Swedish communists hail Brexit, call for Svexit
Fight Back News Service is circulating the following editorial from the June 29 issue of Proletarian, the newspaper of the Communist Party, Sweden. Long live Brexit – now comes Svexit
To the misfortune of the EU elite the British people voted for a withdrawal from the European Union.
The stock markets of finance capital fell, the Brussels bureaucrats are tearing their hair out over the subjects' disobedience and David Cameron, who made the fateful choice to let the people be heard has now fallen on his own grip and is forced to resign.
Opponents of EU in all countries should rejoice when the ruling classes of the European Union are shaken in its foundations. What will happen in the coming weeks is difficult to predict. How EU elite will deal with the current situation even themselves they do not know.
However, what is clear is that the gap between the elites and the people is enormous, as is the people’s contempt of the elites.
The liberals and the EU elites contempt for the people have an obedient agitator in Swedish Liberal MP Birgitta Ohlsson who believes that David Cameron ”opened Pandora's box when he made the announcement that a referendum would be held”.
Pandora's box contained according to the Greek ancient mythology all the world's woes, accidents, combats and diseases. To let the people be heard is, according to Ohlsson, the same as placing this misery in the world.
The construction of the EU superpower is too important. There are too many major political and economic values (read profits) at stake to take the risk that the people will put a spoke in the wheel. Birgitta Ohlsson is a master of draping her support for big power politics in democratic formalwear – whether it is bombing Iraq or defending the power in Washington or Brussels – but now the Empress is naked with here popular discontent in the open.
Adjacent to Brexit Swedish state television SVT did an opinion poll on the on EU in Sweden. It turned out that more than half of Swedes would vote for a continued EU membership if it were a referendum today and over 30 percent would vote for Svexit.
Swedish state television chose to use these figures to say that there is a strong support for EU among the Swedish people. SVT says that the 52 percent who want to remain in the EU is a ”strong support”, while at the same the tv channel called the British vote, 52 percent for Brexit, for a marginal victory that divide Britain. Media's pro-EU propaganda is indeed deplorable.
The poll should rather be interpreted as the opposite.
The fact that nearly a third of the Swedes would vote for secession from EU if there were a referendum today is a sign of strength. Given the fact that the whole economic, political and media elite is united behind the EU. Given the fact that we are daily fed with biased EU positive propaganda. Given the fact that no parliamentary party is actively pushing the issue of Sweden to leave the EU.
Just over half of the Swedes say they would vote to continue our membership. After over 20 years of membership in EU and with the massive propaganda this is nothing more than a failure for the European elite.
Unfortunately the Left Party and its chairman Jonas Sjöstedt, which previously were a major force in the Swedish opposition against EU, have choosen not to support Svexit. After the victory of Brexit Sjöstedt instead once again demands that the Swedish EU membership should be renegotiated.
Sjöstedt’s betrayal of Svexit weakens the struggle for a Swedish exit of EU and leaves the matter in the hands of extreme right party Sweden Democrates (SD).
All opponents of EU in and around the Left has to raise their voices and protest against the act of Sjöstedt and the Left Party which could become an historic betrayal of the Swedish resistance to EU.
Unlike in many other European countries – not least in Britain – the resistance against EU in Sweden has from the beginning been an issue for the left and has had a clear anti-capitalist profile. Long live Brexit – now comes Svexit. The opposition against EU has continually state that the European Union is an association for the big capital. Because of that the bourgeois nationalist anti-European sentiment has been marginalized.
But when former critics and opponents of EU abandon the fight against the union – and are demanding renegotiation of the Swedish EU membership, which would reaffirm and cement the membership rather than dissolve it – this at the same time means giving the extreme right Sweden Democrats (SD) an opportunity to increase its support.
In the parliament SD is therefore taking over the resistance against EU and they are filling it with its bourgeois nationalist and racist content, something that the media happily are stoking.
This does not mean that the traditional Swedish opposition to EU should step back because of fear of being confused with SD.
On the contrary, we must be even clearer in our anti-capitalist and internationalist opposition to the EU. Our struggle for Sweden to leave the EU is not a battle to return to no past, it is a decisive battle for the future.
The fight for Svexit is obviously a national issue, a struggle for national independence. But this is not the whole truth, and for a revolutionary workers party as the Communist Party this is just one side of things.
The fight for Svexit is not the least a question of class struggle. There is a revolutionary potential in the resistance against EU.
When the ruling class in Europe pawn their honour and glory to a project that every day becomes more evident in its hostility against the people, this is undermining the bourgeoisie's grip over the working class and the majority of the people.
When the establishments description of reality is increasingly at odds with the reality that people face outside the EU sanctioned metropolises, then there are openings for a policy that wants something else.
Long live Brexit – now comes Svexit!