roachboy

i dont think american conservatives are in a position to say very much about the situation being created across the eu as a function of a neoliberal meta-state coming into conflict with the welfare states amongst members--too much actual detail, not reducible to claims about the moral superiority of total worker powerlessness dressed up as bromides about "hard work"--this latter perspective only makes sense, to the degree that it does, from the situation of somone who really knows nothing about what is at stake in these votes, nothing about the history of the welfare state, nothing about the history of the trade union movement, nothing about the idea that work in the capitalist mode is shot through and through with political questions--it is only possible to not know about these things in the context of the american system, which mobilized fairly massive repression against political trade union movements early in the 20th century, promoted the self-defeating model of sector monopoly once trade unions were seen to be inevitable (despite ongoing corporate and state violence through the 1940s--river rouge anyone?), and which developed collective bargaining as a mechanism for the total co-optation of these sector monopoly style unions....

the american order is but one options within a range, one historical model amongst others--folk who cheerlead this model from the inside do not for that have any particular vantagepoint on capitalism in general, its histories, its politics--rather, from this particular reactionary form of capitalism, organized around the total irrelevance of working people, characterized in the present in part by a sustained ideological assault on the whole idea of the public, which underpins the ability of citizens to organize themselves and take power from capital--from a conservative position within this particular context, based on no discernable information, this is how the european situation looks.

one of the more cogent arguments about the eu in its present form that has been advanced from almost the ouset concerns the lack of democratic accountability of the institutions. in its present form, the eu could reduce nation-states to a kind of political cul-de-sac--pressure could be brought to bear on the state previously, and existing models for doing so are all organized around the state--the nature of the eu is different, and the non-representative chacter of the institutions, and in particular of the professional cadres within those institutions, who appear to be almost uniformly neoliberal ideologically--this poses a real problem. so on those grounds, i would think the rejection of the constitution not entirely a bad thing because i would see it as a rejection of this particular version of the eu, not the eu as such.

that this would escape the attention of conservatives in the states is no surprise: much of their politics are about self-disempowerment reframed through the language of hortaio alger novels.

most analyses seem to understand the problem as having been insufficient marketing on the part of the governments like chirac's--and a reflection of opposition to the non-democratic character of this framework having been taken out on the governments in power--and a rather large fuck you to these same governments for local reasons.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite