From this morning a unified currency has taken over from 11 different currencies in eleven different countries, with a combined population of over 300 million.
Until removed from circulation, a Mark, a Franc, a Lira are now permanently worth only the fraction of a Euro they held last night. They have been abolished in all but name as a store of value and as a universal measure of value. Soon they will be abolished as a means of circulating payment too.
This is a tremendously progressive development, unprecedented in human history. It is all the more important for putting an end to centuries, millenia, of appalling tribal bloodshed in this corner of the Eurasian land mass.
This achievement could not have come about without the invention of computers to assist the gradual alignment of the currencies and interest rates. It is therefore as technically complex as the docking of an American and a Russian space station, but it involves the successful management of one of the largest capitalist markets in the world.
It is of course in the interests of the capitalists.
It is also in the interests of the people.
Strange but true.
There is an ultra-leftist, actually economist, mechanical argument that because John Monks, head of the British Trades Union Congress, is in favour of Britain joining the Euro, this is because he is a right wing labour lieutenant of capital.
Let the ultra-leftists argue their case. But in doing so they may care also to comment on the following observation by Lenin,
"From their daily experience the masses know perfectly well the value of geographical and economic ties and the advantages of a big market and a big state."
from "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination" 1914, section 5.
Euro-ka!
Chris Burford
London.