File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9710, message 4


Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 17:03:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: The potential of the Eurostate



Dennis Redmond writes:


> the Central European core has been throwing
>$100 billion a year at Eastern Germany; and the glorious French strikes of
>1995 stopped Juppe's austerity plan dead in its track. Any way you slice
>it, whether in terms of union membership, socialist parties, or popular
>mood, the resistance to neoliberalism is considerably stronger on the
>Continent than in hapless, hopeless, deindustrializing, Wall Street-crazed
>America.


Now it's my turn to have doubts.  Is it really a "resistance to
neoliberalism" that we are seeing in on the Continent?  More like an
argument over where to put the living room furniture, I'd say.  And I would
be careful before walking on any "tracks" where austerity plans ostensibly
die; Jospin has had to renege on virtually all the promises made by the
French Left last spring.  The "austerity plan" is alive and well, albeit in
slightly different forms.

Nor is the presence of relatively stable trade union movements any talisman
of popular "resistance"; witness the unions in Germany and Belgium.  And
over in Japan, where about a quarter of the work force is subject to
collective bargaining agreements, the surrender of the trade union movement
is all but complete.  For the socialist parties, whether of the reformed
"Communist" stripe or sui generis right-wing social-democratic groupings,
the end game is the same.  Fundamentally, the cabinet and the central bank
comes to an agreement with the International Monetary Fund about the
economic course a country or trade network is going to take and that is the
path that will be pursued, regardless of whether the Left or Right holds
formal power. All this toing and froing, whether from the unions, the
parliaments, or whatever, means nothing.

How will it be different in the Eurostate, the ultimate apotheosis of the
irrelevance of bourgeois politics?

Louis Godena 



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