dexxy57:
Carryfast:
[…]Back here on Planet Earth CF, things are just rolling along as usual. A dispute here, a grievance there, some disputes between parties that will eventually get resolved. Nothing much to report really. How’s things on your planet?
Although Carryfast often seems to be suffering lunacy, it is discussions with him more than anyone else that have brought me around to a more Eurosceptic outlook.
There was a good piece going around last month from German political economist Wolfgang Streeck: blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/03/ … t-to-fall/
The essential problem with the single market is that it is attacking workers all over Europe. When we say Germany is being preferenced in the EU, what we mean is the German ruling class, not the German worker who has suffered a similar assault in the past 20 years as the Thatcherite assault the British worker suffered in the 80s.
And it is true that the EU backstops certain minimum standards and rights, without which the Tory right in this country may have attacked British workers even more grievously.
But those minimums exist mainly on account of the remaining strength of the German and French working classes, who still have relatively strong unions and the ability to enforce minimums for themselves, and which means their ruling classes have to take steps to stop themselves (in the context of a single market without tariffs and controls) being undercut by nations whose working classes are already either poorer (as in the East and South) or weak and shattered (as in Britain).
What Germany and France are doing, instead of confronting their working classes nakedly, is diluting their market strength by allowing mass immigration. But that is causing squalor for workers in the richer member states as wages are forced down whilst profits soar, whilst denuding the poorer member states of the young and skilled workers which, in proportion, their economies also need to function and grow properly.
The poorer EU economies have effectively become crèches and training schools for the richer economies, benefitting the rich in the richer economies twofold: firstly, they don’t have to pay for the reproduction and training of these workers who migrate in, and secondly, the abundance of trained workers migrating to their door means they can abolish their own domestic reproduction and training, saving costs twice over for skills which the bosses would usually need to pay for.
The usual cost of this strategy in terms of requiring infrastructure has also been avoided by the rich. Rather than building houses, schools, and hospitals, they have simply used the influx as an excuse to cut back the quality of public services and force rents to sky-high levels. And the assault on working class people via rising rents has meant that most have experienced dramatic real-terms cuts to their incomes over 20 years.
Owner occupiers have been insulated somewhat at first, but most are now paying the price in terms of having multiple children who are not earning enough to become owner occupiers themselves, meaning the next generation of working class are either being subject to the exploitation which their parents were able to avoid by virtue of being owner occupiers, or it is forcing the working class to give up on having children (causing a population crisis which then justifies more migration, and justifying more free-riding on the crèche and training functions of the poorer nations).
