Re: [A-List] European Party

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Néstor wrote:

The EU must, first and foremost, make sure it has a tame Left wing
within its 'old' borders in order to succesfully incorporate the
newly acquired subservient masses of the East.  If I am not wrong,
this is exactly what the German bourgeoisie (that is, the EU's
locomotive engineer) learnt within the borders of Germany.

Maybe more knowledgeable people can illustrate.  But yes, I believe
that Mark's proposition was urgent, prophetic and _full of sense_.

------

This is very much the lesson of an illuminating chapter by  Hans-Jurgen
Bieling and Thorsten Schulten in "A Ruined Fortress? Neoliberal Hegemony and
Transformation in Europe" edited by Alan Cafruny and Magnus Ryner (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2003). The authors detail the co-optation of the European
labour movement by the institutions of the EU, very much based on the German
model, which itself has been modified to impose greater discipline upon
German labour in a context of the hanging threat of capital flight -- even
more potent with the recent expansion of the EU. This "new corporatism", in
one way, represents a rehabilitation, if not something of a renaissance, of
organised labour in Europe during the 1990s, when social democratic parties
made a comeback electorally speaking. But the dilution of traditional social
democratic goals and the interests of monopoly capital in the compliance and
active cooperation of organised labour in production make it a rather
different scenario than that of the 1970s.

The book itself offers a very informative synopsis of the present dilemma
facing Europe. Without necessarily being written for a revolutionary
audience, there is sufficiently worthwhile analysis to make it
recommendable. See

http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0742511413

In the year before his death Mark was increasingly agitated about the need
for a new party. We had several discussions to this effect. Sadly, a
conference to be held in London in May 2003 that he wanted to organise could
not take place. But the prophetic nature of his proposition has certainly
been vindicated by this development. I'm not aware of any British group
affiliating to this as yet, and there may be difficulties in this respect,
given Britain's status as the least European European country, and the
British left's traditional acceptance of British state hegemony. The latest
manifestation of this is George Galloway's "Respect Coalition", which
somehow imagines that the British state apparatus can be captured and tamed.
Having someone like Mark around at least offered hope that this sort of
doomed reformism would not capture and tame any emergent movement. But such
is the conflation of genuine opposition to neoliberal policies (as enshrined
in the monetarist European Central Bank & Maastricht Treaty) and social
chauvinism (spanning left, centre and right), and always to the benefit of
the latter at the expense of the former, that clarity with respect to Europe
is sorely missing in much of the "British" left. Indeed it suffers from an
old problem, which is the chauvinist's delusion that problems "over there"
are so much more pressing than problems here. Thus, to name one egregious
and commonplace example, the idea that eurozone membership would represent a
"loss of sovereignty" and a surrender of democracy to unelected bankers. The
fact that this has been accomplished already, and arguably since the first
post-1945 sterling crisis, seems to have passed many by.

Michael Keaney