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European Union: A Marxist Utopia?
As the Cold War came to an end and the political and economic system created by Stalin started to crumble – not least because a new generation of leftists started to regard it as an excessively conservative social force, especially because of Stalinism’s national and traditional great-Russian geopolitical programme[xxx] – Marxists and others went back to their founding texts of their creed and found there good reason to support the new creed of “globalisation”, so eagerly proclaimed by the West in the 1990s. They remembered Marx’s and Engels’ position on free trade and they recalled that Lenin had been friendly towards Western capitalists in the very earliest years of the revolution. [xxxi] As Milovan Djilas wrote in his account of the end of Communism, The Fall of the New Class,
Every Marxist, going back to Marx himself and forward past Lenin, regarded the creation of a world market and all that it brought about (strengthening each and every link among peoples, tearing down the barriers between nations, etc.) as a progressive fact of capitalism and a necessary condition for proletarian internationalism itself and the true convergence of peoples in socialism. [xxxii]
Engels argued that capitalism would destroy nationhood and prepare the way for full freedom, he expressed himself using a modern form of the old alchemists’ formula, solve et coagula:
The disintegration of mankind into a mass of isolated, mutually repelling atoms in itself means the destruction of all corporate, national and indeed of any particular interests and is the last necessary step towards the free and spontaneous association of men. [xxxiv]
This is nothing but the well-known Marxist doctrine of the withering away of the state. For Marxists, indeed, the state is by definition a mechanism of oppression and freedom therefore cannot be achieved until the state withers away. Engels wrote: “The administration of things and the direction of production processes replaces the government of persons. The state is not “abolished”, it dies off.”[xxxv] Lenin wrote, “So long as the state exists, there is no freedom. When there will be freedom, there will be no state.”[xxxvi] Elsewhere, he wrote, “A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the union and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism – until the complete victory of communism beings about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic state.” [xxxvii] Elsewhere, he elaborated on this famous thought:
Accounting and control – that is the main thing required for “arranging” the smooth working, the correct functioning of the first phase of communist society … The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labour and equality of pay. [xxxviii]
In other words, the European construction holds for many the same appeal as Marxism did. It offers the indeterminacy which comes from the denial of any natural order and indeed of truth itself; a concomitant apparent escape from politics and from the decisionism associated with it; a political system in a state of permanent flux; the withering away of the (nation-)state; and its replacement by a new system based on supposedly unpolitical administration. The overcoming of the nation-state, a programme which is central to the European ideology, in fact turns out to be the overcoming of the state tout court and its replacement by a European - and perhaps, one day, a world - statelessness. With numerous former Communist apparatchiks now heads of government and heads of state in EU countries, eagerly cooperating in the dissolution of statehood at both the European and world level, it is clear that the transition from Soviet Union to European Union was easier for many than one might initially have guessed.
http://www.idc-europe.org/en/The-Eur...Marxist-Utopia
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Originally Posted by Linebacker
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