There are a few conclusions to be drawn from all this that are severely discomfiting to, and have been assiduously avoided by, too many leftists who have been entrenched in anything-but-class discourse.
One is that the European Union itself (with the Euro) was one of the main weapons, and falsest of pretenses, in this flim-flam. The EU was the pretty box the rabbit went into, and came out cooked.
The EU is, and always was, a project of capitalist globalization, which, despite much wishful thinking, is not--in fact, is the opposite of--proletarian internationalism. It's a nasty simulacrum thereof, that pushes European society in the opposite direction.
Many leftists, grounding themselves solely in a humanitarian and altruistic paradigm, resist thinking about the disruptions and depressions of labor pools and markets, and the transfer of cheap labor around the continent and the world, as part of a process of capitalist globalization, as a complement and enhancement to the "free" movement of capital, as a process created and managed by capital in its interest and antithetical to the interest of proletarian internationalism. In so resisting, they are again forgoing the critique of the political economy of capitalism and resting within a paradigm of concern shared with wealthy elites. Angela Nagle's argument deserves to be taken seriously. There are many difficult things to unpack here, but altruism is not solidarity, and we have to start thinking the difference.
A corollary conclusion is that it turns out the European nation-state is now the last redoubt of social democracy.
As Michael Hudson frequently points out , we have to think of what the EU (especially through the Euro) has been doing to European nations--and especially to the working classes of those nations--as war with financial and economic weapons: "It's a financial war. And finance really is war by other means, the way it's being conducted today, because the objective of finance in Western Europe is the same as that of war."
It's not a metaphor; it's a war of the bankers and capitalists to wrench the public wealth of European nations from the political control of their working-class populations, with deadly consequences. The working classes are besieged and are fighting back, for social democracy, from the territory in which they are cornered, and in which they still have some power: the national polity.
If leftists can't think of it this way, and only see the expressions of nationalism as "fascism," if they decry the Yellow Vests for singing the Marseillaise"Well, all I can say is: If it was good enough for Rick " The important thing isn't what song you sing, it's whom your song is defying.
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