Glasgow, Scotland – Donald Trump visited Scotland this weekend as part of his four-day trip to Britain. Trumps visit comes at a politically uncertain time, with Britain still in the process of negotiating exit terms with the European Union. With Brexit in mind, British Prime Minister Theresa May is keen to strengthen the U.S.-UK alliance, which the ruling class in Britain commonly refers to as the ‘special relationship.’ However, May’s Tory government is increasingly divided, with several of her cabinet resigning over the past week. The ‘Brexiteers’ who have resigned, including the Secretary of State Boris Johnson and David Davis, citing what they see as a ‘soft’ Brexit. In this backdrop, May will be keen to secure a trade agreement with the U.S. and cement Britain’s position as a junior partner to U.S. imperialism.

In Scotland Scottish National Party (SNP) leader and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has made her disapproval of Trump plain in the past and it appears will be keeping her distance during this visit. Instead of meeting with Trump, she helped to lead Glasgow's massive Pride march of 5000 people this weekend. The SNP’s depute leader, Keith Brown, before Trump’s visit said, “Scotland today stands united – with people from all backgrounds and all nations – against Donald Trump. We will send a message to Donald Trump that Scotland rejects the abhorrent treatment of little children on the U.S. -Mexican border. Scotland opposes his attempt to wreck the Paris Climate Agreement and his vilification of Muslims. We also oppose his barbaric language and treatment of women. Our message will be clear: Scotland rejects Trump’s politics of division and hatred and we stand with our friends in the U.S. who oppose him.”

As a result of Trumps visit, protests were held across Scotland including in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeenshire. In Glasgow’s George Square over 3000 protesters held up banners with messages against Trumps policies including, “Give the weans [children] Irn Bru [a famous Scottish soft drink] not iron cages” as well as many other inventive signs urging Trump to “Get tae fuck.” The crowd consisted of people from all walks of life, with the overwhelming majority there to protest against Trump. Many Scots in attendance were in a jovial mood with many people frequently using the colorful term “bawbag” to describe Trump.

#GlasgowScotland #Glasgow #AntiwarMovement #Brexit #AntiTrump #scotland #ScottishNationalPartySNP

The RMT, which has more than 80,000 members in many sectors of the transport industry, has long held a position against the European Union, and in the recent referendum they campaigned to leave the E.U. Rather than using the term ‘Brexit’, they used the term ‘Lexit’, meaning they advocated leaving the E.U. for left wing reasons, not the right wing reasons that were raised by some leaders of the Brexit campaign.

Hoyle explains their position in this interview.

If the subtitles don't appear by default, click ‘CC’ on the YouTube video for subtitles.

#DurbanSouthAfrica #Durban #EuropeanUnion #Brexit #Lexit

Farage, who recently resigned as UK Independence Party leader, and some of the other racist Leave campaigners, including former London Mayor Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party, stirred up hatred against immigrants in general, and Muslim refugees in particular. And the media dutifully ate it up, magnifying the racist voices and ignoring the many anti-racist worker organizations, trade unions, and community groups that supported Britain’s exit from the EU on progressive grounds.

By doing so, the media stoked the flames of national chauvinism and distracted from the class content of the anti-EU sentiment that had already reached a boiling point among British workers well before the Farage and Johnson circus stormed Britain on their anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim crusade.

The situation has only been exacerbated by the fact that the Labour Party, including its embattled leader, Jeremy Corbyn, abandoned Britain’s working class and ceded the debate for leaving the EU to reactionary forces by campaigning to remain in the EU contrary to the clear interests of the British working class. If Corbyn, an extraordinarily progressive figure in modern Labour Party politics, had hoped that campaigning to remain in the EU would buy him the support of more conservative Labour leaders who otherwise oppose his leadership, he now knows he was sorely mistaken. Corbyn unfortunately lost a no confidence vote by a margin of 172 to 40 among his fellow Labour lawmakers following the vote to exit the EU, according to the New York Times.

The media, through its collusion with the likes of Farage and Johnson, is responsible for the increased incidents of racist attacks in Britain, including the shocking assassination of Jo Cox, a Labour member of parliament (MP) who, despite her support for imperialist intervention in Syria, vocally supported immigration. It is no surprise in this context that many Black, Asian and Muslim voters cast their ballot to remain in the EU out of fear that a vote to exit was a vote for a racist, anti-immigrant backlash against their communities.

By framing the vote as a referendum on immigration and dividing the working class anti-austerity vote, the media served the interests of the majority of British capitalists who wished to remain in the EU. According to polling by the Confederation of British Industry, it almost worked.

While all of this shows the need to shift the struggle to the capitalists in their own country, none of it negates the fact that many British workers left the EU because they rejected the continuance of austerity. And none of it negates the fact that in voting to leave, British workers are weakening the EU.

Weakening the imperialist European Union is objectively progressive

Britain is an imperialist country and historic colonial power whose empire once extended to, and exploited, almost one-quarter of the world’s population and one-quarter of the earth’s total land mass, according to Al Jazeera. The European Union is a collection of imperialist countries and historic colonial powers whose empires, kingdoms, and republics once extended to, and exploited, the whole world over with the rare exception of a few countries such as Ethiopia, according to information from Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire.

A 2012 report by the European Commission identified German, Italian, English, French and Spanish as the dominant languages of the EU. Add to this Portuguese and Dutch and it becomes a veritable Who’s Who of languages for colonizers and slave traders. The imperialist character of the individual EU member states is strengthened by the European Union, not weakened by it.

The EU compels austerity against its own member states, including smaller nation-states such as Ireland and Greece, as French and German capital, particularly German, seek hegemony within the Union. The EU has also proved itself a force for imperialist war, not peace. It has avoided another ‘Great War’ following World War II and instead has helped ensure that the imperialist powers making up the EU consistently point their guns at their former colonies instead of at each other.

Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom (among other EU member states) have all remained in NATO throughout the history of the EU. All of these countries participated in the NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, according to BBC News. Many participated in the invasion of Iraq and continue to support intervention in countries such as Libya and Syria.

Breaking up this united imperialist front, which provides little except austerity for workers at home and war and occupation for workers in the oppressed countries that EU countries formerly colonized, is objectively progressive. There is no evidence of any child living in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, or Iran losing sleep over Britain’s exit from the EU. A united Europe with guns pointed at these children is the main danger the oppressed nations face from the various European imperialist powers.

There is evidence that the courage of Britain’s working class in turning its back on austerity is having positive anti-imperialist ripple effects throughout the EU. The most obvious is that it has reignited the possibility of an exit from the EU by other member states, which would further weaken imperialist unity in Europe. The Washington Post identifies Greece, Sweden, Hungary, Netherlands, Denmark and France as additional countries where referendums to exit the EU are now most likely to gain new momentum.

As in Britain, the anti-EU sentiment in these countries is full of contradictions and there is a right-left divide as to the rationale for the exit with a strong progressive sentiment against austerity, especially in Greece, mixed in with a resurgent nationalist right wing that seeks to de-class the anti-EU struggle with appeals to national chauvinism and ‘country first’ politics. According to German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Dimitris Papadimoulis, leader of the Syriza party in the European Parliament, which firmly opposed Britain’s exit from the EU, acknowledged the risk of EU dissolution saying, “The left should be standing firm on this big challenge as neoliberal and austerity policies have completely failed. The EU must change: Otherwise, it will face the risk of dissolution.”

Much attention has rightly been paid to the racist nature of British resistance to the EU’s liberal immigration rules. It is certainly xenophobic and backward when an imperialist country resists immigration of almost any sort. However, telling only this part of the story fails to account for the racist nature of the EU’s own immigration rules. According to the Telegraph, EU rules discriminate against non-European immigrants by granting only EU citizens an automatic right to live in another EU member state.

Recently, the EU has been accused of killing by neglect after 400 refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea drowned in the Mediterranean Sea when their boat capsized, according to the Independent. The tragedy comes after EU policymakers, who treat the migrant crisis as a border security issue, cut rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

The fact that racists like Nigel Farage and a substantial minority of British capitalists support leaving the EU does not negate the objectively progressive nature of weakening the EU. The same holds true in the U.S. when it comes to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). According to a 2014 report for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, NAFTA has cost at least 845,000 U.S. working-class jobs, primarily in manufacturing. Meanwhile, food prices have spiked and real wages have fallen in both the U.S. and Mexico. A minimum wage earner in Mexico today can afford 38% fewer consumer goods as on the day that NAFTA took effect

Communist organizations, leftist writers, and labor unions in the U.S. almost uniformly oppose NAFTA. So did (and does) crypto-fascist Pat Buchanan, the runner-up in the 1992 Republican presidential primary. Today, Donald Trump, a racist and xenophobe on par with Britain’s Nigel Farage, also claims to oppose NAFTA and support a withdrawal or renegotiation of that treaty. The opposition of NAFTA by racists like Buchanan and Trump has never necessitated a change in the left’s opposition to NAFTA, and it does not do so now.

The objective interests of the working class and the oppressed dictate support for a withdrawal from NAFTA, much the same as they dictate support for any country’s withdrawal from the EU.

Organizations of workers and the oppressed in Europe strongly support British exit from EU

Communist parties in Britain are overwhelmingly united in their consistent support of the right of the British working class to exit the EU. The Communist Party of Britain, Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), New Communist Party of Britain, Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and many other British socialist and communist organizations all rejected the false choice between national chauvinism on the one hand and capitulation to EU austerity on the other hand.

The communist and socialist parties were joined by unions and other progressive organizations, including the Indian Workers Association (GB) and the Bangladeshi Workers Council of Britain. No one is more aware of the dangers of British national chauvinism than the Indian and Bangladeshi people, who have experienced extreme national oppression at the hands of British imperialism as former colonies subject to direct British Crown Rule from 1858 to 1947. Today, Bangladeshi and Indian workers living in Britain face the daily racist discrimination, living as immigrants and the descendants of immigrants in the same country their former colonial rulers call home. Yet these two important organizations of the nationally oppressed living in Britain joined with other progressive forces to campaign for Britain’s exit from the EU.

The progressive Leave voices in Britain are bolstered by the many communist and workers’ organizations across Europe that enthusiastically support the historic decision by Britain’s working class to abandon the EU’s austerity regime. The Communist Party of Ireland, Communist Party of Greece, Portuguese Communist Party, Communist Party (Switzerland), Communist Party, Turkey, New Communist Party of the Netherlands, and New Communist Party of Yugoslavia are among those issuing strong statements of encouragement to the British organizations that successfully stood up to austerity while refusing to cave to racism, national chauvinism or xenophobia.

Left Leave forces in Britain project progressive vision, take on capitalist racism and reaction at home

Britain’s working class organizations are stepping up the fight at home against the capitalist regime based in London, which serves the interests of British finance capital just as the EU served German and French (and British) finance capital.

While their voices were drowned out by the media focus on the racist and xenophobic forces, the anti-austerity perspective and vision for a progressive future won over many of the working class voters who supported the decision to leave the EU. In its analysis of the need for British workers to exit the EU, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) discussed the fact that British workers have enemies on both sides, meaning the perpetrators of austerity in the EU as well as the racists and capitalists at home in Britain, and articulated a vision for exiting the EU that would both secure workers’ rights and weaken all imperialist rulers, including the British ruling class.

Many of the organizations supporting the British exit from the EU have called for the mobilization of progressive forces in Britain to defend immigration and to transform the country into a safe haven for refugees. There have also been widespread calls for campaigns, street mobilizations and industrial actions against privatization, war and anti-worker trade deals.

A coalition of communist and socialist parties, trade unions and progressive issue-based groups have called for a mass emergency demonstration on July 16. The coalition, many of whose members supported leaving the EU, is raising demands against austerity and racism at home. Specifically, the coalition is demanding consolidation of banking institutions into a publicly owned banking system, increased taxes on the rich, a 35-hour workweek, a program to build 250,000 new social homes each year, an end to privatization of public services, and increased unionization.

The media can, and may, continue to ignore the progressive dimensions of the left forces that fought to leave the EU on an anti-austerity basis. But that doesn’t make the left’s analysis any less impactful, their demands any less just, or their appeal to a large section of Britain’s working class any less powerful. And it doesn’t make breaking up the EU anything less than objectively progressive.

#WashingtonDC #Brexit #EU #Europe

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!

#Sweden #Brexit #CommunistPartySweden #EU #Europe

The result of the June 23 referendum in the United Kingdom, in which the majority of voters chose to take their country out of the European Union, is a rejection of austerity measures, economic stagnation, and widening social inequalities in British society.

Brexit implies a repudiation of the laws of motion of monopoly capitalism, the aggravation of these by neoliberal economic policy and the political arrogance and economic greed of the monopoly bourgeoisie, especially the finance oligarch of both of UK and the EU.

Implications of Brexit

The stunning 52-48 vote in favor of “Brexit,” as the Leave-EU option has come to be known, is mainly based on the widespread nationwide sentiment that the stagnation, unemployment and austerity measures have been generated by the EU's persistent push for neoliberal policies and its overprivileged bureaucracy. In a sense, the Brexit is a spontaneous rebellion against the EU and their main UK partners.

The strongest Brexit bulwarks have been the UK's blighted industrial areas, worst-hit by the economic crisis. The neoliberal regime under EU has reduced big sections of the British working people into low-paid, precariously employed, and outright unemployed workers competing among themselves for reduced social benefits.

These comprise both the proletariat and what is more widely labeled as the precariat (unemployed and underemployed, including more and more white collars from the so-called middle class). They are increasingly unable to enjoy the supposed benefits of continued EU membership such as a wider range of cheap consumer goods, unrestricted movement within Europe, and so on.

The Brexit also reflects to a secondary degree the growing influence of rightwing nationalists, populists and xenophobes, whose mass agitation campaigns have spread hatred and anger against refugees and immigrants in the wake of the inflow of millions of refugees to the EU. Ultra-nationalist and racist sentiments have been generated by the monopoly bourgeoisie to obscure the capitalist roots of the crisis, to inflame a section of the masses against others and cause senseless brutal incidents against refugees and immigrants.

But even on this point, the Brexit arguments for national sovereignty and self-determination resonated widely among the British people who feel all the more dissatisfied by the growing and over privileged EU bureaucracy. To many pro-Brexit voters, exit from EU meant better chances to gain more control over national policy-making and improve the economy.

Such current of thinking is buttressed by the fact that the UK has all along maintained fiscal and financial sovereignty and takes into account the better living conditions of several countries like Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. The British financial oligarchy also harbors such thinking as it contraposes London as the financial center of a wider scale to the Frankfurt as the financial center of the EU.

While the voting seems not to have strictly followed class alignments, the polarization once again showed the great class divide between the affluent monopoly bourgeoisie and the impoverished working people. It is this underlying clash of class interests that is expressed outwardly as voting patterns in terms of economic status, educational level, age, residence and ethnicity.

The American and British mainstream media, which reflect the interests of monopoly capitalism, especially of the financial oligarchy, have concentrated only on the pros and cons for British monopoly capitalism during the debate before June 23. Since the resounding Brexit vote, they have focused mainly on the most immediate impacts of Brexit, such as steep drops in the pound and euro, other aftershocks in the financial markets, unexpected complications for the EU labor market, and the seemingly widened floodgates of racist tensions.

What is often obscured are the root causes of the worsening economic and financial crisis. In fact, the proletariat and the rest of the people in the UK are suffering class oppression and exploitation, whether there is Brexit or not. The US has openly expressed for the UK to remain in the UK for the sake of sustaining the US-NATO expansion and pressures on Russia. But the UK has its own distinct internal dynamics despite the intimate Anglo-American links.

On one hand, the UK has always been a hesitant or reluctant member of the EU even during its peak years. The pound sterling has long stood outside the eurozone, symbolic of the long-standing fiscal and financial sovereignty of the British financial oligarchy. This oligarchy has zealously done everything to keep London as a major financial center of global capitalism and pivot point of Anglo-American collaboration.

On the other hand, the factors favoring Brexit have been generated by the ever worsening crisis both of British monopoly capitalism as well as of EU-wide monopoly capitalism, under the auspices of the neoliberal economic policy propagated in Europe and worldwide by the US and UK since Reagan and Thatcher.

The British Left has not been effective in explaining in revolutionary terms to the people that the worsening economic and financial crisis is rooted in the basic laws of capitalism and aggravated at an accelerated rate by neoliberal economic policy, which has been promoted by the US and UK. Racist backlash and the myopic bourgeois media have overwhelmed the obvious fact that the massive inflow of refugees into the EU has been the result of US and NATO wars of aggression, whipped up mainly by the US and UK, in the Middle East and Africa.

The US and UK have been the most vile and violent in unleashing wars of aggression by the US and NATO and have been mainly responsible for the phenomenon of refugees in tens of millions since the repeated wars against Iraq. They have been actively involved the longrunning war in Afghanistan and the wars in the Balkans, Africa, in Libya and Syria They are most culpable for the 65 million refugees that have resulted from the wars.

Consequences of Brexit

What happens after the referendum is still unfolding. Various political forces, still in a state of denial, are calling for a second referendum in the hope of reversing the Brexit. The British and other European oligarchs who favor UK remaining in EU are using the post-Brexit fallout to whip up a “Bregret” trend, an anti-democratic backlash that questions the democratic vote in principle while reasserting the wisdom of the EU techno-bureaucracy, and fears that Brexit could further lead to a breakup of the UK.

British PM David Cameron has chosen to remain for 90 days to try to untangle the political mess, leaving to his successor the decision whether and when to start the formal two-year separation process under Article 50 (the “exit clause”) of the EU treaties, or even to initiate the immediately legislative repeal of some EU obligations. An alternative track entails a more complex and more extended negotiations to define future UK-EU relations. At any rate, the worsening crisis of leadership in both Tory and Labour parties are reflective of a deeper economic and political crisis in the UK.

The ILPS continues to monitor the developments related to Brexit as these directly affect the working people of the UK and Europe in general. Just the same, we call on all ILPS chapters to further study and prepare for its longer-term impacts. The Brexit is among the latest manifestations of the decomposition of British monopoly capitalism and of EU monopoly capitalism. Such process of decomposition is still made less obvious by a working class previously debilitated by social democracy, modern revisionism and neoliberalism.

Considering the major role of the UK in the European economy, its exit from the EU or redefined role can trigger the beginning of further exits by other countries from the EU. Such exits jeopardize further the floundering Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and further worsen the economic and financial crisis of European and global capitalism. Germany can ride on the crisis to loosen or remove US controls resulting from German defeat in World War II and can even favor a European army independent of a US-controlled NATO.

In the still relatively more prosperous countries of Europe, such as Germany, France and the Netherlands, more nationalist and anti-immigrant parties and groups will press for exit from the EU. In countries hard pressed by higher rates of unemployment, stagnation, austerity measures and foreign debt obligations, like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, the people can be led by the Left parties and movements against impositions by their local rulers, monopolies and foreign creditors.

From a proletarian revolutionary viewpoint, it can be said that the tendency of the EU to decompose will result in the eventual weakening of EU and its national components as bulwarks of counterrevolution and aggression. However, proletarian revolutionary parties have yet to effectively lead the education, organization and mass mobilization of the people on the road of revolution.

In many EU countries at the moment, rightwing parties and groups have stood out far more than the Left in responding to the crisis. There are however Left formations which can strive to assert leadership in the face of the crisis conditions that continue to worsen and incite the people to rebel. The working class, youth and people in France, Spain, Greece and Portugal have been among the most determined and military in fighting austerity measures and other neoliberal impositions by the EU and by their respective oligarchies.

In the underdeveloped Third World, the outflow of labor migration and return flow of remittances will begin to constrict as refugees from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia and migrant workers from Eastern Europe and elsewhere compete for shrinking labor markets in EU and UK. More financial bubbles are threatening to burst, aggravating slowdowns, recessions, and unemployment in all parts of the world.

At this point in time, even the IMF and the ruling circles of many countries are aware that the neoliberal economic policy has resulted in stagnation and gross inequality and that the neoconservative policy of aggressive wars have resulted in floods of refugees. But they are paralyzed by their own arrogance and greed and still deny what they perceive.

The worsening crisis of global capitalism and the unraveling of the neoliberal economic policy drives the ILPS to call for all anti-imperialist and democratic forces to move to the front lines and bring the people's struggle forward to greater freedom, democracy, social justice, all-round development and international solidarity against the forces of exploitation, oppression and aggression.

#Netherlands #JoseMariaSison #Brexit #EU #Europe

The result of Britain's referendum demonstrates the increasing discontent of the working class and popular forces towards the EU and its anti-people policies. However these forces must disentangle themselves from the choices of sections and political forces of the bourgeoisie and acquire radical and anti-capitalist characteristics. The result records the dissipation of the expectations, which had been fostered by all the bourgeois parties-in Greece as well-together with the EU's mechanisms that the peoples could allegedly be prosperous inside the framework of the EU.

The fact that the issue of the departure of a country from the EU was posed so intensely- and indeed a country the size of Britain-is due on the one hand to the internal contradictions in the EU and the unevenness of its economies and on the other to the confrontation taking place amongst the imperialist centres, which sharpened in the conditions of the economic recession. These factors reinforce the so-called euroscepticism, break way trends, but also trends that seek a change in the form of political management of the EU and Eurozone.

Vehicles of reactionary “Euroscepticism” are nationalist, racist and fascist parties, like the UK Independence Party of Farage (UKIP), the National Front of Lepen in France, the “Alternative for Germany” and similar formations in Austria, Hungary and in Greece, e.g. fascist Golden Dawn, National Unity of Karatzαferis and others. But “Euroscepticism” is also expressed by parties that use a leftwing label, criticize or reject the EU and Euro, support a national currency and seek other imperialist alliances, with a strategy that operates within the framework of capitalism.

These contradictions and antagonisms permeate the bourgeois classes of every EU member-state. The economic and political processes underway, both in G. Britain and in the EU, the negotiations concerning the position of the British bourgeoisie the day after, can lead to new temporary agreements between the EU and Britain. What is certain is that as long as capitalist ownership of the means of production and bourgeois power remain in place, the developments will be accompanied by new painful sacrifices for the working class and popular forces.

The result of Britain's referendum exposes the other political forces in Greece, which glorified Greece's participation in the EU during all the previous years, presenting it as an irreversible process or sowing illusions about the need for even “more Europe of democracy and justice» It also exposes those forces that consider a national currency as being a panacea that will lead to the people's prosperity. Britain with its Pound Sterling took the same anti-worker and anti-people measures as the other countries that are in the Eurozone. It will continue to take the same measures outside the EU as well, as this is imposed by the need for its monopolies to be competitive and profitable.

It is certain that over the next few days the voices and “tears” will multiply, both on the part of the SYRIZA-ANEL government and on the part of the other bourgeois parties about the “need to reestablish the EU”, about the “EU that lost its way and needs to return to its roots” etc. However the EU since its creation has been and is a reactionary alliance of the bourgeois classes of capitalist Europe, with the aim of bleeding the workers dry and robbing other peoples of the world, in the framework of their competition with other imperialist centres. It was not and will not be a permanent arrangement, just as similar alliances in the past were not permanent. Capitalist unevenness and competition, the change in the correlation of forces sooner or later will bring contradictions to the surface, which will no longer be able to be bridged by temporary and fragile compromises. Simultaneously, new phenomena, processes for new reactionary alliances will be come to fruition on the terrain of capitalism.

The interests of the Greek people, the British people, of all the peoples of Europe must not be placed under a “false flag. They must not be placed under the flags of the bourgeoisie and its various sections, which determine their choices and international alliances according to their interests and on the basis of the greatest possible exploitation of the workers. The necessary condemnation of capital's predatory alliance, the EU, the struggle for the disengagement of every country, to be effective, must be connected to the necessary overthrow of capital's power by workers'-people's power. The social alliance of the working class and the other popular strata, the regroupment and strengthening of the international communist movement are preconditions to pave the way for this prospect of hope.

STATEMENT OF THE PRESS OFFICE OF THE CC OF THE KKE

#Greece #EuropeanUnion #KKE #Brexit

Washington, D.C. – In a bold and historic move, British voters decided to leave the European Union (EU) on Thursday. In a 52% leave to 48% remain vote, the British people have struck a blow against the EU’s regime of austerity. June 23, the date of the British vote to exit the European Union (EU), will go down as the day that British workers turned their back on the anti-democratic and anti-worker EU.

The media have mostly trumped up the negative forces within the camp of leave voters, while ignoring the legitimate grievances of average British workers. The media is aware, however, of the historic nature of this vote. CNN called it “the single most momentous day in British politics since World War II.” The momentous nature of the vote is only reinforced by the fact that at its core the decision to leave represents working class people in a powerful (former) EU state successfully standing up against the imperialist machinations of predatory and foreign finance capital.

The decision to leave the EU is not without its contradictions. Unfortunately, not a few supporters of the decision to exit the EU were motivated by xenophobic and anti-immigrant racism. These forces are what the media chooses to focus on.

Resistance to austerity, bolstered by inter-imperialist rivalry, drove the British vote to exit the EU. These same trends may well be what undoes the EU if the British vote compels a wave of intensified worker resistance in other EU countries.

Economic stagnation and austerity drive British working class to resist EU rule

The EU’s program of austerity has driven British workers to exit the EU. European Union-administered austerity is more than just a set of temporary measures in response to the 2007-08 global financial crisis. Austerity is the long-term budget policy of the EU and is mandated on member states by the terms of the Maastricht Treaty. This permanent austerity policy exacerbated the 2007-08 global financial crisis, but is not purely a response to it.

According to The European Institute, a Washington DC-based policy group focused on transatlantic affairs, Maastricht criteria prohibit EU member-state budget deficits in excess of 3% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or a national debt that exceeds 60% of the GDP. Member states are allowed to exceed these limits only in exceptional circumstances and for limited periods of time.

The Maastricht Treaty outlines three successive stages to economic and monetary union within the EU. The first two stages require the liberalization of the movement of capital and the convergence of member states’ economic policies. Britain was actually exempt from the third stage, which requires participation in a single currency, and the country has always used the pound sterling as its currency, not the euro, as a result.

The pressure to stay within the debt and deficit limits of the Maastricht Treaty created extreme budgetary pressure to cut services. This is true even in Britain, a country that was actually exempt from the fines and sanctions that usually accompany a member state’s violation of the debt and deficit ceiling. According to a 2015 Telegraph article, Britain had violated the EU’s fiscal rules as early as 2008 but was given time to reduce its spending as a result of the global financial crisis. In 2014, Britain’s budget deficit still exceeded 5% of its GDP, and the EU extended its surveillance of that country’s budget.

According to data from the New York Times and The European Institute, the British government had unveiled the country’s most severe public spending cuts in 60 years in 2010. Average government department costs were reduced by 19%, long-term unemployment benefits were sharply curtailed, and a decision was made to gradually raise the retirement age. In the process 490,000 public jobs were slated for elimination. All of this was part of a $130 billion (£83 billion) budget cut aimed at reducing Britain’s budget deficit, which then rested at 11.5% of GDP, down to 1% of GDP over the next five years.

This same scenario has played out to varying degrees in countries all across Europe. Spain reduced wages for public employees by 5%, eliminated 13,000 public jobs, suspended automatic inflation adjustments for pensions, and cut new child subsidies and regional funding in an attempt to reduce its budget from 11.2% of GDP in 2009 to 6% in 2011. When Lithuania implemented austerity measures to reduce its budget deficit, the measures included a two-year freeze in public sector salaries, public sector pension cuts of 11%, increased taxes on medicines and a decrease in parental leave benefits.

No country has suffered more under the EU’s austerity policies than Greece, where attempts to reduce the budget deficit cut public sector wages by more than 25%, cut workers’ bonuses, eliminated temporary workers’ jobs and significantly raised the retirement age. The International Business Times recently reported that the average monthly pension in Greece declined 38%, from $1484 a month in 2009 to $915 a month in 2015. The Greek crisis is exacerbated by the actions of German finance capital and the International Monetary Fund, which have been ruthless in imposing ever-increasing austerity on the Greek government as it struggles to pay back loans to private German, French and Greek banks.

This is just a snapshot of the austerity British workers see in their own country and in most countries across the EU. This is the austerity that British workers are fighting against as they free themselves from the EU’s punitive fiscal policies. The austerity and economic weakness of the EU drove the successful push by British workers to exit the EU and looks poised to drive resistance to the EU’s regime by workers in other countries in the future.

Inter-imperialist rivalry undermines European Union stability

The decision to leave the EU is not without its contradictions. While worker resistance to austerity is one factor in the decision to leave, the interests of British imperialism is another. In 1915, the Marxist theoretician, Russian revolutionary and future leader of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin penned an article titled “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe.” In it, he discussed the important question of the economic content and significance of a trans-European project on this level. Lenin wrote, “From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism, i.e., the export of capital arid the division of the world by “advanced” and “civilized” colonial powers—a Unites States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary.”

Lenin speculated that the inter-imperialist rivalries of the great powers of Europe at that time – Britain, France, Russia and Germany – would make progressive integration impossible and any sort of integration challenging. At the same time, he acknowledged that a United States of Europe was possible as a temporary agreement between European capitalists for the purposes of jointly suppressing socialist movements in Europe and protecting their imperialist interests against the United States and Japan.

The content of the European Union and the multiple forms of resistance to it reinforce Lenin’s view on the subject some 100 years after it was first articulated. Britain’s historic decision to exit from the EU, and the underlying causes driving it, demonstrate Lenin’s thesis that a United State of Europe, even in an undeveloped embryonic form known as the European Union, is certainly reactionary and may well be impossible as a sustainable project. Three of the four great imperialist powers mentioned by Lenin are major players in the EU. Only Russia is not in the EU.

From the perspective of many British capitalists, the interests of British imperialism rest more with the U.S. than with France and Germany, which dominate the EU in many ways. Britain and the U.S. are linked together through a “special relationship” rooted in a strong transatlantic military alliance and the substantial interpenetration of capital and reinforced by a long and storied shared political history. The Financial Times estimates in 2016 that U.S. companies are the biggest inward investors in Britain, having invested a total of $558 billion. According to this estimate, 7500 U.S. companies employ 1.2 million people, making the U.S. one of Britain’s biggest employers.

The Organization for International Investment projects that the United Kingdom is the single largest foreign investor in the U.S. with $449 billion in cumulative investments through 2014. This represents 15% of all cumulative foreign direct investment holdings in the U.S. According to figures from the Confederation of British Industry, British companies employed 943,500 U.S. workers. More than one in four jobs at British-supported companies are in manufacturing. Finance and insurance, information, and retail trade are the next largest industries with approximately 7% each of the jobs at British supported companies.

Viewed from this perspective, many British capitalists believe they have more to gain through an alliance with the U.S. to protect their interests against French and German capital than the other way around. The strong military alliance between Britain and the U.S. only reinforces this view. In 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama called the alliance between Britain and the U.S. “one of the greatest alliances the world has ever known,” according to the Guardian. Obama went on to list the ways in which this military alliance has advanced both U.S. and British imperialism through the anti-Soviet Cold War and the wars and interventions in the Korean peninsula and Afghanistan.

Contradictions between British labor and capital drive competing visions of EU exit

Pro-business nationalists and progressive worker forces have competing diagnoses of the problem and visions for a future outside the EU. Typically, the media have chosen to latch onto the reactionary drive to leave the EU in their reporting, not the progressive drive. The truth is complicated as contradictions between British labor and capital expose sharply different visions of an EU exit.

On the one hand, a substantial minority of British capitalists support Britain’s exit from the EU. According to reporting in the Telegraph, British Chambers of Commerce polling show that 37% of business leaders support leaving the EU, up from 30% last year, and 42% of small businesses employing fewer than ten people support the decision to leave the EU. 47% of National Federation of Builders members support exiting the EU. Pro-leave capitalists and their prominent political supporters intentionally stoke the flames of xenophobia in order to gain the support of conservative voters who hew to an anti-immigrant, British nationalist line.

The voices of this section of capitalists and British nationalists, which include the likes of far-right UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, have unfortunately dominated the media attention and tend to frame the exit as a Brexit (British Exit) that puts Britain’s national interests above “burdensome” EU economic regulations and liberal internal migration rules. Racism, national chauvinism, and conservative economic ideology motivate this section of the leave camp. These forces may dominate the media coverage, but they have a faulty diagnosis of what ails the European Union and an often-times dangerous vision of the path Britain should take upon leaving.

On the other hand, there are a large number of left voices that support leaving the EU. Left forces that supported the exit from the EU along progressive lines include the Communist Party of Britain, Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the RMT rail union, Trade Unionists Against the EU, Indian Workers Association (GB), Bangladeshi Workers Council of Britain, and more.

These forces are battling imperialism on two fronts. They oppose the machinations of other European imperialists, namely France and Germany, by leaving the EU even as they battle their own country’s capitalists in Britain, which is also an imperialist country. Progressive British forces have won this most recent battle against monopoly capitalism.

Now that the vote to leave the EU has succeeded, these same progressive forces will likely turn their struggle to clearly frame the debate and drive a campaign that forces British capitalists to rescind anti-worker policies. Instead of attacks on immigration, which may have some rise in the interim if the decision to exit the EU is accompanied with short-term economic disruption, an anti-austerity battle that takes on shortages in housing, declining wages and the deterioration of public services is the key to building a progressive future for a Britain free of the EU.

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