Alejandro Reuss — An Historical Perspective on Brexit

Capitalist Internationalism, Reactionary Nationalism, and Socialist Internationalism

Backgrounder.

[Karl] Kautsky saw ultra-imperialism as a possible result of capitalism’s tendency toward international economic integration, along with the ruling classes’ conscious desire to avoid future ruinous conflicts…

Leading figures in Western Europe’s mainstream social democratic parties embraced European political and economic integration as a way to avert a replay of the disasters of the first half of the 20th century. (Some were, surely, also motivated by the aim of strengthening Western Europe vis-a-vis the United States. And some had dreams for a united Europe that were genuinely social democratic—though not anti-capitalist.) In the most recent period, the “Third Way” figures who came to dominate the mainstream social democratic parties (like “New Labour” in the U.K.) signed on to the neoliberal project and to the selling of it as a triumph of globalism and cosmopolitanism over nationalism and parochialism. Now that this corporate-dominated and finance-dominated globalization has fallen into a disastrous crisis, a nationalist revanchism—embodied in nativist and “economic nationalist” movements—is capturing the backlash….

There needs to be a radical left alternative that rejects nationalism and racism, that rejects the false equation of capitalist globalization with internationalism, and that fights for a new internationalism founded in workers’ solidarity.

Triple Crisis
An Historical Perspective on Brexit
Alejandro Reuss | Instructor at the Labor Relations and Research Center, UMass-Amherst.