ND

When the Scottish referendum was announced in early 2012, the radical left was not in a good way; it was only in the last nine months or so that the popular dynamic from below seized the campaign.

So the Yes arguments were actually made in less than a year; up to the beginning of 2014, the campaign was an entirely conventional affair dominated by the SNP’s extremely conservative agenda of maintaining the monarchy, retaining sterling, and remaining in NATO.

The Yes movement from below was able to make a positive case for independence as a potential way of breaking with neoliberalism and austerity. The SNP adopted this, at least rhetorically, for the final stages of the campaign.

There are obvious differences between the two referendums. First, the radical left is far more divided over the EU than it is over Scottish independence.

Second, in Scotland, there was at least a well-established narrative around the case for independence among the radical left, which had been thrashed out over the previous two decades, but there was no comparable narrative for leaving the EU.

Until the last year, most critical work on Europe was done outside of the UK left by the likes of Guglielmo Carchedi and Wolfgang Streeck. Where comparable British work did exist, it was saturated with “British road to socialism” declamations about “sovereignty” and the sanctity of the Houses of Parliament.

Third, as a consequence of this, most of the anti-EU running, for at least the last two decades, has been made by the hard right, almost always using the issue of migration — either (as seems to be the case for Nigel Farage) because they actually believe their own populist rhetoric about returning to the 1950s, or (as is certainly the case for Michael Gove) because they want to use migration in order to construct an electoral base to take British capital in a different direction, more oriented towards Asia and the United States.

Fourth, and fairly obviously, the mainstream “out” campaign was never going to adopt the arguments of the radical left in the way the Yes campaign did in Scotland.

So, in a sense, I agree that the radical left was very late in coming to the argument, and had less well-worked arguments than in the Scottish case. It is also true that we have a much less defined outcome to offer people — this is one of the reasons why I referred to the indeterminacy involved.

The argument that a Leave result will cause a crisis for the dominant party of British capital and that it will put it at odds with the majority of the capitalist class they seek to represent is true, but will only lead to a positive outcome for the working class if the Left has some strategic idea of how to take advantage of the situation, in quite concrete terms.

It seems obvious, for example, that if there was a Leave vote, agitation for a general election, and for an alliance of Labour, the Greens, the SNP, and any left MPs, would have to start immediately.

However, in spite of these problems, I don’t think that socialists — and certainly revolutionaries — have any choice but to argue for Leave. It is different if you genuinely believe that the EU is essentially a beneficial institution, but if you don’t, then you have to tell the truth about it, what it is for and what it does.

Saying “we know the EU is terrible but this isn’t a good time to leave” is simply setting a trap for yourself.

What happens if Corbyn’s Labour Party wins the next election and then finds that its path to reform is blocked by the EU — do you at that point say, “Er…sorry we didn’t mention this before, but the EU is actually a regime for imposing neoliberal austerity which we should maybe think about leaving”? Why would anyone listen to you then?

If you put off taking a position on the substantive point because of local circumstances which might be quite short-term, you’ll never do it.

Think about those socialists at the beginning of the Great War who argued for war credits by saying, “Of course we’re opposed to imperialism in general, but we need to consider the specific circumstances under which this particular war is taking place: what will happen if the Germans win? We will lose all our precious democratic freedoms!” And so on.

To be clear, I’m not comparing Remain supporters with the traitors of 1914, but the logic of the argument is the same. If socialists don’t start arguing the case for leaving the EU now, when will there ever be “better conditions”? We’ll be subjected to the same blackmail over and over again.

Finally, it is not the case that everyone who supports Leave is a paid-up racist xenophobe who wants to stop migration. If Remain campaigners really believe that a potential majority of the British working class fall into this category then despair would be the only appropriate response, but they do not, and writing off entire communities off in this way is simply patronizing.

I’m from the northeast of Scotland, where the fishing industry has been devastated by the Common Fisheries Policy. Now, there are certainly valid environmental concerns about overfishing, but to establish a limit with no attempt to find alternative employment for the workers in that industry was always going to be catastrophic for the area, and the people who object to it have a perfectly good case against the EU which has nothing to do with migration.