/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2611916
Israel has been at that for years.

on the one hand that would free some european from EU financial tyranny. on the other it will eventually lead to another european war

>>2611989
Good, they deserve it

>>2611989
>on the one hand that would free some european from EU financial tyranny
Isn't the EU one of the largest economies on the planet?

>>2612030
>they deserve it
Spooky!

>>2612095
I don’t FUCKING CARE

>>2611916
saying that shit when the dissolution of the united states in the interests of the entire planet is crazy work. 🤪

We need 8 more years of trump so the UE can become a truly independent block and thus advance multipolarity

>>2612093
Yes, but the Euro is one of the worst ideas in economic policy history. Monetary policy winds up centralized and effectively set in Germany's interests, while monetary policy remains separate. It's the worst of all possible worlds. (A federal Europe would - like the US - automatically engage in large-scale transfers of money between "winner" and "loser" regions via unemployment benefits etc, while a totally separate Europe would have 25 different currencies each with their own separate monetary policy.)

I haven't explained well because I have - mercifully - apparently forgotten all the in-depth monetary and trade economics I once knew and I'm not going to remind myself of the details. Wasting my time learning it is one of my great regrets, that I can apparently forget is one of life's great mercies.

>>2612100
That's fine. But you're being dishonest to yourself by saying "they deserve it" instead of "I want it to happen to them".

>>2612101
I'm not pro-EU, not really. I'm just questioning what is meant by
>EU economic tyranny
I like the EU as a concept; I like the idea of a confederacy of states that act in the name of mutual benefit while still being largely managing their own affairs. But it doesn't really wring all the possible benefits out of such an arrangement, and it's way too dependent on the US for it to really mean anything anyway.

What I'd like to see is the EU break off from the US and do its own thing. It's already kind of in the position to do so, because it works pretty extensively with Russia. If we want multipolarism, it's in our best interests to have as many poles as possible.

As for Stirner, I like him insofar as he provides an "anti-philosophy". The Ego and Its Own is not good enough to build an entire politics around, but it does a fantastic job smashing the hidden moralisms and idealism that many people hold without even knowing it. I highly recommend it as a starting point for anyone coming from a capitalist-idealist background.

>>2612121
Could you elaborate on that? I don't see why uneven wealth distribution is a given.

>>2612163
basically, the euro prevents exchange rates from adjusting to any single national economy (so, if, say, germany is running a trade surplus and france is running a trade deficit, the value of the euro stays stable when what it really ought to do is drop in france and increase in germany to restore balance. since this can't happen through currency value changing, the main option left is "internal devaluation" - e.g. painful wage and welfare cuts combined with unemployment until competitiveness improves in france.), prevents monetary policy from adjusting to any specific national economy - though in practice set for germany - (so if france is in recession while germany is booming, the ECB has to decide between high inflation in germany to help with france's recession, or worsening france's recession to cool the german economy), but it does not mandate large-scale fiscal transfers between france and germany (which is how the US solves this problem. its states are nearly as diverse as Europe's, but the federal government takes money from California and throws it at Alabama.)

all of these are compounded by the fact that national governments - entirely responsible for fiscal policy - borrow in a currency controlled by the ECB, not by themselves. the greek debt crisis is impossible for a country that controls and borrows in its own currency. if (say) britain got into the same problem, the central bank could always just print pounds. greece can't do that because the ECB owns the money printer instead of the greek central bank, so it's forced to do what the other eurozone countries demand in exchange for loans.
(this also arises in cases like latin american countries who used the money printer so often that lenders will now only lend to them in USD, but it's bizarre that these conditions are imposed across europe on countries that were once basically trusted to run their own affairs.)

basically: it is not that a European confederation is itself a fundamentally bad idea, it is that the specific institutions of monetary union without fiscal union are flawed. most bourgeois economists knew this in advance but it went ahead anyway because it was a political project. (ironically, one primarily demanded by France under the utterly wrongheaded idea it would constrain a unified Germany from dominating Europe through a strong deutschmark.)

>>2612093
thats why its a threat and also why the us had to start a war in ukraine lol

>>2612121
>Yes, but the Dollar is one of the worst ideas in economic policy history. Monetary policy winds up centralized and effectively set in New York's interests

inb4 "US/Trump Isolationism"
inb4 "US/Trump abandoning Ukraine/NATO"
inb4 "despite above EU needs military independence… through NATO"
inb4 "despite above EU must fight for US hegemony at all costs"
inb4 "The problem with liberalism is that the world hegemonic profits are waning"

>>2612332
The problem with liberalism is it’s a shitty fucking idea

So anti-americanism is gonna become pro-EU now?

>>2612690
lol
lmao even

So what is the take of all the cunts who kept arguing with me that EU is inherently a tool of US imperialism?

>>2612800
The US likes the EU as a free trade area where its companies can freely colonize the continent. What it does not like is it being capable of undertaking any sort of centralized action, as often time in the past this ability has been used to constrain and fine US companies, or even wage commercial wars against America like during Trump's first term. So if they support far right parties that want to dismantle all EU institutions from within and leave it as just a free trade area, it's essentially the wet dream of American megacorporations.

Eu retards actually believe this shit

>>2613116
Let me guess, they are actually just pretending and really in cohoots with each other? This is literally just the /pol/ "both sides are owned by the jews" shit but for the left.

>>2613114
>>2611916
>>2613211
The communist position is to prepare the workers and the changing conditions to overthrow the bourgeois state and establish the proletarian state. Therefore, the first necessary action is the control of a national bank, suppressing private banking, to facilitate the socialization of the economy so that the revolution succeeds. Otherwise, it will suffer the same fate as the Paris Commune, a problem the Bolsheviks were certain not to repeat, following the criticisms Marx and Engels made at the time.

I will leave some quotes that show a socialist state cannot be part of an international capitalist imperialist organization like the European Union, which does not allow state monopoly of the means of production without competition. I will leave some quotes that prove my point:

<In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

<In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

<And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

<By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.

<But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

[…]

<Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
[…]
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
[…]
<When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

<Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, February 1848, Chapter II. Proletarians and Communists

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

<Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following:
[…]
<(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.

<Frederick Engels, 1847, The Principles of Communism

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

<10. All private banks will be replaced by a state bank whose bonds will have the character of legal tender.

<This measure will make it possible to regulate credit in the interests of the whole people and will thus undermine the dominance of the large financiers. By gradually replacing gold and silver by paper money, it will cheapen the indispensable instrument of bourgeois trade, the universal means of exchange, and will allow the gold and silver to have an outward effect. Ultimately, this measure is necessary to link the interests of the conservative bourgeoisie to the revolution.

<Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, March 1848, Demands of the Communist Party in Germany

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm

<3. Legal minimum wage, determined each year according to the local price of food, by a workers' statistical commission;
<4. Legal prohibition of bosses employing foreign workers at a wage less than that of French workers;

<Karl Marx and Jules Guesde, 1880, The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm

<It is therefore comprehensible that in the economic sphere much was left undone which, according to our view today, the Commune ought to have done. The hardest thing to understand is certainly the holy awe with which they remained standing respectfully outside the gates of the Bank of France. This was also a serious political mistake. The bank in the hands of the Commune – this would have been worth more than 10,000 hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the whole of the French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favor of peace with the Commune, but what is still more wonderful is the correctness of so much that was actually done by the Commune, composed as it was of Blanquists and Proudhonists. Naturally, the Proudhonists were chiefly responsible for the economic decrees of the Commune, both for their praiseworthy and their unpraiseworthy aspects; as the Blanquists were for its political actions and omissions. And in both cases the irony of history willed – as is usual when doctrinaires come to the helm – that both did the opposite of what the doctrines of their school proscribed.

<1891 Introduction by Frederick Engels, On the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm

Now I will quote Lenin against supporters of the European Union:

<From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism—i.e., the export of capital and the division of the world by the “advanced” and “civilised” colonial powers—a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary.
[…]
<A United States of Europe under capitalism is tantamount to an agreement on the partition of colonies. Under capitalism, however, no other basis and no other principle of division are possible except force. A multi-millionaire cannot share the “national income” of a capitalist country with anyone otherwise than “in proportion to the capital invested” (with a bonus thrown in, so that the biggest capital may receive more than its share). Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, and anarchy in production. To advocate a “just” division of income on such a basis is sheer Proudhonism, stupid philistinism. No division can be effected otherwise than in “proportion to strength”, and strength changes with the course of economic development. Following 1871, the rate of Germany’s accession of strength was three or four times as rapid as that of Britain and France, and of Japan about ten times as rapid as Russia’s. There is and there can be no other way of testing the real might of a capitalist state than by war. War does not contradict the fundamentals of private property—on the contrary, it is a direct and inevitable outcome of those fundamentals. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics.

<Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists … but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America, who have been badly done out of their share by the present partition of colonies, and the increase of whose might during the last fifty years has been immeasurably more rapid than that of backward and monarchist Europe, now turning senile. Compared with the United States of America, Europe as a whole denotes economic stagnation. On the present economic basis, i.e., under capitalism, a United States of Europe would signify an organisation of reaction to retard America’s more rapid development. The times when the cause of democracy and socialism was associated only with Europe alone have gone for ever.

<A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism—about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic. As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others.

<V. I. Lenin, 1915, On the Slogan for a United States of Europe

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/23.htm

>>2612330
Stupid reply, even if it does lead me to catch an error. it should read while fiscal policy remains separate.

Which is obviously clarified in the brackets. The difference between the dollar and the Euro is that when the federal reserve sets economic policy in NYC's interests, NYC pays taxes to Washington and Washington gives that money to whatever state is hurting (via unemployment benefits and other countercyclical stimulus). yes, yes, it's not a household budget and really what happens is the state destroys NYC's money and then prints some for Gary, Indiana. This pedantic distinction doesn't matter at this level.
In Europe the opposite happens: Germany runs a big budget surplus, and whichever country is having its recession worsened sees its fiscal position deteriorate further because Germany/The EU as a whole doesn't pay for their unemployment benefits, they pay for their own.

The USD, within the US, is an optimum currency area with fiscal and monetary union. The Euro has monetary union without fiscal union. You cannot equivocate between the two. You could equivocate with non US countries using the dollar, but that is a bad economic idea - it's just usually the least-bad option for countries that have chaotic macroeconomic histories.

>>2612800
in its current state yeah it is because all its leaders are cia glowies that got grants to go to georgtown and princton for being anti-commie and advancing the liberal global order, but in its intention and structure its a threat to hegemony if it actually becomes economically dependent from wall st

the reason for the article is because it still has the pretense of democracy and are electing 'right wing authoritarians' in response to us imposed austerity who precisely want to return to economic fundamentals of production instead of financial tricks because the us wont share and is trying to subjugate them

even besides the choice part of it and the threat to hegemony its actually necessary because they have to cannibalize something to slow the falling rate of profit and the other targets have nukes

>>2612800
simple, EU was a tool of US imperialism, not anymore.