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dinsdag 25 juni 2024

WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, UCADI #185 - Towards which Europe (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 While European citizens go to the polls to elect the European Parliament

and create the new Commission that will lead the Union for 5 years, a
reflection is needed on the future of Europe and its politics, on the
reasons that led to its constitution , on its future structure. The
development of some considerations in this regard is an opportunity for
us anarchist communists to clarify our position on the European Union
and on the reasons for our support, with many doubts, for its
constitution and offers us the opportunity to clearly answer the
question: which Europe would we like and why.

Our reasons

The confinement of Ventotene was not only the place in which
pro-Europeans such as Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and others
developed a reflection on the war, identifying conflicts between
European peoples as the main instrument through which the dominant
classes, pushing the proletariat of the various countries to a
fratricidal struggle, had the effect of blocking any possibility of
developing progressive policies (for the anarchist communists of social
revolution). Discussions and comparisons between the confined also
became a laboratory for political development for the anarchist
communists, to reflect and prepare the post-fascist society, creating
the conditions for the social emancipation of the exploited. Witness the
debate that developed in the anarchist conference of Ventotene, held at
the end of 1942, in which numerous anarchists took part, among the 140
prisoners, such as Alfonso Failla, Giovan Battista Domaschi, Umberto
Tommasini and many others, who, after having left, the island worked to
rebuild the anarchist communist movement and its armed participation in
the Resistance, placed within the context of anarchist gradualism.[1]
These choices arise from the awareness of considering nationalism as the
first enemy to be defeated; the revival of the United Front and the
commitment in the Resistance to build a Republic in the country,
equipped with a Constitution, which would act as a springboard for a
future project of transforming society in an egalitarian direction;
gives rise to support for the idea of a Union of the peoples of Europe
which would make it possible to avoid wars in the future, at least
between the different countries of the continent.
By making this choice, the anarchist communist movement, which was then
trying to be reborn in the social struggles of the country, amidst a
thousand difficulties, knew well that it risked that the constitutional
space claimed to ensure freedoms would prove to be a failure; he knew
well that moving towards the construction of a union of European states
could lead to the birth of a super state in which capitalism would be
the master and yet he decided to take a risk, trusting to keep the bar
of objectives straight through action politics and struggles.
As is known, the constitutional pact in the country, in some way, has
held up for 80 years, even if, on the one hand, the anarchist communist
movement was politically defeated, for complex reasons that cannot be
developed here; on the other hand, the recent political events taking
place in the country seem to demonstrate that this pact in favor of a
bourgeois democratic state has reached its exhaustion, with the
progressive affirmation of a post-fascist democracy which is taking
possession of the Republic and the feeling social. Furthermore, the
European Union increasingly assumes super-state positions and seems to
have chosen war as the foundation of a new state and a new nationalism,
this time pan-European, as demonstrated by the position taken regarding
the Ukrainian war.
It is no coincidence that senior bureaucrats like Mario Monti go so far
as to hypothesize that a bloodbath is necessary to create Europe,
convinced as they are that in common suffering and common pain identity
is tested and that relationship of belonging is established which forges
the "nation" in the imagination of the people; from this perspective, a
war that sees the nations of Europe fighting and dying for Ukraine would
have a founding function.
We anarchist communists, as internationalists, are convinced supporters
of peace and solidarity between peoples and we abhor the ordeal of blood.
Leaving aside for the moment to address the internal situation of the
country, precisely in view of the European elections, let us concentrate
our considerations on the choices that the European Union will have to
make in the near future, convinced as we are that the choice of all the
political forces nationals to transform the community electoral deadline
into the occasion of a survey on the satisfaction and stability of the
different political formations in the country - essentially into a
gigantic opinion poll on electoral orientations - is frankly
short-sighted and wrong and because
it is necessary to go into the merits of the problems.

The borders of Europe

The first and foremost for Europe today is to understand, to decide what
its borders are and to establish where the extension of its jurisdiction
begins and ends. In defining itself, the European Union has identified
continental membership as a criterion, which is a flexible criterion as
the borders of the continent can be located on the territory at will,
according to the components and political interests. It then identified
as a further parameter that of the community aequis, i.e. the respect by
the States that ask to be part of well-identified standards relating to
freedom, rights, legal relations, social relations, structure and
economic relations, contained in the criteria developed in Copenhagen
and Madrid, respectively.[2]Well, if you look at these parameters, until
now some countries, especially in the Balkans, have remained excluded
from joining the Union and placed on the waiting list as candidate
countries, waiting for the conditions for membership to mature.
In this regard, the European Union is considering making just one
exception in relation to a country at war, Ukraine, which does not
respect any of these parameters, is a country where civil and religious
liberties are denied, where corruption reigns, torn apart from a
conflict that is both international, but also civil war, if you look at
its origin which is inextricably linked to the role, freedoms and rights
of minorities in the country, not only Russian, but also Hungarian,
Romanian and Polish.
By deciding, for geostrategic reasons, to allow, in clear violation of
the Community aequis, accelerated accession and regardless of compliance
with the parameters established for Ukraine's accession, the European
Union distorts its nature and takes on the country's war with Russia and
Russian aggression on Ukraine as the reason justifying his choice; that
is, it places itself on the terrain of confrontation between
nationalisms, bypassing the interests of the other peoples forming part
of the Union.
But there is more: the European Union has proceeded with its enlargement
with prudence and attention, having as its point of reference the
maintenance of a balance between the States originally belonging to it
and those newly joining, taking care that its enlargement does not upset
the overall balance and above all that it did not distort its
principles. At the moment there is no careful and thoughtful reflection
on the effect of an enlargement of the Union to include Ukraine and all
the Balkan countries that are not currently part of it. Enough and about
one reflection: one of the most immediate effects would be the profound
change in the composition of cultural-religious affiliations on the
continent which would be made up of populations belonging to five
different traditions: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, secular and
non-believer, Islamic, of almost equivalent consistency, but with
profound inhomogeneities, on the effects of which there appears to have
been no reflection.[3]
Such a varied society, marked by such profound tensions and differences,
risks constituting an indistinct and unstable melting pot, difficult to
manage, and above all incapable of producing useful orientations and
directions for a univocal development policy characterizing a social
structure that wants to be generally homogeneous and anchored to common
and shared values.

EU and "common defence"

Another inevitable corollary of these choices is constituted by the
policy of so-called common defense which, in reality, hides the
objective of transforming all European countries into a sub-gendarme of
the decadent US Empire, under the umbrella of a revitalized NATO, which
it should act as an operational arm that operates on the different
levels of confrontation of a now multipolar world. This objective, until
now guaranteed by the direction of the servile and foolish secretary
Stoltenberg, should be achievable without much difficulty since it
enjoys the unconditional support of the arms industry which sees in the
rearmament of the European continent an opportunity for business and
process integration producers of weapons which would make their own
products of death more competitive on the world market, as they are
characterized by common standards, gives interchangeability of weapon
systems and the use of ammunition, a problem which proved to be
essential thanks to the Ukrainian war which demonstrated the importance
of the ability to continue to continuously produce armaments and
projectiles, to fuel a war which, to avoid resulting in a nuclear clash,
can only be one of position and attrition, given the substantial balance
of forces on the field.
For these geostrategic and economic reasons, the European Union ends up
transforming itself into a further opportunity for capital to make
profit, without having contributed to removing the cause and reasons for
the war which, albeit on a more global scale, is used for eternity order
to counter solidarity between peoples and the common struggle for a
better quality of life and for a social revolution that puts their
prosperity, social justice and well-being at the center of the lives of
peoples.

EU and the multipolar equilibrium

The rearmament policy is justified by stating that in a world that has
now become multipolar it is necessary that the various "plates" in which
the political spheres of influence and interests are divided are
equipped with a deterrent capacity, capable of ensuring autonomy and
independence. In this new vision of the balance of forces in the field,
the atomic weapon takes on the dissuasive function of a deterrent which
forces the adversary to confront using a conflict limited in time and
space which uses the so-called conventional armament, as if this did not
produce deaths , deaths and ruins and is in some way bearable,
physiological and metabolizable, giving war a viaticum of acceptability.
What contributes to generating this belief is the belief that the
advantages deriving from war production and the
destruction-reconstruction mechanism are the tools that make human and
material sacrifice resulting from conflicts convenient and economical.
Deaths and injuries, deaths and ruins are considered bearable collateral
damage if the aim is to achieve the goal of establishing in the field
who should prevail in the defense of one's interests.
In the shadow of these new balances, the reconstruction of empires is
planned, the emergence of spheres of interest and economic influence, of
strategic control achieved through continuous recourse to "local"
conflicts and wars, considered as physiological tools for resolving
disputes. . From this perspective, European rearmament becomes the
guarantee not only of the rationalization and homogenization of the war
production of the states that are part of it and therefore of further
lucrative business, but also an opportunity for cohesion, embracing the
ancient theory that according to the blood shed that "cement" on which
identity and the very idea of nation and common destiny is based is
formed by the people.
 From this perspective, hatreds and resentments, resentments and claims
are spread liberally, so that unbridgeable ditches are created between
peoples to delineate and draw borders, reaching even grotesque peaks,
such as those created by the campaign for the dismissal of non-Ukrainian
saints, and especially those of Russian origin, from the Orthodox
calendar, by the newly created State Church, autocephalous and
schismatic Ukrainian Orthodox.

EU and crisis of ordoliberalism

There is also a need to rethink the economic policy of the European
Union - for years dominated by Franco-Rhine capitalism - heavily put
into crisis by the change in the flow of energy which, while previously
moving from east to west, now moves on the axis south north, pushing for
a review of the centrality of the German economy which, with its
ordocapitalist approach, has strongly influenced the politics of the
Union, imposing the rule of austerity, of the economy, regulated within
the institutional legal framework defined by the State , within which
the individual and free initiative moved, influencing the market. The
one that is entering into crisis today is the so-called "Third Way"
(naturally nothing to do with that of Blayrian memory), which argued
that between Keynesianism and totalitarianism (i.e. plan economy), a
"Third Way" was possible, through which to rationally manage capitalism
towards full control of a perennial growth of accumulation and constant
and lasting development.[4]
Put simply, it is the ancient Catholic dream of conciliation between
capital and work that is entering into crisis which, inherited from the
Friborg school, or rather from Catholic theology and sociology,
attempted to combine work and capital, deluding itself that class
collaboration was the main instrument for overcoming the exploitation of
man by man, in the illusion that the relationship between capital and
labor was reconcilable within the context of the so-called "social
market economy" (primacy of monetary policy and development policy,
alignment of prices on the supply of goods), which would have produced
the fair and gradual distribution of the increase in well-being.
For the people of Fribourg, every kind of interventionist economic
policy (protected, planned, welfare and Keyensian economy) has as its
presupposition and result the growth of state power, which diminishes
the spaces for individual freedom. Therefore the ordoliberals do not
make a distinction between socialism and capitalism, between
totalitarianism and liberalism; for them, National Socialism and the
Soviet Union constituted the point of arrival of the economic and
political crisis which developed the increase of state power as the only
solution. Therefore, those countries that chose to respond to the 1929
crisis with an increase in the power and capacity of the State to act in
the economy and in society inevitably slipped towards authoritarian
choices and this also happened with Keynesian economic choices.
The "Third Way", which recognizes the individual and the State as the
two main actors, knows the solution to the problem: the State, if devoid
of controls and limits, produces totalitarianism, following different
declinations; individuals, if they have total freedom, do the same, with
equally catastrophic results for society and common well-being.
The "Third Way" would be the only one capable of producing a pluralist
and healthy social order, acting in the legal, political and economic
fields, placed in total connection with each other, through
subsidiarity. In this way, ordoliberalism is proposed as overcoming the
opposition between capital and labor typical of Marxism[here the
reference is clear, to Catholic theology and to a sort of modern and
revisited corporatism, borrowed from Rerum Novarum , first, and from
Quadragesimo anno , Then].
It follows that it is the task of the liberal state to provide a legal
framework, a set of rules (i.e. the price regime) that functions justly
and in accordance with human nature. In this conception the State does
not intervene in the strict sense in the economic sphere because it
would slip into dirigisme but at the same time it is not disinterested
in the economic sphere, but must influence the economy by establishing a
legal space of rules to ensure that the market can "evolve according to
nature", creating a regime of perfect competition, monetary stability
and justice since the order that the State must establish, manage and
protect can perform the function of making a market economy possible and
at the same time creating the appropriate space for the exercise of
economic freedom.
It follows that the State, through the government, must guarantee the
maintenance of full employment, the conservation of purchasing power,
the equilibrium in the balance of payments, which must become primary
objectives, using the credit policy (rate of discount) and the lowering
of taxes, carefully avoiding measures such as
price fixing, supporting strategic market sectors, systematically
creating jobs, also by resorting to public investments, taking price
stability as the primary objective. All this to ensure that the market
operates following a complex but safe mechanism, without extraneous
dynamics intervening to disturb it.
This economic construction has entered into crisis due to globalization
and the changing framework of geostrategic alliances that guaranteed
low-cost energy, allowing profit margins to be able to allocate a part
to trade union shareholding and the co-management of the economic-social
model. It should also be added that the war, by draining resources,
blocked in the bud, perhaps irreversibly, but in any case in a
conditioning way, the evolution of the economic model just described
towards a neo-court and green economy which were in the programs of the
European Union,

The uncertain future landings

The European ruling classes are struggling to take note of what is
happening and, while they have continued by inertia, in this end of the
legislature, to adopt choices that go in the direction of the green
transformation of the Union's economy, aware of the ongoing crisis, have
commissioned two bureaucrats belonging to the European political elite,
Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta, two reports on the future of integration,
on the common security policy (or, if you prefer, on rearmament), a
feasibility study to obtain indications that , regardless of the
electoral result, will have to inspire the policies of the future
Commission.
This choice is prodromal to the difficulties that will have to be faced
in identifying a new leadership, so it is not excluded that, rather than
the helpless and inconsistent Ursula von der Leyen or the ineffable, but
empty, Roberta Métsola, we prefer to draw on the " reserves of capital",
made up of technical figures coming from finance, politics or industry,
of which Draghi is one of the most prestigious, due to his role as grand
commis of capital, proven to be in possession of so few scruples as to
have carried out without batting an eyelid the liquidation of the public
assets of the Italian State, at the service of Goldman Sachs, starting
from the 90s of the last century, putting it up for auction, at the
disposal of capital and world finance.
If this is the framework in which the next European elections are
placed, it is easy to understand how the result of the vote destined to
elect the Parliament and what the elected representatives will be able
to carry out in making these choices are completely irrelevant, given
that the places delegates to adopt strategic decisions are totally
beyond their control, dominated by the Commission and the Council of
Member States.

[1]See: A. DADA', Anarchism in Italy: between movement and party , Teti
Editore, Milan, 1984, pp. 94 ff. But see also: Resolution of the
anarchist conference of Ventotene , pp. 311 and The Italian Anarchist
Communist Federation (CAI), pp.312-313.

[2]The membership criteria were established at the Copenhagen European
Council in 1993 and strengthened at the Madrid European Council in 1995.
These criteria are: the presence of stable institutions guaranteeing
democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect and protection of
minorities; a reliable market economy and the ability to cope with
market forces and competitive pressure within the Union; the ability to
accept the obligations arising from membership, including the ability to
effectively implement the rules, standards and policies that constitute
the body of Union law (the aequis), as well as adherence to the
objectives of the union political, economic and monetary.

[3]G. Cimbalo, The Orthodox Churches and States in Europe: problems and
prospects, Laicidad y libertades. Escritos jurìdicos , 2022,
https://www.giovannicimbalo.it/le-chiese-ortodosse-e-gli-stati-in-europa-problemi-e-prospettive/

[4]There is an extensive bibliography on the elaborations of the Fribugo
School which is inspired by Catholic sociology, by the economic theories
of Raphael Rodriguez De Cepeda, and by the revisitation of the theory of
social classes by Robert Mickel. For brevity see at least Lorenzo
Mesini, Ordoliberalism: an introduction to the Friborg School , Pandora
magazine,
https://www.pandorarivista.it/articoli/ordoliberalismo-scuola-di-friburgo/

GC

https://www.ucadi.org/2024/05/22/verso-quale-europa/
_________________________________________
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