The European Union is one of those topics where there’s a chasm of difference in opinions
between those who are new to left-wing, progressive politics, and those who’ve been seasoned
Marxists for years.
For the baby leftists, it can often appear obvious that the EU is a bastion of progressive,
egalitarian social values and even internationalism – especially in comparison to the evil nasty
USA.
While for the elder Marxists, the EU being an imperialist association that stands in
diametric opposition to the interests of the international working classes is such a glaringly
obvious and self-evident fact that the matter isn’t even worth discussing.
This video is aimed at the former group – the leftists-in-training who are still in the
process of developing their understandings of Marxism, imperialism, and where the EU
fits into such analyses.
By the end of this video – if I’ve done my job right – you’ll be able to see the
European Union for what it truly is: an anti-democratic, anti-communist, neoliberal, colonialist, imperialist,
and ultimately irreformable association.
And if I mess it up and you’re still not convinced by the end of this video alone,
you’ll find even more damning information over on Second Thought’s channel, where
JT has just released a video in collaboration with this one about European Imperialism and
“Frontex”, the brutal agency behind Europe's border walls protecting “Fortress Europa”.
Between these two videos, hopefully it’ll become clear why “European Union bad, actually”
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Now, in order to understand the European Union’s role in the world, we need to look at its
origins.
In the wake of the Second World War, Europe was in ruins.
However, as the war didn’t take place on US soil (aside from Pearl Harbour), the United
States was able to get through World War 2 relatively unscathed with most of its financial
resources intact.
It was thus able to emerge from the war as the largest capitalist imperialist hegemonic
force in the world.
Compared to the war-torn, decimated Europe, the US was still incredibly wealthy.
But all this wealth wouldn’t mean much if it had nobody to play with.
The US needed to ensure that it still had allies and markets to trade with against the
rising threat of the Soviets spreading from the East.
So, in order to maintain imperialist allies, to capture the markets of Europe, to restore
Western capitalism, and to thwart the rise of socialism, the United States pumped over
15 billion dollars into rebuilding European capitalism through what’s known as The Marshall
Plan, or the European Recovery Program.
With inflation, that 15 billion dollars would be roughly equivalent to 120 billion dollars
today.
This would create an anti-Soviet, anti-communist, capitalist bloc in Western and Southern Europe
to protect against the spread of socialism from the East.
Now, this 15 billion dollars wasn’t distributed equally among the European countries.
The primary recipients of Marshall Plan aid were the UK, receiving approximately 50% of
the funds; West Germany, receiving approximately 12% of the funds; and France, receiving approximately
8% of the funds.
These three powers received approximately 70% of the support, with the remaining 30%
being dished out among the rest of the southern and western European countries.
Keep this in mind, because today the European Union is led by the alliance of two massive
capitalist imperialist powers: France and Germany, with the UK formerly being a major
imperialist ally until it left the EU in 2020.
So, with the Marshall Plan, various countries in western and southern Europe began to rebuild
capitalism in their countries and abroad.
The process of capital concentration into fewer and fewer hands (typical of the transition
from free competition to monopoly capitalism) occurred, with the formation of cartels, trusts
and syndicates among the large capitalist powers to monopolise and corner markets.
This occurred of course at the national level, but also across the borders that were standing
in the way of the capitalists’ maximum profits.
To this end, the European Coal and Steel Community (or ECSC), the earliest precursor to the European
Union, was established in 1951 by the Treaty of Paris to regulate the coal and steel industries
of West Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Importantly, the ECSC was created by the capitalists who ruled these industries, in collusion with
their various capitalist nation-states, rather than being created by the workers.
So, from the very roots of this European project, its basis was as an international monopolist
capitalist association.
It was never a proletarian internationalist project, but a project by and for the re-emerging
imperialist bourgeoisie, post-World War 2.
For those who’ve studied Lenin you’ll recognise that the formation of this international
monopolist capitalist association, the ECSC, corresponds almost word-for-word with Lenin’s
theory of capitalist imperialism - particularly its fourth characteristic as outlined in Imperialism:
The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
From this Marxist analysis, we can see that even the earliest precursor to the European
Union, the ECSC, was itself already a capitalist imperialist association supported and funded
by the United States to function as an anti-communist bulwark in Europe, preventing the spread of
socialism from the East.
Now, expanding beyond the monopolisation and regulation of just the Coal and Steel industries,
the more industrially expansive European Economic Community (or EEC) was established in 1957
with the Treaty of Rome.
While each of the member states of the initial EEC in 1957 were re-emerging capitalist imperialist
powers in their own right, the EEC began to admit membership to underdeveloped, oppressed
countries that were politically and economically useful from the 1970s onwards.
This adds a layer of complexity to European associations that often gets missed.
People frequently view today’s European Union as a homogenous “imperialist bloc”
wherein all member countries are more-or-less equal imperialist powers themselves, up there
with France and Germany.
However, the reality is that less than half of today’s EU member states are actually
imperialist countries in and of themselves.
The majority of countries in the EU today are in fact oppressed semi-colonies.
For example, Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, etc.
And let’s not forget the EU’s full old-style colonies like French Guiana in Latin America
(just north of Brazil).
Now, there are specific reasons why each of these underdeveloped, oppressed countries
would be granted admission to the European capitalist associations.
For example, Ireland was admitted entrance to the EEC in 1975 to function as a resident
tax haven for the imperialist powers.
The comprador Irish Free State continues to play this role to this day with tax avoidance
mechanisms like the infamous Double Irish Arrangement, which, while officially outlawed
as of 2020, still exist in numerous slightly adjusted forms.
For much of the Eastern European semi-colonial countries, these were granted admission to
the EU to create a larger pool of workers for Western European capitalists to exploit
– or, as Marxists would say, a larger “reserve army of labour”.
However, this isn’t just bringing in permanent workers who will enjoy equal rights and make
the same make minimum wage as any other worker in the country.
Like the European tax avoidance mechanisms that are in place, there are also mechanisms
in place to facilitate the undercutting of minimum wage, such as capitalists hiring workers
from abroad on short-term temporary contracts as “posted workers”.
EU law permits Western European capitalists to hire Eastern European workers from agencies
on temporary contracts at the minimum wage rate of their home countries, rather than
at the higher minimum wage of Western European countries.
This allows Western European capitalists to extract enormous profits from workers of the
oppressed countries without even needing to travel abroad themselves, instead simply importing
workers from the semi-colonies on short-term temporary contracts who are then paid far
below the Western European national minimum wages.
And so this brings us to the European Union as we know it today, which came into existence
in 1992 with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, and which in turn came into force
the following year in November 1993.
Already we can see why Marxists describe the EU as imperialist, with it being an international
monopolist capitalist association.
We can see why it’s called colonialist from how it exploits the workers and oppressed
masses of the world, including from the semi-colonies and colonies both inside and outside its own
territories.
And we can see why it’s called anti-communist, as its foundation was specifically as a US-imperialist-backed
project to rebuild European capitalism and to stop the spread of socialism coming from
the East in the wake of the Second World War.
However, there’s another crucial aspect to the EU’s anti-communism: and that is
the institutionalisation of right-wing neoliberal economic policies which make it impossible,
by EU law, for member states to transition towards socialism.
One of the primary guiding principles of the European Union is that member states must
conduct economic policy “in accordance with the principle of an open market economy with
free competition”.
Going as far back as 1957, the Treaty Establishing the European Community (now known as the Treaty
on the Functioning of the European Union, or TFEU) includes classic pro-free market
articles such as Article 81, which prohibits any government intervention in the economy
‘which may affect trade between Member States’; Article 107, which prohibits state aid to
strategic national industries; Article 121, which gives the European Council and European
Commission – both unelected bodies – the right to ‘formulate … the broad guidelines
of the economic policies of the Member States and of the Union’; Article 126, which regulates
the disciplinary measures to be adopted in case of excessive deficit; and Article 151,
which states that the EU’s labour and social policy shall take account of the need to ‘maintain
the competitiveness of the Union economy’.
The treaties have created a context wherein State Aid, public procurement and nationalizations
are all, in normal circumstances, essentially illegal under EU law and this is enforced
by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
Furthermore, the EU forbids public monopolies, meaning that states can only provide services
within the context of a free market, rather than abolishing markets.
So, if a government wanted to, for example, establish a public health service in an EU
country that didn’t already have one prior to its entry, the public health service would
necessarily need to exist alongside a private health service in the context of a free market
system.
The private health service, not being subjected to the harsh European laws surrounding public
institutions, would be able to flourish and this in turn would erode and undercut the
public sector institution, ultimately leading towards the dominance of the private sector
and the eventual drowning out and selling off of said public sector institution.
These EU laws and principles, combined with its so-called “Four Freedoms” (the free
movement of goods, services, capital, and people) – all enforced by the ECJ – institutionalise
neoliberalism as the mandatory economic trajectory for all EU member states.
Under such strict, neoliberal economic guidelines, it’s basically impossible for countries
to enact even minor social-democratic reforms, let alone any kind of serious move towards
socialist society.
Under EU law, all roads ultimately lead to privatisation and the maximisation of profit
for capitalists, to the detriment of the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority of ordinary working
people.
And these treaties and structures aren’t something that average citizens of the European
Union can challenge or reform in any meaningful way from within.
As the former president of the European Commission himself, Jean-Claude Juncker, stated at the
beginning of SYRIZA’s mandate, ‘there can be no democratic choice against the European
treaties’” For a more contemporary example, people were
recently very excited by the promises of a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government in Britain.
And there were questions at the time about whether or not the Brexit vote to leave the
EU might be reversed by such a government.
However, the policies proposed in Corbyn’s platform, including re-nationalisation of
key industries, state aid, public procurement, etc. would all have been illegal under EU
law and would have incurred heavy sanctions upon Britain from the European Court of Justice.
So even if the people of Britain had democratically voted in a left-leaning social-democratic
Labour government, and if Britain had remained in the EU, the democratic mandate of the people
would have been completely subverted by the anti-democratic laws, treaties, structures
and institutions of the European Union.
The only options available to EU citizens, then, are to either (a) accept these anti-democratic,
neoliberal terms and conditions wholesale, or (b) reject the European Union itself – that
is, to leave the European Union.
Now, some may say “Hang on, you can simply join the European Parliament yourself and
change things from within”, which, eh…
no, you can’t!
The European Parliament is a sham democratic institution that can’t even propose its
own legislation.
At most, elected Members of the European Parliament (or MEPs) can vote to approve, reject, or
make minor amendments to legislation handed down to them from the unelected executive
body of the EU, the European Commission – however, even this sham democracy is undermined by
the unelected Council of the European Union, which itself can vote to reject the decisions
of the European Parliament.
Oh, and did I mention how legislative instructions are handed down to the European Commission
by an unelected shadowy group of financial oligarchs known as the “Eurogroup”?
No, really.
That’s actually a thing.
The Eurogroup refers to informal meetings of the Finance Ministers of the EU.
It wields enormous power, and yet has no legal basis whatsoever.
How its meetings function is completely opaque - that is, how it functions is not transparent,
with all decisions being made behind closed doors.
It doesn’t publish minutes of its meetings.
It doesn’t publish meeting agendas.
It’s completely unaccountable, even to the European Parliament.
And yet it still holds enormous power, handing down instructions to the European Commission,
which is, again, the official executive power of the EU that proposes legislation, and is
the closest thing to an EU government.
This is why even some liberals are forced to concede that there’s a “democratic
deficit” within the EU that they – presumably – hope to simply reform away.
But, as they say, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, as even
the formerly pro-European Union reformers like Yanis Varoufakis came to realise.
The EU can’t be reformed as its very foundational treaties, laws, structures and institutions
prevent that from ever happening.
It can only be abolished.
So, at this stage it should be clear how the European Union was set up specifically to
be an irreformable, anti-democratic, anti-communist, neoliberal, colonialist, imperialist association.
What do we do with this information?
All progressive forces must unite in support for leaving the European Union, and eventually
for its complete dissolution.
Not on the basis of the disgustingly reactionary, right-wing, racist and xenophobic positions
that dominated the political discourse surrounding Brexit.
But instead with the progressive, left-wing, proletarian internationalist understanding
that the EU is an irreformable, anti-democratic, anti-communist, neoliberal, colonialist, imperialist
association.
It’s our job as those on the left to put forward this clear and concise left-wing analysis
(and perhaps to break it down) so that people can understand the true nature of this extraordinarily
reactionary, anti-proletarian, capitalist-imperialist union.
The only way out of this neoliberal straitjacket, to restore genuine democracy politically,
and to make any kind of advances towards socialism economically, is to leave the European Union
once and for all.
Right, thanks very much for watching this video.
Hopefully you’ve found it useful in one way or another.
Thank you to 1Dime, who recently invited me on for a podcast on this very topic which
you’ll find linked below.
Much of the notes that I put together for that podcast were used for this video.
Thanks as well to Second Thought for collaborating on this video – don’t forget to now go
watch JT’s video on the truth about the EU’s borders and Fortress Europa after we’re
done here.
Thanks especially to the relentlessly enduring supporters on Patreon who continue to make
these videos possible.
Thank you BlueCollarRed, Julia Affentranger, Ian McShea, Yugopnik, Ian Snyder, Jacob Jaffe,
Grimwater, Boricua Guerilla, Ryan Hodgson, soup, Madeleine, sonic232, Sagan, Michaela
Schmid, Christian Nipales, Alfonso Dingo Torres, Mecholova, Rotgardist, Todd Sprang, NikedeSade,
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Joubert, MsMiyamoto, Kyle King, Reverend Lawn Gnome Hollywood, Wonderbad, JT Chapman, Joseph
Sheppard, Comrade Amara, WealthForThe99Percent, and Sp00p.
Cheers everyone, agus slán go fóill.