For a capitalist United States of Europe? A reply to Roy Wall

Comment on socialistresistance.org, 28 July 2012

A comment by Alan in the thread under “For a Capitalist United States of Europe” on socialistresistance.org.

The publication's own web text.

Editor's note. Roy Wall reviewed Alan's pamphlet Behind the EU Crisis (2012) on the Socialist Resistance site under the title “For a Capitalist United States of Europe”. Alan had asked him to, knowing, as Roy put it, that he was “fundamentally opposed” to its analysis. Roy argued that European integration is driven by economic need, that the nation state is a brake on development, and that a single federal European state, able to compete with the USA, China and India, would be progressive. This reply was posted under the review. It follows their earlier exchange, Against a European super-state.

A few points on Roy’s critique:

• Roy argues, essentially, for a reorganization of European capital - in the form of a capitalist united states of Euro - in order to compete more effectively with the USA, China and India. This, he says, would be politically and socially progressive and should be supported by revolutionaries! This, in my view is a fundamentally mistaken approach and a fundamentally mistaken conclusion. In fact is lacks class analysis and even coincides with the objectives of the EU elites themselves.

The EU elites, of course, do have a class analysis. They have constructed the EU as a mechanism to more effectively exploit the European working class, not only by creating the free movement of capital in a neo-liberal framework, but by destroying the gains made by the working class in the post war period including (in fact in particular) the welfare state. This makes the EU an anti-working class project which revolutionaries cannot and should not support.

• I am not against standing for the European Parliament. I supported the LCR when it stood and won positions and I was a part of the Respect team running the election intervention in 2004.

• Nor am I against putting demands on the European institutions, though there are limitations in putting demands on institutions which lack the power to implement them even if the argument was won within them. In fact the action programme at the end of my pamphlet contains demands on the EU as well as demands on the member states.

• Roy argues that the demand for the nationalisation under workers’ or popular control is ultra-left in the current period! I strongly disagree on this. When the crisis broke in 2008 and a series of banks were nationalised with control left in private hands and massive bonuses still being paid this issue came right to the fore. The left had a golden opportunity to discuss nationalisation (and not just of the banks, as a main stream issue and popularise the demands of workers’ or popular control but failed to rise to it. In fact without raising the issue of control it is difficult to defend and advocate nationalisation.

• Roy argues that the EU is a bulwark against war in Europe! He even argues that: “A breakup of the EU and Eurozone, if it happens, will place European war on the agenda again.” This, in my view, this buys directly into the illusions peddled by the architects of the Common Market in the 1950s. The idea that trading relations between capitalist nations, or treaties between them, or even federal arrangements, prevents wars between them not only defies historical fact but seriously misunderstands what drive capitalism to war.

Imperialist expansion is driven by economic forces which require ever-expanding markets and opportunities for investments as individual imperialist states compete for hegemony. Ernest Mandel in his book The Meaning of the Second World War (1986) puts it this way: ‘In the final analysis imperialist expansion (and therefore war) expresses an insatiable thirst for surplus value, its production and realisation – the snowball dynamic of capital accumulation.’

It was this drive which shaped the development of the EU after the Single European Act of 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty on 1991. Such a drive - to generate far greater profits than the home market can yield - is in the nature of every imperialist country. The EU, moreover, is an imperialist (and expansionist) project with competing imperialist states inside it - many of which retain powerful interests from their colonial past. The idea, therefore, that imperialist powers within the EU have given up these ambitions, or are no longer imperialist powers, or are likely to become a single imperialist power, is a dangerous mistake. The British ruling class, for example, remains deeply divided between its role in the EU and its world role as an imperialist power. These forces could blow the EU apart at any time if conflicts arose.

In any case if the EU is such a force for peace it might also be asked as to how come its more powerful member states, sometimes with the support of the EU itself (or NATO acting with EU approval) have been so keen to wage war, and commit mass murder, on counties outside of the EU – Iraq and Afghanistan are obvious examples. In the ex-Yugoslavia they were prepared to do wage war in a region which they were already planning to incorporate into the EU itself.