> On Feb 27, 2025, at 01:50, Ed George via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> (This is a piece of thinking out loud.)
Thanks for the insightful post. I'm thinking out loud, too.
>
> ...
> I
>
...
> Whatever might happen in US politics in coming years, there seems no going
> back on this. This would represent a "Zeitenwende" of some significance.
We did go back once already, didn't we? Trump refused to answer Merkel's
question whether the US would defend Europe from attack and, a few years later,
Biden's US led the NATO coalition to support Ukraine. Why couldn't there be
many years of back and forth?
>
...
> II
>
> Up to now the institutional European politics of the current epoch has been
> structured through three essential interlocking paradigms: a national
> parliamentary paradigm, expressed through national (and sub-national)
> parliamentary institutions (including political parties); a social-economic
> paradigm, expressed through pan-European institutions (principally those
> pertaining to the EU); and a global geo-military paradigm, expressed largely
> through the institutions of NATO. The shift in US governmental policy, if
> followed through, will compress this structuring, by pushing the different
> paradigms towards the space defined by the middle, European one.
>
>
...
>
> There is a logic here that, once unleashed, the mainstream of bourgeois
> political forces within European Union states, and also within states with an
> EU sphere of influence, will find very difficult to resist. [2]
>
As historic forces push to integrate European nation states, we have seen
countervailing forces leading to their dissolution into regions such as Catalan
and smaller nation-states such as Scotland. Would a Wallonia and a Flanders in
the EU make more sense than a Belgium? How do you see this playing out? Does
such processes help or retard European integration?
...
>
> VI
>
> In the above ways, because both immigrants and non-"ethnic" populations can
> be perceived as "other", and consequently irredeemably uncivilised and
> uncivilisable, they can also be projected as innately non-European and
> anti-European. The way is therefore open to the imagining of the new
> monetarily, fiscally and militarily unified Europe as a white, Christian
> *fortress* Europe.
The sunsetting of the British Empire resulted in two world wars and the deaths
of more than a hundred-million people. Arguably it led to two of the worst
genocides in human history outside of the Americas.
The Armenian Genocide may be particularly relevant to this point as it resulted
from the invention of the Turkish people (to re-purpose Shlomo Sand's "The
Invention of the Jewish People"). Halil Karaveli's book, “Why Turkey is
Authoritarian: From Atatürk to Erdoğan,” describes the crises occurring in the
Ottoman Empire during its collapse and the resulting need by a cosmopolitan
ruling class to forge a Turkish nationality that would include people from
foreign places such as the Balkans as "Turks" and exclude others native to the
boundaries of the Turkish nation-state like Armenians, who were deemed to be
not Turks.
The forging of nations often a bloody and genocidal affair, and current
generations face such a threat.
>
>
> VII
>
> Overarching these developments are two global political processes of
> transcendental significance.
>
...
>
> If this conjecture is correct, then this is the real content of the political
> developments we are currently witnessing. What the current United States
> administration is doing appears to be a housekeeping operation: it clearly
> sees the long-term threat to its own position vis-à-vis global markets and
> resources as coming from China, and is streamlining and reordering its
> alliances and affairs accordingly. In short, it is preparing for World War
> Three.
It's hard to discern what the US presidential administration is doing. So much
reality television, government-slashing theater, and a new colonial bluster by
someone too ignorant to understand that we export capital to countries rather
than occupy them with armies these days. When we do invade and occupy lands
it's in part to transfer public funds to the US war industry or to achieve some
other global goal for key special interests like fossil capital. Trump's
beliefs are up for sale and changeable: He is always ready to redo or cancel a
performance.
>
>
> VIII
>
> To say that the European left stands disarmed in the face of all these
> developments would be something of an understatement.
>
>
...
>
> * Post-stalinist campism. Certain political currents, either emerging from
> the Communist Parties, or influenced by them, maintain an outlook in which
> the world is divided up into an imperialist camp and an anti-imperialist one.
> The former is identified as the United States, and the latter by any existing
> state or regime whose geopolitical or domestic interests at any moment appear
> to conflict with those of the US (Iran, India, Assad, Maduro, Russia, China).
> This political outlook, through its Stalinist heritage, has a certain
> purchase within the left social democratic currents referenced above.
This is not the case with several MLists on marxmail. I'm not sure that this is
a heritage thing at all. I think we find similar campist views among
Trotskyists and post-Trotskyists.
>
> * The leninist left. The bulk of these groups are of trotskyist origin, which
> ostensibly provides them with a direct link with the revolutionary heritage
> of 1917, but they are in the main deranged, tiny, cults whose only
> contribution to socialist theory is to give it a bad name. (Included within
> this category are groups like the British SWP and Lutte Ouvrière.)
>
> *Red-brown "diagonalists". Groups like the British Workers Party (Galloway)
> and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht combine ostensibly socialist economic
> politics, campist geopolitics and anti-immigrationism (as well as a certain
> input from alt-right conspiracyism, anti-vaxxism, etc.). Although such groups
> occupy the more exotic reaches of political discourse they are, like the
> far-right (with which they have a geat deal in common) also in a position to
> benefit from the chaos of political ideas the present conjuncture is throwing
> up (witness the recent performance of the BSW in Germany).
I thought BSW recently underperformed with Die Linke over-performing in the
recent elections.
...
>
>
> IX
>
> We need a new left, and while this is not the place to present a screed of
> demands to include in a political platform, it does appear to me necessary,
> given the current configuration of forces and events, to emphasise that any
> progressive movement worth the name would include in its basis the following
> two positions.
I'd start with political organization. How well has the Leninist model served
the left? And why wasn't Lenin a Leninist when in power? Do we want a cadre
organization in the Leninist mold or a general membership organization with a
devoted subset of leaders? In 1971, perhaps near its zenith of size and
influence, the US SWP had about 80 cadre in Philadelphia. Today, the DSA has
1800 members in Portland, Oregon. Of that about 100-150 show up for meetings
and are active - like cadre but part of an organization where people actually
have lives.
I don't know about the DSA, but the SWP gave members the illusion of membership
control. The organization's division of labor, however, ensconced certain
individuals at the top of the hierarchy. A few were able to curate the bodies
they reported to and fashioned a "democratic centralist" organization that
functioned as a top-down controlled one.
>
> 1 Against militarism
>
> The existing European order has neither the right nor the capability to bring
> justice or end oppression through military means. In the case of Ukraine, the
> invasion of Russia, insofar as it represented a violation of Ukrainian
> political independence, i.e. its right to self-determination, was unjust.
> This remains the case independently of any judgement of the character or
> actions of the current Ukrainian state or government. Yet it was always the
> case (as the current situation now shows) that both European and US
> imperialism neither wanted nor were capable of delivering justice for
> Ukraine. While Ukraine has every right to confront militarily the invasion,
> and to demand whatever aid from outside that it wishes, it is incumbent on
> socialists in the imperialist countries to insist that their own governments
> abstain from any military intervention -- including the supply of weapons --
> in any sphere.
Defend Ukrainian workers in words while we agitate in the US and Europe to deny
them defensive weapons against an invader. What is to be gained by such a
policy? Why not international working class solidarity instead?
> A peace that is bought with imperialist power will never anywhere turn out to
> be a just or lasting peace
> and it is the duty of socialists everywhere to disabuse the notion of the
> possibility of peace and justice emanating from the barrels of the
> imperialists' guns. Socialists must oppose NATO, and all its doings. They
> must also oppose the setting up any pan-European defence force.
I expect that Polish, Baltic, and other working people will reasonably ask how
they are to defend themselves from invaders. It might be good to lead what is
to be supported before what is to be opposed.
>
> *Not a person, not a penny for the imperialist system. Not a person, not a
> penny for imperialist war.*
>
>
> 2 For the free movement of peoples
>
> The only beneficiary of control over immigration into Europe is European
> capital. It is not the immigrant who is responsible for the assault on
> ordinary people's living standards, it is the states that allocate resources
> who do this; it is not the immigrant who drives down workers' wages, it is
> the capitalist firms that pay them that do this. And while there is no
> economic argument in favour of controls on immigration, there is no
> "civilisational" one either. There are no races, only racism, and the
> continent that funded its own Enlightenment on the proceeds of the mass
> chattel enslavement of black bodies, who colonised the the known world in the
> name of progress, and who gave the world Mussolini, Franco, Hitler and the
> Holocaust, does not sit in a place from which it can lecture the rest of the
> world on "civilisation". The earth belongs to the whole of humanity, and no
> person either is or can be, for reason of birthright, illegal.
Point 2 is related to climate justice: A point 3 might cover that and present a
program to fight fossil capital and end the record-level extraction and burning
of fossil fuels. A climate justice movement would demand make fossil capital
pay for the environmental destruction it has caused.
thanks, Mark
>
> *Open the borders: for equal rights everywhere, and for all.*
>
>
> ***
>
> Notes
>
> [1] Hegsworth was speaking at a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group
> in Brussels on 12 February. His speech can be seen here:
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcxt2-JQMTE> (the speech begins at 39:45).
> Vance was speaking at the 61st Munich Security Conference two days later; his
> speech is here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCOsgfINdKg>. Trump’s
> reported conversation took place on 12 February, at some point in the day
> after Hegsworth’s speech. The Saudi Arabia meeting took place on 18 February.
>
> [2] The position of the UK is sui generis in this. At the time of writing, it
> seems as if the UK government is doing all that it can to placate the current
> US administration.
>
> [3] It is noteworthy that in the immediately recent past in the British
> parliament the loudest calls for an increase in the UK military budget had
> been coming from the obsessively Europhilic Liberal Democrats.
>
> [4] In this respect, it is an interesting exercise to speculate on what the
> fate of Corbynite Labour government in Britain would have been.
>
>
>
>
>
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