>'No investigation, no right to speak' is a stern rule, but if with all his
>enormous efforts, LP wants to win the battle to be read seriously, whether
>for his own posts, or those on his list, perhaps he can start by
>demonstrating that he has done some investigation into the difference
>between the eurodollar and the euro before continuing with this thread.
>Some indication of embarrassment might also help.
>
>I am prepared to wait.
On February 1, nearly a year ago, a British trade union leader spoke on behalf of his membership at a major rally:
"At present we in Britain are in the midst of an election campaign. Both major parties, the Conservatives and Labour, support Maastricht. The spokesperson for the Labour Party has even warned that we can expect a two-year wage freeze to ensure the implementation of Maastricht. He and Tony Blair are openly promoting this treaty. But I have a message for Blair: We the public workers will not make sacrifices for the sake of the bankers' Europe. The Maastricht "economic convergence criteria" will unleash a tidal wave of austerity measures, welfare cuts, and unemployment across Europe. In the UK alone, the public-sector cuts required to enter the "Euro" could top #18 billion. We say no! We should not underestimate the importance of this gathering here today. I cannot recall a time when European workers came together in this manner. All of us, together, have the power to oppose Maastricht and bring about a People's Europe. We are the inheritors of the English and French revolutions."
I have no idea where Chris gets the chutzpah to claim that the Euro is a victory for working-people anywhere when so many leftists have taken just the opposite position. The Euro was not a conquest of the working-class movement. It was part of moves by the European Union (EU) to consolidate their economic power against US and Japanese imperialism under the auspices of the Treaty of Maastricht. Nothing could be clearer. Why he would want to identify with the bankers and politicians is anybody's guess. I suppose it is the sign of the utter degeneration of Stalinism that such a thing can take place. He belongs to one of the outgrowths of the once militant British Communist Party, which evolved into right-wing Eurocommunism. His sect emerges out of the right wing of the Eurocommunist CP. If I had a choice, I'd prefer to have portraits of Joseph Stalin on the wall than the Tony Blair portraits these birds presumably have hung up.
Any Marxist economist worth their salt has identified the current period as one of intensifying competition between major blocs of capital, as the post-WWII expansion came to halt some time in the 1970s. Harry Magdoff, Harry Shutt, Robert Brenner and Michel Chossudovsky all agree on this. Chossudovsky wrote:
"Economic stagnation in all major regions of the World largely marks the ten year period since the 1987 financial crash. In the OECD countries as a whole, GDP growth has hovered between 1.5 % and 3.0 %. These figures, however, do not in any meaningful way assess the depth of the economic crisis. In the developing World, economic decline exceeds that experienced in the USA during the Great Slump of the 1930s: many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have experienced negative economic growth rates."
So Maastricht can only be interpreted as a defensive measure of European capitalists to reassert their power against rival capitalists, including the creation of the "euro". The primary tensions are not between Western European capitalist powers at this point. Rather they are between this group and other imperialist blocs over economic interests. However, this does not mean that Western Europe has not been acting in an outright warlike fashion in recent years, despite Chris's attempt to whitewash their support for Clinton's war against the people of Iraq.
Western Europe was a prime player in the assault on the public ownership of the means of production in Eastern Europe. Financial pressure on Yugoslavia caused it to unravel. Various Western European governments backed proxy armies in the civil war and the net result has been economic devastation and a disintegrated and demoralized working-class, which is ideal for the making of superprofits. The same pressures are being applied to the former Soviet Union. Chris thinks that because Western European armies are not directly involved, that they are non-belligerents. This is false. They are as responsible for the bloodshed as the fascist powers who backed Franco in the Spanish Civil War were. I should remind Chris that his fervent support for NATO bombing of the Serbs puts him a rather poor position to speak impartially about "peace".
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)