Brexit has shown up the left as having completely surrendered all links to reality. There are leftists defending the not only the EU as a political structure but the ideas of free trade and liberalisation! Brexit should be supported absolutely by any leftist still capable of envisioning a world without capitalism.
Benefits of the EU
The claims that Britain has benefited significantly from EU membership is not supported by evidence. A recent study showed that since 1973 there has been no improvement in the rapidity of economic growth relative to growth in the preceding years. They also show that GDP growth has grown slower since the incorporation of the UK into the EU. There is in fact no evidence that joining the EU has conferred any economic benefit to the UK, political benefit though, is another story.
Additionally the formation of the single market had little positive effect for the UK or EU at large. When assessed on the standard metrics of bourgeois economic analysis, that of GDP and productivity, there is no suggestion from the data to back up claims of the single market’s positive effects on European economies. When GDP per Hour and GDP per capita of the EU15 are expressed as a % of those of the US, we can see that after the creation of the single market in 1992, there has been no significant increase the GDP per capita metric and a significant decline in the GDP per hour metric. Also since single market membership, the share of UK export goods received by the EU has actually fallen from roughly 60% at its inception, to less than 50% in 2014. (IMF direction of trade statistics, http://data.imf.org/?sk=9D6028D4-F14A-464C-A2F2-59B2CD424B85).
The evidence shows that there has been little to no national economic advantage for the UK in being a member of the EU in relation to the trend of economic growth before membership and that UK exportations are much less reliant on EU business than before and that exports to the EU are almost at the same % of total exports as they were before the creation of the EU.
What has been occurring is a deliberate overstatement of the economic benefits of the EU, or rather a conflation of the benefit the EU’s neo-liberal policies have had for the financial capitalists with the national-economic interest. As the evidence above suggests, there has been little to no national-economic benefit for Britain. Yet the financial class have received enormous economic benefits from the massive institutionalised transfer of wealth from the working masses to the idle capitalist class. The evidence for his is readily available in the form of income inequality data over the last few decades.
The EU bloc has also provided a means to allow EU capitalists to compete on the imperialist world stage with the Americans and other large industrial entities. The imposition of tariffs on “third countries” has created a captured internal European market that makes it unprofitable to import finished products from abroad, allowing EU industry to remain profitable and competitive relative to the industries of the third countries.
The left’s view of the EU and Brexit
This overstatement of benefits of the EU for the masses has been working; the contemporary left has capitulated completely to the ideas of neo-liberalism and the EU’s own idea of itself.
The modern social democratic left have instead of seeing Brexit as a once in a lifetime opportunity to give neo-liberalism a good kicking and to present a social-democratic alternative, have been clinging for dear life to a decaying, moribund system. The self-described left have taken it upon themselves to defend free trade and the single market. They are incapable or rather unwilling to acknowledge that the masses voted to leave to throw a spanner in the neo-liberal globalist works because it is a system not working for us and a change, any change is better than our current situation.
The left cling to ideas that the EU is a guarantor of labour, rights, human rights, free speech, that free trade brings prosperity and that national sovereignty is irrelevant in a globalised world that are objectively incorrect, the EU is a capitalist bloc intent of serving only their own interests. A principle maxim of the EU’s single market is the removal of checks on capital flows, financial markets and the privatisation of state assets and natural monopolies, all of which obviously are of benefit to Europe’s capitalist class. As for any meager benefits that the working class gain from the EU, they are purely accidental. One often repeated example is free movement; workers are able to live, work and travel anywhere in the EU. However in reality this benefits only the capitalists of Western Europe through the recruitment of workers from the peripheral countries they are able to undercut wages and working conditions of domestic workers and chronically suppress wages through a continent wide army of reserve labour. The arrangement additionally confers little or no benefit to the peripheral countries as their labour force is sapped and without tariffs, their markets are flooded with the cheap mass produced products of western transnational companies that their domestic industry cannot compete with.
Labour, the EU and Brexit
The mainstream Guardian-reading left’s hysterics are a result of a poor understanding of capitalist economics and the nature of the EU. Its original roots as an anti-socialist project to counter the influence of the Soviet Union are forgotten and its current role of imposing neo-liberalism on the European masses is ignored. The left are suffering from an absolute lack of hope (in the Bloch’s sense of the word), the old school social-democrats would have seen Brexit as once in a life time opportunity to break with the dominating institutions of neo-liberalism that have conferred a great immiseration on the working class. It provides a chance to turn the tide of the class war and reverse the gains of the bourgeoisie have had at our expense since the 80’s.
The labour party leadership seem to be conforming to this old-school social-democratic approach and many on the more radical left are praising this approach. Yet it is far from a radical approach, what the labour leadership is proposing is simply a return the pre neo-liberal economic consensus. What is needed is a much more radical line of full socialist transformation of society. Labour’s approach however should not be thrown out; it can be used to facilitate a move towards the realisation of socialism in the truest sense of the word.
Socialism
In Britain the prevailing conditions do not appear to allow for an October or Chinese style socialist revolution, a different route is required that takes account of the social and economic conditions of the time. In short, Labour’s economic programme involves re-nationalisation of a number of nationally important sections of our Industry; removal of the anti-trade union laws imposed by the Tories and New Labour; placement of workers on boards of directors; creation of a national investment bank and provisions to fund workers applications to take over management of workplaces. This is all standard social-democratic policy but cannot be achieved inside the EU with their anti-state aid laws. This is why a hard Brexit combined with a labour government is nothing to fear for us, the British working class. It may cause short term disruption but in the long term will be of great benefit for the masses.
Labour’s economic programme, is not however enough, it is not a full socialist program, despite its obvious benefits for the working class. It leaves the bourgeoisie ultimately still in a position of power over the workers in the majority of work places, still leaves in place the our limited form of parliamentary democracy that the bourgeoisie can manipulate and ultimately does not challenge the basis of the capitalist system, specifically commodity production and wage slavery. In short, the benefits of labour’s programme are a fraction of what they could be if we only challenged the basic premises of the capitalist system and the concessions won will be short lived unless there is a mass extra-parliamentary movement of workers ready to defend our gains and to win greater gains.
The radical and Marxist left should be preparing for this situation. We need to plan for the movement of power from parliament towards mass workers organisations. The unions are obvious candidates to be transformed into the mass organisations of working class power. The specifics of exactly what needs to be done is a matter for another article. However a principle concern to mention is the need for a programme of mass political-economic education. Union membership is in the millions in Britain, enough to form a significant instance of working-class countervailing power. Yet the vast majority of the membership is passive, if combined with a strong programme of political-economic education the membership would increase in class consciousness and could generate a large quantity of working class leaders to counter the power of the entrenched class-collaborationist professional leadership.
Marx in the Carparx 