And the extra-special reveal: the left discovers the card in its own pocket, discovers that it's been recruited, with various degrees of wittingness, to move from its historical place with the working class to up on the stage as " the left-wing of neoliberalism."
In a specific example of how the imposition of the neoliberal TINA regime has played out in France, Macron's government abandoned a Tidal Energy project because it wasn't profitable--because new industrial projects rarely start out profitable, and need government subsidies to succeed. At the same time, General Electric came in and bought a big energy company.
De-industrialization provides another example. France has lost 40% of its industry as capital moves to lower-wage EU countries like Poland (The dismantling of the post-capitalist Soviet bloc was another huge boost for European unity capital freedom). Auto-workers in central France, desperate to save their jobs, threaten to blow up the plant if the government doesn't intervene. But workers have lost their greatest weapon, the strike, the power to shut down an industry, when capital has beaten them to it.
The EU's real mission was to forge this single neo-liberal political economy to which all its states and all their citizens are subjected. Johnstone sums it up nicely for France, where all the ruling parties "have followed European Union directives requiring member states to adopt neoliberal economic policies. Especially since the adoption of the common currency, the euro, a little over fifteen years ago, those economic policies have become tangibly harmful to France, hastening its deindustrialization, the ruin of its farmers and the growing indebtedness of the State to private banks."
Thus, the neoliberal austerity offensive of the EU is a war on social democracy, That's what the yellow vests and other European populists and "nationalist" movements are responding to. What's also taken so many on the left and in the working class too long to get is that it has been a war on social democratic economic arrangements, carried out by the Social Democratic political parties.
When asked to name her greatest achievement, Margaret Thatcher said instantly and correctly: 'Tony Blair and New Labour." Similarly, Reagan's greatest legacy was Bill Clinton and the Clintonite Democratic Party. And Mitterrand became the best bud of Reagan and Thatcher, creating the Socialist Party of Hollande and Macron. Turning the Socialist Party of France into one of the midwives of neoliberalism in Europe. Rinse and repeat throughout Europe.
For thirty years, the ostensible Social Democratic parties steadily but surreptitiously--under false pretenses--introduced elements of the austerity project, until austerity was all that was left. It's been a neat trick of political-economy substitution--switching social-democracy with austerity right before your eyes.
And one day--after a gas-tax hike or whatever--the working class woke up to realize that all the incremental changes had added up to a qualitative difference. The great post-war social democratic arrangement--whereby the capitalist classes agreed to provide a set of essential public services and decent-life guarantees, in exchange for being allowed to maintain their decisive control of society's capital wealth--was gone. " Macron is a bubble that has burst ."
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