"In our view, the fact that it was reactionary forces who pushed through Brexit can only mean one thing: that the counterweight, the political and social Left, did not do its job. In other words, the Left did not explain that the EU is a structurally neoliberal, anti-democratic and imperialist body. It did not explain that the EU is coordinating the application of austerity policies, at the same time as having spent decades methodically building up a ‘fortress Europe’, closing its borders to migrants and refugees and transforming the Mediterranean into a watery grave for tens of thousands of people.
...
Brexit adds a new dimension to the process that has been underway since the first phase of the 2008 capitalist crisis. Opposition to the EU very clearly establishes the strategic question of the struggle for political and ideological hegemony in Europe today. To put that another way, the choice today is not between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ EU, between one or another version of the Eurozone – as the bankrupt European ideology continues to claim – but between a Left or Right-wing fight against the EU. We can say without any exaggeration that our country [Greece] has acquired the most advanced experience of this question, and indeed paid a costly price for that. In Greece the EU unambiguously showed its true face, casting aside its trappings – mere rags – of democracy and its so-called ‘European values’. This means that for activist-Left and anti-memorandum forces – particularly in the post-Brexit period – our objective can be nothing less than Grexit, leaving the EU by referendum.
Our objective has to be a dissolution of the EU, in such a way that a new project emerges on this monster’s ruins – a project of cooperation and convergence of the European peoples on the path to social progress and socialism.
...
Mélenchon’s other reference point explaining the development of his position is Greece. The lesson he drew from Tsipras and his government’s capitulation is that any confrontation with the EU has no prospect of success unless it has a ‘Plan B’ including the option of leaving the Eurozone and EU. Upon his and Oskar Lafontaine’s initiative two meetings in Paris and Madrid launched this debate, with the participation of personalities and forces mostly coming from the European revolutionary Left.
The crisis strikes Europe at its centre
Thus the second and last conclusion is that the epicentre of the crisis has now been displaced from the countries of the periphery – the ‘weak links’ in recent years – toward the countries at the centre of Europe. The accentuation of the tensions between social classes, the blows to the construction of European unity and the crisis in the legitimacy of the European ruling classes’ strategic plan are opening up new possibilities for rising intervention. In Britain this phenomenon took on the trappings of a revolt at the ballot box, in favour of Brexit. In France – fittingly, given its revolutionary tradition – it has taken the form of an uprising by workers and youth; the first wide-scale social conflict that any major European country has experienced since the start of the decade.
This double breach also defines the challenge that the Left – and more particularly the forces waging the anti-memorandum struggle in our own country [Greece] – has to face. The developments at the very heart of Europe are strengthening and preparing the terrain for the counter-offensive, after the disaster the Greek people was led into through the infamous legacy of Tsipras and Syriza. That is the double message sent by the British ballot boxes and the town squares of France: that the time for mourning and tears is reaching its end, and a new cycle is beginning.
In honour of Brexit I will end with the lines everyone knows by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English poet and revolutionary, Hellenophile and close friend of Lord Byron. These were the last lines of a poem he composed the day after the 1819 Peterloo massacre, when the forces of order massacred the workers who had rallied to demand the right to vote: ‘We are many – they are few’."
Costi Rogozanu
Da, ca stangist din est, nu prea vad treburile asa de simplu. Mai ales ca niciodata in materiale de genul asta nu se continua cu scenariul autohton, de parca dupa ce iesi totul se aranjeaza de la sine.
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu