Why the most progressive leftist to run the UKs Labor Party in years, Jeremy Corbyn, has to side with the market and Conservative Party on the question of the Brexit.
Why the most progressive leftist to run the UK's Labor Party in years, Jeremy Corbyn, has to side with the market and Conservative Party on Brexit. Twocoms/shutterstock.com

In a few days, the citizens of the United Kingdom will vote on whether to stay or leave the European Union. This morning, the Dow jumped 200 points because it seems less likely that Brexit will happen. The markets want the UK to stay put. Also, the left, and even members of the anti-capitalist left, such as Richard Seymour, the Marxist author of Verso's Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical, and a recent guest on Doug Henwood's podcast LBO News, wants the UK to remain in the EU. Most significantly, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labor Party, and the UK's Bernie Sanders (that is, if Bernie Sanders had gotten real about his political situation in the US and not become the Nader-like joke that he is today—watch the SNL skit to get my drift), is at one with the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron‎, on remaining in a union that is by all accounts terribly undemocratic and dominated by German's ordoliberal central bank.

What is going on?

One only has to turn to the assassination of the Labor MP Jo Cox to find the answer. Cox was evidently killed by a British fascist, who is reported to have shouted "Britain First," while shooting and stabbing the MP. Now, a large part of the support for Britain's exit has come from far-right organizations like Britain First or UKIP; they want to solve all social problems by closing borders, kicking out immigrants, and maintaining the racial purity of the UK. The only choice the left has had on the Brexit matter is between siding with this sorry lot or the pro-austerity (make-people-pay-for-the-mistakes-of-bankers) Bundesbank. What would you do? But this difficult situation exposes in very clear terms an important problem that faces the globalized left: The racism that has been at the center of social democracy from its rise in the 1920s to its decline in the 1990s.

Sanders has often said that he wants the US to be more like Scandinavia, but the reason why social democracy (strong trade unions, high standards of living, robust housing rights, meaningful social services) has been successful in this part of the world is because it is racially homogeneous. Indeed, as the political scientist Sheri Berman explains in her 2006 book The Primacy of Politics Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century, the roots of Scandinavian social democracy are not that distinct from those which gave rise to Nazism, National Socialism. What happened is this: The left in Sweden came into power in the 1920s by adopting the language and fantasies of the far right. Berman writes:

The key figure in the party during this period was Per Albin Hansson, who became the party chair in 1928. His key contribution was to cast the [Swedish Social Democratic Party] vision's of the socialist future as the folkhemmet, or "people's home."

...Interestingly, although the idea of Sweden as the "people's home" would become indelibly linked to Hanson and the [Swedish Social Democratic Party], it originated on the right. In fact, it was central to the critique of modern, capitalist, liberal society that in other parts of Europe formed part of the foundation upon which fascist and national socialist movements were built.

The connections between social democracy and the racial purity fantasies of the right by no means end there.

During the years of the Great Depression, Oswald Mosley, Great Britain's Hitler, was also an avid Keynesian, which is an economic program that's consistent with social democractic principles and policies. Hitler, too, was big on the ideas of the British economist John Maynard Keynes (the father of demand-side economics) and was successful at implementing the program on German infrastructure. Indeed, at the end of World War Two, the excellent state of German roads so impressed the Commander of the Allied Forces, Eisenhower, that, upon returning home and becoming president, he initiated what is now one of the biggest Keynesian projects the world has ever known: the Interstate Highway System.

In the US, Keynesianism took the form of the New Deal. But again, the whole program was racialized. The New Deal lead to the surbanization of a huge section of white America, abandoned poor black and brown people in economically devastated urban cores, and formed the foundation/base of the modern Republican Party (at first, it was just the business party; after the Keynesian, social democratic suburbanization of the US, it but became the white people party). Donald Trump emerges from this background.

Even to this day, the racial element of social democracy is alive and well in the US. Just last week, white North Dakotans voted to maintain an 84-year-old law that bans corporations from the state's farming sector. If this looks like socialism, it is because it is. This ban was organized and pushed by socialist activists in the 1930s. Today it is supported by white people who otherwise vote Republican. (If you are not feeling me, watch the 1979 film Northern Lights.)

To conclude: The world needs to confront neoliberal globalization, which is essentially the world-wide free movement of finance capital. We have seen what this kind of freedom has done to Greece, Ireland, and Spain; we have seen how it weakens our democratic institutions. But so far, the only instruments we have to check these kinds of movements are national in nature, and national instruments (closely watching borders, buying locally, protecting jobs, investing in citizens) return us (or revert) to a root problem that has never been solved: the distinct racial character of nearly all successfully implemented social democratic reforms in the West
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The irony of it all is that the grisly assassination of the leftist Cox will probably keep the Brits in the undemocratic EU and the markets happy.