Half of the period of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union has passed by, whose priorities, in the words of Pedro Sánchez, include reindustrialization and guaranteeing the strategic autonomy of the EU, advancing in the ecological transition, promoting greater social and economic justice and strengthening European unity.
On the occasion of this Presidency, many meetings of EU ministers and officials are being held in Spanish cities, including the summit of Heads of State and Government to be held in Granada on October 6. This event will be preceded by the III Summit of the European Political Community in the same city, to which 20 countries have been invited besides those that currently form the EU.
Facing the celebration of these events, the Political Bureau of the PCTE conveys the following assessments to the workers of Granada and to the whole workers’ and popular movement of our country:
1) The European Union is, above all, a union of capitalist states in which a large part of the policies that are imposed in each country by the governments. The driving force of European capitalist unification is the interests of the monopolies, of big capital. The EU is an imperialist alliance of states, contrary to the interests of the working class and the popular sectors.
2) The European Union exists, fundamentally, to guarantee the existence of a single, large market, which concentrates and centralizes capital in order to allow European monopolies to compete, within and outside their borders, in the best possible conditions against American, Chinese, Russian, Japanese or any other power monopolies.
3) The European Union fosters the false illusion of «European» values based on peace, progress and freedom. However, the main powers of the EU are the same ones that caused the two world wars that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.
The reality is that the EU tolerates and whitewashes nazi-fascism and allies itself with its heirs in countries like Ukraine. The reality is that the EU promotes war and imperialist interference not only in the countries of its immediate environment, to which it wants to get closer through initiatives such as the European Political Community, but also in the countries that were once colonies of its members, in Africa, America or Asia. The reality is that these interferences, especially in Africa, generate waves of migrants and refugees whose lives often end up in the waters of the Mediterranean. The reality is that the European Union promotes the very serious historical falsehood that equates nazism with communism, forgetting that it was precisely the Soviet Union that dealt the death blow to nazi-fascism. The reality is that the anti-communist campaign under the protection of the EU institutions of the EU means that several communist parties are illegal in EU countries, are in the process of being illegal in EU countries, are in the process of being outlawed or are not allowed to use communist symbology, while nazi collaborationists are rehabilitated, or that May 9th has become the «Europe Day» and not the day of the anti-fascist victory of the peoples.
4) The social and economic justice of which the European Union boasts hides a tremendously dangerous reality for the working majority. The aim is to improve the profitability of capital by encouraging greater dependence of the worker on his employer. The model of «flexicurity» which is to be imposed in all the member countries of the EU – of which the latest Spanish labor reform is a good example – is nothing more than the concretion of the firm commitment to work on demand, to place the worker at the total disposal of the company when it needs him and, in exchange, to cover the periods in which he is not needed through public funds and the so-called «active employment policies», which have no other objective than to «recycle» the labor force according to the needs of the capitalists. The «social and economic justice» promoted by the EU implies more exploitation of the working majority.
5) At the present time, moreover, the economic policies promoted by the European Union to overcome the crisis catalyzed by COVID-19 are being presented as an example that another capitalist management is possible that does not apply «austerity» -promoted by the EU itself to overcome the crisis of 2008- and does not attack the economic, social and democratic rights of the population of the member countries.
We denounce this falsehood as a new attempt to sow confusion among the working majority and to justify support for this imperialist alliance. We insist that the economic policy being developed by the EU is not favorable to the workers and peoples, but is fundamentally aimed at defending the interests of the big capitalists, seriously affected by the peculiarities of the latest capitalist crisis. The norms and rules that served as justification for «austerity» have only been put on hold for the time necessary to overcome the crisis that broke out in 2020, but they have not been eliminated. Throughout the present political course, the working majority will be able to see how, in exchange for the huge amounts of money destined to overcome the crisis catalyzed by the pandemic, new cuts, new «structural reforms» and new attacks against the rights of the working and popular majority are demanded.
6) The European authorities and the national governments of the member countries share the view that it is necessary to guarantee the role of monopolies based in EU countries. The references to «reindustrialization» and the «strategic autonomy» of the EU are only understood in this sense.
The reindustrialization of which they speak is linked to the realization of the extreme dependence of European countries on production in third countries, which translates into a weakness of the European monopolies, which have greater difficulty in competing with the monopolies that have emerged in other areas of the planet. Hence the insistence on greater «strategic autonomy» that would allow EU members to set their own economic, political and military objectives without being permanently tied to the United States and NATO or any other power or bloc.
The European institutions’ commitment to the «ecological transition» is also linked to these objectives and is mainly aimed at benefiting large companies and investors who are allocating large amounts of capital to the development of new markets and new energy sources that reduce dependence on supplies from third countries that have their own interests in the international arena.
7) For all these reasons, the calls to «strengthen European unity» are nothing more than calls to strengthen and expand a capitalist state alliance whose main interests are those of the capitalists, to develop an economic and social model based on exploitation and which encourages aggressiveness and imperialist interference, covering it all up with false calls for peace, progress and social justice.
Consequently, the PCTE considers that the opposition to the European Union must be frontal and in all fields, and therefore raises as an immediate necessity the unilateral exit of Spain from this imperialist alliance in a process in which there must also be the overthrow of Spanish capitalism and the governments that manage it, which are an integral part of the framework that today is the European Union.
We call for the mobilization against the Summit of Granada and we will support the mobilizations that, in the keys previously exposed, will take place in other Spanish localities during the next months.
Madrid, September 23, 2023
Political Bureau of the PCTE Central Committee