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Brexit and the Left, Jacobin

“…“retreat to the nation state” can mean a number of things depending on the context. To oppose, not just TTIP but the whole apparatus of neoliberal trade and regulatory agreements which usurp democratic powers, could be characterized as a “retreat to the nation state.”

To insist on the right of national states to impose capital controls, nationalize industries, shut down tax havens, prosecute corporate criminals, or any one or all of these things, is a “retreat to the nation state.” Whether it can “benefit the Left” is a question of context and strategy…

In the short run, one wing of the Right will be the victor whatever the outcome of the referendum, because the Left is absent. In the long run, business cannot be confident that in the subsequent struggle to reorganize and re-institutionalize its class dominance, it wouldn’t suffer significant losses.

All of this is not to say that there’s a clean, socialist road to Brexit. Far from it. The point is that while staying in is a relatively known quantity, leaving is not. It would be messy and murky, and in that murk there would be the forces of the petty-bourgeois, nationalist right…

Don’t let the nationalist right be the only ones talking about the brutal and undemocratic nature of the European Union.”

The Socialist Case for Leave, Jacobin

Riot Dog 

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