Re: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: voice of the left?

[Mark Jones <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10/09/2002 14:55, Michael wrote:
> Time was when I would have concurred with this sort of analysis.

Indeed the article has worth only as an indicator of a mindset. The
argument here is between a pan-Euro social-democratic left, and
pan-European finance and corporate capital; the British inflection
presented by Michie is, as you rightly say, a form of saying 'a plague on
both your houses', but this is a position which was long ago made nonsense
by Britain's historical subjection to US imperialism. Britain cannot 'go it
alone' against either the emergent pan-European superstate (a state of
finance capital) or against the US. But in any case, the debate itself, in
its wider Euro context, is either nonsensical in its assumptions, or is
simply the jockeying for position of cynical placemen and timeservers who
want to profit from the role of mouthpiece to capital, or mouthpieces to
organised labour. The EU cannot mutate into a deregulated labour market
stripped of social welfare programmes, and nor is it obliged by (as we now
see, highly overstated) claims about allegedly superior US competitiveness
to do so. Social inequalities in Europe are already too great to stand the
strain of what Michie calls the 'scorched earth  labour market policy'.
Linguistic and other barriers make the kind of unified US-style labour
market the reformer dream of, effectively impossible. And the EU is
surrounded on all sides by still-more impoverished and dangerous
hinterlands; the US only has Mexico to worry about and that is bad enough.
For the EU to implement the kind of labour-market deregulation which
European Central Bank chief economist Otmar Issing yearns for, would entail
the creation of Festung Europa, a fortress Europe highly insulated against
external forces especially inward migration; otherwise instead of a
powerful centralised Euro-superstate emerging from these reforms, there
would be only utter internal chaos, the collapse of civil institutions and
mass disorder. The parasitism of finance capital is here transparently
obvious: they intestinally hate the social security/welfare state but to
abolish it is to invite disaster. Therefore it is surely safe to predict
that whatever people like Otmar Issing think, the welfare state will
continue and even receive renewed attention and investment, because they
simply can't do without it. Only the US can more or less do without a
welfare state, but that is because instead of a welfare state, it (and the
masses) enjoy the benefits of dollar hegemony, indebtedness with impunity,
and the right to exact taxes in kind from the rest of the world, to fund
their bread and circuses, just as ancient Rome did. Since there can be only
one hegemon, rival ie junior imperial powers/subsystems (Japan, EU) must
either collapse completely, or become open dictatorships (substituting
prisons and a total locdown 'security state' for welfare: as in fact is
already happening even in the US) or they must find other ways to guarantee
social cohesion and renewal, ie a welfare state. As the Brazil oil
producers conference has just shown, oil and gas demand is expected to rise
by up to 40 percent in the next 15 years. If this demand cannot be met,
then current living standards in the EU and US can only be maintained by
inflicting still worse devastation and chaos on Africa, Asia and the Middle
East. That is the real backdrop to this whole debate. What the oligopolists
want and must have is the militarisation of Europe; this is the nub of the
issue. More guns = less butter. But without the guns there may be no butter
at all. As Dimitrov said a long time ago, fascism is the spawn of finance
capital.

Mark





> However, it's too parochial. It takes no account of history (British or
> European) or the fact that, since 1976 (and even slightly earlier),
> Britain has been subject to US hegemony which has placed severe
> constraints on the autonomy of HMG. For someone like Michie this matters
> only when a Labour government is in office, since the Conservatives, under
> Thatcher and since, have implemented in Britain what Michie now foretells
> of eurozone membership. However, the sorry state of UK autonomy is very
> much in evidence as Blair desperately shores up his increasingly divergent
> domestic and international positions. Complaints about the "European
> elite" are well justified and necessary, but Michie and so many other
> "leftists" content to associate themselves with David Owen, advocating
> Godleyite policies resurrected from the 1970s when Owen himself would
> never have touched them (a telling symptom of Owen's US-sponsored
> opportunistic spoiler activity), miss entirely the bigger picture in which
> US hegemony runs untrammelled through a divided Europe and a pitifully
> weak Britain. The alternative economic strategy of Sam Aaronovitch, Stuart
> Holland et al., is a museum piece, a battle usefully fought then but
> hopelessly archaic now. Meanwhile there is a significant and growing body
> of opinion within the EU that would dearly love to dump the stability and
> growth pact and the current ECB decision-making structure. Moreover, to
> attribute to the EU New Labour's obsession with public private
> partnerships and the like is, again, to ignore the bigger picture -- a
> vision of the world governed by GATS, enforced by the WTO, in which
> companies are free to compete for contracts from governments acting in
> accordance with the "good governance" principles of the World Bank and its
> champions like Joe Stiglitz who, whatever his sound ideas re the IMF, is
> no friend of the left. The EU is a part of this, but can hardly claim
> exclusive authorship, since its role is to ensure European capital
> interests are served in the inter-imperialist carve-up to be accomplished
> with the US.
>
> BTW, the New Europe outfit headed by Owen, who is publishing Michie's
> pamphlet, has an advisory council on which sits "Lord Sainsbury of Preston
> Candover KG". You will note Michie's own professional title: Sainsbury
> chair of management at Birkbeck, University of London. Also there is
> Christopher Leaver, who retired in 1999 from J Sainsbury plc as Director
> of Corporate Communications after 20 years with the Company.
>
> Another "Lord" Sainsbury, David, is a funder of New Labour and a
> government minister for technology. He had previously funded Owen's Social
> Democratic Party, prior to the SDP's migration to New Labour.