Common Market: The great debate — where we stand

Anyone who has recently been able to spare time from the test matches, television, pop music and so on may be aware that there is a new, rival attraction in the entertainment field. It is called the Great Debate on the Common Market, which makes it sound as if we have all been joining in, in every pub and bus queue and factory floor. At times, indeed, it has gone beyond mere entertainment, what with Harold Wilson walking about with a small forest of knives sticking out of his back and the Labour Party taking such fright at the public spectacle of its leader opposing something which his government tried to pull off, and then spending so much time in pious justification of his two contradictory attitudes, that they have suddenly started a Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to Harold campaign.

In fact, as Wilson (who has been known at times to tell the truth) says, there is a wide split of opinion on whether this country should join the Common Market. Both the big parties are split although the Tories, perhaps not yet completely recovered from their stunned delirium at the victory of June 1970, have been largely successful in stifling their dissenters. The public outside the parties are divided; soon, perhaps, marriages will be ruined and brother fall out with brother, swearing never to speak to each other again. And all because of the Great Debate on the Common Market.

One problem which the politicians have is in stimulating interest in something which has been an issue for about ten years. And such are the intricacies of capitalism’s trade — its agricultural support policies, its commodities agreements, its financial jugglings, that only an addict must now be able to stay awake when the thing is being discussed while the rest of us drop off in front of the telly set.

On the one hand the government case for going into Europe, while admitting that some food prices are going to rise (which, Common Market or no Common Market, is a pretty safe bet anyway) is that this is a tremendous opportunity for unheard of prosperity for us all. The official Factsheets on Britain and Europe talk about British industry having access to a market of more than 250 million people, of firms being able to plan their operations more adequately, of the “major benefits” resulting from the removal of tariffs between Britain and Europe.

It does not need a cynic to perceive a certain familiarity in those promises of a golden future. We can all remember similar prospects, held out over similar schemes of international unity or even international separatism, or some equally irrelevant proposal. The opponents of British entry seem to think that the golden future is here already. They argue that membership of the Six will mean abandoning, or weakening, the trading tie-ups with the Commonwealth, with no compensatory advantages. They mutter about upsetting the balance of payments, of losing that comforting trading surplus, which apparently stands between us and some unimaginable calamity. Some opposition may even be based upon xenophobic fears about the free movement of labour — about virile Frenchmen and Italians flooding over to steal all the best jobs and the most desirable women.

Now the SOCIALIST STANDARD has always made it clear that such matters as the balance of trade, the exports of one capitalist state as against another, the exploitation of markets, are of interest to us only in as much as they illuminate the hopeless anarchies and inadequacies of capitalism. It is for this reason that we do not take a stand of opposing or supporting the efforts of the British capitalist class to get into Europe. This is not a matter of refusing to have any opinion or of imitating the feat of Wilson (and of Gaitskell before him) of sitting on the fence. In fact on this issue, as on all others, we have our own side. We are there, alone, but unlike the rest we know why.

At this point it is necessary to return to basics, however tiresome this may be to anyone who hungers for the excitement of the Great Debate. The first basic is that this is capitalism — if it were not, there would be no such thing as the Common Market. The attempt to join Europe, and the arguments about it, are all based upon the acceptance of capitalism, its needs and its priorities. We are invited to believe that these needs are of concern to workers, that the failure or success of the British application will make enough difference to our lives to be worth taking sides over. But the least which is needed to support this argument is evidence that the countries which are in the EEC are significantly different from those which are not in it.

So here is another basic. Capitalism divides its people into two classes — capitalist and worker, employer and employee, owner and non-owner, whichever term we choose to apply. These two classes are engaged in a struggle over the ownership of the means of wealth production. This struggle takes the form of disputes over wages, which are the only method open to the working class of obtaining wealth, either as the basic necessities like food or the lesser needs such as holidays and so on.

What this means is that a permanent feature of capitalism is (need we say this, in 1971?) the industrial struggle. Sometimes a strike; sometimes a go-slow; sometimes a lock-out. But always a struggle, never ceasing because it is inherent within capitalism. It is not unfair to insist that, if all the hopes and promises about the prosperity of the Common Market were real, its record of strikes and other industrial disputes would be markedly different. Of course it is only necessary to state this to illuminate the absurdity of the idea; France in May 1968, for example, is too recent a memory. Since then there has been a more “normal” pattern of industrial struggle, of transport strikes paralysing Paris, of a one-day general strike throughout Italy and so on. But the point is made. The class division of capitalism is as evident, as divisive and as disruptive in Europe as elsewhere.

We have already said that the Common Market could exist only within capitalism. This is so, first, because capitalism is a market system; its wealth is produced for the market, for sale as distinct from for human need. Now this might be all very well except for the fact that there is no way of adjusting production and the market so that they meet each other’s demands. Capitalism goes to great lengths to find a way of doing this; we are swamped with economic experts and market forecasters and all sorts of other very clever men and most of them are confident, at some time or other, that they have solved the problem and are about to bring everlasting profitability to capitalist industry and trade.

But of course if they ever succeed in this we would never hear dread words like bankruptcy, redundancy, slump. There would never be spectacular collapses like Rolls Royce and Upper Clyde; there would never be unemployment and capitalism would sail along like a great clipper ship under full sail on a calm sea. What actually happens is that it is more like a coracle in the Bay of Biscay in a Force Nine gale. Even the politicians know this; did not the Macdonald government in the thirties blame their troubles onto an economic blizzard; did not Wilson’s lot moan that they had been “blown off course”?

Apply this yardstick again, how does the EEC measure up? Is all well economically across the Channel? All calm and under control? In truth, day by day the reports come in showing that the Market economy is as wild and uncontrollable as anywhere else. On July 27, for example, the West German Economics and Finance Ministry was worried that the “tensions” in the German economy were showing no signs of lessening, with industrial producer prices still rising. The next day the Paris Chamber of Commerce reported a slow-down in industrial production, with what they claimed as the annual growth rate at 4.5 per cent as against the 6 per cent prevailing since last autumn. On July 30 the French Minister of Finance was admitting that the rate of inflation for the first half of 1971 was “not satisfactory”; prices had risen at twice the rate hoped for by the government and a wave of strikes is expected after the summer holidays.

It may be argued that these are trivialities, were it not that they are symptomatic of the basic chaos of capitalism, all over the world. Another current problem of the capitalists of the Six is their “voluntary” limitation of steel exports to America. At present the annual growth of these exports is limited to 5 per cent; the Americans are reported to want to reduce this to 2.5 or 3 per cent, while the European steelmen are anxious that Japanese steel, limited already in its access to the American market, may seriously compete in Europe. Negotiations are, naturally, going on but it does not need a fortune teller to know that they will be a typically futile exercise, with no basic effect on the system nor on the interests of its people.

These are examples of the anarchy of capitalists. As far as Europe is concerned, the anarchy is such that even the “experts” are not united in their forecasts on the British application, nor even on what is happening in Europe at the present. A study published last December by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (described by The Guardian as “the main independent economic forecasting and analytical group in Britain”) contradicted many of the opinions and forecasts from the other “experts”. Compare these views, from the government’s Factsheets and the Institute’s report as it appeared in The Guardian (1 December 1970).:

“Factsheets: One of the striking facts about the Common Market is its rate of growth.
NIESR: The economic growth of the Six has slowed down since the EEC was formed while that of the industrialised countries outside has speeded up.
Factsheets: . . . the main industrial advantage to us would be direct access … to a market of more than 250 million people.
NIESR: So far as the larger market offers advantages, Britain is already getting these from the outside.
Factsheets: The fact that our share of the Community’s total imports of manufacturers is still only about 7 per cent indicates the potential for growth in exports to Europe.
NIESR: Britain’s competitive position inside the Community might suffer as a result of cost increases imposed by Community policies …”

It would be possible to fill up several issues of the SOCIALIST STANDARD with this kind of analysis of the Common Market. When we have cleared away all the rubbish of politicians’ speeches and the contradictory ramblings of assorted economists we are left with some basic facts. The EEC is no more than yet another instalment in the theory of the larger market which assumes, with absolutely no justification, that the problems inherent in a small market disappear, or can be more easily tamed, in a large market. What, if anything, actually happens is that the problems may well get larger with the market and as the intensity of wage-labour exploitation increases.

The problems are not, and cannot be, solved because the market is itself basically uncontrollable. If it were any other way, capitalism would be a much saner and more peaceable society than it is. Through all the Great Debate on the Common Market none of this is being argued; the debate is pre-occupied with other, quite irrelevant, matters such as commodity agreements and budget contributions. And the working class, who are always being misled into taking their masters’ sides in the disputes of capitalism, are now persuaded once again that their interests are what is at stake in the Great Debate and that it is all happening so that their lives can be improved.

The facts show otherwise. Working class lives can be improved by the simple process of getting rid of the social system which divides people into worker and capitalist and which sets up the conflicting interests and the anarchy of the market economy. That is what socialists want, what we work and struggle for. We are not detached from the Great Debate; we are deeply involved in it because we see in it more evidence of the futility and impotence of capitalism and of the urgent need to replace it with a society of common ownership.
IVAN