The Dialectics of Brexit

By Andrew Dobbs

The Independent

1. Brexit represents a watershed political crisis for the imperialist center. The United Kingdom — the world’s fourth largest economy and one of the key political and cultural leaders of global capitalism — has now committed itself to delivering a series of mutually exclusive outcomes to their public. They want a full and meaningful break with the European Union, but they don’t want to lose any of the benefits of EU membership. They do not want to be subject to policies set by the EU, but they want to be internal to the political economy of Europe by sharing in its upsides. They refuse to have a legitimate border in Ireland between their occupied counties and the rest of the country, but they want the Republic to be a foreign nation. They have roundly rejected the separation agreement negotiated by their government with the European Union — which European leaders have repeatedly, severally, and collectively insisted is the only deal the UK will ever get from them — but the UK does not want to crash out without a deal. Finally, they have decided that the referendum is sacrosanct, and yet they are on the verge of punting on its orders. Any path they take will be a betrayal.
2. Specifically the most likely outcomes are either a no-deal Brexit which will represent a massive elective loss of economic power — a betrayal of the rosy pictures leavers were painting for the electorate prior to the 2016 vote — or an indefinite delay of the exit and/or a new referendum to try and cancel the whole process. The latter seems easier in the short run, but it is a much more dangerous decision for the UK state, in that it means two and a half years of effort by all of the country’s major parties was flatly incapable of delivering on a single, simple, unambiguous directive from the people, a directive which the state promised to accomplish. Long delay or a new referendum would be an alienation of popular legitimacy by the state. It may provoke immediate uprising of some sort, likely right-wing unrest, but even if all is quiet at the end of March this year, the die will be cast for the collapse of the UK constitutional order, such as it is.
3. Both outcomes are still legitimate possibilities because the contradiction at the heart of Brexit is entirely internal to the ruling class. The fundamental terms of this intra-bourgeois contradiction can be described as a debate between the primacy of the goose or the golden egg. It is a question of priorities for the imperialist center — should we prioritize maintaining the institutions of imperialist rule or should we seek to lock down the resources generated by the present system of exploitation, blocking their outflows and the perceived middlemen claiming a rent off of them? The answer seems obvious: without the goose, there is no golden egg, so undermining those institutions threatens those flows. That may be correct, but the goose would not have been maintained in the first place if it weren’t for the golden eggs, and if there is a question about their continued viability there must be a reckoning for the goose too.
4. This contradiction is closely related to the dialectics between the productive forces and the relations of of production, and between hegemony and repressive power. Each represents an active, subjective element conditioned by and in turn conditioning a structural, objective element. The European Union and other imperialist institutions are themselves forces of production in that they are the material basis for the hegemony of imperialist production, seen now as contradicting the repressive, exploitative needs of the dominant elements of imperialist society — exploitation being synonymous with the relations of production under capitalism. It is these elements that see their golden eggs going away, and so their hostility to the goose is heightened.
5. The left has been befuddled by much of what is happening in the imperialist centers because we presume that this contradiction here must be arising from the economic base of society, in production. This is broadly true, and there are in fact movements in the productive base at work — as we’ll see — but the immediate contradiction at play in Brexit is actually that of the dialectic between the base and the superstructure itself, that is to say between relations of dominance and relations of exploitation. To keep the analogy going, the eggs being lost are political, superstructural prizes of dominance in particular.
6. See, capitalist exploitation, especially on the primary level of imperialist exploitation where the lion’s share of global surplus is generated, is more secure now than it has been for nearly 150 years. The handful of small, isolated, and existentially threatened states actively resisting the imperialist center are politically and ideologically heterogeneous, geographically disconnected, and governed by movements which are incapable of victory over capitalism (though they deserve our respect and support nonetheless). There is no immediate crisis of capitalist production arising from a political basis, the only basis by which it can be effectively challenged.
7. What is at risk, however, are the dominant political forces of the imperialist superstructure, namely white men upholding a conventional Christian lifestyle. It’s because the primary contradiction at hand is entirely located in the superstructure of the imperialist center that we have political institutions willfully electing to threaten their productive base. Brexit, as well as the Trump movement in the United States, represents a political push by the historically dominant elements of imperialist society to defend existing relations of dominance by asserting the primacy of repression over hegemony, exploitation over shared social development, and the subjective — i.e. the nation — over the objective — the market.
8. It’s here that the roots of the crisis in the productive base become evident, as the decline in relative dominance of these social groups is a function of changes in the fundamental strategies of capitalist reproduction. These changes have been developing for a long time but broke through during the 2007–2008 economic crisis. The basic change is that the historic weakness, in fact almost total absence of meaningful proletarian politics has enabled the imperialist bourgeoisie to begin revoking rents paid to these dominant social groups for the sake of dividing the working masses of the First World. The proletariat, they believe at the moment, has been conquered so there is no reason to continue dividing it, at least in the imperialist centers.
9. This strategy has the added benefit of neutralizing the superstructural struggles of oppressed social formations — women, LGBTQ folks, people of color — by granting their political demands as a reward for their abandonment of any real anti-imperialist dimension to their efforts. Progressive cultural struggles are thus directly integrated into the defense of the present hegemony, as the very real threat of racists and reactionaries pushing for Brexit compels feminist, queer, and POC political elements to defend imperialist institutions like the EU.
10. This then clarifies the generally likely outcomes of the Brexit crisis. One is the victory of the existing hegemony through either the defeat of Brexit or its watering down to the point of meaninglessness, attendant with technocratic cosmopolitanism and a cultural contempt for angry white yokels, and the other is a victory for political reaction opening the way for an especially repressive turn by these dominant forces, a revanchist campaign against the social groups that provoked their resentment.
11. Obviously from a left perspective extraordinary reactionary violence is worse than the hegemonic status quo, but again in the case of Brexit in particular the latter can only happen if the state fails in an essential way to accomplish a basic commitment it made to the public, the source of its legitimacy. In the absence of proletarian politics this breach is liable to be filled by those very same reactionary forces, perhaps with a different agenda but no less dangerous. There is no revolutionary benefit to defending the European Union in the meantime. This is the nature of the oxymoronic policymaking going on right now — how can they meet their obligations without upsetting the hegemonic order they obliged themselves to upset? There is no way out, and so it appears that the UK ruling class is facing an extraordinary political crisis.
12. One final piece of the chaotic puzzle is the reinvigorated social democracy of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. Their program necessitates Third World exploitation to provide the social surplus used to fund their efforts, and it’s the very ebb of Third World politics that underwrites their new life. The result is an impatience with the present political struggle because Labour would rather move on and get with their own “left” imperialist program (i.e. social democracy, the imperialism of the left), hence the ambivalence, ambiguity, and opportunism of Labour’s politics on Brexit.
13. The upshot of all this is that the dialectic between objective conditions and subjective forces means that whether the UK defends its immediate hegemony and undermines its long-term political integrity (likely experienced in the form of reinvigorated national political struggles leading to the independence and reunification of Scotland and Ireland, respectively), blunts its productive capacity, or implodes in reactionary internal conflict the imperialist order will be quantitatively weakened. If this opening is met by newly empowered anti-imperialist elements in the periphery it could translate into a qualitative shift in the balance of forces, advancing global revolution. It’s here that we see Brexit for what it really is: an expression of the fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism, its inability to reproduce itself without destroying itself.
14. There are grounds for encouragement here, but we have to remember Marx’s line at the end of the first full paragraph of the Communist Manifesto, reminding us that all class struggles end “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” The Erfurt Program put it as “socialism or barbarism.” Brexit is an unmistakable step towards the latter, and it is up to revolutionaries to develop the subjective forces capable of winning socialism and resisting imperialist opportunism until the objective conditions shift — as they are guaranteed to do. Brexit is proof that they will, and inspiration to keep fighting for a world without borders or bigotry.