Upstream - Brexit with Joseph Choonara

Episode Date: June 26, 2016

In this interview we hear from Socialist Worker's Party member & Lexit Campaign Spokesperson Joseph Choonara. We spoke about the movement on the radical Left that pushed successfully for Britain to leave the European Union. We also spoke about the larger split between the movements on Left, the abandonment of the working class by Labour, the anti-immigrant nature of the EU, and how we can start to work more effectively across class divides to build a stronger, more viable Left. 

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, You're listening to Upstream. My name is Della Duncan, and today I'm in conversation with Joseph Chunara, member of the Socialist Workers' Party and the spokesperson for Lexit, the left-leave campaign for Brexit. Welcome to Upstream. I'm wondering if you could just start with your background and a little bit of why you came to do the work that you're doing. Yeah, sure. I'm a longstanding socialist activist in the UK. I'm in the Socialist Workers Party, which is the sort of biggest of the far left organizations. for recent months, one of the spokespeople for the Lexit left-leave campaign, which was putting forward a left-wing voice in the referendum campaign in Britain. Other than that, I've written quite a lot on political economy and on issues to do with class and the working class in particular in Britain. So you mentioned Lexit, which is very relevant to right now.

Yesterday, the UK voted to leave the European Union in the referendum. So can you talk a little bit about the Lexit campaign and why you were advocating to leave the EU? Yes. For us, it's an argument that goes back a long time in British politics. Really, if you take the last referendum in the 1970s on membership of one of the European Union's predecessor bodies. Most of the radical left were opposed to membership on the basis that what we were being asked to join at that time was essentially a large capitalist organisation that would be involved in driving for attacks on working-class people. What's happened since then has, if anything, reinforced that impression of the European Union.

You see, if you look at the most recent phase, and in particular if you look at Greece, the European Union has been the key body driving for austerity in Greek society with an incredibly detrimental impact on Greek people. In France at the moment, where there's a huge battle going on between government and labor unions, students and so on, over the implementation of a new labor law, the European Union doesn't simply support the government led by François Hollande. It recommended many of the attacks that holland is currently trying to force through in instance after instance you can see the european union acting as a manager often a quite dysfunctional manager of neoliberal capitalism and it plays this role not just in europe but

on a global scale underneath the ultimate authority of the u, the European Union is sort of like a second partner to the US trying to manage global capitalism. So for all these reasons, we thought that it was important that there was a left critique of the European Union within the campaign. Part of the difficulty is that much of the more mainstream left, the social democratic left, the trade unions and so on, mainstream left, the social democratic left, the trade unions and so on, moved to a much more favorable estimation of the European Union in the 1980s. The reasons for that were largely to do with the rise of Thatcherism in Britain, Reagan in America played a similar role, in which unions and the Labour Party came to see the European Union as a sort of barrier against that neoliberal offensive. What I think that misses is the extent to which neoliberalism has become embedded in

the very DNA of the European Union. In a sense, the European Union now reflects that Thatcherite, Reaganite drive across the whole of Europe. So that's the reasons really why we established the Left Leave campaign. It's a fairly small campaign, a modest campaign, but we thought it was important there was a left voice calling for exit from the European Union. You mentioned the large split within the Brexit decision,

and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that split, because you mentioned neoliberalism becoming a large part of the fabric of the EU. And I'm wondering, is that also part of this picture of an example of the larger division within the left? So can you talk a little bit about why there's this division in the left and what's that about? I think it's probably fair to say that the majority of people, even on the radical left, in this referendum campaign, supported a remain position and argued for some form of reform of the trade unions put forward arguments claiming that the european union was a defender of workers rights and there's something that used to be called a social europe which was promoted very heavily in the 80s and 90s and many of the arguments accepted this idea of social europe in the face of quite a lot of evidence from countries like greece that the european union has been nothing of the. The much more compelling argument, I think, for the left to remain camp were that, first of all, leaving the European Union

would entail restrictions on freedom of movement. There's some logic behind that because the EU does allow at least a limited freedom of movement for work and study abroad for EU members, or EU citizens, sorry. But the freedom of movement that's allowed within the European Union masks a much greater injustice on a global scale in which those people not lucky enough to be EU citizens are excluded from what we call a malef fortress Europe. What you have is the European Union acting really as the border guards for Europe, constructing a huge network of immigration controls and outposts across the continent,

extending all the way into northern Africa, into Turkey and so on, in order to police access to the European Union. And of course, those who are denied access are people from the Arab world, from North Africa, from Asia, and so on and so forth. So it means that you can't really see the European Union as an unqualified anti-racist organisation. And because of that, we argued that whatever we say about free movement, and certainly I defend open borders and free movement in many countries, whatever you think about that, the European Union is not going to be an unequivocal defender of free movement. And we can't rely on the European Union to defend that free movement.

And I say that for a number of reasons. One is that part of the negotiations between Britain and the EU involved the British government, David Cameron, winning the right, if Britain remained in the European Union, to begin a process of stripping the right to claim benefits from EU migrants for a number of years. So you see that right of free movement, even within the European Union, becoming gradually eroded. Secondly, a whole series of racist and far-right forces have developed on the terrain of the European Union. Some of these forces are in favour of the European Union. So, Jobbik, a very, very nasty far-right

organisation in Hungary, quite a big organisation there, recently changed its position to be a pro-EU position. Historically, it's been anti-EU. Part of the reason is that Jobbik can accept and tolerate a position that says there's an intrinsic difference between Europeans and non-Europeans, and that's the key dividing line. So the European Union doesn't present a barrier to these kind of racist forces that are growing around Europe. The only thing that provides a barrier are mass anti-racist campaigns. I suppose the final reason why people on the left supported Remain is that they feared that if there was a Leave vote, there'd be a much more right-wing government would come to power in Britain. And what they're talking about here is really the split in the ruling Conservative Party.

The leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, called the referendum as a sort of gamble to calm down dissent within his own organisation, the Conservative Party, over the question of Europe. He was opposed in that by quite a large number of Conservative members of Parliament, large numbers of people in his own organisation more generally, and particularly prominent in the Leave campaign were Boris Johnson, the former Mayor of London, who's a prominent Conservative, Ian Duncan-Smith, who's a former Cabinet member, and Michael Gove, another person from the Tory Conservative cabinet. So the suspicion on the left was that if Cameron went, a much more viciously neoliberal right-wing Tory leadership would take over. I think that's a mistaken view because it

relies on a strategy of propping up one wing of the Conservative Party against another. That's not really the job of the left. And the key people supporting Remain in the Conservative government, David Cameron and George Osborne, have driven through some of the most vicious attacks on working class people. They've been the ones spearheading the austerity drive in Britain. I think it was a mistaken calculation, but it's also the case that the decision to leave the EU has plunged the Conservative Party and the ruling class generally in Britain into a situation of extraordinary turmoil. David Cameron has resigned as Prime Minister or announced his resignation. It's an open question who will replace him as Prime

Minister. But the efforts made by the Conservative Party is going to be to install a new Prime Minister without a general election. In that situation, the left can advance an argument at calling for a new general election in Britain. And that's one of the key arguments that we will put forward in the coming months. Part of the situation then it seems is kind of how do people vote, whether people vote strategically, you know, because they need to, you know, think, oh, if I do this, then this will happen, this will happen. Or do people vote based on, you know, their morals or their values? Or I've even seen some things around, you know, the divide between how more older people voted and younger people voted and how older people weren't thinking in the best interest of younger people, kind of making it sound like

they should have thought about others when they were voting. It just, it brings up a lot of, you know, what do we think about when we vote or why do we vote? Do you have any thoughts about that? Yeah, that's a really interesting question because in truth, the calculation that people make when they're voting are not quite the same calculation that the left-wing people or the left-wing people are making. There were progressive people voting on both sides. I would say lots of particularly younger, progressive-minded people voted for a Remain position in this referendum. I'm very committed to work with those people because by and large they did so for good reasons, partly as a sign of solidarity with migrants because they broadly saw it as a left-wing thing to do. And there should be no barrier between people who voted for an exit

and people voting for remain, continuing to fight alongside each other over austerity, racism, and so on. We have to do that. But I think we have to be very wary of a sort of contempt that people have for working-class people who voted to exit. Because if you look at the vote, one of the things that's very interesting is that the Leave vote won overwhelming support among skilled, unskilled, and semi-skilled working class people, as they're categorized by sociologists.

Now, lots of those people were people in quite large multicultural cities in the north of England or the Midlands, in Birmingham, in Sheffield, in Bradford, in cities like this, where lots of manual blue-collar workers feel that they've been left behind and deserted by the establishment. And for those people, this vote was a sort of kick in the backside for people like David Cameron and a whole class of politicians who they feel have betrayed them. And it's fascinating because the three biggest politics, the three dominant politics in British political parties and British politics, all called for a Remain vote. 75% of members of parliament called for a Remain vote. Almost every major British corporation supported the Remain vote. 75% of members of parliament called for a Remain vote. Almost every major British corporation supported the Remain camp. Every major institution of British capitalism from the Bank of England onwards supported a Remain vote. And yet these people defied all that and called for

an exit vote. I think largely that reflects the disenfranchisement that those people face. And this is a wider European-wide, but also North American, I suspect, problem of people feeling estranged from the political system and looking for a voice in that system and not finding it. Now, of course, it's true to say that there can be a racist version of that argument in which opposition to migration becomes a sort of symbol of how people feel they've been left behind by politics. Now, we can't accept that. We have to challenge any racist conclusions that people draw. But simply to write these people off as uneducated, stupid racists doesn't do justice to the complexity of the situation. What I think the radical left has to do is actually get in those communities

and say, look, you're right to hate the establishment. You're right to hate the European Union for its neoliberalism, its lack of democracy and all the rest of it. But we need to now channel that rage towards transformation of the political system and struggle in Britain. And that's the message we have to take to those people in the coming months. And I think it's a message that has a certain amount of resonance. One very interesting factor in this will be what Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, does. Corbyn is an extremely radical figure by the standards of British politics. He's someone who's been in the anti-war movement iraq war and a very prominent role in that has been on every major

picket line when workers have taken strike action that i can think of he's a principled left-wing figure within context for labour party and he was elected as leader of labour party on the way on the back of a wave of anger against the establishment, largely for young people. The question is whether that movement around Corbyn can now connect with this sense of discontent inside the wider working class. Now, Corbyn, in the referendum campaign, took a remain position. His own personal position, I think, is more complicated. took a Remain position. His own personal position, I think, is more complicated. He comes from a traditional old Labour left-wing background, and personally, I think he's probably quite hostile to the European Union, but he struck a deal within the Parliamentary Labour Party, in which he's

quite isolated, to campaign for a Remain vote in the referendum. It's interesting though after the referendum he's made some very very positive noises about trying to draw together progressive people in a common struggle against austerity in Britain. Now that's very very useful because it means we have an ally from the remain camp who broadly is arguing the same kind of things as we in the left exit campaign are arguing. And we have to build on that now to try to build a mass movement over racism and austerity. Do you feel like the Labour Party has largely abandoned the working class? I think that there was a long process of erosion of the roots of the Labour Party inside the working class. And that's something that's happened in the last few years.

That goes right back to the 1970s, but particularly the 1980s, and then accelerated when Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour Party in the 1990s. Because the agenda that Blair was pushing was almost identical to that of the Conservatives. You know, you hear people in the US talking about how similar the Democrats and Republicans are politically, with the exception of people like Bernie Sanders and so on. But you could begin to see British politics going down that same route in which you have two big neoliberal capitalist pro-war parties in politics. Corbyn, in a sense, marks a partial break with that trajectory. So what you've seen on a European wide scale, and I think Bernie Sanders is a similar expression of this in North America,

is you've seen the narrowing of the base of mainstream politics and the emergence of forces both on the radical right and the radical left. In most European countries, or many European countries, that's taken the form of the emergence of new political parties. So in Spain, a new political party, Podemos, which is now in alliance with another group called Esquerra Unida, is now in second place in opinion polls in Spain. We've got elections taking place there tomorrow. In Greece, you've seen the rise of Syriza and other radical left forces.

In Britain, that didn't happen. There have been various attempts to build a radical left party in Britain. They've not been successful. And instead, it takes a paradoxical form of this explosion of discontent, which then is channeled into Jeremy Corbyn's leadership campaign in the Labour Party. And the result of that is that you now have two different Labour Parties in practice. You have the Labour Party inside Parliament, dominated by people of people who supported Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the traditional right wing of the Labour Party

in which Jeremy Corbyn is actually very isolated politically and then you have the 400,000 people who are now members of the Labour Party, a number that's grown enormously in the last year or so, who by and large support Jeremy Corbyn and are much more radical than the party itself. So it's a very, very strange situation that's developed inside British politics. Just yesterday, there's been a statement launched by two Labour MPs calling for a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. The response of this has been, I think, 600,000 people signing an online petition saying,

we have confidence in Jeremy Corbyn, mainly members of the Labour Party, but obviously it goes beyond members of the Labour Party. And this is the tension now within the Labour Party in Britain. So it's an extraordinarily strange situation. My position on this, I'm not in the Labour Party, is that we need to build a mass movement outside of Parliament that can actually support the kind of progressive measures that Corbyn is calling for and demand a new election, which I think Corbyn could potentially

win. So you mentioned that the folks in the working class who largely voted for leaving the European Union, that one of the important things is to talk to those folks and to work with them. And I'm just wondering if you have any advice or suggestions on that, particularly being middle class, upper middle class ourselves, how can we reach out and work among the class divides without it feeling patronizing or condescending? Where do you see are the spaces or the ways to start these cross-class dialogues? You see, for me, I think the way that these things work is much more complicated than saying that there is a middle class and a working class. You see, lots of people, I gave the figures and said

that skilled, unskilled and semi-skilled workers voted for leave. These are sociological distinctions. There are large, large numbers of people who I would regard as white collar workers, you know, in the public sector, in the service sector, even in the financial industry, and so on, who I would regard as working class in terms of their relationship to the system, to capitalism. So, first of all, we shouldn't accept this argument that there are two groups that have biometrically opposed interests. All of us in those positions are exploited by capitalism, by capital in different forms.

All of us suffer from oppression. All of us suffer from the growing gap between the 1% and the 99%. So let's start from what actually we have in common here. Secondly, yes, we have to be very, very clear that we are not here to condescend to and patronise working class people. We don't start from saying you're an educated, therefore you're stupid. We don't start from saying you're racist. We don't start from that kind of approach. Where there is racism, we call it out and we challenge it. But we also have to listen to the voices of those people when they say, we are under attack from this political system. We're suffering under austerity. We're suffering under the growing inequality, which has grown over 20, 30 years across the

developed world. And we want to do something about it. And the question then is, what can you do about it? One of the things we can do about it is get in and help with the process of organising those working class communities. And that means linking up the struggles that are going on at the moment. You see, there are struggles going on. There are massive battles in Britain over the question of housing. And if you get involved in those kind of struggles, what you find is precisely those kind of disenfranchised, angry, working class people who feel they simply can't get a home in this country because houses are so extortionately expensive and social housing and council housing and so on has been under attack

for 30 years. We can help to organise those campaigns to engage in those struggles and so on. Within those campaigns, other issues such as issues of racism always come up. Now we have to respond to that. We can't do that unless we first of all fight alongside those people. So we have to both fight alongside people and begin to challenge some of the arguments about racism that are thrown up in the course of those struggles. And this is really going back to a tradition of the 1930s, the left tradition that used to exist in North America and in Britain, of saying that we both address the causes of social discontent and we take a hard line against racism and we try to understand the contradictory nature of working class consciousness and the way that we can build a movement against racism inside the working class. One of the things that actually helps us in that argument is the fact that in Britain, certainly, the working class is much more multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-gendered, and so on, than it was 40 or 50 years ago.

So in any big workplace, you have black and white workers working alongside each other, you have migrants, non-migrants, gay and straight women, and men, by and large, working together. So the basis for working class unity is much stronger today. But I think the left has to play a much more serious role in building those kind of struggles that actually provide a way forwards for people. And the working class contradiction of consciousness that you're talking about is this kind of working class struggle, but then the racism that can come in sometimes. Is that what you mean by that? Yeah, I think it was put, I'm basing myself on Antonio Gramsci. His point was very simple. He said that it's really silly to write off working class people as always progressive, always socialist, and so on. It's equally stupid to say that they're just reactionary, racist, right wing, and so on, that for most working class people, what you have is a complex and contradictory mixture of ideas. On the one hand, you have some ideas that are uncritically

accepted from society at large. And remember that politicians have been feeding us a diet of racist divide and rule for generations now. This is not something that's just emerged with the referendum campaign in Britain or Donald Trump in the USA. It has much, much deeper and more long-term roots. So some people uncritically accept some of these ideas. They're always combined with other more progressive ideas. Some basic memory of struggle, of the time that we got one over on the boss, of the way that we joined hands in solidarity with other people, or something that our parents told us, or something we heard from someone once about how you could go on strike and

how you could win stuff. And the role of the left, I think, is to try to tap into and build on the progressive element of that contradiction to develop it, to draw out the logic and so on. It's not about the left coming into these communities and saying you're all stupid and we're going to take these stupid ideas out of your head and fill them with good ideas. It's about saying that there is a basic good sense in working in communities. There is a basic notion of solidarity there, but it's in tension with other ideas that talk about individual competition and so on and so forth. We have to draw out the logic of the good side of consciousness. And that has to be the

starting point for us. So it's not about having big thing patronizing to these people or treating them with contempt. It's about drawing on the good sense that they have in their heads and trying to challenge some of the more problematic ideas that people sometimes uncritically accept from society. Yeah, I'm really appreciating the conversation and particularly seeing how kind of the upstream perspective of this, which is, you know, where a show is called, it's kind of a question between national capitalism versus international capitalism a little bit. And so one of the biggest important

points that I'm really hearing is the need for a general election so that there's change forward. So I'm wondering if you could talk about how you're advocating for a general election and, you know, what's needed for that to happen and for the left to successfully claim it as a victory. Yeah, I think that the question of a general election is central because the mandate that the Conservative Party have is quite weak. They have, I think it's now a majority of 12 MPs in Parliament. The Prime Minister has gone. Whoever takes over will not have faced an election as the leader of the conservative party the notion that the the tories as a party can simply elect the next leader of the country i think is a notion that will not sit well and there's a logic to

calling for an election and i think having an election will be quite favourable for Jeremy Corbyn. And for all kinds of reasons, I would love to see Corbyn win that election. I mean, broadly, I think it would open up a bigger space for the left if Corbyn did win. So that's the demand. Whether that demand has a big resonance with people will partly depend on what people who represent bigger social forces than me do. So what does Jeremy Corbyn say? I think if Corbyn calls for an election, that will have a really powerful resonance. I think if the trade unions, which are still several million people in trade unions in Britain, if the unions call for a new election, that will carry a certain amount of weight

with people. So I think this is a demand that could begin to gain ground. And if it does so, I think we'd have a very interesting election campaign, because one of the key elements of that campaign would be a debate about austerity. Do we need more austerity or not? And I suspect that the mood in Britain is shifting to one which says, even among those people who grudgingly accepted austerity initially, that's enough. We stop here and we need something different.

So I think that'll be quite an interesting election campaign. Whether we win or not, let's see. But I think that we can't simply premise how we voted in the referendum campaign on the immediate political outcome. There's a wider issue here, which is about the role that the European Union plays on a global scale, as a manager of global neoliberal capitalism, as a force of imperialism in the world, as an exclusionary force attacking refugees trying to gain access to Europe. And for me, the bigger prize in some senses, the beginnings of the breakup of this neoliberal Europe, there's every possibility that in the coming weeks and months, other countries talk

about having their own referendums on departing from the European Union. Very important that the radical left in Europe and beyond don't simply stand back from those arguments, or even worse, seek to prop up the European Union, because the only beneficiaries of this process then will be the right. I think one of the problems is that too often the left has played a role of defending these institutions in fear of the radical right. And it's time that we started to say we have a left-wing critique of these institutions, which we think can gain a hearing among working class people, and being a little bit more confident and optimistic about the opportunities for the left to begin to carry this argument. Well, it is about having active hope. It's a verb to hope. So

thank you so much for your time. And I'm wondering if people want to learn more about you, the work that you're doing, or the campaign, where would you direct them to? Well, there's a weekly newspaper called Socialist Worker in the UK, which they can read. And I'm a monthly columnist in Socialist Review, which is a monthly publication. They're both available online. And there's also a journal which I write for called the International Socialism Journal. Any of those publications you can read their full content online. You can find out a lot more about politics from those. Thank you so much for your time today and sharing your wisdom with us. politics from those. Thank you so much for your time today and sharing your wisdom with us.

You've been listening to Upstream. For more interviews and episodes, please visit upstreampodcast.org. The sun is rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our bones that break To the morning we run To shoreline Calling us to speak of surrender Waves under the earth and throes Fasting ghostly shadows Tall like diamonds

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