the modern state, have been constructed and constantly reconstructed as capitalism itself has recomposed, extended, expanded, and carried on its permanent struggle with its exploited classes. But despite the constant ebb and flow of the friction between the exploiters and the exploited, it is an ebb and flow. Welfare states have been thrown up in the West as a result of the organisation and militancy of the working class. The EU - a super state designed as a European platform for globalisation - emerged at the end of the push for Welfare States in Europe. Although the Western European states had to accept some reforms, the cores of their states were never reformed. And although the EU responds to some workers' rights, not only its core but most of its state hinterland remains, determinedly, unavailable. Reform of the EU (which is not the same as EU leaders making midnight compromises) is deliberately designed to be inaccessible. The EU was created to overcome the post war concessions made to the working class at national levels and to thereby strengthen big capitalism in Europe vis a vis other global centres.
In reality, above theoretical concepts, how do these forces (uniquely) combine in Britain's Brexit?
Ok. Surely the EU is a red light? Bring it down! And if you cannot bring it down at least get your nation out of its clutches. But wait. What if a layer of the ruling class of Britain, albeit a reactionary, small business, pro-tax haven layer of would-be imperialists, starts the fight against the EU? And what if a new, serious political force arises, running nearly 4 million votes in a General Election, based wholly on racism, and which is leading this fight against the EU? Is it really a 'principle' to vote to leave the EU in that context? Is not the key priority of the British working class and its organisations to smash this new historic horror of 'little Englanders' at all costs? It is surely not, after all this, a question of the researching the extent and depth of racism or otherwise inside the working class itself. A pointless exercise. It is the fact, the revolutionary fact, of this deadly racist surge heading for leadership in society that determines what action to take. Which is the dominant danger for the British working class and for other, European and wider working classes? The rise of the new right-wing with a huge social base and deep connections with the Tories that are close to power in Britain, or voting to stay in the EU, for now, without any illusions, to break the organised racist momentum.
That was the context, the meaning and the key question of Brexit for the left in 2016.
And in 2018?
From 2016 to 2018/19 an historic political shift has meant the over-determination of the new meaning of Brexit. For the left in Britain, Brexit is now, essentially, a part of the struggle to win a radical Labour government. The racist right are still active and constantly spawning new tendrils and initiatives. But they are limited. Official racism is more loud and vicious than ever. The British Prime Minister has only one lever that she relentlessly pulls to win a future government, and that is racism. But there is another huge political force in action, first with the radicalisation of youth, second with the tremendous momentum behind Labour's 2017 Manifesto and thirdly a growing sense of the need for deep, pro-working class change.
None of these developments are irrevocable but the unity of the the working class, ex retainers and ex leavers, is essential to the cause. And in this new context it is relevant to remove as much of the EU's obstacles as possible which are deliberately set to deny any radical, pro-working class government.
Showing posts with label What does Brexit mean?. Show all posts
Showing posts with label What does Brexit mean?. Show all posts
Saturday, 16 February 2019
Thursday, 1 March 2018
Brexit and change.
Brexit (phase 2) is already creating a lot of agony, most of all for Britain's political institutions. Prime Minister May rails against the EU's latest document which, she claims, could undermine the sovereignty of Britain! Indeed, how to 'solve' Britain's poisoned part of Northern Ireland has been a century long saw. But May's Churchillian hyperbole only results in underlining the real point. The dilemma here is that the Brexit sound and fury currently vented by the Tory Party, Blair etc., just serves to mask the most critical questions for the rest of the British people. And that is the problem that has arisen since Britain's EU referendum. It has stood in as a proxy for the deep changes that are actually required to deal with the UK's failing society.
Following the February 26 speech that Labour leader Corbyn made (which focused on the need for a Customs Union with the EU) the mainstream British media interpreted Labour leader Corbyn's remarks about the EU's role in Britain's future as a political manoeuvre to break up the Tories. (See, for example, 'BBC Reality Check, Labour's Position'.) It may contribute to that end. But Corbyn's comments had a much wider and more refreshing purpose. He said;
'The EU is not the root of all our problems and leaving it will not solve all our problems. Likewise, the EU is not the source of all enlightenment and leaving it does not inevitably spell doom.'
Corbyn is not suggesting abstention from the EU argument. He has now begun to raise the issue in Parliament. And his specific recommendation in favour of a Customs Union with the EU makes no concessions to actual or potential EU regulation which might hinder or prevent key nationalisations or UK government led investments. In other words Corbyn is trying to deal with the EU from the point of view of the needs of a projected British economy; one which serves the people as a whole. Meanwhile Tory Britain rots on every front.
Right at the heart of Tory decay is PM May's alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party. The privileges and money now showered by Britain's government on one of the most backward, self-seeking, corrupt and unforgiving political formations in Europe is nothing at all to do with Brexit. It has everything to do with Tory (and ruling class) desperation to prevent an early General Election and a victory for a Corbyn-led Labour government.
Equally the Tory failures to maintain the NHS, to provide housing, to shore up welfare, to raise wages have nothing to do with Brexit as such. They are long term political/economic decisions about who should bear the burden of modern social welfare and whose living standards need to be defended and promoted, in the context of globalisation.
These simple truths are constantly covered up and muddled up by the public discussion of Brexit.
What then is the argument about Brexit?
In the 2016 referendum it was picked up in mainstream politics by the right in British society. It started from the impact of the UKIP platform, which argued that Britain lost a lot of money which could be spent on social needs because of the British payments to the EU and that hundreds of thousands of EU workers poured into Britain using services, taking jobs and cutting wages of the British residents. These ideas were predominant in the referendum campaign. Additionally they were initially reinforced by a deep sense of the failure of Britain's long-standing political leadership.
The argument about Brexit today still contains some of its previous racism and jingoism. Certainly the British far right have expanded and racist attacks remain much higher than prior to the referendum. But UKIP has collapsed. The Tory right have failed to shackle the momentum of UKIP and its 4 million voters. Their perspective for the creation of the largest tax haven on earth is currently a damp squib and their enthusiasm for a future under the tutelage of the US has been squelched by Trump. Indeed it is Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party that has created an alternative vision of an anti-establishment mainstream political force already predominant among younger voters. The more the Corbyn leadership identifies Britain's relationship to the EU in terms of the new model economy required in Britain - as he has begun in his identification of the parasitic role of the City of London - so the real meaning of the EU emerges.
Although an undertow of racist strains remain in the population and the far right use it when they can, the major arguments about Brexit in Britain are now moving towards the negative impact of capitalist globalisation and how to resist it. In that context the EU finds its natural place as a European instrument designed to promote globalisation and the interests of European based corporations and centres of wealth, in a contest with the US and Asia. And the Tories find themselves, like Blair, part of a worn out, backward looking and unsavoury British political establishment.
Following the February 26 speech that Labour leader Corbyn made (which focused on the need for a Customs Union with the EU) the mainstream British media interpreted Labour leader Corbyn's remarks about the EU's role in Britain's future as a political manoeuvre to break up the Tories. (See, for example, 'BBC Reality Check, Labour's Position'.) It may contribute to that end. But Corbyn's comments had a much wider and more refreshing purpose. He said;
'The EU is not the root of all our problems and leaving it will not solve all our problems. Likewise, the EU is not the source of all enlightenment and leaving it does not inevitably spell doom.'
Corbyn is not suggesting abstention from the EU argument. He has now begun to raise the issue in Parliament. And his specific recommendation in favour of a Customs Union with the EU makes no concessions to actual or potential EU regulation which might hinder or prevent key nationalisations or UK government led investments. In other words Corbyn is trying to deal with the EU from the point of view of the needs of a projected British economy; one which serves the people as a whole. Meanwhile Tory Britain rots on every front.
Right at the heart of Tory decay is PM May's alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party. The privileges and money now showered by Britain's government on one of the most backward, self-seeking, corrupt and unforgiving political formations in Europe is nothing at all to do with Brexit. It has everything to do with Tory (and ruling class) desperation to prevent an early General Election and a victory for a Corbyn-led Labour government.
Equally the Tory failures to maintain the NHS, to provide housing, to shore up welfare, to raise wages have nothing to do with Brexit as such. They are long term political/economic decisions about who should bear the burden of modern social welfare and whose living standards need to be defended and promoted, in the context of globalisation.
These simple truths are constantly covered up and muddled up by the public discussion of Brexit.
What then is the argument about Brexit?
In the 2016 referendum it was picked up in mainstream politics by the right in British society. It started from the impact of the UKIP platform, which argued that Britain lost a lot of money which could be spent on social needs because of the British payments to the EU and that hundreds of thousands of EU workers poured into Britain using services, taking jobs and cutting wages of the British residents. These ideas were predominant in the referendum campaign. Additionally they were initially reinforced by a deep sense of the failure of Britain's long-standing political leadership.
The argument about Brexit today still contains some of its previous racism and jingoism. Certainly the British far right have expanded and racist attacks remain much higher than prior to the referendum. But UKIP has collapsed. The Tory right have failed to shackle the momentum of UKIP and its 4 million voters. Their perspective for the creation of the largest tax haven on earth is currently a damp squib and their enthusiasm for a future under the tutelage of the US has been squelched by Trump. Indeed it is Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party that has created an alternative vision of an anti-establishment mainstream political force already predominant among younger voters. The more the Corbyn leadership identifies Britain's relationship to the EU in terms of the new model economy required in Britain - as he has begun in his identification of the parasitic role of the City of London - so the real meaning of the EU emerges.
Although an undertow of racist strains remain in the population and the far right use it when they can, the major arguments about Brexit in Britain are now moving towards the negative impact of capitalist globalisation and how to resist it. In that context the EU finds its natural place as a European instrument designed to promote globalisation and the interests of European based corporations and centres of wealth, in a contest with the US and Asia. And the Tories find themselves, like Blair, part of a worn out, backward looking and unsavoury British political establishment.
Thursday, 12 May 2016
Let's be clear about Brexit
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.
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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