Blaming EU and Germany

Submitted by Matthew on 25 April, 2012 - 9:13

We need to tackle those with economic power, but that is not the intention of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left Front.

At most its economists (some of them coming from the Socialist Party) adopt the language of the alternative-globalisation movement and denounce “financial” capitalism, “neo-liberal globalisation”, and stock-market speculation.

It’s the same old story of imagining a fair capitalism, a benign alternative capitalism, a capitalism that will simultaneously exhaust fewer resources and submit to capital’s laws of reproduction, a kinder capitalism...

It is a nationalist and protectionist perspective which the Left Front proposes (and the Communist Party too, but that is not new):

• Denunciation of the European Union, blamed for all the workers’ woes... and supposed to have produced “a new totalitarianism” headed by “Lady Ashton and her 5,000 bureaucrats of the European foreign office”...

• Denunciation of Germany. In his programmatic book, They should all go!, Mélenchon recycles some old prejudices: “The relations of the Germans with their neighbours are not definitively harmonised... It was a mistake to agree that the Germans should be more numerous in the European Parliament than the French...”

No doubt this language pleases some sections of the CP, long nourished on the poison of nationalism. It remains a fact that to suggest to workers that they could have national interests rather than class interests is to sustain a demagogy also used by the far right...

From www.quilemportera.net

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