An Alternative #EUref Reading List

Note: What follows is some waffle on how I’ve been thinking about Britain’s referendum on EU membership, followed by a bunch of links to articles that discuss the issue from both the ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ sides of the argument but on terms that (unlike most of the mainstream debate) actually mean something to me. Feel free to skip the waffle…

Living through the past few weeks of political debate in Britain has been a bizarre and disorientating experience, and not only because it’s involved watching Nigel Farage and Bob Geldof conduct low-level naval warfare against each other from rival fishing boat flotillas in the Thames.

Things have felt weird to me thanks to a fundamental disconnect. The mainstream narrative is that my vote in Thursday’s EU Referendum is one of the most important electoral decisions I will ever make: something that will help define the political, economic and cultural direction of this country (and possibly many others) for at least a generation. And yet the mainstream debate on that choice is so meagre and shoddy — partly because it’s saturated with lies, half-truths and the basest of appeals to human hatred, but also because it’s being conducted almost entirely on terms which feel irrelevant to me and the things I care about politically — that at times I’ve felt completely unprepared to make that decision. It’s like I’m being marched, unarmed, into some sort of climactic Game of Thrones battle scene framed by moody skies and an epic soundtrack, but without really knowing who is on what side, how I’m supposed to fight, or why the hell this orgy of gratuitous mutual destruction is taking place at all.

I want to live in a world with open borders, where communities of every size and shape cooperate with one another and stand together in solidarity during mutual struggles. I want to live in a world in which citizens enjoy real political agency over their lives and over the environment around them. I want to live in a world structured by an economic system which is geared towards social justice and the needs of us all, not a system in which markets are fetishized and basic human resources commodified, one geared towards the private enrichment of the few.

The EU works to support some elements of this world I want to live in, and it works to suppress many others. It is a deeply-flawed institution, and its bureaucratic impulses are dizzyingly contradictory — especially regarding what I believe to be the fundamental political issue of our age, namely the outsized power wielded by transnational capital, and the way in which that power has corrupted and diminished the avenues through which we can practice meaningful democracy.

The EU enables the free movement of people within its territory, and I think that is a good thing. And yet at the same time as it promotes a deregulated labour market for (predominantly white) Europeans, it defends its external borders with violence and inhumanity — attacking and excluding some of the most vulnerable people on earth. The EU creates forums in which citizens from different European countries can come together and work collectively. But it also provides a focal point for lobbyists representing corporate interests, and helps them in their efforts to insulate financial flows from democratic oversight. The EU offers some protections to workers and to the environment, certainly more than British citizens would ever enjoy under an untrammelled Tory government. But a commitment to markets, to private competition and to neoliberal orthodoxy is hardwired into its architecture; there is no doubt in my mind that were a democratically-elected British government ever to try and implement a programme of genuine left-wing reform, never mind radical change, the EU would (along with many other institutions) mobilise to stymie it.

For me, these ‘downsides’ are not just peccadilloes that can be harmlessly swept up into a familiar “well yes, no one is saying the EU is perfect, of course it needs reform…” -type drone, and then forgotten. They are serious, fundamental objections to the EU as it currently exists — and I’m amazed that so many of my friends and colleagues who consider themselves to be politically on the left haven’t found it as hard as I have to grapple with them. That is not to say that one can’t think through these issues carefully, acknowledge that it is a complex and difficult decision, and then ultimately decide that voting to remain inside the EU is the right thing to do. But it feels as if — with some honourable exceptions — many people I know have just ‘defaulted’ to a pro-remain position because they have a vague sense that this is the progressive side of the argument to be on, and because they are (rightly) horrified by the toxic racism of those leading the main campaigns to leave. And even more depressingly, some have decided that anyone attempting to think through this question and consider all its subtleties must be a closet xenophobe. I’ve seen jaws literally drop around London pub tables after telling people that I was still trying to make up my mind on how to vote.

Like many others, I’m nauseated, and terrified, by the bigotry of Nigel Farage and his enablers (Gove, Johnson etc), and of the momentum a Brexit vote will hand them. These people are political enemies, not bedfellows. But so too are most of those who front the mainstream remain campaign. Some people insist they would be perfectly happy to consider voting out if it weren’t for the poison dripping from the leave campaign, especially on immigration. And yet they have no qualms about voting in, despite the truly unprecedented nexus of establishment interests that are so visibly dominating that campaign. There’s Cameron, of course, and Osbourne, and Theresa May and Peter Mandelson, but there’s also the IMF, every major bank and financial institution on the planet, the City of London corporation, nearly every business giant and multinational executive, and Jeremy Clarkson and the Mail on Sunday (yep, seriously).

Just as a vote for leave will, regardless of the voter’s intentions, contribute towards a victory for a certain virulent section of the political class that is willing to stoke fear of the ‘other’ to serve their own ends, so a vote for remain will contribute towards a victory for political and financial elites who use economic scare tactics and terror of the unknown to entrench their own privilege and relentlessly narrow people’s imaginative horizons of what a better society could look like. Both, to me, are defeats.

It’s worth adding that the main leadership of both campaigns are adept at disingenuously railing against inequality and adopting the language of anti-austerity to attract support, while simultaneously knowing full well that their vision of the country post-referendum involves ramping up austerity and inequality to new heights (Corbyn and the Labour left on the remain side, including most of the trade unions, are an obvious exception to this).

So the question for me is not ‘what sort of people do I want to troop through a voting lobby with’ — the answer to that is ‘none of the above’ — but rather under what conditions do I think those political defeats can be resisted in the long-term. In other words, what outcome in this referendum offers better prospects for a fightback on different terms, on terrain that matters? And that’s not an easy question to answer, or at least not easy for me (fair play to those who have found it a doddle). Britain’s political system is largely dysfunctional and highly undemocratic; its centre of gravity does not appear to be shifting to the left at the moment (unlike Scotland’s, for example, around the time of the independence referendum). The EU is also largely dysfunctional and highly undemocratic; the ‘reforms’ it appears capable of delivering under pressure seem to be taking us, if anything, in a more neoliberal direction.

I want a very different type of cross-border European solidarity and shared politics throughout the continent (and beyond it) than the EU currently offers, and I also, for that matter, want to see a very different type of formal politics in the UK as well. Achieving either is going to be a bloody hard slog. And yet friends of mine seem very pessimistic about achieving progressive political change outside the EU, and very optimistic about doing so within it. I don’t object to the pessimism in the former case, but the optimism over the latter leaves me baffled: have they seen something that I’ve missed regarding the possibility of positively reshaping the EU from below?

For what it’s worth, I will — with bugger-all enthusiasm or merry cheer — vote to stay in the EU on Thursday, because I worry that the short-term consequences of Brexit will fall hardest on the most marginalised: migrants, refugees, people of colour. I don’t know whether this, on its own, is a good enough reason to make a political decision that’s not about choosing a five-year government, but rather about what the basic apparatus of how we are governed may look like for a generation or more. If this was an abstract philosophical debate on the EU, I’d choose to leave it; if we were outside the EU and being asked to join it, I’d say no. But those are not the choices in front of me. Try as I might, I can’t extract this referendum from its context, and its context — rightly or wrongly — makes a leave vote today feel more disturbing than one to remain.

But I fully respect those that come at this from a similar place, have worked through the nuances of the referendum decision, and eventually come down on the other side. I don’t think that necessarily means they are racist xenophobes, just as I don’t think choosing to vote remain necessarily renders someone a Goldman Sachs-loving corporate apologist. Ultimately, this referendum is about so many things other than the stark question on the ballot paper. It is about the crisis of the nation-state in a neoliberal world, about the capacity of individual citizens and communities to enact political change in an age where capital transcends the traditional mechanisms we have to curb it, and about the failure of the social-democratic liberal-left — especially Britain’s Labour Party — to articulate a cohesive response to the economic changes that have rearranged the planet over the past three decades or so and left so much human wreckage in its wake. Thursday’s referendum is the product of all of those issues, and yet whether we wake up to Brexit or Bremain on Friday morning, none of them will be solved.

So, in a nod to those like me who have found all this a little trickier to navigate than the mainstream referendum discourse might suggest, here’s an alternative reading list — with contributions from both remain and leave supporters — which at least try and speak to some of the dilemmas discussed above. I thought it might be useful to anyone who has been wrestling with the EU question and eager to hear different critical perspectives, and who has been left cold by the puny lines of debate that have monopolised most media outlets in the run-up to this week. Please feel free to add your own links and suggestions below, and of course to tell me why I’m a nincompoop who has got everything wrong…

The Reading List

Pro-Leave

• Oliver Huitson (who is with the Labour Leave campaign) runs through some of the key ‘Lexit’ (Left Brexit) arguments
• The Green Party’s Jenny Jones explains why she is voting out, and makes the important point that for all its environmental protections, the EU is wedded to a vision of capitalism and economic growth that is destroying the planet
• In Dissent magazine, Richard Tuck critiques some of the main left-wing claims for remain, and questions the ‘Another Europe is Possible’ campaign supported by Yanis Varoufakis and other prominent leftist figures
• Lisa McKenzie (albeit without revealing which way she will vote herself) contends that working-class support for leave is driven not primarily by concerns over immigration but by a desire to stand up to a status quo which offers only precarity and fear
• In relation to the point about which political direction the EU is drifting in at the moment, Kenneth Haar unpacks why Cameron’s EU ‘reform’ deal sent champagne corks popping in the City
• Red Pepper’s Michael Calderbank points out that apocalyptic prophesies always accompany moments of potential political change, and believes panic over Brexit is misplaced

Pro-Remain

• Paul Mason argues that now is not the time for Brexit, and also tackles the point above about disingenuous appeals by elites to working-class disaffection (it’s interesting to read this latter piece alongside the pro-Leave Lisa McKenzie article)
• James Stafford makes, for me, a very persuasive case that the referendum cannot be considered in isolation, and that we must understand how and why it has emerged from the turmoil of the right
• Tom Walker counters Michael Calderbank’s vision of post-Brexit Britain with a more pessimistic (to put it mildly) take on what might unfold if we vote to leave
• Sirio Canós Donnay brings a much-needed continental European voice to the pro-remain left-wing argument, making the very valid point that the societies which have suffered most from neoliberal EU strictures also want the EU to survive
• Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, warns that regardless of the arguments for leave, an exit from the EU on Thursday is one that will take place on the terms of Little Englanders, not those of the left
• The Guardian’s Gary Younge has written one of the best analyses of the referendum that I’ve come across — situating this vote in its proper context of rampant globalisation and a crisis of democratic engagement, but concluding ultimately that ‘remain’ is the ditch he chooses to die in

Other voices

• Open Democracy’s Anthony Barnett has pulled together a heroic and brilliant real-time book on the referendum, ‘Blimey, it could be Brexit’, which delves into many of the debates above in a lot more detail. He is going to vote in but is no lazy pro-remain cheerleader; every article/chapter is engaging and insightful, whatever side of the argument you’re on.
• Bertie Russell interrogates why, when it comes to the referendum, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t
• The philosopher Rupert Read explains why he’s going to spoil his ballot
• And finally, an article which is over two years old and focused primarily on the intricacies of Italian politics — but which opens with one of the best summaries of Europe’s current malaise that I’ve ever read: Perry Anderson in the LRB