Against the European Union referendum! The working class can only defend its conditions with class organisation and class struggle !

For months the working class in the UK has been subjected to an ideological onslaught on the future of “their” country. In an effort to keep his own party’s MPs and supporters in line, Prime Minister David Cameron promised to renegotiate membership in a reformed European Union and put the issue to the electorate. He got very little in the way of concessions from the EU, but decided to proceed with the referendum.

The slogging match that ensued has revealed deep divisions within the ruling class, making a mockery of the claim that the British economy has been out-performing the other 27 countries in the EU. Those in favour of leaving (Brexiters) claim that migrants moving from other EU countries into the UK are taking advantage of the country’s “generous” benefits system, while those in favour of remaining have agreed that benefit cuts are required “to solve the problem”. In general, there appears to be a consensus that “uncontrolled immigration” is putting strain on jobs, housing and services.

In reality the run-down of services goes back four decades to the economic crisis of the late seventies and the response of the then Labour government. Thatcherite free marketers carried on the project, using mass unemployment to discipline the working class and make people grateful for any work that was on offer, however bad the conditions. Large swathes of industrial production were moved abroad and the mini-booms of the Major and Blair era were largely based on non-productive sectors such as financial services, together with credit expansion and rising house prices. Public and private debt mounted and job creation focused on “flexible” labour, i.e. low wages, rotten conditions and no trade union protection. The latest manifestation of this has been “zero-hour contracts”.

The crisis of capitalism is world-wide

The economic crisis is not, as the Leave campaign would have us believe, the result of “Brussels bureaucrats” or “over-regulation” or even the weakness of the Euro. No, it is inseparable from the ongoing global crisis of capitalism. Every country in the world is affected, even those that have until recently enjoyed rapid growth, such as the so-called BRIC countries. Brazil is now a financial basket-case, Russia will suffer negative growth this year, and while official growth rates in India and China appear high, investment is falling rapidly – a clear sign that capitalists in those countries expect lower profits. The Brexiters’ claim that Britain would have great opportunities to trade with the rest of the world, if only it threw off the shackles of the EU, is therefore complete baloney.

Immigration

It is no exaggeration to say that the referendum has been turned from one about the European Union into one pitting British people against foreign immigrants. This has stirred emotions to the point that a Labour MP was murdered by a fascist who shouted “Britain first” before shooting and stabbing her.

Brexiters likewise claim that British capitalism’s problems can be resolved by cutting the number of workers arriving from abroad and putting “Britain first”. They say that EU immigrants (though in fact most immigrants come from outside the EU) are driving down wages, driving up unemployment and putting pressure on healthcare and education. However, the Remainers will not rebut this with the simple truth, which is that all capitalists of all countries always aim to drive wages down to the minimum by whatever means. Because that is the very nature of capitalism: to extract the maximum profit from waged labour and under-cut the competition to win market share. This will not change whether Britain is in or out of the EU. Instead, the Remainers piously claim that immigration is a “price worth paying” for being in the single market.

The only way workers can defend themselves is by uniting their struggles as a class. We have seen some powerful examples of this in other EU countries. In France there has been resolute resistance to attacks on workers living conditions in recent weeks. And our Party has reported on the determined struggles by workers in the Italian logistics sector against both the bosses and the state-enrolled trade unions. The essential lesson is that if you don’t fight against the bosses’ attacks as a class everybody suffers: capitalists do not care whether you are British, Polish, Irish or Romanian: all they see in you is an opportunity to make profit, to be tossed aside when profits fall.

The fragmentation of the working class can only be overcome by class-wide forms of organisation, uniting workers on the shop-floor, in offices and services, and not allowing their struggles to be diverted by the Labour Party / Trade Union officials. The working class can only protect its interests by means of its own class organisation and its own struggles – by opposing the attacks wherever they originate.

“Sovereignty”

A lot of the argument in the referendum has revolved around the bourgeois idea of “popular sovereignty” or “the sovereignty of parliament”. The main argument of the Brexiters is “we need to take back control”. The main argument of the Remainers is “we have greater control by being at the EU negotiating table”. But the reality is that there is no “we” – the idea of popular sovereignty is a fiction to masquerade the reality, that there are only opposing class interests. Which is why, whatever the outcome of the referendum, this so-called “exercise in popular sovereignty”, little will change and attacks on the working class will continue as capitalism’s debt crisis worsens.

The workers have no country of their own – they cannot lose what they have never had. Every capitalist State represents the interests of the ruling class against the working class. Workers can only exercise “sovereignty” as an international class, through the dictatorship of the proletariat.