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THE BREXIT CRISIS

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The Brexit Crisis


A VERSO REPORT

With contributions from


tienne Balibar, William Davies, Akwugo
Emejulu, John R. Gillingham, Peter Hallward,
Laleh Khalili, Stathis Kouvelakis, Sam Kriss,
Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, Lara Pawson,
Wail Qasim, Salvage Editors, Wolfgang Streeck,
Antonis Vradis

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The Brexit Crisis. A Verso Report, collection Verso Books 2016 William Davies 2016 Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit first appeared on
PERC Laleh Khalili After Brexit first appeared on Truth Out Salvage
2016 Not a Coup but a Blaze first appeared on Salvage Peter Hallward
2016 The Will to Leave first appeared on Jacobin Lara Pawson 2016
Can This Really Be Us? first appeared on Versobooks Sam Kriss 2016,
The Whorled Circle of a Political Cosmology first appeared on Versobooks Akwugo Emejulu 2016, The Whiteness of Brexit first appeared
on Versobooks Wail Qasim 2016, A Special Intensity of Exploitation
first appeared on Versobooks Rebecca Omonira Oyekanmi The Myth
and Reality of Brexit and Migrants first appeared on Versobooks
Etienne Balibar [translation by David Broder] Originally published in
Libration Wolfgang Streek 2016 [translation by David Fernbach] originally published in Die Zeit John Gillingham, 2016, The European
Idea has Turned Rancid extracted from The EU: an Obituary, Verso
Books, 2016 Antonis Vradis, 2016 Stop Shedding Tears first appeared
on Versobooks Stathis Kouvelakis 2016, Letter to The British Left first
appeared on Jacobin
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Verso
6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
UK:

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books


eISBN-13: 978-1-78663-234-0

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Contents
Introduction
1. Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit
William Davies

2. After Brexit: Reckoning with Britains Racism and Xenophobia


Laleh Khalili

3. Not a Coup but a Blaze


Salvage Editors

4. The Will to Leave?


Peter Hallward

5. Can This Really Be Us?


Lara Pawson

6. The Whorled Circle of a Political Cosmology


Sam Kriss

7. On the Hideous Whiteness of Brexit


Akwugo Emejulu

8. A Special Intensity of Exploitation


Wail Qasim

9. The Myth and Reality of Brexit and Migrants


Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi

10. Brexit, the Anti-Grexit


tienne Balibar

11. Collapsing Constructions: Reflections on British Exit

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Wolfgang Streeck

12. The European Idea Has Turned Rancid


John R. Gillingham

13. Stop Shedding Tears


Antonis Vradis

14. Open Letter to the British Left by a Greek Leftist


Stathis Kouvelakis

About the Authors

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Introduction
Lets Take Back Control was the slogan that won it. Devised by the
Leave campaign, it left questions begging take control of what?
From whom? When did we last have control? intentionally unanswered, the slogan acted as a blank to be filled by the grievances
and frustrations of a disgruntled and austerity-battered electorate.
It anatomised the perceived unfairness at the heart of the relationship between little Britain and the technocrats of Brussels. It
touched the historical nerve that replays the image of Britains
plucky independence and resolute courage in the face of impossible odds. It was the machine-like feedback loop that repeated
difference and separate-ness until the hate began to bloom.
And so, in the days following the vote on 23 June, this is what
Capital-H History feels like. And it is clear that History comes as a
shock. The financial markets dont like such turbulence. The
ripples from such a seemingly parochial event are being felt around
the world. Sterling has collapsed. The Bank of England is getting
ready to pump more money into the financial system. Interest
rates might dip to 0%. Property prices are looking like a bad bet.
The main political parties have collapsed, in a crisis of legitimacy.
The commentariat is forced to look to new diagnoses for the sickness of the moment.
History is returning, and this collection of pieces, gathered in
the days following the vote, is an attempt to take seriously this rupture. The authors come from both sides of the vote, or refused to

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get involved in what they considered a false choice. Together they


are searching for what this historical moment reveals about the
current state of things, and what kind of future we might pick out
in the ruins of the past.
There is no place for unearned hope, here; nor is there any
overblown claims about the end of the world. There is only the
gathering of observations from a variety of voices, and places, and
a number of different political perspectives that pick at the bones
of the promise to take back control, lest we forget that control has
always been, and remains at least for now, out of our hands.
The Verso editors
July 2016

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Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit


William Davies

The Geography Reflects the Economic Crisis of the 1970s, Not


the 2010s
It became clear early on in the night that Leave had extraordinary
levels of support in the North East, taking 70% of the votes in
Hartlepool and 61% in Sunderland. It subsequently emerged that
Wales had voted for Leave overall, especially strongly in the South
around areas such as Newport. It is easy to focus on the recent history of Tory-led austerity when analysing this, as if anger towards
elites and immigrants was simply an effect of public spending cuts
of the past 6 years or (more structurally) the collapse of Britains
pre-2007 debt-driven model of growth.
But consider the longer history of these regions as well. They
are well-recognised as Labours historic heartlands, sitting on
coalfields and/or around ship-building cities. Indeed, outside of
London and Scotland, they were amongst the only blobs of Labour
red on the 2015 electoral map. There is no reason to think that they
would not stay red if an election were held in the autumn. But in
the language of Marxist geographers, they have had no successful
spatial fix since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. Thatcherism
gutted them with pit-closures and monetarism, but generated no
private sector jobs to fill the space. The entrepreneurial investment

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that neoliberals always believe is just around the corner never


materialised.
Labours solution was to spread wealth in their direction using
fiscal policy: public sector back-office jobs were strategically relocated to South Wales and the North East to alleviate deindustrialisation, while tax credits made low productivity service work more
socially viable. This effectively created a shadow welfare state that
was never publicly spoken of, and coexisted with a political culture
which heaped scorn on dependency. Peter Mandelsons infamous
comment, that the Labour heartlands could be depended on to
vote Labour no matter what, because theyve got nowhere else to
go spoke of a dominant attitude. In Nancy Frasers terms, New Labour offered redistribution but no recognition.
This cultural contradiction wasnt sustainable and nor was the
geographic one. Not only was the spatial fix a relatively shortterm one, seeing as it depended on rising tax receipts from the
South East and a centre left government willing to spread money
quite lavishly (albeit, discreetly), it also failed to deliver what many
Brexit-voters perhaps crave the most: the dignity of being self-sufficient, not necessarily in a neoliberal sense, but certainly in a communal, familial and fraternal sense.
Handouts Dont Produce Gratitude
By the same token, it seems unlikely that those in these regions (or
Cornwall or other economically peripheral spaces) would feel
grateful to the EU for subsidies. Knowing that your business,
farm, family or region is dependent on the beneficence of wealthy
liberals is unlikely to be a recipe for satisfaction (see James Meeks
recent essay in the London Review of Books on Europhobic farmers who receive vast subsidies from the EU). More bizarrely, it has
since emerged that regions with the closest economic ties to the EU

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in general (and not just of the subsidised variety) were most likely
to vote Leave.
While it may be one thing for an investment banker to understand that they benefit from the EU in regulatory terms, it is quite
another to encourage poor and culturally marginalised people to
feel grateful towards the elites that sustain them through
handouts, month by month. Resentment develops not in spite of
this generosity, but arguably because of it. This isnt to discredit
what the EU does in terms of redistribution, but pointing to
handouts is a psychologically and politically nave basis on which
to justify remaining in the EU.
In this context, the slogan take back control was a piece of
political genius. It worked on every level between the macroeconomic and the psychoanalytic. Think of what it means on an individual level to rediscover control. To be a person without control
(for instance to suffer incontinence or a facial tick) is to be the butt
of cruel jokes, to be potentially embarrassed in public. It potentially reduces ones independence. What was so clever about the
language of the Leave campaign was that it spoke directly to this
feeling of inadequacy and embarrassment, then promised to eradicate it. The promise had nothing to do with economics or policy,
but everything to do with the psychological allure of autonomy and
self-respect. Farages political strategy was to take seriously communities whod otherwise been taken for granted for much of the
past 50 years.
This doesnt necessarily have to translate into nationalistic
pride or racism (although might well do), but does at the very least
mean no longer being laughed at. Those that have ever laughed at
chavs (such as the millionaire stars of Little Britain) have
something to answer for right now, as Rhian E. Jones Clampdown
argued. The willingness of Nigel Farage to weather the scornful
laughter of metropolitan liberals (for instance through his periodic
appearances on Have I Got News For You) could equally have

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made him look brave in the eyes of many potential Leave voters. I
cant help feeling that every smug, liberal, snobbish barb that Ian
Hislop threw his way on that increasingly hateful programme was
ensuring that revenge would be all the greater, once it arrived. The
giggling, from which Boris Johnson also benefited handsomely,
needs to stop.
Brexit Was Not Fuelled by a Vision of the Future
One of the most insightful things I saw in the run-up to the referendum was a video produced by openDemocracys Adam Ramsey
and Anthony Barnett discussing their visit to Doncaster, another
Labour heartland. They chose Doncaster because it looked set to be
a strong pro-Leave location, and wanted to understand what was at
work in this. Crucially, they observed that in strong contrast to
the Scottish Yes movement Brexit was not fuelled by hope for a
different future. On the contrary, many Leavers believed that withdrawing from the EU wouldnt really change things one way or the
other, but they still wanted to do it. Ive long suspected that, on
some unconscious level, things could be even stranger than this:
the self-harm inflicted by Brexit could potentially be part of its appeal. It is now being reported that many Leave voters are aghast at
what theyve done, as if they never really intended for their actions
to yield results.
This taps into a much broader cultural and political malaise,
that also appears to be driving the rise of Donald Trump in the US.
Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political
movements dont need to promise any desirable and realistic
change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if
predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that
chimes more closely with peoples private experiences. The discovery of the Case Deaton effect in the US (unexpected rising mortality rates amongst white working classes) is linked to rising alcohol

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and opiate abuse and to rising suicide rates. It has also been shown
to correlate closely to geographic areas with the greatest support
for Trump. I dont know of any direct equivalent to this in the UK,
but it seems clear that beyond the rhetoric of Great Britain and
democracy Brexit was never really articulated as a viable policy,
and only ever as a destructive urge, which some no doubt now feel
guilty for giving way to.
Thatcher and Reagan rode to power by promising a brighter future, which never quite materialised other than for a minority with
access to elite education and capital assets. The contemporary populist promise to make Britain or American great again is not made
in the same way. It is not a pledge or a policy platform; its not to
be measured in terms of results. When made by the likes of Boris
Johnson, its not even clear if its meant seriously or not. Its more
an offer of a collective real-time halucination, that can be indulged
in like a video game.
The Remain campaign continued to rely on forecasts, warnings
and predictions, in the hope that eventually people would be dissuaded from risking it. But to those that have given up on the future already, this is all just more political rhetoric. In any case, the
entire practice of modelling the future in terms of risk has lost
credibility, as evidenced by the now terminal decline of opinion
polling as a tool for political control.
We Now Live in the Age of Data, Not Facts
One of the complaints made most frequently by liberal commentators, economists and media pundits was that the referendum
campaign was being conducted without regard to truth. This isnt
quite right. It was conducted without adequate regard to facts. To
the great frustration of the Remain campaign, their facts never cut

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through, whereas Leaves facts (most famously the 350m/week


price tag of EU membership) were widely accepted.
What is a fact exactly? In her book A History of the Modern
Fact, Mary Poovey argues that a new way of organising and perceiving the world came into existence at the end of the 15th century
with the invention of double-entry book-keeping. This new style of
knowledge is that of facts, representations that seem both contextindependent, but also magically slot seamlessly into multiple contexts as and when they are needed. The basis for this magic is that
measures and methodologies (such as accounting techniques) become standardised, but then treated as apolitical, thereby allowing
numbers to move around freely in public discourse without difficulty or challenge. In order for this to work, the infrastructure that
produces facts needs careful policing, ideally through centralisation in the hands of statistics agencies or elite universities (the rise
of commercial polling in the 1930s was already a challenge to the
authority of facts in this respect).
This game has probably been up for some time. As soon as media outlets start making a big deal about the FACTS of a situation,
for instance with Fact check bulletins, it is clear that numbers
have already become politicised. Facts (such as statistics) survived as an authoritative basis for public and democratic deliberation for most of the 200 years following the French Revolution. But
the politicisation of social sciences, metrics and policy administration mean that the facts produced by official statistical agencies
must now compete with other conflicting facts. The deconstruction of facts has been partly pushed by varieties of postmodern
theory since the 1960s, but it is also an inevitable effect of the attempt (beloved by New Labour) to turn policy into a purely scientific exercise.
The attempt to reduce politics to a utilitarian science (most often, to neo-classical economics) eventually backfires, once the science in question then starts to become politicised. Evidence-based

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policy is now far too long in the tooth to be treated entirely credulously, and people tacitly understand that it often involves a lot of
policy-based evidence. When the Remain camp appealed to their
facts, forecasts, and models, they hoped that these would be
judged as outside of the fray of politics. More absurdly, they
seemed to imagine that the opinions of bodies such as the IMF
might be viewed as independent. Unfortunately, economics has
been such a crucial prop for political authority over the past 35
years that it is now anything but outside of the fray of politics.
In place of facts, we now live in a world of data. Instead of trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers,
a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined,
visualised, analysed and interpreted however we wish. If risk modelling (using notions of statistical normality) was the defining research technique of the 19th and 20th centuries, sentiment analysis is the defining one of the emerging digital era. We no longer
have stable, factual representations of the world, but unprecedented new capacities to sense and monitor what is bubbling up
where, whos feeling what, whats the general vibe.
Financial markets are themselves far more like tools of sentiment analysis (representing the mood of investors) than producers
of facts. This is why it was so absurd to look to currency markets
and spread-betters for the truth of what would happen in the referendum: they could only give a sense of what certain people felt
would happen in the referendum at certain times. Given the absence of any trustworthy facts (in the form of polls), they could
then only provide a sense of how investors felt about Britains national mood: a sentiment regarding a sentiment. As the 23rd June
turned into 24th June, it became manifestly clear that prediction
markets are little more than an aggregative representation of the
same feelings and moods that one might otherwise detect via twitter. Theyre not in the business of truth-telling, but of moodtracking.

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The Least Enslaved Nation in the EU Just Threw Off Its


Shackles
If the EU worked well for any nation in Europe, it was the UK.
Thanks to the scepticism and paranoia of Gordon Brown, Britain
dodged the catastrophic error of the single currency. As a result, it
has been relatively free to pursue the fiscal policies that it deems
socially and politically desirable. The fact that it has consistently
chosen neoliberal ones is not really the fault of the EU, the stability
and growth pact notwithstanding. But in contrast to southern
European members of the EU, Britain is scarcely constrained at all.
Instead, it has benefited from economic stability, a clear international regulatory framework and a sense of cultural fraternity with
other member states. One could even argue that, being in the EU
but outside of the Eurozone, Britain has had the best deal of any
member state during the 21st century.
This has been abandoned. Meanwhile, nations that might genuinely describe themselves as shackled, have suffered such serious
threats to their democracy as to have unelected Prime Ministers
imposed upon them by the Troika, and have had their future forcibly removed thanks to the European Union, might look at Brexit
and wonder.

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After Brexit: Reckoning with Britains


Racism and Xenophobia
Laleh Khalili

Theoretically, there was a progressive case to be made for Britain


exiting the European Union via the referendum held on June 23,
2016. But the campaign for Brexit the infelicitous name given the
political process was, from the very first, fought on the grounds
of xenophobia and racism. Moreover, what has transpired in Britain since the Leave campaign won has only shown how easily the
veneer of civility and conviviality can be peeled back to reveal the
virulence of racism and xenophobia seething under the skin of
British social life.
Britain was never a part of the eurozone. Therefore, the extensive austerity measures that its Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition
government of 20102015 put into place, and that the Tory government of 2015 ratcheted up, were its own doing. That said, the
austerity measures emanating from the more financially powerful
EU states Germany and France and imposed upon and
massively affecting the economies of countries such as Greece and
Portugal were on the forefront of every British progressives mind
before the EU referendum. It is possible to be a member of the EU
and not part of the eurozone monetary sphere as is the case with
the UK, alongside Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark,
Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden.

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The EU itself is a massive bureaucratic mechanism, institutional machine and ideological apparatus devised to facilitate the
movement of capital, goods, services and people across its internal
borders. The free or relatively unrestricted movement of goods
and capital without encountering tariffs or protection barriers has
resulted in the further consolidation of the power of the big manufacturers in Europe as well as unfettered growth in and institutional protection of the financial and banking sector. The EU legal bodies legislate around or regulate some of this free trade, but generally decide in favor of big business over trade unions.
The EUs empire of free trade has been the target of the ire of
both the right and the left; the right is incensed over the regulations seen to hamper businesses (especially environmental and
health-and-safety regulations as well as the human rights charter)
and the left is incensed over the unaccountability of the EU officials and its rigid neoliberal stance. This undemocratic power exercised by distant Eurocrats is the plausible basis of a progressive
criticism of the institution.
But what has distinguished the EU free-trade pact from other
free-trade pacts notably the North American Free Trade Agreement is the relatively unrestricted movement of people across internal European borders to seek jobs or residency elsewhere in the
Union. And it is this free movement of people that has triggered a
long festering xenophobia at the heart of British society.
Britains insularity has been punctured throughout its history
in moments where the need for migrant labor has trumped the
Little Englander aversion toward foreigners. One such moment
was the post-Second World War reconstruction era when the devastated country needed people to aid in the reconstruction of the
national economy (much like the rest of Europe). The importation
of guest workers from the colonies, followed by decolonization and
the migration of former colonized subjects to the metropole have
triggered virulent xenophobic and racist responses in Britain. That

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the British political classes have refused to reckon with the countrys colonial legacy and their steadfast refusal to acknowledge the
racism interwoven in its institutions have only exacerbated this
xenophobia and racism.
This xenophobia takes different shapes according to the historical moment, but neoliberal policies have only ever intensified
these sentiments. Migrants are today blamed for taking up places
in housing and schools, burdening the countrys publicly-funded
universal health system and weakening the working class. Scant attention is paid to how, beginning with Margaret Thatchers
scorched-earth neoliberalism, policies of privatization and austerity during both feast and famine have led to a degradation of
national life, a diminishing of social mobility and a growth in inequality in the UK.
In the 1990s, under the reign of Tony Blairs New Labour,
Thatchers policies continued in new guises: the fiercely beloved
National Health Service (NHS) was funded, but often via publicprivate partnerships that have in fact burdened the NHS with serious debt and crumbling infrastructures, while enriching private investors and developers. Instead of preserving unused schools, local
councils were encouraged to sell off their school buildings in the
1990s, again benefiting property developers who turned these attractive Victorian structures into high-end housing without anticipating the acute future need for school buildings and school
places. The sale of social housing, which had been a pillar of
Thatcherite policy of privatization, has been exacerbated by wholly
inadequate construction of new affordable housing and no effort to
replace the stock of social housing lost under Thatcher.
The privatization of the efficient national rail, electricity, phone
and water infrastructures has been a boon to profiteering private
firms, while the basic transport and utility infrastructures have deteriorated, and their costs especially of commuting have become exorbitant. The replacement of manufacturing jobs with

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service jobs, the destruction of the mining and shipping sectors,


and the weakening of trade union protections particularly in the
more militant sectors have also had massively detrimental effects
on vast swathes of Britains industrial areas.
It is no matter that the Tory Party (under its official name the
Conservatives) is ostensibly a party of both fiscal and social conservatism, that the Liberal Democrats are ostensibly a party of social
liberalism and fiscal conservatism, and that Labour is a selfavowed socialist party (though subjected to neoliberal reforms under Tony Blair, New Labour moved to the center as did many other
social democratic parties in Europe). In the face of rising popular
discontent with this abasement of social life in the UK, it has been
easier for politicians across the political spectrum to displace the
blame for these policies to vulnerable migrants rather than to acknowledge the role not only of the Conservative (Tory) Party (and
for a while, its Liberal Democratic coalition partners), but also of
the Labour Party in bringing about this turn of events. In this regards, Labour has been wholly complicit in pandering to xenophobic sentiments in order to deflect blame from New Labour
policies.
These policies of austerity and attendant anti-migrant sentiments have occurred in the context of ever more intense hysteria
around the question of terror. We live in a time of legislations on
radicalization, particularly the absurdly authoritarian Prevent
laws, practices of surveillance not only of Muslims, but also of suspicious talk in schools, universities, hospitals and public places,
and counterterrorism operations. These government measures
and particularly the Prevent legislation, which makes it mandatory
for school and university teachers to spy on their students and any
public official to look out for signs of radicalization among
Muslim youths in particular have led to criminalization of entire
communities, and an increase in the sense of vulnerability among
British citizens and residents of Muslim origin.

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This convergence of anti-migrant xenophobia and Islamophobic racism has now become the most recognizable feature of
politics in Britain and have shaped successive election campaigns.
Parliamentary elections, especially since 2010, have often pivoted
around the question of migration. Although in the 2015 elections,
Nigel Farages right-wing anti-immigration and Eurosceptic party,
UK Independence Party (UKIP), only secured one seat in the parliament, he nevertheless picked up millions of votes and Farage
managed to define the discourse around migration. So much so,
that in pandering to UKIPs base, David Cameron announced the
EU referendum.
The London mayoral election, held a scant eight weeks before
the EU referendum, was another example of this ignominious turn.
The campaign between Labours Sadiq Khan, a liberal Muslim
leaning toward New Labour, and the Tories Zac Goldsmith, until
then best known for his environmental campaigning, showed the
extent to which even the more ostensibly liberal members of the
Tory Party would appeal to this seam of racism and Islamophobia
in order to win votes. This all came to a head with the referendum,
where all other issues faded into the background and migration
and anti-Muslim sentiments (the latter of which does not have a
logical relation to the EU in any case) became the central axis
around which the referendum pivoted.
Although the outcome was not really foreseen, and although the
end result of the referendum was fairly close (52 percent for Leave;
48 percent for Remain), the win for Eurosceptics took even Leave
voters by surprise.
The most prevalent clich of post-referendum analysis has been
that the vote for exit should be read as a working-class revolt. Setting aside the unspoken assumption that this rebellious working
class must by definition be white, the post-referendum exit polls
actually indicate the working-class characterization of the Leave
vote is inaccurate. It is true that a higher percentage of working-

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class voters voted for exit than did upper- and middle-class voters
46 percent versus 64 percent. But once turnout by class was
taken into account, the numbers looked different. As Ben Pritchetts calculations (along with his caveats about the turnout numbers including anomalies) have shown, the far greater turnout of
the middle and upper classes, versus the working class 90 percent versus 52 percent meant that in absolute numbers, a far
higher number of middle- and upper-class voters (around 10 million voters) actually voted to Leave the EU than the working class
(approximately 7 million voters), many others of whom abstained
from voting.
Lord Ashcrofts exit polls showed that if voters thought that
multiculturalism, feminism, social liberalism, the environmental
movement and immigration are forces for ill, they voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. The same polls showed that while 53
percent of voters who described themselves as white and 58 percent of those who described themselves as Christian voted to leave
the EU, more than two-thirds of Asian voters, nearly three-quarters of Black voters and 70 percent of self-identified Muslims voted
to remain in the EU.
Only hours after their win, the Eurosceptic leaders had already
back-pedaled on some of their most major promises. Nigel Farage
claimed that he never agreed with the claim emblazoned on the
side of a campaign bus used by Eurosceptic leaders that the 350
million weekly payments formerly paid to the EU would actually be
used to fund the NHS. Iain Duncan-Smiths weaker claim was that
only after the EU agricultural subsidies (to the Tory heartlands)
were replaced would any leftover funds be divided between the
NHS and other needs. The irony was of course that many of those
agricultural heartlands had been in receipt of more handouts from
the EU than other places in the UK.
Claims that the UK fisheries could benefit from a post-EU deregulation were similarly walked back. Even on migration, which

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had played such a decisive and divisive role in the referendum, the
Eurosceptic leaders were already tempering their claims. These retreats from promises have been so blatant that the Leave campaign
has simply wiped the archive of all their opinion pieces and documents from the web.
Even more astonishing is how the Leave camp seems not to
have planned at all for an eventual exit. There is no certainty as to
when or even whether Article 50 (a provision of Treaty of Lisbon which provides for EU member countries leaving) will ever be
invoked, setting into motion two years of negotiations that will allow Britain to unravel its legislations, trade arrangements, migration processes and regulations from the EU.
Perhaps the most worrying fallout of the referendum vote,
however, has been the extraordinary spike in violence against migrants and non-white British citizens and residents. Although
many if not most of those who voted for Leave did not do so
out of xenophobic or racist reasons, the vote seems to have legitimated an extraordinary outburst of such attacks against migrants
especially those from Poland and non-white British citizens, residents, and visitors.
There is very little that promises an abatement of such racism.
The immediate economic fallout of the Leave vote will only exacerbate the sense of economic uncertainty, possibly leading to a recession. The weakening of the pound will inevitably lead to a rise in
price of imports (which will be exacerbated by the implementation
of tariffs once the UK leaves the EU). Massive losses in the stock
market have wiped vast amounts off pensions, giving yet more
alibis to the state and private pension providers for reducing what
is available to retirees. Rating agencies downgrading of UKs ability to borrow will lead to higher borrowing costs for the UK government and a growth in UK deficit, which of course provides an
excuse for further austerity measures and an increase in taxes
(which Tory governments of course will not levy against the

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corporations or the richest earners). The revocation of EU protections for migrant workers means that while the UK will continue to
see migration from the EU countries, these workers will not be
protected from the worst depredations of unscrupulous employers.
As labor studies scholar Roland Erne has argued, this degradation
of migrant worker rights will only accelerate the race to the bottom
for all workers, both migrant and British. Nor will parliamentary
politics in England provide any respite.
Already, politicians from Scotland and Northern Ireland (both
of which voted overwhelmingly to Remain in the EU) are talking of
a second independence referendum and a reunification of Ireland,
respectively, in order to remain in the EU. The rump state that
would remain if such fragmentation occurred would likely have a
much strengthened Tory government and a Labour Party that
would have difficulty winning.
In a coming recession, with intensified inequality, rising
poverty and stalled social mobility, under a Tory government
which has no stakes in egalitarian social policies, racism and
xenophobia, right-wing populism, ultranationalist ideologies, even
fascism will find a fertile soil. The horrifying racist and xenophobic
attacks of the last week are haunted by the rivers of blood racism
of yesteryears. In a now notorious 1968 speech, the Tory MP
Enoch Powell promised rivers of blood to a country in which migration had led to the Black man [having] the whip hand over the
white man. UKIPs Nigel Farage has never hidden his admiration
for Enoch Powell, and even the anti-immigrant views of many in
the Tory Party are shaped by Powell.
The long and brutal history of British colonialism and empire
lies at the heart of so much British insularity and racism. The deep
roots of this racism will likely influence the politics of tomorrow, as
it has already done that of today. To counter such a bleak future,
mass mobilization is necessary and any form of progressive mass
mobilization has to recognize that class politics are always

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articulated through a politics of race. Reckoning with Britains racism and xenophobia across time, place, parties and social classes
is the necessary first step in such mobilization.

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Not a Coup but a Blaze


Salvage Editors

In the spectacle of plummeting share prices, currency values, property prices, and trade volumes, we can scry a future.
The United Kingdom, a dream kingdom, a twilight kingdom, is
on the brink of its downfall. Any party of government that did not
implement the verdict of the European Union referendum would
probably be doomed to self-destruction. Any party of government
that did implement the verdict of the European Union referendum
would face the same fate. To implement Brexit would result in an
economic catastrophe, only compounded by the promised punishment from the EU. To avoid implementing the verdict would be to
ignore the decision of 17 million people, which would an astonishing act of oligarchic disdain and bravado. Forget Ukip: it would be
the ranks of far-right street gangs who would be recruiting on the
back of that. There is already a spike in racist violence and harassment, the racists and fascists given confidence by the Brexit result,
obscenely buoyed up by the murder of Jo Cox MP a week before.
Scotlands secession is now all-but certain, and the rump-UK will
be but two or three steps from emergency rule in the particularly
British form of a National Government. All politics involves the
death-drive, but Britain is accelerating toward a thanatocracy with
strikingly little friction slowing it down.
Some on the Left insist on their unedifying fidelity to Bad
Hope, glossing the referendum result as, in the extraordinary

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Candide-like words of one socialist newspaper, A Blow against


Austerity and Neoliberalism. To be clear, that the result ushers in
a full-spectrum systemic crisis, and was absolutely not neoliberalisms preferred outcome, is not in doubt, any more than is the disempowerment, fury and despair underlying the strong workingclass Exit vote. But it is a grotesque dereliction to imply that the racism which was so constitutive of the Exit campaign, and was key
to the articulation of that fury, is somehow simply epiphenomenal,
a gloss, a bolt-on, relatively easy to unbolt. Or to suggest that racism is a danger we must now try to avoid, rather than a poison
not just here but gushing. It is not.
Which does not mean that there are not, as the Left always so
eagerly insists, opportunities. There are rarely no opportunities to
any conjuncture, let alone to a crisis of legitimacy. But whatever
opportunities are now before us and they are there have arrived utterly imbricated with brakes, hurdles, catastrophes, as part
of a vicious wave of reaction. They are profoundly mediated and
hard for us to operationalise much more so than are the opportunites that have also arrived for the hard and far right, and which
they are eagerly taking. If the Left is to have any chance at all of
taking ours, we must start by acknowledging how hard that will be,
and how much more significant are those of our enemies at this
moment. Not to duck the task: to be at all capable of rising to it.
How do Labours travails fit into this grim scenario? The votes
are in: 172 Labour MPs, to 40 against, have voted for the No-Confidence Motion in Jeremy Corbyn, as part of their abruptly flowering coup against him. Though it is a coup that fails on some basic
definition of the word. Naturally, the assailants want Corbyn out,
but a coup ordinarily involves something more of a strategy, and
there is usually a usurper waiting in the wings, self-evidently prepared for power. The Labour MPs who launched this coup, remarkably, appear to have planned everything to perfection apart
from: who their candidate is, what their alternative is, and how

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they propose to remedy Labours problems. The current scramble


to find the right candidate has seen several names put forward.
Briefly, it seemed that the GMB might support Lisa Nandy as a
rival candidate from the soft-left, but that has not, so far,
materialised. Anti-Corbyn MPs like Stephen Kinnock have backed
Angela Eagle, a figure of more Blairite cast, and she is flagged in
the New Statesman as the most likely challenger. Yvette Cooper is
also rumoured to be considering a bid, as is the skilled political
thug, Tom Watson. It may be that, despite months of obvious preparation for this coup, and despite enough combined ruthlessness
to make Frank Underwood blush, they will end up repeating the
same problems as they did in the 2015 leadership election, less
than a year ago. That is, the anti-Corbyn forces will lack a plausible
united candidate, they will lack a persuasive message, and they will
have nothing particularly appealing or coherent to say on the major issues.
This is not to say there is no signalling as to what kind of politics a successor should pursue. Polly Toynbee in the Guardian
writes:
The resignation of most of his shadow cabinet at least offers hope
of revival, with a new leader to seize the day. Who and how we
dont yet know, but the party cant go on denying their heartlands
demand for migration curbs.

That is to say, Corbyn is being criticised for being too critical of the
EU on progressive grounds, but his opponents are being encouraged to exploit this crisis to attack precisely the one key progressive aspect of EU membership, the free movement of labour
(within, of course, carefully circumscribed limits). Corbyn reached
out to working-class voters with a critical Remain position; the Labour Right think they can reach out to them with yet another sop
to immigrant-bashing. This would wipe out one of the most important benefits of having a left-wing Labour leadership that

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there is one major political leader among a dismal crop who will
not concede a thing to racism. It would also continue the practice
whereby the electoral left-of-centre cultivates the ideological terrain for the far right, before losing it to them in a state of bewilderment. Forget Pasokification; this is the UKIPisation of British
politics. Anyone now gurning with satisfaction at Corbyns discomfiting, who feels resentment at Corbyns failing to campaign hard
enough in the referendum should remember this. The very first act
of a post-Corbyn Labour leader would be to address the legitimate
concerns of ordinary people about migration, just as we are seeing
the ghastly violence that results from years of pandering to such
xenophobia.
To their credit, while Team Corbyn have been frustratingly and
ostentatiously reasonable in their approach, at a time when they
are entitled to go for blood, they have thus far responded to all of
this without obvious panic. Corbyn has stoically insisted that he
would not step down and would be part of any new leadership election. He has appointed a new cabinet that is far more left-wing,
more female and more multi-racial, than the previous. And when
he took to the despatch box he used the opportunity to denounce
his own restive backbenchers, to their predictable groans. Rather
than simply try to placate his enemies, he has appealed over the
heads of his parliamentary party to the membership, the unions
and the wider left. That the balance of forces beyond the PLP appears to still favour Corbyn is attested to by a petition in his support with over 200,000 signatures, by the repeated statements
from trade unions that they support the Labour leadership, and by
the turnout at short notice of thousands of protesters in Parliament
Square, to defend the incumbent. The doubts among some PLPers
as to the coup, and the willingness of decidedly non-Corbynite Chi
Onwurah to join a rickety cabinet, suggest some residual awareness of this on the backbenches. Even Watsons stiletto was half-

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hearted enough to suggest that he is unclear as to exactly how this


cookie will crumble.
The danger for Corbyn is that Project Despair begins to gain
ground as, indeed, it is already doing in some quarters. There is a
very palpable stratum of feeling, probably pervading a minority in
the party but enough to be a problem, that regardless of the justice
of the coup, resistance to it is futile. Whoevers fault it is, the reasoning goes, Corbyn cant unite the parliamentary party and so
with a tragic shake of the head he must consider his position. His
polling is poor, however much that has to do with the combined offensives of the media and backbenchers, so he must consider stepping back. Perhaps a mediating figure, someone from the centre of
the party, can hold off the worst, save us from another Blairite regime forgetting that Miliband was precisely such a figure, and
that his record in this regard was abysmal.
There is an adjoining position, which is that the overwhelming
priority now is to stop Brexit, and that Labour needs a leader willing to renege on the referendum outcome. Corbyns nuanced position on the EU, his criticism of its faults, is seen in this light not as
an asset in speaking to ordinary Labour voters, as it undoubtedly is
and was, but as a shocking failure of commitment. And some have
really begun to persuade themselves that Labour could win an election with a more establishment leader, willing to flip off those portions of the Labour base who joined the majority in voting for
Brexit. Such a collapse into anti-democratic reasoning overthrow
an elected leader in order to overthrow a democratic outcome is
a result of blind panic and unreason. It will not withstand the cool
light of retrospection. But regardless, there is a looming danger
that just enough people begin to cave that Corbyns majority is
endangered.
This brings us back to the political death-drive, the fascination
with annihilation, the allure of comprehensive destruction. The
death-drive is in play because we despise our own ideals, and the

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way in which they tyrannise us, restrain us, and deny us. We loathe
the people we imagine ourselves to be when, however appealing
those ideal selves might be, they make us too chaste, too virtuous,
too abstinent, or when we are aware of just how remote they are
from our real selves. Hence the desire to bring it all down, to
watch the world burn. And it is hard to understand the Labour
Rights extraordinary, grandiose petulance, apart from this drive.
They are not only fighting to regain control of their party at any
cost, including that of the party: whether they know it or not, they
are out to destroy the party they have professed to love, whose
ideals they have extolled, and in the name of which they claim to
act now.
This is not a coup, but a blaze. It is a furnace built not just for
Corbyn, but for the Labour Party, for social-democracy, for the
spirit of 45, for the dream of progress in its various incarnations,
for even the consummately bourgeois ego-ideals of civility and toleration. Those who are unwilling to stop the arson, will have
mountains of ashes to harvest.

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The Will to Leave?


Peter Hallward

Theres been a lot of talk, the last few days, about the need to respect the sovereign will of the British people. A simple question
was asked, a simple answer was recorded.
Like the main party leaders on both sides of the referendum,
most commentators on the Left seem to agree with Owen Jones,
that whatever happens there can be no argument for reversing the
expressed democratic will of the British people what is done is
done.
The people have spoken. Dont the basic principles of democracy require that our government now simply do what weve told
it to do?
There are three reasons why the answer to this particular question isnt as simple as it might appear.
First of all, the referendum posed a question about membership
of the EU, but it was immediately clear that millions of people
seized the opportunity to answer a related but quite different question, and arguably an essentially different question a question
about exploitation, austerity, and the brutally disempowering impact of neoliberal capitalism.
For decades, British voters like voters all over Europe have
been deliberately deprived of any real occasion to answer this
question, or even to pose it.

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As far as the basic consequences of Thatcherism are concerned,


weve spent the last twenty years living in the equivalent of a
single-party state. Denied any direct chance to say no to harrowing levels of inequality and precarity, a huge fraction of the electorate used the referendum to say just that, and with very good
reason.
Everyone on the Left can rally behind a collective rejection of
policies designed to intensify exploitation and class domination,
and to funnel grotesque amounts of money and power from the
poor to the rich. No one disputes that the EU is currently organized
as an undemocratic oligarchy, which has helped both national and
transnational elites impose punishing neoliberal policies on an entire continent.
And the great advantage of pursuing such austerity policies on
a properly continental scale, of course, is that it allows reactionary
governments to cut public resources while simultaneously deflecting responsibility for these cuts onto hapless outsiders who can
always be blamed, contrary to all evidence, for taking more than
their fair share.
Never have the failings of the EU been so starkly exposed. Optimistic Lexit approaches to the referendum debate, however, relied on a permanent equation of neoliberal restructuring with ongoing membership in an unreformable EU.
But the truth is, leading figures on both sides of the referendum
campaign all supported, and will continue to support, further and
deeper privatization and marketization. Its wishful thinking to
imagine that an anti-neoliberal government might somehow
emerge as a result of temporary squabbles inside the Conservative
Party, let alone as a result of a Blatcherite coup within an unrepresentative Parliamentary Labour Party.
Nothing has sharpened and clarified the relentlessly misleading
referendum debate as much as its result. And if, as seems likely,
this result now leads to further outsourcing, stagflation, and more

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local unemployment then the choice of scapegoats has already


been made, and the ugly consequences are impossible to
anticipate.
As for an allegedly unreformable and unredeemable EU, it
seems a bit too early to tell; to re-appropriate Europe from below
would indeed be immensely difficult but not impossible, and over
time surely less difficult in the wake of 15M, of the Oxi vote, of
Nuit Debout, etc., and allied with the likes of Podemos and the
European Left (whatever their current limitations might be) than
trying in relative isolation to wrest Little England away from the
Tories.
A second reason why we might question recent appeals to the
sovereign people concerns the very meaning of that fetish-word
par excellence: sovereignty.
Even the most cursory glance at the history of political theory
shows how the modern notion of sovereignty implies first and foremost a relation of imperative command a relation that assumes
and exercises the supremacy of one actor or party over all others.
This notion of an insistently commanding authority was foreign
to medieval theories of law and politics; they understood law less
in terms of command than of custom and established precedent.
When Jean Bodin provided the first systematic account of sovereignty in his Six Books of the Republic (1576) defining it as the
greatest power to command he also stressed this distinction.
Custom takes its force little by little, he observed, but law comes
suddenly and takes its vigour from those who have the power to
command everyone.
As theorists of sovereignty ranging from Hobbes and Spinoza to
Rousseau would go on to argue, however, everything depends on
the actual possession of just such power. Everything depends on
the real, material acquisition of this capacity to actually command
and prescribe.

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Put differently, to will the end is always to will the means. To


affirm the people (rather than a monarch or an aristocracy) as sovereign if it is to mean anything at all must mean a readiness to
acquire and use all the means that the people might need to command everyone, and in particular to command those best placed to
resist them, i.e. the rich and the privileged.
On this score, the Leave campaign certainly tried to tap into a
theme that is currently being milked to great rhetorical effect by
far-right parties all over the world. As the consequences of untrammelled capitalism continue to hit home, everyone from Marine Le
Pen to Donald Trump is lining up to say that its time to take back
control.
The irony is that these figures propose to reassert control by relying on precisely those inward-focused nation-state mechanisms
that have already proved so powerless in the face of neoliberal
globalization and capital flight.
Its the ongoing processes of marketization, outsourcing, financialization, and so on that have devastated the lives and jobs of ordinary people, in the United Kingdom and everywhere else far
more than the unsettling shifts in migration patterns that follow in
their wake.
Does anyone believe that a more jingoistic British Parliament,
adorned with all the trappings of a bygone sovereignty, might now
begin to control such processes? Will a parliament still shaped by
the legacy of Thatcher and Blair somehow start to command international capital to put people before profits? Who thinks it will so
much as pretend that it wants to do so, even if it could?
The only actor that might exercise the power actually required
to control these processes is indeed the people themselves, and not
the parliaments or governments that are supposed to represent
them. But in order to exercise such power, people first need to acquire it, and that requires education, organization, and mobilization on a truly revolutionary scale.

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In the absence of such mobilization, claims that were taking


back control ring just as hollow as people like Nigel Farage and
Boris Johnson always intended them to be: the scapegoating of immigrants is one thing, but popular interference with our rulers
freedom to exploit and pillage is quite another.
So did the Leave campaign foster such popular mobilization?
And will its victory help or hinder it, in the future? This is the third
question that needs an answer.
Perhaps the radical left will now rise to this unexpected occasion, as the Lexiters suggest. Like any sort of will, the formation of
a common or popular will is indeed up to us, and the chance is
ours to take or lose. However, if we fail to act, the mere recording
of a narrow majority vote is certainly no substitute for the will of
the people in any proper sense of this phrase.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau the most insightful thinker on popular sovereignty helps clarify whats at stake here. Rousseau pointed out that theres a big difference between a popular or general
will and a mere will of all. The latter is an aggregate of isolated
opinions and, like any opinion poll, normally reflects the existing
balance of forces and fears that dominate a society.
Theres a big difference, in other words, between an actively
shared project on the one hand (for instance the sort of mass determination that overthrew the monarchy in revolutionary France)
and a scattered distribution of individual preferences or aversions
on the other.
What generalizes the will, Rousseau argued, is not so much
the number of voices or votes as the common interest that unites
them. This interest can be diluted or concentrated by all kinds of
factors, but it only makes sense to evoke a popular or general will,
in the singular, when there is a powerful collective determination
to affirm a positive common purpose.
Moreover, such a purpose is a matter of volition or volont a
genuine will of the people Rousseau continued, only when it is

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adopted by free and equal political actors who are properly informed and who, able to penetrate the lies and evasions of those
who might seek to deceive them, thereby gain the capacity to voluntarily make decisions, and have them stick.
It is only their ability to formulate and then impose such a purpose that allows the people to become an actually sovereign actor
in the first place and Rousseau was the first to admit that this is a
rare and hugely difficult achievement.
Laboriously self-constituting, popular sovereignty only persists
as an exercise of political will (rather than as a mere expression of
public opinion), he added, insofar as it continues to project itself
into a freely chosen future: the sovereign never acts because it
willed [in the past], but because it wills, in a present of its own
making, and by definition a sovereign people cannot impose on itself a law that it cannot break. What is to be done is never simply
done.
The referendum may have given everyone their chance to say
yes or no to a deceptively simple question. But in no sense did it
contribute to the constitution of a new general will, let alone that
egalitarian and inclusive civic virtue that Rousseau and his Jacobin admirers understood to be the sole animating force of such a
will.
On the contrary: relying on deceit, nostalgia, and fear, the leading Leave campaigners did everything they could to divide people
against each other, leaving us even more fragmented and disempowered than we were before.
As things stand, to invoke the sovereign will of the people remains an appeal to what we might still decide and do, in the future,
and not to what has already been done to us in the past.

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Can This Really Be Us?


Lara Pawson

A few hours before polling stations closed last Thursday, I travelled


to west London to watch an extraordinary film about Syria.
Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait (2014) is composed almost entirely of footage shot on mobile phones and uploaded, anonymously, onto YouTube. Some of it is also the remarkable work of
Wiam Simav Bedirxan, a Kurdish woman surviving and filming
tenaciously in the city of Homs. The film moves back and forth
between Syria and France, to Paris where its Syrian director, Ossama Mohammed, lives in exile. The violence feels relentless: we
see a young man being tortured, a truncheon thrust up his arse;
another sitting upright in a plastic chair, his face blown off in
shreds; we see the carefully wrapped bodies of dead children; the
grief of weeping women; we see a kitten chewing the insides of a
dog; and a pair of dead horses, starch stiff on a Homs street. It
goes on and on and on.
Early in the film, however, I was confused, briefly, by some of
the footage. Was I watching a scene in a Syrian city or in Paris?
The narrow streets looked so familiar the almost quaint blocks of
flats complete with tiny balconies, blinds and plants in pots. But as
the film rolled out, the physical destruction of Syria expanding, so
the distinction between here and there and there and here became
clear. On screen, at least. In my head, it was a different matter. A
series of thoughts were scrambling. Here we were watching a film

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about the indescribable suffering of so many Syrians on the very


day that millions of British voters were marking a cross to keep
foreigners out. How many of us have even the vaguest clue of what
it is to live with war? How many of us desire to truly understand?
Mixing in with my anger and shame was another frightening
thought, one that has gone round and round my head for months
now: that our meanness, our arrogant notions of British exceptionalism, our racism, parochialism and narcissism are leading us ever
closer to violent conflict here.
Months ago, I became convinced that we would vote to leave. I
was surprised by the number of friends and acquaintances who
thought otherwise. Largely due to the amount of airtime willingly
given to a jingoistic, quasi-alcoholic, ex-trader, I was certain, too,
that there would be a surge in public expressions of racism and
hatred. Again, I was taken aback by the number of people who suggested I was suffering from exaggerated pessimism. When Jo Cox
was assassinated, I sat at my desk, welling up, appalled, afraid and
ashamed. Yet I felt no sense of surprise. What did amaze me was
the number of people, from left to right, who spoke of their shock.
The word was used again and again, as if Tommy Mairs white supremacist violence, and his devotion to apartheid and Nazism, had
come from nowhere. Even today, almost a week after the referendum result, as social media and news reports stack up with more
and more examples of public, largely unchallenged racist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic abuse, many are still expressing a certain dismay. Can this really be us?
Alas, it can. And it is. And it is with urgency that we must look
long and hard at ourselves, examining who we are and how we got
here. We and I am speaking to those of us with white skin, those
of us who live with white privilege at the expense of others freedom and prosperity and happiness need to own up to ourselves
that the Kingdom is United by ideas of white supremacism, the
very ideas that are now pulling it and us apart. Its no good ringing

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our hands over the white Manchester teenager on board a tram


yelling, Go back to Africa! He is but one miserable symptom of
much deeper levels of ignorance, denialism and embedded racism
that is rooted in our colonial history. There are so many examples,
and so much evidence, it sparks a sort of madness in my mind that
any of us might need reminding. Im thinking of the British suppression of the Mau Mau; Im thinking of Cecil Rhodes and Henry
Stanley; Im thinking of the endless recycling of two world wars
and one World Cup; of the reluctance to place the Holocaust within a much broader European history of genocide and racial hatred.
Im thinking of all the times Ive heard highly-paid BBC
presenters failing to notice, let alone disrupt, racist discourse on
live radio and television. Im thinking of the lack of justice for
Jimmy Mubenga, the Angolan man who died at Heathrow Airport
while being escorted out of Britain by G4S security officers. Im
thinking of the deportation centres dotted across this country,
packed with people who need our political, financial and emotional
support not the hate we show them day in, day out. Im thinking
about New Labour capitulating to the right, with David Blunkett
and others falling over themselves to show their intolerance towards migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Im thinking of that
partys ghastly red mug. And Im thinking of all the times Ive
heard people including some of my own neighbours and even a
few friends express their loathsome ideas about foreigners and
migrants and people with darker skin. That so many journalists
continue to describe the racist rhetoric of our politicians as merely
dog whistling is beyond me. Shame on the lot of us.
We need to recognize the white supremacist legacy of colonialism and how some of us continue to benefit from it. I believe that
people like me need to lose our many privileges to make the world
more just and fair for everyone. I dont want to hear from white
friends of the centre- or radical left that they are pootling off to
their Paris apartment or their holiday home in Barcelona because

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they cant face whats happening here. I dont want to read comment pieces by leftists with stiff upper lips who insist we accept the
results, buckle down and start building post-Brexit Britain. The
referendum was not democratic. It was fed by a white supremacist
media that either deliberately stoked racial hatred or is so deluded
with its own whiteness, it couldnt recognise the hatred it was helping to harness. I hate to break it to you folks, but that is not democracy: its the building blocks of fascism.
And this is what frightens me most. Despite everything that has
happened in the last few days, starting with the political assassination of a progressive MP, far too many British people still think it
couldnt happen here. Its not the British way, they say. How I wish
they were right. But Ive lived in countries with wars and Ive seen
how quickly societies disintegrate. Ive listened to people who have
survived conflict, whose families have been split in two, brothers
shooting brothers. We need to grow up. Fascism is here. Not the
sort of fascism that Hillary Benn spoke of in his charismatic but ultimately empty speech urging MPs to vote in favour of Syrian airstrikes, but a very British fascism that has been given the green
flag. As the poet George Szirtes wrote, States are fragile fabrics.
We are more fragile at this point than at any time in my life here.
It could happen here. It is happening here.

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The Whorled Circle of a Political


Cosmology
Sam Kriss

What the parliamentary Labour party is doing right now is very


stupid, and we shouldnt shy away from saying that theyre doing it
because they are very stupid people. In one day, eleven members of
Jeremy Corbyns shadow cabinet resigned, their announcements
spaced out for total media saturation, little grins of transgressive
glee breaking through their sham TV-ready seriousness. With the
British public, that vast and wandering abstraction, having very
possibly voted itself out of existence, and the government in a state
of permanent turmoil, only an opposition party that is deeply stupid would think that this is the best moment to attempt to remove
its own leadership. Only the deeply stupid (or the outrightly fascist) would see a country collapsing into fascism as a great opportunity to start attacking the left. But the Labour right are a deeply
unimpressive lot: blinkered, vicious, grasping, narcissistic, petulant, and desperate, these people operate primarily through the
medium of the hapless plot, and want very keenly to be loved, to
which end they will do almost anything except trying to be less
loathsome. It doesnt really make much sense to call them Blairites
any more Blairs original pact was directed at a universal and
post-ideological petit bourgeoisie, offering them bright colours and
melodic sounds in a sunlit neoliberal utopia. As we discovered, that

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deal was hollow; what we got was war and collapse. Labours new
right, by contrast, is neurotically fixated on a half-remembered image of the working class, and its only promise to them is to be more
racist.
There was something very strange, and mostly unremarkedupon, in the short period of stage-setting that preceded yesterdays
mass resignations. In a series of documents leaked to the media,
shadowy and nameless disgruntled MPs complained that Corbyn
had failed to effectively press for Britain to stay in the EU, sabotaged the LabourIN campaign, and spent much of his time criticising Brussels while ostensibly defending it. But then there was
this: an allegation that Corbyn would not allow the Labour party to
discuss or address concerns around immigration, writing them off
as xenophobia, prejudice or racism at every turn. On the face
of it, this doesnt make much sense: these much-vaunted and (as
were constantly assured) deeply reasonable concerns around immigration tend to correlate strongly with an antipathy to the EU;
indulging them would have only further doomed the Remain campaigns efforts. Corbyn seems to be in an impossible position, not
allowed to defend or critique the European project. But this
shouldnt be read on its face. It isnt a complaint; its a symptom. If
you want to know whats going on in the Labour party, this is a
good place to start: the little psychic knot at the heart of the right
wings determination to get rid of the man.
This is why theyre trying to depose Jeremy Corbyn he refused to be racist enough. The real nature of the complaint is of
course buried in metaphor; the preferred euphemism is electability. For years, Labour has attempted to endear itself to the populace by adopting the language of the far right Gordon Browns
British jobs for British workers; Ed Miliband putting the words
controls on immigration on an official mug and the rock that
would become his tombstone. Its a curious form of self-abasement: a metropolitan elite, terrified of what it is and desperate to

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be seen as something else, takes its worst prejudices about the


working classes and upholds them as a positive. Unsurprisingly, it
hasnt worked people who do subscribe to racist ideologies will
tend to vote for parties that espouse them out of the genuine conviction of evil, rather than those who openly announce that their
evil is only a cynical ploy. But it has had the effect of entrenching
the language of the far right across the political spectrum, and
thereby reinforcing the idiot axiom that you have to speak it to win
popular support.
In this whorled circle of a political cosmology, Corbyn is an utterly abject thing: he represents an electorate that does not want to
elect the designatedly electable, a structural impossibility, and like
all structural impossibilities he becomes the object of a visceral, somatic horror. Labour has given up pretending that its anti-socialism is a matter of political expediency. This is a war of extermination, and its being fought for reasons that are simply not rational.
Each resigning shadow cabinet member gave the same ramblingly
tautological explanation: its not ideological, and Jeremy is (in a
nauseatingly reiterated phrase) a great human being, but hes
been unable to lead effectively, unable to secure the support of the
parliamentary party, and therefore they can no longer pretend to
support his leadership. In other words, theyre forced to hate him
because they already hate him; they want him to go because thats
what they want.
Still, theres no point pretending. The Labour party has not
done well under Corbyn, it has not been united, and it has little
hope of winning a general election. The fact that this is mostly
down to the recalcitrance of its right-wing MPs doesnt change this
fact, and cant be subtracted from its effects. But if his leadership
has been turbulent, his ouster would be fully disastrous. The party
might be unified, but with the unity of the inept. Yes, Corbyn has
failed to keep his party together, but his enemies who are, remember, supposed to be the politically savvy ones here have

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been even more cackhanded in their attempts to remove him. The


current shambles of a coup is no exception. From a purely strategic
perspective, it was a terrible idea: the plotters had no real leverage,
and no real plan beyond the expectation that Corbyn would obediently resign. So far, he has not resigned, and hes almost certain to
win any new leadership election. All these people have succeeded
in doing is exhausting and exposing themselves. They think they
can take Labour to victory, but they cant even carry out a half-decent conspiracy; far from saving the party, any successful intervention would probably end up destroying it forever. Which is for the
best. After all, imagine the peril wed be in if these slapstick mediocrities managed to get their hands on nuclear weapons.

This eBook is licensed to Joo Santos, joaopedrosantos92@gmail.com on 07/12/2016

On the Hideous Whiteness of Brexit


Akwugo Emejulu

Despite vociferous claims to the contrary, Brexit really is about


racebut not in ways we might expect. In this seemingly postrace era, Brexit shows us how whiteness, as a power relation, operates in ways to cast itself as both a victim and an innocent
simultaneously.
Whiteness as Victimhood
An unstated campaign strategy of the Leave campaign was to reimagine Britain and Britishness (but really Englishness) as white
in order to make particular kinds of claims to victimhood which
would highlight economic inequality without challenging neoliberalism. For instance, a key argument of the campaign was that the
working class (who were unquestionably assumed to be white)
were suffering under the burden of mass immigration, which
transformed the culture of their neighbourhoods and put undue
strain on public services. Thus we see whiteness operating as victimthe white working class is being held hostage in their own
country by migrants. Any critique of this victimhood further re-enforces a victim status through fulminations that the critic is the
real racist.

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This construction of whiteness as victimhood purposefully


makes it difficult to understand how and why public services are in
crisis. Rather than migration causing the crisis, the crisis is, in fact,
the official policy of the current Conservative government: austerity measures have been the dominant policy response since the
2008 economic crisis. Austerity, however, has not been imposed
on Britain by the European Union. Rather, the then Coalition government and the current Conservative government voluntarily adopted this policy of shrinking and privatising the statewith disastrous and uneven effects for particular social groups. In other
words, those shy 2015 Tory voters have much to answer for in
terms of the destruction that austerity has wroughtbut this complicity has been erased by the Brexit campaign. Instead, migrants
have been weaponised to stoke fear and get out the vote for the
leave campaign.
Although we appear to be in a post-fact Britain, I feel compelled to remind readers that austerity measures are unequally distributed across the population. Certainly, the poorest local authorities, especially those in the north and east, are being hit hardest by
these unprecedented cuts to public spending. However, looking
more closely at the data shows us that womenand women of colour in particularare disproportionately impacted. Because women of colour, on the whole, are more likely to be public sector employees but also living in the poorest households, cuts to vital services, such as libraries, public transport and afterschool care,
translate into further immiseration as jobs are threatened and
household incomes decline. Even though people of colour are more
likely to be living in poverty and are being hit hardest by austerity
measures, 75% of voters of colour opted to remain in the EU. What
does a claim of white victimhood mean in this context?
Whiteness as victimhood is also deployed in a much more insidious fashion. Both before and after the Brexit vote, previously invisible and privileged white EU migrantsexcluding white

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migrants from Eastern Europe who have been and continue to be


subject to institutionalised xenophobia as their labour value is exploitedbegan to report feeling unwelcomed and unsafe. These reports have combined with social media accounts of increased racial
harassment, leading to figures suggesting that such incidents have
risen 57% since the referendum. The sincerity of these claims of
feeling unsafe, nor the legitimacy of these reports of racist and
xenophobic abuse, must not be doubted. But whiteness, even in
discussions about racism and anti-racism, can intrude, appropriate
and colonise these spaces in order to re-enforce an identity of
victim-hood, whilst at the same time seemingly de-prioritising the
interests and experiences of people of colour.
I do not seek nor desire a victim identity. I do, however, want
public acknowledgement, solidarity and collective action against
Britains de facto policy of indefinite detention of migrants; of
everyday and institutionalised Islamophobia and the state violence
deployed against Sarah Reed, Sheku Bayoh and Jimmy Mubenga
and other people of colour. What does it mean that those who now
are expressing concern about a surge in xenophobia have previously had little to say about everyday and institutionalised racism
and violence that people of colour experience? And that people of
colour were not taken at our word, as others have been, about what
we experience? It seems some people are only concerned with racism and xenophobia when their own privileged migration status is
challenged.
Whiteness as Innocence
The spate of racist and xenophobic attacks in the aftermath of
Brexit also reveals another operation of whitenessthat of innocence. We can see this manifested in three inter-related ways.
First, public shock and outrage about increases in racial harassment seem to define racism as an aberration in Britainthat it

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only exists in relation to extraordinary events such as the Brexit


vote (This is not who we are). The framing of public outrage in
this way seeks to treat whiteness as innocent. But the wealth of this
country was built through colonial plunder, exploitation and enslavement. Our contemporary social relations are imbued with and
reflect this history. To only understand racism as localised,
reactionary inter-personal violence is to misunderstand what Britain (and indeed Europe) is and the power relations that maintain
and legitimise racial hierarchy. But to acknowledge this history
would mean coming to terms with the arbitrariness of race and the
racial order, of which there seems to be little appetite.
Secondly, whiteness also seeks absolution of responsibility
through performative outrage. Racial attacks that heretofore would
have remained invisible, ignored or subject to question (Arent
you just being over-sensitive?) now gain legitimacy through the
white gaze. Now that some have decided to see racism, it can, in a
very limited and non-threatening way, be named. Whiteness is
thus recast as witness to racism, but without any imperative to dismantle white supremacy, the system of racial hierarchy remains
firmly in place, with whiteness preserved, unchallenged and intact.
Finally, whiteness cloaks itself in innocence by arriving late to
scene and adopting an identity of ally. I question those who now
claim to stand shoulder to shoulder with me when they also maintain, without irony, that a focus on race and identity politics fractures the left at a time of crisis and undermines class politics. I
question those who now only seem to care about racism and xenophobia when Brexit has used their bodies as borders. I question
those who now believe racism is real because they have witnessed
it with their own eyes. I also question those who seek to extract
from me and other people of colour our emotional labour to absolve them of responsibility.

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I am not looking for allies; I want collective action. We face an


uncertain future. Let us be honest about our past and our present if
we truly seek to dismantle white supremacy.

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A Special Intensity of Exploitation


Wail Qasim

In the absolute furore that has followed Britains decision to leave


the EU, there is one clear issue that has emerged as the central
concern: immigration. Those from across Europe, who chose to
build lives and lay down roots here in the UK, have now been sent
a clear message of hostility from this country. Indeed, anyone who
appears foreign to Britons is now a possible target for racial abuse
and assault in public, whilst property owned by supposed foreigners, such as the Polish Social and Cultural Association and Kashmir Meat and Poultry, a halal butcher in Walsall, have also come
under attack.
All the while, the referendum has triggered multiple stages of
official discussion over the lives of immigrants. Throughout the
campaign, people were used as political bargaining chips, and now,
whilst also suffering from an increase in racist harassment, continue to be fodder for negotiations between both parties at home and
state leaders across Europe. It is difficult not to think that this will
be used as an opportunity to tighten the nets of our immigration
system more widely, affecting all those who rely on a precarious
right to be in the country.
Whilst many are quick to point out that immigration wasnt the
motivating factor for everyone who voted Leave, this argument obscures the fact that immigration and racism have played a significant role in the Brexit discussion. It now feels inevitable that

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xenophobic ideas will gain in popularity, but they have not come
out of nowhere and indeed are enforced by the state. The recent
history of British immigration and border policies shows a longstanding willingness to divide people according to their usefulness
to the nation. The official approach to immigration has always
been keen to use popular racism as a weapon to meet its ends.
At a protest to defend migrants rights, called for the day of the
referendum result, I spoke to Anna Pichieri from Movement for
Justice By Any Means Necessary, an independent migrant and civil
rights movement. Asked why Movement for Justice had helped call
the demonstration, Anna told me:
We need to be clear about why this referendum was planned. This
is the outcome of many different governments, on the right and on
the left, using the racist scapegoating of immigrants to push
through all their cuts and austerity measures and the widening of
inequality that we have seen. All these measures yet they have no
solutions, so both parties know that they have to use the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the stereotyping of immigrants, to make sure
that they could push their cuts.

We need not go back far to find examples of scapegoating that


Anna and Movement for Justice talk about. In 2013, the Home Offices dismal campaign targeting undocumented immigrant communities in London deployed vans displaying billboards that read:
In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest. The go home rhetoric
has been used by racists for a long time, but this was an example of
explicit use in government policy.
The targets of the 2013 Home Office campaign were those with
no right to live and work in the UK, but since last Thursdays referendum, telling EU migrants to go home has also been legitimised,
resulting, for example, in the harassment of Polish centres, homes
and schools. This current sentiment has its political antecedent in
Gordon Browns now infamous 2007 British jobs for British

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workers speech. And, going further back, we can see how racism
as a response to immigration has become ingrained in public consciousness by looking at the history of immigration of people of
colour migrating from British colonies.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan often notes that the history of Britains immigration acts is a history of its developing racism. With a
need for post-war reconstruction, the British Nationality Act of
1948 conferred Commonwealth citizens with British nationality
and the right to free entry into the UK. In the years that followed,
mass migration from the colonies took place and was largely responsible for the multicultural Britain that some like to cite as one
of our greatest national achievements. In reality, many who made
the journey hoped for employment and opportunities in the United
Kingdom, but would instead be greeted with hostility and
criminalisation.
With the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, popular
xenophobia and racism would become legislated and codified, removing the right to citizenship and free movement held by ex-colonial subjects. Whilst Britain was happy to exploit their labour,
made cheaper by racial wage disparities, it was not willing to endow these immigrants with the same rights as British workers. A
succession of immigration laws would begin with this Act of 1962,
each one in response to both the economic desire for labour and
the national popular racist mood.
Around the same time, we see the development of some freedom of movement agreements between the EUs predecessors,
such as the European Coal and Steel Community. Britain joined
the European Economic Community in 1973 and began to reap the
benefits of free access to labour from across Europe. Simultaneously, access from the Commonwealth was massively restricted
a policy to allay the fears of original EEC nations that Britain
would become an open passageway for Commonwealth nations into Europe.

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We can see from these examples in the short history of postwar immigration policy that the state has consistently divided up
immigrants according to how they benefit the economy: racism
and profiteering go hand-in-hand. Now that boundaries of bigotry
are being redrawn once again according to a neoliberal guide-map,
in some ways EU migrants are beginning to face what has previously been quotidian for non-white migrants from Commonwealth
nations.
Subjecting different groups to their own special intensity of exploitation has long created divisions amongst the working class.
This animosity forms part of the violence of Whiteness, though it is
important to reiterate that racism is also top-down from the
powerful elites. Politicians act shocked at the upsurge in racism, as
though they never imagined that decades of using hatred to justify
their policies could turn into an actual violent revolt against people
racialised in the UK.
Anti-racism faces two interlinked challenges: tackling popular
participation in the racist structure of Whiteness and opposing the
states racist laws. In recent years activists have concentrated on
state violence, especially combatting immigration raids and supporting calls for justice for those killed in custody. We can see how
these two concerns overlap in the case of Jimmy Mubenga, who
was unlawfully killed by G4S guards on a deportation flight in
2010. Unfortunately, this referendum has now unleashed popular
expressions of racism and it is tempting to concentrate on tackling
this development. But the state is responsible for creating the conditions that popular racism flourishes, and we must tackle the
states failures if we are to have any hope of impacting racism in
Britain as a whole.
Brexit threatens us now, but it is preceded by a history of devaluing human life with borders. The left as much as anyone failed
to address this and opted instead for quiet disapproval in favour of
concentrating on issues seen as more urgent. Racism is and has

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been an urgent problem. It is time for its disastrous history to be


undone before all that is left is the fascist face of Farage.

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The Myth and Reality of Brexit and


Migrants
Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi

The official campaign to leave the European Union was based on


two xenophobic myths, woven into public discussion. Subtlety was
unnecessary because these ideas around immigration had been
decades in the making: the media led the narrative, the public understood it and politicians whipped it out whenever things got
tricky.
Myth One: Take Back Control
The first myth was that leaving the EU would shield Britain from
the refugee crisis and stem the flow of people seeking sanctuary on
these shores. This undertone was made explicit by Nigel Farages
Breaking Point poster, which pictured Middle Eastern refugees
queuing at Europes borders. The subheading read: We must
break free of the EU and take back control. There was little ambiguity. Taking back control was about keeping this particular group
of people out. And this is what many voted for. This is regrettable.
Because in reality Brexit will have no bearing on those seeking
sanctuary from war and persecution.
When the people of Syria took to the streets in March 2011,
Thamer was there, leading the cries for freedom. For much of his

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four decades, Thamer, a human rights lawyer, poet and academic


cloaked his criticism of the government in the dry language of academia or disguised it with humour. In 2009, he published a collection of short stories, gently mocking the authoritarian regime of
Bashar al-Assad. When you want to write about the government in
Syria you change the names or change the places. Or you replace
them with animals.
But the time for secrecy had passed. Thamer watched governments in Egypt and Tunisia topple, and felt optimistic. Here was a
chance for peaceful revolution, for the Syrian people to come together and demand their rights. Thamer committed himself to the
protests. Looking back at this time, in moments of sadness, his
wife Rashida regrets the choice her husband made because it
would change their lives forever. He always had to fight, to help
people in Syria for freedom. Why, why, why?
It didnt take long for Assads security forces to identify Thamer
and over the course of three months he was arrested, tortured, released, arrested, tortured, released. He continued to stand with the
protestors and one several occasions Assads police attempted to
assassinate him. Thamer survived and fled to Jordan, arranging for
his wife and their four children to follow shortly afterwards. In
Jordan, he felt uneasy, certain that Assads forces were at work
there. The Jordanian government did their best to protect him, offering him a bodyguard, but fellow comrades were killed. Thamer
made the decision to move again.
There were other factors in the decision to move. Jordan was
is a tough place for Syrians, there was little work and while
Thamers family were lucky enough to have a house to live in, it
was overcrowded, open to whoever managed to escape Assads
deadly aim. Rashida would cook and clean, day and night for the
passing revolutionaries, all the while her own nerves frayed as her
parents remained in Aleppo, bombs falling about them. By now,
Thamers thick dark hair had turned a shocking white, the torture

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had ravaged him mentally and physically; his back was a source of
constant pain and his mind slipped from his grasp where once it
was agile. He became distant with his family, but he was thinking
about the future, his childrens future. The war showed little sign of
abating and the international community dithered. Syria was the
past, it belonged to him and Rashida, but perhaps the children
could have a future somewhere else. He chose Britain. The UK is
the first state in the world for human rights. English is the first language in the world. This is the language for science, the new,
everything. A good future for my children.
Thamer flew from Jordan to Paris, then to London, where he
claimed asylum. A day later he was sent to Glasgow, where he now
lives with his family. It took more than a year for Thamer to secure
visas for his wife and children to join him in the UK under the
countrys family reunification rules. The entire process was
fraught, despite the strength of the familys case. An exhausted
Rashida had to convince the British embassy in Jordan that
Thamer was her husband and that her children were her children.
Meanwhile, there were regular reports from home of the deaths of
friends and family. Thamers mother died of a brain haemorrhage
because it was too dangerous for her to leave the house to get to a
hospital, just a few hundred metres away.
Thamer and Rashida still live the horrors of the Syrian war, but
their children are safe, and already their Syrian accents are giving
way to a thick Glaswegian lilt. The hope Thamer had in 2011 when
he took to the streets is now the hope for them in a new country,
with a future free of Assad and his bullets.
Bullets that are still being fired. Which brings us to the point.
Whether or not Britain leaves the EU, there is a war in Syria and
refugees in its neighbouring countries live in squalid conditions.
Thamer wasnt exercising free movement within the EU, or coming
as an economic migrant, he was fleeing war. Whether or not Britain leaves the EU, the UK is a signatory to the refugee convention

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and is obliged to do its bit for people fleeing persecution (the dereliction of that duty thus far is another story). Our obligations to him
and his family wont and should not change because of Brexit.
Myth Two: The Migrant Benefit-Scrounger
The second xenophobic myth peddled by both Leave and Remain
campaigns was that migrants are a burden on the welfare state and
live an easy life here at the expense of British citizens. This was a
myth both campaigns were comfortable with because it is one that
has been perpetuated consistently for about two decades. We know
it well. During the 90s it was tales of bogus asylum seekers. Today
the language has changed slightly, with newspapers happy to use
the word migrant as a catch all term for bad migrant. Stories
abound of Eastern Europeans, Muslims, black Africans, either
queuing at Calais or simply turning up and expecting handouts.
Even the left has capitulated to this myth; what to do about these
problematic people and the pressures they place on the country
has become one of the political questions of our time. Thus the demonization of the poorest migrants became de rigueur, resulting
in a decade or more of government policies whose effect has been
to criminalise this group. The evidence is in the 3,000-strong detention estate and regular mass deportation flights to Britains
former colonies carrying hundreds of people that have spent their
formative years in this country. The evidence is the destitution of
refused asylum seekers and EEA migrants with restricted access to
public services and social housing. The evidence is in recent immigration legislation which gives power to doctors, bankers, landlords and others to act as border guards, policing the legality of
anyone who appears foreign. The evidence is in the story of Mahalia*, a young Pakistani woman who arrived in the UK in 2012
after an arranged marriage to a British citizen.

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Mahalia was treated as a slave, made to cook and clean for her
husband and his extended family, and regularly slapped and
taunted. Her husband was the most violent, either kicking her in
the stomach or punching her face, depending on his mood. Her
mother-in-law and father-in-law, would slap her occasionally and
always shouted and cursed her, even once taking away her baby for
a few days because she struggled to stop the childs crying. It was
easy for her husband to control her movements and limit escape
routes; he prevented her from attending English classes and made
no attempt to regularise her migration status. Once her spousal
visa expired, if she tried to report him to the police she risked
deportation.
One winter, Mahalia ran away and, unsure of what to do, she
went and sat in her local park. A family friend discovered her and
took her home, aghast at the young womans story. But her
mother-in-law called the police, who escorted Mahalia back to the
family home, where her husband tried to suffocate her. He then
pummelled her stomach his feet, pulled her hair and punched her
head against the wall. This time she called the police.
If Mahalia was a British citizen she and her daughter could
claim housing benefit, which would cover the cost of a bed at a domestic violence refuge. But she is a migrant with uncertain status,
which means that she cant easily access this support. When Mahalia turned up on their doorstep, several refuges turned her away
because they assumed she had no access to benefits and couldnt
cover the cost of her stay. Still traumatised and unable to speak
confidently in English, Mahalia and her little daughter stayed in
homelessness hostels, mixed sex hostels for refugees and hotels,
while she attempted to gather evidence needed to sort out her migration status and get access to support.
Persevering, Mahalia worked on her English and began to gather the evidence she needed to prove that she had been abused and
to regularise her status. She does all this from a Travelodge, where

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she and her daughter live in a small room with no cooking facilities. Sometimes shes afraid to leave the room, but she must because her daughter is full of energy and needs space. Every week
she visits Safety4Sisters, a migrant womens rights group that campaigns on issues affecting undocumented women experiencing
gender-based violence. It is here that Mahalia learned she might be
eligible for support under the Home Offices domestic violence
spousal visa exception, yet all the services she came into contact
with assumed that, as a migrant, she was entitled to nothing.
Mahalia isnt an isolated case, there are hundreds like her and
many have no access to public funds. Other abused women continue to live with their violent partners for this reason. This is hardly
the easy life of a lazy scrounger getting handouts from the welfare
state. If you are a poor migrant in Britain today, just as is increasingly the case for British citizens, there are few safety nets to catch
you if anything goes wrong. It is hard to see how the Leave campaigners might seek to make Mahalias life any more difficult than
it already is.
These are profoundly uncertain times; there are calls for a
second referendum, the possibility of a general election and maybe
a referendum on Scottish Independence. Whatever happens, the
public debate will continue, and we need to address the myths and
face the reality. British people must be given the opportunity to
make up their own minds about the reality of migration in this
country based on truth and not lies.

This eBook is licensed to Joo Santos, joaopedrosantos92@gmail.com on 07/12/2016

10

Brexit, the Anti-Grexit


tienne Balibar, translated by David Broder

Far be it from me to minimise the dramatic consequences the UKs


vote will have for the British as well as for Europe. But I am struck
by the way in which the French and foreign newspaper headlines
present us how things are After Brexit With very few exceptions
all of them seem to take it for given that a divorce has indeed taken
place. In reality, while we are certainly entering into a turbulent
period, the outcome is not at all clear. And what I want to try and
comment on and interpret is this uncertainty. As we know, comparisons arent everything. But how could we fail to note that in the
recent history of European politics national or multi-national referendum results have never been put into effect? Such was the case
in 2005 and 2008 with the European Constitution and the Lisbon
Treaty, and even more clearly in 2015 with the memorandum imposed on Greece. Very probably the same will be the case here, too.
Above and beyond the personal conflicts that led to a difference of
tactics, the British ruling class is manoeuvring to push back the
deadlines and negotiate the terms of exit as best as possible. Certain governments (the French one in the lead) as well as European
Commission spokespersons have been rattling their sabres (out is
out, leave means leave). But Germany isnt listening with the
same ear, and there will be no unanimity at most a faade of it.
The most plausible result at the end of a period of tensions,
whose outcome will be determined less by public opinion than by

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the fluctuations of the finance markets is that we will end up


with a new geometry for the system of European states. Formal
EU membership will remain articulated with other structures: the
Euro but also NATO, the border security system that takes over
from Schengen, and a free-trade zone defined in function of economic power relations. Again from this point of view the comparison between Grexit and Brexit could prove instructive. The weakness of Greece abandoned by all those who logically ought to
have supported its demands has led to a regime of internal exclusion; conversely, the relative strength of the UK (which can
count on solid support within the EU) will doubtless lead to an accentuated form of external inclusion. Is that to say that this isnt a
turning point? Obviously not. Lets briefly examine the British
side and the European side, before explaining why they are not
separable, but instead represent two sides of one same coin.
Clearly in explaining the emergence of a hegemonic antiEuropean sentiment we have to consider Britains particular history, its imperial past, its privileged relationship to the US, and its
social history made up of abrupt reversals. The analyses provided
thus far show the extraordinary variety of variables at work here,
with division according to factors of class, generation, nationality
and ethnicity. These factors potentially contradict one another, and
it is this contradiction that the sovereigntist discourse manipulated by the partisans of Brexit overlays. So we should ask how
long it will be able to mask the fact that the economic ravages to
which a growing proportion of the new poor in the UK are now
subject owe to the cumulated effect of neoliberal policies that not
only the EU imposed on Great Britain. On the contrary, from the
Thatcher period through the New Labour era the UK was one of
the most active supporters of neoliberalism across all of Europe.
Whatever its modalities, Brexit by itself will not itself bring any
correction to this situation. Evidently, that would only be the case
if an alternative policy became a majority one. But not the least

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paradox of this situation is that in order for that to happen it would


have to have a counterpart on the Continent, because the law of
competition between territories will now impose itself more than
ever.
That brings us to the European side. Even properly taking all
the different specificities into account, none of the problems hitting the UK is absent from the other nations of Europe. There is
some truth in the populist (neither Left nor Right) propaganda
now breaking out across the whole EU, calling for referendums on
the British model. Even in 2005 former Chancellor Schmidt observed that if referendums like the ones staged in France and the
Netherlands had taken place everywhere, with a few exceptions
they would have resulted in No votes everywhere. All countries
have seen the development of the crisis of legitimacy, of the return
of nationalism, and of the tendency to project the social and cultural malaise onto an enemy within targeted by xenophobic and
Islamophobic parties. The governments already won to austerity
used the Greek crisis to make public debt into a spectre haunting
the taxpayer. The refugee crisis has been collapsed into questions
of security. Clearly what manifests itself in the UK as separatism
is expressed everywhere in Europe in the tendency for societies to
fragment, with their internal and external fractures aggravated.
We can put that better. We have passed a threshold in the process of the disaggregation of the European project. This is not because of the British vote, but the referendum did reveal tendencies
toward polarisation in the European collective and a both moral
and political crisis. As I have said, in my book Europe: crise et fin?,
it is not only that we are in an interregnum; rather, we are witnessing a destituent process that for the moment has no constituent counterpart.
Are we powerless? Thats the whole question. For the short
term I am very pessimistic, because the discourse about refounding Europe is almost entirely in the hands of the political and

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technocratic class. A class, that is, that does not at all envisage
changing the course that guarantees it the goodwill of hidden
powers (those of the financial markets) and which does not want to
deeply reform the system of government from which it draws its
monopoly of representation. By consequence, the role of opposition is taken by parties and ideologues who seek to destroy the
links between the peoples (or more generally the residents) of
Europe. It will take a very long march and perhaps other brutal
shocks before we arrive at the conjugation and clarification in
the eyes of the majority of citizens, across borders of the close interdependence between shared sovereignty, transnational
democracy, alter-globalisation, the co-development of regions and
nations, and exchange among cultures. We are not at that point,
and time is running short All the more reason if we do believe
in Europe, as I do to continue without relent to explain what is
going on.

This eBook is licensed to Joo Santos, joaopedrosantos92@gmail.com on 07/12/2016

11

Collapsing Constructions: Reflections


on British Exit
Wolfgang Streeck, translated by David Fernbach

We shall have to wait and see whether German Europeans will


learn anything from the outcome of the British referendum. There
is not much hope of this. In their first reactions, they claimed that
the land of Shakespeare and Adam Smith, Newton and Hobbes,
Hndel and Marx had never really belonged to Europe unlike
ourselves of course. It is obvious here to anyone not caught up in
the German fog that similar votes would have had similar results in
a whole series of countries: Denmark, Netherlands, Austria, Hungary and Italy, not to mention France. The European Union as we
know it, the institutional framework of European integration as
Germans imagined it, is experiencing its Gtterdmmerung. And
anyone who does not believe this risks being buried by its collapsing constructions.
Will the German political class understand that it might have
decisively accelerated the collapse of its Brussels cloud-cuckoo
land? British public opinion followed with amazement and dread
how the Merkel/Gabriel government used their Europe to destroy
the economy of Greece and humiliate the country, rescuing German and French banks in the name of rescuing Greece and the
European idea. It also followed more or less closely the spectacle
of Germanys go-it-alone policy towards refugees: the opening of

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German and European borders to fill Germanys demographic gap,


presented in the absence of an immigration law as a humanitarian
rescue operation to be undertaken by Europe with no upper limit,
with fixed quotas for all member states, accompanied by moral
condemnation of all whose labour market and demographic conditions were not the same followed by a 180-degree turn which included offering the perspective of European entry to the dictatorial
Erdogan, and prosecuting on the orders of the chancellor a
comedian who had broadcast tasteless poems about all this on a
local tv station.
It was clear enough that there was a popular instinct in Great
Britain that it is better not to belong to a club in which something
like this is possible. The Remain camp accordingly based its position exclusively on economics, and not on love for any kind of
European idea. It is well known that British thinking inclines to
empiricism, judging ideas by how they prove themselves in real
life. The fact that the Leave camp won, despite widely predicted
and persistently threatened economic disadvantages, is remarkable
in a world in which the only thing that counts today is supposedly
economic gain and won among the Anglo-Saxons at that. Those
who refuse to be trapped by this logic are then deemed irrational,
from the German point of view, if not incapable of thinking. Perhaps people are just fed up with being morally instructed by a
German-led continent, for instance on the issue of the closing of
the Channel Tunnel to illegal immigration?
The British, in contrast to the Germans, do not have a need for
unconditional love. It is enough for them if everyone learns their
language and clumsily speaks it. Other emotions and affects could
therefore prevail rather than fear of a withdrawal of European love
emotions and affects that are widespread outside of Great Britain, though until recently they have remained latent here. They
have been released by the idolatry of so-called globalization on the
part of elites, who make the openness of their societies to the

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stressful fluctuations of the world market a criterion of both economic and moral judgement. The cultural depreciation of local traditions and those who cling to them by an upper and middle stratum who view themselves as cosmopolitan, who value their country
and its people according to their competitiveness, is very widespread in European societies. It is part of the economistic revaluation of all values in the wake of a capitalist advance accelerated by
neoliberalism. As a result of the shift of the Zeitgeist to the opposing camp, which has forgotten the difference between and internationalism of solidarity and one of finance, those who resist this are
often left with no other language at their disposal than that of the
nation and its good old days. Branded as populists who have not
intellectually grasped the worlds new complexity, and semantically dismissed as anti-European, they hide away in their Gallic villages until an election or a referendum summons them out, with
the encouragement, for lack of any other, of demagogues who are
often shady, as a result of which they are eloquently condemned by
Schultz, Juncker and co. as dangerous backwoodsmen, or even, in
the words of Sigmar Gabriel and his ilk, their former representatives, as a rabble.
With Brexit, however, they were for the first time the majority
in an EU country, and this they could soon be anywhere, and not
just once. At some point then even slower wits will learn that the
European Union as a model of the future is now already something
long past (the very slowest, the drivers of the Brussels and Frankfurt centralization machine, will never learn, but then this will no
longer be necessary). Attempts at a giant state seem today a modernization project that has become unmodern, since it has proved
incapable of moderating the opening up of the world in such a way
as to do justice to the different local abilities, interests and needs
on such a diverse continent as Europe. The end of the EUs social
dimension in the 1990s was also the end of the EU as a body protecting its populations against neoliberal restructuring and re-

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education. Since then, the EU as a prospective superstate has fallen


into the hands of accelerators of neocapitalism and the German export industry with the help of national elites, to whom it is unimportant whether Disraelis one nation becomes two nations again,
so long as its own playing field expands in accordance with its ambitions. It is above all in the Mediterranean space today that the
EU, in the form of a currency union, is acting as a machine for rationalization and impotence, as an instrument of levelling down by
ordoliberal market economics, or at least it is seeking to do so,
though at present with decreasing success.
Size and diversity, and the relationship between them, are in
times of globalization the most important variables in any political
architecture, particularly in Europe. For the Scots forerunners
perhaps of a new modernity, as they once were in the days of the
Scottish moral philosophers Great Britain was already too large
before the Brexit vote, as it refused them the freedom to find their
own way in the global world. For this reason, those who want to
keep the EU as it is should have no illusions about Scottish intentions; small countries, who have recently won their autonomy from
a large country the Baltic states for example are unwilling to
immediately return to the management of a still larger one. Wales,
Catalonia, Corsica, the Basque country, if they should ever become
independent, would join the EU above all to exercise and protect
their autonomy. Now that the EU has failed as a great state in waiting, being unable to protect the interest that little people have in
the political control of capitalist advance, the future may well belong to small-scale, flexible, relatively homogeneous, responsible
action and freely negotiated cooperation, in political units that
seek and fill niches. The smaller nation states of Europe today
could give a foretaste of this, whether in the EU or not: Denmark,
Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, countries in
which collective goods, collective identities, and collectively
formed will are more concrete, perceptible and achievable than in

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a European superstate (and which will all continue, except the


Netherlands, to have their own currency for a long time to come).
Perhaps the attempt by the late prime minister of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Jrgen Rttgers, to have his Land join the Benelux treaty,
immediately nipped in the bud of course by Berlin, was not so confused as many people at the time made it out to be?
Is there a realistic path to a Europe of variable geometry, of
self-determined and flexibly adaptive cooperation between small
state units, without Schultz and Juncker as godfathers? The separation agreements to be negotiated with London could be helpful
for the construction of an EU lite, a second, slimmed-down EU
with less than full membership in the Brussels ever closer union
apparatus, as a platform for horizontal collaboration with equal
rights via international treaties and conventions, with the subsidiarity principle taken seriously for a change, rather than being
watered down by Brussels functionaries, protecting autonomy
while mutually contractual (as advocated by Fritz Scharpf, Governing in Europe): without the European Parliament, which is no such
thing, without the European Court, which freely creates and dispenses a constitutional law impossible to rectify, without nontransparent summit decisions, without open and secrete policy updates by the European Central Bank. Such a framework could also
be attractive for many present full members, who would demand
that it should be open to receive the orderly migration of all of
them, not just the British. Brussels can see this, and fears it as the
devil does holy water which is why its representatives are pressing for the British departure to be sealed as rapidly as possible,
leaving no time to consider an institutional framework for a
second, alternative, contemporary European integration.
Will the EU, and Germany as its leading power, recognize and
use the opportunities that the British decision offers for a renewal
of Europe? The Brussels functionaries and their supporters in the
national states, not least in conformist German opinion, want to

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make an example: to punish London in any case, and thereby show


the Danes, Dutch, Hungarians, etc. whats what, so that they dont
also get funny ideas. Above all, they want to prevent the British exit
letting the debate suppressed for decades about the finalit of
European integration what is it really supposed to lead to?
from breaking out again. One superstate for all, one single political
and economic regime from Hammerfest to Agrigento, from Cork to
Turkeys eastern border, in which, as attested by proud European
integrationists, 80 per cent of valid legislation is made in Brussels,
and nation states must be satisfied with carefully marketing their
cultural inheritance? If this overdue question is still not answered
after Brexit in the way that new conditions demand, and this is
what we have to fear, then an increasingly disintegrating Europe
will proceed to rot. The constructions have at last begun to
crumble, and if their controlled explosion is not begun soon, they
will collapse and kill off Europe.

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12

The European Idea Has Turned


Rancid
John R. Gillingham

Weakened by the events of the past year and for the historical
reasons described in this book Brussels fate will most likely be
sealed in 2016. The EU may not disappear altogether but survive in
vestigial form, yet it will no longer be central to the European conduct of affairs. As is so plainly clear today, it seldom has been during most of its six decade history. The Delors years (19851995)
and its aftermath, the Eastern Enlargement, were exceptional in
this respect. The EUs marginality during most of its existence can
no longer be denied.
The EU may for many years have been Europes great hope but
it has turned out to be a disappointment, even to its advocates. It
has made notable contributions to the liberalization of the economy, the democratization of Eastern Europe, and the reconciliation of peoples, but these achievements are now threatened.
Above all, there is still no European nation, nor will there be in the
foreseeable future. To expect that this situation can be changed is
tantamount to awaiting the eleventh round in a ten round boxing
match.
Indeed, there may be no further need for an EU. Driven by
technological change, marketplace competition, and consumer demand, the process of integration in Europe and the world at large

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will go on with or without it. Globalization continues to erode the


powers of supranational entities of which it is the leading example,
and in fact has long been doing so. Alternatives to Brussels do exist
and are at hand. Whether they can, or will, be grasped is, of course,
another matter.
The European Union cannot manage any of the present crises it
faces. The current refugee tragedy drives the point home. A million
and a half or more unwanted victims of war and civil disruption,
mainly from the Middle East, are expected to press at Europes
gates this year, in addition to the million that came in 2015. Such
figures must be quadrupled to include family members in order to
estimate the number of arriving persons, present and future, who
might eventually have to be assimilated into European society
the final number will probably be no less than 10 million. An increase in terrorism, furthermore, has been the terrible accompaniment to this human influx. These interrelated problems may not be
insurmountable, but they are undoubtedly immense, enduring,
and far exceed the administrative capacities of the debilitated and
all but immobilized institutions acting in the name of Europe.
The refugee crisis is, however, only one of several widening,
lengthening, and now crisscrossing fissures many of them caused
by Brussels itself responsible for the crumbling of the EU. The
European Depression is the greatest of them. It cannot be ended
unless the single currency project is abandoned. In addition, the
present monetary regime must be replaced by partly restored national monies, and fiscal independence returned to the nations of
Europe. Until this happens, antagonism between North and South,
and (increasingly) East and West, as well as across classes and generations, can only mount. This in the end will fuel public anger
with, and resentment of, Brussels. While it may take divergent
forms of expression from country to country, the EU will be the final target of this universal ire. The European idea has turned
rancid.

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The chances are slight that globe girdling mega institutions of


commerce and finance like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Pact (TTIP), now under negotiation, will come to the rescue of the
EU. For that to take place Brussels must clean up its act. The Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal demonstrates how difficult this
might be. The implications of this cheating must be borne in mind.
VW is the leading manufacturer and recognized pacesetter in the
largest and most crucial European industry as well as an essential provider of jobs, growth, and prestige. The spillover from the
companys misdeeds is immense.
The motor industry is joined at the hip with its purported regulator, the EU. Caught red-handed by US authorities for engaging in
activities detrimental to the health and welfare of the European
public the spewing of noxious fumes from more than 11 million
automobiles over a period of many years the Commission
(amidst professions of concern and with deeply furrowed brows)
punted and did its best to evade responsibility. Unlike the US Environmental Protection Agency, it did next to nothing to curtail the
foul and illegal practice making exhaust pollution hazardous let
alone punish the malefactors. Nor, to its shame, did the self-anointed conscience of eco-Europe, the so-called European Parliament
based in Strasbourg; it also caved in before the vehicle manufacturers. How in the world should one expect a duplicitous EU to
serve as an honest and equitable rule maker in an organization like
the one proposed by the ocean spanning trade agreement, whose
overarching responsibility would be to set, as well as enforce, international standards for products and processes?
The European Unions IT policy raises a similar issue on a still
larger scale: it concerns the future rather than the present. The revolutionary fifth generation (G5) of telecommunications equipment now in view will require unprecedented resources of capital,
technology, entrepreneurship, and managerial savvy. G5 will be an
essential determinant, worldwide, of the future industrial cyber

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economy. Consider, for instance, the self driving automobile,


which requires all but instantaneous information transfer in order
to operate, a requirement only G5 can satisfy. The example illustrates, one would hope, what the term the Internet of Things implies: it will change the face of the modern economy.
With this future in mind, the kind of guerrilla warfare that the
Commission, the Courts (ECJ) and, in general, the European
Union wage against the American high-tech mega corporations
seems futile as well as self-defeating. It can only accelerate the rate
of European decline. The expectation that an enfeebled EU can
force these giants to lie in a Procrustean bed of regulation is laughable. The real US adversary in the in the struggle for the future of
IT is not Europe, of course, but China. In this contest, the EU is a
bit player.
The example of Ireland the one Asian Tiger in todays Depression Europe demonstrates, furthermore, that growth occurs
and jobs materialize not in branches of production where costs
have been driven down by the austerity policy of so-called internal
devaluation but chiefly from foreign investment channeled into in
new high technology fields. This thought should be pondered by
the witch-hunting protectionists in the present Commission.
Other equally serious but perhaps less obvious crises loom before the EU. It is too early to assume that the threat of financial
meltdown has passed. As the IMF has often protested, over the
long run Greece cannot meet the terms of the current bailout,
therefore something must eventually give. At the moment,
however, the risk of Italys collapse is front and centre in European
concerns. The citizens and institutions, both public and private, of
the country with the fourth largest EU economy, own the bulk of
its huge sovereign debt. It comprises no less than half of the EMU
total and is currently booked at face value and far above what it
could command in the market. Once sold, the true worth (or lack
thereof) of this low quality paper would expose the desperate

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condition of the banking system, the most vulnerable and illiquid


in Europe; cause foreclosures across the board; land Italy in the
arms of the IMF; and threaten the very survival of the Eurozone.
To make matters worse, 18 per cent of the loans held by Italian
banks, most of them to local businesses, are non-performing by
far the highest rate in Europe. Not without reason is the precariousness of Italian finance a well-kept secret.
Last December the threatened failure of only a couple of the
countrys many minor banks nearly toppled the present pro-EU
Matteo Renzi government. Even a partial default would have been
political suicide for the Italian prime minister, devastating the
middleclass savers who provide his main support and thereby also
standing between his fragile coalition and its powerful enemies,
the anti-EU duo of the Five Star Movement and the separatist
Northern League. By dint of sheer necessity, Renzi therefore devised a national bailout scheme at odds with new EMU rules requiring share and bondholders to take hits prior to any resolution
or bankruptcy proceeding. Major fudging on the part of Brussels is
called for lest its weakness as a regulator be revealed.
Although Italys numerous midget banks have received much
recent attention, the countrys three giants constitute a much
greater danger. All of them are in far deeper trouble than publicly
acknowledged, and at least one (Monte dei Paschi di Siena) is for
all practical purposes bankrupt. Their share prices all collapsed in
January. Notwithstanding denials by Italian central bankers, the
perilous financial state of their country could well degenerate into
an Existenzkrise of the EU.
Portugal, like Greece and Ireland, has heretofore been a
throwaway of negligible importance to the grand scheme of the
EU. Yet even in respect to this fringe nation, Brussels and Frankfurt now have little leverage. In connection with the resolution of
the corrupt Banco Esprito Santo and its successor, Nova Banco,
the recently installed anti-austerity Socialist government of

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Antonio Costa, backed by the Portuguese central bank, administered a haircut to senior, mainly American, bondholders so brutal
that the nations credit rating plunged almost at once to junk
status. Within earshot of thundering herds moving in the wrong
direction, Brussels got the shivers.
The man now at the helm of Lisbon will not relish having his
knickers twisted by Frau Merkel. But this may not be necessary. In
short order Costa forced her to acquiesce in his governments antiausterity budget, which violated EMU restrictions, and she even
did so without the prior consultation required by the mandatory
provisions of the new European Single Financial Market.
The German chancellor must have feared that where little Portugal has gone, big Spain could follow. The tottering Spanish banking structure is now at the mercy of political instability. Two
months have passed since the December elections, which produced
a standoff between the two traditional parties of government and
anti-EU populists, neither of which can command a majority due
to the resurgence of Catalonian secessionism. What began as an
anti-EU electoral wave is turning into a crisis of state.
No one can be more closely attuned to the fragility of Europes
financial system than the MIT trained economist and Goldman
Sachsschooled banker who runs the ECB, Mario Draghi. He dare
not, however, broadcast the disheartening news that private finance in Europe has never recovered from 2008. Carrying a trillion
euros of bad debt and in serious need of capital infusions, the
banks are in a state of chronic crisis. Their shares plunged nearly
20 per cent at the beginning of the year and can be expected to fall
further, as rich sovereign wealth funds, their biggest investors,
close out large positions.
The underlying problem European banks face, as Draghi well
knows, is that the powers that be in both the public and private
spheres have drawn the wrong lesson from the economic crisis: instead of introducing the up-to-date market methods of financing

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familiar to Wall Street and the City, they have propped up outmoded national banking communities that cannot provide the
credit the economy needs for recovery. Instead, they are a bottleneck to it. With little fanfare, he is trying to mend the problem. The
onerous official plan for EU/EMU banking regulation (Mifid II) is
effectively on indefinite hold.
Economic stagnation is not the only, or even perhaps the main,
source of Europes discontent. Disenchantment with the EU also
pervades those member states who wisely chose not to accept the
trammels of the Eurozone and which, as a result, have enjoyed superior economic performance Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, and Britain. The hard truth is that the EU is no less
unloved in these comparatively fortunate countries than those
trapped in the EMU.
Only a fool would venture to predict how the official institutions of Europe will become unglued, unravel, fall apart, or simply
evaporate into thin air. The list of possible scenarios is innumerable. A reasonable guess would be, however, that Brexit will trigger
the process of decomposition and reconfiguration. If past events
can serve as a guide to the British referendum planned for 23 June,
the tide will shift in favour of the anti-EU cause.
This was the case with other recent EU referenda: the Dutch
and French rejected the constitution; the Swedish refused to enter
the EMU; the Irish initially repudiated the Maastricht Treaty; and
in December 2015 the Danish decided not to revise the nations opt
out agreement. In each of these instances, establishmentarian, proEU campaigns heavily outgunned diffuse, under financed, and disorganized populist factions and, contrary to nearly all predictions, eventually lost out to them. There is little reason to conclude
that in Britain, where the sides are more evenly matched, the outcome will be much different.
It is now evident that Prime Minister Cameron has not wrested
enough concessions from the EU to placate the countrys wary

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voters the majority of whom support his own party, in which,


however, a traditional division between Europhiles and Europhobes has been replaced by a more nuanced distinction between
Eurosceptics and Brexiteers. Recent polls have swung decisively in
favour of the Leave campaign. Behind this shift in sentiment is a
reality of awesome significance: Camerons promise of a better deal
for Britain has little meaning in respect to an EU in disarray, which
is untrustworthy, falling behind economically, and unable or unwilling to deliver on its commitments. At the rock-bottom level,
moreover, a sovereign national political system, like Britains,
based on the supremacy of parliament, is incompatible with the existence of a supranational entity, whose leadership remains in
spite of everything unwavering in its determination to create a
European state.
Why, finally, would anyone want to upgrade a second-class to a
first-class ticket on a ship that is already slipping below the waterline? The UK need no longer be a supplicant to Europe; the shoe is
now on the other foot it has more to give, economically and politically, than it needs to take. The Stay campaign there fore clamours
for Britain to come to the rescue of Europe, if only in its own best
interests. Many voices on the Continent are delivering a similar
message.
This is no incidental matter. Responsibility for engineering the
wind down of the Brussels institutions and their replacement with
something different and, with luck and statesmanship, better
will inevitably devolve upon him as leader of the successful reform
party. The task will be daunting. Every EU member state has its
own gripe list and each one of them can be counted upon, once Britain pulls out, to demand concessions from the EU and EMU or, if
necessary, its successors in receivership. Let it be hoped, in such an
eventuality, that an elegy would be more appropriate for the lost
case than an obituary.

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13

Stop Shedding Tears


Antonis Vradis

Pretty much exactly one year ago, me and a group of friends found
ourselves in a remote village in the countryside of the Peloponnese,
watching with awe and some admitted excitement as Alexis Tsipras
was announcing a surprise referendum on something whose wording didnt quite help one understand what it was about. Yet most of
us took this as a veiled suggestion, a hint at questioning Greeces
place in the euro (and potentially the EU), and voted accordingly.
This is where the similarities with Britains turbulent moment lie:
the majority of the Greek population, just like the British one yesterday, did bite the bullet and voted against both what the status
quo had paternally asked for, against what was perceived to be its
own self-interest.
But this is also pretty much where the similarities end. The
Brexit vote was led by nationalism and racism, as we saw: the fictitious migrant influx into the UK elevated to a major national
calamity that has to be avoided by any cost. We chilled as we
watched the Nazi-reminiscent propaganda and gasped at the
frivolous way in which the dominant discourse sank into a vile
anti-foreigner rant. In this sense there is, of course, nothing to immediately celebrate about yesterdays vote. The most reactionary
side has won. But what was the other side ever about? Why did the
progressive voices of Britainand much of Europe as a

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wholelargely uncritically align themselves with the likes of David


Cameron, Martin Schulz and all those Heroes of the People?
A vote for Bremain would not have averted the current trajectory of the European Union mechanism, which is way worse than
merely vile xenophobia. It is what leads to this xenophobia, building up a mechanism that forms and perpetuates a colonial-like injustice across the continent. This not only by dramatically altering
the relationship between member-states (a dangerous argument at
such, as it plays into the far-right propaganda itself), but also and
primarily by exacerbating the class divide: creating jaw-dropping
super-rich and an abysmal super-precariat in all member-states, at
a staggering level each country on its own would never be able to
produce.
Vote Remain to keep the far-right genie in the box, then we can
talk progressive EU reform went the liberal line of argument, if I
got it right. Its because of the urgency of the times, we were told.
Make sure we can weather just this one last storm, and then we
can talk it all through, and so on and so forth. But these two
simple words, and then can only come from those who have the
luxury to wait. And theres clearly not as many around any more.
So, a nice and well-intended try, but it will no longer cut it. The EU
has morphed itself into a gigantic, monstrous mechanism that is
destroying the livelihoods and the prospects of millions in its
fringes. Not in some distant future: this is happening right now.
And not in some far-fetched, run-down province or suburb: the
fringe has now taken centre-place.
By a funny twist of history interlacing with personal life, me
and largely the same group of friends find ourselves in the same
Peloponnesian village in the morning Britain awakens to the Brexit
shock. There is already the smirking suggestion that any vote going
against the establishment will be declared void, that Britain will do
a Tsipras and chose to simply ignore what happened. What shocks
and saddens me the most is that the liberal and progressive forces

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in the country are already quick to line themselves behind this suggestion, unable to understand the colossal disregard of popular
opinion it presumes and demands.
Brexit was instigated and celebrated by the vile and reactionary
forces of the far-right. But this does not refute the fact that too
many of us have mistaken a bureaucratic mechanism perpetuating
injustice for the land mass and the 330m people that make up
Europe. If there is anything of a formidable progressive force left
in our continent that is able to capitalise on a historical opportunity dawning upon us, it must stop shedding tears for the bureaucratic European Union monster that fades away, and help strike
the final blow instead

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14

Open Letter to the British Left by a


Greek Leftist
Stathis Kouvelakis

Dear Friends and Comrades,


To a foreigner who has been living and working in the United
Kingdom for the last sixteen years, the immediate post-referendum
situation appears highly paradoxical. It seems as if the shock has
been of such a magnitude that even the most celebrated British virtues sense of humor, understatement and, above all, solid common sense have faded away.
On the losing side, which includes, of course, most of the media
and the economic and political establishment, the impact is as devastating as it is unexpected. The markets are plunging all over the
world and the City, the economys central nervous system, faces
disaster.
Its quasi-official voice, the Financial Times, laments that after
Jonathan Hill, the British EU commissioner for financial services,
resigned the City of London has lost its voice. Some are already
petitioning for a new vote, or for the referendum to be ignored.
From a continental perspective, this blatant rejection of democracy is no shock. After all, in nearly every past referenda in which
a proposal emanating from the European Union (a constitutional
proposal, a treaty, euro membership, even an obscure trade-

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agreement with Ukraine) was at stake, no votes prevailed and


were ignored.
However and this is where the paradox lies the fact is that
its not only the City that looks voiceless and agitated. So does the
Left. Of course, as was entirely predictable, all those within the Labour Party who never accepted Jeremy Corbyns leadership found
the pretext they were looking for to launch an assault against him.
But what is stunning is their justification: Corbyn didnt do enough
for the Remain cause, and is therefore responsible for its defeat.
Almost two-thirds of Labour votes supported Remain.
However, the results show that Leave won in nearly all the Labour
heartlands outside of London and a couple of cities such as Liverpool and Manchester. Even there, the more working-class districts
didnt follow the euro-enthusiasm of the gentrified inner-cities.
A significant chunk of Labour voters rejected the Remain line
their leadership officially defended, a line the Parliamentary Labour Partys anti-Corbyn majority even more vigorously pursued.
They were joined by a majority of voters. Yet bizarrely, the MPs
who have just been disavowed by their constituencies are now plotting to overthrow a leader because he didnt do enough to support
their unpopular platform.
A bad defeat for British common sense, indeed.
This arguments logical conclusion is the type of social Darwinism, deeply ingrained in the mind of the British ruling class, that is
more or less explicitly argued by all kinds of pundits, particularly
those in the center-left media like the Guardian.
Brexit won, they say, because the most impoverished, essentially white, part of the working class supported it. And these cohorts of losers and uneducated people voted for Leave because they
are racist and ageing. Figures like the over 70 percent Remain
vote in areas such as the London councils of Haringey or Lambeth
or in categories such as those aged 18 to 24, or those who hold university degrees are constantly repeated as the ultimate evidence.

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The class configuration of the vote is certainly a complex one.


Substantial parts of the working class, essentially in the greater
London area, voted for Remain, and a large part of them are nonwhite. But as results from the multi-racial areas of the Western
Midlands testify, not all of the non-white working class electorate
voted Remain. Even constituencies considered white working
class such as Barking and Dagenham in the greater London area
where the far-right had some success in the previous election
have a high proportion of residents born outside of the United
Kingdom (30 percent) and voted in a way similar to Luton, which
has a similar proportion of foreign-born residents.
Conversely, many very white and affluent areas in west London
or in Oxfordshire voted overwhelmingly for Remain, which
reached nearly 70 percent in Kensington and Chelsea. Actually, as
indicated by graphs that break down the vote by an areas annual
median income, very few places outside of Scotland (and some relatively big cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, and Cardiff) with
an annual resident income below 25,000 voted for Remain.
And the overwhelming majority of the areas with a below 60%
proportion of residents belonging to the so-called ABC1 grades
(that is the three layers of the middle class labelled by the statistical jargon as upper, middle and lower middle) voted in favour
of Brexit. Once again the exceptions were the sallle mentioned previously (Scotland etc.), whereas the near entirety of the areas
where the proportion of those strata reaches 70% and above voted
overwhelmingly in favour of Remain.
According to the Ashcroft polls there is a strict linear correlation between the belonging to the higher social gradex and the
propensity for a Remain vote (57% for the AB upper middle class
grade, unfortunately not differentiated between the A and the B
grade, 34 for the C2DE working class and non-working grade).
The class logic is therefore strongly prevalent but overdetermined by the spatial polarization that has characterized Britain

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since the Thatcher era. So, a non-white worker who lives in a declining area tended to vote with her white neighbor for Brexit,
while her counterpart in the economically thriving capital city, although not necessarily wealthier, tended to vote with the more affluent population, with whom she shares the reasonably grounded
hope for a better future (if not for herself, then at least for her
children).
Something similar can be said concerning the younger populations electoral behavior, particularly the fraction holding a university degree that hasnt yet properly entered the job market. The
rate of Europhilia drops sharply among the bulk of the active population (35 to 55). The youngsters euro-enthusiasm has to do with
cultural and ideological parameters, but even these correlate to the
upward social mobility expected by holders of post-secondary
degrees.
Interestingly, the Guardian graph shows that otherwise very
different areas that had comparable proportions of degree holders
such as Haringey, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Oxford, and Edinburgh voted in similar proportions in favor of Remain.
In any case, the figures contrasting young peoples Europhilia
with their elders Europhobia have to be mitigated by taking into
account two variables: the first is that the turnout among the 18 to
24 set was significantly lower than the average. As a result, while
the young Remainers were the most motivated to express their
views, their weight was relatively limited within their entire cohort.
The second mitigating factor is that the economic decline endured
by the non-metropolitan areas has translated into an exodus of the
young and most educated layers of their population, which raises
the median age of those who still live there.
Once again, the spatial division of economic growth, which has
to be understood as a particularly brutal that is, neoliberal version of capitalisms combined and uneven development, overdetermines factors such as age and education. Needless to say, this

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aspect also played a crucial role in the emergence of Scottish nationalism, explaining the anomalous in social and class terms
success of Remain in what increasingly looks like an independent
country-in-waiting. To put it differently, Scottish nationalism
could never have achieved that level of power had the Thatcherite
restructuring of the British economy not produced such intense
spatial-economic polarization.
Displaced Class Struggle
Lets leave the objective side of the question aside and discuss
head on what seems to be the main issue for most, and certainly
for all those who stood against Brexit on the Left. Was the vote actually a referendum on immigration? And if so, does this mean that
its undeniable class dimension was dictated by a racist outlook
particular to the working class?
The pro-Brexit campaign was dominated by a discourse with
strong racist undertones and explicit xenophobia. The argument
that Brexit would stop the influx of immigrant workers from
Eastern European countries was repeated ad nauseam by Johnson,
Farage, and their likes. It is also true that those who chose Brexit
often mentioned the rejection of immigration as a serious, or even
a decisive, motivation.
But it rarely, if ever, appeared on stage alone: even when antiimmigration was cited as the main reason for the vote, it was mentioned as part of a broader picture that almost invariably included
some or most of the following: job and housing shortages, low
salaries, overburdened public services, an overall sense of alienation, downward social and individual trajectory, and the loss of
control over ones own life. Entirely real issues fuelled legitimate
anger but were misdirected against immigrants.

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As the French philosopher Etienne Balibar formulated it in


Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities a canonical text of
Marxist literature devoted to this topic racism should be understood as a displaced form of class struggle that can become prevalent when the class-consciousness of subaltern groups is at its
weakest. Instead of turning outward, against the class adversary,
the violence of class antagonism and the anxieties and moral
panic it generates turn inward and accentuate pre-existing differentiation within the subaltern groups. The result radically undermines their collective agency.
That is, the Brexit votes class dimension and the hegemony of
the Leave campaigns reactionary discourse are not mutually incompatible. Their conjunction comes out of a contingent, but effective, situation that combines the Lefts weakness with the
Rights capacity to channel popular anger. This is also why there is
nothing inevitable about large sectors of workers class anger taking on a racist outlook.
The working class is not by definition more racist than other social groups we know how strong the upper classes exclusivity is.
But neither is the working class immune to racism, particularly
when it seems caught in a downward spiral of social degradation
and loss of its collective ethos. The fact that in the case of Brexit
working-class revolt picked up to a significant extent, although
the precise level of which is still subject to debate a racialized
outlook has first and foremost to do with the Lefts and the tradeunion movements political weakness, their total inability to overcome the damage produced by decades of Labours neoliberal conversion, which culminated in the Blair-Brown era.
In a moment Ill come to the deeper reasons for the Left Remain campaigns failure. It is enough for now to highlight how
much more successful the Right Brexit campaign was in articulating the working classes anger and the need for a radical shake-up,
of course by channeling it into xenophobia and nationalism.

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From this angle, the worst thing the Left could do to confront
the Rights hegemony is to conform to the dominant narrative that
Brexits success is a racist outburst from the depths of Britains
psyche. Not only because this interpretation is analytically incorrect, but also because this discourse has an immanently performative dimension. If a consensus emerges as it unfortunately seems
to be doing that voting Leave unmistakably indicates racism,
then the complex and contradictory set of motivations and actions
that led to that result are retroactively fixed.
To put it differently, the Left failed not only to intervene effectively in the referendum campaign but also to win the battle for the
interpretation of its result. Losing that battle could indeed ease the
way for all those who will try to turn the ongoing political crisis into an opportunity to further turn toward an authoritarian and
xenophobic form of neoliberalism.
Misplaced Anger
There is however a more sophisticated argument that dismisses
Brexits political meaning: the vote expressed legitimate social anger, but had nothing to do with the European Union. Instead, it
came from decades of neoliberal policies, hardened during the
Cameron-Osborne years of austerity, which Johnson and Farage,
thanks to an accumulation of lies and demagogic statements, succeeded in presenting as a consequence of the belonging to the
European Union. The center-left media has systematically promoted this narrative, and it will most likely become dominant
within the broader left, including sectors of the radical left.
At first sight, this seems like a more credible story, one that dispenses with the overtly patronizing and essentialist explanation of
a racist working-class pro-Brexit vote. It is however perhaps even

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more illogical and ends up producing quite a few misleading


assumptions.
Lets start with the core claim: the vote had nothing to do with
the European Union, but was the misplaced expression of domestic
grievances that some manipulative politicians succeeded in turning
against Brussels. Well, if after no less than forty-three years of
European Union membership, the majority of the British public remains so ignorant about its exact role that voters appear ready to
believe buffoonish demagogues blaming Europe for their difficulties, then this tells us something about the complete alienation
of the people from such a union. Far from pleading against Brexit,
such a claim, if it were true, would provide a decisive argument in
its favor.
Secondly, the argument assumes that there is some kind of
British exceptionalism in the vote an exceptionalism of the
wrong sort, of course, that combines backward insularity and outward ignorance. But the result of the British referendum isnt exceptional at all. For many years, the European Union has lost all
popular referenda on its proposals and its authority.
The list is quite long and includes the 2000 and 2003 referenda
in Denmark and Sweden on joining the euro, the 2001 Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty, the 2005 referenda in France and in the
Netherlands on the European Constitution, the Irish 2008 referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and, last but not least, last years Greek
referendum on the so-called Juncker plan in reality another
draconian austerity plan that Alexis Tsipras surrendered to just
one week after a resounding 61.3 percent OXI vote from the
people.
Shameful as it was, Tsiprass capitulation wasnt an anomaly,
either. In all the above-mentioned cases with the exception of the
euro referenda held in Scandinavia the European Union ignored
the popular decisions. And in some cases Denmark in 1993, and

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Ireland in 2009 it even forced the electorate to return to the polls


to make at last the right choice.
This history in which popular referenda reject the European
Union and the European Union rejects popular referenda points
eloquently to the fact that the unions primordial problem lies in its
denial of democracy to which we will come in a moment in more
detail.
But lets make first a final observation on the nothing-to-dowith-the EU argument. For the sake of the discussion, lets assume
that its true. How then to explain the complete inability of the Left
Remain campaign promoted essentially by the Labour Party, but
also by the Greens, the Scottish National Party (SNP), and the
main trade unions to make the case that staying in the European
Union would bring some improvement in British peoples social
standards?
Very simply: such an assertion is laughable. Why should the
European Union do tomorrow the opposite of what it has been doing for the past forty-three years? Dont the terms of Camerons
February 19 deal terms that would have been put into effect had
Remain won further confirm that the European Union is ready to
make as many concessions as it needs to as long as it can further
entrench neoliberal policies? How credible is it to claim that staying in would improve social standards when everyone knows that
the union is designed to relentlessly promote its founding principle
of free and undistorted competition, a principle that entails free
movement for capital, the deregulation of the labor market, and
the privatization of the public services? And if there was the slightest possibility that a Remain vote could trigger the relaxation of
austerity policies, why then was Remain almost unanimously supported by the City, big business, and of course by David Cameron
and the majority of his Cabinet and Parliamentary party with the
generous help of guests like Obama and the usual European Union
extras?

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Replacing the Nation


To conclude on this point, lets ask a final, and perhaps even more
painful at least for the author of these lines question. How is it
possible for people who pretend to be so aware of European realities to ignore so blatantly what happened to Greece and its first
elected left government?
Syriza was initially elected, in January 2015, to abolish austerity and cancel the major part of an odious and illegitimate debt. It
confronted an immediate all-out war launched by the European
Union, which started with the strangulation of its banking system
and the escalating restrictions on its liquidity provision that took
effect days after its victory.
Tsipras and the majority of his cabinet capitulated last July
precisely because they were trapped by their own illusions about
their ability to reform the EU from within and shift gradually the
balance of forces. As a consequence, they had no plan B to allow
them to confront the Troikas blackmail, which produced a liquidity shortage leading to bank closures and the economys near
collapse.
Such an alternative plan would have required exiting the euro,
and thus breaking fundamentally with the European Union.
Between Grexit and signing up for another austerity plan thus
reneging entirely on their platform and raison-dtre Tsipras and
his followers opted for the latter. The result has been an unmitigated disaster, the weight of which the entire European left feels
heavily.
There is however an even more embarrassing question that the
British left needs to ask and start answering, which brings us back
to the domestic situation. Where did the energy and the impact of
the Rights pro-Brexit faction come from? Their capacity to articulate a displaced and racialized form of popular anger partially answers the question, but its not the whole story.

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Lets not fool ourselves: without a strong argument against the


European Union as such, the rejection of immigration would have
been radically insufficient to create a pro-Brexit majority. Despite
embittered progressive Remainers denials, this was a referendum
about the European Union. And the key to Brexits success is very
simple: democracy.
Take control was its main motto, and it appeared credible because the European Unions refusal of any notion of democracy is
now obvious not only to the British public but also to an increasingly significant part of Europe. According to a Pew Research
Center poll, released on June 7, the European Union had lower favorability rates in France and in Greece than in the United Kingdom, which was actually tied with Germany (!), Spain, and the
Netherlands.
Further, democracy only makes sense in connection with some
notion of the peoples sovereignty even in the very distorted and
archaic British version of parliamentary sovereignty. Which
brings us to the complex and slippery but unavoidable terrain
of the nation, about which more in a moment.
Let me first put what has been said in somewhat stronger
terms, since here lies, in my view, the real danger of the current
situation. By leaving the terrain of a principled opposition to the
European Union to the Right, the British left with the limited exception of some far-left groups that constituted the low-visibility
Lexit campaign didnt just abandon any credible anti-austerity
platform. It also handed over the task of defending democracy to
reactionary forces. And the latter isnt any less devastating than the
former. After all, in the United Kingdom as in most of continental Europe the labor movement emerged as a political actor during the battle for voting rights, a moment of intense class struggle
that also constituted the founding moment of modern democracy.
To sum up, the pro-Remain Left was caught in a double bind:
trapped by a Europeanist faith, it bypassed the issue of the

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European Union and the denial of democracy that its institutional


set-up requires. Having abandoned this decisive battleground to its
adversary, it had no other choice than to retreat to a type of syndicalism, focusing on a minimal social agenda of workers rights. Alas,
the Remain sides overall configuration which itself reflects the
sheer brutality of the European Unions neoliberal policies (see the
wave of so-called labor law reforms in various countries, France
being the most recent case) made that claim entirely fanciful.
Of course, democracy or more precisely, democracy in its
narrow, procedural, and institutional sense is neither a magical
solution nor an absolute. Ancient Athens showed that polities with
internal democracy notwithstanding their limitations can become brutal imperial and colonial powers. This is why Marx
thought that political emancipation wasnt the whole of human
emancipation and why the political state should abolish its separation from civil society via the radical transformation of the social
relations that both levels organize and reproduce. However, no
such emancipation is possible without waging and winning the
political battle through which the subaltern groups become the hegemonic, leading force in society.
The decisive terrain for that battle is democracy, and its exercise implies a positive, conquering attitude at the level of the national formation. If we start from the premise that any positive reference to the nation inherently produces nationalism, racism, imperial and colonial nostalgia, then the Left is doomed to lose this
political battle by losing touch with the working and the popular
classes.
This reference to the nation opposes those who defend concessions to anti-immigrant rhetoric and racism in order allegedly to
reconnect with the white working class. Instead, it requires hegemonizing the very concept of the people that constitute the living
substance of the nation to transform it into an inclusive, multiracial, multi-cultural, welcoming, and sovereign body politic.

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The significance of the national level from the subaltern groups


hegemonic perspective is that it would raise them to what Gramsci
called the national-popular, transforming them into a new historic bloc constituted by the exploited and the oppressed who then
lead, seize power, and orient the social formations development in
an entirely new direction. As Marx and Engels famously put it in
the Communist Manifesto: Since the proletariat must first of all
acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the
nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national,
though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
Such a concept is not only compatible but also quite logically
leads to genuine internationalism, distinct from abstract bourgeois
cosmopolitanism. To be genuine, internationalism that is, the
consciousness of a unified, universalistic, struggle against a common adversary needs to be concrete. And concreteness means
that it cant bypass the national level, which is where class struggle
occurs at the political level and where the subaltern groups organizations acquire their distinctive existence and identity.
Plan B
Let me emphasize one last point. The British left, in its majority,
might want the rest of the European left to share in its mourning
over Remains defeat. This is certainly true of the social-democratic
parties who, with the Christian-Democratic Right and other conservative forces, have been the pillars of the European project
since its outset. But for the rest of the European left, its rather
good news.
Destabilizing the European Union, shaking its legitimacy and
leadership to the ground, is an opportunity not to be missed. See
for instance how Jean-Luc Mlenchon the leader of the French
radical left who is currently getting higher approval ratings than

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President Franois Hollande reacted. For Mlenchon, Brexit reveals the European Unions total deadlock. The lesson to be drawn
is that a proper left government in France should immediately propose exiting from all the existing European treaties in order to implement an anti-austerity, eco-socialist program. And if Germany
blocks this move, then a French referendum to exit the European
Union will become inevitable.
Mlenchons reaction is neither isolated nor opportunistic.
After Syrizas capitulation, Mlenchon launched the plan B project with other forces of the European radical Left, including Oskar
Lafontaine in Germany, the left-wing of Podemos in Spain, Eric
Toussaint and his Committee for the Abolishment of Illegitimate
Debt, those who left Syriza to create Popular Unity, and Zoe
Kostantopoulous new Course of Freedom movement in Greece.
The idea is quite simple: the existing European Union bars the implementation of any agenda that would halt or even moderately
slow the advances of neoliberalism and austerity, as amply
demonstrated in Greece. It is therefore absolutely urgent to break
the founding European treaties, which enshrine perpetual neoliberalism and negate democracy and popular sovereignty.
If this is not possible through negotiations as once again the
Greek case suggests then a plan B, leading to an exit from the
European Union starting with an exit from the eurozone is necessary. The plan needs to be specifically elaborated according to
the needs of each country and also from the perspective of a genuinely new Europe to emerge from the ruins of the existing, failed
European Union.
Two international Plan B conferences have already been held,
in Paris and Madrid, with more to come. I am certain that all the
parties involved in the project would be delighted to see comrades
from the British Left participating in its forthcoming activities and
starting a serious conversation about these issues. Such a move
would no doubt help build the type of strategic thinking that is so

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much needed today. It would indeed be sad irony if in a country


with a rich tradition of labor struggles the Left remained paralyzed under the weight of its own insufficiencies and contradictions
at a moment when the dominant class and its political personnel
are facing the most severe political crisis of the last decades.
Stathis Kouvelakis
London
28 June 2016

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About the Authors


tienne Balibar is a French Marxist philosopher and the most
celebrated student of Louis Althusser. He is also one of the leading
exponents of French Marxist philosophy and the author of,
amongst others, Spinoza and Politics (Verso, 2007), The Philosophy of Marx (Verso, 2013) and co-author of Race, Nation and
Class (Verso, 2010) and Reading Capital (Verso, 2016).
William Davies is the author of The Limits of Neoliberalism
(Sage, 2014) and The Happiness Industry, (Verso, 2015). His writing has appeared in New Left Review, Prospect, the Financial
Times, and Open Democracy. His website www.potlatch.org.uk
was featured in the New York Times. He teaches at Goldsmiths,
London.
John R. Gillingham holds a doctorate in History from the
University of California, Berkeley, and is a fellow at the Harvard
Center for European Studies. He is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, among them the American Historical Associations research prize in International History. He is the author of
The EU: An Obituary (Verso, 2016).
Peter Hallward teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern
European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He is the
author of several books including Absolutely Postcolonial
(Manchester U P, 2002), Out of This World: Deleuze and the

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Philosophy of Creation, (Verso, 2006) and Damming the Flood


(Verso, 2008).
Laleh Khalili is a professor of Middle East Politics at SOAS,
University of London, and the author of, inter alia, Heroes and
Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration
(Cambridge, 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in
Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, 2013).
Stathis Kouvelakis teaches political theory at Kings College
London. He formerly served on the central committee of Syriza.
Sam Kriss is a writer, journalist, and dilettante living in london.
His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Jacobin, Vice, and Salvage.
Chantal Mouffe is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the
Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster. Her books
include The Return of the Political; Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy (with Ernesto Laclau); The Democratic Paradox (Verso,
2009) and Agonistics (Verso, 2013).
Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmis reportage on migrants and
refugees was shortlisted for the 2012 George Orwell Prize for Political Writing (blog category) and the 2013 Speaking Together Media
Award. She was shortlisted for the 2015 George Orwell Prize for
Political Writing and for the Georgina Henry Women in Journalism Prize. She has been published by OpenDemocracy, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Washington Post, the New Internationalist, the Independent and others. She is writer-in-residence at
Lacuna, a human rights magazine based at the Centre for Human
Rights in Practice at Warwick University.

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Lara Pawson is the author In the Name of the People: Angolas


Forgotten Massacre (IB Tauris, 2014), which was shortlisted for
The Bread & Roses Radical Publishing prize 2015 and longlisted
for The Orwell Book Prize 2015. Her next book, This Is the Place to
Be is published in September 2016 with CB editions. Until 2007,
she worked for the BBC World Service in Angola, Ivory Coast, Mali
and the UK. She now lives in east London. Her website is: unstrunglarapawson.wordpress.com.
Wail Qasim is a writer and campaigner.
Salvage is a quarterly of revolutionary arts and letters, edited and
written by and for the desolated Left, by and for those committed
to radical change, sick of capitalism and its sadisms. Salvage is
committed to publishing the best radical essays, poems, art and
fiction without sectarian, stylistic or formal constraint, requiring
only that they cleave to liberation. www.salvage.zone
Wolfgang Streeck is the director of the Max Planck Institute for
Social Research in Cologne and Professor of Sociology at the
University of Cologne. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Society for
the Advancement of Socio-Economics and a member of the Berlin
Brandenburg Academy of Sciences as well as the Academia Europaea. He is the author of Buying Time (Verso, 2014) and the forthcoming How Will Capitalism End? (Verso, 2016).
Antonio Vradis is a geographer at Durham University, soon to
join Loughborough as a Vice-Chancellors Fellow. Hes looking at
Europes urban transformations under austerity, and also at how
the management of the migrant crisis is transforming the continent as part of the Transcapes collective. He blogs at The Slow.

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12/07/2016.
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