The left and the (un)foreseeable consequences of monetary integration

The singular parable that led the left from advocating the fight against regular (yes, you read correctly: regular) emigration to hebephrenically exalting the "migrant" as the "avant-garde of our lifestyle" may seem similar to the parable that led the same left from a position of skepticism towards monetary integration, seen as a project of "anti-worker deflation", to total and unconditional adhesion to the single currency (highest and most irreversible of monetary integration), presented as "Europe's strongest and most innovative pillar".

It may seem similar, but it isn't.

It is not (simply) analogous, because it is the exact same trajectory, seen from two different angles, but driven by the same incompressible force: the instinct of conservation , the anxiety of surviving the collapse of one's own geopolitical block of reference to cost, which in fact it has proven to be sustainable ( they live ), of the betrayal of one's electoral bloc of reference: you.

But let's start from the beginning.

The non-immigrationist left

Yes, there was a left against legal immigration. Marchais' words are well known, and I propose them to you here , but they are still worth listening to together:

"The faut stopper l'immigration officielle et clandestine. Il est inadmissible de laisser entrer des nouveaux travailleurs immigrés en France, alors que notre Pays compte près de deux millions de chômeurs français et immigrés" (applause).

Here we are Europeans, not pro-Europeans, so we don't need translation, right?

I am almost certain that, despite the attempt to hide and deny them, similar utterances also exist from exponents of the PCI, in addition to those of the most illustrious exponent of the PCF, also because the concept expressed is rather obvious, and on the left, specifically in the communist left, it had a long history (free ticket to #goofy14 to anyone who tracks it down for me). After all, why do you think the First International was created? If you ask Wikimm … you won't have the answer, but you just need to wander around a bit (and we, who are Europeans, not pro-Europeans, can do it) to find it:

Oh yeah!

The First International had posed the problem of international coordination of trade unions, which in re ipsa envisaged discouraging the importation of scabs from other countries . The immigration of foreign workers was therefore correctly framed and managed for what it was and is: a way to weaken the proletarians in their struggle against the bourgeoisie, a struggle which, as Carletto had said, "is initially a national struggle" (you may remember when I explained this to the communists in Zombia ). If when a national proletariat calls a strike the boss turns to the workers of another country, the strike is less effective, I would say. The reason why the proletarians of the whole world had to unite, as Mr. Carletto had said in 1848, was not to jointly organize the reception of boats of the last, but to prevent the penultimate from pecking each other like chickens of Renzo (even if across national borders).

Incidentally, every time a whitewashed tomb, or an ignorant person, attempts a risky comparison between the deaths of Marcinelle and those of too many maritime tragedies of today, we should oppose him with the objective data:

In 1954 the unemployment rate in Belgium was 1.2% , and therefore there was work. When the kind colleague who went down in history for the particular twist given to the term "resources" (stra) spoke about the avant-gardes of our future lifestyle:

the unemployment rate in our country was 13.7%.

Do you understand the difference between going to work where there is work and going to work where there is no work? What was the point of praising globalization if it clearly took production factors where they could not be used? Of course there was a meaning…

The non-deflationist left

Yes, there was a left against monetary integration. Napolitano's words in his declaration of vote against that larva of the euro which was the EMS, the European Monetary System, a system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates of which we have so often spoke:

The asymmetry of the system was clear and crisp, the dangers for Italy were well delineated, and everything had been put on record here . Moreover, if Napolitano didn't know the economy, Spaventa knew it well , and Barca (the real one) knew enough to understand the consequences of the "hard" currency: deflation and anti-worker recession ! Concerns founded in economic theory, and neglected when the facts confirmed them.

To survive.

To avoid being crushed under the rubble of the Berlin Wall par excellence.

To build a new shore outside the country on which to leverage to govern "safely from the electoral process".

To achieve all this, it was necessary to bow down to the euro, it was necessary to reinvent the class struggle, that is, the defense of the real wage, not as a defense of the nominal wage, but in terms of defense against inflation: the rentiers thanked (and tolerated, indeed : they cajoled and supported a similar left!), but naturally, as John Maynard says, whoever wants the end (deflation) wants, in the sense that he cannot not want, the means to achieve it (and the relative political cost).

And by what means is deflation achieved?

Essentially three:

1) cuts to public investments,

2) cuts to the welfare state,

3) creation of a vast industrial reserve army (aka: unemployed).

It is the latter that is in direct logical connection with the price level, via the “Phillips curve”, but the first two (the cuts) serve indirectly to create it, the army of unemployed, and to make it vulnerable.

Then, when this mechanism does not act quickly enough, the unemployed simply need to be imported. And even in this the left has its work cut out for it: immigrationism is the humanitarian face of grim austerism. These are two ways of achieving the same thing: downward pressure on the remuneration of wage earners. It goes without saying that by definition both have negative consequences on wage earners (of course: they serve to reduce their standard of living to put them in direct competition with "Chinese lu"!), but immigrationism also has a direct and immediate negative consequence on the life of the classes that the left had traditionally set out to protect. Oh yeah! Because immigrationism, the fetish of the last at the expense of the penultimate, which, as you will remember, was the prime mover of my conservative choice , poses a direct existential threat on the biological life of the penultimate and especially the penultimate (the statistics speak clearly). It is also surprising how the people of Piddini do not realize that their attempts to sweeten the pill by denying reality (in deference to the famous Rome toilet paper ) are counterproductive, are the real driving force first of repulsion and then of hatred, because people do not he can no longer hear about Uomolandia and Coetanistan. When it becomes clear that someone wants to tell you one thing for another, you may become suspicious and susceptible.

Accepting a drastic reduction in one's social rights, perhaps in exchange for a sprinkling of cosmetic rights (the so-called "civil" rights, which for the left are iRitti™️ par excellence), is a challenging but not impossible exercise. Accepting direct physical violence, perhaps of a sexual nature, perhaps against a close relative, is a very different ordeal, and it is to this test that the left is calling its voters, and unfortunately us too (who don't deserve it).

What the divisions (in the military sense) of the left are is sufficiently clear. The left has with it the Non-Moderate Army (let's spare ourselves the nonsense about silent majorities here), but it has made a mistake: it has come out into the open… And when the institutions to which we entrust our security take sides in such a blatant way against it, the breakdown of the social pact is declared, for better or for worse, the good being (perhaps) the stimulus to the search for a new balance. And yes, to dismantle this beautiful castle of lies and privileges you have to start from a conceptually simple and intuitive operation, which not surprisingly have done so much to make you hateful: strengthening your representatives, that is, counting more. Whoever gave you the virtuous goal of counting less just wanted to fuck you, he just wanted to survive an unequivocal condemnation of history, and there was no sacrifice of yours that he wasn't willing to endure to do so, including that of your life or that of your loved ones !

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This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2025/02/la-sinistra-e-le-conseguenze.html on Sun, 02 Feb 2025 22:23:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.