[D66] The European elections and the resurgence of the class struggle

[A.OUT]

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/05/30/eur-m30.html

The European elections and the resurgence of the class struggle
By Alex Lantier
30 May 2019

The European elections have revealed the deep discrediting of the
political establishment and its imperviousness to growing demands from
the working class for political change.

Across Europe, traditional ruling parties collapsed to unprecedented
lows, amid mounting social anger and protest against austerity and
militarist policies they have pursued since the European Union’s (EU)
foundation in 1992. The combined vote for the traditional conservative
and social-democratic parties fell to only 43 percent in Germany, 23
percent in Britain, 15 percent in France and 32 percent in Italy.
Nominally “left” allies of social democracy like Germany’s Left Party,
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI) and Spain’s Podemos all
suffered major setbacks.

The main beneficiaries on election night, however, were either extreme
right parties like the Brexit Party and France’s neo-fascist National
Rally, or pro-EU liberal or Green parties linked to social democracy.
This will resolve none of the problems that drove tens of millions of
voters across Europe to abandon the traditional ruling parties.

The framework of European bourgeois politics still moves relentlessly to
the right. The European financial aristocracy, whose fortunes were saved
after the 2008 crash by a vast build-up of public debt funded by
draconian austerity, have amassed vast wealth and power. Amid explosive
geopolitical and economic conflicts undermining the foundations of
European capitalism—threats of a US attack on Iran, a continuing NATO
military build-up in Eastern Europe targeting nuclear-armed Russia, US
trade war threats against both China and Germany, and Britain’s imminent
exit from the EU—the European imperialist powers are all building up
their armies and police state machines. This determines the extreme
right evolution of European politics.

These policies have already provoked an initial upsurge of social
protests and strikes. This year saw the first national teachers strike
in Poland since the Stalinist restoration of capitalism in 1989, a wave
of strikes in Portugal, and the continuing “yellow vest” movement in
France against President Emmanuel Macron, as well as the youth climate
strike against global warming. The elections confirmed that the ruling
class intends to make no concessions to this growing movement.

The election campaign developed within the narrow confines of a conflict
between pro-EU and nationalist or neo-fascistic parties. After a
decades-long shift of the entire ruling class far to the right, however,
little separates the crisis-ridden EU from the “Europe of the nations”
proposed by neo-fascists like Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini
or France’s Marine Le Pen.

Pro-EU parties—including conservatives, social democrats, and allies of
Greece’s Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) government—have poured
billions into the army, built up police powers and a vast network of
concentration camps for refugees fleeing NATO’s Middle East and African
wars, and imposed deep austerity. Amid growing US-EU conflicts, the EU
now serves as a framework for Paris and above all Berlin, which is
rapidly remilitarizing its foreign policy, to try to build up European
military forces independent of Washington. As a result, the conflicts
between pro-EU and more explicitly nationalist forces reduce to little
more than a vicious faction fight over relations with the Trump
administration, and related shifts in great-power alignments inside
Europe itself.

The collapse of Europe’s traditional parties of rule testifies to the
bankruptcy of European capitalism. But the working class cannot remain a
bystander in a fight between defenders of the EU machine and defenders
of a far right “Europe of the nations” like Salvini, who is also
imposing austerity and viciously targeting immigrants. Both are rapidly
moving towards fascistic and authoritarian forms of rule. Unlike in the
1930s, the ruling class has not, as of yet, developed a base for a mass
movement in support of fascistic policies. However, the danger of such a
development is clear. Against it, the way forward is to mobilize the
European and international working class in struggle, under its own
banner and on its own political program.

This requires an understanding of the class dynamics of the unfolding
crisis, which requires the international unification of the struggles of
the working class, independently from all political representatives of
the bourgeoisie and the affluent middle class. The EU elections testify
irrefutably to their reactionary role.

In Britain, Nigel Farage’s far right Brexit party took first place with
31 percent as Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative party fell to 9
percent, and her government collapsed. Farage was able to capitalize on
explosive social discontent in Britain above all due to the bankruptcy
of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Catapulted into the post of party
leader by growing social anger, he studiously avoided calling for
working-class struggle against May in solidarity with the struggles
across Europe. After endlessly making concessions to the Iraq war
criminals in the wing of his party led by Tony Blair, he ended up this
year holding talks with May to prop her up in the Brexit crisis.

By demonstrating his party’s alignment with the Conservatives, leaving
workers looking to him with no way to fight, Corbyn handed Farage the
opportunity to demagogically pose as the only opponent of the May
government. Corbyn’s humiliation by Farage, as Labour fell to 14
percent, was completed by the Liberal Democratic party’s victory in his
own Islington electoral district.

In Germany, the 43 percent result for the “Grand Coalition” government
was yet another popular repudiation of its agenda of militarizing German
foreign policy and promoting extreme right professors to legitimize
Hitlerism, militarism and dictatorial forms of rule. Despite these close
ties between the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the ruling
parties and the constant promotion of the far-right in the media, the
AfD’s 10.5 percent score was far outstripped by the Green’s 22 percent.
This reflected broad opposition to neo-fascism as well as concern over
ecology expressed in mass protests against climate change.

The Green party is, however, no alternative to the Grand Coalition
parties, with whom the Greens work closely. It supported brutal NATO
wars in the Balkans in the 1990s and worked with the social democrats to
impose the hated Hartz IV austerity laws in the 2000s. Now, one of their
founders and major leaders, former 1968 student protester Daniel
Cohn-Bendit, is a close advisor to Macron as he represses the “yellow
vests.” If they came to power, the Greens would pursue policies
indistinguishable from those currently implemented by the Grand Coalition.

The elections also exposed an entire layer of “left populist” parties of
the affluent middle class constituted of the descendants of Stalinist
parties and petty-bourgeois renegades from Trotskyism. Their attempts to
effect policies more favorable to the privileged social layers in which
they have their base, including the union bureaucracy and “left”
academia, are impotent. In just a few years, bitter experience has shown
that these pseudo-left parties serve almost exclusively to block
opposition in the working class.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called new elections after Syriza
was beaten into second place by the right-wing New Democracy. Having
flagrantly betrayed his 2015 election promises to end EU austerity and
imposed billions in social cuts on Greek workers, while also imprisoning
tens of thousands of refugees on Greek islands and selling arms to the
Saudi war in Yemen, Tsipras is again doing what he can to hand power to
the right. Lying to the last, he pledged as he called new elections that
he would “never abandon the struggle for equality, solidarity and social
justice.”

In Spain, Syriza’s ally Podemos lost half its EU parliament seats, after
it backed a pro-austerity social-democratic government and called no
action against the police crackdown on the 2017 Catalan independence
referendum and ensuing prosecution of Catalan nationalist political
prisoners. Its leader, Pablo Iglesias, responded by pledging to build a
new coalition government with the social democrats, who are for their
part considering an alliance with the openly right-wing Citizens party.

Marine Le Pen’s first-place finish in France, finally, is above all the
product of the reactionary role of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive
France (LFI) party, the Pabloite New Anticapitalist Party, and the
Stalinist trade unions. Having tacitly backed Macron in the 2017
presidential elections, they were vitriolically hostile to the “yellow
vest” protests. Despite having won 7 million votes in 2017, Mélenchon
called no mass protests to defend the “yellow vests” against the vicious
wave of police violence targeting them. And the unions isolated and sold
out strikes called in solidarity with them.

This handed the initiative to the neo-fascists. Despite their heritage
as the descendants of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime, they
cynically posed as the best opponents of the hated Macron presidency and
as defenders of the “yellow vests’” right to protest—even as neo-fascist
police beat and maim “yellow vests” on the streets.

This European election came in a period of transition and crisis, marked
by the advanced state of collapse of the old ruling elite and the still
initial stages of the upsurge of the class struggle. After decades of
political reaction, the social democratic and pseudo-left parties have
cut whatever links they retained to the working class or to social
protest. Workers no longer see them as a force for opposition, and are
beginning to take the struggle into their own hands. The outbreak of
mass protests and strikes organized independently of the unions on
social media point to a broad shift to the left in the population, even
as the ruling elite shifts to the right.

This situation vindicates the perspectives and analyses of the
International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). The
Stalinist restoration of capitalism did not spell the “End of History”
and of the era of international class struggle against capitalism opened
by the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Moreover, the ICFI correctly
foresaw the form that the resurgence of the class struggle would take: a
rebellion against all the old social democratic, Stalinist and Pabloite
bureaucracies and their trade union allies.

Revolution and socialism, conceived of as fundamental change improving
the social conditions of the working population, are increasingly
popular around the world. However, workers and youth are still in the
initial stages of the process of radicalization described by Leon
Trotsky in his great History of the Russian Revolution:

    The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social
reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old
régime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and
even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the
masses. The fundamental political process of the revolution thus
consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising
from the social crisis—the active orientation of the masses by a method
of successive approximations.

For now, in the initial stages of the resurgence of the working class,
much remains to be clarified. Opposition still bears the traces of the
previous era, in which what passed for the “left” was the politics of
the affluent middle class, presented in popular and democratic terms and
opposing class struggle. Protest votes go behind Green or liberal
parties promising a more humane capitalist politics, or even
neo-fascists promising to make the nation state protect the people—not
revolution by the international working class.

Events are rapidly moving class consciousness, however, preparing
explosive shifts in the political orientation of the working class. The
radicalization of workers and youth, coupled with the impossibility of
shifting policy under the iron grip of the financial aristocracy, will
strengthen the position of the ICFI and its call for a class-based
policy. The ICFI’s European sections—the British Socialist Equality
Party, the French Parti de l'égalité socialiste, and the German
Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei—campaigned in the European elections to
prepare such a development.

Experience will show that the only way forward is the realization of the
ICFI's program and perspective: the mobilization of the full power of
the international working class for the expropriation of the capitalist
class, the taking of political power and the construction of socialism.
The solution to the crisis of European capitalism is neither the EU nor
a fascistic “Europe of the nations,” but the struggle of the working
class to build the United Socialist States of Europe.