[...] In the absence of currency devaluation or exchangerate variations, wage compression for internal devaluation was meant to increase competitiveness. [...] Brussels, capital of the EU , is somewhat of a symbol. One in three city inhabitants is at risk of poverty. One child in four grows up in a family where no one has a job. Even temporarily forgetting about Greece, Brussels is no exception. Over the last decade, the number of working poor has doubled in Germany. In Italy, over 8 million people live in relative poverty. In France, 9 million people, of which 3 million are children, are poor. Portugal lost half a million workers between 2011 and 2014. While Portuguese workers were fleeing their country, big corporations saw their money reserves increase from 750 billion euros to 3,200 billion. The rich and wealthy meanwhile are seated on mountains of money, or rather, hiding them in tax havens across the world.

Six considerations seem to play a central role in the seductive force of a left-exit. (1) Left-wing policies are incompatible with the European treaties. (2) National states, preferably guided by left governments, can be allies or offer a bulwark against neoliberalism. (3) A demos exists only at the national level. Therefore, the national level is the most appropriate space to wage the struggle. (4) Power relations are more favorable in certain member states than in others. Nationally, we can show alternatives exist. (5) The EU is pitting people against each other, and an exit will allow for a different, real internationalism. A step back to leap forward. (6) A European continent-wide movement is unlikely to emerge anytime soon.

[...] the ontology of the European state apparatus under construction leaves no doubt. Such a different Europe will require vastly different institutions. The current European treaties and institutions are designed not just to guarantee corporate oversight over decision-making at every level or create an interventionist “defense” system, but also to defuse, co-opt, and swallow any challenge to the system in an infinity of committees and commissions, meetings and institutions. European capital is building a state apparatus to obtain bigger slices of global spoils. Calls to save the EU or the social-democratic fantasy of turning this apparatus into a tool of and for labor are just that: fantasies obscuring the class nature of existing institutions. Rather than raising awareness of the need to build a counterforce to the power of capital, such claims reinforce illusions in the neutrality of the constructed apparatus.

Not only is Emmanuel Macron intent on breaking the exceptional resilience of the French welfare state, but he combines this with renewed activism on the international stage. This activism reminds us — in barely subliminal fashion — that Germany remains a geopolitical dwarf compared to its neighbor, which has nuclear weapons, a seat on the UN Security Council, and nurtures a major neocolonial influence in Africa and the Middle East. [...]

[...] while this declaration was symbolic in character, that did not mean that there was any room for ideological concessions. We can clearly see as much from the section on unemployment benefits: “The unemployed have the right to adequate activation support from public employment services to (re)integrate in the labour market and adequate unemployment benefits of reasonable duration, in line with their contributions and national eligibility rules. Such benefits shall not constitute a disincentive for a quick return to employment.” Activation support, reasonable duration, no disincentives to a quick return to employment.... If the principle of unemployment benefits is indeed recognized here, it comes with a series of precautions that seriously reduce the scope of this right

[...] if the eurozone were to disband, the main losers would be Germany,
Austria, and in, even greater proportion, the European tax havens (Lux-
embourg, Netherlands), who would see the deterioration of their agents’
balance sheets. In such a scenario, Portugal and above all Greece would see
a boom in their public debt. This would necessarily have to lead to a — in
any case desirable — restructuring process.

However, beyond that, the financial and nonfinancial private sectors
of each of these two economies, and the rest of the countries taken as a
whole, would see their position improve. In other words, the expressions
of financial fragility would be concentrated at the very points where there
exist situations in dire need of resolving – i.e., the public debt of peripheral
countries in need of relief, and tax havens — and within those countries
whose financial situation is sufficiently robust that slight damage to certain
sectors’ financial balance sheet could be absorbed without any major shock.

Neoliberal policies are at the very heart of the European Union. This demands that the social and political organizations of the Left find the avenues that will allow them to activate a new plan for the Continent, running against the forms that the integration process has taken in the past. Between a simple reenactment of what went before in the name of the European ideal, or a Euroscepticism that is just a stunted version of a retreat into nationalism, I suggest that there is also an alternative strategy: namely, the project of a selective de-integration and re-integration of Europe. The objective is to keep open the channels of cooperation between European states, while at the same time acquiring greater room for manoeuvre, in order to reactivate a socialist and environmentalist socioeconomic project. In other words, the goal is to change the hierarchy of the questions around which European integration is organized.

The fate of the single currency is central to such a perspective, given its deflationary bias, the unilateral character of the adjustments that it imposes, and the resulting loss of diversity in socio-productive systems. In theory, a European fiscal system that allowed the rapid rise of a welfare state, an ambitious industrial policy, and consequential regional programs, could change the social nature of the existing monetary order. In practice, the conditions of policymaking at the European level rule out any substantial change within the foreseeable future. This means that for the Left, it is an important political responsibility to embrace exit from the euro, a dismantling of the eurozone, or, preferably, the transformation of the euro into a common currency. Although it should be understood that is not an objective unto itself, but rather a means of taking back control of the political agenda, this question is nonetheless an unavoidable one. While such an institutional construction process poses important legal and political questions, there are no technical difficulties that preclude the adoption of such a course. On the contrary, as I have argued, the incentives structure that today sets creditor countries in opposition to debtor countries would be overturned through the perspective of abandoning the single currency, for each country would have an interest in cooperating to limit financial turbulence and finding a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Here, then, is the fundamental problem. Those who advocate for an emancipatory basic income policy while showing considerably less interest in the persistent dilemmas of class politics have forgotten, or failed to see, that what they are pushing for is already a form of communism. There is consequently no prospect of the hoped-for policy coming to pass until there is a working-class constituency that is organized and powerful enough to be able to extract it, in spite of the predictable resistance of superbly organized capital. The employers of labor are, after all, not about to expropriate themselves out of untold future profits out of the goodness of their hearts, much less because proponents of a generous basic income have fairness and human decency on their side.

In our view, the tendency persistently to overlook these facts owes to a certain familiar but problematic approach to normative inquiry. The problematic orientation is on display whenever theorists on the Left — rightly concerned by the many social ills we face — ask in response what sorts of policies “we” should put in place. This question makes practical sense only if author and audience together already have the social power to carry out the necessary steps. Alternatively, it assumes that every powerful actor in society is motivated to do whatever it is that we, all of us together, should. Either way, the animating presupposition of much left-wing theorizing is normally false, and certainly false when the question is whether “we” should implement a genuinely liberating basic income.

It is not the case that, by legislating a generous basic income, “we” could empower the most exploited workers among us better to resist their capitalist bosses. On the contrary, we shall argue in this essay that the familiar story about the emancipatory potential of a generous basic income has got things almost exactly backwards. A basic income high enough to be genuinely liberating for the low-wage worker would require enormous expropriation of businesses and wealthy people. Consequently, there is no chance of its passage until there is a working class with the social and organizational power already adequate to extract it. The means to the requisite political organization, moreover, must come through labor organizing and left-wing political leadership, and not through elite-driven “entitlement reform,” precisely because only an organized working class will be able to hold elites to account and control the fate of their social policy proposals in our plutocratic times. Accordingly, when a livable basic income finally arrives, its function will not be to empower the individual worker against her capitalist bosses, since a livable basic income already presupposes that an organized working class has effective control over the shape and direction of the economy. Instead, the role of a livable basic income, if and when it comes, will be to limit the labor discipline that may be democratically imposed on all, whether by individual employee-owned workplaces or by genuinely majoritarian legislation. In short, if the idea of a liberating basic income is to have a place in an attractive political vision, we should think through not how it will renovate capitalism, but its emancipatory purpose in an already functioning institutional socialism.

[...] recently even billionaires have been paying lip service to the idea that some version of the policy could make existing social spending more efficient, labor markets more flexible, and so on. As we have stressed, however, implementing any version that could plausibly be called liberating for the average worker would require permanent and unprecedented expropriation of businesses and wealthy people. However meticulous the case for a policy that has this consequence, it should be clear that the business class will not willingly agree to expropriate itself.